The Black Tower (4 page)

I
T’S
V
IDOCQ’S LITTLE
coup de théâtre, of course, and it depends for its effect on shock, which is the one response I can’t provide.

To a medical student, after all, a body is a body. The only surprise in this case is to find Chrétien Leblanc’s body still here. Under normal circumstances, he would have been borne straight to Vaugirard or Clamart or, if money were wanting, the potters’ field at Père-Lachaise. It’s clear enough Vidocq wants me to have this private audience, and nothing more can happen until I do, and so at last I do ply myself against this
face,
oily with candlelight. The bush of hair inside his Roman nostrils and the chin cleft, deep enough to hold a thumb, and the threads of blood worrying his sealed eyelids. The scalp has shrunk back to reveal a grubby stripe of gray beneath Leblanc’s blackened locks, but the whiskers are still neatly combed, the brows trimmed, and his pores breathe out the sweet-sharp scent of pomade.

“Maybe fifty-five, fifty-six,” says Vidocq. “We can’t be sure.” He’s standing so close behind me that his chin actually tickles my shoulder as he talks. “Ring any bells, does he, Doctor?”

“I don’t know him.”

“You’re sure?”

“Absolutely.”

Vidocq grunts. Laces his hands behind his head and tips himself back against the wall.

“He didn’t leave any family. Took us two days just to find someone who could identify him. Thank God for creditors, Doctor! A shoemaker on the Rue Dauphine came round to swear a complaint. Said some bastard named Leblanc had stiffed him on a pair of boots and skipped town. ‘Skipped town?’ I said. ‘Gone to a better world, more like it.’ Well, wasn’t the shoemaker fit to be tied? He took one look at that body and said, ‘Damn your soul! Where am I supposed to get my seven livres now?’”

Vidocq chuckles. “I’d have been happy, naturally, to pay him out of Leblanc’s private funds, but the wallet was long gone when we found him. The clothes, too. Leave a body lying around long enough, every last article goes. Even the gold crowns. No,” he says, his voice trailing down. “I’m afraid the only personal effects left on Monsieur Leblanc were his drawers.”

He leans over the cadaver. “There there,” he murmurs, and in a gesture startling and soft, he runs his hands through the strands of perfumed hair. “You can imagine, Doctor,” he says, looking up. “I come across a few corpses in my line of work, Doctor. Robberies gone bad, usually. Sometimes a victim protests too much. Or the thief’s a bit of an amateur. Something goes wrong, he can’t cut the purse free, he panics. Or the victim
knows
the thief and has to be—” He looks up at me. “It’s quick, usually. And clean.
This
was less quick and less clean.”

He pulls the rest of the sheet off. He says:

“What do you see?”

No, this is what he says: “What do you see,
Doctor
?”

“Well, now.” Maybe you can hear it: my new baritone. “Judging from the
joints,
rigor mortis has largely dissipated. Muscle proteins have begun to decompose. Which would indicate he’s been dead at least thirty-six hours. No, I’m sorry, make that forty-two.”

“Why forty-two?” he asks.

“I don’t believe you’ve met,” I answer, extending my hand toward him.

Sitting on the tip of my finger is a fly. Robed in emerald, drowsy-still.

“Lucilia sericata,”
I say. “The greenbottle, to you and me. Usually the first insect to arrive—thirty-eight hours at the earliest. This one looks like he’s had a few more hours to feast.”

And as if on cue come the answering buzzes of other flies, gathering at the same table. One of them even lands on the bridge of Vidocq’s nose. He pushes his lower lip out and sweeps the fly away on a current of air.

“Forty-two hours,” he murmurs. “That means…dead before nightfall…well, how do you…”

And suddenly: the first whisperings of piano from the next room. Scales, executed with light precision. It could be anybody, but my mind seizes for some reason on the image of a young girl. Ringleted and pinafored—the apple of the morgue keeper’s eye.

“No signs of head trauma,” I say. “The fatal blow must have come—
here
—just beneath the left rib cage. A longish sort of thrust, perhaps from a—a—”

“A
poignard,
I’m guessing. Or a dirk.”

“Now this is curious.” My fingers step across Leblanc’s hairless torso. “See these lacerations? No more than an inch in diameter. By my count, there are a good half dozen on the chest alone.”

“Four more on the back,” says Vidocq.

