The Black Tower (3 page)

He pays me no mind, he’s too busy dragging his hands across his face—and taking Bardou’s face right with it.

And why stop there? Why not yank the white hair straight off his head, like a bird molting in a single stark second?

There he stands, the brazen nestling. Hair: a damp sward of chestnut. Mouth: wryly puckered. Grayish blue eyes presiding over a voluptuous nose. And, most troubling of all, the faintest trace of a scar on his upper right lip.

“You should—you should be aware,” I stammer. “There’s a guardhouse. Not two blocks away.”

The stranger smiles into the handkerchief that is even now smeared with the remains of Bardou, and in a suave and strange voice, he says: “Four.”

“Pardon?”

“
Four
blocks,” he insists, with a priest’s patience. “Corner of Cho-lets and Saint-Hubert. We can go there right now if you like.”

And then comes the most remarkable transformation of all. He straightens. No. That doesn’t begin to describe it. He
grows
. As though he’s suddenly discovered another five inches of spinal column and is unfurling it to a previously unguessed length. Before my eyes, the tiny old cripple from the street corner has become a strapping man of five and six. Square and proud and blunt, built along geological lines, with thick strata of muscle bleeding into outcroppings of fat—and the fat somehow bleeding back into muscle, so that he remains an indissoluble unit, a thing of bestial power, shaking you down to your larynx.

“I must ask you to leave this house right now,” I say. “You have—you have presumed far enough on my charity….”

There may be a tremor in my voice, but I wouldn’t know. I can only hear the stranger’s dry muttering undertone:

“Call that a macaroon…paving stone, more like it…what does he think he’s…” And then rising to his own declamation: “Christ, don’t you have something to wash it down with?”

His eyes light on a bottle of half-drunk wine on the buffet. Wrenching the cork free, he grabs a glass from the china cabinet, holds it skeptically to the light (eczema spots of dirt appear from nowhere, as though he’s called them into being), and then decants the wine with great care into the glass, running his truffle nose round the rim.

“Better,” he says, after a couple of sips. “Beaune, is it? That’s not half bad.”

And me, I’m…looking for weapons. Amazing how few come to hand. A couple of butter knives. A candlestick. Maybe Charlotte left the corkscrew in the drawer? How long would it take to find? How long to…

But every last calculation ceases the moment he says:

“Please, Dr. Carpentier. Have a seat.”

J
UST LIKE THAT
, he’s disarmed me. And for one excellent reason: He has called me
Doctor
.

In these early days of the Restoration, no one thinks me worthy of that title, least of all me. And so, even as I lower myself into one of the dining chairs, I am
rising
toward that
Doctor
. Striving, yes, to be worthy.

“Well now,” I say. “You know
my
name, and I have not yet had the honor of—of being introduced.”

“No, it’s true,” he concedes.

He’s on the prowl now—sniffing, inspecting—compromising everything he touches. The rectangular fruitwood table with its matted surface. The clouded, chipped carafes. The scorch marks on the ivory lampshade. Everything, under his touch, gives off a puff of meanness.

“Aha!” he cries, running his finger down a stack of blue-bordered plates. “Made in Tournai, weren’t they? Don’t look so ashamed, Doctor. There’s nothing like convict labor to keep the porcelain cheap.”

“Monsieur. I believe I have already begged the honor of knowing your name.”

His merry eyes rest on me for a second. “You have, indeed, and I do apologize. Perhaps you know of a man called…”

And here his fingers form a bud round his mouth, and the name flowers forth, like a shower of pollen.

“Vidocq.”

He waits, with great confidence, for the dawning in my eyes.

“You mean—oh, he’s that
policeman
sort of fellow, isn’t he?”

His smile dips down, his eyes shrink. “
Policeman
sort of fellow. And Napoleon is just a soldier sort of fellow. Voltaire told a good joke. Honestly, Doctor, if you can’t get things in their right scale, I despair of you.”

“No, I don’t—I mean he locks up thieves, doesn’t he? He gets written up in the papers.”

A grandiloquent shrug. “The papers write what they like. If you want to know about Vidocq, ask the scoundrels who tremble at his name. They’ll write you whole tomes, Doctor.”

“But what has Vidocq to do with anything?”

“Vidocq is me.”

It has the air of afterthought the way he says it. As though, having breathed the name into the air, he need lay only the gentlest claim on it. And this is more declarative than if he’d shouted the news to the chandeliers.

