“Maybe I can just ask a grandmother to come to the bakery. I could make up a story of how Maman needs help, and—”
“Oh, that won’t be necessary, Lucien. You’ll just conk her on the head. That is the proper way.”
The ragpicker nodded, as if it was well-known that conking a grandmother on the head was the accepted method.
Tears began to well in Lucien’s eyes. “I don’t want to. I don’t want to conk a grandmother. I don’t want to. I don’t want to. I don’t want to.”
“Eh, war is hell,” said the ragpicker.
Père Lessard tousled Lucien’s hair, then pulled the boy’s head against his hip in a hug. “Shhhh, son, stop crying. I’m just fucking with you.”
Now the ragpicker threw his head back and laughed in the way only a Frenchman with seven teeth and a conscience soaked in wine can laugh, the sound his donkey might make if he were a heavier smoker and had just licked the devil’s ass to chase all taste of goodness from his tongue. The ragpicker wasn’t a scoundrel, but scoundrels envied his laugh.
Humiliated, horrified, and not a little out of breath, Lucien flailed at Father with his fists; the first bounced harmlessly off the baker’s bottom, the second plowed solidly and with great force into Père Lessard’s testicles, and in that instant, time stopped for the baker, and even before the breath left his body and he crumpled to the ground in pain, he thought, The boy has his mother’s sense of humor.
As Lucien ran up the hill toward home, Père Lessard said to the ragpicker, “He’s a sensitive boy. I think he should be an artist.”
Madame Lessard met him at the top of the stairs, her hands on her hips, her chin jutting like the prow of a warship. “So, you will have my son bake my mother into a pie, will you?”
“Just a grandmother, not his grandmother. I was teasing him.” Although it then crossed Lessard’s mind that if one were choosing a grandmother from which to make pies, Madame’s mother, who, upon a sunny day, when the twin locomotives of her bosom towed her cumulus skirts through the market at Louveciennes, was followed by children and dogs seeking shade, would indeed make for a rich and prodigious filling. He would atone for the thought, he knew, whether he chose to or not.
“I adore your mother, my love. I was simply preparing Lucien to help find new sources of filling for our pastries.”
“Like his grandmother?”
“Like rats,” said Père Lessard.
“No…” said Mère Lessard, for once not feigning shock.
“You know, the rabbit is a rodent also, and delicious.”
“Now you will feed me rat. Mother warned me about you.”
“No, ma chère, the rats will be for the customers only.” But your mother should thank the saints she lives in Louveciennes or there would be fat bitch pie for everyone on the butte, he thought.
LUCIEN DID NOT TAKE IMMEDIATELY TO THE DUTIES OF RAT CATCHER; IN FACT, for the first two days, he spent his morning chasing his quarry into the dark corners of Montmartre, only to find himself chased right back out of those same corners by a rat that had tripled in size and, if he was not mistaken, was carrying a knife.
Madame Jacob, who owned the crémerie, found him sulking one morning behind the Moulin de la Galette. She had gone to the north slope out of habit, to fetch her cows, but they had already passed on by then, and she was simply herding ghosts.
“No rats today, Lucien?”
“No one is supposed to know I am catching rats,” Lucien said.
“Well, you aren’t, are you?”
“They’re huge! They tried to rape and kill me.”
“Ah, but Père Lessard needs to feed Montmartre, as do I. I’ll tell you what, Lucien, let me give you something easier to catch, and you bring them to me, and I will give you three traps that I have, and some garlic, which your father can use for his rat pâté.”
“Easier to catch?” Lucien asked. He hoped Madame Jacob wasn’t going to suggest grandmothers again, because after his experience with the rats, he didn’t want to imagine what kind of raping and killing an angry grandmother might visit upon him.
“Escargots,” said Madame Jacob. “You’ll find them early morning in the cemetery, when the mist is still running over the gravestones.”
“Merde!” said Lucien, for the first time in his life.
THE NEXT MORNING, WHILE FATHER WAS STILL PROOFING THE OAKY LOAVES for baking, Lucien made his way up rue Lepic, past the still blades of the Moulin de la Galette, and down through the Maquis, with its row upon row of tiny, ramshackle houses, splintering privies, decimated vegetable gardens fenced with pickets of rough sticks, and the occasional broken wagon or junk pile. Usually the Maquis woke up shouting, but today it was oddly still, not even a late whore or early scavenger about; no rooster crowed, no dog barked, anyone able-bodied enough to have been at work was away, camped at the barricades with the militias. Of the scores of tin chimneys, but one bled a tarry stream of smoke over the roofs, someone burning oily rags to chase the morning chill, the only sign at all that the Maquis was still alive.
Lucien shivered and hurried down the hill to the cemetery. There, among the sycamores and chestnut trees, the moss-covered monuments and blackened bronze crypt doors, he found his prey. Upon the third tomb he passed, a fairly fresh slab of basalt belonging to the late Léon Foucault, was an angry escargot, his horns extended, lording over his stony realm like a dragon over his hoard of gold.