‘I’ll tell you anything you like, but first, tell me about your most dramatic adventure—your escape from the cells under the leaden roof of the doge’s palace in Venice.’
‘The Piombi? You’ll be surprised to know, Madame, that I was in far greater danger in Rome than in Venice. I witnessed the most appalling debauchery in the Holy City. I was forced to keep my hand firmly on my sword, the entire evening, for fear of being sodomized!’
She laughed.
‘But will you tell me how you escaped from the Piombi?’
The Chevalier de Seingalt gave a slight bow.
‘I shall indeed, Madame, but in return, you will indulge my curiosity as to the criminal underworld of Paris!’
‘It’s a promise! My husband tells me everything.’
Satisfied, Casanova launched into his account:
‘One day, in Venice, I was warned of a plot against me by a league of wicked and—above all—jealous gentlemen. I was told I must flee. I laughed it off, and found myself imprisoned in the Piombi the very next morning. The place from which no one had ever escaped.’
Casanova’s companion gave a small chuckle.
‘So typical of you, Chevalier—you never listen to anyone, or anything!’
The Venetian acquiesced with an ironic smile, and went on:
‘From the moment I found myself in prison, I began ceaselessly to plot my escape. I stole a key when I was escorted into the open air for a walk, and I used it to scrape a hole in the floor of my cell, leading down into the apartments of my guards, which I knew were directly underneath. I had almost finished when, thinking to please me, they moved me to a new cell with a higher ceiling and a view of the lagoon!’
The lady chuckled again. Casanova had bound his audience with rings of steel, as always. He continued:
‘I began scraping with the key again, but this time at the ceiling, to reach the cell of a monk that lay above mine. From there, I could make my escape with him over the rooftops. One night, after a month of sustained effort, I reached his cell. The monk had succeeded in scraping a hole in his own ceiling. I led my reluctant companion out onto the roof. From there, I spied an attic window, which I reached by means of a rope fashioned from sheets and towels. I forced the window, then pulled my companion down after me. I almost broke my neck ten times over but, bloodied and battered, I reached the palace archives. There, I picked a lock to gain access to the Cancelleria, but the great doors leading to the doge’s staircase were locked and impregnable.
‘And so, Chevalier, what then?’ cried Madame Ferraud.
‘I had brought all my clothes with me in a bag. I dressed, and thus attired, I leant out of the window and called down into the palace courtyard, to one of the sentries. I told him he was an idle good-for-nothing, and ordered him to fetch the warden, who was swiftly brought. I told him that my friend the monk and myself had been locked in by mistake, and that we had fallen asleep. He seemed reluctant at first, but I gave him a thorough scolding, and he hurried to open the doors!’
He snapped his fingers.
‘And there you have it! Now you…’
The lady leant towards him with a greedy smile.
‘What do you want to know, you rascal?’
‘Your husband is involved in a curious case: a faceless woman… Do we know yet who she is?’ he asked.
‘We do,’ she said, triumphantly. ‘Imagine this—the Inspector of Strange and Unexplained Deaths has established her identity by means of a delicate gold death mask, made by a sinister monk!’
‘A monk?’
‘His colleague.’
Casanova remembered the eerie figure of the monk, tall and straight as Mozart’s Commendatore himself, on the driver’s seat of his cart.
‘Ah yes, I saw him! A strange figure indeed. What is his role in all this?’
Madame Ferraud broke into a knowing smile.
‘Officially, he examines the bodies of the victims of the crimes investigated by the Inspector of Strange and Unexplained Deaths.’
‘To what end? When a fellow’s dead, he’s dead!’
‘No, no, you don’t understand. He is looking for the cause of death.’
The Chevalier de Seingalt looked troubled.
‘But anyone can see whether a fellow’s been strangled, or had his throat slit.’
The prosecutor’s wife shook her head vigorously.
‘Don’t be so sure. This is the scientific police! My husband has told me that bones break differently depending on the nature of the blow, and that the shape of a wound can reveal whether it was made using a single or a double-edged blade.’
