Beyond Rue Morgue Anthology (33 page)

Guédiguian retreated to his seat, ashen, and sat with his hands between his knees. “I swear. It is not
—not
what you imagine...”

“I am not prepared to imagine, monsieur.” Poe stood and buttoned his jacket. “I am only prepared to
know.
And I know I am right in thinking you have bedded both Madame Jolivet and Marie-Claire Chanaud, her former understudy. As well as many singers before them, probably. Perhaps they see it as no less than their duty, and you as no more than your privilege.”

“Please...” Guédiguian began sweating profusely and took out a handkerchief to stem the tide.

“‘Please’? It is not a question of
please
...
”
Poe refused to back off. “What I also know is that you regularly frequented the premises of Madame Floch on the Rue Blondel, known as ‘Tante Berthe’ to her girls. I’m afraid she was very illuminating when I said she might be implicated in some exceedingly violent crimes. Extremely eloquent and forthcoming.”

“Don’t...” The opera manager cringed, holding his skull in torment. I could only stare as the Master rounded on him, unabated.

“She would not normally divulge the names of her clientele, but for me she made an exception. She said you were amongst that fine coterie of men who have certain proclivities. That is, an insatiable longing for young flesh. To use the untouched and the unknowing for your gratification and—”

Guédiguian shot to his feet. “You can prove none of this! This is preposterous! I am not listening to another word! Who said such—?”

“I heard it from the lips of a child.”

Guédiguian stammered. “A child? What child?”

“The child whose bed you took, whose chastity you took, whose childhood you took, for the price of a few francs.”

Afraid the opera manager might become aggressive, I got up and stood between them, holding him by the upper arms. He barely made a show to get past me as soon as he saw in my eyes that everything Monsieur Dupin the detective knew, I knew. I think he saw the plain disgust there. As Poe had said earlier, I was fairly inept at masking my emotions. And didn’t care if he did see.

“I do not sit in moral judgment. That is between you and your Maker, if you are foolish enough to believe in one.” Poe stood at the window, the profile of his supercilious nose against the sunlit panes. “Over weeks and months you visited this child. You knew her in every carnal and intimate fashion. Sometimes you took a toy or doll. She didn’t understand she was the merest plaything to you, an object to satisfy your lust. To her, you became special. She looked forward to your visits. I will not say you hurt her, though many others did. On the contrary, perhaps you were the first to show her the illusion of love. Perhaps that was your downfall. You thought nothing of her, but
she
loved
you.
And, in time, came to be sad when you left, and one afternoon followed you.

“That day, having crept into the opera house, invisible, she espied you with Madame Jolivet in all her finery. A beautiful woman adored by the gentleman she thought was hers. She thought, ‘Why not me? Would he truly love me if not for her?’ The hatred and envy festered in her. She was an orphan. She had not known love, and all her young life had only known those who wanted to use her as a commodity. She saw prettiness and wanted to make it ugly. She wanted those bright, successful women who lit up the stage, and your life, to feel as mutilated and destroyed as she herself was by the countless men who passed through her room. She wanted—”

“Stop!” Guédiguian wrapped his arms around his head. “Stop! In the name of Heaven and all its saints—must you torture me? I am not a criminal!”

“You took what was not yours.”

“As a hundred men do in Paris every day!” He scowled. “And worse!”

“I say again: your morality, or lack of it, does not interest me. You can discuss that with a priest, or some other ne’er-do-well. I am, however, interested in your culpability. In respect of your... addiction—and I am far from able to pronounce on anyone’s
addiction
to anything—setting in train the events that have generated such pain and anguish.”

“Then I
am
culpable. There. I have said it. Could I have known? No! Could I have stopped it, had I known—perhaps! But I did not know! I. Did. Not. Know! How could I? She—”

“Say her name.”

“Don’t tell me what to—”

“What was her name?”

Guédiguian crumbled. His shoulders heaved and he let out a strangled moan. I helped him to his chair. He slumped in it like a sack.

“Édith.”

“Édith Dufranoux,” said Poe. “She came with it, according to Madame Floch. But if you ask me, her real name, like her true family, is lost on the winds of time.”

Guédiguian wiped a slime of spittle from his lower lip. His eyes could no longer meet ours. I wished I felt an ounce of pity for him.

