by Louis Bayard
But on this day of March the twenty-third, this ritual will be violated in a rather shocking way. By Bardou himself, who commits the singular offense of looking at me. Angling his face toward mine and fastening on with a real intent.
Is he chiding me for my stinginess? That’s my first thought, I admit, but as I make my way down the street to my house, another possibility strikes me, and this is more shocking than being stared at. The possibility, I mean, that this is not Bardou.
I’m laughing even as I look back. Not Bardou. The same crooked, huddled form. The tattered hat and the leather shreds of boot, always threatening to come apart but never quite managing. And the stump, for God’s sake! Twitching like a divining rod. Not Bardou?
He vanishes from my thoughts the moment I enter the house. The student lodgers have gone to their lectures; Mother has taken Charlotte, the maid, to buy curtains at the Palais-Royal; I am alone. Precious minutes lie before me, waiting to be squandered. I kick off my boots and incline on the horsehair settee, the one that no one is supposed to sit on, and I read Talma’s notices in the latest issue of the Minerve Française (which I had to lift from Le Père Bonvin because we can’t afford to subscribe) and I…I was going to say reflect, but dozing seems to cover it. When the knocking comes, I feel as if I’m being dragged from a canyon.
Never mind. I drape the newspaper over my face. Charlotte will get it.
Ah, but Charlotte’s not home. No one’s at home but me, and the knocking is coming louder and faster. I can ignore it, I’ve done that before, it’s an aptitude of mine, but the rapping grows only more urgent, and in my dazzled state, I begin to wonder if it might not harbor a code, which will never be explained until I answer the door, and I have no time to ask if I want it explained, I’m running into the foyer and pulling back the bolt and throwing open the door….
And there stands Bardou. His head bowed, his voice choked.
“A thousand pardons, Monsieur.”
It’s the most shocking thing he’s done yet. Standing. For the first time in my memory…and maybe the last. His bent frame inscribes slow circles in the air. A second more, he’ll give way altogether.
“Some bread,” he gasps, steadying himself against the lintel. “If you…”
I should make this clear. There is not an ounce of charity in me at this moment, only a prickling of terror. I don’t want him to die on our parquet floor. Because, even if I manage to spirit the body away, Mother will smell him, seeping into her wax, and it will be one more item on the scroll of offenses, and this scroll is no piece of paper, it is something endless and coiling and half fluid, it is the pink tongue of a great serpent, flicking at my neck as I dash toward Charlotte’s pantry….
He mustn’t die on our floor. He mustn’t die on our floor.
There’s no bread, but there’s…something that resembles bread…a macaroon! A week old, perhaps. Perfect.
Back I trundle with my stale sweet, a thin smile penciled on my face, and there, on the front stoop…
No one.
From behind, I hear a clearing of throat. It is Bardou. Transposed by some strange agency to our dining room. Leaning against our buffet.
“I’ve….”
The words die in my throat as he grabs the macaroon and downs it in two bites.
“Ugh,” he says, flinging the wrapper away. “Lizard shit.”
And then he lowers himself into the very settee I’ve just vacated. (The one that no one is supposed to sit on.)
And again the words—the bourgeois reproaches—won’t come clear, for I am just now remarking the change in Bardou’s voice, which is shaking off years with each passing second.
And this is nothing next to the alteration in Bardou himself. He is coming undone. The ribbons tumble from his empty sleeve, and his lone arm scurries into the hollow of his breast, and in mere seconds, another arm has miraculously appeared where there was only stump.
Like a hydra, I think, staring in wonder. Growing new appendages.
“See here, my good fellow, I don’t know what you’re up to….”
He pays me no mind, he’s too busy dragging his hands across his face—and taking Bardou’s face right with it.
And why stop there? Why not yank the white hair straight off his head, like a bird molting in a single stark second?
There he stands, the brazen nestling. Hair: a damp sward of chestnut. Mouth: wryly puckered. Grayish blue eyes presiding over a voluptuous nose. And, most troubling of all, the faintest trace of a scar on his upper right lip.
