The Wolves of Paris

by Michael Wallace

  The muleteers got their animals up and harnessed. Men saddled horses for the Boccaccio brothers and their agent. Only eight miles from the city now, they’d tried to press on the previous evening, but a broken wagon axle stopped them short. Instead, they had pitched tents at the edge of some woods midway between two villages and set a watch. Axle repaired, morning fast broken with dark bread and hard cheese, they were eager to reach the city and figure out what had happened to the Boccaccio agent there, why they’d received no word from Paris in months.

  On the road, the brothers traveled in silence at the front of the caravan. Lorenzo was in a foul mood, irritated by the yellow cross on his breast, and bored of his brother’s company after so many days on the road. Marco criticized the villagers and peasants as superstitious, as pagans, while insisting they stop at every shrine, then take confession and mass whenever they came across a church or abbey. Once, passing through Provence, they’d wasted eight hours crawling on their knees through the streets of some village so they could receive expiation of their sins in the presence of a piece of the True Cross.

  “Three trips to the shrine is as good as one trip to Rome,” the local bishop assured them.

  Lorenzo was exhausted mentally as well as physically. These last few miles at the end of the trip were the worst, the anticipation crushing. Paris wasn’t Florence, it was a filthy, violent northern city, worn down by decades of war and plague and famine. But it would be better than this interminable time on the road. And then there was Lucrezia, and the thought of seeing her again.

  She was widowed. The news had reached all the way to Florence. Lorenzo was sure he wasn’t the only young Italian dreaming of bringing her back to her native land. But how many others would be in Paris tonight? Not many. Lorenzo glanced at Marco. Well, there was at least one other.

  Lorenzo kept his thoughts on Lucrezia until Marco pulled his horse next to Lorenzo’s some time later.

  “If Giuseppe is in trouble with the king, we must be sure to disassociate him from the company.”

  Lorenzo raised an eyebrow. “After two decades of service to the family? Doesn’t one usually demand forty pieces of silver before turning a man over to the centurions?”

  “We can only assume the worst.”

  “And that is?”

  “Giuseppe received word of Father’s apoplexy,” Marco said, “assumed we were too young and callow and preoccupied to look after the family interests, and has decided to set himself up on his own.”

  “You credit him with too much imagination,” Lorenzo said.

  “Then what?”

  “Maybe it’s because of the king or his provost.”

  “What, you think they arrested him?”

  “Why not? Charles needs money to fight his wars. Giuseppe balked at committing more funds and Lord Nemours clapped him in irons to force the matter. He is intercepting our correspondence.”

  Marco grunted his disagreement.

  Lorenzo thought his theory not only plausible, but probable as well. The king was already indebted to the Boccaccios for 11,000 florins, and another 115,000 to other Florentines. A staggering sum. His debts rivaled the pope’s. But Charles had his kingdom back. Mostly.

  If simple pecuniary interests were behind Giuseppe’s mysterious silence, the brothers carried the means to resolve the situation. In addition to four carts of spices and silk, they carried a strongbox filled with silver pennies for small expenses, plus notarized cheques, contracts and pledges. If needed, they could raise additional sums equal to the amount already lent. But if that’s what the king was about, Lorenzo was determined to extract favorable terms.

  They passed through a pair of villages on the approach to the city. The road changed from rutted, frozen mud to a gravely base to bits of the old Roman road, flat and well-drained and lined with paving stones. Around midday, they passed the churches and abbeys of Saint-Médard, then the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in the flat, flood-prone fields on the left bank of the city. They passed through the gates of the city wall itself, and Lorenzo was pleased to see that Paris had developed on this side of the Seine since his previous visit four years earlier, with older, crumbling buildings shored up, and windlasses lifting stones to repair damaged or partially built churches and monasteries. Burghers built new homes where once sheep had grazed.

