by Claire North
“He died of a sudden heart problem twelve months ago. We would have thought nothing of it, but then his wife died too, his youngest daughter, then three friends of the family, all aged twelve or younger, and finally his son. His son, who was eleven, killed himself by jumping from a cliff into a low river. The press wrote of it as a terrible tragedy, and of course the duke was of such a nature that these things lend themselves easily to drama.
“The death of Monsieur Blanchard of the Blue Cross shipping line four months later attracted similar note, for he had famously proclaimed when two of his vessels went down within weeks of each other that the captains were to blame, and the fifty-seven sailors who drowned, and that any accusation that his ships were not seaworthy was to be taken up with the insurance companies, and he would sue any man who dared repeat such claims. His wife died first, of an unexplained heart condition. Then his son, and his daughter, and a friend of his still-living child, and finally him. I can only conclude, for him to have died fifth in this sequence, that he was as poor a father as he was an employer.
“He left one heir, a boy of fifteen. We cannot find him; he has disappeared from the institution to which his parents sought to confine him after a series of lunatic episodes. From the fact that many of his former friends are still living, I would say the child has done well, so far.
“The American railway magnate who ordered his Chinese workers to dig deeper with their nitroglycerine slung around their necks, because their lives were cheaper than explosives. The British politician who bought his seat in the Manchester election, and used his power to destroy the homes of ninety families so he might finally build his glorious new tennis courts. The Belgian general in the Congo who ordered two hundred African men stripped, suspended from the trees of the forest and their bodies maimed, and drank gin beneath them as they slowly bled to death, until finally he decided the flies were a bit too much, and set fires burning beneath his living victims to help purify the air, and to remind others of the nature of their working relationship… I’m sure you see the pattern here. A sudden, unexpected death that sends them to the ground without a whisper. Then another, and another, and another, every person their lives have ever touched – dying.
“We recognise this, of course. We know how the lidérc kills. I assumed you did it. The British have been so eager to catch you, and a man who has killed before will perhaps find it easier to kill again. But as I followed your trail of blood, it was not what I expected. You did not appear in the same place as the victims I was supposed to connect you to. Your actions did not correspond with the death of the margrave, or the industrialist, or his wife. You were simply killing British agents. That thought led me to a different line of enquiry: who else, I wondered, might be performing these crimes?
“The investigation has been most invigorating. Such a relief after so many tedious years. My breakthrough was finding the daughter of a British tea manufacturer in India. He had ordered the ringleaders of a pickers’ strike to be cut into four, the various pieces of their bodies sent by night to their kin and fellow conspirators as a reminder of what he could do to them, and how little they could do in reply.
“The father was dead, of course, by the time I found the child. The girl is eight years old, and loved her father very much. He was kind, gentle, affectionate – some might say overly sentimental. He would carry her on his back and play at galloping up and down while she charged at invisible dragons or was swept away on the back of a giant flying eagle. He would caw and croak the noises of the monstrous beasts she tamed and slew, and so, of course, he died first, when the child was cursed.
“Do you know how to put the shadow on another, Dr Abbey?
“Your friend Margot – she knows. She knows.
“The girl was in a hospital when I found her, and I would say her curse was just a few hours away. I rescued her. She is on her way to Vienna now. She will be safe, for a while.”
He finished speaking, and sipped his wine.
I sat a while.
Then stood, marched to the window, looked down across the city below.
Then returned to my chair, but could not sit.
Then marched to the bar and ordered something to drink – I forget what. And didn’t drink it. And paid too much, and forgot the change.
Then returned to my chair, but could not sit.
Then went out to the balcony to breathe some fresh air, and to shudder and shake and listen to the buzzing of the insects clinging fat-bellied to the dark green leaves, and the trilling of birds in hidden branches.
After a while, Ritte joined me.
I said, “You should understand that I despise you. It is a very childish, very deep and passionate thing. There is nothing that is not spiteful in it. I just want that to be clear.”
