"If it requires a uniform it's a useless endeavour"
George Carlin.
She can hear them coming down the street soon enough to have time to stash the gear. As if the lockstep tramp of heavy boots and the dragging of a scabbard across the cobbles aren't enough of a giveaway round her 'ends', she can make out the voice of the pock marked Sergeant, clear as the bells for Sunday Mass, saying "It's the house by the steps, Guv!"
He's never been able to keep his voice down, that one, still imagines he's bawling out cavalry recruits for the Emperor.
He's answered by a terse, infuriated rumble which she cannot rearrange into words, even with her ear pressed to the window. Still, she recognises the timbre of the voice. So now she not only knows that they are coming, but exactly who they are.
"Silly beggars!" she says under her breathe, the habit of not swearing in front of the children so ingrained that she now seldom curses even when they're not in the room, even when she's only talking to herself.
Wildly, for a moment, she considers shimmying out the back window – until she remembers that she's lodging on the third floor now, having quite literally gone up in the world. And she's got the kids. And the gear. Best to play it cool, play it brazen.
So she smoothes down her clothes and her hair and does what she needs to do, reflecting that she is smarter than any one of them, time and again she is.
Still, when she hears the knock, three raps of the lead tip of a cane against the door, she flinches. No matter how many occasions she's heard an official knock at the door since she was a child it still makes her shiver, every, every time.
"La Magnon!"
She can feel a film of sweat rise up like ground water from the skin between her shoulder blades and threaten to seep through the silk of her peignoir. For the fraction of an instant her hand recoils from the door handle, as if she fears touching it might exposes her to some unspeakable disease.
"Marie Magnon!" that deep, terse rumble again like the first crack of thunder as a storm kicks off.
"Gentle Jesus how I hate him!" Magnon screams inwardly. Outwardly she only sucks her teeth and kicks the door before drawing back the latch and opening just wide enough to stick her head out, glaring.
"Monsieur L'inspecteur" she says, feigning neither surprise nor politeness.
"May I?" he says, gesturing past her into the flat, as coolly civil as if he has just suggested entering an acquaintance's smoking room. The shit.
"You can show me the warrant or – "
"Don't need a warrant for a little chat Marie, you know that. So let's be friends, civilised like, yeah?" says the Pock Marks, whose name La Magnon now recalls as Minot. He's leaning against the wall of the stairwell. Behind him loiters a young officer with dreadful spots who doesn't really seem to know where to look. Magnon remembers with a jolt that she is still in her peignoir and nightgown, with curl rags in her hair.
"However, I do happen to have a warrant . . . Now, I appreciate that this is an early call, but we servants of the Law have much to accomplish in a day so, if it pleases you . . . "
La Magnon opens the door and gestures for the men to follows her as if she's conceding defeat.
"She's not here."
"Ah, Malbrouk s'en va t'en guerre! What a shame! However, it is not La Belle Anglaise that I am here to see, La Magnon, but you."
"I cannot imagine why," she hisses
"Never mind what you can imagine," Javert says, gesturing for his officers to follow him into the apartment. "In you come lads!"
She follows the three men who are taking themselves and their muddy boots into her sitting room. The film of sweat between her shoulders has by now coalesced into droplets which, in their turn, merge into an icy rivulet which makes its was unpleasantly down her spine.
Magnon leans against the corridor wall, opposite the sitting room door when the three men are searching through her belongs in a manner made completely merciless by its calm efficiency. Her arms are folded across her stomach and she's pouting in a pantomime of insolence and affronted dignity, but this is mostly to hide her panicky mental running commentary on their hunt hot, hotter, hottest. Freezing! as if it were a children's game.
Every so often she fires off a barb or complaint at one or other of the officers. Javert answers the sallies aimed at him with neutral politeness, refusing to acknowledge her hostility, countering with questions of his own. They are courteously phrased, but oddly tangential to what she images he's come for. Not at all the questions she is expecting – or the ones she herself would have asked, were she the one asking the questions. Minot says nothing. He keeps his back to her and his head down whenever possible. He is clearly most uncomfortable and she relishes that. She can tell that he at least has realised that he's unwelcome in her home not just in a general way, as a policeman, but specifically, as an individual. The youngster looks affronted, but says nothing, He has clearly been told before hand 'not to engage with the suspect'. He isn't entirely successful in this. Magnon notices that he is persistently stealing glances at her chest – it's cold in the flat for all its summer and the silk of her peignoir is thin.
She catches his eye, tilts back he chin and snaps "You wanna takes notes on that or something, for when you get back to the henhouse?"
