‘I want to be as good as you,’ Ti-Loup says.
‘Then you must pay close attention to the carcasses. You must listen to them. You must let them teach you.’
‘It’s so exciting,’ Ti-Loup tells Capucine. ‘It’s like solving a riddle in Greek.’
‘You’re not just listening to the carcasses,’ Cap says. ‘You’ve been listening to Ti-Christophe and Papa so much that you sound exactly like them when you’re with us. You sound like a peasant. Next thing I know you’ll be able to talk to dead steers.’
‘And you,’ Ti-Loup accuses, ‘when you’re in the chateau, you sound exactly like my maman.’
‘I do not.’
‘You do. It just happens. We don’t even notice. I can do Father JG.’
‘Do Father JG.’
‘Ask yourself,’ Ti-Loup says in a tight and slightly prissy British accent, ‘if the history of Europe might be altogether different if François I had not beaten Henry VIII in a wrestling match in 1520.’
Both children collapse with laughter.
Ti-Loup and Cap are stranded together in St Gilles in the apprentice’s room (that is, in Ti-Christophe’s room) at Monsieur Monsard’s place. Father John Gabriel is taking Ti-Christophe with him to Tours. Cap’s brother has refused to let his sister accompany him.
‘Why not?’ Cap demands.
‘Because it’s a private matter,’ her brother says.
‘Is this something to do with Olivier and Chantal?’
‘That is none of your business.’
‘It might be,’ Cap says. ‘Will you be safe? Pierre and others – servants, I mean – say Olivier works the black market. They say he’s killed people.’
‘I can look after myself,’ her brother says.
Cap has a book and is curled up on her brother’s bed, reading. Ti-Loup is carving up a lamb in the cutting room next door. This is the first time he has been unsupervised, but Petit Christophe says he is learning well, he is attentive to the scaffolding and rigging and river systems of the animal body. Lamb is carved on the butcher-block table, not while suspended from a hook. The gutted body of the lamb seems so small, the ribs so fragile, that Ti-Loup has the uneasy sense of cutting up a child. He has noted the particular tenderness, the reverence, with which Petit Christophe dissects lamb. Always, in fact, before cutting, Petit Christophe crosses himself.
Ti-Loup does the same.
First he removes the shanks, then the neck. He follows the soft spaces between the bones. Then he reaches into the carcass and counts the ribs down from the neck. He makes a mark between the fifth and sixth ribs on both sides (inside and out) and cuts. He is preparing a Frenched rack of lamb.
‘What are you doing here?’
The interruption startles Ti-Loup and causes his knife to scrape against a rib. A young woman pushes through the insulated door from the courtyard and faces him across the butcher block. ‘You’ve spoiled my cut,’ he accuses.
‘How did you get into this room?’
‘Petit Christophe let me in.’
‘How come I didn’t see you in the courtyard?’
‘I must have come when you weren’t looking,’ Ti-Loup says.
‘Where’s Petit Christophe?’
‘He has gone to Tours.’
‘Tours?’ The young woman looks disturbed. ‘Why Tours?’
‘I don’t know why.’
‘He didn’t tell me he was going to Tours.’ The voice of the young woman rises a notch. Cap opens the door from her brother’s room a half-inch to watch and listen. ‘Why didn’t he tell me?’ The young woman crosses her arms and hugs herself. She is shivering. The room is always kept cold and Ti-Loup wears two sweaters and a warm undershirt. ‘I know you,’ she says. ‘You are le vicomte from the chateau. Petit Christophe talks about you all the time, but I never see you. What are you doing here?’
‘Petit Christophe is teaching me. I only come when the butcher shop is closed. Are you Chantal?’
‘Yes. Does he talk about me?’
‘Not to me,’ Ti-Loup admits. ‘But he talks to his sister and she talks to me.’
‘What does she say?’
Ti-Loup flicks his eyes towards the door that leads to Ti-Christophe’s quarters and is aware of Cap’s presence. ‘Sometimes she talks to me,’ he says carefully. ‘But she never tells me much. She says your father and your brother don’t like Petit Christophe. They don’t approve of him.’
‘I don’t care what they think.’
