The Black Tower (2 page)

I’
M A MAN
of a certain age—old enough to have been every kind of fool—and I find to my surprise that the only counsel I have to pass on is this: Never let your name be found in a dead man’s trousers.

N
AME, YES
. M
INE
is Hector Carpentier. These days,
Professor
Carpentier, of the École de Médecine. My specialty is venereology, which is a reliable source of amusement for my students. “Come with us,” they say. “Carpentier’s going to tell all about the second stage of syphilis. You’ll never screw again.”

I live on the Rue du Helder, with an orange tabby named Baptiste. My parents are dead, I have no brother or sister and haven’t yet been blessed with children. In short, I’m the only family I’ve got, and at certain intervals of calm, my mind drifts toward those people, not strictly related, who took on all the trappings, all the meaning of family—for a time, anyway. If you were to pin me down, for instance, I’d have to say I recall the lads I went to medical school with better than I recall my own father. And Mother…well, she’s present enough after all these years, but from some angles, she’s not quite as
real
as Charles. Who was perhaps not real at all but who was, for a time, like family.

I
THINK ABOUT
him every time I see a penta. One glance is all it takes, and I’m standing once more in the Luxembourg Gardens, somewhere in May. I’m watching a pretty girl pass (the angle of her parasol, yes, the butter brightness of her gloves), and Charles is brooding over flowers. He is always brooding over flowers. This time, though, he actually plucks one and holds it up to me: an Egyptian star cluster.

Five
arms, hence its name. Smaller than a whisper. Imagine a starfish dragged from the ocean bottom and…never mind, I can’t do it justice. And, really, it’s not so remarkable, but sitting there in the cup of his hand, it lays some claim on me, and so does everything else: the Scottish terrier snoring on a bench; the swan cleaning its rump feathers in the fountain; the moss-blackened statue of Leonidas. I am the measure of those things and they of me, and we are all—sufficient, I suppose.

Of course, nothing about our situation has shifted. We are still marked men, he and I. But at this moment, I can imagine a sliver of grace—the possibility, I mean, that we might be marked for other things. And all because of this silly flower, which on any other day, I would have stepped on like so much carpet.

H
E’S BEEN ON
my mind of late, because just last week, I received a letter from the Duchesse d’Angoulême. (She is staying at Count Coronini’s estate in Slovenia.) The envelope was girt round with stamps, and the letter, written in her usual shy hand, was mostly an essay on rain, sealed off by prayers. I found it comforting. Word has it that the Duchess is penning her memoirs, but I don’t believe it. No woman has clutched her own life more closely to her bosom. She’ll hold it there, I expect, until the coroner assures her she’s dead.

Which may be a long time coming. God’s funny that way. The more his servants pine for his presence—and make no mistake, the Duchess does—the longer he keeps them shackled to the old mortal coil. No, it’s the blasphemers he’s aching to get his hands on. Take Monsieur Robespierre. At the very height of the Terror, Robespierre decided that the name “God” had too much of an ancien régime color to it. In his capacity as head of the Committee of Public Safety, he declared that God would henceforward be known as the Supreme Being. There was some kind of festival, I believe, to celebrate God’s promotion. A parade, maybe. I was only two.

A few months later, with half his jaw shot off, groaning toward the scaffold, was Robespierre already composing apologies? We’ll never know. There was no time for memoirs.

M
E
, I
HAVE
acres of time, but if I were to write up my life, I don’t think I could start with the usual genuflections—all those ancestors in halberds, I mean, the midwives catching you in their calloused mitts. No, I’d have to start with Vidocq. And maybe end with him, too.

A strange admission, I know, given that I spent no more than a few weeks in his company. Fifteen years have passed with virtually no word from him. Why, then, should I bother revisiting the terrible business that brought us together?

Not from any hope of being believed. If anything, I write so that
I
may believe. Did it really happen? In quite that way? Nothing to do but set everything down, as exactly as I can, and see what stares back at me.

