The Black Tower (8 page)

“May I ask, Madame, how you learned of Monsieur Leblanc’s death?”

She looks at me a while longer. Gives her lower lip a soft bite.

“Leblanc had a habit of visiting me every Monday morning, precisely at ten. He was regular as the dew that way. Monday last, he failed to show. Indeed, he sent no word of any kind. It was most unlike him. Having failed to find him at his lodgings, I did what any Parisian might do. I took myself straight to the morgue. There I gave the concierge a very close description of Leblanc and, at the cost of a few sous, was led to the”—she stops—“to the gentleman in question. Doctor,” she says, “would you mind if we sat?”

There is a bench not ten feet off. With my handkerchief—my only handkerchief—I wipe it dry for her. She nods her thanks and drops onto the bench by scarcely visible degrees, her spine never once unbending. She sets her parasol alongside her. She examines her gloves. She says:

“Doctor, I wonder if you quite know where you’re treading.”

“No,” I answer. “I never do. You may see from the condition of my boots.”

She resists the temptation to look down, but something unexpectedly warm brews from those strange irises.

“It would be pleasant to trust you,” she says.

“I don’t yet know what I’m to be trusted with.”

And that’s the last thing either of us says for some five minutes. A curious thing happens, though. As we sit there, the fog begins to pull apart, like an emulsion dissolving into its constituents, and I realize, with a small shudder, that we are sharing this park with other human beings.

But what is there to dread about
these
specimens? A grisette, slumped halfway off a bench. A convent-school girl and her grandfather, sharing cheese and brown bread. A pair of law students. In normal weather, I would scarcely have remarked on any of them. This morning, there is something miraculous about their very ordinariness.

I say:

“He’s here.”

The Baroness’s face turns an inch toward mine.

“Those were Leblanc’s last words,” I tell her. “He was announcing someone’s arrival. Whose?”

And rather than meet my eye, she stares at a space just to our west.

On the other side of the path, three yards down, sits an old soldier, crouched over the
Quotidienne
. He wears a Louis XV uniform, with a pair of crossed swords on the back and, hanging from his neck, the Cross of Saint-Louis. He’s the kind of relic you regularly find in places like these, keeping warm with memories, exchanging insolent glances with Napoleonic officers, sporting a large white ribbon in his buttonhole to show he’s on the right side of history.

Of all our newfound neighbors, he is the one who attracts the least notice. Why, then, is the Baroness stiffening at the sight of him? Pricked by chivalry, I am about to suggest we change our seats, when I am stopped by the Baroness’s voice, calling across the gravel walk.

“Monsieur Vidocq, would you care to join us? You’ll be able to hear much better.”

S
TARTLED, THE OLD
soldier glares out at us from the caves of his eye sockets. In the next moment, his papyrus skin is rent by a grin, familiar in all its essentials, and I know the Baroness has struck true.

The surprise is that Vidocq himself doesn’t seem to care. Springing up on a young man’s feet, he bows low and, in a voice of pickled suavity, says, “My apologies, Madame. I was reluctant to force myself on you.”

“Ah, but I have read a great deal of you in the local press, and I have never been given to understand that
shyness
is one of your faults, Monsieur.”

“Perhaps not,” he says, bowing still lower. “But in the face of such extraordinary powers of discernment, I do find myself at a loss for words.”

“Madame,” I interject. “Would you excuse us?”

I draw Vidocq aside; I lean into his ear. Rage is rising up inside me, but all that comes out is a muffled splutter.

“How—how did—?”

“How did I know you were making
private
inquiries?” he growls. “About police business? If you must know, it cost me twenty seconds and ten sous. Madame la Baronne will either have to hire more discreet porters, or
you
will have to become a better tipper.”

It’s one of his gifts, I suppose. In the act of being caught, he manages to catch you.

“So you’re telling me I may not even venture out of doors without consulting you.”

“Of course you may,” he hisses back. “If you’d like to meet the same fate as Leblanc.”

“Messieurs,” interjects the Baroness. “If you insist on communicating sotto voce, we might as well adjourn to my lodgings.” A light pinking in her cheek as she ponders the implications. “In my younger days, I should have balked at bringing
two
gentlemen home. I’m now at the age when it might actually enhance my reputation.”

W
E’RE WIPING THE
fog’s remnants from our skin—it feels like the oil from a drake’s feathers—and Vidocq has gently kicked the Baroness’s cat out of his way, and the Baroness is humming something as she sets down her faded silk parasol, and I’m met once again by the feeling that I’ve been meeting her in this way for many years, gathering in the same room with the old round table and the Breton peasant’s chair. The way the Baroness slips into her bedroom, for instance…isn’t that the kind of casual disappearance one can effect only with longtime friends? And please note her uncluttered gait as she sweeps back into the room, as though she were setting up a game of whist.

