Revolution (10 page)

17

… so we see that 1795 was indeed a turning point for Malherbeau, the year he broke from the musical conventions of his time and forged a unique harmonic style. How? Why 1795? As yet, no one has answered these questions. Our knowledge of Malherbeau’s early life, his parentage, the town of his birth, his early musical education, is nonexistent. We know only that he arrived in Paris in the autumn of 1794 and, once there, began to earn his living by composing for the theater.

In the following chapter, we shall look at an early work—the Concerto in A Minor, also known as the
Fireworks
Concerto. Why Malherbeau referred to the piece by this name, like much else about the composer, remains unknown. Unlike, for example, Handel’s
Music for the Royal Fireworks
, commissioned by Britain’s George II to commemorate the end of the War of the Austrian Succession, the
Fireworks
Concerto was not commissioned by royalty, nor are there records of its being played during a state event. Though the concerto lacks the sophistication and finesse of his later works, it is nonetheless of singular significance. Composed during the summer of 1795 in his rooms in the Marais, the
Fireworks
Concerto marks the beginning of Malherbeau’s abrupt and stunning harmonic reorientation.

I lean back in my chair and stretch. My stomach growls. I look at my watch. It’s almost three and I haven’t eaten a thing all day. I’ve been too busy reading. Trying to get some background on Amadé Malherbeau.

He’s a mystery. The books say a lot about his music, but not much about the man himself. He appeared in Paris at the age of nineteen, basically wrote Muzak for some city theaters, then quit and started writing the stuff that made him famous. He never married or had children, and he made enough money by his forties to buy a swank house by the Bois de Boulogne. He died at the age of fifty-eight and left the house to the Paris Conservatory.

It’s a start, but I’m going to need a lot more or I’m not getting out of here on Sunday, and I’ve already booked my ticket. I couldn’t get a normal flight to New York on such short notice—something that departs in the morning and gets me into the city the same day. All I could get was a flight that departs Orly at nine p.m. and involves a seven-hour layover in Dublin. It’s going to be a nightmare, but it’s either that or wait until the twenty-third, which would be a bigger nightmare.

Now … where else can I find more on Malherbeau?

The old guitar case is lying across from me on the table. I pull it over so I can mess with the lock while I’m thinking. G said there was a collection of Malherbeau’s music at the Abelard Library. Which is in central Paris. I could go there and look at the collection. Maybe photograph it. That would be both a primary source and a visual. I could go to Malherbeau’s house and check out his stuff. Take a look at the portrait that’s hanging there. And then what? This is hard. People like Vijay with his quotes from world leaders really raise the bar.

That prong is still stuck. It won’t budge no matter how much I jiggle it. It’s really pissing me off. I head to the kitchen and start digging around. Five minutes later, I reemerge with a nail set, a screwdriver, a crochet hook, and a bottle of olive oil.

I take the guitar out of the case, then move the case to the middle of the table, right under the chandelier so I can see what I’m doing. I tilt it on its side, drip a tiny bit of oil into the lock and get to work.

Half an hour later I’m nowhere. The nail set wouldn’t fit into the lock. The screwdriver was useless and I bent the crochet hook. I’m really mad now and leaning way over the table, trying to tilt the case just right so that the light from the chandelier shines directly into the lock, when I hear a soft little clunk.

I look down. It’s Truman’s key. It slipped out of my shirt and knocked against the side of the case. What are the chances, I wonder? I take the key off and try it. It fits into the lock, but it won’t budge when I try to turn it. I twist it a little harder. Just a little. I don’t want to break anything. Still nothing. I try to pull the key back out but it’s stuck.

I start to panic. I shouldn’t have taken it off. I never take it off. I twist it again—too hard. My hand slips and I slice a knuckle on the edge of the lock. I suck on the cut, then try again. I want Truman’s key back.

I’m pulling and pushing and twisting it as hard as I can. My fingers are hurting and my knuckle’s bleeding and I’m swearing and about to give up when suddenly there’s a scraping sound and the key turns and the prong rises and sinks again, but the key keeps turning. It should stop, but it doesn’t. It’s still turning and suddenly there’s a
kachunk
sound and a thin crack appears along the side of the case.

I’ve broken it. Oh, shit no. I look closer, wondering how in the world I’m going to explain this to G, and I see that the crack’s perfectly straight with no splintery edges, which is weird. I wedge my fingers into it, widening it a little, and a strange spicy smell wafts out. There’s a bit of resistance, and then I hear a small, soft sound, like a groan. The top slowly raises, and as it does, I gasp.

