Read Chapter 4: The Commissar's Invitation

The summons came at dawn, scrawled on cheap paper and slipped under the door of the room where Émile had spent the night—not his darkroom, not his flat, but the garret of a midwife who owed him a favor. The handwriting was neat, administrative. The seal was the Commune's.

*Citizen Chardin. You are required to present yourself at the Hôtel de Ville at nine o'clock. Failure to appear will be treated as an act of hostility against the people's government.*

Signed, *Raoul Delacroix, Delegate for Public Safety.*

Émile read it twice, then held it over the candle flame until the edges curled black. He had not slept. The plate was still in his coat, wrapped in oilcloth and wedged against his ribs like a second heart. He thought of Jules, of the blood pooling under his assistant's chair, of the note pinned through fabric and skin. Then he thought of Céleste—the calm set of her jaw as she told him she was Versaillais, as if that explained everything.

"Fool," he muttered, and pulled on his coat.

The streets were quiet. Too quiet. The barricades still stood on the great boulevards, manned by National Guards who warmed their hands over braziers and watched him pass with flat, unreadable eyes. Paris had the feel of a held breath. The Commune had been alive for eleven days now, and every day the Versaillais shells fell further into the city. Every day, more Communards died. Every day, the leaders talked of fraternity and shot their own.

The Hôtel de Ville rose ahead of him, its façade scarred by last year's Prussian bombardment, draped now in red flags that hung limp in the still morning air. Guards flanked the entrance, rifles at the ready. Émile gave his name. They did not search him.

They led him through corridors smelling of wax and damp wool, past portraits of dead kings whose gilt frames had been yanked from their hooks and stacked against the walls like firewood. The building had been transformed into a bureaucratic engine—desks in every salon, clerks shouting over typewriters, the clack of heels on marble. And above it all, the smell of gunpowder and fear.

Delacroix's office was a former antechamber of the mayor, still containing a massive ebony desk and a ceiling fresco of cherubs gamboling through clouds. He sat behind the desk like a man who had conquered it, which perhaps he had. Émile had seen him once before, from a distance—the little schoolteacher who had become the Commune's security chief, a man whose thin spectacles and mild face concealed a gift for violence that the newspapers called "necessary."

"Citizen Chardin," Delacroix said, rising. "Thank you for coming."

"Your letter was not an invitation."

"No. I suppose it wasn't." Delacroix gestured to a chair. "Sit. Please."

Émile sat. He kept his hands visible on his knees, the way one does in the presence of a dangerous dog.

"You're known to us," Delacroix said, resuming his seat. "War photographer. Algeria, Crimea, the siege. You documented our city's suffering with great honesty. The Commune respects honest men."

"Your Commune put my assistant's body on the floor of my darkroom."

Delacroix's expression did not change. "We did not kill your assistant. Nor, I suspect, did the Versaillais—not directly. He was tortured for information. Information about you. Both sides wanted it. Someone got to him first, but they did not get your plates."

Émile felt the blood rise in his cheeks. He forced his voice flat. "Whoever came for Jules will come for me."

"Yes," Delacroix said, as if stating a weather report. "But I am offering you a better option. You will work for me."

"And if I refuse?"

Delacroix leaned forward. His eyes, behind the spectacles, were the gray of winter water. "Then I will arrest you as a spy and have you shot before sunset. I will do this without pleasure, but with certainty. You have a photograph, Citizen Chardin. A photograph of a meeting you were not meant to see."

Émile said nothing.

"You may deny it," Delacroix continued, "but I have witnesses. You were on the Rue Royale. You photographed the barricade. And the man who took a shot at you—my man, as it happens—reported that you had a clear line of sight to the window of the Café de la Paix. The window where I conducted a conversation that, if misrepresented, could be very damaging to the unity of the Commune."

Unity. That was a rich word. Émile had seen the Commune's factions tearing at each other—the Jacobins, the Proudhonists, the Blanquists—all squabbling over the corpse of a revolution. And he had seen, through his lens, a security chief shaking hands with a Versaillais officer.

