For the King (19 page)

28

B
ack at the Prefecture, Roch resumed his review of the mail that continued to pour in. Inspector Alain came to report on his progress, or lack thereof. The search for Saint-Régent and François Carbon remained fruitless. Roch groaned. His visit to the Mayenne Inn had not brought the results he had expected. He remembered the first days of the investigation, when he had seemed to make headway so fast, so easily. Now, at the time of his father’s danger, nothing seemed to be happening anymore. It was already the 11th of January, the 22nd of Nivose, only two weeks away from the time set by Fouché for Old Miquel’s deportation.

The Prefect again had Roch called to his office. Maybe word of Roch’s visit to the Mayenne Inn had reached the Prefect. Dubois pretended to continue writing without taking any notice of Roch, who looked out the window. It was already dark outside. After a few minutes, the Prefect raised his head.

“Ah, yes, Miquel, here you are!” he said. “Chevalier’s case will be reviewed by a Military Commission tonight. You are to fetch the man from the Temple and take him to the Ministry at nine o’clock, and then to the place of execution.”

Roch felt a pang at the mention of the Temple. So now the Prefect was sending him to the place where his father was imprisoned. He took a deep breath to compose himself. “Chevalier?” he asked in a detached tone. “That engineer who experimented with an infernal machine?”

“Yes, of course, the same.”

Roch could not help asking, “And if Chevalier were acquitted by the Military Commission, should I take him home?”

The Prefect leered. “I told you already to be careful, Miquel. I am tired of your witticisms. Maybe your mood will be less jocular tonight when . . . anyway, be sure to bring Chevalier to the Ministry at nine o’clock.”

Roch bit his lip. He could ill afford to provoke his superior these days. He left the Prefecture at seven that night and went to a nearby tavern. Standing at the counter, he hastily swallowed a bowl of hot onion soup before hailing a hackney.

Why was the Prefect sending him on this pointless errand? Military Commissions, which dealt with matters involving the safety of the Nation, were the exclusive province of the Army. The attendance of a man from the Prefecture was not normally required.

The hackney stopped in front of the Temple. It was difficult to imagine that the place, so grim now, had been one of the palaces of the King’s brother before the Revolution. These days it housed, in addition to Old Miquel, scores of other opponents to Bonaparte. Beyond the former palace loomed the massive square tower. Tiny windows projected points of light from all of its stories. Roch asked the hackney driver to wait.

The prison clerk, Fauconnier, recognized Roch, whom he had met on occasion. The man’s greeting lacked warmth and his eye kept shifting to the far corners of the room. Roch could not take his thoughts off his father, so close and yet out of reach.

“Ah, yes, yes,” the clerk said. “The Military Commission, obviously. Yes, it’s about Citizen Chevalier. I received my instructions all right. I’ll take you to him right away, Citizen Chief Inspector. The soldiers should be here in a moment to escort you to the Ministry.”

Roch followed the clerk across the courtyard, lit by lanterns, and down a narrow stairwell to the basement of the tower. They found Chevalier, lanky, sullen, unshaven, standing in his cell. Roch was chilled to the bone, and the dampness oozing from the bare stone walls reminded him of the cold sweats of agony. He turned up his collar and tried not to think of Old Miquel, who was perhaps housed in a similar cell. No one spoke. Chevalier’s Adam’s apple kept moving up and down. He avoided Roch’s eyes and kept staring out a barred window, just under the ceiling, that opened at the level of the courtyard.

Roch looked up when he heard noise outside. The hooves of many horses, orders barked by a hoarse voice, then heavy footsteps beating against the cobblestones. The military escort must have arrived. At least the wait was over. A soldier tied his horse’s reins to the bars of the window. Only the man’s boots and the animal’s legs were visible. Voices resonated within the prison, mingled with the metallic clang of heavy doors opening and shutting. A captain, accompanied by two privates, entered the cell. The soldiers, after saluting Roch, proceeded to shackle Chevalier’s hands. It was half past eight.

In the hackney Roch could feel the prisoner, seated next to him, shivering. They drove in silence to the Ministry of Police, where the proceedings of Military Commissions were held on the second floor. The captain pushed Chevalier inside a room while Roch remained in the corridor.

