The Black Tower Read Online Free PDF Page B

pieces we find, the more something might jog that timid little memory of yours, and I want to be there when something finally pops out, because I don’t think you’re quite so idiotic as you look.”
    His face is wrinkled with disgust as he wrenches himself away from me.
    “Monsieur Can-I-Go-Home-Now. You’ll go home when I fucking tell you!”
    And with that, he turns his back on me and charges down the street— daring me not to follow. It is then that the question, the obvious question, startles my lips apart.
    “Where are we going?”
    But the hope of receiving an answer is negated by the sound of my own voice: bleating and braying, cracking me open, as it were, to reveal the small green quivering heart-fruit beneath. I resolve never again to ask him where we’re going. And I never do.
     
    T RUTH BE TOLD , we don’t seem to be going anywhere. The drizzle has stopped for the time being, and a dandelion glimmer has plumped out the drifts of cloud. It’s a fine time for a walk.
    And what a pair of strollers we make. Me in my black trousers, shiny at the knees, and the black coat vented at the elbows. Vidocq, striding like a deposed king in Bardou’s sodden rags. After some time, he pauses at a street corner to realign the leather scraps that pass for boots, and in his best honey-and-cloves voice, he says:
    “I hope I haven’t distressed you unduly, Doctor.”
    “Why should I be distressed?”
    “Oh, some men don’t like being thrown off their schedule.”
    I tell him I don’t really have a schedule. To speak of. He shakes his head.
    “Doctor, may I submit that that’s horseshit? I’ve spent no more than a day following you, and I’ve already got you dead to rights. École de Médecine in the morning, nine-thirty to eleven. Followed by Le Père Bonvin, where you buy your single cup of coffee, followed by a sugar-and-water. You sneak your little newspaper into your coat. (They don’t chain down the papers at Bonvin’s, do they?) You go straight home. A little catnap, some afternoon puttering. Dinner with Maman and her boarders. A walk just before bed, with a pinch of tobacco in the left cheek. You walk around the block and no farther. You go to sleep, repeat next morning. Do I have it about right?”
    So many ways to protest. I could tell him that, some mornings, I stay at the École all the way to noon. That I treat myself now and then to a chocolate at the Café des Mille Colonnes. That I only take tobacco at night if Charlotte’s cooking doesn’t agree with me.
    But these are all just different ways of admitting he’s right. So I remain silent, which is in itself a confession.
    “Yes, you’re a man of regular habits, Doctor, considering you’ve no—”
    Job, he means to say. Life. Something stops him from finishing.
    “Yes indeed,” he says, nodding slow. “I could set my watch by you.”
    And then, perhaps because this strikes him as too close to an assertion of faith, he adds: “It’s the same with all criminals.”
    We cross the Pont St.-Michel, we trot up the Rue des Arcis, a right on Neuve-St.-Méderic…and almost at once the streets begin funneling down. Which is to say the old Paris closes round. The roar of the boulevards gives way to the clatter of paving stones. The streets wind and dart, turn their backs on you, stop you dead. Sewers split open before you like unsutured wounds, and houses built centuries ago totter forward in raiments of black.
    No great plan at work, here in the Marais, but there is a kind of unnatural order. As sure as the sun rises and sets, the late-winter rain will leave brackish tides pooling against the corner posts, and this water will merge with the slops toiling downward through blackened gutters to produce that peculiar mud, so Parisian in its odor and provenance. If you kick in your boots too hard, you’ll actually taste some, flying into your mouth like a retracted insult. You’ll smell it, too, and feel it with every step: a squelch beneath the