“You should—you should be aware,” I stammer. “There’s a guardhouse. Not two blocks away.”
The stranger smiles into the handkerchief that is even now smeared with the remains of Bardou, and in a suave and strange voice, he says: “Four.”
“Pardon?”
“Four blocks,” he insists, with a priest’s patience. “Corner of Cho-lets and Saint-Hubert. We can go there right now if you like.”
And then comes the most remarkable transformation of all. He straightens. No. That doesn’t begin to describe it. He grows. As though he’s suddenly discovered another five inches of spinal column and is unfurling it to a previously unguessed length. Before my eyes, the tiny old cripple from the street corner has become a strapping man of five and six. Square and proud and blunt, built along geological lines, with thick strata of muscle bleeding into outcroppings of fat—and the fat somehow bleeding back into muscle, so that he remains an indissoluble unit, a thing of bestial power, shaking you down to your larynx.
“I must ask you to leave this house right now,” I say. “You have—you have presumed far enough on my charity….”
There may be a tremor in my voice, but I wouldn’t know. I can only hear the stranger’s dry muttering undertone:
“Call that a macaroon…paving stone, more like it…what does he think he’s…” And then rising to his own declamation: “Christ, don’t you have something to wash it down with?”
His eyes light on a bottle of half-drunk wine on the buffet. Wrenching the cork free, he grabs a glass from the china cabinet, holds it skeptically to the light (eczema spots of dirt appear from nowhere, as though he’s called them into being), and then decants the wine with great care into the glass, running his truffle nose round the rim.
“Better,” he says, after a couple of sips. “Beaune, is it? That’s not half bad.”
And me, I’m…looking for weapons. Amazing how few come to hand. A couple of butter knives. A candlestick. Maybe Charlotte left the corkscrew in the drawer? How long would it take to find? How long to…
But every last calculation ceases the moment he says:
“Please, Dr. Carpentier. Have a seat.”
CHAPTER 2
Death of a Potato
JUST LIKE THAT, he’s disarmed me. And for one excellent reason: He has called me Doctor.
In these early days of the Restoration, no one thinks me worthy of that title, least of all me. And so, even as I lower myself into one of the dining chairs, I am rising toward that Doctor. Striving, yes, to be worthy.
“Well now,” I say. “You know my name, and I have not yet had the honor of—of being introduced.”
“No, it’s true,” he concedes.
He’s on the prowl now—sniffing, inspecting—compromising everything he touches. The rectangular fruitwood table with its matted surface. The clouded, chipped carafes. The scorch marks on the ivory lampshade. Everything, under his touch, gives off a puff of meanness.
“Aha!” he cries, running his finger down a stack of blue-bordered plates. “Made in Tournai, weren’t they? Don’t look so ashamed, Doctor. There’s nothing like convict labor to keep the porcelain cheap.”
“Monsieur. I believe I have already begged the honor of knowing your name.”
His merry eyes rest on me for a second. “You have, indeed, and I do apologize. Perhaps you know of a man called…”
And here his fingers form a bud round his mouth, and the name flowers forth, like
a shower of pollen.
“Vidocq.”
He waits, with great confidence, for the dawning in my eyes.
“You mean—oh, he’s that policeman sort of fellow, isn’t he?”
His smile dips down, his eyes shrink. “Policeman sort of fellow. And Napoleon is just a soldier sort of fellow. Voltaire told a good joke. Honestly, Doctor, if you can’t get things in their right scale, I despair of you.”
“No, I don’t—I mean he locks up thieves, doesn’t he? He gets written up in the papers.”
A grandiloquent shrug. “The papers write what they like. If you want to know about Vidocq, ask the scoundrels who tremble at his name. They’ll write you whole tomes, Doctor.”
“But what has Vidocq to do with anything?”
“Vidocq is me.”
It has the air of afterthought the way he says it. As though, having breathed the name into the air, he need lay only the gentlest claim on it. And this is more declarative than if he’d shouted the news to the chandeliers.
