Running from the Comédie-Italienne, the shots of the crazed count still echoing in my head, my lungs burning, I instinctively fled to my old neighborhood in the Jewish quarter.
I walked down the middle of my dark street. The moon shone on the wet cobblestones. An old lame peddler appeared from the shadows, his basket of rags strapped to his back. He gaped at me in my wig and livery. I tipped my hat, which seemed to frighten him. He hurried past me, limping up the street. I stopped at my parents’ door. The street was silent. All good people were asleep. I thought with yearning of my old corner of the bed. Shlomo had it to himself now. I imagined sneaking in beside him. He would let out a bellow. I chose a dark doorway across the street, a few doors down, and waited for my father and brother to emerge for morning prayer. The night felt eternal. I kept dropping off, then waking with a start when my cheek felt cold, wet stone. I was so hungry. At last, at dawn, the Jews began their day. Men striding to prayer, women setting off with baskets of rags or used clothing. The door to my building opened, and my father, stout, glowering, officious, emerged, followed by the scarecrowlike Shlomo, whose gaze was always trained on his own feet. My father was explaining something to my brother, his arm waving. Once they had walked up the block, I scurried into the building and up the stairs.
The door to our apartment was open. My mother was sewing below the back window when I stepped in. She didn’t hear me. Buttery light softened her pointed features, made her look young. I stood very still, watching her, her head bent low to see the stitches. The room was bare; the furniture had been pushed to the walls, and an iron tub stood in the center of the floor, as it always was when there was a body to purify. As I have mentioned, my father was among those who prepared our dead. When someone found the body of a Jew, it was my father who was notified. The dead were washed, shrouded; then, the regime suffered us to bury them in cover of darkness, without fanfare, in silence.
“Who died?” I asked. My mother looked up. Nearsighted, she gasped at the liveried figure in a powdered wig standing there, incongruous as an apparition. Then, squinting, she stood. Her darned sock fell to the floor.
“Jacob …” It was almost a growl.
“Mother,” I answered. She walked toward me, into shadow. Reddish pockets under her eyes made her look haggard. I opened my arms, expecting to embrace her, to drink in the scent I knew so well. Tears sprouted from her eyes as she approached me. A low moan escaped her lips. She walked up to me, looked me level in the eye, and hit me in the side of the head.
“You’re supposed to be in jail! What happened? I’ve been going there for months! They told me you had been released, but I didn’t believe them. I didn’t believe you could disappear like this!”
“Please, Mother, can I sleep here for the day, while Father is out? I am very hungry and tired.”
“Are you crazy?” she shrieked. “You’re going back to your wife! Take off that ridiculous costume.”
“I’m not going back to that maniac,” I said.
“What kind of a man are you?” she whispered with frightening disdain, turning and opening the bread basket. She took a challah roll, cut it in two with a furious sawing motion, then hacked a thick slice of cured beef off a haunch hanging from the ceiling. Pressing the sandwich into my hand contemptuously, she drew me to her, kissing me hungrily all over my face, then pushed me away, tears running down her cheeks. I ate like an animal.
Just then we heard footsteps on the stairs. My ear was still hot from her slap as she shoved me into her bedroom. I heard shuffling, something being dragged along the floor. My father’s stentorian voice boomed out a few orders. My mother came back into the bedroom carrying a bowl of stew, handed it to me furiously, and bolted us in.
“Who died?” I whispered between mouthfuls.
“Chayim,” she answered.
“Chayim Levi?” I asked.
“Be quiet,” she said, her eyes ferocious. She sat down in a chair opposite me and watched me eat. It was unnerving, but still I licked the plate clean. In the next room I heard the sound of water being poured over the body. The purification had begun. This could take ages, I knew, and it was making me thirsty. My mother would return me to Hodel, probably that afternoon. I would be yoking up my peddler’s box by morning. I had to get out. I stood and walked to the door. My mother’s exhausted eyes seemed to bulge from their sockets as she beseeched me silently to stay in the room. But what was there to lose? I unlocked the door and walked into the kitchen.
My father and Shlomo were standing on stools holding beakers of water. The tall, wasted body of Chayim the petty criminal was on a slanted board, held up by two strong men.
The board was propped inside a metal tub. My father was pouring a cascade of water over the naked dead man, washing his sins, the only things that had distinguished him, away. Poor Chayim, the rake. His jaw was tied shut with a strip of white muslin. In life, he had never shut up. He had loped around the neighborhood whenever he was in Paris to sell some gems or seed pearls, his coat flapping open, ragged slippers on his feet, his deep-set eyes glimmering with anarchic humor. It didn’t seem fair to cleanse him like this without his permission. The water glided, shining, over the wasted flesh, gradually filling the metal tub. My serious brother stood at the ready with his beaker. The flow of water over the body must not be interrupted. My father looked up and clapped eyes on me. He took me in slowly, from head to toe. The flow of his beaker thinned. My father turned to Shlomo, who was now staring at me, and told him to begin pouring. When Shlomo began, my father got off his stool and turned his back to me, watching the proceedings. I could hear my mother sobbing in the next room. I thought about going in to her, but I couldn’t bear to.