‘And where does that get us?’ asked the Venetian, unconvinced.
‘You mentioned strangulation. Well, thanks to his colleague, the inspector once showed that a person did not die by his own hand, from hanging, but was murdered. The murderers—two brothers—sat astride their victim and blocked his nose and mouth until death ensued.’
‘A serviceable monk, indeed,’ Casanova was forced to agree.
‘Serviceable, but a heretic!’
Casanova’s guest lowered her voice, and whispered conspiratorially:
‘They say he roams the cemeteries at night and exhumes newly buried corpses to take back to his mortuary. He opens up the bodies to study their anatomy! They say he eats the brains, to expand his own knowledge.’
‘Dear God! And what of our faceless victim? Who did you say she was?’
‘Highly confidential information, my friend. My husband has sworn me to secrecy. He should never have told me, but what’s the point of knowing all the best secrets if you can’t share them with a living soul?’
She burst out laughing.
‘But you can tell me,’ Casanova insisted. ‘My lips are as mute as that carp’s, which we are about to eat.’
‘Not a word to a soul: she’s one of the king’s little whores, a wig-maker!’
Volnay pushed the door with a sudden feeling of dread. The monk stood waiting in silence. His expression was dark, and his habit was stained with blood.
‘Not mine I assure, you,’ he said, seeing his colleague’s anxious expression. ‘Alas, I left the doors to the laboratory ajar, and someone forced his way in, hoping to cut my throat. I killed him.’
He showed Volnay an adjacent cellar, to which he had dragged the body. The room contained a few bottles of wine, sealed with wax. Hams and bunches of flowers hung from the ceiling to dry. On the floor, the corpse lay in a pool of its own blood.
‘I washed the laboratory floor—you could eat your dinner off it now, if you so desired! We must dispose of the body straightaway—we’ll take it to the Seine, like everyone else! No corpse, no questions asked. Now is not the time to be attracting Sartine’s attention.’
Volnay squatted beside the corpse and turned it over, to reveal the gaunt, weather-beaten face, covered with scars and dotted with smallpox.
‘The face of a true villain,’ said the monk, scornfully. ‘I found a large sum of money in his pockets, his wages for my life, and the sum total of its worth, in the eyes of whoever paid him. I’ll keep his money and drink to his very good health!’
‘Drink to the angels if you’ve no one better to toast,’ muttered Volnay, dropping one knee to the floor.
Briefly, he examined the wound.
‘A single, fatal strike,’ he said appreciatively. ‘You’ve not lost your touch!’
There was a note of pride and respect in his voice.
‘No sense in wounding an assailant like him first,’ said the monk.
Volnay nodded gravely. He was utterly at a loss. What had he got himself mixed up in this time? Who possessed enough information, and the certainty of his own impunity, to attack an inspector of the king’s police, and his partner? The attack was all the more worrying given that few people knew where the monk lived and worked. Plainly, an attempt had been made on the monk’s life. Volnay stared at the dead man, and reflected that he himself might have had his throat cut, by Wallace
, if he had handed over the royal letter.
He slipped his fingers inside the man’s buffalo-leather jerkin, half opening it, and registered in silence the small rosary around his neck. He exchanged a knowing look with the monk. His partner was noticeably unmoved, and gazed at the body with the calm serenity of a man returning from vespers.
‘A good Christian and a murderer…’ he observed, simply.
A deathly silence ensued.
‘I questioned one of the king’s wig-makers,’ said Volnay, at length, tearing his gaze from the corpse’s chest with some difficulty. ‘I secured little in the way of hard information, but I did ascertain that Mademoiselle Hervé was with child, by our dearly beloved monarch!’
The monk’s face darkened.
‘And worse than that,’ Volnay continued, ‘Le Bel, the first valet of the king’s bedchamber, spied on us during our interview.’
The monk sighed.
‘Everyone spies on everyone else at Versailles. People have nothing better to do with their day. It’s even said that the king finds the queen’s company so tedious, he kills the flies on the windowpanes to pass the time.’
