The Blood of Lorraine Read online

  “Until?” Martin raised his eyebrows. The fact that Antoinette Thomas did not want a child might be important.

  “Until Pierre made enough money so she could quit.”

  “And that didn’t happen?”

  Geneviève Philipon shook her head. “He drinks too much.”

  Martin leaned forward. “And you? Were you still able to feed the child from your own breasts when he died?”

  Her eyes widened with fear as she folded her arms over her sterile bosom and slowly began to shake her head. “But,” she pleaded, “I gave him everything I could. By the name of Mary the Most Holy Virgin I swear it. I even took the cow’s milk from my own children’s mouths to feed him.”

  “And what else did you feed him?”

  The woman shrank back in her seat. “Nothing. Nothing, truly. He was not ready. I knew that.”

  “You know that. Well—” Martin made a show of searching through the mounds on his desk. Although Fauvet had not yet submitted his report, any piece of paper would do. “This,” Martin said, holding up an official-looking document, “is from the doctor who examined young Marc-Antoine Thomas, and he reports that the poor child died from asphyxiation. Either smothered or choked to death on a piece of bone or meat or, even, a stone.” He paused before continuing. “Do you know why we don’t know what killed him? Why we don’t know what he might have choked on?” He stared at her until she met his eyes. “Do you know why? Because,” he said in a loud voice, “someone cut him open and gutted him!”

  Her gasps came out in a series of low croaks. Martin was not sure whether they echoed her inconsolable sorrow, or guilt and naked fear.

  “And,” Martin pressed on, “I believe that you are the one responsible for the death of this unfortunate little boy and that you are the one who heartlessly and savagely took out his insides.”

  Her eyes grew wide. She gulped, then declared, “Oh no sir, no. ’Twasn’t me. Or my kids. ’Twasn’t any of us. It was that man. That Jew.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “But I told the policeman, and he wrote it all down. It was that man. I swear. It was the Jew.”

  “There was no man. There was only you and your children.”

  “No, no,” she wailed. “We wouldn’t do that. We loved Marc-Antoine more than—”

  She stopped short, not daring to go on. It was one of those moments that occurs in so many interrogations, when the sudden silence is so palpable that you could reach out and clutch at it and will it to speak to you. Instead, Martin merely grasped the arms of his chair and leaned forward. “More than who?” he asked slowly and quietly. The mother or the father?

  “No one, I didn’t mean….” She brought the shawl over her face again, as if that would be enough to fend off Martin’s questions.

  Martin glanced over to Charpentier and nodded. This was their signal that the clerk should be ready to take down a spurt of uninterrupted testimony. Charpentier responded with a cocksure smile. This was the part of any interrogation he liked best, the moment when a suspect either began to confess or, even better, got tangled up in a web of lies. He never wasted any sympathy on the poor and the ignorant.

  “Very well, then,” Martin said, settling back in his chair again, “if what you say is true, I want the whole story from beginning to end of everything that happened on Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning. Speak slowly so that Monsieur Charpentier can get it all down in the official record.” And, Martin thought, please tell the truth. All of it. Now.

  Geneviève Philipon opened her mouth, but nothing came out.

  “Please begin,” Martin said, as he clasped his hands together across his stomach and pursed his lips, making it evident that he was utterly comfortable in what was, after all, his command, and could wait her out, no matter how long it took.

  The wet nurse swallowed hard before reciting a story that did not differ one iota from the account in Jacquette’s report. She had rehearsed it well. Despite his show of ease, tension rippled at the back of Martin’s neck and down his spine as she talked. She was lying. Yet from everything he had seen, Martin sensed she was incapable of making up such an elaborate story all by herself. He had to find out who had put her up to it.

  The fingers in his clasped hands were gripping together so tightly that his knuckles were turning white. But his hands were below the wet nurse’s vision. All Martin hoped she saw was his stern, impassive stare. When she finally began to squirm, he pounced. “I don’t believe you.”

  “It’s the truth, I swear it.” She tried to sit up straight, as if putting her rectitude on display.

