Tannhauser 02: The Twelve Children of Paris (27 page)

He understood the grievances of an Hervé. He saw the opportunities for criminals. There would be a rash of robberies and killings. Some private feuds, high and low, would be settled. Death cancelled all sorts of debts. There would be a lot of talk and bravado. No more than that. The King had shown his teeth. He had slaughtered his political foes. He had established his authority. He had preserved the faith of his fathers.
Te Deums
would be sung, the city would heap him with praise and his subjects would go back to making money.

Applause erupted from the mass of men in the Place de Grève. Tannhauser looked back and saw the gallows. As if to confirm the pettiness of their ambitions, a lone figure convulsed at the end of a rope, his body a blotch against the newly risen sun. He swung back and forth, his legs flailing and his torso bucking, to the accompaniment of jeers. They hadn’t even made a decent job of hanging him.

He despised the men in the square. Yet his only claim to superiority lay in his skill with arms. Like each of them, he was trapped in the squalid cell of his own feelings. The only moral high ground he might stand on was a blood-soaked dunghill.

Despair gnawed on his heart. He felt exhausted. His mind was dulled. Beyond his notion to recover his gear from the printer’s house, he had no plan. Worse, he had no desire, no direction. Without Carla to fire them, such impulses had no meaning. Rage stirred within him but then subsided. There were riddles to solve and debts to settle, but he had no appetite for either. Her death had drained his spirit. He had taken enough revenge to know that, hot or cold, it was a dish that fed only the worst in himself and poisoned what was best. He tried to summon his hatred for her killers. But the square was a lake of hate already and he did not feel inclined to piss in it.

He wanted only to be far away.

Across the river, he saw the hulk of Notre-Dame de Paris.

He rode towards the high tower of Saint-Jacques. At the Rue Saint-Martin he turned south across the Pont Notre-Dame, whose guards watched him approach and lowered the chain without saying a word.

The road across the bridge was flanked on either side by identical terraces of narrow houses, each with a ground-floor shop and two upper floors. The shops were given over to luxury trades and goods. Their signs hung out above the street on long iron rods. Hatters, wig makers, art dealers, feather merchants; importers of Italian finery for women. Though the morning was well advanced, and this was one of the busiest thoroughfares in Paris, the street was deserted. He was sure all the houses were occupied, for while militiamen might leave their wives abed, no shopkeeper ever leaves his stock unguarded, yet of human life there was no sign at all.

Tannhauser found himself back on the island of the City.

Tight streets. Alleys that even Juste would have found a squeeze. Houses on the verge of collapse, some only prevented from doing so by ingenious buttressing. A splendid new townhouse would appear wedged into the midst of the ruling decrepitude. Inns abounded. Hereabouts there was more activity, though the tension was no less palpable. He smelled cooking from taverns and rotisseries. Several establishments had stationed an armed man on the doorstep, some wearing the jackets of the
sergents à verge
. None appeared very sure of himself. As Tannhauser passed, they nodded, as if in the hope he had come to tell them what was happening and what they ought to do.

The road continued south into what must have been the Left Bank. All that identified the end of the bridge was a squat fort, which Grégoire told him was the Petit Châtelet. At a cross street Tannhauser turned for the cathedral.

Notre-Dame de Paris loomed abrupt and massive, as much a fortress as a church, less a celebration of faith than a demonstration of power. A threat in stone. He would not have called it the most beautiful, but perhaps he had spent too much time in Italy. With the sun at its back, it did not fail to inspire his awe. But he had not come to pray. He craned his neck at the immense height of the two bell towers.

The cramped cathedral square, the Parvis, was the geographical centre of France, or so Juste assured him with the pride of a visitor who had garnered some notable facts. In defiance of the timid quietude elsewhere it was shrill and swarming with whores, beggars, hawkers, poets, jongleurs and buffoons, half of whom at least were thieves or shills. There were gangs of militia, too. They were fewer and less loud than those in the Place de Grève, but their members seemed bred from a nastier bone.

When they saw Tannhauser and his bloodstains, they gave him the nod.