  On the other hand, the roads were still filthy with human and animal waste, the butchers piled their offal in vacant fields or dumped it in the river, and entire streets near the more prosperous houses had been foolishly given over to tanners. Tanning was one of the more noxious trades, with masters and apprentices outside in the chill air, scraping hides, rubbing them with chicken feces, or soaking them in pits filled with oak and water. The smell was . . . pungent, to put it kindly. Thank goodness for the cold. In the heat of summer, the stench would be unbearable.

  Lorenzo’s eyes stretched across the river to the Cité, to the towers of Notre Dame, then northwest along the river bank to the manors and grand hôtels stretching along that side of the island. Lucrezia d’Lisle lived in one of those homes. Did she ever think about him? Did she ever think about Marco?

  Lorenzo studied his brother, riding tall in the saddle, as handsome and rich and arrogant looking as Piero de’Medici, and hoped not.

  ✛

  They had difficulties crossing onto the island of the Cité. To Lorenzo’s surprise, the Petit Pont—the little bridge—was crawling with watchmen. The men inspected wagons, opening grain baskets and thumping great casks of wine and olive oil—anything big enough to conceal a man, it seemed. The Florentine wagon train made it onto the bridge, then stalled as they fell under inspection.

  Demetrius rode his horse up from the wagons a moment later. “Two men want to inspect the strongbox.”

  “Open it,” Marco said. “But don’t let them touch anything.”

  When Demetrius had gone, Marco turned to Lorenzo. “We’re inside the walls. A little late to be searching for English spies, don’t you think?”

  Lorenzo frowned. Yes, strange.

  Finally at the toll gate itself, they waited while a band of filthy, crippled men and women argued they were mendicants and not subject to the toll.

  “What’s your business?” a guard asked.

  “The Hôtel Dieu,” one of the beggars said. He waved a scrap of parchment. “This here is from the bishop.”

  The toll collector glanced at the parchment, but neither he nor the beggar likely could read what was written there. “Show your faces. All of you. Arms and hands, too.”

  The beggars pulled back cowls and lifted sleeves to prove they were not escapees from the leprosarium outside the city walls. The toll collector waved them in.

  Lorenzo dropped from his horse to present his credentials. A copy of his orders, the list of his goods to trade, with the wax seal of the Boccaccio and Father’s signature—forged by Mother, since Father couldn’t grip a quill since the apoplexy struck his body. The toll collector gave a perfunctory glance, then handed it back for the Florentine to read aloud. Lorenzo read it first in Latin, then translated to French. He looked up to see the toll collector staring at the yellow cross on his breast.

  He remounted. Waiting for the mule train to pull into motion, his eyes wandered along the riverbank toward the grand manor houses, thinking about Lucrezia again. A chilling sight caught his eye. Live bodies hung in the gibbets that dangled over the stone wall to the left of the gatehouse. He hadn’t paid them much attention from a distance, except to notice the shear number of them—at least forty metal cages at the end of twelve-foot poles. Criminals—both civil and ecclesiastic—might end their days in one of the metal contraptions, condemned to die from thirst or exposure. More typically, they’d winch up a convicted murderer after his execution, let the crows pick his flesh. The skeletons might sit in that position for years.

  Indeed, most of the gibbets held nothing but bones and a few greasy strands of hair. But the nearest three gibbets held bodies. The first, strangely eno
ugh, held a dead dog—a mastiff or some other large breed. The other two held young men, dressed in rags. They gripped the bars and stared back at him.

  Lorenzo couldn’t look away. He imagined his own hands on the cold metal, thought of the miserable twenty-four hours he’d spent at the priory of San Domenico, doing penance in just such a contraption. Summer then, not winter, the heat like hammer and tongs on his tonsured scalp. His tongue like worn-through boot leather. His hand went to the cross at his breast.

  Marco and the rest of the wagon train were ahead of him, passing through the gates onto the island with the clomp of hooves and the shouts of muleteers. Lorenzo turned his horse to follow, but hesitated as he passed beneath the gatehouse.

  “Tollmaster,” he called up at the man staring down from a window above him. “Who are those men in the gibbets?”

  A shadow passed over the man’s face. “Loup-garou.”