  Martin had seen it all before, the obvious fabrications, followed by righteous denial. But this poor woman, who for so many years had been bent over with work and cares, made only the most pitiful attempt at stubborn defiance. His body relaxed. He had her. “You must know that if you are caught lying to a judge, he can imprison you and sentence you to hard labor. For years.”

  Her mouth trembled. “I…I…I….”

  “Did you make up this lie? Or did someone else put you up to this? Pierre Thomas, for example?” This was Martin’s first opportunity to get at a motive behind the anti-Jewish slander.

  “No, not him!” she blurted out, then covered her mouth. She had answered too quickly.

  “Then was it Antoinette Thomas?” Martin shouted. He meant to frighten Geneviève Philipon, and he succeeded.

  “No…Yes.” She began gasping for air again. “Maybe the two of us.”

  “Why?” Martin was still shouting.

  “Because,” the woman cringed, “because she was afraid to tell Pierre about what happened. She thought he would blame it on her. She wanted it to seem like he was murdered.”

  “Marc-Antoine? Then he wasn’t murdered by a stranger? Is that what you are saying?” Martin lurched toward her with mock surprise.

  She nodded and huddled down into the chair, as if she feared he was going to strike her.

  “Then, if you have been lying, we must start all over again. With that afternoon. You must tell me everything you know about why Marc-Antoine died and why he was mutilated. Telling the truth now is the only chance you have to not go to prison for a very long time.” Martin sat back and gave himself leave to scratch the beard under his high collar. He was itching from the anxious sweating that a crucial interrogation always brought on. They were almost there.

  Geneviève Philipon stared into space for a long moment, then, speaking as if she were in a trance, gave a very different account of little Marc-Antoine’s death. She had often left him in the charge of her two older daughters while she worked in the field. That afternoon, she heard cries for help. When she ran to the cottage, the seven-month-old was already blue and stiffening. Her older girls were hysterical. Their little sister was wailing in the corner. Apparently the baby had crawled over to the hearth while no one was watching and stuck a stone or piece of ash in his mouth. After ordering her children to wait inside the cottage until her return, she took the boy’s body up into the attic loft and left it where neither her cow nor pig could get at it. Then she ran to the factory to find Antoinette Thomas. Antoinette came and took the boy. She was the one who opened him up, gutted him and left the body by the river for Geneviève and the men from the village to discover the next morning.

  “It was an accident,” the wet nurse whimpered and repeated over and over again.

  An accident. Martin had seen enough of Geneviève Philipon to be predisposed to believe her. An accident, not a crime. But one that had caused a child’s death and incited an incendiary lie. A lie that could set off a lot of mischief in the wake of all the panic about Dreyfus’s treachery, dangerous mischief; a lie that could be humiliating to Israelites like David Singer and his family. Martin had to squelch the story before it got out. He had to get all three of them to confess.

  When she stopped sniveling, Martin asked, “Whose idea was it to make up the story about the Jewish tinker?”

  Geneviève Philipon shrug
ged. “I can’t remember.”

  “But surely you can,” he insisted. “You remember everything else. You probably spread the story to the whole village. Whose idea was it to blame a Jew?” he asked again, giving emphasis to each word.

  He watched as her mouth opened and closed a number of times before she finally told him, “Antoinette. The Jew was her idea.”

  The wet nurse’s hesitations, more than her words, indicated that she was telling the truth. “Why would Antoinette Thomas invent such an elaborate lie?”

  Geneviève Philipon shook her head, not daring to look at him. “I don’t know,” she whispered.

  “Surely you must know. You said you were friends. Where would she get these ideas?” Martin leaned forward and glared at her, waiting.

  “Maybe from a priest?” she finally offered.

  “When? How?”

  “A sermon, maybe, a sermon, about them, you know, the Jews.”

  Her replies were barely audible. But their impact was explosive. Martin didn’t want to tangle with the bishop over the behavior of one of his priests. “Which priest?” he asked.