“I understand.”
“And I don’t believe you.”
He shrugged, and though he had no shadow, he knew that I was lying. I believed him, I did not, I believed him, I did not – the mind holds many truths all at once, until at last it is forced to see.
“The child… the girl… what will you do with her?”
A pause, a little roll back on his heels, roll forward onto the balls of his feet, suddenly uncomfortable in his shoes. “I don’t know. She is half-Indian, and thus cannot pass in civilised society as you did. We will probably just keep her in a travelling cage, like the Russians do. Like your British did. It is—”
“If you say that it is just business, I cannot guarantee the placidity of my reaction.”
He sighed, leaning with arms folded across the balcony railing. “I have done… despicable things,” he repeated, seeing through the city as if it weren’t there. “It turns out that all I needed was to be bored.”
“You’re going to operate on her. On the child.”
“Not me. But my masters, they are very impressed by your professor’s techniques, they have been trying to study—”
“I think I left my gun by the dinner table, if you wouldn’t mind waiting here just a second so I can shoot you?”
“Dr Abbey,” he snapped, before I could move, “if I was otherwise inclined I could have anaesthetised you by now, locked you in a crate and put you on the first ship to Pula. Your actions have made you predictable.”
“Why haven’t you?”
“Because I’m growing old. No. That is not it. This girl, this child, I took her from the hospital and promised I would send her somewhere safe, and she looked in my heart and… well. She saw it clearly, knew as an adult knows, because I knew it. What we intended for her. What we would do. It has been… I never had a child. Elke and I were never… and she died, my wife, I mean, she died, and I never really had much interest, not since my own father was so… I am growing old. I wish I had been ignorant, when I looked the girl in the eye. I do wish that.”
He straightened, let out another puff of breath, shook himself like a dog spinning water from its fur, and finally met my eye.
“It is my experience that the truth has very little effect on policy. People will believe what they want to believe. They hear what they want to hear. We will cut out a child’s brain, and for what? So we can misinterpret according to our egos. And you: we will kidnap you and perhaps do the same, and it will all be, fundamentally… a rather silly little exercise. Meanwhile your Halloran, she will travel the world and curse the children of great men, and many people will die. Many, many people. Children. That is also the truth of it. Now, perhaps I can find her on my own, and stop her, since she clearly needs to be stopped. But I think my chances of doing so are much higher if I have an ally who knows her well. So here I am… reinterpreting my orders. What do you say?” When I didn’t answer, he straightened up, bristling, and in a voice that snapped a mote too loud for this quiet place, barked, “Come, I do not know the truth of your heart, and here I am. Come! She is cursing the children, using a child’s love for a parent to kill them. Will you let that stand?”
“I don’t believe you. I… can’t believe
you.”
“Then allow me to prove it.”
And this is the truth of Ritte’s heart: that he is still looking for truth. Many years ago he sat in a room with me as I blathered out his deepest secrets, and even then found himself noting some of the things I said with a sense of ah yes, how true; or no, not at all, he’s missed the mark entirely. He has never believed anything anyone told him about himself, nor truly known what he values. He hopes that perhaps, now that he is growing old, he will find out. He hopes that maybe, in the murder of children, he has found a line he will not cross, and perhaps at last a mirror he is happy to look in.
I closed my eyes against the brightness of the sun. “What exactly do you propose?”
Chapter 67
Langa comes, and I wait for him. I have turned my face towards the shadow and reached out my hands, in search of truth, or blood, or sometimes just a familiar, comforting thing. He has been more constant in my life than any family or friend; we have been together for so many years.
In 1909, I struck a devil’s bargain with Josef Ritte. It is of immense satisfaction to me that Albert is hearing this for the very first time; the Nineteen is not as far-reaching as it likes to think. Did I believe then what he claimed: that Margot was cursing the children of great men?
I believed it, I did not. The mind holds many contradictions.
