City of Light (City of Mystery)

by Kim Wright

  There seemed to be nothing to report here, except the sad news that the boys were being not merely buggered but bilked, that Charles Hammond had persuaded them to turn over a hefty portion of their hard-earned funds for rent, costuming, and instruction in the unlikely art of ballroom dance. Davy was beginning to regret that he had held Mickey back from his stew for so long when they came to the final room, the final bureau, and the final drawer.

  Mickey yanked it open.

  Frilly things. Lacy stockings, a high necked blouse, kid gloves. Some sort of undergarment that Davy dimly recalled having a French name. Clothing of a much higher quality than the other items Mickey had shown him. The sort of things a lady might possess.

  Davy frowned. “A woman lives here? Hammond employed girls as well as boys?”

  Mickey shook his head. “Was Tommy’s drawer, and he’s gone too, Sir, left the same day the master took off. Just as you’d expect, wouldn’t you?” When he looked up and took note of Davy’s bewildered stare, Mickey tried again. “Thought he was better than us, didn’t he? Tommy wouldn’t stay behind to scratch out a living with the rest of the chickens. And the master would take him wherever he went, wouldn’t he? Seeing as how Tommy was his pet.”

  “Take him where? You do know where Hammond is, don’t you?”

  Mickey hesitated.

  “Stew,” Davy reminded him, none too gently.

  “They say he took Tommy to France,” Mickey blurted. “Up and run they did, when the news came back the coppers had grabbed up poor Charlie and pulled him to the bloody jail. The rest of us didn’t know what we was to do, but Tommy was the only one he cared about, the only one he took with him. Always the golden boy, Tommy was, the one that made him the posh money, only one the master cared for.”

  Davy picked up one of the gloves. It was small, spun from silk. He lifted it to his cheek. It smelled of lemon verbena.

  We’ve been very stupid, he thought. We’ve been very slow to see.

  “And why was Tommy the favorite?” he asked, even thought he was quite sure he knew the answer.

  “Because he was one of the boy-girls, wasn’t he, Sir?”

  “The boy-girls?”

  “Yes, Sir. They knew they was better than the rest of us and wasn’t going to let us forget the fact. See what I mean?”

  Paris

  1:20 PM

  Bodies talk.

  This was something Tom Bainbridge believed with all his soul and it was the primary reason he was prepared to assume the role of coroner of the forensics unit the minute his schooling was complete. The silence of the morgue subdued and perhaps even frightened some of his school mates and he knew that they saw cadavers as proof of the limitations of their calling. The sort of limitations doctors were loathe to admit. For if medicine was an imperfect science, then they must be, by implication, imperfect scientists, priests in service to a minor god. The nearly oceanic arrogance of doctors, professors, and even the students of medicine would make them bristle and mutter at such accusations - and nothing was as accusatory as a corpse.

  His friends called them mute. One of the more poetic chaps back at Cambridge had referred to their precious collection of cadavers as “the mute choir.” But Tom never saw them as such. To him, the dead were bursting with stories and quite willing to share them, at least to a man who was patient and respectful, who understood that death could be as complex as life.

  With a mention that they had wished to view Graham’s body, Rubois had vigorously nodded and sent for a young translator named Carle who could escort them to the morgue and answer any questions. But when Trevor had asked if there was another body which had also been taken from the Seine, this simple question had caused an abrupt change of plans and Rubois had suddenly opted to come with them as well. Their silent party had stomped across town, stopping to buy ham and cheese rolls from a vendor as they walked, and entered the palatial doors of the Paris morgue. Tom had always assumed that Rayley’s letters exaggerated the opulence of the building, but they had not. He and Trevor had exchanged a look of sheer disbelief as they had crossed the marble lobby. The bodies brought here greeted death in far grander accommodations than they had likely ever known in life.

  But this was an irony to be contemplated later, in leisure, with a glass of fine port. For now, as the four men made their way down hall after hall, turning so frequently that Tom would have been unable to find his way out on a bet, he focused on settling his mind. Releasing the innumerable impressions and changes of the last seventy-two hours and bringing his thoughts fully into the present. Tom’s faltering French had allowed him to understand more of Rubois and Carle’s conversation than they probably intended, and he knew that Rubois was not entirely convinced that Tom and Trevor deserved to view both bodies. The British still had something to prove. If he could manage to deduce something that their own coroner did not, perhaps Rubois would open even more to them, be willing to share his own research and theories.

  Tom wished his French was more fluid but he knew the true test of his powers of translation would come when he stood before the corpses. In death, he considered, we all pass over into some countryless land. We begin to speak a new language that only a handful of the living can decipher. Tom noted that Trevor was clinching his jaw as he walked. His discomfort with the dead, so odd in light of his chosen profession, was well known but rarely commented upon by his underlings.

  Rubois was unsure they should be here. Trevor didn’t wish to be. It would fall to Tom and Tom alone to ask and answer the question: What are these particular bodies trying to tell us?

