Aristide cautiously edged toward her, as if she were a shy wild thing that might flee if he drew too close, and pressed her hand in his. “Would you allow me to be your friend?”
“I won’t be your lover,” she insisted.
“I don’t want a lover.”
She said nothing, though she looked sharply at him, the question in her eyes.
“Has it never occurred to you that a man could be just as deeply scarred by life as you have been? That he could go through life alone, by his own choice, never opening his heart, because he never dares trust himself with such intimacy? Because he fears he might be capable of doing a great wrong to the person he most cares about?” He paused, surprised at how much he had confessed to her, and sighed. “Perhaps we’re two of a kind. Were you to look into my heart, I suspect you would find that I dread love as much as you do. But there are gentler emotions than love.”
He brushed his lips across her fingers and felt her tremble, instinctively stiffening, though she did not pull away from him.
“However cruelly men have used you,” he said, “I beg you to believe that at least one cares for you, despite all. . . .”
She squeezed her eyes shut again as tears glinted suddenly in the wan sunshine.
“He said he cared for me. I thought it was true.”
He did not need to ask whom she meant.
“No,” he said, “I’m not your Henri. I don’t know who he was or why he abandoned you. And I think that if I kiss you, you’ll imagine his kiss, his touch. So I won’t even try. But I hope you’ll believe me when I tell you I am your friend.”
#
After he had escorted Rosalie home and dismissed the hired carriage, Aristide stalked through the bustling streets to the Seine, and across the Pont-Neuf toward the Cité. He lingered on the bridge, near the flag-draped recruiting booth below the empty pedestal that had once held the statue of King Henri IV. Brooding, he stared at the moss-green river glittering below him, as behind him the traffic flowed by, endlessly busy, carriages, handcarts, horses, pedestrians, the hordes of Paris.
Ravel, he told himself, you’re a fool; you’ve come to care far too much for this woman, who carries adversity with her like a burden she can’t set down. Why can’t you find a measure of happiness with a safe, complacent, prosaic creature like Clotilde?
The daylight was failing as the inevitable gray clouds gathered once again. He stirred and slouched farther along the raised foot pavement of the bridge, past the peddlers with their trays of sweetmeats and trinkets, and the street singers and prostitutes, and the stalls full of second-hand books.
“Oh, damn,” he said at last, aloud in the din, “damn, damn,” and pushed his way through the crowds toward the Right Bank.
CHAPTER 19
Aristide found Brasseur in his office, seething.
“Of all the colossal incompetence!” Brasseur stormed, thrusting a letter at him. “By God, before the Revolution the police had to answer to their superiors, and things got done properly! But now nobody tells you anything--every commissaire has his own patch and he can’t be bothered with anything outside it--let me get my hands on that fool Dumas--”
“What? Who’s Dumas?”
“The commissaire of the Théâtre-Français section! Remember him?”
“What about him?”
“Aubry’s vanished!”
“Vanished?” Aristide skimmed the letter.
#
It is my duty to inform you that, as you requested, a watch was put upon the house in the Cour de Rouen in which Citizen Aubry resides, but the person charged with this duty reports that Citizen Aubry left his domicile in the early evening of the 26th of Brumaire and has not yet returned.
#
“Four days ago!” Brasseur roared, and stomped across the room. “He’s been gone, out of sight, for four days, and that idiot didn’t think it worth his time to inform me until today!”
“The twenty-sixth,” Aristide said. “That’s the day Aubry was questioned.”
“Damn right it was! And now he’s gone--skipped while he had the chance--he’s probably in Brussels or Geneva by now!”
“Why would he run?”
“Eh?” Brasseur paused in his angry pacing.
“Our witness failed to identify him. He was in no immediate danger of arrest. I did warn him that he ought to give us a more convincing alibi, but still . . . he had no reason to drop everything and run for it, and make himself look guilty.”
Brasseur sighed and threw himself into his chair. “Then where the devil is he?”
“Well . . . we suspect he wasn’t telling us everything. Do you suppose he really does know who committed the murders?”