He expected the wait to be short. Military Commissions were composed of a few officers. No attorneys were allowed nor were any witnesses required, and the sole record of the proceedings consisted of a few lines sending the accused to his death. When the door opened again fifteen minutes later, the sentence could be plainly read on Chevalier’s face.

The hackney was still waiting for them in front of the Ministry. Soldiers climbed into their saddles. It was quite a way to the place of execution, but traffic would be no hindrance at this time.

In the hackney the prisoner’s face was briefly lit at regular intervals by the streetlights, then it fell back into complete darkness. They drove by the great classical front of the Ecole Militaire, the Ecole de Mars, as it had been called during the Revolution, half drowned in the fog. Roch knew the place very well. Old Miquel had enrolled him there, after Veau’s Academy for Boys had closed, to receive at the Nation’s expense the education of a future warrior of the Republic. With his comrades, he had performed physical exercises for hours, always outdoors, always in the nude, even in the biting cold of winter that shriveled their genitals to nothing.

At last the Ecole Militaire disappeared in the fog and the hackney stopped in an empty plot just outside the Grenelle Gate. When the captain opened the door, the prisoner started at the sight of the cart waiting for what would soon be his corpse. Roch wondered about this strange twilight, when one was still fully alive, and yet moments away from certain death.

The captain ordered Chevalier to stand with his back to the wall that marked the city limits. A soldier took a lighted lantern and placed its strap around the prisoner’s neck.

“Makes an easier target at night,” he explained to Roch. “No good for anyone if we miss the chest.”

Now the man’s face was lit from beneath by the lantern. His features looked still grimmer than before, his clenched jaw jutted, his orbits were empty holes, as though the head had already been reduced to the bones. A dozen soldiers, dark figures shrouded in fog, gathered in a line in front of Chevalier. The points of the bayonets attached to their rifles were only a few yards from the man’s chest. The captain commanded, “Present arms.” The soldiers brought the butts of their rifles up to their shoulders. Sharp clicks resonated in the cold night air. The soldiers, hunched over, took aim. The captain now shouted, “Fire!” Orange flames shot from of the barrels of the rifles, billows of white smoke mixed with the fog. The thunder of the explosion startled Roch. The horses barely nickered.

The smell of powder hovered over the scene as on Rue Nicaise on the night of the attack. Roch felt his mouth fill with saliva. He turned towards the wall against which Chevalier had stood. His stomach pulsed, the muscles of his belly contracted. He retched. The taste of vomit filled his mouth before its stench filled his nostrils.

One of the soldiers asked, “You all right, Citizen Chief Inspector?”

Roch drew himself up and pulled a handkerchief from his pocket. “Never better, soldier,” he said, wiping his mouth.

His step was steady when he walked to the body. It had fallen facedown. The captain, with the point of his boot, turned it over onto its back. The chest was nothing but torn flesh, still shaken by tremors. The bloodstains on the shirt seemed black in the light of a soldier’s lantern. The captain pulled a pistol and fired it down into the man’s head. Roch braced himself before the shock and avoided looking at what was left of the face.

“Well, now he’s all yours,” said the captain.

For Chevalier all was over. But Roch was not done. The soldiers grabbed the body and lifted it onto the cart. They mounted their horses and headed for town, talking and laughing quietly between themselves, their task accomplished. Roch climbed once more into the hackney, which followed the cart to the graveyard of Vaugirard. There he pulled the clerk from his bed, wrote and signed the death certificate, and watched the body thrown without ceremony into the open pit of a common grave. The other corpses there had been sown into burlap sacks, but Chevalier’s would be denied even that modest rite. The surly graveyard clerk was content to open a barrel and shovel a layer of lime over the body.

Roch stepped back wearily into the hackney. As soon as they reached the city limits, he pulled the cord to make it stop. Walking home in the cold would help him cleanse his mind of the night’s memories.

Roch was thinking of Chevalier, the dead man. He had built a bomb, an infernal machine similar to the one used in the Rue Nicaise attack. What could his purpose have been, if not to kill Bonaparte, probably along with many innocents? He must have deserved to die. But then why had he not been tried by a regular court?