"I don't know what you're talking about," Émile said.

Delacroix smiled then, and the smile was worse than the threats. "Let me be clear, Citizen. I am not asking you to hand me the photograph. I am asking you to help me find it—or, rather, to help me ensure it never appears. There are those within the Commune who would use such evidence to destroy me. There are those among the Versaillais who would use it to paint me as their agent. I am neither. I am a man trying to keep a doomed experiment alive for one more day, and I will strangle any man who shortens that day."

He rose and came around the desk. His steps were light, almost feminine. He stopped before Émile and looked down at him.

"I do not believe you destroyed it," Delacroix said. "Men like you don't destroy photographs; they hoard them. You will find it, and you will bring it to me. In exchange, I will see that your name is removed from the lists. Both lists. I will give you a pass, signed by me, that will get you through any checkpoint in the city. And I will guarantee your safety."

"My safety," Émile repeated. "You can't guarantee the sun will rise."

Delacroix laughed. It was a thin, dry sound. "No. But I can guarantee that the sun will not rise on your corpse. Take the bargain, Citizen. Or take the bullet. Those are your only options."

Émile looked past Delacroix, at the cherubs on the ceiling. They seemed to be laughing at him. He thought of the plate in his coat—seventeen grams of glass and silver emulsion, two men shaking hands, a secret that could topple a government or, more likely, simply get him killed. He had no intention of giving it to Delacroix. He had no intention of giving it to anyone. But he needed time. Time to think, time to move, time to disappear from Paris before the Commune fell and the Versaillais came in to shoot everyone who had ever owned a red flag.

Beside the plate, in the same oilcloth, was something else. A second plate, unrecorded, that he had not yet developed. He had hidden it because hiding was instinct, but he still did not know what it held. If it was the same meeting from another angle, it was redundant. If it was something worse—

"I'll help you," Émile said.

Delacroix's brows rose. "So quick?"

"I have no desire to die for a plate of glass. I kept it—I won't deny that much—but I don't know where it is. Someone took my equipment after Jules was killed. The plate may have fallen into other hands."

Delacroix studied him, looking for the lie. Émile let him look. The lie was well-made, and Émile had spent a lifetime perfecting such constructions. The man could not see the oilcloth against his ribs.

"Where did you keep your plates?" Delacroix asked.

"My darkroom on Rue de la Chapelle. And a second, in the cellar of a building near the Luxembourg—a safe house I used during the siege."

"Then that is where we will begin. You will be accompanied by one of my men."

"I work alone."

"Not anymore." Delacroix returned to his desk and withdrew a sheet of paper from a drawer. He wrote for a moment, then held it out. A pass, stamped with the Commune's seal. "This will protect you. Use it well. And when you find the plate, do not be foolish."

Émile folded the pass into his coat pocket without reading it. He rose, and the chair scraped against the marble. His hand was near his chest, pressing lightly against the oilcloth. He could feel the broken corner of the glass plate through the fabric.

"There is one other thing," Delacroix said, as Émile reached the door.

Émile paused.

"I know about the woman," Delacroix said. "The one who bandaged your arm on the Rue Royale. Céleste Aubert. She is on the Versaillais payroll. The question is whether she is also in your bed."

Émile kept his face still. "She's a fighter. She was at the barricade."

"Yes," Delacroix said. "And in my experience, Citizen, the people who appear at barricades are rarely there for the revolution. They're there for revenge, or profit, or something else entirely. If she contacts you again, I want to know."

"She won't."

"She will." Delacroix smiled his thin smile. "Everyone returns to their work, Citizen. Even photographers. Even spies. The only question is which side they choose when the hour comes."

Émile left. The corridors were longer than they had seemed on the way in. The cherubs followed him with their painted eyes. And when he stepped out into the gray morning, he did not go to the Rue de la Chapelle.

He went to find a woman who had ruined his life by saving it, to ask her exactly whose bed she was in.