The Painted Girls (18 page)
Authors: Cathy Marie Buchanan
He leans his head up against the back of the carriage, looking not a bit like he desires to talk, and we ride in quiet for a bit, me sipping away. In this moment I should be thinking of nothing more than the tiny bubbles at the back of my throat, but never have I showed a talent for dwelling on what is good; and in my mind’s eye appears Antoinette, last Sunday, coming in from visiting at Mazas and burying her head in her arms folded on the table. I sucked in a deep breath and reminded myself about the hundred times she was patient with me. “Well?” I said.
“They found the knife. The inspector told Émile.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling a glimmer of hope rising up. Was Émile Abadie’s guilt finally slithering into her mind?
“Can’t you see? Pierre Gille wouldn’t give up the place where he got rid of it unless he knew not an ounce of blame was aimed at him.”
She looked up, skinny and tired, her eyes rimmed in red, and it made my heart ache. Stirring hope in a girl crumpled on a chair was not right, not when it was only putting off the further heartache just around the bend. But her anguish was such that in that moment I forgot about the promise I made myself to show her Émile Abadie through the clear lens of my own eyes, and I said, “Maybe the inspector was bluffing.”
“He showed Émile the knife.”
She would have to give up her fantasy of Émile Abadie’s innocence, and I put my palm upon her shoulder, as tender as I could. But I felt her bristle, irritated by my touch, like it was traitorous of me to think the news might tip her over to seeing his guilt. Was it possible she was not swayed in the least? “There is no doubt, then, that those boys slit the throat.” I stated it like a fact.
“Don’t prove a thing,” she said and shrugged off my hand.
M
onsieur Lefebvre blinks his head straight from resting against the back of the carriage, and I remember I have not said a word of thanks for the slippers. Such a gap. “Well,” I say, feeling the boldness of the champagne on nothing but a crust of bread, “if my feet shone even the smallest bit today, it was on account of your gift. You sent me to the stage with my spirits soaring high.”
And then his hand is upon my thigh again, but there is no squeeze like Papa’s. No, the hand stays put. I remember Josephine’s claims of abonnés dreaming up the unnatural, forcing it upon a girl, of fingers creeping where they do not belong. My back grows rigid, my shoulder blades pushing hard against the back of the bench, and the hand lifts. Perot said the abonnés only helped out so a girl could keep her mind on her work. “Madame Dominique tells me you’re up before the roosters, kneading dough at a bakery.”
“It’s true,” I say, and then I cannot really remember what made me so skittish about a hand upon my leg. It seems like nothing, now, with even the memory of that hand’s weight gone.
“It can’t continue,” he says. “You’ll have performances in the evening. You should be sleeping late. How much do they pay you?”
Is he right now thinking about altering my situation? For a bit of luck, I slip my hand into my pocket and touch the black iron of the key waiting there. “At the bakery? Twelve francs each week and two baguettes a day.”
He reaches inside his jacket, pulls out a wallet, and hands me a twenty-franc note. “Quit,” he says, and it appears Perot has a truer view of the abonnés than Josephine. I think of the dust-licking curtsey of a coryphée Monsieur Mérante had switched from the lesser role of a maenad to a nymph in
Polyeucte
and get up from the bench, wanting to copy it, but am only jostled back into my spot. Instead, with Monsieur Lefebvre’s laughter spurring me on, I bring Charlotte’s easy smile to my lips and find the voice she uses with the pork butcher. “Such generosity,” I say. “I am in your debt.”
“Nothing pleases me more.”
He tilts the champagne bottle to my empty glass, and I hold it out to him. I lap at the froth filling my glass, laugh when it tickles my nose, which keeps the smile upon his face. It is then, with my glass again drained and filled back up, that he opens the sliding window and says to the driver, “The Bois de Boulogne,” which I have never before seen but know to be thickly wooded and far away on the western outskirts of Paris.
I swallow the bubbles of air at the back of my throat.
Next month Émile Abadie and Pierre Gille go to the Court of Assizes to answer for the murder of the tavern owner Bazengeaud, that brave woman of Montreuil who was massacred with the knife these young scoundrels were able to locate for the chief inspector. While both have confessed to going to the tavern with the intention of blackmail, Gille claims Abadie slit the woman Bazengeaud’s throat in a moment of panic. Abadie denies anything beyond enjoying a cognac at the tavern after the blackmail attempt failed and leaving in advance of Gille.
