Authors: Susanne Alleyn
Aristide could think of nothing to say that would not have sounded unbearably banal. At last he dared a glance at her. She stood stiff and still, hugging herself in the crisp air.
“So,” she added abruptly, her gaze still fixed to the wild long grass at her feet, limp and graying in the autumn chill, “did you find Henri?”
“I’d meant to tell you before, but this matter of Aubry put it out of my mind … I visited the barracks at the Palais de Justice a few days ago. They’d never heard of your Henri Longval.”
“That’s impossible. I saw him in his uniform often enough. You can’t tell me he lied to me about that.”
“I expect Longval was not his real name.”
“I did always like to think he was actually Henri de Longval, count—or marquis—or even duke or prince—of something or other. But I imagined he’d simply abandoned his title. It never occurred to me that everything about him might be a lie.”
“I’ll inquire further, if you wish. Perhaps he had reasons you know nothing of. Perhaps his family called him home. Perhaps it was simply a matter of money, of needing to marry a woman with a rich dowry.”
She slowly shook her head. Aristide heard her voice tremble as she spoke. “No. Don’t go looking for him. I wish you hadn’t. What use would finding him be, except to … to provoke a disgusting scene?” Abruptly, no longer able hold back her tears, she turned and hurried away. He followed her, reaching for her elbow.
“Rosalie—”
“For God’s sake,” she cried, whipping about, “what do you
want
from me?”
“Nothing.”
“Everybody wants something!”
“Well then, I want to see you happy! Because I care for you.”
“What could you possibly care about? There’s no such thing as unselfish love—I ought to know!”
“Damn it, not all men are self-seeking brutes! I’m not surprised you should detest all men for the misdeeds of a few—but there
are
decent men in this world, and I—I hope I’m one of them.”
“I don’t want love from you. I don’t want another lover, ever again. It always brings you far more misery than it ever makes you happy. Just let me be.”
Aristide cautiously edged toward her, as if she were a shy wild thing that might flee if he drew too close, and pressed her hand in his. “Would you allow me to be your friend?”
“I won’t be your lover,” she insisted.
“I don’t want a lover.”
She said nothing, though she looked sharply at him, the question in her eyes.
“Has it never occurred to you that a man could be just as deeply scarred by life as you have been? That he could go through life alone, by his own choice, never opening his heart, because he never dares trust himself with such intimacy? Because he fears he might be capable of doing a great wrong to the person he most cares about?” He paused, surprised at how much he had confessed to her, and sighed. “Perhaps we’re two of a kind. Were you to look into my heart, I suspect you would find that I dread love as much as you do. But there are gentler emotions than love.”
He brushed his lips across her fingers and felt her tremble, instinctively stiffening, though she did not pull away from him.
“However cruelly men have used you,” he said, “I beg you to believe that at least one cares for you, despite all… .”
She squeezed her eyes shut again as tears glinted suddenly in the wan sunshine.
“
He
said he cared for me. I thought it was true.”
He did not need to ask whom she meant.
“No,” he said, “I’m not your Henri. I don’t know who he was or why he abandoned you. And I think that if I kiss you, you’ll imagine
his
kiss,
his
touch. So I won’t even try. But I hope you’ll believe me when I tell you I am your friend.”
#
After he had escorted Rosalie home and dismissed the hired carriage, Aristide stalked through the bustling streets to the Seine, and across the Pont-Neuf toward the Cité. He lingered on the bridge, near the flag-draped recruiting booth below the empty pedestal that had once held the statue of King Henri IV. Brooding, he stared at the moss-green river glittering below him, as behind him the traffic flowed by, endlessly busy, carriages, handcarts, horses, pedestrians, the hordes of Paris.
Ravel,
he told himself,
you’re a fool; you’ve come to care far too much for this woman, who carries adversity with her like a burden she can’t set down. Why can’t you find a measure of happiness with a safe, complacent, prosaic creature like Clotilde?
