Chapter IV
Gringoire hadn't gotten any specification, any further hints, from John after that, but he had the unsettling feeling that he usually got when John said something that seemed vaguely directly at him. So he paced the room for a few minutes, hands shoved in his pockets and humming "Rivage." John nonchalantly wadded up a paper, dabbed some glue onto it, and flung it at the wall. It stuck. He grinned victoriously, and Gringoire finally had to accept the caretaker's iron will.
"See you around, John," he said with a quick wave, tugging the door open.
"Of course," John answered amiably, and aimed a dart at the suspended piece of paper. Gringoire gleefully put a sound effect to it—"Ska-reewwwwwwwrrrrrr!" John spun around.
"Scram, you!"
"Good afternoon, John!" Gringoire mock-saluted, chuckling, and stepped back into the daylight.
At the sight of the building's exterior, Gringoire realized he wasn't any more at ease than he had been when he'd walked in. Or, at least, that he was still confused. His brief flash of good spirits dampened like someone had dumped a bucket of ice water on them.
Maybe Fritz will know something, he speculated, raking his hair away from his face to let it spring stubbornly back into its preferred place. The Target had witnessed Isabelle's death with him after all—in a birdcage, granted—and he tended to perceive things from angles overlooked by most. Gringoire made his way in the direction of the square, deciding against trying to track down someone else immediately after finding the first. What was he doing dwelling on the whole thing anyway?
He just wanted to fix things. That kind of thing was always John's job, though, but John didn't seem to be up to it this time. Something had really changed in him, and Gringoire didn't know what to make of it. It seemed more and more like John had put a piece of his soul in those old white shoes he'd stolen, and when the family had left, that piece had never been returned to its owner.
Humans. They always shook things up. There were so many stories of how some awkward soul overturned a whole realm, brought there for being disillusioned or out-of-place in their own world. The creative spirit of the Cirquish was never fully realized in humankind, even when it had the potential to be. Too much logic, too much judgment.
They need us, John had once told Gringoire when he was young. It wasn't until then that he'd really even begun to understand them. Zoe had been so dead-eyed and timid when she first came to Quidam, it made even Gringoire see some reason for all the madness.
Another presence in the street snapped Gringoire out of his abstraction. The brown-suited, musician-mocking clown himself, pacing and grumbling over some recent injustice.
"Charlie Chaplin!" Toto flung his hat to the ground and began vengefully chomping on the stem of a rose, scowling so hard that the creases in his forehead and nose practically merged.
"You're going to have to translate that," Gringoire said gently. He stood a few feet from the bench Toto had plopped onto a few seconds before to pout more effectively.
"Film, Gringoire. Silent, artsy film about rejection." Toto gnashed his teeth, snipping the end of the rose off. He spat it out and watched it sail a good three or four feet to become miniature driftwood in a puddle.
Gringoire restrained himself from shaking his head and sat next to Toto, expecting the filmmaker to scoot over. Toto clearly didn't take the hint, and Gringoire realized he'd just sentenced himself to enduring a bony shoulder digging into his arm.
"She didn't even show me her film reels!" Toto yelled into the wind, making frantic cupping gestures with his hands. "Can you believe it?"
Gringoire adjusted his coat uncomfortably.
"And she was blonde, too! I thought for sure." Toto sighed, and sunk back into the bench. "You know you're like an armchair?" he added, poking Gringoire's shoulder inquisitively.
"You—!"Gringoire instinctively swatted at Toto's hand. "Quit that. You should really stop trying to pick up Terran girls. How do you even get them here anyway?"
"I'm a clown. I can do anything." Toto hooked a thumb under his jacket collar as a substitute for suspenders, looking smug.
Gringoire raised an eyebrow. "The Quidam is fine with you whisking human girls away and testing their sanity? I don't think so." He laughed quietly, but he felt melancholy trickle into the sound. "That's his job, after all."
Toto snorted. "I don't think you heard me, my singing slow-witted armchair-colleague." His ironic formality earned a sharp, distinctively John-esque glare from Gringoire, but the clown ignored it. "I said I'm a clown. We don't exactly operate on the same rules as, say, you or the jump-ropers or Les Égarés."
"And what does that mean?" Gringoire asked, dropping his annoyance for an almost ingenuous curiosity. Toto met his intrigue with a complacent smirk.
"If I explain it to you, it's not funny anymore. And what the hell am I supposed to do with my life then?"