I saw the two of them up close last week when they were taken to the Montreuil tavern by the chief inspector for questioning. One could not help but be immediately struck by Abadie’s bestial look. He is barely nineteen years old and yet is shaped like a herculean man—stocky, wide shouldered, arms of steel. His head is solidly planted on a short, thick neck, and a large and powerful jaw gives it a brutish air. His coloring is yellowish—the skin color of prison. This young thug oozes crime from top to bottom. Meeting him in a dark place would send one’s hand flying to the hilt of one’s sword.
Gille, on the other hand, is fresh faced, all smiles. He looks like a bright young man, who, on first glance, elicits sympathy. At sixteen years of age, he is tall, slim, narrow waisted. His coloring, despite his long detention at Mazas, is still of an elegant paleness. With his blond, abundant hair over a large, well-proportioned forehead, his look is exceptionally gentle; I will say more—it is distinguished. If he were dressed by a fashionable tailor, all the girls of Paris would yearn for him. On the night of a premiere, with his lovely adolescent head seen in the front rows, he would be taken for the son of an English lord.
T
oday, the final day of the trial, I stand for the first time in the crammed gallery of the Court of Assizes, awaiting the judges, the prisoners. Just yesterday, a day of recess, I sat across the iron grates from Émile, and when I asked a string of questions about the trial, he snapped I should bother showing up if I was so concerned. But once when he was fuming, he called all those court-goers gawkers and degenerates—both the society ladies, who petitioned for a spot on the witness benches up front, and the hordes, who lined up for hours to get a place in the gallery. “I didn’t want to gawk,” I said, which did nothing to alter the hard look on his face, and so I made the promise I keep today: “Tomorrow I will be in the court.”
For weeks the nose of Marie has been glued to the newspapers, and since the trial got under way, she spends every waking moment worrying and planning and licking her lips, getting herself ready to prove to me the guilt of Émile. Just last week, she tapped the newspaper spread open on our little table where I was digging the last of the marrow from a bone. “They found a pair of trousers and a shirt flecked with blood in the storage shed belonging to Pierre Gille’s father,” she said. “The trousers are the right size for Pierre Gille, not the shirt though. The shirt is more the size of Émile Abadie.”
Such news was not good. I had intelligence enough to know that. Yet seeing hopefulness on her face that finally my mind was turned against Émile, I pouted my lips and gave a saucy shrug. “Proves Pierre Gille slit the throat, don’t it?”
“Proves he was close enough to get splattered, which isn’t different from what he’s been saying all along.”
I stood up from the table.
She tapped another spot, lower down the column of print. “The missing watch has yet to turn up. Émile ever show you a fancy lady’s watch, Antoinette?”
A week ago an inspector came waltzing into the washhouse, asking if I was the sweetheart of Émile. He pulled open a portfolio and shoved underneath my nose a drawing of a watch with the face behind a heart-shaped opening. “Missing from the strongbox at the tavern,” he said, poking the drawing. “Your darling make a habit of giving you gifts?” I never laid eyes on such a watch and said, “Don’t know a thing about it,” which turned out to be the exact words Émile used when I next sat across the iron grates from him and asked about the watch.
I gave my harshest glare to Marie, standing there, chin pushed forward, hands on her hips. “He gave me a dozen watches,” I said, “all of which I pawned.”
“Yes or no, Antoinette?”
“What makes you think I’d tell you if he did?” It got my back up, her harping, her going on and on. I felt like she wanted him proved guilty more than she wanted happiness for me, and it made me wonder if at the heart of all her fussing was some dream of not sharing me with Émile.
The next evening, she was at it again, this time following me about our lodging room with a newspaper like I could not hear her blathering unless she was breathing down my neck. “Émile Abadie’s stepfather—a Monsieur Picard—was in court today,” she said. “He called Abadie …” She finds the spot in the newspaper. “ ‘A no-good boy who always had money for women and drink, even without a day of honest work in his life.’”
I snapped around to face her. “He hates Émile.”
“Antoinette, listen. Just listen with your mind open to the possibility that maybe Émile Abadie isn’t what he seems.” She cleared her throat and, reading from the newspaper, said, “‘Under oath Monsieur Picard said, “That boy, he pulled a knife on the missus once, threatened her life, all because she refused to pour him a glass of wine when he was already soused.” Madame Picard corroborated the story.’”
My face must have blanched because next thing I knew Marie was reaching out, tenderly laying a hand upon my arm. I steadied my voice and said, “She is lying for her husband, just showing a bit of loyalty, which is more than I can say for you.”
Her hand fell away. She bit her lip. And maybe I felt a tiny bit remorseful for rebuking the girl. But still, it worked to shut her up.