  1:35 PM

  Davy sat and watched Mickey Cooper shovel in two bowls of stew, several slices of bread, and gulp the beer like water. During this luncheon – which, in the boy’s hungry haste, had lasted no more than ten minutes – Davy had been able to gather a few more particulars. It seemed that Charles Hammond had regularly gone back and forth between England and France, during the six months Mickey had been in his employ. Mickey claimed not to know the reason for the travel beyond the vague explanation of “business” and Davy believed him.

  It seemed that Hammond normally kept somewhere between five and eight boys in his employ at any given time, all recruited by the aforementioned Henry Newlove from the post and telegraph offices. Henry not only served as Hammond’s procurer of new talent, but had also been an instructor in the sort of skills Hammond had declared the boys must know if they were to succeed in their new profession. He had tutored them in diction – Davy suspected Mickey had been somewhat of a disappointment to Newlove in this particular arena – as well as dancing, proper table manners, and undoubtedly other, darker arts as well, the specifics of which Davy did not inquire and Mickey did not offer. Newlove obviously served as Hammond’s second in command and normally ran the brothel during the man’s frequent absences. But no one had seen Henry in weeks.

  Thus, with Newlove missing and Hammond on the run, the boys had been left on their own. No clients had appeared since the dark day of Charlie Swinscow’s arrest, a boarded up door and warnings from Scotland Yard hardly serving as invitation to an evening of forbidden frolic. So the boys had constructed their climbing web of ropes and continued to come and go via the back of the house, living off the message delivery wages and, Davy suspected, a fair bit of theft.

  But here was the surprising part. If you discounted this last bit of trouble which began with Charlie’s arrest, Mickey claimed the boys had been quite content with their lot at 229 Cleveland Street. Most of them had come to London from mill towns and farms, where grueling physical labor was the norm and the requirements of the postal service, which demanded long hours in exchange for paltry pay, had not been a great improvement. A profession which required only an hour a two of effort each day was a welcome novelty and even their living conditions were a decided improvement from what they’d left.

  In fact, Mickey’s main complaint seemed to be not what Hammond - whom he continued to refer to as “the master,” with it grati
ng more on Davy’s nerves each time he said the word - had expected them to do with the gentlemen who came calling, but rather the preferential treatment afforded the boy-girls. Apparently they received not only better clothes and more exacting training, but they progressed on to more glamorous settings where they made the acquaintance of even wealthier men.

  When Davy tried, as best he could, to ascertain if there was anything unusual about the physiology of the boy-girls, his questions were greeted with a frown and more shakes of the head. Through Mickey’s rambling attempts at explanation, made all the more difficult to follow because of the mouthfuls of lamb stew, Davy could only gather that the boy-girls tended to be younger than the others, twelve or thirteen, still with smooth faces and slender frames.

  “Pretty, I guess you’d say,” Mickey concluded thoughtfully, and took another deep drag of his beer. “Though Tommy’d sure try to punch me if he heard it put out there like that.”

  Davy sat back to mull this over. So most of the boy-girls were young enough to retain a genderless quality, not yet in puberty and semi-starved besides. Mickey casually but pointedly, tilted his empty mug in all directions and Davy signaled the barmaid for a fresh ale. The gesture earned him a grateful, gap-toothed smile from the lad, and Davy decided to try a new tack.

  “The clothes in that drawer were expensive. How could Tommy afford them?”

  “But the master bought them for him, didn’t he, Sir?”

  Having Mickey constantly refer to him as “Sir” was also disconcerting for Davy, almost as distressing as hearing Hammond deemed “the master.” “Sir” was the proper form of address for a detective, or even a copper, especially from a boy the age of Mickey, but the word still made a dull clink each time it hit his ear. Davy was almost always in the presence of Trevor, almost always the one saying “Sir” rather than responding to it. Now each time Mickey addressed him as such, it only served as a reminder that Trevor was far away.

  “Why did Hammond use his own money to supply clothes for the boy-girls and not the rest of you?”

  Mickey looked at him archly, a grown man’s expression settling across a boy’s freckled face. “The rest of us just wore our clothes at home, of course, for socials in the parlor. But the boy-girls would go out, wouldn’t they, to places where people would know.”

  “Know that they were boy-girls?”

  A full stomach had restored Mickey’s confidence and he gave Davy a look of open exasperation. “Course not, Sir, that’s the point. The posh people thought they was girls, of course, so when Tommy was at the playhouse or the proper pubs he had to look like a girl and he had to have the right things, didn’t he, else the posh people would know him for a poser. The master used to say our costumes had to be good enough for the dark but Tommy’s had to be good enough for the light.”

  Speaking of light, it was finally beginning to dawn for Davy. “My God,” he said. “You mean these men would take twelve year old boys out to the theater or to restaurants and pass them off as women? Is that why Hammond taught you to dance?”

  Mickey nodded.

  “And this happened more than once? With more than one boy?”

  Another nod.

  “For the love of God, why would they do such a thing?”

