City of Light (City of Mystery) (24 page)

Ian had managed to
keep Henry alive on their forays about the town and countryside, had shielded
him from the taunts of the other children far better than he had managed to
shield himself.  Ian supposed you could take the fact Henry had survived to the
age of eighteen as evidence he had completed the task that his mother had so
carelessly assigned him.  But on another level he knew he had not taken care of
Henry at all.

The rumor was that
Henry had come to Paris.  And if he had, there was only one explanation for
why.  He had followed Ian here, just as he had followed Ian his entire life. 
And then what had become of him?  Ian had been to the morgue every day for the
last three weeks but he had not found his younger brother on display.  He had entered
the heavy doors each morning with his heart in his throat, fear overriding his
logical mind.  Because Armand wouldn’t do that, would he?  He might hurt other
people, but only if he had to, and Armand would never hurt Henry.  Not Henry,
who might talk a grand game and bluster and brag but who, at heart, was still no
more than a child.  The same child he had always been, struggling and
scrambling to keep up with his elders, calling after the bigger boys “Wait for
me, wait for me.”

Henry was an innocent.
Harmless.  His talk was just talk and no one knew that better than Armand.

Ian believed this
and yet he could not stop himself from going to the morgue, day after day.  And
day after day he had seen them there, the scattered boys come from small towns
all over Europe, propped up, open eyed, staring out at a world that had treated
them badly, a world which had brought them to this premature and ignoble end.  All
those boys who might have been Henry... but who weren’t.

Henry was alive. 
Ian had to believe that.  Alive, and most probably in London, with the rumor
he’d come to Paris just that, a rumor.  This was the primary reason Ian was so
determined to get back to London.  To see his brother and to assure himself
that he was not, as it so often seemed, completely alone in this cold world.

“Pretty child,” a
man’s voice said, and Ian looked up to see one of the movers, leaning against a
tall wooden crate as he waited for the elevator to descend.  “Yours?”

Ian shook his head. 
“My brother. Years ago.”

“Ah,” said the man. 
“Well, sorry to say, but your brother is about to be trod upon, pretty as he
is.  Midday break is over and a load of furniture is going up.”

Ian stood and gazed
at an enormous rectangular crate which had been wheeled by dolly to the base of
the elevator. “Is that a mirror for one of the restaurants?”

The man shook his
head and spat, the tobacco-brown glob landing just above Henry’s rosy forehead.
“Painting.  Going straight to the top, to Monsieur Eiffel’s aerie.”

“So the aerie is real?” 
Everyone in the Paris had been talking about Eiffel’s private apartment,
perched at the very apex of the tower, but Ian had not been entirely convinced. 
It seemed too much like the way people speak of Heaven, another place whose
existence cannot be verified but which the downtrodden comfort themselves with
promises they will someday see.

“Oh, it’s real, all
right,” the man said, turning as the elevator arrived with a rattle and the
doors were slowly cranked open. “Nothing but the finest going up there.  It
took the three of us to get the velvet settee in this morning, but this
thing….”  He broke off and whistled to two men standing to the side and they
ambled up to help him move the awkwardly-large crate into the elevator.

“What is it?” Ian
asked.

“Told you,” the man
said, as they struggled to get the corner through the elevator doors.  “A
painting.”

“But what kind?”

“Don’t know,” the
man said, stepping back to let his assistants ease the crate toward the back of
the elevator.  He held the door as they went back for other, small boxes. “A
rich man’s painting, that’s what kind it is.  Here, there’s a tag.  It’s a Whistler
Blout, according to the writing.  Does that name mean anything to a young
artist like yourself?  You know a man named Whistler Blout?”

He said the word
“artist” with palpable sarcasm, stretching out the final syllable until it was
almost a hiss, but Ian didn’t mind.  God knows he had been called worst.  “That’s
not what the tag means,” he said, as the webbed door of the elevator closed in
front of the man’s smug face.  “It means the artist is James Whistler and the
subject is Isabel Blout.”

 London

1:45 PM

It took Davy a
significant block of time to compose his telegram to Trevor.  Knowing you must
pay by the word generally has the marvelous effect of sharpening the mind, but
this story was so outlandish that he had trouble keeping the message to his
customary twenty words.  Once he finally had an acceptable version of the
morning’s events, he walked halfway across the city to make sure the telegraph
office he used would have no connection to the one where the trouble had all
started. 

He ended up at a
location suitably removed from Cleveland Street, and patiently waited in line.  When
his turn came, the man in the window refused to accept his piece of paper and
rather made Davy dictate the message to him while he typed it through. 

Cleveland boys
dressing like girls, trained to pass as female in public.  Highly valued. 
Hammond took boy-girl Tommy to Paris.

If the story
confused the old duffer behind the desk, it was no more than what he deserved,
Davy thought, as he enunciated one word at a time, all the while looking over
his shoulder to make sure no one else overheard.  But it seemed that telegraph
operators were as immune to depravity as policemen, for when Davy had finally
finished, the man merely looked up and said “And the name?”

 “Do you have to pay
to sign your name too?”

“Certainly.”

“Then I won’t sign
it,” Davy said, sliding the coins across the counter with a sigh. “He’ll know
well enough who it’s from.”

Paris

2:35 PM

“Did Detective
Abrams have an opportunity to examine this second body?”

Carle nodded yes.

“And did he have
reason, beyond the similar location in which the two bodies were found, to
think the cases might be connected?” Trevor considered the corpses before him.
“He obviously suspected as much, so I suppose what I’m actually asking is if he
had managed to collect any proof.”

