The Black Tower (16 page)

W
E LEAVE FOR
Paris late that afternoon. Not in a stage, as we came, but in a cariole personally hired by Vidocq. As punishment, he puts Goury on the driver’s box, but the only protest we hear on the way back to town is from the vehicle itself, arthritic through the rims, spitting up stones and rotten pears—even, at one crossing, a turtle, pitched on its back, waving farewell as we turn the corner.

Next to me Charles Rapskeller slumbers. In a dead man’s clothes. The carefully brushed round hat, the old-fashioned waistcoat, the black trousers and black wool socks…these came straight from Tepac’s wardrobe. The only articles that are unmistakably Charles’ are the copper-buckled shoes and the coat, which is, providentially, the same shade of yellow as the mud. Into this coat he climbs and, as soon as the carriage is in motion, falls straight to sleep. The only sign that something lives inside that yellow carapace is his protruding face, soft and sun-reddened.

“Is he really sleeping?” growls Vidocq.

“I think so.”

“Maybe you’d be so kind as to check.”

Gingerly, I pry open an eyelid.

“Asleep. Yes.”

“Then maybe you can tell me. How’d we get ourselves in such a fucking mess?”

In our short acquaintance, I’ve never seen him this glum. Two men dead. A killer still at liberty. Murderers queuing up for instructions at confessional booths…

“And don’t forget,” Vidocq says, as if he were divining my inventory. “A so-called king. Who doesn’t know he’s supposed to be a king. What the hell am I supposed to do with
him
?”

“I don’t know….”

“Ahh.” Vidocq tips his head in mock deference. “Dr. Hector’s got something on his mind.”

“No, it’s just that…”

“What?”

“He
fits
.”

“How do you mean he
fits
?”

“What I mean is if Louis the Seventeenth really
was
rescued—spirited away, as the old story says—then we would expect to find in him a certain amount of damage. Even today.”

I’m waiting for him to stop me. But for once he’s all ears.

“Think,” I say, “of all that boy suffered during his years in the Temple. Think of the abuse to his mind and body. He was beaten, he was shut away for months in confinement. He suffered a painful and wasting illness. He was separated from his sister. He saw his own father dragged away, he was forced to testify against his mother. Even if he’d survived it all, the trauma might have forced some—some rearrangement….”

“Rearrangement?”

“Well, consider the medical literature. Bidaut-Mauger has found that children, regularly beaten, can manifest all the signs of brain damage even when the cerebellum and cerebral cortex are intact. The slowness, the inattention, all those
symptoms
we associate with idiocy might simply be a way of—detaching from hostile surroundings.”

“Detaching,” he says, reaching into his pocket for a handful of pistachios. “So much so they forget what happened to them?”

“Hypothetically.”

“So you’re saying Louis the Seventeenth would have developed amnesia.”

“I’m saying he could have survived only by
excluding
certain parts of his past from his consciousness. Parts of his identity, even.”

Chewing, half smiling, Vidocq shakes his head.

“Christ in heaven.”

“What?”

“You
believe,
Hector.”

“No…”

“I can see it on your face. You think he’s the real article, don’t you?”

The faintest twitching then in Charles’ hand, as if he were going to protest the turn of our conversation.

“I don’t know what he is,” I say.

And once again, I’m filled with a surprising longing for my father. I want him to be, yes, in this very carriage, telling us everything that happened behind the Temple’s thick stone walls….

Vidocq pries apart another pistachio shell, pops it into his mouth.

“Something you haven’t yet considered,” he says. “What if our boy here is making up his symptoms?”

“I think that would require more sophistication than he has.”

“Ha! If you’d ever been conned, you’d know how complicated simple people can be. This
Monsieur
fellow, for instance. Is he a genius or an idiot?” He folds out his hands in an agnostic attitude. “A public assassination. That’s an awfully good way of calling attention to yourself, isn’t it?”

“Well…” I stifle a yawn. “Maybe
you
forced his hand.”

