Read Chapter 8: The Brother's Watch

The water had done its work. Cold, filthy, alive with the refuse of a city at war, the Seine had carried him downstream past the Île de la Cité and deposited him, coughing and shivering, on a mudflat near the Quai de la Tournelle. He had crawled ashore like a sewer rat and lain there for long minutes, listening for the sound of boots on the embankment above. Nothing. Only the lapping of water and the distant pop of rifle fire from the direction of the Butte.

The plate was still against his chest. He felt its edges through the sodden fabric of his coat, a hard rectangle of glass and collodion that had become the most dangerous object in Paris.

He knew where to go. A cellar door on the Rue des Bernardins, unremarkable, painted the color of dried blood. He knocked in a rhythm he had not used in months—three quick, two slow. The door cracked open an inch. A single eye surveyed him, taking in the dripping clothes, the wild hair, the desperate cast of his face.

“Émile.” The voice belonged to a man he trusted with his life, which was to say, a man he trusted more than most. The door swung wide. “Get in before someone sees you.”

The cellar smelled of damp stone and tobacco. A single oil lamp burned on a barrel that served as a table. The man who let him in was named Bastien, a printer by trade, a Communard by accident, and a friend by stubborn habit. He was fifty, bald, with the thick forearms of a man who had spent his life pulling ink across paper.

“You look like hell,” Bastien said.

“I feel like the bottom of a boat,” Émile said. He stripped off his coat and wrung it onto the floor. The water that pooled there was gray and rank.

Bastien fetched a blanket and a bottle of rough brandy. Émile took both without thanking him, wrapping the blanket around his shoulders and drinking deep. The brandy burned going down, and for a moment, it was enough.

“You have trouble?” Bastien asked.

“I am trouble,” Émile said. “Have you heard anything today? Anyone looking for me?”

Bastien’s face shifted. Something passed across it, quick and unreadable. “Word travels. The Commune’s police are asking about a photographer. Man on the bridges, man in the water. I did not think it was you until you knocked.”

“It was me,” Émile said. “I was the man in the water.”

Bastien nodded slowly. He did not ask why. That was why Émile had come here. Bastien had learned long ago that questions were a luxury neither of them could afford.

“I need a dry place to think,” Émile said. “A few hours. Then I am gone.”

“You can have the back room. No one comes here except me and the rats.” Bastien gestured toward a curtained doorway at the far end of the cellar. “There is a stove back there. You can dry your things.”

Émile moved toward the curtain, then stopped. Something glinted on the barrel that served as Bastien’s table. A small silver object, catching the lamplight.

A pocket watch.

He knew it at once. He had seen it a thousand times, dangling from his brother’s waistcoat chain, always open, always ticking. Their father had given it to Lucien on his eighteenth birthday, the year before the war with Prussia had swallowed everything. The case was engraved with an ornate L, and the face was chipped in the lower left corner, the result of a fall Lucien had taken as a boy.

Émile’s hand moved toward it, then stopped.

“Where did you get this?”

Bastien’s silence was an answer in itself. He had gone still, the way men went still when they had bad news to deliver and did not know how to begin.

“Bastien.” Émile’s voice was low. “Where.”

“It was left here,” Bastien said. “Two days ago. A boy brought it. A street urchin, the kind who runs messages for anyone with a franc. He said a man paid him to deliver it to this address. Said the man told him to give it to Bastien the printer, and that Bastien would know who it belonged to.”

“The boy. What did he say about the man?”

“Only that he was tall. Dressed well, for the times. Pale eyes. The boy said he spoke like he was used to being obeyed.”

Émile picked up the watch. It was cold in his palm. He flipped open the case, not knowing what he expected to find. The inside was empty—no photograph, no hidden note. Just the worn engraving and the steady tick of the mechanism.

It was still running. Someone had wound it.

“Lucien,” Émile said. The name felt strange in his mouth. He had not said it aloud in months.

“I did not know he was missing,” Bastien said carefully.

“I did not know he was here.” Émile turned the watch over in his hands. “I thought he was in Lyon. He wrote to me in February, said he had found work there, that he was staying out of the fighting. I did not question it. Lucien was never a fighter. He was always the cautious one, the sensible one. The one who stayed out of trouble while I walked into it with my eyes open.”

