The Black Tower

by Louis Bayard

  “Where are we going?” I ask.

  “Paying a little call at the morgue, that’s all.” He smiles faintly, shakes his head. “You still don’t believe me, Doctor.”

  “No, I—”

  “You don’t think I’m him, do you? Not another word, damn you! Here!”

  Into my lap drops a round pasteboard card, wedged between two pieces of glass. On one side: the arms of France and the words SURVEILLANCE ET VIGILANCE. On the other: a single surname, VIDOCQ, in triumphally raised gold letters.

  “Signed by the prefect himself,” he says dryly. “If that eases your mind, Dr. May-I-see-your-papers.”

  It doesn’t, how could it? It only gives me leave, finally, to call him by that name. And still I hesitate.

  Vidocq. Say it, for Christ’s sake. Eugène François Vidocq. Come at it in pieces, if you must, syllable by syllable. Vee. Dohk. Vee. Dohk…

  EVEN IN THESE early days of the Restoration, it is a famous name. It comes, you might say, with its own exclamation point. Terror of thieves! Scourge of crime! Bonaparte of the barrières!

  Only a couple of years past forty, and yet he already drags behind him a full complement of legends. There are people, for instance, who swear they were at Denoyes’ cabaret the night he raided it. They remember him staring down a dance floor of knife-wielding thugs and, in a voice that resonated as far as the Bastille, ordering them to quit the premises. One man demurred and lost a finger. The rest obeyed without a murmur. (Vidocq chalked white crosses on the worst offenders as they passed so that the policemen waiting outside would know which to arrest.)

  And what about the time he tracked down a thief, knowing only the color of the man’s curtains? Or when he waded right into a Tuileries reception and plucked a confidence man in the act of bowing to the King? Or captured the fearsome giant Sablin in Saint-Cloud while Sablin’s wife lay in the throes of labor? (Vidocq had enough time left over to catch the baby and to serve as godfather.)

  One night, they say, he insinuated himself into a group of assassins stationed outside his very own door. Sat with them all night, they say, waiting for that accursed Vidocq to show up, then joined them in their despondent trek home—where, naturally, he’d stationed a tribe of gendarmes. (His reward was a tumble in the sheets with the ringleader’s mistress.)

  Legend has it that if you give Vidocq two or three of the details surrounding a given crime, he will give you back the man who did it—before you’ve had time to blink. More than that, he’ll describe the man for you, give you his most recent address, name all his known conspirators, tell you his favorite cheese. So compendious is his memory that a full half of Paris imagines him to be omniscient and wonders if his powers weren’t given him by Satan.

  And yet he is doing God’s work, is he not? To hear the papers tell it, Vidocq, in the space of a few years, has sent hundreds of malefactors to prison. The ones that remain abroad cross themselves at the sound of his name. If a robbery falls apart at the last minute, it’s Vidocq’s doing. If a credulous old widow manages, against all odds, to keep her jewels, blame it on that scoundrel Vidocq. If an innocent man lives to see another morrow, who’s behind it? The accursed Vidocq, that’s who.

  All it takes some nights is a shift in the wind’s direction, a creak on the stair, and the name flies like an oath from their throats.

  Vidocq. Vidocq is abroad.

  AND NOW THIS same Vidocq is pounding on the roof of our cab, as if to gouge out a straighter path for his words.

  “Driver! A little faster, will you? Oh, and don’t forget to stop at Mabriole’s bakery. I want to show this bastard what a macaroon tastes like.”

  Folding his arms across the swell of his belly, he regards me with a look of naked skepticism.

  “You’re not a fainter, are you?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Well, that’s a relief. You look like one.”

  I’VE ALWAYS THOUGHT of the morgue as the fullest realization of democracy. Anyone can enter: man, woman, child; dead, alive. You don’t even have to give your name. When Vidocq and I arrive a little after two, I catch only the faintest glimmer of a concierge. I’m already moving, like everyone else, toward the glassed-in chamber that opens off the main hall.

