New Venice 02 - Luminous Chaos

by Jean-Christophe Valtat

  While Lilian and Thomas went for a drink together at the nearby Eden-Parnasse, in the busy, flickering rue de la Gaîté, Gabriel had gone back to the hotel, staggering with exhaustion, his temple throbbing relentlessly. At the desk he found a message confirming the presence of the others, as well as their room numbers. He climbed the stairs, and noticing light spilling under the door of Brentford’s suite on the fifth floor, he allowed himself to knock.

  Brentford was propped on his pillow, counting money from a small chest open on the striped bedspread. At least they wouldn’t want for anything. Gabriel cleared his throat and sat at the foot of the bed.

  “Well, that was quite a trip,” he said.

  Brentford smiled a weary smile. “If you thought that was hard, wait for the journey home. Travelling backwards in time is one thing, but travelling forward to a city that doesn’t exist yet …?” He shook his head, then noticed Gabriel’s bandages. “How’s your head?”

  “It still holds most of my brain, I suppose. Everyone all right here?”

  “Given the situation, not too bad. Blankbate is already out, prowling for God knows what. He’s quite the night creature, as you can imagine. And resourceful, too—for all my reluctance, his idea of scraping the real dates off our Canadian papers and replacing them with something more credible not only got us out of Iceland but has worked wonders getting us into this hotel. I suppose a little forgery on an already false passport isn’t too terrible a crime, is it? As for Tuluk, he’s cleaning and feeding the Colonel. He’s become practically Branwell’s right-hand man now. They get along famously and joke in Inuktitut all the time. How did it go at the hospital?”

  “Oh, it was nothing special, really. Lilian and Thomas were pumped full of morphine and Jean-Klein Lavis is dead, except that he’s alive.”

  Brentford turned pale.

  “Take me through that last bit a tad more slowly, will you?” he asked.

  Once Gabriel had finished his tale, Brentford carried on nodding for a while. Then he said, “Did you try to explain things to the young Jean-Klein?”

  “Well, you know, explaining something I don’t understand wouldn’t normally scare me. Hell, I used to teach literature in college! But, this time, I was tired before I began, and not feeling especially willing to end up in a straitjacket.”

  Brentford pursed his lips. “It’s troubling what you say about Jean-Klein—that is, our Jean-Klein—not remembering the weather being like this. It sounds as if we’re in some alternate past, but the circumstances are curiously similar to the ones we were supposed to deal with in the present.”

  “You mean that Peterswarden knew this would happen and sent us back in time on purpose?”

  “I have no proof of that—and anyway, I don’t see how he could have planned it,” Brentford admitted. “We don’t have much choice, in any event. If we want to understand what’s happening, we’ve got to start at the beginning and get in touch with Jean-Klein Lavis, Jr., again. At least, we should see if he can give us the lowdown on the couronne magnétique, since the old Jean-Klein had heard about it. I agree with the Colonel that it might play a part in this adventure of ours. Let’s go first thing tomorrow.”

  “You sound as if you’re enjoying this,” Gabriel said, between two gaping yawns.

  Brentford looked surprised, but realized that it was true: the more trouble he was in, the more excited he became. Getting everyone back home—well, everyone but Jean-Klein, alas—was a challenge that made governing New Venice look like a breeze, and after a brief bout of despondency, he had discovered that he was not only ready but willing to take it up.

  “Let’s say I find it … interesting.”

  By the time he got to his diminutive but charmingly red-furnished room, Gabriel discovered that his nagging throb had bloomed into a full-grown migraine. The first thing he unpacked from his trunk was a wooden music box, offered to him by the Twins on the day of his departure from office. Their effigies stood under the lid, two little Dresden dolls dressed as Tamino and Pamina that slowly, jerkily danced to a melody from The Magic Flute. He looked away from the figurines, for fear they would make him miss their originals even more than he did. Instead, he opened a drawer hidden in the side, took out a flask of Armstrong Black Drop, and made sure that he still had everything else he’d packed to get through these months of exile.