‘She says that Ti-Christophe knows you spend time with Olivier and it makes him angry.’
‘That’s a lie! I don’t spend time with Olivier. I hate him! I hide from him whenever he comes. Why doesn’t Ti-Christophe know that?’
‘Your brother told him you are going to marry Olivier.’
‘I’m not. I will never marry Olivier. I’m frightened of him.’ They can both hear footsteps in the courtyard. Chantal looks terrified. ‘It’s my father,’ she says. ‘Or my brother. Where can I hide?’
‘Uh …’ Before Ti-Loup can think of any response, she has leaped at the steel hook from which one of the carcasses is suspended and has pressed herself inside the steer’s husk of flesh and bone. The hook screeches on its track and the carcass swings like a pendulum possessed, spinning and twisting, but coming to rest with its severed gut facing the wall. Chantal is curled inside like a chrysalis inside its cocoon, her hands just visible on the hook above the severed neck of the steer.
The door from the courtyard bangs open. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ Michel Monsard demands. ‘And how the hell did you get in?’
‘Petit Christophe let me in. I’m his assistant.’
‘What? My father never hires extras. Where is he?’
‘Your father?’
‘I know where my father is. Where is Petit Christophe? He can’t hire anyone.’
‘He hasn’t hired me. I don’t get paid. I just help. Petit Christophe is teaching me.’
‘Not on our carcasses, he isn’t. Not if I have any say. I recognise you. You’re the son of la comtesse. Where is Petit Christophe?’
‘He’s in Tours.’
‘In Tours! Why?’
‘I don’t know why.’
‘He’s looking for me or Olivier, that’s why.’ Michel Monsard is pacing around the cutting room, opening refrigerated lockers. ‘I saw my sister come in here. Where is she?’
‘Your sister?’ Ti-Loup looks convincingly astonished. ‘No one ever comes in here except Petit Christophe.’ Ti-Loup gestures at the scrubbed and bleached floorboards, the freezer cubicles lining the walls. ‘You can check the lockers. There’s no one here except me.’
‘And you’ve got no business here,’ Michel Monsard says. He snatches the cutting knife from Ti-Loup’s hand and grabs the boy by the scruff of the neck. He presses the tip of the blade to Ti-Loup’s throat and draws blood. One crimson bead appears on the pale skin, then two, then three. ‘You’re the fifi American boy who wears dresses. We don’t let homos touch our meat because it’s a known fact that the meat turns rotten if homos touch it. Get the hell out and don’t come back. Stay inside the chateau where you belong, fifi boy.’
Ti-Loup does not flinch. ‘You are right,’ he says calmly, seeming to be calm, though Cap can hear the kettledrum beat of his heart on the far side of the door. ‘The chateau should not deal with Monsieur Monsard. We should take our business to the butcher in Chinon.’
Michel Monsard is arrested in the act of toying with the knife blade and Ti-Loup’s throat. He lets go of the boy and hurls the knife like a dart at the butcher block. It lodges in the flank of the lamb. He punches savagely at the row of carcasses and they screech and careen across the ceiling tracks. Ti-Loup and Cap watch the clasped hands of Chantal speed across the room and get lost in the crowded huddle of chilled and ghostly overcoats of former cattle.
‘I will speak to my mother, la comtesse,’ Petit Loup says. ‘I will tell her that Monsieur Monsard no longer wants her business. We sho
uld deal with the butcher in Chinon.’
Michel spits on the floor. ‘We’ll see about that,’ he says. ‘If your mother speaks to my father, you’ll have to answer to me. You! To me! Understand?’ He pushes Ti-Loup ahead of him into the courtyard and bangs the door shut behind them.
‘You can come out now,’ Cap tells Chantal. ‘They’ve gone.’
‘I’m frozen,’ Chantal says. ‘I can’t move my arms. I think I might have dislocated my shoulders.’
‘Here.’ Cap reaches up and wraps herself around Chantal’s hips. ‘Just let go and I’ll hold you.’
‘I can’t move my fingers. They won’t let go.’
‘Just stop hanging on.’ The sensation of a centre of gravity changing is slow and then sudden. Cap falls and feels pain in her buttocks and thighs. Chantal is on top of her.
