Revolution (40 page)

76

T
he same chords. Over and over. Never progressing.

Amadé’s sitting at one end of the table. I’m at the other end trying to get him to talk to me.

“You want me to say I’m sorry? I’m not sorry. I’d do it again.”

He doesn’t reply.

I left the Temple after the guard hit me. I got new strings, then went to the Palais and played. My drunken friend was there. He called me Pocahontas again. Said he liked the blood on my face, that it made me look even wilder. I told him I’d gotten splattered when I scalped the last idiot who tried to grope me. I told him I’d scalp him, too, if he put his hands on me again.

He’d pressed his hand to his heart, told me he loved me, and threw money in my guitar case. And this time I snatched it up before the blind kid did. I bought food, and a bone for Hugo, and half a pound of coffee. It cost the earth but I knew I wasn’t getting back into Amadé’s rooms without it.

“He’s a child, Amadé. Alone and dying,” I tell him now.

“Say one more word about it and I’ll throw you out.”

“Go ahead. I’ll take my coffee with me.”

He glares at me.

“He’s cold and hungry. Suffering in the dark.”

“That’s not so. He’s well looked after.”

“He’s sick and he’s in pain and he’s been that way for years, Amadé. For
years
”

“How do you know this?”

“Books. Dozens of them will be written on the Revolution. Hundreds. Two centuries after it happened people will still be trying to understand it.”

“The Revolution is past. It’s done with. Over.”

I start laughing. “It’s never over. You had a king. In another year or two you’re going to get another one.”

“What happens?”

“I told you. Bonaparte takes over. Has himself crowned emperor. Which is exactly what you all fought to get rid of. He wages war on the world. Screws everything up. Big-time.”

“I meant to the boy.”

I look away.

“If you know so much, tell me what happens to him.”

“He dies,” I say quietly.

Amadé snorts. “Then why are you bothering? What’s the use?”

I can’t answer him.

“You’re mad. Perhaps it’s from the fall you took. Perhaps you always were mad. I don’t know. What I do know is that you must never again do what you did today. They’ll kill you next time.” He stops speaking abruptly, looks as if he’s weighing his words. Then he says, “You must also stop what you do at night.”

“Um … what do I do at night? Snore?”

He brings his fist down on the table, startling the hell out of me. “This is no joke!” he shouts. “There is a bounty on your head! General Bonaparte wants you dead! You must stop setting off the fireworks, or you soon will be.”

I don’t get it. Not at all. And then I do.

“Wait a minute,” I say, laughing. “Amadé, you don’t think
I’m
the Green Man, do you?”

He doesn’t answer right away. He just stares at me. After what seems like a really long time, he says, “Why do you think I helped you? Took you in? Kept you off the streets so the guards would not find you? I guessed who you are when first I met you in the catacombs. From the key around your neck. I saw the
L
on it. For Louis, the orphan in the tower. He’s the one for whom you light the rockets, isn’t he?”

“No, Amadé, you’re wrong. I’m not—”

He doesn’t let me finish. “And then today, at the Temple. If I had any doubts, what you did there took them away. I knew you for the Green Man then. You risk your life for the child. You light up the sky so that he will know he is not forgotten.”

“Look, I’m
not
the Green Man. I swear to God I’m not.”

He shakes his head, disgusted. He puts his guitar down and goes to the mantel. There’s a wooden box sitting on top of it. He takes something out of it and places it on the table in front of me. It’s a small ebony frame that contains two miniature portraits. They show a man and a woman, regal and elegant, both holding roses. I’ve seen them before. They’re in the portrait of Amadé, the one hanging in his house near the Bois de Boulogne. The plaque on the wall next to the portrait said they were thought to be Amadé and his fiancée, but looking at them now, I’m not so sure.

“Who are they?” I ask him.

“The Comte and Comtesse d’Auvergne. My parents,” he says.

“Amadé, you’re a noble?” I say, stunned.

He nods.

“But the books … they don’t say that. They just say you came to Paris in 1794.”

“I do not know of which books you speak, but yes, I came to Paris in 1794. I had no choice,” he says.