Because underneath it is Truman’s face. Looking up at me.

18

“I
t’s the drugs,” I whisper. “I took too many pills again. I’m seeing things.”

I close my eyes tight. But when I open them again, he’s still here.

A few seconds later, when my heart stops trying to crash through my ribs, I see that it’s not Truman’s face at all—it’s another boy’s. But still, I know it somehow. It’s painted on a small oval of ivory, framed in gold. The boy’s eyes are blue, his hair is blond and curling like Truman’s, but his features are different, more delicate. He’s wearing an old-fashioned lace-collar shirt and a gray jacket.

Next to it, pressed down into the velvet lining, is a little muslin sack tied with a blue ribbon. I pick it up, press it to my nose—cloves. There’s a book, too—small and leather-bound with no title. I open it. The pages are stiff, brown at the edges, and covered with writing. The first one has a date on it—
20 April 1795
. That’s over two hundred years ago. Which is kind of mind-blowing.

Can this book possibly be that old? I start reading. It’s slow going. The French is old-fashioned and the writing is wild and scrawly.

20 April 1795

History is fiction.

Robespierre said that and he should know. For the last three years, he has written it.

It is my turn now.

These pages you now hold in your hands are no fiction. They are a truthful account of these bitter, bloody days. I write them in haste and in hope—hope that by reading what is contained within them, the world will learn the truth. Because the truth will make you free.

Robespierre did not say that. Jesus did. And lest you think me a fool, I am well aware what became of him.

If you have found this account, then I am lost. And this last role I have played, that of Green Man, over.

But he still lives. In fear and misery—yet he does live. Plots are hatched to free him, but they fail.

Do what I could not. Get this account out of Paris. Get it to London, to a Fleet Street man there who can print it and put it about. Once the world knows the truth, he will be free.

Only make haste. Please, please make haste.

They keep him in the Tower, in a cold, dark room with one window, small and high. The guards are cruel. There is no stove to warm him. No privy. His filth piles up in a corner. He has no playthings. No books. Nothing but rats. What food he is given, he puts in a corner, to draw them off. He does not know his mother is dead and writes these words with a stone on his wall—Mama, please …

You know of whom I speak. The prisoner in the Tower. Yes, he.

Do not close these pages. Read on, I beg you. Once you were brave. Once you were kind. You can be so again.

My name is Alexandrine Paradis.

I am seventeen years of age.

I will not last much longer.

I stop reading.

The writer mentions Robespierre and a prisoner in a tower.

That
Robespierre?
That
prisoner?

“Can’t be,” I say. “No way.”

I pick up the miniature of the boy. I look at his face, at his solemn blue eyes, and I realize where I’ve seen him before—in G’s stack of photographs, the ones he and Dad were looking at the night we arrived. There was one of the son of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, mixed in with the photos of the heart in the glass urn.

What happened to those photos? Where did they go? I think back to that dinner—Lili got mad at G and scooped them all off the table. Where did she put them? I start hunting, still clutching the tiny portrait. The photos aren’t on the dining table. They aren’t in the kitchen. They aren’t on top of the coffee table. And they aren’t on any of the bookshelves. Maybe they’re not here at all. Maybe they’re in Dad’s briefcase. Maybe G took them to Belgium. I keep looking and nearly pounce when I finally spot them on top of a stack of books.

I riffle through them, find the one I want, and hold it next to the portrait. The clothes are different. The hair in the miniature is longer. But still, it’s him—Louis-Charles, the lost king of France.

“Can’t be,” I say again.

But it is, a voice inside me whispers.

It is.

19

I
put the photo away. Put the portrait back in the case. And the diary, too. And then I lock it as fast as I can.

I tell myself it’s a bummer, that diary, a sorry trip. And I don’t need someone else’s sorry trip. I’m already on one of my own.

But the truth is that I’m afraid of it and I don’t know why. Reading it feels like taking candy from strangers. Hitchhiking. Riding the subway late at night.

I flop down on the sofa, turn on G’s TV, and watch CNN. Two minutes later, I turn it off, call Vijay, and get his voice mail. I pick up the book I’m reading on Amadé Malherbeau and flip it open.

… the surviving scores show us that his pieces for the theater were pleasing but undistinguished. In no way did they presage the brilliance and complexity of his later work…

I slap the book closed. I can’t concentrate. Can’t sit still. I get up, rummage in the kitchen for something to eat but don’t find anything, then walk back to the case, key in hand, like Bluebeard’s idiot wife.