  Lorenzo wasn’t sure he properly understood the French. “I’m sorry—did you say wolf man?”

  “Yes, exactly. Those two—plus the dead one—tore out the throat of a toll collector. Ravished two young girls in wolf form.”

  “The dead one? The dog?”

  “That’s no dog.”

  “Looks like a dog to me,” Lorenzo said. “But I haven’t seen many wolves in Italy.”

  “It changes its shape, you understand. You can’t tell by looking at it.”

  “So there are wolf men inside the walls?” Lorenzo asked. “Are there more of them?”

  Lorenzo looked at the two condemned men, who had turned their heads at the conversation. They fixed the young Florentine merchant with hollow stares, but neither spoke.

  “Henri Montguillon ordered two known witches burned at the stake,” the toll collector said. “No doubt one of them was responsible for this sorcery. One loup-garou remains, but not to worry. We’ll find him. His pack is captured, his mistress dead. There’s nowhere to go.”

  The last of the wagon train had passed beneath the raised portcullis and was tromping on the paved streets of the Cité on the other side. Anxious to be away from the awful sight of the condemned men in their gibbets, Lorenzo urged his horse forward to catch up.

  Henri Montguillon again. Why would the prior be involved in this bit of superstition? The Dominicans generally focused on bigger crimes of heresy, and Paris suffered persistent rumors about secret Jews, Cathars, even Templars—if remnants of those wicked knights still existed after all these years. Lorenzo imagined a credulous sergeant at arms or night watchman reporting a—what was it called?—a loup-garou to the bishop or to one of the learned doctors at the college. Then, when ignored by right-thinking men, he might appeal to Montguillon in desperation. And then what? What evidence would make Montguillon pursue the matter?

  Lorenzo caught up with his brother at the head of the train. Two roads came together and their men were trying to muscle through a group of pilgrims on their way to the cathedral, while drovers leading sheep tried to fight through in the opposite direction.

  Marco was waiting for him with a scowl. “Problems?”

  “Not for us, no.” He explained what he’d seen and heard.

  “Loup-garou?”

  “A bunch of superstitious nonsense.”

  “I agree, it sounds like nothing.” A half smile on the older brother’s face. “Perhaps it means Montguillon will be too busy to see to your penances. But you’ll present yourself to the inquisitor tomorrow all the same.”

  “Yes, I know,” Lorenzo said. “You’ve reminded me of that twice a day for the last fortnight.”

  Chapter Three

  A servant let out a squeak when he answered the insistent banging to see the brothers from Florence standing in the undercroft before Giuseppe’s front door. His eyes widened at the carts and their muleteers coming down the narrow lane, where houses sat shoulder to shoulder. The corbelled upper stories leaned so far over the street that a man on one side could throw open his shutters and shake hands with a man on the opposite side.

  After so long on the open road, the tunnel-like alley had made the horses skittish, and Lorenzo and Marco had dismounted. Lorenzo held their reins and let his brother step forward. This early business with Giuseppe might be ugly.

  “Don’t stand there gaping,” Marco told the servant in a rude tone. “Send for the stable boy. And two men to unload these carts. Where are your stables anyway?”

  “We don’t have stables,” the man said. “I rented them from the monastery, and—”

  “And who the devil are you?”

  “Luc Fournier, my lord.”

  He was a short, nervous man, no older than thirty but already completely bald, except for a little tuft at the back and a fringe above his ears. He’d appeared on the undercroft without a hat.

  “Well, Fournier, I want your master. Where’s Giuseppe? Summon him at once.”

  “I don’t. I mean . . . ”

  “Hurry up, man. Do you want a flogging?”

  Lorenzo cleared his throat. “Gentle, Brother. Be easy on the man. We’re unexpected.”

  “That is to say,” Fournier said, addressing Lorenzo in an anxious tone, like a whipped dog. “My master is not in the city.”

  “Where is he then?” Lorenzo asked.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t seen him since All Hallows Day. More than two months. He left for Troyes to buy a shipment of hard Castilian soap. Never returned.”

