The Black Tower (7 page)

“Oh, yes. Great things are expected of Monsieur Hector.”

“And aren’t we fortunate to have gotten him at the ground level? We must be sure to record all our impressions for the sake of future biographers.”

It’s not that I lack for defenders. There is Charlotte, for example, who has been standing all the while in the doorway, glowing like a coal.

“For your information,” she declares, “Monsieur Hector was praised just the other evening. By a very important personage.”

“And who would that be?” asks Nankeen, his eyes ghoulishly glittering.

Too late to stop her. She squares her shoulders, charges.

“The Duchesse de Duras!”

In the face of such laughter, the chandelier over the table actually rattles. The air wrinkles round, and the curtains dance in tune. I sit in the heart of the noise, where, if one can attain the right level of abstraction, everything becomes quite still. Tonight, however, I glance up and, to my surprise, find Father Time looking back. A second or two, no more, but there flashes between us—well, call it a shared condition.

“Hector,” says Mother. “I don’t know where that horrible man took you, but you smell like a sewer or worse.”

Stunned, I raise my cuff to my nose, and the aroma of Vidocq comes coiling through my sinuses. That strange,
animate
scent.

He’s marked me,
I think, sinking back into my chair.

And in the same instant comes the overtone of Leblanc’s dying breath.

He’s here
.

I
T’S A LITTLE
after nine o’clock, and I’m taking my evening walk. The same walk I take every night, as Vidocq has pointed out, at the same time. Around the block and no farther.

Tonight, it’s true, I briefly consider changing the pattern. When I come down the steps, I could decide to turn left instead of right. I could take the Rue des Postes south to the Rue de l’Arbalète. Or take the Vieille Estrapade de Fourcy toward the Panthéon. If I were really feeling bold, I could walk east all the way to the Jardin du Roi. Cross the river into the Faubourg-Saint-Antoine! Why not?

In the end, I do what I always do.

I smell like myself now.

There’s a moon: a half-nibbled peach. Patches of pocked sky, too, where the clouds have yawned clear. For the first time in weeks, it seems, the higher architecture is declaring itself, and as the plaster housefronts and the piles of garbage rear up on every side, I’m visited with that old feeling of walking through an alpine pass.

And then, as if I had personally commissioned them, the day’s events etch themselves across the canvas. I see the baby on the chafing dish. The widow Maltaise in her blue kerchief, and Poulain, flopped in the sawdust, his boot still tied to his chair. And Mozart and greenbottle flies and the veined blue marble of Chrétien Leblanc. One by one, they file past. Like things that happened to a living man.

16 T
HERMIDOR
Y
EAR
II

 

Have met consid difficulty in getting Prisoner’s cell cleaned. Tower guards say lingering too long in pestilential air wd be fatal. Refuse to go inside, assist in any way. (One confided in me that they are afraid of being branded royalist sympathizers.)

 

Have relayed my concerns to Barras. This
A.M
., spoke with officials of the Commune. Informed them that Prisoner’s health—
survival
—depends on hygienic surroundings. No amt of physic can overcome contagion. V. insistent on this point. Was told to await Commune’s decision.

 

17 T
HERMIDOR

 

Word has come. Commune has authorized 2 men to undertake cleaning of Prisoner’s room. Men are to be duly appointed reps of French people, discreet, politically pure, etc.

 

22 T
HERMIDOR

 

8
A.M.
: appointed cleaners arrived w. buckets, mops, lge quantities of soap. Soon realized they wd need more.

 

Dust, dirt, excrement everywhere. Mattresses damp all the way thru; atmosphere fetid—
poisonous
. Work lasted 1 full day—extremely arduous—required freq rest intervals, occasional vomiting. Both men at var times bitten by rats, fleas, spiders. Everything is
alive
in this room, said one. Companion was heard to say he’d seen cleaner sewers.

 

Prisoner remained in cell thruout. No movement observed until section of shutter removed fm window—first time in 6 mos—upon which he turned twd light. Stood for some moments w. sun on face, eyes half closed. When asked if light was painful, Prisoner answered in affirmative. But declined to remove himself.

 

23 T
HERMIDOR

 

Commissaries have at last agreed to bath for Prisoner. I sent cook’s assistant, young Caron, for tepid water, bathed him myself. Sent for Mother Mathieu (mngr of Père Lefèvre’s tavern) to cut & comb hair. Hair full of scurf, reached to shoulders, had not been washed in many mos. Exceptionally tender—combing v. painful for him. Mother Mathieu able to clip Prisoner’s toenails & fingernails, which were length of claws, consistency of horn.

