GAME OF PATIENCE (Aristide Ravel French Revolution Mysteries) Page 4

  “Did he wear a hat?”

  “I saw dark hair and a ribbon, but . . . no, wait . . .” He screwed up his face, trying to summon the memory. Aristide waited silently, tapping his fingers on the tabletop. “He wasn’t wearing his hat when I saw him run out,” Grangier said at last. “Must have been carrying it under his arm. But he wore it when he came back. A round one, low-crowned, with a wide brim. Dark. That’s why I couldn’t see his face so well, because the brim threw a shadow on his face.”

  Brasseur added a few more notes in his own notebook. “Good. Let’s go through your statement again. At about six o’clock in the evening, you heard someone running up the stairs, but didn’t see him. Then, a little while later--How long? Ten minutes? Twenty minutes?”

  “Maybe ten minutes.”

  “Ten minutes later, you heard footsteps running down the stairs, and you saw a young man rushing out the street door, but only from the back. Twenty or thirty minutes later, he returned, and you saw his face briefly as he ran past you and up the stairs.” Grangier nodded.

  “Did you see him leave again?”

  Grangier opened his mouth, considered a moment, and frowned. “No, come to think of it, I didn’t. I’d gone back in here for another dram of eau-de-vie. I don’t meddle with the tenants’ business.”

  “In other words,” Aristide said dryly, “you don’t trouble yourself keeping watch on the house unless you’re asked?”

  “Well, I’ve a bad knee, rheumatism, and I don’t fancy climbing the stairs unless I have to.”

  “So you don’t know when he left.”

  “No. He must have come back down, though, mustn’t he? There’s no other staircase. But if he was running and making a racket I’d have heard him, what with the echo. He must have walked down, quiet. I wouldn’t notice that if the door was closed.”

  “Which, of course, it was, while you were having your second, or third, glass of brandy.”

  “Yes, citizen.”

  Brasseur sighed. “All right, then. You saw a young man of about twenty-five, dark-haired, wearing a dark blue or green coat, and black culotte, top boots, and a dark-colored round hat with a wide brim. He was pale and seemed upset, and took the stairs running. And you’ve not seen him since he ran up the staircase for the second time.”

  “No.”

  “You’ll take an oath to all this you’ve told me?” The porter nodded. “Very well, you’ll be summoned to the justice of the peace shortly to give an official statement.” He pushed the brandy bottle back to Grangier, who took it with immense relief.

  CHAPTER 4

  The autumn dusk was closing in by the time they were done interrogating possible witnesses, and Brasseur had sealed the apartment. Few people had been about, owing to the fine weather and the day of rest, décadi, which in the republican calendar now occurred only every ten days instead of every seven, and none had provided them with anything as useful as the porter’s information.

  “A young man,” Aristide said to Brasseur as they strolled back to the commissariat through the swarming streets of the Butte-des-Moulins section, past peddlers, sightseers, hack drivers awaiting fares, and a few early prostitutes. “That could mean nearly anyone. A victim of Saint-Ange’s extortion, or the friend or relative of a victim. Brother, lover, perhaps a husband.”

  “The bastard,” muttered Brasseur. “Well, we’ll see what the mousetrap brings in.” He glanced at his watch. “Nothing for you to do now, until we know more, and I have to write my report. Care to join me for supper afterward? Marie’s stewing a hare.”

  “What is it you want?”

  Brasseur grinned. “Why should I want anything?”

  “You always want something of me when you offer to give me dinner.”

  “Well then, I want you to lend me a hand with that hotel murder from last month.”

  “Man robbed and stabbed in his bed, probably by the whore he came in with?” Aristide shook his head. “Not interested.”

  “The whore he came in with, who was wearing men’s clothing. A bit unusual, don’t you think?”

  “Certainly, but I’m still not interested.”

  “Ravel--”

  “You know me better than that. I’m glad to accept what you pay me for providing information or evidence; but only because I find the interactions that lead to one human being killing another eternally fascinating. What do I care about a lecher who went looking for an anonymous whore and found a thief and a killer instead? I want justice for that girl, who died merely because she was in somebody’s way.”

