‘Indeed, Mesdames! He has them in extraordinary number, and above all coloured diamonds of remarkable size and perfection.
The king himself has nothing like it!’
‘But how has he obtained stones of such quality, and where do these riches come from?’ asked someone, voicing the question on everyone’s lips.
Silence fell. Everyone around the table was thinking the same thing, thought Volnay. Had the Comte de Saint-Germain discovered the secrets of alchemy?
‘I may have the elements of an answer,’ ventured the baron. ‘Our king learnt that the comte knew the secret of making the flaws in diamonds vanish, and he entrusted him with a stone that possessed a sizeable flaw. The diamond was estimated at six thousand livres, but ten thousand without the flaw. The king asked Saint-Germain, “Would you help me to gain four thousand livres?” The comte accepted, and returned one month later with the flawless diamond. The stone was weighed, and its weight was unchanged!’
Everyone marvelled at the news. Delighted with his success, the baron continued:
‘They say at Court that he can enlarge pearls and give them the very finest lustre.’
‘Does he also practise alchemy?’ asked Volnay, abruptly.
Another silence fell around the table. Chiara gave him a knowing smile that warmed his heart.
‘I have no idea,’ replied the baron at length, somewhat disconcerted.
The tension eased slightly. All eyes turned expectantly to Volnay. The inspector pretended not to notice.
‘Chevalier,’ Chiara’s clear, impassioned tones were heard around the table, ‘do you believe the philosopher’s stone may indeed exist?’
The subject touched on the immortality of mankind on earth, territory fraught with the utmost danger. Chiara’s youth prevented her from realizing the full implications of her question. To answer ‘yes’ was blasphemy, and liable to punishment of the very worst kind. Adroitly, Volnay chose to answer the question with another of his own.
‘People are seeking nowadays to turn base metals into gold, and to communicate with the spirits, water goblins and salamanders. Is it not strange that in this century of reason, the finest minds should be so fascinated by magic and alchemy?’
Some dinner guests lowered their eyes in discomfort, others smiled at the clever response. People turned their gaze on Chiara, hoping to spy her reaction, but the young woman wisely chose not to pursue this sensitive topic in public. Eager to maintain the flow of conversation, the mistress of the house leant towards Volnay, taking advantage of the attention he had secured.
‘Chevalier, is it true that a woman was killed in Paris, and her face entirely cut away?’
Having posed her question, she swept the company with a look of triumph and satisfaction at the presence of the man in charge of the extraordinary investigation, seated at her table.
‘Yes, Madame,’ said Volnay. ‘But I can say nothing further.’
He noted with pleasure that Chiara was unable to take her eyes off him now. His feelings were such that he quite failed to hear his hostess’s next question, and was forced to stammer a convoluted, non-committal reply. Chiara smiled at his distracted state, knowing she was its cause.
‘But what monster is capable of such a heinous crime? A madman?’ his hostess persisted, raising one eyebrow.
Volnay recovered himself, just as great baskets laden with pyramids of fruit were brought to the table. Platters of candied fruits were brought, too, and quantities of pastries.
‘Madame, experience has taught me that even a madman follows a logic all his own, and that for every effect, there is a cause.’
The company reflected on his words, and pondered what they might actually mean. The meal was over. Sorbets were served, with coffee from the colonies, and liqueurs. The company moved to the large salon for the games of cards and chance so beloved of the nobility, who had money to lose. Casanova seized the inspector’s arm and led him aside, watched by Chiara.
‘Chevalier, what a shame your conversation is so plain! The whole table was waiting for a few words from you about this strange business of the faceless woman, whose body I discovered. A wonderful opportunity to shine, if you were so inclined.’
‘It is not my vocation to be a performing monkey for society at large!’
Casanova sighed.
‘And that is why you will never shine at dinner! My invitation from the Comte de Saint-Germain is for tomorrow, late morning. Our mutual friend will be joining me. Are you sure you won’t accompany us?’
Coldly, Volnay extricated his arm from Casanova’s grasp. He could not bear to be in physical contact with this man.