And why had Roch been asked to witness this grisly masquerade? Once at home, he removed his boots and dropped heavily onto his bed without bothering to undress. He fell asleep very fast.

29

E
arly the next morning, before Roch left for the Prefecture, a messenger brought a note. He felt weak in the knees when he recognized the seal of the Ministry and Fouché’s handwriting. For a moment he could not bring himself to open it. Maybe it simply contained more clues, more directions for the investigation, perhaps even the name of the third man, the fellow with the gold spectacles. But the note might also seal Old Miquel’s fate. Roch shook himself and tore it open. It only said
You may visit your father at five o’clock this afternoon
.

Roch threw his head backwards and took a deep breath. He was relieved, happy, of course, but what if he found Old Miquel weakened, thinner, a shadow of his former self ? What if this were the last visit before his father’s deportation or execution? He could not banish from his mind the impressions of Chevalier in the face of the firing squad.

Roch went to the Prefecture as usual that morning, but he had trouble concentrating on his work. A report to Dubois, which should have taken no more than ten minutes to compose, had to be started over many times, and Roch, after reading its latest draft, still was not sure that it made any sense. No matter, it was probably good enough for Dubois.

All day Roch kept looking out his office window at the pale winter sun. A fine day, dry and crisp for the season. At last it was four o’clock. He set off on foot and reached the Temple in less than half an hour. The prison clerk, Fauconnier, greeted Roch with a warmth that contrasted with his embarrassment of the night before.

“Ah, Citizen Chief Inspector,” he said, “I expected you. Received the instructions today from the Minister
himself
.” He shouted an order to the guards and turned his attention back to Roch. “There’s not a better man than your father, and I’ll be sorry to see him go when his time comes. I mean when he is released, of course. But then, mind you, we have nothing but the cream of the cream here. True, we lost Citizen Chevalier last night, as you know, but we still have three generals, seven judges, and dozens of
ci-devant
noblemen. And also Citizen Topino-Lebrun, the history painter, and his accomplices in the Conspiracy of Daggers. You won’t find any common criminals here, no, Citizen.”

The clerk, swelled with pride, patted the prison register. “I could show you the names of the
ci-devant
King and Queen in here. They sent me a thief the other day, imagine that! But I saw the mistake right away, and I refused to receive the scoundrel. A common
thief
, here!”

Roch nodded in response. He did not want to show any weakness now, especially before his father, and drew himself up. A door opened, and at first all he could see was a blurry figure, flanked by two guards. He had no time to bring his father’s hand to his lips, and felt a pair of arms wrapped tightly around his shoulders. Once the embrace relented, he drew back and looked at Old Miquel. Indeed his father did not seem altered at all.

“Roch,” he cried, “I haven’t been so happy in weeks!”

“Thank God I find you in good health, Father. And in good spirits too, it seems.”

The turnkey was smiling in a sanctimonious manner, his head cocked to the side. Roch, impatient to be rid of him, slipped him a silver coin.

“You’ll be comfortable by yourselves in there, Citizens,” the man hastened to say. He unlocked the door to a square room, fitted with a barred window, and furnished with a table and two straw chairs.

Old Miquel patted Roch on the shoulder before taking a seat.

“I knew you’d worry. Of course, the first day, they only gave me a piece of bread and a bowl of that greasy slop they call
the soup
. And I spent my first night on a straw mattress they threw on the stone floor of the common room, without even a blanket, so I was mighty cold. But we’ve slept in worse places in the old days, you and me, and eaten food that wasn’t much better, haven’t we?”

Roch clenched his jaw. He recalled what Fouché had said about Old Miquel being comfortable in prison. So that was what the scoundrel’s assurances meant.

“But things took a turn for the better the very next day, thanks to you,” continued Old Miquel. “After the turnkey got your money, I got my own cell, and now I take my meals at the paying table. Also, I can play ball in the afternoons with the others in the courtyard.” Old Miquel chuckled. “Turns out I’m one of the best, at my age too! I can still kick that ball, and run faster than most young fellows. And I get to read the papers too. So I know what happened since my arrest, at least what’s printed in those rags.”