Paper Conspiracies

by Susan Daitch

Elbowing in front, the Napoléon interjected himself between them, upstaging the other who leaned over in order to hear his whispers. He looked at Fabien closely as if he finally recognized him. Looking at the paper then back at Fabien, he began to frown and turn beet colored. Words Fabien couldn’t quite hear were spoken with a kind of sibilance, then straining, he heard a few explosive syllables and saw the bearded man wiping his face. The Napoléon seemed like a child suspended in the seconds between injury and scream, but the beard suddenly took the paper from his hands. Too quick sometimes, was all Fabien heard. Too quick to make accusations, perhaps. Too quick to jump to conclusions. Too quick to suspect. He wanted them to believe he shared in their cause, but was at a loss as to what slogans, other than those he’d already voiced, might serve to dispel their doubts. Against sounds of paper folding and crackling, Fabien interrupted them.

  “Ridicule, I find, is a very effective weapon.” He hoped his loud voice reaching back into the basement sounded convincing. He gave the r sound in ridicule as extra high trill. The pencil moustache looked at him with suspicion then retreated into the inky distance, walking straight and turning corners as if every one measured ninety degrees.

  “You can work with this photographer.” The beard wrote a name and address on a piece of paper, smirking just a bit. “The paper will pay for whatever prints we use.” He spoke about their well-placed contributors but their identities (a bishop, an abbé, a general) were only alluded to, the artists and writers themselves were not named.

  In the distance a dog began to bark again, and Fabien wondered what they paid, although he had no intention of getting behind a camera. He felt uneasy, pocketed the address he’d been given, and left the two men to their schemes. Upstairs, the butcher shop was shuttered and locked as if it had never been there at all. Fabien turned the piece of paper over: Roger Artois. It was not the name Fabien wanted. When he got to the street he threw the address away, then went back to retrieve it, putting the paper in his pocket, folding it into quarters, then folding it again.

  In place Maubert Huguenots and heretic printers had once been burned along with their books, and though it was now the site of blooming trees, wide boulevards, and busy shops, a man had recently been found dead of opium poisoning in a public bathroom at the square. To find the cellar under the butcher shop one had to walk away from place Maubert and infiltrate a web of streets, full of sliver-shaped cafés whose business transactions resembled those of the men who had lurked in the deserted Chinese Theater. The names of these streets, he knew, were followed in speech by the word malfamée. New buildings elbowed out the medieval ones, and some spoke of razing the tortuous streets altogether. He felt as if the desires of inquisitors or burnt printers had screwed themselves into this dark corner, taking root in the cellar beneath racks of meat not intended for sale.

  In order to obtain the address of the woman photographer he had to return to the cellar offices, but thought it a good idea to make his inquiries when the two men he’d met were out, when someone else would be at the presses. He returned and positioned himself under a short flight of stairs across the ruelle and watched the empty street. No one bought any meat at the shop. No one opened a window or left their building. It was as if all had been evacuated, but at midday he finally saw the pair come up from under the butcher shop, and as they disappeared into place Maubert, he descended into the cellar. The cavernous space was quiet; only one figure sat minding the presses. In silence Fabien watched her, a woman in yellow, until she noticed him. Startled and annoyed, she jumped then stood in front of the table as if hiding something on it.

  “The men will be back in an hour.” She slowly unwrapped a grenade-shaped cheese studded with peppercorns and wiped her hands on her dress.

  Fabien looked at his watch. He had neither the time nor the desire to wait around in the basement; the smell of ink and machinery made his eyes smart. The woman’s clothes were very bright against the dim cellar walls, and she examined the pages left on the table slowly as if to convey a seriousness and gravity that excluded him. In the dark, without the witnesses of his past performance, he felt it easier to slip into his role as accomplice. The subterfuge of allegiance suddenly seemed effortless. He made his usual comments about traitorous shoppers and the need to cleanse the city of foreigners, then his voice trailed off. She agreed with him, and he remembered to apologize for startling her.