Except that she’s carrying not a card table but a cross-legged stool in blue satin. And the illusion of domesticity ends in that moment, for this article, so elegant and uncompromising, no longer fits with our surroundings.

Even the Baroness doesn’t know quite what to do with it. She makes as if to set it on the ground, then reconsiders and gathers it in her lap, hugging it toward her like a spaniel.

“Monsieur Vidocq,” she says, “it has taken me at least an hour to trust Dr. Carpentier. Is there anything you can tell me that would, in your case, accelerate the process?”

Vidocq—from pride, maybe—has kept his makeup on all this time, and some of those assumed years cling to him even now as he strolls toward the Baroness’s sideboard.

“Madame, I could say I’m honest as linen, and how should I expect you to believe it? I will say only this. I consider every crime in Paris to be a crime against
me
. A personal affront, yes! And it is only when that crime is avenged that I consider my own honor to be restored.”

He stands there, studying the image of his altered face in the looking glass.

“As a young man,” he continues, “I spent more than my share of time in prisons. The very worst, Madame, I can assure you. I was punished a thousand times over for a single passing indiscretion. The only thing that kept me from surrendering to despair, finally, was the belief—no, the
certitude
—that I was not like the wretches around me. As much as I deserved to be free, I knew there were men who deserved to be where I was. I had
tasted
their character. I knew that society could survive only so long as they remained apart from it. That belief has been my salvation—then and now.”

An actor at the Odéon might have fitted out such a speech with all manner of curlicues and italics, hurled it straight to “the gods,” but Vidocq utters it in a single pacific register and then locks his gaze onto the Baroness’s as if she were the only audience he ever coveted.

“Madame,” he says. “You are wise to husband your trust. With me, you may invest it freely. And before this day is out, you will have your return.”

And still she hesitates. Though the mask of her face does begin to slacken.

“I believe you mentioned an object,” he murmurs.

Getting no response, his voice grows even softer.

“An object that Monsieur Leblanc asked you to identify.”

She nods, briefly.

“Would you happen to know where he found it, Madame?”

She draws a long breath, which she releases in staccato segments.

“He never told me,” she says at last. “His correspondent preferred to remain anonymous.”

“So he had no idea who this correspondent was.”

“Apparently not.”

“And did Leblanc take this object with him?”

“No.”

It’s amazing to watch him now, those big feet treading as lightly as a cuckolder’s.

“What did he do with it, then?”

“He asked me to hold it in safekeeping. Until such time as he could retrieve it himself.” She makes a grave study of her cuticles. “Leblanc was ever an optimist.”

“You have the object, then?” asks Vidocq.

“Yes.”

Restraining himself is almost too much labor now. It cinches his lips, tortures his syntax.

“Might we prevail upon your goodness to favor ourselves with it?”

She looks down then and, like someone roused from a drunken slumber, discovers the blue satin stool in her lap. Her hand traces the length of one leg until it meets an obstruction: a kind of gleaming garter, indissoluble from the stool, or so you might think, until the Baroness’s chalk fingers loosen it with a quick flurry.

Vidocq lays it out on the table, even as I grab a candle from the nearest sconce. There, against the grains of mahogany, lies a hoop of gold, worried and notched, spotted with tarnish.

“Small,” I hear myself say. “Too small for a bracelet.”

“Too large for a ring,” adds Vidocq. “An
adult’s
ring, that is.”

He draws it closer to the candle flame. A smile flickers across his lips.

“For a
baby,
” he declares, “it might do quite nicely.”

And just like that, all the distresses in the ring’s surface acquire a meaning.

“A
teething
ring,” I say.

“Worth a fair sum, too,” says Vidocq, rolling it across the plain of his palm.

The Baroness’s blond brows form high tight arches. “It’s pure gold, if that’s what you mean. However, its value derives largely from its original owner.”

“A baby?” he asks.

“He was a baby then.”

“And did you know him?”

“I met him once or twice. I knew his mother slightly.”

“She must have been well-off if she could give her son a hunk of gold to chew on.”

The Baroness pauses. And when she resumes, a new quality has crept into her tone: a sense of words beneath words.

“She
was
well-off, as you say. For a time. The ring, though, was a gift from the child’s grandmother.”