He had money, connections. I still knew something of the People’s Society that he did not, and could see into the hearts of men. Perhaps even into Margot’s heart, if we could find her.
Unlike the baron, Ritte was fascinated by the secrets of his unravelled soul. I have never spent so much time with one who both dreaded and hungered for the truth. His relationship with the shadow had evolved over the years to an almost religious experience. Like a self-flogging priest, he feared the pain and yearned for the bleeding, a combination of sentiments I found thoroughly unappealing.
But he could keep me safe from the Nineteen. I don’t know what lies he had to spin to his own masters to do it, but for a little while, I could close my eyes at night and not fear the darkness.
We sailed west, heading for Italy.
I avoided Ritte as much as possible. The Austrian stayed in the second-class lounge, smoking and making idle chatter with a widow of a certain age, who found the idea of reckless dalliance far more interesting than the reality of the man with whom she dallied. A day from Ceylon, we were struck by a storm that sent all scurrying below decks, and the aroma of puke and alcohol rose up through the floorboards with the hot sun of the following morning. I made myself mildly useful, assuring passengers in first class that a little seasickness did not justify medicinal electric shocks or the licking of crystals of radium chloride. If man can make a substance that sizzles or sparkles, he will surely try to use it to cure his gout.
In third class I was more useful, diagnosing not so much conditions brought about by the voyage, but long-standing maladies that the travellers could not afford to cure on dry land, and that convenience now lent to my inspection. In this manner I passed the remainder of the voyage happily avoiding Ritte until we reached Suez, where intelligence was waiting for him from his contacts and commanders.
“So much to work through!” he tutted, leaning over a great map of the world spread out on the small table in his airless little room. “So many possibilities!”
A packet of newspaper cuttings and reports, well over a hundred and fifty unexplained deaths, was laid out on the cabin floor. One stood out to him – the death of a father, his wife and his daughter in Bordeaux; the sole survivor – a girl of seven – committed to an asylum for her gibbering madness.
“Unfortunate,” he muttered. “By now the French will have worked it out, and will be picking her up. My masters will be exasperated.”
“I wonder if the French will wait for her to grow up before scooping out her brains.”
“Oh no – she is a nice girl from a wealthy family! It would be a terrible waste. With appropriate training in languages and deportment, they can have her seducing the greatest men in Europe by the time she’s fifteen.”
He spoke without sentiment. Just the truth; just the God-gifted, praise-heavens truth of the thing. I stood in mute, seething silence and Ritte muttered and drew lines from Bordeaux in pencil across his map, calculating the speed at which Margot’s shadow would travel, the likely radius within which she was still moving, the places she might be.
“It doesn’t have to be Margot,” I muttered. “It could be a madwoman. It could be… anyone at all.”
He puckered his lips, clicked his tongue, said nothing. My stumbling words were not truths poured down from heaven, and thus didn’t interest him. “By now, she could be in Moscow, or halfway across the Atlantic Ocean. But it is probable that she is moving across Europe. Berlin, Vienna, Dublin or Naples are most likely. By the time we reach Italy, we should have a sense of the thing!”
I didn’t argue, and stared at the map of murders he was drawing across the cabin floor, and wondered how we had come to this.
We made port in Taranto a few days later, and within an hour were ensconced in a decaying old hotel lined with wilting vines that never bore grapes, whose chief attraction appeared to be its proximity to the post office.
There, more letters and packages were waiting for my companion, reports of blood and whispers of madness. Within two days we were on the last train from Taranto, hugging the eastern coast through Ancona to the north, falling asleep to moonlight over water and waking to the first signs of snow and the grey, flat plains that hug the foothills of the Alps. Our crossing to Innsbruck was delayed at the border by filthy sideways rain that verged into snow; our papers were examined and examined again, our bags torn open and put back together three or four times by various officials of different nations. Ritte barked and snapped in his highest, most imperial German until finally the black-coated inspectors permitted us through to the other side of the blasted, shivering valley. By then thicker snow and an overflowing river down the line confined us for eight hours to the border hotel, which had run out of all beverages save a brutal wine made by the proprietor’s uncle and infused with the aroma of that man’s sweating feet.
