City of Light (City of Mystery)

by Kim Wright

  “This is one serious story he might actually find fit to print,” Marjorie said with a snort. “Seeing as how it has plenty of sex and scandal. But even if he doesn’t accept it, I won’t so much mind. I’m doing this for Patrick.”

  Emma nodded, glad that at least one person in this mad little chase was motivated by the newsman’s memory, for he was certainly getting the least attention of Delacroix’s triad of victims. They had come to the end of the lawn and turned right and Emma found herself approaching one of the most beautiful streets in Paris, if not the world. She had always sworn that someday she would stroll the Champs-Elysees, although she had never imagined the scene quite like this one, with her all but running alongside a hammer-swinging American reporter. But her life and her frustrations are probably much like mine, Emma thought, as they arrived at their first kiosk and Marjorie pulled a poster from the saddlebag slung over her shoulder.

  “Does it ever bother you,” Emma asked, while holding the poster straight for Marjorie, “being told what the news of the day is or is not to be?”

  Marjorie smiled grimly around the nails she was holding in the corner of her mouth. “Does it ever bother you,” she answered, “being told what is and is not a crime?”

  2:30 PM

  Over the seven decades of her life, people had called Geraldine Bainbridge many things, but no one had ever called her a fool. She knew that she had been posted at this extraordinarily unremarkable spot on the river bank for one reason and one reason alone: to be kept out of the way.

  When the contents of the glove had proven that they were indeed on the verge of finding the precise location where Rayley had been taken, Tom had headed towards the street, hoping to waylay a flic for assistance or, better yet, to intercept Trevor on his way back to the river. He had brushed aside Geraldine’s quite sensible suggestion that she would be of more use if she moved upstream to stand guard at the sewer fortress itself.

  “It’s not safe, Auntie,” Tom had said, in what was a rather infuriatingly condescending tone for a twenty year old man to assume. “It’s one thing for you to sit here, in this area which may be dreary but is at least well-traveled. In fact, it’s the bloody Champs-Elysees compared to what awaits upstream. It’s impossible to blend in and observe when there are no people to blend in with. You understand, do you not?”

  She understood perfectly. He was saying that she was old and fat and female, a bad combination in a detective and thus quite out of her element. He was right on all counts, of course, but that did not excuse the sentiment.

  Geraldine watched Tom disappear up the bank and then stood to better survey her options. Tom was correct inasmuch as she could hardly sit herself down outside a fortress and wait for someone to approach, when that person would most certainly be either Delacroix or one of his dreadful minions. But there must be a way in which she could draw close enough to discreetly observe. Geraldine pinched her lower lip between her thumb and forefinger, a gesture which from girlhood had been a sign she was deep in thought, and slowly turned in a circle to peruse the area.

  Ah yes. Of course.

  Seventy-one years under Rule Britannia had left Geraldine Bainbridge with a profound appreciation of the tactical advantages of a naval assault. She had been quite silly not to think of it earlier, for within sight were any number of small watercraft which she might logically commandeer. Simple rowboats, most of them, piloted by men in rags who were dragging the riverbank with nets, presumably in search of fish. Geraldine quickly settled on one of the boats, which was a bit more sizeable than the others and held two men. If rowed upstream, it would offer the perfect vantage point for her surveillance mission and would provide safety besides. For no man on foot, no matter how angry he might be, could overtake a rowboat.

  Geraldine walked resolutely down to the edge of the water where, in lieu of a proper dock, the fishermen were merely launching from the muddy bank. “Good day,” she called out, in what she considered her best French. “I am in need of assistance.”

  None was forthcoming. In fact, all the men within earshot turned away in a most rude fashion, proving that when it came to badly spoken French, even the indigent fishermen of Paris were snoots. Geraldine tried again.

  She didn’t quite know how to say “I wish to hire you,” so instead she called out “I wish to buy something,” which were indeed the first words she had ever learned in French.

  A collective deafness continued to possess them all. Geraldine decided to switch to a more universal language. She unfastened the purse which dangled at her side, pulled out a wad of money, waved it in the air, and shrieked “Voila.”

  The auditory senses of their captains thus miraculously restored, the entire small fleet paddled around in the water and began to approach her position on the bank. Geraldine signaled to the half-rotted tub she had come to think of as “the big boat,” which was indeed bearing down upon her with the most speed. The others stopped rowing and fell back, filling the air with curses, and within minutes Geraldine was seated on the back bench of the rowboat, her two oarsmen paddling upriver in an enthusiastic, if somewhat unsteady, cadence.

