For the King (6 page)

Roch frowned. He had never heard of these characters. And this was almost too easy. How could Fouché, only a few hours after receiving Roch’s note, put him on the trail of the Rue Nicaise assassins? This must mean that the Minister had already received word from his informers.

True, the Catholic and Royal Army in the West was full of them. And Fouché had many
mouchards
in Paris as well. They were prostitutes, tavern keepers, merchants, beggars or former nobles. The Count de Bourmont, for instance, a former General of the Chouans, was now a recipient of Fouché’s largesse.

While the maid was grinding coffee, the bacon was already frying on the stove with a delicious smell. The maid broke two eggs, which landed in the pan in the midst of tiny grease splatters. Soon the fragrance of the fresh coffee mingled with that of the meat. She set the breakfast on a tray, which she took to the dining parlor.

Roch sat down at the heavy walnut table. He never felt at home in this room. The lodgings were rented furnished, and he had brought nothing of a personal nature beyond his clothes, a pair of razors and a few toiletries. Indeed the only mementos from his youth had been an assortment of pens, books and booklets from Monsieur Veau’s Academy for Boys. Old Miquel might have kept them in the attic of the Mighty Barrel, but Roch had never cast a glance at them since leaving school.

He rose, seized the plate and ate standing by the window. He was staring into the pool of darkness at the bottom of the courtyard below. At last he gulped down a cup of coffee and went to his bedroom.

He stripped to the waist and proceeded to lather his face. He liked the warmth of the water against his skin, the cold bite of the razor blade, even the burning feeling of his freshly shaven cheeks. He glanced at the maroon velvet drapes of his bed, and was tempted for a moment to lie down. Daylight would not come for another two hours. Yet he did not feel any fatigue. He would be more tired if he took a brief nap than if he eschewed sleep altogether. He put on the clean shirt his maid had laid on the bed and buttoned his waistcoat.

On his way to the Prefecture, he kept thinking of Captain Platel’s testimony. The man seemed a reliable witness, not suspiciously eager to remember things. Who was the tall bespectacled fellow in the blue jacket? He did not seem to fit the description of either of the two men mentioned in Fouché’s note.

Roch returned to the Isle of the Cité and turned right towards the Quai des Orfèvres, the Goldsmiths Embankment. There, on Rue de Jérusalem, behind the main courthouse, the Police Prefecture was housed in a decrepit warren of turrets and unsteady walls, reeking of dry rot, dust, mildew and old paper. The guards on duty at the entrance saluted Roch. He followed several sharply angled corridors. The steps of a corkscrew stairwell shook under his boots as he made his way up to his office. It was located under the eaves, and in places its ceiling was so low that Roch had to bend slightly lest he hurt his head. But he had this room to himself, a favor he had enjoyed since being promoted to the rank of Chief Inspector at the beginning of the year.

Roch pulled from a drawer of his desk the list he kept of all characters suspected of harboring unfriendly feelings towards the First Consul, and there were many. They fell into two main categories: the most vocal in Paris were the Jacobins, who insisted on keeping France a Republic. They distrusted Bonaparte and his ambitions. And then there were the First Consul’s other enemies, the Chouans. Old Miquel was right. In spite of the pacification of the West, they continued hoping, and fighting for the restoration of the King.

The current pretender, the so-called
Louis XVIII
, was a younger brother of Louis XVI. He had sought refuge abroad and been forced to wander from city to city to flee the victorious French armies. That man of forty-five, so obese that he could barely walk, did not seem a fearsome foe, but to the Chouans he was the King. Yet to Roch royal blood, whether shed on the guillotine or flowing in the veins of raggedy pretenders to the throne, was of no account. France was a Republic now. Even Bonaparte understood it.

Roch perused his lists, eager to find any character resembling the fellow with the gold spectacles, or the men described in the Minister’s note. He frowned. No, no one, whether Jacobin or Chouan, seemed a match. He opened the door and shouted to a clerk to bring him the lists of all persons who had traveled to or from Paris, on stagecoaches or private carriages, during the previous months. These lists, kept daily by the Prefecture, included names, descriptions and places of residence.

