The Black Tower (11 page)

O
NLY LATER, WHEN
I am shaking the webs from my brain, will I have the space to recall the look in Father Time’s eye. The coolness that lingers there, a dry clarity—neither gentle nor cruel.

“You mean he never told you? Well, isn’t that funny?”

Though he doesn’t look amused. Particularly.

Without knowing it, I’ve plopped myself down on his bed. I’m smoothing out the rag that passes for his coverlet. A whirring cloud of dust is trailing after me.

“When?” I ask. “When did he ever have cause to meet that boy?”

“Oh my, it was summer of ’94. Just a few weeks past the height of the Terror. I was
there,
you know, the day they took Robespierre. Horrible business. He was
bellowing
the whole way. Well,
you
might have complained, too, if—if you were missing half your
face
—”

“Please, Monsieur, I didn’t ask about—”

“Oh, but the point
is
with Robespierre gone, people could afford to be a bit less
abstract,
couldn’t they? The fever broke—the fever of
Theory,
yes—and everyone sat up in bed and looked about. Asked after friends and relations. So it was only natural someone would ask about that boy. Because nobody had seen him in—well, it felt like forever….”

I
N FACT, IT HAD
been two years.

I will look up the dates later, and I will find that the last time the public at large had glimpsed the dauphin, Louis-Charles, was on the thirteenth of August, 1792. On this occasion, the royal family was being driven from the Tuileries to their new prison in the Temple—escorted by what looked to be the entire population of the Parisian faubourgs. All of them shaking fists, waving pikes, raining down oaths.
Pointing
to every toppled marble monarch.
Do you see the fate that awaits you?

A good two hours it took to travel a relatively short distance. At last a low drone of pent rage escaped the mob as the
berline
pulled into the courtyard and the thick iron gates of the Temple swung closed after them.

For the royal family, the respite was short-lived. Five months later, the boy’s father would be dragged to the Place de la Révolution. (His neck a little too thick for the occasion: the blade had to fight its way through.) Fourteen months later, the mother would follow. Seven months more, the boy’s beloved aunt, gentle Princess Élizabeth, would climb the scaffold.

But
he
stayed where he was, that boy with the brook blue eyes and the strawberry-blond ringlets hanging to his shoulders. Immured in a great tower. Behind walls of stone, nine feet thick.

I was a boy myself when I first saw it. Late summer, and Mother and I had been walking for hours, as we often did in pleasant weather, and we’d just stopped at a chemist’s shop on the Rue du Meslay (Father needed copper nitrate), and on a whim, I suppose, I veered down the Boulevard du Temple.

Mother hesitated, I can see this now. But the day was lovely, and we were in no hurry to be home, and so she followed.
Still
hesitating, for she remained a step or two behind me the whole way.

We speak of buildings rising up before us, as if they somehow unfurled, brick by brick. The tower that met my eyes now had unfurled many centuries ago. It was emphatically past tense—and still very much present. Silly to say you were discovering it. If anything, it was finding you.

Other towers, other turrets protruded from the medieval château they called the Temple (deceptively religious name!), but this tower was different. Larger—easily sixty feet in height—and
black,
like the inside of a chimney, and lord of all its secrets. Only after staring at it for some time could I discern the flaws in its masonry: the tiny pinpricks of windows scattered around its skin. Too small, surely, to admit much in the way of light. Or air. Whatever was in there stayed there.

I knew nothing then of the tower’s history, but I do remember, yes,
picturing
someone, of no distinct character or color, on the other side of those walls. Looking down at me. Calling out, even, it would make no difference because—this was what unnerved me—I would never be able to see or hear. Whoever it was might just as well have been erased from this earth.

And the notion that a human being could be erased like that, so easily, so entirely, this was somehow worse than the tower itself. Or perhaps the same thing.

I felt a prickle in the back of my shoulders, and in the same moment, I saw Mother clasp her arms tightly round her chest.

“Come, Hector.”

Down the street she drew me and round the corner. Neither of us looked back.

By then, the tower had already fallen into disuse, and before I was twenty-one, it had been torn down, on Napoleon’s orders. It rears up again, though, at the mere mention of that name.

The Temple
.

“H
E WENT THERE
every single morning,” says Father Time. “Took a cab, though he hated spending the money. Always a
different
cab, too—different route—never knew if someone might be following you, eh? The Temple commissaries gave him a special pass—he showed it to me once—and then, of course, if you had to see one of the prisoners, why, you needed a
visa,
too. ‘For the Tower’ it said, or something like that.

“And that’s right, he could stay no more than an hour.
Same
hour every day. Any
more,
he’d have to—what?—oh, petition the commissaries or else—ugh!—that awful Committee of Public Security. And everything was in
utmost
secrecy. Not a word.”

“Why did they choose my father?” I ask.

“Mm.” He weaves his fingers through his beard, as though he were carding wool. “Bit of a fluke, really. Your father had once treated General Barras’ sister. For a
goiter
. Mightily impressed she was. Didn’t hurt, I expect, that he was—such a handsome cur in his youth.
Barras
certainly wasn’t above noticing such things, if you—if you take my meaning. Well then, once Barras was put in charge of what was
left
of the royal family, he realized the boy would need a doctor. Forthwith!”