The daylight was failing as the inevitable gray clouds gathered once again. He stirred and slouched farther along the raised foot pavement of the bridge, past the peddlers with their trays of sweetmeats and trinkets, and the street singers and prostitutes, and the stalls full of second-hand books.
“Oh,
damn,
” he said at last, aloud in the din, “damn, damn,” and pushed his way through the crowds toward the Right Bank.
Aristide found Brasseur in his office, seething.
“Of all the colossal incompetence!” Brasseur stormed, thrusting a letter at him. “By God, before the Revolution the police had to
answer
to their superiors, and things got done properly! But now nobody tells you anything—every commissaire has his own patch and he can’t be bothered with anything outside it—let me get my hands on that fool Dumas—”
“What? Who’s Dumas?”
“The commissaire of the Théâtre-Français section! Remember him?”
“What about him?”
“Aubry’s vanished!”
“Vanished?” Aristide skimmed the letter.
#
It is my duty to inform you that, as you requested, a watch was put upon the house in the Cour de Rouen in which Citizen Aubry resides, but the person charged with this duty reports that Citizen Aubry left his domicile in the early evening of the 26th of Brumaire and has not yet returned.
#
“Four days ago!” Brasseur roared, and stomped across the room. “He’s been gone, out of sight, for
four days,
and that idiot didn’t think it worth his time to inform me until today!”
“The twenty-sixth,” Aristide said. “That’s the day Aubry was questioned.”
“Damn right it was! And now he’s gone—skipped while he had the chance—he’s probably in Brussels or Geneva by now!”
“Why would he run?”
“Eh?” Brasseur paused in his angry pacing.
“Our witness failed to identify him. He was in no immediate danger of arrest. I did warn him that he ought to give us a more convincing alibi, but still … he had no reason to drop everything and run for it, and make himself look guilty.”
Brasseur sighed and threw himself into his chair. “Then where the devil is he?”
“Well … we suspect he wasn’t telling us everything. Do you suppose he really does know who committed the murders?”
“Christ,” Brasseur muttered. “D’you think
he’s
dead, too?”
“Perhaps … or possibly in hiding from the real killer. I don’t think we should dismiss the possibility.”
“I need a stiff drink.” Brasseur fetched the bottle of brandy he kept locked in the back of a cabinet. “You?”
“Thanks, no.” Aristide read the rest of the letter. According to his servant, on the twenty-sixth of Brumaire Aubry had returned from the examining magistrate’s chambers, taken a late luncheon alone in his apartment, and then left the apartment without telling the servant where he was going. He had proceeded on foot and had taken no parcels or valises of any kind with him. The police agent assigned to observe Aubry had followed him as far as the Pont-Neuf, where congestion brought about by a carriage accident on the bridge had caused him to lose sight of his quarry, and Aubry had not been seen since.
Brasseur was tossing back his second glass when Dautry thrust his head inside the door.
“Commissaire? A citizen outside seems very agitated, and he says he’ll discuss his business only with Ravel—”
“Citizen Ravel?” said a man, shouldering past him. “Is Ravel here?”
“Here,” Aristide said, trying to place the man. Tall, red hair, an anxious countenance. “What can I do for you, citizen?”
The man edged closer to him, lowering his voice to a murmur. “Citizeness Beaumontel told me you’d saved her from an embarrassing, perhaps dangerous, predicament.”
Of course,
Aristide thought, remembering him: Lafontaine, the “friend” of the timid Sidonie Beaumontel, who, he was certain, knew more about the Rue du Hasard murders than she would admit to him. “Yes?”
“And since it was my signature on those letters,” Lafontaine continued, “I’d hoped to add my thanks to hers… .”
“You’re welcome, of course; but it looks as if something more urgent is troubling you?”
“I—can we talk somewhere in private? I’d prefer to shield her reputation… .”
Brasseur waved them outside. Aristide gestured Lafontaine out to the street, where the peddlers and carters hurried past them, indifferent. “What’s the matter? Why come to me?”
