by Jess Faraday
Lambert was dead. Vautrin had killed him, most likely to keep him silent regarding the truth about Madame Boucher’s disappearance. But why had Madame Boucher done her disappearing act in the first place? Had she endeavored to bring sympathy to her cause? Or perhaps she had learned of Vautrin’s ambitions and feared them? Had she known that her disappearance would cast suspicion on her former lover? If Javert hadn’t wanted Dr. Kalderash for his own purposes, the newspapers and police would have only been too happy to take up the cause. Or perhaps this had been Madame’s purpose all along—some kind of twisted revenge against Dr. Kalderash for leaving? Corbeau cursed, causing the people walking in front of her to glance her way and move aside.
Stepping past them, she turned her thoughts to Dr. Kalderash. The inventor had cited violent jealousy as her reason for leaving Madame Boucher’s milieu. It certainly seemed possible. But it could also be just one part of the truth. The more she thought about it, the more she was sure that Kalderash had told Madame Boucher about the Left Hand of Justice. They had been in love—Kalderash had been adamant about that. And Kalderash had been running from Javert. Lovers could be mind-bogglingly indiscreet, especially in that first, heady rush of emotion, when the object of one’s affection seems unassailably perfect and the end of love is inconceivable. Of course Kalderash had told her rescuer what she was hiding and why. The question was, what did Madame Boucher do with the information?
If Madame Boucher really had been on a crusade, she had to have known that, at some point, she would encounter resistance. She had to have seen the potential for a weapon like the Left Hand of Justice. Perhaps this potential, rather than simple jealousy, had precipitated Dr. Kalderash’s departure—just as it had precipitated her departure from the Department of the Unexplained. Now, if she could just figure out at what point Vautrin had decided to step out of his role as Javert’s informant and start down the road of his own dark ambitions.
The crowd seemed suddenly, unbearably close. Rain and night had cleansed the air, but she choked on it all the same. She pushed her way out of the crowd, heart racing, and leaned against the corner of a building, elbows on knees. Eventually the sensation passed and she rose, drawing a long, cool breath.
“We meet again, Inspector.” Corbeau whirled, but before she could put a face to the gravelly voice behind her, a thick arm coiled around her neck, while another snaked through her elbows, pinning her arms. The voice was familiar, the words hissed through missing teeth. The man sounded pleased. She suddenly recognized the distinctive voice, and her heart sank.
“I’ve got the money. Tell Jacques—”
“It’s too late for that now.” The man flexed his arm and pulled her tighter to him, a low chuckle rumbling in his chest. Corbeau gasped for breath. A veil of stars clouded her vision, but in her mind’s eye she could see the smug, jowly, pockmarked face of the man she’d left bleeding on the floor of Oubliette the night before.
“Get someone to stitch your face up?” Her voice came out a ragged wheeze. The man chuckled again as he began to drag her back into the alley, her boot heels leaving parallel ruts in the mud. In front of her, the market crowd continued to surge and flow, the people that comprised it blissfully unaware of what was happening in the alley a few short yards away. The shadows closed around them; if anyone had seen her, they didn’t see her anymore.
Once out of sight, the man tightened his arm to the point Corbeau was half convinced he was trying to crush her windpipe. But Jacques was a businessman. A dead debtor was not only useless; the body was a liability. But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t give her something to think about, even if she gave him every last coin in Javert’s pouch. She flailed against the man’s iron grip, but to no avail. He waited patiently as she continued to struggle and gasp until finally her limbs went heavy, she slumped against him, and the shadows of the alley swallowed them whole.
*
“Inspector.”
Cold water hit her face. Corbeau sputtered and blinked. She tried to move, but her limbs were bound tight. She was tied to a chair. Her cap had come off, and her hair lay plastered to her neck, dripping cold water down the back of her shirt. She struggled against the ropes, pulling side to side until the chair overbalanced and teetered onto two legs. Hands caught the chair and righted it before she hit the ground.