Father Time shrugs now. The briefest of motions, and yet the fabric of his old coat actually retains its new shape even as the shoulders return to their former position.

“Naturally,” he says, “the job was advertised as a—a
high
sort of duty. Requiring a doctor of pure republican credentials. Rare skill. I doubt your father had ever been
courted
so fiercely before.”

I close my eyes. I try to imagine—me—surrounded by good citizens, hearing words like
honor
and
calling
.
Patrie
.

“How long did he attend the dauphin?”

“Right up to the
end,
nearly.”

“But—why did he never tell me?”

“Oh, well, at the
time,
you see, you were a little sprig. No more than three, eh? You wouldn’t have known a dauphin from a—from a
dolphin
.”

“But, Mother…”

“She didn’t know, either. He went out, mm, an hour
earlier
every morning, that was the only difference. Told her he was needed at the hospital. Yes, and always came home for lunch.
Punctual
sort, your papa. No one…” He reaches over suddenly, brushes a speck of dirt from my vest. “No one would have guessed anything was amiss.”

“He couldn’t even tell his own wife?”

“Oh, he didn’t
dare
. It might have been her death warrant. Don’t you see, your father was taking an enormous risk. In those days, assisting the royal family—helping the children of Louis the Sixteenth in
any
way—why, you could pay for that with your life. Hundreds already had.
Thousands
.”

“But Barras asked him to. The Committee asked him to—”

“Ah, that’s just it! Today, the Committee’s on board.
Tomorrow,
it changes its mind. Day
after
tomorrow, a whole
new
Committee! And whoever did the bidding of the last one…giving up his head to Old Growler before sundown.”

Without thinking, he sketches a line across his throat. A
firm
hand, not a tremor. He might have made a fine surgeon himself.

“Monsieur,” I say. “You must forgive me, I still don’t understand. How could anyone blame my father for trying to save a young boy’s life?”

“Oh.” His eyes swirl out of focus. “That’s—that’s not what they—wanted him to…”

“What, then?”

Squinting, he crouches and scans the full perimeter of the room—as though the train of his thought were even now scurrying toward the floorboards.

“Yes,” he says, folding his lips down. “I asked him that myself once. We were at our usual table—the Wise Athenian, I’ve told you about the Wise Ath—I have?—the weekly coffee, yes, it was your
father’s
turn to pay—he would
insist
on that, he would—where was I? Oh, yes, he was going on about these dreadful commissaries and committees. Ha! Death by
bureaucracy,
he called it. Nicely turned, eh? Well, I suppose I must have become a little irritated on his behalf because I said, ‘Well, now, why would they hire such a—such a
sublime
physician as yourself if they weren’t going to
listen
to him?’”

“And what did he say?”

“Nothing at first. That was his way, of course, he was—ten parts
thought
to one part speech. And at last—it was just as we were getting up from the table, we were—ha!—brushing the macaroon crumbs from our coat sleeves—well, that’s when he said—and I’ll never forget it—he said,
They don’t want me to heal that boy. They want me to make sure he dies
.”

L
IKE A TALLOW CANDLE
, Father Time’s brain gutters and crackles and throws off a good greasy light, but its span is brief and its end conclusive. Speech fails, then consciousness, and before another five minutes have passed, he has fallen across his straw pallet—at a cumbersome tangent, like a dropped ceiling beam. All that’s left to do is to remove his boots before bidding him good night.

Over the next two days, I do all I can to resume our conversation. Outwardly he is all eagerness.
Inside,
something balks, and no manner of private hints—the Temple, the Wise Athenian—will quite uncork him. The best I can secure is a promise, vaguely worded, to take me to “the archives” someday.

Where these archives are, what they contain…none of this can be determined, hard as I ply him. Through all of Saturday and Sunday, I wait for the clouds to pass. Monday comes round with nothing more to show for my labors. Only the old routine, waiting to be shouldered. I leave the house at the same time: nine-fifteen. I am bound for the same place: the École de Médecine. The one difference is this. When I’m twenty or so paces from my door, a fiacre rolls up. A gendarme leans out of it.

“Dr. Carpentier?”

“Yes?”

“You’re wanted.”

He’s under no charge to say
who
wants me. There’s no need. I climb in, and the gendarme calls up to the driver.

“Number Six, Rue Sainte-Anne.”

My initiation into the Sûreté (Number Six, as it’s known to intimates) comes via the rear courtyard. My escort leads me into a marble-floored entry and presses casually against a leather wall panel, which swings in to reveal a spiral staircase. On the first floor, another panel swings open on a long corridor, illuminated almost entirely by skylights.

Down this hallway the gendarme leads me, and as I peer into the open offices, a clammy fear takes hold of me. Who
are
these men, with their red hands and their coarse blue trousers and the patches sewed on with twine? Where are the police?

A good half minute passes before I realize…and you will have to imagine the sudden lift in my stomach…these
are
the police.

Unbidden, the words of Nankeen circle back.
Impossible anymore to tell the law enforcers from the lawbreakers.