  “To the sewer,” she called, and one of them looked back at her and nodded, although it was unlikely he understood what she meant. Going upriver, even against the gently meandering flow of the Seine, seemed to confound them and as a team they were badly yoked, with one of the men far larger than his partner. They hit the rocks on one side of the bank with a thud that caused Geraldine to release a little yelp of surprise, then grossly overcorrected and hit the bank on the other side. Snarling at each other, pushing off from the rocks with their splintery oars, the two finally managed to somewhat synchronize their strokes and begin to progress upstream, accompanied by the derisive hoots of their comrades and the vagrants on the shore.

  Geraldine clutched both sides of the boat and prepared herself for a bumpy voyage – or perhaps even a swim. There was, she reflected, a reason why no one ever spoke well of the French navy.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Paris

  2:49 PM

  Arrest warrant in hand, Trevor, Rubois, Carle, and a half dozen flics climbed into a police wagon and headed out in search of Armand Delacroix. To his gratification and surprise, Trevor had been handed a set of paperwork by Rubois before they left the station. It was embossed with a seal, some sort of document that Trevor could only assume temporarily afforded him the privileges of the French police.

  But at the white brick house on the Boulevard Saint Michal, they found nothing but a handful of servants and a twelve year old boy in knee breeches, who was in the back yard lazily swirling on a swing. Marianne, evidently, caught in his more natural form, and the police swept up the child along with the others, herding them toward a second wagon for transfer back to the station. Repeated shouted assurances that they were being carted in as witnesses, not suspects, did nothing to calm the excitable flock, who were weeping and wailing as if they were standing witness to the Biblical end of days. The cook, forced to abandon a half-baked chicken, had proven especially vocal.

  “You will be all right,” Trevor said at one point to the boy, who was standing solemnly to one side. The child blinked slowly, as if he did not understand what Trevor was saying. But he couldn’t have forgotten his English so quickly, so it was more likely a matter that he understood Trevor well enough, but simply did not believe him. Waiting amid the loudly lamenting servants the child remained silent, and when it was time to board the wagon, he climbed in passively, prepared to be transported to this unexpected new fate without protest or even a question. Trevor gazed after him sadly as the wagon lumbered up the street. It was hard to predict what life held in store for the boy known as Marianne.

  After that, the remaining officers reassembled and reentered their own wagon. Through Carle, Trevor managed to convey to Rubois that it might be a wise move to return to the river. That was their agreed-upon meeting place, after all, once Emma finished with the posters and Tom with the addresses.
And Gerry would be waiting there too, of course, her mind undoubtedly churning with possibilities. Considering her nature, Trevor feared he may have already left her too long on her own.

  3:01 PM

  Henry was dead. This was the private shame Armand Delacroix had lived with for the past two weeks, but did the entire city of Paris have to know it as well?

  His nightmare had rendered him unwilling to return to sleep, so Armand, who had never held to traditional hours of work and rest, had risen from his bed and taken to the streets. Under the circumstances, it was probably not a bad idea to make a few social calls. All those men who claimed to miss Isabel so badly…they needed to be reassured that business would proceed as usual, that Armand had options still available for their perusal. If not Marianne, then someone else. Perhaps even a boy who looked like a boy if that was how their inclinations lay, for he was hardly one to judge. In a time of crisis, as this most surely was, it was essential that Armand cement the trust of his most important clients, and that he bring any lost sheep resolutely back to the fold.

  He had gone first to see a trader of bonds, an unpleasant blowhard with strong ties to the financial community of Paris and thus to the Exhibition. After a brief chat with the fellow – and an invitation to Armand’s next soiree on April 29 – Armand was back on his rounds and making his way toward the office of a minor politician, a man whose own pockets were not particularly deep but who had proven connected to a wide spectrum of potential investors. And as he had paused at the corner of a residential street, Armand had seen it.

  Do You Know This Girl?

  If you did, the poster advised you to immediately contact the French police. Some business about a reward.

  Armand felt as if he had been struck with a blow to the head. He reeled. He may have staggered. The world spun, bright and terrifying, before his eyes.

  Henry had resurfaced. He had come, for all practical reasons, back from the dead, pointing a milky white finger at the head of Armand Delacroix. The police most certainly knew they didn’t have a girl, that what they had was a boy, a boy dressed as a girl, and thus a rather interesting sort of fish to catch. As he tried to regulate his breath, his hand clutching the very lamppost that held the damning poster, Armand felt that it was all closing in on him somehow. Isabel was still missing and Cleveland Street had collapsed. And now here was Henry, loosened from the water and in the hands of the police.

  He couldn’t go back to the house at the Boulevard Saint Michal. If the police were onto him, then that would be the first place they would look. He must get money, he thought, he must go to his bank before it closed at five and he must withdraw all the funds at his disposal and then he would go…where? Somewhere. Across some border, into Italy or Austria, Germany or Spain. Someplace where Charles Hammond and Armand Delacroix did not exist.

