City of Light (City of Mystery)

by Kim Wright

  10:10 PM

  “They need help?” the thin young man asked. His voice had gone high with hope. He had spent a miserable night on the river bank, for although the April days were pleasant, the evenings grew cold. There were some francs in his sack but he had been bringing them to light slowly, for the future was uncertain if a man was a foreigner here in this grand city, alone without a single friend. Even the cost of this pitiful glass of wine, which scraped its way down his throat like a rasp, was an extravagance for anyone in his precarious position.

  But he had known he must go somewhere, must do something, must talk to someone. A person cannot exist forever on the banks of a river, skulking his way around the little slums which spring up around the sewer openings. Those shameful ghettos where the people gnawed bread crusts and the rats gnawed the people. So he had ventured into this disreputable bar and seated himself in the center of the action. And, just as he’d hoped, within minutes he had been pulled into the swirl of conversation.

  The men around him were batting about a piece of news. The tower not yet finished and the clock was steadily ticking down to May 9, the official opening date for the Exposition. Nothing fresh to report there. But apparently Eiffel’s desperation had grown so severe that his company was prepared to hire the sewer rats. Unskilled labor, boys and men of all strengths and experience level - in general anyone who could stand on two legs. Hired to cart and carry and polish and scrape and thus free the better trained laborers for the final touches. A full franc a day. All one had to do was show up at sunrise and present himself as sober and able-bodied, or at least reasonably close.

  Ian chewed his lip. A franc a day meant merely nine days until he could earn passage back to London.

  The men were joking among themselves, something about the sewer rats becoming known as the sewer monkeys and they were laying bets on which among them would be the first to tumble from the tower. They seemed to be under the impression that their jobs would require them to scale the outside of the structure like an army of drunken apes, wherein Ian suspected the actual work would be far more mundane. All those restaurants and shops, he thought. They will have to be stocked. Boxes of glassware and hats going up and down the elevator. And staircases to the second level and the third. They would have to be finished and this was tedious, backbreaking labor. The tile, the high lights, the doors and windows and counters. Holding the railings in place for the welders…now, that might be a tricky business. Might require a fellow to show a bit of nerve.

  But never matter. It was a stroke of luck that there was work to be had of any sort and the beginning of a plan was forming in his mind. In nine days he could set sail back to London. For the chance to go home, he would do anything, even if the job was a bit dicey. Ian Newlove had many fears, but a fear of heights was not among them.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Paris

  April 26

  11:20 AM

  The word was celadon. She’d never heard it before, but she loved this silver-green silk which swirled around her legs. Emma could not help but smile at her reflection as she stood in front of the mirror in the dress shop on the Rue de Monge.

  “I adore it,” she whispered to Gerry who was sitting behind her with a huge smile on her face.

  “You look marvelous,” Gerry said. “Try another.”

  “But I don’t think I could ever love another half as much as I love this one,” Emma said, glancing at the shopgirl, who stood in attendance like a severe little soldier.

  “Not another in place of, dear. Another in addition to.”

  “Geraldine, no. Really. It’s too much.”

  Gerry’s eyes also flickered to the salesgirl, but there was no sign that she understood even a word of English or had the slightest desire to. She was staring fixedly down at the twirled design of the rug beneath her, as if her boredom was so profound that it had driven her into a trance.

  “You’ll need more than one dress,” Geraldine said pointedly, raising her pale eyebrows. “So ask this girl to show you another. Perhaps two.”

  Emma supposed she was right. There was no way to know how long they would be in Paris and she could scarcely appear at more than one social event clothed in the same celadon dress. She was, after all, masquerading as the fiancé of a young man with family money.

  “Puis-je voir une autre robe?” she ventured and the salesgirl shook herself to attention and disappeared into a back room, leaving Emma to contemplate herself once again in the mirror. She felt disloyal even thinking the thought, but this had been the best morning of her life. She could scarcely forget that Rayley was in danger and thus the seriousness of their mission, but still…walking the streets of Paris on a brilliantly sunny April morning, coming to this fashionable shop, perching on a padded chair beside Geraldine while the shopgirl solemnly brought out one dress after another for her inspection. For a young woman who had spent most of her life sewing her clothes, quite often revising the cast-offs of others, it was almost too much to absorb.

  The shopgirl was soon back, bearing a pale pink gown with a draped bodice. Grecian style, as the magazines called it, and it looked so soft that Emma’s hand involuntarily shot forward to brush the cloth. But the color, with her hair, would simply not do. Pink was not a shade her mother would have ever allowed Emma to select growing up. Girls with ginger hair, her mother had always said, look best in blue and green. Now Mary, who was blonde, would have been lovely in pale pink…But she mustn’t stop to think of that. Mary was a door Emma’s mind rarely opened, and when she did allow herself to consider the fate of her older sister, she would lose hours or even a day in tears. She could not afford the luxury of collapsing now.

  “No,” Emma said, regretfully. “Merci.”

