City of Light (City of Mystery)

by Kim Wright

  The murmuring of the policemen around him was enough to indicate a general light was dawning on them all. To take matters further on his own would be impolite and unnecessary, so Rayley merely smiled at the housekeeper and said “Merci, madame.” The man to his left, whom he shortly realized was the same Claude Rubois who had originally examined the girl, sprang on the trembling Jeanne Marie like a wolf, and she promptly spewed out her whole story. Rayley could glean a fair amount from context and the tone of her voice, but Carle later filled in the blanks. The boy who had come to the door had been not her lover, but her brother. And yes, the two had planned for him to perform his heist of the family silver on an evening when they believed she would be the only one in the kitchen. Jeanne Marie had no way to warn her brother that the unexpected dinner guest had meant a change of plans and thus that the luckless Mr. Martin would also be present. When he found the cook washing clams at the sink the boy had panicked, performing a clumsy murder when a simple turn-and-run would have sufficed. Emerging from the pantry to find their perfect crime had fallen to disaster, his sister had felt she had no alternative but to cover for him. She had shooed the boy from the kitchen, wiped down the knife he had used, concealed it among its fellows, and then – small but fatal error – had washed her hands before summoning help.

  The girl was led away. Fairly gently, Rayley was relieved to note. The housekeeper, sobbing, was taken off in a different direction. A few more officers strode from the room in a hurry, evidently off to arrest the girl’s brother. Rubois slapped Rayley on the shoulder, a gesture that startled him but he raised his eyes to see the man’s chin nodding in an unmistakable gesture of “Well done.”

  And then they all were gone, even Carle, and Rayley was left in the room alone. What else could he have expected? He looked at his watch. Barely four, but he felt an urge to celebrate. He could eat at a better restaurant tonight, be supposed, or indulge in a complete bottle of wine. But solitary celebration is a sad thing, so instead he rose to his feet and headed toward the door. There was a telegraph office on the corner. He couldn’t wait to tell Trevor.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Paris

  April 20

  5:40 AM

  She was both beautiful and smart. A disastrous combination in a woman, one guaranteed to doom her to a life of disappointment, and life had been disappointing Isabel Blout now for thirty-one years.

  There appeared to be only a certain amount of time she could spend with a man before ennui would begin to set in, as slow and persistent as mold on a cottage wall. Mama had predicted - had promised, really – that a marriage between a groom of sixty-four and a bride of sixteen would most probably fail to survive the honeymoon. But George Blout had lingered into an even older old age, occasionally still rallying to demand a particularly distasteful variation of his husbandly rights. Her time with Andrew had been six years, five of them delightful. Randolph eight, but with an extended break in the middle. Three years with Carlo, two of them best forgotten. James barely one, and their bond was of a most unusual sort. Unorthodox as it was, the intensity of their time together expanded his presence in her memory and made him seem in some ways the most significant of the lot. Armand didn’t count. She had known him forever, since the fumbling days of her girlhood, and her business with him was of a totally different sort.

  Anyone clever with mathematics would see the problem immediately. For a woman who began her romantic life at sixteen, six and eight and three and one adds up to somewhat more than Isabel’s current age of thirty-one.

  Yes, regrettably there had been a bit of overlap between the affairs and this had at times proven painful for both Isabel and the gentlemen in question. Others might blame her for this pain and even for the familial and marital upheavals which so often accompanied her arrival in a man’s life, but Isabel did not blame herself. She knew she had been dealt a most unusual and very tricky hand to play. Beautiful and smart. A woman should be one or the other, not both, or else she is in an impossible situation – attractive enough to draw men, but shrewd enough to see through them. Once a woman realizes the frailties of men, her life can quickly assume a nightmarish quality. It’s as if she is being given a series of gaily wrapped presents, and yet she opens them only to find each one empty, until the floor around her feet is littered with piles of tissue and with abandoned boxes.

  Isabel had traveled a great distance. Not just Manchester to Paris, obscurity to prominence, ignorance to sophistication, or poverty to wealth, although these transitions, and many others, were all certainly made along the way. She often bemused herself with the fantasy that she would someday return to the town of her birth. She would walk the streets in her finest clothes and wait to be recognized. She suspected it would take some time. Manchester was a small town, but yet her transformation has been so profound that she knew she may have to walk its streets many times before the citizens would recall her name. All those spot-faced boys who’d thrown mud at her and sometimes worse, the ones that called her The Princess for merely daring to be different, for wanting more out of life than the men of Manchester could offer. Her childhood tormenters would be old now. Worn down by too many children to feed and life in the mill. They might not know her at once but then, when understanding finally dawned…they would see a woman resurrected. They would grab at the hem of her gown and beg for healing. They would reach to her like the lepers who tried to touch Jesus.

  Isabel looked different, she knew. Sounded different. Moved differently and carried fans and furs and ivory-handled parasols, all the talismans of her new life. But, despite the trappings of change, her real journey had been an interior one. For the past fifteen years, Isabel had been her own artwork, her own invention, her own opus. She had created herself out of nothing, and this had taken a tremendous amount of energy.