Neither can move for what seems like a very long time.
Chantal rolls off Cap’s body. ‘I don’t think I can walk,’ she says.
‘I don’t know if I can either.’
‘Why did Petit Christophe go to Tours?’
‘I don’t know,’ Cap says. ‘I asked him but he wouldn’t say. I’m afraid he’s looking for a fight with Olivier.’
‘Olivier will kill him.’
‘No he won’t. My brother can look after himself. Ugh! My back hurts, but I think I can move.’ She stands, assessing the pain. ‘I’ll probably have a bruise the size of France on my backside. You need to get warm.’ She hooks Chantal by her underarms and drags her into Ti-Christophe’s room.
‘I won’t be able to leave,’ Chantal says. ‘My brother will see me and he’ll kill me.’
‘First you have to get warmed up, and then I’ll get you out so no one sees you.’
‘How?’
‘The way Ti-Loup and I get in.’ She hoists Chantal into Petit Christophe’s bed. ‘Get warm first,’ she orders, pulling the quilt over the young woman.
‘Is he in love with me?’ Chantal asks. ‘Or does he just enjoy annoying my brother and my father?’
‘I think he’s in love with you but he doesn’t want to be. He knows your father will never permit it.’
‘We could leave,’ Chantal says. ‘We could live somewhere else. Maybe that’s why he went to Tours. If he finds work in a butcher shop there, we could run away and get married.’
‘You could get married in St Gatien. My father says that’s where I was born.’
‘In the church?’
‘In the convent. The nuns had a hiding place. The crypt, perhaps.’
‘The crypt! With skeletons and coffins all around you?’
‘I suppose. I don’t remember anything about it.’
‘What a terrible omen. Your birth was foretelling a death.’
‘Yes. It was. My mother died. I never knew her.’
Chantal crosses herself. ‘Petit Christophe and I will have to get married secretly but I won’t get married in a crypt.’ She shudders. ‘Even thinking about it – surrounded by corpses … It would mark us for death.’
Cap refrains from indicating the clothes racks of carcasses in the frigid room next door. She stops herself from saying: You are a butcher’s daughter. You are surrounded by blood and slaughter every day.
Instead she says: ‘The crypt is a sanctuary where babies were born. It kept them safe. It could only be a good omen. It would mean that you and Petit Christophe will have a baby.’
12.
In the wake of the sinking of the Santa Maria, Cap is too agitated to remain on the park bench at Conservatory Water. She is also too agitated to re-open the manila envelope. She is afraid of what else she will find. She is moved to know which photographs the countess must have treasured and retained, which ones she had brought with her when she reluctantly returned to New York. But the photograph of Ti-Loup and Petit Christophe in the cutting room is so disturbing that Cap finds it necessary to take brief refuge in a cubicle in the public bathrooms. She is not able, not entirely, to hold back the need to weep. She blots her cheeks with toilet paper. When she washes her hands, she notes that they are trembling. She hates to feel exposed in this way. She nods and smiles to other women in the restroom. Outside, she pats dogs and exchanges small talk, functioning on automatic pilot, but the storm weather inside her head persists.
That photograph, the existence of which is a shock, could only have been taken by Michel Monsard or his father. But when and how? And they must have shown it to the countess, which would at last – nearly forty years later – explain what had happened next. This was why the countess had sent Ti-Loup away. Since it must have caused her extreme anxiety, why had she preserved it? What other archival material – pictorial, textual, tactile (a lock of Ti-Loup’s hair, for example?) – might be lying in hidden drawers or in cavities behind quilted silk panels in the crumbling walls of the chateau?
Will anyone ever know?
