For the King Page 5

  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

  Roch 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.

  “The Chouans also could have done it, Citizen Prefect.”

  Dubois snorted. “The Chouans! You are out of your mind, Miquel. This bears all of the hallmarks of a Jacobin atrocity.”

  Bertrand, the Chief of the High Police Division, in charge of all political cases, intervened. “Maybe, Citizen Prefect, Miquel’s memory is no more reliable than those so-called lists of his. Maybe he forgot all about the Conspiracy of Daggers.” A sneer further distorted Bertrand’s misshapen face. “Now, if that wasn’t a Jacobin plot!”

  Roch had always loathed Bertrand, a sort of giant, lame and almost blind in one eye. Indeed Roch had not forgotten about the Conspiracy of Daggers. A few months earlier, a police informer, a Captain Harel, had befriended a few vociferous Jacobins, prodded them, shamed them for being content with words where action was needed. Finally, under the Prefect’s supervision, Harel had hatched a plot whereby twelve men were supposed to surround Bonaparte and stab him to death during a representation of the play The Horatii at the Opera. The problem was that all of the supposed assassins had stayed home that night. Nevertheless, several Jacobins, including the painter Topino-Lebrun, had later been arrested and were still languishing in jail.

  “Exactly, Bertrand,” opined the Prefect. “Were not the assassins in the Conspiracy of Daggers planning to stab the First Consul at the Opera? And pray, Miquel, where was the First Consul going during last night’s cowardly attack? To-the-O-pe-ra.” The Prefect detached every syllable, as though Roch had been a particularly slow-witted schoolboy. “Is not the similarity evident to you?”

  There was no arguing with such nonsense. Piis himself kept silent.

  Bertrand, his only eye alight with malice, intervened. “And I’d like to hear what Miquel has to say about Chevalier’s infernal machine. Wasn’t he experimenting with a barrel of powder fitted with a lighting mechanism when we arrested him?”

  “Yes, precisely!” said the Prefect. “And Chevalier is a notorious Jacobin.”

  “Certainly, Citizen Prefect,” answered Roch, “there is a connection between Chevalier’s device and the bomb used in last night’s attack. Yet in itself it does not prove the Jacobins’ guilt. The Chouans might simply have copied Chevalier’s idea. It is too early to exonerate anyone. I am only saying that it might be unwise to neglect clues that would lead to the Chouans. We do not know enough yet.”

  “I disagree with you, Miquel,” said Henry, Chief of the Common Crime Division. “We have more than enough evidence to arrest all notorious Jacobins.”

  Henry, a thin little man resembling a weasel, had been in the force since the days of the Old Regime, when the chief of Paris police was still called the Criminal Lieutenant. Henry knew every pick-pocket, swindler, forger and burglar in town. In Roch’s opinion, he even knew them a bit too well, but the man was fond of repeating that “one needed a thief to catch a thief.”

  Now even Bouchesèche, Chief of the Food Supply and Safety Division, gravely nodded his approval. Bouchesèche had written a Historical and Geographic Description of Hindustan. He was a quiet, lumbering fellow with a high, balding forehead, and had the reputation of a fine scholar, though Roch could hardly be a judge of that, for he knew little and cared less about the geography of India. Still, until today, he had found Bouchesèche a pleasant colleague.

  The Prefect pursed his lips. “So according to you, Miquel, we should ignore all the glaring clues that point to the Jacobins. We ought to wait for proof positive of their guilt before making any move, is that right? Instead we should chase after shadowy Chouans escaped from the countryside of the West?”

  The Prefect’s thin, prominent nose jutted more decidedly in Roch’s direction. “Well,” he added, “I am afraid this is not how police work is done. But I can guess, along with everyone else, why you are so keen on defending the Jacobins. This is to be expected from you, Miquel, considering who and what your father is.”

  Bertrand bellowed his hilarity and slapped his thigh repeatedly with his huge hand. But Roch’s anger was not directed at the brute. He closed his eyes for a moment and imagined the degree of satisfaction he would feel if his closed fist were allowed to hit the Prefect’s angular face. Unfortunately, this was not to be. So Roch swallowed the insult, steadied himself and looked straight at his superior.