He sits down then and tells me how they lived—his father, his mother, and him—in an ancient château in the countryside of Auvergne. It was beautiful there. He was happy. His parents were both musical and saw to it that he, too, studied music. He had lessons on the piano, the violin, and the guitar from a very young age. He showed great promise and was composing by the time he was eight. There were plans for him to go to Vienna to further his studies shortly after his fourteenth birthday. In the autumn of 1789.

“A few months before I was to leave, however, my father, as a member of the nobility, was summoned to a meeting of the Three Estates at Versailles. I put off my trip—just for a few weeks, or so I thought—so my mother would not be alone. It was the beginning of the revolution. And the end of my family,” he tells me.

“What happened?” I ask, dreading his answer.

“Like many of the nobility, my father supported the reforms the revolutionaries were demanding,” he says. “The country was bankrupt. The old regime was corrupt. France needed change and he saw that. However, after the attacks on the Tuileries, after the massacres, he’d had enough. He realized a monster had been created but it was too late to kill it. At the end of the year, the king was put on trial. Nearly all the delegates voted for his death. It was suicide to vote for clemency, but my father did it anyway. He was always loyal to his king. My family had a motto. It was on our coat of arms. It said—”

“From the rose’s blood, lilies grow.”

“You know the motto?” he asks me, surprised.

“Yes, I do,” I reply. I know it from the Auvergne coat of arms hanging in the stairwell at G’s house.

“My father was called a monarchist, a traitor to the Revolution. A few days after the king’s death,” he says, “my family’s property was confiscated. The revolutionaries took everything. Lands and buildings that had been granted to my ancestors by Henry I in the eleventh century. My father and mother were jailed. I went to my father the night before his trial. He told me where he’d buried some gold coins. And then he told me that no matter what I might hear at the trial, I had his love always. In this world and the next. ‘Live, beloved son.’ Those were his last true words to me.”

Amadé pauses here and stares into the fire. A bit of time goes by before he starts talking again. “As the son of a traitor, I should have been tried myself and probably would have been, but in the middle of his own trial my father suddenly stood up and denounced the Jacobin officials conducting the trial, the Revolution, all of it. Then he turned to me. He called me a filthy Robespierrist and a traitor to the king. He said I was no longer his son. He called me liar and bastard.

“I was shocked. I argued with him. Shouted at him. All in front of the Jacobin judges, the entire tribunal. Which was exactly what he intended. His words had been lies, every one, but those lies saved my life. I was never charged with anything, never tried. After my father’s trial, the chief prosecutor, a greasy Jacobin with dirty boots and black teeth, moved into our house. A house where kings had stayed. Where writers and painters and musicians—the finest of their day—had stayed …”

His words trail off.

“And your parents?” I ask. “What happened to them?”

“They were guillotined. In the village square like common criminals. I was forced to watch.”

“Oh, Amadé,” I whisper.

His eyes are wet with tears now. “I left Auvergne for Paris. Changed my name. It used to be Charles-Antoine. I dug up the gold my father spoke of before I went. It kept me for a while. I knew how to play and compose, so I wrote pieces for the theater. Light, silly things, yet without them I would have starved. But I find I can no longer write them. I can write nothing at all. I try, but pretty melodies sicken me now. My heart, my soul, all of me grieves. For my parents, for our lost life, for this country—” His voice cracks. He covers his face.

My heart is breaking for him. I reach across the table and try to take his hand, but it’s knotted into a fist and he won’t open it. So I get my guitar instead and start to play. I play Bach’s Suite no. 1.

After a few minutes, he picks up his guitar and joins me. The sadness is so deep, and words have failed us, but the music … the music speaks. I stumble a few times, as I always do on this piece. Amadé stops playing. He wipes the tears from his cheeks, then shows me how he fingers the notes. I follow him. It works.

We finish Bach. I play “Rain Song” for him next because I know he likes Jimmy Page’s guitar. He listens once. The next time, he can almost follow me, and after playing it through two more times, he’s got it. He plays brilliantly. I totally suck next to him.

