A Bludgeon In His Pocket, A Flower In His Buttonhole
He slid out from a shadow, and was a shadow himself. The knife in his hand glinted silver in the moonlight – the only brightness in the dim alley.
"Be silent," he whispered. "Be still."
She froze, obedient as ever to him and him alone, the palms of her hands pressed to the cold bricks behind her back.
For a moment which held eternity in it, there was nothing but the night and that knife, and the cold wall against her skin, and the cold cobblestones beneath her bare feet. Then he moved, slid the knife away to its secreted sheath, and she felt her body – tense as a coiled spring – relax.
"That painted slut will probably return for the body," he said, and though his voice was not a whisper, it was soft and low and she had to strain her ears to pick out the words, even in the tomb-like silence of the dark alley.
"She will be back," he repeated thoughtfully, "and she will bring friends… Wealthy friends, I hope."
She shivered. She hated him like this – calm and calculating and quietly, absolutely, merciless. She had seen him angry before, his temper flaring white-hot and violent, but never against her. She was careful to keep it that way, careful always to stay on the right side of the knife.
Still, his rage was nothing compared to his business manner, and he frightened her in both moods.
He frightened her in any mood, truthfully…
"Go back to your father," he said now, turning away from her to peer around the corner and down the quiet, lamp-lit street. "Go give him the money you earned."
She had to push herself off the wall to get moving. Her muscles felt bound in iron, as though his command still held her.
"Go on," he hissed. "You did your work, and you did it well, and I paid you for it – so be off. I don't want to see you any longer."
"Bonne nuit, 'Parnasse," she whispered as she darted away into the curling night, her fingers gripping the coins she had taken from the body – the body that lay there on the cobblestones, in the already drying pool of sticky, dark blood; the body that had been a man, an innocent, walking after midnight with his mistress laughing on his arm. A man whose only sin, at least that she was aware of (for that little street rat knew enough of life to know that every man was guilty of thousands of sins), was to try to take a shortcut through the wrong alley.
Eponine's job had been to hold the lady. This job she had done and done well, as Montparnasse had said – she had kept one hand pressed tight to the lady's scarlet-painted mouth, ignoring the bites that were meant to get rid of that grimy gag, and with her other arm had held the woman about her waist, holding on against her kicks and lunges and muffled yells, with the wiry strength that many were surprised to find in such a scrawny guttersnipe.
She let the lady go after the elegant murderer was done with his work, had removed everything of value from the corpse, and had cleaned his blade on the dead man's shirt. She let the lady go, half-expecting Montparnasse to knife her, as well – but he let the terrified, pop-eyed woman run, whimpering rather than shrieking, away from her erstwhile lover's corpse.
"Why didn't she scream?" Eponine had asked.
"She fears the devil at her heels," had been the cool reply. "But when the sun rises and she remembers her faith in God, she'll return. With a strong friend or two, of course, because a harlot like her hasn't got much faith to begin with."
He gave her a handful of coins for her task, silently accomplished. The coins felt hot in her palm as she span away from his quiet leer, rushed home to deliver them to her father – though, she thought, as she quickened her pace, she wouldn't give them all, not all of them for that louse, no.
But it was money, however earned, and it would buy her something to eat, and maybe it would get her something she could wrap around her feet – the cobblestones did feel so sharp under her sore heels – and it didn't matter that the woman had been hardly older than she herself, and that the man had tried to fight back even as he fell into his own blood, and it didn't even matter that her father would hit her and take away what coins she tried to keep for herself.
It only mattered that she had no faith to hold back her fears of the devil at her heels, and she ran knowing that he would always be there, in the form of a pretty, pretty boy, with his hat and his coat and his knife, and a flower in his buttonhole.