The Cavalier of the Apocalypse

by Susanne Alleyn

21

  It was mid-afternoon by the time they arrived back at the H?tel de Beaupr?au and returned the horses to the stables. They snatched a hasty meal of bread and cheese in the servants' hall, under the solicitous gaze of a plump kitchenmaid, and continued in a fiacre to the northern edge of the city, past the Boulevard.

  Here the roads were not yet cobbled and Paris was far less congested. A number of ramshackle theaters stood among fine new apartment houses that had been built alongside the broad avenue marking the long-demolished sixteenth-century city walls. Beyond the tax collectors' wall, which was still being constructed in a new, much larger ring around Paris to control and tax trade in and out of the city, lay rambling villas, abbeys, and farms. Within the tax wall, suburban manufactories, livery stables, market gardens, and other such enterprises requiring the extra space unavailable in the crowded heart of the city, lined the muddy roads.

  Aristide found Rue de Bellefond at last and asked the first workman he saw for directions to Fragonard's workshop, unsurprised when the man spat on the ground and tramped away without another word. A second man, though no less contemptuous than the first, was more helpful and pointed out the house of the mad horse doctor. "Though I'd stay away from there if I was you," he added, crossing himself and hurrying off.

  A slovenly, middle-aged woman servant, wearing a stained apron and clutching a wooden spoon, answered their ring and told them that monsieur was out in the barn, as usual. "You can go out and try to have a word with him, but I don't know as how he'll see you or not," she said, shrugging.

  "Is a gentleman with him?" Moreau inquired.

  "A gentleman?" she echoed him, scowling. "You mean a real gentleman, the quality? Lord love you, no. Only Paul and the boy, who help monsieur with his nasty experiments."

  "But gentlemen sometimes come here?" Aristide said.

  "Sometimes. They come to buy those horrible things that monsieur makes out of dead animals." She swiftly crossed herself with the spoon. "No accounting for the tastes of rich folk, that's all I'll say."

  "Has a gentleman visited monsieur during the past few days?" Aristide said, before she could shut the door. "A Monsieur de Beaupr?au?"

  "Nobody's been by for the past week except deliveries."

  "Deliveries?" said Moreau.

  "Carcasses for his experiments. I ask you! Any number of villainous-looking sorts come here with something dead they want to sell him. I don't ask any questions; I just point them and their carts toward the stableyard. Now did you want to talk to monsieur or not?" she added, impatient.

  "Would he spare us a moment?"

  The woman shrugged. "Well, you'd have better luck in the summer. Wintertime, he's always busy out there, hardly comes in for meals, even."

  "Why the summer?" Moreau inquired.

  She cast him a pitying glance, as though he were a particularly feeble-minded errand boy. "'Cause of the stink, of course. You can't mess about with maggoty carcasses in July, can you? Winter's when he does all that, cutting up dead horses and dogs and the like. Now you go around the house there, through the alley, and he'll be in one of the barns out back, couldn't tell you which one. I don't go out there farther than the privy, ever," she added, in response to Aristide's curious glance.

  They picked their way past the icy pools of mud in the alley and found themselves in a stableyard, crisscrossed with frozen ruts that led to various barns and sheds. A thin stream of smoke drifted from the smallest of the stone outbuildings. Somewhere behind a fence, a chain rattled and a dog bayed as it hurtled toward them on heavy paws.

  From another direction, a powerful reek of turpentine, combined with other odors Aristide could not identify, assailed them like a sudden gale. Following the smell, he found an open cauldron simmering over a fire, tended by a dirty-faced boy who stared at them, slack-jawed, when Aristide asked him if Monsieur Fragonard was about. Aristide repeated his question, more slowly, over the dog's barking, and at last the boy jerked his thumb at the largest of the barns.

  Aristide tried the high double doors, found they were barred shut on the inside, and knocked. When he received no response, he knocked again, insistently. At last he heard a heavy beam being lifted away, and one of the doors swung open halfway, revealing a short, gray-haired, untidy man in his shirtsleeves, wearing a canvas apron.