Perhaps the countess left sealed directives with her lawyers, open-sesame instructions for recessed spaces not visible to the eye. Who is now in possession of these codes? How much of the chateau furniture was shipped to New York when the countess moved back in ’68? Certainly some of it was. There were pieces Cap saw in the penthouse. They had the air of aristocratic refugees bemused by the Fifth Avenue din. But there were so many, so many beautiful things she had never seen since she herself left the chateau. Were they in New York? If so, those items had not been on display when Cap visited. Had they been held in storage? Or were they sold off in France? Were those extraordinary Louis XIV and Louis XV pieces currently showing up around the world in exclusive – and quite possibly illicit and private – auction rooms? For years, Cap has been watching for them in Sotheby’s catalogues, in Christie’s, in Bonhams, but has never seen an item she knows. And she does know them intimately. The mere memory of stroking those consoles and armoires, the mere fact of having once been in the same room as them, of having fallen in love with them, still casts an extraordinary aura of happiness and awe. Are they now owned by Saudi princes? By rock stars with indiscriminate acquisitive instincts? By billionaires who know more about the stock market than art?
Or are they in dusty flea-market displays at the Porte de Clignancourt in the eighteenth arrondissement of Paris?
Where are they?
And where is the talismanic blond curl from Ti-Loup’s very first haircut?
In any case, Cap is as touched by the fact that the countess has kept the First Communion photograph as she is distressed that persons unknown must now have one of the originals in their hands. Or perhaps not persons unknown. Who else but Celise could have managed access to the private possessions and secret drawers of the Vanderbilt penthouse? The family lawyers perhaps? Of course, all of the above were possible candidates. Any or all of them might have sold off boxes of memorabilia for peanuts at a second-hand store. Any or all of them might have sold items for much larger sums of money to traffickers in intelligence or scandal. It seems to Cap that the image of the First Communion has been smudged and tainted and desecrated by the photocopier’s finger pads.
Cap herself keeps one of the originals, untainted, wallet-size, in her purse or under her pillow at all times. She is not superstitious, but nevertheless keeping that photograph within reach was a source of comfort after Ti-Loup was lost in Vietnam. Perhaps the countess had kept the golden lock of his infant hair under her pillow.
Perhaps she had believed it would keep Ti-Loup alive. Perhaps it had.
Naturally Cap does not believe in this sort of primitive sympathetic magic. Nevertheless, furtively, she rummages in her shoulder bag and takes the photo from her wallet. She brushes it with her lips, slides it into the pocket of her jacket, keeps her hand in contact. Obviously whoever sent the packet of photographs understands the psychology of violation.
The question is, who would find this necessary and why? Cap can think of no logical reason, no possible advantage to be had from the flaunting of access to archival footage of her life. How could this be used for blackmail? There was
nothing remotely salacious about a First Communion. Precisely for this reason the escalating activity feels ominous. She has a sense of waiting for a hurricane to make landfall, a sense that it will be a Category 5 with spin-off tornadoes, hail, a storm surge that will wash across Battery Park and rampage up Broadway, split into tidal gangs, smash the Village and Chelsea, vandalise Midtown, pickle Central Park in brine, clump overturned lives into matchstick heaps of sand-swamped debris.
This is ridiculous.
Nevertheless she does trust her instincts. Her intuition and her premonitions have saved her life more than once and she finds that she is bracing for the funnel of wind that will suck her back to the moment when the Gestapo held her mother’s head under water. Or shot her. Or did whatever they did.
How many hours or days after Cap’s birth had they done this?
Certain moments in any war, certain intersections of anxiety and threat, certain ways of thinking engendered by cultural or economic fear: all these hone the capacity for desecration. At such times, brutality acquires finesse. It becomes sophisticated. It becomes a monstrous form of art. It can even mask itself as virtue. It sees itself, in its own mirror, as patriotic duty.
Lucifer is well trained in the psychology of violation but Cap does not believe he would ever assault her in this way. On the other hand he has colleagues – who knows how many? – who might well be less scrupulous. And of course there are agents of shady and dysfunctional governments – who knows how many? – who have been burned in the court of international opinion, who wish to curtail Cap’s ability to travel, have her passport impounded, undermine the credibility of any evidence she might amass. But how would these photographs help them? And how could the photographs have come into their hands?
Could Celise have sensed blackmail potential and sold to the highest bidder? Cap has never found Celise even marginally interesting but nor has she ever had any illusions about the woman once married to Ti-Loup’s cousin and now married to Lucifer. She has never considered Celise worth attention, but perhaps she has been naive.
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