Javert spins round at this, "For fucksake Rouselle, stop looking at Mademoiselle's tits!"
"Guv?"
"She's not enjoying you watching, I'm not enjoying watching you watching and you won't be enjoying anything ever again if you don't buck your ideas up sharpish! Now then, we're done in here. Someone go search her bedroom and Miss's bedroom – "
The young man makes as if to go.
"Not you! You – " he says, gesturing to Minot, "You do Miss's, I'll do Magnon's. Rouselle, search the kitchen – you'll be safe in there unless La Magnon has particularly comely mice!"
"You're not going in my bedroom, you rat! You can't"
"Yes I can!" Javert snaps, striding past her. He stops, turns, looks at her. "That's a very nice dressing gown Magnon, good silk . . . "
"It's fourth hand. I didn't steal it if that's what you mean!"
"No, I was just thinking that if you'd followed my advice you might have been able to make your own"
With that said, mildly enough, he heads off down the corridor and Magnon is not able to stop herself snapping "Oh fuck off you twat" as she follows him, following this up with guesses as to Javert's parentage, the likely occupation of his mother and the recreational activities that he and his men probably engaged in with their sisters and/or horses. These imprecations trail behind Javert as ineffectual and incidental as seagulls in the wake of a fishing boat. Gently but decisively he thrusts open the bedroom door and then stood peering into the room looking rather surprised
Two little boys stare at him wide eyed and startled, still tousle haired and stunned from sleep, having been woken by the commotion Magnon had caused in the corridor. The littlest starts to cry, more it seems out of shock than genuine fear.
Magnon barges past Javert and pulls the little boy to her, railing at the policeman as she does so; "Now look what you done, you monster! You've no reason to be here, I've done nothing wrong! What the fuck is wrong with you? God in Heaven, why can't you just leave me alone? I hate the sight of you!"
Javert's face twitches slightly at this, although he carries on searching the room. In a voice shaking slightly with what could be anger, but could simply be exasperation, he says "Oh come now Magnon, please do not expect me to believe that those children are not accustomed to strange men bursting into this place at all hours. Cannot you just tell them I'm St Nicholas's nasty brother or something?"
"You're a bloody swine!"
"I'll be done in a moment anyway"
"You're a useless bloody swine! You come in here, upset me, upset my children – and for what? You haven't found anything, have you? And why, because you're bloody useless – and you always bloody have been, you know that!"
For a moment Magnon thinks that she has succeeded in chastening the inspector but then he responds with a cold, surgical precision, "I saw your sister the other day Marie – little Marthe. She's very well"
Magnon shivers. Putting an arm around each of the children she drags them from the room. "Breakfast children – now!"
Later, when she has the boys settled with their bowls of milk, the three officers regroup in her kitchen. They don't speak, only nod to each other in a way which Magnon might assume was loaded with significance if she wasn't sure they had found nothing. As things stand, she assumes their silence is down to embarrassment.
"Get everything you came for did you? I trust it was a useful visit?"
"As it happens, yes. I might come back soon though"
"When"
"Je reviendrai à Pâques! Mironton, mironton, mirontaine! Je reviendrai à Pâques, ou à la Trinité" Javert sings softy, seemingly caught in an irreconcilable impasse between the desire to create a genuine air of mystery and a deeper set, more instinctive impulse to take the piss, to annoy.
Magnon curls her lip and gazes at him with insolent contempt, but unexpectedly the two little boys titter shyly and sleepily. Equally unexpectedly, Javert looks down at them, tips his top hat like a mountebank at a street carnival, and winks. However, when he raises his eyes back to Magnon they are as hard and full of malign intent as any criminal in the district has ever seen them, holding nothing for her but aversion. Without saying a word more he sweeps out with his officers at his back.
It's only later in the day, when she has sent the children out on errands and she's checking over all the gear she'd hidden that Magnon admits to herself that she isn't feeling as smug about the morning's events as she's hoped – there's not many people who call old Javert a fucking bastard with no comeback, there's not many people who have their gaffs searched by three officers only for them to come away with nothing. But still, she isn't happy – the more she thinks about it, the more Javert's odd questions – the ones about La Petite Jondrette, for example – bother her. And the mention of her sister too.
As she packs away the silver, the clothes, the guns which she has hidden safely like a good fence, Magnon admits that she is trembling.
Two things are for certain. Firstly, if there is one human creature upon the face of God's earththat she would be happy never to see again until the day of her death it is Monsieur Javert. Secondly, if he ever mentions Marthe to her again, she will slap his face for im, even if it means spending the rest of her days in Saint Lazare.