The Black Tower

by Louis Bayard

“Dr. Carpentier.” A lightly tickled contralto. “How good of you to come.”

  She rises from her peasant’s chair and offers me her gloved hand. Not knowing what to do, I close it round. With a hint of charity, she draws herself free.

  “You must excuse me,” she says. “You are not quite the man I was expecting.”

  I am going to ask what she was expecting, but I’m stopped by the thing I missed on my first canvassing: the spectacle of her eyes. One brown, one blue—borrowed, I would almost conceive, from two different women.

  “Would you care for some tea, Doctor?”

  She serves it herself in porcelain that, I am relieved to see, was not made by convicts. She tells me…well, I’m not conscious of much more than the music of her voice. I’m dimly aware of the concussion of spoons…a settee, a sisal rug…and finally a natural history cabinet, empty except for a few seashells and a line of red morocco bindings.

  “Ah, you are coveting my library,” she says in an ironical tone. “Those are the memoirs of my late husband, the Baron. He was ambassador to Berlin under Louis the Sixteenth.”

  Not knowing how to answer this, I say nothing, and this proves to be the very signal she was waiting for. Setting her teacup down, she folds her hands in her lap and, with a conscientious and abiding air, as if she were showing visitors round a house, begins to speak. And all the facts that should have been elicited after days, even weeks of small talk and trust building come tumbling out now in a helpless profusion.

  “We lost everything, of course, during the Revolution. The Jacobins nationalized our lands, that much we were expecting, but then most of my jewels were lost on the way to Warsaw, and the Baron made rather a hash of the money we had left. He made a rather poor émigré, given how accustomed he was to travel. Voluntary exile was one thing, he used to say, involuntary quite another. He chafed, poor thing. Always intriguing to come back here, where he was least wanted.”

  She picks up her cup, rests it briefly on her underlip.

  “Intrigues, I am sad to say, cost money. At least his always did.”

  With a rush of undercoats, she rises. Opens the cabinet with a scant pressure of hand, strokes the morocco bindings.

  “This is what’s left of his estate. A life in ten volumes. To the end, he was persuaded that someone would publish it.” She takes the leftmost volume in her hand, holds it out to me. “This one might be to your taste, Doctor. It follows the Baron from his nativity in Toulon to his brief and, if I may say, unexceptional term as intendant of the Limousin.” She rubs the spine with her knuckles. “I find it is the only volume I can bear to read myself. The others fall a little too near to home. Why, good morning, puss-puss!”

  I feel it before I see it: a friction against my trouser leg. Then an unstable spectrum of black and white and orange, bounding into the Baroness’s open arms.

  “Is puss-puss just waking up? What a sleepy puss it is! It’s the fog, isn’t it? Yes, puss-puss loves the fog, doesn’t he? Come see, can you see?”

  In the shadows of the sconce light, they become, briefly, a unitary organism: limbs coiled toward a common purpose, murmurs twining with mewls.

  “I’m afraid I must pose an indelicate question,” she says.

  It’s some time before I realize she is talking to me. Her voice hasn’t quite come back to its human register.

  “If you like,” I stammer.

  “Were you followed?”

  “No.”

  Such a ring of conviction in my voice, and the truth is I have no clue. I’m still getting used to the idea that I’m worth following.

  “It is my turn to be indelicate, Madame la Baronne.”

  “By all means.”

  “What possible connection could you have to Monsieur Leblanc?”

  With manifest regret, she sets down the cat, and in that moment, I have—for the first time—the full dint of her attention. I fairly blanch before it. The smile alone, whetted against a million drawing rooms and antechambers.

  “Doctor, I find myself longing uncharacteristically for exercise. Would you do me the honor of escorting me?”

  THE FOG HAS begun to lift from the Luxembourg Gardens, but everything above our heads is still shrouded. The statuary. The fountains. The palace itself, where the Chamber of Peers—dried-up remnants of old monarchies and empires—make the rattling sounds of coffined men. Even the canopies of the plane trees have been sheared away, leaving only the trunks, damp and scarred, lining our path like battle trophies.

