Armand recognized the voice before he could discern the face, and it was this that undid his resolve for several minutes: had a stranger commanded him to proceed with his rounds, he would have insisted on knowing what was being concealed at the foot of the wall; but this man had corrected his earliest reports, had lent him money when an ague kept his mother bedridden, and wore, as he did, the uniform of the Paris police.
“You are a great distance from your post, my lad.”
The young patrolman lowered his lantern. In this street of northern Paris, where daylight left behind scarcely less misery than the night, a clutter of paving stones forced passersby to skirt the fronts of the houses. The other stood beside a sewer grating, with that peculiar composure common to men who know that one will ask them for assistance before calling them to account. His name was Victor Prévost.
Armand had caught sight of a bundle. He now saw the hand that moved to cover it.
“Has something fallen?”
“A matter for the street sweepers. Move along, now; you have your duty to attend to.”
He obeyed. He even took three paces, which he would subsequently recall with cruel precision: the first to step away from the wall, the second to avoid a puddle, the third because it would have seemed singular to halt after the first two. Then he heard behind him a dull, soft thud, followed by the rustle of coarse linen, and everything that had at first seemed reassuring in that familiar voice struck him suddenly as calculated to drive him away.
The Colleague
In September 1879, a jewellery broker named Alexandre Lenoble was murdered at Prévost’s lodgings on the Rue de l’Évangile. The killer, intending to profit from his victim’s effects, set about disposing of the body. It was a labour far more difficult than the deed itself; it was no longer enough to be solitary within a room—he had to venture out, to carry the remains, perhaps to encounter someone—and this immense city, otherwise so accommodating to disappearances, kept watchful eyes even in its most deserted corners.
Those eyes belonged to Armand. He had turned back, not yet knowing what he sought. Prévost watched him approach, then raised a hand to his collar, as though the warmth oppressed him. The gesture proved nothing; nor did the bundle, so long as it remained tied. But the young patrolman felt that unease which sometimes precedes certainty, and of which honest men first seek to unburden themselves, because it compels them to suspect those whom they would have preferred to thank.
“Show me what is there.”
Prévost gave a start of almost offended surprise.
“To me?”
He had chosen the readiest argument. To him, indeed; to the man who knew the customs of the prefecture, the superiors, the means of reprimanding a novice who showed excessive zeal. Armand thought of his mother, of the banknote he had not yet repaid, of that dinner at which Prévost had taught him that a man might eat on credit without surrendering his dignity, provided he returned to settle the score. He wished a sergeant would appear at the end of the street and decide the matter in his stead.
No one came.
Prévost drew back the cloth. It was less what Armand saw than the haste with which the other immediately sought to hide it that stripped the young man of his last excuse. He raised the lantern, called out, and his voice, at first too faint, finally found the pitch he had been taught to use.
A Forgotten Woman
When the affair came to light, the quarter altered its recollections. Neighbours discovered in some long-forgotten phrase a menace they had never perceived at the time; others averred that they had always distrusted that overweening confidence, though they had once willingly entrusted Prévost with their predicaments. Human wisdom possesses a singular facility for arriving after the event, demanding to be received as though it had foretold it all along.
Yet the inquest did not stop with Lenoble. It brought back to light the name of Adèle Blondin, murdered in 1876. Three years had elapsed between the two killings; for three years, a man had pursued his existence among those whom his office required him to protect, while the disappearance of a woman waited to be linked to the murder of a broker.
Armand learned this name in an office where records were being filed. A clerk pronounced it as he turned a page; to him, it was merely an entry to be located. The young patrolman asked that it be repeated, and copied the two words, Adèle Blondin, into his pocketbook with an exactitude the cause of which he would have struggled to explain. He had spent the night brooding over what he risked losing by denouncing a colleague. He now discovered that a woman had already lost everything when he was still of an age to believe that the uniform chose its wearers for their virtue.
That evening, he returned to his mother’s home. She noticed his soiled boots and reached to take them; he pulled them off himself, sat beside the stove, and remained a long while without answering her enquiries. At length, she asked him whether someone had insulted him.
“No,” he said. “Someone had done me a service.”
It was the only explanation he could give.
The Debt Settled
Prévost went to the guillotine on the 19th of January, 1880. A conventional expression of repentance toward the department compromised by his crimes was made to accompany his memory. The press found therein material for that species of wonderment in which moral indignation and the witty retort vie for the reader’s favor; as for the institution, it was eager to close the dossier on a man whose likeness it no longer wished to bear.
Armand, however, kept the banknote he was bound to repay. He had placed it in an envelope inscribed with the recipient’s name; after the execution, he spent several weeks wondering what one ought to do with a debt owed to a dead man of whom one had learned to feel ashamed. The money had not changed. His mother had indeed been attended by the physician, the fever had abated, the help had been real. None of this lessened the crimes; but the crimes, in turn, did not efface the moment past when he had felt genuine gratitude.
In the end, he carried the sum to a charitable relief society, offering no explanation. Then he resumed his beats. When a passerby stopped him to ask for directions, he answered with the same care as before; only, he no longer mistook the relief that appeared on the stranger’s face for proof of his own virtue.
In the back of his pocketbook, between an address and a station-house number, remained the names of Adèle Blondin and Alexandre Lenoble. He had never met either of them. Yet it was they who had at last taught him his trade.