The streets had begun to congest with strolling retailers: a cheese-seller pushing a large wheel of blue-veined stuff on a sort of wheelbarrow, a mustard-seller carrying a small capped pail and a scoop, numerous porteurs d’eau, their stout bodies harnessed into frames all a-dangle with wooden buckets, a butter-seller with baskets of butter-pats strapped to his back. This kind of thing would only get worse, to the point that it would immobilize him. He had to get rid of Turk. No trouble: the horse business was everywhere, he’d already passed by several livery stables, and hay-wains filled narrow streets with their thatched bulk and narcotic fragrance. Jack followed one to a stable and made arrangements to have Turk put up there for a few days.
Then out the other side, and into a large open space: a plaza with (surprisingly enough) a monumental statue of King Looie in the center. On one side of its pedestal, a relief of Looie personally spearheading a cavalry charge across a canal, or perhaps that was the Rhine, into a horizontal forest of muskets. On the other, Looie on the throne with a queue of Kings and Emperors of Europe waiting, crowns in hand, to kneel down and kiss his high-heeled booties.
He must be on the right course, because he was beginning to see a higher class of vendor: sellers of books strolling along holding advertisements over their heads on sign-boards, a candy-man carrying small scales, a seller of eau-de-vie carrying a basket of tiny bottles, and a goblet; a seller of pates carrying a sort of painter’s palette with smudges of different varieties, and many orange-girls: all of them crying the particular cries that belonged to that sort of vendor, like birds with their own distinct calls. Jack was on Rue Vivienne. It was starting to look like Amsterdam: finely-dressed men of many lands, strolling along having serious conversations: making money by exchanging words. But it also looked a bit like the Booksellers’ Quarter in Leipzig: whole cart-loads of books, printed but not bound, disappearing into one especially fine House: the King’s Library.
Jack crutched his way up one side of the street and down the other until he found the House of the Golden Frigate, adorned with a sculpture of a warship. This had obviously been made by an artisan who’d never come near the ocean, as it was queerly distorted and had an unlikely profusion of gun-decks. But it looked good. An Italian gentleman was there on the front stoop, worrying a hand-wrought iron key of many curious protuberances into a matching keyhole.
“Signor Cozzi?” Jack inquired.
“Si,”replied he, looking only a little surprised to be accosted by a one-legged wanderer.
“A message from Amsterdam,” Jack said in French, “from your cousin.” But this last was unnecessary, as Signor Cozzi had already recognized the seal. Leaving the key jutting from the lock, he broke it open right there and scanned a few lines of beautiful whirling script. A woman with a cask of ink on her back, noting his interest in written documents, shouted a business proposal to him, and before he could deflect it, there was a second woman with a cask of vastly superior and yet far cheaper ink on her back; the two of them got into an argument, and Signor Cozzi took advantage of it to slip inside, beckoning Jack in with a trick of his large brown eyes. Jack could not resist turning around, now, to look behind him for the first time since he had entered the city. He caught sight of a sworded man in a somber sort of cape, just in the act of turning around to slink away: this policeman had spent half the morning tailing a perfectly legitimate banker’s messenger. “You are being followed?” Signor Cozzi inquired, as if asking Jack whether he was breathing in and out.
“Not now,” Jack answered.
It was another one of those places consisting of bancas with large padlocked books, and heavy chests on the floor. “How do you know my cousin?” Cozzi asked, making it clear he wasn’t going to invite Jack to take a seat. Cozzi himself sat down behind a desk and began to pull quills out of a little jar and examine their points.
“A lady friend of mine has, uh, made his acquaintance. When he learned, through her, that I was about to journey to Paris, he pressed that letter on me.”
Cozzi wrote something down, then unlocked a desk-drawer and began to rummage through it, picking out coins. “It says that if the seal has been tampered with I should send you to the galleys.”
“I assumed as much.”
“If the seal is intact, and you get it to me within fourteen days of the date it was written, I’m to give you a louis d’or. Ten days gets you two. Fewer than ten, an additional louis d’or for each day you shaved off the trip.” Cozzi dropped five gold coins into Jack’s hand. “How the hell did you do it? No one travels from Amsterdam to Paris in seven days.”
“Think of it as a trade secret,” Jack said.
“You are dead on your feet-go somewhere and sleep,” Cozzi said. “And when you are ready to return to Amsterdam, come to me, and maybe I’ll have a message for you to take to my cousin.”
“What makes you think I’m going back?”
Cozzi smiled for the first time. “The look in your eye when you spoke of your lady friend. You are mad with love, no?”
“Mad with syphilis, actually,” Jack said, “but still mad enough to go back.”
WITH THE MONEY HE’D BROUGHTwith him, and the money he’d earned, Jack could have stayed somewhere decent-but he didn’t know how to find such a place, or how to behave once he found one. The last year had been an education in how little having money really mattered. A rich Vagabond was a Vagabond still, and ’twas common knowledge that King Charles, during the Interregnum, had lived without money in Holland. So Jack wandered across town to the district called the Marais. Movement was now a matter of forcing his body into narrow, ephemeral gaps between other pedestrians-primarily vendors, as of (in some districts) peaux de lapins (bundles of rabbit-pelts), baskets (these people carried enormous baskets filled with smaller baskets), hats (small uprooted trees with hats dangling from branch-ends), linge (a woman all adrape with lace and scarves), and (as he came into the Marais) chaudronniers with pots and pans impaled by their handles on a stick. Vinegar-sellers with casks on wheels, musicians with bagpipes and hurdy-gurdies, cake-sellers with broad flat baskets of steaming confections that made Jack light in the head.
Jack got into the heart of the Marais, found a pissing-corner where he could stand still, and scanned the air above the people’s heads for half an hour or so, and listened, until he heard a particular cry. Everyone in the street was shouting something, usually the name of whatever they were selling, and for the first couple of hours it had just been Bedlam to Jack. But after a while Jack’s ear learned to pick out individual voices-something like hearing drum-beats or bugle-calls in battle. Parisians, he knew, had developed the skill to a high degree, just as the Lieutenant of Police could scan a torrent of people coming in through a gate at dawn and pick out the Vagabond. Jack was just able to hear a high-pitched voice crying “ Mort-aux-rats! Mort-aux-rats!” and then it was easy enough to turn his head and see a long pole, like a pike, being carried at an angle over someone’s shoulder, the corpses of a couple of dozen rats dangling from it by their tails, their freshness an unforgeable guarantee that this man had been working recently.
Jack shoved his way into the throng, using the crutch now like a burglar’s jimmy to widen small openings, and after a few minutes’ rattling pursuit caught up with St.-George and clapped him on the shoulder, like a policeman. Many would drop everything and sprint away when so handled, but one did not become a legend in the rat-killer’s trade if one was easily startled. St.-George turned around, making the rats on his pole swing wide, like perfectly synchronized pole-dancers at a fun-fair, and recognized him. Calmly, but not coldly. “Jacques-so you did escape from those German witches.”