Tannhauser 02: The Twelve Children of Paris (2 page)

‘Good luck.’

Tannhauser received no reply.

He pushed on beneath the first of two portcullises and into the gatehouse, where a customs officer was too busy counting coins to afford him more than a sour glance. Here more emigrants were being fleeced and they, too, were clad in black. He entered the city and stopped in the shade of the wall. The humidity was suffocating. He mopped his brow. The journey north from the Garonne had consumed eight days and a dozen mounts, and had almost wasted him, too. He felt as if he didn’t have a mile left in him. But this was his first time in the capital and he roused himself to take some measure of its spirit.

The Grand Rue Saint-Jacques ran ahead, downhill towards the Seine. For most of its length it was no more than five yards wide. Every square foot teemed with human beings and their animals. The clamour of voices, the bellowing, the bleating, the barking, and the snarling of flies, would have made a field of war seem tranquil; and those among the damned whose eternal task it was to scour Satan’s piss pot with their tongues knew not a fouler smell. All this he might have expected, but beneath the workaday turmoil he sensed a more malignant tension, as if too much fear and too much fury had been swallowed by too many for too long. Parisians were a truculent lot, prone to disobedience and public disorder of every kind, but even they could not sustain a mood so febrile as a matter of course. In a different circumstance, this might not have caused him much unease, but he had not travelled the length of France to pull on trouble’s braids.

He had come to find Carla, his wife, and take her home.

Carla’s foolhardiness in visiting Paris had caused him an agony of worry and exasperation, emotions compounded by the fact that she was, by now, exceeding late in pregnancy. It would be their second child, and God willing the first to survive. Yet her behaviour had not much surprised him. Carla’s mind, once resolved on any matter, evinced an iron fixity of purpose, and practical hurdles of any kind aroused her scorn. This was one of the qualities he loved in her, and a wall he had cracked his skull against more than once. If one added to this the fact, as he had it on good advice, that pregnancy was a temporary state of insanity, then her journey to Paris, along roads unimproved since the fall of Rome, might even seem unremarkable.

And few women can resist an invitation to a wedding, especially one between two royal houses and celebrated far and wide as the union of the age.

A pair of child prostitutes tottered towards him through the muck, their faces caked with white lead, their cheeks and lips daubed with vermilion. The little girls were perfect twins, which no doubt added to their asking price. The radiance that had once lit their eyes had been snuffed and would never shine again. As if trained in the same school of depravity, they mimed lewd smiles for his delectation.

His stomach turned and he searched the press for their pimp. A brutish adolescent caught his gaze and realised he was staring down the bore of a thrashing or worse. The pimp let out a shrill whistle. The wretched girls turned on the spot and scurried back to his side, and they vanished into the crowd to be raped elsewhere.

Tannhauser urged his horse into the throng.

His knowledge of the city and its geography was primitive, gleaned from the letters of Orlandu, his stepson, who was here to study mathematics and astronomy at the Collège d’Harcourt. This southern half of the city, on the Left Bank, was called the University. The island in the Seine was the City. The Right Bank beyond the river was known as the Ville. Beyond that he knew only that it was the biggest city on earth, a vast overpopulated warren of uncharted streets and nameless alleys, of palaces, taverns, churches and brothels, of markets, abattoirs and workshops, of multitudinous hovels too desperate to contemplate.

He had travelled using the relay network of post-horses re-established after the wars. The final stable in the chain lay on a side street west of the Rue Saint-Jacques. He found it easily enough – the Écurie D’Engel – but not without repelling further entreaties from the off-scourings of humanity. Paris was home to more beggars, whores and thieves than existed in the whole of the rest of France. Hired assassins were so numerous that, like the goldsmiths and the glovers, they boasted their own guild. Criminal gangs flourished in league with various of the
commissaires
and
sergents
. And at the other end of the hierarchy, the Crown and the great aristocrats, when not plotting against each other or fomenting mindless wars, devoted those energies surplus to their debaucheries to robbing their subjects with ever more ingenious taxes, these latter being, in Tannhauser’s view, the most heinous of their many crimes.