  Through the panes, three biers slope toward us like grain chutes. On each bier, a body. To be kept here another twenty-four hours and then, if no one claims it, shipped straight to the medical schools, ten francs a cadaver. And so hundreds of still-living souls crowd round this window every day to keep their friends and relations off the dissecting table—or else to enjoy the spectacle of someone else’s death. I’ve seen more English tourists in the morgue than in the Louvre.

  “Come,” says Vidocq.

  He takes me by the elbow, draws me down a corridor. We pass into a room with yellow calico curtains and a horsehair settee and…and, most troubling of all, a pianoforte. I reach for middle C. It pings back, in perfect tune.

  “What do you want?” Vidocq grumbles. “The morgue keeper’s family has to pass the time, don’t they?”

  We enter a room with no flowers, no pianos. No furniture, not even a window. Only a black marble slab, draped in white cambric, and two candles, blazing in sconces.

  Vidocq grabs one of the candles, walks to the head of the table, and peels back the sheet to reveal the slumbering head beneath.

  “I don’t believe you two have met,” he says, in a voice dry as shavings. “Dr. Carpentier? Monsieur Chrétien Leblanc.”

  CHAPTER 4

  The Missing Fingernails

  IT’S VIDOCQ’S LITTLE coup de théâtre, of course, and it depends for its effect on shock, which is the one response I can’t provide.

  To a medical student, after all, a body is a body. The only surprise in this case is to find Chrétien Leblanc’s body still here. Under normal circumstances, he would have been borne straight to Vaugirard or Clamart or, if money were wanting, the potters’ field at Père-Lachaise. It’s clear enough Vidocq wants me to have this private audience, and nothing more can happen until I do, and so at last I do ply myself against this face, oily with candlelight. The bush of hair inside his Roman nostrils and the chin cleft, deep enough to hold a thumb, and the threads of blood worrying his sealed eyelids. The scalp has shrunk back to reveal a grubby stripe of gray beneath Leblanc’s blackened locks, but the whiskers are still neatly combed, the brows trimmed, and his pores breathe out the sweet-sharp scent of pomade.

  “Maybe fifty-five, fifty-six,” says Vidocq. “We can’t be sure.” He’s standing so close behind me that his chin actually tickles my shoulder as he talks. “Ring any bells, does he, Doctor?”

  “I don’t know him.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Vidocq grunts. Laces his hands behind his head and tips himself back against the wall.

  “He didn’t leave any family. Took us two days just to find someone who could identify him. Thank God for creditors, Doctor! A shoemaker on the Rue Dauphine came round to swear a complaint. Said some bastard named Leblanc had stiffed him on a pair of boots and skipped town. ‘Skipped town?’ I said. ‘Gone to a better world, more like it.’ Well, wasn’t the shoemaker fit to be tied? He took one look at that body and said, ‘Damn your soul! Where am I supposed to get my seven livres now?’”

  Vidocq chuckles. “I’d have been happy, naturally, to pay him out of Leblanc’s private funds, but the wallet was long gone when we found him. The clothes, too. Leave a body lying around long enough, every last article goes. Even the gold crowns. No,” he says, his voice trailing down. “I’m afraid the only personal effects left on Monsieur Leblanc were his drawers.”

  He leans over the cadaver. “There there,” he murmurs, and in a gesture startling and soft, he runs his hands through the strands of perfumed hair. “You can imagine, Doctor,” he says, looking up. “I come across a few corpses in my line of work, Doctor. Robberies gone bad, usually. Sometimes a victim protests too much. Or the thief’s a bit of
an amateur. Something goes wrong, he can’t cut the purse free, he panics. Or the victim knows the thief and has to be—” He looks up at me. “It’s quick, usually. And clean. This was less quick and less clean.”

  He pulls the rest of the sheet off. He says:

  “What do you see?”

  No, this is what he says: “What do you see, Doctor?”

  “Well, now.” Maybe you can hear it: my new baritone. “Judging from the joints, rigor mortis has largely dissipated. Muscle proteins have begun to decompose. Which would indicate he’s been dead at least thirty-six hours. No, I’m sorry, make that forty-two.”

  “Why forty-two?” he asks.

  “I don’t believe you’ve met,” I answer, extending my hand toward him.

