Chapter 369: News from France

Chapter 365 – News from France
In the small cafe by the roadside, Arthur found a seat by the window and casually ordered some baked crème brûlée, crème brûlée and Mont-Blanc and other small French desserts.

Not long after the desserts were served, Arthur saw a large gentleman with shiny greasy hair push open the door of the cafe.

Wind chimes fluttered and with them came the sound of Arthur raising his hand in greeting.

“Mr. Coconut Tree, you are as youthful and beautiful as ever after such a long time.”

Coconut Tree saw Arthur and walked over with his small leather bag, he joked as if mocking himself, “Luckily you came alone today, if I let me see that friend of yours again, I’ll have to make him rub my steel plate-like pectoral muscles.”

After Coconut Tree said this, she took a look at a few small desserts on the table, “You’ve gone to quite a bit of trouble, but to be honest, these small desserts taste good though. But the meals I miss the most are still those pies still covered in grass dust that I used to eat every day after work when I wasn’t rich and found an inferior tavern with my old buddies.”

Arthur was in no hurry to cut to the chase.

Ever since his encounter with Mr. Vidocq, he had been trying to recruit the legendary detective and his team.

Although the current Scotland Yard’s Criminal Investigation Department had already completed the process from scratch in Arthur’s hands, when it came to the utilization and management of the detective department, there should be no one better than Vidocq in this world.

And in the course of his exchange of correspondence with Vidocq over the past year or so, Arthur’s respect for this fifty-something year old French gentleman was still deepening.

Whether it is Vidocq’s pioneering ballistics, physical evidence and other modern policing techniques, or the Parisian plainclothes detective team under his command that applies make-up and disguise to the point of perfection and easily puts Parisian dissidents under surveillance, or the secret files of the Security Department that record all the Parisian underground criminal organizations, they are all the things that make Arthur’s mouth water.

It can be said that if Vidocq is willing to come to London to find another job, Arthur can now delegate the command of the Criminal Investigation Department in its entirety to this grandmaster of the detective industry.

Perhaps a capable and restless fellow like Vidocq would be a headache for the chiefs of the Greater Paris Police Department.

But for Arthur, the rootless duckweed of Scotland Yard, watching Vidocq make it big in Scotland Yard is not a good thing. After all, with his personal power, it is really difficult to compete with the original shares of Scotland Yard – the senior officers from the Army.

He had merely made a trip to Liverpool, and Director Rowan had nearly taken his lair by the scruff of the neck.

If Viscount Melbourne, the Home Secretary, hadn’t been mindful of Lord Brougham, the Lord Chancellor’s feelings, it’s not unlikely that Arthur would have been able to carry his bag and completely move his front line from Scotland Yard to the newly formed London District Attorney’s Office in a while.

But, as the old saying goes, there is no such thing as a sixty-year Prince, so naturally there can be no such thing as a sixty-year Chancellor.

Although Lord Brougham was ostensibly very secure in his position as Lord Chancellor, anyone familiar with the political landscape of Britain knew that a radical like Brougham would not be able to stay in a high position for long under normal circumstances.

The reason why he can become Chancellor at this time is only the Whig Party in order to promote parliamentary reform and then stabilize the ruling position of the expedient.

This is not only true for Lord Brougham, but also for the present Prime Minister, Earl Grey.

Once the parliamentary reforms are completed and these two radicals still insist on pushing for other liberalization reforms, it won’t be long before this position will have to be replaced.

And in terms of Arthur’s understanding of Lord Brougham, it was clear that his mentor was not an easy character to compromise.

Therefore, to make himself invincible in the turbulent times, there were only two reliable paths to choose from.

One was to maintain good relations with both parties at the same time, and for them, the affairs officers responsible for choosing sides, it was undoubtedly a foolish act to firmly choose sides.

But having said that, to maintain good relations with both parties at the same time is not an easy task. If it is not done well, it is likely that both sides will not be pleased, and in the end, they will end up in a situation where they will be attacked by a group of people.