“Well, that’s all very well,” I say, folding my arms across my chest. “But do you have any papers?”

“Listen to him now! Papers! Please, Doctor-eating-off-your-convict-made-china, tell me why I need papers.”

“Why, you come in here….” I’m amazed to find my anger rising in direct proportion to his. “You
barge
in here, Monsieur Whoever You Are, with your little tricks and your
faux
stump, and you say, ‘
Voilà!
Vidocq!’ and expect me to believe it. Why should I? How can I be sure you’re who you say you are?”

He mulls it over. And then, with some regret, informs me:

“You can’t.”

It is a good lesson to get out of the way. Eugène François Vidocq, if so he is, will not be held to the same empirical standards as the rest of the world. Take him at face value or go to hell.

“Very well,” I say. “If you’re this Vidocq fellow, tell me where Bardou is.”

“Having a lovely week, I assure you, with the Bernadine sisters. Tending to their melons. I think you won’t find him eager to return to his street corner, Doctor.”

“But why would you go to such lengths in the first place? Taking his place on the corner, dressing like him,
looking
—”

“Well, now.” The stranger leans into the table. “If a hunter is tracking prey, Doctor, he must take care not to be seen.”

“But who is the prey?”

“Why, you.”

And in that moment, I twitch my head to the side, and there, in front of the settee, lie my empty boots and my half-read newspaper.

“And why should you have any call to hunt me?” I ask.

Except I already know.

Eulalie
.

With distressing speed, the writ scrolls out in my head. Eulalie and her law clerk…fencing stolen plate…captured by the gendarmes…
we’ll let you off this time if you give up your mastermind
…and who better to give up than poor little Hector? Won’t he do anything for Eulalie—
still
? Won’t he go to La Force for her?

And back from my shriveled clod of heart comes the answer:
yes
.

“It’s absurd,” I say. “I’ve done—what could I have—”

“Now now,” he says, working the crick out of his neck. “If there’s interrogating to do, you really should leave it to me. That’s what they pay me for, you know. Let me see….” He gulps down another draft of wine, swipes his arm across his lips. “You could start by telling me what a certain Monsieur Chrétien Leblanc wanted with you.”

“I don’t know anyone named Leblanc.”

He smiles softly. “You’re quite sure about that, Doctor?”

“As sure as I can be, yes.”

“Well then, it’s a very funny business. Because I’m here to tell you that Monsieur Leblanc knows
you
.”

Fumbling once more in his shirtfront cache, he draws out—not another arm, no—a piece of butcher’s paper. Flecked with wax, stiff with grease. And from this corrupted surface, the words leap up: hot, black.

DR. HECTOR CARPENTIER

No. 18, Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève

He’s behind me now, the terrible stranger, watching me read, wreathing my neck with his breath. The air grows confused with wine.

“That is your address, is it not, Doctor?”

“Of course.”

“And that is your name?”

“Yes.”

“And I believe you have the honor of being the only Dr. Carpentier in all of Paris. Don’t think I didn’t check,” he adds, cuffing me gently on the ear. “Damnit, though, I’m still hungry as the devil. Anything else to eat? That
fucking
macaroon…”

A moment later, I hear him rustling in the pantry, arraigning each article as he finds it. “Chestnuts have seen better days…. Pear preserves? I think
not.
…Cheese looks all right, except…well,
that’s
a scary purple, you don’t see
that
particular…”

“This is ridiculous!” I call after him. “I’ve never received a Monsieur Leblanc here! I’m not—”

Not even a practicing physician
…

But pride cuts me short. Or else it’s the sight of the stranger, reemerging with a potato in his mouth. A
raw
potato, crammed like an apple into a trussed pig.

“Well, Doctor.” He grinds out a hunk of its hard flesh, mashes it into submission. “We’re certainly—in agreement on—on one point. You couldn’t have—received Monsieur…”

“Leblanc.”

“Leblan
c,” he echoes, through whirling pellets of tuber. “For the simple reason…he never made it here.”

“Well, then, why are you bothering me? Why don’t you question
him
?”

Another hunk of potato. Another round of gnashing.

“Because he’s…mpxxcchsik….”

That’s how it comes out, I’m afraid. He puts up a single finger—
Wait, please
—but it’s a good long minute before his larynx breaks free.

“Because he’s
dead
.”

