The Black Tower (22 page)

T
HE STORM PASSES
quickly enough, but we’re too wet to do anything but go home. There we find clothes and a fire already blazing and a baguette and two cups of hot, bitter coffee and even a good-humored reproof from my mother.

“Goodness’ sakes. Gentlemen should always carry umbrellas.”

By now, Charles’ customary good nature has been chaffed into something heavy and inward. Every question invokes only silence, and Charlotte, in the act of spooning cabbage onto his plate, feels compelled to ask after his health.

“You seem a bit quiet is all,” she adds.

“Perhaps the Vicomte’s estate has uncovered new heirs,” suggests Nankeen.

Charles, knowing nothing of vicomtes or estates, fails to rise to the bait. His movements, his expressions grow steadily more listless, until at last he sets down his knife and fork entirely.

“It is a great puzzle,” says Rosbif. “Thank the good Lord we have in our midst an esteemed
physician
. Your diagnosis, Monsieur Hector?”

For several long seconds, I study my plate. Then, in a voice of newfound authority:

“Monsieur Charles needs only to shake off his cares. I propose to help him.”

“How?”

“By taking him to the Palais-Royal,” I announce. “We shall leave in two hours.”

L
ATE AT NIGHT
, the former palace of the Duc d’Orléans glows like a pyre. Floods of light, streaming up from the foundations, sweep over an army of Parisians, captured in the act of choosing sins. Will they go down to the cellar for the dancing dogs and the blind ballad singer? Or will they stride along the ground-floor arcades, sampling snuffboxes and alabaster clock-cases and obscene etchings of milkmaids?

Or will they go still higher, to the glittering realm of the dining rooms? Thirty years ago, it’s said, Camille Desmoulins leapt onto one of the café tables here and declared revolution. These days, you’ll seldom find anyone leaving his chair. Wives sit inches away from prostitutes; tradesmen buy drinks for adventurers; rogues and swindlers twine their arms like lovers.

And the wine flows, though the intoxication here is something more general. Something to do with being alive, I think.

And in the Café des Milles Colonnes, the champagne flows.

“Mm,” says Charles, drawing in the fumes. “It tickles and burns at the same time….”

I call back the waiter and order another magnum and, for good measure,
pâté de foie aux pruneaux
and cold
boulettes
and two apple tarts and…I forget what else. We eat and drink in the gleam of all those glassed columns, watching romances bloom and die—until we are accosted by two women in low-cut silk ball dresses, who look at us as though we’re every bit as interesting as what we’re watching.

“We were thinking you gentlemen might care for company.”

“By all means,” mumbles Charles, half rising from his seat and then crashing back down.

My appointed companion is perhaps twenty-two, with rough freckled hands and brown eyes shining over a thin, pickled mouth.

“Virginie,” she tells me.

“I was just going to guess that.”

The woman who claims Charles is named Berthe. She has a granite head and an air of interrupted industry, as though she’s left a pile of dirty laundry in the coffee room.

“No thanks,” she says, pushing away her glass. “Champagne makes me burp.”

If a human being has ever said anything funnier than that…well, Charles has yet to hear it.

“Burp,” he gasps.
“Burp.”

Virginie’s fingers scuttle up my arm.

“My, aren’t you handsome?”

“Ladies,” I say, rising unsteadily to my feet. “Shall we scatter?”

I fully expect us to head upstairs to one of the houses of tolerance, but Virginie takes us straight down to the garden and out the gate.

“Aren’t we…?”

“Bit of a problem with our licenses,” she answers. “Never mind, we’ve got lovely rooms not four blocks off.”

To my right, I see Charles listing east to west, with only Berthe’s stout arm to keep him vertical. By the time we reach the corner of the Rue Droit-Mur, he is leaning almost all of his weight into her, and a song is pouring out of his throat, high and raucous:

“There’s a chérie I know

And her boat I shall row

Frontward, backward

Any way she’ll go—”

 

“No more,” I whisper in his ear.

