Anyone who might have been unfortunate enough to peek inside the room at that very moment would have seen a sparkling river of diamonds being cradled and rocked gently into thin air and heard the sound of small kisses being lavished upon them.
The Invisible Man was scheming.
Jess Nevins’ droll idea of bringing together nearly all of the most famous master thieves and criminals of their times was originally planned to appear in our first volume, but its execution was delayed by Jess’ prodigious work on the two companion books to League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, as well as his more recent Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana. But like the famous dish that is better served cold, it was worth the wait and is, in fact, perfectly suited to a volume entitled Gentlemen of the Night. Join us now for a merry chase à la It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World throughout France and Europe as the most notorious villains of all times compete…
Jess Nevins: A Jest, To Pass The Time
Paris, Monte Carlo and London, 1921
It was, of course, the sensation of the season. The “Moonstone,” that fabulous yellow diamond which was the subject of a Nine Day’s Wonder two generations ago, anonymously donated to the Louvre! The Moonstone was to be granted a space to itself in the Galerie d’Apollon, the glorious Apollo Gallery, and would make its debut in a fashion guaranteed to leave lasting memories: an invitation-only unveiling, accompanied by a string quartet, and an introductory lecture by the noted gemologist Bernard Sutton.
Paris, still shuddering from the War and the new garden of white crosses at the Père Lachaise Cemetery, seized on the news with the avidity of a demi-mondaine near a bachelor millionaire. Invitations could not be had for love–but since we are being honest, we will call it “sex”–or money. A year’s subscription to the Palais Garnier, a week with the Lady Wyndham, most delectable of the haut monde’s colombes, a private audience with Prime Minister Briand–all were politely laughed away as far, far too little. As the correspondent for Le Temps put it, “No debut since Princess Narda’s has been so anticipated or exclusively attended.”
The night of the stone’s unveiling brought with it a storm of Wagnerian proportions; sometimes Nature is kind enough to provide the best accompaniment for an event. The gem’s donor, who wished to remain nameless–for there was some question as to how the Moonstone had made its way from India to the West for a second time–inspected the security precautions an hour before the Louvre’s doors were to open and pronounced them “sound.”
Inspectors Jordan and Tony, two of the Sûreté’s best detectives, had personally overseen the security measures. Flambeau, once notorious in the French underworld as a thief without peer but long since reformed, had as a personal favor to Inspector Jordan tested the museum’s defenses himself. Flambeau was caught before he reached the second floor. The Police had men everywhere, officers at the entrances, watchers on the roof, plainclothes detectives among the guests–nothing could go wrong. All precautions had been taken. No thief could possibly come close to the gem, much less escape with it.
You may laugh now.
The local press accounts of the evening’s events were broadly accurate, though erroneous in the particulars. As described in Le Petit Vingtième, M. Sutton was most eloquent about the Moonstone’s beauty (on a par with the fabled Koh-i-tur), its size (rivaling the great Takawaja emerald), and its reputation (as dire as that of the Cosmopoli sapphires and the Gola pearls). The food was superb, especially the cailles en sarcophage, which had the older members of the crowd wondering if Achille Papin had somehow returned to his kitchen. The wine was a stunning array of rare vintages; an astonishing four bottles of the Branaire-Ducru Medoc ’05 were available. The string quartet was flawless. Most of the guests were dressed in a fashion that, in a company less wealthy, would have been described as ostentatious. For this group of individuals, the adjectives chosen were “stylish” and “flamboyant.” The women wore an array of custom-made silk Chanel and Patou gowns. The men were clad in bespoke tuxedos, white ties and silk cummerbunds. At its height, the party brought back memories of la belle époque, and the reporters, those vultures of the press, were complimentary to the point of obsequity in their descriptions. Even the Marxists fell prey to the allure of glamorous excess: M. Dicky, who could usually be relied upon for an “Oh, for a Chauchat and a wall to line them up against” quip about the haut ton, contented himself with a weak grumble about the starving children of Paris.
But then the lights in the Apollo Gallery went out. For all their acumen and attitude, the press of Paris did not report correctly what took place in the darkness and after the power was restored. Le Matin and Le Figaro were too busy flattering the egos of the Bencolins and the Trissons of the Sûreté to be bothered to accurately describe what took place. Perhaps unsurprisingly, only the foreign correspondents came closest to the truth in their accounts. But even they missed many relevant details.