“Fairly shallow. No more than half an inch, as far as I can tell. You might have done as much with a dinner knife.” I frown, run my index finger across the scapula and back to the neck. “I could almost…”

“Yes?”

“Assuming he didn’t inflict these himself…”

“Yes?”

“I might almost believe they
wanted
him to bleed. Before they killed him.”

Taking the candle from the sconce, I move the light across him in rippling pools.

“Is this how the body was found?” I ask.

“Not exactly. We had to clean it up a bit. There was a goodly amount of dried blood, especially around the fingers.”

“The fingers?”

“Mm. The right hand. Couldn’t even see it at first for all the damned blood. Look for yourself, Doctor.”

He watches as I raise Leblanc’s fingers to the light. The piano has fallen silent now, and the only sound is the buzzing of the flies and a distant trickle. And the windings of an étude.

“The fingernails,” I say at last. “Three of them are missing.”

“Not just missing,” Vidocq answers, smiling grimly. “Pried loose.”

He drops a small buckram bag on the marble table. Three ragged patches of cuticle scatter into the light.

“We found them when we went back to the scene. I’m sure Monsieur Leblanc was loath to part with them.”

One of them is resting in my palm now. Hard. Like a flake of amber.

“Oh, the memories,” says Vidocq. “I once saw Bobbefoi do that to one of his pals in the
bagne
. With a saddler’s awl. You never heard such screaming. Bobbefoi figured the fellow for being a police spy, but he got the wrong man. Lamentably.” He strokes Leblanc’s brow. “There there, old bear. We’re almost done.”

“The knife wounds,” I say. “The fingernails…”

And in this moment, the music from the adjoining room seems to twine with my own thoughts, drawing them into their natural key.

“They
tortured
him, didn’t they? Before they killed him.”

Vidocq shrugs, takes a couple steps away.

“Torture’s a simple business, Doctor. You either want your man to hurt or you want him to
give
.”

“But what would Leblanc have to give?”

“A name, maybe. The name of the very fellow he was going to see.”

And with that, the remains of Chrétien Leblanc’s fingernails are obscured by the piece of paper that Vidocq showed me less than an hour ago. How different it looks to me now.

DR. HECTOR CARPENTIER

No. 18, Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève

The great Vidocq is yawning now. No need to suppress it. He lets it pop his jaw open and swell his neck column and flush his lungs out.

“Don’t think I mentioned,” he says at last. “We found the paper in a tiny leather pouch. He’d tied it round his waist and tucked it in his drawers, if you can believe it. You could have searched him all you like, you would’ve been hard-pressed to find it. Not unless you had him on a slab in the Paris morgue.”

His fingers lock round one another and pulse in tiny motions.

“Leblanc lived on the Rue de Charenton, we know that much. A good long walk from your neighborhood, Doctor. My guess is he was being followed from the moment he left his apartment.”

“Then why didn’t they—”

“Oh yes, I had the same question. Why didn’t they just follow him straight to your house?
Tell
us, old cod.” He runs a finger round the dead man’s ear. “Why
didn’t
they? Did you catch them on your tail? Maybe you threw them off the scent, is that it? Went in circles, took a wrong turn or two. Maybe you even tried to save yourself by making for the nearest station house.” He blows into the dead man’s ear: two gentle puffs. “But they didn’t let you, did they? Poor old salmon.”

The étude keeps coming, like a river. And as I drag up horns of my own hair, it seems to me I am knocking the music off balance. Just to give myself company.

“If Leblanc was coming to see me…”

“Yes.”

“And he didn’t want—whoever it was to know…”

“Yes.”

“Then why didn’t he just commit my address to memory? Why go to the trouble of keeping it on his person?”

He smiles down at Leblanc’s bare white abdomen. “I think he had in mind—well, I almost blush to say it, Doctor—someone like me. If the very worst happened, he wanted to put the information where I’d be sure to find it.” He coos into Leblanc’s fleshy ear. “And who better than Vidocq, eh? Who better?”

I’m sitting down before I realize there’s a chair waiting to catch me.

“Leblanc was protecting me,” I say softly.

“Oh, it’s all guesswork, of course, but I look at
this.
…” His hand describes the length of Leblanc’s body. “I look at
that.
…” His index finger glances down on the scrap of paper. “I say to myself, ‘Leblanc did everything but cram that piece of paper up his ass.’ And all I can think is he wanted to keep them from doing to you what—what they did to
him
.”

