Roch looked up when he heard noise outside. The hooves of many horses, orders barked by a hoarse voice, then heavy footsteps beating against the cobblestones. The military escort must have arrived. At least the wait was over. A soldier tied his horse’s reins to the bars of the window. Only the man’s boots and the animal’s legs were visible. Voices resonated within the prison, mingled with the metallic clang of heavy doors opening and shutting. A captain, accompanied by two privates, entered the cell. The soldiers, after saluting Roch, proceeded to shackle Chevalier’s hands. It was half past eight.
In the hackney Roch could feel the prisoner, seated next to him, shivering. They drove in silence to the Ministry of Police, where the proceedings of Military Commissions were held on the second floor. The captain pushed Chevalier inside a room while Roch remained in the corridor.
He expected the wait to be short. Military Commissions were composed of a few officers. No attorneys were allowed nor were any witnesses required, and the sole record of the proceedings consisted of a few lines sending the accused to his death. When the door opened again fifteen minutes later, the sentence could be plainly read on Chevalier’s face.
The hackney was still waiting for them in front of the Ministry. Soldiers climbed into their saddles. It was quite a way to the place of execution, but traffic would be no hindrance at this time.
In the hackney the prisoner’s face was briefly lit at regular intervals by the streetlights, then it fell back into complete darkness. They drove by the great classical front of the Ecole Militaire, the Ecole de Mars, as it had been called during the Revolution, half drowned in the fog. Roch knew the place very well. Old Miquel had enrolled him there, after Veau’s Academy for Boys had closed, to receive at the Nation’s expense the education of a future warrior of the Republic. With his comrades, he had performed physical exercises for hours, always outdoors, always in the nude, even in the biting cold of winter that shriveled their genitals to nothing.
At last the Ecole Militaire disappeared in the fog and the hackney stopped in an empty plot just outside the Grenelle Gate. When the captain opened the door, the prisoner started at the sight of the cart waiting for what would soon be his corpse. Roch wondered about this strange twilight, when one was still fully alive, and yet moments away from certain death.
The captain ordered Chevalier to stand with his back to the wall that marked the city limits. A soldier took a lighted lantern and placed its strap around the prisoner’s neck.
“Makes an easier target at night,” he explained to Roch. “No good for anyone if we miss the chest.”
Now the man’s face was lit from beneath by the lantern. His features looked still grimmer than before, his clenched jaw jutted, his orbits were empty holes, as though the head had already been reduced to the bones. A dozen soldiers, dark figures shrouded in fog, gathered in a line in front of Chevalier. The points of the bayonets attached to their rifles were only a few yards from the man’s chest. The captain commanded, “Present arms.” The soldiers brought the butts of their rifles up to their shoulders. Sharp clicks resonated in the cold night air. The soldiers, hunched over, took aim. The captain now shouted, “Fire!” Orange flames shot from of the barrels of the rifles, billows of white smoke mixed with the fog. The thunder of the explosion startled Roch. The horses barely nickered.
The smell of powder hovered over the scene as on Rue Nicaise on the night of the attack. Roch felt his mouth fill with saliva. He turned towards the wall against which Chevalier had stood. His stomach pulsed, the muscles of his belly contracted. He retched. The taste of vomit filled his mouth before its stench filled his nostrils.
One of the soldiers asked, “You all right, Citizen Chief Inspector?”
Roch drew himself up and pulled a handkerchief from his pocket. “Never better, soldier,” he said, wiping his mouth.
His step was steady when he walked to the body. It had fallen facedown. The captain, with the point of his boot, turned it over onto its back. The chest was nothing but torn flesh, still shaken by tremors. The bloodstains on the shirt seemed black in the light of a soldier’s lantern. The captain pulled a pistol and fired it down into the man’s head. Roch braced himself before the shock and avoided looking at what was left of the face.
“Well, now he’s all yours,” said the captain.