  “And you didn’t go looking for him?” Marco said. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “But I did go looking. I sent word, then I went myself. Nobody saw him after he left Troyes. He traveled with eight men. Another merchant and several guards. They all disappeared.”

  “So our man is missing,” Marco said, his voice both angry and wondering. “Probably dead at the hand of bandits. Why haven’t we heard of this in Florence?”

  “I was trying to resolve matters myself,” Fournier said. “In the Boccaccio way. I petitioned the king to investigate, sent letters to the bishop of Saint-Pierre-et-Saint-Paul. I thought—well, I hoped—there would be an explanation. When that turned up nothing, I sent word by courier. Didn’t you receive it?”

  “When did this post go out?” Lorenzo asked.

  “Five weeks this Tuesday.”

  Lorenzo caught his brother’s eye and they shared frowns. Five weeks—the letter must have reached Florence after their departure from the city. Mother could have sent a rider after them, he supposed, but with the two already on the way and carrying valuable cargo, perhaps she’d figured they were far enough along to investigate matters for themselves.

  “And this is the truth?” Lorenzo asked. “We’ll find out soon enough.”

  Fournier nodded vigorously. “I swear it.”

  “Open the doors,” Marco said. “And for God’s sake, find someone to stable our animals. And quarters for our men.”

  Fournier rushed off. Demetrius and the muleteers hauled goods to the storeroom in the cellar. Left alone, Lorenzo and Marco went from room to room. The house was a solid manor with timbered walls and blown-glass windows, thickened and distorting in the center, but numerous enough to let in good light, at least on the upper floors above the street. Fournier’s maid—that would make her a servant’s servant’s servant—ran ahead of them, opening doors at their command.

  “What do you think?” Marco asked when they reached the library with its swept wooden floors.

  Lorenzo lifted a silver candlestick, then ran his finger across the Flemish tapestry hanging from one wall above a cold, ash-filled hearth.

  “I think Giuseppe has done well for himself as an agent of the Boccaccio,” he said.

  “Perhaps too well.” Marco glanced at the book shelves, their precious contents visible behind a locked metal grille. “He has a small library here. Thirty-five, forty books. Must have paid a fortune to the copyist at the college.”

  “It’s unlikely he would have run off without selling these goods first, don’t you think?” Lorenzo said. He ben
t and lifted the corner of the rug on the floor. There was dust underneath. “Giuseppe was a clean man. Three months looks about right from what I see.”

  Marco looked thoughtful. “I suppose he’s dead. We’ll look into his books and make sure they balance. See if we can find his widow or children, if he has them. Offer them a modest pension.”

  “I don’t think he remarried. His only daughter is in a convent in Lombardy.”

  “Then we’ll make an offering at the Hôtel Dieu in his honor, and ask Rome for intercession on behalf of his soul. That should satisfy our duty.”

  “You don’t think we should try to figure out what happened?” Lorenzo asked.

  “I don’t see how that matters. We need to worry about the business. This Fournier is a nobody, obviously, but he hasn’t robbed the house, so far as I can see. That means he can be relied on. We’ll hire a new agent, and leave Demetrius and Fournier to keep an eye on him for the next year or two until we’re sure the new man can be trusted.”

  Lorenzo found this business unpleasant. Giuseppe had served the family for nearly twenty years, since Marco and Lorenzo were young boys. He’d arrived in Paris during the roughest part of the war, with Lancastrian English armies savaging western France and Jeanne d’Arc laying siege to Orleans. He’d tended the family business through famine and plague.

  Marco must have caught his frown. “You don’t like it?”

  “A five-minute conversation, a hasty inspection of the house, and you want to declare him dead?”

  “You’re far too sentimental.”

  “I call it honorable,” Lorenzo said. “We’ll be here two weeks, at least. There are contracts to arrange, goods to sell. I have my . . . penance to serve.” The word tasted like dust in his mouth. “The inquisitor isn’t going to hand me a paternoster and tell me to say a prayer or two.”