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 seven-syllable 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.
After reading it I thought perhaps, for some mysterious reason, you were lying (nor is it difficult to conclude from your life, as you have so frankly related it, that you do sometimes lie). If there is anyone who should know for sure that you didn’t kill me, it would be I myself. I wanted to investigate. I removed my clerical garb and, almost naked, went down to the cellar and opened the trap door.
At the entrance to that foul-smelling passageway that you so well describe, I was taken aback by the stench. I asked myself what it was I wanted to find out: whether there were still a few bones from the body you say you left down there over twenty-five years ago. And did I have to go down into that filth to discover those bones weren’t mine? If you’ll allow me, I already know. Therefore I accept what you say—you did kill an Abbé Dalla Piccola.
So who am I? Not the Dalla Piccola you killed (who in any event didn’t look like me). But how can there be two Abbé Dalla Piccolas?
The truth is perhaps I’m mad. I dare not leave the house. Yet I have to go out to buy food, since my cassock prevents me from visiting taverns. I do not have a fine kitchen like you—though, to be honest, I am no less of a glutton.
I am gripped by an irresistible urge to kill myself, but I know it’s the devil tempting me.
And then, why kill myself if you have already done it for me? It would be a waste of time.
7th April
Dear Abbé, enough of this.
I have no recollection of what I did yesterday and found your note this morning. Stop tormenting me. You don’t remember either? So do as I do—contemplate your navel and then start writing. Allow your hand to think for you. Why is it I who has to recall everything, and you who remember only the few things I wanted to forget?
At this moment I am beset by other memories. I had just killed Dalla Piccola when I received a note from Lagrange. This time he wanted to meet me at place de Fürstenberg, at midnight, when the place is fairly ghostly. I had, as God-fearing people would say, a guilty conscience, as I had killed a man, and feared (irrationally) that Lagrange already knew. But he obviously had something else to talk about.
«Captain Simonini,» he said, «we need you to keep an eye on a curious character, a priest…how can I put it…a satanist.»
«Where do I find him, in hell?»
«I’m not joking. He’s a certain Abbé Boullan, who years ago came to know a certain Adèle Chevalier, a lay sister in the convent of Saint-Thomas-de-Villeneuve at Soissons. Strange rumors began to circulate about her. It was said she had