For Chevalier all was over. But Roch was not done. The soldiers grabbed the body and lifted it onto the cart. They mounted their horses and headed for town, talking and laughing quietly between themselves, their task accomplished. Roch climbed once more into the hackney, which followed the cart to the graveyard of Vaugirard. There he pulled the clerk from his bed, wrote and signed the death certificate, and watched the body thrown without ceremony into the open pit of a common grave. The other corpses there had been sown into burlap sacks, but Chevalier’s would be denied even that modest rite. The surly graveyard clerk was content to open a barrel and shovel a layer of lime over the body.
Roch stepped back wearily into the hackney. As soon as they reached the city limits, he pulled the cord to make it stop. Walking home in the cold would help him cleanse his mind of the night’s memories.
Roch was thinking of Chevalier, the dead man. He had built a bomb, an infernal machine similar to the one used in the Rue Nicaise attack. What could his purpose have been, if not to kill Bonaparte, probably along with many innocents? He must have deserved to die. But then why had he not been tried by a regular court?
And why had Roch been asked to witness this grisly masquerade? Once at home, he removed his boots and dropped heavily onto his bed without bothering to undress. He fell asleep very fast.
29
Early the next morning, before Roch left for the Prefecture, a messenger brought a note. He felt weak in the knees when he recognized the seal of the Ministry and Fouché’s handwriting. For a moment he could not bring himself to open it. Maybe it simply contained more clues, more directions for the investigation, perhaps even the name of the third man, the fellow with the gold spectacles. But the note might also seal Old Miquel’s fate. Roch shook himself and tore it open. It only said You may visit your father at five o’clock this afternoon.
Roch threw his head backwards and took a deep breath. He was relieved, happy, of course, but what if he found Old Miquel weakened, thinner, a shadow of his former self ? What if this were the last visit before his father’s deportation or execution? He could not banish from his mind the impressions of Chevalier in the face of the firing squad.
Roch went to the Prefecture as usual that morning, but he had trouble concentrating on his work. A report to Dubois, which should have taken no more than ten minutes to compose, had to be started over many times, and Roch, after reading its latest draft, still was not sure that it made any sense. No matter, it was probably good enough for Dubois.
All day Roch kept looking out his office window at the pale winter sun. A fine day, dry and crisp for the season. At last it was four o’clock. He set off on foot and reached the Temple in less than half an hour. The prison clerk, Fauconnier, greeted Roch with a warmth that contrasted with his embarrassment of the night before.
“Ah, Citizen Chief Inspector,” he said, “I expected you. Received the instructions today from the Minister himself.” He shouted an order to the guards and turned his attention back to Roch. “There’s not a better man than your father, and I’ll be sorry to see him go when his time comes. I mean when he is released, of course. But then, mind you, we have nothing but the cream of the cream here. True, we lost Citizen Chevalier last night, as you know, but we still have three generals, seven judges, and dozens of ci-devant noblemen. And also Citizen Topino-Lebrun, the history painter, and his accomplices in the Conspiracy of Daggers. You won’t find any common criminals here, no, Citizen.”
The clerk, swelled with pride, patted the prison register. “I could show you the names of the ci-devant King and Queen in here. They sent me a thief the other day, imagine that! But I saw the mistake right away, and I refused t
o receive the scoundrel. A common thief, here!”
Roch nodded in response. He did not want to show any weakness now, especially before his father, and drew himself up. A door opened, and at first all he could see was a blurry figure, flanked by two guards. He had no time to bring his father’s hand to his lips, and felt a pair of arms wrapped tightly around his shoulders. Once the embrace relented, he drew back and looked at Old Miquel. Indeed his father did not seem altered at all.
“Roch,” he cried, “I haven’t been so happy in weeks!”
“Thank God I find you in good health, Father. And in good spirits too, it seems.”
The turnkey was smiling in a sanctimonious manner, his head cocked to the side. Roch, impatient to be rid of him, slipped him a silver coin.
“You’ll be comfortable by yourselves in there, Citizens,” the man hastened to say. He unlocked the door to a square room, fitted with a barred window, and furnished with a table and two straw chairs.