“I apologize for the ropes,” Ugly Jacques said. “But they’re for your protection. André hasn’t quite forgiven you for what you did to him at Oubliette. He’s looking for an excuse to finish what you started, and I wouldn’t want you to inadvertently give him one.”
“Shit,” Corbeau said.
Jacques laughed. “Normally, I don’t approve of strong language from women, but in your case, I think it’s warranted.”
They were in a windowless room—a basement, she surmised. The only light was from a lantern, which, from the angle of the shadows, was hanging on the wall behind her. That had to be where the entrance was. Boxes were stacked along one wall, the chair the only furniture. They were under a business, then, or a warehouse. Somewhere that would be closed for the night and abandoned.
“I have the money,” she said.
He chuckled and pulled out the pouch Javert had given her, tossing it into the air and catching it. Ugly Jacques wasn’t as objectively unattractive as his name led a person to believe. He had the muscles of a laborer and the scarred hands and reshaped nose of a fighter. The nose suited him, though. Without it, his light, wavy hair might have seemed angelic and the twinkle in his blue eye something other than malice.
“This?” he asked, tossing the purse again. “There were a few sous in here, but not nearly what you still owe.”
Corbeau craned her neck to glare at André. Now, André was ugly—especially when he was jingling her coins in his jacket pocket. Laughing, he spat out a great oyster-like gob, which landed at her feet. Corbeau turned back to her captor.
“He took it,” Corbeau said. “Check his coat.”
Ugly Jacques laughed again. “And I should believe you because you’ve dealt so honestly with me so far? Really, Inspector, I’m disappointed. I do you a favor, and this is how you repay me.”
“You don’t understand!”
Whether he did or not was immaterial, of course. Jacques didn’t care why she needed the money. If Joseph and his mother owned their house outright or slept in the streets, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference to him. What Jacques did understand was that Corbeau owed him money, and lots of it. As he strode back and forth across the length of the stuffy little room, fingering the knife at his belt, she could almost hear the conflict in his mind. On one hand, the longer she avoided payment, the more interest accrued. On the other hand, no matter how much interest accrued, if he let payment slide, he might not see a penny. As satisfying as it would be to maim, or even kill her, doing either would likewise ensure he would never get his money. Feet shuffled on the dirt behind her. A third man.
Corbeau began to panic. Even if they didn’t hurt her badly enough to keep her from crawling out of that basement, eventually, she had to get to Dr. Kalderash and Joseph. And she had to stop Vautrin. She felt someone press up against her back and hoped it wasn’t André. Her hopes were scuttled when she felt his soft, rough laugh through the back of her head and his shovel-like hand stroking her throat.
“If you kill me, you’ll never get your money,” she said.
Ugly Jacques stopped pacing and turned. “It’s true. On the other hand, the way prices are rising, by the time you pay me back, it won’t be worth anything anyway. And André has put up with so much from you. It’s not fair that he not get to have his fun.”
Corbeau’s heart stopped. They both knew that André had taken the money from Javert’s purse. And she was pretty sure they both knew what sort of fun André would have once Jacques and the others left her alone in the basement. Yes, it made sense. Jacques wouldn’t endanger her livelihood with a beating. But he would make his position clear; he would assert his masculine authority throug
h André in the time-honored tradition. She began to struggle again, to the great amusement of the hulking beast behind her.
“I can have the money for you in an hour’s time.” Javert didn’t live far. He would give it to her. He had to give it to her.
Ugly Jacques smiled, his teeth unnaturally straight and sharp. “I’m afraid the terms of our agreement have changed.”
“Half an hour,” she said. “Come with me.”
André’s cracked, dirty fingertips began to caress her lips. She wanted to bite them, but he could have snapped her neck as easily as swatting a fly. She pulled against the ropes again but stopped when she realized that if she tipped over at this point, it would only make things easier for them. Jacques continued to watch her with the interest of a boy pulling the wings off a fly. He would have been the kind of boy to pull off the legs, too, one by one. A cold drop of perspiration slid down her back. But panic was not the answer.