  "Yes? What is it?"

  "Monsieur Fragonard?"

  "Yes, what do you want?"

  "I want to know about the human cadaver that was recently delivered to you."

  The anatomist's small eyes narrowed suspiciously. "What's it to you? What cadaver?"

  "You ought to have asked 'what cadaver?' first, I'm afraid," Aristide said. "So you do have a corpse in there, don't you? Male, forties, medium height?"

  "Who the devil are you people?" Fragonard snapped, stepping back a pace. He seized hold of the door, ready to slam it, as his wary gaze raked over Aristide's shabby black suit. "Are you the police? I'm a man of science, I'll have you know, and that cadaver was honestly obtained."

  "Honestly obtained?" Aristide said. "I hardly think so. Surely you must have noticed, monsieur, that the man had been murdered."

  Fragonard eyed him, at last shaking his head. "And they call me mad. What are you jabbering about? Get off my premises and leave me in peace." He attempted to slam the door but Moreau shot forward and leaned his shoulder into it.

  "Please listen, monsieur."

  "You know what I'm talking about, monsieur," said Aristide. "The corpse that was recently delivered to you, the one you're probably working on right now, with-as a lurid novel might describe it-the throat cut from ear to ear."

  "My dear young man," the anatomist said, stepping backward, "you're sadly mistaken. The only adult human subject I've had here for, oh, at least two or three years, is the body of a man who was hanged. All perfectly legal and aboveboard. Not even the Church could accuse me of impropriety."

  "Hanged?" Moreau exclaimed.

  "Hanged, I assure you."

  "But?" Aristide paused, drew a deep breath, regretted it as the frigid breeze blew a strong whiff of turpentine his way, and began again. "I know that the body of a man with his throat slit must have been delivered to you during the past few days. Do you deny it?"

  Fragonard bristled. "Monsieur, I am an anatomist by profession, and I can recognize the difference between a slit throat and a broken neck! Would you care to see for yourself?"

  "See?"

  "Come in, if you must. I've nothing to hide."

  Aristide hesitated and the older man gave him a brief, superior smile. "Don't worry, I haven't begun dissection yet; the subject is still soaking in brine, and quite presentable to the layman."

  "I saw your finished pieces, the ?corch?s, at the Veterinary School, monsieur," Aristide said as he and Moreau followed Fragonard into the chilly barn. "They're?astonishing."

  Fragonard, as he had hoped, was as susceptible to flattery as anyone else. The anatomist paused and straightened his shoulders a little.

  "Someday everyone will appreciate the value of my work. And the Church, with its stupid, hidebound prejudices, will no longer dictate to men of science. Someday, monsieur!"

  Aristide could sense a vaguely disagreeable odor, raw flesh, he realized, like the smell of a butcher shop, mingled with the strong scent of the preservative mixture. "You're still creating ?corch?s, aren't you?"

  "From time to time, on commission." Fragonard gestured at a high shelf, where a handful of small animal skeletons and ?corch?s stood already mounted on stands, draped in sheeting, presumably waiting to be claimed by their buyers. Below, at one of several nearby tables, an assistant was arranging the flayed, gutted cadaver of a small animal, perhaps a dog or a fox, over a wooden framework. A few other specimens lay in dissecting trays and a neatly sorted collection of bleached bones waited to be assembled on yet another table.

  "I provide ?corch?s or articulated skeletons for certain clients," Fragonard told them, "the more open-minded of our physicians, for example; or sim
ply laymen with an interest in natural philosophy who wish a rare or exotic animal, or even a pet, preserved."

  "A pet?" Moreau echoed him, uneasily, as the dog began to bark again outside the barn. Aristide suddenly wondered if it, too, was destined for a dissecting tray, but Fragonard coughed gently.

