In the Shadow of the Fire, page 13
She’s falling. She’s rolling down a staircase without end. Her whole body hurts. Her head thuds against a wooden bar, her shoulders hitting a jerking, jolting floor. It’s completely dark. Is she locked in a trunk?
A casket.
She tries to cry out, but a piece of cloth has been stuffed into her mouth, stopping her. She wants to take deep breaths, fill her lungs with air, try to calm the crazy pounding of her heart, but she chokes and splutters, suffocating, nostrils flaring wide. Then it all comes back to her: Lalie, the hansom cab, the horrifying sight of the girls, the man she didn’t see. He’s taken me.
Slowly, gradually, she manages to think. She’s still in the hansom cab, which is jouncing roughly along a street or a road. She can feel rope around her wrists and ankles, cutting into her skin. A road. She pictures those parts of Paris where the roads have been picked apart, near the fortifications. The clusters of foul, shabby huts thick with misery as black as the faces of the boys clad in rags you see playing in puddles or pretending to be swordsmen on the boulevard. He’s taking me there to kill me and throw me in a ditch.
She struggles, kicks at the wooden panel, moans from deep in her throat. I’m going to die. If she can only scream, she might wake herself up from this nightmare. She tries to free her hands from the cords binding them, but she can’t do it, so she lies still, trying to calm her breathing and gather her thoughts. She imagines the minutes to come. They’ll take her out of this trunk, this recess, and that will be the time to act, to call for help, to run. But it’s nighttime. But her ankles are tied together. A wave of panic washes over her. She pictures a man with a knife in his hand. She can already feel the blade slicing into her throat, so sharp that she won’t feel any pain at first, her life gushing in torrents from her gaping neck. She will watch herself die.
Maman. Come back. Maman will come back and chase them away and take me in her arms. I’m her little girl. Sometimes she used to hold me when someone had been nasty to me, and she soothed me and cradled me and whispered soft, sweet things into my ear.
The coach stops. She hears movement above her. She realizes that she’s beneath a seat, in a trunk. They’re talking. Muffled voices. The shifting gleam of a fire. The creak of a door opening. They’re not coming for her. The fear ebbs. They aren’t going to kill her. She tries to imagine what they’re going to do with her. Maybe she isn’t capable of imagining what they could do with her. Maybe it’s better to be killed right away than to endure that.
No. Life. I will fight them.
A commotion in the carriage. She hears the girls moaning, the sound of them being struck. Their pleas. Then a deep silence in which she can hear the crackling of a fire.
Then, a sudden racket. A board is pulled away, and hands grip her by the arms and lift her. Come here. She can’t see the man’s face at all. She smells his acrid, animal odor. The smell of a stable. He makes her sit down on a seat in the coach, ties her by the wrist to a door. Don’t move. Don’t make a sound. Or he’ll kill you. Believe me. He’ll kill you. He takes a little vial out of his pocket. Drink this. It’ll help you.
She is astonished by his soft, almost gentle voice. By his actions, too. Stripped of all brutality. A gloved hand supporting her neck as she drinks the bitter potion. And even his fingers, brushing the hair away from her face as if to see her better.
Don’t move.
She doesn’t move. She lets herself slip into a light doze, in a sort of cocoon that lulls her to sleep. A spider web, maybe.
8
The man behind the dividing wall insists loudly that he wants to see the police chief because there’s been a horrific massacre and they have to come right away. His speech is slurred, his voice heavy with drink. Antoine Roques is in the midst of rereading the deposition of the Courbin woman, who continues to deny that her husband is a spy for Versailles, despite the maps, plans, and notes found in his desk during the search, which they’ve been thrusting in her face for hours. No, he’s nothing but an honest citizen whose success isn’t due to anything but hard work, never expected to be handed anything on a plate the way too many naïve and lazy people do these days, never broken even a minor law. Always on the side of law and order, of course, not like all these thieves being let out of prison so that decent people and even priests can be locked up instead.
She’d quickly regained control of her emotions. Éliette Andrieu, married name Courbin. She’d dried her tears and quieted her sobs to confront these two ad hoc policemen, appointed by the Reds or gone over to the enemy side, not bothering to conceal the hatred she felt for them, these awkward oafs veering between intimidation and restraint, these idiots trying to make her tell where her husband might be hiding now.
Antoine Roques listens to the guards trying to calm their drunken visitor, explaining that massacres are far from a rare occurrence right now, what with these Versaillais pigs trouncing the National Guard and bombarding Paris, and that he’d do better to go somewhere else and sleep it off if he doesn’t want to get a good thrashing. The Quai de Jemmapes, he insists. He saw everything, three local grunts slaughtered like rabbits, bam! Bam! Bam! And that other one, he was looking for somebody . . . can’t remember the name . . . Clovis, or somethin’ like that . . .
Clovis. Not exactly a common name, and yet this is the second time he’s heard it today. Luck comes when you least expect it, hand in hand with random chance. Better grab it before it gets away. When he steps into the hallway the man is being bundled toward the exit by a couple of guards. Roques orders them to stop and bring the man to him; he has to shout to make himself heard because the lobby of the police station is swarming with people who have come to file a complaint about the theft of a flower pot or the disappearance of a cat—the price of which, per kilo, has dropped sharply since the siege ended. The man shakes off the hands grasping him and hurries toward Roques.