  The sandpackets were there—precious, small white squares labelled with serif fonts: the One Midsummer Night Stand, a reputed metaphrodisiac; the Fly Fantasia Flint, for simulated dream flights; the Princess Charlotte’s Pinch, which caused déjà vu; the Giant Gravel Galore, which changed the size of objects; the Supreme Selenium Standard, which triggered the eeriest out-of-body experiences; and then the most recent concoction, which Gabriel had not tried yet: the Diviner’s Diamond Dust, a pinch of greenish-white crystals, and a powerful morphetamine that was rumoured to enhance lucid dreams until they turned into full-fledged hallucinations.

  But this physically harrowing trip had for the time being drained him of any curiosity for metaphysics. He simply took a glass of the laudanum Black Drop and went to bed, his temple now pounding as if his brain were trying to ram its way out of his skull. A click of the electric light and it was dark.

  And darkness felt like home.

  III

  The Blackamoor

  For Blankbate, darkness wasn’t home—it was a kingdom, a land of adventures and quests, full of trials and treasures. As soon as he had shaken off the mist of a short, solid nap, he donned his cape, muffler, and large-brimmed hat, concealed a few weapons on himself, and hurried towards the south, where the lights were dim and few and far between.

  Walking in the black slush, he soon left behind him the dazzle of Montparnasse, and after passing the cemetery he turned to his left, where a green copper lion dared him to come closer. He ignored the warning, and brushing by the well that marked the entrance to the catacombs, spent long minutes walking down a deserted boulevard whining with icy winds.

  He finally turned to the right, southward again, and followed a narrow frozen brook. The city grew darker, poorer, muddier. The sour reek of leatherwork wafted from the cankerous, cracked walls that crouched along its course. It always struck him that you only had to cross a street to stumble on a parallel world, a new reality, where the very stone seems to be different. From time to time human silhouettes sprouted from the moist walls, assessed Blankbate’s bulk, and shrank back into nothingness. He was getting nearer.

  He could hunt by instinct alone, but this time he knew what he wanted and he had come to Paris to get it. This thing, if he found it, would be his ultimate triumph, and a glorious addition to the Scavengers’ Arcaves, even if materially it was worth next to nothing. Its value was not to be measured in gold: it was a symbol, without the likes of which no line of royalty could be complete. Such a talisman would make the Scavengers the last heirs and defenders of the dark, noble tradition of the Pariahs, the Untouchables who night after night saved the world from choking on its own waste, and got nothing in return but disgust and contempt. For these penitents, who emptied the garbage bins, sluiced the cesspools, scraped the sewers, and dragged the rivers for corpses, Civilization was a bit of a joke. Yet in many ways, they were its last defenders—and, Blankbate liked to think, its most likely survivors. They were, he thought, the coming race. He would take the Little Black Father and the Blackamoor back to New Venice and make them the jewels of the Scavengers’ scrap crown. That was his mission.

  He met the first ragpicker at the top of the rue Croulebarbe, a wide paved street just above the river. He was an old man, though probably younger than he seemed, and carried strapped upon his back a wicker basket that made him look like a mad, wretched St. Nick. The lantern in his left hand sent across the street the dreadful shadow of the hook he held in the right one. But formidable as the shadow looked, the hook was but a modest tool, splashing through the slushy sidewalk.

  “Does it bite, comrade?” Blankbate asked, using the solid Fr
ench he had learned in the Foreign Legion, more years ago than he would care to count.

  The ragpicker looked at him from under his single bushy brow, suspicious and perhaps scared. That, too, was a part of their life, Blankbate thought. In Paris, as everywhere, their caste stuck together—had their own restaurants, their own cafés, their own slums, their own rituals, and their own justice. It was beyond their ken why anyone would meddle with them, and they knew too much about “real” people’s real habits to be curious for more.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Blankbate said, holding his hands well apart. “It’s a lonely night, and I just felt like having a little chat.”

