The Emperor's Assassin (15 page)

“I am simply telling that the war is
not
over. Not 'ere, and not in France, neither. It is a war that never end. That is why I retire from it, and I make war now just on the quails and the snails and the trout. And these fat 'appy English I cook for, they make war on the foxes. That is why I like this club. These English, they are stupid and proud, and they are 'appy. You see, I am finish with politics, 'Enri. But
it
is not finish.”

“I am not fighting a war, Marcel, just trying to keep the king's peace. The name of the man with the raspberry mark?”

“If I tell you, I do not tell you because I care one dried-up bean for the whole
canaille
of imbecile, parasitic royalists. I hope the ocean rise up and drown every one of them. They 'ave France again now because a great man—a
great
man, 'Enri!—has fallen, destroyed by 'is own destiny, because the 'eavens 'ave say,
Not yet
. But these royalists, they are not worthy to untie 'is shoe latchet, as one say.”

Morton took another sip of his wine and waited.

“
Non
, and I do not tell you because I believe your country is correctly govern, or just, or generous to its people. It is not true, and any man with eyes in his 'ead can see this. I do not tell you because tyranny 'as been— but I think you 'ave 'eard my speeches before, 'Enri.”

Morton shrugged acquiescence. “Perhaps you tell me because I am your friend,” he suggested.

“Well, well, or because I know that you will find 'im anyway, with a mark on 'im like that, and you such a clever,
puissant
police. And really, I care nothing at all for this person,
pas de tout
.
Alors
. The man with that mark on his pate is name Jean Boulot. He live for many years in the City, in Maiden Lane, or somewhere nearby there, where there are some others like him. I 'ave not ever been there to see them, but this is what people say. Boulot, he is a supporter of the emperor, an
ardent
supporter. Or so I 'ave always heard.”

“If he is a supporter of Bonaparte, then why has he been in England for so long?”

Marcel shrugged. “I don't know. 'E say so many things when 'e drink—”

“You know him, then?”

Houde looked slightly embarrassed. “You drink French wine during the war, 'Enri?”

“You know I have.”

“Then you 'ave come close to know 'im yourselves. Boulot is an
ami
of the smuggler. I buy the wine and brandy from 'im for many year, but 'e became too drunk and—'ow you say?—unreliable.”

“I see. What else can you tell me about him?”

“What
can
I tell you? What
will
I, you should say.” Marcel Houde laughed, his old, more cheerful self beginning to return. “I will tell you this. 'Is friends would be very surprise to 'ear that he go about calling 'imself the
gentilhomme de Malmaison
. They will not be please with 'im. Unless it is part of some plan.”

“What manner of plan? What kind of capers do this Boulot and his friends get up to?”

“Ah, I do not know that. Maybe all they do is smoke their pipe and talk about
les droits de l'homme
and sing
‘ça Ira’
and ‘
La Marseillaise
.’ Sometime people talk, that
they have connections to Fouché, and Veyrat, and the rest of the secret police in Paris. Or at least, that they once did. But, 'Enri, you must not listen to this talk. It is
exagéré
. Perhaps some of them were sent over here from Paris— years ago. Now?
Impossible!
They all used to be fighting against
le comte
d'Artois, the brother of King Louis, and against his spies, his royalist underground in France, and those idiots, the Chevaliers de la Foi and their master, Abbé Jean-Baptiste Lafond. But what does that matter now? Now they are all gone back to France. You understand who I am speaking about, 'Enri?”

In fact, Morton was getting a little lost in the names, and it was hard to keep up with his friend's volubility. He was a London police man, not an intelligence officer in the foreign service, like Westcott. So Houde was forced to explain a bit further. Fouché was
chef
of the French security police, and Inspector-General Veyrat was in his service. In the course of the long war they had struggled against the agents of the Bourbon spymaster Artois, who was next in line for the French crown after his gout-ridden brother Louis. Many had died, on both sides. Neither party had been less ruthless than the other, and there were crimes of every kind. But now all had changed. Fouché, who many years before had helped overthrow Robespierre, the bloody tyrant of
la terreur
, had only a few weeks ago performed the same manoeuvre against the defeated Napoleon. It was Fouché who had forced Bonaparte's second abdication, and Fouché who had now, yet again, changed sides and smoothed the path for the return of the Bourbons, who hated and distrusted him but could not do without him.

