Illumination (43 page)

‘The cocotte is back in the city as well,’ the Leopard said, ‘and has been telling everyone she can about me for some hours now.’ He almost sounded impressed. ‘You have killed us all.’

Clem had taken a cigarette from the doctor’s jacket; it remained unlit between his fingers. Mademoiselle Laure was alive – alive and in Paris. He might feel those copper locks against his cheek once more.

‘Perhaps that is what we deserve,’ Hannah said. ‘What do you think?’

‘Now hang on a minute,’ Inglis protested, standing forgotten by the door, ‘I don’t believe that I—’

‘I could try to talk to her,’ Clem broke in. ‘To Laure, I mean. It might not be too late. We were friends for a while. I might be able to make her see sense – or at the very least slow her down a little.’

Hannah shook her head. ‘She won’t listen to you.’

‘I can’t imagine that you’d find her, Clement,’ said Elizabeth, ‘before it could make a difference, at any rate.’

The Leopard retreated to the hearth, to the boundary of the candlelight, turning around again as he arrived at a new decision. He was standing with his back to that damned portrait; it looked as if he was sneaking up on himself.

‘I want asylum at the British Embassy,’ he said. ‘It should still be secure. Paris is spent. She will fall in a matter of days – and then I’ll depart.’ He went to Elizabeth’s desk. ‘I shall write a note informing my superiors of the situation. There is a locker in the Gare de l’Ouest from which correspondence is collected and conveyed to Versailles – if you, Mr Pardy, would be so good as to take it there.’

He took hold of a pen with his undamaged left hand, dipped it in the ink pot and started to write with swift fluency. Clem stared: there it was, the hand that had written both the letter and Elizabeth’s Leopard reports. The best ruses, he reflected, were often the most straightforward. Allix had presented himself as a man impaired, and there had been no reason to disbelieve him. Han had seen it too. She didn’t move, but the self-control she’d upheld to that point was buckling; she looked as if she’d happily overturn the desk and go at the brute behind it with the poker.

‘We’ll never reach the embassy,’ Elizabeth told the Prussian. ‘It’s too far. The streets are packed with National Guard, the Champs Elysées especially. Someone is bound to recognise us.’

Clem caught something in his mother’s tone – a hint of excitement. Dear God, he thought, she’s actually relishing this awful turn of events. She’s probably started to construct the narrative in her head: a daughter dramatically returned, a family held prisoner, a mother cast into a battle of wits with an impossibly cunning Prussian agent. You had to hand it to her – Elizabeth Pardy was certainly adaptable. Any ordeal one cared to name was just so much grist to her mill.

‘Mont, how about your place? The rue Joubert is a fraction of the distance. No one would think to look there. We’d be safe until morning.’

Inglis pushed up his kepi. ‘No, Lizzie,’ he answered, ‘I will not knowingly help this man. How could I? It would render my life in Paris untenable.’

Elizabeth pursed her lips. ‘You are my friend, though, are you not?’

The journalist let out a tired sigh. ‘I am.’

‘Then I ask that you do it for me. My family’s safety is at stake – the safety of my dear daughter, so miraculously restored to me. This man has deceived us most despicably, that I cannot dispute, but I’m afraid we need to ensure that he reaches the embassy.’

Inglis thought for a moment. Unwilling to look at the Leopard himself, he scowled at the portrait behind him. ‘Very well then,’ he said. ‘For you, Lizzie. I must say, however, that my concierge is quite the gatekeeper. I cannot guarantee that he’ll prove amenable.’

‘He will,’ said the Leopard.

Clem returned his unlit cigarette to his pocket and looked at his mother and sister, arranged stiffly around that armchair as if waiting to have their photograph taken. It was up to him to act – to save the three of them. A lightness fluttered through his belly; a hot prickle crawled up his spine. Amazed by his own daring, he took a step towards the door – the Leopard was busy interrogating Inglis, discovering exactly where the journalist kept his apartment – and then he was against the varnished panels, scrabbling with the handle, out in the hallway and at the first staircase. The stairs flew beneath his boots; he jumped down the last half-dozen, nearly falling when he landed, skidding off towards the next flight.

The lobby was a hellish, bloody blur, the air alive with yelling and the dreadful rasp of the bone-saws. Clem raced along its edge and plunged onto the boulevard. Only then did he risk a backward glance. There was no sign of the damned Leopard; he was plainly a lesser concern, of no real consequence to the scoundrel’s escape plan. He’d been allowed to get away.

