“I’m recovering from a serious illness, Madame. I’ll pay extra to have my meals brought to me in my room. I ask you not to disturb me otherwise. My physician has ordered complete rest.”
As he spoke, the Viper laid pound notes one by one on the lace-covered table where the proprietors of the rooming house served their guests and conducted business. The notes were crisp: He’d evidently obtained his currency at the bank very recently, but had wisely not changed them for French francs, whose value fluctuated daily with the situation in Europe.
The expression on Madame Frontenac’s heavy features changed from avarice to sympathy as she regarded the stranger. He was pale, and obviously in discomfort. She thought his accent Belgian or Swiss. There was always some malady stewing in those land-locked countries, with no sea winds to blow away the miasma.
“It will be no imposition at all, Monsieur”—she glanced down at the register—“Marechal. My husband came down with distemper of the throat this past winter. He isn’t whole yet. I hope your complaint is less severe.”
“It’s an inflammation of an old injury. I’m assured of a complete recovery in a fortnight.”
She smiled congratulations, and swept the money into an old candy box bearing a chipped image on the lid of Bonaparte, the sallow shaggy-haired twenty-one-year-old hero of the Bridge at Arcole in Italy. “Is this your first visit to Paris?”
“No, I was here some years ago, before the Consulate.”
“Ah. You’ll find it a more orderly place now.”
Just then a wagon struck a loose cobblestone outside. The bang startled the visitor, who winced and placed a hand to his side. “It seems a busy neighborhood for one so far from the center of the city.”
“That’s the brewer down the street, bringing back the empty barrels.” She spoke quickly, lest he change his mind about staying. “We have a quiet room in the first floor back, overlooking an alley no one uses. You’ll swear you’re in the country. May I carry your bag?”
“Thank you. I shall manage.”
“Our cook is simple, but her lamb stew is popular with all our guests. You’ll be strong as a horse by Bastille Day.”
Muscles twitched at the corners of his mouth.
“Thank you. That is my wish also.”
Days passed peacefully. The husband whose health was taking so long to return was a confirmed egalitarian who insisted upon being addressed by everyone, even children and peddlers, as Jean-Baptiste, not monsieur (he found the Republican “Citizen” stilted). His wife, Claudine, was annoyed by this and thought it common. He was even more rotund than she, with a shining bald head and no outward evidence he was under the strain of illness.
“Just between us,” he told their guest in a low voice, “I’m much recovered. But my late inconvenience spares me mundane chores.”
“Your secret’s safe with me, Jean-Baptiste.”
The host set a tray of covered dishes on the side table in the lodger’s room. “More mutton, I’m afraid. Our Juliette seems to know all the butchers in the city who sell it cheap.”
“I won’t hear a word against it. Thanks to her I grow more stout by the day.”
The landlord thought this a true statement. The man, who had seated himself on the edge of the bed after admitting his visitor, was less gaunt than when he’d arrived only days ago. His dressing gown no longer hung in loose folds and he didn’t perspire so easily after a minor exertion. Jean-Baptiste found him never less than civil, and at times cordial. He wished all their boarders would learn by his example.
“The whiskers are coming in nicely,” he ventured. “I envy you your ability to grow them.”
The man on the bed stroked the sandy growth.
“I can’t claim credit for something I can’t control. But at least they itch less with length.”
For whatever reason, possibly to spare himself the effort of shaving completely, the lodger had begun what promised to be a fine set of fierce muttonchops. They were darker than his hair, and gave him a military demeanor—enhanced, perhaps, by his name: Marechal, the term for a groom in the cavalry. He wondered if the fellow had served. He seemed of an age to have defended the Republic in its early days, a foreign convert. The man was Breton; he’d swear to that on a stack of Bibles. Perhaps it was in that service he’d sustained the injury that had come back to lay him low.
“Your Christian name, sir, if I may be so bold? I promise not to address you by it without your permission, and never in public.”
Jean-Baptiste’s lodger gave no evidence of offense, however independent his smile seemed of the rest of his face. “León.”
Fouché was livid; which meant that his complexion was a bit less waxlike.