“And it’s in…out…

Lord, how she shouts!

In…out…”

 

“Shut up!” hisses Berthe. “You’ll get the gendarmes on our tail!”

“You remind me of a goat I used to have,” he says.

“Thanks very much, I’m sure.”

“Do you have playing cards where you live?”

“I should think so,” she answers vaguely.

“Ninepins?”

“Oh, ninepins.”

We turn down the Petite Rue Picpus and come to a crackled white plaster housefront, wreathed in ivy, with a single night lamp burning in the window.

“Just three floors to climb,” says Virginie.

With Charles lurching and stumbling, it seems to take nearly half a day. As soon as he’s shown his room, he falls onto the cot bedstead with the weight of a hundred men and goes directly to sleep.

“Not much of a drinker, is he?” says Berthe.

Shrugging, she draws over a chair to the room’s single candle and takes up a square of embroidery, blue and puckered.

“Look here,” I say. “He’ll be all right, won’t he?”

“What, you think I’m going to
wake
him? This is the first break I’ve had all day.”

“But he doesn’t like being left alone. He likes having company when he sleeps.”

“Dearie, he’s fine,” murmurs Virginie, tugging on my arm.

V
IDOCQ ONCE THEORIZED
that I hadn’t been fucked since Waterloo. In fact, I’ve had enough recent experience with prostitutes to recognize the advantages of Virginie. She has, to begin with, teeth. Her face doesn’t resolve into harsh grooves the moment you touch her. Through it all, she retains the same air of benign encouragement she had when she sat down at our café table.

One thing I
have
forgotten: how stirring a woman’s humidity can be. A whole continent waiting to be claimed, yes, and I can only be grateful that my little explorer shakes off the slumber that has seized the rest of me. In the exhaustion that follows there’s a seam of satisfaction, as if I’ve been clearing away brush.

“How much do I—?”

“Oh, no hurry about that,” says Virginie.

At some point, I realize I am embracing not her but the sheets where she lay. As these are every bit as pliant, I drop straight to sleep. And in no time, I’m hustled back to Saint-Cloud. Once more the Grand Cascade has kicked into life, and Monsieur Tepac lies pale and heavy before me, blood flowing freely from his side.

Gathered round us, in a loose triptych, are more watchers: Vidocq, in his best finery, and Charles, wearing a lopsided crown, and Tepac’s assassin, Herbaux. There is about all of them a sort of hesitation—they’d like to help but don’t know how—and blood flows through the flap of Tepac’s skin and jets from the Grand Cascade and falls from the sky.

I wake, with shreds of Saint-Cloud trailing after me. I reach for the candle by the bed, thrust it into the darkness. In the doorway, a tall shadowy figure stands framed.

The man raises his own candle, and in the pool of our joined light, I behold him. No dream, after all. Herbaux, flesh and blood.

T
HE THING IS
, if you’d asked me
before
what Herbaux looked like, I doubt I could have told you. Somehow, without my knowing it, those features imprinted themselves on me. The hero’s jaw, tapering into a cleft chin. The boxer’s nose (broken at least twice in its career), and the satyr eyes, too wideset for comfort, coming at you from every possible angle.

One thing I didn’t recall from Saint-Cloud: the
scale
of him. The very doorframe peels back to accommodate him.

“Get up,” he says.

This is harder to do than I would have guessed. Champagne has rotted my head from the inside out.

“May I—put my clothes on?”

“Your trousers,” he says. “That’s all you’ll need.”

I move slowly, not from any strategy but simply to slow my heart. For several seconds, my gaze lingers on the window—until I hear Herbaux’s measured tone:

“I wouldn’t. It’s a four-story drop. Now let’s go wake your friend, shall we?”

“But I came alone.”

“’Course you did.”

He grabs me by the back of my neck and, with very little effort, flings me down the hallway. I land about three feet short of Charles’ door.

