For the King (12 page)

She paused, her jaw suddenly slack. “So that could’ve been the powder they used to blow up Bonaparte? So that’s why you were talkin’ o’ the reward?”

“Indeed, Citizen Roger. And you will receive your share of it once the culprits are caught and punished.” From the corner of his eye Roch saw a lanky man in a brown jacket, with the air of a whipped dog, cross the courtyard and enter the porter’s lodge. Citizen Roger’s husband, by the looks of it. “And then what happened?” asked Roch.

Citizen Roger’s tone was softer now. “The short bugger came back every day. Sometimes the other two also, but I’d told’m to leave the door open whenever there was more’n one in there. There was always one posted like an idiot outside the shed. An’ then, on the 3rd o’ Nivose, aroun’ five in the afternoon, the short fellow came to the lodge to return the key. Rat Face an’ Pussy were with him. Dressed in their blue jackets, all three o’ them. He said they didn’t need the shed no more after all. Imagine that, after payin’ fer three months! An’ they left together with their horse an’ cart. I wasn’t sorry to see that sort o’ gentry go. But when I came back here to make sure they’d locked the door ’fore leavin’, what d’you think I saw?”

Citizen Roger, shaking all over with indignation, pointed at a spot in the straw. Roch waited with bated breath.

“They hadn’t cleaned up after their damn horse, the stinkin’ buggers!”

Roch repressed a groan of disappointment. “And you never saw those men again, Citizen Roger?”

“Never.”

Roch thanked Citizen Roger warmly. He then spoke to her husband, who had nothing of interest to add.

Before leaving the place Roch looked around at the gray walls of the courtyard, pierced by a multitude of narrow windows. Pots of half-frozen cabbages were crowded on the sills. The final preparations for the Rue Nicaise attack had taken place right here, under the porter’s nose, without her suspecting anything other than buggery.

The alleged Leblanc and the man Citizen Roger called Rat Face fit the description Fouché had sent him of the Chouans Carbon and Saint-Régent. There was no longer any doubt that the Rue Nicaise attack was a Royalist plot. And the man with the gold spectacles kept appearing with those two characters. All that remained was the small matter of discovering his identity, and arresting all three assassins. Roch would have the usual Chouan haunts in Paris closely watched.

17

T
he short afternoon was drawing to a close. It was getting colder now. Roch put on his gloves and turned up the collar of his coat. When he crossed the Pont-au-Change, the Bridge of the Money Changers, a thin layer of fog covered the river. At his feet, a puddle of what seemed like urine had frozen into yellow ice. Frost gave a silvery sheen to the bare trees on the embankment. The air was very still, and wisps of smoke, barely visible against the white sky, rose straight from the chimneys on the Isle of the Cité.

At the Prefecture, a guard stopped Roch. “A youn’ lady’s been waiting for you for over an hour, Citizen Chief Inspector. She asked for you by name, and she said it was very important. So I took her to the little room downstairs.”

Roch’s first thought was of Blanche. But no, it could not be. Blanche would never compromise herself by coming to the Prefecture, even in an emergency. Instead she would have discreetly sent a messenger.

Roch frowned. “A lady? What sort of lady?”

“She wouldn’t say her name, Citizen Chief Inspector.” The guard smiled and winked. “But she talked like she knew you personally, if you catch my meaning. So I didn’t press the point.”

“What is she like?”

“Oh, real pretty, with gray eyes and blond hair, sort of red almost.”

Roch felt a rush of anger. How dared Alexandrine disturb him now, when she must know how busy he was? He thought he guessed the purpose of her visit.

In the course of the previous spring, Vidalenc had run into trouble for trading in adulterated wine. Indeed the beverage the old man supplied to the Armies of the Republic and to the taverns of Paris, including the Mighty Barrel, had little to do with wine, apart from its color and a distant similarity in tartness. His warehouse on Bernard Embankment, the wine port of Paris, had been searched by the police, and the composition of the liquid had been uncovered. It consisted of a decoction of various woods, in which carrots and turnips had been left to macerate. Purplish food coloring was added for good measure. The remains of a cat, wonderfully preserved, fur, whiskers and all, had even been found at the bottom of one barrel.