  Sitting on the tip of my finger is a fly. Robed in emerald, drowsy-still.

  “Lucilia sericata,” I say. “The greenbottle, to you and me. Usually the first insect to arrive—thirty-eight hours at the earliest. This one looks like he’s had a few more hours to feast.”

  And as if on cue come the answering buzzes of other flies, gathering at the same table. One of them even lands on the bridge of Vidocq’s nose. He pushes his lower lip out and sweeps the fly away on a current of air.

  “Forty-two hours,” he murmurs. “That means…dead before nightfall…well, how do you…”

  And suddenly: the first whisperings of piano from the next room. Scales, executed with light precision. It could be anybody, but my mind seizes for some reason on the image of a young girl. Ringleted and pinafored—the apple of the morgue keeper’s eye.

  “No signs of head trauma,” I say. “The fatal blow must have come—here—just beneath the left rib cage. A longish sort of thrust, perhaps from a—a—”

  “A poignard, I’m guessing. Or a dirk.”

  “Now this is curious.” My fingers step across Leblanc’s hairless torso. “See these lacerations? No more than an inch in diameter. By my count, there are a good half dozen on the chest alone.”

  “Four more on the back,” says Vidocq.

  “Fairly shallow. No more than half an inch, as far as I can tell. You might have done as much with a dinner knife.” I frown, run my index finger across the scapula and back to the neck. “I could almost…”

  “Yes?”

  “Assuming he didn’t inflict these himself…”

  “Yes?”

  “I might almost believe they wanted him to bleed. Before they killed him.”

  Taking the candle from the sconce, I move the light across him in rippling pools.

  “Is this how the body was found?” I ask.

  “Not exactly. We had to clean it up a bit. There was a goodly amount of dried blood, especially around the fingers.”

  “The fingers?”

  “Mm. The right hand. Couldn’t even see it at first for all the damned blood. Look for yourself, Doctor.”

  He watches as I raise Leblanc’s fingers to the light. The piano has fallen silent now, and the only sound is the buzzing of the flies and a distant trickle. And the windings of an étude.

  “The fingernails,” I say at last. “Three of them are missing.”

  “Not just missing,” Vidocq answers, smiling grimly. “Pried loose.”

  He drops a small buckram bag on the marble table. Three ragged patches of cuticle scatter into the light.

  “We found them when we went back to the scene. I’m sure Monsieur Leblanc was loath to part with them.”

  One of them is resting in my palm now. Hard. Like a flake of amber.

  “Oh, the memories,” says Vidocq. “I once saw Bobbefoi do that to one of his pals in the bagne. With a saddler’s awl. You never heard such screaming. Bobbefoi figured the fellow for being a police spy, but he got the wrong man. Lamentably.” He strokes Leblanc’s brow. “There there, old bear. We’re almost done.”

  “The knife wounds,” I say. “The fingernails…”

  And in this moment, the music from the adjoining room seems to twine with my own thoughts, drawing them into their natural key.

  “They tortured him, didn’t they? Before they killed him.”

  Vidocq shrugs, takes a couple steps away.

  “Torture’s a simple business, Doctor. You either want your man to hurt or you want him to give.”

  “But what would Leblanc have to give?”

  “A name, maybe. The name of the very fellow he was going to see.”

  And with that, the remains of Chrétien Leblanc’s fingernails are obscured by the piece of paper that Vidocq showed me less than an hour ago. How different it looks to me now.

  DR. HECTOR CARPENTIER

  No. 18, Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève

  The great Vidocq is yawning now. No need to suppress it. He lets it pop his jaw open and swell his neck column and flush his lungs out.

  “Don’t think I mentioned,” he says at last. “We found the paper in a tiny leather pouch. He’d tied it round his waist and tucked it in his drawers, if you can believe it. You could have searched him all you like, you would’ve been hard-pressed to find it. Not unless you had him on a slab in the Paris morgue.”

  His fingers lock round one another and pulse in tiny motions.

  “Leblanc lived on the Rue de Charenton, we know that much. A good long walk from your neighborhood, Doctor. My guess is he was being followed from the moment he left his apartment.”