“Sidonie—Citizeness Beaumontel—she’s disappeared.”
“
She’s
disappeared, too?”
“We were to meet the day before yesterday, and she never arrived.”
“The husband? You think he learned of your … friendship?”
“Her husband was my first thought, too, but he was at a dinner party for hours with a dozen other guests. She’d given the servants the afternoon off and she was to claim a migraine at the last minute, and let Beaumontel go alone to the dinner, which began at three. Then she would slip out of the house and join me at Monceau at a little past three o’clock. We often met there, in the gardens. When she didn’t appear, I assumed she hadn’t been able to get away. But she sent me no note by way of the florist yesterday morning, no excuses, no apology, nothing. I asked a friend of hers to call on her and learn what might be wrong, but she said they told her Sidonie was not at home to visitors. Today also. No explanation.”
“Citizen,” Aristide said, “aren’t you overreacting? The citizeness may genuinely have fallen ill.”
Lafontaine shook his head. “She’d have sent me a message. I—I wouldn’t have worried so if it hadn’t been for something she told me when we met last, at the Palais-Égalité. She seemed troubled. When I pressed her, she told me she’d just recognized someone. Someone she’d seen outside the house where that swine Saint-Ange was murdered.”
“Someone loitering about, you mean?”
“No, you don’t understand. When you questioned Sidonie, it was the twelfth of Brumaire, two days after the murders, wasn’t it? But what she didn’t tell you was that she’d already been there, on the tenth, on the evening of the murders.”
Aristide sighed. “So that was it.”
“She told me everything. That evening, she’d gone to give Saint-Ange his hush money. Of course she’d made sure the street was nearly empty before she approached. And just as she was about to go inside the house, a young man came rushing out the front door and collided with her. She thought nothing of it, of course, until she continued upstairs—avoiding the porter—to Saint-Ange’s apartment. She knocked, received no answer, and at last tried the door. It was unlocked and she went inside, and found the girl, dead, right in front of her. She was still quite warm. Sidonie was so shocked that she could do nothing but tiptoe out of the house. She was too frightened to send for the Watch, even. She was sure no one saw her—naturally she’d taken pains not to be seen. But the man who’d collided with her outside the house might have been the murderer!”
Aristide frowned. “Why did she return to the house on the twelfth, then, if she knew Saint-Ange was dead?”
“She didn’t know he was dead until you told her yourself. She said she never saw his body, only the girl’s.”
Aristide nodded, remembering that both Didier and Thibault had said the sofa had all but hidden Saint-Ange’s corpse from view.
“So she assumed he was still alive and she came back on the twelfth,” Lafontaine continued, “to pay him off, and to learn what she could. And a police inspector detained her and frightened her badly—”
“Didier,” Aristide said, disgusted.
“And then you told her Saint-Ange was dead, as well, and she panicked. She feared the police would suspect her of killing him if they knew she’d actually been in the house on the evening of the tenth. She did have good reason for wishing him dead.”
“Christ.” Aristide beckoned Lafontaine along and set off at a swift stride toward Rue Honoré. “And she told you recently that she’d just seen the man from Rue du Hasard, the man who had collided with her? Did you see him? Did she point him out to you?”
“No. She only said she’d just seen him in the arcades, among the crowd in the Palais-Égalité. A young man—”
Aubry? Or—who?
“—And if she saw him and recognized him,” Aristide interrupted him, “then he might just as easily have seen her. Oh, damn,
damn
.”
“Where are you going?” Lafontaine panted, hurrying to keep pace with him.
“To the commissariat of her section!”
#
Though, in theory, the commissariats of Paris were to be open to all citizens every day until ten o’clock at night, most commissaires chose to take
décadi
off from their duties. A visit to the Section du Roule produced only the suggestion, from the bored, glum inspector on duty, that the young wives of middle-aged men often unexpectedly disappeared by their own choice.