  Mickey wiped his bowl with a crust of bread and considered the question. “Spose it’s cause they could, Sir.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Paris

  1:35 PM

  Since boyhood, Ian had taken nibs of charcoal, scraps of paper, and hidden from his schoolfellows to sketch. Faces were his favorite, and he seemed to have been born with a certain ability to capture them. He had been gifted even before James had taken him under his wing and shown him a bit of technique. Before James had given him his half-dried pots of paint and those tired brushes whose bristles had gone unruly with too much use.

  Ian had been accustomed to psychological torment in his youth, mostly come in the form of insults and slurs from the other children in town. They had sometimes thrown lumps of coal at him and, in return, charcoal had been his own weapon of revenge. His portraits were almost always the product of anger, firm strong lines of black across the white page, the ugliness of the person’s spirit evident in their face. James had looked at these sketches and seen both the raw talent and the emotion behind it, which was even rawer. “The world isn’t merely savage,” James had told him, his hand on his shoulder, his face full of understanding. “It’s savage, yes son, yes indeed. But not merely.”

  James taught Ian to see the subtlety in human faces. They would walk, the worldly man and the younger man, through the parks of London and they would find a bench on a well-traveled sidewalk. They would observe the people strolling past and then James would nudge him and say “That one,” and they would both begin to sketch. London streamed by them, one face at a time, and James had taught Ian to draw fast, without revision or judgment, saying that sometimes our truest read on a human face is our first.

  After so many years of being observed himself, and not often kindly, Ian had reveled in the role of being the observer. James held a high standard, so a compliment from him was much to be cherished, and one day he had picked up one of Ian’s castoff sketches, which he had allowed to fall to the pavement beneath his feet. It was a portrait of a baby in a pram, no more than a dozen hasty lines seized before the child had been rolled from view, but James had smiled at it and said “You have an eye.”

  An eye. James Whistler had said he had an eye. He may as well have anointed his head with oil.

  The tubes of paints were now dried beyond rescue, the brushes all tossed into a rubbish bin. If James strolled past Ian in this moment, crouched like this by the edge of the street, he likely wouldn’t know him. It had been painful to Ian to realize that any interest he had ever held for James was fleeting. Artists look deeply but they do not look for long. Once they have captured something, they let it go. Their eye flitters to a new subject, a different face, and there is a cold detachment at the core of any creative impulse. Ian came to understand this in time. The sting of James’s betrayal had gradually faded and Ian was now able to see his brief friendship with the man for what it was: the greatest gift of his lifetime.

  As he had predicted last night in the bar, the work required on the tower was not especially taxing. Ian had been assigned to one of the tile-layers, told to go along behind the man on hand and knee, scraping any splattered dots of mortar from the tiles. The pattern was a black and white herringbone, hypnotic when viewed from close range, and the morning had sped by quickly. When the church bell struck one, they had all been released for an hour, herded into the wailing elevator which carried them back down to the street. The other sewer rats had scattered, no doubt half of them off to spend their morning wages on lunchtime beer and thus unlikely to return for the afternoon’s labors. The managers were trying to be kind when they decided to grant a partial day’s pay to each man as he left the tower. The coins pressed into the grimy palms had undoubtedly been intended to insure that each worker could buy himself a proper lunch. That he would at least face the afternoon with enough food in his belly to keep him from getting light-headed and prone to a fall. They were engineers, logical men. They did not understand that when one gives a coin to a sewer rat, what one has most likely purchased is his absence.

  Ian had used his own money on bread and cheese from the street vendor on the corner and then, walking slowly back toward the tower with at least thirty minutes of leisure still his own, he had paused to observe each sidewalk artist that he passed. They were all focused on the tower and Ian wondered how many bad paintings of the damn thing there would be before the Exposition was over. He imagined one hanging over every bar in Europe and in half the middle class homes as well. The Parisian artists favored pastels over oils and he picked up abandoned slivers of chalk as he wandering among them, arriving back at the base of the tower with a dozen colors collected in his pocket. He stooped, heedless of his already aching back, and set to work on a b
lank piece of sidewalk.

  He did not draw the tower. Certainly not. He turned his hand instead to the face of Henry. Not the regrettable Henry of late, but rather his brother at the age of two or three, back when the boy had the face of a cherub. His mother had worked in the mills and she had given him Henry to watch. “Take care of your brother,” she had said, a directive tossed out casually from a woman who was tragically ill-suited to her parental role, but an order that Ian had taken to heart. He and his best friend Charles – his only friend, if the truth be told – had dragged the child with them as they climbed the riverbanks, throwing stones into the canal, chasing squirrels with branches. Henry had no choice but to grow up quickly, to become a small echo of his older brother and their resemblance was impossible to ignore.

  Ian had managed to keep Henry alive on their forays about the town and countryside, had shielded him from the taunts of the other children far better than he had managed to shield himself. Ian supposed you could take the fact Henry had survived to the age of eighteen as evidence he had completed the task that his mother had so carelessly assigned him. But on another level he knew he had not taken care of Henry at all.