This is a time of essential loss; of the sacrifice of innocents; of fear, darkness, barrenness, death. The Aztecs knew, and so did the Maya, that, far from wanting to save the world, their gods were bent on its destruction, and that only the blood of sacrifice could appease them for a little while. . . .
We sat there in silence, like old friends. I fingered the charms on my bracelet; she stared into her chocolate cup. Finally she looked at me. “So what are you doing here, Zozie ? ” Not too original, but—hey, it’s a start. I smiled. “I’m a—collector,” I said. “Is that what you call it? ” “For want of a name.” “And what do you collect? ” she said. “Debts outstanding. Promises due.” She flinched at that, as I knew she would. “What do I owe you? ” “Let’s see.” I smiled. “For assorted workings, glamours, charms, tricks, protection, turning straw into gold, averting bad luck, piping the rats out of Hamelin, and generally giving you back your life—” I saw her begin to protest, but moved on. “I think we agreed you’d pay me in kind.” “In kind? ” she repeated. “I don’t understand.” In fact, she understood me perfectly. It’s a very old theme, and she knows it well. The price for your heart’s desire is your heart. A life for a life. A world in balance. Stretch a rubber band far enough and at last it snaps back in your face.
Call it karma, physics, chaos theory, but without it, poles tilt; ground shifts; birds drop from the sky; seas turn to blood; and before you know it, the world’s at an end.
By rights I could take her life, you know. Today I’m inclined to be generous. Vianne Rocher has two lives—I only need the one. But lives are interchangeable; in this world identities may be passed around like playing cards; shuffled; reshuffled; and redealt. That’s all I’m asking for. Your hand. And you owe me a debt. You said so yourself.
“So what’s your name ? ” said Vianne Rocher.
My real name ?
Ye gods, it’s been so long that I’ve almost forgotten. What’s in a name? Wear it like a coat. Turn it, burn it, throw it away and steal another. The name doesn’t matter. Only the debt. And I’m calling it in. Right here, right now.
One small obstacle remains. Her name is Françoise Lavery. Clearly I must have made a mistake somewhere in my calculations, missed something in the general cleanup, because this ghost still won’t leave me alone. She’s in the papers every week—not on the front page, thankfully, but nevertheless I could do without the publicity, and this week, for the first time, the piece suggests foul play as well as simple fraud. There are posters too showing her face, on billboards and lampposts around the city. Of course I look nothing like her these days. But a combination of bank and surveillance camera footage may yet lead them uncomfortably close, and all it needs then is some random element to be thrown into the mix, and all my elaborate plans are blown.
I need to vanish—and very soon—and (this is where you come in, Vianne) the best way of doing that is to leave Paris for good.
This, of course, is where the problem lies. You see, Vianne, I like it here. I never imagined I could get so much fun—so much profit—from a simple chocolaterie. But I like what this place has become, and I see its potential as you never did.
You saw it as a hiding place. I see it as the eye of the storm. From here, we can be the Hurakan—we can wreak havoc; shape lives; wield power— which is really the name of the whole ball game, when you come to think about it—as well as making money, of course, always a plus in today’s venal world. . . .
When I say we—
I mean me, of course.
“But why Anouk? ” Her voice was harsh. “Why bring my daughter into this? ”
“I like her,” I said.
She looked scornful at that. “Like her? You used her. Corrupted her. You made her think you were her friend—”
“At least I’ve always been honest with her.”
“And I haven’t? I’m her mother—” she said.
“You choose your family.” I smiled. “You’d better be careful she doesn’t choose me.”
She thought about that one for some time. She looked calm enough, but I could see the turbulence in her colors, the distress and confusion and something else—a kind of knowledge I didn’t quite like.
At last she said, “I could ask you to leave.”