  Geneviève Philipon shrugged her shoulders. “Her priest? I don’t know. I’m not saying nothing more. I can’t. I told you everything!” She wrapped her arms around her chest in a final gesture of defiance. She was biting down on her lips and breathing hard. Tears were trailing down her sallow cheeks. She had just betrayed her friend. She was through talking.

  “Very well.” Martin suddenly rose from his chair. She had to get a taste of the consequences of her lies and her stubbornness, at least until he corroborated her testimony. “Charpentier, go get a policeman to accompany Mme Philipon to the jail. We’ll hold her until somebody decides to tell us the entire truth.”

  “No, no, please.” The woman fell on her knees.

  Without a word, Charpentier brushed past her on his way to the door. He could barely conceal the smirk on his face.

  “Let me go home,” she pleaded. “My children. Someone has to be with them.”

  “I will send Inspector Jacquette to see how your children are doing. I will also order him to question them about what happened.”

  “No, sir, please. I didn’t do nothing wrong. It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t their fault either.”

  Martin turned his back on her. He could mete out mercy later, after he found out how a mother could tear open her own child and start a slanderous rumor, and who had put such a dangerous idea in her head in the first place. If it was a parish priest, Martin would have to move quickly to quash the slander before it spread.

  6

  “IT WAS THE JEW THAT did it,” Antoinette Thomas shouted as soon as she spotted Martin as she entered his office.

  Martin watched with wary fascination as the uniformed officer pushed her forward. Her feet stuttered, just as Geneviève Philipon’s had. But not because she was timid or scared. Her scowls and expletives indicated that her resistance stemmed from defiance rather than fear. The veteran policeman sighed with relief when he finally shoved her into the witness chair in front of Martin’s desk. Antoinette Thomas promised to be a tough customer.

  “It was him, I tell you,” she said again, her green eyes flashing, daring Martin to call her a liar. She did not flinch even as he made a show of scrutinizing her face. She sat straight up, arms crossed, returning his disapproving stare.

  Antoinette Thomas was taller than Geneviève Philipon, and healthier. In less dire circumstances, she might have been considered an attractive woman, even seductive. Her thick dark brown hair stood out on each side of her face, the tangle of unruly curls bristling with electric energy. An angry ruddiness colored her cheeks, and some hidden store of pride stiffened her carriage. As she held back her head waiting for Martin to respond to her ridiculous accusation, she lifted her firm square chin and thrust her chest forward. Her breasts were not limp and dry like the wet nurse’s.

  Yet these breasts had not nourished her son. If what the wet nurse had told Martin were true, Antoinette Thomas had not been a mother at all, beyond giving birth to the unfortunate Marc-Antoine. How could any true mother disembowel her own baby? Martin shuddered as he remembered the greenish-gray corpse lying in the morgue. And then, equally unbidden, came the image of his own dear wife, with her great belly, waiting eagerly for the day that she would nurse a child at her breast. Martin squeezed his eyes shut, for to think of Clarie as he looked upon Antoinette Thomas seemed almost a sacrilege.

  Martin stayed very still for a moment, clearing his mind to prepare himself for battle. With a hard case like Antoinette Thomas, it might take all manner of threats and manipulation to get her to confess to what she had done and why, and, most important of all, to tell him who had incited her to make up her inflammatory little fable.

  “The Jew,” she repeated, filling up a silence broken only by Charpentier clearing his throat at the little desk to the left of Martin and the muted sound of footsteps through the window behind him. Her voice was quieter and less confident. She crossed her arms over her chest again, protectively this time.

  Martin leaned back in his chair, trying to effect a casual pose, even though his stomach was churning with disgust. “Madame Thomas,” he began, “before we get to your”—he paused to underline his skepticism—“your accusations, we need information for the official record. Please answer truthfully and slowly so Monsieur Charpentier can write everything down with utmost accuracy.”

  Martin heard another cough, and much shuffling of papers behind him. Charpentier had caught on. Martin was about to grind the witness down by asking in slow, excruciating detail about her past and present life. He would make her spell out every name, every address, every date. And drive her a little mad in the process.

