Read Chapter 26: The Ruins of the Sacré-Cœur

The basilica rose from the hill like a broken ribcage, its half-finished walls open to the sky. Émile pressed himself into a shadow between two scaffolding towers, his breath ragged from the climb. Below, Montmartre burned. The Versaillais shells had found the powder stores, and the night had turned the color of embers.

Céleste had insisted on scouting ahead toward the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, a route that would take her through the safer southern passages. Émile had agreed only because his arm needed binding and his camera needed more than binding. The leg joint had snapped clean during the retreat. He'd tied it with wire and a strip of his own shirt, but the bellows sagged like a dying lung.

He checked his coat. The plate was there, pressed flat against the lining, warm against his ribs. The surrender photograph. The one that damned the Communards who had shot a man with his hands raised. And in his pocket, the decoy plates, worthless, overexposed, yet now the only things the world believed he carried.

A sound echoed through the unfinished nave. Not shells. Voices.

Émile moved toward the sound, stepping over discarded stonecutters' tools and coils of rope. The basilica had been a skeleton before the war; now it seemed a monument to interruption. Half-carved angels stared from blocks of travertine, their faces unfinished, blind.

He found them in what would have been the transept. A circle of Communard soldiers, their red sashes visible even in the dim light. At the center, a man knelt with his hands bound behind him. His shirt was open at the collar, and his face bore the particular resignation of a man who had already died several times in his imagination.

A deserter, Émile thought. Or a spy. The Commune was eating its own again.

He should have walked away. He had no camera that worked, no reason to witness another death. But his hands moved before his mind could stop them, and he was already lifting the apparatus, wedging the broken leg joint against a block of marble to steady it.

The officer in charge raised his hand. "On my command."

Émile's fingers found the dark slide. He pulled it free.

The rifles came up.

"Fire."

The volley cracked across the hollow space, and the man jerked backward, his body folding like a puppet with cut strings. Émile's shutter clicked a half-second late. He had missed the impact, caught only the fall.

He lowered the camera, the plate exposed, precious even in its lateness. A habit of the trade. You photograph what you cannot save.

The soldiers dispersed without ceremony, dragging the body toward a pile of rubble. Émile remained in the shadows, watching them go. And then he saw him.

The soldier at the rear of the column, the one who had fired with a practiced, almost bored efficiency. He sheathed his bayonet and scratched his jaw with the back of his hand, and the motion knocked loose something in Émile's memory.

Jules.

Eight months earlier, Jules had been standing beside Émile on a rooftop in Belleville, photographing the National Guard's assembly. A soldier had walked past, had looked directly at the lens, and Jules had laughed and said, That one will be trouble.

The same man now walked across the ruined basilica floor, his boots crunching over stone dust.

Émile's chest tightened. He had never known what happened to Jules after they were separated outside the Palais Garnier. Only that his colleague had been found in a gutter with his throat cut and his camera stolen. The authorities had called it robbery. Émile had called it murder and had been called a paranoid.

Now the man who had killed him was twenty paces away, unbuttoning his coat against the cold.

Émile followed.

The soldier left the basilica through a gap in the northern wall, heading down a winding street of half-collapsed houses. The bombardment had stopped, or paused, and the silence was worse than the noise. Every footstep sounded like a drum.

The man turned into a narrow alley, then pushed through a low door. A light flickered inside—oil lamps, the smell of cheap wine and woodsmoke.

Émile waited thirty seconds, then approached. The door bore no sign, but he could hear voices now. The murmur of men drinking, the clink of glasses. A tavern for soldiers, the kind of place that would ask no questions and remember every face.

He went in.

The room was low-ceilinged and thick with smoke. A dozen men sat at rough tables, their uniforms marking them as Communards, though their demeanor held a slackness that suggested they had been fighting too long to care who won. The soldier from the firing squad sat at the far end, alone, a bottle of wine already half-empty before him.

Émile took a seat near the door, ordered nothing, and watched.

The man drank like a man trying to forget something. His hands trembled slightly as he raised the glass. Not from fear, Émile thought. From something else. Exhaustion, perhaps. Or guilt.

The barman approached Émile. "You want something or you want to stare?"

Émile placed a franc on the table. "A glass of whatever he's drinking. And a word with him, if he's willing."

The barman looked at the coin, then at Émile, and shrugged. He poured the wine and carried it to the soldier's table, leaning down to murmur something. The soldier's eyes lifted, found Émile, and held.

There was no recognition. No flicker of memory. The man saw only a stranger, perhaps a journalist by his coat, perhaps a deserter by his condition.

Émile raised his glass in a toast.

The soldier hesitated, then raised his own.

Émile crossed the room, his boots loud on the wooden floor. He sat across from the soldier without asking permission.

"You shoot well," Émile said. "Saw you at the basilica."

The soldier's mouth twisted. "It's not a skill worth admiring."

"Maybe not. But you've had practice."

The man's eyes narrowed. "What do you want?"