Old Miquel patted Roch on the shoulder before taking a seat.
“I knew you’d worry. Of course, the first day, they only gave me a piece of bread and a bowl of that greasy slop they call the soup. And I spent my first night on a straw mattress they threw on the stone floor of the common room, without even a blanket, so I was mighty cold. But we’ve slept in worse places in the old days, you and me, and eaten food that wasn’t much better, haven’t we?”
Roch clenched his jaw. He recalled what Fouché had said about Old Miquel being comfortable in prison. So that was what the scoundrel’s assurances meant.
“But things took a turn for the better the very next day, thanks to you,” continued Old Miquel. “After the turnkey got your money, I got my own cell, and now I take my meals at the paying table. Also, I can play ball in the afternoons with the others in the courtyard.” Old Miquel chuckled. “Turns out I’m one of the best, at my age too! I can still kick that ball, and run faster than most young fellows. And I get to read the papers too. So I know what happened since my arrest, at least what’s printed in those rags.”
Old Miquel smiled at Roch. “I even read your name a couple o’ times. Made me feel all funny, proud and sad at the same time. Then at night after dinner the guards herd us, there’s a roll call and I am locked back in my cell.”
“Did they put you in a decent place at last?”
“Oh, yes, it’s quite all right. A little chamber, up in the tower. It used to be occupied by Madame Elisabeth, the ci-devant King’s sister, before she was guillotined too, poor thing. Too many people died then, for sure.” Old Miquel shook his head pensively. “See, Roch, I sleep in the bedroom of a princess now. Never thought that’d happen to me. And then, because it used to be Madame Elisabeth’s cell, all the Chouans in the Temple come and visit. The turnkey charges them a fee to bring them up there. So they kneel, and say prayers for the repose of her soul, and the souls of the royal family. A pilgrimage, they call it. So now I’m used to people kissing the filth on the floor at the foot of my cot, and I move out of the way. I don’t agree with their ideas, but that’s no reason to bother them, is it? Then, when I see they’re done with their prayers, I talk to them for a bit.”
“Really, Father? And they talk to you?”
Old Miquel shrugged. “Oh, yes, they’re even quite nice. Normally I wouldn’t make friends with ci-devant aristocrats, but in jail you can’t be too fussy about the company you keep. So I’ve discovered we’ve something in common: we all hate Bonaparte, and here the differences between us don’t matter anymore. See, once in a while the guards call someone to take him before one of those Military Commissions, and everyone knows what it means. Sometimes we read his name in the papers the next day, sometimes not even that. That can happen to any of us, any day, so that makes it easy to understand one another.”
Roch closed his eyes, then, very fast, reopened them. The scene of Chevalier’s execution had come to mind again with fresh intensity.
“I read in the papers about those Jacobins who got deported,” continued Old Miquel. “And they say it’s only the beginning. So I reckon that, even though I missed the first ship, someone’d make sure I got on the next one, or the one after that.”
Old Miquel, from prison, had a perfectly clear understanding of his own situation. Roch, dumbfounded, had not expected this. He was torn between the desire to confide all he knew about Fouché’s threat and the fear to confirm his father’s all too perceptive assumptions.
“It’s not for me to decide, of course,” continued Old Miquel, “but if I’d my say, I’d much rather die cleanly with my chest full of lead after a Military Commission than be sent to rot alive across the oceans, in a place that’s too hot for people, and full of vermin and mosquitoes.”
Roch was still uncertain of what to reveal, but was spared that decision, for Old Miquel hastened to say: “Enough talk about me. Tell me about you and that investigation of yours.”
“I am sure the Jacobins are innocent. So far, I have three suspects, all Chouans. And Fouché sent me information leading to the identification of two of them.”
“Nothing about the third man?” mused Old Miquel. “Yet I bet Fouché knows about that one just as well. Maybe he’s protecting him. Maybe he’s made an alliance with some Chouans against Bonaparte.”
