Jefferson (35 page)

“Un joli boeuf,” the Frenchman next to him said.

James nodded. In front of the crowd the butcher had now wrestled the steer down to the filthy cobblestone street. The butcher lifted a club the size of a brick and hammered it down in one straight overhead swing, so hard that even thirty feet away, pressed between dozens of chattering Frenchmen, James heard the skull crack and the steer’s head bounce against the pavement.

The crowd sighed. The steer writhed on its side and moaned.

With a bound the butcher had straddled its massive neck and pulled out of somewhere a long curving knife that glinted in the sun like a fish before it darted suddenly down toward the outstretched throat. The blood pumped horn-high in brilliant jets.

The butcher jumped back—skating on blood—then hurdled the steer’s flank and dropped on his knees by the belly. James saw his back, his head dipping, his red arm plunge. The steer roared and kicked its back legs high in wild convulsions. The crowd pushed forward, murmuring, watching intently as the butcher’s hands started to yank the entrails out, pink slithering ropes of skin that a boy caught and coiled in his arms. But James’s eyes never left the animal’s face. As the butcher sliced and pulled, James fastened his gaze on the brown snout, the great black wondering pupils. Each roar, each feeble shake of the horns drew him closer. The steer twisted his neck, raised his head in anguish. In the corner of his vision James saw the butcher’s hands again, then the red heart beating, then the knife.

Chaos to the steer. Order to the butcher.

Every Monday he had the day off, no cooking lessons, no household duty. In the spring months he had wandered the Boulevards until he knew every inch, stopping in like a regular at all the white men’s cafés, reading British newspapers at the bar, ending the day (or night) at Denis’s three-room bead-curtained brothel with young Marcella, she of the squirming black limbs. But come the hot weather and the long days he had taken to wandering east, far past the Opéra and the Boulevards and all that Jefferson, fancy, silk-swaddled Paris. Faubourg Saint-Marcel, the city’s anthill, that was where he came now, every Monday, drinking brandy for breakfast and watching animals die.

The Frenchman beside him wanted to parley—“Vous êtes noir? Vous êtes noir?”—but James shook him off, tucked his bottle under his coat, and started to walk. On the Quai de la Feraille they sold birds, men, and flowers—the men were young country drunks hauled staggering up to an army recruiting booth by a bounty-hunter, the birds and flowers were offered to servants and couples passing from the markets or over the bridge to Notre-Dame. James had seen the flower merchants follow a customer half the length of the quai and, if he refused to buy, cover him with
mud. The recruiting officers lounged under posters and crooked little fingers at him like a girl.

You’ll
come back dead
, Adrien Petit had warned him;
one of these days you’ll walk down an alley in the Faubourg Saint-Marcel, and a Savoyard will drag you back here on a litter, dead as a rock, knifed through the throat
. The Savoyards were the errand boys of Paris. They clustered in groups at street corners, wearing soft caps down over one ear and culottes held up by cloth belts sailor-fashion. They lounged and waited for work, anything from scraping shoes or putting down planks over the mud—Paris was the City of Mud—to carrying letters or parcels right to your door. Rough, loutish boys mostly, but they ran their groups with such severity—no robbery, no drunkenness, no knives—that people entrusted them with the most amazing errands. In James’s presence Petit had once handed a Savoyard a package of money for Jefferson’s banker and sent the boy off without asking so much as a receipt. Petit was right, they would carry his corpse home piggyback … as long as Jefferson paid them.

By nightfall, he had reached the seventh stage of the seventh stage of drunkenness, as his mother used to say. He was slumped in one of the smoky
tripots
next to the Bastille and pushing cards across a table with a crew of broken-toothed, red-eyed soldiers, playing a game he didn’t know, by rules that changed with every new bottle. At some point the soldiers disappeared, and he found himself outside on the streets again, weaving along the mossy wall of a building and breathing in sharp foreign smells—French straw, French spices, the cadaverous dead-geranium odor of a nearby church. Jefferson never went to church, but once in a while, remembering the slave houses at Monticello and the Sunday services halfway down the hill, James would go by himself into a Paris church. The trouble was, the French left their corpses in them overnight, before the funeral, so many corpses, so few windows, the churches smelled like wet boneyards, you gagged and choked the minute you entered.

Jefferson.

The man bathed his feet in cold water every morning—to keep off diseases, he said. James knew. Each day he carried the basin upstairs as soon as it was light and put it down by the bed, and
Jefferson was always already awake, dressed except for his shoes, reading or writing something by candle.

“Vien ici, James. Je vais vous donner quelque chose à boire, du café.”

James blinked himself—it seemed—to a sitting position. Braced each hand on the arm of a chair, watching a skinny white man with greasy hair pour him a stream of coffee, right out of a pewter pot.

“You’re a slave, James.”

“I know what I am, you stupid old man. In Paris I’m a free man.”

“I mean you’re a slave to
that
.” The Frenchman pointed to an empty bottle of cognac, emerald-colored and twisted wrong somehow at the neck like the body of a plump green chicken, and James made a point of looking in the other direction, still blinking, forcing the walls to stand still. It was Le Trouveur’s little one-room apartment, upstairs, off the rue de Charonne, and James had been there half a dozen times, sober once, drunk the rest, talking earnestly in French with the filthy old man, who carried a five-sided bull’s-eye lantern wherever he went, even in his room, and made his living finding things in the street. Le Trouveur, the Finder. In daylight he set up a little stall near the Pont Neuf where people could come and see his display of found objects. At night he took his lantern and crept over the slimy pavement like a big white rat. The streets, James thought, were the image of shit.

“Slave to strong drink,” the old man repeated. “Have this.”

