UMBERTO ECO : THE PRAGUE CEMETERY (32 page)

Our parting was cool. Goedsche suggested we should split the bill and, indeed, worked out that I had drunk rather more beer than he did. He promised me news within a few weeks and departed, leaving me seething with rage at the long, pointless journey I had made at my own expense without seeing a single thaler of the payment already agreed with Dimitri.

How stupid, I thought. Dimitri knew Stieber wasn't going to pay and had simply secured my document at half the price. Lagrange was right: I shouldn't have trusted a Russian. Or perhaps I had asked too much and should have been satisfied with the half I had received.

I was now convinced I would hear no more from the Germans, and in fact several months passed without any news. Lagrange, to whom I had confided my worries, smiled indulgently. "These are the risks of our trade," he said. "We're not dealing with saints."

I was most irritated by the whole business. My story about the Prague cemetery was too well constructed to be allowed to go to waste on Siberian soil. I could have sold it to the Jesuits. After all, the first real accusations against the Jews, and the first suggestions about their international conspiracy, had come from Barruel, a Jesuit, and my grandfather's letter must have attracted the attention of other leading figures in the order.

The only possible point of contact with the order was Dalla Piccola. It was Lagrange who had put me in contact with him, and Lagrange to whom I now turned. Lagrange told me he'd let him know I was looking for him. And some time later Dalla Piccola came to my shop. I showed him my wares, as they say in the commercial world, and he seemed interested.

"Of course," he said, "I'll have to examine your document and refer it to someone in the Society. These people aren't going to buy sight unseen. I hope you'll trust me with it for a few days. It won't leave my hands."

I felt I could safely trust a priest.

Dalla Piccola returned to the shop a week later. I invited him up to my office and tried to offer him something to drink, but his manner was far from friendly.

"Simonini," he said, "you clearly took me for a fool, making the fathers of the Society of Jesus think I was a counterfeiter and ruining a network of good relationships I'd been developing over the years."

"Monsieur l'Abbé, I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Stop playing games with me. You gave me this document, which is supposed to be secret," and he threw my report about the Prague cemetery on the table. "I was about to ask a considerable sum of money for it when the Jesuits, staring at me as if I were a shyster, quietly informed me that my highly confidential document had already appeared as fictional material in a novel called
Biarritz
, by a certain John Retcliffe. Exactly the same, word for word." And he threw the book down on the table as well. "You obviously understand German, and must have read the book as soon as it came out. You found the story of that nocturnal meeting in the Prague cemetery, you liked it, and you couldn't resist the temptation of selling fiction for reality. And you had the impudence to presume, as plagiarists do, that no one reads German on this side of the Rhine."

 

"Simonini," he said, "you clearly took me for a fool."

"Please listen, I think I understand—"

"There's little to understand. I could have thrown this paper into the bin and told you to go to the devil, but I'm stubborn and vindictive. I warn you, I'll make sure your friends in the secret service know who you are and how much they can trust your information. And why have I come to tell you in advance? Not out of loyalty — someone like you has no right to such a thing — but if the service decides you are worth a dagger in your back, you'll know who suggested it. There's no point killing someone out of revenge unless he knows you're the person who's having him killed, don't you think?"

It was all quite clear. That villain Goedsche (and Lagrange had told me he published
feuilletons
under the name of Retcliffe) had never taken my document to Stieber. He realized the story fitted into the novel he was about to finish, and it appealed to his anti-Jewish frenzy, so he took a true story (or at least he must have thought it was) and made it into a piece of fiction — his own fiction. Lagrange had warned me that the rogue was already a well-known forger of documents, and the fact that I had so naively fallen victim to a forger enraged me.

But my rage was matched by fear. When Dalla Piccola spoke of being stabbed in the back, he may have been talking metaphorically, but Lagrange had been quite clear. In the secret service, when someone gets in the way, he's dispensed with. Just imagine an informer who is publicly exposed as untrustworthy because he sells fictitious rubbish as secret intelligence and, what is more, has made the service look foolish in the eyes of the Society of Jesus. Who wants to have him around? A quick knifing and he'll end up floating in the Seine.

This is what Abbé Dalla Piccola was promising me, and it was pointless trying to tell him the truth — there was no reason he should believe me. He didn't know that I had shown my document to Goedsche before the scoundrel had finished writing his book; all he knew was that I had given it to him (Dalla Piccola)
after
Goedsche's book had appeared.

There seemed no way out.

Apart from stopping Dalla Piccola from talking.

I acted almost out of instinct. I have a heavy wrought-iron candlestick on my desk. I grabbed hold of it and pushed Dalla Piccola against the wall. He looked at me, eyes wide open, and murmured, "You don't want to kill me . . ."

"I'm sorry, yes," I replied.

And I really was sorry, but it was a question of making a virtue of necessity. I struck the blow. The abbé fell, blood streaming through his protruding teeth. I looked at the body and felt not the slightest guilt. He had brought it upon himself.

Now all I had to do was get rid of that troublesome corpse.

When I bought the shop and upstairs apartment, the proprietor had shown me a trap door in the cellar floor.

