Author's Note: Throughout the story, height is measured in French feet. One French foot is equivalent to 1.07 English feet.
Author's Note 2: Believe it or not, this fic is sort of based on a true story.
A ray of sunlight pierced the crookedly aligned Venetian shutters and settled squarely on Vidocq's face. The lukewarm tickling sensation made his eyes water and his nose itch. He twitched his nostrils, squeezed his eyelids and sneezed twice, waking up halfway through the second sneeze.
At that instant the old clock upstairs gave a half-hearted chime. Several seconds later, the resonant peal of Palais de Justice made every glass pane in the house vibrate. It was half past three in the afternoon; Vidocq's self-allotted "ten minutes of shut-eye" had lasted a entire hour.
Vidocq pushed his chair back out of the weak, milky sunlight, looked over the now irrevocably dry ink on the sheet in front of him, and glanced out the unwashed window.
Outside in the courtyard birds chirped in their delight at the warm April day, and wind from the river rocked the branches of several sickly maples and birch trees, rustling in their new leaves, which were still only half unfurled from their buds and sticky with sap. The sun had been doing its utmost all day to penetrate the dense gloom of the labyrinth of the Cité, but the skies over Petite Rue Sainte-Anne looked as overcast as usual. But even around the quay des Orfevres, everything that was capable of chirping, blooming or budding chirped, bloomed and budded as hard as it could, in perfect oblivion to the foreign soldiers flooding the streets of Paris, the looming imperative of the Emperor's abdication, and the general crisis of the French Empire.
"Lucky critters," thought Vidocq out loud and reluctantly picked up his quill once again. Unfortunately, clarity of thought, which he had hoped to recover with a short nap, was still absent from his head. Vidocq stared at the two meager paragraphs before him, nibbling thoughtfully on his pen.
The air in the room was intolerably stuffy: the windows had been pasted shut since yesterday afternoon, when the glazier finally deigned to show up with the new window panes. Dust particles whirled about in glittering flocks through beams of diluted sunlight. Now and then, an ancient plank of wood would creak of its own accord somewhere in the house, and the sound would resonate through all three stories like a death groan.
Vidocq was finding the idea of remaining indoors for the rest of the shift more and more intolerable by the minute.
One could perhaps decide to call it a day on the paperwork, he mused, and go off to do something more productive. Like staking out that dram-shop three streets down, for example. It's usually chock full of "firewood" with empty bellies and itchy fingers. Although it is a bit early for the evening crowd. More than a bit early, even. What else was there to do... The witnesses on Rue de Temple still hadn't been interviewed, and it'd definitely be best to get to them before the municipals show up and start waving their truncheons around. But what a devil this Fossard is! Well, it's not the end of things. Patience, surveillance, initiative, that's the ticket. We'll have him in no time.
A movement outside caught Vidocq's eye. Squinting, he half-rose from his chair and looked out the least smudged part of the window.
Someone was advancing down the stone path running through the courtyard: a tall, lanky figure in the modest garb of a worker and with the assured gait of a soldier.
Vidocq pushed his chair in. Now who could that be, he thought bemusedly. I haven't scheduled anyone to come by today... Have I?
There was a firm rap on the door - Vidocq immediately remembered with displeasure that the brass knocker was still lying unscrewed and dismembered in the top drawer of the desk. He picked up his coat from the back of the chair, threw it over his shoulders and reached into the inner side pocket for his old St. Etienne. Adjusting his grip on the smooth, slippery handle under the cloth, he walked up to the door and bent an ear towards the freshly lacquered wood.
Unwanted visitors are never entirely noiseless. Hired bailiffs and warrant officers announce themselves with impatient shuffling and the tapping of heavy canes on the ground; soldiery of the Gendarmerie Royale will cling their bayonets and belch incessantly; and a hired assassin will almost never be able to resist half-cocking and releasing his trigger once or twice as he waits for the victim to throw open the door. But nothing was to be heard from the other side.
"Enter!" exclaimed the intrigued chief of the Parisian secret police.