The taste of the raw potato must finally breach his senses, for all of a sudden, it comes sluicing out in a fast brown stream—right into the waiting carafe.

“Thought it was a bit riper,” he mutters.

And my first thought is, yes: Mother. Must clean up the mess before Mother gets here. I’m already reaching for the carafe when he intercepts me.

“Three blocks from here.” (His sausage fingers curled round the carafe handle.) “That’s where the unfortunate Monsieur Leblanc died. Not too far from the Université where you spend so much of your days.”

He pushes the carafe away, takes one long step toward me.

“Monsieur Leblanc was killed on the way to seeing you, Doctor, and I’m counting on you to tell me why.” He brushes a pebble of damp potato from my coat. “If it’s a question of which confessor you’d prefer, I should tell you I’m a much easier touch than God. At the very worst, you’ll get a few years of state-supported education in a cell of your choice. Think of it as an exercise in character building.
Come
now, tell Vidocq all about it. Before”—and here he gives me the most knowing of smiles—“before Mama Carpentier comes home and gets her little white feathers ruffled.”

He steps back and contemplates me for a moment. Then, wheeling round, he upends the wine bottle. A single crimson drop touches down on the dining table’s surface.

“Oops, we’re out! Be a good man and fetch us another, would you?”

I
T’S THE WAY
of the human conscience, I suppose. A man suggests you’re guilty of something, and the more you say you’re not, the more it sounds like you are. The voice rings of tin, the heart rattles like a fistful of beans, and every
no
sounds like a
yes,
until you can actually feel this
yes,
inching onto the parapet of your lip…when your interlocutor grabs the bottle of Burgundy—the one you fetched for him not half an hour ago—and peers into its jungle green interior and, in a voice tinctured with resignation, announces:

“Out again.”

Then he waggles his finger at the glass of wine sitting unmolested before you. The one you haven’t had the stomach to drink (thanks to him).

“Are you—do you—”

And, seeing you shrug, he hoists it straight to his mouth. A long leak of satiated breath and then a belch, fruiting the air. He looks down at himself. He sees, as if for the first time, Bardou’s rags. He draws out a watch.

“Time to go.”

For
both
of you to go, that’s what he means. He is moderately surprised to find you remaining in your chair.

“I need to show you something,” he says.

And still you don’t move, and rather than explaining himself further, he lifts his voice into a gently mocking register.

“Maybe you need to leave a note first? In case she worries?”

And here’s the damnable part of it. You
were
going to leave a note. And all you can do now is squeeze yourself into your boots and stare at the newspaper still lying on the floor and think (you can’t help it):
This is all that will be left of me.

Your legacy: a half-read journal, a half-finished monograph. But you can’t do more than pause because he’s already swung the front door open and stepped out on the stoop with the air of a man surveying his estates. He’s waiting for you.

“Coming,” you mutter. “Coming, damn you.”

L
ATER TODAY
, I
WILL
reflect on the curious fact that he came alone. No other officers, no squad of gendarmes to subdue me. Not even a weapon, as far as I can tell. He’d watched me long enough to know: I could be handled.

And was he wrong? Here I am, climbing without a second thought into the carriage waiting round the corner. Waiting, benumbed, as he barks the address to the driver above.

“Quai du Marché!”

He pulls the curtains over the windows and yanks up his sleeves—only to remember he doesn’t have sleeves, only Bardou’s damp rags, which cling to him now in the form of an apology.

The cab must recently have carried a wedding party, for there’s a scrap of lace caught in the door and a scattering of hothouse orange blossoms and the snapped-off handle of a Japanese fan. And overlaying everything a ripening scent, like something that would waft from a tannery.
His
smell, I suddenly realize.

“Where are we going?” I ask.

“Paying a little call at the morgue, that’s all.” He smiles faintly, shakes his head. “You still don’t believe me, Doctor.”

“No, I—”

“You don’t think I’m
him,
do you? Not another word, damn you! Here!”

Into my lap drops a round pasteboard card, wedged between two pieces of glass. On one side: the arms of France and the words
S
URVEILLANCE ET
V
IGILANCE
. On the other: a single surname, VIDOCQ, in triumphally raised gold letters.

“Signed by the prefect himself,” he says dryly. “If that eases your mind, Dr. May-I-see-your-papers.”

It doesn’t, how could it? It only gives me leave, finally, to call him by that name. And still I hesitate.

