Camera Obscura (3 page)

  There was a dresser with a vanity mirror and plenty of rouge and white paint, and she could almost picture the senior L'Espanaye in her mind. She went through the drawers and found a small-calibre gun at the bottom-most one on the left, and it was loaded. The bed was large and unmade, the sheets rumpled. In the small adjacent washroom she found several bottles of pills and grimy walls, and when she ran the tap the water was brackish.

  She scanned the bedroom again but found nothing else of interest and moved on to Mademoiselle L'Espanaye's room. The daughter's was almost bare, the bed dominating the room, a single chair by the window, candles, many no more than stubs, standing like fat monks around the room, their wicks dead. She tossed the room and found nothing: it was as if no one had lived there and if they had, they'd left nothing behind them.

  Conjecture: the two women shared the master bedroom, and the dead man had been using the daughter's room.

  Grimm whistled from the other room, and so she walked over and stared down at the man's corpse, which looked even worse now than it did before, thanks to Grimm. "Traces of what?" she said.

  The automaton spoke in Silbo Gomero, a technical compromise on communication that was also an assurance of confidentiality, since there were not many speakers of the whistling language, in Paris or elsewhere. The language had come from the Canary Islands, adopted by the Spanish who settled there and finally modified by Grimm's makers using a simplified French vocabulary. Grimm whistled again, and the lady said, "That doesn't make any sense."

  Grimm whistled, more insistent now, and she said, "What do you mean, watch?"

  Instead of an answer the mechanical insect crept closer to the corpse and extended a pincer toward it, gently touching the man's flesh. The lady watched. A small blue spark of electricity passed between Grimm and the dead man.

  The corpse twitched.

  The woman watched, her hand going to the butt of her gun without her being consciously aware of doing so. Grimm retreated from the body but it continued to twitch – and now its one remaining eye shot open.

  The woman took a step back and her gun was in her hand and pointing at the corpse – she watched a dead foot kick, and the finger that had been pointing at nothing was rising now, impossibly, and the dead man was pointing directly at
her
, his face twisted in a mask of grotesque agony, accusing her…

  The bullet took out the remaining eye and bits of brain exploded over Grimm and the print of the lizard queen. The pointing hand fell down, lifeless again. The body shuddered, once, twice, and finally subsided. The woman reholstered her gun and said, "Get rid of it."

  Grimm began to whistle then, apparently, changed its mind. It approached the corpse again, pincers extended like surgical saws. Together, woman and automaton worked to erase the crime that had taken place there, tonight, and as they worked, dismantling the lifeless body into its separate components, she wondered why it was left the way it had been – were they interrupted, or was the dead man himself a message scribbled into the stones of the Rue Morgue for her to find?

 
 

 
 

When the work was done she left Grimm to dispose of the body parts – the giant insect secreting quicklime, squatting over the man's dismembered corpse digesting one piece at a time. She looked through the apartment again – there had been no sign of a struggle, and she thought it was a reasonable enough proposition that the two women who resided here had merely been absent – by chance? Or were they paid to make themselves scarce? She thought she'd be able to find them – assuming they were still alive…

  A locked-room murder. The apartment was four stories high. Well, Grimm had managed to scale it easily enough. And the window was open… The how of it scarcely interested her. The who, though, had become something of a priority.

  She washed her hands in the foul-smelling water in the sink, watching it turn red and pink and disappear in a gurgle down the drain, taking the dead man's blood with it. She dried her hands thoroughly and returned to the room and was relieved to see Grimm was almost half-way there. When it sensed her it turned, its feelers shaking, and emitted a burst of high-pitched whistles. The lady nodded, then said, "Take the samples to the under-morgue when you're done."

  She went back to the window, glaring out at the city below. Night was settling in and, if she guessed correctly, the Madame and Mademoiselle L'Espanaye would be hard at work. She pulled out the matchbox she had found on the corpse and looked at it again.

  Montmartre.

  She put it back abruptly and turned away from the window. Why was the name of the tobacconist familiar? She said, "I'm going for a walk."

  Grimm whistled, a sad lonely sound that followed her as she walked out of the door.

  Below, Rue Morgue was deep in shadow, its residents hiding behind their cheap walls. Windows were shuttered, as if excitement had given way, suddenly, to fear.

  Good.

  She walked alone, and the soft sound of her moving feet was the only break in the silence of the street. She watched the shadows, her hand on the butt of her gun. She was not disturbed.

  She decided to walk for a while. She had always liked the city best when it was dark and silent. As a child she–

  She turned at the sudden sound and the gun was in her hand and the shadows shifted and then eased back. She smiled, without humour, and walked on.

  She thought about the dead man. He had carried something inside his own belly, a foreign object that had somehow been inserted into his flesh, and valuable enough that it had been ripped out of him savagely and carried away. The man had no identity, as yet, and neither did his killers. And as for his cargo…

  She thought about Grimm touching the corpse, that little spark of electricity that had set the dead man rising. She had to conclude that, though he was human on the outside, his inside may have been a different matter. Well, it was of little concern right now. No doubt the doctor would be engrossed by Grimm's samples, down in the under-morgue…

  She passed out of Rue Morgue, breathing a sigh of relief, though the entire neighbourhood was the same, dark and dank and dismal. She headed for the Seine, finding her way with ease through the narrow, twisting streets. The old city morgue used to sit at the end of that street, she remembered, lending the road its name. Thoughts of the corpse niggled at her. She had seen plenty of bodies but nothing like the one Grimm was busy erasing from existence.

  After a while the streets became wider and more prosperous. She found an open café and went inside, into the gloom of candles and smoke. She ordered a coffee and sat down by the window and glared at the night.

