The tea was very strong and sweet. Remus would have preferred coffee, but the stuff at the hotel was nearly undrinkable. He would wait until he visited the Café de Paris to collect his coffee and the day’s gossip. It would be interesting to see what the masses had to say about the odd theft of El Grande’s tapestry and Remus’s role in its recovery. If there was too much talk about Remus Maxwell, he might have to move on before dealing with El Grande. Important lesson number three: Be flexible. People who fell in love with a certain plan of action tended to be rigid. The rigid got broken when the winds of change blew though.
He would also have to keep an ear out for news of any bodies found near the railroad tracks. Eventually someone would probably find the detective’s remains. Unless it was thoroughly scavenged, his identity would ultimately be discovered.
And that led to important lesson number four: Disappearing after using an identity for criminal activity was always a good idea. Dying was even better. And death was easy enough to arrange in certain foreign countries—so many exotic diseases, so many wild animals and dangerous jungles. All it took was an official whose greed matched or surpassed your immediate need. A funeral, death certificate, and obituary could be had relatively cheaply from the wild outposts of the world, and it nearly always discouraged any law-enforcement figure or insurance investigator determined enough to follow you to a foreign shore. And if he had to pay more—well, then he did. Remus smiled again. He had once joked with a friend: Do you know why funerals are so expensive? Because they’re worth it. His friend hadn’t understood.
Of course, all this couldn’t help if one’s true identity was suspected—which led to important lesson number five: Don’t repeat your crimes. If you had an identifiable pattern, you could be anticipated. In his time, he’d been a footman, a chauffeur, an ambassador’s secretary, and a courier for a museum. All successful jobs that had led him to even more successful robberies. And he had gotten the jobs because of a combination of good timing, good documents, and an uncanny ability to blend in with his surroundings. That was important lesson number six: Don’t stand out. You had to be believable. When he was a footman he was an exemplary footman. No secretary had ever been more secretarial. No one had ever suspected he was anything other than what he appeared. The victims might think that the footman had stolen their jewels, but they never thought the footman was an actual jewel thief. Indeed, if a brilliant outside detective—Remus Maxwell, hired by one of The Chameleon’s victim’s—hadn’t gone to Scotland Yard and compared notes on unsolved crimes, they would still be in ignorance of him.
The detective owed him for that inconvenience. Or he had. Lending The Chameleon his identity and letter of transit had rather repaid the debt. After all, the Bible even said that greater love hath no man than that he should lay down his life for another. And there was also something about carrying rancor to the grave but no further.
Remus finished his tea and then went to gather his hat and linen jacket. It was going to be an entertaining day.
Millie tapped on the door and then poked her head inside. Relieved to have actually written something, Alex looked up and smiled.
“Alexandre? The car is here.”
“Oui. I am prepared. Here is the latest chapter.” And good riddance—he really was not enjoying this book at all. The man he had been then was quite unlikable.
“I’ll enter it into the computer first thing tomorrow,” she promised. “Safe travels. Please don’t bring any animals back from Mexico. That cat is quite nuisance enough. She behaves like she’s the mistress and I’m her servant.”
Alex looked at Lady de Winter and realized for the first time that her eyes were the same color as Thomasina’s. It was like seeing a ghost. Shaken, he looked away from the cat’s intent gaze.
“I am not planning on collecting souvenirs in Mexico,” Alex assured Millie. “I shall return alone.”
Millie snorted, suggesting she didn’t believe him. Alex wasn’t sure he believed himself either. He was going to Mexico to find something or someone.
And perhaps to die. The notion was an odd one, for if God had forsaken him years ago, Alex had in the meantime become one of Death’s favored few, one whom Death spared even when circumstances were against survival and all around him died. Perhaps this was because he’d reaped enough souls through the centuries to be useful to Old Grim. Perhaps it was because when he killed it was done with a pleasing ferocity and high style. Whatever the reason, The Reaper hadn’t made an earnest attempt to kill him in decades. Alex had to wonder why he felt as if this had now changed, that Death was on Saint Germain’s payroll and coming for him with an extra-sharp scythe.
CHAPTER FOUR
To expect human nature not to be ungrateful is to expect the wolf to be a vegetarian.
—Alexandre Dumas
Nobody who has not traveled in Prussia can have any idea of the hatred felt for us by the Prussians. It amounts to a monomania which clouds calm and untroubled minds. No minister in Berlin can be popular unless he makes it pretty plain that, sooner or later, war with France is inevitable.
—Letter warning about the rise of German aggression from Dumas in La Terreur Prussiene
If God were suddenly condemned to live the life which He has inflicted upon men, He would kill Himself.
—Alexandre Dumas
Alex spent a lot of the trip thinking—but not about what awaited in Mexico. Perhaps it was because he was probably going to confront an old and dangerous foe that his mind turned back to other times of pain and danger that had had to be lived through. Like the moment when his son died.
