The Black Tower (26 page)

T
HEIR SCHEME HAD
an author, and his name was Virgil.

Like so many French revolutionaries, Professor Corneille revered dead Romans, and when my father approached him, he was reading the second book of the
Aeneid:
“How They Took the City.” The great wooden horse, hauled inside the walls of Troy with its cache of Greeks. The city overrun…battlements in flames…Hecuba wailing…

Why not the same trick on a smaller scale?

And so Professor Corneille bought a cedar hobbyhorse, four feet in height, five in length, and hollowed it out until it was large enough to hold a child. He put casters on it, used an awl to poke air holes, installed a panel with a secret catch over the cavity…and, after two days of work, declared the thing ready.

“Ready for what?” I ask.

“To be carried into the Temple. That very evening, your father took it in. The seventh of June it was.”

The seventh of June. The very night he left that letter with my mother.
Important business…not without danger…might not return…

And here was his business: driving to the Temple in a hired wagon with Professor Corneille and a hollowed-out hobbyhorse.

“Oh, they were surprised to see your father, I’ve no doubt. Even more surprised to see him rolling a wooden horse! But he explained the situation very calmly. Said he’d been deputized by the Committee to present this—what did we come up with?—yes, a
peace
offering. From Prussia.”

“Why would they believe that?”

“Well, of course, we had to forge some papers.”

And here Professor Corneille found in himself a previously unsuspected gift. Using Father’s own entry visas as a model, and with nothing more than a scroll of parchment, a candle, and a pair of inkwells, he re-created the signature of Citizen Mathieu and the unique stamp of the Committee of General Security, right down to the rancid-butter shade of wax.

The papers were unimpeachable, and it was too late in the evening to verify the orders personally. So the horse was suffered to pass through.

“And what then?”

“Your father personally carried it up to Louis-Charles’ cell.”

“Why?”

“Isn’t it obvious? To put the boy inside.”

“But how were you to get the horse back down? Without attracting suspicion?”

That was the work of
another
document, which arrived three hours later. Likewise from “the Committee,” likewise forged. Announcing that the hobbyhorse in question was now to be removed forthwith.

“After only three hours?”

“You have to understand, my boy, we had one very important thing on our side. The sheer
capriciousness
of the Committee. Everyone knew whatever they blessed at sunset could be illegal by sunrise. So it was with the hobbyhorse. ‘Upon second consideration, the Committee has resolved that no son of a tyrant shall be granted idle amusement while France’s children cry for bread’—oh, I forget the exact language, but it sounded
distinctly
plausible.

“At any rate, it
worked
. They let your father in. They even assigned him a couple of guards to help him carry the thing back down.”

“But wouldn’t they have inspected the cell after Father left?” I ask. “He said the guards checked on Louis-Charles several times a night. And first thing in the morning.”

“Of course they did,” says Father Time, unflappable. “That’s why we brought the
other
boy.”

A
ND HERE
L
EBLANC
reenters the picture.

Through discreet inquiries, he had managed to locate a woman—a laundress and former prostitute named Félicité Neveu—who had been in the Conciergerie during Marie-Antoinette’s final days and who had become, at no small risk to her safety, one of the queen’s most ardent defenders.
Idolized
the woman and didn’t care who knew. No one else had been so kind to her, she’d say, so gracious, so (for want of a more acceptable word)
Christian
.

Félicité especially liked to tell of the day her own son had come to visit. The queen had made a special point of saying how charming the boy was. And how—you must imagine her, brushing a tear from her noble cheek—how
closely
he resembled her own Louis-Charles. Félicité had been so moved by the queen’s grief that she had resolved, upon her release, to give up her criminal ways and dedicate her life to Marie-Antoinette’s memory.

Leblanc courted her over a round of drinks at Thicoteau’s—and then took the perilous step of telling her the plan he had in mind. Before the evening was done, she was on board.

“On board?”

“Why, yes,” says Father Time, blinking mildly. “
Her
boy would go to the Tower, and Louis-Charles would go free.”

“But what sort of mother would agree to such a thing?”

“A desperate one. Her boy was
dying,
you see. In great squalor, with no hope for recovery. She must have reasoned—well, at least in the
Temple,
her son would have Dr. Carpentier looking in every morning, Leblanc the rest of the day. Exercise, games. Fresh air on the tower platform. Oh, and a decent
burial,
that was most important. She couldn’t afford to bury him herself, and she wanted him to have a
stone
. Even if it had the wrong name on it.”

And being a royalist sympathizer, she couldn’t have guessed that Louis-Charles would never receive a stone. That he would be thrown into an unmarked grave, covered in lime, left to rot….

“So this
other
boy was in the hobbyhorse that Father wheeled up.”

“Yes, indeed. Terribly
weak,
poor thing, but before we closed up the panel, he—he managed to tell us how comfy it was inside. Really
charming
manners.”

