Chapter 13
From a distance, one could almost take Javert and Landot for dear friends heading home after a night of cards or billiards, so affectionately did the taller man's arm seem to drape over the shorter one's shoulder. A slightly closer look, however, showed that Javert's left hand was performing odd and unfriendly motions behind his back: either peeling something away, or ripping something off, or clawing something out. Whatever Landot was telling him, he did not seem to be finding his tale very convincing.
"So! the infamous Jean Valjean," sounded a voice suddenly to his left, and Vidocq had appeared at his elbow, as if condensing on the spot from the summer evening air.
"I am Jean Valjean, yes." How strange it felt to affirm his identity without fear.
"You and Javert. Quite a history between you."
"I suppose."
"How long have you two known each other?"
"About twelve years," Valjean said, deciding to discount their brief acquaintance in the Toulon galleys back in the early days of the Empire.
"Know him pretty well, then?"
"Not really."
"No? But he runs into you on a public thoroughfare, demands you submit to be arrested, and you are ready to go back to the galleys, just like that?"
Valjean shrugged.
"I was tired of running. Besides, I have nothing to live for anymore. I am old and alone. Why not make some cogne happy with the reward for my recapture?"
He avoided mentioning the absurd wave of regret that had washed over him when he learned from the Moniteur that the reward would not go to Javert after all. It had taken him by the throat, as if by ambush; for several days, he found himself unwilling to so much as rise from his cold bed.
"So you two are on moderately good terms, then? No hard feelings? No personal animosity?"
"Not on my side," Valjean said firmly. "The man did his duty. I knew that."
"Tell me," asked Vidocq with curiosity, "how did it happen that you two ran into each other so much? The first time, well, we can chalk that up to coincidence. Who among us hasn't moved up north to be mayor of a small town, only to run into one of his old argousins as the local enforcer? A matter of daily routine, this."
Valjean said nothing. The spy's sarcasm was wearisome. Javert's own needling irony was far less aggravating by comparison.
"But the fact of the matter is," continued Vidocq, "that my Javert swears up and down that he had run into you some half a dozen times in the last few years. You seem to haunt him like a specter. He would see you in some hovel or other, in the face of a passer-by on the street, in a particularly broad silhouette in the evening dark..."
"His powers of observation are indeed prodigious," allowed Valjean with a small smile.
"So there was some truth to it? It was not just his imagination playing tricks?"
"We had run into each other several times, yes. I succeeded in eluding capture, but he always knew me straight away. I could never fool him with any guise."
"That, at least, doesn't surprise me. He has studied your form well," muttered Vidocq cryptically. "But if you had run from him all the times before, why did you surrender now?"
"I am too tired to run any more," replied Valjean. "I am quite old. What would be the point? Another year, another marathon; no end in sight; no peace..."
They turned a corner. There was no longer anyone standing under the broken gas lamp; the other cigarette had long been extinguished. Meanwhile, Javert and Landot were picking up the pace. Javert's arm, extended earlier in comradely support, now dragged its prey mercilessly along the pavement, as if to an inexorably ignoble end. Landot made occasional weak attempts at breaking free. Valjean was already debating whether or not to run up and restrain him, when Vidocq began to speak once more:
"So that last time - how did you come to meet Javert that night a month ago?"
"Morning," Valjean said, distracted by the motion's of Landot's right hand, which seemed to be aiming to reach for something secreted underneath his vest. "It was morning, not night."
"What do you mean, morning?" asked Vidocq, surprised. "He said he found you at dusk by a sewer exit with a half-dead boy on your shoulders."
"He did, but I had first encountered him that day at dawn, when I arrived at the barricade and found him tied up in the tap-room of that café."
Suddenly Vidocq grabbed Valjean's arm hard, forcing him to stop.
"I think you'd better tell me the whole story now," he said quietly. His eyes burned with such a terrible fire that Valjean momentarily forgot all about his intentions of running ahead. "Tied up? in a tap-room? what the devil mean you?"
Valjean explained briefly his sojourn to the barricade and Javert's subsequent near-execution that noon.
"That whoreson," hissed Vidocq when Valjean had finished. "That lying, scheming, suicidal whoreson..."
Ahead of them, someone shrieked.