“Go fetch,” says Herbaux.

Nothing about what happens next is planned. With one hand, I’m turning the knob. With the other…I’m grabbing Herbaux’s candle and driving it toward his face. A grunt of pain, and then the candle clatters to the ground and Herbaux staggers back. I plant a foot in his midsection and send him sprawling onto his back. Then I fling the door open and slam it after me.

“Charles!”

My eyes, adapting slowly to the darkness, find him exactly where I left him—on the cot, breathing in long slow drafts.

By now Herbaux has recovered himself enough to hurl his bulk against the door. Again and again he comes, and as I press myself against the door, it seems to shrivel between us, as though it were aging before our eyes.

“Charles! For God’s sake, wake up!”

My feet, scrambling for a purchase, knock against a white porcelain pitcher. With a single swing of my arm, I send its contents flying toward him. At once, the room is filled with an acrid stench, and Charles bolts upright in bed.

“Did I piss myself?” he cries.

“It’s all right. Listen, now….” How calm I sound to myself! “I need you to do something for me, all right? I need you to get up right now and bring that dresser
here
. Can you do that?”

His faculties are even muddier than mine, but after several seconds of groaning, he manages to drag the dresser across the wooden floor. And with his help, I’m able to wedge it against the door.

“Now I need you to
push
. Can you do that?”

“Like this?” he asks.

“Harder. As
hard
as you can.”

He leans into the door—and is stunned to feel it buck back.

“Someone’s out there,” he says.

“Yes, that’s right. We’re playing a
game
. If we can keep the man on the other side from coming
in,
he’ll”—a second or two of wild groping—“he’ll make us breakfast.”

Clouds of nausea pass over Charles’ face. “Bit early for that, isn’t it?”

“Just keep pushing.”

And he does. Even after the door begins to splinter beneath Herbaux’s weight, he doggedly applies the counterforce. I can hear the sounds of his exertion as I sprint to the window and call down into the darkness below….

“Help!”

No answering call, just the echo of my own voice, bouncing off the gutters and rubbish heaps and grease drains.

Then I see, espaliered on the building face below me, a network of lead waste pipes, branching out in a hundred elbows, like an old grapevine.

“I think…we’re going to lose,” gasps Charles.

“Just a few more seconds!”

Scrambling now, I drag the cot away from the wall, wedge it against the dresser.

“All right,” I tell him. “On the count of three, we’re going to run to the window. One…two…”

The dresser gives way at once, but the cot holds fast. For now.

“This is the most fun part of all,” I say. “We’re going to climb down.”

“Down?”

“Yes, it’s all part of the game. First one to the ground gets a special prize.”

“I’m not sure….”

Behind us, another section of the door panel splinters apart.

“I’ll go first,” I say. “Then you can follow….”

“Oh no, you don’t!”

Without a second’s more hesitation now, he sets his foot on the first length of pipe and, finding it secure, lowers himself to the next level. Three seconds later, he’s vanished.

I follow close behind. There’s no more than a sliver of moon to light the way, and my legs are heavy and my hands numb. My eye sockets feel as if someone is pressing a thumb against them. And looking up, I can see Herbaux’s candle, lit once more, weaving circles in the night.

I take a long breath. I lower my leg, and another elbow of pipe is miraculously waiting to greet it.

By now, I’ve lost all sense of where Charles is. I could almost imagine I’m alone in the world—until my bare foot wiggles into a strange niche, not part of the original architecture. There is an answering squeal, then a chivvying at my toes. And then they’re all over me.

An ocean of rats, red-eyed with outrage. They scuttle through my hair and shrill in my ear and fasten on my limbs. Groaning, I shake them off, but more come from every quadrant: silken fur, rasping teeth. And as I slide down the building face, swinging from pipe to pipe, they follow like a thousand reprimands.

It may be that I leap that final distance, but it feels more as if I’m
riding
those rats, as one might ride a wave. We breach together in the alley below, and we lie there for a while, stunned and spent.