Vidocq.
Say it, for Christ’s sake.
Eugène François Vidocq
. Come at it in pieces, if you must, syllable by syllable.
Vee. Dohk. Vee. Dohk
…

E
VEN IN THESE
early days of the Restoration, it is a famous name. It comes, you might say, with its own exclamation point. Terror of thieves! Scourge of crime! Bonaparte of the
barrières
!

Only a couple of years past forty, and yet he already drags behind him a full complement of legends. There are people, for instance, who swear they were at Denoyes’ cabaret the night he raided it. They remember him staring down a dance floor of knife-wielding thugs and, in a voice that resonated as far as the Bastille, ordering them to quit the premises. One man demurred and lost a finger. The rest obeyed without a murmur. (Vidocq chalked white crosses on the worst offenders as they passed so that the policemen waiting outside would know which to arrest.)

And what about the time he tracked down a thief, knowing only the color of the man’s curtains? Or when he waded right into a Tuileries reception and plucked a confidence man in the act of bowing to the King? Or captured the fearsome giant Sablin in Saint-Cloud while Sablin’s wife lay in the throes of labor? (Vidocq had enough time left over to catch the baby and to serve as godfather.)

One night, they say, he insinuated himself into a group of assassins stationed outside his very own door. Sat with them all night, they say, waiting for that accursed Vidocq to show up, then joined them in their despondent trek home—where, naturally, he’d stationed a tribe of gendarmes. (His reward was a tumble in the sheets with the ringleader’s mistress.)

Legend has it that if you give Vidocq two or three of the details surrounding a given crime, he will give you back the man who did it—before you’ve had time to blink. More than that, he’ll describe the man for you, give you his most recent address, name all his known conspirators, tell you his favorite cheese. So compendious is his memory that a full half of Paris imagines him to be omniscient and wonders if his powers weren’t given him by Satan.

And yet he is doing God’s work, is he not? To hear the papers tell it, Vidocq, in the space of a few years, has sent hundreds of malefactors to prison. The ones that remain abroad cross themselves at the sound of his name. If a robbery falls apart at the last minute, it’s Vidocq’s doing. If a credulous old widow manages, against all odds, to keep her jewels, blame it on that scoundrel Vidocq. If an innocent man lives to see another morrow, who’s behind it? The accursed Vidocq, that’s who.

All it takes some nights is a shift in the wind’s direction, a creak on the stair, and the name flies like an oath from their throats.

Vidocq. Vidocq is abroad.

A
ND NOW THIS
same Vidocq is pounding on the roof of our cab, as if to gouge out a straighter path for his words.

“Driver! A little faster, will you? Oh, and don’t forget to stop at Mabriole’s bakery. I want to show this bastard what a macaroon tastes like.”

Folding his arms across the swell of his belly, he regards me with a look of naked skepticism.

“You’re not a fainter, are you?”

“No, of course not.”

“Well, that’s a relief. You look like one.”

I’
VE ALWAYS THOUGHT
of the morgue as the fullest realization of democracy. Anyone can enter: man, woman, child; dead, alive. You don’t even have to give your name. When Vidocq and I arrive a little after two, I catch only the faintest glimmer of a concierge. I’m already moving, like everyone else, toward the glassed-in chamber that opens off the main hall.

Through the panes, three biers slope toward us like grain chutes. On each bier, a body. To be kept here another twenty-four hours and then, if no one claims it, shipped straight to the medical schools, ten francs a cadaver. And so hundreds of still-living souls crowd round this window every day to keep their friends and relations off the dissecting table—or else to enjoy the spectacle of someone else’s death. I’ve seen more English tourists in the morgue than in the Louvre.

“Come,” says Vidocq.

He takes me by the elbow, draws me down a corridor. We pass into a room with yellow calico curtains and a horsehair settee and…and, most troubling of all, a pianoforte. I reach for middle C. It pings back, in perfect tune.

“What do you want?” Vidocq grumbles. “The morgue keeper’s family has to pass the time, don’t they?”

We enter a room with no flowers, no pianos. No furniture, not even a window. Only a black marble slab, draped in white cambric, and two candles, blazing in sconces.

Vidocq grabs one of the candles, walks to the head of the table, and peels back the sheet to reveal the slumbering head beneath.

“I don’t believe you two have met,” he says, in a voice dry as shavings. “Dr. Carpentier? Monsieur Chrétien Leblanc.”