Dark Cities

by Christopher Golden

  So naturally, this was where the latest body had been found.

  I was summoned to the Rue Asseline at 6.00am on a morning in October—this October just passed, which was neither mild nor merciful. You remember it, yes? The chill of winter was already in the air despite the warming smell of baking Viennoiseries carried on the westerly wind. The cafés had not opened at that hour but they were already preparing for the early morning onslaught.

  The corpse was lying at the edge of the pavement, one arm stretched out into the road. He looked as though he had met his demise in the act of hailing a cab. He was formally dressed, in a black tuxedo whose satin edgings had lost their lustre forever, stained as they were with their late owner’s cerebral matter. His skull was not only smashed, it was also seriously truncated. Monsieur Crâne, very evidently, had struck again.

  The Irishman, Sergeant Riordan, was there before me and was scraping at the dead man’s fingernails, where presumably there was something of value to be found. An assailant’s blood and tissue, perhaps, or the rare earth of some specific and identifiable quarter of the city. I don’t care much for Riordan’s irreverent manner but I admire his stubborn perfectionism and his dedication to duty. When the dead rose and became the undead he fought indefatigably in the city’s defence. It was said that he had put a bullet in the head of his own wife when she clawed her way out of the body bag and tried to eat their only child. Afterwards he had carried her corpse three miles to lay her down in the mass grave in the Jardin du Luxembourg along with all the other zombis. Respect must be paid to such a man.

  A young woman, her hair wet as if she had just stepped out of the shower, was standing beside him. She was taking photographs of the crime scene. Not of the body, but of the buildings round about. Curious, I thought. She was curious herself. Her pale blue eyes and ash blonde hair, the extreme pallor of her skin seemed to belong to another place and time. She might have been one of the city’s marble statues come to life. Or she might have been one of the zombi revenants, but there were no revenants now. We had won that war, at a cost— to each and all of us—almost too high to reckon.

  I took up a station immediately behind Riordan, leaning against the wall of an adjacent building. I was resigned to a long wait. The Irish detective’s methods are exhaustive, and exhausting. “So,” I said to pass the time, “do you have any ideas as to the cause of death?”

  The woman—apparently Riordan’s partner or assistant— looked around as I spoke, her gaze taking me in from toe to crown. Her stare allowed the possibility that I might be, or become, interesting. It explicitly did not go any further than that.

  “You’re a very funny man, Inspector Philemon,” Riordan murmured. “It’s a struggle to restrain my merriment with you making such jocular observations.”

  The woman walked across to the edge of the pavement and took a series of photographs of a small dog that had wandered up to join us. It stared into her lens with a long-suffering patience, as though it was used to such impertinences. “Is the dog a suspect?” I asked Riordan.

  He looked around at the woman, at the animal, and gave a little snort that conveyed no information at all.

  The woman took my picture next. The magnificent frontage of the Hotel Belle Époque provided a very photogenic backdrop, but I doubt it did anything to offset the shadows under my eyes or the rumpled, lived-in state of my clothes.

  Riordan straightened. He was looking similarly lived-in, to be honest. Both of us had been on this case more or less continuously since it had first broken more than a month before, and we were far from the only ones. The body of a young woman, a streetwalker, had been found lying in the middle of the Champs-Élysées. In swerving around her the cars had made hundreds of concentric ruts in the autumn mud, roughly circular but tapered at either end: a yoni mark, as though in deference to her profession.

  The top of her head had been removed. There was nothing above the bridge of her nose. The resulting damage, however, had none of the neatness of an incision. It had not been done with a scalpel or a bone saw. It was more in the nature of a crush injury, as though someone had pounded the woman’s head repeatedly with a hammer until the resulting mass of pulped flesh and bone fragments could be scraped away. What was left of the skull and the head bore the typical signs of crushing: the bone fragmented along parallel lines of stress, and pulled free of the muscles in the same vertical plane. Striated trauma artefacts extended all the way down into the shoulders and upper back.

  Monsieur Crâne had left his calling card. He was to do so again a further twelve times in the following weeks. Today’s corpse brought the overall total up to fourteen, and still we were no closer to an arrest, or even to establishing a suspect.

  We were still recovering, of course, from the great war between the living and the dead. Perhaps on some level we could not help but see the victims as potential enemies. Certainly we carried our scars from that war, every one of us. We were the walking wounded, emotionally and psychologically depleted. The world we lived and moved in seemed drained of colour. It was almost as though that high tide of death had left us beached and we were only waiting for another wave to carry us away.

  There were, of course, more prosaic problems with the investigation. Logistical ones. The victims were bafflingly diverse. The first, a prostitute who must have been attacked in the course of her nightly work—an occupational hazard, one might have thought. But the second body to appear was a Japanese commodities broker well known on Wall Street, and the third was a respectable lady who ran a cantina on Juarez Hill. Back to the gutter for victim number four, a homeless drunk. And so, and so, and so. Perhaps there was no scalpel involved, but Monsieur Crâne’s needle pricked the fabric of society at every level and pulled it into a tight, unlovely gather.