  “I’m working,” the man answered gruffly.

  “Such ungrateful work, eh?” Blankbate said gently, coming closer. “Especially with this snow. And so few who appreciate it.”

  The man stood silent for a while. Even from his position, Blankbate could smell the whiff of cheap wine that floated on his breath. On closer inspection, he wasn’t quite the ruin Blankbate had first surmised. His hair, though disheveled, was silvery white, and under his beard—which could have been cleaner—his wrinkled face retained a certain wounded dignity that years of running the gutters had not managed to erase. For one second Blankbate suspected the rags, the beard, the basket were a disguise, but the scarred, chilblained, dirty hands, barely protected by torn, woolen half-mitts, could not be faked.

  “Even I, I’m not sure I appreciate it, y’know?” His accent too, as far as Blankbate could judge, was not quite as coarse as expected.

  “I wasn’t talking about liking it. I was talking about understanding it.”

  The man’s eyes glinted. “Now, that’s different. Nobody understands it.”

  Blankbate went down on one knee, reaching with his thick glove into the gutter, and picking up a little faded ribbon. He delicately wiped the dirty snow off it and handed it to the man. “Well, I’d like to understand it. My name’s Alan Blankbate.”

  “My name is … Amédée.” And after a moment of hesitation, he added: “Baron Amédée de Bramentombes.”

  Blankbate stood up. “Baron?”

  Amédée gave a sad smile that revealed missing incisors. “You see me claiming it now? I had what you’d call a reversal of fortune. But that’s history,” he added, his eyes on the gutter, in a tone that made Blankbate think that he wouldn’t need much pressing to tell his story. Perfect, then. That would make his own tale easier to spool off.

  “Listen,” Blankbate proposed, “why don’t you let me accompany you through your round, and then we’ll go and eat somewhere. What do you think?”

  “But why?”

  Blankbate looked around and, finally, shrugged. “It’ll get us out of the cold for a while.”

  “We’re almost done,” Amédée confided, after they had circled a few streets. He walked quickly, with determination, his head constantly bobbing like a clockwork toy, and Blankbate struggled to match his stride. He had guessed correctly, though: the ragpicker had now overcome his wariness, and seemed badly in need of hearing his own voice.

  “It’s one o’clock and I’ve been at it for five hours. Even though I won’t get more than fifty sous for all this. There are two sides to that damned snow, really … It covers the trash, but sometimes it also protects it from other pickers … Not that I wish them harm, y’know, but I have to make a living, especially with all these Belgians, Italians, Germans, and whatnot who come to steal our bread. You know what the problem is? We don’t have a strong government.”

  Suddenly the man stopped, as if realizing that this stranger could well be one of these foreigners he was complaining about.

  “You said the snow protects the trash, right?” Blankbate asked, to steer Amédée’s thoughts back to where he needed them.

  “Yes. If you want to find anything, you have to watch the snow to see if it’s been tampered with, the footsteps around it, the shape of the lump, whether the dogs go near it … though there are fewer dogs now. A lot of them have been eaten this last winter.”

  “But then you find dog bones.”

  Amédée croaked, like someone who only vaguely remembered having read a manual about how to laugh.

  “Yes. Yes.” He nodded constantly, nervously, and every now and then forgot Blankbate and talked to himself.

  “Fifty sous. It doesn’t sound like a lot,” Blankbate tried again, after a pause.

  “Depends for whom, I guess,” Amédée said, nodding.

  All this while the man kept on walking, swerving suddenly when a rival’s lantern appeared at the end of a street, heading always towards a hill, which he called the Butte-aux-Cailles (Quail Hill? Blankbate tried to translate). As they started to climb its steep, curved, narrow streets, Blankbate felt he had been spirited away from Paris. Only the main street seemed to have been imported from that nearby capital, and even that main artery seemed to end in midair, in a wasteland from which rose a kind of wooden derrick. For the rest, the old houses huddling up and around the hill and the limestone quarries looked more like a mountain village, if not a shanty town. That was where the metropolis decomposed into smelly atoms.