“Well, that’s all very well,” I say, folding my arms across my chest. “But do you have any papers?”
“Listen to him now! Papers! Please, Doctor-eating-off-your-convict-made-china, tell me why I need papers.”
“Why, you come in here….” I’m amazed to find my anger rising in direct proportion to his. “You barge in here, Monsieur Whoever You Are, with your little tricks and your faux stump, and you say, ‘Voilà! Vidocq!’ and expect me to believe it. Why should I? How can I be sure you’re who you say you are?”
He mulls it over. And then, with some regret, informs me:
“You can’t.”
It is a good lesson to get out of the way. Eugène François Vidocq, if so he is, will not be held to the same empirical standards as the rest of the world. Take him at face value or go to hell.
“Very well,” I say. “If you’re this Vidocq fellow, tell me where Bardou is.”
“Having a lovely week, I assure you, with the Bernadine sisters. Tending to their melons. I think you won’t find him eager to return to his street corner, Doctor.”
“But why would you go to such lengths in the first place? Taking his place on the corner, dressing like him, looking—”
“Well, now.” The stranger leans into the table. “If a hunter is tracking prey, Doctor, he must take care not to be seen.”
“But who is the prey?”
“Why, you.”
And in that moment, I twitch my head to the side, and there, in front of the settee, lie my empty boots and my half-read newspaper.
“And why should you have any call to hunt me?” I ask.
Except I already know.
Eulalie.
With distressing speed, the writ scrolls out in my head. Eulalie and her law clerk…fencing stolen plate…captured by the gendarmes…we’ll let you off this time if you give up your mastermind…and who better to give up than poor little Hector? Won’t he do anything for Eulalie—still? Won’t he go to La Force for her?
And back from my shriveled clod of heart comes the answer: yes.
“It’s absurd,” I say. “I’ve done—what could I have—”
“Now now,” he says, working the crick out of his neck. “If there’s interrogating to do, you really should leave it to me. That’s what they pay me for, you know. Let me see….” He gulps down another draft of wine, swipes his arm across his lips. “You could start by telling me what a certain Monsieur Chrétien Leblanc wanted with you.”
“I don’t know anyone named Leblanc.”
He smiles softly. “You’re quite sure about that, Doctor?”
“As sure as I can be, yes.”
“Well then, it’s a very funny business. Because I’m here to tell you that Monsieur Leblanc knows you.”
Fumbling once more in his shirtfront cache, he draws out—not another arm, no—a piece of butcher’s paper. Flecked with wax, stiff with grease. And from this corrupted surface, the words leap up: hot, black.
DR. HECTOR CARPENTIER
No. 18, Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève
He’s behind me now, the terrible stranger, watching me read, wreathing my neck with his breath. The air grows confused with wine.
“That is your address, is it not, Doctor?”
“Of course.”
“And that is your name?”
“Yes.”
“And I believe you have the honor of being the only Dr. Carpentier in all of Paris. Don’t think I didn’t check,” he adds, cuffing me gently on the ear. “Damnit, though, I’m still hungry as the devil. Anything else to eat? That fucking macaroon…”
A moment later, I hear him rustling in the pantry, arraigning each article as he finds it. “Chestnuts have seen better days…. Pear preserves? I think not.…Cheese looks all right, except…well, that’s a scary purple, you don’t see that particular…”
“This is ridiculous!” I call after him. “I’ve never received a Monsieur Leblanc here! I’m not—”
Not even a practicing physician…
But pride cuts me short. Or else it’s the sight of the stranger, reemerging with a potato in his mouth. A raw potato, crammed like an apple into a trussed pig.
“Well, Doctor.” He grinds out a hunk of its hard flesh, mashes it into submission. “We’re certainly—in agreement on—on one point. You couldn’t have—received Monsieur…”
“Leblanc.”
“Leblanc,” he echoes, through whirling pellets of tuber. “For the simple reason…he never made it here.”