I
t is a stinking, sweltering day, and the heat is even worse in the courtroom than it is outside. I feel my skin growing damp, smell the tobacco and garlic and sweat of those crowding close in the gallery. My stomach flip-flops, and I wonder how I will endure the day, even as I shove an elbow into a toothless fellow taking advantage of the tight quarters to press himself against my hip.
The court is long and narrow, with the seats of the judges at the end farthest from the gallery. Beneath the tall windows running the length of a side wall, the men of the jury wait, stroking mustaches, brushing lint from their jackets, straining to look full of thought. I shift my gaze from one to the next and see, just like Émile said, each is the kind who admires Baron Haussmann for flattening the lodging houses of the poor to open up the boulevards, the kind who believes it is nothing but dance halls and cafés keeping the lowly from eating meat every night. Across from the jury are the defending attorneys, those heroes of the court according to Émile, and behind them, perched high up and awash in the harsh light spilling through the windows, the prisoners’ box where Émile and Pierre Gille will be held.
The din of the crowd grows, and then the ladies, sitting in their finery on the twelve benches up front, shift to their feet. In the gallery, the gawkers rise up on tiptoe, straining to see. More than one points. Émile and Pierre Gille, blinking into blinding glare, shuffle to the prisoners’ box, a jailer each gripping their arms. A moment later the attention shifts over to the three judges filing into the court. Any other day, I would howl at the ridiculousness of those men, each wearing a little hat, like six inches of stovepipe propped upon his head, and a heavy red robe trimmed at the front opening with a wide band of white fur spotted with black. Even before the presiding judge takes his seat underneath a carving of Jesus suffering upon the cross, sweat is creeping down his face. I glance to the windows, the still curtains hanging there, the laden sky beyond, and wish for a clap of thunder, a breath of cool air upon the neck of that roasting judge.
After I said I would come, Émile told me what to expect—first, the final plea of Monsieur Albert Danet, the attorney defending him, and that of the attorney lying through his teeth on behalf of Pierre Gille, and then the summary of the judge and last the verdict of the jury and the sentencing. Émile said more than once about Monsieur Danet slaving like an ant on his behalf, and the scrawny, black-robed gentleman with the bruised-looking eyes has got to be him.
He approaches the jury, and with his gaze locked upon the face of one or another of those stern men, he says, “The prosecutor asked you to consider why Émile denied being in Montreuil the day of Elisabeth Bazengeaud’s death. The answer he supplied—that Émile knew his guilt—is in fact true. The part, esteemed jurors, where you were misled was the prosecutor’s suggestion that the boy knew himself to be guilty of murder, when in truth, he knew himself to be guilty of nothing more than an attempt at blackmail. To accept any other conclusion is to shirk your responsibilities to this court.”
He goes on about the blood-speckled trousers, saying they were no doubt worn by the scoundrel who held the knife to the throat of the good woman Elisabeth Bazengeaud. “Much ink has been spilled describing Émile’s herculean physique,” he says, “and I can assure you of this: Even with the pulling and yanking of the inspector, the blood-speckled trousers—the very pair that fit Pierre Gille like a glove—never made it more than halfway up the thighs of Émile Abadie.” Then Monsieur Danet slips off his robe and holds it by the collar, out from his side, and turns in a slow circle. Back to facing the jury, he explains about being more or less of the same build as Pierre Gille and how he himself is wearing a shirt that is a replica of the blood-speckled one that turned up in the storage shed. “Not the best fit, to be sure,” he says, “but good enough, particularly for a youth—estranged from his family, without employment—such as Pierre Gille.”
He moves on to recounting the stories of three witnesses, each showing the stepfather of Émile to be a known liar, a brute to his wife, her son. I lean in and lean in farther, and Monsieur Danet, he goes on for two hours, showing the worthlessness of every scrap of evidence against Émile.
To finish Monsieur Danet pulls a handkerchief from his pocket, takes his time wiping his brow, then says, “Is Émile Abadie one of the murderers of the good woman Bazengeaud? The prosecutor instructs you not to hesitate even one minute before declaring him thus. I can still hear his words asking you to hand down a verdict without pity. But is it right to pretend the details of this case are as clear as day? Wouldn’t it be truer to say that never before has a case left spirits more uneasy and consciences less reassured? Émile Abadie, at nineteen years of age, with his life before him, has not been proven guilty, and I remind you, esteemed jurors, of the vow you have taken, the duty you have to fulfill.”