  “I’ve lost an address, one I was given the day before, the address of a woman who takes photographs.”

  She pulled a pen from behind her ear and wrote a few lines on a corner of paper. “She may not be on the street this afternoon,” she said, tearing it off, “one of our photographers was attacked last night.”

  He didn’t answer her, wondering if it were possible to snap blackmail pictures with no conviction whatsoever, as if taking them was just a job. They might not realize what they were doing, these photographers who snapped pictures as an assignment and nothing more, but some, Fabien was sure, might be moonlighting doctors, lawyers, or lamplighters; people who would chose to sweat in the sun or freeze in front of shop windows waiting for someone to emerge, so sure of themselves and their assignment that it meant nothing to stand for hours in the rain outside Lazare’s and to do so with zeal. No one even brought them coffee or brandy or held an umbrella over their heads as they waited in the rain. He didn’t think anyone could take the pictures without realizing what they were about.

  “Self-defense is important, even when you know you’re doing the right thing.” He stressed the first syllable of important in an effort to sound sincere, even tutelary, but she went back to the table cluttered with bread, sausages, wine glasses, sheets of scribbled paper, and jars of ink. The paper she’d handed him smelled of brine.

  When he reached the street he unfolded it. She had written an address but no name, as if she had assumed he knew the woman’s identity. He hadn’t even seen her face, only the mask, and there were many just like it. The studio owned a trunk of them. All he really knew was her approximate size and that she carried a brass-legged tripod. Waiting at the entrance to her building, watching for the appearance of a big woman carrying a tripod, bleary eyed, perhaps covered with mud, out of breath as if she’d been running, he would emerge from the shadows himself unshaven, hands dangling. Then what? He would do nothing. It was getting late; he needed to return to Montreuil. The Devil’s Island sequence was due to be shot soon. A desolate shore and stunted plants had to be painted, a prison yard constructed, and hands with decorative ambitions had to be kept from tampering with the sparseness of his cell. Dreyfus had only one bucket of brackish water for drinking and washing. Mosquitos swam in it. He had no privacy. The prisoners who worked in the laundry ripped the hems of his clothing open, looking for hidden messages.

  He turned away from place Maubert, but instead of walking directly toward the train station, his steps traced the trajectory of a wider arc, across boulevard Saint Germain, past cafés and shops. Her address would only take him a little out of his way, but as the arc widened further he passed large buildings set back behind gardens; white facades were covered with balconies and long glass doors, shades drawn halfway like lidded eyes. He had expected vulgar, explicit, angry buildings, larded with ironwork and signs about dogs. He stopped and looked up. Water dripped down the damp wall he was leaning against, soaking the back of his jacket. Most of it was vine covered but, despite the apparent wealth of the neighborhood, initials and parts of words had been carved into some of its surface. Fabien leaned against wet leaves again. He saw two figures embracing as he looked up. He had expected she might live in a large apartment building with so many tenants he would have to stand and watch for days, and he would never be able to truly identify her, but there were no crowded buildings on these blocks. He went on counting numbers, white on black.

  The address was less grand than the others, an apartment house set close to the street, and unlike the neighboring buildings, no trees grew in front of it. As he stood across the s
treet mentally dividing each floor into separate flats, a man with a portfolio walked out of the building. A woman in a fur coat entered, and he took advantage of her preoccupation with a cigarette, easily following her into the courtyard. A dry fountain was stuck in its center, bracketed by statues of Athena, Pan, and one of Hermes that looked as if he had been added recently because he was carved in a different style. Although it wasn’t a hotel particulier the building was still more elegant than he would have imagined. He looked for the concierge who had seen him first and was knocking on a window with a key; the glass that separated her quarters from the courtyard was partially frosted, and she was a black and white blur behind it, bearlike and annoyed. As she opened a window, leaning out to question the interloper, her voice rang high and shrill.

