Read Chapter 15: The Committee's Eye

The smell hit him first—cheap rosewater fighting a losing war against sweat, tallow, and the sour tang of spilled wine. Étienne pushed through the velvet curtain and let it fall behind him, pressing his back against the wall as his eyes adjusted to the low amber light of the brothel.

Louise Marchand appeared at the top of the stairs like a ship's captain surveying a storm. She was fifty, built solid, her face a map of hard winters and shrewd bargains. Her silk gown was the color of dried blood.

"Étienne Vasseur." She descended slowly, arms folded. "You have the look of a man who owes someone money and is about to ask me for more."

"I need a room. Discreet."

"You need a bath and a shave and about three years of sleep, but we don't sell those here." She stopped two steps from the bottom, studying him. "What did you do?"

"Nothing that isn't true."

"That's the worst thing a man can do in this city." She gestured with her chin toward the back corridor. "Third door. Two francs a night, payable in advance, and I don't want to know what you're carrying."

Étienne counted coins from his pocket, his fingers moving slow and deliberate. "I want to send word to La Lanterne's printshop. I'll need someone to run messages."

Louise took the money, bit a coin, and nodded. "Annette. She's fast and she doesn't read what she carries. But she'll want a story for her trouble."

"Tell her the story's coming."

He took the room at the end of the corridor—no window to the street, just a small grate near the ceiling that let in the smell of the Seine and, if he stood on the chair, a sliver of grey sky. There was a bed, a washstand, and a rusted lock that would stop no one determined.

Étienne locked it anyway.

He sat on the edge of the bed and laid out what remained of his war chest: the decoded ledger pages, rolled tight in oilcloth; the falsified Barbès letter; twenty-three francs in assorted coin; a knife that had seen better days. The brass key to Aubertin's lockbox was still in his boot. He'd need to retrieve that lockbox from the professor's apartment before someone else found it—another errand, another risk.

A knock came soft and quick. Étienne slid the papers under the mattress before answering.

The girl at the door couldn't have been more than seventeen, though her eyes had the flat calculation of someone twice that age. Her blonde hair was pinned loose, and a thin shift was all she wore. She made no move to cover herself.

"You're the journalist," she said. It wasn't a question.

"Depends who's asking."

"Nobody. I've seen you before. You wrote about the factory girls—the ones who died in the fire." She glanced up and down the corridor before stepping inside and pushing the door nearly closed. "Annette. Madame says I run your messages."

"Good. I need you to take a note to the Rue de Vaugirard printshop. Give it only to the foreman, name of Desmoulins. If anyone else asks, you're buying bread."

She held out her palm. "Paper. Pen. I'll wait while you write."

Étienne produced a stub of pencil from his coat but found no paper. He tore the blank margin from an old issue of La Lanterne he'd stuffed in his pocket days ago—the one announcing the formation of the Provisional Government, now hopelessly outdated, another promise rotting on the vine.

He wrote quickly: *Three new pieces. Run them over the next two days. First: the royalist recruiting lists Baudouin burned—I got a copy before the flames. Second: the rifle shipment from the Orléans estate, docked at Bercy under customs seals. Third: the Prefect's correspondence with the Comte de Chambord's agent. Print them in sequence. V.*

Annette watched him fold the note. "The police are asking questions about journalists."

Étienne paused. "What kind of questions?"

"Paying questions." She crossed her arms. "Some of the girls carry tales for coin. Men talk in bed easier than they do in taverns. One of the regulars—a sergeant from the Prefecture—said they're putting together a list. Subversives. Men who write for the radical sheets are worth five francs a name. Editors like you, more."

"How much more?"

"Fifty." Her lip curled. "That's two months of tricks for a working girl. A man can retire on that kind of betrayal."

Étienne stood, his mind already working. "And the sergeant—does he still visit?"

"Every Thursday. Drinks too much, talks too much, pays too little." She studied him. "You want to turn him?"

"I want to turn everyone." Étienne said. "But first, I need you to deliver this note. Come straight back. Don't talk to anyone on the street, don't stop for bread, don't make friends."

Annette took the folded paper and tucked it between her breasts without ceremony. "Madame said you'd try to protect me. You can't. But I'll run your message."

She slipped out the door.

Étienne waited, counting his breaths. When the corridor fell silent, he pulled the papers back from under the mattress and began to arrange them in order—the ledger's first sections, the ones implicating the royalists most directly.

Louise found him an hour later, sitting at the small table with the oilcloth spread open. She set down a bowl of bread and soup and a glass of wine without asking.

"You'll bring trouble to my door," she said.

"Not if I bring it elsewhere first."

"You plan to fight three armies with a pen?"

"I plan to make them fight each other." Étienne tore a piece of bread, chewed slowly. "You've read the papers. You know what's happening: the royalists want a regency, the republicans want their secretaries in power, the foreign interests want a weak France they can carve up. All of them lit matches in February and called it revolution. All of them think the fire is theirs alone."

Louise pulled back the chair across from him and sat, heavy and deliberate. "And you know this how?"

"Because I have the receipts." He tapped the oilcloth. "Three articles. The first goes to press tonight. It exposes the royalist money that funded the barricades on the Rue du Bac. The second—two days from now—reveals the republican committee's attempt to bribe the National Guard into inaction. The third announces the foreign bankers who financed the whole affair from London."

"They'll kill you by the second."

"If they kill me by the second, the third never runs—and they'll never know if there's a fourth." Étienne leaned forward. "I need this room for a week. I need your girls to listen and report. I need Annette for my messages, and I need you to pretend you've never met me if the police come asking."

Louise's eyes narrowed. "And if they come with warrants?"

"Then you throw me out the back window and keep the papers." He pushed the copper key across the table. "There's a lockbox in the third arrondissement, in a professor's apartment. I can't go myself—too many eyes. Send one of your girls. Have her bring the box here."

Louise's hand closed around the key. She turned it over, studying the worn brass teeth. "What's inside?"

"Insurance." Étienne let the word hang. "Names of men who think they're safe because they never put anything in writing. But they did. And I have it."

A scream cut through from the front room—high, startled. Étienne's hand went toward the knife as Louise rose with surprising quickness. She was halfway through the door before the scream turned into raucous laughter, a customer's crude joke, a girl's exaggerated delight.

Louise looked back. "No more surprises."

"Nothing's ever a surprise in Paris," Étienne said. "It just arrives earlier than you expected."

She left him with the bread and the wine and the collected weight of every lie he'd told. He finished his meal in silence, chewing slowly, thinking about the shape of the story he was feeding the presses. Three articles, three factions, each designed to make the others smell blood.

But if Annette was right, the police weren't just hunting journalists for what they printed. They were hunting them for what they knew. And someone was paying fifty francs a head for the names.

He'd been worrying about the fists and knives of secret societies. He'd forgotten the simplest weapon of all: a uniformed man walking door to door with a list of names and coin to buy more.

Étienne set down the bread. He took up his pencil and began to draft a fourth article—the one he'd never print, but would show around carefully, to see whose hand reached first.