City of Light (City of Mystery)

by Kim Wright

  So that was how they did it.

  Gerard had been preoccupied with lifting and carrying Rayley’s limp body and did not see Isabel turn and retreat. She had run to the ghettos down by the river, to that part of town where people ask so few questions. She had traded her fine clothes for a working man’s rags, had wandered mindlessly and fearfully through a long day, and spent the night sleeping on the stony ground of the riverbank.

  The luck, if there was any, was that Isabel’s survival skills had not been completely dulled by her years of fine living. By the end of the second day she had found both a humble job and a grandiose point of sanctuary. The aerie suited her. As a child she had imagined herself to be a princess in a tower and indeed, this was precisely what she had now become: A woman trapped in elevated seclusion, looking down at the pretty snarl of the city beneath her, the river tossed like an abandoned ribbon, shining silver in the moonlight. Here she stood, waiting for one man to come and save her from another, although who this rescuer might be, or even the precise face of her oppressor, Isabel could no longer say. In her childhood games, it had all been much clearer. Life is never so cruel as when it gives us precisely what we have said that we want.

  Isabel turned slowly on the narrow balcony – more of a parapet, actually – and reentered the apartment. It was a jewel set atop a high crown, each detail perfect in its execution. Miniature, true, but far more elegant than the house Armand had leased for her in Paris or even the grand old home George Blout had provided in London. The mirrors and crystal glittered in the candlelight and the fabrics on the furniture were as soft as a whisper. She regretted that she would soon be forced to leave.

  Getting a job working on the tower had been a rare stroke of luck, but once she had been hired, it had proven easy enough to hide behind the high stairwells as each day’s labors came to a close. The engineers who supervised the work were the sort of men who thought of both everything and nothing. They stationed guards at the elevator on the bottom level to make sure no one crept into the tower at night, but they had employed virtually no method of ensuring that all the workmen left at the end of the day. It would not have surprised Isabel to learn there were several of her sewer rat comrades also sleeping at various points on the tower, although she was undoubtedly the only one bold enough to claim Eiffel’s aerie for her own. In the morning she would go down the series of spiral staircases and hide somewhere on the lower level. She would give herself time to recover from the descent, for while going down is always easier than going up, the steps were still numerous and tricky. When the elevator spit out the first load of workmen, she would wait for them to disperse and then insinuate her way among them. No one notices the comings and goings of just one more nameless man.

  Isabel sat down on a red velvet armchair and gazed up at her portrait. It was hung over the settee, the largest and most dominant piece of art in this artful room. Each picture has its personal code, James had often told her, with the clues plain enough to anyone with the eyes to perceive them. But so few people really look. They see what they expect to see, nothing more, and Isabel’s entire life has been built on this principle. It is not hard to fool people when they do not want to know the truth.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Paris

  3:15 AM

  If Tom Bainbridge had not been so exhausted and worried, he would have laughed. He and Emma had slipped out of the apartment in full darkness so as not to waken Trevor or Geraldine – an unlikely complication since, just as Emma had predicted, both of them had begun loudly snoring within minutes of closing their bedroom doors. It was not until Tom and Emma were standing outside beneath a streetlight that he got his first proper look at her ensemble. She had borrowed a man’s shirt and trousers from a bureau, but Geraldine’s cousin evidently had the shape of a bear. Although it had been wrapped three times, the belt barely managed to keep the trousers attached to Emma’s slender waist and, despite the fact she had carefully rolled both the pants legs and shirt cuffs, the slightest physical effort would undoubtedly unfurl them.

  “Those clothes are so ridiculously large that you’re swimming already,” Tom said. “When the cloth gets wet, you’ll be pulled straight under.”

  Emma lifted her small pointed chin. “I’m a good swimmer.”

  “No one is that good a swimmer.”

  “Then when we get to the river, you can give me your clothes and take these.”

  It was not a bad suggestion. If they exchanged garments, they would both be in clothes that were, while definitely too large, at least not floppy enough to drown them.

  “Perhaps,” Tom said cautiously, a bit ashamed that his first thought had not been the viability of the idea but that it meant he’d get a chance to glimpse Emma naked. “But first we have to get to the river.”

  They scuffled to the nearest avenue where they were both surprised to see that there was a good amount of activity. This hour would find the streets of Mayfair completely empty, but Paris were still bustling and Tom did not have the slightest trouble in hailing a cab. It took them to the bridge where Graham’s body had been found, which they had deemed as good a starting point as any. Once there, they left the lighted world of the street to pick their way down the increasing darkness leading to the riverbank.

  On a rainy night there would have been any number of indigents sleeping beneath the bridge for shelter, but this night was clear and calm. Therefore, the unfortunates of Paris were scattered about the bank, looking a bit like bodies on a battlefield, as if each had simply fallen wherever he was struck. In this case, it was undoubtedly alcohol rather than bullets which had felled them, but it was still a bit startling to see so many people - men, women, and children alike - dotting the ground. Tom had almost tripped over one black-swathed form, which had growled in protest before returning to slumber. But their eyes eventually adjusted and, holding hands, Emma and Tom found their way to the bottom of the slope.

