"Wait! Mademoiselle! What should we tell. . . ."

She coils herself back round.

"Tell your master that Jeanne-Victoire has held up her end. Now it's his turn."

CHAPTE R 3 6.

Vidocq's Confessional Booth "S he said TH A T ?" Vidocq asks.

I nod.

"Oh, the little polecat," he murmurs. "But wait a bit, did Herbaux

really call you Doctor?"

"He knew who I was, I tell you. He knew who Charles was, too." "Hm."

Fissures darken his forehead, and he says nothing for a good long

time. Then, sounding almost insanely cheerful, he says:

"Let's go shake some fruit off Herbaux's tree, shall we? You know,

it isn't many civilians get to see an interrogation. I should charge you

admission, Hector."

A nd so I lea rn just what it means to be a suspect. Vidocq walks me through the cellar of Number Six and into an antechamber, where I find, scattered across a table, the tools of the torturer's trade-leg irons, leather whips, iron manacles-and, hanging on the walls, a painting of a cadaver swinging from a gibbet, another of a guillotine slicing through a neck. By the time we enter the interrogation room, I'm ready to confess every sin I've ever committed and some I haven't.

Herbaux, by contrast, seems to have resigned himself to death. His head is bowed from the moment we come in, and to all queries he makes no reply-until, jerking his head up, he bares his teeth at us.

"I'm going to hang anyway. What do I get by talking to you?" Vidocq rests his hands lightly on Herbaux's ox shoulders. "You've got a friend, don't you? "

The smallest tightening in the prisoner's jaw.

"I think you met him in La Force. Oh, what's the boy's name?

Wettu, that's it. Pretty thing. What I hear, he only made it out alive because he had a nice big rooster looking out for him. Now if for some reason he should find his way back there-without you to protect him-oh, I shudder, Herbaux, I really do."

Vidocq walks his fingers up the back of the prisoner's neck. His voice grows petal light.

"Such soft skin Wettu has. Such a white throat."

The manacles round Herbaux's feet rattle like a box of coins. He starts to rise, but Vidocq presses him back down.

"Although I suppose he could always find himself another rooster. . . ."

And now Herbaux sags in his chair, as if he'd been cudgeled a thousand times over.

"What do you want to know?" he says.

Vidocq settles back in his chair. "Tell me about this Monsieur," he says.

I t began, says Herbaux, not two days after he escaped from La Force. He was holed up in Wettu's apartment in the Rue Jacquelet when a porter arrived with a note, addressed to him.

"A porter? Did you know him?"

No.

"You weren't suspicious ? "

Sure he was. But it couldn't hurt to have Wettu read it. "What did it say?"

Meet me at three-thirty, in the confessional booth at Saint-Sulpice,

the one nearest the baptistry. You'll get two louis for showing up-a great deal more after. Signed, Monsieur.

"Don't suppose you kept the note, did you?"

Burned it.