I did not. Oh, yes, I was there. And that is why you may rely on my account of the events which followed.
Monsieur Sutton was concluding his remarks, quoting the Lama Samdad Chiemba to the effect that the Moonstone is “the heart of India, and where the Moonstone is, there also India is,” when the lights suddenly flared and went out. The abrupt loss of the luminous glow created by the lights and the delicate colors of the paintings in the Gallery–The Fall of Icarus had never seemed so lush, nor Schalken’s portrait of the Amayats so heartbreaking–created a sensation of almost physical shock, especially among the more refined women in the crowd, who were accustomed to nothing more distressing than an incorrectly mixed aperitif.
There was a second of horrified silence, broken by the triumphant shout of “Z is the life! Z is the death!” The reaction to this cry... you can imagine it, but to truly understand it, you had to have lived in Paris while the monstrous Zigomar–for the cry was his motto–was terrorizing the citizenry.
Wallion, in his article in the København Aftonbladet, caught something of the electric thrill of panic which ran through the crowd on hearing the shout. Elvestad put it well, in his account in the Stockholm Boersen, when he described the sounds of women fainting in the dark as “an arrhythmic percussion emphasizing the medley of screams.” The reaction of the men in the Gallery–first, hearing the motto of the serial murderer Zigomar, then hearing their women faint, and all the while unable to see anything–as Hagen-Kander put it in the Berliner Morgenpost, “every man present was caught between the Jekyll of terror and the Hyde of fury.”
After 30 seconds of panic and rage in the darkness–I tell you, I have heard nothing like it since the War, when Auguste Dubois, Miraculas and I blew up the castle at Styria and left Götz, Wormer and their men trapped inside to die by fire–electricity was restored to the Gallery and the lights came back up, and the men and women in the crowd immediately fell silent.
The guards protecting the Moonstone were on the ground, unconscious or dead, and a quite undistinguished man in a surprisingly tedious tuxedo was clutching the diamond. His face was so plain that even a Holmes would not have spared him a second glance–but to look that ordinary is a kind of genius, and in that way, this man was among the greats of our century. But even while his face betrayed nothing–besides a lack of hygiene and an appalling taste in facial hair–his eyes... well, they were cold, my friend, cold as the killing fields of Verdun. He held a gun on the crowd, his hand was steady and he had the manner of a man who has long passed caring about one murder. Or five. Or a hundred.
In ordinary circumstances, his manner, and his gun, which in the silence looked so very big, would have been sufficient to guarantee his escape. But as he opened his mouth to again shout, “Z is the life!” a knife, thrown from somewhere in the crowd, hummed through the air and knocked the gun from his hand.
(In retrospect it was foolish of him to expect this, of all crowds, to be daunted by the sight of a gun. He could not have known who he would face, but it was predictable that the debut of the Moonstone would attract an... unusual group of men
and women).
He recovered quickly and grabbed for another gun, but before he could draw it, the front row of men was on him. No man, not even Dunot himself, can hold off an angry crowd for long, and the men in this crowd were both skilled and angry. The thief fell quickly to the pistoning arms and legs of the crowd. A moment of confusion followed, and then the most elegant man in the room emerged from the scrum holding the diamond.
I had spoken with him earlier during the wine reception (what my friend Countess Told calls “the miracle of reverse Transubstantiation: turning a heavenly red wine into dull, temporal water”) and had been impressed by him. An Italian, he was a friend of Comte Etienne de Beaumont–you know of him, he of the “townhouse le monde,” the intimate of Chanel and Cocteau, and by acclaim the best-dressed man in the city–and all observers granted the Italian the palme de soie as the Comte’s superior in couture. The Italian wore a monocle, a double-breasted coat, and a cloak, all the superior of the shops of Milan. He claimed to be a Baron of noble lineage and even a descendant of Caradossa himself. The Baron had struck me as cultured, erudite and quite incapable of physical violence. He was tall and thin–“wiry,” if you are feeling generous–but there were small (but visible) crow’s-feet around his eyes, his hair was streaked with silver, and his mustache was waxed; experience has taught me that no man who waxes his mustache is effective in a fight.