A
ND HOW EASILY
the time slips away, after all. I need but shut my eyes, and two decades vanish in a breath, and I am standing once more in…

The year 1818. Which, according to official records, is the twenty-third year in the reign of King Louis XVIII. For all but three of those years, however, his majesty has been reigning somewhere else entirely—
hiding,
an unkind soul might say, while a certain Corsican made a footstool of Europe. None of that matters now. The Corsican has been locked away (again); the Bourbons are back; the fighting is done; the future is cloudless.

This curious interregnum in French history goes by the name of “the Restoration,” the implication being that, after senseless experiments with democracy and empire, the French people have been restored to their senses and have invited the Bourbons back to the Tuileries. The old unpleasantness is never alluded to. We have all seen enough politics to last us a lifetime, and we know now: to take a hard line is to take a hard fall.

I know it, too—although I am young when this story begins, so young I scarcely recognize myself. Four years shy of thirty: thin and pink and inclined to catch cold. My father has been dead for some eighteen months. He left me and Mother the house I grew up in, as well as some undeveloped land in the Chaussée d’Antin, which I have already lost through bad speculations. To be specific, I was the chief investor in a pretty, bony dancer named Eulalie. She had dark eyes and a stealthy sort of smile, it seemed to climb round from the back of her head, and a way of softly clicking her wrists in and out of joint which never lost its charm.

I’ve heard it said that dinners and plays and carriages and gloves cost nothing in Paris. This is certainly true if you’re not the one paying for them. And Eulalie, in the time I knew her, never paid for a blessed thing—it was part of her allure—and when, under duress, she admitted that she owed two thousand francs to the dressmaker and another thirteen hundred to the upholsterer and, oh, God knows what else, it was the most natural thing in the world to sell my father’s land and walk about in muddy bluchers and a single black suit.

I learned after a time that the money was going to a law clerk named Cornu, who had been keeping company with Eulalie through five years and two children.

Scenes always disgusted her, so we never had one. She left me a cellar of memories, which is where I spend most of these early days of the Restoration. Rummaging. My mother and I reside in the Latin Quarter, and to make up for the lost assets, we’ve begun to take in lodgers—students, mostly, from the university. Mother, in her tulle cap, presides over the dinner table; I fix leaks. Squeaks, too, if I can. (The joists are a bit rotten on the third floor.) In my spare time, I haunt the university’s laboratories, where Dr. Duméril, an old friend of my family, suffers me to carry out experiments, the nature of which no one is quite clear on. I tell people I am halfway through a monograph, but in fact, I’ve been halfway through this monograph for about two years. The only part I’ve finished, really, is the title: “The Therapeutic Efficacies of Animal Magnetism in Conjunction with Divers Orientalist Practices of Ancient….”

Oh, I won’t go on. I once rattled off the whole thing to my mother, and her face assumed a look of such bottomless misery that I resolved never to speak of it again—and nearly resolved to drop the project altogether. If I’d been braver, I would have.

Why did I mention the monograph? Oh! Because I am coming home from the laboratory on the morning in question. No, that’s not quite right. I am coming home from Le Père Bonvin.

It’s Monday. March the twenty-third. Spring, to be exact, although word is late getting to Paris. About a week ago, a front of green-gray drizzle-ice settled in like a malevolent houseguest. The old distinctions between air and water no longer hold. Everywhere you hear splashing—your own, the man behind you, the woman ahead—and everywhere a roiling liquid darkness, as if we’re all frogs in a sunken kingdom.

Umbrellas are useless. You clap your hat on as firmly as it will go and pull up your lapels and carry on. Even if you have nowhere to go…go!

Yes, that describes me pretty well as I turn into the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève: grimly resolved and going no place in particular. Except home. The street is empty, except for Bardou, who lifts his head a bit by way of greeting. Bardou is my chief coordinate, for he keeps his corner vigil no matter what the conditions. Long ago, they say, he lost his arm in a paper mill, and though he works now and then as a church beadle, he always comes back to his station by the old condemned well, and whenever I pass, I try to drop a coin or two his way (more copper of late than silver), and he shows his appreciation by tipping his head an inch to the side. It’s our ritual, obscurely comforting in its outlines.