I have only a very dim sense of Vidocq now, weaving round me in the darkness—until his hand lands with a light explosion on my shoulder.

“And a fine job he did, eh, Doctor? Here you are. Still in the flower of your youth, more or less.” He plucks a thread of something from my coat. “How does it feel, I wonder? To have your life saved by a man you’ve never met?”

I will say this: There’s no judgment in his voice. I think he just wants to know.

“Old turtle,” he says, bending over Leblanc’s face. “I am honored by your trust. Leave it to
us
to finish the job, will you?”

O
NLY LATER, ONLY
much later will I register that shift from singular to plural,
I
to
us
. It will dawn on me that this was the moment it turned, although it could well be there
was
no single moment—nothing that could be called back. Much as I might have wished to.

“G
O TO SLEEP NOW
,” whispers Vidocq.

He pulls the sheet back over M. Chrétien Leblanc. Setting the candle back on the sconce, he pauses one last moment—not in prayer, exactly, but in some kind of suspended thought. Then he stalks out of the room, stopping only to cast the reproach that I am half expecting.

“Maybe you’d rather stick around with the maggots?”

I
NEVER DO
see her, the piano player of my imagination. But by way of compensation, her sonata comes after me: a spring tide of notes, catching me as I pass into the main hall. I will never again be able to hear Mozart without thinking of greenbottle flies.

V
IDOCQ’S MOVING AHEAD
from the moment we step out of doors—and with such a bounding gait that I have to jog just to catch up. He scatters plumes of rainwater and mud as he goes, and there I am, following,
ever
following, mincing round the puddles he’s fording, shielding my hat from the horse droppings that are anointing him.

“Excuse me…Monsieur Vidocq?”

“What is it now?”

“I was wondering if perhaps I might go home now.”

He looks at me in a state of unvarnished amazement.

“And why would you do that?”

“Well, it occurs to me there’s—I imagine there’s no further
use
for me now.”

His jaw swings gently open.

“Insomuch as…” I tender him a propitiatory smile. “I mean, given that I can’t make a—a
positive
identification of the unfortunate Monsieur Leblanc, I can’t see what more I can do for you.”

He lowers his head until it’s level with mine—until I can actually feel his breath scalding my cheeks.

“Listen to me, you little prick! A man’s been murdered, and
you
know something about it. The more pieces we find, the more something might jog that timid little memory of yours, and I want to be there when something finally pops out, because I don’t think you’re quite so idiotic as you look.”

His face is wrinkled with disgust as he wrenches himself away from me.

“Monsieur Can-I-Go-Home-Now. You’ll go home when I fucking tell you!”

And with that, he turns his back on me and charges down the street—
daring
me not to follow. It is then that the question, the obvious question, startles my lips apart.

“Where are we going?”

But the hope of receiving an answer is negated by the sound of my own voice: bleating and braying, cracking me
open,
as it were, to reveal the small green quivering heart-fruit beneath. I resolve never again to ask him where we’re going. And I never do.

T
RUTH BE TOLD
, we don’t seem to be going anywhere. The drizzle has stopped for the time being, and a dandelion glimmer has plumped out the drifts of cloud. It’s a fine time for a walk.

And what a pair of strollers we make. Me in my black trousers, shiny at the knees, and the black coat vented at the elbows. Vidocq, striding like a deposed king in Bardou’s sodden rags. After some time, he pauses at a street corner to realign the leather scraps that pass for boots, and in his best honey-and-cloves voice, he says:

“I hope I haven’t distressed you unduly, Doctor.”

“Why should I be distressed?”

“Oh, some men don’t like being thrown off their schedule.”

I tell him I don’t really have a schedule. To speak of. He shakes his head.

“Doctor, may I submit that that’s horseshit? I’ve spent no more than a day following you, and I’ve already got you dead to rights. École de Médecine in the morning, nine-thirty to eleven. Followed by Le Père Bonvin, where you buy your single cup of coffee, followed by a sugar-and-water. You sneak your little newspaper into your coat. (They don’t chain down the papers at Bonvin’s, do they?) You go straight home. A little catnap, some afternoon puttering. Dinner with Maman and her boarders. A walk just before bed, with a pinch of tobacco in the left cheek. You walk around the block and no farther. You go to sleep, repeat next morning. Do I have it about right?”