There too Roch’s search was fruitless. Of course none of the suspects was stupid enough to arrive in Paris on a public conveyance. They would have reached the capital secretly, traveling on horseback, or even on foot, from friendly farm to friendly farm, and would have crossed the city barriers hidden amidst the piles of linen of a washerwoman’s wheelbarrow or among the vegetables of a farmer’s cart. Roch dropped the lists and swore under his breath.

At last a white dawn was creeping above the rooftops. This was the hour when Dr. Huzard, the Prefecture veterinarian, was to examine the remains of the horse. Roch was fond of horses. As a child, he had for years slept in a corner of the stables of an inn. Those accommodations were less expensive than even the smallest and filthiest of garrets. Old Miquel would spread a blanket on the straw for them to lie down. The horses nickered, shifted in their stalls, kicked the wooden partitions, but Roch was so used to them that their night noises only eased him to sleep.

Now Roch went down the rickety stairs that led from his office to the courtyard. He frowned when Dr. Huzard pulled away the oilcloth that covered the carcass. This was the first opportunity for Roch to have a look at the animal in full daylight. He was thankful for the cold weather, for it had not begun to smell. It was a small draft horse, with a bay coat and a ragged mane.

“It looks like a cannon ball hit it,” said the veterinarian, his eyebrows raised. “Most of the internal organs are gone.”

“Male or female?” asked Roch.

Huzard bent over the cavity at the rump end of the carcass. “A mare,” he said, pointing at a reddish mass. “See? This is a piece of the womb.”

The veterinarian then examined the long, yellow teeth. The lips were curled back in a final snarl.

“Not a young horse either,” he continued. “It had a rough life. Look at these scars on the head.” He squeezed the muscles of the neck. “But it is fat enough. It had been well fed lately.”

Huzard asked the guards to turn the carcass over so that he could examine its intact side. The hair had turned white where the shafts of a cart would have rubbed against the flanks, but there were no brands or other marks of ownership. The veterinarian pulled a measuring tape from his pocket and announced a height of one meter, fifty centimeters at the withers. Roch thanked Huzard, who went inside to write his report.

Roch had ordered all of the blacksmiths in Paris pulled from their beds before dawn. They waited in a room of the ground floor of the Prefecture for their turn to look at the horse. One after the other, they stopped in front of the carcass. Dozens had already looked at the remains and shaken their heads. Roch was beginning to despair when at last a large man with huge hands and arms, by the name of Legros, cried:

“Aye, that’s her!”

“You recognize this animal, Citizen?” asked Roch.

“Oh, yes, I shod her a week ago. Three men brought her to the smithy. Her old shoes were all worn out, see.”

“Can you describe these three men?”

“One of them was a short fellow, not much over five feet, I’d say. Fat, he was, with a round face and flattened nose. Funny-looking, if you get my meaning, Citizen Chief Inspector.” Roch was thinking of the man whom Fouché, in his note, had called
Short Francis
.

“In what way was that man funny-looking?” asked Roch.

“He was ugly, for one thing, and he had a funny scar on his eye.”

“Which eye?” The blacksmith only knit his brows. “What kind of funny scar was it?” continued Roch. He imagined that, if it had not been so cold in the courtyard, beads of sweat would have formed on the man’s forehead at the unwonted effort of putting his thoughts into words.

Roch sighed. “Show me, Citizen,” he said.

“Like this.” The blacksmith pulled on his eyelid with a fat finger, next to his left temple.

“How old would you say that man was?”

“Oh, I’d say forty.”

“And what about the other two men?” asked Roch. “Were they funny-looking too?”

“Guess not, ’cause I can’t remember them. They looked younger than the short one, maybe. Taller too, specially one of them. But it was the short one that was doing all the talking.”

“Did one of the men wear spectacles?”

“Well, Citizen, now that you mention it, could be. The tall one.”

“What kind of spectacles?”

“Well . . . you know, spe’tacles.”

“Were the frames made of steel? Of gold? Round? Oval? Square?”

The blacksmith stared at Roch as though he had never before considered the existence of so many kinds of spectacles.

“How were those three men dressed?” Roch asked.