The monk locked the cellar door carefully behind them, then led Volnay back to the laboratory. The furnace glowed red in the half-light. Rows of pipettes were filled with liquid, coloured spinach green, walnut brown or purple as a bishop’s robe.
‘The truth goes beyond what you say,’ he observed acidly. ‘There’s a Court spy behind every door, and every minister has several of his own.’
The monk smiled into his short beard.
‘Ministers always want to know whatever ill is being spoken of them!’
‘They even pay off the police informers, to get information about themselves,’ said Volnay. The thought revolted him. ‘There is no such thing as idle talk, now. Every unfortunate joke or slip of the tongue is reported to the chief of police. Friends at dinner together guard against saying too much, because so many men of quality are professional spies. Not to mention the household servants, who are all in the pockets of some aristocrat and enemy of their master. Royal family secrets are never kept for long.’
He sat astride a high-backed chair and refused the glass of water pushed towards him by the monk.
‘You shouldn’t drink that stuff,’ he told his colleague.
‘I infuse my water with lemon balm, iris root and a small glass of eau de vie,’ said the monk. ‘Delicious to drink and thoroughly hygienic!’
But Volnay’s mind was far away; he reconsidered, analysed and compared each fact, each piece of information.
‘You should know, too,’ he said, ‘that Mademoiselle Hervé was Sartine’s mistress.’
To his astonishment, the monk burst into delighted laughter.
‘This whole affair is so entertaining! First the Devout Party, as they like to call themselves, and now our own chief of police is mixed up in it all! But I doubt the girl was his mistress. Sartine doesn’t mix business with pleasure. She was his informer, most likely… The police’s interest in prostitutes is dictated solely by their clients. Well—I hope Sartine isn’t after the letter, along with the religionists!’
‘I know what you’re going to say,’ Volnay cut in. ‘You and I are the only people who know about the existence of the letter, and we’ve spoken of it to no one. The only explanation for these attacks on us is that someone saw me remove the letter from the body. Casanova saw me do it, quite plainly, and he’s a man who knows how to negotiate for information of that sort.’
The monk looked sceptical.
‘I can’t see Casanova selling that to the Devout Party when as far as they’re concerned he’s the Devil incarnate! His dealings with the Church are confined to orgies with pretty young nuns.’
He could see Volnay was becoming impatient.
‘If Casanova saw you remove the letter,’ he went on quickly, ‘others are sure to have seen it, too. The precinct chief, for example. Those people are always in someone else’s pay.’
Volnay got to his feet and paced slowly around the room, as if to make space for his thoughts.
‘If not Casanova, then I wonder how the person who saw me managed to arrive so quickly at the scene of the crime, unless—’
‘Unless he was already there, is that it?’ The monk was accustomed to following his partner’s logic.
Volnay stopped pacing and stood deep in thought.
‘Yes, either because he was the murderer—though I doubt that, because the murderer would have thought to recover the letter before cutting away his victim’s face—or because the young woman was being followed. In either case, whoever ordered the attack on me is very likely one of the Devout Party, because my attacker was that man Wallace. As for the second attack, it was doubtless ordered by the same people, in an angrier mood now…’
Silence fell, broken only by the buzzing of a fly at the neck of an empty bottle.
‘So many questions, so many possible answers!’ exclaimed the monk. ‘The king, the Devout Party, Sartine—suspects aplenty! I suggest you keep a very cool head. Take care and do as St Thomas Aquinas said: “Be not indiscreet, but watch your words, and like a prudent son, do not cast pearls before swine.” For my part, I shall leave this place for a time, and return to one of my old hideouts.’
He laughed merrily.
‘Why, it’s almost like the good old days, when my heretical books were burnt! But you cannot retreat like me into the shadows. And so, be on your guard with everyone.’
He paused. His tone was harder, and darker, when he spoke again:
‘Because now, there are just three things you can trust in this world: me, your talkative magpie and the tip of your sword!’