“That imbecile on the coast has lost our chief conspirator.”
Prefect Dubois did not so much as twitch his moustache at this news.
“Cadoudal, you mean. Is this confirmed?”
“The fat swine stepped into a tonsorial parlor in St. Germaine and never came out. After thirty minutes the man assigned to him decided to investigate. It’s never taken me more than fifteen to have my hair cut.”
“Perhaps your creature thought he had his nails trimmed as well. What did the barber say?”
The Minister passed the report across his desk.
Dubois put on his spectacles. “A man answering Cadoudal’s description walked in, said, ‘Bonjour, Citizen,’ and went on out the back door, he claims. Is he trustworthy?”
“He’s on his way here for questioning, but I suspect he is. He has a son in the army—that’s confirmed—and he was given a citation by the Committee of Public Safety commending him for harboring fugitive Revolutionaries from the King’s soldiers in the old days. He framed and hung it on the wall of his shop.”
“Such things can be faked.”
“It was yellowed and flyblown. My creature, as you call him, turned out to be a dunce, but he has an eye for detail.”
“Except how many doors a barbershop has. At least we know Cadoudal is on his way to Paris.”
“Most likely he’s here already, and meeting with our friend Meuchel.”
“I fear we shall never hear again of anyone by that name. What now? Alert the press?”
“We’d be inundated with false reports. It would be the Terror and the Christmas Eve Plot rolled into one great mélange. Given the opportunity it’s only human nature to denounce your neighbors.”
“That’s Limodin’s view. We must take steps to protect the First Consul. When’s his next public appearance?”
Fouché’s smile was piteous. “What would be?”
“Bastille Day, of course.” What a prize booby he must think me, thought the other.
“He and Madame Bonaparte will appear on the balcony of the Tuileries and wave to the crowd on the anniversary of France’s liberation.” The Minister’s thin upper lip folded over its mate like the flap of an envelope. Fouché himself shunned the center of the light. Like a grub.
“We must persuade him not to take part in the celebration,” Dubois said.
“Bonaparte, the son of Mars? Impossible. Even if he agreed, our conspirators would remain underground. The object is to flush them out, falcon and falconer together.”
“Is it? I wasn’t told.”
“I’m telling you now. We’ve wasted enough time hunting this assassin when we should have let him come to us.”
“Risky.” Dubois did not mention that this was the plan he himself had confided to Limodin. The situation changed with the direction of the wind.
“I’m open to any suggestion less hazardous.”
“You should place faith, Monsieur le Ministre, in our two agencies. Both men’s descriptions are in the hands of every officer and informant in France. We must pull them all into Paris, place them behind brooms and pushcarts and in all the inns and taverns. Sooner or later, one or the other will show himself. If Cadoudal, your people will sweat Meuchel’s whereabouts out of him. If Meuchel—and we shall call him that for now—we can proceed to the capture of the prime mover at our leisure. Perhaps his creature will flee from the pressure and give us room to breathe.”
“Do you really think he would flee?”
No. Aloud: “Je ne sais pas.”
“What you’re suggesting may take weeks. We haven’t that much time.”
“Which is why we must buy some. Citizen Bonaparte must sit out Bastille Day.”
Fouché contemplated a headless bust on a corner pedestal; some prosperous Roman merchant, no doubt, dead since Christ.
“You’re right.”
Dubois, surprised by this admission of defeat, sympathized; it had to have come with a wrench. “I shall speak to the First Consul myself,” he said.
The Minister shook his head. “That’s my responsibility. I shall approach him tonight, once he’s rested. A glass of wine may help him see reason.”
Dubois didn’t say what was in his head: There wasn’t wine enough in France to persuade Napoleon Bonaparte to stand down from a cowardly threat of murder.
Claudine Frontenac smiled at her lodger.
“Another constitutional, Monsieur Marechal? Are you quite certain you’re not overtaxing yourself? To lose my favorite boarder to a chill would devastate me.”
“Small chance of that, in such balmy weather. At all events I must put myself to the test. I’m feeling much fitter than yesterday.”
