When it came to a summing-up, Jacques Malroux allowed, the life of the country constable was not a bad one.
His hours were his own, barring rare urgencies, and a man with simple appetites could do worse when it came to money. He’d been the local postmaster for twelve years. That too had been a decent life until governments started changing with the wind from Paris, and when the mail went missing because some fool postman deserted his route to join the rabble or—as more often happened—the bureaucrat in charge of the province that week became frustrated with his backlog and chucked the lot into the stove, it had been Malroux who bore the wrath of the citizenry.
He’d been quick to put in for the constable’s position when Old Zazou, his predecessor, became too rheumatic and fat to straddle a horse, and the bureaucrat in charge that week had stamped his application simply because it was on top of the pile.
Most times the horse, a gelding, grew as fat as Old Zazou while its master processed paperwork and heard the odd complaint, one neighbor against another, and nine times out of ten settled the matter by summoning both parties to his office above the bakery in Pontoise and encouraging them to shake hands and put their petty differences behind them. For this Malroux drew his month’s pay and pocketed such fines as he saw fit to impose for petty vandalism and blaspheming within the hearing of women and children; drank strong coffee by the gallon and took snuff confiscated from smugglers caught attempting to swindle the government of the tax. These were the perquisites of office, and nothing like what highers-up claimed for themselves.
By sundown he was at home with his homely but affectionate wife and eleven-year-old daughter, who had inherited the uglier characteristics of both parents (her father’s lumpy nose, her mother’s close-set eyes and high forehead), sparing him concerns of unwanted pregnancy and the expense of a dowry.
The sole fly in his soup was Monsieur Blaq (Blaq insisted upon the Monsieur). The sallow, pockmarked city rat had been forced upon him by the Ministry of Police “to assist the local authorities by providing the latest investigative methods developed in Paris in matters beyond the purview of provincial officers.”
Malroux had not been taken in by his promotion to plural, nor insulted by the suggestion that he was a bumpkin in need of sophisticated guidance: His objection was entirely impersonal. The man was a spy.
Whether he was expected to report upon the constable’s own behavior or those of the citizens he served was mysterious—and of little account, because apart from diverting a few sous that officially belonged to the Ministry, Malroux had nothing to hide, and he knew his neighbors to be capable of anything but treason. But he resented the fellow’s presence, and not just because he stank of toilet water: The sweet lilac reek permeated everything in the office, including the constable’s chicken pot pie, lovingly prepared by his wife and sent with him each morning in his pewter lunch pail, along with a jar of beer. “Parisian soap” was the popular phrase for this layering of scents. The constable himself made it a point to bathe on the first and fifteenth of each month, regardless of drafts, but this fellow Blaq had never known immersion except in cologne.
Blaq was always there, circling like a vulture round every letter Malroux read and wrote, peering over his shoulder when he made a minor entry in the ledger—listening outside the water closet when the constable took a shit, no exaggeration; as if he might be hiding a traitorous message in a turd for the slops boy to extract and deliver to an accomplice. Malroux had exulted last month when Blaq took sick and was absent for a time, but the ailment proved to be minor, not at all bubonic, and at the end of ten days he was back, aromatic as ever, gaunter and sallower still, but evidently not terminal. It shook a man’s faith in God, or Providence, or whatever universal truth was sanctioned at present by the state.
When the little peddler entered the office, holding his ratty hat in front of his overalls like a shield, Malroux could sense Blaq’s feelers rampant, like a cockroach’s at the scent of a piece of moldy cheese. The wretch hadn’t the look of a put-upon local; he was a stranger to the constable, who knew everyone in the village and the rustics who visited it to secure supplies and provisions. And he was decidedly green about the gills. Any break in the office routine alerted Blaq to the possibility of some conspiracy against the Republic.
Malroux himself viewed it as a pleasant distraction from the oppressive existence of his resident spy.
The stranger, it developed, traded in kitchen implements, hauling a cacophonous load of pots, pans, graters, and skillets from one stone hut to another along his route, hoping to persuade some of the gimlet-eyed farmwives who reigned there into trading their patched and broken tools for shiny copper-bottomed vessels “forged in the shops of the finest artisans in Marseilles.”
“Spare me your sales pitch, monsieur.” Malroux patted back a belch flavored with chicken and peas. “There is nothing disgraceful in rescuing goods from junkpiles and patching them with tin. What’s the purpose of your visit?”