I was almost down the stairs when I heard her shouting my name. I turned. Her face swollen from weeping, she ran down the steps, stuffed a few coins into my hand, kissed me on the mouth, then ran back upstairs.
I spent a week in flophouses or sleeping in parks. I wrote to Solange, begging her to meet me at eight o’clock at night one evening, any evening, at a certain fountain in the Tuileries, with my earnings from the bet. Every night for two weeks I waited for her. I began to get to know the night life there. Once the sun set, figures moved silently, furtively, through the hedges. Fine carriages slowed and were approached by silken shadows. Figures alighted and were dropped off, flitting back into the darkness. A great deal of money was exchanged as I waited, hungry, for Solange. One night a well-dressed man sat beside me on the cool stone rim of the fountain. He wore a powdered wig. His face was very pale in the moonlight. He was looking at me intently from under long lashes. I said nothing.
“I’ve had a long night,” he said. “But my rod is ready.”
“Excuse me?” I asked.
“Let’s go,” he said, grabbing my hand. I looked at him stupidly.
“Are you deaf?” said the man. “I’ll pay you thirty sous!” At that, a man with an enormous mustache, a rarity in those days, emerged from behind a neighboring shrub.
“You are both under arrest!” he pronounced. Beside him, an officer of the watch shook his leg, trying to get his circulation back after squatting in that bush for hours, I guessed. My companion on the bench turned to me with a withering look. “Sale mouche,” he muttered, then rose to meet the inspector with great hauteur.
“I am the Marquis de Saumane, second cousin of the Duc de Condé,” he said. “Do you still want to arrest me?”
The inspector was flustered and bowed his head. “In this case, monsieur, I will be happy with your pledge that you will no longer indulge in the Italian vice, at least not in such a public way. Our sovereign has made it clear he will not abide by it.”
“What is your name?” asked the man.
“Inspector Marais. I act on the pleasure of the king.”
“You are the famous Inspector Marais?” said the marquis, smiling. “I hear the king sits in bed with Mme de Pompadour and reads out your reports on the intimate habits of the noblesse. I hear that the royal consort finds it all very entertaining.”
“The king wishes me to keep track of the nobles of Paris, and I do so. What he does with the information I give him is his own affair,” said Marais, raising a low-slung chin. It was dark, but I imagined he was blushing. The marquis gave a little snort and walked off. Marais dismissed the officer with a shrug. The man walked off to find more scenes of Sodom, still limping slightly. Marais looked down at me.
“I really was just sitting here,” I said.
“I know,” said Marais.
“You’re not going to arrest me?”
“No,” said the inspector, sitting down beside me, his large behind drooping over the rounded rim of the fountain. He eyed my livery. “You are in service?”
“I was. I lost my job,” I said.
“Well, that is fortuitous,” Marais said, smoothing his mustache. “Because I have one for you.”
So began my life as a honey trap, a “mouche,” a fly to catch the spiders. Every night I reported to the Tuileries at nine o’clock, meeting up with my fellow informer, Georges, a desperate young runaway from the country with broad shoulders and stubby legs. Clearly, Marais was looking for two physical types. I was meant to attract the men who were looking for a slip of a thing. Georges could have killed his potential customers with his bare hands. Marais had given me money to buy a set of gentlemanly clothes to work in. I found a yellow silk jacket and britches at Les Halles. The job also came with a place to live: I roomed with Georges in a furniture-free rented room near the Tuileries. We shared a straw mattress on the floor.
Eventually Solange appeared one night, her back rigid, slender hands firmly jammed in a muff, despite the warm weather. She had been trying to find me for days, she said. My money was gone—and so was Le Jumeau. He had found my stash and fled with the well-padded cook. So that was that. Solange gave me a few sous, her mouth turned down with dismay. “Ah, Johann,” she said. “What has become of you?” She took me for a prostitute. I didn’t bother to set her straight. My current occupation was not much better than whoring.
For several months I worked for Inspector Marais. I was good at the flirting. I got reprobates of all types arrested, from chimney sweeps to men of the Church. For me it was a game, an act. Georges took it much too seriously. He felt ashamed of posing as a pederast, and often cried himself to sleep on our lumpy straw mattress. It was impossible, he explained to me, for him to return home. His father, a violent drunk, would almost certainly kill him.
One night, Marais and his policemen were nowhere to be seen and I had trapped a man ready to give me a fat sack of coins for my services. He offered to take me to his home—a rarity. I went. It did me no harm.