The Black Tower (6 page)

I
T’S NEARLY SIX
in the evening when Vidocq brings me home. He has borrowed from Allard an overcoat with a triple cape. From a secondhand clothes dealer, he has acquired (without in any obvious way paying for it) a hat, broken near the band. He has run some spit through his hair.

What better signal that we are returning to civilization? To my own, my native clime, though I no longer recognize it so well. I turn the corner of the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, I pass the old condemned well where Bardou used to sit, I hear the rhythmic grunts of Monsieur Tripot’s pigs, running loose in the gutters. I stand on the front step of my very own home, and still I can’t help thinking I’ve taken a wrong turn.

But then the door is swung open by Charlotte, parched and freckled, and there can no longer be any doubt.

“He’s home!” she calls back down the hall. “Madame Carpentier, he’s home!”

Mother is hanging back by the drawing room doors: a shivery black spectacle in her tulle cap and woolen petticoat. The skirt has been refashioned from an old dress. The slippers have long pulled away from her feet, they seem bound to her now only by habit. Her hands form a funnel round her mouth. She says:

“Oh.”

“Monsieur Hector.” Charlotte is charging toward me. “Are you—”

“He is quite unharmed, ladies,” answers Vidocq, stepping out from behind. “As you can see.”

I will never be certain which part of him Mother fastens onto first. The shabby hat? The tufts of spit-slicked hair or the bullying breast? I tend to think it’s the confounding bulk of him—the
hole
he makes in his surroundings.

“I was about to send for the police,” she says in a thin voice.

“But there was no need, Madame! The police have already sent for your Hector.” Vidocq takes the back of my neck in a loose, proprietary grip. “This very afternoon, your son has demonstrated exceptional mettle in an inquiry of unspeakable urgency.”

“Inquiry?”

“He would be only too glad to tell you, I’m sure, but he has been sworn to secrecy. By the Prefect himself.”

“By the—”

“Oh, he’s got a brilliant mind, your son. All of Paris seems to chant his praise! Just the other evening, you know, I was passing an hour or two in the library of the Duchesse de Duras, and she said to me—perhaps you know the Duchess, Madame?—she pulled me by the sleeve, and in that charmingly raspy voice of hers, she said,
‘You must introduce me to the marvelous Dr. Carpentier!’
”

It is those last two words that change the tenor of the conversation. For Mother is even less accustomed to hearing me called Doctor than I am. Her mouth shrinks into a black line.

Vidocq pauses to puzzle out his offense. “A thousand pardons, Madame. I neglected to introduce myself. I am Vidocq.”

It’s quite something, the bow he tenders her. Not the gently toppling head of your average Parisian gentleman but something explosive and battle-bred. (I will later learn he was a sergeant-major.) It all but finishes off poor Charlotte, who is rubbing her ears in wonder.

“This is your daughter, Madame?” asks Vidocq.

“Our maid,” says Mother, in a voice stiff as whalebone.

“Ah, I see loveliness is a prerequisite of living
chez
Carpentier.” His lips graze the knuckles of the young woman’s hand. “What pretty fingers. Like precious corals strewn across a beach.”

Charlotte’s face, I should say, is always a kind of mottled coral, from bending over fires and clambering up stairs. At this moment, though, something violet bleeds up through the strata of skin. Mother, no fool herself, steps forward and, in the tone used by elderly marquises with dustmen, thanks Vidocq for bringing her son home to her.

“Why, think nothing of it!” he cackles. “It was my dearest—”

“Good day, Monsieur.”

He’s still there when the door closes on him—scratching his ribs, twisting his mouth.

“So nice to make your acquaintance,” I hear him say from the other side.

There is nothing shining in Mother’s face, but there seldom is. I can recall her laughing only four times in my life. (Four times more than my father.) Hers is a face for storing time in. Even her limestone-colored eyes, which must once have been beautiful, seem layered with years in some precise and biologically determinable way, like a shelf of sedimentary rock.

“We had no idea where you were,” she says.

“I know.”

“You might have left a note.”

“I am very sorry, Mother.”

“As if I don’t have enough to do without wondering if you’re dead or dying or I don’t know what. As if I don’t…”

She seizes a shawl from the nearest hook, and her voice, when it comes back, is low and snappish, like something prodded out of its corner.

