The Black Tower (13 page)

I
F YOU’RE GOING
to build yourself a château, you could find far worse places than the town of Saint-Cloud. A mere six miles from Paris’s madness, lofting up from the Seine and bearing the clouds with it. A view fit for kings, yes, and before the kings, there were dukes and Florentine bankers, and after the kings, there was a certain emperor, who turned the Salon de Vénus into his personal throne room. And now the royals are back in Saint-Cloud, as eager as ever to flee Paris. And the tourists, equally eager, are following close behind.

I would have been no more than seven the first time I came here, and the only thing I can summon back now is water. Great sluices of emerald water, pouring through the aghast mouths of gargoyles. And a fox terrier, charging out of the woods—rising up on its hind legs and cocking its chin like a pugilist. I’ve been afraid of dogs ever since.

We must have come in a coach like this one, under towering steeples of trunks and valises, mire flying from the iron wheels and a great cape of dust trailing afterward. Wouldn’t Mother be shocked, though, to see the change in my costume? Coarse gray woolen socks…wide cotton-velvet trousers…an old violet waistcoat, torn at every fold…and no shirt! Vidocq was particularly keen on keeping my neck and arms bare—never mind the chill—and before we left, he took great pleasure in drawing a faux tattoo on me. A dromedary, toiling across my right biceps.

“Why?” I asked him.

“Because tattoos make a bastard look
bigger
. And if anyone could use some size, it’s—Jesus, Hector, where’d you get these?”

“What?”

“The scratchy things all down your arm. Been crawling through nettles, have you?”

“Little accident in the laboratory, that’s all.”

“Well, it does give you a breath of danger. Oh, but Christ, you’re still pale as an empress.”

From his desk drawer, he fished out a tortoiseshell compact.

“What’s that?”

“Bit of rouge,” he answered breezily. “A dab here, a dab there, you’ll look like you’ve actually met the sun once or twice in your life. Oh, but the hands are still too soft. Here, rub ’em with sandpaper. We can’t have you looking like a Parisian, can we?”

What with the last-minute toilette and a final fusillade of orders to “the boys,” it’s three-thirty by the time we leave and a little after five in the afternoon when the coach lumbers across the stone bridge into Saint-Cloud. On the far side of the Seine, chestnuts and hornbeam trees droop down in grapelike clusters. At ragged intervals, the gable of a
folie
noses through the foliage.

“We’re day laborers,” Vidocq is telling me. “Hoping to get in nice with the tourists. Oh, don’t bother with an accent, Hector, you’re the quiet one. A little
simple,
if you get my drift. You can manage
simple,
can’t you?”

The inn goes by the name of the Golden Fleece. Five years ago, it was called the Golden Eagle, but all signs of eagles—or of the emperor who inspired them—have long since been expunged (except for the faint impress of an
N
on the street door). The proprietress is Madame Prunaud, a freely swearing widow with great patches of aggrieved scalp showing through scruffs of beige hair and a single brown tooth, flopped over her lower lip like a loose shingle.

“You’ll get no beds from me,” she growls.

“We’re not particular, Madame. The attic or stable would do just fine.”

Vidocq’s pains have not been unavailing, for her eyes shimmer with contempt as she studies our rags.

“You don’t set a paw inside ’til I get forty sous. In advance.”

Supper is a slice of mutton and a bottle of Romanée served before one of those tavern fires that can neither be killed nor coaxed into full roar. Vidocq takes advantage of the cold to introduce himself to a group of cartmen and wagon drivers, who by their absence of bundles, give sign of being regular drinkers at the Prunaud tavern. To better commend himself to them, Vidocq steals two bottles of gin from Madame’s cellar and serves them up in pewter mugs. Someone else brings out the cigars. A musical tribute to the pudenda is drawn out through ten choruses, the mottled tin lamp shakes to the stamp of clogs, and things are far enough along that Vidocq can say, in the very instant the tobacco smoke forks from his nostrils:

“Anyone here know a bugger by the name of Tepac?”

“What’s he to you?” comes the general reply.

“Me and my pal,” answers Vidocq. “We heard he had some coins to spread around.”

“Tepac?” cries a tinware peddler, who is perhaps not really a tinware peddler. “I’ve never gotten a sou off him.”

“Lucky you,” says a wagoner. “I’ve never gotten a
word
. Tip your hat, he looks right
over
you, doesn’t he? Lord of all creation or some such shit.”

“I know the type,” Vidocq says, winking. “Farts roses, does he?”

“That don’t even—you’d think he was the pope’s snot, he carries hisself so high.”

“Fuck.” Vidocq hangs his head low. “No chance of squeezing him for work, then. He’s bound to have loads of servants.”