  The men she would be meeting at the tower… They were not the sort with whom she would normally trifle. The reporter, that boy, the kind of man who would still be called a boy when he turned fifty. And the other, the detective. She had noticed his solitude at the café Sunday last. She had known who he was, of course, since Armand made such a fuss about gathering information on people, especially people who might prove useful at some point in the future. Especially those who’d come from London, who might carry gossip and rumors about their heads like lice.

  She had been instructed to spy on him and, as Armand so charmingly put it “to find the dirt.” Armand believed there was always dirt. But it had been the detective’s palpable solitude that Isabel had first noted. Perhaps she had even dreamed about him afterward. She did that frequently - dreamed of men she had only seen in passing.

  It occurred to Isabel, as she dressed in the shadows of early morning, that she herself might have been for the first time in her life genuinely lonely. For it was not only curiosity about the tower which drove her down the marble steps of her apartment and out through the heavy oaken door. It had been some time since she had seen so much worship in a man’s face as she had seen in the detective’s. Perhaps she was merely nostalgic for England or perhaps she was homesick for her own youth, the borders of which seemed to be receding even farther in the distance. She would not take him as a lover. He was too ugly, too small and serious and there was a high probability that he might expect the sort of things that she was ill-prepared to give. But she would take him as a mirror. She would hold him out from her at arm’s length and admire the image of her that was reflected in his sad and eager eyes.

  6:02 AM

  Working the early shift at the morgue was hardly the best job in Paris, but the workers shuffled in as the church bells struck six - silent, sleep-grogged, and resigned to their fates. Two unidentified bodies had come in during the night and would require embalming for display. Two more had gone unclaimed for more than a week and would thus be buried beneath generic crosses in the small cemetery across the street, deemed the Pauper’s Garden.

  The burials were especially dispirited tasks, since each one marked a failure fo
r the French police, who prided themselves on body identification. But with the starting date for the Exhibition nearing and more people streaming into Paris each day, the count would certainly keep rising and, given the fact that many of the visitors were foreign - vagabonds, gypsies, criminals, and itinerates seeking work - it was unlikely that many of the bodies which would arrive at the morgue in the next few months would ever be named or claimed. The police and the morgue workers were braced for an onslaught of corpses, and some were concerned that the demand might be more than the patchy soil of Pauper’s Garden could bear. There was talk of procuring land for a second cemetery, for just as the city was opening new hostels and cafes in anticipation of the visitors, so must they create accommodations for the anticipated dead.

  But of course, even within the republic of the morgue, some bodies received preferential treatment, such as the corpse which had been held in its own marble vault since it had been found on the banks of the Seine on the morning of April 12. This body had been embalmed, but it had not been put on display with the others, nor was there any talk of carting it out to Pauper’s Garden. At the insistence of the supervising detective, it was even packed in ice to preserve it as perfectly as possible, although in anticipation of what fate, no one could say. The marble vault kept the ice frozen rather well but even so, it had to be completely changed twice a day, with the origin of each new work shift and even now, two workers were headed toward the vault pushing a wheelbarrow. It was a tedious task, for large quantities of ice were not easily obtained at 6 AM in Paris, but this was what had been ordered and what the morgue workers must do.

  This corpse was special. It was bound tightly in muslin, wrapped with the care of a mummy. In a mere matter of days it had achieved a certain notoriety among the workers and in a building where the dead were treated nonchalantly, the body in the marble vault was handled with care. They called her The Lady of the River.

  6:05 AM

  Across town from the morgue a group of seventeen people, including two representatives from Eiffel’s engineering firm, huddled at the base of the tower. Rayley, who arrived early for all engagements as a matter of habit, had been waiting for a half an hour when Graham blustered up amid a pack of his fellow journalists.

  No Isabel.

  One of the American engineers, a chap with the prosaic name of Thomas Brown, introduced himself and began listing the glories of the Otis elevator system, using short sentences, which were promptly translated into French. He described the cable system as being “doubly safe,” wincing a little on the phrase. A decade may be a long time in the world of engineering, but it is a mere blink of the eye in public memory and Rayley wondered how many in their little party were considering the fate of the Baroness de Schack on this particular morning. No one was meeting anyone else’s gaze. In fact, they stood in a small circle, eyes downcast, rather in the manner of a family gathered at a burial plot, preparing to drop roses on the coffin of a departed loved one. Brown mumbled steadily through his prepared speech, striving to hit the middle ground between reassuring his audience while stopping short of scolding them for being anxious in the first place.

