Bonaparte tugged at his waistcoat. “This needs letting out again. I grow fat in the saddle as usual.”
Constant, his valet, considered that they were camped only a few leagues outside Paris, on a training exercise; his master could hardly have taken on weight overnight. But he said nothing.
The First Consul finished buttoning the garment, which was indeed snug at his middle, and thrust his arms behind him for Constant to help him into the plain green colonel’s tunic he wore on campaign. The valet brushed away dust and lint and set the bicorne hat on the commander’s head.
Now he resembled his image in paintings and lithographs, one of the most famous in the world. He took the small shaving mirror off its nail on the tent’s center pole and turned it this way and that, inspecting himself from hat to knee-high boots.
“Yes, absolutely portly. Disgraceful.”
“You’ll look healthy to the men.”
Bonaparte turned and twisted Constant’s left earlobe; his most painful way of showing affection.
“I warn you against too much diplomacy. I may make you an ambassador.”
The time was 7:00 A.M. In the palace and on the field, he was usually up long before then, breaking his fast on the sprint, but he’d been until nearly four o’clock dictating letters to his platoon of secretaries; lecturing the pope, correcting the latest draft of the Civil Code, and imploring Josephine to balance her household accounts.
But he showed no fatigue when General Lannes, his aide- de-camp, entered the tent and saluted.
“What is it, Jean?”
“A visitor from Paris. Police Prefect Dubois.”
“Indeed. He’s getting to be a gadabout. Send him in.”
Dubois took the aide’s place, removing his hat.
“What the devil’s that?” said Bonaparte. “It looks like an oversize snuffbox.”
“A design of my own, Citizen. I found the other too grand for my humble office.”
“Let’s see it.”
He handed over the cap with the low cylindrical crown.
The First Consul turned it over, inspecting the manufacturer’s label, and ran a finger round the sweatband. “It doesn’t provide much protection against the elements.”
“Neither did its predecessor, once it was saturated with rain or snow. This one sheds water like a duck.”
“It’s certainly lightweight. Do you intend to outfit all your officers similarly?”
“Not without your permission.”
“Do so, if you like.” He returned it. “At least no one will mistake a city policeman for an admiral. Surely you didn’t come all this way to discuss haberdashery.”
“Something new has happened, Citizen.”
“Report.” He folded his hands behind his back in a posture aped by many of his officers.
“It’s General Pichegru. He’s in France. Moreover—”
Bonaparte lunged, unlinking his hands, and clapped a hand over Dubois’ mouth.
The Prefect was shaken to the core. Apart from the occasional excruciating twist of an earlobe, the First Consul and he had never before made physical contact.
“Leave us, Constant.”
The valet packed away his master’s toilet kit and stepped out. The hand withdrew from the Prefect’s lips.
“Don’t interpret his dismissal as a stain on his character. The man’s a model of discretion; but the less who know, the better for all. What’s your source?”
“A Royalist named Bouvet de Lozier, in the Abbaye Prison. We swept him up with others after Cadoudal went missing. It was pure luck, Citizen; an officer in his charge asked him playfully what he knew about Four Nivose. He said, ‘Ask away.’”
“A cream puff in truth. Is he reliable?”
“We checked his background. He was a close confidant of Georges Cadoudal’s before the Royalist general left for England. Under threat of close questioning—you understand, Citizen, what I mean by—”
“Yes, yes. Fouché missed his calling. The Inquisition would have embraced him. Continue.”
“He said Pichegru has met with Cadoudal and Moreau in Paris.”
“Impossible! Moreau bleeds in tricolor. He hates Royalists more than I.”
“They convened in a house in the city. We have the owner, a man with known Royalist sympathies, under watch.”
“Arrest him.”
Dubois circled his hat through his hands.
“The Police Minister thinks that if the man is harboring Cadoudal, any action there would alert our quarry and drive him farther underground.”
“Did Fouché explain what his people were doing when Pichegru left Guiana? Fishing, perhaps?”
“I can but guess. A man traveling alone is hard to track.”
Bonaparte smiled, showing his splendid teeth.
“You’re a good policeman, Nicolas; you never criticize a colleague outside your own office.” The smile evaporated. “However. This is two men the Minister has managed to misplace among his papers and plunder. Pichegru was one of my instructors at the military school in Brienne, did you know that?”
“It’s in his file.”
“Fouché and his files. I indulged him, gave him Bastille Day. The Vatican negotiations were at an impasse, so I welcomed the reprieve. But what has he done with it? It’s possible, Dubois, to raise a capable man too far above his station.”
Dubois said nothing.
Bonaparte groped inside his tunic, extracted a sack of peppermints, and popped one into his mouth. Crunching:
“Arrest the owner of the house and search it. Take it down to the foundation if necessary. We’ll erect a statue in its place: Charlemagne Christianizing the Saxons. I don’t see how a papist Royalist could object.”
“May I ask what I’m looking for?”
“Evidence tying the swine to Four Nivose. Manufacture it if you must, but see that it stands the test of logic.”
“I should report to the Minister first.”
“By all means. We can’t have our top men falling out like thieves. Embrace and kiss, but be quick about it. I want Cadoudal, Pichegru, and Moreau before a squad of musketeers.
“No excuses this time,” he added, his eyes gray as ice. “Unless you want to take their place.”
Fouché raged.
Part of his fury was directed at Dubois, who’d stabbed him from behind. But mostly it was at himself for handing him the dagger.