I grinned. “Why not try? Or call the police—better still, call the social services. I’m sure they could offer you all kinds of support. They’ve probably still got your notes in Rennes—or was it Les Laveuses? ”
She cut me off. “What exactly do you want? ”
I told her as much as she needed to know. My time is short—but she can’t know that. Nor can she know about poor Françoise—soon to reappear as someone else. But she knows I am the enemy now; her eyes were bright and cold and aware, and she laughed scornfully (if a little hysterically) as I delivered my ultimatum.
“You’re saying I should leave? ” she said.
“Well,” I pointed out reasonably, “is Montmartre really big enough to hold two witches? ”
Her laughter was like broken glass. Outside, the voice of the wind keened its eerie harmonies. “Well, if you think I’m going to pack up and run away just because you did a few sneak workings behind my back, then you’re going to be disappointed,” she said. “You’re not the first to try this, you know. There was this priest—”
“I know,” I said.
“Then what? ”
Oh, that’s good. I like that defiance. It’s what I have been hoping for. Identities are so easy to take. I’ve taken enough of them in my time. But the opportunity to face another witch on her home ground, with weapons of choice, to collect her life, to add it to my charm bracelet with the black coffin and the silver shoes . . .
How many times do you get that chance ?
I’ll give myself three days, that’s all. Three days to win or lose. After that it’s so long, good night, and off to pastures green and new. Free spirit, and all that. Go wherever the wind takes me. It’s a big world out there, full of opportunities. I’m sure I’ll find something to challenge my skills.
For now, however—
“Listen, Vianne. I’ll give you three days. Till after the party. Pack up by then, take what you can, and I won’t try to stop you. Stay, and I won’t answer for the consequences.”
“Why? What can you do? ” she said.
“I can take it all, piece by piece. Your life, your friends, your children—”
She stiffened. That’s her weakness, of course. Those children—especially our little Anouk, already so very talented . . .
“I’m not going anywhere,” she said.
Good. That’s what I thought you’d say. No one hands over their life like that. Even mousy Françoise fought back a little at the end, and I’m expecting rather more from you. You have three days to make your stand. Three days to placate the Hurakan. Three days to become Vianne Rocher.
Unless, of course, I can get there first.
Saturday, 22 December
TILL AFTER THE PARTY. what does she mean? surely there can be no party now, with this strange threat hanging over our heads. That was my first reaction, when Zozie had gone to bed and I was left in the freezing kitchen to think out my plan of defense.
My instincts all tell me to throw her out. I know I could; but the thought of what effect that might have on my customers—let alone on Anouk—makes it quite impossible.
And as for the party—well. I am not unaware that over the past couple of weeks this party has taken on a significance far greater than any of us could have imagined. For Anouk, it is a celebration of us, an expression of hope (and maybe we still share the same perpetual fantasy, that Roux will come back and that everything will be made miraculously new).
As for our customers—no, our friends—
So many have contributed over the past few days, bringing food, wine, decorations for the Advent house, the Christmas tree itself donated by the florist for whom little Alice works; champagne offered by Madame Luzeron; glasses and croc
kery supplied by Nico’s restaurant; organic meat by Jean-Louis and Paupaul, who paid for it, I suspect, with flattery and a portrait of the supplier’s wife.
Even Laurent brought something (mostly sugar lumps, I’ll admit), and it’s so good to be a community again, to feel included, to be a part of something larger than just the little campfire circle we make for ourselves. I’d always thought Montmartre such a cold place, its people so rude and contemptuous with their Vieux Paris snobbery and their mistrust of strangers. But now I can see there’s a heart behind the cobblestones. Zozie taught me that, at least. Zozie, who plays my part as well as I ever did myself.