Roch stared at Old Miquel. “The Chouans wouldn’t have anything to do with him. They hate him. Remember, Father, he voted in favor of the King’s execution in ’93.”
“Oh, like I told you, I’ve talked quite a bit with the Royalists here. Now I understand better what they think of many things and many people, including Fouché. They hate him all right, and they’ll never forgive him for voting to kill Louis XVI, but they’d be mighty happy if he’d help them get rid of Bonaparte. Then, with Bonaparte dead, they’d turn on Fouché. Many people here talk of having him drawn and quartered, which, come to think of it, isn’t a bad idea for a man like that.”
“I must have been very naïve, Father. I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Neither has Fouché, I bet. He’s clever, but less than he thinks. So yes, Roch, he could’ve turned around and made friends with some of the Chouans, without realizing the risks to his precious person.”
“So you think Fouché might be betraying Bonaparte? Indeed I have heard that Bonaparte does not trust him at all.”
Old Miquel nodded. “Our glorious General may be right about that. Just make sure you don’t trust Fouché either. I’ve always thought you were too keen on the man. He doesn’t care about you, or Bonaparte, or anyone else. He only cares about himself, about his position, his safety, his money. Help him, and he’ll be your friend. Until he betrays you, that is.”
“I am afraid you are right. I didn’t want to believe that of him before.”
“Be careful, that’s all. Now tell me about the Barrel. Everything’s all right there?”
“Alexandrine has offered to keep it open in your absence. I thought you would like that, and I accepted.”
“Well, of course I like that. That’s kind of Alexandrine, but then she’s always kind. And old Crow likes her. He’ll feel a bit lonesome, after all these years we spent together.”
Roch looked away. “Crow died three days ago, Father. Quietly, at Alexandrine’s feet.”
Old Miquel opened his mouth without uttering any sound. At last he pulled a red and white handkerchief from his pocket. “Poor Crow,” he said, noisily blowing his nose. “Changes aren’t easy, for old dogs or for old men. At least Alexandrine was there with him. She must’ve petted him when he went away. Be sure to thank her.”
“I already did, Father.”
Old Miquel tucked his handkerchief back into his pocket and looked into Roch’s eyes. “I mean thank her properly, from the heart. I’ve noticed that you’re not always so very pleasant with her.”
Roch flushed. “I regret it now. I am beginning to appreciate her as she deserves.”
“Good. And you should thank her on your own account too,” added Old Miquel. “It’s b
etter for you if the Barrel remains open, because you’ll get a better price for it when you sell it.”
Roch looked intently at Old Miquel. “It belongs to you. Alexandrine is keeping it open for you, until your return.”
Roch’s words sounded hollow to his own ears. His father simply gazed at the darkening sky outside the barred window.
“Well, Roch, you should know that I put my affairs in order a few months ago. Like I knew what was coming. Actually it wasn’t so hard to guess. Mignon, my attorney, will give you all the details, but everything goes to you, of course.”
Roch felt a lump in his throat. “Please don’t talk like this, Father.”
Old Miquel seemed to hesitate. “I don’t like it either, Roch, but we need to talk now, because I don’t know if we’ll get another chance. There’s something I have to tell you. Yesterday afternoon the clerk told me that I’d be taken to a Military Commission at nine o’clock that evening and—”
“The bastards!” Roch hit the table with his closed fist. “If—”
“Don’t let your anger govern you. That’s no good.” Old Miquel patted Roch’s arm. “Anyway, I reckoned I’d have a close look at the guns of the firing squad in a matter of hours. But then at night they locked me in my cell as usual, and they told me someone’d given other orders to the contrary. Still, in the meantime, I tidied up my mind, so to speak. The good thing’s that I’m leaving everything in order. I owe no money, and if I’ve ever harmed anyone, it was done without malice, and I’d beg their forgiveness if I could. The only thing that bothered me, and it bothered me quite a bit, was about you. I know it’d cause you a great deal of pain.”
“They made you go through that agony!” muttered Roch between his teeth. “I failed you. I should have prevented that.”
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