“Well, then, why are you bothering me? Why don’t you question him?”
Another hunk of potato. Another round of gnashing.
“Because he’s…mpxxcchsik….”
That’s how it comes out, I’m afraid. He puts up a single finger—Wait, please—but it’s a good long minute before his larynx breaks free.
“Because he’s dead.”
The taste of the raw potato must finally breach his senses, for all of a sudden, it comes sluicing out in a fast brown stream—right into the waiting carafe.
“Thought it was a bit riper,” he mutters.
And my first thought is, yes: Mother. Must clean up the mess before Mother gets here. I’m already reaching for the carafe when he intercepts me.
“Three blocks from here.” (His sausage fingers curled round the carafe handle.) “That’s where the unfortunate Monsieur Leblanc died. Not too far from the Université where you spend so much of your days.”
He pushes the carafe away, takes one long step toward me.
“Monsieur Leblanc was killed on the way to seeing you, Doctor, and I’m counting on you to tell me why.” He brushes a pebble of damp potato from my coat. “If it’s a question of which confessor you’d prefer, I should tell you I’m a much easier touch than God. At the very worst, you’ll get a few years of state-supported education in a cell of your choice. Think of it as an exercise in character building. Come now, tell Vidocq all about it. Before”—and here he gives me the most knowing of smiles—“before Mama Carpentier comes home and gets her little white feathers ruffled.”
He steps back and contemplates me for a moment. Then, wheeling round, he upends the wine bottle. A single crimson drop touches down on the dining table’s surface.
“Oops, we’re out! Be a good man and fetch us another, would you?”
CHAPTER 3
The Chamber of the Dead
IT’S THE WAY of the human conscience, I suppose. A man suggests you’re guilty of something, and the more you say you’re not, the more it sounds like you are. The voice rings of tin, the heart rattles like a fistful of beans, and every no sounds like a yes, until you can actually feel this yes, inching onto the parapet of your lip…when your interlocutor grabs the bottle of Burgundy—the one you fetched for him not half an hour ago—and peers into its jungle green interior and, in a voice tinctured with resignation, announces:
“Out again.”
Then he waggles his finger at the glass of wine sitting unm
olested before you. The one you haven’t had the stomach to drink (thanks to him).
“Are you—do you—”
And, seeing you shrug, he hoists it straight to his mouth. A long leak of satiated breath and then a belch, fruiting the air. He looks down at himself. He sees, as if for the first time, Bardou’s rags. He draws out a watch.
“Time to go.”
For both of you to go, that’s what he means. He is moderately surprised to find you remaining in your chair.
“I need to show you something,” he says.
And still you don’t move, and rather than explaining himself further, he lifts his voice into a gently mocking register.
“Maybe you need to leave a note first? In case she worries?”
And here’s the damnable part of it. You were going to leave a note. And all you can do now is squeeze yourself into your boots and stare at the newspaper still lying on the floor and think (you can’t help it): This is all that will be left of me.
Your legacy: a half-read journal, a half-finished monograph. But you can’t do more than pause because he’s already swung the front door open and stepped out on the stoop with the air of a man surveying his estates. He’s waiting for you.
“Coming,” you mutter. “Coming, damn you.”
LATER TODAY, I WILL reflect on the curious fact that he came alone. No other officers, no squad of gendarmes to subdue me. Not even a weapon, as far as I can tell. He’d watched me long enough to know: I could be handled.
And was he wrong? Here I am, climbing without a second thought into the carriage waiting round the corner. Waiting, benumbed, as he barks the address to the driver above.
“Quai du Marché!”
He pulls the curtains over the windows and yanks up his sleeves—only to remember he doesn’t have sleeves, only Bardou’s damp rags, which cling to him now in the form of an apology.
The cab must recently have carried a wedding party, for there’s a scrap of lace caught in the door and a scattering of hothouse orange blossoms and the snapped-off handle of a Japanese fan. And overlaying everything a ripening scent, like something that would waft from a tannery. His smell, I suddenly realize.