After the street and its open sewer the smell of the stable afforded his nostrils and eyeballs some relief. He heard the sound of someone being flogged, and it wasn’t a horse for the victim was too quiet. The grunts of pleasure accompanying the lashes came from the flogger’s throat. Tannhauser dismounted in the yard and followed the sounds to a stall, where a muscular fellow, stripped to the waist, worked up a sweat by whipping a boy with the sharp end of a bridle. Tannhauser glimpsed bloody rags, an ungainly body curled and writhing in silence on a mass of straw.

It didn’t sit right with him.

He caught the bridle by its bit as the hostler cocked his arm, and looped the strap around the hostler’s neck and heaved. As the hostler choked on his own fist, Tannhauser stomped on his Achilles tendon and rammed a knee into his spine. He rode him down with his full weight and the hostler’s face bounced from the flagstones. A piss runnel carved into the floor ran past the stalls, replenished by the frightened mare. Tannhauser crammed the hostler’s nose and mouth into the stream and let him inhale. He wondered if this were Engel himself. The hostler squirmed and wheezed in the piss until his strength fled. Tannhauser let go of the bridle and stood up.

The flogged boy was on his feet. He was a big lad but otherwise nature had been no kinder than life. A harelip exposed his gums as far as the left nostril. His age was hard to guess, perhaps ten or so. To his credit, there were no tears on his cheeks. His lower jaw was misshapen and Tannhauser wondered if he might not be an idiot.

‘The mare needs a rub.’

The boy bobbed his head and disappeared.

Tannhauser booted the hostler in the chest until he crawled out of his way, then unloaded his gear and stripped the saddle. As the boy arrived with a currying glove, Engel stumbled past, dragging one leg and clutching his ribs, and reeled towards the street. The boy watched him go. Tannhauser wondered if he’d done him any favours. Future beatings would likely be more vicious than before. He contemplated the weight of his belongings and the prospect of hauling them through crowded streets and crippling heat.

‘How well do you know the city, boy?’

The boy garbled something unintelligible. He uttered a strange, halting laugh. He hunched his shoulders and made odd gestures with his spade-like hands. All Tannhauser gleaned was a sense of enthusiasm.

‘What’s your name?’

He had a stab at interpreting the strangled, nasal reply.

‘Grégoire?’

Again the laughter. Furious nodding. Tannhauser laughed, too.

‘Well, Grégoire, I’m going to make you my lackey. And I hope my guide.’

Grégoire fell to his knees with his hands clasped and chanted what might have been a blessing. The boy would make a singular Virgil, not least because Tannhauser could hardly understand him. He raised him to his feet and looked in his eyes. They were bright with intelligence.

‘See to the horse, Grégoire, and we’ll find you some decent clothes.’

Grégoire, reattired in Engel’s white cambric shirt, bore up well under the burden of two enormous saddle wallets, a canvas sleeping roll, a goatskin of water and a pair of holstered horse pistols, from which Tannhauser had blown the priming so that the boy wouldn’t blow off a foot. Tannhauser carried his wheel-lock rifle cradled in his arm. His hand-and-a-half sword was slung by his side. As they approached the Grand Rue Saint-Jacques, Engel reappeared.

His nose and lips looked like a mass of rotten pears, and one eye was swollen shut. He was in the company of two
sergents à verge
armed with short bows. Tannhauser wondered how much Engel had paid to recruit them. The
sergents
weighed up the large, well-armed figure striding towards them and concluded that their fee had been inadequate.

‘Thanks be to God,’ said Tannhauser. ‘You’ve arrested him.’

The
sergents
stopped.

‘I found that man buggering my horse.’

Engel’s jaw dropped. Blood drooled from the new gaps in his teeth.

‘In fairness, it was a mare, but I trust that the penalty is no less severe.’

Engel took a breath to protest and Tannhauser stepped up and fed the butt of the rifle into his brow. Engel toppled as if his feet were nailed to the ground, his fall only broken when the back of his skull cratered a mound of filth. Tannhauser smiled at the
sergents
, who had retreated and grabbed at their sword hilts.

‘My lackey here can testify to his crime. Can’t you, Grégoire?’

Grégoire garbled something incomprehensible.

‘Now, do you officers need anything else?’

‘Carrying that gun contravenes the law.’

‘Your laws don’t apply to the Knights of Saint John.’

The
sergents
looked at each other.