Ah, but this same Tepac, we learn, has only two servants: a cook and a man of all work. He arrived in Saint-Cloud three months ago, in the thick of winter. A certain altitude to his personality led many to think he was affiliated with the royal family, but no one has ever seen him visit the court. He seldom eats out, has no known source of income, and has never been witnessed in the midst of labor. No one has seen him do
anything
except stroll the streets, twice a day, with a knobbed oaken staff that discourages even the hardiest thief.

“Well, that’s it, then,” says Vidocq, throwing up his hands. “We’ll have to find us another fish.”

“Hold a bit!”

The oldest of the cartmen has just finished baptizing the fire with a day’s fund of urine, and as he tucks himself back in his trousers, he snarls:

“What you nosing round Saint-Cloud for? A lot more fish in Paris, ain’t there?”

Vidocq gives his gin a stir with his index finger and mutters:

“We got our walking papers handed to us.”

“Yeah, and who gave ’em to you?”

“Vidocq.”

The response is pure gratification as, one by one, the onlookers ply us for more—
more
. Is it true Vidocq’s got eyes in the back of his head? Me, I heard he can sniff a lie from ten miles. What
I
heard? He’s in league with the devil, and once a month, he’s got to burn some poor hardworking thief
alive
. No, it’s only ’cause he’s got fire coming out his eyes. Honest to God, I saw him burn someone’s hat just by looking at it funny….

The only one who refuses to traffic in the general mythography is the cartman, who announces, in a voice loud enough for all Saint-Cloud to hear:

“I ain’t afraid of no Vidocq. If he was sitting there—right where you are, brother—I’d give him what for, believe it. Tear his brains out and shit in his skull, that’s what I’d do. Hey!” From his pyre of rage, he glares down at me. “What’re
you
smiling at?”

“I told you already,” interjects Vidocq, catching me in the temple. “He’s a bit of a simple, that’s all.”

“Don’t no one come on our turf and laugh at us,” says the cartman, giving his waistband a belligerent hitch. “Ain’t polite, is it?”

Before anything can escalate, the high, squiggling birdcall of Madame Prunaud comes sailing through:

“I’ll tell
you
what ain’t polite!”

An avenging vision in her nightgown, already reaching for the cowhide strap on the chimney corner.

“I ain’t wasting a good fire on the likes of you! Out with you all!”

At first, she means to include Vidocq and me in the diaspora. It takes another ten sous and a measure of sweet talk to propitiate her.

“To the attic with you, then.”

No bed, of course, but there is a mattress. Oozing straw.

“
You
take it,” says Vidocq. “I’m not tired yet.”

For about the twentieth time today, I mourn my absent shirt as the air congeals round us and the cobwebs, one by one, leave veins of ice across my bare arms. Shivering there in the dark, I watch the broad outline of Vidocq sidewinding through the dust. Round and round he goes—until at last, he says, in a not-ungentle tone:

“Good night, Hector.”

M
ANY HOURS LATER
, I awake with a great inrush of air—utterly persuaded I’m drowning.

My hands claw the air for half a minute before the sensation of water begins to ebb. And even then, even after I’ve tested the floor and the wall and the mattress and found everything still solid, I can’t shake the feeling that the ocean is roaring over me.

As the minutes pass, this sensation funnels down into a sound, and this sound draws me away from the relative warmth of my mattress and sends me crawling across the attic floor.

There, in a splash of starlight, sprawls Vidocq in all his mass. A single horsehair blanket cushions him against the ground. He lies uncovered, utterly still…except for the tidal pulse of muscle along his jawline.

Who would have imagined that the mere grinding of a man’s teeth could produce this sound? Like water, yes, storming into a boulder’s cranny—and clamoring to be let out again.

Vidocq is legendary, among police and criminals alike, for scorning sleep. And in future weeks, when I think back to this moment, I will wonder if it’s because sleep hauls him back to the galleys—the iron collar, the chained ankle. For they are
raging,
these teeth, toward liberty.

He’s awake before dawn.

B
REAKFAST IS BOILED
chestnuts. Punishment enough, but Madame Prunaud, out of some torturer’s instinct, has set a marmot, a goose, and a partridge crackling over the kitchen fire. My head, of its own volition, keeps swerving toward the spit, but Vidocq gnaws with a quiet grace, even makes a point of complimenting Madame on her seasoning. And when she declares it’s time for us to go, he tenders her a small bow, picks up his knapsack, and bids me follow.

Only when we’ve left the inn far behind does Vidocq, with a grunt of satisfaction, reach into his knapsack and pull out three strips of grayish bacon, a hard roll, and a slab of white cheese.

“Stole ’em right off her plate,” he crows.

We eat on the go, wiping our mouths with our hands, and for the first time, I feel the freedom that a disguise can bring. To be no longer myself! The sun drizzles down my neck. A river breeze ambles through, bearing scent-threads of clover, yarrow, wild oats. In the jasmine, the first drowsings of bees.