  "Merely a watchdog, monsieur. I receive threats now and then from the ignorant louts who live in this quarter, and I don't intend to make it easy for some band of drunken vandals to invade my workshops during the night and smash up my specimens, or set the place on fire." He gestured at a small ?corch?, an undersized human fetus like those Aristide had seen at the Veterinary School. The horrid little corpse, shriveling and gnomelike, was already flayed, dissected, and posed upon a framework, though the drying tissue, each individual muscle and tendon carefully separated from the rest, was not yet parched and papery. A pot of the strong-smelling preservative sat beside it. Fragonard seized the paintbrush resting in the pot and set to work. "They believe, most of them," he continued, as he carefully brushed the varnish on the flesh, "in their simpleminded superstition, that I'm an unholy ghoul who creeps into the cemeteries at night to dig up their dead relatives! Bah! There are plenty of unbaptized infant corpses to be had, for a few livres, from the charity hospitals, but try telling these local buffoons that?"

  "The cadaver, monsieur," Aristide said, guessing that Fragonard had already forgotten the purpose of his visit. "You were about to show it to me?"

  "The cadaver?" Fragonard said, without pausing in his brushstrokes.

  "The full-grown male cadaver you recently acquired?"

  "Dear me, of course." Fragonard set down his brush, shaking his head, and crossed the barn to a long tin tub, one of three. He jerked back the coarse sheet draped over it. "Here, messieurs, look all you want; look in all the tubs if it pleases you."

  Moreau hesitantly leaned forward, drew in his breath with a sharp gasp, and quickly looked away, muttering an oath. Aristide peered into the tub, expecting the worst, but saw nothing more repulsive than the intact, nude body of a paunchy middle-aged man, submerged in saltwater. The neck bore a faint reddish imprint around it, but there was no trace of the gaping wound or the slashed symbol that Aristide had seen at the Basse-Ge?le. The man, moreover, was completely unfamiliar to him.

  "Well, am I right?" Fragonard demanded. "You'll agree this man did not die of a slit throat?"

  "Yes?yes, I fear so."

  He examined the cadaver's features more closely, trying to fix them in his memory. The man's face was prematurely lined and pouches sagged beneath his eyes. He bore signs of overindulgence and hard living; small, shiny, unmistakable syphilitic ulcers had formed on his lower lip and genitals, while his flabby skin, though pallid, was sallow and blotchy and crisscrossed with tiny spider veins.

  This was no common, habitual felon from the slums, Aristide realized immediately; such men would rarely have the opportunity to grow fleshy and gross. "What?what was his crime?"

  "I've no idea."

  "Don't you-"

  "I don't need to know anything," Fragonard said impatiently. "I merely pay them what they ask."

  By "them," Aristide guessed that Fragonard meant resurrectionists, or perhaps assistant executioners eager to scrape a few more livres' profit from a criminal whose clothes they would already have sold to the ragman. He glanced into the other tubs, which contained only brine. "Who offered you this cadaver?"

  Fragonard shrugged. "One of the usual disreputable-looking ruffians. They don't give me their names, and I don't inquire. I was merely delighted to have a full-grown cadaver, for once. I may do another rider," he added thoughtfully, "if I can get hold of a decent horse for him-not one of the starved nags they usually try to sell me, which are fit only for the glue pot-it's a splendid challenge, and any one of my wealthier clients would pay very well for that, I should think?"

  "The man who sold you this corpse," Aristide persisted, "when did he-"

  "Friday morning," said Fragonard, still looking over the cadaver. At last he sighed and threw the sheet back over the tub. "Now, monsieur, I believe you've seen everything, and I'm busy."

  "Do you know a Monsieur de Beaupr?au?"

  "Beaupr?au?" Fragonard thought for a moment. "The name seems familiar?"

  "A monkey-"

  "Yes, yes, of course. Some time ago, three or four years. He commissioned a myological study of a marmoset, if I'm not mistaken, which he supplied himself. What about him?"

  "Has he called on you lately?"

  "No, certainly not."

  Aristide sighed and turned to his companion, who was staring hard at the half-assembled skeleton of something with impressively sharp teeth. "Moreau? I think we're done here."