I search the face of Émile, looking for some sign he is just as hopeful as I am after the brilliance of Monsieur Danet, but he is looking to his feet, his lips pressed to a line. Did he not hear? Has fear made him deaf as mud? No. He is only taking the broken posture of a boy deserving of the mercy of the court.
The attorney of Pierre Gille walks to the same spot where Monsieur Danet stood and opens his hands to the jury. “Why,” he says, “would young Pierre Gille divulge the location of a knife that could prove the guilt of a murderer? There is only one answer. The murderer is other than Pierre Gille.” Three times more he asks the same question and answers using different words, but always the meaning is the same. The chins of four men of the jury bob down, then up, and the attorney replies to those timid nods with a forceful one of his own. “Elisabeth Bazengeaud was not a small woman,” he says, “nor was she meek, not with the long hours she kept, laboring in a tavern. My colleague Monsieur Danet asserts that she was murdered single-handedly.” He points behind him to the prisoners’ box. “It is impossible that such a scrawny boy as Pierre possesses the strength required.”
In the prisoners’ box Pierre Gille sits with his head bowed, his shoulders falling forward, his hands in his lap. He has grown skinnier at Mazas, and slouching like he is, he looks to have no more power than a newborn bird. Across the room, the men of the jury shift their attention back and forth between the waifish frame of Pierre Gille and the hulking one of Émile. Pierre Gille looks up, giving those jurors full view of his face. He wipes at the corner of his eye with the back of his hand before going back to bowing his head, and I hate that boy a thousand times more than in that moment when he slapped my face.
I lace my fingers together, knock my knuckles against my chin. Those men, what they need to be told is Pierre Gille is no weakling. They need to hear about the shove throwing Colette onto her rump, the slap sending my head jerking to the side, the kick snapping the neck of a dog. I want to scream it out. Never mind about the rules of the court, and the presiding judge in the robe of an emperor and the attorney with his gazing and pausing and velvet, practiced tongue. But with those final words between me and Émile yesterday, I know better than to open up my trap.
Both his hands were clutching the iron bars of the grate. His face was hanging low and his voice no louder than a whisper, when he said, “Monsieur Danet told me to prepare for a verdict of guilty, for a sentence of death by guillotine.”
I felt a creeping coldness, like Death breathing alongside me in the cell. My limbs lost their vigor, my heart ceased thudding in my chest. Those words, they hung between us, beyond my strength to grasp.
Then Émile was speaking again, his lips moving, but I could not hear. I mustered the strength to wag my head the smallest amount, and he repeated himself. “Wait,” he was saying. “All is not lost.”
I bent forward from the waist until my forehead was resting against the iron bars of the grate.
“Monsieur Danet, he told me to prepare because, in the court, I need to show only remorse. He said the president of the Republic has got the power to lighten a sentence. No hoisting fists, he said. No hurling threats. Not unless I want to spoil any chance of clemency.”
A
fter the jury comes back into the courtroom from the deliberating, each of the men stares at his shoes instead of straight ahead into the faces of Émile and Pierre Gille. Sweat trickles down my back, even with the bit of breathing room I been granted by the others in the gallery grown nervous of me. Already, during those thirty minutes the jury was away, I glared at an old nanny goat, swearing she could see the mark of the devil upon Émile, and batted the coins from the hand of a man collecting wagers on the outcome of the trial, and spat, “Stupid enough to eat hay, the both of you,” into the faces of a pair of girls giggling about the prettiness of Pierre Gille.
I wait alone in the courtroom for the only judgment I ever cared about in my life. Alone and afraid. There is a part of me wishes Marie was here. To have her fingers laced with my own would be a comfort. To have her wanting what I want would be enough to make me a little brave. But she would not be waiting beside me, wishing with all her might for the court to declare the innocence of Émile, and I could not bear it any other way. And so I wait, trembling in the courtroom. Alone.
The head juror gets to his feet, and with the court-goers holding their breaths, he says, in a low voice, “We, the jury, find defendants Émile Abadie and Pierre Gille guilty as charged in Elisabeth Bazengeaud’s murder.”
Émile closes his eyes, puts a hand upon his heart, and the presiding judge says, “First I ask Émile Abadie, have you anything to say?”
Émile lifts his eyes, higher than the bench where the judges sit, to that carving of Jesus upon the cross. “I only ask for my good mother to find it in her heart to forgive me.” He sits, still as a stone, through the judge asking the same of Pierre Gille and Pierre Gille making a little speech about the dishonor he has brought his family, about how his father and brother are upright and hardworking and should not be persecuted because of their association with him.
