Red-Handed (Pax Britannia: Time's Arrow 01)

by Jonathan Green

  “And who told you that? You know your vocabulary, I’ll give you that, but you speak French like you learnt it at boarding school.”

  “And how would you know what that sounds like?”

  “You learn a lot in this business, I’ll tell you that for nothing.”

  As the woman continued her tirade, Ulysses became aware of a distant banging sound, like someone pounding on a door.

  “Who’s that?” he demanded.

  “It’s just someone at the door downstairs,” Madame Marguerite said, affronted at being interrupted. “What does it matter?”

  There was an insistent quality to the banging. Ulysses had heard banging like that recently. It was the same sound he had heard upon arriving at the house of the murdered man.

  “Because I can’t imagine you receive all that much trade in the early afternoon.”

  The brothel-keeper looked from Ulysses to the towering youth at her back.

  “Oscar,” she said, an anxious urgency underlying her words, “go and see who that is, would you?”

  The youth departed Josephine’s bedchamber

  “It’s them,” Ulysses muttered almost under his breath.

  “Who?” the girl asked, glancing at the door.

  “The police.”

  “Are they looking for you?” Madame Marguerite said, her voice rising in a tone of appalled horror.

  There was no point denying the truth. “Yes.”

  “So who are you?”

  “You have to help me,” Ulysses hissed, trying to get out of bed, gasps of pain punctuating his words and hindering his progress. “I have to get back to London!”

  Londinium Maximum suddenly seemed a very long way away. At that moment he would have done anything to hear the ever-present clatter of the Overground as it rattled on its interminable way above the city. He missed the streets that he had walked for so many years, the worn pavements he had trod, with a fierce longing.

  He had been away for – what? – two months by his own reckoning, even though he hadn’t actually left yet, if that made any sense at all. He missed its familiar vistas, its landmarks, its noise, its bustle, its people. In his mind’s eye he pictured it as it had been before the Wormwood Catastrophe: St Paul’s not yet overrun by Locust swarms, London Zoo not yet devastated by a train wreck.

  As a child he had enjoyed regular visits to the Challenger Enclosure along with Nanny McKenzie and his brother Barty. But they were both gone now – as were the dinosaurs – and he missed them.

  He missed his home in Mayfair too. But he would have happily never returned there if it had meant he could be with Emilia again.“Who are you,” the woman repeated, more forcefully this time, “and what have you done?”

  Ulysses listened. The banging had stopped. He felt the first tentative stirrings of relief deep inside. Perhaps it hadn’t been the police after all. Or perhaps they had simply gone on their way.

  It was then that he heard the thud of hobnailed boots on bare floorboards somewhere below.

  “They’re coming upstairs!” Josephine squeaked, putting a shaking hand to her throat.

  Ulysses met Madame Marguerite’s stare as the brothel-keeper glared at him.

  “Alright, alright,” he said, wilting under the woman’s intense glare. “My name is Ulysses Quicksilver. I am an agent of the British government, and I’m here in Paris working undercover.”

  Josephine gasped and Ulysses caught the fleeting look of romantic delight in her eyes. Madame Marguerite looked less convinced.

  “But if the police find me here my mission is over and a dangerous felon will escape justice.”

  For a moment, nobody said anything. The thud of footsteps on the stairs was drawing closer with every passing second.

  “Oh, what the hell,” the middle-aged madame grumbled, bustling over to the side of the bed. “But you’re still in no fit state to make any kind of daring rooftop escape, or whatever it is you’re planning. They’re bound to look under the beds, so we’ll have to find somewhere else for you to hide.”

  “Madame Marguerite!” the girl suddenly interjected. Her gaze lingered on the clothes rack in the corner of the room. “I’ve got an idea.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Angels and Insects

  THE WARBLING VIBRATO of the soprano’s voice crackling from the gramophone player reverberated from the brick walls of the tunnels and secret chambers of the labyrinthine cellars. Puccini’s unmistakeable melody was everywhere; the distant spark and hum of electricity and the ticking of the clock on the wall of the study were the only other sounds.

  The lepidopterist paused in his work for a moment as the music surged through and around him. Hands poised delicately in the air, he conducted with the tweezers held between his fingers.

  And then, as the melody moved on, he resumed his meticulous work. For somebody whose sole aim in life – or so he claimed – was to create chaos, in the microcosm of his own private world he liked things to be fastidiously organised.

  The bookcase in the corner, filled with such philosophical texts as the Englishman Hobbes’ Leviathan, and Poincaré and Hadamard’s writings on chaos theory; the rich red leather-upholstered wingback armchair beside it, angled at an exact forty-five degrees; the framed, mounted specimens on the brick wall above the desk where he worked; all was just so.

  The specimen cases filled almost every inch of bare brick wall, like some immaculately completed jigsaw puzzle. Most contained butterflies and moths, but some contained exotic jewel-like beetles or dragonflies with iridescent stained-glass wings.

  With the Red Admiral in place on the right-hand side of the frame, there was space for two more specimens. Downing tools for a moment, he took up his cup of tea, sat on its own die-cut paper doily on the desk in front of him. It had to be said, for all their crass, over-domineering Imperial bombast, there were some things that the British did very well. And there was a place for bombast in the Great Scheme of Things, as Giacomo Puccini had known so well. As did the butterfly collector himself.