"You'll find there are a few steps," he had said, "and at first you won't have the courage to go down them because the stink will make you want to faint. But sometimes you'll have to. You're a foreigner so you may not know the whole story. At one time people threw all their filth into the streets, and a law was passed that you had to shout 'Look out, water!' before you tossed your business out of the window. But that was too much trouble — you emptied your chamber pot, and it was just too bad for anyone below. Then open gutters were built along the streets, and eventually these were covered over, and the sewers were created. Baron Haussmann has now, at last, built good sewers for Paris, but they serve mostly for draining away the rainwater, and (when the pipes under your lavatory are not blocked up) the excrement flows away by itself, into a pit that is emptied at night and the filth hauled off to large dumps. There is now discussion about whether, at last, to adopt a system of
tout-à-l'égout
, where the major sewers would drain not only water but every other kind of rubbish. For this reason a decree, made ten years ago, requires owners to connect their houses to the sewer by a tunnel at least one meter thirty wide. That's what you'll find down there, except that (I need hardly say) it's narrower and lower than the law requires. These laws are laid down for the main boulevards, not for a dead-end passageway that is of no importance to anyone. And no one will ever come around checking whether you're actually taking your rubbish down there as you ought to be. When you can't face the idea of squelching through all that filth, just throw your rubbish down the steps, and you can be sure that when it rains some of the water will flow as far as here and carry the rubbish away. Then again, this route into the sewers could have its advantages. As it turns out, every decade or so there's a revolution or a riot in Paris, and an underground escape route isn't such a bad thing. Like every Parisian, you'll have read that novel Les
Misérables
, which came out recently, where our hero escapes through the sewers with an injured friend over his shoulder, so you'll understand what I mean."

As an avid reader of
feuilletons
, I was familiar with Hugo's story. I certainly had no wish to repeat the experience, not least because I had no idea how his character managed to get so far down there. Perhaps the underground drains in other parts of Paris are higher and broader, but the one under impasse Maubert must have been a few centuries old. It was already hard enough carrying Dalla Piccola's body downstairs to the shop and then to the cellar — fortunately the little dwarf was quite bent and thin so was fairly easy to handle. But to get him down the steps from the trap door, I had to roll him. Then I went down and, with my head lowered, dragged him for a few meters to make sure he wouldn't putrefy right beneath my house. With one hand I pulled him along by the ankles and with the other I held a lamp — unfortunately I didn't have a third hand to hold my nose.

This was the first time I'd had to dispose of the body of someone I'd killed. With Nievo and Ninuzzo the matter was sorted out without my having to worry (though with Ninuzzo I should have been more careful, at least that first time in Sicily). I realized that the most irritating aspect of a murder is hiding the body, and it must be for this reason that priests tell us not to kill, except of course in battle, where the bodies are left for the vultures.

I dragged my deceased abbé for ten meters or so, and it is not a pleasant experience having to drag a priest through excrement (not just my own but of goodness knows whose before me), and worse, having to describe all this to the victim himself — my God, what am I writing? But finally, after squelching through a great deal of effluent, I could see a distant blade of light, indicating a manhole cover in the street at the entrance to the alleyway.

I had originally planned to drag the corpse as far as the main drain and leave it to the mercy of its more plentiful waters. But afterward I thought, These waters may carry the body who knows where, perhaps into the Seine, and someone may manage to identify it. Quite right, because now, as I write, I discover that in the great rubbish dumps below Clichy there have recently been found, over a period of six months, 4,000 dogs, 5 calves, 20 sheep, 7 goats, 7 pigs, 80 hens, 69 cats, 950 rabbits, a monkey and a boa constrictor. The figures do not mention priests, but I could have contributed to making them even more grotesque. By leaving my deceased in that place, there was a good chance he wouldn't move.

Between the wall and the actual channel — which was much older than Baron Haussmann's — there was a narrow walkway, and that was where I left the corpse. I calculated that it would decompose fairly quickly in that miasma and humidity, leaving no more than an unidentifiable heap of bones. And, too, bearing in mind the nature of the alleyway, it seemed unlikely that this place would merit any maintenance, or that anyone would venture that far. Even if human remains were found there, it would still have to be proved where they'd come from: anyone climbing down through the manhole cover from the street could have brought them there.

I went back to my office and opened Goedsche's novel at the place where Dalla Piccola had left a bookmark. My German was rather rusty but I managed to follow the story, though not in detail. It was certainly my rabbis' gathering in the Prague cemetery, except that Goedsche (evidently someone with a theatrical imagination) had expanded my description of the cemetery at night and introduced a banker, Rosenberg, who was the first to arrive there, accompanied by a Polish rabbi wearing a skullcap and with ringlets around his temples, and in order to enter he had to whisper to the custodian a kabbalistic sevensyllable word.

The next to arrive was the person who had been my informant in the original, introduced by one Lasali, who promised to let him watch a gathering that occurred every hundred years. They had disguised themselves with false beards and broad-brimmed hats, and the story continued more or less as I had told it, including my ending, with the bluish light that rose from the tomb and the outlines of the rabbis walking away, swallowed up into the night.

The blackguard had used my succinct report to conjure up scenes of great melodrama. He was prepared to do anything to scrape together a few thalers. What is the world coming to?

Exactly what the Jews want it to come to.

It's time for bed. I have deviated from my habit of gastronomic moderation and have been drinking not wine but intemperate quantities of calvados (and intemperance is making my head spin— I fear I am becoming repetitious). It seems I wake up as Abbé Dalla Piccola only when I plunge into a deep dreamless sleep. But now I'd like to see how I can possibly wake up again in the shoes of a dead man, whose death I had caused and witnessed.

15

DALLA PICCOLA REDIVIVUS

6th April 1897, at dawn

Captain Simonini, I don't know whether it was during your (immoderate or intemperate) slumber that I woke up and was able to read your diary. At the first light of dawn.