And in order to solve this problem, one has to put some effort into building up one’s own base. As long as the base is solid, then whether it’s the Whig Party or the Tory Party, they will have to weigh up before they do it, whether the gain gained from doing so is higher than the loss of profit.

In other words, Arthur would have to have some reason why the bigwigs couldn’t replace him, a bit of hard work, some good social reputation, and preferably some insignificant personal connections mixed in.

Vidocq, on the other hand, can help Arthur with just the first of these.

Coconut Tree recalls, “It was a wonderful time, when we were all young. The chief wasn’t called Vidocq yet, he preferred to go out under an alias, like ‘Jean-Louis’ or ‘Julius’ or something.

I remember the first time the chief took us out on a mission, we were standing in the street in front of his place on Rue Saint-François Nouvelle smoking a cigarette, when we noticed a couple of guys with bulky packages scurrying out of an alleyway.

But just as they came out they spotted us and turned back, as if they were hiding from the lights and pedestrians outside. We were about to go up and interrogate them, but the chief stopped us with a stretch of his hand, and he told us not to frighten the snakes. Let’s follow them first, these vipers will definitely come out of their holes again eventually.

As a result, just as we followed them, we heard someone behind us call out the leader’s pseudonym, ‘Jean-Louis’. We turned our heads to look, and it turned out to be Frost, one of the Liangshangjie that we had befriended back when we were still hanging out on the road.

The other thieves realized that it was a familiar face, so they all came out of hiding, and we all smoked cigarettes and passed the fire together. The thieves told us that the police seemed to be on to them. The leader then offered us to go ahead and scout the way for them, and when they heard this, they thanked us profusely, saying, ‘They say that Jean-Louis is a man of honor, and that’s true today’.

They took us all the way to the lumber yard on the Rue St. Sebastian to keep the loot there first. Then Frost offered to take the chief with him to the next house, saying, ‘My name is no good, but if Jean-Louis goes with me, the price will be higher than usual.’

Frost this idiot afraid of the head did not agree, so also promised that if this single negotiated, can give us a share of 30%. As a result, the chief just swaggered along with Frost and ran to the stolen goods den, and took the place down in one fell swoop.”

Hearing this, Arthur couldn’t help but ask: “Mr. Vidocq doing this once or twice would be just fine, catching more people, wouldn’t the people in the road behind him still know his true identity?”

Coconut Tree grabbed a kosher and ate it as he returned. “Those people only know that the Greater Paris Police Department recently came to a thief-catching expert Vidocq, but those who have actually seen what Vidocq looks like are a minority after all. In the perception of the Parisian gangsters, ‘Jean-Louis’ and ‘Julius’ are still the reputable connoisseurs of the road.

Moreover, the chief had made arrangements in terms of identity, and every time he appeared as ‘Jean-Louis’ and ‘Julius’, he would be arrested together with the gangsters. He also often placed himself in the same cell as the mortals in order to trap the prisoners. Once when he ran into an overly cautious fellow, he even arranged a scene to save him from his cell, and the end result was, of course, well-received.”

Hearing this, Arthur smiled meaningfully and returned, “Now I can finally understand how Mr. Vidocq was able to suppress the crime rate in Paris by forty percent in the first year of the Security Department’s establishment. From this point of view, it was really a bad decision to ostracize him behind the Greater Paris Police Department.”

Coconut Tree ripped off a slice of bread and threw it into his mouth, leaned back in his chair and rolled his eyes, “Their bad decisions go beyond that. Besides, the tactics they used when they forced the chief to resign back then were really underhanded.”

“You mean about the cloak?”

“More than that, before that, they sent a lot of sickening disinformation around Paris.”

Coconut Tree was full of fire at the thought of those things, “To tell you the truth, Mr. Hastings, as you know, I am a gentleman, a French gentleman, a romantic by nature, and a great lover of love with ladies. Back then, I followed my chief all the way to the top in Paris, so after I had some savings, I began to focus on my feelings ……”

Arthur picked up his teacup and took a sip, “Mr. Coconut Tree, you don’t have to go through all the trouble of laying it out like that, you can just directly say that you have a few lovers, I understand what you mean.”