But the Italian Baron was possessed of a surprising strength, enough to wrest the Moonstone away from a crowd of men desperate to possess it. The Baron held the Moonstone in one gloved hand and let the lights play off the diamond’s facets and reflect off the mirrors of the Gallery. The light built in brightness until it seemed that the Baron held a tiny star in his hand, and the audience hushed and grew still as we shared his appreciation of the diamond’s beauty. But scant seconds later the moment was ruined.
“You, there! Put that down!”
The speaker was a museum official who had made himself unwelcome during the reception due to his coarse manner and the distasteful way in which he drank his wine. (The wine server should have given him a spoon.) He was officious, had an offensive mustache, wore a remarkably unfashionable suit, and his voice was a marvel of abrasiveness. He advanced on the Baron.
“You, sir! I am Louis-Charles Picardet, Chief of Security for the Louvre, and I demand that you relinquish the stone at once!”
His chest puffed, his chins quivering; the man was the very picture of a petit-bourgeois official finally given the chance to hector one of the nobility. The Baron smiled with great geniality and with a flourish proffered the gem to Picardet. I was particularly impressed that the Baron’s expression did not at all betray his disappointment at not being given the chance to swap the Moonstone for the glass duplicate cunningly concealed in his vest pocket.
Picardet swept from the Gallery in a cloud of self-importance. He snapped his fingers at two of the guards who were still conscious, and they followed him out of the Gallery and toward the Escalier Henri II. But once out of sight of the crowd in the Gallery, Picardet’s stride lengthened, the heavy, clumsy clomp of his so-unsuitable shoes changed to a light, nimble tread, and a close observer would have noticed that he was suddenly four inches taller and somehow broader in the shoulder. Even an acute observer, however, would have been hard-pressed to have followed Picardet’s fingers as he slipped the Moonstone into a sleeve pocket and exchanged it for a duplicate.
As Picardet reached the stairwell, he was beaming and almost skipping. So joyous was he, in fact, that he temporarily forgot that, behind him, were two armed security guards, both of whom might be as false as the duplicate Moonstone.
The first guard–his uniform read “Marcel Troyon”–was lean to the point of gauntness, and his Byronically pale skin bore a fascinating set of scars and tattoos. The second–his uniform read “Etienne de la Zeur”–was somewhat shorter, more muscular, though giving way to the comfortable bulk of middle age, and had a naturally glowering expression. A Policeman, seeing him, would immediately arrest him, simply on general principle; de la Zeur’s was a face that guaranteed future violence.
Troyon moved first. Picardet was entering the stairwell when Troyon struck him on the back of his head with a nightstick. It was a clean blow, well-practiced, and he awoke a half-hour later with only a slight headache. De la Zeur, not having suspected his comrade of duplicity, was momentarily surprised; Troyon used the moment to unsheathe a stiletto from his boot and point it at de la Zeur, holding him off while Troyon rummaged through Picardet’s pockets. Troyon found the Moonstone and then fled down the stairs.
He took the stairs two at a time and exited on to the Entresol. He ran through the Oriental Antiquities wing, not even glancing at the celebrated diorama of the Duke of Chin’s approach to Knei Yang which looms over the Richelieu Wing. Perceiving that de la Zeur was close behind, and in possession of a knife of his own, Troyon tore down a Metzengerstein tapestry and threw it on top of de la Zeur, followed by the oversize frame containing Penniel’s The Hills West of Napa Valley.
Troyon ran down the Escalier de la Victoire de Samothrace and into the maze that is the Louvre’s sub-level, where the relics and damaged works are kept. He followed a series of chalk marks on the wall until he reached a janitor’s bathroom. He locked the door behind him and waited. Several moments passed, and he still heard no sounds of pursuit. He grinned and stripped out of his uniform, removing his wig and facial makeup.
He was examining his hair and mustache in the bathroom’s cracked mirror when the door was kicked open. De la Zeur leapt inside and fell on Troyon before the latter could reach his knife. Troyon managed to disarm De la Zeur, and the two were left to grapple for the Moonstone. A terrible struggle followed, each abandoning what martial skill they knew to resort to savagery and brute strength. I have seen rams fighting who had more subtlety, and feral cats with more mercy.