‘Please understand that I have no need of you, should I choose to visit the Comte de Saint-Germain.’
‘Of course,’ said Casanova, with a venomous smile. ‘As part of an official investigation… Am I therefore to understand that the comte is part of your inquiries?’
Volnay thought fast. He did not want to give that impression. Viewed in that light, the offer was tempting: he would gain access to the comte in all innocence, without causing alarm. He would also be able to keep an eye on this sham seducer and his wagging tongue. Besides which, the Venetian was holding his beautiful young compatriot too close for Volnay’s liking, and she seemed far from impervious to his charms.
Just at that moment, a commotion was heard in the hallway. A voice boomed. There was the sound of running feet, and a liveried valet entered the room, rather too hurriedly. All eyes turned to him, in curiosity. The man paced quickly across to Volnay and whispered something in his ear. The inspector invited him to lead the way and the two hurried from the room. Volnay did not notice the Chevalier de Seingalt following close behind.
The Inspector of Strange and Unexplained Deaths hurried down the main staircase, shadowed closely by Casanova. Chiara hurried after them, too. One of Volnay’s men stood waiting in the great hallway, awkward and out of place beneath the crystal chandeliers.
‘What’s happened?’ asked the inspector sharply.
The man’s face was white and drawn.
‘Another young woman has been found dead, and her face cut away!’
A small group of men in black surrounded the corpse. The precinct chief stared, dull-eyed, at Volnay as he approached.
‘Never thought I’d have occasion to work with the Inspector of Strange and Unexplained Deaths. My colleague in Paris told me about the affair. This victim was killed in the same atrocious manner. No witnesses.’
His mouth stretched into a scornful grin.
‘Seems your investigation just got a little more complicated, Inspector!’
Volnay made no reply. He knelt beside the dead woman. She was appallingly disfigured. Shreds of flesh hung from around her face.
‘Shoddy work,’ said the precinct chief solemnly. ‘The murderer must have been in a great hurry.’
‘Hurried, or disturbed,’ said Volnay, quietly.
His fingers rested for a moment on the young woman’s neck, marked by two elongated, purplish bruises.
‘There were no marks of this sort this first time,’ he noted.
He lifted one eyelid.
‘The pupil is dilated, the lips are blue. The contusions on the neck and throat suggest to me that the victim was strangled bare-handed before being cut up. So much the better for her…’
Volnay placed both hands around the young woman’s neck, enclosing it delicately, as if to strangle her a second time.
‘God in heaven!’ The precinct chief swore loudly. ‘Have you gone stark, staring mad? You’re fit for burning, man!’
Volnay turned slowly. His eyes blazed cold as ice.
‘I am trying to form an idea of the size of the murderer’s hands.’
In the heavy silence that ensued, he took hold of the corpse’s wrist. As with the first victim, hers was the hand of a young woman who took good care of herself. A pretty ring glittered on one of her fingers, and she wore a band of gold. Volnay removed them carefully and pl
aced them in a small pouch, where he kept his clues. Her clothes seemed well cut, though rather plain. They were bloodstained, and in disarray, as if the young woman had fought fiercely to escape her attacker. This time, he made a systematic search of the body, but found nothing. He examined the surrounding area with his lantern, and discovered what looked like a small, round grain, smooth as boxwood, stuck between two cobblestones. He removed it under the ironic gaze of the precinct chief and placed it carefully in his pouch of clues.
‘Did you know,’ he said quietly, ‘that almost a thousand years ago, a magistrate of the ancient Tang dynasty, one Ti Jen-Chieh, studied crime scenes by examining every piece of material evidence?’
Without waiting for a reply, he took one of the victim’s small, delicate hands in his. These were not the hands of a woman who worked by day and caressed her lover by night. They were too white, too delicate. Nor were they the hands of a society lady: the victim was not sufficiently well dressed. A woman who plied her trade by night, then? Seductive, immodest hands, Volnay decided. Hands that were unafraid to insinuate themselves beneath shirts and breeches. Delicately, he turned them palm upwards. The skin was white, soft and intact, unlike the first victim.