  He looked around, tried to remember who he was, where he was. Not to panic, he thought. Nothing was so deadly as panic. The clock on the corner said just past three, which gave him nearly two hours to get the money and he could easily be gone from Paris by dusk. Armand pushed off of the lamppost, his hand dragging across the picture of Henry Newlove’s face – pulling it, tearing it – and began to walk down the street. But Henry was waiting for him on the next corner too, and also watching from across the street, his eyes accusing, his lips in a pouty sneer. “Outrun me, will you?” he seemed to be saying. “There is no point. I am on every avenue and boulevard, just waiting for you to pass.”

  Yes, get the money, Armand thought, desperately trying to hold onto a sequence of logical thought. Get the money and get out of Paris. But first you must do something about that inconvenient Detective Abrams.

  3:16 PM

  Henry was dead.

  He had known it and he had not known it, not fully, not until he had taken the elevator down to the street.

  Ian had not seen the poster at once. He had spent his afternoon breather precisely as he had spent all his brief moments of leisure - taking the broken bits of pastel from his pockets, finding a bit of shade, and settling down to draw. Today he had found himself sketching the face of one of the men who worked beside him, a broad ruddy fellow, porcine but friendly, a layer of tile. A random human face, one of any you might pass in a day, but James had taught him that there was a particular challenge in drawing strangers, for you had to give them an imagined history when you didn’t know what their true one might be. Ian had finished the outline of the man’s head and was beginning with the curve of his brow when he happened to glance up at the kiosk before him.

  He did not immediately react. Did not flinch or make a noise. He rose as if in a dream and walked towards the poster. Stooped and read the fine print. The body of a girl, it said, but there was no doubt that the face before him was Henry’s. Found on the morning of April 12, it said, perhaps the only part of the brief description which Ian did not on some level expect. For this meant that his brother had been dead for more than two weeks. That Henry had been dead even before the afternoon Ian sketched Rayley, before the party for the Exhibition, before they climbed the tower, before Graham was drowned.

  It was a level of betrayal that Ian would not have guessed was possible. Armand had not only killed Henry, the child he had promised to protect, but after killing him he had been able to go convincingly about his everyday life. He had taken Isabel to cafes and to parties, he had swirled champagne and laughed and kissed her forehead, all the while knowing that she would never see her brother again.

  Ian dropped his pastels, which bounced at his feet and scattered, small stubs of color against the broad gray expanse of cement. He pulled the poster from the kiosk and slipped it inside his shirt, then went to the elevator. For once he was unaware of the noise of the ascent. As he emerged on the first level he noted, as if he were watching them from a great distance, the movements of the other workers and the chatter of their voices. There was even more activity on the second level, welders and painters and men on ladders hanging globes that would someday be filled with light. So many people, each with their own faces, their own scars and worries and each absorbed with their own tasks, this was the key thing. Ian looked around him slowly, and waited until he was sure that no one was looking back.

  And then he burst up the final staircase, the highest and thinnest of them all. The one that led to his sanctuary. The spiral was tight and the center post was slightly swaying, requiring a man to twist his body, forcing him to climb unnaturally, almost in a sidestep. The afternoon sun shone wickedly bright on his face, blinding him, making it hard to see the small steps, so that Ian stumbled, not once but twice, with one hand holding the slender railing and the other clutching his brother’s picture to his chest. It was an ascent which might have frightened a man who had anything left to lose.

  3:37 PM

  This time was different. His prison door had opened on several occasions during his three days of captivity, each time bringing a sudden searing light to the small cell. It was always frightening, always jolting Rayley from his reveries which were becoming ever deeper and more disorienting, his dreams so persuasive that at times he wondered if he were already dead. Perhaps this was what death was like – all solitude and memory, the sense that one was a hollow vessel, floating atop a dark sea.

  But this time was different. This time it was only Armand who entered, and there were none of the man’s false pleasantries, none of his questions or innuendos. He advanced upon Rayley decisively, the cloth already in his hand and, most tellingly of all, he left the cell door open. One way or another, Rayley knew his imprisonment was coming to an end.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Paris

  3:41 PM

  Maintaining one’s position in a flowing river required a constant rowing against the current, a reality of physics which Geraldine’s two oarsmen were not bearing with particular good grace. She had found the location Tom described easily enough, its muddied walls and irregular lines reminding her of structures she had seen during her time in India
, buildings which seemed to have pushed their way up from the dirt of their own volition, with no evidence of human design. They had been bobbing there in front of the fortress for what she guessed to be about twenty minutes, periodically being pulled downstream a few feet and having to row back.

  Geraldine knew that her crew was both tiring and utterly mystified as to the purpose of their mission, but each time they slipped downstream she had lost sight of the building for a precious few minutes. She spoke sharply to the two men. Her only function was to stand guard and she refused to fail at even that.

  But fail she did, for after the latest of their drifts they had rowed back to find that one of the innumerable doors of the building had been shockingly altered during their brief absence.