She calmed her breathing. It would be a mistake to show fear at this point. She steeled her body and began to build a wall around her mind. While Jacques’s thug exacted his punishment, her thoughts would be wandering Boucher Mansion, trying to figure out where they were keeping Dr. Kalderash and Joseph.
So deep was she in thought she nearly missed the sudden change in Jacques’s demeanor, the furrowed brow, the flick of his hand, and the rush of cool air as André stepped back from her as if burned.
“Of course, now that I think about it, Inspector, it occurs to me that you have something I want even more than money, and even more than revenge.”
André’s disappointment was palpable.
Corbeau frowned. He couldn’t mean the Left Hand of Justice. Jacques was the master of his domain, but it was one of petty criminals and small-time vice. Not that he wouldn’t love to have a weapon like the Left Hand of Justice at his disposal, but Corbeau knew he didn’t have either the connections or the reach. “I’m listening.”
“It’s not so much a thing as a service.” Jacques grew serious. He squatted down to her level, the arrogance leaving his expression. In the light of the lantern behind her, he almost looked human. “You’ll forgive my dramatic and heavy-handed manner,” he said. Corbeau would forgive him nothing, but curiosity and her instinct for self-preservation ensured she would listen. “I don’t have to tell you how late you’ve been with your payments. And I had to make sure you weren’t holding out on me. Business is business.” Corbeau met his supplication with a cold stare. He sighed. “I understand that you’re investigating the disturbances in Montagne Ste. Geneviève. One of the victims, Claudine Fournier, is very dear to me.”
Corbeau blinked. “The fire-starter.”
“That’s right.” Jacques gestured to one of the men standing behind her. The man dragged one of the boxes from beside the wall and positioned it for Jacques to sit. “You tended to her, very kindly, according to witnesses. She woke the next morning as if nothing had happened. But sometime that day, she disappeared.”
Disappeared? Corbeau’s heart sank. If Vautrin had anything to do with it, Mademoiselle Fournier was already dead. Corbeau just hoped it wouldn’t fall to her to break the news to Ugly Jacques. “I’m sorry.”
“If you find her, I’d be willing to consider the business between us closed. She is…she is everything to me.”
Corbeau blinked again. Who could have guessed that beneath the flashy clothes and layers of cologne beat an actual human heart? A fallible heart whose weakness could be exploited to broker her freedom. Would wonders never cease? “You love her?” she asked.
He nodded. “Can you find her?”
“I don’t know.”
He sighed, resting his massive, square chin in one hand, elbow on knee. “She works as a paid companion to that woman who disappeared. Boucher. I never liked those people. They gave me the shivers. But Claudine said it was good work, and she didn’t mind. Said Madame had even promised to help her with her little problem.” He smiled, fleeting and bitter. “Didn’t bother me, but she was so ashamed of it.”
“Was she taking any sort of preparation to suppress it?”
“Yeah. Yeah, come to think of it, she was.”
Corbeau nodded. Just like Lambert. The past was repeating itself, only this time it wasn’t her fault. Had anyone heard from Michel Bertrand? She regarded Ugly Jacques gravely. Part of her wanted to promise she’d find his Claudine—promise him anything he wanted, just to get out of there—and let the consequences catch up with her later. But the last twenty-four hours had been nothing if not a lesson in just what a mistake it was to borrow trouble from the future.
“I can’t promise to return her alive,” she said. “In fact, the odds are against it. There were three victims in the Montagne Ste. Geneviève, and one has turned up dead.”
“It’s those Divine Spark people, isn’t it? Always knew they were no good.”
Ironic, Corbeau thought, coming from a man who had just threatened to let his thug recover his debts from her flesh. “I can’t tell you the details. It would jeopardize the investigation. But I can assure you that I will personally see the guilty parties punished for their crimes. If someone has harmed Mademoiselle Fournier, they will hang for it, I promise.”
He seemed to consider this for a moment, then, pressing his hands to his knees, he stood.
“Untie her. Go on,” he said when his men didn’t immediately jump to the task. They freed her arms first, then her feet. She stood gingerly, flexing her fingers and toes as the crawling sensation of pins and needles signaled that blood was returning to her extremities. “Tell me honestly. Do you think she’s still alive?”