Three hours later, Father went back to the Temple with his forged papers to reclaim the hobbyhorse. Professor Corneille bided his time two blocks away in the baggage wagon. The night was still and damp, the crickets chirring, the stones slumbered in the heat….

But the professor never once drowsed. How could he? The time passed like an agony. One hour.
Two
hours. Still no sign of Father.

“I confess I despaired of him more than once. Something must have
happened,
that was the only explanation, and I didn’t know what to do. All I could think of was having to break the news to your poor mother.

“And then—oh, it must have been well after one in the morning—he came! Wheeling that silly horse.

“Well, we set it down in the rear of the wagon, and we both climbed back in, and we drove—oh, it was a good long time, yes. Your father was guiding the whole way.
Turn right at the corner…. And now left…. Bear right again.
Me, of course, I hadn’t a
clue
where we were going. I assumed they’d arranged—oh, some kind of
safe
house, I suppose, your father and Leblanc. I never would’ve guessed we’d end up where we did.”

“And where was that?”

“At the apartment of Félicité Neveu.”

“The washerwoman?”

“Oh, yes! I remember, she lived in the—yes, it was the Rue des Coutures-Saint-Gervais. Nowhere you’d want to be
alone
at night, I can tell you.”

“What happened then?”

“Well, your father tripped the catch on the hobbyhorse. He took the boy out, very gently. And then he—he
carried
him upstairs to Mademoiselle Neveu.”

“But which boy was it?” I can barely restrain myself now. “The dauphin or the changeling?”

“I’ve no idea!” cries the old man, shrugging toward the heavens. “I had to stay with the wagon, so I never did see the face. And, of course, the two boys
did
resemble each other. You’d have had to study them rather closely to—to distinguish them.

“Well, you may imagine—when your father returned, I was—oh, perfectly
exploding
with questions—but he cut me off. Quite brusque about it.
All is well,
he said.”

The same words he used with my mother.

“Naturally, I—I asked him what he meant. He was quiet a good while, and then he just—he said it again.
All is well
. And nothing more.”

“And he never spoke of that evening again?”

“Oh, no. And don’t think I didn’t try to draw him out, either.”

I stare once more into the old man’s face. The bleary smile, the bleary brain. To think of him carrying off such a grand and dangerous folly. And never speaking of it until this very minute.

And yet what has he told me, after all? The mystery hasn’t so much been solved as funneled down: into that span of two hours between when Father went into the Temple and when he came back. Somewhere in that interstice lies the answer. To Louis-Charles’ fate. To Father’s fate. To everything.

And I’m no closer to knowing now than I was before…and Father Time is slipping deeper into his cloud. The mouth is folding down, the eyes skimming over…the time for questions is drawing to an end.

“What did you think,” I ask, “when you heard that Louis-Charles had died that very day?”

“Well, I—I didn’t know what to think. The boy in the tower—
he
might have died. But which boy was it?” He pauses to let the prospect play out before him. “All the same, I wouldn’t be shocked to hear the dauphin was alive
today
. Though I—I suppose we would have
heard,
eh?

“Oh, but I just remembered something else your father told me. This was many months later. He’d already given up his practice by then, and we were having—yes, that’s right—the usual coffee at the Wise Athenian. Awfully quiet he was.
Thunderously
gloomy—well, by then, he was
always
gloomy.

“
D’you know,
he said—he was staring into his cup, I remember—
there’s one thing I can never really forgive myself for.
I asked him what that was, and he said:
I actually believed that one boy’s life was worth more than another’s.
And before we parted that morning, he said one more thing. He said,
It’s true what you used to tell me, Junius. I am no republican.
”

T
HE LIGHT FROM
the streetlamp at the corner is slowly dissolving into morning light. The abandoned well where Bardou used to sit is empty but for a pair of pigeons, picking at wood lice. The first cries of the chimney sweeps can be heard in the distance, and a quarrier’s wagon comes trundling over the cobbles.

This is the last conversation I will ever have with Father Time. This is the last time I will ever look at this house. And yet the subject that’s most weighing on me is something else entirely.

“What happened to Félicité Neveu?” I ask.

“I’ve no idea. I made a point of looking in on her a few days later, but there was no sign of her. Or her child. The neighbors seemed to think she’d fled town to avoid being arrested. It wouldn’t do, you know, being a royalist in those days.”

“And her son. What was his name?”

“Name,” says Father Time. “Name…”

The light drains from his eyes, the cheeks droop…then from nowhere, a spark bursts forth, and the old man cackles to the sky:

“Ha!
Virgil!
That’s it! What better sign that he was heaven-sent? Oh now, Hector, before you go, I don’t suppose I could touch you for a—a
coin
or two? For the diligence to Vernon? Oh, that’s very kind of you. As to the wedding, well, I’m
desolate
I can’t invite you, but she prefers a
small
affair, my fiancée.
Simple
girl. Hope you understand….”