Mr. Coconut Tree laughed out loud, “In this point, you really don’t look like an Englishman, frankly almost an Italian. Yes, I do have a lover, a beautiful Jewish girl, in fact I’ve been thinking about her since I was 20 years old.

But at that time I was a thief who ate and ate, and she was from a decent family, so naturally there was no possibility. But then it was different, I became an important member of the security department and had money and status, so our relationship developed rapidly.

But what I didn’t expect was that in order to bring down the chief, Di Plessi actually sent someone to bribe her. Let her spread gossip everywhere saying: ‘One night, I was dressed up and ready to go out to look for my darling. As a result, when I was passing Swallow Road, I was stalked by one of my suitors. He told me that my Darling was hitting it off with another woman. I didn’t believe him, so he led me to a courtyard, and just as I entered I heard oohs and aahs, and I leaned out of the window to see what was going on, only to discover that it was Vidocq and my darling who were ravishing an old washerwoman of advanced age.'”

Arthur nearly spat a mouthful of tea in Coconut Tree’s face when he heard this.

Coconut Tree spoke up with a dark look on his face, “Mr. Hastings, you think that joke is nonsensical too, don’t you? For fuck’s sake, that bunch of donkey day shit, in order to force us to leave, they even spread this kind of gossip. Saying we raped a sixty-something washerwoman, why don’t they say we raped a sow?”

Arthur lifted his handkerchief and wiped his mouth, “I think that if you guys had stayed hard at that point and not left, you might have raped a sow back there. But it’s a good thing that Diplesey is now out of the way, and things should be better now that Mr. Vidocq is back in Security, right?”

Coconut Tree smiled as if laughing to himself, “Improved? Of course, when we were first invited back, we were naturally offered as saviors. But now, lo and behold, why am I in London now, isn’t this something worth pondering over?”

Of course Arthur knew what Coconut Tree was saying, he was just pretending to understand.

Thanks to his long correspondence with Vidocq, Arthur knew the dynamics of the Parisian police scene, if not by heart, at the very least.

Since the July Revolution, the Paris Police Department, headquartered on the Rue de Jerusalem in Paris, has been like a bus station, with all the forces on the stage.

Since 1830, in less than two years, the Greater Paris Police Department has changed its director seven times.

Mr. Kashmiri Pelletier, the French Minister of Justice, who was a banker, had not been able to figure out who should be appointed to run the Paris police.

From a normal person’s point of view, the head of the police department should be appointed from among experienced officers.

Unfortunately, as the representative of the big financial bourgeoisie, the appointment of the officials of the July dynasty followed a different logic.

They gave preference to businessmen with a solid style.

That is why, in September of this year, Mr. Pelletier officially appointed an old acquaintance of his, Mr. Henri Jissouquet, who had been an apprentice at his bank for seven years and had eventually founded his own bank, to take over the Grand Paris Police.

Mr. Nissokoi was clearly doing a much better job than his predecessors. But after Paris was hit by cholera, as was Britain, the Paris police, which was on the right track, soon fell back into disrepair.

London deployed its military police and close-guard cavalry for the cholera, and naturally Paris was no better.

After the cholera claimed more than three hundred lives in one day, Paris saw a succession of mob attacks on government offices.

Rumors spread that the Parisian police had taken advantage of the situation to put the cholera virus in the drinking water of the Jews.

And naturally, the political climate in Paris became highly sensitive at such a time.

In London, cholera was mixed with parliamentary reform, and the double pressure threatened a mass uprising at any moment.

In Paris, cholera threatened to penetrate the already weak rule of the July dynasty and bury Louis-Philippe’s new dynasty in its coffin.

At such a time, the complexity of Vidocq’s composition was naturally subject to suspicion from above.

Vidocq, who came from the streets, had been a member of the Bourbon Legion in his early years and had served in the Napoleonic government. In addition, he and Hugo, Musset, Dumas and other members of the Second Parisian literary society and many contacts.

Thus, in the eyes of the July dynasty government, he was likely to be associated with either Bonapartists, orthodox dynasticists, or republicans.

(End of chapter)