“Christ,” Brasseur muttered. “D’you think he’s dead, too?”
“Perhaps . . . or possibly in hiding from the real killer. I don’t think we should dismiss the possibility.”
“I need a stiff drink.” Brasseur fetched the bottle of brandy he kept locked in the back of a cabinet. “You?”
“Thanks, no.” Aristide read the rest of the letter. According to his servant, on the twenty-sixth of Brumaire Aubry had returned from the examining magistrate’s chambers, taken a late luncheon alone in his apartment, and then left the apartment without telling the servant where he was going. He had proceeded on foot and had taken no parcels or valises of any kind with him. The police agent assigned to observe Aubry had followed him as far as the Pont-Neuf, where congestion brought about by a carriage accident on the bridge had caused him to lose sight of his quarry, and Aubry had not been seen since.
Brasseur was tossing back his second glass when Dautry thrust his head inside the door.
“Commissaire? A citizen outside seems very agitated, and he says he’ll discuss his business only with Ravel--”
“Citizen Ravel?” said a man, shouldering past him. “Is Ravel here?”
“Here,” Aristide said, trying to place the man. Tall, red hair, an anxious countenance. “What can I do for you, citizen?”
The man edged closer to him, lowering his voice to a murmur. “Citizeness Beaumontel told me you’d saved her from an embarrassing, perhaps dangerous, predicament.”
Of course, Aristide thought, remembering him: Lafontaine, the “friend” of the timid Sidonie Beaumontel, who, he was certain, knew more about the Rue du Hasard murders than she would admit to him. “Yes?”
“And since it was my signature on those letters,” Lafontaine continued, “I’d hoped to add my thanks to hers. . . .”
“You’re welcome, of course; but it looks as if something more urgent is troubling you?”
“I--can we talk somewhere in private? I’d prefer to shield her reputation. . . .”
Brasseur waved them outside. Aristide gestured Lafontaine out to the street, where the peddlers and carters hurried past them, indifferent. “What’s the matter? Why come to me?”
“Sidonie--Citizeness Beaumontel--she’s disappeared.”
“She’s disappeared, too?”
“We were to meet the day before yesterday, and she never arrived.”
“The husband? You think he learned of your . . . friendship?”
“Her husband was my first thought, too, but he was at a dinner party for hours with a dozen other guests. She’d given the servants the afternoon off and she was to claim a migraine at the last minute, and let Beaumontel go alone to the dinner, which began at three. Then she would slip out of the house and join me at Monceau at a little past three o’clock. We often met there, in the gardens. When she didn’t appear, I assumed she hadn’t been able to get away. But she sent me no note by way of the florist yesterday morning, no excuses, no apology, nothing. I asked a friend of hers to call on her and learn what might be wrong, but she said they told her Sidonie was not at home to visitors. Today also. No explanation.”
“Citizen,” Aristide said, “aren’t you overreacting? The citizeness may genuinely have fallen ill.”
Lafontaine shook his head. “She’d have s
ent me a message. I--I wouldn’t have worried so if it hadn’t been for something she told me when we met last, at the Palais-Égalité. She seemed troubled. When I pressed her, she told me she’d just recognized someone. Someone she’d seen outside the house where that swine Saint-Ange was murdered.”
“Someone loitering about, you mean?”
“No, you don’t understand. When you questioned Sidonie, it was the twelfth of Brumaire, two days after the murders, wasn’t it? But what she didn’t tell you was that she’d already been there, on the tenth, on the evening of the murders.”
Aristide sighed. “So that was it.”
“She told me everything. That evening, she’d gone to give Saint-Ange his hush money. Of course she’d made sure the street was nearly empty before she approached. And just as she was about to go inside the house, a young man came rushing out the front door and collided with her. She thought nothing of it, of course, until she continued upstairs--avoiding the porter--to Saint-Ange’s apartment. She knocked, received no answer, and at last tried the door. It was unlocked and she went inside, and found the girl, dead, right in front of her. She was still quite warm. Sidonie was so shocked that she could do nothing but tiptoe out of the house. She was too frightened to send for the Watch, even. She was sure no one saw her--naturally she’d taken pains not to be seen. But the man who’d collided with her outside the house might have been the murderer!”