“Well, take your coat off, for goodness’ sake. Naturally, your boots are filthy. Never mind, there’s no time to brush them. Our guests are seated for dinner.”

F
ROM THE MOMENT
we first had to take in boarders, Mother persisted in calling them
guests
. Behind this affectation, I’ve always believed, lies a thin dry vein of hope. Guests
leav
e, don’t they?

Whereas the three young men crowded round our dining table give every evidence of staying. Forever, possibly. In the beginning, Mother had vowed never to take students because she had heard they eat too much bread. But in the Latin Quarter, you don’t get much choice in the matter. Students are as numerous as the stars, as ineradicable as rats.

These three arrived in a pack of their own: stout comrades from the École de Droit. They immediately took the liberty of calling my mother Mama, a name she loathes but feels obliged to answer to.
Their
names are unimportant. (I’ll forget them, anyway, as soon as I’m gone.) Let us call them by their defining traits, beginning at the bottom of the power chain with Lapin. Rabbity face, rabbity soul. Next, Rosbif, named for his favorite meat (too expensive to be served here) and for the way he dines on the flesh of others. Finish with Nankeen, named for the elephant-leg nankeen trousers he sports in the summer, with stirrups of rust-colored braid. The son of a Rouen magistrate, Nankeen is the wealthiest of our boarders, which means that, for 1,500 francs a year, he gets to sleep in my father’s old bedroom (with whomever he has brought back with him that evening). Also, he gets to take his coffee in the courtyard, beneath the lindens.

Tonight, the three students are engaged in the preprandial ritual of baiting Mother’s fourth tenant: a retired professor of botany, fully eight decades along. The students call him Father Time. This is not an honorific. Father Time wears a ragged necktie and polishes his shoes with egg yolk. For the last year, he has been selling off his orchid volumes, one by one, to pay the rent and even so is two months behind. Mother might have evicted him long ago, but he is an old friend of the family, although neither he nor my mother ever speaks of days past.

“Father Time!” shouts Rosbif. “You’ve got something in your beard, old boy.”

“What’d you—I didn’t quite—”

In addition to his other infirmities, Father Time is nearly deaf. He used to bring an ear trumpet to the table, but the students took to tossing croutons into it.

“There!” cries Rosbif. “I’ve got it! Why, I do believe it’s a grub. Imagine, gentlemen, a whole colony of fauna living in Father Time’s beard.”

“Call the exterminator,” says Lapin.

“No, too hasty, my friend! We must call in France’s greatest scientists. There are species here entirely unknown to man.”

“Charlotte,” says Mother, gently unfolding her napkin. “The pears look delicious.”

This is her way of changing a subject. It is also her way of cloaking her own economies, for she is most lavish in praising what has cost her the least. The pears, for instance, cost two liards apiece. The potatoes were bought (slightly rotten) for ten sous. The mutton she personally haggled down to a franc and fifty centimes. She will praise them in that order.

“Thank you, Madame.”

Charlotte’s voice is barely audible as she circuits the table. How distracted she is! She must still be feeling Vidocq’s lips on her hand. I watch her wandering out of the room, only to wander right back in. I watch her pour cream into Lapin’s wineglass. And when she tries to take my plate before I’ve even started eating, I finally have to tap her on the wrist.

She gives me a private grin, and I give her one back. Because I don’t know what she’s about to do.

“Monsieur Hector,” she announces, “has had quite the adventure today.”

One by one, the three students tilt up their faces, set their knives down. The room grows still.

Mother moves swiftly.

“Hector has been hounded for an entire afternoon,” she says, “by a perfectly dreadful man. Who smells of spirits and bear grease and I can’t even say what all else.”

A few more seconds pass as the students decide whether this resolves the question or merely suspends it. They are just reaching for their knives again when Charlotte’s stage whisper stops them in midmotion.

“Vidocq.”

I see the makings of a smile on Rosbif’s wine-tinctured lips.

“Not the scoundrel!” he cries.

“Why, he’s not!” Charlotte swats the back of his head with her apron. “He’s the terror of criminals everywhere, he’s—he’s the reason we can sleep with our throats bare.”

“Oh, that’s good! He’s the last man in the world I’d trust with my throat.”

“The very last,” agrees Lapin.