Here, an exchange
between Rubois and Carle which resulted in a nearly simultaneous shrug, a
synchronized gesture Trevor might have found amusing under other circumstances. 
The four men were standing in one of the private viewing rooms in the heart of
the morgue, with the body of Patrick Graham on one marble slab and the body of
the nameless young man on the other.  It looked a bit like an amateur staging
of the last act of Romeo and Juliet.

“We had the time
line backwards,” Trevor muttered to Tom, who was standing impatiently behind
him. “They found the boy dressed as the girl first, and then Graham. This casts
a different light on the entire matter, does it not?” 

Turning to Carle,
Tom asked, “Was any blood drawn from the unidentified body for testing?”  

“No,” Carle said,
with a guilty little grimace that implied this was not the first time he had
answered this particular question.    

“All right, let’s
reconsider what we have,” Trevor said.  “The first body is found on April 12 and
originally assumed to be the result of suicide.   A jumper.  Quite common.  We have
them in London too,” he added, and Carle obligingly explained this to Rubois,
who nodded with calm resignation.  Lunatics were undoubtedly flinging
themselves off bridges and buildings all over the world at any given moment,
and all the police could really do was mop up the mess.  In the vast majority
of these cases there was no crime behind the suicide, at least not of the sort
that could be prosecuted.  And the owner of this particular body, a boy dressed
as a girl, undoubtedly had more reasons for wishing to end his life than your
average jumper.

Trevor continued. “And
Graham also first looked to be an accidental drowning victim, at least until
you found the sort of bruising that implies a forced drugging.  So it’s entirely
possible that chloroform was used in the first case too, that both victims had
been rendered unconscious before they met the water. But since the first body
was embalmed as a matter of course, we have no way of testing this theory.”

There was a pause
while Carle translated Trevor’s words.  Rubois nodded and then, for the first
time in nearly an hour, spoke himself, a blast of French that constituted the
longest speech Trevor had ever heard the man make. 

“He says that if we
could prove chloroform was used in both deaths, it would link the cases closely
enough to have them officially declared a double murder,” Carle said.  “Which
means they would be moved to a priority status.  A greater number of flics
assigned, that sort of thing.”

It was Trevor’s turn
to nod.  It was beyond dispute that some cases got more attention than others, both
from the media and the police.  Anyone who had worked on the Ripper
investigation could attest to that.  If they had a prayer of finding Rayley,
they must emerge from this room with at least enough evidence to prioritize the
case in the eyes of the Rubois’s superiors and thus demand more flics in the
hunt.  Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to rattle the cage of the newspaper men as
well.  After all, Graham had been one of their own, and if they caught wind
that his death had been more than a drunken fall into a shallow river, the
papers could certainly be expected to respond with their usual mindless
hysteria and volleys of exclamation points.  And for once, a media frenzy might
prove useful to Trevor’s larger plan.  On the eve of the Exhibition, the French
could hardly afford a public panic over a pair of unsolved murders, even if the
victims were the most disposable of creatures - a foreign journalist and a
homosexual whore.

“Might I examine the
bodies?” Tom asked.

Permission was
swiftly granted and Tom approached the first table and began to unwrap the
cloths draping the young man’s body.  He had been not merely embalmed but
packed in ice as well, a procedure that undoubtedly had required repeated
reapplications and thus indicated to Tom that the police, or at least Rubois,
had gone to considerable effort to keep the body in pristine condition.  Unfortunately
in the process, some patches of flesh had actually frozen, so the ice may have
altered as much as it preserved.

“What are you
looking for?” Trevor asked, as Tom peered through a magnification glass at the
corpse’s right hand.

“Some sign of a
struggle,” Tom said.  “This boy wasn’t as burly or strong as Graham but it’s
still possible he put up some resistance.”

“His mouth is very
full,” Trevor said. 

“I noticed that
too,” Tom replied, glancing up at the face.  “But there doesn’t seem to be any
bruising, so I think we can assume his plump lips are merely a gift of
nature.”  In the background was the low and steady murmur of Carle translating
their conversation for Rubois.

“Note his hair,”
Trevor said. “Quite long for a man, evidently grown to a length that can be
brushed back in a manner to simulate a woman’s –“

“He was wearing these
when he was found,” Carle interrupted, turning Trevor’s attention to a pile of
women’s clothing on a chair in the corner, with what appeared to be the hide of
a large squirrel resting on top.   Coming closer, Trevor realized it was a
shank of curly brown hair.  “The illusion,” Carle said “was very effective. The
flic who found the body was completely convinced that the victim was a young
woman until he moved to cover her exposed legs and in the process realized…He
described it as a great shock.”

“I can imagine that
it was,” Trevor said, going through the garments one at a time.  The boy’s face
was rounded and feminine, the artificial hair was soft and abundant, and the
clothing quite dainty.  Only the boots would have given him away.  They were
cut and laced in the manner of a lady’s footwear, with a narrow heel and
pointed toe, but they were rather too large to be entirely convincing, at least
not when Trevor held one in his hand and examined it at close range.  But then
again, the men who had dealings with the boy were most likely not looking at
his feet.

“The morgue workers
have named this body The Lady of the River,” Carle said quietly. 

“See here, Trevor,”
Tom called from the table.  He had been glad when the other three had moved to
study the clothing, for it had given him the chance to pry open the mouth
unobserved. Rigor was advanced and it had been a graceless procedure, leaving
the deceased no longer serene and composed on the table, but now in the
position of a beached cod, chin thrust rudely forward, mouth agape.

“Throat very
swollen, lacerations on the inside of the lips,” Tom said, remembering to offer
the magnification glass to Rebois, so that as ranking officer, he could have
the first look.  “Caused by something going in or out with significant force,”
Tom added, as Rubois stooped to peer into the silent scream of the boy’s mouth. 
“Most likely either a powerful penetration of the throat or an exceptionally
violent form of nausea.”