  “Who do you want here?” Before he could answer she beckoned him inside. Fabien avoided her inquisitorial look, glancing upward from shuttered windows to the lunettes that faced the courtyard, still figuring possible divisions of each floor as he stepped into her rooms.

  She had been reading, but shut the book and put it away before Fabien could see the title. A cup of black coffee that must have been drunk slowly all morning lay on a table; rings marked the levels at which it had been sipped and then abandoned. The wall behind her was covered with photographs. Children in carriages, aunts or uncles in stiff suits standing before painted backdrops of Greek columns or flatly rendered but highly detailed rooms. Fabien didn’t recognize the woman herself in any of them. Her post in the building wouldn’t allow her time to be the photographer, but the person behind the camera might have been her daughter or some other relative.

  “You have so many pictures.” He reached to touch the frame of one. The woman pushed his hand away. He asked her if she had any floors to let.

  “Three floors, three apartments, all occupied.” She looked at his clothes, which reflected the dust and paint of the Dreyfus film: bits of the fence of Devil’s Island, frayed threads from the underside of a judge’s wig clung to his trousers. The woman turned from Fabien and squared one of the frames. He explained that the apartment was for his aunt who was returning to Paris in a month. “I was asked to find something for her,” he said to the woman’s back. He could have given her money, but he didn’t have enough to make the gesture worthwhile.

  “Three floors, three apartments, no vacancies.”

  Thanking her in what he considered an obsequious voice, he took another look at a photograph of a woman in a clown suit posing on a Venetian terrace, a photograph done in the style of Nadar. The venture had been a useless waste of time. He stopped long enough in the courtyard to strike a match against one of Pan’s elbows. She watched him through the frosted glass as he lit a cigarette then gazed up at the windows and balconies overhead as if he were looking for someone. When Fabien disappeared out the entrance she checked the statue’s elbow for scratches, running a rag over Pan’s stone arms and hollow flute. Satisfied they were unmarked she ran upstairs and knocked on a door.

  On the train to Montreuil he looked out the window, unable to study his lists. In a flash he saw one of the frog killers near the tracks being beaten by a man in a torn shirt. Fabien twisted around to try to see more of the beating, but the train sped on, and they quickly disappeared from sight.

  For several hot nights cafés spilled into the streets and marble tables gleamed with glasses of beer, green wine bottles, red brandy, and chips of potatoes fried in oil. As he moved from crowded pavement to empty silent ruelles, he came to the river, and standing on a bridge, he looked at the dark shapes of barges anchored below. Light hit the face of a man sleeping on a top deck. Fabien couldn’t remember if this was a place where the current was strong, and the water was too dark to see. He rubbed his eyes, hands still smelling of the gasoline he’d used to remove paint. Someone caught his arm, pulling violently at it, and he allowed himself to be turned around, passively expecting to be robbed.

  “I thought you were about to jump.”

  The woman was angry, her voice was knifelike as if he’d caused her unnecessary, wasted alarm. She ran her hands through short hair, picked her fedoralike hat up from the ground. He explained he was just looking into the river. She apologized for interrupting, but he wasn’t sure she really was sorry. Embarrassed to be rescued when no risk had really been taken, he tried to detain her by thanking her too many times for preventing a suicide attempt never considered. His attempt at conversation went nowhere. She shrugged in response to his questions, rejoining friends when it was clear he was all right and had never had any intention of tipping himself off the edge of the bridge. Her friends pointed at him. They had seen his picture. They knew who he was.

  “What’s wrong with you?” He shouted after them. People stared. They had seen his picture, too. Someone under the bridge yelled in mimicry.

  “What’s wrong with you?” The phrase echoed, bouncing against the stones and back.

  “A woman is moving out at the end of the month.” She twisted the top buttons of her dress. “She isn’t home. I can show you the floor.”