 

Garments (entirely infested) removed & burned, replaced w. entirely new linen suit, including pantaloons, waistcoat, jacket.

 

At end of day, undertook 1st complete examination of Prisoner. Genrl condition v. shocking. Head droops. Lips discolored, cheeks hollow, v. pale w. greenish tinge. Limbs extremely wasted, disproportionately long in comparison to torso. Stomach enlarged. Suffers fm acute diarrhea.
Extremely
sensitive to noise. Averse to speaking.

 

Body rife w. ulcers, yellow & blue, most pronounced on neck, wrists, knees. Have attempted to lance & dress but this occasioned grt pain in him. Will endeavor to do more in days to follow.

 

Most pressing concern: knee. Swollen to twice normal size. Color unhealthy. Prisoner unable to walk w/o extreme pain.

 

Prognosis: v. poor. Am preparing full medical report for Barras. Hopeful that, w. aggressive course of intervention, Prisoner’s condition can be arrested. New environment wd be v. helpful. Have taken liberty of removing surplus bed fm room of Prisoner’s sister so he may sleep in greater comfort.

 

Was forced to reprimand 1 of Temple guards, who, upon entering Prisoner’s room, shouted, Back in your corner, Capet. Explained that, from now on, Prisoner was to be called Monsieur. Guard remonstrated, said there are no more “monsieurs,” we are all “citizens” now, etc. I was insistent on point, citing authority invested in me by Barras.

 

Upon hearing my request, Prisoner observed that “Monsieur” was too distressing to him, begged not to be called by that title. When asked which he wd prefer, Prisoner said he wd answer only to “Wolf Cub.” When it was pointed out that Prisoner was not animal but boy, Prisoner was seen to smile, for first time. Appeared to pity me greatly.

 

He asked then how old he was? Nine, I said. Yes, that’s right, he said.

 

Will make it a point, in future entries, to refer to Prisoner as Charles.

 

F
OUR DAYS HAVE
passed since last I saw Vidocq, but still I feel him. Every time I take my walk around the block or stroll over to the Rue d’École de Médecine or sneak a newspaper out of Le Père Bonvin, it’s
his
voice, insinuating in my ear….

I could set my watch by you
.

And then on Friday morning, something knocks me out of my accustomed orbit. A letter. On lilac stationery with flaking gilt edges and a coat of arms indifferently embossed at the top—paper so brittle I don’t trust myself to hold it.

Dr. Carpentier—

 

Recent events surrounding the late M. Leblanc compel me to write. I wonder if I might entreat you to call upon me tomorrow morning at ten o’clock. You may find me in my apartment at No. 17, Rue Férou.

 

Failing any further communication from you, I shall await the pleasure of your company. Your discretion is earnestly requested.

 

Baronne de Préval

 

The name seems as brittle as the paper. A baroness!

My first thought is that Nankeen and the other boarders are having me on. My second thought—and it’s the thought I’ve been having from the moment Vidocq came into my life—
You’ve got the wrong man
.

More than that, the wrong class. The closest I’ve ever come to aristocrats is Sunday afternoons on the Champs-Élysées. Now that the Bourbons are back, it’s the best kind of sport, sauntering through the elms while the coupés sweep past. Horses with rosettes in their ears, drivers in wigs and cravats, and through the windows, snatches of powdered skin, a Chinese ivory handle, an uncinching mouth-bud. The notion that one of these women might stop the carriage and usher me in with her superbly enervated arm seems as likely as the King asking me to cure his gout.

In short, there are reasons to doubt this promotion. Look first at the man who brought me the message. Not the usual liveried footman but a common porter, older than Mont Blanc, snarling at the few sous of gratuity I drop in his palm.

Next, look at the address. The Rue Férou, a quiet little spoke off the wheel of the Luxembourg Gardens, far removed from the thrum of court life. What business does a baroness have living there?

All afternoon, all evening, I limn the many reasons for declining the invitation. By the next morning, I’ve accepted. I even know why. It’s the last thing Vidocq would expect of me.

P
ARIS IS FOGBOUND
this morning. The smokes of last night’s fires, woven with sewer fumes and the evaporations of three weeks’ rain, lie in sepia drifts on the mansards, in the gutters, along the trees and wagons and vendor booths. Thickly scalloped and all the same moving—
renewing
—as if the city itself had been caught in the very act of breathing.

The only discernible parts of no. 17, Rue Férou, are a façade of rough yellow-daubed stone…three small windows with blinds drowsily lowered…and a wrought-iron knocker carved in the shape of a winking satyr. The knocker won’t move, so I have to pound on the door, which is answered by an old concierge, dressed in black merino and grinning like a procuress.