  “You know the story of this arrondissement?” Amédée asked. “Last time the city was extended beyond its walls, the rich people in the west refused to live in what was supposed to become the thirteenth arrondissement, simply out of superstition over the number. So the order of the boroughs was reversed clockwise, and the poorest of the poor inherited number thirteen.”

  “Nice,” Blankbate said with a frown.

  “It’s a good place, though,” his guide went on, with a faint but unmistakable enthusiasm. “A lot of mattress-makers live here. You always find some merinos”—which Blankbate understood was what pickers called the wasted wool and fabric off-cuts—“sometimes as much as one pound. The problem is that a lot of us pickers live just down the road.”

  Then Blankbate saw Amédée cautiously lift on his hook not a scrap of fabric but a wet crust of bread that had fallen in the snow.

  “Taking that too?” he asked, curious to know.

  “Sure. Why not? If it’s clean, we eat it. If it’s not, the bourgeois will.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing is ever really lost here, monsieur. Nothing, not a single fallen hair, not a single chicken bone. It will become a wig, a brush, a button, a china plate, a candle, a bar of soap, or a cream. There is nothing that a chic woman puts on her face that doesn’t come from my basket, you see. When I think of my former life,” Amédée sighed, “I see all of its luxuries as they really are, and believe it or not, I never regret them.”

  He turned towards Blankbate, suddenly very moved.

  “I have visions, you see. I see these salons, and everything they wear and hold in their hands is made of filth and smells of death. And for some reason, these things disgust me less where I find them now.”

  He stood silent for a while.

  “And what about the crust, then?” Blankbate asked. He wasn’t surprised by what he had heard. After all, he was in the same trade, and things were not that different in New Venice. This was something all luminous, glorious cities had in common: they were built on, and lived upon, the vilest trash. Though why say vilest, Blankbate wondered. What could be more human than trash?

  Amédée shook himself from his dream.

  “The same. With the clean crusts, you can make baby mush, for instance. This is often what the country nannies, in the villages around, feed to the city children they are supposed to mind. The dirty crusts you can sell to people who raise animals. But sometimes they’re so disgusting, even the beasts won’t touch them. So people burn them to a powder, like coffee, and that’s where breadcrumbs come from in certain restaurants. The really charred crumbs are sold as chicory or used to make toothpaste. This is why I stopped brushing my teeth a long time ago. I’d rather eat the crust while it’s fresh.”

  Blankbate chuckled. “I guess there’s some justice in all of this. Everybody’s eating
someone else’s dirt.”

  “There’s no justice, monsieur,” Amédée said in a low, lugubrious voice, giving his pronouncement the weight of a universal truth. “It is simply the bourgeois feeding each other. It’s a business, you see. People make millions out of what we collect and sell to them.” He nodded solemnly at the thought.

  “I’m done,” he finally said. “Just let me put my cashmere”—he tapped his basket—“at my place, round the corner, and we’ll go to eat.”

  “I’m not sure I’m that hungry any more.” Blankbate joked pleasantly, as they took the stairs of rue de la Colonie, a wasteland where wooden shacks and trailers were scattered on each side of the winding, slippery steps. In the distance the city shone, but it didn’t fool anyone here. On the other side, beyond the dark, mangy rim of the fortifications, spread the mysterious “zone,” a no-man’s-land peopled with shadows and distant fires. Under the snow, it looked about as welcoming as the frozen ocean seen from New Venice.

  “It depends where we go. I know the good places. But it’ll have to be on you.”

  “Will Le Pot Tricolore do?” Blankbate risked. Amédée looked at him, narrowing his eyes.

  “Maybe yes, maybe no,” he answered.