Behind them, unnoticed during their fight, a wall panel in one of the stalls silently slid aside, revealing a tunnel into the bedrock. Crouched in the tunnel, owlishly watching Troyon and de la Zeur grunt and strain to throttle the other, was a figure in heavy black robes and a hood and wearing a black ceramic mask which bore a severe expression and only exposed the eyes and mouth.
(Yes, you are correct–it was the “Phantom of the Louvre” himself. No, he is no myth; I have spoken with him myself).
The Phantom waited, unmoving and breathing shallowly, until the inevitable occurred: the Moonstone was jarred free. Troyon and de la Zeur were too occupied with their struggle and their pain–de la Zeur’s arm was dislocated, and one of Troyon’s eye sockets was fractured–to notice the gem rolling free. The Phantom scooped up the Moonstone and replaced the wall panel, and neither Troyon nor de la Zeur were ever the wiser as to the gem’s disappearance while they fought.
There are many stories about the tunnels beneath and around the Louvre: that they connect to the catacombs of the city, form a spiderweb beneath the city, and reach even as far as Amiens; that a vampire once used them as his home; that the Masons and Rosicrucians use them now for secret rites; that they are hellish passages, covered in slime and home to spiders the size of cats and rats the size of mastiffs. Only the latter story is false. The tunnels beneath the Louvre are usually cool and dry and quite pleasant; centuries of feet have worn the stone smooth, and the regular passage of people have chased the vermin into the sewers.
The Phantom followed a twisting trail through these tunnels–even I would have been hard-pressed to follow him–until he finally exited into a sewage tunnel underneath the Rue de Rivoli. Those tunnels are as ghastly as rumor make them out to be; the Phantom was wise to wear black, as the unspeakable stains he rapidly acquired would not show against the fabric of his robes.
He crept to the intersection of sewage tunnels beneath the church of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois. I have, to my regret, been there (I had to have both my trousers and boots burned afterward), and it is a foul place. Picture a wide, rough-hewn cavern with a suffocating
ly-low ceiling. Picture multiple pipes emptying their filth into the cavern. Picture a slurry of sewage, sometimes only ankle-deep, but over a foot high on this evening due to the torrent of rain. Now imagine yourself in this place, and imagine it enlivened only by the dimmest of lights, and imagine it bearing a smell only Arabic has the words to describe.
The Phantom was slogging through this cavern, no doubt holding his breath, when he became aware that he was not alone. He stopped, and out of the darkness a voice spoke to him, bearing the coarse accent of the Apaches of the streets.
“Good evening... What are you calling yourself these days? The Duc d’Arcachon? Belphegor? Mylord L’Arsouille?”
The Phantom did not respond but carefully drew a revolver–care more than speed was called for, for to drop the gun into the liquid at his feet would be to lose the gun (that is, you wouldn’t want to try to get the gun back)–and began peering into the gloom, searching for the source of the voice.
“Never mind. It’s not important. We bear a message for you from Margot.”
The Phantom froze and stared to his right, in the direction of the tunnel which led to the Pont Neuf station.
“You remember Margot, don’t you? She’s no ‘Lord of Terror,’ and she’s not known by a clever anagram, but she is our queen, and we feel kindly toward her. So when she tells us, ‘Boys, go get this diamond for me,’ why, we’re happy to do so.”
The Phantom pointed his revolver to his right and said, in an incongruously high-pitched voice, “If she’s the queen, she should have sent rooks and bishops, not pawns. They’re the first to get knocked off the board.”
Small lights appeared around the Phantom. In the opening of each sewage pipe and tunnel stood several street urchins, holding lit matches in one hand and a knife or cudgel in another. They numbered perhaps two dozen, and under their filth and rags they were well-fed and healthy, sewer rats grown plump and sleek on a diet of foie gras and mignon au poivre. Their leader grinned ferally and said, “Oh, but we’re not playing chess. We’re playing vingt-et-un, and I’ve got 21.”
Tales of the Shadowmen 2: Gentlemen of the Night Page 18