Aristide frowned. “Why did she return to the house on the twelfth, then, if she knew Saint-Ange was dead?”
“She didn’t know he was dead until you told her yourself. She said she never saw his body, only the girl’s.”
Aristide nodded, remembering that both Didier and Thibault had said the sofa had all but hidden Saint-Ange’s corpse from view.
“So she assumed he was still alive and she came back on the twelfth,” Lafontaine continued, “to pay him off, and to learn what she could. And a police inspector detained her and frightened her badly--”
“Didier,” Aristide said, disgusted.
“And then you told her Saint-Ange was dead, as well, and she panicked. She feared the police would suspect her of killing him if they knew she’d actually been in the house on the evening of the tenth. She did have good reason for wishing him dead.”
“Christ.” Aristide beckoned Lafontaine along and set off at a swift stride toward Rue Honoré. “And she told you recently that she’d just seen the man from Rue du Hasard, the man who had collided with her? Did you see him? Did she point him out to you?”
“No. She only said she’d just seen him in the arcades, among the crowd in the Palais-Égalité. A young man--”
Aubry? Or--who?
“--And if she saw him and recognized him,” Aristide interrupted him, “then he might just as easily have seen her. Oh, damn, damn.”
“Where are you going?” Lafontaine panted, hurrying to keep pace with him.
“To the commissariat of her section!”
#
Though, in theory, the commissariats of Paris were to be open to all citizens every day until ten o’clock at night, most commissaires chose to take décadi off from their duties. A visit to the Section du Roule produced only the suggestion, from the bored, glum inspector on duty, that the young wives of middle-aged men often unexpectedly disappeared by their own choice.
“You don’t understand,” Aristide snapped. “This woman is a witness in a case of murder. She may be in grave danger.”
“And what evidence can you offer me,” the inspector inquired, “that the lady didn’t simply decamp with a paramour?”
“Her paramour is outside in the antechamber, wondering where she can be!”
The inspector sighed. “Look, I’ll report it to Commissaire Hubert. Have the man leave a statement with me. I’m sure the commissaire will have someone sent over to ask Beaumontel about his wife.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow. There’s not much more I can do. Runaway wives aren’t really our business unless the husband brings charges of adultery or desertion.”
And that would be all the help he would get, Aristide thought as he left Lafontaine behind with the commissaire’s secretary. A tight knot of apprehension was growing in his belly.
#
2 Frimaire (November 22)
A note awaited Aristide at Rue Traversine two days later.
#
Citizen:
In accordance with your request to be kept notified of any new intelligence regarding the alleged disappearance of Citizeness Marie-Sidonie Chambly, wife of Citizen Beaumontel, it is my pleasure to inform you that a peace officer yesterday called upon the said Beaumontel. He found the citizen in a state of great agitation. The citizen gave a statement to the peace officer, the essence of which was that his wife had run away with a paramour, but upon being questioned further, could not provide any tangible evidence of her desertion, such as a letter in her handwriting informing him of the fact. The citizeness has been officially registered as a missing person and we are investigating Citizen Beaumontel’s movements.
Hubert, Commissaire, Section du Roule
#
Aristide muttered a curse under his breath and flung the letter onto the fire. After a few minutes’ debate with himself, he hurried to the Ministry of Justice, where a junior clerk told him that Lafontaine had stayed home that day by reason of pressing personal business. He went on to the Chaussée d’Antin and found Lafontaine prowling restlessly about his apartment.
“Show me where you waited for Citizeness Beaumontel in the gardens at Monceau.”
After a brief, silent journey in a fiacre to the edge of the city, they alighted at the eastern end of the English gardens, now national property, which had once belonged to the royal Orléans family. Lafontaine pointed to the long, curving line of columns just visible through the trees. “There, by the pond. That’s where we always met.”
