The Enterprise of Death - Jesse Bullington [130]
“It ever cross yours it might not’ve?” Monique kicked the base of an easel, bringing a painting he had been tweaking for half a year facedown into a spreading pool of paint.
“Stop!” Manuel went for her, the smirk breaking her face like a rock through a window telling him this was just what she had in mind. His fingers went numb as his punch struck her cheek, and then he was down again, unable to breathe or even see straight as first a jab to the stomach and then a boot to the armpit sent him rolling across his floor, the forest of stands toppling around him.
“—’eard the way she talked bout ya,” Monique was saying as the artist moaned, wiping the smear of blood from his face. Paint, he realized, which was somehow worse. “Only ’eard lads on the line talk bout their da’s like that, or preachers preachin bout the All-Father. You’re a saint ta her, Saint Manuel the fuckin Brave. She’d tell ’ow you saved’er from Werner an’ them more times’n you talk bout the ’orny fuckin bishop, talk bout your little pictures like they was treasures of Heaven. Have you even fuckin thought bout her since them men came lookin?!”
Manuel had thought of hardly anything else, but had almost convinced himself she would do better without his blundering about, leading her hunters to her hiding place. Things were better than they had ever been in Bern, he wasn’t some fucking peasant anymore, he was coming up fast. Von Stein, asshole though he certainly was, had found his little cowherd even more useful on these obscure political battlefields, and so vanishing from society for who knew how long to ride to Paris to maybe get his friend killed, and himself and his growing family besides, had not seemed exactly judicious. Tell that to the raging lummox in his studio, though.
“I should’ve written,” he admitted, still not moving lest she deliver another kick. “I should have fucking found a way to get word to you, alright? They said if she were lying, they’d, they’d take measures. Measures with Kat, and our fucking kids! She sent them to Muscovy and—”
“How in fuck ya know she said that, Manuel?” Monique sat down on his stool, one of the few untipped items in the room. “How you know that wife of yours didn’t point ta Paris an’ say—”
“She’s not a liar,” said Manuel, the fear one he had harbored ever since that day, to his shame and frustration. “We’ve never lied to each other.”
“And ’ow you know that? You her confessor, too?”
“We don’t go anymore,” said Manuel. “We’re, we’ve broken. You should, too—God doesn’t need you to pay some—”
“Manuel!” She was using her battlefield voice, and he knew a servant would arrive soon, praise God. “I don’t fuckin care how ya do your prayin, I want ta know how ya fuckin know your wife ain’t a fuckin snitch!”
“She fucks other men!” Manuel shouted back now, furious at her for voicing that needling doubt, for opening that box he had locked up and weighed down with volumes of Katharina’s proven honesty. “She tells me about that! And she tells me when she’s been selfish or nasty, which she is sometimes, being fucking human and all. We’re not all fucking saints, Monique! We’re not all fucking heroes who only pause their prayers long enough to enslave other women, to foster lust, to, to, to fuck girls who’d puke at the thought if they weren’t drunk, broke, and starving! So ask me how I know my wife isn’t a fucking liar and I’ll tell you how I know—because she doesn’t even lie to herself, so why—”
“I told them where she was.” Katharina was in the doorway. She looked tired. “I didn’t lie to Niklaus, though. They came, and I told them she had gone to Moscow. They didn’t believe me. They showed me something they had in a little case, a sort of bracelet with metal spines on the inside, and pointed at my baby son, and so I told them to look in France. I told Niklaus they had come in and asked, and I had told them Muscovy.