  Since they could scarcely float along with Tom’s pocket watch in their possession, they had earlier determined that they would enter the river precisely as the church bells struck four, then leave the water when the same obliging chapel released a single peal to indicate the half hour. But the fact that they had found a cab more easily than expected now left them with more than twenty minutes to idle until the hour rang. It was very dark on the bank, as if they had been sunk into a great teacup with the lighted rim of the street above, and, with a perfunctory look around her in all directions, Emma turned her back and resolutely began unhitching the belt which held her trousers. Tom turned in the opposite direction and did the same until, having tossed their castoff clothing one item at a time over their shoulders, each had assumed the outfit of the other.

  Then there was nothing to do but sit on the ground and wait. It was hard to see the actual river from this angle, but the bank did not look particularly steep and the gentle murmur of the water suggested that the current would not be especially strong. Emma closed her eyes, already dreading the icy sting that would come with their first immersion.

  “When you float,” she said to Tom, “keep your legs straight out in front of you and headed downstream. Then, if there are any boulders in the water, you will strike them with your feet and not your head.”

  “Indeed,” Tom said. “But there shouldn’t be many large rocks, should there? The river is used for commerce, so they’ve doubtless cleared the worst of them out.”

  “Boulders on the shore, I meant.”

  “Ah, yes. Quite right.”

  A moment of silence, and then Tom added, “And keep your head up out of the water as best you can. City rivers are fed by sewers, not springs, and the less we expose our facial apertures to contagion, the better.”

  “Facial apertures?”

  “Mouth, nose, eyes, ears. That sort of thing.”

  “Oh. Oh yes, I see what you mean.”

  Another expanse of silence. Each waited for the bells, but none came.

  “How did you know the bit about
keeping the feet out first?” Tom finally ventured.

  In the darkness, Emma smiled. “I was raised in the country, remember? This will not be the first river I’ve swum.”

  Tom smiled as well. “Lest you forget, I was raised in the country too. When we were children at Rosemoral, Leanna and I once pirated our grandfather’s little skiff from the dock house and attempted to-“

  Just then, the first bell.

  4:00 AM

  At the sound of the bells, Rayley stirred, causing his entire body to throb in protest. His muscles, his skin, the joint of his left elbow. All pulsing with pain and he could taste the salty warmth of blood in his mouth. He probed with his tongue. Two teeth loose, possibly three. But all still embedded into the gum, it would appear, and this was most fortunate.

  The beating had been bad… but not nearly as bad as it could have been. This he knew even as he ventured to stretch and felt his shoulders spasming in response, even as he began to sense the contusions and cuts along his arms and hands. This had been a surface beating, with no serious blows to the ribs or abdomen – no more than a warning, a metaphorical shot across the bow. Gerard was certainly capable of more brutality and in fact had probably had trouble muting the force of his punches. His restraint was undoubtedly due to very specific orders from Armand Delacroix. The man had wanted Rayley frightened, but not immobilized. He wanted him to sense rather than experience Gerard’s potential force, to be stunned into submission, unnerved enough to betray Isabel’s hiding place.

  Rayley put a throbbing finger to the corner of his split lip. He’d had nothing to confess to Delacroix, even if he had been willing to do so, and in terms of his own fate, he suspected it didn’t matter either way. Delacroix could hardly kidnap a Scotland Yard detective, reveal his identity to that same detective, and then let him go free. No matter what secrets were told or withheld, Armand’s willingness to personally appear in the cell had made one thing clear: this captivity would ultimately end in Rayley’s death.

  That is, unless…

  Trevor was in Paris. While Armand Delacroix had learned nothing from Rayley Abrams in this opening skirmish, the opposite had not been true. In fact, the conversation had been a bounty of information. Trevor had come to Paris, evidently bringing Tom, Emma, and – for reasons Rayley could not begin to fathom – Geraldine Bainbridge along with him. Rayley knew his only hope for survival was to either stay alive long enough to give Trevor and the others time to find him or to devise some means of escape.

  But how? He was trapped in a room with nothing but a high window, a bed, and a bucket. And his wits, he supposed, although they had been compromised by steady doses of drugs and the almost complete disorientation that extended stretches of captivity can impose on the mind. Still, there had to be some way.

  Gerard was coming to the cell twice a day to bring food, water, and chloroform. There was no evidence the man spoke English, and Rayley’s French was hopeless. So it was unlikely he would be able to trick Gerard into betraying some vital piece of information, and even less likely he would find some way to bribe him or appeal to any residual sense of mercy.

  Rayley pulled back his finger, stared at the slight smear of blood, barely visible in the dull reflected glow of the streetlight. Across the room, something scuttled. A wharf rat, no doubt. They had been coming and going through the last forty-eight hours, taking more interest in the mushy potatoes Gerard delivered than Rayley had been able to muster. As he watched, the rat ran up the wall and out through the narrow window, his tail flicking against the rusty iron bars as it slipped out of sight. Rayley sank back on his bed, deep in thought.