There’s a story my mother used to tell. Like all her stories, it’s about herself—a fact I came to realize too late, when the doubts I’d had in the long months leading up to her death became too much for me to ignore, and I went in search of Sylviane Caillou. What I found confirmed what my mother had said in the delirium of her final days. You choose your family, she said—and she’d chosen me, eighteen months old and somehow hers—like a parcel delivered to the wrong address that she could legitimately claim. She wouldn’t have cherished you, she’d said. She was careless. She let you go. But the guilt of it had followed her across continents, a guilt that eventually turned to fear. That was my mother’s real weakness—that fear—and it kept her running all her life. Fear that someone would take me away. Fear that one day I’d learn the truth. Fear that she had been wrong all those years ago, that she had cheated a stranger out of her life, and that in the end she would have to pay— The story goes like this. A widow-woman had a daughter whom she cherished above all things. They lived in a cottage in a wood, and though they were poor, they were as happy together as any two people have ever been, before or since. In fact they were so happy that the Queen of Hearts, who lived nearby, heard of them and was envious, and set out to collect the daughter’s heart, for although she had a thousand lovers and more than a hundred thousand slaves, she was always hungry for more, and she knew that she could never rest knowing that there was a single heart out there that had been given to another. And so the Queen of Hearts made her way quietly to the widow’s cottage. As she hid among the trees, she saw the daughter playing alone, for the cottage was a long way from even the nearest village, and there were no playmates to share the daughter’s game.
So the Queen, who was no queen at all, but a powerful witch, changed her shape to that of a little black cat and strolled out, tail high, from among the trees.
And all day the child played with the cat, which gamboled and chased pieces of string and climbed trees and came at her call and ate from her hand and was undoubtedly the most playful and picture-perfect of pretty kitty cats any child had ever seen—
But for all its purring and preening, the cat could not steal the daughter’s heart, and when night came, the child went indoors to where her mother had laid dinner on the table, and the Queen of Hearts yowled her displeasure to the night, and ripped out the hearts of many small nocturnal creatures, but was not satisfied, and wanted the child’s heart even more than before. . . .
So on the second day, she changed into a handsome young man and lay in wait for the widow’s daughter as she searched for her kitty cat in the woods. Now the daughter had never seen a young man, except from afar, on market days. And this one was glorious in every way—black hair, blue eyes, fresh as a girl, but all boy—and she forgot about the kitty cat, and they walked, and talked, and laughed, and ran together through the forest like fallow deer in season.
But when night came, and he dared steal a kiss, the daughter’s heart still belonged to her mother, and that night the Queen hunted deer and cut out their hearts, and ate them raw—but still she was not satisfied and longed for the child more than ever.
So, on the morning of the third day, the witch did not change her shape but instead stayed close to the house and watched. And as the child went off in vain to search for her friend of the previous day, the Queen of Hearts kept her eyes fixed on the child’s mother. She watched as the mother washed clothes in the stream, and knew that she could do it better. She watched as the mother cleaned the house, and knew that she could do it better. And as night fell, she took the shape of the mother herself—her smiling face, her gentle hands—and when the daughter came back home, there were two mothers there to greet her. . . .
What on earth could the mother do? The Queen of Hearts had studied her, had copied every gesture, every mannerism too flawlessly to be caught out. Everything she did, the witch could do better, faster, more perfectly—
And so the mother set the table with another place for the visitor.
“I’ll make dinner,” said the Queen. “I know all your favorites.”
“We’ll both make dinner,” said the mother. “And then my daughter will decide.”
“My daughter,” said the witch. “And I think I know the way to her heart.”
Well, the mother was a good cook. And she had never worked harder over a meal—not at Easter, not at Yule. But the witch had magic on her side, and her glamours were very powerful. The mother knew all the child’s favorites—but the Queen knew those she had yet to discover, and she set them effortlessly on the table, one by one, throughout the meal.
They began with a winter soup, lovingly cooked in a copper pot with a shinbone left over from Sunday lunch—
But the witch brought in a light bouillon, simmered with the sweetest of baby shallots and scented with ginger and lemongrass and served with croutons so crisp and small that they seemed to vanish in her mouth—
The mother brought in the second course. Sausages and potato mash; a comforting dish the child always loved, with sticky onion marmalade—
But the witch brought in a brace of quail that had been gorged on ripe figs all their lives, now roasted and stuffed with chestnuts and foie gras and served with a coulis of pomegranate—
Now the mother was close to despair. She brought dessert: a stout apple pie, made to her mother’s recipe.