  “Are you sure, dear?” Gerry said. “I think it’s quite pretty.”

  “It is,” Emma admitted, “but not for a girl with ginger hair.” She shook her head toward the shopgirl and said “Mes cheveaux est…rouge.”

  She girl nodded briskly, as if she could see well enough for herself what color Emma’s hair was and continued to stand at attention holding the gown.

  “May as well try it, dear,” Geraldine said. “She seems quite insistent and her judgment in these matters is undoubtedly sound. We’re in Paris, after all, so let’s allow ourselves to be surprised.”

  “No doubt we’ll all be very surprised before this affair is over,” Emma murmured, but she nodded to the girl and let herself be escorted back to the small changing room.

  It was a strange thing indeed to stand so still and wait for another person to work their way down the sequence of buttons at the back of one’s dress. Strange to raise your arms and have another person pull a rustle of celadon cloth from your body. Strange to stand undressed before a complete stranger and to wait so passively, like a toy doll, for another rustle of pink cloth to descend. Emma had often played the opposite role in this little drama, easing Geraldine in and out of her grandiose ensembles, but she had not had anyone dress and undress her since she was a child. It’s tedious, she thought with surprise. A lot of waiting around for someone else to do something I could better manage myself.

  “The white is nice. I want you to see you in it.”

  The sound, coming from outside the dressing room, startled her. A man’s voice. Speaking English.

  “But I like the blue.”

  The second voice was that of a child or a very young girl. High and a little breathless, but still demanding. Just the suggestion of a whine.

  The man laughed. A deep sound, a little gruff. “Then perhaps we should try them both.”

  The nimble fingers of the salesgirl were working their way up the back of Emma’s spine, fastening the innumerable hooks of the pale pink dress. Emma stood stiffly, holding her breath, waiting to hear the sound of Gerry’s voice chiming into the conversation. For these were precisely the sort of expatriates she had predicted they would meet, were they not? An English father escorting his spoiled young daughter around Paris f
or a day of shopping. They would doubtless leave the store with both the blue and the white dress, perhaps a buttercup one as well. But there was no further conversation. Gerry was keeping her own council for once, and Emma wasn’t sure why.

  The shopgirl stepped back, indicating she was finally finished, and Emma pushed aside the curtain and emerged again into the sunny showroom.

  Things were much as she had left them and yet somehow strange. Gerry was still sitting on her padded velvet chair, but more stiffly now and her eyes met Emma’s with a sharp snap that seemed to say it all. Something about the man and his daughter must have struck Gerry as noteworthy and Geraldine Bainbridge, as so many thoroughly unorthodox people seem to be, had always been an astute judge of the behavior of others. In opting not to speak herself, Geraldine was signaling Emma to follow suit, and thus not to give them away as being English. Emma gave a small nod to indicate the message had been received, and made a great fuss of picking up the draped skirt and advancing toward the mirror.

  The man was tall and handsome, with closely cropped hair and obviously expensive clothes, including a blue silk cravat that billowed around his throat. The girl with him appeared to be about thirteen. Too young for the clothing in this fine shop and much better suited for a schoolgirl’s plaids, at least in Emma’s option. But a blue dress and a white dress, held by separate shopgirls, were being displayed before them and the boutique owner herself, a woman who had not been at all effusive when Emma and Gerry had entered an hour before, was chattering nervously in the background. They were important, these two people, or at the very least they had spent significant sums in this shop before.

  Standing in front of the mirror and pretending to study her dress allowed Emma to truly study the man and girl. He seemed vaguely familiar to her, especially when he tilted his chin to address his daughter, whose name was revealed to be Marianne. She was holding the blue dress in front of her now, and swaying back and forth coyly in front of him, saying that she must have it, she simply must. Something in the scene made Emma suddenly uneasy.

  One of the shopgirls gathered up the blue and the white dresses and, just as Emma had predicted, the other sprang forward with two more. In a flurry of words, spoken so quickly that Emma did not catch the full of the conversation, the shopgirls, the boutique owner, and the girl all marched off in the direction of the dressing room. Emma looked at Gerry’s reflection in the mirror and their eyes locked. Not all the words uttered in the rush of conversation had been clear, but two of them had stood out well enough. The boutique owner had addressed the handsome man as Monsieur Delacroix.

  Apparently, they were in the presence of none other than Armand Delacroix, lover to Isabel Blout and benefactor to the Exposition Universelle. The girl now in the dressing room was most certainly not his daughter, but rather an employee, a child on the cusp of womanhood, whose need for expensive dresses, be they white or blue, was a function of her job.

  With the girl gone, Delacroix lowered his long limbs gracefully into one of the chairs, and, with a polite nod toward Emma and Gerry, proceeded to wait. Gerry was so excited by this unexpected turn of events that it seemed, at least to Emma who knew her so well, she could barely contain herself. She obviously couldn’t wait to tell Trevor that she and Emma had been the ones to find Armand Delacroix and that they had managed to accomplish the feat before noon on their first day in Paris.