  4:10 AM

  Tom couldn’t decide if he had merely adjusted to the cold of the water or was in the first stages of hypothermia. He and Emma had bobbed along for several minutes now, and it was becoming abundantly clear that their primary problem was not crashing into boulders or drowning beneath the weight of their oversized clothing, but rather moving at all. The Seine had turned out to be a stagnant river, faintly malodorous and slow. As they had expected, Tom’s heavier body had floated slightly faster than Emma’s, but only marginally so, and they had stayed with sight of each other for the whole of their limited journey.

  “It’s certainly shallow,” she called up to him. “My feet keep scraping the bottom.”

  “Try and keep them up,” he called back. “We need to measure how fast bodies float, not how fast we can walk.”

  “I know that,” she snapped. “But the current is so weak that I keep sinking. Are you sure we can’t lie back in the water and travel like a proper pair of corpses?”

  Tom tried to weigh the risks. She was right, their absurd efforts to remain upright in the water were forcing them to paddle and thus they were scarcely reproducing the movements nor the pace of the original two bodies. “All right then, lie back,” he finally yelled over his shoulder. “But keep your face out of the water. And thrust your fingers in your ears.”

  “With pleasure,” Emma muttered. She released herself into the water, looking up into the night sky, and almost immediately began to float faster. The same was probably true for Tom, she thought, perhaps to the degree that their paths would diverge or that his increased weight would stretch the distance between them in the river. As annoying as it was to have Tom give advice about her own experiment, she didn’t really want to lose him in this darkness or in this cold river. Didn’t really want to lose him at all.

  She drifted on, straining to arch her neck and keep her mouth and nose free from any splashing. The cold was gripping into her. The fingers she had thrust into her ears had gone completely numb, as had her feet. Her scalp was pricking with icy needles and Emma felt as if she were caught between two worlds of darkness. The moving one beneath her, which gently lifted and then lowered her body, as if the Seine was somehow keeping time with the pattern of her own breathing. And then the other great darkness above, the night sky stretched like a blue-black cloth punctured with stars.

  There are times, she thought, when we are lifted quite out of ourselves, when we could be any person, in any place and time in history. The last six months had changed her beyond comprehension. In fact you might say that Jack the Ripper had turned Emma Kelly from one person into another, snatching away any hope of reconciliation with her sister but also giving her this unlikely new job and a life that was suddenly full of passion and purpose. Fate drives cruel bargains. We must always release one thing before we can grasp something else, Emma reflected, and with a strange internal jolt she wondered if Isabel Blout had ever felt this way. If so, she had come to the right city. Paris, so bright and full of hope. That wildly manic painter she had met at the party tonight, the one who had told her that he wanted to go to Tahiti. Gauguin had been his name and he had looked at Emma with such emotion that she had turned away, almost embarrassed, as if the man were exposing his very soul to her in the middle of the crowded party.

  “This urge to reinvent yourself is very strong,” Gauguin had said. “I believe you may feel it as well, do you not?” He had leaned towards her to whisper, bringing his lips very close to her ear. Impossible rudeness, unthinkable presumption, an act of such raw intimacy that she had flushed with the feel of his breath on her cheek. And he had murmured, “Yes, Miss Kelly, I somehow sense that you do.”

  A shudder gripped Emma. Her legs were cramping with the cold, and her breathing was becoming shallow and ragged. How much longer could this river go on? And in the very moment that she thought this, she drifted into something. Not a boulder, but Tom’s arms. He righted her in the water, but her legs were weak and they stumbled together toward the shore.

  “Didn’t you hear it?” he said. “The bell for the half hour?”

  She shook her head, teeth chattering. With their limbs gone numb, it took some effort for them to climb up the bank, short as it was, and then they each sprawled for a moment on the muddy shore to catch their breath.

  “I didn’t hear anything,” Emma finally said. “Fingers
too far in my ears, I suppose.”

  “We’ve got to keep moving,” Tom said. “Otherwise we’ll take a chill. If you had heard the church bell and stopped, you would have come to shore just there, at that point in the river where the woman in white is sleeping. Close enough to where I pulled up, so I don’t think there’s any need to make separate counts.”

  Emma nodded and struggled to her feet. They began walking back up the riverbank, trying to keep a steady trod and each silently counting every step. After a few minutes, Tom stopped at a section of the bank that had a greater congregation of people, some of them awake and moving in the darkness.

  “Where are you?”

  “1,138.”

  “I’m at 1,123. Not too much of a discrepancy. Let’s split the difference at 1,130. Wait here a minute, I have an idea. Hold the count.”

  Emma nodded and he climbed up the bank and out of sight. She repeated 1,130 over and over in her head and struggled to fight the impulse to lie down and rest. For Tom was right. The simple act of walking, even slowly, was returning life to her body. She could move her fingers and toes now and her lungs were expanding into deeper and more productive breaths.