In his office on the Quai Voltaire, not far from the Rue Saint-Nicaise, Joseph Fouché heard something that might have been a door slamming somewhere in the building. He paid it little attention; there was always some officious government supernumerary in residence who assumed that a show of haste was evidence of efficiency. In any case the shelves of books that surrounded Bonaparte’s police chief, exquisitely bound in leather, gold, and watered silk, absorbed much of the noise.
He went about his present task with the measured precision he brought to all things.
Fouché had every lamp burning, along with a stump of candle on his desk, making the room as bright as day. It was a necessary expenditure in a time of austerity. He was staring through a heavy convex glass at the top of a wine cork sealed with vermilion wax, looking for the tiniest of holes.
He resembled the ecclesiastic he’d once set out to be: cadaverous, stoop-shouldered, and hollow-chested, with a habit when deep in thought of dry-washing his long yellow hands, like a minister presiding over a funerary service. The simple black tailcoat and gray knee-breeches he wore when the occasion did not call for the blue-and-silver velour of his office spoke of the pulpit; but he was no priest. He’d been spared that obsolete profession by Providence and the Revolution. He was France’s judge, jury, and executioner, and clerics came under his jurisdiction as enemies of the state.
The Church had lost a fire-and-brimstone servant when Joseph Fouché threw aside the cassock for a seat on the National Convention in 1792. In that post he had voted to kill the King.
Later, directed by the Committee of Public Safety to root out disloyal factors in the provinces, he’d ordered the infamous Massacre of Lyons, slaying seventeen hundred citizens for the crime of disloyalty.
He’d stood the first lot between trenches and blasted them with cannon. Sabers dispatched the survivors, matchlock muskets and the guillotine saw to the rest. Some were accommodating, falling directly into the trenches; others had to be kicked. A number of them were his former fellow divinity students. De-Christianization, the Revolutionary government called it. The Committee hadn’t the ironic sense to recognize the truth in the term.
That had been under the Committee of Public Safety. After that body fell, much of it into other trenches, the Directorate followed. Immediately after taking power, the First Consul himself had appointed Fouché to the Ministry of Police. Reminded that the man was nothing more than an assassin, Bonaparte shrugged. “He is the sort of man we need in an affair like this.”
Like Bonaparte, Fouché appeared to subsist mainly on oxygen, sleeping only a few hours out of twenty-four and, when his belly demanded, snatching an unbuttered roll and a draught of water on his way out to attend to the duties of his office. He was no gourmand. His taste buds, like his faculties of mercy, were underdeveloped. He could eat lamb in champagne sauce followed by a rotten egg and not notice the difference.
He spared his appreciation for things less ephemeral.
At length he found what he was looking for through the thick glass: a hole the size of a pinprick in the sealed cork.
That wouldn’t do. The fellow was a fool as well as a thief, but his eyes were younger than those of the police chief.
He applied the flame of the stubby candle—vermilion also—to the wax, softening it, then smoothed over the blemish with the ball of his thumb. He set aside the bottle and passed time reading one of the police reports heaped on his desk, a fantastical mass of solid mahogany carved into gryphons and other mythical creatures. It had belonged to an aristocrat, since deceased.
It was a surveillance report, compiled over a forty-eight hour period in the case of one Felix Desmoulins, an army quartermaster suspected of stealing supplies and selling them on the black market. The operatives had dined where he dined, whored where he whored, and kept tabs on everyone with whom he came into contact, providing descriptions when the names were unknown. The pages would fill a substantial pamphlet.
The outlook for Citizen Sergeant Desmoulins was grim.
Humming to himself, Fouché selected another sheet and filled out a warrant for the man’s arrest. Small enough fry, but he would name his co-conspirators before a musketeer’s ball released him from the cares of this world.
The wax on the cork had hardened by the time he sealed the document and slid it inside his dispatch case. He examined the wax again through the glass, pronounced the result satisfactory, and returned the bottle of wine to its rosewood cabinet where he could be sure his servant would find it. He took the precaution to identify it for his own safety with an infinitesimal scratch at the base of the neck from the diamond ring on the small finger of his right hand. It wouldn’t look well for a highly placed official to drink his own poison by mistake.
The rest of the evidence—a metal tube with a plunger at one end—he disposed of by stopping the hollow point on the other end with a cork and placing it in his safe, locking it securely with the only existing key, a small gold one attached to his watch chain. He was grateful to Monsieur Jenner for the invention of the hypodermic syringe, a development but two years old, designed to introduce his smallpox vaccine into the bloodstreams of willing subjects. Fouché admired it not for its humanitarian use, but for its part in his own contribution: the means by which a man could lace wine with deadly arsenic, the victim unaware that the bottle had been tampered with.
It was an experiment in a more effective type of execution than either the noisome firing squad or the unwieldy guillotine, but he could not be certain of its success until he put it in practice. The servant was a contemptible sneak who thought he could sample the product of his master’s excellent wine-cellar undetected, merely because he assumed no account was kept of the number of bottles in his cabinet. Fouché despised small thieves: Why filch a bottle of wine, when there were countries to be stolen? As well pilfer needles and buttons like that imbecile quartermaster. How much better to align oneself with a Bonaparte, for as long as he lasted. The Minister himself hadn’t paid a sou for his books and statuary, the extravagant fixtures that had transformed his policeman’s office into a museum.
Arsenic poisoning was a hideous way to die, with excruciating cramps and vomiting, and the coma near the end its only respite; but what the compound lacked in mercy it more than made up for in effectiveness, and Fouché was not a fellow who trusted to chance. He would, of course, attend the man’s burial ceremony out of respect for his months of service, and cluck over the sudden tragic attack of some mysterious malady in the prime of life. Medical science had still much to learn so early in a new century.
The pettiness of the offense was immaterial. A man who would steal from his master would betray his country. Had Louis Capet acted to snuff out all intrigues at the beginning, he would still have his crown, and a head to wear it.
Mostly, the chief was curious to see if the trick worked.
He sighed. His method really was an ingenious device, almost on a par with Jenner’s great discovery, and it was a pity he couldn’t claim credit. But he was a realist, a true child of the Age of Reason, and resigned himself to anonymity. Somewhere, sometime, someone would receive the credit; most probably the fellow would not seek it, and pay the price.
He inspected his watch: quarter to nine post meridian, allowing for the five minutes he set it ahead, to maintain his reputation for punctuality. Early to bed, for once, that the Republic should receive full measure of his devotion beginning before dawn.
He was blowing out the last lamp when a loud knock came to his door, the reports so close together they sounded like a fusillade.
Fouché frowned. Plainly this was not the unctuous knock of his dishonest servant. It was the one employed by his own officers when the matter was pressing.
Groping in the dark, he drew a tinder box from his desk and reignited the lamp. He thought back to that earlier noise and wondered if perhaps it had not been a door slamming after all.