“Murder, Citizen Constable. What I saw was no accident.”
Whereupon he illustrated his point by vomiting upon the official floor.
Blaq, to the constable’s satisfaction, turned green at the sight.
“Well, well. Congratulations, Crusher. I had you down for a tryst with the Gaunt Lady in Paris, but you stood her up. Well, what’s one head more or less?”
Malroux was in a cheerful humor. The chill damp of Germinal was lifting, bearing an early promise of the bright blossoms of Floreal and evenings of warm late sunshine, and one less road-agent in the rotation.
He considered the dead bandit in the road worth the journey from town.
Malroux had spent much of his tenure a half-day behind one of the luckiest and dullest-witted brigands in western France, interviewing irate travelers minus their purses and luggage and studying the same holey boot-prints in the coach roads, which always seemed to lead to a dead end caused by a providential rainfall ordered by the patron saint of thieves. By the time Crusher was run to ground, the booty was gone, spent or hidden, and when it came to his word against his accusers’, the fellow’s skull-faced grin at close range had invariably cowed them into uncertainty. Today was the first time anything had stuck.
He wasn’t smiling now, and it had taken the constable a moment to identify him definitively. His eyes and mouth were open in surprise, and no wonder. Anyone who had gotten close enough to tear open his belly and spill his inwards on the ground had either his trust or been considered by him to be harmless.
Malroux suspected a falling-out between thieves, and felt confirmed in the diagnosis by the presence a few steps away of a dead man wearing the remnants of a military uniform, still clutching a musket across his splayed body. Recognition was impossible with the fellow’s face blown away, but the Crusher was known to work with a partner. Were it not for army deserters, the bandit population would not run so high.
But where was the plunder they’d slain each other to obtain?
The constable sighed. In the sensational pamphlets popular in Paris, clues were tangible items: broken penpoints, footprints in the rose garden, a compromising letter found in the hollow of a bedpost. In life, they were more often the absence of such things.
In any case he found it difficult to concentrate with Blaq retching noisily into the bushes alongside the road.
He found some satisfaction in that. He himself had seen worse as a young conscript in the service of the late king. But in addition to being useless the man was a nuisance, and the fact that he’d had oysters at luncheon remained obvious as long as he insisted on vomiting upwind.
Malroux sniffed all three weapons. Then he blew his nose into his handkerchief, expelling the rotten-egg stench. Fired. Crusher’s fearsome injury was consistent with close range, but the constable was troubled by the absence of scorching on clothing and flesh.
Also—looking at the other corpse—was any pistol load capable of obliterating a man’s head? Better a cannon.
Here in the dust were the signs of a horse and small vehicle, and of another pair of boots. A third accomplice possibly. More likely he’d been a victim waylaid by the Crusher. Hard to tell whether he was present when the partners quarreled.
If they quarreled. The evidence struck him as too consistent with so easy an explanation. Criminal investigation was rarely as orderly as sorting letters.
Unpleasant duty. Wrapping the handkerchief round his hand, he went through the dead men’s pockets, came up with a pipe, a pouch of cheap shag, and eleven sous. Nothing worth fighting about there, and nothing fallen upon the ground.
He unwound the handkerchief and cast it away. For a moment he stood rooted to the spot, hands on hips, committing details to memory. Malroux had been an efficient postmaster, attentive to minutiae; there was not a deal of difference between keeping track of mail sacks and marking the positions of corpses.
He straddled his gray gelding. The Parisian’s sorrel mare was picketed beside it.
“Take your time, Monsieur Blaq,” he told the retching man. “I’ll return in an hour.”
“You’re not leaving me with them?” The Ministry spy, sallower than usual, stood bent beside the road with his hands on his knees. Bits of his breakfast were ensnared in his beard. He gestured toward the dead brigands without looking their way.
“They can’t harm you, but a stray dog or a resurrectionist may come along and drag them away before Dr. Eslée can have a look at them.”
“What good is a doctor? They’re beyond treatment.”
“As usual, you grasp the matter very well. Beyond treatment, yes, but they may yet bear witness to a man who knows which questions to ask.”
“What if someone comes along?”
“Show them your impressive credentials. But I suggest you wipe the vomit from your face first. Minister Fouché is fastidious to a fault, and will thank you for it.”