The Black Tower (14 page)

Q
UICKLY
V
IDOCQ LAYS
out the parameters. Two of us will follow Tepac; the third will circle round and rejoin the party after five minutes; the first man will then peel off, and the rotation will continue.

Always we stay in conversation with one another. Under no circumstance do we make eye contact with the quarry. Periodically, we step aside to make small changes in our appearance: adding a scarf, dropping a tie, turning a vest inside out. Vidocq, during one changeover, slaps on a pair of leather gaiters, and a short while later, Goury appears in a red Phrygian bonnet that was last seen on the Bastille ramparts.

What would Monsieur Tepac think, I wonder, if he knew how much effort was being expended on his behalf? But he never looks back, never even moves his head as he keeps his course through Saint-Cloud’s half-deserted streets. To the people who pass—a tinman, an umbrella peddler, an old woman cadging for change—he pays not the slightest heed.

“Even Bonaparte would have given ’em a fucking nod,” grumbles Vidocq.

We follow him over a brook, through a copse of sycamores, over blankets of moss and a sward of Henry the Fourth’s ruff. For entire intervals, Monsieur Tepac’s stout figure disappears entirely from view, only to reappear in some unexpected place, like the cleft in a linden.

A half hour more, and he is veering south. No curlicues this time. He walks with greater purpose, as if a destination has suddenly occurred to him. And as the Seine breaks once more onto our eye, and the stone bridge rears up on our left, I realize, with a sting of something like hilarity, where he’s heading.

“Oh, the bastard!” says Vidocq.

T
HE
K
ING OF
F
RANCE’S
park is still a grand place to visit in these early days of the Restoration. Most people make a point of going in the summer, when, on any given Sunday, twenty-four jets of water come blazing into life. There’s always a watercolorist with an easel propped under an old chestnut, and there’s always a band playing, and complete strangers dance together in the high damp grass.

On a Tuesday in April, however…well, the château is closed, and there are maybe a dozen and a half people strolling through the grass and bindweed—most of them English missionary ladies in black fender-bonnets. The waterworks are on hold. Le Nôtre’s great
parterres de broderie
are no more than boxwood skeletons.

The birds are here, though, threshing the lawns. And the
air,
that’s here, too. Even Monsieur Tepac pauses alongside the carp basin to take his fill of it.

I
S IT NOW
that I remember? That it was the same air beloved of Marie-Antoinette?

She tasted it, yes, and resolved that the air of Saint-Cloud was fit for royal children to breathe. And so, at her behest, the King bought the château from his cousin, and this became the royal family’s haven from the Parisians who stared daggers at them through the long days and nights.

It was Saint-Cloud they were trying to reach before everything fell apart. April 18, 1791: The royal
berline
came thundering out of the Tuileries courtyard, bound on the usual route…but this time the way was blocked by a mob of sans-culottes so unappeasable that even General Lafayette couldn’t disperse them. For more than an hour, they surrounded that carriage, lobbing volleys of spit, every species of Parisian invective—baying for the head of the Austrian bitch and her cuckold. And through it all sat the King and Queen of France, trapped by their own subjects…knowing in their heart of hearts they would never again see Saint-Cloud.

But maybe, during that long hour, they allowed themselves a hope. That one day, not too far distant, their
son
would breathe that air once more.

A
ND ONCE MORE
I gaze at this plump bourgeois gentleman with his steel-tipped bluchers and his three waistcoats, strolling down from the Terrasse des Orangers, moving with inerrant straightness, as if a silk train were unfurling behind him.

Is this why you came here? To finish their journey for them?

And then Vidocq’s voice comes jabbing in.

“Jesus, quit
staring
at him, Hector!”

T
HE
K
ING OF
F
RANCE’S
park boasts a shrub, lately arrived from the Indies. A tangle of branches, fine as hair, powdered with millions of tiny white blossoms. Its positioning near the Fontaine du Gros Bouillon gives it a certain status so that, if you’re anywhere in its vicinity, you feel obliged to pay respects. The missionary ladies stop for a bit. Also a gitano in an embroidered blue turban, and in the same crowd: an abbé with a torn cassock; a pair of mariners, somewhat the worse for last night, locking arms round each other to keep themselves erect; and a pride of Russian soldiers, tilting their shakos at the exact angle of defiance they sported when they were occupying Paris three years ago.

Even Monsieur Tepac joins the throng. Through Vidocq’s binoculars, I see him fold his hands into his waistcoats and bend ever so slightly forward. A fluttering of eyelid, a quickening of nostril.

One minute, that’s all he grants this particular plant. Then, gripping his staff like a scepter, he continues in the same stately fashion toward the Grand Cascade, where even now, the emerald water I remember from childhood is pouring through those gargoyle mouths.