  For someone who takes little exercise, the Baroness has a rapid step. I have to quicken my own to keep pace with her. Before long, though, our feet are moving together in a companionable rhythm—I could almost believe we’ve been meeting like this for generations, wearing out a trough in the gravel.

  “You’re still a young man,” she says at last. “Twenty-five, perhaps?”

  “Twenty-six.”

  She nods, abstractedly.

  “It was nearly that many years ago I met Chrétien Leblanc. A summer afternoon in the Stare Miosto in Warsaw. I was dining out of doors—a bowl of krupnik, I remember—and I looked up, and there he was, in his blue stockings and this rather faded frock coat. He was watching my soup, the way a cat watches a rabbit. In spite of myself, I was touched.”

  Her gloved hand exerts a barely perceptible pressure on my left arm.

  “Leblanc was an émigré, too, in his own way. Lacking the curse of a title, he had weathered it out longer than most of us, but he, too, was obliged to leave Paris before long. In a hurry. He was wearing that look we all had at first, as though someone had dragged us into one of Montgolfier’s balloons and tumbled us out before we’d quite landed. He was still finding his balance when I met him.” She steps carefully round a puddle. “We fell into conversation. I liked his manners, and by the time he had finished my krupnik for me, I had formally engaged him.”

  Even through the fog, I can see where we are walking: along the parapet of the Pépinière, near the Rue de l’Ouest. I can hear the uproar of sparrows and woodpeckers and linnets.

  “My husband left behind a great financial ruin,” says the Baroness. “I was correspondingly obliged to dismiss our servants. Leblanc was good enough to stay on for some time, and when he could no longer afford to, he continued to visit me at regular intervals, simply to see how I was faring. I rather think he kept me alive.”

  A tiny grunt as she slackens her pace.

  “It was Leblanc who persuaded me to come back to Paris with the Bourbons. ‘Bonaparte is gone,’ he assured me. ‘You may be happy once more.’ He overestimated me, I’m afraid. But I did consent, if only to please him. My one condition was that he find me a place as far as possible from my old life.”

  With a gesture as eloquently foreshortened as any by Mademoiselle Mars, she sketches her present environs.

  “Here I am,” she says.

  “I am sorry for your trials, Baroness.”

  “You needn’t be, Doctor. Many have endured far worse. And there is something to be said, after all these years, for simply being alive. At any rate, you cannot have come here to lavish pity on an old fossil like me.”

  “I still don’t know why I’ve come, Madame.”

  Keeping her left foot still, she executes a slow pivot with the right—training her eyes in every direction.

  “A week ago Wednesday,” she says, “Leblanc came to me in a most agitated condition. He told me he had come into possession of a particular object, and in order to authenticate it, he required someone—shall we say someone of a certain estate. However fallen.”

  “What was this object?”

  Whether she hears me or not, I can’t say, for she quickly tacks on.

  “Having satisfied himself that the object in question was authentic, Leblanc told me he required someone else to make a further identification. Toward that end, he set about locating a Dr. Carpentier in the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève.”

  “He never reached me.”

  Her slippered
foot sketches a circle round a shorn-off robin’s wing.

  “I thought as much,” she says.

  She looks at me now, her blue and brown eyes gleaming with their opposed intelligences.

  “Doctor, I am by no means an exemplary woman. I have wished evil on many people in life, but I would gladly call up every last flame of hell if I could be certain that Leblanc’s killers were on the pyre.”

  “May I ask, Madame, how you learned of Monsieur Leblanc’s death?”

  She looks at me a while longer. Gives her lower lip a soft bite.

  “Leblanc had a habit of visiting me every Monday morning, precisely at ten. He was regular as the dew that way. Monday last, he failed to show. Indeed, he sent no word of any kind. It was most unlike him. Having failed to find him at his lodgings, I did what any Parisian might do. I took myself straight to the morgue. There I gave the concierge a very close description of Leblanc and, at the cost of a few sous, was led to the”—she stops—“to the gentleman in question. Doctor,” she says, “would you mind if we sat?”