“Oh, like reg’lar bourgeois. Nothing out of the ordinary, really.”

“Were you not surprised to see
three
bourgeois bring a draft horse to your smithy, when one groom could have done just as well?”

The man hit one of his palms with his closed fist. “Yeah, of course, I was surprised!” He beamed at Roch and shook his head up and down with undisguised admiration. “See how clever you’ve got to be to work for the police! At the time, I knew there was something peculiar ’bout those three fellows, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Now, seen in that light, that
was
funny, wasn’t it, Citizen?”

Roch took the blacksmith inside, where the man signed his statement with a cross.

9

R
och could never look at the emaciated, worried face of his superior, Citizen Dubois, Prefect of Police, without deep animosity. This was odd, because the man was quite unremarkable. Dubois had been an attorney under the Old Regime. During all the years of the Revolution, he had never expressed any political opinion, defended any noteworthy case, been a member of any club, participated in any event of any import. He had simply avoided being noticed. Absent some extraordinary mishap, men of such stubborn, deliberate mediocrity survived the stormiest of times.

Bonaparte, it was rumored, had designed the new function of Prefect of Police, though in theory subordinate to that of Minister, with the specific intent of curtailing Fouché’s influence. Roch had not been surprised when Fouché had warmly supported Dubois’s appointment as Prefect. For weeks Roch had heard the Minister repeat with great conviction that “Dubois was a man who knew Paris well, very well indeed.” That might be true, but it was a distinction Dubois shared with the remainder of the 700,000 inhabitants of the city.

The Minister’s purpose in wanting a man of such limited abilities for a rival was obvious. And Roch had no reason to complain, because, when the Prefecture had been created, Fouché had ensured his promotion to the rank of Chief Inspector.

When Roch entered Dubois’s office on the 4th of Nivose, he saw all of the Division Chiefs already gathered there. Piis, the Secretary General, Dubois’s second-in-command, was standing by his superior’s desk. Piis was a former nobleman, an affable man, an excellent character even. His only defect was a profound lack of interest in police work. All Piis cared about was poetry and plays, his own in particular. Sheets of his latest work stuck out of his coat pocket, and he was always ready to read it to his colleagues at the slightest hint of interest, or even without any such prompting. His features, too large for his smallish face, tended to give him a slightly comical aspect. That day Piis, uncharacteristically, kept his large bulging eyes away from Roch and fixed on a flowery detail of the carpet.

As soon as Roch stepped into the office, all conversations halted. The Prefect looked at him coldly.

“Glad you could join us at last, Miquel,” he said. “Have a seat.” Dubois cleared his throat to underscore the solemnity of his speech. “As you all know, we were able to derive helpful information from the remains of the horse that pulled the cart suspected of harboring the infernal machine. We had the presence of mind to have the carcass brought here forthright. Thanks to ou diligent investigation, we were able to obtain from a blacksmith the description of the authors of this heinous crime.”

We
,
our
, thought Roch, a thin smile on his face. Dubois could have given him or Sobry a little credit here, but this was fair enough. The Prefect was after all their superior, and entitled to claim as his own any accomplishments of his subordinates.

“Descriptions of that horse and the suspects,” continued the Prefect, “are being printed as I speak. Within hours, they will be posted all over town. The clerks at the barriers have been ordered to search each and every cart and carriage entering or leaving Paris. All coffins headed for the graveyards located outside the city limits shall be opened. Furthermore, the Minister is offering a reward of 2,000 gold
louis
for any information leading to the arrest and conviction of the Jacobins who committed this atrocity.”

Roch raised his hand. “Are we sure yet that the Jacobins are to blame, Citizen Prefect? I compared the descriptions of the suspects, as given by the blacksmith, to my lists. They do not match any known Jacobin.”

Dubois squinted at Roch. “Well, Miquel, then your lists must not be as accurate as you would like us to believe. And pray, according to you, who would be the culprits?”

Roch had never heard a kind word from the Prefect, but he was nevertheless taken aback. He would have accepted, and not worried a great deal about a one-on-one reprimand, but now Dubois was trying to humiliate him in front of his colleagues. That prompted Roch to fight back.