He laughed, a bitter sound with no humor in it.

“Or so I told myself.”

“Émile.” Bastien hesitated. “There is more.”

Émile looked up. The watch was still in his hand, ticking.

“The boy said the man gave a message. Said to tell the photographer that his brother is waiting for him. Said the photographer would know what to bring.”

Émile’s fingers closed around the watch. The metal pressed hard against his palm.

“I did not know what it meant,” Bastien said. “I did not even know for certain it was about you. For all I knew, it was a trick. I have kept it here, waiting.”

“You did right.” Émile pocketed the watch. It was heavy against his hip, a familiar weight that did not belong there. “My brother is not in Lyon. He has not been in Lyon for some time.”

Bastien’s brow furrowed. “How do you know?”

“Because I know Lucien. He is not cautious, Bastien. He is timid. He is the kind of man who crosses the street to avoid a dogfight. He would never have chosen to be in Paris during a siege.” Émile’s jaw tightened. “Unless he was sent here. Unless someone sent him here.”

“Who would send him?”

Émile did not answer. He was thinking of Lucien’s last letter, the one that had arrived in March, full of careful cheer and nothing at all. He had read it and felt no alarm. Lucien was always careful in his letters, always vague about his work. Émile had assumed it was because his brother did factory work, tedious labor that did not bear describing.

He had never stopped to wonder why Lucien’s letters from Lyon bore no Lyon postmarks. He had never stopped to wonder why they had stopped altogether three weeks ago.

“I need to know what he was doing here,” Émile said. “I need to know who sent him.”

Bastien shifted his weight. “There is a woman. A nurse, from the barricades. She comes sometimes to the market on the Rue Mouffetard. She asks questions, quietly. She was asking about you two days ago.”

Émile’s blood went cold. “A nurse? Tall, dark hair? Carries herself like a soldier?”

“I do not know. I have only seen her from a distance.”

Céleste. If she was asking about his brother, then she knew something. Or she was hunting for something, and Lucien was a way to reach him.

“Lucien was a courier,” Émile said slowly. The words came out before he had fully formed them, but as soon as he spoke, he knew they were true. “That is what he was doing here. He was carrying messages between the two sides. I do not know who he was working for. I do not know if he knew what he was carrying. But that was his job.”

Bastien stared at him. “A courier? Between who?”

“Between the Commune and Versailles. Between men who wanted to negotiate without being seen to negotiate.” Émile thought of the photographs in his darkroom, the images of Delacroix and de Valois meeting in secret. “Men like Raoul Delacroix. Men like the Comte de Valois.”

“Your brother was working for them?”

“I do not know who he was working for. But he was here, Bastien. He was in Paris, in the middle of a war, doing the kind of work that gets men killed.” Émile’s voice cracked, just slightly, on the last word. He steadied it. “And now he is missing. Presumed dead. And someone has left his watch on your table as a message to me.”

Bastien was silent for a long moment. Then he spoke, his voice rough. “What are you going to do?”

Émile looked down at the watch in his hand. It was still ticking. Still keeping time. Still counting the seconds of a life that might already be over.

“I am going to find him,” he said. “But first, I am going to find out who took him. And when I do, I am going to make them wish they had never heard the name Chardin.”

He closed his fist around the watch and felt the cold metal bite into his palm. The brandy was warm in his stomach. The stove in the back room was waiting. But he would not sleep. Not yet.

There was too much to think about.

His brother was alive. Or he had been, recently enough for someone to wind his watch. His brother had been working as a courier between the enemies, which meant his brother had known things. Secrets. The same kind of secrets that Émile had been carrying against his chest for days now.

The same kind of secrets that got men killed.

Émile put the watch on the table. He could see it from where he sat, glinting in the lamplight. He did not take his eyes off it.

“I will need paper and ink,” he said. “And a place to work that cannot be found.”

Bastien nodded. “You have them.”

Émile nodded back. Outside, the city was quiet. The guns had fallen silent, for the moment. But the war was not over. It was only waiting, the way he was waiting, the way his brother’s watch was waiting, ticking away the seconds of a life held in the balance.

He sat down in the chair and began to plan.