Read Chapter 13: The Healer's Fee

Céleste kept her arm locked around Émile’s waist as they stumbled through the gutted streets of the Thirteenth. His shoulder had gone from screaming to a dull, wet numbness, and the blood soaked through the torn sleeve of his coat in a slow, patient pulse. Every step sent a white flash across his vision. He didn’t ask where they were going. He didn’t have the breath.

She stopped before a narrow building wedged between a shuttered bakery and a collapsing apartment block. The facade was pockmarked with bullet holes, but the door was solid oak, freshly reinforced. Céleste knocked in a pattern Émile couldn’t follow—three quick raps, a pause, two more. A slot slid open at eye level.

“It’s Céleste. I have a wounded man. Doctor Vautrin is expecting us.”

The slot closed. Chains rattled. The door swung inward and a hulking woman with a shaved head and a shotgun cradled in her arms stepped aside without a word.

The interior smelled of iodine, coal smoke, and stale bread. A stove hissed in the corner of what had once been a print shop. Presses had been pushed against the walls, their iron frames draped with bandages drying like strange laundry. In the center of the room, a man in his fifties with spectacles perched on a broad nose was grinding something in a mortar. He wore a surgeon’s apron over a threadbare waistcoat. He looked up at Émile and sighed, as though the sight of another broken body was a personal inconvenience.

“Bring him to the table,” the doctor said.

The table was a door laid across two barrels, covered in a stained sheet. Émile sat heavily. The room tilted. Céleste caught his good shoulder and held him upright.

“Gunshot,” she said. “Through the deltoid. Exit wound’s clean, but he’s lost a lot of blood.”

Doctor Vautrin set down the mortar and crossed to them. He peeled back Émile’s coat without ceremony, then the shirt beneath, which stuck to the wound with dried blood. Émile hissed through his teeth. Vautrin examined the hole in his shoulder with the calm detachment of a man inspecting a cut of meat at market.

“You’re lucky,” he said. “The ball missed the bone. Another inch down and you’d be writing with your left hand for the rest of your life. Assuming you lived.”

“Lucky,” Émile repeated. The word tasted absurd.

Vautrin gestured to the woman with the shotgun. “Marguerite. Boil water. Clean rags. And fetch the whiskey, not the cheap stuff.” He turned back to Émile. “This will hurt. I don’t have ether. I had chloroform two weeks ago, but a man with a gangrenous leg needed it more than you do.”

“Just get on with it,” Émile said.

Céleste moved behind him and placed her hands on his shoulders. Not to restrain him, but to steady him. He felt her fingers press into his trapezius, grounding him. He didn’t know if he trusted her. He knew he needed her to be real right now, just for the next few minutes.

Vautrin worked quickly. He poured whiskey over the wound first, and Émile saw stars. Then came the probe, the tweezers, the feeling of someone rooting around inside him like a man searching a coat pocket for a lost key. Émile bit down on his tongue and tasted copper. Céleste murmured something in his ear, but the words were lost in the roar of his own pulse.

“Clamp,” Vautrin said. Marguerite handed it to him. “There. The bleeding’s stopped. Now the exit wound—hold still.”

Émile understood, distantly, that this was the part where the doctor was pushing something through his shoulder from the inside out. The pressure was immense, worse than the pain, a sensation of being turned inside out. He gripped the edge of the door-table so hard the wood splintered under his fingers.

Then it was over.

Vautrin packed the wound with clean linen and bound it tight around Émile’s chest. The pressure was a relief. The room swam back into focus. Céleste was still behind him, her hands now gripping his good shoulder.

“You’ll live,” Vautrin said. He washed his hands in a basin and dried them on his apron. “But you’ll need rest. Three days minimum before you use that arm, and even then, no lifting anything heavier than a glass of wine.”

Émile laughed, a dry, broken sound. “I have a camera. It’s heavier than a glass of wine.”

Vautrin looked at him for a long moment. Then he removed his spectacles and polished them on his sleeve. “Ah,” he said. “Then you’re the photographer.”

The words landed like a stone in still water. Céleste’s hands tightened on Émile’s shoulder. Marguerite shifted her weight, adjusting her grip on the shotgun.

“I don’t know what you’ve heard,” Émile said carefully. “I’m just a man with a camera who’s been in the wrong place at the wrong time more often than he’d like.”

“You’re the one with the photograph,” Vautrin said. “The one who’s been making Versailles nervous enough to send their men into the Thirteenth looking for you.”

Émile’s blood went cold. “You know about that.”

“Everyone with a pulse between here and the Butte-aux-Cailles knows about that.” Vautrin sat down on a stool across from him. “I don’t care about your photograph. I care about my patients. I’ve treated forty wounded Communards in the last week, and I’ve lost eleven of them. You know what those eleven had in common?”

Émile shook his head.

“They died because Versailles outguns us. Because our marksmen are shooting with hunting rifles against Chassepots. Because we don’t have the numbers, the ammunition, or the artillery.” Vautrin leaned forward. “But you know what we do have? We have the truth. We have photographs of the barricades, of the men and women who stand behind them. And when this is over—when Versailles crushes us and calls us criminals and burns our names from the record—those photographs will be the only testimony that we existed.”

Émile understood where this was going before Vautrin said it. He felt the trap closing around him, and he was too weak to step out of it.

“You saved my arm,” he said.

“I did.”

“And now you want payment.”