“Possibly.”
He looked as happy with the answer as Corbeau felt delivering it. But he knew as well as she did that false hope would get them nowhere. He extended his hand. Corbeau hesitated then took it.
“I’m a businessman, Inspector. My methods can be harsh, but I’m a man of my word. Find my Claudine, alive or dead, and consider your debt repaid in full.” Corbeau’s eyes went, unbidden, to André’s hand jangling the coins in his pocket. André caught her eye and sneered. “In the meantime, if you need anything to aid you in your search, I, and my men, are at your disposal.”
Corbeau thought for a moment. “Do you know whether the Divine Spark did all of their work at the house? Or did Claudine mention another place, maybe where they might have done things they wouldn’t want the neighbors to find out about?”
Jacques scratched his head, frowning. “There was another place, come to think of it. Not too far from here, actually. Down by the water. Claudine had me fetch her there, now and then, when it was dark. Said the Gypsy woman had a lab there. Noisy business, apparently, but given the neighborhood, nobody ever noticed.”
Corbeau’s heart beat fast. If the Divine Spark—either Madame Boucher’s followers or Vautrin’s—were holding Dr. Kalderash for the purpose of bringing the Left Hand of Justice to life, they were holding her there. And chances were, Joseph would be there too. If only she had some way of getting word to Javert! But time was of the essence, and if Vautrin was still at Madame Boucher’s house, then Javert’s men would do the most good detaining him there. And perhaps, if Claudine Fournier was at the house, they could ensure her safety as well.
“Can you get someone to take me there?” Corbeau asked.
“Certainly.”
“Not him.” She looked daggers at André.
Jacques’s mouth twisted wryly. “No, no, that wouldn’t do at all. I’ll take you there myself.”
“One more thing. Do you know the boy Joseph, who sometimes runs messages for me?”
“I’ve seen him.”
“It’s possible that they’re holding him, along with Dr. Kalderash and Mademoiselle Fournier. My debt to his family is greater than anything I will ever owe you. If anything happens to him, I would appreciate it if you would promise to watch out for his family.”
Jacques nodded, short and quick. “Anything else?”
“Can I have
my purse back?”
Clapping her on the back, Ugly Jacques laughed out loud.
Chapter Thirteen
Jacques led her through back streets and hidden passages to a tight, dark alley that stank of refuse, stagnant water, and decay. At the mouth of the alley, she hesitated, wondering if she wasn’t walking into a trap. But then Jacques stopped, put a finger to his lips, and gestured toward a narrow door. “There it is,” he said, stepping back. “Good luck.”
Corbeau opened her mouth to thank him, but by the time she’d turned, he had melted back into the shadows. She leaned against the crumbling bricks and evaluated the building on the other side of the alley. It had been a tenement once, possibly a factory. Now it stood dark and abandoned. The windows that weren’t boarded up were jagged black holes. Nothing stirred in the alley, though not far away the strains of raucous music and breaking glass marked one of the low taverns that dotted the darker parts of the city. The air was tense with foreboding. Corbeau wasn’t surprised Claudine had been afraid to walk home from there. The place was, however, the perfect location for a noisy machine lab or for holding prisoners. Glancing toward the rooftops, then up and down the alley, she darted toward the door that Jacques had indicated. It was locked tight, as she’d expected it would be, but the locks gave way easily to her picks, and she was inside within seconds.
Beyond the door it was as dark as the grave. Her hand instinctively went to her tinderbox. Fortunately, training overruled instinct. Pressing herself up against the wall, she took her hand out of her pocket and waited for her vision to adjust. Ahead of her, at the end of a narrow corridor, she could make out the dim rectangle of a window from the cracks of muted light pushing between the boards that had been nailed unevenly over it. A staircase to her left led up, while another to her right led down. No footsteps creaked overhead, no conversations hummed. However, if she listened hard, she thought she could discern voices below, as well as the soft clank of metal and tools.