  He closed his eyes as he sipped his tea, savouring the tepid infusion along with the soaring musical phrases. The aria was one of his favourite pieces of music. The soprano’s pining for a lost love had touched him, even as a child. In fact, it had made a huge impact on him, when he had lived at the Opera with his mother, who had worked there as a seamstress.

  It had been too long since Puccini’s masterpiece had last been performed on the stage of the Paris Opera. Once upon a time he would have done something about that, but there was little point now. There was only one performance that mattered now and that would be the Opera’s last.

  The music washed over him, bringing with it a sense of enduring, meditative calm. Just as the lepidoptery did; his art. For that was what he was, at heart - an - artist, although the canvases he sometimes worked upon were on a much larger scale. And none was larger than the city of Paris itself.

  Opening his eyes again, blinking at the glare of the lights set within the Tiffany stained-glass lampshades, the collector returned to his work.

  The work suited him, its subject matter as much as the meticulous precision it demanded of him. Many thought little of butterflies and moths, beyond what they brought to the world in terms of their natural, symmetrical beauty. Few understood the true power they held within their gossamer-light wings.

  Even fewer would have suspected that this mild-mannered, well-manicured, Opera-loving collector was the same man who was spoken of in hushed whispers in the palaces of power, at newspaper offices across the country and behind the closed doors of police stations through the city.

  For it was no coincidence that to the wider world he was known as Le Papillon. And yet Le Papillon was more akin to a fictional villain from some penny dreadful, a masked terrorist who brought chaos into the lives of all those whom he chose in an apparently arbitrary manner.

  To his victims – the families he ruined, the investments wiped out by his schemes, the property his actions destroyed –
there seemed little method to his madness. But then they, with their limited, blinkered mind-sets, could not see the bigger picture.

  The very fact that his targets were so random in terms of the people he selected, and the manner of their undoing, was precisely his method. To bring chaos where before there was order, to have the rest of the world live in fear that they could be next, to be an agent of anarchy – that was precisely his raison d’etre!

  He had had a name once, and for those times when he was forced to go out and about in the real world, it was still useful. But it was only a name. Le Papillon was an identity. It told the world what he was about, even if the world did not realise it.

  As the warbling echoes of Madame Butterfly continued to wash over him, Le Papillon selected a Large White from the specimen tray in front of him. It was a male, its wing-tips shaded charcoal grey, but missing the black spots that the female of the species sported on its wings. Spots would have spoiled the look he was trying to create with the piece.

  The Large White was another import from across the other side of La Manche.

  He manipulated the butterfly into place with his tweezers, only pinning it when he was entirely happy with its positioning.

  A bestial howl echoed throughout the vaulted spaces of the extensive cellars.

  The man’s jaw tensed as the primate roar, although distant, interrupted the diva’s divine rendition of Puccini’s classic.

  His hands froze. He would let nothing disturb his delicate work.

  He breathed in through his nose and then out again slowly, his hands still immobile over the mounting board as he listened to the dying echoes of the animal’s savage cry. It was either angry or in pain. Most likely both.

  He disliked having to let the doctor join him in his lair, but it was a means to an end. And the end justified the means; that was his mantra, after all.

  Besides he would not have to put up with his house guest for much longer. Months, the scientist had been carrying out his experiments, continuing his noted ancestor’s work – although Dr Montague Moreau had taken it along a different path, utilising alternative branches of science.

  At another primate bellow, Le Papillon looked up from his work, glancing back over his shoulder towards the depths of the cellar where the doctor had constructed his caged operating-theatre-cum-laboratory.

  Actinic blue flashes of lightning illuminated the shadows, throwing primal shadows across the crumbling brickwork. When the discharges ceased, so did the gorilla’s animalistic screams. The last of the crackling bursts of blue fire left a lingering negative image of the howling beast on his retinas. Then, slowly it seemed, the warm glow of the house lamps returned, briefly drawing the man’s attention to the organ, half-buried within its arched brick alcove.

  It was what one might call a family heirloom. It had, after all, been his great-grandfather’s once upon a time. It was whilst sitting at that very instrument that his great-grandfather had been unmasked by his great-grandmother. And yet, in many important ways, it most definitely wasn’t the same instrument anymore. The engineer Pierre Courriel Pascal had seen to that.

  It still had the multiple keyboards, sculpted brass pipes and intricately carved console, with its protruding, ivory-handled stops, but several significant additions had been made at the behest of its current owner.

  Spools of trunked cabling now sprouted from the organ, as if the device’s mechanical intestines had ruptured and burst from its teak and brass body. Then there were the appendages that looked like ear trumpets, strange Bakelite blossoms connected to yet more snaking wires. And then, of course, there was the Babbage engine unit itself, that had been built into the organ above its tiers of ebony- and ivory-inlaid keyboard registers.

  As the crackling discharges abated and the monstrous shadows faded, the bestial bellows became breathless grunts and the soaring melodies and otherworldly musical phrasing of Madame Butterfly calmed his irritated mood once more.