But the witch had made a pièce montée: a pastel-colored sugared dream of almonds, summer fruit, and pastries like a puff of air, all scented with rose and marshmallow cream, and served with a glass of Château d’Yquem—
And the mother said: “All right. You win,” as her heart just snapped clean in two, with a sound like popcorn in the pan. And the witch smiled and reached for her prey—
But the daughter did not return her embrace. Instead she fell to her knees on the floor.
“Mother, don’t die. I know it’s you.”
And the Queen of Hearts gave a scream of rage as she realized that even now, in the moment of her triumph, the child’s heart was still not hers. And she screamed so loudly and so furiously that her head exploded like a fair-day balloon, and the Queen of Hearts in her terminal wrath became the queen of nothing at all.
As for the ending of the tale— Well, that depended on my mother’s mood. In one version, the mother survives, and she and the child live alone forever in their cottage in the wood. On darker days, the mother dies, and the child is left alone in her grief. And there is a third version, where the impostor, in a final twist, foresees the mother’s broken heart and collapses herself, thus prompting a vow of eternal love from the child while the real mother stands by, unable to speak, discarded and powerless as the witch begins to feed—
I never told Anouk that tale. It frightened me then as it frightens me now. In stories we find the truth, and though no one outside of a fairy tale ever died of a broken heart, the Queen of Hearts is very real, though she does not always go by that name.
But we’ve faced her before, Anouk and I. She’s the wind that blows at the turn of the year. She’s the sound of one hand clapping. She’s the lump in your mother’s breast. She’s the absent look in your daughter’s eyes. She’s the cry of the cat. She’s in the confessional. She’s hiding inside the black piñata. But most of all she is simply Death; greedy old Mictecacihuatl herself, Santa Muerte, the Eater of Hearts, most terrible of the Kin
dly Ones—
And now it’s time to face her again. To pick up my weapons—such as they are—and to stand and fight for the life we have made. But for that I need to be Vianne Rocher, if ever I can find her again. The Vianne Rocher who faced down the Black Man at the Grand Festival du Chocolat. The Vianne Rocher who knows everyone’s favorites. The peddler of sweet dreams, small temptations, treats, trinkets, tricks, petty indulgences, and everyday magic—
If only I can find her in time.
Saturday, 22 December
It must have snowed during the night. just a thin scattering for now, turning to gray slush nearly at once. Still, it’s a start. There’ll be more soon. You can already see it in the clouds; clouds so heavy and dark below the Butte that they’re practically touching the church spires. Clouds only look lighter than air; actually the water in just one of those clouds could weigh millions of tons, Jean-Loup says; that’s a whole multistory full of cars parked up there, just waiting to fall, today or tomorrow, in tiny little flakes of snow.
On the Butte, it’s Christmas in a big way. There’s a fat Santa Claus sitting at the terrace of Chez Eugène, drinking café-crème and scaring the kids. The artists are out in force too, and there’s a little band of college students playing hymns and Christmas songs just outside the church. I’d arranged to meet Jean-Loup this morning, and Rosette wanted to see the Nativity (again), so I took her out for a little walk while Maman worked and Zozie went out to do some shopping.
Neither of them mentioned what happened last night, but they both looked OK this morning, so I guess Zozie must have sorted things out. Maman was wearing her red dress, the one that always makes her feel good, and she was talking about recipes, and everything sounded so cheerful and right—
Jean-Loup was waiting in Place du Tertre when I finally got there with Rosette. Everything takes time with Rosette—anorak, boots, hat and gloves—and it was nearly eleven by the time we got there. Jean-Loup had his camera—the big one with the special lens—and he was taking pictures of people going by: foreign tourists; children watching the Nativity; the fat Santa smoking a cigar—