“Show me.”
They followed a muddy bridle path across the lawn, past leafless thickets drooping sadly beneath the weight of raindrops in the autumn chill. A short distance away the architectural follies built for the late Duke’s amusement peeped out from amid the fading foliage: an obelisk, a pair of Dutch windmills, a Venetian bridge over the stream that fed the pond, a miniature pyramid, a small Roman arch, a number of lone columns and stone blocks carved in classical style scattered here and there. An artfully crumbling tower, two or three stories high, with a short section of castle wall clinging to it, frowned down upon Aristide. It looked more like a cemetery than a pleasure ground, he thought as they tramped past.
“I waited just here,” Lafontaine said as they approached the small, shallow ornamental lake and the broad semicircle of Corinthian columns that embraced one end of it. “I waited two hours.”
Aristide surveyed the landscape. Trees and bushes obstructed the view beyond the pond. “She would have been coming from the south, southeast, wouldn’t she?”
“Yes, she usually came that way.”
Aristide retraced his steps around the pond’s edge, turning southward until they stood among the counterfeit ruins. “So she would have entered the gardens there,” he said, gazing at a distant gate, “and walked along that path. . . .”
Dwarf trees and thick clumps of lilac bushes flanked the path. The Duke’s garden would be a fragrant, colorful haven when the trees blossomed, but in the sunless damp of late autumn it was deserted and desolate.
“Is it always this solitary here?” Aristide inquired.
“In winter, yes, aside from a few people out riding. That’s why we came here, because we weren’t likely to encounter anyone we knew.”
“So someone might have followed her here and no one would have noticed.”
Lafontaine turned haunted eyes to his. “Dear God, you think . . .”
Aristide pointed to the gate. “You’d better begin over there . . . look among the bushes, in the thickets. Shout if you find any trace of her, or anything out of the ordinary.”
&nbs
p; He turned back and tramped through the underbrush, glancing from side to side. The shrubs and hedges were running wild. He doubted the gardens been properly tended since well before the Revolutionary Tribunal had dispatched the Duc d’Orléans, the dead king’s cousin, to the guillotine in 1793. The overgrown boxwood hedges, still a deep glossy green amid the fallen leaves, gave off a harsh, acid odor of damp and decay.
He emerged from a clump of wet bushes, shaking droplets from his overcoat, to find himself once again facing the stone garden follies. Sighing, he explored the lawn, finding nothing but a few sundry footprints, nearly obscured by the marks of many horseshoes, several days old and blurred by the last rain. His search took him past the obelisk to the pyramid, where a pair of stiff Egyptian caryatids, supporting a lintel stone, flanked the low entrance to the chamber within. The wooden door stood a trifle ajar. From behind it a faint, rank odor drifted to him on the damp air, the butcher-shop reek he had smelled not long ago at the Basse-Geôle. Seized with a sudden queasy twinge, he stooped and dragged the door open.
Sidonie Beaumontel lay on a bed of mold and rotting leaves with her hands folded on her breast, eyes closed, her muddy white gown arranged decorously about her limbs. But nothing could disguise the blue-black marks of groping, squeezing fingers about her throat.
#
“Strangled,” said the police surgeon, backing out of the pyramid after a cursory examination. “She’s been dead a few days.”
“How much strength does it require to strangle someone?” Aristide asked him. He did not dare look inside the low stone chamber again.
“A fair amount. Strong hands. But this woman’s small, with a delicate frame. Perhaps not so much strength as usual for this one.”
“Could a slender man have done it?”
“I expect so, yes. Or even a woman, if she were young and vigorous.”
Aristide nodded and moved away from the pyramid and the thing within it. Commissaire Hubert fell in step beside him.
“So your suspicions were founded. You think she went out to meet Lafontaine on the twenty-eighth, and the murderer followed her here and seized his chance when he saw nobody was about?”
GAME OF PATIENCE (Aristide Ravel French Revolution Mysteries) Page 19