So many ways to protest. I could tell him that, some mornings, I stay at the École all the way to noon. That I treat myself now and then to a chocolate at the Café des Mille Colonnes. That I only take tobacco at night if Charlotte’s cooking doesn’t agree with me.

But these are all just different ways of admitting he’s right. So I remain silent, which is in itself a confession.

“Yes, you’re a man of regular habits, Doctor, considering you’ve no—”

Job,
he means to say. Life. Something stops him from finishing.

“Yes indeed,” he says, nodding slow. “I could set my watch by you.”

And then, perhaps because this strikes him as too close to an assertion of faith, he adds: “It’s the same with all criminals.”

We cross the Pont St.-Michel, we trot up the Rue des Arcis, a right on Neuve-St.-Méderic…and almost at once the streets begin funneling down. Which is to say the old Paris closes round. The roar of the boulevards gives way to the clatter of paving stones. The streets wind and dart, turn their backs on you, stop you dead. Sewers split open before you like unsutured wounds, and houses built centuries ago totter forward in raiments of black.

No great plan at work, here in the Marais, but there is a kind of unnatural order. As sure as the sun rises and sets, the late-winter rain will leave brackish tides pooling against the corner posts, and this water will merge with the slops toiling downward through blackened gutters to produce that peculiar mud, so Parisian in its odor and provenance. If you kick in your boots too hard, you’ll actually taste some, flying into your mouth like a retracted insult. You’ll smell it, too, and
feel
it with every step: a squelch beneath the stone and a slight release, as though the city is giving way beneath you.

Where are we going?

Not even two in the afternoon, and there’s a candle in every window, and the light seems to partake of the same medium as the air and the ground and the water, so that even when your eyes are open, you have the strangest feeling that they’re closed.

Never mind, my companion knows the way. He takes his bearings not from celestial but from human bodies. Washerwomen, wheelwrights. A ragpicker with a basket and hook. Beldams, in groups of four, gossiping on doorsteps. Vidocq knows where they’ll be before he’s even seen them. Already calling out to them, isn’t he, with the swagger of a stagecoach driver pulling into the courtyard of an inn.

“Good afternoon, ladies! Saying our rosaries, are we?…Hey, Gervaise, you pile of shit! You still owe me thirty sous on that cock of yours. Never mind, just keep a place for me at next Sunday’s fight, will you? And bring a bird with some heart in him!…Ah, is that the sun I see or Mademoiselle Sophie? Why, you’re
better
than the sun, it’s true….”

Even his gait changes as he approaches them. The right foot drags slightly behind him, like an embarrassed child, and the left foot skates through the drifts of mud, and his
hands,
those great bear claws, tease the air.

“Oho, it’s Tambour! Haven’t seen you since you went to the
bagne
. But what are these phials you’re foisting on the public? Herbal panaceas? Why, Tambour, I had no idea you were such a philanthropist—hey now, do any of these potions give a fellow bigger balls? My friend here might want some….”

They all stand stock-still as he approaches, with the frozen half-smiles of guests at a Tuileries garden party. It comes as a surprise when we turn onto the Rue des Blancs-Manteaux to find a man not just standing but coming
toward
us, with a turnip sack over his shoulder.

“Chief,” he says, in the mildest of tones.

“Allard.”

They stand there, staring over each other’s shoulders, making scraps of small talk, lofting an oath or two at the weather. And then Allard, without altering his cadence, murmurs:

“He’s inside.”

“How long?”

“Since eleven.”

Vidocq cuts his eyes north. “Woman, too?”

“Whole family.”

“Give.”

Allard swings the turnip bag off his shoulder. Before I can protest, Vidocq stuffs it into my arms.

“Don’t jiggle it, Doctor, if you’d be so kind.”

Motioning me to follow, he stops in front of a poulterer’s window, where he makes a show of interest in a Norman goose. Then, without a word, he draws me inside the adjoining building. The door closes after us, he puts a finger to his lips, he points…
up
.

But who would have guessed
up
would mean five floors? With a heavy bundle in your arms? By the time we reach the top, I’m rubbing my shiny forehead on the turnip bag, and Vidocq’s belly is swelling to twice its normal stoutness—all the more so because he’s trying to still the sound of his own breathing. A minute passes, the belly contracts…Vidocq puts his knuckles to the door and raps, lightly, three times.