Vautrin shrugged. “I’m not a charity. I’ve got a building full of wounded men and a single woman to help me run it. I need supplies, and I need leverage. You have a camera and a reputation. I want you to spend two days documenting the barricades in the Thirteenth and the Fifth. The Fort d’Issy knows what’s coming—everyone does. When Versailles takes the city, I want evidence. Real evidence, the kind only your camera can produce.”

Émile closed his eyes. His shoulder throbbed. Somewhere in the city, his brother was waiting in a cell at Fort d’Issy, and the clock was running toward dawn on the fourth day. He didn’t have two days to spare. He didn’t have two hours.

“I can’t,” he said. “I have somewhere I need to be.”

“Then you should have found another surgeon,” Vautrin said flatly. “Gangrene doesn’t wait for your schedule. Infection doesn’t care about your brother. If you leave now, you’ll be dead within a week.”

Émile opened his eyes. “How do you know about my brother?”

Vautrin smiled, a thin, knowing expression. “Everyone with a pulse between here and the Butte-aux-Cailles knows about that too. The man who was seen carrying messages between the Commune and Versailles. The man who disappeared. The man whose photograph is being circulated among the Versaillais officers with the word ‘traitor’ written beneath it.”

“He’s not a traitor,” Émile said.

“I don’t care what he is,” Vautrin said. “I care about my barricades. You take my deal, I’ll make sure you’re strong enough to walk out of here. You refuse, and you can stagger out into the street and bleed out in a gutter for all I care.”

Émile looked at Céleste. She was watching him with an expression he couldn’t read. A week ago, she had been a stranger who had nearly killed him. Now she was the only person standing between him and a slow death. He hated how much he needed her.

“Fine,” he said. The word tasted like ash. “Two days. But I need you to send word to the barricades first. I’m looking for information about a man named Lucien Chardin. I was told he was seen near the Printemps department store.”

Vautrin raised an eyebrow. “Printemps. That’s a fortress now. Barricaded to the third floor, and the Communards inside don’t trust anyone they don’t know. If your brother was there, he’s either dead or living among ghosts.”

“He’s alive,” Émile said. The certainty in his own voice surprised him. “He has to be.”

Vautrin studied him for a long moment. Then he stood and walked to a cabinet against the wall, unlocked it, and pulled out a bottle of whiskey. He poured two fingers into a glass and handed it to Émile.

“Drink that. You’ll sleep for six hours. When you wake up, I’ll have a message sent.” He paused. “And then you work off your debt.”

Émile took the glass. The whiskey burned going down, and the warmth spread through his chest like a slow tide. His shoulder was a dull ache now, a distant drumbeat. The room began to soften at the edges.

Céleste helped him lie down on a cot that Marguerite had prepared against the wall. He felt the rough wool blanket beneath his back, the weight of his own body pressing into the mattress. He was so tired. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept through the night.

“Émile,” Céleste said, leaning close. Her voice was soft. “Why Printemps?”

He turned his head to look at her. Her face was half in shadow, lit only by the coal stove’s orange glow. He thought about lying. He was too tired to lie.

“Ferrand told me Lucien was taken near the Butte-aux-Cailles,” he said. “But Ferrand had a habit of telling people what they wanted to hear. Then you told me the same thing. And Delacroix was watching me long before I ever walked into that mansion.” He closed his eyes. “Lucien knew I’d look for him. He left me his watch, knowing I’d follow the trail. The trail led to lies. So I’m going to the place where the truth lives.”

“And where is that?”

“Printemps,” Émile said. “Because that’s where Delacroix gave his first orders. Where the men who sold out the Commune were paid. It’s the last place anyone would think to look for a traitor’s brother. Which makes it exactly where Lucien would hide.”

He let the darkness take him.

Six hours passed in a blink. When Émile woke, the print shop was quiet. Vautrin sat at a desk near the window, writing by candlelight. Marguerite had propped her shotgun against the door and was asleep on a pile of rags. Céleste was gone. The place where she had knelt beside him was empty.

Émile sat up slowly. His shoulder screamed in protest, but the movement was possible. The pain had receded to something manageable. He flexed his fingers. They moved. He was, against all odds, still whole.

Vautrin looked up. “You’re awake. Good.” He set down his pen. “I sent Marguerite’s sister to the Printemps with your name and a question about your brother. She came back an hour ago.”

Émile’s chest tightened. “What did she find?”

Vautrin folded his hands on the desk. “He was there. Last night. Wounded, from what she could gather, but alive. He was seen being helped into the building by a man who works the barricades on Rue de la Victoire. No one’s seen him since.”

Émile let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. Lucien was alive. Wounded, but alive. And he was in the Printemps, surrounded by Communards who would tear him apart if they knew his true allegiance.

He swung his legs off the cot and stood. The room tilted, then settled. Vautrin watched him with the resigned expression of a man who knew his patient was about to ignore all his advice.

“You’ll need someone to carry your camera,” Vautrin said. “You won’t be able to hold it steady for at least a day.”

“I’ll manage,” Émile said.

“You’ll die,” Vautrin said again. He didn’t sound angry about it. Just factual.

Émile walked to the window and looked out at the gray Paris dawn. The barricades were already rising in the street below—a skeleton of cobblestones and overturned carts being reinforced by men and women with rifles. Somewhere beyond them, in the Printemps department store, his brother was hiding from the world, waiting for someone to find him.

Émile didn’t have the photograph. He didn’t have a plan. He had a wounded shoulder, a camera that felt like it weighed a hundred pounds, and a promise he’d made to a brother he hadn’t seen in years.

It would have to be enough.