“What might all this have to do with the current situation in London?”

“
Rien! Rien de tout!
Nothing! All the important royalists
'ave gone back to the continent. I can see no cause for old
Bonapartiste
spies to do anything but slip away into the woodwork, like cock-a-roaches, and 'ope they will be forgotten. If there are republicans and
Bonapartistes
in England now, 'Enri, it is not because they are 'ere to do
espionage
or to kill people. It is because they are running away from France.”

Morton frowned in perplexity.

“All the same, can you tell me the names of any of Boulot's friends, these Bonapartist folk?”

“What, 'ow much betrayal do you want in one day? For one plate of
canetons
?” And now Houde's anger seemed genuine. Henry Morton backed away.

“Marcel,
mon cher
, I had not thought of asking you for betrayal at all. Pray, disregard the question. I am very grateful for your assistance, and I promise you, I shall use what you have told me only to catch a murderer, not to influence the course of political events.”

“Per'aps to do one is to do the other.”

“Well, I cannot judge of that. A person has been killed. My duty is simple.”

Houde relented a little. “Well, 'Enri, I hope that it remain so.
Alors
,” he sighed, “if my old friends the republicans have done a murder, then I give them my curse. Remember you the words of Madame Roland, 'Enri? Madame Roland, as she stood at the foot of
la guillotine
?”

Morton smiled ruefully.

“ ‘O liberty, ’ ” quoted Houde, “ ‘what crimes are committed in thy name! ’ ”

“Do you recall the words of Shakespeare?” asked Morton.

“Ah, Shakespeare!
Très bien!
But which?”

“ ‘A plague on both your houses. ’ ”

Marcel Houde gravely raised his glass in approval.

I
t was seven in the evening when Henry Morton and Jimmy Presley descended from their hackneycab at the west end of Maiden Lane, and bells were clanging in the steeples of the nearby churches of Saint Anne and Saint Botolph. The street in this coaching district was loud with the rattle of heavy vehicles and their teams, and a bustling, noisy traffic of barrows and drays and shouting drivers flowed steadily by the two Bow Street men as they conferred.

“Go gently, Jimmy,” Morton told him over the racket. “We don't want him bolting on us.”

“Your peacher said there were a parcel of Frenchies in the neighbourhood, didn't he?”

“Aye, so try not to beard any of them, lest they fly and give him warning.”

Presley nodded and stepped with a born Londoner's confidence into the busy flood and made his way across. They began to move separately down either side of the lane, ducking here and there into the maze of neighbouring byways. As discreetly as possible, sometimes
cupping their hands to make themselves heard, they enquired at doorways, or from people on the street—at least people who looked English. A cove with a raspberry patch on his crown? Did they know him? His place of residence? Frencher, named Boulot?

To Henry Morton, Jean Boulot had somehow seemed a better bet than Gilles Niceron. If Morton had had to explain why he was here, he might have had some trouble. Largely it was a hunch—it seemed too great a coincidence that Boulot would visit the count and that same night d'Auvraye would fly into a rage and order his mistress cast out of her house. Morton was also a little sceptical whenever he sensed another was trying to direct the course of his investigation—as Rolles had done with his list of suspects—some of whom were dead! At any rate, he had let John Townsend be the one to ride out to Walthamstow to look up Niceron.

A diminutive child with a massive topper appeared in Morton's path, surrounded by a gang of smaller children, all equally shabbily dressed, though without the impressive headgear.

“Oy, yer lookin' for a Frenchy lives hereabout?”