‘As the last thief I met discovered, this gun enforces statutes of its own.’

To compensate himself, and with the pleasure of a connoisseur in life’s injustices, one of the
sergent
s
smirked at the luckless hostler.

‘Don’t worry, sire. We’ll make sure this sodomite gets everything he deserves.’

They left the
sergents
to rifle Engel’s pockets and walked to the Grand Rue where Tannhauser stopped. Somewhere in this vast midden was Carla, and in her belly was their child. As to her exact location, he had no clue. His hopes of finding her hinged on the assumption that her son, Orlandu, would be rather better informed.

‘Grégoire, I want to find the Collège d’Harcourt, on Rue de la Harpe.’

Grégoire emitted one of his cackles and set off through the crowd.

Tannhauser followed. They gave a wide berth to a pair of lunatics chained together and shovelling sewage into a cart. They saw a priest and a slattern rutting in an alley, their skirts pulled up round their waists. From Saint-Jacques they turned west into a seething maze, where the buildings were piled so high their roofs almost touched above the thoroughfare. At length they entered a quarter full of students and a corresponding ubiquity of whores. Tannhauser caught fragments of several different tongues. If any among this elite were wrestling with metaphysics, he did not hear them, though he did see one pair wrestling in the filth, to the amusement of drunken friends who spoke in English.

The stern ambience of the Collège d’Harcourt restored some of Tannhauser’s hopes for the groves of academe. The entrance hall was deserted but for an ancient porter on a high stool in a recess behind a counter. The old man looked as if he hadn’t left the stool in years. He wore a short horsehair periwig a size or more too small and which partly concealed the disease consuming his scalp. Grey lice scouted the wig’s edge above his ears. His eyeballs bulged proud of his cheekbones and flitted back and forth beneath closed, blue-veined lids. Tannhauser rapped on the counter.

The porter awoke without moving, like a lizard. His eyes were a shocking blue, as if the ancient carcass were inhabited by the spirit of some other being. They took in Tannhauser’s clothes, the white cross on his chest, the cradled rifle. They took in Grégoire, festooned with luggage and dripping sweat. They returned to Tannhauser. They saw everything that he was: a foreign, lowborn killer, upon whom Fate had smiled. The porter despised him. The porter did not speak.

‘I’m looking for Orlandu Ludovici.’

‘The college term is long over, sire.’ This seemed to gratify the porter. ‘Few of the students remain in these lodgings at this time of year.’

‘But do you know Orlandu Ludovici? And is he among those few?’

‘The Maltese has not lodged here since, oh, Michaelmas last.’

‘Do you know why he moved out?’

‘I am not privy to Master Ludovici’s thoughts, still less his motives.’

‘Do you know where I can find him, or where he lodges now?’

‘I’m afraid not, sire.’ This ignorance, too, appeared to please him.

Tannhauser had been warned that any interaction with Parisian officialdom, no matter how petty, would require considerable tenacity.

‘But he remains a member of the college.’

‘As far as I know, sire.’

‘When did you last see him?’

‘I don’t recall, sire.’

‘A week? A month?’

‘I don’t recall.’

‘You recall his moving out a year ago but not when you last saw him.’

‘At my age, sire, memory becomes unreliable.’

Tannhauser had last written to Orlandu four months ago, before the voyage that had detained him in Velez de la Gomera and parts far beyond. He pointed to the rack of lettered pigeonholes that hung at the rear of the porter’s domain. Filed in the box marked ‘L’, he saw papers. He propped his rifle against the counter.

‘Has he any messages or letters?’

‘No, sire.’

‘I’d be grateful if you’d make sure.’

‘I am already sure, sire.’

Tannhauser swung open the hinged flap and strode to the pigeonholes.

‘No one is allowed behind the counter, sire.’

Tannhauser shuffled the papers from box ‘L’ through his fingers. There was nothing for Orlandu. The box marked ‘O’ was empty. He turned.

There was a smile in the old man’s eyes. His lips didn’t move yet conveyed the depth of his scorn. Tannhauser had the disconcerting sense that the porter had been expecting him, that his visit had been foretold; that the porter knew who he was.

‘You know who I am.’

‘A gentleman of very great eminence, I am sure, sire.’