“Oh, yes? And how’d he know old Vidocq was making for Saint-Cloud? Did
you
tell?”

“I didn’t know I was coming myself.”

The air is fragrant with pistachio and mud and spores—and Vidocq’s own scent, unmistakable, hastening the decay of everything round it.

“Well,” he says, “we’ve got one advantage on our side. Monsieur killed the wrong man. What’s more, he doesn’t
know
he killed the wrong man. And that gives us time.”

“To do what?”

“Find our other assassin, Herbaux. That’s
my
job.
Your
job is to figure out what that father of yours knew. Damn him for being dead,” he adds, in an undertone.

“What about…”

I nudge my head toward that sleeping figure.

“Monsieur Charles? You’re right, he
will
need somewhere to stay. And I’ve just the place for him.”

“An apartment, you mean?”

He nods. “In a very fine establishment in the Latin Quarter. The Maison Carpentier.”

T
EN MINUTES BEFORE
the cariole reaches the Barrière du Maine, Charles crawls from the chrysalis of his coat. Stretches his arms, rubs his eyes.

“Are we there?”

“Nearly.”

On either side of us, there’s nothing but fallow wheat fields and abandoned tracts. Through the long scraggly stretches of close-clipped grass, some wild poppies are stirring, and in the distance, you can make out a gypsum quarry and a mill, turning in violent hitches.

“I don’t see any,” he says.

“What?”

“Buildings. Paris has such tall ones.”

“Oh, but we’re still outside the city walls. Once we’re in, you’ll have all the buildings you could desire. Why, look, even from here, you can make out the Hôtel des Invalides.”

“I don’t like churches so much,” he says. “They make me sneeze and fart all at once.”

He blows an oval of vapor onto the glass. Rubs it away with his finger.

“Oh!” he cries. “That must be Paris!”

Up ahead, a brownstone wall, three meters high and twenty-four kilometers round, cinching Paris like a chastity belt. Any other city, I think, would have built such a wall to keep the barbarians out. Paris built its wall to keep the money in.

“What do they want?” asks Charles. “Those men.”

“They’re customs officers. They have to inspect us.”

“Why?”

“To make sure we’re paying our duties.”

“What’s a duty?”

“That’s the—that’s the money you pay the city. Whenever you bring something in.”

“How funny,” says Charles, hooking his thumb westward. “You pay for something back
there
—and then you pay all over again
here
.”

“And keep paying,” grumbles Vidocq, just as the flat-crowned, broad-brimmed black hat glides into the window frame.

“Goods to declare?”

“Nothing,” Vidocq assures him. “Not so much as a scrap of hay.”

“Well, then,” he says, scratching his earlobe. “Maybe you’d be so kind as to show me your passports.”

Through the mirror of his eyes, I’m recalled to the spectacle we present: Vidocq and I, bare-armed, in our old waistcoats, patched trousers.

“Monsieur,” says the
douanier,
bearing down on Charles. “I believe I asked for your passport.”

Charles keeps staring out the window.

“Monsieur,” says the
douanier,
more pointedly.

“I’m afraid he doesn’t have one,” says Vidocq. “This gentleman has been apprehended on police business.”

“That so?”

“I’d be happy to show you my identification. I’m—”

“You’ll kindly keep your hands in plain view.”

Grimacing, the customs officer bends his head over our papers. Then he steps back a pace. From nowhere, a stupefied grin snaps his face open.

“It
is
you! I knew it!”

Snatching the black hat off his own head, he presses it to his heart.

“Monsieur Vidocq…what an
honor
!”

“You’re too kind, my friend.”

“Oh, my! Oh, this is—see here, Monsieur, I’ve got this brother. Been having a spot of wife trouble.”

“Gone missing, has she?”

“
Catting,
more like. Was thinking one of your boys could follow her round, catch her mid-
thrust,
know what I’m saying….”

“Mm.” Vidocq gives the matter a juridical pause. “I’ll tell you what. Have him come round next week. Mind he asks for me in person, eh?”

