Jeanne drew back the cloth and, with a shock, I saw the pile of coins that lay there. Most of them were centimes and sous, of course, but one of them was gold. Louis d’Or had almost disappeared in Paris now and in the rest of France.
“Very good indeed to do so much for you. Is he a close friend of yours, Citizeness?”
“On the contrary, he is a stranger to me.”
“Then truly he is a great philanthropist. I didn’t believe that there were any such men in Paris. You have surprised me.”
“We were surprised ourselves.”
“What is this good man’s name?”
“He told me he was just a well-wisher who pitied my plight. He said he wished to remain anonymous, because he cannot help everybody who is in need.”
“Had you ever met him before?” I asked, wondering about a man wealthy enough to possess gold and give it to a stranger, for no other reason than kindness. I expected her to say no, but again she surprised me.
“He bought bread from me once, a few weeks ago.”
“You have an excellent memory, Citizeness, if you can remember every customer who comes into a busy shop like this.”
“I remember him because it’s not often a gentleman comes in here.”
“A gentleman you say? What makes you think that?”
“He spoke like a gentleman and wore good clothes. They fitted him well and his linen was of the finest quality. I was a laundry maid once, before I married the late Pensol, and I used to wash such things.”
“That’s not to say the man was a gentleman, although he did act like one,” Jeanne murmured. Her tone was astringent. “Who knows who anybody is any more, these days, with everything so mixed up. Not like it was when we were young.”
“No indeed,” Citizeness Pensol agreed with her, “but, from his speech, I am sure that this man was gently-born, at least, and so I recognised him when he came in today.”
“Can you tell me exactly when it was he came into the shop before?”
“It must be some weeks ago now. I told you about it, Jeanne, at the time. Don’t you remember?”
The old woman nodded. “That’s right. It was several days before Marianne died.”
“Can’t you remember more exactly than that?”
“No, I’m sorry. It was just an ordinary day like any other and the shop was crowded. If he had been plain-spoken, I would not have remembered him at all.”
“No matter. I should like to meet your benefactor and thank him for his kindness to you. There are very few people like him, more is the pity. Do you know where I could find him?”
They looked at me blankly. “No, Citizen, how should we know that? We have only ever seen him here in the shop.”
I smiled. “Never mind. It is good to know such people exist, at least. I cannot match his generosity, but you would please me by adding this to your collection.” I put one of the last of my coins into her hand, although not without a pang.
“You are also very kind, Citizen, I thank you.”
14
I took Jeanne Simon to the Conciergerie on the Ile de la Cité, where the Chouans were being held. It’s a dark and gloomy place, made dank by the nearness to the river. A sour smell met our nostrils as we entered; the scent of people kept in close confinement and afraid. The Governor showed us to a small barred window which overlooked the principal corridor of the prison. He told us that, usually, the prisoners were free to come and go there, but he had cleared the place for our benefit. He signalled and, one by one, the Chouans were brought out into the light. I watched Jeanne keenly, but the first man provoked no reaction at all from her. The second man was different. As soon as he appeared, she clutched my arm.
“Merciful God, that’s the man who asked poor Marianne to hold his cart.”
I, too, remembered him as one of those I had seen on that night, the man with the bushy beard. I did recognise him after all.
“Are you sure?” I asked her, although I was already certain myself.
“I’ll never forget his face, the black-hearted villain.” She had risen to her feet and her hands were tightly clenched. I could see the white of her knuckles. She went forward to the window and gripped the bars, as if she would tear them out of their sockets to get to him.
“Who is he?” I asked the Governor.
“His name is Saint-Régeant. One of those cursed Breton rebels. This will do for him now. He’ll plant no more bombs here or anywhere else.”
Jeanne turned around as if to go, no doubt thinking her task over. The Governor shook his head and said, “We’re not finished yet. There’s another one of these swine for you to see.”
She nodded and returned to the window. “Yes, of course. There were two of them on the cart.”
The third man, the one with the scar, came right up to the window. He was in rags and his face smeared with blood. He looked very different from the last time I had seen him, drinking in the tavern.
“Yes,” Jeanne said. “He drove the cart.”
“You are sure?”
“I am. His face has haunted me ever since it happened.”
“His name is Carbon,” the Governor told us. “François-Jean Carbon. We’ve got that much out of him. He’s wanted for robbing diligences, amongst other things. They call him ‘Petit François’”.
“Inappropriate,” I murmured, looking at the size of the man.
“He hasn’t said anything much about the bombing so far, but he will now.” It wasn’t hard to guess his meaning and I repressed a shudder.
The Governor turned to Jeanne. “Thank you, Citizeness, for your assistance.”
“He made a young girl die a horrible death and many others too. Make sure that he suffers for it.”
“Oh, I will, you can be assured of that,” the Governor said, with a smile that made me freeze .
I tried to feel some pity for these men, knowing what was about to happen to them, but I did not. They deserved none.