He’s proceeded differently, thought Volnay. Perhaps a different murderer altogether?
The dull clatter of cartwheels rang out over the cobbles. Heads turned to look.
‘Dear God!’ sighed the precinct chief.
The cart drew to a halt. A rumour ran through the crowd that had assembled now. Pulling on the reins, a ghostly figure sat deeply swathed in a monk’s habit, the hood pulled down over his face. He stared straight ahead, and his intense, fixed gaze was troubling indeed.
A number of onlookers made the sign of the cross. As people always did.
The dead woman lay stretched out on her bed of stone, in the foul depths of Paris’s police headquarters. Other recently arrived corpses lay around her, by no means all in perfect condition, though they had kept their faces, at least. After the attack on the monk, Volnay had judged it preferable to bring the body to the basement gaol at the Châtelet, which served as the city morgue. The vast, gloomy cellar was the repository for any corpse found on the streets of Paris or fished out of the Seine, once they had been liberally salted, like fish on a market stall. The air was filled with the smell of decomposing flesh, at once sweet and fetid. The inspector insisted on special conditions for the work of his mysterious colleague: no salt, a private corner, with some daylight—for light entered the basement gaol only through a series of narrow slits, and it was famously dark.
‘A word,’ said Volnay. ‘Could we possibly avoid the dramatic entrances with your cart, each time a corpse is discovered?’
The monk’s face lit up with a half-smile, and his eyes glittered wickedly.
‘But that’s the best part! All eyes are on me!’
‘And you play your part to the hilt! Is the mask finished?’
The monk skipped delightedly on the spot. He was never livelier, or more good-humoured, than when faced with a surfeit of things to do. It was his nature—or perhaps the effect of the herbs he collected at the forest edge and chewed for long periods, when he sought to stave off the effects of fatigue.
‘It is,’ he said. ‘But it’s far more rudimentary than the first.’
‘Why is that?’
‘The skin of the face was torn away very roughly this time. Not at all like the first victim. In so doing, the murderer has splattered the victim’s upper garments with blood. Perhaps he worked in a hurry…’ he added.
Volnay nodded.
‘He must have worked directly out in the street, while she was fully clothed, whereas before he stripped the body, probably inside the courtyard, then re-dressed and dragged it out onto the street once he had finished.’
The monk frowned and indicated the young woman’s neck.
‘As you saw straightaway, she was strangled. The bruises at her throat are doubtless due to the pressure from the murderer’s thumbs: the central marks are circular and quite symmetrical. His nails have pierced the skin, too.’
He opened the dead woman’s jaw, with extraordinary gentleness.
‘The victim seems to have reacted by biting her tongue, alas. The murderer pressed very hard, because the curved tongue bone has been broken, and the cartilage in the trachea is crushed. I found no trace of wounding or strangulation on the first victim. The facial skin had been very neatly removed, like skinning a rabbit, truly it seemed like the work of a surgeon. Now, for the second murder, we have strangulation, followed by this act of butchery, and unskilled butchery at that, for I have no wish to slander a profession of such vital importance!’
With infinite delicacy of touch, the monk lifted one of the victim’s hands and turned the fingers over for the inspector to examine.
‘The girl put up a fight. There is blood under three of her fingernails, and scraps of flesh. If we could only identify to whom they belong. At least we know the murderer bears a livid scar on one arm, with three bloody scratches. And lastly, the palms of the hands are perfectly intact, whereas on the first victim, they seemed to have been burnt away.’
The monk pursed his thin lips in an expression of doubt.
‘Thinking about it, the only thing common to the two murders is the torn-off face and the fact that—ah yes, I omitted to mention—the young women had both made love to a man an hour or two before their deaths. What do you think?’
‘Either this is another murderous lunatic, copying the earlier crime, or the same murderer who, for reasons unknown, has proceeded differently this time. And in Versailles, a town crammed with agents and officers of the king! Not a place where people are murdered on the street, as a rule!’
Both fell silent. The inspector pressed his face briefly to the metal grille separating the decomposing bodies from the public. When he looked up once more, his eyes were cold as ice.