Émile reached into his coat, pulled out the decoy plate—the overexposed one, worthless—and slid it across the table. The soldier looked at it, confused.

"I'm a photographer," Émile said. "I document things. And I'm looking for a man who killed a colleague of mine. Name of Jules Moret. He was found with his throat cut outside the Palais Garnier."

The soldier's hand stopped mid-reach for his glass.

"Jules Moret," he repeated, the name tasting strange on his tongue.

"You knew him."

"I saw him die." The soldier's voice dropped. "Not by my hand. But I saw him die."

Émile's heart hammered. He kept his face still. "Who killed him?"

The soldier looked around the room, then back at Émile. "If I tell you, I'm a dead man."

"If you don't, you're still a dead man. The Versaillais are shelling this hill. The Commune is executing its own. Your odds are not improving."

The soldier laughed, a humorless sound. "You talk like a man who's already made his peace with dying."

"I've made my peace with a great many things."

The soldier drained his glass, refilled it, drained it again. The wine was working on him now, loosening the seams of his caution.

"What do you know about a photograph?" he asked. "A plate that shows two men meeting. One from Versailles, one from the Commune."

Émile did not blink. "I know something about it."

The soldier nodded slowly, as if confirming something to himself. "That's why Moret died. He developed the plate. He saw what was on it. And the man you're looking for—" he leaned forward, his breath sour with wine, "—he works for Colonel Moreau."

The name hit Émile like a shell blast. He forced himself to breathe.

"Moreau," he repeated.

"You know him."

"I've had the displeasure."

The soldier's eyes flickered to the door. "Moreau wants that plate because it shows him meeting with both Delacroix and de Valois, the leaders of both sides. And it shows him with a third man. A Communard who went missing." He paused. "A man named Luc."

Émile's blood went cold.

"I thought Luc was in prison," he managed.

"Luc was never in prison," the soldier said. "Luc was in Moreau's pocket. He's been missing since the massacre at the Mazas prison because he's the one who arranged it. He's the one who led the prisoners to their deaths—or their salvation, depending on who you ask."

The room seemed to tilt. Luc. The man Émile had risked everything to save. The man whose staged execution had torn Émile's conscience in two. He had been the architect of his own disappearance.

"And you," Émile said slowly, "you killed Jules."

"I did what Moreau paid me to do." The soldier looked at his hands. "Jules developed that plate. He made the mistake of telling the wrong person he had it. Moreau wanted it before it could reach the Commune's leadership."

Émile's hand drifted to the plate in his coat. The true plate. The one Moreau had stolen from him—no, the decoy. Moreau was holding a worthless piece of glass, believing it was the key to his power.

But the soldier was still speaking.

"Moreau doesn't care about the plate itself," he said. "He cares about what it proves. He's been playing both sides from the start. The massacre at Mazas? Staged. The surrender at Montmartre? Staged. He's been manufacturing outrage to keep the war burning. To keep himself indispensable."

"Why?"

The soldier smiled, a thin, broken expression. "Because when both sides are exhausted, the man who can deliver peace will become the man who rules. Or have you not read your history?"

Émile stared at the man across from him. The soldier who had killed his friend. A hired hand in a grander scheme, but still a killer, still a hand that held the blade.

He should kill him. He had a knife in his boot. It would take seconds.

But the soldier was still talking, and Émile needed to know everything before he decided what to do about the man who had murdered Jules.

"Where is Moreau now?" he asked.

The soldier shook his head. "I don't know. He moves between the lines. No one sees him arrive or leave."

"He'll be at the end," Émile said. "When the war is decided."

"Not the end." The soldier's eyes met Émile's. "The beginning. He's waiting for the moment the Commune falls. He'll declare himself the mediator who saved Paris from itself. He'll be the hero of both sides."

The plate in Émile's coat suddenly felt heavier, more dangerous. Moreau had lied to him, manipulated him, and now owned a decoy that he thought was a key. But the true photograph, the one that showed Moreau with Delacroix, de Valois, and Luc—that plate was hidden inside a camera darkroom beneath a ruined church.

And Céleste was waiting there, unaware of the truth they now held.

"One more thing," Émile said. "You said Jules developed the plate. Was it the only copy?"

The soldier frowned. "There was another. Jules made a print, gave it to someone before he died. A messenger. I don't know his name."

Émile thought of Luc. The watch copy. The man who had been Moreau's agent, now vanished.

"Thank you," Émile said, rising. He left the plate on the table—the decoy, worthless to anyone who knew what it truly held. "For your honesty."

The soldier looked at the plate, then at Émile. "You're not going to kill me?"

"That would make me as useful to this war as you are. I want you alive. I want you to remember that you told me everything. When this is over, you'll be asked to repeat it."

The soldier's face went pale.

Émile walked out into the narrow alley, the cold air hitting him like a slap. Above, the sky was lightening, the first gray fingers of dawn stretching over the burning city.

Luc was alive. And Luc was Moreau's man.

The revolution was built on a lie, and the lie had a name.