James raised the cup to his mouth. A year of cooking lessons had given him a nose that could separate ten different smells in a single dish. Have this, the teacher would say, handing him a bare wooden spoon from the bowl, and James could sniff and lick his way through a whole recipe of ingredients—ginger, yeast, saffron, two kinds of dill. The old man’s coffee had a strong taste of caramel, like most French coffee; the warm grounds stuck to his teeth like sugar.

“You remember Jean-Claude?”

James nodded. The third man in the room was Le Trouveur’s particular friend, another old tramp who made his living off the streets. Why the hell did he come here instead of staying in the
Faubourg Saint-Honoré, where people washed their cups and had carpets instead of straw down on the floor? James opened his eyes and offered a little mock bow to Jean-Claude across the room.

“It’s too late for Jean-Claude to go home,” Le Trouveur said, earnest as always. “Les espions, vous savez.”

James looked at Jean-Claude without interest. One of the stranger things about Paris was that outside the Fauborg Saint-Marcel, the streets were genuinely safe, you could go anywhere (almost anywhere) anytime day or night without fear of bandits or thugs; but from nightfall on the police had spies hard at work, tracking suspicious characters, informers, prostitutes, gamblers, foreigners, occasionally demanding papers, usually content just to have their presence felt. Jefferson hated the spies; he called them the king’s black angels.

“Got a load of posters, right?” James forced a little grin. Jean-Claude lived by pulling down posters. Paris was covered with them, of course; batlike, they flapped on every street corner in the city. What the old tramp did was go out by night with
hid
lantern and strip a place bare, then sell the posters to butchers and grocers who used them for wrapping or to one of the box-makers on the Quai Tournelle who turned them into crude packages. He also burned them for heat in the winter and used them himself for blankets and shoes. He could read, so he had a little system. Posters that advertised books and medicine he left up; but he took down anything that advertised puppet shows, circuses, theatrical performances, anything he disapproved of. Since posters were theoretically illegal, the police paid no attention whatever to Jean-Claude, who was nevertheless convinced that their spies followed him everywhere. The strongest single drive in human nature, Jefferson had told Short, was the need to feel
important
.

“You remember what I told you, James?”

Le Trouveur sat down beside him and refilled the cup. James squinted at the old man’s skylight; overhead was not black, not blue, somewhere in between, meaning he still had time to go outside, walk to the Grille de Chaillot, fall asleep in his own bed.

“You remember? I read it to you right out of the
Mercure de France
. Slavery does not exist in France. You could be a free man, just go and tell him. You have brothers and sisters?”

“I have my sister. Sally.”

“She’s here?”

“She’s coming.
Maybe
she’s coming. He sent for his little daughter, and Sally’s coming with her, as the maid. If the boat ever leaves.”

“How old is Sally?”

“Fourteen. Fifteen.” At Monticello the date of a slave’s birth was not necessarily recorded in Jefferson’s book.

“She could be free; you both could be free.”

James sneered. “Free like you? Sniff around the street on all fours,
poor
? Free like him, nothing to worry about but food and money and jail?”

Earnestness was an impenetrable defense. In the gloom of his bleak little room Le Trouveur came up with sheets of paper, some kind of pamphlet. James heard the word
petition
. Le Trouveur pressed the pamphlet into his jacket pocket. It was written by somebody named Condorcet; it told how a slave, even a diplomat’s slave, could submit a paper to the courts and be free.

“Free to starve,” James spat, struggling to his feet. But he held on to the pamphlet, and outside, in the cool September night, he gripped it fiercely in both hands as he walked, like a club.

Like a brighter, silkier club, Jefferson held up Maria Cosway’s pink parasol twelve hours later and pointed it into the wind.

“Such a wind, such a wind,” she said, using one hand to grip the edge of her straw bonnet, the other to press down her fluttering skirt. “Such a
warm
wind.”

“It won’t last,” Jefferson said, smiling. Every tree in the Tuileries seemed to sway and toss under the wind, like so many huge green balls bouncing. “In half an hour it should all be calm as a baby’s cradle.”

Maria looked down; looked away; looked at the long, sad river that ran next to the gardens.

At the same moment, a mile farther up the Champs-Élysées, James Hemings dropped into his chair and braced his elbows on the kitchen table. He was used to brandy, he thought glumly. He drank wine or brandy by the bottle six days out of seven, and the only price he ever paid was a bad temper that his mother said he had been born with anyway. But this morning he craved coffee,
hot coffee to soothe his brandy-soaked brain, and fresh, cool air to replace the heat of the kitchen.

He grunted at one of the kitchen maids and sat back in his chair while she brought his cup. Then he fumbled in his pocket and brought out a slip of paper.

It was one of Jefferson’s peculiarities that he liked to collect recipes. He was known to ask anybody, even one of his elegant French hostesses, to write down the recipe for something they served him, or else he would copy recipes himself from books, adding annotations in English and little unreadable drawings, and then pass them along for James to try.

James rubbed his forehead and unfolded the newest acquisition. They had progressed a long way since the earliest instructions for heating the oven just right, to avoid burning a crust. This recipe—James sipped the scalding coffee and blinked—this recipe, which Jefferson said he was going to send to everybody in Albemarle County, was for a new dessert called ice cream. James smoothed the paper on the table. A cold dessert. You made a mixture of custard and vanilla flavoring and ice and salt in a wooden container, then when it was frozen, you scraped it out with a spatula and put it in tin molds packed with more ice-salt, pounds and pounds of it.

He shook his head, regretted it, looked up.

At the fireplace the old woman who did most of Jefferson’s ordinary cooking was down on her knees stoking the fire. To her right the turnspit dog sat on his treadmill watching. She was cooking beef, James noticed, which meant company today, since Jefferson and Short ate practically no meat themselves; which meant that in another hour the kitchen would be a furnace. Which meant that making ice cream there was a near impossibility.