“Dr. Carpentier, yes! She’s expecting you.”

Taking a candle, she leads me up two flights of stairs—an act for which her body is deeply unqualified. She has to
haul
it forward, dragging each leg like a valise.

“You were able to find the way? Oof. Mornings like these, I can barely see my own nose. Grrm. The Baroness will be so glad to see you. I’m always telling her, you know, invite some
young
people for a change. Fwoof. Much better than those old goats in their—kroomp—blue stockings and their dirty vests. Always
mooning,
aren’t they? The
old
days. Pwiff. I say what’s done is done, bring on the next. I’ve always been that way. Ploonf.”

She stops at last before a door of besmirched oak. A knock and then a bearlike roar.

“Madame la Baronne! Your visitor is here!”

Then, by some prearranged ritual, she turns the handle, opens the door three hairs wide, and backs slowly away, her gasping chest bent parallel to the floor.

I see worn red tiles under a threadbare carpet. An old round table, a low sideboard topped by a hanging mirror. A bench, unanchored. And a short-backed armchair, the type of grim, cured artifact that might have been lifted from a Breton widow’s cottage.

A magnificent woman is sitting there.

No, let me be clearer. A magnificent woman
was
sitting there. She was wearing peach blossoms in her hair and a gown of loose lawn to accentuate her glorious bosom, and she had doeskin gloves of a paradisiacal whiteness.

But that was thirty years ago. Today, the white has sickened into yellow; the lawn has given way to a black damask dress, no longer fashionable; the fichu has been mended so many times there is almost nothing left to mend.

And that once-handsome, that still-handsome face has hardened into something unyielding and curatorial, like the tablet of a lost civilization.

“Dr. Carpentier.” A lightly tickled contralto. “How good of you to come.”

She rises from her peasant’s chair and offers me her gloved hand. Not knowing what to do, I close it round. With a hint of charity, she draws herself free.

“You must excuse me,” she says. “You are not quite the man I was expecting.”

I am going to ask what she
was
expecting, but I’m stopped by the thing I missed on my first canvassing: the spectacle of her eyes. One brown, one blue—
borrowed,
I would almost conceive, from two different women.

“Would you care for some tea, Doctor?”

She serves it herself in porcelain that, I am relieved to see, was not made by convicts. She tells me…well, I’m not conscious of much more than the music of her voice. I’m dimly aware of the concussion of spoons…a settee, a sisal rug…and finally a natural history cabinet, empty except for a few seashells and a line of red morocco bindings.

“Ah, you are coveting my library,” she says in an ironical tone. “Those are the memoirs of my late husband, the Baron. He was ambassador to Berlin under Louis the Sixteenth.”

Not knowing how to answer this, I say nothing, and this proves to be the very signal she was waiting for. Setting her teacup down, she folds her hands in her lap and, with a conscientious and abiding air, as if she were showing visitors round a house, begins to speak. And all the facts that should have been elicited after days, even weeks of small talk and trust building come tumbling out now in a helpless profusion.

“We lost everything, of course, during the Revolution. The Jacobins nationalized our lands,
that
much we were expecting, but then most of my jewels were lost on the way to Warsaw, and the Baron made rather a hash of the money we had left. He made a rather poor émigré, given how accustomed he was to travel.
Voluntary
exile was one thing, he used to say, involuntary quite another. He chafed, poor thing. Always intriguing to come back
here,
where he was least wanted.”

She picks up her cup, rests it briefly on her underlip.

“Intrigues, I am sad to say, cost money. At least
his
always did.”

With a rush of undercoats, she rises. Opens the cabinet with a scant pressure of hand, strokes the morocco bindings.

“This is what’s left of his estate. A life in ten volumes. To the end, he was persuaded that someone would publish it.” She takes the leftmost volume in her hand, holds it out to me. “
This
one might be to your taste, Doctor. It follows the Baron from his nativity in Toulon to his brief and, if I may say, unexceptional term as
intendant
of the Limousin.” She rubs the spine with her knuckles. “I find it is the only volume I can bear to read myself. The others fall a little too near to home. Why, good morning, puss-puss!”

I feel it before I see it: a friction against my trouser leg. Then an unstable spectrum of black and white and orange, bounding into the Baroness’s open arms.

“Is puss-puss just waking up? What a sleepy puss it is! It’s the fog, isn’t it? Yes, puss-puss loves the fog, doesn’t he? Come see, can you
see
?”