Night fell over the city, with its cortège of shadows, phantoms and thieves. Honest citizens sought a peaceful night’s sleep in their beds of straw, feathers or wool. Here and there, windows glowed with dim yellow light. But the inns and gambling dens were ablaze with tall wax or tallow candles. Loud bursts of laughter rang out in the darkness. Volnay walked fearlessly, a pistol in his belt and his sword at his side. He was constantly on the alert, and his eyes followed every suspect shadow. He picked his way carefully along the dark, filth-strewn streets. His nostrils quivered in disgust. He glanced more than usual at the prostitutes, who did their best to attract him, like supernatural sirens taunting a lost mariner. He paused for a moment, then went on his way. He walked down a narrow lane that turned a sharp corner before skirting the gardens of a fine mansion and petering out on the banks of the Seine.
‘Watch out below!’ yelled someone overhead, before emptying a bucket of slops from a window.
Volnay leapt to one side to avoid being splattered, then made his way to the Rue des Lanternes, populated by cloth brokers, wig-makers and corset-makers. There he saw her. A girl, cleanly and decently dressed, but whose dark eyes were full of fire. She gave a small sign, then pushed at the door of an inn, the Leaky Barrel. Before disappearing inside, she shot him a penetrating stare: a mix of conflicting emotions, and an invitation to follow her. Intrigued, he stepped through the door.
He found himself in the main room of the inn, long and low-ceilinged, its floor strewn with fresh straw. Near the entrance, an old man sat with his head nodding on his chest. He seemed to have tossed his goblet aside. Volnay surveyed the room but saw no female presence. Tallow candles lit the tabletops, each one the centre of a still life or tavern scene, as if freshly painted on canvas. A small group ate chunks of bread dipped in pea soup. At another table, diners were devouring small cuts of pork fillet pricked with sage and washed down with thick, syrupy wine. Then Volnay spotted the men sitting in the darkest corner of the room. Three of them, all dressed in black, and watching him with particular attention. One, with a swarthy complexion and a square jaw, possessed a natural authority. He rose, as if to drink Volnay’s health. The inspector paled. The man gestured discreetly, and Volnay moved forward, as if in a trance.
‘Welcome, brother,’ said the man with the sw
arthy complexion.
And he made the sign of the Brotherhood.
‘What do you want from me?’ stammered Volnay under his breath. ‘It’s been so long—’
‘And the time has come for you to join us once more. We need you.’
‘In what way?’
‘You’re in charge of an investigation that is of interest to us. A letter meant for us has come into your possession by mistake. You must hand it over.’
Volnay reeled slightly, but stood his ground.
‘It’s not addressed to you,’ he said.
‘Have you opened it?’
‘No, but—’
‘Do you know who wrote it?’
‘Yes, absolutely—’
He stopped short. This cross-examination was pointless.
‘If you know who wrote the letter,’ he said scornfully, ‘tell me yourself.’
The man leant closer.
‘Someone of great importance!’
‘Then you will know why I am unable to give you the letter,’ said Volnay, lowering his eyes. ‘I am the king’s servant.’
One of the other men—fat, with piercing grey eyes and a black beard—leant across. He seemed sprightly indeed for a man of his constitution. His German-accented voice was curiously soft.
‘You serve the king! Come on, Volnay, you know us. Your life is as spotless as your reputation. The worst anyone can pin on you is a penchant for our modern philosophers, and saving the king’s life!’
Volnay stared down at the floor. The men in black had been watching him in silence. Now, all eyes turned to the fat man. Volnay scrutinized him. His neck beard hid a voluminous double chin, and the moustache brought a certain depth and majesty to his upper lip. His eyes burnt with passionate fire. The inspector understood. Here was the true leader of this little party.
‘I followed the orders of the Brotherhood of the Serpent at the time, nothing more. Damiens was one of us, but he lost his nerve and wanted to kill the king, far too soon. That was what the Grand Master told me. He had to be stopped.’
Casanova and the Faceless Woman Page 8
