"Untie the gentleman!" ordered Javert. "And let no one go out!"
As the soldier jumped to the task, Javert sat down at the table. There was a single candle on it, and an inkstand, but no paper.
Javert drew from his pocket an arrest form, stamped but otherwise blank. The introductory sentences of such a text never vary from arrest to arrest; therefore, conscientious policemen take care to add this preamble to forms ahead of time, to avoid dragging out what is usually a tiresome and sometimes a brutally exhausting undertaking.
Javert had neglected to fill in those lines a priori.
Had he been accompanied by anyone else from his commissaire's office, this would have been remarked upon as highly irregular. Javert was as irreproachable in his commitment to efficiency in paperwork as he was in every aspect of his job.
However, the agents of the police with him belonged to other precincts, and the soldiers he had commandeered for the operation knew nothing of these little technicalities of the police trade.
"What miserable light," muttered Javert, casting a glance around the garret. A miserable smell hung around as well, - like badly charred beef stew, only somehow more nauseating.
Javert's eyes paused briefly over the fireplace, where a brazier stood filled with glowing coals; then over the sergeant still laboring over the knots of the rope binding the foot of the elderly white-haired victim of the night's escapade.
The man seemed to be insensate to the commotion around him, sitting as still and as erect as a statue while the soldier huffed at his feet.
With his eyes still on the bed and its preoccupied duo, Javert pulled open the desk drawer, discovering in it a thin stack of coarse yellow paper weighed down by a kitchen knife. Its steel edges seemed clean, but the sight of it turned Javert's stomach. Drawing several sheets of paper from underneath the blade, Javert shut the drawer again and motioned for two police agents to come to him.
"Delisle, Corbin - come hold these as reflectors for me."
The agents stepped forward and received from Javert two sheets of paper, which he instructed them to hold up and around the candle in a sort of reflective barrier. Now its meager light fell wholly upon the arrest form on the table, consigning the corner with the bed to shadows tinted red by the coals of the fireplace.
For several minutes, Javert's pen scratched away, almost drowned out by the ambient noise of irregular breathing from the captured men, occasional quiet words from the arresting officers, careless clanging of handcuffs and sabers, and every other disturbance that can be expected from a crowd of fourteen policemen and seven rogues. For all that no one spoke, the garret, with its darkness, noise, and smoky atmosphere, made the impression of a packed theatre where the raising of the curtain had been delayed, and the audience had taken to shifting in their seats and conversing under their breath.
The preamble finally written, Javert raised his eyes almost imperceptibly and pronounced: "Let the gentleman whom these gentlemen bound step forward."
No one moved. Javert straightened out in his seat. The police agents began to glance around them.
"Well?" said Javert, stretching out his neck to peer into the shadows. "Where is he?"
The soldier who had been engaged in untying the man and who was now standing with his back to the bed whirled around and beheld the bed empty. The prisoner had disappeared.
An agent made his way to the window and looked out.
There was no one outside, but the rope ladder was still moving slightly in the winter wind.
"The devil!" exclaimed Javert. "That one must've been the best of the lot."
The statement from the victim having proved impossible to collect, Javert ordered his squad and the sergeants to take the prisoners down to the fiacres.
On his way out, the last of the agents in line to cross the threshold to the stairs was moved to glance over his shoulder and saw a peculiar thing: Javert was crouched by the hospital bed in the corner and appeared to be searching for something on the floor. The young agent was about to offer assistance, when he heard Javert exhale a small but triumphant "ah!" and saw him pluck something from between the floorboards.
The cab rocked slightly with the substantial new weight.
"I believe this is yours," said Javert, proffering a sou coin to the white-haired man now sitting next to him.
The man accepted the coin without a word and put it in the pocket of his threadbare yellow coat. "Are you going home now, or to the Prefecture with me?" asked Javert.
"To Rue de l'Homme Armé," said the man after a pause. "I would be of no use at the Prefecture right now. And it is perhaps not the best time to show up back home."
Javert lowered the glass and dictated the address to the driver. The fiacre started unhurriedly. The men sat in silence as gaslight after gaslight cast their faces now in light, now in shadow. "Pondering how low you've fallen?" Javert finally teased, casting a look at his neighbor. "From a mayor, an industrialist, a venerated philanthropist, to a police agent, skulking in the shadows, climbing out of windows - at your venerable age…"
The man exhaled once and inhaled once. It was a laugh, but the lugubrious laugh of a spectre. "Valjean, art thou well?" asked Javert in a low voice, bending over the man and placing a hand on his arm.