Alex had found the letter from Alexandre fils on his own tomb while visiting the General’s grave, something he did annually as a sort of pilgrimage to his patriotic father. The note from Alexandre to his supposedly dead father was short, but it had moved Alex, changed him in a fundamental way. Of course, regret came too late. The Paris newspapers had reported it that morning—Dumas fils was dead. And for the first time since his own “death” Alex had wept.
He still had the note, though he no longer needed the paper to recall what it said. His prodigious memory had grasped the contents at once and written it on his brain in bitter iron-gall.
Father, does one still remember, in the world where you now are, the things of this world of ours, or does eternal life live only in the human imagination made childlike by its fear of no longer existing? That is something we never discussed in the days we lived together, nor do I think that you ever worried your head with metaphysical speculation…For close on a quarter of a century you have been sleeping peacefully under the great trees of Villers-Cotterets between your mother, who served as your model for all the good women you portrayed, and your father, who inspired all those heroes to whom you gave the gift of life…The world moves fast. Soon we shall meet again, and then I will know.
But they would not meet again. At least not for a long time, and only if God could forgive and open His gates to such a terrible sinner as Alex had become.
Kneeling beside the tomb, Alex had folded the paper carefully, his tears having disturbed his son’s writing, which was already as thin as cobwebs and obviously written by an ailing hand. His son had grown old while he remained young. And he hadn’t even been there at the end.
Why had he left it so long? Why had he not found some way to see his child, to save him from mortal death?
Not sure why, since there was nothing to be done, Alex had gone to his son’s home at once, presenting himself to the widow as a distant cousin. He had been allowed to sit awhile with his son’s body, to hold the frail, cold hand of the vessel that had once contained his son. Alexandre fils was lying in a carved bed, the pretty lemonwood adorned with bronze swans. The boy—no longer a boy, but an old man now—had been laid out in his working clothes, his feet left bare just as he had instructed in his will. Alex had stared at those pale toes and the narrow, arched instep that shoes had pained all through his life and felt the urge to weep again.
He was to
o late. His son was dead and beyond reach. He would never again have the chance to give in to temptation and reveal that he was alive—after a fashion. He would never have to decide if it was right to offer this strange and often painful form of life to his moralistic son. He would never have to risk being reviled by his child as an evil, damned thing. He had been a coward, letting his son die rather than risk being hated.
Shaken by his thoughts, Alex had left the house, bitter tears coursing down his cheeks and even more bitter thought and memory bringing on a kind of insanity. The next morning Alex left Paris, and nearly twenty years passed before he returned. He’d run hard and he’d run far, but that didn’t mean memory and regret didn’t follow him like his own shadow everywhere he went. Some things could not be outrun.
Death wasn’t so bad for Alex in the beginning. He’d had to give many things up, of course, but at first, he hadn’t been entirely sorry to escape the burden of being Alexandre Dumas. The last years of his mortal life had been wearying and unhappy. And he had enjoyed being restored to full physical health and vigor. His children were established, he had argued when the moments of temptation came, economically secure, married with families of their own. He was free to do as he pleased, and so were they.
But there was a dark side that came with Dippel’s gift, and Alex was made aware of it every time he closed his eyes. Night after night when the moon was on the wane, he was attacked by a murder of phantom crows. They were brutal creatures, tearing not just his body but trying to rip out his soul. And he wasn’t young and strong when he fought them either. His body had returned to the natural state of decay it had reached when the Dark Man intervened in his life, insisting he knew a way to save France’s greatest writer from slow heart failure and blindness. The dream implied that someday, Death would have to be repaid—if not with Alex’s life, then with the lives of others.
The terrible dreams felt like premonitions, and so they proved to be—and on a scale so massive that Alex couldn’t comprehend it at first. It was right before Bismarck’s rise that he had felt old age come upon him almost in a night. And it was not just the aging of the body, the dimming of his sight that plagued him, but also the enfeeblement of the mind, the draining away of his creative powers.
Being unwilling to face this horror, he had done what the Dark Man had told him he would need to do. He had killed himself during a winter storm, dying so that he might rise up renewed once more. And when he was reborn with a clear mind and strong body, he’d left America and also his old regrets about his dead son, and returned to Europe to see what ravages the new war had wrought on his old home. He was ready for adventure and optimistically certain that he could once again influence events in Europe.
But Death got there before him.
Of course, Alex knew that the world had changed. War had changed, but he had thought he was prepared. He had ended up at the Battle of Liège in August of 1914, and then at the Battle of Verdun in the winter of 1916. Not before or since had he ever seen so many dead. There was no place to step on the battlefield without treading on corpses—French, German, their lifeless bodies littered the ground. Like many of the soldiers around him, he had gone into a state of shock. He had no memories of the battle itself, no sense of how long it lasted, just killing and killing and more killing. He had been awarded a medal for his valor, but he never felt as though he deserved it. He had been Death’s pawn.
After the war, he had left the shattered remains of his country and returned to the States. But times were hard there, too, and then the influenza pandemic had swept over the land, killing even more people than the Great War. Nursing was not his vocation, being so tame and boring for a creative mind, but he had found himself working in a hospital at Camp Funston because there was almost no one else who could. There were only a handful of nurses or doctors left. The flu had spared no one.
