Game of Patience (6 page)

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?”

“Nothing connected with the Revolutionary Tribunal, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Aristide said mildly, refusing to be goaded by his companion’s acrimony. “I told you, I’m no informer.”

“Plenty deny it now, who were proud of it three years ago.”

“I was never a talebearer,” he repeated, “for the public prosecutor’s office or the Committee of Security or anyone else.” That was not entirely the truth, though he had preferred to call himself an “agent” of Danton in 1792 and 1793, when the ill-conceived war against Prussia and Austria had proved disastrous for France and many people had whispered of foreign plots to undermine the Revolution. Rumors and hysteria, most of the whispers, while distrust and uncertainty had been at their height; but he and Brasseur could testify that not all of them had been groundless… .

“I’ve no cause to have loved Robespierre’s government,” he added. “My dearest friend—”

He abruptly realized it was likely that the man before him had been present himself at Mathieu’s death. They exchanged level stares.

“Forgive my poor manners,” Sanson said at last. “I don’t like myself on execution days, and after I’ve been drinking to forget them, I like myself even less.” He pushed back his chair. “I thank you for the wine. Good evening. I won’t embarrass you by offering you my hand to shake.”

“But I offer you mine,” Aristide said, rising.

Sanson gazed for a moment at Aristide’s outstretched hand. At last he pressed it, muttered a good-bye, and strode away.

“
Nothing new yet on the Rue du Hasard affair?” Aristide inquired as he wandered into Brasseur’s office.

“Nothing as of this morning,” Brasseur grumbled without looking up from the reports and letters strewn across his desk. “You needn’t have come in.”

“Ah, well, what better have I to do?” Aristide tossed his hat on a bench. Hands clasped behind him, he looked over the dossiers in their cardboard folders, crammed onto the rows of shelves that covered one whitewashed wall of the small chamber. Most of them were the tawdry, humdrum records of petty thieves and confidence tricksters, crooked merchants, registered prostitutes; but a few evoked memories of shared chases and challenges. He turned to Brasseur, about to murmur, Do you remember the Martin affair? when he thought instead, Did we really get the right man there? He sighed, thinking back to a few occasions when a murderer had gone to the scaffold although they had never found indisputable proof of his guilt.

A junior inspector thrust his head into the office and Brasseur glanced up impatiently. “Commissaire, Inspector Didier sent me over. They’re holding a woman who went up to Saint-Ange’s apartment half an hour ago.”

“Well, well,” said Brasseur, brightening, “seems I spoke too soon. What’s she look like? A whore?”

“Nicely dressed, young, looks scared to death. Should they bring her over here?”

“Good God, no,” Aristide said, retrieving his hat. “She’s probably harmless. Let’s keep it discreet.” Brasseur grunted and gestured him out.

#

“
She’s in the porter’s room,” Didier announced, with a sullen glance at Aristide. “The commissaire did say we were to hold visitors for questioning.”

Aristide brushed past him, Brasseur’s secretary following. Within, a petite, veiled woman perched on the edge of a rickety chair like a terrified bird.

“Out, if you please,” Aristide told the inspector who waited beside her. “Good day, citizeness,” he continued when the man had left them and he had shut the door in Didier’s face. “My name is Ravel; I represent Commissaire Brasseur of the Section de la Butte-des-Moulins, and this is his secretary, Citizen Dautry.”

“Am I under arrest?” the woman quavered. “I haven’t done anything …”

Aristide sighed. “Did the inspector give you that impression? I apologize. I merely need answers to a few questions. Your name?”

“Marie-Sidonie Beaumontel, née Chambly,” she whispered. She pushed an identity card toward him bearing an address in the prosperous faubourg Honoré and quickly looked away, shivering. “Please—I don’t know what I can tell you. I … I was merely visiting a friend.”

“The friend you were visiting was Louis Saint-Ange?” Aristide said. She nodded. “I must inform you that Citizen Saint-Ange is dead.”

“Dead!” she gasped. “But I—I don’t understand.”

“Saint-Ange was murdered two days ago.”

She sat frozen in her seat for a moment before hiding her face in her hands. Aristide let her sob for a few minutes, drumming his fingers on the table before him, and silently handed her a handkerchief when her own grew sodden. At length she calmed and lifted away her veil. Beneath it she was ashen, with dark smudges beneath her eyes, her face powder blotched and streaked with tears.

“Was Saint-Ange extorting money from you?”

She went even paler beneath the remains of her powder. “Was he?” Aristide repeated. “We need to know.”

“Please—if my husband hears a breath of this, my life won’t be worth a sou.”

“You can trust our discretion.”

“You—you don’t think I murdered him?” She clutched at his arm. “I swear—”

“Citizeness … please, tell me the truth.”

She swallowed but said nothing. Aristide sighed and gestured to Dautry to cease writing. “Very well. Perhaps the commissaire couldn’t, in good conscience, do this; but I can.” He took Dautry’s notes and dropped them in the fire, but not before he had made a mental note of her address.

“You’re right,” she said after a moment of silence. “He was demanding money from me. He—he knew I had a lover … I don’t know how he knew … I’m married to a man seventeen years my senior. He treats me well enough, but he’s horribly suspicious; he sees infidelity in every word I exchange with another man. Until eight months ago I’d never given him reason to be jealous.”

“But you’ve fallen in love?”

“Yes—with a younger man, who is kind and sympathetic. I was lonely, and I broke my marriage vows … I—I kept his letters. I was a fool. I ought to have thrown them on the fire after I’d read them. But I couldn’t.”

Aristide nodded. “And Saint-Ange got hold of these letters?”

“I don’t know how. I knew him slightly, but he’d never been a guest at my house. One day I received a message, telling me to meet him at a certain café, and it enclosed one of Fernand’s—one of my lover’s letters. I went to their hiding-place—beneath the lining of my jewelry case—and the letters were gone. I don’t know how he could have taken them. Not even my maid knows where I kept them.”

“What sort of woman is your maid?”

Madame Beaumontel frowned, puzzled. “Victoire? She’s an ordinary sort of woman, not terribly clever perhaps, though I’ve no complaints about her work.”

“Is she young and pretty?”

“No, not especially; she’s older than I, about forty.”

“I ask because usually it’s a lady’s maid who unwittingly allows men of this sort to do their work. Before you found the letters were missing, was Victoire behaving in an unusual manner? Was she more animated, perhaps?”

“I think—yes, she was. She was looking pleased with herself.”

Aristide nodded. “Then you may count on it she’d found a lover. Plain, unmarried women of that age are usually susceptible. Tell me, how long did she behave in this fashion? Not long?”

Madame Beaumontel frowned. “I was so distressed I scarcely noticed her behavior … but yes, she suddenly became preoccupied … and then ill-natured and morose.” She drew a quick breath. “Oh, no—do you mean Saint-Ange was the man?”

“I expect so. As I said, a woman of that age is an easy target for a seducer. He probably flirted with her on her afternoons off, made love to her; she secretly let him inside the house, and one night, while she was asleep, he crept into your boudoir and searched for anything incriminating.”

“But how could he have known that—that I had a secret to protect?”

“Well,” Aristide said, “young, pretty wife, middle-aged husband … there’s usually a lover somewhere. And I’m sure Saint-Ange was a practiced observer of human nature, since he evidently depended on extortion for his livelihood. Did you think you were the only one paying him to keep a secret?”