  “What do you mean exactly, Citizen Prefect? Unlike Bertrand, I did not catch the joke.”

  “It is about time you caught people’s meanings, Miquel. And this is no joking matter. You have twenty-four Inspectors under your command, plus an untold number of mouchards, and yet you failed to get wind of this conspiracy. You and your men did nothing to prevent this. An unforgivable negligence, Miquel, and one that has not gone unnoticed in high places, I can assure you. How is it that the streets along the path of the carriage were not secured?”

  Roch, his face reddening, was no longer hiding his anger. “You, Citizen Prefect, gave me strict orders not to meddle with any matters concerning the personal safety of the First Consul. That was supposed to be the exclusive province of General Duroc and his Military Police.”

  “Enough, Miquel. Do not compound your incompetence by your insolence. I will not tolerate either much longer.”

  Roch had no opportunity to respond. The Prefect was now looking at Bertrand and his other subordinates. “I will expect every night on my desk a detailed report from each of you. Even from you, Miquel.”

  Dubois rose and announced that the meeting was over. Roch’s colleagues, casting furtive glances in his direction, left promptly. Only Bertrand tarried. Still grinning, he bent towards the Prefect, covering one side of his mouth with his giant hand, as though to share confidential information. The Prefect, smiling, nodded in silence. Roch clenched his fists to hide the trembling of his hands and returned to his own office.

  10

  The reward of 2,000 louis offered by the Minister of Police produced immediate results. Crowds flocked to the Prefecture and waited in long lines to be heard by the next available policeman. People reported their friends, foes, neighbors and relatives for speaking ill of the First Consul, for carrying a few hundred francs in their pockets, for going to the tavern and getting drunk. Roch had to listen patiently as a man told him in hushed, breathless tones that his next door neighbor had given a dinner to “several people around a table lit by four candles” on the night of the 3rd of Nivose.

  A woman described to Roch the activities of her cousin, who spent his spare time crafting miniature windmills in his attic. Those devices had always attracted the deponent’s distrust, but now it was all too clear that those were models for bombs like the one used in the Rue Nicaise attack. Roch was mesmerized by the woman’s fingers, mimicking the clockwork movement of the wings of the windmills. He had long stopped listening to her drivel. He was thinking of the meeting in the Prefect’s office. Of course his superior had always disliked him, but now the new turn of events had given free rein to the man’s animosity. Dubois was no longer afraid of Fouché. And that was very unfortunate news for Roch, who was completely dependent upon the Minister’s patronage.

  R
och started when an usher interrupted the woman’s narrative and his own train of thought to hand him a note.

  “From the Prefect himself,” announced the man with due solemnity.

  Roch held his breath. For a moment he believed that he was being dismissed, without even the benefit of a personal interview with his superior. But no, the note only ordered Roch to go question a Citizen Vigier, who had reported hearing someone or something fall into the Seine River next to his bathing establishment.

  This was better than anything Roch could have expected. Not only did he keep his position, at least for a while, but he remained part of the investigation. He rose, thanked the windmill woman and pushed her firmly towards the door, assuring her that he would keep her informed if her cousin were arrested thanks to her testimony. He reached for his hat and left the Prefecture.

  Vigier’s Baths consisted of two separate barges, one for men and the other for women, moored next to the Pont-Royal, the Liberty Bridge, formerly the Royal Bridge. The place would have been bustling during the heat of summer, when Parisians flocked there to enjoy the pleasures of cool water, but in winter it was deserted. Yet a fine day it was, the sky the lightest shade of gray. The thin haze that rose from the river veiled the towers of Notre-Dame in the distance.

  Sobry, a scowl on his face, the collar of his coat turned up, already stood on the deck of one of the barges, under a sign that advertised in bold letters: Private and Public Ladies’ Cabins, Showers and Baths. He watched as his men, armed with nets and long poles fitted with hooks, dredged the bottom of the river from a dozen rowboats.

  “Any luck?” asked Roch.

  The other man grunted. “Do I look lucky? Oh, we fished out old boots, a female fetus, a few dead dogs and of course enough animal entrails to fill the Tuileries. Those butchers from the slaughterhouses of the Châtelet toss the offal into the river. So no, no luck. Very little to show for a day spent chilling myself here.”