It was the rule of his life never to place his responsibilities ahead of self-interest. But after swallowing the bitter bile of Bonaparte’s wrath for losing Cadoudal on the threshold of Paris, he’d been so eager to redeem himself he’d assigned his most reliable informant to watch the house where the three conspirators had met, and sent Dubois to report to the First Consul while he put on a show of keeping to his post. Of course the man had made himself the hero of the affair, and Fouché the goat.
He’d been forced by circumstances to violate his cardinal maxim in order to adhere to it.
Dubois, the devil, appeared unaware of the storm surging behind the Minister’s placid facade. The Prefect stood awaiting instructions with his preposterous hat under one arm.
“Be especially thorough,” Fouché said evenly. “Assign your most destructive crew to the house. If Cadoudal isn’t inside, be certain it will never again shelter anything so large as an underfed rat.”
“So the First Consul said. I’ll give it to Limodin. He needs to flex his joints after so many weeks reading reports.”
Fouché looked him in the eye. “A word of advice.”
“Yes, Citizen?”
“Take care not to give too much responsibility to the men around you. You run the risk of their letting you down or showing you up.”
Dubois looked puzzled. “Thank you. I won’t forget.”
Fouché studied him; undecided whether the man’s seeming transparency was in fact a veil, or transparency itself. He regarded both as dangers.
Directly after the deeply unsatisfactory meeting with Pichegru and Moreau, “Citizen Couturier” slipped another social notch. Georges Cadoudal in a few weeks’ time had moved from a plush bed in a country estate to a cot in the back of a Paris fruit shop, where rats passed in and out like shoppers at a bazaar.
The proprietor was a Royalist, although not so ardent he neglected to charge his guest a rental fee that would have put him up at the finest inn in Paris, if he could but risk it, with additional charges for extras:
A bottle of undistinguished claret, three francs;
A tin of snuff, a franc;
That day’s edition of the Moniteur, five centimes.
He’d resisted the wine the first day, but after one hellish night with bedbugs (Revolutionaries, judging by their ferocity) he relented, to ease his misery. The snuff settled the urge for tobacco without smoke to give himself away, and he absolutely could not live without the newspaper. He read every word, looking for his own name.
Its absence brought no comfort. The press survived or perished on advertising and circulation, and when there was no news, it made some up. Silence suggested government pressure, which meant his presence in Paris was no secret; withheld from public knowledge while the net tightened.
Or perhaps not.
A rabbit cowering in a hollow log fed on his own fears, and they were bitter sustenance.
He was in hiding. So was Pichegru, and Moreau was out of the picture. These were no positions for generals.
“Merde.” He swigged claret, waiting for the heat to crawl forth from his stomach and burn off the pestilential itches that pricked him from neck to ankle. They made a man wonder if Fouché’s racks and screws were any worse.
Moreau’s desertion was a great setback, a devastating loss. Cadoudal had hidden his emotions from Pichegru. However misguided his purpose, the sour Jacobin had represented the possibility of hundreds of recruits to the Cause. Pichegru, mercurial creature, might have flown the coop if he’d sensed Cadoudal’s despair.
Dim, close quarters stoked a man’s worst fears. His idea of salting Bonaparte’s Hussars with Bourbon loyalists seemed as absurd as Pichegru had said, a dream smoked up on the influence of opium and classical literature. Seeking for something else to occupy his thoughts, Cadoudal found something worse: the certainty he was undone.
This conviction started as a rustle, a mouse gnawing through plaster; or a Police Ministry spy carving an eyehole through the wall with a knife. More likely it was the sound of his host, whispering secrets to someone in the shop. He was not a whispering man; his delivery boys cringed from the volume of his mildest instructions.
Cadoudal knew better than to pass off this sensation as idle anxiety. His instincts had seen him into middle age in a pursuit that slew many in their youth.
He was on his feet in an instant.
He assumed his disguise, a stained cotton jerkin and the floppy leather hat of a market porter, shouldered the rucksack containing all he owned, and ran into the street, upsetting the owner’s display of peaches on the pavement. They bounced and rolled. He stepped on one, turning his ankle when it spun out from under his heel. A blade of white-hot pain shot to his knee, but he seized a stick from an old man goggling at him, knocking him down, and used it to vault himself into the back of a passing cabriolet.
“Go!” He thumped the floorboards with his stick.
The driver turned a face as ugly as his passenger’s, with a nose broken like a twist of pipe and a strawberry mark crimsoning him from cheek to collar. “Where to?”
“Anywhere! Use your lash!”
“Not so fast, Cadoudal.” A new voice.
The speaker mounted to the seat from the other side of the vehicle, jerking a pistol from under his coat. He was in civilian dress, but all policemen looked the same.
Cadoudal’s pistol was in hand. He shoved it into the man’s ribs and yanked the trigger. The report was muffled by clothing and flesh. A burning stench filled the cab.
The policeman cried out, dropping his pistol, and buried his hands in his belly. Cadoudal heaved his weight against him, tipping him out into the street.
The vehicle was moving now, picking up speed; the horses had caught the scent of spent powder and burnt flesh and broken into gallop. More plainclothesmen ran alongside, weapons drawn. Cadoudal scooped the unfired pistol from the floor and shot at the man nearest. He yelped and fell behind.
But the cabriolet was slowing. Either the driver had regained control or yet another policeman had climbed aboard and taken over. The Royalist dropped both pistols and braced himself to jump.
A flash of metal and his nose collapsed, crushed by a swung pistol. Mon Dieu! Was the world made of police?
His last thought before the darkness.