  He did not like interruptions. His work demanded precision and care. In fact everything he did demanded precision and care, especially bringing chaos and confusion to the world. For anarchy to be effectively created, it had to be meticulously planned.

  The Large White specimen poised over the mounting board, the butterfly collector now pinned it carefully in place. The tempered steel point punctured the fragile, black-furred body of the insect, miniscule desiccated internal organs compressed as pressure was applied.

  In fact, through his desk-mounted magnifying lens, the honed point of the pin looked more like the tip of a javelin, as if he was spearing the body of some monstrous insect. Such things were rumoured to have taken over whole swathes of the British capital, while there was talk that moths had been created by the Japanese, in the wake of their experimentation in new forms of power, with wingspans of over two hundred feet. What he wouldn’t do to have one of those specimens mounted on his study wall...

  The Large White placed in the middle of the board, he looked to his collecting tray for another suitable specimen to complete the piece.

  You had to have patience in his game. To create chaos required a great deal of waiting. For an attack to have the greatest impact it had to be executed at the most propitious time. Waiting for the good doctor to complete his work was part of that. Waiting for the Opera orchestra to have time to rehearse was another. The organ – his ancestral heirloom – now that was ready to go.

  The acoustician had made the necessary alterations to the organ buried in the basement of the Opera House, and soon he, too, just like the composer and the ordinateur-auteur, would meet his maker. Then Le Papillon would be one step closer to pulling off the greatest act of anarchy the world had ever known – greater even than the attacks suffered by Londinium Maximum, as orchestrated by Magna Britannia’s former Prime Minister of good standing, Uriah Wormwood.

  The pieces were slowly coming together and fitting snugly into place. Time was counting down to the moment when Le Papillon would unleash a catastrophe upon the world such as it had never known. But for the time being there was nothing he could do but wait.

  He paused in his selection of another specimen and leaned back in his creaking chair, taking in the array of collections already on display in the study. They had all been created whilst waiting for various plans to come to fruition. And each one was a flawless demonstration of the crystalline patience he possessed and employed in everything he did.

  Butterflies were truly wondrous creatures, and had captured the imaginations of the ancients. And yet, in this modern age of iron and information, so much had been forgotten, the majority of people knowing next to nothing about them.

  The various species of Lepidoptera had long been associated with the divine in man, that undying part of him that lingered after a body had become the food of worms and bacteria. It was a remarkable example of the universality of animal symbolism, found in cultures on practically every continent. The ancients observed how a butterfly or moth would hover for a time in one place or fly in a fleeting, hesitant manner, and saw this as a reflection of the soul, reluctant to move on to the next world.

  The transformation of caterpillar into butterfly provided the ultimate model for human ideas of death, burial, and resurrection. The scattering of flowers at funerals was an ancient custom; the flowers attracted butterflies, which then appeared to have emerged from a corpse. Some even believed that the chrysalis inspired the splendour of many coffins in antiquity. In fact the Greek word ‘psyche’ meant soul, but could also designate a butterfly or moth, while the Latin ‘anima’ had the same duality of meaning.

  Of all God’s creations, surely the jewel-like blue morpho was one of His finest. The specimen in Le Papillon’s collection testified to that fact, with its crimpled wing-tips, the stained glass cerulean blue of the minute scales that covered its wings and the dark kohl-shading where they joined the butterfly’s body.

  An expert knowledge of insect anatomy was required to manipulate the specimen so that it looked like t
he butterfly had only alighted on the canvas for a moment, and that it might take off again at any second. The careful positioning of an antenna, pulling the wings fully open, whilst avoiding tearing the delicate membrane at the same time.

  It had taken him some time to do that, having spent a day collecting specimens in the poppy meadowsnear Argenteuil,before starting on the composition of this particular piece which, he now realised, was taking on a particularly patriotic tone. Ironic, considering what he had planned for the City of Lights.

  Happy with the positioning of the blue morpho, the butterfly collector carefully pinned it in place, trapping it forever upon the board beside the Large White and the Red Admiral.

  Puccini was disturbed a second time by the shrill ringing of the Bakelite-and-mother-of-pearl telephone sitting at the corner of his desk. The man’s jaw tensed again.

  The ringing disturbed the diva’s sublime singing, but Le Papillon didn’t rush. He laid his tools down on the desk and carefully picked up the handset.

  “Yes?” he said.

  The electronically-distorted voice at the other end had an English accent. “Le Papillon?”

  “But of course,” Le Papillon replied, in English.

  “How is the work progressing?” There were no conversational niceties, no social pleasantries. The speaker cut straight to the chase.

  “The work is progressing as anticipated.”

  “Meaning?” The voice had a hard edge to it.

  “Meaning everything is – as you would put it – going according to plan.”

  “Explain.”

  The man snorted. “Excuse me, perhaps I misunderstood the terms of our agreement, but didn’t you engage me so that you would not need to know the details of any plan? What was it you called it? Plausible deniability?”

  For a moment the voice said nothing. Then it came again, a growl of distorted static.

  “Zero hour is set for Saturday, is it not?”

  “But of course. That was the date I said I would work towards when you first engaged me.”