“Ah! Here now!”
Roques ushers him into his office. The man sits down with a sigh, shaking his head as if to rid himself of his indignation at such treatment. He shifts his weight from one side of his rump to the other in his chair like a timid boy. He smells of cheap wine and old cheese. He’s dressed in a worn smock that must have been blue once but is grayish now, stained and patched at the elbows. A sailor’s cap is perched atop his gray hair. A thick mustache gives his face a surly look, and his shadowed, bleary eyes and sallow, deeply lined skin speak of immense fatigue. Antoine Roques asks his name, and he looks around warily from beneath his bushy eyebrows before answering:
“Colignon. Augustin Colignon. Born April 9, 1821, in Silly-en-Gouffern.”
“Where?”
“Silly-en-Gouffern. It’s in Orne, in Normandy. Even I forget where it is exactly, sometimes, you know. It’s . . .”
“Why were you shouting like that? What’s this massacre?”
Augustin Colignon shrinks back in his chair, which creaks shrilly. He looks down.
“Can’t tell you. That fellow . . .”
“What fellow? Talk!”
Colignon stands up.
“Can’t. Let me out of here.”
“If you try to leave this office, I’ll have you locked up for obstructing justice.”
The man sits back down. He takes off his cap and sets it in his lap.
“Now, you were talking about a fellow . . .”
“I was at Miron’s. Little dive on the Quai de Jemmapes. I think I must have fallen asleep. Miron don’t care; he leaves me alone, long as I don’t bother anyone, and at least it’s quiet there, better than my place. Anyway, I about fell out of my chair when I heard it! Bam! Bam! Bam! Three gunshots, and that barbarian with his pistol, and the three others on the ground—well, one of them was on the table first, but then he fell, too. Lot of smoke, there was, too, room was full of it, you could hardly see, and it smelled like powder. Reminded me of the army. Sebastopol.”
“You were at Sebastopol?”
“Damned right I was! Almost died there, too, like so many others!”
“So, your barbarian, as you call him . . .”
“Wore a big hat. I only saw him from the back, and when he saw me, he gave me one of those looks . . .”
The man trails off and covers his eyes with his hand, as if to protect himself from the killer’s gaze, even now.
“It’s a look you don’t forget. Like his eyes were shooting fire, but black, you know?”
Antoine Roques can’t quite picture it, but he can see that Colignon is trembling as he tells his story.
“Had you had much to drink?”
“No more’n usual. Two, three glasses, and just a bit of the hooch. Miron makes it special for good customers like me. But what I’m telling you, that’s for sure—I saw and heard it all perfectly!”
“Go on.”
“So I asked if I could leave, and I got out of there without even finishing my drink! He was a bizarre one, anyway, that fellow; his face was all smashed in under his hat, like he’d taken a shovel to the face. Nose flattened, and his . . . you know, above his eyes . . .”
“The brow bone.”
“That’s it! All crushed; you could hardly see his eyes! I saw men like that in the war, faces taken right off by a gunshot or an exploding shell. Not pretty to look at, the poor fellows, I can tell you that! Not many of ’em lived to tell the tale.”
“But he spoke to them before he killed them, right? I heard you saying that in the corridor just now.”
“He was looking for someone called Clovis. A cabman, I think. Looked like it meant a lot to him. I pretended to be asleep because I could tell the whole business was going to go sour. One of them asked him for money to tell where he was, the legendary Clovis. That’s when he went after him and shot him. Must not’ve been in the mood to go to the bank; I understand that.”
“Do you know him?”
“Who’s that?”
“Clovis. The cabman.”
“No. I know lots of people, not him, though. Name means nothing to me, I swear.”
Roques levels a keen gaze at the man, hoping to look intimidating, as if he can see into the deepest reaches of Colignon’s mind, to sow a bit of doubt and fear. But the other man stares back guilelessly, picking a clump of sleep out of the corner of one eye with a dirty fingernail.
“Where were the bodies? Did he kill them all in the same place?”
“Near the door, in front of the window. Practically in a heap, all three of them, stone dead.”
Roques stands, opens the office door, and calls a guard.
“Put him in the staff room. Don’t let him out of your sight. I’ve got to go out.”
He calls for Loubet, who appears immediately.
“Come on; we’re going out.”
“Alone?”
“Yes, alone. You have your gun?”
“Always, these days. We’d be the only ones in Paris without one!”
On the way, Antoine explains the reason for their errand. A triple murder. A man with a battered face, a mysterious cabman named Clovis, probably mixed up in the kidnapping of a young girl. Loubet, happy to be doing real police work again at last, like before, doesn’t question it.
“Do you miss the Empire? The siege?”
The inspector gestures emphatically in denial. “God, no! But you must admit, since the Commune came into being, we haven’t had much to do! Fewer thefts, fewer crimes. But what I love about police work is chasing down thieves and criminals and arresting them, you see?”