  There is a bench not ten feet off. With my handkerchief—my only handkerchief—I wipe it dry for her. She nods her thanks and drops onto the bench by scarcely visible degrees, her spine never once unbending. She sets her parasol alongside her. She examines her gloves. She says:

  “Doctor, I wonder if you quite know where you’re treading.”

  “No,” I answer. “I never do. You may see from the condition of my boots.”

  She resists the temptation to look down, but something unexpectedly warm brews from those strange irises.

  “It would be pleasant to trust you,” she says.

  “I don’t yet know what I’m to be trusted with.”

  And that’s the last thing either of us says for some five minutes. A curious thing happens, though. As we sit there, the fog begins to pull apart, like an emulsion dissolving into its constituents, and I realize, with a small shudder, that we are sharing this park with other human beings.

  But what is there to dread about these specimens? A grisette, slumped halfway off a bench. A convent-school girl and her grandfather, sharing cheese and brown bread. A pair of law students. In normal weather, I would scarcely have remarked on any of them. This morning, there is something miraculous about their very ordinariness.

  I say:

  “He’s here.”

  The Baroness’s face turns an inch toward mine.

  “Those were Leblanc’s last words,” I tell her. “He was announcing someone’s arrival. Whose?”

  And rather than meet my eye, she stares at a space just to our west.

  On the other side of the path, three yards down, sits an old soldier, crouched over the Quotidienne. He wears a Louis XV uniform, with a pair of crossed swords on the back and, hanging from his neck, the Cross of Saint-Louis. He’s the kind of relic you regularly find in places like these, keeping warm with memories, exchanging insolent glances with Napoleonic officers, sporting a large white ribbon in his buttonhole to show he’s on the right side of history.

  Of all our newfound neighbors, he is the one who attracts the least notice. Why, then, is the Baroness stiffening at the sight of him? Pricked by chivalry, I am about to suggest we change our seats, when I am stopped by the Baroness’s voice, calling across the gravel walk.

  “Monsieur Vidocq, would you care to join us? You’ll be able to hear much better.”

  CHAPTER 10

  The Double Eagle

  STARTLED, THE OLD soldier glares out at us from the caves of his eye sockets. In the next moment, his papyrus skin is rent by a grin, familiar in all its essentials, and I know the Baroness has struck true.

  The surprise is that Vidocq himself doesn’t seem to care. Springing up on a young man’s feet, he bows low and, in a voice of pickled suavity, says, “My apologies, Madame. I was reluctant to force myself on you.”

  “Ah, but I have read a great deal of you in the local press, and I have never been given to understand that shyness is one of your faults, Monsieur.”

  “Perhaps not,” he says, bowing still lower. “But in the face of such extraordinary powers of discernment, I do find myself at a loss for words.”

  “Madame,” I interject. “Would you excuse us?”

  I draw Vidocq aside; I lean into his ear. Rage is rising up inside me, but all that comes out is a muffled splutter.

  “How—how did—?”

  “How did I know you were making private inquiries?” he growls. “About police business? If you must know, it cost me twenty seconds and ten sous. Madame la Baronne will either have to hire more discreet porters, or you will have to become a better tipper.”

  It’s one of his gifts, I suppose. In the act of being caught, he manages to catch you.

  “So you’re telling me I may not even venture out of doors without consulting you.”

  “Of course you may,” he hisses back. “If you’d like to meet the same fate as Leblanc.”

  “Messieurs,” interjects the Baroness. “If you insist on communicating sotto voce, we might as well adjourn to my lodgings.” A light pinking in her cheek as she ponders the implications. “In my younger days, I should have balked at bringing two gentlemen home. I’m now at the age when it might actually enhance my reputation.”

