* * * * *
Aristide left Joubert's shop with five louis in a pouch in his pocket, as partial advance payment, and a request for three essays, of suitable length for duodecimo pamphlets, to be written on the state of France and what might be done about it-in a lively and entertaining manner, to be sure. He and Derville enjoyed a good dinner near the Palais-Royal before he headed southward again for the Left Bank.
A fine, frigid rain was falling by the time he crossed the Pont-Neuf, the Seine below him dark and choked with slabs of river ice. With money in his pocket, he had no great desire to return yet to his cold garret. A house farther east where half a dozen scantily clad, giggling women gazed out the windows soon promised an evening's diversion.
Though he had never considered himself particularly handsome, neither had he lacked willing girls when the mood struck him; at present he was spending the night, once in a while, with a simple, cheerful laundress in the faubourg St. Marcel. But real Parisian sophistication-not to be found in laundresses, milliners, and shopgirls-was tempting, and a house in the Latin Quarter, he reasoned, could not possibly cost as much as one in the Palais-Royal.
The rain abruptly swelled to a sharp shower and he hastily decided which young lady most appealed to his fancy. As he reached the door he felt someone bump up against him, and with a queasy jolt in his belly, found his money pouch was gone.
"Hell!"
He caught sight of a fleeing figure at the end of the street and with a shout pursued him.
In the murky streets of Paris, Aristide soon discovered, people did not pay so much heed to shouts of "Stop, thief!" as they did elsewhere. Heads scarcely turned as he sprinted after the pickpocket, who was rapidly leading him into the ever darker, ever narrower and more tortuous streets that converged upon the seedy Place Maubert. Despite the cloudburst and the treacherous patches of dirty ice that lay here and there, Aristide increased his pace, seeing the distance between them diminish. He sped on, rounded a corner, and promptly cannoned into a shadowy figure in his path, sending them both tumbling to the cobblestones.
Aristide scrambled to his feet, with an oath and a muttered word of apology, and launched himself after the thief, but realized he had lost him. Disgusted, and dripping with slimy mud, he turned back to the stranger.
"What the devil do you think you're doing, you damned fool?" the other man roared. He made a halfhearted attempt to brush himself off. "What do you mean by blundering into a fellow and sending him into the mud? Look at my overcoat!"
With a qualm, Aristide recognized the voice and face as that of his former neighbor, Brasseur, the police inspector. "Forgive me, monsieur," he said, fetching Brasseur's hat from where it had rolled into a torrent of dirty water. "But I've just had my pocket picked, and I don't know my way about this quarter too well-"
"Don't I know you?" the inspector demanded, thrusting out a hand for his hat.
"Your ex-neighbor, Ravel, formerly from the fifth-floor attic."
Brasseur peered at him through the gloom. "So you are. Put out any more fires lately, have you?"
"Only if they were on my person this evening," Aristide said, indicating his dripping coat. Brasseur stared at him for a moment and abruptly burst into a loud guffaw.
"Well, after all, what can you do but laugh?" he exclaimed. He shook himself and spat into the running sewer before them. "Damn these foul streets-Paris mud's like nothing else anywhere. This overcoat's pretty near ruined." The fact did not seem to upset him greatly, for his overcoat and three-cornered hat had seen better days long before their dip in the gutter.
"I would offer you what recompense I could," Aristide said, "if I hadn't just lost a month's worth of earnings-"
"Had your pocket picked, you said?" Brasseur interrupted him. "Hmm, where did it happen?"
"In front of a house on a street paralleling the river-Rue de la Huchette, I think it was."
"Oh, that house. Yes, the cutpurses often hang about there. They profit by the distractions, you know."
"That house," Aristide agreed, embarrassed. "It was distracting?"
"Come with me, lad," Brasseur told him, shaking the water out of his hat and clapping it firmly back on his head. "Let's see if we can't find your purse."
"But?he's long disappeared. I'm afraid my purse is gone for good."
"Maybe not, if you're lucky; maybe not. Come on, let's go back to Rue de la Huchette, the way you came."
Shrugging, Aristide surrendered to his companion's demands. He led the way back, as well as he could remember, along the route he had taken from the brothel. At last Brasseur paused before a church and stood studying it for a moment. "You passed this way, you say?" he asked. "You're sure?"
"Yes, I remember noticing the steps."
"Hmm. Well?" He prowled about the steps for a moment. "Not much in the way of hiding places here?no, wait!" Casting a glance about him like an eager hound, he strode into the alley between two of the tall, rickety houses that huddled about the church. Aristide watched him, completely mystified.
"Were you gaining on him before you ran into me instead?" Brasseur demanded, emerging once more from the depths of the alley.
"I think so; I'm not a bad runner."
"Ah, then I must be right?where the devil?"
"Monsieur inspector," Aristide said, impatient to be on his way to the nearest guardpost, "I thank you for your trouble, but perhaps-"
"Got it!" he exclaimed. Beckoning Aristide on, Brasseur proceeded to the far side of the church, where a barred iron gate closed off a second alley between two sagging buildings. "There."
"There, what?"
"Your purse. Somewhere in the alley, just out of the light." He gestured at the lantern glimmering sullenly overhead from a rope stretched across the narrow street.
"What would my purse be doing in a locked alleyway?"
"Monsieur," he said patiently, "think it out. The pickpocket lifts your purse and runs this way. You follow him at a pretty fair pace, and get him thinking that you have a good chance of catching him and turning him over to the Guard, which means-with you present to testify against him-branding at best, or even hanging if he has a long record. Maybe the sight of St. S?verin here"-he indicated the church-"set his guilty conscience to pricking him. So what does he do? Why, he gets rid of the evidence, of course-but in a way that, if he does lose you, he can return and retrieve the swag at any time he pleases. So he tosses your purse through the nearest iron gate, hoping no one else will find it before he has the chance to creep back here. After all," he added, "collaring him's no good if we don't find the loot on him."
"Isn't that quite a lot of 'maybe'?" Aristide said.
Brasseur sighed and planted his fists on his hips. "My dear young gentleman of letters, you ought to know people better if you're going to write about them. Human nature. All you need to do, to succeed as a thief-taker, is to know how they think, and be smarter than they are. Now if I'm wrong, and you've lost your money, I give you my word I'll make amends, and even forgive you muddying my clothes, by buying you supper."
"All right, then," Aristide said, not altogether convinced. He doffed his overcoat, coat, and hat, thrust them in Brasseur's arms, and clambered up and over the gate-just like climbing a tree in the abbey gardens at school, he thought.
It was black as Paris mud inside the alley. Not far beyond him, a rain gutter emptied itself from four stories above onto the cobbles. He felt his way along, edging past the worst of the torrent from the waterspout, until his foot struck something soft. Eagerly he reached for it, only to find he was clutching a squashy, slimy object that could have been anything from a rotten melon (had it been the season for melons) to a sheep's stomach, or worse. He flung it away with a curse and continued on his quest.
It took him little time to find his purse, once he investigated the sides of the alley more thoroughly. He snatched it up, after ensuring that it was, indeed, a leather pouch and not another handful of offal, and to his pleased astonishment felt the familiar weig
ht of four gold louis and a handful of silver ?cus within. He turned back toward the gate, brandishing his prize overhead, and, giddy with his triumph, stepped directly into the path of the rain gutter.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~