“N
O,” SAYS
V
IDOCQ.
“It’s too much to believe.”

I come back just as he’s sitting down to breakfast. Such a pacific scene. The Sèvres coffeepot, the Sèvres coffee bowl…the coil of steam…scents of lemon and orange pouring in through the French windows…Vidocq himself—sleep-softened, night-calmed—in an open dressing gown, a frieze shirt, and red trousers.

And here comes Hector. Rude and urgent, bristling with news. The reverie is over.

“A lookalike boy?” cries Vidocq. “Smuggled past two hundred guards?
In a hobbyhorse?
”

“That’s what the professor said.”

“And why the devil should we trust him?”

“Well, you’ve—you’ve
met
him. He doesn’t have any reason to lie. And he’s the last living eyewitness.”

“Oh? And what did he witness, Hector? Did he ever actually
see
Louis-Charles? Of course not. If I’m going to take this matter to the minister of justice, I’ll need more than the word of some gamy old partridge.”

Vidocq stabs a brioche with a butter knife, swallows it in three bites. In the next instant, the bells of Saint-Séverin come shimmering out. Followed by a chain of answering bells, fording back and forth across the river.

Sunday
.

Which may be why Vidocq chooses this moment to invoke the deity.

“Lord above! Is it too much to ask for a little
evidence
? Something that won’t get me laughed on my ass?”

“I don’t know what more you can ask of me,” I say. “I’ve given you eyewitness testimony….”

“Hearsay.”

“I’ve given you my father’s
personal
account….”

“Which leaves us just where we started, damn him.”

Something in my expression, maybe, softens him into silence. Then, with a low grumble, he says:

“Very well. Get me the journal.”

Not a speck of care in his fingers now as he whips back and forth through those calcified pages.

“Here’s what’s bothering me, Hector. That final line.
Enough for now
. Doesn’t that sound to you like there’s more to come?”

“There isn’t. I’ve looked.”

“But it doesn’t make sense. We know your father wasn’t interrupted. We know he didn’t need to bury the thing in any haste—no one even knew it existed. So why didn’t he stay to make a proper accounting?”

In the breeze from the French windows, the pages billow before him, like a meadow. Vidocq is just about to close them when something snags at his eye.

“Stop a bit,” he mutters.

He raises the book to the sunlight. In the inside back flap, a small crevice—a violation in the book’s fabric—stands revealed.

“Christ,” mutters Vidocq. “I can’t believe I…”

His finger disappears into the opening…and reemerges seconds later with a tightly folded bundle. He lays it out before us on the breakfast table, next to the preserves and the honey.

To Whom It May Concern:

 

You may verify the merchandise via the following particular: a mole, black-brown, 1 half-inch in diameter, located between 4th and 5th toe, on right foot.

Yours,
Dr. Hector Carpentier

 

 

Vidocq’s eyes are hard. His mouth is a thin black line.

“Is this your father’s hand?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“You can positively identify it?”

“Yes.”

He slams his fists on the breakfast table. So hard that the book jumps toward the ceiling and the coffee spoons shriek and the maid comes running, starchy with terror.

“Where’s Monsieur Charles?” he bellows at her.

“Still in bed.”

“All the better.”

H
E’S JUST AS
I left him. The head wafting on pillows, the breath rolling out. We yank open the curtains, and the inrushing light picks out faint deltas of saliva at the corners of his mouth.

“Sleeps like a fucking angel, doesn’t he?” mutters Vidocq, snatching the covers away.

The bare feet twitch, as if stunned by the light, then fall still again.

Vidocq drops to one knee. With the same delicacy he showed Leblanc’s corpse in the morgue, he pries apart the fourth and fifth toes.

“Hector,” he whispers. “Bring the lamp.”

But it’s already visible in the morning light. A brown-and-black mole, of irregular proportions, roughly one-half inch in diameter.

The bedclothes rustle; the mattress creaks. From the mesa of his pillows, Charles Rapskeller gazes down at us through half-open lids—perfectly agreeable, as if this were how every day began.

For several seconds, Vidocq hovers on the brink of a choice. And in the end, he decides to remain on bended knee. And to angle his head toward the floor. The very image of subjection.

“I will not call you
Majesty,
” he says. “Not yet. But if all goes well, I hope you will have occasion to recall my humble service.”

He raises his head now. All traces of subjection are gone.

“We’ve more in common than you know, Monsieur Charles. They locked me away, too. They tried to
extinguish
me, just as they tried with you. And they couldn’t. And they won’t.”

How to describe this next moment? With great care and patience, he pulls the coverlet and sheets back over Charles, tucks them round so that only the sweat-tousled head is still visible. I have never seen Vidocq so tender—or so strategic.

“Tomorrow morning,” he announces, “we shall call on the minister of justice. May heaven help us all.”