“Who is it?”

“Friends.”

From inside, a scatter and a scuffle. Moments later, the door opens on a young woman—maybe not young at all—skinny as a limpet with a cat-nose and vole-eyes.

“Ah!” cries Vidocq. “La belle Jeanne-Victoire!”

“Monsieur Eugène,” she says, even as glass.

“I’m looking for Poulain, my sweet.”

“Not at home, to be sure.”

“Ahhh.” His eyes execute a quick sweep of the room. “Then we’ll just wait for him, if you don’t mind.”

She pauses to consider, but he’s already stepped around her, and the only thing left to consider is
me:
hat in hand, smiling with reflexive courtesy, clutching that mysterious package to my breast.

“I don’t believe you’ve met,” Vidocq calls back.

It is a strange feature of Parisian apartments: The closer they get to Heaven, the more hellish they become. A ground-floor apartment will, often as not, come with a nice fireplace, a rosewood dresser, Utrecht velvet on the armchairs, even a garden. By the time you get to the garret, you can feel the cold bleeding through the plaster cracks, you can
hear
the worms eating into the boards.

And yet people do live in the high-ceilinged pen that Jeanne-Victoire calls home. No doubt they freeze in the winter, but why bother with a fireplace when the drafts would kill any fire? Why bother with curtains when there’s no light? Or wallpaper when your walls ooze a putrid tar? Even the floor has been stripped down to its foundations, and as for furniture, there’s a pair of straw pallets, crawling with dust mites, and a table listing on three legs. Everything else is a melee of rags and old shoes and broken boards and broken bowls.

And a single baby.

I don’t see it at first. I’m just trying to find a place where I can, in good conscience,
stand,
and this means nudging away some old stockings and a birdcage, and it’s in the act of relocating a kettle that I see, lying atop a chafing dish, something soft and purple-cheeked and still.

So very still I’m already reaching toward it—looking for a pulse point—and then I see the eyelids shudder and the hands feint in my direction.

It holds my eye, this baby. And it never makes a sound.

“In blooming health, I see,” says Vidocq, peering over my shoulder. “I congratulate you, Jeanne-Victoire. Your third, isn’t it?”

No embarrassment in her eyes, either.

“The first with Arnaud,” she says.

“Ah, yes. You
would
need to start over again with Arnaud, wouldn’t you? A whole new accounting system for Arnaud.”

“Monsieur does not look so blooming himself. Police work must not be paying as well.”

He grabs a fistful of Bardou’s dirty blouse and grins like spring. “Austerity measures! Vidocq lives to serve!”

He opens his arms wide. As though he were about to embrace her and everything in the room. Squeeze the life out of it.

“You wouldn’t have a pipe, would you?” he asks.

She shakes her head.

“My mistake. I could have sworn I smelled one.”

“Arnaud keeps one around, of course. For when he’s here.”

“Of course.” Then, as if the thought has just occurred to him: “Do you mind if I look at his? I’m in the market for a new one.”

“Ah, what a pity, Monsieur. I can’t remember where he—”

“Never mind!” he cries, reaching into a broken water pitcher and pulling out a length of briar pipe. He smiles as he waggles it between his fingers. He flares his nostrils. “Mm, still smoldering. Now that’s what I call good tobacco.”

Her chin is tucked all the way down to her collarbone, as though she’s getting ready to charge. But all she says is:

“Arnaud will be so sorry to have missed you, Monsieur.”

“Not half as sorry as…”

His eyes widen. Putting down the pipe, he steps round an overturned washbasin and pauses behind an old sheet-iron furnace, angled against the wall. Then, with a look of faint regret, he tips the furnace over.

The door swings open, and out tumbles a man. The sort of man who could fit inside a furnace: small and wiry and jointy, with scabbed elbows and gray skin and eyelids squeezed so close together that even astonishment can’t drag them apart.

Vidocq gazes down at him with a dotard’s grin. “Ah, Poulain. What a stroke of luck! Say, you wouldn’t mind having a drink with us, would you?” He crooks his thumb toward me. “Me and my pal here? We’ve come to toast the new baby. You’re not too busy? Well, come on, then.”