  WE’RE WIPING THE fog’s remnants from our skin—it feels like the oil from a drake’s feathers—and Vidocq has gently kicked the Baroness’s cat out of his way, and the Baroness is humming something as she sets down her faded silk parasol, and I’m met once again by the feeling that I’ve been meeting her in this way for many years, gathering in the same room with the old round table and the Breton peasant’s chair. The way the Baroness slips into her bedroom, for instance…isn’t that the kind of casual disappearance one can effect only with longtime friends? And please note her uncluttered gait as she sweeps back into the room, as though she were setting up a game of whist.

  Except that she’s carrying not a card table but a cross-legged stool in blue satin. And the illusion of domesticity ends in that moment, for this article, so elegant and uncompromising, no longer fits with our surroundings.

  Even the Baroness doesn’t know quite what to do with it. She makes as if to set it on the ground, then reconsiders and gathers it in her lap, hugging it toward her like a spaniel.

  “Monsieur Vidocq,” she says, “it has taken me at least an hour to trust Dr. Carpentier. Is there anything you can tell me that would, in your case, accelerate the process?”

  Vidocq—from pride, maybe—has kept his makeup on all this time, and some of those assumed years cling to him even now as he strolls toward the Baroness’s sideboard.

  “Madame, I could say I’m honest as linen, and how should I expect you to believe it? I will say only this. I consider every crime in Paris to be a crime against me. A personal affront, yes! And it is only when that crime is avenged that I consider my own honor to be restored.”

  He stands there, studying the image of his altered face in the looking glass.

  “As a young man,” he continues, “I spent more than my share of time in prisons. The very worst, Madame, I can assure you. I was punished a thousand times over for a single passing indiscretion. The only thing that kept me from surrendering to despair, finally, was the belief—no, the certitude—that I was not like the wretches around me. As much as I deserved to be free, I knew there were men who deserved to be where I was. I had tasted their character. I knew that society could survive only so long as they remained apart from it. That belief has been my salvation—then and now.”

  An actor at the Odéon might have fitted out such a speech with all manner of curlicues and italics, hurled it straight to “the gods,” but Vidocq utters it in a single pacific register and then locks his gaze onto the Baroness’s as if she were the only audience he ever coveted.

  “Madame,” he says. “You are wise to husband your trust. With me, you may invest it freely. And before this day is out, you will have your return.”

  And st
ill she hesitates. Though the mask of her face does begin to slacken.

  “I believe you mentioned an object,” he murmurs.

  Getting no response, his voice grows even softer.

  “An object that Monsieur Leblanc asked you to identify.”

  She nods, briefly.

  “Would you happen to know where he found it, Madame?”

  She draws a long breath, which she releases in staccato segments.

  “He never told me,” she says at last. “His correspondent preferred to remain anonymous.”

  “So he had no idea who this correspondent was.”

  “Apparently not.”

  “And did Leblanc take this object with him?”

  “No.”

  It’s amazing to watch him now, those big feet treading as lightly as a cuckolder’s.

  “What did he do with it, then?”

  “He asked me to hold it in safekeeping. Until such time as he could retrieve it himself.” She makes a grave study of her cuticles. “Leblanc was ever an optimist.”

  “You have the object, then?” asks Vidocq.

  “Yes.”

  Restraining himself is almost too much labor now. It cinches his lips, tortures his syntax.

  “Might we prevail upon your goodness to favor ourselves with it?”

  She looks down then and, like someone roused from a drunken slumber, discovers the blue satin stool in her lap. Her hand traces the length of one leg until it meets an obstruction: a kind of gleaming garter, indissoluble from the stool, or so you might think, until the Baroness’s chalk fingers loosen it with a quick flurry.

  Vidocq lays it out on the table, even as I grab a candle from the nearest sconce. There, against the grains of mahogany, lies a hoop of gold, worried and notched, spotted with tarnish.

  “Small,” I hear myself say. “Too small for a bracelet.”

  “Too large for a ring,” adds Vidocq. “An adult’s ring, that is.”

  He draws it closer to the candle flame. A smile flickers across his lips.

  “For a baby,” he declares, “it might do quite nicely.”