The Black Tower Read Free

I think, staring in wonder. Growing new appendages .
    “See here, my good fellow, I don’t know what you’re up to….”
    He pays me no mind, he’s too busy dragging his hands across his face—and taking Bardou’s face right with it.
    And why stop there? Why not yank the white hair straight off his head, like a bird molting in a single stark second?
    There he stands, the brazen nestling. Hair: a damp sward of chestnut. Mouth: wryly puckered. Grayish blue eyes presiding over a voluptuous nose. And, most troubling of all, the faintest trace of a scar on his upper right lip.
    “You should—you should be aware,” I stammer. “There’s a guardhouse. Not two blocks away.”
    The stranger smiles into the handkerchief that is even now smeared with the remains of Bardou, and in a suave and strange voice, he says: “Four.”
    “Pardon?”
    “ Four blocks,” he insists, with a priest’s patience. “Corner of Cho-lets and Saint-Hubert. We can go there right now if you like.”
    And then comes the most remarkable transformation of all. He straightens. No. That doesn’t begin to describe it. He grows . As though he’s suddenly discovered another five inches of spinal column and is unfurling it to a previously unguessed length. Before my eyes, the tiny old cripple from the street corner has become a strapping man of five and six. Square and proud and blunt, built along geological lines, with thick strata of muscle bleeding into outcroppings of fat—and the fat somehow bleeding back into muscle, so that he remains an indissoluble unit, a thing of bestial power, shaking you down to your larynx.
    “I must ask you to leave this house right now,” I say. “You have—you have presumed far enough on my charity….”
    There may be a tremor in my voice, but I wouldn’t know. I can only hear the stranger’s dry muttering undertone:
    “Call that a macaroon…paving stone, more like it…what does he think he’s…” And then rising to his own declamation: “Christ, don’t you have something to wash it down with?”
    His eyes light on a bottle of half-drunk wine on the buffet. Wrenching the cork free, he grabs a glass from the china cabinet, holds it skeptically to the light (eczema spots of dirt appear from nowhere, as though he’s called them into being), and then decants the wine with great care into the glass, running his truffle nose round the rim.
    “Better,” he says, after a couple of sips. “Beaune, is it? That’s not half bad.”
    And me, I’m…looking for weapons. Amazing how few come to hand. A couple of butter knives. A candlestick. Maybe Charlotte left the corkscrew in the drawer? How long would it take to find? How long to…
    But every last calculation ceases the moment he says:
    “Please, Dr. Carpentier. Have a seat.”

CHAPTER 2
Death of a Potato
     
    J UST LIKE THAT , he’s disarmed me. And for one excellent reason: He has called me Doctor .
    In these early days of the Restoration, no one thinks me worthy of that title, least of all me. And so, even as I lower myself into one of the dining chairs, I am rising toward that Doctor . Striving, yes, to be worthy.
    “Well now,” I say. “You know my name, and I have not yet had the honor of—of being introduced.”
    “No, it’s true,” he concedes.
    He’s on the prowl now—sniffing, inspecting—compromising everything he touches. The rectangular fruitwood table with its matted surface. The clouded, chipped carafes. The scorch marks on the ivory lampshade. Everything, under his touch, gives off a puff of meanness.
    “Aha!” he cries, running his finger down a stack of blue-bordered plates. “Made in Tournai, weren’t they? Don’t look so ashamed, Doctor. There’s nothing like convict labor to keep the porcelain cheap.”
    “Monsieur. I believe I have already begged the honor of knowing your name.”
    His merry eyes rest on me for a second. “You have, indeed, and I do apologize. Perhaps you know of a man called…”
    And here his