“Indeed I am. Do you know him?”

“Might do,” the child said, spitting lazily onto the cobbles.

Morton reached into his pocket as though he might find a coin. “A man with a raspberry mark on his bald pate. Where might I find him?”

The child nodded to Morton's hand in his pocket. “Tip us the blunt first. D'ye take us for simkins?”

Morton tossed a couple of copper coins, and the boy snatched them nimbly out of the air.

“The bilker dwells round the corner. Number two, Paul's Court.”

The din of the street faded as the two Runners turned into Huggin's Lane, and died away almost entirely as they entered the dark little close called Paul's Court. They paused a moment in the centre, looking about themselves. It was quiet here, and still, the city's commotion now like a distant rushing of water beyond the gaunt-eyed walls. Number 2 was a shabby brick building, wedged in tightly amongst a row of others like it, each seeming to lean against its neighbour for support. Indeed, they all looked to be typical poor men's lodgings, almost indistinguishable from thousands of others like them in the metropolis: decrepit, black with soot, windows unglazed. But to Morton's carefully assessing eye, they seemed far from the worst of the “netherskens.” They hadn't a patch on that lowest and most dangerous species of doss house, the sort that filled the criminal “holy land” of St. Giles or lined the back of the Ratcliff Highway. No, these were nigh on respectable, by comparison.

About the police men the usual little knot of onlookers, mostly children, had started to materialise, seeping silently out of the doorways and cellar traps and alleys. It was hard to conceal the arrival of the “horneys” long in a place like this. Morton and Presley bore no visible badge of office and wore no distinctive clothing, but the denizens knew them instantly for what they were.

“Who's the proprietor in there?” Morton demanded, without turning. He pointed to number 2.

“No pr'priet'r, yer honour,” piped a sickly looking man. “There's but a deputy, Mr. Wi'm'sun.”

“Any Frenchies living in there?”

“Uh-uh, aye, yer honour. And in t'other kens, too.”

“Let's at it, then,” said Morton to Presley, ignoring the shrill pleas to “tip us a farden, oy!”

Mr. Williamson was to be found in the kitchen at the back of the house, a low room whose blackened beams hung down almost to eye level. The landlord's deputy sat smoking beside the unlit hearth, his elbows resting on a scarred tabletop, a bar of dim light from the single small window at the end of the room passing slantwise across his face. Otherwise the kitchen was deserted except for one slatternly woman who shuffled amongst the clutter of empty benches, gathering up scraps and utensils. There would presumably not be another meal served for hours, but a penetrating smell of cooked fish still hung in the air from the last.

“ 'E's been bousing,” wheezed the old man. “He's not come out of his room in days. Poxy Frenchman. He's mad. Let 'im die of barrel fever if 'e likes, say I.”

“He abides up there by himself?”

“Uh, aye. Except from time to time a buttockwoman, or some of his Frenchy friends.”

“Does he pay up regular?” Jimmy Presley wanted to know.

The deputy coughed, richly and long, and then hawked and spat on his stone floor. He shrugged. “I'd not 'ave 'im there if he didn't. All me tenants pay up.”

“How long has he been on this binge? Was he in his room three nights ago?”

“Do you traps think I spend all me time spying out what folk do? 'E can come and go as 'e pleases. Tenants have their own doors. I don't lock up. I just know 'e 'asn't been down 'ere to sup or break his fast for a time—days. I 'ear 'im raving up there, and then I 'ear 'im singing, and then I hear 'im laughing or squalling like a baby. 'E's daft. Take him away if it pleases ye. I can get another for his room in an hour. People like this 'ouse. They like I gives them privacy.”

“We'll speak with the cove. Take us to him.”

“Be on the top floor, at the end, on the left. You can find it for yerselves,” he added, his tone openly hostile. “Me tenants don't like traps, and I don't make 'em welcome.”

Jimmy Presley thrust his baton close to the old man's crooked nose.