The Parvis was flanked on the south side, along the river, by the hospital, the Hôtel-Dieu. Several Hospital Sisters moved among the throng of the maimed, the poor and the monstrously diseased that milled around the gate in the hope of acquiring admittance or food. With expert eyes they picked the truly needy from the many fakers, though even the most fortunate of the bunch were models of wretchedness. One of the latter such petitioners spotted Tannhauser, or the Hospitaller’s cross on his chest, and detached himself. He appeared to have only one leg, though in Paris one could never be sure, and he moved at remarkable speed, his body almost horizontal to the ground, using a pair of short sticks in cankered hands. Before Tannhauser could swing Clementine to swat him aside, the stocky little dog exploded from between her hooves and went for the beggar’s leg without a bark of warning.

The beggar scuttled away, his sticks clacking on the flagstones. The dog stopped, his chest puffed out, gold braid gleaming, and watched him retreat. He wagged his obscene pink tail. He barked in contempt. Grégoire and Juste looked at Tannhauser.

‘As you see, he’s extremely intelligent,’ prompted Juste.

‘Perhaps even more intelligent than Clementine,’ added Grégoire.

‘I doubt any of the three of us are that,’ said Tannhauser. ‘But in Paris, a dog that runs off beggars must be worth a tidy sum. I wonder how much the Hôtel-Dieu would pay? The Hospital Sisters would adore him. Imagine all the time and labour he would save them. Imagine all the soup they’d no longer have to boil.’

Grégoire and Juste exchanged glances of panic.

‘Or,’ said Tannhauser, ‘we could donate him, as an act of Christian charity.’

The dog returned and halted between the two boys. He looked up at Tannhauser, tongue lolling, as if in expectation of some reward.

‘But master, as you see,’ said Juste, ‘we cannot possibly sell him to anyone, or even give him away as an act of Christian charity, until all his hair has grown back.’

‘It’s true,’ agreed Grégoire. ‘The sisters would never take in a bald dog.’

‘A fair point,’ conceded Tannhauser. ‘I can think of no religious order that would accept a bald dog. Until his hair grows back, then. Give him some affection so he knows he did us a service.’

The boys petted the dog and exchanged winks of triumph and relief.

‘What have you decided to call him?’

Juste said, ‘He’s called Lucifer.’

‘That would certainly dismay the gentle sisters.’

‘You don’t like it?’

‘I worry I’m neglecting your moral education.’

‘Master, I have never learned so much so quickly. Grégoire, too, I’m sure.’

‘Master, it’s true. You are a fine teacher.’

‘You can learn a lot from a dog, too,’ added Juste.

‘Keep your eyes and ears open,’ said Tannhauser. ‘Much of what you hear will be rumour, fantasy and lies, but pick up what fact you can. Say little, preferably nothing. Today every step we take, every word we speak, might betray us.’

The dog yapped at Tannhauser.

‘That’s a big name for a small dog.’

‘He is small,’ agreed Grégoire. ‘But he survived the fire.’

There was food to be had in the square and Tannhauser dismounted and bought a warm loaf for the boys. They tore it apart with such ardour he bought a pair of roast pigeons, still hot and threaded on sticks, to go with it. He watched them eat. The lads were so hungry it wasn’t until the food was half gone that Grégoire thought to give a morsel to Lucifer, beyond which point the dog enjoyed the best of both their rations.

Grégoire pointed out a corral in a side street and there they left Clementine. As they approached the façade of the cathedral, Tannhauser scanned the multitude of arcane figures and hieroglyphs with which the grand portal had originally been adorned. Many had been erased by hammer blows inflicted by priests who, though ignorant of their meaning, had learned that they spoke from the Hermetic rather than the Christian tradition. Other icons had been smashed by Huguenot fanatics.

Tannhauser entered through the portal of the Last Judgement.

He crossed himself with Holy Water but spared himself the misery of genuflection. After the bright sun it seemed dark inside and Tannhauser waited for his eyes to adjust. The first thing he saw was a wickerwork crib in which lay three babies, none above a month old. Tannhauser felt a lump of pain in his chest. He turned away.

The rearmost pews of the cathedral were colonised by prostitutes, of either sex and to suit every taste. At least two were currently
in flagrante
, bending over the benches in front of the panting clients while various of their colleagues watched, though whether this was out of boredom or because they had been paid to do so, he could not tell. At the far end of the church a service was taking place behind the rood screen, but the distance was so great that neither business interrupted the other.