  He slipped franc notes into the book left by her cup of cold coffee, and she moved the book to the side of the table, then dropped it into a drawer, which she locked. She took him up a curving marble stair to a series of large rooms on the first floor. Letters that had arrived by the morning post lay on a table in the hall; he tried to lean over to read the addresses, but she swooped them up and turned them over. As if it were routine she unlocked the apartment’s entrance with a quick twist of the right set of keys then threw open door after door as they wandered through each room. In the bathroom, small marble tiles felt icy under his touch despite the heat outdoors. In other rooms clothes lay scattered on floors and chairs, and when he thought she wasn’t looking he picked up a red dress, but she unexpectedly turned around at the door catching him holding its shoulders. It was too small for the photographer he was chasing. He made a gesture with his raised hand across his neck as if to cut his throat. The pantomimed knife made no sense, but he felt he had to do something. He dropped the dress to the floor, tripping on the folds of material as he left the bedroom. She took his hand as if to say she recognized him as an interloper touring a museum of opulence. The concierge must have sensed he had no aunt. Her hand was dry as if she’d been counting money.

  “My aunt is too old for this,” he said, looking at a painting of naked women sitting on a grassy knoll with clothed men.

  “The painting will not stay.”

  “Also, she’s very short. She wouldn’t be able to reach the light switches or shelves in the closets.” The image of a tiny relative who, though rich, was more at home in the country, came out of nowhere.

  “The police have already been here.”

  “Why?”

  “I think you know.”

  She pressed her lips together; she wouldn’t say much more to him. The meanness of his tip and the weakness of his story might have indicated to her that he was some kind of policeman, some kind of investigator, the kind who didn’t appear to pay attention, the kind who made a poor pretence of reading the paper or examining traffic signs, so you never really knew who he was or what he wanted. The tour ended, and the woman led him downstairs. He thought he saw a bundle of tripod legs and the edge of a black coat disappear into her quarters, but she steered him away from her own rooms, and they stood in the courtyard. The fountain had been turned on, and Fabien struck a match against Hermes’s wings.

  “Are you trying to scratch that?”

  “My aunt might want to see the rooms herself.”

  “The police have already been to see the departing tenant, the woman who lived in the rooms you just saw. They asked her to save them trouble, but I don’t know what kind of trouble. They were looking for something, papers, documents, letters. I don’t know anything more than that.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “They had rude manners and asked questions about flowers delivered with notes from a man who turned out
to be Dreyfus’s brother. They were very thorough. While she looked on they turned drawers upside down, tapped for concealed sections of furniture and walls.”

  Fabien looked over her head toward the door and considered that he could wait in a café across the street. The photographer would have to appear again.

  “Who was she?” he asked.

  “A friend of Esterhazy, maybe he’s the real spy, maybe not. He used to come here often, and he was a charming man.”

  “I meant who was the woman who disappeared behind the glass.”

  “There wasn’t anyone in the courtyard besides yourself and the three statues. They often give the illusion of moving into my sentry as you descend the stairs because of the reflections in the pool and glass.”

  The nice man who visited the former tenant had probably given the conceirge money, but not enough. Money for watching and for knowing who came when, but not enough to stop her from dropping hints once in a while. Fabien couldn’t keep up with the bribes either. His nonexistent aunt would have to find another empty apartment. He didn’t really have time to sit in the café across the street and watch the doors of the photographer’s building, hoping one of the people who walked in and out all day might be her, but his picture on the front page of La Libre Parole haunted him, and he relived its taking, helpless before the power of the printed pages circulated to thousands.

  On his way to the train station he walked past Lazare’s shop. Another photographer, a man, was stationed in front, although the storefront was shuttered. He was silent, immobile, like a statue or a figure in a wax museum, and he looked as if he would wait forever. She might have been haunting other shops, but he wouldn’t travel across the city to find wherever it might be that she stood waiting. The bits of newsprint with the addresses of the two photographers written on them were in his pocket, and the one that bore her address still smelled salty. He rolled them up into balls and threw them from the train window.