Jack turned away and walked back across the Pont-Neuf toward his entresol in the Marais. He tried to stare only at the stone paving-blocks below his feet, but sometimes there were moving creatures trapped in them, too. So he would look up and see peddlers selling human heads-then avert his gaze into the bright sky and see an angel with a flaming sword, like a kienspan, bearing down on the city-then he’d try to concentrate instead on the carved gods’ heads that adorned the Pont-Neuf, and they would come alive, and cry out to him for release from this gibbet of stone.
Jack was finally going mad, and it was a small comfort to know that he’d picked the right city for it.
THEARMENIANS LIVING ABOVE THEwig-maker and below Jack did not appear to have any intermediate settings between killing strangers and adopting them into the family. As Jack had come recommended by St.-George, and had further established his bona fides by bargaining shrewdly with Christopher over coffee, they could not very well kill him-so: Jack became the thirteenth of thirteen brothers. Albeit something of an estranged, idiot half-brother, who lived in the entresol, came and went at odd times and in odd ways, and did not speak the language. But this did not trouble the matriarch, Madame Esphahnian. Nothing troubled her, except for suggestions that anything was troubling her, or could theoretically trouble her-if you suggested that anything was troubling her, she would look taken aback, and remind you that she had borne and raised twelve sons-so what, again, was the difficulty? Christopher and the others had learned simply not to bother her. Jack, likewise, quickly got into the habit of entering and leaving his shack via roof-tops so that he would not have to say good-bye to Madame Esphahnian when he left, and hello when he returned. She spoke no English, of course, and just enough French to enable Jack to impregnate her mind with colorful, grotesque misunderstandings whenever he tried to say anything.
His stay in Paris was typical of his wanderings: the first day was a great event, but next thing he knew it was a month later, then two months. By the time he thought seriously about leaving, it was not a good time of year to travel northwards. The streets had become even more crowded, now with an influx of hairy firewood-sellers, from parts of France where being torn apart by wild beasts was still a major cause of mortality. The wood-sellers knocked people down like bowling-pins, and were a danger to everyone, especially when they were fighting with each other. The garret-dwellers across the street from Jack began selling themselves as galley-slaves, just to get warm.
The strange visions that had made Jack’s first day in Paris so memorable, went away after he had gotten a night’s sleep, and usually did not come back unless he got very tired, or drunk. Lying in his hammock and peering across at the garret, he had reason, every day, to thank St.-George for having put him up in a place that did not have so many outbreaks of typhus, sudden raids by the Lieutenant of Police, stillborn babies, and other annoyances: he saw young women-runaway servants-showing up one day only to be dragged out the next, and (he assumed) taken to the city gates to be cropped, whipped, and spat out into the countryside. Either that, or else some private arrangement would be made, and then Jack would be subjected to the sounds and (depending on wind) aromas of some police inspector satisfying himself carnally, in a way no longer attainable to Jack.
He put the ostrich plumes up for sale, and went about it in his favorite way: getting someone else to do it. After he’d been hanging around for a fortnight, and showed no signs of getting ready to leave, Artan (oldest of the Esphahnian brothers who was actually resident there at the time) inquired as to what Jack intended to do, actually, in Paris-making it clear that if the answer was “cat-burglary” or “serial rape” the Esphahnians would not think any the less of him-they just needed to know. To demonstrate this open-mindedness, Artan brought Jack up to date on the family saga.
It seemed that Jack, here, had blundered into the fourth or fifth act of a drama-neither a comedy nor a tragedy, but a history-that had begun when Monsieur Esphahnian pere had sailed the first ship of coffee, ever, into Marseille in 1644. It was worth a lot of money. The larger Esphahnian family, which was headquartered in Persia, had plowed a lot of their India trading profits into buying this boat-load of beans in Mocha and getting it up the Red Sea and the Nile to Alexandria and thence to France. Anyway-Pa Esphahnian sold the beans, realized a handsome profit, but realized it in reals- Spanish money-pieces of eight. Why? Because there was an extreme currency shortage in France and he couldn’t have taken payment in French money if he’d wanted to-there was none. And why was that? Because (and here it was necessary to imagine an Armenian pounding himself on the head with both hands- imbecile!) the Spanish mines in Mexico were producing ludicrous amounts of silver-
“Yeah, I know about this,” Jack said, but Artan could not be stopped: there were piles of silver lying on the ground in Porto Belo, he insisted-consequently its value, compared to that of gold, was plunging-so in Spain (where they used silver money) there was inflation, because it was not worth as much as it had been, whereas in France all gold coins were being hoarded, because gold was expected to be worth more in the future. So now Monsieur Esphahnian had lots of rapidly depreciating silver. He should have sailed to the Levant where silver was always in demand, but he didn’t. Instead he sailed for Amsterdam expecting to make some kind of unspecified, brilliant commodities deal that would more than recoup his exchange-rate losses. But (as luck would have it) his ship ran aground, and he got his nuts caught in the mangle of the Thirty Years’ War. Sweden happened to be just in the act of conquering Holland when Monsieur Esphahnian’s ship eased up onto the sandbank and stopped moving; and, to make a long story short, the Esphahnian dynastic fortune was last seen northbound, strapped to the ass of a Swedish pack-horse.
This, by the way, was all first-act material- beforethe first act, really-if it were a play, it would open with the young Monsieur Esphahnian, huddled in the beached wreckage of a ship, spewing expository pentameter, gazing miserably off into the audience as he pretended to watch the Swedish column dwindle into the distance.
The upshot, anyway, was that Monsieur Esphahnian, at that point, fell from the graces of his own family. He somehow made his way back to Marseille, collected Madame Esphahnian and her (already!) three sons, and perhaps a daughter or two (daughters tended to be shipped east at puberty), and, in time, drifted as far as Paris (end of Act I), where, ever since, they’d all been trying to work their way off the shit list of the rest of the family in Isfahan. Primarily they did this by retailing coffee, but they would move just about anything-
“Ostrich plumes?” Jack blurted, not really trusting himself to be devious and crafty around such as the Esphahnians. And so at that point the selling of those ostrich plumes, which Jack could’ve accomplished in a trice a year and a half ago in a thieves’ market in Linz, became a global conspiracy, yoking together Esphahnians as far away as London, Alexandria, Mocha, and Isfahan, as letters were sent to all of those places and more inquiring as to what ostrich-plumes were selling for, whether the trend was up or down, what distinguished a Grade A ostrich-plume from a B, how a B could be made to look like an A, et cetera. While they waited for the intelligence to come back, Jack had very little to do on the plume front.