“Oh, Monsieur, my whole family is in your debt. Eternally.” Grinning, he claps his hands to his cheeks. “I can’t wait to tell my wife! The great Vidocq!”

The glow of his regard follows us all the way through the city gates, and it leaves Vidocq looking not so much flushed as
chaffed,
like a bull swiping its tail at a fly. For a full minute, he refuses to meet our eyes.

“Well,” he says at last. “I saved myself thirty sous in bribes.”

Then, rapping absently on the ceiling, he calls up to Goury.

“Headquarters!” Followed by this scarcely audible afterthought: “Please.”

T
HE BLOOD
DOES
come off my hand, thanks to a toothbrush (supplied by Coco-Lacour) and a liberal application of Windsor soap. Monsieur Tepac won’t scrub off so easily. The memory, I mean, of his skin, flapping like a mouth—the pulse of his blood through the crevices of my fingers. Another man’s life, yes, passing through mine….

“Listen, Hector.”

With a quiet cuff to the jaw, Vidocq jars me back.

“We’re going to send you back home in a cab, all right? But before you go, I need to give you Charles’ new identity. I’m going to give it to you
once,
and I need you to plaster it right in that noggin of yours, can you do that?”

In an instant, the old narrative—Tepac, Agatha, Saint-Cloud—gives way to the new. Charles Rapskeller is now the natural son of the Vicomte de Saint-Amand de Faral (by way of a chambermaid whose skirt caught fire one afternoon within the Vicomte’s reach). The old hedgehog has at last succumbed to a heart inflammation, and in the absence of legitimate heirs, his estate (if not his title) passes to Charles, who curtails his religious instruction in Strasbourg to hasten toward Paris. On the westward-bound stage, he encounters—me—returning in glory from my…

“Scrofula symposium,” says Vidocq. “In Reims.”

Charles confesses he has nowhere to stay, and I urge him to take a room at my mother’s, where the rent is low but the tone high.

“But if he’s coming into money,” I say, “shouldn’t he be staying somewhere…”

“Nicer? Yes, but the money hasn’t quite
landed,
has it? Last-minute wrinkles, a long-lost nephew in the Massif Central, nothing serious. Lawyers will have it smoothed out in a matter of weeks.”

Clicking his tongue, he counts five twenty-franc pieces into my palm.

“Living expenses, Hector. Courtesy of the Prefecture. Use ’em well and keep a good ledger, will you? I don’t want those damned bookkeepers up my ass.”

“But what about Charles?”

“What about him?”

“Somebody’s bound to ask him questions….”

“Well,” says Vidocq, with a thin smile, “that would only be a problem if he had a fucking brain. As it is, the only thing I’ve ever heard him confess to is his own name. He’ll be fine. And if folks get curious, tell ’em he was dropped by the midwife.”

I
N MY MOTHER’S
case, the only thing I have to mention is the entirely fictional name of the Vicomte de Saint-Amand de Faral. This produces at first a flinching and then a ripening. By the time Charles has tendered her a bow and dropped three gold pieces in her hand—gaily, as if they were marbles—she is extending her hand in her best chatelaine fashion.

“Any friend of Hector’s, Monsieur Rapskeller, is doubly welcome in this home. And how fortunate! You’ve arrived just in time for supper. Charlotte, my dear! A setting for our new guest, please. And perhaps some ices for dessert….”

No one gives a rap where I’ve been. Even Charlotte, who normally peppers me with questions if I’m gone so much as an hour, has something else on her mind when she beckons me toward her just before dinner.

“Oh, Monsieur Hector! What a love he is!”

“Who?”

“Your friend! He came in just now, the dear, and asked if he could help set table. When he doesn’t even know where a fork goes! Or a spoon. Oh, he was quite hopeless, but still he tried, didn’t he?” She gives me a nod of boundless sagacity. “You can
always
tell a gentleman, Monsieur Hector. Blood will
out
.”