I get the diary out and page past the first entry. As I do, something flutters out and lands on the table. It’s a newspaper clipping, small and fragile.

GREEN MAN STRIKES AGAIN

Paris, 2 Floréal III
—The Green Man, a street name for the outlaw who has been terrorizing the citizens of Paris with destructive firework displays, struck again last night, causing damage to property on the Rue de Normandie
.

No one knows the purpose of his pyrotechnical displays. Some believe the Green Man—so named because of the fresh leaves fire-workers once wore to protect themselves from sparks—is sending up rockets to signal foreign armies. Others think the fireworks are coded communications between members of an insurrectionary force within the city
.

General Bonaparte, commander of the Paris Guard, was grilled by the Assembly this morning as to why the Green Man remains at large. Bonaparte assured them that he was doing everything within his power to capture the miscreant
.

“I have increased the number of guards on the streets and have placed a bounty of one hundred francs upon the Green Man’s head,” he said. “He will be caught—it is only a matter of time. And when he is, justice—swift and severe—will be served.”

“Two Floréal,” I say aloud. I remember that word—
Floréal—
from my class on the Revolution. The Assembly banished the old Julian calendar and made September 22, 1792—the day France became a republic—Day One of Year One. They declared that time would begin again—with them. The III stands for Year Three or 1795, I think.

But who’s the Green Man?

I flip back to the first entry. The writer mentions a green man in it. She says it’s the last role she played. But she’s a she, not a he. Her name is Alexandrine. Did she pretend to be a man? Why? And, if so, what was she doing with the fireworks? Other than pissing off Napoléon Bonaparte, which doesn’t seem smart. Dude had a temper. And an army.

“Who are you?” I say out loud. To nobody.

My cell phone goes off. I nearly jump out of my skin.

“God, Vijay! You scared the hell out of me. What do you want?”

“What do
you
want? You left me a message.”

“Yeah, I did. Sorry. You’ll never believe this. I just found this diary. It was hidden in an old guitar case. I think it might be really old. Like, from the Revolution.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, it is a wow. There’s an old newspaper clipping in it. It has a weird date—two Floréal three. Any idea what month that corresponds to?”

“May, maybe?” he says. “Hang on a minute.…” I hear him typing on his keyboard, then “Okay, got it. April 21, 1795.”

“How’d you do that so fast?”

“I found a conversion chart online. So what’s it say?”

“I’m not sure yet. I just started reading it, but—”

“Vijay!” I hear in the background. “How can you study on an empty stomach? Why haven’t you eaten the breakfast I made for you?”

“Because I’m
on the phone, Mom!
”

“Fooling around with your friends again! Who is that?”

“Ahmadinejad.”

“Oh, my goodness! What is he saying?”

“That he wants to see Jeezy at the Beacon tonight. Putin’s going, too. He scalped a ticket from Kim Jong Il. All tha gangstas are going.”

“Don’t be so fresh, young man!”

“Gotta go,” he says to me. “Enemy forces have dropped a Momshell.”

“Fall back, soldier. Over and out.

“April 1795,” I say to myself as I hang up.

I run my hand over the leather cover of the diary, thinking about the girl who wrote it, and how she’d hoped to get it out of Paris. That didn’t happen, because here it is, more than two centuries later, still in Paris.

What about her, though—Alexandrine? What happened to her?

Didn’t G say the guitar was found in the catacombs? She must’ve put it there. It sounds like she was on the run. Maybe she hid it in the catacombs for safekeeping and then couldn’t get back to get it. Or maybe something bad happened and she died down there. And the case stayed hidden underground until the cave-in, and the guy who found it never tried to open the false bottom because who expects a false bottom in a guitar case? And anyway, he didn’t have the key.

But I do. Somehow I have it. How did that key get from eighteenth-century Paris to twenty-first-century Brooklyn?

Did she escape to New York instead of London? With the key in her coat pocket? And it somehow ended up in a box of junk at a flea market? Or maybe Truman’s key isn’t her key at all. Maybe it’s just some old generic key that opens instrument cases. That seems a lot more likely.

Either way, I don’t think the hidden compartment has been opened for a long time. I don’t think the diary and the miniature would still be in it if it had been. I don’t think it’s been opened since Alexandrine herself locked it and ran. Or locked it and died.

Not until now.

Not until me.

I tuck the clipping back into the diary and keep reading.