The inside handle jiggled once, then again, more aggressively. The door remained closed. Vidocq cussed and spat on the floor in frustration. He had forgotten all about the changed locks.
"Wait, I'll open it myself. Touch nothing," instructed Vidocq gruffly and turned the inside handle to make the lock release. The mechanism gave a click - finally, thought Vidocq, something in this dump that's not yet broken, - and the door swung slightly ajar, letting in a mild draft.
Nothing happened. Vidocq waited about ten seconds and then cautiously pushed the door open the rest of the way with the tip of his boot.
The visitor, an unusually tall and thin man, was leaning against a porch support beam with his arms crossed on his chest.
"Why didn't you open the door when I unlocked it?" asked Vidocq, frowning.
"You said to touch nothing," answered the stranger in a hoarse, lightly accented baritone. The massive voice sent tremors of uneasiness throughout Vidocq's gut. It was a voice that did not belong to this century, or even this millennium. It belonged to the times when men in bear-skins got through the winter by slaughtering their neighbors for jerky.
"So I did," agreed Vidocq, adjusting once again his grip on the pistol under his coat, keeping it trained on the visitor's heart. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"
"We had, aeh, made an appointment," said the stranger somewhat apologetically. Somewhere way above Vidocq's head, two intent eyes glinted faintly in the deep shade of the rounded bill of a worn leather cap.
"I do not recall making any appointment for today," said Vidocq.
"It, aeh, wasn't for today," said the stranger. "It was made for quite a while ago. I was, aeh, delayed. The war, you know? I was forced to make a slight detour, as it were, on my way to Paris."
"Do speak plainly, monsieur. Who are you and what business do we have together?" demanded Vidocq.
"Nom d'un chien! Have I really changed that much?" The stranger's smile grew into a beastly leer that stretched the two corners of his mouth outwards instead of upwards. "It's been a while, I concede."
Something stirred in his memory. "Wait a minute, wait just a minute..." mumbled Vidocq, frantically sifting his mental catalog of acquaintances for a similar leer.
The stranger waited patiently, arms crossed on his chest and right foot propped casually over the left ankle. His facial features were difficult to discern: the wide-billed cap cast his face almost entirely in the shadow, with only the massive square jaw protruding out into the daylight. The jaw made languid clockwise oscillations, as if the man were slowly breaking up a wad of chewing tobacco in his mouth.
"Are you from the Prefecture? Did Monsieur Henry send you here?" asked Vidocq uncertainly.
"No," said the owner of the remarkable jaw somewhat petulantly. "I was not sent here by any Monsieur Henry. You sent me here yourself, remember? We met back when you were imprisoned in Toulon. We exchanged some letters after you escaped. In the last one, you promised to make arrangements with Renault to have me discharged from duty so that I could join your team."
The man kept making small pauses between sentences; it almost sounded as though he had gotten unused to speaking French and had to weed grammar mistakes out from his sentences before voicing them.
"Your name?"
"'I'm warning you.'"
Vidocq blinked.
"Come again?" he asked.
The stranger sighed and his back sagged slightly against the support beam.
"When we first met in the year VII," he explained patiently, "you knew me under that appellation: 'I'm warning you.'"
It was as though a small explosion went off in Vidocq's skull. His grip on the pistol loosened and his arm lowered itself as if of its own accord.
"Does this mean my liver is safe for now?" asked the stranger sarcastically, gesturing with his chin in the direction of the hidden pistol. His mind in a jumble, Vidocq yanked off his coat, locked the trigger and shoved the pistol furiously into an outer coat pocket.
"You are three years late," he said hoarsely, not recognizing his own voice.
"I know," patiently admitted the visitor. "That was the start of the conversation, as I recall."
Silence reigned for a few long seconds.
"Aren't you going to invite me in?" the visitor asked curiously.
Whatever possessed you to grow so much? thought Vidocq desperately. Your own mother wouldn't recognize you now!
Instead he said:
"Come inside. Shut the door behind you."