And from Vidocq’s great frog-throat, a swelling of song. The same Mozart motif we heard in the morgue.

“Tepac,” I say, half to myself. “That’s a curious sort of name.”

“Oh, for the love of—spell it
backward,
will you, Hector?
C-a-p
…”

“…
e-t
.”

Capet
.

The name of a long-ago landowner who begat a great line of kings. The name that Temple guards hurled at the dauphin as though it were the most loathsome of epithets.

“Do you know,” says Vidocq, “I’m very near to being insulted by that name. What a vulgar touch!
Tepac
.” He bats at a low-hanging alder branch. “That’s what I get, dealing with amateurs. Give me professionals anytime. You always know where you are with them.”

After five more minutes of walking, we come to a pile of oak logs, fashioned in a pyramid, standing sentrylike atop a long, steeply pitched hill. Vidocq slows his gait—to get his bearings, I assume, until I see him make a quick scan of the horizon and lean over the woodpile.

On the other side is a long, lank, swaddled customer with a lush growth of whiskers and a pair of close-set mole-eyes, gray from exhaustion.

“Ah, Goury!” says Vidocq. “Such a pleasure.”

Drawing back his eyelids, Goury takes my measure.

“Who’s this?”

“My good friend Dr. Carpentier. Makes very little fuss, you won’t even notice him. Tell me, has anyone come and gone since yesterday?”

“Not a soul.”

Leaning round the woodpile, I peer down the hill and I see—we’ll say
two
houses. The first is a four-room, foursquare cottage with a steeply cut hipped roof and flat slate tiles. The kind of door-mad house that looks unabashedly outward and grows grapevines like hair and relishes every ray of sun on its plaster skin and harbors an eternally kindled hearth.

Slowly, though, the morning mist superimposes a second house over the first. From nowhere, I see blackened slashes of wall, fissured with cracks. I see two broken windows, stuffed with bales of straw. And nailed to the front door, a seagull, stretching its wings wide in taxidermic rapture. It could be the hideout of an Ostend smuggler.

“And other than that,” says Goury, “he’s your basic hearth-and-home stiff. Honestly, boss, I don’t know what you want with this one. Never stops for a drink. Never bats an eye at the girls. Don’t think he’s got a single vice.”

“I hear he likes to go for strolls.”

“Twice a day, yeah. Nine-forty in the morning, four-forty in the afternoon.”

“Creature of habit, is he?”

“You could track the sun and stars by this one.”

“Well, let’s see, that gives us—twelve minutes till the next orbit. Just enough time for refueling, eh?”

From an inner recess of the knapsack comes a small canteen, which Vidocq, after a swig, passes round. Goury downs his portion in half a second; I spit mine out at the first sign of trouble.

“My own recipe,” explains Vidocq. “Brandy and stout and a sniff of absinthe. Takes the rust off, don’t it? Careful, though. You drink too much, you’ll sleep through whole
eras,
it’s true. Hang on now,” he says, screwing the cap back on. “I think this is our boy.”

We
hear
him first: a squeaking of hinge, a laboring of door. Then comes a single boot, extending past the plane of the doorframe, in the manner of an Opéra-Comique dancer preparing her entrance. In the next second, he’s standing there in his entirety: Monsieur Tepac of Saint-Cloud, surveying the planet.

At this remove, nothing remotely dynastic clings to him, unless you count his burgher’s air of entitlement. His build is squarish, portly. His hair is the color of late-summer wheat. His feet join at the heels and turn outward at the toes.

“Well, now,” murmurs Vidocq, pressing a pair of binoculars to his eyes. “They got the age right, anyway. Thirty, thirty-two. Coloring’s close enough. Not that it’s any
hardship,
mind you, finding a blue-eyed Frenchman. But what a spectacle he makes of himself! Look for yourself, Hector.”

The first thing I see is the high-crowned hat. Moving downward: a dandyish, outsize collar, an even larger necktie.
Three
waistcoats, worn one over the other, each a different shade of olive. A short-waisted fishtail coat and a double row of silver buttons marching straight up a rather prosperous belly.

“Eats well,” says Vidocq, sourly. “Hold on. Who’s that behind him, Hector?”

An apron with a dusty-rose border billows into the doorframe, pursued by a single chapped hand.

“It’s the cook, I think.”

Tepac turns his head back, lifts his hand in farewell. Then, from the interior of the house, comes another figure: the man-of-all-work, striding past with a kettle full of wood chips. He angles his chin toward Tepac and disappears round the side of the house.

The briefest of tableaus, yes, but enough to give me a sense of…easy terms, I suppose…domestic covenants, lightly shouldered. This fellow may take airs with his townsmen, but in his own castle, he wears the master’s robes lightly.

Giving his oaken staff a rapier twirl, Monsieur Tepac sets off down the road, in the general direction of the river.

“After you,” whispers Vidocq. “After you, my highliness.”