His body never sickened from the virus, but his soul did. He might not ail in carcass, but he did in spirit. There was no escaping death in those years. He had had to grapple with it daily. It was divine punishment for wasting his own life.
This wasn’t his first plague, of course. Cholera had come to Paris in 1832. He recalled the streets being filled with black hearses that rolled to the cemeteries from sunup to sundown. They were soon replaced by moving vans that carried up to twenty bodies at a time. There were no funerals then, just mass burials in common graves. He had contracted the disease, but was nursed by friends with treatments of ether and constant bed warmers, and by the grace or God—or something—he had survived.
1832 was not the end of the dying. Cholera came and went and came again. But Alex was brash and thumbed his nose at Fate, and a year later he gave a grand ball. Republican Paris—those who had survived the uprising and the epidemic—came indroves to see what Alexandre Dumas would do to celebrate.
He did not disappoint them. Alex decided to serve venison, which he hunted himself, trading away one of his six deer for a giant salmon that he personally prepared. He ordered five hundred bottles of champagne iced, three hundred bottles of Bourgogne properly chilled, and three hundred bottles of Bordeaux properly warmed. Ciceri, set designer of the Théâtre-François, was brought in to paint battlefield murals on the walls, and there were two orchestras hired so that Paris could dance in defiance of death and an unjust government.
He’d thrown no balls after the Great War. He was no longer so impetuous. Modern war and death on a scale he had never imagined had beaten it out of him. Alexandre Dumas was humbled.
Alex hadn’t written of that time, and probably never would. His bravery on the battlefield was something of which his father would be proud, and his mother would have applauded his humanitarian efforts in the hospital, but he had no intention of ever revisiting those memories in a book. Not ever. Especially not when a part of him wondered if the Dark Man and his son hadn’t had something to do with unleashing this horror on the world. He had no proof of this belief—none—and logic argued against it. But he had seen the Dark Man in 1919, far from sane, ranting about owning the world and acquiring it through his puppet, Bismarck. And the son? Well, from what Alex had learned through research, Saint Germain had been born evil. He should have found some way to kill both. Forever.
Was such wickedness contagious? Had that same evil tainted him as well when he accepted the Dark Man’s gift? Alex always wondered. Would he know if he were wicked? Could evil recognize itself? He feared that perhaps it would not. And like him, it would live on indefinitely, perhaps spreading poison, all while unaware.
Alex had lived in many places since the Great War, most recently in France, but he always came back to America eventually. He loved the people of that land. They were innovative and optimistic and young at heart. Innocent really, naïve and childlike. They reminded him of his younger self. This was both a good and bad thing. Because of their unaging culture, the people of the United States lived in a quick-fix, instant-gratification society that did not do well with concepts or projects that required long-term attention. He understood this. He had not been a patient man. His own son had called him a giant baby. But an extra century of life had taught him many things, among them the need to look ahead, to plan carefully for the future that would surely come. It did not do to live in the past; but one had to glance at the past from time to time, see the patterns and then relate them to the future so that mistakes were not repeated.
Most Americans did not plan. They were good at applying technology to problems, and they tended to think that they could always find a solution to their troubles in the laboratory when troubles came along. Sadly, that wasn’t always true, and they were always so surprised and indignant when they encountered loss, privation, or pain. In their indignation, the men tended to lash out and lash hard. They didn’t do well when put on diets, be they fiscal or caloric. Again, he sympathized. He had never been able to live on a budget. But he now understood that this could be fatiguing for those in power who had to grapple with long-term problems. It made them
cranky and ruthless. Sometimes they acted impulsively.
Which was all the long way of saying that there would be no help from his American friends with the conundrum of Saint Germain—even assuming that they believed his wild tale of a man who would not die. Without volunteering for a DNA test to prove his own strangeness, Alex doubted he could convince any of his contacts in the government that something terrible was afoot in Mexico. After all, what did he know? He was just a famous novelist.
He wouldn’t be in the United States long enough to find help anyway. Better this affair be dealt with over the border. The people of Mexico—though geographically American—were a different group altogether. Their thinking was more European, at times more fatalistic. They might be more willing to believe in the impossible, and Alex had some friends there as well. He wondered if that was why Saint Germain had chosen it for a base. It wouldn’t be the first time that he had opted for the desert over the city or more verdant and gentle countrysides, not the first time that Alex had followed him into the wilderness either.
Feeling resolved and at last ready to write, Alex accepted another glass of champagne from the lovely blond creature with the soft blue aura working first-class, and then opened his notebook. It was jumping ahead a bit, but he felt it was time to write about the first occasion when he’d seen Saint Germain face to face. Like many momentous occasions, he hadn’t realized how important the moment was.
Chapter Three Enter the Femme Fatale
Thomasina Marsh came slinking into the music room in a silk dress the color of dawn that clung to her like sunlight on bare skin. Remus knew his clothes, and that dress had not been designed in England where everyone was sporting stiff winter wool that could have been used to scour pots.
He watched her move toward him, smiling slightly, and thought that the frock was so smart it probably had independent thought.
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