Roques understands. This morning, during the failed arrest of Courbin, the Versaillais spy, he felt that instinctive impulse, that sort of inner thrill, in spite of the shootout. He nods.
They arrive on the quay as twilight is falling. The water in the canal is the color of lead. A very small boy dressed in rags fishes with a line tied to a long stick. He clicks his tongue to attract the fish as if they were chickens.
“They biting?” Loubet asks.
The boy looks up and eyes him from beneath the brim of his cap, then spits in the water.
“Watch it, smells like pigs around here,” he mutters.
“So young, and yet he’s already got a keen nose,” Roques says.
“It’s instinct. Some family lines, it’s in the blood. Condition of survival for them. Like animals who have to learn very early to detect predators.”
“You can’t say that. They’re human beings. I can’t believe you’d even make the comparison. Society isn’t a jungle where the stronger ones always control and feed off the weaker ones.”
“And yet that’s what’s happening, isn’t it? That’s how things work, seems to me. Don’t they?”
“They do, but it’s not written anywhere that it always has to be like that. That’s the world the people have risen up against; it’s why the Commune was formed, why it’s fighting, to build something new. Don’t you think? Dignity, equality, liberty—they’re still to be won.”
Loubet shrugs. “If you say so . . . sure, you’re right,” he says, without conviction.
Roques is about to ask him why exactly he joined the insurrection in its first days, but just then he spies the bar a bit farther along the quay.
Miron Wines and Liquors
The name of the place is clumsily written in green on a yellow board hung over the door. A crude representation of a barrel fashioned of sheet-iron and painted bright red serves as a sign.
They enter the tavern, which is dark and completely empty, lit only by two lanterns hanging from posts. The owner is sitting at one of the tables. Playing cards are scattered across its surface, and he is holding one in his hand, considering his next move. Finally he decides, and only then does he deign to turn to Roques and Loubet, gathering up his cards as he does.
“Well, well, here’s a couple of smart gentlemen. And yet I managed to win anyway. It wasn’t easy. What can I get you? On the house.”
He walks around behind the bar, feet shuffling, and lights an oil lamp, which he sets on a shelf in front of a mirror. Then, hands flat on the zinc counter, he looks from one to the other, awaiting their orders.
“Sûreté Genérale,” says Loubet.
“I didn’t doubt it for a moment.”
“Are you Hector Miron, the proprietor of this . . . establishment?”
“Yes, that’s me, in the flesh. Will you have a drink?”
They don’t answer and begin surveying the room. Antoine Roques starts off in one direction, Loubet in the other. The air smells of soft-soap and cheap wine. There is a vast dark spot on the beaten-earth floor near the window. Roques stoops down and scratches a fingernail across the dampness. Loubet disappears into the shadows at the back of the room. They can hear him opening and then closing a door.
“There’s an exit out the back.”
The owner rolls himself a cigarette behind his counter, lights it, blows the smoke toward the two policemen.
“May I ask what you’re looking for?”
Antoine Roques approaches him, smiling widely.
“Of course. I think you might even be able to tell us. Three men were shot dead here with a revolver early this afternoon. Did you happen to see or hear anything, by any chance?”
Miron twists his mouth, knits his eyebrows. Acts like he’s searching his memory. Roques wants to backhand him across the face, teach him a few things about being a mocking little prat.
“No, can’t say I recall anything. Not a lot of people have been through here today. Folks’ minds are on other things at the moment.”
Roques sighs. Reaches deep within himself for the strength not to leap over the counter or break a chair over the man’s head.
“They fell here, in front of the window. Does that still not help your memory at all? Perhaps you were out at the time, and nobody told you anything? In that case, the bodies could have been removed without your knowledge. We aren’t always in control of everything, even in our own homes, you know. And I’d understand if you didn’t want to admit to such a minor weakness, in front of us.”
Miron’s face has lost some of its arrogance. He looks at this flicard, so calm and courteous, talking the way people do in books, and he seems caught between a rock and a hard place. He is undoubtedly used to rougher manners from the city sergeants and the middle class. Roques can sense him questioning his own assumptions, his frame of reference wavering. He takes a bottle down from the shelf behind him and pours himself a stiff drink.
Roques catches the scent of plums from his glass.
“Who told you these ridiculous things? That idiot Gustin, I’ll bet. He was deep in his cups, I can tell you. I had to throw him out because at a certain point, he turns into a total crackpot. Last week he saw a three-master sailing on the canal, even saw sailors on the bridge. Does that sound like a man with all his marbles to you? I threw him out because after a few glasses he can’t remember how much he’s drunk and refuses to pay. Not that I don’t give him credit; I even let him drink for free sometimes, have for as long as he’s been coming here. But, you understand, characters like that aren’t good for the reputation of an honest establishment . . .”
Roques nods, smiling, waiting for the flow of hogwash to dry up. “Especially one managed by a respectable and law-abiding individual such as yourself,” he says. “That’s exactly why we’ve come to talk to you.”
Miron senses the irony in his voice. He’s about to respond but catches himself, hesitates, drains his glass, slurping at the last traces of alcohol.