And now an even longer pause—a full half minute—before she breaks it herself by reaching into the drawer of a curio cabinet and extracting a pair of opera glasses, of ancient provenance.

“Here,” she says, proffering them to Vidocq. “The grandmother’s emblem has been engraved in miniature. You may see for yourself.”

The glasses, being too small for his ox-head, give him the look of a harassed chemist as he lowers his face toward the table. For several long seconds, he gazes. A crevasse appears between his brows.

“You should be able to discern a double eagle,” says the Baroness. “Quite different from Signore Buonaparté’s emblem. Do you recognize it now, Monsieur?”

Closing his fingers round the ring, Vidocq gives a dazed nod.

“You have spent some time there, perhaps?” she asks.

“A few weeks. Fighting with the cuirassiers of Kinski. I got to know their insignias quite well.”

“Kinski?” I stammer. “But that’s Austria.”

“Of course,” says the Baroness, sweetly. “We are looking at the heraldic emblem of the Empress Maria Theresa.”

“See for yourself,” says Vidocq.

I press the opera glasses against the bridge of my nose, and the miniature universe of the ring comes rushing toward me. The two-headed eagle…the Teutonic cross…

“And the child’s name,” says the Baroness. “You can just make it out.”

Sure enough, a line of letters appears on the ring’s inside rim. Some of them are gnawed away, but enough remain to make out what was once there….

LO IS CHA L S

“Louis-Charles,” I whisper, and the words seem to pool on the table beneath me, reflecting the name back to me. “The dauphin.”

From behind me comes the Baroness’s voice, edged with irony.

“I believe, after all these years, the word
king
may now be in order.”

And, as if it were answering a cue, the ring slides from view. When I next look up, it’s resting in Vidocq’s palm; in the next second, it’s being flung against the nearest section of wall. With it goes the last reserve of Vidocq’s decorum, for the word that now emerges from his mouth is something that should never be uttered in the same room as a blue satin stool.

“Shit!”

“In a manner of speaking,” says the Baroness. “Yes.”

I
F THE
B
ARONESS
has chosen to excuse Vidocq’s vernacular, she is simply being true to her times.

You see, these early days of the Restoration are meant to be a great forgetting. We are meant to forget that a world was overturned, that a king and queen were carried to the Avenger, that the Place de la Révolution ran red with blood, that the rich man and the bishop quaked before the artisan and the peasant.

We are meant to forget that, from the ashes of this conflagration, emerged an upstart who overran half a continent and made monarchs tremble before his name and cost France nearly a million of its men.

We are meant to forget—all of it—everything that happened between 1789 and 1815, between the Bastille and Waterloo. No hard feelings. Let the Restoration begin.

And here’s the interesting part: Forgetting can be quite easy. In just the last two years, without a backward glance, we have thrown out our monogrammed Bonaparte dinner plates, our eagle pictures. We’ve torn down the emperor’s statues, stripped every
N
from the Louvre walls, painted
royal
over every
imperial
. We have cheered our new king as loudly as we once execrated our old one.

It has been, in part, a blessing to do this, for living in historic times is no life at all. Better to pretend it never happened.

Only we
can’t,
hard as we try. In the end (and by now, you’ve figured this out) there
is
no forgetting. History lies low but always rises up.

And so, when we least look for it, we are visited by the specter of a boy. A boy whom, more than anyone else, we would like to forget.

His name was Louis-Charles, Duc de Normandie. He was a prince from storybooks: lovely and flaxen, bright of eye, rudely healthy. He was baptized in Notre-Dame. He had armies of servants: chamber-women, ushers, porters, room boys, servants to dress his hair and clean his silver and do his laundry—his own personal cradle rocker. He gamboled through groves of orange trees, he had eight black ponies at his call. He rode in carriages, and palaces were his playrooms.

He never asked for any of it, he was merely born into it, but the revolutionaries, in their wisdom, found him guilty nonetheless. Guilty of living in luxury while so many thousands of France’s children suffered. What better punishment than to make him suffer, too?

They sent him to a fortress called the Temple. Night and day they set a guard over him. They stripped him of his title and dignity, they beat and starved him. They didn’t dare execute him, as they had his parents. (The world was still watching.) They merely created the conditions in which he would die—and then they watched him die. Slowly, in agony and squalor, cut off from those who might have given comfort.

And when they had sucked the last breath from him, they tossed him in an unmarked grave, to mingle with strangers’ bones. No tomb, no marker. No prayer.
Equal
to the end. He was ten years old.