He hasn’t said a word to anybody in the crowd, but his leaving somehow loosens the social fabric. The missionaries disperse, and the Russian soldiers make toward the nearest restaurant, and those two sailors unlock arms and go careening northward, in widening parabolas.

“Those sailor boys will…”

This is what I’m about to say.
Those sailor boys are going to kill someone if they’re not careful.

And I look over at Vidocq, and I see, stamped on his face, the same thought—carried to a different conclusion.

“Goury,” he says. “It’s time to break up this party.”

H
OW DID HE KNOW
? Curiously enough, it’s the thing he was at such pains to correct in me.

Their skin.

Not the sun-cured crust that Vidocq remembered well from his own brief career at sea but the lymphatic whiteness so exclusive to Paris.

And once that discordance has registered, every pretense of being a bystander vanishes, and Vidocq is calling back to Goury and
driving
forward, like a baggage wagon breaking free of its harness, powering toward the Grand Cascade….

And already he’s too late.

The two sailors have shaken off their drunken fog, and in the same breath, they reach into their pockets and
converge
on Monsieur Tepac, moving in the straightest possible line with the least expense of energy.

Oh, it’s evil.

The staff is knocked from Tepac’s hand. The first blade catches him in his left side. A foot-deep thrust that freezes him in place for the second blow, a long slash across the neck.

An instant, that’s all it takes, and the sailors have flung the blades away and peeled off in opposite directions, and Vidocq, his face a furious purple, is barking orders at Goury and sprinting down the château terrace, and Goury is heading straight for the woods, and Monsieur Tepac is still, against all possibility, standing.

And then, in the next second, he’s crumbling like old mortar. Tipping into the Grand Cascade’s waiting basin with a muffled splash.

I hear a woman shout. I see a blur of wool and steel as the missionaries gallop toward the river and the Russians circle in confused alarum. And then, from nowhere, the waterworks come screaming into life—weeks ahead of schedule. Great plumes of sun-dazzled water, hooping and spiraling round us—and weaving a cocoon round the whirling figure of Monsieur Tepac.

Later, I won’t be able to recall jumping into the water. My memory will click in at the precise moment that my hands close round Tepac’s shoulders. The weight of him! Which is the weight of the water, too, soaking through all those waistcoats—and the weight of that
face
. Pale and trembling. Coughing up columns of water.

“Is there a…”

Doctor
…That’s the word that hovers on my lips.

And what a shock! To realize I’m calling for myself.

With a mighty heave, I drag his body out of the basin, tip him by degrees over the balustrade, and drag him toward the grass. I look round. The grounds are utterly deserted, and his breath is still coming, in long straggling rasps, but the only symptoms I can read in this moment are my own. The magnetic crackling of the hair on my arms. My heart slamming off my breastbone…

And in the seconds that follow, a span of three years drops away, and I am standing in the dissecting laboratory of the École de Médecine, and Dr. Duméril is bidding me to…

“Slow down, Monsieur. Take it, symptom by symptom, if you please.”

Contusion on forehead…

That’s it….
likely related to fall. Does not appear serious.

Continue.

Throat wound: relatively superficial. Carotid artery…

Yes…?…
and jugular vein still intact
.
Patient still able to breathe, w/difficulty.

Continue.

Side wound…

And here…here the act of enumerating for Dr. Duméril gives way before the act of touching—
feeling
—that raw flap of skin.

Possible…possible rupture of spleen…

But it’s not the spleen I’m conscious of, no, it’s his eyes. He looks somehow as if it were happening to someone else.

I at once applied pressure to wound.

Except all I have to apply is my own hand, and how inadequate it is. The blood runs through the crevices of my fingers, and the skin round his mouth grows whiter and whiter, and…

“You’ll be all right,” I whisper.

A coldness, quite different from the chill of the water, is stealing over him as the blood draws back to his heart and the orphaned extremities quiver.

“No,” I say. “No.
Look
.”

Extending my index finger, I lower it toward his half-seeing eyes. I draw it back. I lower it once more.

“Watch the finger. That’s all you have to do.”

Something sparks in the depths of his irises. The pupils slowly narrow to a point.

“That’s it,” I say. “Don’t think of anything else. Just the finger.”

And gradually, as he draws me into focus, the trembling begins to ebb, and a vein of color reveals itself in his cheeks, and even the blood—or do I imagine this?—even this begins to abate.

With a stifled cry, I look up to find Vidocq—cast in such a deep shadow by the sun that, at first, I think he’s flung a satchel over his shoulder. But then the satchel reconfigures itself into a man. In a mariner’s suit.

The man is conscious, yes, but utterly still in the grip of a larger will. Vidocq flings him onto the grass as if he were a bag of feed. Places one knee on the man’s back, draws out a pair of handcuffs, and binds the wrists together in a single practiced stroke.

“Move a fraction,” he growls. “Move a
fiber
.”