  Through his research, Rayley knew that the Otis company prided itself on its stellar safety record, which was largely the result of having created and patented hoisting cables a certain design. If a cable broke or was for any reason stretched too far, leaf springs were released, bringing the falling car to what was promised to be a slow and gentle stop. Apparently the French had hired the American firm because of this admirable technology and then proceeded to doubt the very mechanism for which they had paid so handsomely, forcing the Otis company to not only install their patented hoisting cables but also a sort of rack and pinion halting device that Eiffel used on his railway ventures. Thus, the tower could be touted as “doubly safe,” and thus Brown’s barely concealed dismay as he claimed it to be so. Rayley felt sympathy for the man. No one knew better than he how the French could both invite and exclude in a singular gesture.

  “And so we begin,” said Brown. “Mind your step at the entrance, ladies.”

  Ladies? As he had been looking about for Isabel, Rayley had noticed only one female, an American, clearly the sort who favored votes for women and smoked cigars she detested in an effort to make some sort of philosophical point. The young woman’s face was pretty but her hair was cropped short, barely past her ears, and the cut of her jacket struggled to conceal all evidence of her gender. Graham, whose taste in women appeared to be truly catholic, had of course taken to the creature at once, attempting to draw her into a discussion about the difference between a buffalo and a bison. To her credit, the woman had given him an incredulous look and moved to a different part of the circle. She had proclaimed herself to be a reporter from the New York Times and probably knew no more about prairie animals than the rest of them.

  But the Times reporter had been the only female in their midst when Brown had begun his speech and now he had used the word “ladies,” clearly plural. Rayley stepped back to crane his neck and indeed, there she was, standing apart from the others. She wore shades of purple. An amethyst coat with a scarf of lavender above it, a hat of deep rose pulled low across her face, plum colored gloves. Or perhaps he merely imagined the colors. Although the sky was slowly beginning to lighten, they still stood swathed in shadows.

  At the translator’s invitation, the group began to shuffle toward the square box of the elevator, which Brown had explained could hold a maximum of sixty people for its two-and-a-half minute ascent. Sixty would make you feel rather packed, thought Rayley, and the webbed metal design of the car was enough like being caged as it was. He was struggling not to indulge his tendency toward claustrophobia and was relieved that no one in the group, save Isabel and Graham, knew he was a Scotland Yard detective. Should his nerve fail, he hoped to only humiliate himself, not the whole of his motherland and Queen. Isabel had walked straight to the corner, although whether or not to enjoy the view or to get a better grip on the handrails, he couldn’t say. He found himself in the middle of the car, wedged between Graham and the girl from the Times, who seemed happy for his presence, if only as a buffer.

  “I say,” Graham ventured, leaning across Rayley in fresh attempt to start up with her. “When Otis talked to your very own paper last year he said the Tower would never be built, that there was too much risk. And now here his company is, all tangled up with Eiffel. I suppose financial opportunity creates strange allies, does it not?”

  The girl sighed and the elevator commenced with a jerk. Rayley startled and his hands flew in the air, a gesture no one but Graham appeared to notice.

  He grinned at Rayley and wove his way over to Isabel, who had yet to greet either of them. It was a very odd business, Rayley thought. She had been outrageously friendly in the hotel ballroom but was so aloof today. Well, good luck to Graham if he was trying to engage her in conversation, because the minute the car began its ascent it became quite apparent that American leaf springs and French rack and pinion mechanics combined to produce a cacophony as loud as a runaway train. The female reporter clamped her hands over her ears and within seconds half the men in the car had followed suit. They were rising slowly and more steadily now, but the feeling of a diagonal ascent was disorienting and Rayley planted his feet a bit further apart and stared down at the boots of the man beside him, thinking that if he fixed his eyes on something still inside the car the motion might be less unnerving. He was beginning to regret several of his decisions at breakfast.

  Brown had said they would rise 275 meters. This information had meant very little to Rayley at the time and probably to none of the others as well. If a man had spent his life no higher off the ground than a second story balcony or an oak tree climbed in childhood, 275 meters was a pointless measurement. They had all stood at the foot of the tower and gazed up at the base when Brown said this, but looking up, Rayley was beginning to understand, was quite a different thing from looking down. For when he had tried to fixate on the
boots of the man beside him, he had been forced to notice the sight of the ground below, visible between the slats in the elevator floorboards and steadily retreating, like something from a nightmare.

  Rayley gasped for air. Inhaled, tried to exhale. He had not wanted to perceive the slowly receding benches and sidewalks of the park beneath them, but now that his vision had locked on the sight, he seemed unable to look away, even though the rest of the occupants of the car were growing ever more jubilant. For when the elevator cleared the tops of the trees, suddenly they could see all around them, farther than they had ever seen before. There were cries of delight beneath the drone of the engines. Some people released one hand from the rail and ventured to point at a landmark or another. The Seine, a blue-gray ribbon. Notre Dame, the Sorbonne, the Palais Royal. Or perhaps their own apartment building or hotel, suddenly looking very small and insignificant against the spreading panorama of the city.

  Rayley concentrated on the arithmetic. Two-and-a-half minutes was how many seconds? Two times sixty and then thirty more…150 seconds, not so long. He lifted his head and, very cautiously, looked at Isabel.