  Emma turned back to the mirror. The dress she was wearing looked different than it had in the shopgirl’s arms. It was not so much pink or peach or blush or any of the other colors one might use to describe a woman’s gown. No, when stretched taut across her body it proved to be the color of human flesh and it had clearly been designed to give the subtle but distinct impression that the woman wearing it – in this case, Emma Kelly – was naked. It was audacious and quite glorious. Emma stared at her reflection and the reflection of the man lounging behind her.

  In a world where so few things turned out as one expected, Armand Delacroix was precisely as Emma had imagined him to be. Elegant, yes, but ostentatious as well. Not at all afraid to draw attention to himself or his money. Obviously a regular customer of this shop and obviously this young woman was not the first of her kind he had brought here. The dresses she was trying on now were more sophisticated than a girl her age would wear in London but yet, like the pink dress Emma herself was now wearing, they were not vulgar. Suggestive and yet not inappropriate in any glaring way, and Emma suspected this veneer of respectability was part of what the boutique was selling. Perhaps part of what all of Paris was selling. Sex, most certainly, but the sort of sex that seems accidental, the sort that scolds the observer more than the observed. For who is more to blame that one who gazes upon an innocent white dress and sees nothing but the movements of the body that lies beneath it? Who is guiltier than he who cannot behold a simple beauty without also seeing the vulgar possibilities it brings?

  She would have to say something to Gerry eventually. Otherwise it would look odd. Gerry understood more French than she spoke, so Emma turned to her, held out the soft pink foam of the skirt and asked “Vous aimez?”

  “Oui,” Gerry said, quite sensibly holding herself to a single syllable.

  “Vous belle,” said Delacroix.

  An outrageous observation coming from a stranger and, had they been in London, an invitation for the man to have his face slapped. But they weren’t in London, were they? They were in Paris where a man telling a woman that she was beautiful was not presumptuous but merely evidence that he knew his civic duty. To acknowledge ugliness was the ultimate crime in London but here in Paris it would seem it was a greater sin to fail to acknowledge what was beautiful.

  Besides, what Monsieur Delacroix said was true. Emma, who had never worn pink in her life, was forced to admit that it was her color. It turned her hair, which sometimes she privately though to be the shade of moldering leaves, to fire, and her complexion, which she often compared to that of an invalid, to ivory. Despite it all, despite everything that was going on around them, despite the fact Graham had been pulled from the Seine and Rayley may be destined for the same fate… and despite the fact that the man who might be responsible for both atrocities was sitting here before them, his legs crossed and his glance a little insolent, a little suggestive…despite it all, Emma Kelly was in Paris and she looked beautiful. And she was tired of being the adjunct, a girl they used as an accessory but did not consider a full member of their team. She was tired of being told that she had done enough, thank you, that the men would see to it from here. She would show Trevor. She had a brain to match any of theirs and other weapons at her disposal as well.

  “Merci,” she said. “Merci, Monsieur Delacroix.” For once in her life, Emma Kelly was prepared to be surprised.

  London

  11:50 AM

  “So where the deuce is everybody?”

  Davy looked up to see Chief Inspector Marcus Eatwell striding into the laboratory, a startling sight since the man rarely left his spacious suite of offices at all, much less to venture down the series of steps that led to the dreary cells of the basement.

  “They’re out, Sir,” he said promptly, rising to his feet. If his tenure at Scotland Yard had taught Davy anything, it was that a man could never be faulted for stating the obvious.

  “Well, when Welles gets back, tell him this. We still haven’t found the Hammond fellow who was running the brothel on Cleveland Street, but since he hasn’t been seen for fourteen days we’ve had him declared officially missing. You know what that means, don’t you boy?”

  “That we can now legally enter and search the premises?”

  Eatwell looked momentarily startled, as if the last thing he’d expected was for Davy to actually know what that meant, but he quickly regained his footing. “Yes,” he said, “quite right. We have all the necessary paperwork to break into the damned place and snatch up whatever we find. The idea is that forensics might come first, gather any evidence which might be of a sensitive nature, tha
t sort of thing.”

  Davy nodded and waited. Obviously a man of Eatwell’s rank had not ventured down the stairs to deliver such a simple directive. He would have sent one of his innumerable assistants.

  “And of course,” Eatwell continued, right on cue, “the Yard will be expecting absolute discretion from this unit, no matter what you turn up in the hunt. Any reports generated won’t go up the normal chain of command, to be gawked at by a hundred coppers and no doubt sold to the press. Do you think you can manage to make this clear to Detective Welles?”

  “I can, Sir.”

  “I don’t want him running to the Queen with whatever he finds.”

  “I can assure you that won’t happen, Sir,” Davy said, thinking that for once this was true.

  “The reports come straight to me.”

  “Quite right, Sir,” said Davy. “In fact, I shall deliver them myself.”

  11:55 AM