  I took these musings to the establishment I mentioned earlier, the Café Moche on Fifth and Taylor, just off Unterdenlinden, and stirred them into lethargic activity with a double espresso. I ordered a croissant too, but left it untouched. I considered lacing the coffee with brandy, a great specific both against the weather and against unpleasant thoughts, but it was still very early in the day. I usually endured my stations of the cross without anaesthetic until the middle of the afternoon. Otherwise I would have been drunk all the time. To make a continuing investment in what was left of my life and work required me, occasionally, to be sober.

  But the waiter, Sam, must have seen the temptation cross my mind. “You want a slug of something hard in that, Phil?” he shouted from the bar.

  I shook my head. “Not unless you have the Koh-i-Noor diamond ready to hand.”

  He laughed—a loud and raucous sound. “Still on order. I’ll let you know.”

  “I’ll take a brandy, though, if you’re offering,” said the young woman from the crime scene. She slid into the seat opposite me and shot me a cold smile. “Lutetia. Lutetia Lumière. In case you’re wondering, you’re very pleased to meet me.”

  I looked around for Riordan. He was not on the premises.

  “You seem to have misplaced your partner, Madame detective,” I observed. “Should I telephone the precinct and ask them to conduct a search?”

  The woman—Lumière? A good name for a photographer, I supposed—ignored the question. She pushed some photos across the table at me. I pushed them back, which caused her to twist her very expressive lips into a warning frown. “I need you to look at these,” she said. “They’re part of my inquiry.”

  “But not of mine,” I pointed out mildly. “The Sûreté and the Garda are not collaborating on this case. I’m sure Sergeant Riordan would be quite homicidally distressed to know you were canvassing the details of his investigation with an officer of a rival organisation.”

  Lumière grinned. “Sergeant Riordan can keep his investigation. I’m talking about mine. And I don’t work for the Garda.”

  “Then why…?” I began, but she stopped me with a raised finger. She was still smiling, but there was something hard and sharp glinting from
underneath it like broken glass in a flower bed.

  “Hey. Excuse me. I said I don’t work for the Garda. I also don’t work for the Sûreté or the Policeini or the Aktionsstyrke or the Kogu-Keisatsu. I’m strictly freelance, Inspector. Which is why I’m sitting here talking to you now, under the possibly mistaken impression that you actually give a shit about all these dead people we keep tripping over. If I’m wrong, I’ll just move right along.”

  It was an impressive speech, though it was slightly undercut by the arrival at that precise moment of her brandy, delivered by Sam with a wink and a smirk. I knew very well what had put that leer on his face. We had fought together, the two of us, and killed together those who were already unarguably dead. He was misinterpreting this meeting as a romantic liaison and he was pleased on my behalf. He was an optimist, and looked out continually for signs of a thaw in my perpetual winter. And I continually disappointed him.

  Lumière thanked him for the brandy, then turned the searchlight of her attention back to me. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s start at the beginning. What do we have?”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Assuming, for the sake of argument, that there is a composite entity that could reasonably be called we, what we have is fourteen bodies killed at various places around the city in a one-month period. Nothing to tie the suspects together, and nothing for that matter to link the murders themselves apart from the manner of death, which in all cases is severe crush injury to the head.”

  Lumière shook her head sternly. “Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy,” she said. “Three times over, for the three things you left out. If we’re going to work together I’m going to need you to be a little more forensic.”

  I considered what might be added to my summary. The alternative would have been to get up and walk away, which I wasn’t inclined to do since I had been there first. “All the killings were at night,” I offered. “At least, the bodies were found in the morning in the vast majority of cases.”

  “Good. What else?”

  “The crush injuries aren’t the only consistency in the evidence. In all cases the crime scene was surprisingly clean. There was blood and cerebral tissue to be found, and some bone fragments, but far less than one would expect from such an extreme physical trauma. Oh, and some of the bodies also bear lacerations to their lower legs and ankles, as though they were bitten, ante-mortem, by a large animal.”

  “And that’s two. Finally?”

  I shrugged irritably, taking another sip of my coffee. “I don’t know. You tell me.”

  “Accelerating pace, Inspector. The intervals between the killings have been getting shorter. These last two were on successive nights.”

  This was true. I had shied away from saying it because I was trying not to think about it. It meant that tonight would almost certainly yield a new horror which I would have to face come tomorrow morning. I had had enough of such sights. Possibly I had had too much. On a day like this it was hard to shake the feeling that I was nearing some psychological terminus at a reckless and irrevocable velocity.

  “So that is what we have,” I summed up, with brittle emphasis. “What we don’t have is anything in the way of witness testimony, any fingerprints or physical clues left at any of the scenes, or any clinical evidence that might help to identify a suspect. Therefore, after one month and fourteen bodies, we are still very much where we were at the outset. Which is to say, desultorily masturbating while the world goes to Hell.”

  I would not have used such a crude analogy if the woman had not insulted my professionalism. But Lumière didn’t seem shocked or taken aback. She drained half of her brandy in one gulp, rolling it around her mouth before she swallowed. “When I masturbate, Inspector,” she said, “it’s never desultory. Look out of the window.”