Vidalenc, when confronted with the evidence, had stared blankly and retreated into an idiotic silence. Not a shadow of a ledger was found within his warehouse. One of his clerks explained that the old man barely spoke any French, and could neither read nor write. It was all true, though Vidalenc understood French perfectly well when it suited him. Roch also suspected him of keeping very accurate accounts in his head.

Old Miquel had beseeched Roch to help his longtime friend. Roch had refused at first, but the old man had reminded him that Vidalenc had lent him the money to send Roch to school, and also to purchase the Mighty Barrel, without any security but Old Miquel’s word.

So Roch had yielded to his father’s entreaties. He had gone to his colleague Bouchesèche, Chief of the Food Supply and Safety Division, and, his face the same color as Vidalenc’s fraudulent beverage, asked that the case be allowed to slip into oblivion. Bouchesèche had agreed. True, Roch was deemed Fouché’s protégé, and Fouché had been all powerful then. Vidalenc had escaped with a stern warning that, should he ever be caught again, his name would be erased from the list of Army suppliers.

Now, thought Roch, the old rascal was up to the same tricks. He was again in trouble, and he had sent his daughter to the Prefecture in hopes of having the charges dismissed a second time. Well, he would be disappointed. Under no circumstances would Roch go again through the humiliation of applying to Bouchesèche on Vidalenc’s behalf. It might be useless anyway, perhaps dangerous, now that Roch’s position at the Prefecture had become so unsteady. He would send Alexandrine on her way with a firm admonition never to approach him again with such a plea.

Roch walked to the waiting room. The door, painted a grayish green, bore marks of grimy fingerprints around the handle. It was ajar. The young woman was indeed Alexandrine. Her back was turned, but he recognized the tall, upright figure, the reddish blonde curls on her nape, beneath the black silk bonnet. She was wearing a gown made of remnants of blue and white fabric stitched together at odd angles. She had been dressed like a fine lady on the 3rd of Nivose, on account of Christmas, but now she wore her ordinary clothes. Yet this dress showed her figure to advantage. Roch was almost certain that she had sewn it herself, and that, for a reason he could not understand, made him all the more unhappy to see her.

“Good afternoon, Alexandrine,” he said in the Roman language as he pushed the door open. “What is it? I have not much time now.”

Alexandrine turned around at the sound of his voice. Her eyes were red and swollen. That was unlike her. He had never seen her cry before, except on the day her mother had died, and she had been a child then.

“What is the matter, Alexandrine?” he asked more gently.

“I am sorry to disturb you, Roch, but I had to tell you right away. It is about your father.”

Roch grasped both of her elbows. “What about Father? Speak!”

“He was arrested this morning.”

Roch swore. “Arrested?” Now he hated Alexandrine with a passion. “It’s about your father’s wine again, I bet. Damn the old scoundrel!”

“No, Roch, please listen to me. It can’t have anything to do with that wine business. Your father was taken to the Temple.”

Roch let go of Alexandrine. He felt as though he had been hit in the stomach. Only political opponents were imprisoned there. Old Miquel must have been arrested because of his past Jacobin sympathies.

Roch bit his lip. “Thank you for coming here, Alexandrine. I am sorry to have been so rude to you. I do apologize, but I need to be alone now.”

She opened her mouth, seemed to hesitate, then walked to the door and closed it gently behind her. Once she was gone, he collapsed in a chair, his face in his hands.

18

R
och cursed himself. All he had worried about had been his own troubles, and he had not given a thought to Old Miquel’s danger. How could he have been caught off guard, after the stormy meeting in the Prefect’s office? That coward, now that he believed Fouché powerless, felt free to attack the Minister through Roch, and Roch through his father. And this was only a preparatory, tentative move. Sobry was right: if the Minister fell, Roch would be dismissed, maybe even arrested.

Both his father and he would rot indefinitely in jail, like the unfortunate painter Topino-Lebrun and his supposed accomplices in the Conspiracy of Daggers. Roch had easily dismissed Mulard’s concern over Topino, and offered bland comfort and vague assurances. Now he understood how it felt to be uncertain of the fate that awaited a loved one.