  “Then why didn’t they—”

  “Oh yes, I had the same question. Why didn’t they just follow him straight to your house? Tell us, old cod.” He runs a finger round the dead man’s ear. “Why didn’t they? Did you catch them on your tail? Maybe you threw them off the scent, is that it? Went in circles, took a wrong turn or two. Maybe you even tried to save yourself by making for the nearest station house.” He blows into the dead man’s ear: two gentle puffs. “But they didn’t let you, did they? Poor old salmon.”

  The étude keeps coming, like a river. And as I drag up horns of my own hair, it seems to me I am knocking the music off balance. Just to give myself company.

  “If Leblanc was coming to see me…”

  “Yes.”

  “And he didn’t want—whoever it was to know…”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why didn’t he just commit my address to memory? Why go to the trouble of keeping it on his person?”

  He smiles down at Leblanc’s bare white abdomen. “I think he had in mind—well, I almost blush to say it, Doctor—someone like me. If the very worst happened, he wanted to put the information where I’d be sure to find it.” He coos into Leblanc’s fleshy ear. “And who better than Vidocq, eh? Who better?”

  I’m sitting down before I realize there’s a chair waiting to catch me.

  “Leblanc was protecting me,” I say softly.

  “Oh, it’s all guesswork, of course, but I look at this.…” His hand describes the length of Leblanc’s body. “I look at that.…” His index finger glances down on the scrap of paper. “I say to myself, ‘Leblanc did everything but cram that piece of paper up his ass.’ And all I can think is he wanted to keep them from doing to you what—what they did to him.”

  I have only a very dim sense of Vidocq now, weaving round me in the darkness—until his hand lands with a light explosion on my shoulder.

  “And a fine job he did, eh, Doctor? Here you are. Still in the flower of your youth, more or less.” He plucks a thread of something from my coat. “How does it feel, I wonder? To have your life saved by a man you’ve never met?”

  I will say this: There’s no judgment in his voice. I think he just wants to know.

  “Old turtle,” he says, bending over Leblanc’s face. “I am honored by your trust. Leave it to us to finish the job, will you?”

  ONLY LATER, ONLY much later will I register that shift from singular to plural, I to us. It will dawn on me that this was the moment it turned, although it could well be there was no single moment—nothing that could be called back. Much as I might have wished to.

  “GO TO SLE
EP NOW,” whispers Vidocq.

  He pulls the sheet back over M. Chrétien Leblanc. Setting the candle back on the sconce, he pauses one last moment—not in prayer, exactly, but in some kind of suspended thought. Then he stalks out of the room, stopping only to cast the reproach that I am half expecting.

  “Maybe you’d rather stick around with the maggots?”

  I NEVER DO see her, the piano player of my imagination. But by way of compensation, her sonata comes after me: a spring tide of notes, catching me as I pass into the main hall. I will never again be able to hear Mozart without thinking of greenbottle flies.

  CHAPTER 5

  An Astounding Reemergence

  VIDOCQ’S MOVING AHEAD from the moment we step out of doors—and with such a bounding gait that I have to jog just to catch up. He scatters plumes of rainwater and mud as he goes, and there I am, following, ever following, mincing round the puddles he’s fording, shielding my hat from the horse droppings that are anointing him.

  “Excuse me…Monsieur Vidocq?”

  “What is it now?”

  “I was wondering if perhaps I might go home now.”

  He looks at me in a state of unvarnished amazement.

  “And why would you do that?”

  “Well, it occurs to me there’s—I imagine there’s no further use for me now.”

  His jaw swings gently open.

  “Insomuch as…” I tender him a propitiatory smile. “I mean, given that I can’t make a—a positive identification of the unfortunate Monsieur Leblanc, I can’t see what more I can do for you.”

  He lowers his head until it’s level with mine—until I can actually feel his breath scalding my cheeks.

  “Listen to me, you little prick! A man’s been murdered, and you know something about it. The more pieces we find, the more something might jog that timid little memory of yours, and I want to be there when something finally pops out, because I don’t think you’re quite so idiotic as you look.”