‘I was born in that crib,’ said Grégoire.

‘Your mother’s loss was our gain.’

Tannhauser surveyed the vast and enchanted interior, in which each stone had been carved and placed to embody its own several and particular meanings. Petrus Grubenius had believed that the whole structure had been built, on the principles of sacred geometry, as a single gigantic alchemical vessel – that is, not only as a crucible, though it was that, or as a text which transcended words, though it was that, too, but as a cosmic ship on a voyage to the time beyond Time, and whose spiritual pilot was Hermes Trismegistus. Tannhauser felt that boys might by stirred by this notion.

He said, ‘If we accept – as Petrus Grubenius did, and as do one or two adepts within the Hospitallers – that the Mass is a manifestation of the Magnum Opus, and that the seven sacraments symbolise alchemical processes, whose goal is at once the transmutation of matter into spirit and of spirit into matter, then Notre-Dame de Paris does indeed become our Mother, the sacred centre, the womb from whence we might be reborn into enlightenment.’

Grégoire and Juste looked up at him with perfect politeness. He appreciated it. He needed, for a moment, to feel that he was more than he knew himself to be.

‘The mysteries of which the best of us once were masters will never be understood again, not in all the world’s turning. We’re doomed to grope in twilight, forever trying to persuade ourselves it is dawn. We come here in desperation, kings, killers, babies, whores, hoping to breathe some essence of the Divine, but the most we can take away is an inkling of how much we have lost. Yet, I’m certain that these babes see farther than the wisest man. That’s the root of your distinction, Grégoire. Once, you too saw so far.’

‘But, master, I can’t remember seeing anything.’

‘Your mind has forgotten but your spirit has not. Now, can you tell me how to climb the north bell tower?’

Grégoire took him to a door but the door was locked.

‘Can I help you, my lord?’

Tannhauser turned to look at the speaker.

The speaker had done so over his shoulder, for he was a burly young brute and he was busy pissing against the cathedral wall. The general stench suggested he was no lone offender. As he finished and put himself away, Lucifer trotted over towards him.

Tannhauser tapped both boys on the shoulders.

‘He’s your dog. You look out for him.’

Lucifer sniffed with scorn and cocked a leg. The burly one took a half step backwards, to get a good swing into his kick.

‘Sirrah! That’s our dog!’ shouted Juste.

‘Don’t hurt him!’ added Grégoire.

The burly one looked at the boys and mimed his regret that they enjoyed protection. He looked at Tannhauser. Cherubic but brutal features, a face not merely shaped by, but born to, a world of vice. The corruption ran so deep he could have been as young as fifteen or ten years older. Tannhauser recognised him, and vice versa, but he couldn’t place the face. The cherub smiled.

‘If your Excellency wants a bit of privacy with his boys, in the stairwell there, I can arrange it. I can arrange all sort of things that might please you.’

Tannhauser considered himself within his rights to kill him there and then, even, given that he judged them within the narthex, inside Notre-Dame during Sunday Mass. But, as if the greasy tone of the pimp’s voice were a trumpet call, two wretched children tottered from the shadows. Vermilion daub made harsh gashes of their mouths, and their eyes had been driven deep into their skulls by something more hurtful than pain, something more lasting than grief, something more degrading than terror. They were the same twin girls that the same pimp had tried to sell the day before. The pimp, whose business it was to recall both faces and predilections, held his palm out behind him.

The girls stopped dead.

‘I want to get to the top of the bell tower,’ said Tannhauser.

‘The top of the tower?’ Though he daily catered to grotesque sexual appetites, this request struck the pimp as bizarre. ‘But there’s four hundred steps. So I’m told.’

‘If you have the key, open the door and I’ll give you a sol.’

‘You wouldn’t want these two sweet girls to starve, would you, sire?’

‘I don’t want the girls. I want to get to the roof.’

‘I know you don’t want the girls, sire, what I mean is –’

‘Open the door and take the sol. Or I’ll take the key.’

The pimp was as tough as his trade demanded, which meant he could frighten women and girls and the kind of men who paid to abuse them. He grimaced as if swallowing vinegar. He wagged a key at the end of a cord around his neck.