  I took a glance. The fog had settled in thickly, conclusively deciding the uneven struggle between afternoon and evening. “It’s foul,” I agreed.

  “Not my point,” said Lumière. “Now look at your plate.”

  I glanced down at my uneaten croissant. “Perhaps I was not so hungry as…” I said. The sentence remained unfinished as the pale woman lashed out, as quick as a snake. I was suddenly lying on the floor of the café with my own blood welling up thick and cloying in my mouth.

  She stood over me, holding the stem of her broken brandy glass. Her face was calm and perhaps a little solicitous. “I’m sorry about that,” she said. “But the liquor will sterilise the cut. And if it needs a stitch or two, I’ve got a kit right here in my pocket. Get up, Inspector.”

  I did so, but I drew my Chamelot-Delvigne as I rose, and by the time I was on my feet again I had it pointed at her face. The café’s other patrons had mostly remained seated, but were watching us warily. A debacle like this one could turn serious very quickly. Sam was watching too. He had picked up the stout shillelagh he kept behind the bar, but seeing that I had the situation in hand he made no move to deploy it.

  “You’re under arrest,” I told Lumière coldly. “For assaulting a police officer.”

  She seemed unperturbed. “Tell me again about your croissant,” she invited me.

  “What?” I demanded. “What in the world are you…?”

  Once again I faltered into silence, although this time not because of an incised wound. It had been morning when I came into the café. That was why I had ordered a croissant. Now it was evening. The day had passed in the space between two breaths.

  “Merde alors!” I exclaimed.

  Lumière laughed. “I know, right? It gets easier to see through the bullshit, trust me, but the first time you pretty much have to be in severe pain. I got my hand slammed in a revolving door. Blessing in disguise, although I fucked and blinded like a longshoreman at the time. All these things are tied together, Inspector. I can show you how. Are you up for this?”

  I hesitated, but only for a heartbeat—and mostly because her idiom had left me a little confused. “Up for, c’est quoi?”

  “Ready. Motivated. Inclined to pursue a specific course of action.”

  “Yes,” I assured her. “I am very much up for this.”

  She took me first back to the site of the latest murder. There was no fog now. We had opened the door of the café to find the street cold, clear and lamplit. “I tried three times with that Irishman,” she told me as we walked through the frigid dusk. “Smacked him in the mouth, bit him, and stabbed his hand with a letter opener. He couldn’t see it. So I thought I’d try you. Glad I did.”

  “You weren’t tempted to work alone?” I asked her. “If you’re still walking around loose after doing all those things to Mr Riordan you must be a woman of formidable talents.”

  “Thank you, Inspector Philemon. But this is much too big for me to handle on my own. Probably too big for the both of us together but hey, misery loves company.”

  My own misery did not. I almost said as much, but she slowed and stopped. We had come to the exact corner, the place where the dead man had been lying when I first arrived on the scene that morning (or an hour ago, for both of those statements seemed correct). There was no body to be seen now. The liveried doorman in front of the hotel stood with his hands clasped at his back, his fastidious sneer making any crime here seem not just impossible but déclassé.

  “You said earlier,” Lumière reminded me, “that there was no physical evidence left at the crime scenes. I think there is, but people are missing it for the same reason they miss all this messed-up time-shifting.”

  I looked around, but at first could see nothing.

  “Try chewing your lip,” Lumière suggested. “The torn bit. Stick your tongue in the wound to make it smart.”

  I felt no inclination to do that, and it wasn’t necessary. Just grimacing so that the wound cracked open again was enough. I winced in pain, and at the same moment saw what I had failed to see before.

  “The hotel!” I said, pointing. “I think… I’m almost sure…”

  Wordlessly the pale woman handed me one of the photos she had tried to
show me in the café. It was a photo of me that morning, standing exactly where I was standing now. To my left, a brass sign announced with many Romanesque flourishes that this was the Hotel Belle Époque.

  Now it stated in stiffly serifed copperplate that it was the Waldorf Astoria.

  “That… that isn’t possible!” I whispered.

  “And eighty-minute days are?” Lumière’s tone was sardonic, even flippant, but there was tension in her face. She held out the rest of the photos for me to take.

  I leafed through them with shaking hands. I easily recognised the common theme. Each of them showed one of the scenes where a body had been found. Each of them ignored the body and concentrated on the physical landmarks in its vicinity. A street sign, an awning, in one case the elegant neo-classical façade of the Bundesbank.

  Looking at them made my head ache. I sensed in each case that a substitution had been made similar to that which I had just witnessed. Tverskaya Street had once been the Boulevard Saint Germain. The Hafiz Mustafa was formerly the Patisserie LaRochelle.

  “What is happening?” I demanded. “What does all this mean?”

  “I have no idea,” Lumière said sourly. “All I know is that the murders are accompanied by these inexplicable phenomena. These transformations. And that most people walk right past them without even slowing down. They’re completely unaware that anything has changed.”

  A memory struck me, coming out of nowhere. “This morning,” I said. “Your hair was soaking, though the weather was dry.”