Well, it
is
hard for Parisians, in these early days of the Restoration, to twine themselves round the idea—Vidocq’s idea—that catching criminals might require men who
look
like them, think and act like them. The officers of the Brigade de Sûreté may lack for uniforms but not for pasts.

Take Aubé. The fellow in the yellow cap. Renowned forger in his day, specializing in royal writs and church encyclicals. Never met a signature he couldn’t make his own. And that bull in the woman’s blouse? Fouché. Went to prison at age sixteen for armed robbery. The only one who looks he’s on the right side of the law is Ronquetti—still lounging in last night’s evening clothes—a confidence artist who set himself up for a time as the Duke of Modena, with an Italian mistress and a blackamoor servant.

And behind the unmarked pair of doors at the end of the hall: Coco-Lacour. Grew up in a brothel. Did most of his schooling in prison. Likes to ply whores with trinkets he’s fished out of the Seine. He’s now Vidocq’s personal secretary.

“Dr. Carpentier, is it?” A good third of Coco-Lacour’s teeth are missing, but he smiles as if he had garnets in his gums. “The chief will be with you soon. May I fetch you some coffee, perhaps?”

“Send him in already!”

The voice comes roaring from the adjoining room. Coco-Lacour leans into it without blanching.

“Won’t you please follow me, Doctor?”

The elegance of the office takes me aback. Bookshelves, framed etchings, a black marble fireplace with an ormolu clock on the mantelpiece, white cotton gloves on a mahogany table. And, seated in a black leather armchair behind a massive fruitwood desk: Vidocq, every bit as massive, every bit as elegant, in a black suit with yellow tulips tucked in the lapel. Today’s issue of the
Indépendent
lies before him, turned open to the theater page.

“Sit down, Hector.”

And if some small part of me has been toying with the notion of withholding my news, that part gives way utterly in this moment. For in the act of planting me so squarely in his official circumference, Vidocq has enrolled me in the same freemasonry that binds Ronquetti, Aubé, Fouché, and Coco-Lacour. I’m one of
his
now.

It’s the most natural thing in the world, then, to tell him everything I’ve learned from Father Time—and for him to take it in like a confessor, threading his hands under his chin, grunting occasionally over some detail. When I’m finished, he tips his head back, as if he were pouring the whole tale straight into his skull.

“Well, that’s very interesting, Hector. I bet you never dreamed you had such an illustrious papa. Mine was a baker.
Bastard,
that was his real trade. Used to thrash me every chance he got. In all fairness,” he adds, “I stole from his till every chance I got. On the scales of justice, we’ll have to call it a draw.”

A wizard’s cackle flies from his chest. His gray eyes brighten into a noonday blue.

“Shall I tell you what I’ve been up to, Hector?”

“If you like,” I answer, faintly.

“Ah, you’re too kind.” Cocking his shoulders, he turns toward the window, where Sainte-Chapelle lies framed: sun-sanded and immaculate. “You recall, I hope, the dying words of Monsieur Leblanc.”

“He’s here.”

“Exactly.
He’s…here.
The
he
part, well, we’ve at least got our mitts on that one, but what about that
here
business, eh? Such a simple word, and look how it wriggles when you try to grasp it. Does it mean
here
on the very street where Leblanc died? Not very likely. Does it mean Paris itself? I confess I thought it did. If you’re some kind of idiot impostor king and you want to keep yourself hidden, you could do much worse than Paris.
Here,
you can make yourself scarce for years on end, and don’t I know it?

“Ah, but then I started looking at it from the perspective of the—the
deeply
loyal Monsieur Leblanc. And the damned word started shifting on me again! Because to someone like Leblanc—someone who’s been waiting his whole life for Louis the Seventeenth to come back—that word
here
could mean simply”—he extends his arms—“
France
. The native land. Crying out for its savior. Are you with me so far?”

“Of course.”

“Well, now, if
here
extends as far as the nation’s boundaries, we’re in for quite a search, I’m afraid. But it must be because we’re such good Christians, Hector, because God throws us a bone. Whoever was communicating with the lamented Monsieur Leblanc”—a lewd wink—“doesn’t know he’s dead.”

“The newspapers reported it, surely.”

“Ah, well, I called in some favors. A few free-market exchanges, and
voilà
! Nothing in the ‘Local Notices’ column. No memorial services, either. The body’s still where you and I left it. Other than the Baroness, the only people who know he’s dead are his creditors, and they’re not likely to squawk. Bad for their reputations.” Smiling, he folds his hock-arms against his belly. “Maybe you can guess why I’ve denied Monsieur Leblanc’s corpse the customary Christian rites.”

“To see if the parties in question attempted to contact him again?”

“Score one for you!” he bellows. “Oh, but Hector! You are
not
looking well, my friend.”

“I don’t—I don’t
feel
—”

“No, don’t argue with me. There’s only one possible treatment for what you have. A change of
air
.”

“Change of—”

“
Climate,
too, you’re absolutely right. A day or two, you’ll be back in the oats.”

“Please, I don’t—I haven’t a clue what you’re saying.”

Grinning, he flings up his hands like a symphony conductor.

“We’re going on a trip, Hector!”