As a nation, we’ve worked hard to forget this boy. You can understand, then, why someone like Vidocq, who has ridden each new wave of history without losing his footing, should resent being called back, like an inn guest who hasn’t paid his bill. A modern man, he wishes to speak of the future. Which, I don’t need to tell you, is the past.

“A
COUPLE OF EAGLES
,” he mutters.

He’s repented enough of his outburst to retrieve the ring from the floor. His fingers close round it now.

“And a fancy cross,” he adds, more loudly. “And I’m supposed to believe a boy’s risen from the dead.”

“I can only tell you that Leblanc believed it,” says the Baroness. “To his great cost.”

And as though she’s already dismissed us, she lowers herself onto the bench that sits unmoored in the center of the room. She squares herself toward the wall and extends her arms, and in a flash, it becomes clear what used to be there.

A pianoforte.

“I remember when the rumors first reached us in Warsaw,” she says. “All these high-pitched whispers.
The prince is alive!
Everyone had it on the highest authority, and everyone’s story was the same. A little cabal of royalists had managed to switch the prince with another boy and spirit him to safety. We were told it was only a matter of time before our monarch returned to claim his throne.”

She rests her hands on her invisible keyboard. The fingers begin to flutter.

“Well,” she says, “it all sounded very mystical to me. And, of course, as the years went by, no dauphin ever emerged, which did nothing to diminish the faith of certain individuals. There was a duchess, I remember, who would declare at all her soirées that our boy-king was due back the following week.
Next week, I tell you!
After many months of this, I said, ‘My dear, if he insists on taking so long, I fear Jesus Christ will get here before he does.’ She never did invite me back.”

Her fingers flutter into stillness. She gathers them into her lap.

“For my part, I always assumed the rumors were propaganda to pick up ou spirits. God knows we needed it.”

Vidocq is standing by the window now, rubbing the water vapor from each casement. You can hear the friction of his knuckles against the glass.

“Madame,” he says, “do you know how many dauphin pretenders have come out of the wormholes already? I’ve had the pleasure of meeting a few myself. One was a tailor’s son, one belonged to a clockmaker. There was a boy who claimed to have the pope’s mark on his leg, but it was a scar from poaching rabbits. Mathurin Bruneau, maybe you’ve heard of him? A
shoemaker’s
son. Very celebrated trial down in Rouen. You will find him now holding court in the dungeon of Mont-Saint-Michel.” Sneering, he raps his fist against his chest. “If you’ve got another lost king to peddle, Madame, you’ll have to knock on someone else’s door.”

“I am peddling nothing,” she answers, the first touch of frost crisping her voice. “It was Leblanc who believed, not I. And if he was wrong,” she says, rising and fronting him, “may I ask why he is dead?”

She waits, with great courtesy, for his answer. Then, tilting her head in deference, she adds: “Surely, there would have been no need to kill a man who was laboring under a delusion.”

Vidocq’s arms are locked across the spur of his belly. A long stream of breath issues from his nostrils.

“Tell me this,” he says. “How would Leblanc know anything about Louis the Seventeenth? You said he wasn’t an aristo.”

It’s the first time I’ve seen her flinch. That old epithet of the Revolution—
aristo
—strikes her like a clod of dirt. She pauses to gather herself. Then, in the coolest possible voice, she replies:

“Leblanc would be only too glad to tell you, I’m sure. If he could.”

“And the only proof he had was this damned ring? He might have stumbled over that anywhere. I’ve seen Marie-Antoinette’s old plates turning up in the beet market at Les Halles.”

“He swore to me he had other tokens. When I asked him to show them to me, he told me it would have to wait. He was too occupied in finding someone.”

“Who?”

“The man who could conclusively identify this missing king.”

“And who was this man?”

A touch of exasperation abrades her voice now.

“Dr. Hector Carpentier, of course.”

Until this moment, I believe they’ve even forgotten I’m in the room. And as they give me the full gift of their attention, I feel the air around me warming and cooling at once.

“It’s absurd,” I mutter.

But the air won’t stop roiling, and my voice climbs once more into that register of guilt.

“He had the wrong man, I tell you. I was—I was
three
when Louis the Seventeenth died. I never—how could I possibly speak of someone I’ve never met?”

“No,” muses the Baroness. “You couldn’t be expected to do that.”

She turns toward her looking glass now. Briefly tousles her strawberry-blond curls, stretches the skin across her cheekbones. Fingers away every last corruption of city air. And still she neglects to arrange her mouth, which is slightly askew as she turns back to me.

“And now, Doctor, at the risk of being trite, may I ask: What did
your
father do during the Revolution?”