‘There’s something I didn’t tell you yesterday,’ he said quickly. ‘The Brotherhood have found me. They threatened me with death if I didn’t serve their interests.’
The monk’s expression closed tight as an oyster at low tide.
‘And what might those be?’
‘To discredit the king and La Pompadour. In their eyes, the king is Bluebeard himself, and the marquise his procuress-in-chief!’
‘Wait…’
Volnay had turned to go, but the monk caught his sleeve.
‘You and I, we know the Brotherhood’s true name: the Brotherhood of the Serpent. They pride themselves on their rational, pragmatic cast of mind, yet their leaders engage in bizarre ceremonies that perpetuate the cult of the gods of Egypt and Babylon! Isis, Osiris, Baal, Moloch, Semiramis… They are dangerous madmen! And you were mad to join them when you did. You know that once initiated, a brother can never leave. But you would not listen to me. You wanted to kill kings and topple their royal houses back then! Ah, the folly of youth!’
Volnay slipped from the monk’s grasp.
‘That’s precisely why I have distanced myself from them ever since,’ he said curtly.
‘Keep it that way,’ said the monk, who had turned white as a sheet. ‘The Brotherhood of the Serpent seeks to emulate ancient Sumer, and Babylon. A fine example! The Sumerian and Babylonian civilizations invented slavery, conscripted standing armies and based their expansion on a state of perpetual war and the subjugation of other peoples. They destroyed their lands with the greed of their farming, and turned green fields into deserts. I have a feeling this second murder brings us closer to the king—all the more reason to flee the Brotherhood!’
He lowered his voice and bent closer to Volnay.
‘A royal letter associated with the first body, and a royal setting for the second—Versailles, in the quarter they call the Parc-aux-Cerfs, just minutes from Rue Saint-Louis, the site of a house set aside for the king’s amorous pleasures! The first victim may have coupled with the Comte de Saint-Germain before her death, the second with the king
himself.’
The monk broke off and cursed softly.
‘By the bowels of Christ, what have we got ourselves into?’
Volnay looked thoughtful.
‘And was she with child, like the other victim?’
‘If she was, I would have told you.’
The monk threw off his hood and drew Volnay’s attention to the young woman’s clothing.
‘An habituée of the Parc-aux-Cerfs. That seems the most likely hypothesis, to me.’
He struck a theatrical pose and raised a finger, like a scholar delivering a lecture.
‘I shall confine my remarks to a certain “habit”, but there is much in that alone. Habit, habitual—from the Latin habitudo: condition, plight, customary behaviour. But curiously, also, clothing, raiment, attire…’
He paused for effect. Volnay stared at his eccentric colleague in silence. One might know a man, or a monk, by his ‘habits’, and, in the present case, both seemed highly questionable.
‘A person’s habit describes their habits, for we may see how it is worn,’ said the monk, emphatically. ‘A well-worn garment acquires a certain patina. Over time, it cleaves to the wearer’s form. It conforms to the thing we are. And so this garment reveals the gestures performed repeatedly by its wearer, such as the lifting of her dress.’
He caressed the fabric lovingly, and showed Volnay a patch more worn than the rest.
‘You see,’ said the monk thoughtfully. ‘The hands are frequently placed here, in the same position. The repeated gesture wears the garment and testifies to the wearer’s habits, which in turn reveal her true person. Our habits are what differentiate us one from another, they are what give a person’s clothing, their habit, its movement, its life. I can read it like a book, and from my observations, I deduce that we have here a young woman of pleasure, with an irregular, not always substantial income, who frequently lifts her skirts.’
‘A vulgar prostitute,’ concluded Volnay. ‘A young woman of the world.’
The monk’s pale eyes rested in his.
‘A prostitute is a woman of the world because she is the property of every man on earth, but where is the vulgarity in prostitution? Which is better, to starve to death or to sell one’s body? Are our bodies such objects of shame that we must wear them out in drudgery and labour, and never enjoy them for our pleasure? As to selling one’s body, we are all of us confronted with tragic choices in this life.’
Casanova and the Faceless Woman Page 12