We neither ate nor slept that night, and by the time we were on the road again on a crystal-clear morning that belied the settling cold, Ritte was back at his maps, muttering to himself: Prague or Vienna, Prague or Vienna? A baron was rumoured dead in Munich, another piece to the puzzle, but by now Margot – not Margot, some demon with her face – would have moved on, the damage done, and our delay had put us eight days behind. That would give her shadow time to travel nearly two hundred and eighty miles, landing her either in or just beyond a circle of travel that included at its edges Prague, Vienna, Parma, Trier, Bratislava and Turin.
“She will choose a big city; a city she knows well,” he muttered. “You know her – where will she go?”
“I knew her,” I replied. “If it’s her at all.”
He gave a sniff of indignation, and chose Vienna.
“No,” I murmured. “She prefers Prague.” I couldn’t meet his eyes, felt like a child again, wished Langa were near.
A smile at the corner of his mouth, his finger drifting over the map. “Prague, then.”
We arrived in time for a sodden downpour that left the Danube raging against its banks, inches away from inundating the ancient stones and the newer, imperial bastions of culture and prestige. We were only there for four hours before a telegram reported a woman matching Margot’s description crossing the same Innsbruck border we had slaved across not a day before, heading in the opposite direction. I laughed at the fury on Ritte’s face as we turned south again. I wondered if we had passed each other in the night, two trains heading in opposite directions, faces half glimpsed through dirty, coal-streaked glass.
I slept with my feet up on the couch, hat over my eyebrows, and laughed again at Ritte’s even more fervent rage at being questioned at the border again by inferior men, and wondered where La
nga was, and decided he was probably somewhere on the northern edge of the Hindu Kush, about to descend to the jagged hills of central Asia, or to the flatlands that clung to mighty rivers and the dusty places of hidden sacred tombs. What sights would he see, my shadow, as he crossed through the lands swept over by Alexander and Genghis Khan, by Tamurlane and the great Persian kings? What dreams would he hear as he passed by the sleeping towns of the Tigris, or through the rattling markets of Istanbul? I wished for a moment that we could just sit and talk, he and I, and share in the wonders we had beheld.
“Where now?” Ritte barked, as we disembarked into wet sideways snow below the Alps.
I looked at his map for a long moment, the criss-crossing rings of distances travelled and times taken. “Milan,” I said at last. “She always liked the opera.”
A sharp nod, a yap of “Come, come!”
The landscape around Milan was a blasted torment of the modern world: mountains gouged open for metal and stone; flat fields of endless wilting stalks ploughed into earth, and finally, ahead, the belching chimneys and grinding endless roads of factories, freshly sprung up around the railway lines, ringing the older city and its mosquito-buzzing nights with fire.
A woman met us at the railway station, and I instantly wished Langa was there to tell me who she was, for she gave her name merely as Madame Rossi, and held out one gloved hand for Ritte to kiss, and spun on her heel once this formality was done to march us through the churning streets of stone and timber, old and new. Her hair was the colour of lead, her eyes algae; her walk was the march of a triumphant army, her hands clenched into fists around the handle of her swinging black bag. She wore the tight, high collar of a mourning queen and the sharp-toed boots of a fashionable young lady, and watched everything from the corner of her eyes, and never once turned her head unless her whole body spun with it.
“I was surprised at your telegram,” she informed Ritte in brisk German, laced with a flavour of something I supposed might be Italian. The spy scrambled to keep up with her as she ploughed past men in huddling coats and shuffling steps, walking from one place they didn’t want to be to another they didn’t want to go. “Of course my resources are limited, times being as they are. I have not had any official word on my situation for several years, so yes, I was surprised – very surprised.”