  Brasseur turned to a coffee seller on the street and tossed her a sou. “You take care, Ravel,” he continued, turning back to him, a battered pewter cup in one hand. “You lose all sense of proportion if you let an affair like this bedevil you.”

  “I’m not--”

  “I’ve seen it happen before. It’s happened to me, once or twice. Don’t let it--and her--possess you. I warn you.”

  “Never you mind about me,” Aristide said. He searched his pockets for coins as the coffee seller hopefully thrust a second small cup toward him.

  “Saints, woman, what do you put in this, mud?” Brasseur exclaimed with a grimace. “Did you go to the Place de Grève yesterday?” he continued, more softly, to Aristide, as he sipped gingerly at the coffee.

  “It was just as abominable as I’d expected.”

  “How did Lesurques behave?”

  “Like a man resigned to what he hadn’t deserved, I thought . . . but what do I know?” Aristide drank his own tepid coffee in a few swallows and handed the cup back to the peddler. “There’s the essence of it; what do I know? I would dearly like to believe as confidently as the judges and jury did, that he was guilty as sin, but I can’t . . . and then I begin to wonder how many other innocent people the police--you and I included--may have mistakenly delivered over to the courts, and perhaps even to the scaffold.”

  Brasseur nodded. “I know; that’s the hell of our work. But all you can do, every day, is to learn the truth as best you can. You can’t go on brooding about something you had nothing to do with and can’t fix, or you’ll go mad. Forget it, and move on; find the killer who murdered that man and girl instead.”

  They parted outside the commissariat on Rue Traversine. Aristide stood a moment in the street, pulling his collar more snugly about him in the autumn chill as wagons and fiacres rattled past toward the busy artery of Rue Honoré and impatient pedestrians elbowed by him. Despite Brasseur’s words, he could not banish the scene at the Place de Grève from his memory. At last he set off toward the Île de la Cité. To learn whether or not the law had made a terrible error, he mused, who better to ask than one who had seen more than his share of men condemned to die?

  Many of the windows were dark by the time he arrived at the Palais de Justice. He bypassed the Grand Stair to the public halls and instead went straight to the far right-hand corner of the May Courtyard and the door in a small lower courtyard below ground level that led directly to the Conciergerie.

  “Where can I find Citizen Sanson?” he asked the surprised turnkey who answered the bell.

  “Sanson?” the man echoed him. “You mean the executioner? Not here. He doesn’t come here unless they’re fetching somebody away to be topped. But you might find him, or find word of him, at the public prosecutor’s office. Up in the Caesar Tower.” He jerked a thumb upward and behind him, toward the three conical towers, remnants of the Conciergerie’s origins as a medieval fortress, that edged the quayside. “Here, you’re a police agent, aren’t you? I’ve seen you before. You can cut through with me instead of going around the long way to the quay.”

  Aristide followed the man, glancing silently from side to side as they tramped through the dim corridors. A few gaunt and bedraggled women watched him without interest from open cell doors and from piles of dirty straw. His guide was cheerful for a jailer, and eager to point out spots of interest along their route.

  “I expect you know this is the women’s side
? There, down the passage, that’s the cell the queen was in. Two months she was in that nasty damp place! Not that I hold with royalty, but it was cruel, it was. Next door, that’s where Robespierre spent his last hours. And just beyond it,” the turnkey continued, pointing, “that’s the old prison chapel. Course they don’t hold Mass in it any more. They use it as a common room sometimes. The Brissotin deputies, the twenty-one who were all topped together, they had their last dinner there, you know. Come to think of it, it was almost three years ago exactly, when they were topped. All Hallows’ Eve what was. Very sad it was, all those fine young gentlemen.”

  Mathieu . . .

  Aristide stepped forward, peering down the corridor at the gloomy chapel. “May I see it for a moment?”

  The turnkey nodded. “Please yourself.”