It was a little lighter outside than before, the crowds and towering buildings touched with silver. Clem looked for the source; above was a glorious spread of stars. National Guardsmen, both red and bourgeois, were everywhere. He worried briefly that he might be recognised again and set upon with more effectiveness, but he’d made his move; he could only turn up his collar and press onwards.

It really was too much. The dead brought back to life; the Pardys’ position in Paris turned on its head; a close friend – of Han’s and Elizabeth’s, at least – revealed as an extraordinary and devious foe; and all before he’d had a chance to remove his hat. More than anything he wanted to stop, to smoke a cigarette and think it over.

There was no time. He cut to the left, heading for the northwards diagonal of the rue Lafayette.

They needed help.

IV

The Prussian, the man who was not Jean-Jacques, had returned to the window. He appeared to be monitoring the crowds; Hannah assumed he was waiting for a lull during which it would be safe – or at least safer – for them to leave for Mr Inglis’s apartment on the rue Joubert. Focused on reaching the embassy, he’d barely reacted when Clem had taken flight. There was no point in a pursuit; it wasn’t as if Clem could damage the name of Jean-Jacques Allix any further.

Hannah wanted to die. She was certain of it. Shame seethed in her; it clogged her veins and choked her heart. She’d bound herself to Jean-Jacques, blended herself into him, and now she had nothing. Her life was founded on deceit, empty, flimsy and improbable, and now it had been stamped flat. The only thing left was death.

‘Where has Clem gone, do you think?’ she asked Elizabeth.

‘To find the cocotte,’ her mother replied, ‘where else? The little minx has him in thrall. He’s been pining for her all blessed winter. His father was the same – easily infatuated. It will burn itself out eventually.’

Recovered from her swoon and everything that had followed it, Elizabeth was now a model of dignity. Her arm remained firmly wrapped around Hannah’s shoulders; her narrowed eyes were glued to their captor. Mr Inglis, the final occupant of that plush, shadowy sitting room, had sat down in a chair opposite them. He was shifting about impatiently like someone being forced to miss the start of a much-anticipated concert; were it not for ageing limbs and rheumatic joints he’d have probably made a break for it too.

‘I am hateful,’ Hannah murmured, ‘the worst kind of fool.’

Elizabeth’s hold tightened. ‘Do not think that. You must never think that. I will not permit it. You are my daughter and you are
exceptional
. When I believed you dead I almost died myself.’

Hannah scarcely heard her. She looked at the black back before the window. ‘He knew exactly what to tell me – how to act with me. Even the way he pretended to be fighting against his feelings. He saw straight away that I was a callow girl with a head full of stupid romantic notions, and he used it to the full.’ She put a hand to her face, across her eyes. It was already damp with her tears. ‘I didn’t suspect a thing, Elizabeth. Dear God, I
defended
him when others voiced their doubts.’

‘His actions were those of a thoroughgoing cad,’ Inglis declared stoutly. ‘Beyond anything I have encountered during fifteen years of life in Paris – the supposed capital of this kind of roguish behaviour. These blasted Prussians really are a breed apart.’

‘True enough, Mont,’ said Elizabeth, ‘but this man is no predator, seducing and deceiving for amusement alone. There was a goal very much in sight.’ She addressed the Prussian. ‘Tell me – I shall keep calling you Allix, I’m afraid, as I must call you something – was absolutely
all
of it feigned?’

Hannah cringed, grasping at the armchair, thinking for a second that her mother was going to talk of love; of intimate matters. Elizabeth was more than capable of it. But no, thank God, she meant the politics, the creed of the International: Jean-Jacques Allix’s commitment, stated so often and with such commanding eloquence, to the cause of the workers, to fighting the evils of the bourgeois state, to establishing a commune in Paris and thus bringing about freedom and equality for her citizens.

‘It was false, Elizabeth, plainly,’ she snapped; she was beginning to sense something like admiration in her mother for this provocateur. ‘Dissemblance, every last word. This is a man prepared to urge factory lads and shop assistants onto the battlefield to see through the designs of a king – and employ socialistic doctrine to do it. He is a charlatan, dedicated to a wicked cause.’

Elizabeth was smiling, pleased by this resurgence of her daughter’s spirit. ‘I suppose that the extremes of opinion are easier to simulate.’

