The Missing Italian Girl (29 page)

“Please don’t let us disturb you,” Séverine said in a loud voice, breaking the silence. “We are here to hear what you have to say. I am Séverine, the reporter.” She waited for those who recognized her name to give approving nods. “And this is a teacher.” Another dramatic pause. “Like our own Louise Michel.” By this time everyone was nodding. Clarie avoided their eyes. Her shoes lightly stuck to a floor made tacky by spilled drink mixed with ashes. The café reeked with the sour odor of hard-worked bodies, and cheap tobacco and alcohol.

“We were about to read from the Bible,” one of the men called out.

Clarie looked up, startled. A Bible at an anarchists’ café?

“And what Bible would that be?” Séverine retorted with confidence, obviously pleased at having been recognized.

“Anything by the man who said ‘Property is Theft’!” he retorted, to the laughter and clapping of his table.

“Proudhon,” Séverine whispered to Clarie.

Clarie had heard the name, but she certainly had not read him. She stood up straight, not wanting to touch the wall, which she feared might be crawling with vermin.

The short stocky man waved his arm as he declared “I dedicate this reading to our bourgeois state.” This drew even more hoots and hollers. He cleared his throat, held the book near a candle, and read: “‘To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated at, regulated, docketed, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, weighed, censored, ordered about, by men who have neither the right nor the knowledge nor the virtue.’”

“Hear! Hear!” someone shouted.

“‘To be governed means to be, at each operation, at each transaction, at each movement, noted, registered, controlled, taxed, stamped, measured, valued, assessed, patented, licensed, authorized, endorsed, admonished, hampered, reformed, rebuked,’ and finally,” the reader said, spreading out his arms, “‘arrested.’”

When the cheers died down, the brawny bartender, whose damp opened shirt revealed a hairy chest, turned to Clarie and Séverine. “What is it that you want with us?”

Séverine ignored the suspicious edge in his voice. “We are looking for Maura Laurenzano. She is missing. She is the sister of the dead girl, Angela. We understand she used to come here to listen to the Russian, Pyotr Ivanovich Balenov. Have any of you seen her?”

There was a general shaking of heads. Those who were bored, or already too drunk to care, began to lift their glasses.

“Have any of you heard ‘Pieter’s Song’? Do you know where the street singers are?”

“I’ve seen them,” an old toothless man raised his hand. “At the Anarchist Soup Kitchen. It’s a good song.”

“Thank you,” Séverine responded. “Anyone else?”

“Along the rue Marcadet, at dinner time, near a big café.” This from one of the rough-looking women in a striped dress.

“Good!” Séverine said.

Clarie clasped her hands together and pressed them against her queasy stomach. These were not places where she wanted to go looking for the girl.

“And do you know where they live?”

Those who were not drinking either shook their heads or just stared at Séverine.

“I want to defend the young Russian anarchist women being so wrongly held at Saint-Lazare. I want to prove that they are not violent. Did Pyotr ever talk of violence? Do you believe that he planted the bomb that went off in his cart?” Clarie heard pride in Séverine’s bold assertions of her intentions and her capabilities.

“That girl who was moonin’ after him, is that the one you’re lookin’ for?” asked the bartender, wiping his counter with a dirty cloth.

“Yes!” Séverine said, almost rising to her toes.

“Ain’t been here.”

Clarie grimaced. He had raised her hopes, too. She had been scanning the room, looking for Maura. There were only a few women dispersed among the men, none of them as young or as innocent as the Laurenzano girl.

“Then let’s return to my last question. Pyotr, was he violent?” Séverine persisted.

Clarie shifted from one foot to another, longing for an answer that would prove Maura and Angela had been telling the truth.

“Nah, but he should have been,” one drunk retorted. “It would have done us all more good.”

“No!” one of the younger men shouted. “He saw what violence had done in his homeland. He always spoke of peaceful ways to get our freedom. Isn’t that right?”

“Yeah. Yeah.” The answer and the nodding came from a few patrons, who slammed their glasses on the tables in agreement.

“Well, I’ll tell you what I think,” a tall man standing amid the shadows and smoke at the back of the room said: “I think he was fooling us.”

“What!” someone yelled in surprise.