He stood at the base of the stairs in the light topcoat he’d asked Jean-Baptiste, the master of the house, to purchase for him, giving him more than the necessary amount in notes. At that it was too heavy for the season. Messidor, the month of harvest, was nearly half gone, with blistering Thermidor waiting in the wings—July, according to the old calendar. Dogs lay stupefied in the gutters.
True, Madame Frontenac considered, there was color in the man’s face, framed by his striking new sidewhiskers, and although he carried a stick he didn’t lean on it. In less than a week he’d passed from invalid to boulevardier.
A handsome man, she decided: It was the facial growth. She had thought him quite ordinary-looking at first, apart from his illness, which she saw now as romantic. Perhaps an old duel was the source of his complaint: Un affaire du coeur, she hoped. When he’d left his room for the first time, she’d scarcely recognized him. Men transformed so easily, without daily recourse to paints and powders, alchemic extremes. She wished Jean-Baptiste could grow something more than gin-blossoms on his round face.
“Enjoy your walk, monsieur.”
He did. It was a fine day, with the sun warm on his back. He swung the stick as he strolled, feeling the not-unpleasant tightness of new skin on his wound. Absent a musket ball, the Paris physician who’d stitched it up had accepted his story that he’d been gored by a bull on a shortcut through a farmer’s field; there was no reason to report the visit to the authorities. He’d discarded the last of his dressings, and with them all regret.
He ran a hand over his sidewhiskers, a pleasant sensation. They’d foil any description that might have been broadcast from Pontoise.
The tailor’s shop he found bore a tricolor in a wall frame, smaller than the dark patch where the Bourbon fleur-de-lis had once advertised it as of service to the King.
When the proprietor heard his request, his cheeks cracked in amusement. “An accident?”
“An atrocity.” He assumed the indignant air of a loyal servant. “A street tough threw a ball of horseshit at my master, knocking it off his head.”
“I don’t know what’s become of our youth. They should all be conscripted.”
“Can you have it by Bastille Day?”
When the tailor hesitated, he dealt bank notes onto the counter.
“Of course. Come back in three days.”
Claudine was involved with her accounts when her boarder returned. “Your Moniteur, monsieur. The boy just left.”
He thanked her, gave her a newly acquired centime for the newspaper, and unfolded it.
She returned to the receipts spread out on the table. They were beyond Jean-Baptiste, or so he claimed; she’d begun to wonder if his glacial recuperation wasn’t merely a strategy to avoid work.
Intrigue surrounded her.
In keeping her books, she suspected Juliette exchanged more than small talk with the merchants who sold her provisions for the kitchen; but she wouldn’t challenge her. Prices were so high, with so many foreigners visiting now that things had settled, domestically, anyway—more of them than at any time since the days of the Court—and after all it was Year IX, in which all the prudish old ways were buried with the past. Jean-Baptiste was Republican enough for them both, but if five pounds of potatoes could be got for twelve centimes when more exacting households were paying fifteen, she could wear the red cap and wave the Tricolor as zealously as any Jacobin.
A sudden violent crackling of newsprint returned her attention to Monsieur Marechal. He’d torn a page of his newspaper.
He looked from it to the landlady, seeming to come to himself. Color stained his cheeks.
“Your pardon, Madame. I overexerted myself, just as you predicted. I need rest.” He refolded the paper and dropped it into the trash basket on his way to the stairs.
A most curious man.
She got up and retrieved the paper. She skimmed the gray columns from front page to back, but the news was less than alarming. French diplomats were meeting with representatives of the King of Naples in Florence to discuss peace: That was good. A slave grandly calling himself Toussaint L’Ouverture was leading an uprising against colonial control on the island of St. Dominique: too far away to fuss about, and the man was black. The First Consul expressed his regrets that negotiations with Rome over a possible accord between France and the Vatican would keep him busy with the Foreign Minister at Malmaison over Bastille Day, preventing him from taking part in the ceremonies in Paris: A disappointment, surely, but these things happened.
No, there was nothing there to upset her guest. He’d exhausted himself, as he’d said. Away with the paper, and back to her potatoes.