  This should not have been difficult. Martin’s refusal to respond to her provocations seemed to have put her in a state of animal-like alertness. Although she maintained her pose, straight as a statue before him, the way she clutched her shawls together with white-knuckled fists gave her away.

  Still, instead of answering Martin’s simplest questions, she hurled demands and invective at him and his clerk.

  “Tell me why I am here! Ain’t it your job to find the Jew that killed my boy and took out his guts? Don’t you know about them, what they do? You bring in a poor, grieving mother, when they are out there right now finding more innocent children to use in their wicked ceremonies.”

  She caught her breath and smiled for just an instant, as if she had surprised even herself with the last inventive flourish.

  It was enough to get on anyone’s nerves. Nevertheless, Martin kept his voice low and steady. “Please spell your full name, maiden and married,” he repeated.

  And repeated. Until she began to respond. Until she understood that this was a game she could not win. Martin proceeded, stony, methodical, and relentless, gathering both useful and useless information about her life. He wanted to make her squirm with impatience and annoyance. At the same time, he hoped that the routine triviality of his questions would lull her into a state of compliance, so that when they got to what she had done and why, she would blurt out her answers without thinking.

  Once he got her started, she was quite forthcoming. As long as she could pour scorn on other people.

  Geneviève Philipon “had always been a stupid cow. Kept behind in school, she was. That’s how I met her,” Antoinette Thomas explained. “It was me that had to help her with her numbers.”

  When asked about her employer, she informed Martin that she worked at a factory owned by a “rich dirty old Jew. Working us to the bone to make his money.”

  She was hardly kinder to her husband, who was “the one who wanted a kid.” The one “who comes home smelling of drink and dead animals’ blood and shit.” Her nostrils flared out with distaste. “He promised to get me out of the factory, then got me pregnant. The pig.”

  “Then why did you marry him?” The question slipped out, unplanned. But, Martin thought, it might offer him an opening.
If the husband felt the same contempt for his wife, Martin could turn them against each other. He shifted in his chair, eager to see what she would have to say.

  “I married him because they paid us. They said we should be ‘wed in the eyes of God’ because we were co-habiting,” she sneered as she pronounced the fancy word, which evidently had been pressed into her limited vocabulary from some higher source. “What difference did it make to me?”

  “Who paid you?”

  “Them snooty ladies who like to stick their noses into everyone’s business.”

  “The Saint Regius Society,” Martin mumbled. A charity propagated by those having too much time on their hands. Rich women who believed that they could turn the Antoinette Thomases of the world into pious bourgeois housewives despite the poverty and brutality of their lives. What cruel foolishness.

  “Yeah, that one. And they would have paid me to nurse my kid too, but I couldn’t do it.”

  “Couldn’t?” Martin asked, thinking of the proud, full breasts, which she had managed to keep well within his view. If only she knew how much her spite and hardness repulsed him, then maybe she would just relax back into the seat and stop trying to be provocative.

  “How were we going to eat if I didn’t keep going to the factory, making that Jew rich?”

  Well said, thought Martin, only barely restraining himself from shouting at her. Blame your predicament on the Israelites. Yet who was to blame? Fauvet had reminded him that mill women often sent their children to the country in order to keep on working. Many, if not most of them, including the vixen who sat in front of him, had no choice. He sighed. “And you chose Geneviève Philipon because…?” he asked

  “Because,” she leaned forward and screwed her mouth into another sneer, “she still had her last one at her breast and I knew she was desperate after her husband kicked the bucket. Because,” she added as she sat back, “she’d take anything I gave her.”

  “Let’s talk about you and Mme Philipon,” Martin said, clasping his hands around his stomach. His gaze roved slowly over every facet of Antoinette Thomas’s face, stopping at exactly the point where his eyes bored into hers. They had finally come full circle. To the pitiful dead body of little Marc-Antoine. To Antoinette Thomas’s blatant lies and ridiculous accusations. Back to what the wet nurse had told Martin.