“It was my fault,” Neil said.
“No, is totally okay.” Magdalena had gray smudges around her eyes. Neil hoped it was makeup. “I am hearing her in my head right now saying, ‘Magdalena you are big fucking idiot for not making the box closed better than that.’ ”
“Mm,” Neil said, not exactly sure who she was talking about.
Maybe Magdalena realized he was confused because she looked toward the shoebox, whose top didn’t fit right anymore because of the garbage bag inside, and said, “She is my friend who is dying last year.” Neil felt himself inclining his head a little toward the box, as if saying hello.
“I’m so sorry,” Neil said. “I just had no idea.”
“Well, I am not really wanting to tell you, it is a little bit not-so-happy, you know?”
“Yeah, I know,” Neil said. “It was last year?”
“Like over one year ago,” Magdalena said. “We are living in London together and then she have some problems with one man, and well, with some other things also, but she accidentally deathed herself on some apricots.”
“What?” Neil said.
“Here you want to see?” Magdalena took some papers out of the shoebox and handed them to Neil. It was an autopsy report. Presence of cyanmethaemoglobin. Marked dark cyanotic hypostasis, petechial haemorrhages, pink mucosa. “There,” she said, pointing to where it said Cause of death. “She gets one big juice machine and like totally stupid person she puts in all those fruits with still having the seeds.”
“Oh my God,” Neil said.
“Yeah, is fucking one in the million, they are telling me,” she said.
“That’s awful,” Neil said.
“Yeah. She is my best friend,” Magdalena said. “I am thinking now it’s time already I should bring her home.”
Obviously, after that he gave her the money for the bus ticket. She asked for his address, saying she’d send it back to him when she got home, and Neil said, “Okay, but really, whenever,” because he was pretty sure they both knew she never would. But he wrote it down on a napkin anyway and gave it to her.
She lifted the napkin up close to her face. “This is your name?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Usually you say it ‘Neil,’ like, to kneel, but I like the way you say it too.”
“No, I mean this. This is also name of your father?” she said, pointing to Neil’s last name.
“Yeah, didn’t you know?” Neil said, then realized there was no reason a person from Lithuania who wasn’t some kind of book freak would have heard of Inga Beart. “My dad usually makes it seem like a big deal, so I figured your mom would have heard all about—”
“And your father’s other name is Richard?”
“Yeah. Or Rick,” Neil said. “It’s funny he’d tell your mom Richard. Pretty much he just goes by Rick.” But he could tell Magdalena wasn’t listening. She was tracing her finger through a bit of sugar that had spilled as if she were trying to think of how to spell it.
“R-I-C-H-A-R-D,” Neil said.
“Oh, yes, I know,” she said.
They had another coffee, and Magdalena asked him about Paris and what he was doing there, which was nice of her. Neil could tell she didn’t feel like talking. Her eyes were still wet, and she kept taking her glasses out of her bag and unfolding them, then putting them away without putting them on. But she had a way of looking at him so intently, with her lips tensed a little, as if something important was going on behind them, that Neil started believing she was actually interested in the Roman-era origins of the Chatelet butchers’ quarter.
In his notebook Neil had a postcard of the Tour Saint-Jacques and he showed Magdalena. It was an old one he’d found at the flea market in front of Les Halles, probably from the 1950s or ’60s, back when people kept getting killed by chunks of mortar falling off the sides, it was in such bad shape. In the photograph the tower looked sort of corroded, studded with half-dissolved gargoyles. It was going to look a lot better than that when they were done with the reconstruction, Neil told her. The tower had been under scaffolding for almost eight years now, and Neil wouldn’t have even recognized it in the postcard except for the unmistakable asymmetry caused by the statue of Saint Jacques himself, who stood perched on one corner, walking stick in hand, pointing pilgrims on their way.
Magdalena flipped the postcard over to read what was on the back.
“It says ‘Leaving tomorrow,’ ” Neil said. “I think it could have been written by someone who was going on a pilgrimage, which is, you know, like a religious trip, because this was the starting point for the Saint Jacques pilgrimage. And see the date? Right around this time of year. Which makes sense because people who wanted to make it by the Feast of Saint Jacques, which is July 25, would have had to leave Paris in June. See, they had to go all the way down to a place in Spain called Santiago de Compostela and also another place, Finisterre—you know, ‘the end of the earth.’ That was where this guy, Saint Jacques, supposedly washed up on the beach. And he should have been all rotten and dead but instead he was perfectly preserved with scallop shells stuck to him, and so it was, you know, a miracle.”
Something he’d said had caught Magdalena’s attention. She looked up from the postcard, waiting for him to go on. “I mean that’s one story. There are lots of others. And of course it’s pretty unlikely it was actually him. To have floated all the way from Jerusalem? It’s basically impossible. But in medieval times people wanted to worship something they could see for themselves, like an actual body. So churches started saying that they had, you know, relics, which were usually parts of holy people, their heads or a bone from their arm or even—” The cathedral at Conques had claimed possession of Jesus’s prepuce, which was a word Neil had had to look up. “Well, some of the stuff they had was pretty gross. But Saint Jacques, he was one of the few whose relics stayed intact. Sorry, intact, it’s like all together. That was part of the miracle. People traveled huge distances because they believed that the saint was so powerful he wouldn’t let his body be broken up.”