I get to my feet. From behind me comes a light, high mewling.

“Ohh,” says Charles, pressing his knees to his chin. “Oh, God, rats…God…”

“Never mind,” I tell him. “They’re gone.”

Not a sound in the alleyway, not even a breath of wind. Dimly, I register a brindled dog…a skein of fish bones…a heap of fermenting rubbish, exhaling vapor…and somewhere in the distance, a tassel of amber light.

And then, from nowhere, a figure comes between us and the light.

“Pardon, Monsieur!” calls Charles. “Do you think you might—”

“There you are,” says Herbaux.

Not an ounce of civility in his voice now.

“Listen,” I say. “We can
pay
you. Between us, we’ve got quite a lot of money.”

“I’m paid well enough.”

“Then let my friend go,” I say. “He’s done nothing.”

“Oh, that’s the hell of it, Doctor. He
has
.”

And then, from the folds of his peacoat, Herbaux withdraws a pistol.

“Is this part of the game, too?” asks Charles as I shove him behind me.

“Doesn’t matter to me which of you goes first,” calls Herbaux. “All cats are gray at night.”

Very slowly, very carefully, he points the muzzle straight at my heart. He cocks the pistol. He squeezes one eye shut….

And then, confoundingly, one of his knees buckles.

And the other.

With a great roar, he topples to his side.

Something stirs now in the shadows behind him. A crouched figure: shapeless, except for a luminous length of razor. This figure rises now, swallowing the space so lately vacated by Herbaux.

“Who are you?” I call out.

Calmly, the figure sheathes the blade and steps round the fallen man’s writhing body.

“I demand to know who you are!”

“What?” comes the dry reply. “No
thank-you
?”

A woman’s voice. That’s enough in itself to stun me into silence. Charles, though, finds only encouragement. He peers down at Herbaux’s crumpled form and inquires:

“What did you do to him?”

“The hamstring,” she answers, shrugging. “Saw it done to a racehorse once.”

“Bitch,” hisses Herbaux, attempting to rise.

She kicks him back down. “Quiet! Or I’ll tell your friends you got brought down by a girl.”

“He’s only mad because he lost,” Charles explains. “He has to make us breakfast now.”

Half laughing, the woman whips off her cloak and, in a startling gesture, offers it to me. For the first time, I’m conscious of my naked torso, speckled with cuts and bruises and bites. I’m conscious of something else, too: the lining of her cloak. A bright scarlet. The color of a cock’s comb.

“You,”
I say, dully. “You’ve been following us round town. Following us for days.”

“What if I have? You didn’t really think he’d let you go running across Paris all by yourselves?”

No need to ask who
he
is. Vidocq, like God, requires no antecedent.

“He’s no fool, after all,” says the woman. “Whatever else he is. But I don’t believe you recognize me, Doctor.”

Numbly, I shake my head.

“I’m Jeanne-Victoire. Arnaud Poulain’s girl.”

Quickly, the coordinates reassemble themselves. The thief who robbed Leblanc. That terrible apartment in the Marais. Rags everywhere and stolen shoes and broken boards…and there, resting on a chafing dish….

“A
baby,
” I blurt.

It’s too dark to see her eyes, but the slight recoil of her head…that much I see.

“She’s with my brother now. In Issy. She likes it there.”

From under her scarlet cloak, she draws a silver whistle and puts it to her lips. Straightaway, we hear the rumble of answering boots.

“The gendarmes’ll be here in a minute,” she says. “Go with them to the guardhouse, Doctor, and maybe they’ll fetch you some new clothes, eh? As for
me,
I’m going to catch some winks. You boys are enough exercise for one day.”

She’s halfway down the alley before I think to call after her.

“Wait! Mademoiselle! What should we tell….”

She coils herself back round.

“Tell your master that Jeanne-Victoire has held up her end. Now it’s
his
turn.”