The man moaned and shrank from his touch.
"Pardon me," he muttered, giving Javert a forced smile. "I am a mite sore from the exertion. Thank you for not questioning me up there. And the sou. It is a handy little thing. I would have been sorry to lose it. Did anyone see you search for it?"
"What is wrong with your arm?" asked Javert with narrowed eyes, letting the man's babbling pass unanswered.
"Nothing, it is nothing."
"Take off your coat."
"I merely…"
"Off with it."
Javert reached to slide the man's arm out of the sleeve without waiting for permission or acquiescence. "What is this?" he said with quiet fury as he beheld the man's bloodied shirt sleeve.
"Nothing, a mere stupidity," said the man, attempting to shield the spreading red patch with his large hand.
"Let me see."
"There is no need…"
"I order you to let me see. This is not your provincial shithole of a realm. I am leading this dance, not you. As your superior, I order you to let me see."
Javert pulled off the man's hand and raised the sleeve. The man submitted but turned away his head to avoid Javert's gaze.
The passing gas lamps illuminated a fresh angry hole of a wound, seeping gore and with the skin charred around the edges.
For a few long seconds, there was silence in the cab. Then, all of a sudden, Javert bent low over the man's arm and inhaled harshly through his nose.
"So that was you," he said with a dull fury. "That stench of… meat…"
"I told you not to look," the man chided quietly, pulling the sleeve back down and holding it over the wound, to keep it from dripping on the Utrecht velvet of the cab seats.
"Which one of them did it?" asked Javert, his knuckles white around the head of his cane.
"No one," said the man firmly. "I told you - it was a stupidity. I did this, myself."
"You are lying. Why? To protect one of them? Valjean, these men do not deserve your clemency!"
"There is no clemency. I did this, to myself. It was a play for time. They were about to pounce on me - it was a way of holding them back without resorting to violence. It was stupid, but I was becoming desperate. Be angry with me, not with them."
"Time!" growled Javert. "A play for time! oh! I will kill him."
"Whom?"
"That pup of a lawyer." Javert wiped roughly at his face with his huge hand. "That coward of a milksop that lives across the partition…"
"Don't blame him either. I should have shouted."
"Shouted! Into what? The wasteland on the side of the window? the walled-off palisades?" Javert sagged forward in his seat, his face in the heels of his hands and his elbows propped on his knees. "I gave that idiot two pistols for a reason - you could've screamed your lungs raw, and I wouldn't have heard you from the street! Dame! Serves me right for trusting him."
"Don't worry so much." The man reached over with his left hand and gripped Javert's shoulder. "I will be fine."
"Fine! with a hole burned in your arm with a coal! 'fine'!"
"It was a chisel."
Javert sagged even further into his hands with a groan.
"Cosette will take care of me," went on Valjean, still rubbing the shoulder under his left hand. This time, he thought to himself with a growing chill. But what of the time after that?
"So why are you going to Rue de l'Homme Armé?" asked Javert angrily. "Is she there now?"
"I will return home tomorrow."
"Why? Why tomorrow? Why should you spend the night shivering in that unheated rat-hole, with no one to bind your arm or give you a drink of water?"
"You know why. I cannot show myself to Cosette like this - in the middle of the night, dirty, exhausted, with a wound. She would ask questions. It is hard enough for me to dodge them on normal days, coming and going as I do at every hour of the day. I can't give her more grounds for suspicion. She can't know what I do. I see no shame in it, you know this - but she must marry eventually, and I cannot have her be tainted by this life I lead. Any part of it. The past or the present."
The cab had meanwhile rolled to a stop. Valjean opened the door. To his surprise, Javert climbed out after him and paid the cabbie.
"It is not so far from here to the Prefecture," he said, not meeting Valjean's eye. "I hope you have bandages, because if you do not, that shirt is a lost cause."
End Notes: Written for the Valvert Gift Exchange, prompt #17: "Valjean, instead of being hunted by Javert after Arras, became a Surete agent (explain it or not - your choice). When Valjean is attacked by Thenardier's gang (either in the Gorbeau house or on the street - your choice), it is really a planned sting, the cumulation of a combined effort between Javert and Valjean to bring the gang down."
Gift by: axmxz
Gift for: spiderfire47