“My dearest Charlotte, has no one ever told you? Your precious Vidocq is nothing more than a petty criminal.”

“It’s a lie.”

“May God strike me down if it is. Why, I tell you he’s been a cherished guest at some of France’s finest penal institutions.”

An irked look wells out of Mother’s eyes. “That can’t be,” she says. “He’s some sort of police creature, isn’t he?”

“Creature,”
says Nankeen, adjusting the spectacles on his Greek nose. “How well you put it, Mama Carpentier. It’s the usual story, I’m afraid. A blackguard chafes at prison confinement and volunteers his services as police spy, a profession which demands only effrontery and a complete want of conscience. Small wonder Vidocq should prove so well suited to it.”

“I’ll tell you what I heard,” says Rosbif, chiming in. “Before he was done, he peached out every last one of his friends, just to curry favor with his new masters.”

“Peached out,” repeats Mother, squinting. “I don’t know what that means.”

“It means
betrayed,
Mama Carpentier.”

And then—from nowhere, it seems—a low smoky voice slides across the table.

“Last I heard, betraying criminals was a good thing.”

We turn and find Father Time mouthing into his plate. Unaware, maybe, that anything slipped out.

In a quiet voice, Nankeen asks:

“What was that?”

“Nothing.”

“I’m sorry, I thought I heard you speak.”

“It was nothing.”

“Are you quite sure?”

“Yes.”

Behind the screen of her napkin, Mother is whispering.

“Hector, is all this true?”

“I’ve no idea,” I mutter.

With a peal of triumph, I would almost call it joy, she cries:

“I knew there was something not right! Didn’t I, Charlotte?”

“And now,” says Nankeen, “this saintly Vidocq has clawed his way to the top of the police hierarchy. And if one required any more proof of how really cunning he is, one need only remark on the startling development that has been bruited in all the papers. This Vidocq, if you can believe it, has founded a brigade of plainclothes police. It is known as the Brigade de Sûreté, and it is composed entirely of thieves, deserters, and scoundrels—the human offal who have ever been his closest companions.” He smiles into his lace cuff. “One can’t help but admire the diabolical brazenness of the man. With the full consent of the Comte Anglès and Monsieur Henry, he has succeeded in blurring every last boundary between good and evil. It’s impossible anymore to tell the law enforcers from the law breakers.”

“From what I hear,” says Lapin, “he splits the crooks’ take with them. And when they won’t pay up, he pitches them in jail.”

“Oh, Vidocq is simply exemplary of his kind,” answers Nankeen. “Scientific studies have quite conclusively demonstrated that the criminal mind is incapable of being rehabilitated. You may dress up a rogue, you may give him a job. Drag him to mass, drive him down the Champs-Élysées. He will always revert to his old ways.” A note of tragedy floats into the monotone. “It’s incontrovertible, I’m afraid.”

“Hector,”
says Mother, once again whispering behind her napkin,
“if you ever allow that man in our house again, I don’t know what.”

“But he wasn’t…”

I’m about to say he wasn’t in the house. And then I’m stopped by the memory of him—
here
—bestriding this very chair. Swearing and glugging wine and spitting out macaroons and half-eaten potatoes. Just the thought of it tickles my lips apart. I think I may even be on the verge of laughter when I hear Nankeen’s voice, ever so faintly curdling.

“Monsieur Hector. You haven’t yet told us what this Vidocq fellow wanted with you.”

I clear my throat. I clear it again.

“I’m afraid I’m not at liberty.”

He doesn’t pursue the matter. He doesn’t need to. Rosbif and Lapin gladly take up the chase.

“Not at liberty, he says!”

“Come now, Monsieur Hector!”

“Must we drag it out of you?”

“The royal family needs a new physician, is that it?”

“Ha! Everyone knows the king’s gout is getting worse.”

“I’m sure once King Louis has had a dose of—I’m sorry, Monsieur Hector, what’s that business you’re looking into? It always escapes me.”

I explain that my research would likely be of no interest to them. In a voice of soft astonishment, Nankeen cries:

“Now why do you say that? Don’t you know you’re the talk of the École? Why, my intern friends inform me that Monsieur Hector, when at last he bursts the trammels of his laboratory, will
astonish
the world with his findings.” Puzzlement creases his brow as he turns to Rosbif. “They
do
say that, don’t they?”