“Yes, I think Pyotr Ivanovich was a true revolutionary, as we all should be, and that he knew how to build a bomb and was going to kill those bourgeois ladies in the fashion district. Just like those women who died in the Charity Bazaar fire. We didn’t do it. But we could do the next one.”

Suddenly all eyes were on Séverine and Clarie, two bourgeois ladies. Clarie closed her eyes. She prayed that her jacket was covering her enough to hide her heaving chest. She didn’t belong here. This was all such a bad, foolish idea.

“Thank you!” Séverine said, showing no signs of shock or fright. “I will do my best to defend the Russian girls. And if any of you see the singers, contact me at
Le Petit Parisien
or
L’Echo de Paris
.” Then, she linked her arm in Clarie’s and led her out the doorway.

“That was terrible,” Clarie said as soon as they were a block from the café. “To want to repeat something like the Charity Bazaar fire.” Over a hundred upper-class girls and women had been burnt alive as they tried to flee a wall of fire rolling across the pretty displays they had set up for their annual charity fair.

“You know that was an accident. Or, as some say, God’s punishment of
someone
for
something
.”

Clarie noted the sarcasm in Séverine’s response. “Of course, I know that.” It had been in the papers for days. A movie projector had erupted into flames just as the Bazaar was getting under way. Clarie shuddered at the ironic horror of it. A machine promising the newest of pleasures causing the most ancient of nightmares—a storm of hellfire—to rain down upon the poor, screaming women.

Séverine shook her head as she pulled Clarie along. “That one could want something like that to happen again.” The irritation directed at Clarie had become anger aimed at the man who had spoken with such cold hatred.

“But don’t you see, some of these people are violent.”

Séverine stopped and grabbed Clarie’s other arm. “No, my dear,” she said, forcing Clarie to look her in the eye, “that’s not what I see at all. What I see are agents provocateurs. Two of them. But why two? Unless one is a police spy and the other a madman.”

“Police spies,” Clarie whispered. As in Maura’s song, lying, hoping to provoke, in order to arrest. Or a madman on the loose.

Séverine began pulling Clarie along again. “I’d better get you home.”

14

M
ARTIN HAD REASON TO WORRY
. He put down his pencil and closed the books he had been perusing in the Labor Exchange’s library. To keep his newly created position at the Bourse, he had to prove himself useful. But he didn’t want merely to
prove
himself useful, he wanted to
be
useful. He glanced across the table at a youth mouthing each word of a newspaper article. It was workers like him that Martin wanted to help, to elevate, to enlighten. This is why he was here.

Martin yawned and rubbed his eyes. He was preparing a course on labor law and trying to figure out the best way to explain the snarl of regulations that limited worker freedoms. The class was scheduled to begin next week, and he desperately hoped someone would show up for it. As he picked up his bowler to go out for a reinvigorating walk, he was all too conscious of the fact that what he was doing, taking a few minutes for rest and refreshment, was a right none of the union men or women legally held. Not yet. Engrossed in how they might produce legislation for that right, he almost ran into the Bourse’s reception clerk.

“Maître Martin!”

“Yes.”

“This message has come for you.” The man handed Martin a pneumatic letter.

“Thank you,” Martin murmured as he scanned the thin blue envelope in vain for a return address. It wasn’t from Clarie. Nothing terrible had happened at home. He pocketed it to read later.

The clerk stood aside to let Martin go first, then both of them took the stairs down toward the Exchange’s main entrance. The clerk returned to his post, while Martin headed out into the sunshine. As he strolled toward the Place de la République he debated whether to stop at the corner café for a cup of coffee. No, he’d rather a bench under a tree. After he crossed the street to the square, he reached in his pocket, pulled out the pneu, and tore the envelope open. When he saw who the letter was from, he thanked God he had not attempted to read it at the Exchange.

“Maître Martin, I write as a matter of professional courtesy. Please meet me at the Café Madeleine, between three and four this afternoon. I have a serious matter to discuss with you. Jobert.”