I took Jeanne Simon to the nearest tavern and bought her enough ale to help her recover from her ordeal. She was shaking. Seeing the men again had obviously unnerved her. As her anger left her, she seemed to shrink and become suddenly aged. It took me some time to calm her down.
“If only I hadn’t let Marianne hold the horse,” she kept saying over and over. “She didn’t really need the money; her mother has a good business. What kind of man buys a young girl’s life with twelve sous? I blame myself. I should never have left her...”
I was glad to be able to bundle her into a hack and tell the driver to take her home.
“Why does a man give a gold Louis to a woman he doesn’t know?” I asked Fournier, when I returned to the bureau after leaving Jeanne Simon. Laurent and Petit were also in the room and both of them glanced up sharply at me when I asked the question.
“The usual reason? So she’ll go to bed with him?”
“You’ve got refined tastes and too much money if you pay your doxies in gold! Me, I like them rough and cheap,” Petit said with a leer.
“You would!”
“That can’t be the reason,” I objected. “The woman’s old enough to be his mother.”
“Not everyone has the same tastes as you, mon brave. These old hens know a thing or two the young ones don’t. That makes them worth their money.” Fournier grinned. “Of course, I wouldn’t know myself, but that’s what they say.”
“They’re worth gold?”
He laughed. “No, of course not. Not to me anyway. If I had gold, I’d find better ways to spend it. But who are you talking about anyway?”
I told them the story of the bread shop. When I finished Fournier looked thoughtful.
“What do you think?” I asked him.
“I can give you three possible answers to your question. There could well be more.”
“And your three reasons are?” I prompted.
“The man is rich and sorry for her loss, just as he said.”
“Unlikely,” Laurent muttered, “why should
he be? No one goes around giving money to strangers, just because there’s been a death in the family. Deaths happen every day and no one does anything about it, unless you know the people concerned.”
“Two.” Fournier ticked off his reasons on his fingers. “The man has more money than sense.”
“Then he should give some of it to me,” Petit interjected, “I could use it.”
Fournier ignored him and his eyes hardened as he said, “Three. He is trying to compensate her.”
“Compensate her? What for?”
“For the loss of her daughter.”
“Why should he do that?”
“A man might do so, if he felt responsible for her death.”
I stiffened. “Do you mean that he might be one of the people who planted the bomb that killed her?”
Fournier nodded. “Why not? One or two of these men escaped us and there may be more. Lots of people were killed, but he knows this girl’s name and where her mother’s shop is. Perhaps he passed the place and saw the devastation his work caused to the lives of the people who were there. This girl was so young. Maybe he has grown sentimental over ending a young life and now he regrets causing her death. He can’t restore her to life, so this is his way of making some sort of reparation to her mother.”
“Far-fetched.”
“Perhaps he is afraid she will come back and haunt him,” Petit sniggered.
“Do villains who blow up innocent people have regrets?” Laurent asked in a mocking voice.
“Most people do, about something. The only difference is how they deal with their regrets,” Fournier answered him calmly. “If I had done such a thing and had enough money, I might do the same.”
“Well, you’ll never have enough money. That’s for sure.”
“True.”
“Speak for yourself. I don’t regret a thing,” Petit said.
“You’re the exception then.”
“I am. Exceptional is the right word for me.”
“We were not discussing you, however. This man might be exactly as he described himself to the mother...or he may not.” Fournier watched me closely.
“Well?” I asked him.
“It may be worth while trying to find him again and then we’ll ask him. At least, his generosity is unusual enough to be suspicious. Would you recognise him again?”
“I would, now I’ve seen him at the shop.”
“Was he one of the men in your sketches?”
“I’m not sure. Possibly. He looked familiar to me, but I’ve questioned so many people since then. He could have been one of the people I worked with that evening, or a witness I saw later. I certainly couldn’t swear to him.”
“A pity. If you remembered where you encountered him before, it might help us find him. We haven’t got any better leads to those who escaped, even though everyone’s still searching. Unless or until the prisoners talk, we’re at a dead end. Why don’t you follow this up and see if you can trace him? Don’t you agree, Laurent?”
“I suppose so,” the man said grudgingly. “He’s as good doing that as anything else and he can’t do much harm, even if he is searching for a phantom.” I bristled at that, but Fournier caught my eye and shook his head slightly, so I let the remark pass unchallenged.
I left the Ministry and set out to try to find the man, with a feeling of foreboding. It’s difficult to locate anybody without a starting place and with only the few isolated facts at my disposal. I combed the streets round Citizeness Pensol’s shop, with no success. No one recognised my description. Obviously the man did not live in the area, or someone would know him. He had certainly been there twice, as witnessed by Citizeness Pensol and Jeanne Simon but they had already told me all they knew.
I searched the alleyway he went down on the day I had met him, but it proved to be another dead end, a literal one this time. It led only to a small square in front of an old church. There were no other exits. The man must have returned the way he entered, perhaps while I was still talking to the women in the bread shop about him.