Roch was pacing the little waiting room. He paused and rested his forehead on the cold window pane. He stared at the spot, down in the courtyard, where the carcass of the little mare had rested under its oilcloth cover. It was easy to guess whence the decision to arrest his father came. Bertrand, the Chief of the High Police Division, must have a hand in it. He had acted out of personal malice, or on the orders of Dubois, or both. In any event, Bertrand must have consulted the Prefect before taking such a measure against the father of a colleague of equal rank. Or perhaps the idea came from the Prefect himself.

That meant that only one man could order the release of Old Miquel. It was Fouché, Dubois’s superior. And Fouché, whatever Dubois believed or hoped, was still the Minister of Police. He could overrule the Prefect’s decisions and order Old Miquel’s release.

Roch ran down the stairs. He left the Prefecture and crossed the river in the direction of the Left Bank, where the Ministry was located. Roch’s father hated Fouché, whom he called
The Traitor
. Of course, in Old Miquel’s eyes, many deserved that epithet, but none more than the Minister. At the height of the Revolution, Fouché, the defrocked monk, had organized shameful masquerades where jackasses, covered with priestly vestments, with prayer books tied to their tails, were made to drink from chalices.

But there was much worse. He had been sent by Robespierre, the Jacobin leader, to Lyon to quell the Royalist insurrection there. Under Fouché’s direction, thousands of opponents had been gathered by the side of vast open graves and shot by firing squads, or, when more expeditious means were required, by cannons that simply aimed at the helpless human mass. All without trial. Robespierre, once informed, had been horrified and immediately recalled Fouché.

And Fouché understood the precariousness of his own situation. He had joined those conspiring to overthrow Robespierre. While the memory of the atrocities in Lyon was still fresh, Fouché disappeared from the public eye, until at last the shades of his past faded away. Then he had been appointed Minister of Police. As such, he had not hindered Bonaparte’s coup, nor had he been dismissed afterwards.

Roch, hurrying along the Malaquais Embankment, was looking straight ahead. Certainly, to Old Miquel, Fouché was the worst of men: cruel to those who fell into his power, servile to his superiors and ready to betray everyone, high or low, in the pursuit of self-interest. Yet to Roch, he was a providential patron. Fouché had noticed Roch, who had languished as a lowly clerk at Ministry for a few years, and had entrusted him with a few missions that required discretion, loyalty and wits. Roch, who made no mystery of his ambitions, had given full satisfaction. Within months, he had been appointed a Police Inspector, then, when Bonaparte created the Prefecture, Chief Inspector. Roch could never have hoped for such swift promotion but for Fouché’s patronage.

Of course, he harbored no illusions as to the Minister’s motives. Fouché had not acted out of benevolence, but simply needed a dependable man, a man who owed him everything, within the Prefecture to spy on Dubois. Roch understood those things, and Fouché’s reputation did not bother him. The horrors of Lyon had taken place seven years earlier, after all, and the Nation had been in great peril then. Was not a man like Fouché just as respectable as the imbecilic Dubois, who had done nothing, and had nothing but his outstanding mediocrity to recommend him?

Roch finally reached the splendid Juigné mansion, where the Ministry of Police was located. It was probably no coincidence that the Prefecture had been assigned its shabby premises on the Isle of the Cité. Fouché wanted to make his superiority of rank over the Prefect perfectly clear to the most casual of observers. Roch was shown without delay into the office of Marain, the Minister’s private secretary.

“Well, if this is not Chief Inspector Miquel!” The man raised his eyebrow. “An unexpected pleasure, I must say. It is two days early for your appointment with the Minister. Did the collections from the bawdy houses come ahead of schedule?”

“No, but I need to see the Minister. It is urgent.”

Usually Marain greeted Roch with friendliness and showed him promptly into Fouché’s office. Now he seemed in no hurry. “I will see whether the Minister can receive you.”

Marain disappeared for a few minutes. He returned with a grave look on his face. “You have five minutes,” he said.

Roch could not find himself in Fouché’s presence without marveling at the resemblance of the man’s face to a skull. The sallow skin seemed glued to fleshless bones. The gray hair, brushed forward onto his forehead and temples, gave the impression that he had been hit from behind by a powerful gust of wind. His eyelids were no more than half open, though Roch never suspected the Minister of being sleepy.

Fouché was writing at his desk and did not look up. “What good wind brings you here, Miquel?” he asked.