He takes Lafosse to see Lecoeur’s corpse, though not, of course, to see Jeanne, who could hardly be soothed by the sight of a man like Death’s steward at the end of her bed.
When they come out of the workshop, Lafosse dabs with a handkerchief at the bloodless tip of his nose. ‘And the girl will live?’ he asks.
‘Jeanne? It is what he asked. Lecoeur.’
‘And you answered?’
‘Yes. She will live.’
‘Then I do not see there is any difficulty.’
‘I should be pleased if you told me how to proceed.’
‘We are in a cemetery, are we not?’
‘We are.’
‘And how many have you taken out of the ground?’
‘I cannot say exactly. Many thousands, I think.’
‘Then putting one in should be a matter of no great consequence. The balance will still be in your favour.’
‘Bury him? In les Innocents?’
‘Bury him, bury his effects. Remove his name from all documents, all records. Never mention him again.’
‘Those are the minister’s instructions?’
‘Those are your instructions.’
They cross to the cemetery door together. The rain has moved through, replaced by a strange damp warmth, febrile.
‘One less mouth to feed,’ says Lafosse. ‘One less wage to pay. It should enable you to make a saving. The country is bankrupt, Baratte. The minister pays for all this from his own purse.’ He scans the cemetery, in his face a slow flowering of disgust. ‘How do you tolerate it here?’ he asks.
The engineer pulls open the door for him. ‘I did not think I had any choice.’
‘You do not. But even so. .’
‘You get used to it,’ says Jean-Baptiste.
At dusk — an early moon skitting between clouds — he walks Héloïse back to the rue de la Lingerie. She has cooked and cleaned. She has laboured all day. He thanks her.
‘Tomorrow I will do the same,’ she says. ‘I will do everything Jeanne did. I will go to the market.’
He wants to object — is this what he had in mind for her, a cemetery housewife? — but he knows he will find no one more competent, more to be counted on.
‘I will pay you,’ he says.
‘Yes, you will,’ she says. They smile into the gloom ahead of them. First smile of the day.
They reach their room without encountering either of the Monnards or Marie. She lights a candle; he lights the fire.
‘You are going back there,’ she says.
He nods. ‘Some matters. . outstanding.’
‘Of course.’ She looks at the candle, strokes the flame. ‘I am half afraid to let you go,’ she says.
‘And I,’ he answers, ‘am half afraid that if I do not go now I will never set foot in the place again.’
15
He has already settled on pit fourteen. Newly emptied, scraped, its earth at the side of it, and far enough from the tents for there to be some hope of secrecy, pit fourteen is the obvious place.
In the sexton’s house the kitchen is deserted. The old man must be upstairs with Jeanne. Lisa, presumably, will have gone home for the night to her own people. There is no one to be curious, to ask questions. He stands in the doorway of the records office, blocked for a moment from entering it, intimidated by some spectral afterglow of the life that so recently inhabited it; then he barges in, lifts Lecoeur’s bag onto the bed and starts quickly filling it with those few objects he troubled to unpack. A pair of square-toed shoes. A horsehair bob-wig. A shirt left draped across the desk. The knitted waistcoat. Two books: Rousseau’s Les Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire, and La Mettrie’s L’Homme Machine. The empty bottle of tincture. An inexpensive watch. The ribbon-bound parcel of Valenciana papers.
He consults his own watch. It is too early for what he has in mind. He takes L’Homme Machine out of the bag and sits with it at the kitchen table. He has not read the book. La Mettrie is not remembered kindly. A provincial like himself, a clever rogue, a man who died from eating an excess of pâté. After a moment, he opens the book, survives almost half a page before he loses the first word. He looks away, looks back, sharpens his focus. Nothing gets any clearer. He flushes: that old schoolroom shame he has become reacquainted with these last months. Then shame is swept away by something more urgent. A spasm in the guts, deep in the lower-left quadrant, the soft coils. It fades, but only to return more sharply, sharp enough to make him groan. He stuffs the book into a pocket, stands up from the bench, gets outside and runs, an awkward, lopsided, wounded-animal run, round the back of the church to the slit canvas wall of the latrines. Unwise to come in here at night without a light! He grips one of the poles, feels with his toe for the hole, one of the holes. Here? Here will do: he cannot wait longer. He gets his breeches down (loses a button in his haste) and lets the muck fly out of him, hears it slap the surface of the muck already in the hole. A pause: the body seems to be listening to itself; then another burst, almost burning him as it passes. He clings to the pole, his forehead against the planed wood, panting, waiting for the next convulsion. They will name squares after us, said Lecoeur that morning in Valenciennes, the snow brushing the window. The men who purified Paris!
One dead now with a ball in his head. One hanging from a pole above a pool of his own sewage.
When it is done, he tears pages out of L’Homme Machine, cleans himself as best he can, drops the pages and then the book into the hole, draws up his breeches.
In the sexton’s house, he scrubs his hands with vinegar. The fire is burning low. He prods it, lays on more wood. He looks for brandy but for once cannot find any. Overhead, the boards creak, but no one comes down. He goes outside again, peers towards the tents, then goes back into the kitchen, lights a lantern and carries it to the doctors’ workshop. He puts the lantern on Charlotte’s coffin, then takes hold of the lapels of Lecoeur’s coat, tries to raise him to a sitting posture, but Lecoeur, dead some eighteen hours, is stiff as a clay pipe. He stands back and tries to think it through as a problem, then goes to Lecoeur’s feet (where one stocking has unravelled to a cold white ankle), swings the feet out and lets the body cantilever against the edge of the table. It works, more or less. Lecoeur rises, though he seems not so much a clay pipe any more as a rolled carpet, a heavy rolled carpet, sodden. There is a thud onto the earth between them. The pistol? He will come back for it later. In three movements, he turns the body about, clasps it under the arms, adjusts his grip and is shuffling backwards to the workshop entrance when he hears the canvas flap being drawn.
‘You might have trusted me to help you,’ says Armand. ‘Or did you think I was squeamish?’
‘Get the lantern,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘And the pistol. It’s on the ground.’
‘There’s moon enough for us to see our way,’ says Armand, coming round to take hold of Lecoeur’s feet. ‘And he will not miss his pistol.’
They go without speaking, carry the body side-on to the edge of the pit, set it down beside the pulley. The engineer returns to the house for Lecoeur’s bag. Manetti is in the kitchen now, sitting in his chair.
‘I am taking some of his things,’ says Jean-Baptiste.
The sexton nods, solemnly. Who knows what he understands.
Out of the door, Jean-Baptiste reaches again for the convenient spade. At the pit, he drops the bag to the bottom. It lands discreetly enough. They lift Lecoeur into the sling, the cradle. Armand wraps a loop of chain round his waist, leans back his weight, takes up the slack, while Jean-Baptiste pushes both sling and body out over the pit. Then the pair of them play out the chain, the pulley wheel complaining like a mechanical goose.