Martin was tempted to tear up the letter and forget it. He could see no good reason to meet in private with a police inspector. Yet he read it again and shook his head at the way, in these very few lines, Jobert had managed to put his considerable cunning on display. The appointment hour, since it was already almost three, did not give Martin much time to think about what to do. The place was easy to get to by omnibus,
and
it was posh, unlikely to be frequented by anyone from the unions. At the same time, the message conveyed a sense of urgency, without telling Martin anything. He closed his hand in a fist. If Jobert expected that he, Martin, would become a police spy or some other appendage of the government, just because he had once been a judge, because he had once worked for the state, well, then he needed to stop these suppositions once and for all.

Martin beat a hasty retreat to the Bourse to tell the receptionist that he was off to work at the Law Library of the Palais de Justice and would be in early tomorrow. Then, cursing the police inspector who had turned him into a deceiver, Martin set out for the omnibus.

Martin had to thread through a throng of tables serving contented well-dressed customers before he spotted Jobert, enjoying his cigar, at the back of the café, pointedly far from the windows. When he saw Martin, he jumped up to greet him and extended a hammy-pink hand. Martin did not take it. “Why am I here?” he demanded.

“Sit down,” Jobert said, responding to Martin’s rudeness with his own.

“I don’t think that will be necessary.”

Jobert peered at him and sucked on his cigar. As in their first meeting, the inspector’s blue eyes conveyed an irritating superiority, as if he possessed some secret knowledge. And again, even more loathsomely, he proved that he did. After blowing out a cloud of his sweet-smelling smoke, he declared “I think you may want to sit down when I tell you what your wife has been up to.”

“I don’t see what business that is of yours—”

“Consorting with loose women, anarchists.”

Martin dropped into the chair. “What do you mean? What loose women? What proof do you have?” The questions tumbled in rapid fire, bullets aimed at Jobert’s impudence. Martin took off his bowler and placed it on the table.

“Séverine. You’ve heard of her, I presume. Close friend of the old, dead Communards. Divorcée. Child abandoner. Always skirting the law, if you’ll excuse my
bon mot
for that thing she tends to lift for any man who comes along.” Jobert chuckled, enjoying his own joke.

“And a good investigative journalist who doesn’t let the police get away with their abuses.” Why in God’s name had Martin blurted out a defense of a woman he disdained? Unless, having shot blanks at Jobert, he had no choice but to send up his own smokescreen. He was still getting over the shock that Clarie had come to the attention of the Paris police. He was grateful, at least, for the relative coolness of the cavernous café and the uninterrupted low conversations surrounding them.

Jobert ran his tongue over his upper lip, almost touching his bushy gingery mustache. Finding some speck, he reached up and picked off a bit of the cigar’s debris. He was in no hurry. Martin got the annoying feeling that he was enjoying himself. Finally, leaning forward, the inspector said, quietly, “I am doing this as a professional courtesy. No matter what side we are on, I trust we are both men of the law. It’s not only that your wife is stepping out. She may also be putting herself in danger.”

“What do you mean? How do you know all this?”

Jobert stretched back, as if to get a better look at Martin. His hand rested on the table, with the last of the burning cigar jutting up through his fingers. “As you well know, we keep some of our own men in strategic places. One of them, a good man, had gotten on to this Russian anarchist, Pyotr Balenov, only a few days before his demise. This man was at this stinking little working-class café last night when your wife appeared on the scene with the so-called journalist.” Jobert crushed his stub into an ashtray and waited.

“Your man, an agent provocateur.”

Jobert pursed his lips and nodded. “If that is what you insist on calling him.”

“Yes, a police agent who tries to provoke a few fanatics to commit some violent crime so that you can prosecute anyone who calls himself an anarchist, even good union men.”

“A man who protects the public. Upholds the laws…. Anyway,” the smile was sardonic, “we’re not talking about the Labor Exchange now. We’re talking about your wife. Do you know what she was doing there?”

“No.” That’s all Martin intended to say about Clarie. No.

“Well, here’s what I’m getting at. Generally, I think of these places as being filled with fools, but occasionally we spot someone who is really, seriously dangerous. That night after my man delivered the usual, shall we say, provoking declaration, some idiot went even further. He stood at the back wall and talked all sorts of bombast about wanting to set off a major explosion to kill a lot of people. That’s when your wife and her ‘friend’ took off. But not until everyone had a good look at them.”