“You see, monsters come in all shapes and sizes, Holmes,” said Poe. “They do not all wear wolf skins. Some wear the utmost fashion in respectability. You do not need to open the covers of a book of horror stories by Poe. You need only look in the mirrors of the Opéra Garnier.”

“You are not privy to my mind, Dupin,” Guédiguian spat.

“I very nearly am. Do not be sure about that. I am the Man of the Crowd. I walk in many shoes. That is my business. To understand pure logic one must understand its opposite, perversion, when pure instinct is unleashed, unrestrained. The tragedy is, you could not have known the harvest your libidinous appetite would reap.” Poe’s words took on a melancholy tone as he stared out of the window at a passing world blissfully unaware of the dark, impish secrets we discussed. “You were haunted by the phantom of all kisses: obsessive love.”

The opera manager covered his face with his hands.

“What will happen to her? The police...”

“The police know nothing,” said Poe. “About you, or about her. As far as Bermutier is concerned, the Phantom of the Opéra Garnier escaped from their clutches, disappearing forever. A mystery unsolved. I bade him persuade his
gendarmes
not to divulge any details of the crime to the
presse
, but that may be a vain hope that some juice does not seep out of the apple barrel...

“As for the girl, earlier this morning I took her to a woman I know at the Hôtel Dieu, the last bastion of
‘La Couche
,’ as it is known, the old
Hôpital des Enfants-Trouvés
created as a refuge for the abandoned waifs of the city, amongst other things to prevent them being purposefully maimed and sold as beggars. I have no idea whether she has a chance there of a ‘proper’ or ‘decent’ future—whatever that is. She may end up a wastrel or die of cold and hunger on the streets, or drowned in the sewers, or be sold to peddlers and mountebanks for money-making purposes. Or become an opera singer. I can only say that for now she has food and water, the prospect of friends and even adults who do not despise her, and schooling in the ways of Christianity. For a while, at least, she will be safe. Beyond that, her life is her own.”

“Can I see her?”

“If you do, I will see to it that everyone in Paris knows what I know.”

The opera manager choked and swallowed. “Did she—did she say anything about me?”

Poe glared at the man. “She asked if she would go to the guillotine for her crimes. She said she wouldn’t mind if she did. She said she had no fear of dying because she was dead already.”

Guédiguian closed his eyes. I cannot remember clearly what he said after that, but he was a man diminished, and the conversation over. In a fatuous gesture to make amends, he proposed, mumbling and almost incoherent, that he would donate some of the opera’s profits to the poor, to the workhouse, perhaps expecting us to cry “Bravo!” Poe greeted it with the silent disdain it deserved, and I think thereafter Guédiguian found it difficult to sit much longer in our presence. It took every atom of politeness I could muster to shake his hand, but for all his insistence that he had no morality, Poe did not.

I attempted to give back the gift he had brought us—people often did, as C. Auguste Dupin accepted no fee for his services— but Guédiguian showed me his palms. He did not want it and was now eager to go. When the door closed after him I was left with it in my hands.

“Stradivarius,” Poe commented. “You should take it up. There is a power in music ‘to soothe a savage breast.’”

He took the rolled-up play bill Guédiguian had brought advertising
La Traviata
—a memento of our adventure, he had said—unfurled it briefly, glimpsing the name of Marie-Claire Chanaud as Violetta, then placed it next to the violin case.

“You knew it was a child all along,” I said, gazing into the fire to stop my upset from showing. “Poe, I am constantly amazed at your capacity for casual cruelty. You were prepared for me to... to ridicule myself by talk of a... a maniac
dwarf?”

“To feel ridiculous is a very small price to pay, my dear Holmes. It was necessary for you to
appear
to deduce that fact convincingly in order to send Bermutier on a hunt for the proverbial wild goose. Before condemning a child to the punitive forces of law and order, I needed to know why it had chosen such vehement and intractable actions.”

“Then you see yourself above the law?”

“Not above. Parallel to. Let us debate this another day. Today I find it tiresome. Let us just say I wanted the whole picture to be complete. I am sorry I allowed you to feel foolish
—je suis desolé
!—but it was to that end, I promise. I would never be cruel unless it was for the greater good. Well, almost never.” And my anger could almost never sustain itself when I saw that dark twinkle in his eye.

Without calling Le Bon, he fetched our coats from their pegs.

“Will he live with his shame?” I asked, inserting my arms in the one he held up for me.

“Of course he will,” said Poe, doing the same in reverse.