  He trod lightly down the short passage. The pale silhouette of a vanished crucifix gleamed faintly on the bare, smoke-grimed plaster and a few chairs and benches stood about amid scattered straw. It seemed suddenly like yesterday, an hour ago, a moment. Here in this dim, chill room they had dined and exchanged their last farewells, and sung “La Marseillaise,” and toasted the Republic that had condemned them.

  Of course the scene would not have been as sublime as popular legend already had it. Some of them, he imagined, remembering Mathieu’s sardonic descriptions of his comrades in public life, must have been foul-mouthed in their bitterness, or insufferably self-righteous in their political martyrdom.

  See that fellow? That’s Buzot . . . yes, the one who’s always hanging about Minister Roland’s wife. But all they do is gawk sentimentally at each other . . . I’d be surprised if Buzot actually knew how to do it, he’s such a sanctimonious prig . . .

  But they were all dead now, whatever their faults or merits, and Mathieu with them. No false sublimity for Mathieu at the final moment, but jest after black jest until they climbed the scaffold’s steps one by one, anything that might serve to keep the lurking terror of death at bay.

  Aristide searched the shadows as if he might find something of Mathieu, a phantom of his wicked smile, lingering there yet. He shut his eyes to the gloom and tried to remember him in happier days, the prankish boy he had known in Bordeaux, or the eager young man, glowing with revolutionary ardor--anything but his last glimpse of him, waiting in the rain before the guillotine.

  By force of childhood habit he hurriedly made the sign of the cross, for the sake of all the souls who had passed through that cold stone chamber. “Requiescat in pace.”

  “This way,” said the turnkey, beckoning him on. “Just up those stairs.” He unlocked a heavy iron-bound door that led to a spiral staircase. “Someone above can show you the way.”

  Aristide thanked him and climbed the stairs to the landing. Approaching the nearest clerk, he explained his errand.

  “Sanson?” echoed the clerk. “No, he’s not here. But Desmorets, his chief assistant, is.” He pointed to a middle-aged man, just emerging from the inner office.

  Young Sanson, it seemed, often spent some time after an execution in a wine shop near the Châtelet, the medieval castle in the center of the city that now housed jails, morgue, and police courts. The assistants, Desmorets added, generally gathered to drink together in a cabaret in the faubourg Denis, their own neighborhood, but Sanson, he was a bit standoffish and didn’t mix much with them. “His father, he was just the same,” he concluded. “We lodge at his house, most of us, and serve at his table, but he doesn’t care to be seen with us, beyond the work, that is.”

  The work, Aristide repeated to himself. An innocuous euphemism for a repugnant vocation. Though he had spoken with the elder executioner and his assistants before, in the course of his own work, he found he still harbored a trace of uneasy distaste toward men who put their fellow beings to death for pay.

  “Do you--do you enjoy your trade?”

  Desmorets glanced at him, passive reproach in his gaze. “I’m used to it. Doesn’t mean I enjoy it. And the son of an executioner has precious little choice in the matter. Take up your father’s trade or go hungry. No one else will employ you.”

  “Forgive me. I spoke without thinking.”

  “No offense taken, citizen. It’s not as bad as it was before the Revolution. Used to be some folk were afraid to touch us, for fear they’d be contaminated. But during the Terror, all of a sudden it seemed we were the keystones of society. That’s what some of them called old Sanson: ‘Keystone of the Terror.’ He didn’t care for it, but it was better than being called butcher, and scum, and worse.”

  Aristide nodded. He had crossed paths with the elder Sanson in 1793, and he could imagine how that dignified and taciturn public official might have reacted to the crude adulation of tipsy sansculottes.

  He found the wine shop soon enough, on a narrow side street winding off in the shadow of the Châtelet’s towers. After a moment’s search among the crowded, noisy tables of card players, he recognized his quarry, seated alone at a small dimly-lit table in a corner, staring at his empty bottle.

  “May I?” he inquired, and slid into a chair opposite the younger Sanson, quickly taking stock of him. The new executioner of Paris was a robust, handsome young man of no more than thirty, who would not have seemed out of place strutting in an army officers’ mess or riding amid the wealthy and fashionable in the parkland of the Bois de Boulogne. “What are you having?”