In the shadows of the sconce light, they become, briefly, a unitary organism: limbs coiled toward a common purpose, murmurs twining with mewls.

“I’m afraid I must pose an indelicate question,” she says.

It’s some time before I realize she is talking to me. Her voice hasn’t quite come back to its human register.

“If you like,” I stammer.

“Were you followed?”

“No.”

Such a ring of conviction in my voice, and the truth is I have no clue. I’m still getting used to the idea that I’m worth following.

“It is my turn to be indelicate, Madame la Baronne.”

“By all means.”

“What possible connection could you have to Monsieur Leblanc?”

With manifest regret, she sets down the cat, and in that moment, I have—for the first time—the full dint of her attention. I fairly blanch before it. The smile alone, whetted against a million drawing rooms and antechambers.

“Doctor, I find myself longing uncharacteristically for exercise. Would you do me the honor of escorting me?”

T
HE FOG HAS
begun to lift from the Luxembourg Gardens, but everything above our heads is still shrouded. The statuary. The fountains. The palace itself, where the Chamber of Peers—dried-up remnants of old monarchies and empires—make the rattling sounds of coffined men. Even the canopies of the plane trees have been sheared away, leaving only the trunks, damp and scarred, lining our path like battle trophies.

For someone who takes little exercise, the Baroness has a rapid step. I have to quicken my own to keep pace with her. Before long, though, our feet are moving together in a companionable rhythm—I could almost believe we’ve been meeting like this for generations, wearing out a trough in the gravel.

“You’re still a young man,” she says at last. “Twenty-five, perhaps?”

“Twenty-six.”

She nods, abstractedly.

“It was nearly that many years ago I met Chrétien Leblanc. A summer afternoon in the Stare Miosto in Warsaw. I was dining out of doors—a bowl of
krupnik,
I remember—and I looked up, and there he was, in his blue stockings and this rather faded frock coat. He was
watching
my soup, the way a cat watches a rabbit. In spite of myself, I was touched.”

Her gloved hand exerts a barely perceptible pressure on my left arm.

“Leblanc was an émigré, too, in his own way. Lacking the curse of a title, he had weathered it out longer than most of us, but he, too, was obliged to leave Paris before long. In a hurry. He was wearing that look we all had at first, as though someone had dragged us into one of Montgolfier’s balloons and tumbled us out before we’d quite landed. He was still finding his balance when I met him.” She steps carefully round a puddle. “We fell into conversation. I liked his manners, and by the time he had finished my
krupnik
for me, I had formally engaged him.”

Even through the fog, I can see where we are walking: along the parapet of the Pépinière, near the Rue de l’Ouest. I can hear the uproar of sparrows and woodpeckers and linnets.

“My husband left behind a great financial ruin,” says the Baroness. “I was correspondingly obliged to dismiss our servants. Leblanc was good enough to stay on for some time, and when he could no longer afford to, he continued to visit me at regular intervals, simply to see how I was faring. I rather think he kept me alive.”

A tiny grunt as she slackens her pace.

“It was Leblanc who persuaded me to come back to Paris with the Bourbons. ‘Bonaparte is gone,’ he assured me. ‘You may be happy once more.’ He overestimated me, I’m afraid. But I did consent, if only to please him. My one condition was that he find me a place as far as possible from my old life.”

With a gesture as eloquently foreshortened as any by Mademoiselle Mars, she sketches her present environs.

“Here I am,” she says.

“I am sorry for your trials, Baroness.”

“You needn’t be, Doctor. Many have endured far worse. And there is something to be said, after all these years, for simply being alive. At any rate, you cannot have come here to lavish pity on an old fossil like me.”

“I still don’t know why I’ve come, Madame.”

Keeping her left foot still, she executes a slow pivot with the right—training her eyes in every direction.

“A week ago Wednesday,” she says, “Leblanc came to me in a most agitated condition. He told me he had come into possession of a particular object, and in order to authenticate it, he required someone—shall we say someone of a certain
estate
. However fallen.”

“What was this object?”

Whether she hears me or not, I can’t say, for she quickly tacks on.

“Having satisfied himself that the object in question was authentic, Leblanc told me he required someone else to make a further identification. Toward that end, he set about locating a Dr. Carpentier in the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève.”

“He never reached me.”

Her slippered foot sketches a circle round a shorn-off robin’s wing.

“I thought as much,” she says.

She looks at me now, her blue and brown eyes gleaming with their opposed intelligences.

“Doctor, I am by no means an exemplary woman. I have wished evil on many people in life, but I would gladly call up every last flame of hell if I could be certain that Leblanc’s killers were on the pyre.”