Read Chapter 6: A Name from the Past

The name hit Étienne like a brick to the chest. He stood in the narrow Belleville street, the locket still warm in his palm, and read the inscription again by the light of a distant oil lamp. *Pour Jean, 1843.* The engraving was fine, the work of a jeweler who did not serve working-class clients. And Jean Roux—former marksman, barricade courier, dead man with a clean-handed killer behind him—had once been a servant in the household of the Comte de Vasseur.

Étienne’s own name. His own blood. The name he had buried along with his inheritance seven years ago, when he had renounced his father and taken up a pen instead of a title.

Léon watched him from a few paces back, arms crossed against the damp night air. “You know him?”

“No,” Étienne said, too quickly. He closed his fist around the locket. “I knew of the family, that’s all. Old money. Dead branches.”

Léon’s eyes narrowed, but he said nothing. The boy was clever, cleverer than his age suggested. Étienne had already seen that much. He needed to be more careful.

He pocketed the locket and turned away from the dim building where the woman in the portrait might be sleeping. He had come to Belleville to find her, to ask questions about Roux and the ledger and the Company of the Black Star. But now that the name in his head connected to the face in the miniature, the questions felt like knives pointed inward.

His half-sister. If the Comte had sired a daughter after Étienne’s mother died—and the old man had remarried within the year, as Étienne’s mother’s lawyers had sourly noted—then the girl would be nineteen now, raised in the same cold rooms Étienne had fled. Whether she knew of his existence was another matter. Whether she had loved a servant named Jean Roux, and whether that love had gotten Roux killed, was a question he did not want answered.

He wanted to hold the ledger. He wanted to lose himself in its coded columns and clean arithmetic. There was comfort in numbers. No father, no sister, no ghost of the boy he had once been.

“Where are we going?” Léon asked as Étienne started walking again.

“To find a man named Bouchard.”

“The police spy?”

Étienne glanced at him. “You know of him?”

“Everyone in the Faubourg knows Bouchard,” Léon said, matching Étienne’s pace. “He was taken hostage during the June days last year. The workers were going to shoot him, but he talked his way out. Said he’d been a soldier, too. Some say he still works for the Prefecture, but on a leash. Others say he’s nobody’s man now.”

“That’s the kind of loyalty I can use.”

Léon grabbed his sleeve, stopping him. The boy’s face was sharp in the lamplight. “Bouchard sells secrets to whoever pays. He’s not dangerous because he’s loyal. He’s dangerous because he knows everyone’s secrets, including yours, and he’ll sell them the moment the price is right.”

“Then I’ll make sure I’m the highest bidder.”

Léon’s grip tightened, then released. “You trust me?”

Étienne almost laughed. “No.”

“Good,” Léon said. “I don’t trust you, either. But we both want the Company to burn, and right now you’ve got the matches.”

Étienne resumed walking. “Bouchard drinks at the Café du Pont-Neuf, near the Palais de Justice. Stays close to the jail so he can claim he was never far from a cell. Let me do the talking when we find him.”

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The Café du Pont-Neuf was a smoke-choked hole beneath a leaking roof, the kind of establishment where men came to forget their names and leave with new ones. Bouchard sat in the back corner, a grizzled crow of a man with a caved-in nose and the restless hands of a pickpocket. He spotted Étienne the moment he entered and raised two fingers at the barmaid without looking away.

“Vasseur,” Bouchard said as Étienne slid into the chair across from him. “I was wondering when you’d come sniffing around. Word is you picked up something shiny near the barricades.”

“Word travels fast.”

“Word travels fastest when it’s paid to.” Bouchard’s eyes flicked to Léon, standing near the door. “Who’s the cub?”

“My shadow.”

“Shadows have a habit of falling on useful things.” Bouchard drained his glass and set it down with a thunk. “You’re not here for conversation, reporter. You’re here because you need something and you think I have it. You’re right, but I don’t work for kind words.”

Étienne placed forty francs on the table—half of what Faubert had given him. Bouchard looked at the coins, then at Étienne. “That’s a start, not an answer.”

“Then we bargain in stages,” Étienne said. “First question. What do you know about a man named Roux, formerly of the army, who delivered messages from Belleville to the barricades?”

Bouchard’s eyebrows rose. “Roux is dead. Shot at the barricade two days ago. You were there—I heard you were the one who took his package.”

“I’m asking what else you know.”

Bouchard leaned back, tapping the coins with one finger. “Roux was a strange one. Worked as a servant years ago, for some noble family. Got out, joined the army, did his time. Came back to Paris and fell in with the wrong crowd.” He paused. “Or the right crowd, depending on your politics. He was one of the few who could cross the city without being stopped. Knew the soldiers’ patrol schedules. Knew the sewers and the roofs. That’s why they used him.”

“Used him? Who?”

Bouchard’s smile showed too many teeth. “That’s the second question.”

Étienne added twenty francs. Bouchard pocketed them with a smooth motion. “The Company of the Black Star. Or at least the men who pay its bills. Roux was a courier for a third party, though. Someone who hired him independently. That’s the part that’s interesting. The Company didn’t like not knowing who Roux worked for. They were watching him. He was watched the morning he died.”

“Who was watching?”

“A man in a black coat,” Bouchard said. “Same description I’m hearing from three different sources this week. He’s been asking questions about the same thing everyone asks about: a ledger. He’s Ministry of the Interior, or he’s someone who plays them like a fiddle. Either way, he wants the book. One of my boys saw him meeting with the Prefect yesterday, which means the police are looking too.”

Étienne’s jaw tightened. He had known the ledger was valuable. He had not known the entire machinery of the state was cranking to retrieve it.

“Final question,” he said. “The woman in the locket Roux carried. Who is she?”

Bouchard’s eyes glittered. “That one’s going to cost you more than coins, because I’m fairly sure the answer is going to hurt.” He paused. “She’s a nobleman’s daughter. The Comte de Vasseur’s. Her name is Anouk. Roux was sweet on her, or she was sweet on him—the servants gossiped, and I’ve heard enough of it to know they were meeting in secret while he worked in the house. When he left, she wrote to him. When he came back to Paris, he came back for her.”

The world tilted slightly. Étienne kept his face still.

“Do you want to know why he was at the barricade that day?” Bouchard asked.

Étienne nodded.

“He was carrying money to the rebels. But he was also carrying a message from someone in the Comte’s household—a message that never reached its destination.” Bouchard slid the coins toward himself. “You can ask the Comte what the message was. If you’ve got the stomach for that conversation.”

Étienne stood. “I don’t need the Comte. I need the Company.”

Bouchard laughed, a grating sound. “No, reporter. You need to decide who you’re really hunting. Because the Company is using the revolution. The Ministry is using the Company. And the Comte?” He shrugged. “Men like that always have their own ledger.”

Étienne turned and walked out without another word, Léon falling into step beside him. The night air was cold, and the locket in his pocket felt heavier than lead.

“Well?” Léon asked. “What did he tell you?”

Étienne thought of Anouk—his sister, a woman he had never met, who loved a dead servant named Roux. He thought of his father, the Comte, who had disowned him for refusing to enter the Church. He thought of the ledger in his satchel, the cipher of pain and money, and of the article he needed to write before the Company found him first.

“He told me that my enemies are not the ones I thought they were,” Étienne said. “And that the revolution I’m covering is not the one I’m being paid to report.”

Léon fell silent for a long moment. Then he said, “So what do we do?”

Étienne stopped, turning to face the boy. The lamplight caught his eyes.

“We write the truth,” he said. “And we hope the truth is loud enough to drown out the bullets.”