  Sanson glanced at him, expressionless.

  “Are you sure you want to sit with me, citizen?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you have the advantage of me.”

  “My name is Ravel.”

  Sanson shrugged. “Stay, if you must.”

  Aristide ordered a half bottle of red wine from a barmaid and then returned to the table and his companion. “Citizen Sanson,” he said without wasting words in idle talk, “do you believe Lesurques was guilty?”

  Sanson raised his head and glowered at him.

  “What should it matter what I think? It can’t be undone. Let the dead rest in peace.”

  “I ask you because I, too, am a servant of the law.”

  Sanson glanced at him again, with vague interest. “Are you--”

  “No,” Aristide said hastily, “I’m not one of your . . . colleagues . . . but I do serve justice. I assist one of the section commissaires, a friend of mine.”

  “Informer?” Sanson inquired, with a contemptuous twist of his lips.

  “Certainly not. An investigator.”

  “Well?”

  “I had nothing to do with the case, though I’ve followed it. But I do believe that every servant of the law must take some of the burden upon himself for such a terrible error, if an error was made. If Lesurques was innocent as he claimed.”

  Sanson was silent for a few minutes, drinking down the last of his wine and staring at the play of the candlelight on the empty glass. “My father has probably presided over more executions than any man in history,” he said. “For forty years he’s watched felons expire on the wheel, or at the end of a rope, and he saw plenty of the innocent die as well, in ’ninety-three and ’ninety-four. He’s seen enough to know how a man with a clear conscience dies. When it was over, this time, he said to me, ‘We’ve executed an innocent man.’ ”

  “And you, you believe that as well?”

  Sanson nodded. “Lesurques didn’t look like a felon; he looked like one of the poor sods sent to the guillotine for no good reason during the Terror. Stunned, resigned, scared maybe; but not cocky like some cold-blooded ruffian, or whining and blubbering like a worm who knows he deserves what he’s about to get.”

  “Thank you,” said Aristide. “Though I wish you’d been able to say you believed he was guilty.”

  “What the devil can you do about it now?”

  “Nothing at all. But I hope to do my best to ensure that such a thing never happens again.”

  The wine arrived and Aristide poured out a glass
for Sanson. He splashed a token swallow into his own glass, preferring the stimulation of coffee to the intoxication of alcohol, and paused for an instant, wondering whether or not he ought to toast his companion.

  “I’ll save you the trouble of scrambling for a tactful toast,” said Sanson. “To the health of the ladies who are dearest to our hearts. That’s a safe one, don’t you think?”

  Aristide nodded and repeated “To the ladies,” though in truth there was no one, at present, dear to his heart.

  “You married?” inquired Sanson.

  “No.”

  “I am. Three months ago. Gave up my mistress and my dissolute bachelor ways, and let my mother find me a respectable girl who’d overlook our profession for the sake of our fortune.” He fell silent again, glowering into the garnet depths of his glass.

  It was a cruel twist of fate, Aristide mused, that had condemned the fine young man before him to a distasteful trade and the life of an exile in his own land.

  “Why should the police give a damn how an affair turns out, once it’s tied up and handed over to the public prosecutor?” Sanson suddenly demanded. “Why do you care?”

  “Isn’t it just as much the duty of the police to free the innocent, as to bring the guilty to justice?”

  “I don’t imagine many think of it that way. Usually it’s nothing more than ‘Do your duty, and leave the issue to Heaven.’ ”

  “But you believe as I do,” Aristide said, concealing his surprise that the public executioner should quote a classic dramatist like Corneille. But then again, he thought, performing a distasteful duty ought not to prevent a man from being a scholar or a gentleman.

  “I have to, or I’d run mad. I have to believe the law doesn’t make mistakes. Most of the time.” Sanson poured himself another glass and drained it. Aristide sipped at his own wine, shaking his head when Sanson made a move to refill his glass. “Of course there are times, too, when the law doesn’t give a damn who gets caught beneath its wheels. What were you doing during the Terror, citizen police spy?”