  The door of the café banged open, then shut, and a shadow slipped into the seat opposite her. She raised her eyes and stared at the smiling Gascon.

  "Milady," he said. "What a pleasant surprise."

  She glared at him. The Gascon signalled to the waiter, mouthed, "Coffee."

  Ignoring her.

  "You followed me," she said.

  "Surely a coincidence," he said, and now his smile hardened. "Of all the places–"

  "What do you want?"

  The Gascon shrugged. And now the smile melted away, having never reached his eyes. "That murder is mine," he said.

  "What murder?" she said, and was pleased to see the flicker of anger that passed over his face.

  "You wouldn't," he said.

  She sipped her coffee. The hot liquid revived her. She stared at the man evenly, waiting him out. He looked away first.

  "The Republic has law," the Gascon said at last. "You can't cover up–"

  "Can't?" she said. And now she stood up, dismissing him. "Stay out of my way," she advised. "And forget about the Rue Morgue. There is nothing there for you now."

  He looked up at her. She examined him, feeling a vague sense of unease. Why was the Gascon still pursuing the case?

  "I can help you," he said. His voice was soft. She smiled, showing teeth, and walked away without answering him, her back to him all the answer she needed to give, and the door banged shut behind her.

 
 

 
 

She could have taken a coach or one of the new baruch-landaus but instead she walked, not feeling an urgency any more, but wondering what it was that had been surgically inserted into the dead man's belly. It was not a case of murder, she thought, but theft. She found the Seine and followed it for a while, watching the ruined Notre Dame cathedral growing larger as she approached, a wan yellow moon rising above it. Lizard boys hung around the broken-down structure at all hours: hair shaped into ridges over otherwise bald domes, skin tattooed into lizard stripes, tongues forked where they had paid some back-room surgeon to split them open. Dangerous, yes, but predictable.

  She crossed the river, looking down at the Seine snaking its way through the city, a lone barge still floating down it at this late hour, carrying pails of garbage, and she thought – there were a hundred different ways to disappear forever in this city.

  She walked away from the river, into the maze of neverending streets, her feet sure on the ground, knowing their way, the ground like taut skin stretched over the body of a giant lizard. She thought the dead man must have come into the city very quietly, but not quietly enough – had slipped in and found the apartment in the Rue Morgue, thinking it was safe – he must have waited, must have made contact with person or persons still unknown, and waited to conclude the transaction – for she was sure that's what it was – but had somehow faltered. Or not. Perhaps he knew all along how he would end up, a gutted fish in a Parisian market where everything was for sale.

  She walked for a long time, her long legs carrying her easily, swiftly, along the ancient narrow streets. She knew them well. As a kid she had run through them, had lain in wait for the apple cart owner to turn away for just one crucial moment – for a dark shadow of a girl to swoop and make a grab and run away, laughing. She had looked through rubbish piles for clothes and food, and hid in the abandoned places, the tumbledown houses where others roamed, the animals in human guise who preyed on those who had the least of all… a far cry from the home she could no longer remember, the place where she'd been born, so far away, where the sun always shone, where her mother had come from, the same mother who had died so quickly here, in this new land of white men and gleaming machines. She had first killed in a place just like this, a dark alley where a man was bent over a child – a boy who was a friend, as much as the other small humans on the street could be called that – and she had snuck behind the man and cut his throat with her knife, feeling nothing but a savage satisfaction, and the boy – he was still alive – had staggered away from under the corpse and down the street, clothes drenched in blood, some of it his own. She never saw him again, and there had been other predators, other animals on the streets of this most glorious Paris, city of equality, fraternity and liberty, this city of the Quiet Revolution.

  The streets gradually became brighter, lamps alight and places of business still open: night business, for she was approaching Pigalle. There were people on the street, women leaning at corners, two men fighting in an alleyway, drunks spilling out of a nearby tavern, the sound of music and shouting and dancing from a building nearby, a brasserie serving buckets of mussels with bread for late diners, glasses of beer – faces leering at her until they saw the gun and turned away, eyes suddenly, carefully empty. She saw a man's pocket being picked by a small child and two gendarmes watching without comment. The man never noticed but the gendarmes did and when the child tried to run they were waiting for him, counting the money, taking out their share. This was her world, had been her world, and she still felt more comfortable here than she ever had at the lizardine court or the embassy balls – though that was merely a different kind of throat-cutting and pick-pocketing, done on a different scale.

  The little boy ran off, and the two gendarmes disappeared through the doors of a bar. She walked on. Closer to Montmartre now, and the streets grew quieter, the ruined church on the hill above casting down a faint eerie glow. She walked a short way up to the small square where a couple of restaurants were closing, and into the all-night tobacconist's that only recently had sold a box of matches to a dead man.

 
 

 
 

Thumb's Tobacco was well lit and empty. Behind the counter were orderly rows of the tobacconist's merchandise. Hanging on the walls, startling her for a moment, were posters advertising
The P.T. Barnum Circus – The Greatest Show on Earth!
A tall black woman, muscled and scantily clothed, holding a pair of guns, was featured on one. She looked at it for a long moment and bit her lip.
The Ferocious Dahomey Amazon!
screamed the notice above her head. She smiled at last, and shook her head, and looked away. Then she looked over the counter and a pair of eyes stared back up at her.

  The eyes rose to meet hers – and now she knew why the name had sounded familiar, as the eyes blinked recognition and a wide grin suddenly split the small face they came with.

  "You!"

  She nodded, unable not to return the grin as the small man behind the counter straightened up, climbing onto a stool so that he stood with his upper body above the polished wooden top. "Cleo–" he said, and she shook her head,
No
. "It's De Winter now."

  "I haven't seen you since–"

  "It's good to see you, too, Tom," she said.