The man turned to them. His efforts to remain detached were faltering again; creases had appeared between his eyebrows, a reliable indication that Jean-Jacques was becoming riled. But this was not Jean-Jacques. The familiarity was misplaced. Hannah glanced away in confusion. How much else of her lover lingered in this Prussian agent? Would he dress with the same precision and care? Would he also refuse all drink but strong coffee and cold water? Would he kiss with the same unhurried passion?

‘As I have already told you,’ he said to Hannah, ‘I acted only to stop the war. My aim was to speed the surrender – to rob the reds of their will to keep fighting. I knew that the sorties would fail, but also that they had to happen. Paris had to be bled. Once the reds were reduced, so we thought, the bourgeois would lay down their arms. It was believed in Versailles that Trochu was only staging a resistance at all because he was afraid that there would be a revolution if he didn’t.’

‘A fair analysis,’ opined Mr Inglis, ‘although to be truthful—’

‘I desired a rapid conclusion,’ the Prussian continued. ‘Painless, without occupation or bombardment. There are men close to my emperor who wished Paris to suffer for her decadence and abandonment of Christian morality. I was never one of those.’

This frustration seemed genuine. The siege had not gone as the provocateur had planned. There was no gloating here; no pride in his manipulations. He just wanted it to end.

Hannah wasn’t mollified. ‘At what point would you have left,’ she asked, ‘if Trochu had surrendered in September, or in October? Would you have told me, or simply melted away?’

The Prussian didn’t reply. ‘We must go,’ he said, moving from the window. He wouldn’t look at Hannah; he clearly wished that he hadn’t broken his silence. ‘Mrs Pardy, can I trust you to impress upon your daughter the need for quiet?’

Elizabeth relaxed her embrace; she laid her hand on the back of the armchair. ‘Will you stay quiet out there, Hannah?’

Hannah hadn’t yet decided what she would or wouldn’t do. She looked across the room. Against the far wall, between the door and a chest of drawers, were a number of her
café-concert
canvases: Elizabeth had been grouping them by subject. Foremost was a scene from the Danton. Lucien, a dent in the sheen of his silk top hat, was reading a morning paper in a shaft of sunlight. On the stool behind him was Laure, clad in a short-sleeved scarlet polonaise, smoking a cigarette. Drawn loosely, coloured luminously, they appeared to have wandered in after a night in the dance halls. It was an image from a different life entirely.

Her mother leaned in. ‘My dearest girl,’ she said gently, ‘you owe it to yourself to leave this mess as cleanly as you can. You think that revenge will ease your pain, but it will not. You must trust me. The best you can do is start anew. Will you stay quiet?’

Hannah met Elizabeth’s grey eyes – eyes identical to her own. The Leopard put out the candle, dropping them into darkness.

‘I will,’ she replied.

A swell of dirty militia uniforms was blocking the boulevard des Capucines, the guardsmen drowning the humiliation of their latest defeat in gallons of cheap wine. Angry songs were sung and glass was broken; an order to disperse was met with a roar of rowdy, embittered laughter. Hannah realised that they were not leaving the Grand because the time was right, but because it was running out. Whatever was building up in the north would soon be upon them.

‘Listen to that!’ exclaimed Mr Inglis. ‘The people of Paris might be done with Fritz – but by Jove, they ain’t quite finished with each other yet!’

Infantrymen had been stationed on corners to keep the more boisterous guardsmen at bay. More than ever, the regulars and irregulars looked like two separate forces – forces that were on the verge of opposition. The Leopard was recognised before they’d even moved out from under the Grand’s porch. He’d taken a cloak from a dead Zoave to cover his black suit, but he could not disguise his height, or the four-inch scar on his cheek – or the distinctive English trio trailing behind him. The soldiers began to shout things, asking him where he’d been during the battle, or calling for an officer to place him under arrest.

Elizabeth had remained by Hannah’s side, an arm linked through her daughter’s.

‘This is my fault,’ Hannah said to her. ‘I should have spoken up sooner. We could have been ready to leave as soon as you arrived at the hotel.’

‘You wanted to punish him. That is perfectly understandable.’ Her mother looked down the boulevard Madeleine. ‘Besides, my girl, they don’t have us yet.’

They turned left, heading north onto the place de l’Opéra. There were more soldiers here, queuing in their hundreds outside the military supply depot that had been set up in the opera house. A single petrol lamp burned above the entrance, its sooty glow failing even to reach the edges of the square. The Prussian tried to take advantage of this gloom, but it was no use; within moments shouts of ‘
Le Léopard!
’ were echoing between the opera house and the Grand Hotel.