I do “Bron-Y-Aur,” the nonstomp version. “Ten Years Gone,” “Over the Hills and Far Away,” “Stairway,” and “Hey Hey What Can I Do?”

We stop a lot. So I can tap out a beat for him or repeat a riff. So he can tweak my grip or show me how to unmuddy a tricky chord. We play for hours. Zepp and more besides. Sad songs in minor chords. Until it gets dark, and then after. We light candles. Forget to eat.

And later, much later, when we finish, he takes my face in his hands and kisses my cheeks.

“Be careful,” he says. “You cannot right the wrongs of this wretched world. My father tried and look what happened to him. Do not take such chances as you did at the prison today. Do not set off your fireworks again.”

“But Amadé—”

“Do not deny it. I’ve guessed who you are. Pray, my friend, that Bonaparte does not.”

And then, tired and hurting, he goes to bed. I play on a bit longer, knowing that the sounds will help him keep out the bad thoughts, the hard memories. When I finally hear him breathing deeply, I stop. I stare out of the window for a bit, into the darkness, thinking.

I think about Amadé, about all the things he told me—how he saw his parents die, how he left his home and changed his name. How he can’t write music anymore.

I think about Alex. About her last diary entry. Scrawled. Unfinished. Stained with her blood. Shoved into her guitar case just before the guards came. Or before she bled to death.

I hear Orléans’ voice in my head, ancient and arrogant, telling her that nothing changes, that the world goes on, stupid and brutal.

And then I hear her voice, quiet and clear:
Once you were brave. Once you were kind. You could be so again
.

I make my way to Amadé’s bed, reach under it, and pull out a bundle wrapped in linen—Fauvel’s bundle. I carry it back to the table; then, one by one, I carefully pack the rockets into my empty guitar case. Then I close the case, take a pack of matches from my bag, and quietly let myself out into the night.

77

T
he night sky is filled with clouds. I can’t see the stars.

“This is why, isn’t it, Alex? This is why I’m here,” I whisper to the darkness. “To finish it.”

She can’t answer me, though. She’s dead.

Where do the shafts go? I wonder, staring at a rocket. Is this waxy stuff the fuse? What happens if I fall off this roof? I guess it would be a quick way down. Quicker than the six flights of stairs I just walked up.

I stick the shaft in the bottom of the rocket and hope for the best. Then I stretch forward out of my perch, near the peak of a roof, in the crook of a chimney, on top of a house in the Rue Charlot, and stick the shaft between two roof tiles. I light a match and hold the flame to the fuse. It catches and burns. The rocket starts sparking. But nothing happens. It just sits there.

It’s not going anywhere. It’s farting sparks but it’s not moving. And it’s crammed with gunpowder.
Gunpowder
. It’s going to catch fire any second and explode like a bomb and blow the roof off this house. And me with it.

But then there’s a whoosh of air, and it’s gone. Gone! I can see its bright comet’s tail rising into the darkness. Up it goes. Higher and higher. And then suddenly there’s a terrifying boom and then up above me, like a miracle, a million tiny twinkling lights are hanging in the sky.

“Ha!” I yell out loud.

And then I high-five the air and lose my balance and fall forward onto the downslope of the roof. A tile cracks under my hand, slides down, and falls. I hear it shatter on the street below. I dig in with the heels of my hands and push myself back up.

I’m shaking so hard I can barely light the next match, but I do it. I light the next rocket, too. As fast as I can. I know I have to be done and gone before the guards get here.

There’s another thundering boom. And then another. The rockets are exploding. They are breaking the night apart, cracking open the darkness.

He can hear it. I know he can. Even the Temple’s thick stone walls cannot keep out the sound. And he can see it. Oh, I hope he can see it. Because if he sees it, he will know that someone remembers. That he is not alone. That a hundred million stars are sparkling in the darkness. For him.

I held Truman’s hand at the end. I knelt down in the street. In the blood. I pushed the cops aside and grabbed his hand. And I saw it. Before it went out forever. I saw the light in his eyes. One last time.

Turn away. From the darkness, the madness, the pain
.
Open your eyes and look at the light
.