I went into the church since the door wasn’t locked. It was dusty and disused, as most churches are now, although vagrants must have taken shelter there. I found footprints in the dust and the marks where bodies had lain on the floor, a cold and uncomfortable place to sleep. I pitied those people, if they had nowhere better than this.
I went out of the church, left the square and returned to the Rue Saint-Nicaise. I was walking along when I thought I recognised a figure on the other side of the street. She was dressed in a close-fitting black coat and wore a hood covering her hair, but her face was unmistakable. It was Eugénie, Gilbert’s daughter. There was too much traffic to cross over to her or even to call a greeting. She would not have heard me through the din. By the time I had found a gap through the carts and riders, she had gone. I retraced my steps and looked in all the shops in case she had entered any of them. She had vanished and perhaps it was just as well. I had no idea what I would have said to her. The glimpse of her made me sure that I wanted to see her again, very much indeed. I vowed that the next time we met, I would wear my best clothes, have the right words prepared and a valid excuse to visit her home.
15
After several days of fruitless searching for the man with the gold, I gave up and returned to the bureau to report my failure. I hoped that Réal, Laurent or Fournier, I didn’t care who, would find me something more productive to do. I was thoroughly bored and beginning to wonder about whether I should make an attempt to find another type of employment. Police work seemed to consist of long boring hours of doing the same thing over and over again or furious activity and tragedy. It had a similarity to being in the army, but more often than not I was alone and that made a difference. Before, I always had friends around me. I was even starting to become sentimental about some of the people I disliked, which was stupid. I knew that I would soon be forgetting the bad times, the blood and the loss and the pain. Perhaps it is like that for the old soldiers who talk about their memories, remembering the interesting times and forgetting the horror. I was too young for that. But it seemed to me that police work had most of the bad and little of the good.
I pushed open the door of the Bureau and walked into a celebration. The room was overcrowded and Petit stood in the middle of it, shaking hands and being congratulated by the others.
“What’s happening?” I asked Manon who was standing inside the doorway.
“Petit’s got his hands on Maître Chagrin at last.”
“Has he?”
“Petit’s been telling us the story. Apparently Chagrin tried to be a bit too clever for once and walked into a trap. There’s a jeweller down in the Rue Jacques that Petit knows. He arranged for some gems, which were likely to tempt Chagrin, to be delivered there and remain for three nights before they were shipped off. Petit put the word out in several places. He had the place staked out, even before the rumours spread and everybody waited. Sure enough, Chagrin arrived, went inside and they caught him climbing out of one of the windows with his booty in his pocket.”
“Careless of him,” I observed. “I was told that he wasn’t the kind of man to walk into that kind of snare.”
“They all get too clever in the end. There’ve been enough traps set for him, certainly, and he’s always avoided them before. He’s had the devil’s own luck and some narrow escapes. Don’t know why his luck ran out this time, though I dare say we’ll find out after Petit questions him. We’ve never even known what he looks like before.”
“What does he look like?”
“Small, mean and ferret-faced, or so Petit said.”
“He’s cock-a-hoop about the whole thing,” I said, looking at Petit’s face. For once he was beaming and his smile was quite genuine.
“Well he might be. There’s a big reward for catching Chagrin. Most of the jewellers in Paris put up the money. They must think it’s worth it to get rid of the man.”
“I suppose it must be to them,” I said.
“Now Petit will be able to afford the kickshaws he likes so much. Perhaps he’ll even pay me back the ten francs he borrowed off me last month, if I’m lucky.”
The crowd eddied and Petit came towards us. I didn’t like the man and wasn’t particularly pleased with his success. It would have been churlish of me, though, to say nothing to him. I held out my hand to him and said,
“Well done, Petit.”
“Thanks.”
“You off to question him now?” Manon asked.
“Soon. I’ve got a few things to do first. If he tells me where he’s stashed the hauls from his other robberies, we’ll really have a celebration.”
“Good luck, then,” Manon said, “I’ll look forward to it.”
Petit left and most of the others did too. I looked around for Fournier, but he wasn’t among the crowd. Laurent was there, though, and he was the man I had to see. I waited until he was the only one remaining. He scowled at me as I went over to his desk.
“Well, what have you got to tell me?” he asked.
I took a deep breath and reported my failure to him, “I’m getting nowhere searching for the other bombers. No one recognises my descriptions, no one admits to having heard of any of these men. No more Louis d’Or have shown up among the other victims and no one has offered them any money. None of the informers have anything to tell me. He’s vanished; worse, it’s as if he never existed.”
“Have you questioned the drivers of the diligences?”
“Several times, especially the ones who drive the coaches going west towards Brittany. None of the drivers recognise the sketches, but the man could have disguised himself and left Paris for all that.”
Duval and the Infernal Machine (Napoleon's Police Book 1) Page 11