But on this day of March the twenty-third, this ritual will be violated in a rather shocking way. By Bardou himself, who commits the singular offense of
looking
at me. Angling his face toward mine and
fastening
on with a real intent.

Is he chiding me for my stinginess? That’s my first thought, I admit, but as I make my way down the street to my house, another possibility strikes me, and this is more shocking than being stared at. The possibility, I mean, that this is not Bardou.

I’m laughing even as I look back.
Not Bardou
. The same crooked, huddled form. The tattered hat and the leather shreds of boot, always threatening to come apart but never quite managing. And the stump, for God’s sake! Twitching like a divining rod.
Not Bardou?

He vanishes from my thoughts the moment I enter the house. The student lodgers have gone to their lectures; Mother has taken Charlotte, the maid, to buy curtains at the Palais-Royal; I am alone. Precious minutes lie before me, waiting to be squandered. I kick off my boots and incline on the horsehair settee, the one that no one is supposed to sit on, and I read Talma’s notices in the latest issue of the
Minerve Française
(which I had to lift from Le Père Bonvin because we can’t afford to subscribe) and I…I was going to say reflect, but
dozing
seems to cover it. When the knocking comes, I feel as if I’m being dragged from a canyon.

Never mind
. I drape the newspaper over my face.
Charlotte will get it
.

Ah, but Charlotte’s not home. No one’s at home but me, and the knocking is coming louder and faster. I can ignore it, I’ve done that before, it’s an aptitude of mine, but the rapping grows only more urgent, and in my dazzled state, I begin to wonder if it might not harbor a
code,
which will never be explained until I answer the door, and I have no time to ask if I want it explained, I’m running into the foyer and pulling back the bolt and throwing open the door….

And there stands Bardou. His head bowed, his voice choked.

“A thousand pardons, Monsieur.”

It’s the most shocking thing he’s done yet.
Standing
. For the first time in my memory…and maybe the last. His bent frame inscribes slow circles in the air. A second more, he’ll give way altogether.

“Some bread,” he gasps, steadying himself against the lintel. “If you…”

I should make this clear. There is not an ounce of charity in me at this moment, only a prickling of terror. I don’t want him to die on our parquet floor. Because, even if I manage to spirit the body away, Mother will
smell
him, seeping into her wax, and it will be one more item on the scroll of offenses, and this scroll is no piece of paper, it is something endless and coiling and half fluid, it is the pink tongue of a great serpent, flicking at my neck as I dash toward Charlotte’s pantry….

He mustn’t die on our floor. He mustn’t die on our floor.

There’s no bread, but there’s…something that
resembles
bread…a macaroon! A week old, perhaps. Perfect.

Back I trundle with my stale sweet, a thin smile penciled on my face, and there, on the front stoop…

No one.

From behind, I hear a clearing of throat. It is Bardou. Transposed by some strange agency to our dining room. Leaning against our buffet.

“I’ve….”

The words die in my throat as he grabs the macaroon and downs it in two bites.

“Ugh,” he says, flinging the wrapper away. “Lizard shit.”

And then he lowers himself into the very settee I’ve just vacated. (The one that no one is supposed to sit on.)

And again the words—the bourgeois reproaches—won’t come clear, for I am just now remarking the change in Bardou’s voice, which is shaking off years with each passing second.

And this is nothing next to the alteration in Bardou himself. He is coming undone. The ribbons tumble from his empty sleeve, and his lone arm scurries into the hollow of his breast, and in mere seconds, another arm has miraculously appeared where there was only stump.

Like a hydra,
I think, staring in wonder.
Growing new appendages
.

“See here, my good fellow, I don’t know what you’re up to….”