“I shall never be able to listen to opera again, after this vile business.”

“Crime is vile in all its manifestations. Mysteries abound. We are adrift in an ocean of unknowing. The only respite is to solve them. And until we conquer the great question of non-dimensional creation, the seeking of those solutions will be the essence and eternal vexation of Man. Come, let us go to the Rue du Faubourg Montmartre, to the Restaurant Morot, and talk about the rigors of decapitation. There’s a murder in
Le Figaro
today and I’m convinced they have the wrong man. You remember? With its dark fittings and the hat racks above the tables it’s like dining in a railway carriage. Vidal will always find a table for me, and he serves the best pig’s ears in Paris. You can drink, and I shall watch.”

“Amontillado?”

“Please. That is beneath you.”

He took my arm. His own was thin. He was a skeleton in a suit by sunlight. It brings a tear to my eye now, but I hardly noticed then a frailty that was increasing with the passing years. Years all too few.

We were, of course, too late. Out of gossip and half-truths the myth was born. If accidents happened at the theater, the stage hands would still ascribe it to their
Fantôme.
He had escaped, but not into the non-existent lake—into stories. Descending with his disfigured face and mask to his watery home. And coming to haunt us from the pages of a book, and the flickering screen.

In the months that followed we had other cases, including that of an extraordinary patient of Dr. Charcot at Salpêtrière, the “Gates of Hell” affair, and the spirit photography of Monsieur Boguet, but none pierced my heart quite as much as the tale of Olivier Guédiguian, whose mask disguised a monster, and little Édith Dufranoux, the true Phantom of the
Opéra de Paris.

¹
See “The Comfort of the Seine” in
Gaslight Arcanum: Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes
—ed. J.R., Campbell and Charles Prepolec (Edge Publishing, 2011)

By

Winter, Lewis decided, was no season for old men. The snow that lay five inches thick on the streets of Paris froze him to the marrow. What had been a joy to him as a child was now a curse. He hated it with all his heart; hated the snowballing children (squeals, howls, tears); hated, too, the young lovers, eager to be caught in a flurry together (squeals, kisses, tears). It was uncomfortable and tiresome, and he wished he was in Fort Lauderdale, where the sun would be shining.

But Catherine’s telegram, though not explicit, had been urgent, and the ties of friendship between them had been unbroken for the best part of fifty years. He was here for her, and for her brother Phillipe. However thin his blood felt in this ice land, it was foolish to complain. He’d come at a summons from the past, and he would have come as swiftly, and as willingly, if Paris had been burning.

Besides, it was his mother’s city. She’d been born on the Boulevard Diderot, back in a time when the city was untrammeled by free-thinking architects and social engineers. Now every time Lewis returned to Paris he steeled himself for another desecration. It was happening less of late, he’d noticed. The recession in Europe made governments less eager with their bulldozers. But still, year after year, more fine houses found themselves rubble. Whole streets sometimes, gone to ground.

Even the Rue Morgue.

There was, of course, some doubt as to whether that infamous street had ever existed in the first place, but as his years advanced Lewis had seen less and less purpose in distinguishing between fact and fiction. That great divide was for young men, who still had to deal with life. For the old (Lewis was 73), the distinction was academic. What did it matter what was true and what was false, what real and what invented? In his head all of it, the half-lies and the truths, were one continuum of personal history.

Maybe the Rue Morgue had existed, as it had been described in Edgar Allan Poe’s immortal story; maybe it was pure invention. Whichever, the notorious street was no longer to be found on a map of Paris.

Perhaps Lewis was a little disappointed not to have found the Rue Morgue. After all, it was part of his heritage. If the stories he had been told as a young boy were correct, the events described in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” had been narrated to Poe by Lewis’ grandfather. It was his mother’s pride that her father had met Poe, while traveling in America. Apparently his grandfather had been a globe-trotter, unhappy unless he visited a new town every week. And in the winter of 1835 he had been in Richmond, Virginia. It was a bitter winter, perhaps not unlike the one Lewis was presently suffering, and one night the grandfather had taken refuge in a bar in Richmond. There, with a blizzard raging outside, he had met a small, dark, melancholy young man called Eddie. He was something of a local celebrity apparently, having written a tale that had won a competition in the
Baltimore Saturday Visitor.
The tale was “MS. Found in a Bottle” and the haunted young man was Edgar Allan Poe.