Panting, he kneels beside me. His eyes lock onto mine.

“How is he?”

“I can’t—he’s too—”

With a dark wonder, I hold my hand up to the light, and it’s someone
else’s
hand: palsied from effort, painted with blood. Vidocq is already stepping round me…leaning over the dying man…purring raspily into his ear.

“Help’s on the way. You’ll be just fine, your—your
king
ship….”

I’ll never know exactly how he means that title. I can only testify to the change it produces in the dying man. A violent bucking rhythm that takes him from his bluchers to his shoulder blades but concentrates itself most intensely in the head, which swivels from side to side, like a clock pendulum—
repelling
the title Vidocq has granted him.

And this denial, finally, is what costs Monsieur Tepac his last drop of force. The eyes, having lodged their objections, scroll up. The head falls still. The lower lip rolls down.

“The game’s done,” says Vidocq.

G
OURY COMES BACK
alone. Nothing to tender but apologies.

“Sorry, Chief, he was a fast one for being so tall…made straight for the woods…I kept
at
him….”

But Vidocq is locked in a silent colloquy with the dead man.

“Well, now,” he says, to no one in particular. “Bastards learned their lesson, eh? Didn’t want any dying speeches, like the late Monsieur Leblanc. So they took out his throat. Ah yes,” he says, nodding. “But they couldn’t keep him from talking, could they, Hector?”

“He was saying…”

“He was saying
no
. He was saying you’ve got the wrong man, brother.”

Frowning, he kneels once more by the dead man. Circles his finger round a small pond of sepia by the temples.

“Iodine?” I guess.

Vidocq shakes his head. Thrusts his hand deep into the dead man’s locks. A single brute swipe, and then the fingers reemerge in the morning light, with a phantasmal coat of gold.

“Hair dye,” whispers Goury.

“Mm,” grunts Vidocq. “Bit young to be coloring his roots, isn’t he?” He wipes his hand on his trousers. “
Someone’s
been made an ass of. Damned if I know who.”

For the first time, the sound, the spectacle of the waterworks impose themselves on his senses. His nostrils twitch like a salamander’s. His eyelids quiver down.

“Goury?”

“Yes, Chief.”

“Keep a watch on our little prisoner over there. Hector?”

“Yes.”

“I wonder if you’d join me for a bit of exercise….”

W
HEN
C
HATEAUBRIAND WAS
first presented at court in 1785, he was favored with a smile from his queen, Marie-Antoinette. It must have captivated him because, twenty years later, he could still pick it out from the bones exhumed from the mass grave near La Madeleine. One sight of those enameled tiers, blazing forth from a skull, and he could say in perfect faith:
That was her.

As for me…well, no queens have ever smiled on me. How, then, should I know a Hapsburg lip when I see it? Maybe I stumbled across it in a textbook. (
Pathology: mandibular prognathism
.) Maybe I glimpsed it at the Louvre. But when I see Vidocq sprinting away from the dead man, I don’t have to ask where he’s going. My mind is already traveling back there.

To the strange cottage we left just an hour ago, where a young man—a man-of-all-work, or so we thought him—came striding through a doorway with an armload of wooden chips and thrust his chin toward Monsieur Tepac.

A chin that was already thrust forward.

As it has been thrusting, more or less, through generations of Hapsburgs. The Empress Maria Theresa passed it on to her daughter Marie-Antoinette, who married a king of France and gave birth to a boy, and this boy met the world in the same way as his ancestors: the upper jaw retiring, the lower jaw crawling out like a cantilever—producing a drooping lip that looks either pugnacious or dim or shy, depending on the context, and resembles no other lip in the world.

T
HE COTTAGE IS
glazed and serene when we reach it. Woodsmoke crawls from the chimney. In the near distance, a cow and a horse woo each other….

We find him at the rear of the house, kneeling in the damp spring soil, sweating freely through his blouse.

He doesn’t know we’re there. Vidocq has to insert his massive frame between the sun and the earth—
drown
the fellow in shadow, like Alexander towering over Diogenes. Only then does the young man pause in his labor and look up.

“Good day,” he says.

The hair is dirty blond, unkempt, straggling halfway down the neck. The eyes are blue. The skin is freckled and creased by long exposure to the sun.

The
hands
…scratched, calloused, caked in dirt. The hands of a laborer.

And what have they wrought! My eyes can’t even take it in. The austere boxwood patterns of Le Nôtre—wheels and spirals and paisleys—but crawling with life. Pansies and tulips, crocuses and lung-worts, the beginnings of roses and tuberoses and jasmine and pinks. All of it somehow crammed into a twelve-by-fifteen plot.

“What’s your name?” I ask him.

The sketch of a smile emerges from that prominent lower jaw…then withdraws. He extends one of his loam-coated hands and, like a child reading from a primer, says:

“My name is Charles.”