Floats the Dark Shadow (28 page)

With a moan, Averill broke away. He looked hungry, as if he could devour her. Then the flame died in his eyes. He was suddenly weary, despondent. She kissed him again, trying to call him back to her. “Averill….”

“It’s wrong,” he said, tense and trembling in her embrace. “It’s impossible.”

She thrust away all the arguments she had made herself. “Other cousins—”

“—No!” he broke in. “I’ll pull you into my darkness.”

“I’m not afraid of your darkness.”

“You’re lying,” he said.

Once it had been true. Now she wasn’t sure. She tightened her arms around him. “Why can’t you come into the light? Just a little?”

“Because I see myself too clearly.” He pushed her away hard.

Theo stumbled against the desk. Shocked, she watched him stalk across the room. “Averill!”

He stopped for one instant, pressing his fists to the door. Then he walked out and left her alone.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Idealism enslaves thought as politics enslaves will.

~ Mikhail Bakunin

WHEN Michel went to Urbain Charron’s luxurious office off the
Champs Élysées
, he was told that the doctor was lecturing at Salpêtrière Hospital. He thanked the secretary, regretting that he had no excuse to explore further. Though the rich neighborhood was well patrolled by gendarmes, the office would be quiet at night and well equipped for slaughter. He hired a carriage to the Left Bank. Salpêtrière had first been a gunpowder arsenal, then a notorious insane asylum—a fetid dumping ground for diseased prostitutes and beggars, and an equally insalubrious hospice for aged and feeble women. But in the last fifty years the asylum had been reformed and expanded to become one of Europe’s most advanced institutions, specializing in neurological disorders.

When Michel asked the guardian at the desk where he could find Urbain Charron, the man mistook him for a doctor and told him the lecture was in progress, he’d best hurry. Michel did not disabuse him but followed his directions along the hallways to an infirmary door. Beyond, he heard a low voice but no clear words. There were also what sounded like small whimpers of pain and an odd mechanical whirring. Michel prayed it was not to be an experiment in vivisection.

When he entered he was shocked to see a naked woman spread-eagled on a table directly in front of him, her knees lifted and held back with leather cuffs and chains. Some sort of rubber gag was wedged between her teeth. She was the centerpiece to a group of a dozen men standing on either side, observing her. Something was suspended from the ceiling on a pulley, and held in the possession of a solid man in a highly expensive suit who stood with his back to Michel. The noise ceased abruptly as the man turned, holding the suspended object—some sort of motor with a gun-shaped implement at the end of a snaking tube.

“You’re late, doctor.”

“I apologize,” Michel said, not wanting to be dismissed from the lecture. This must be Urbain Charron.

The doctor frowned and gestured for him to join the others. “With all due respect to Hippocrates, the modern vibrator is far superior to the classic method of manual vulvular massage. Truly a tedious procedure. While water therapy remains a useful alternate approach in the case of incarcerated hysterics, this new technique is without parallel. Restraints such as we have employed today will keep violent, frenzied, or vituperative patients under control until they achieve hysterical paroxysm.” He nodded to the left. “You will be able to test the efficacy of the device yourselves in a few moments.”

Glancing to the side, Michel saw two other patients pinioned and gagged while they awaited treatment. He was convinced that Charron had chosen their position to provide shock value to his lecture—and to humiliate the women.

“Such extreme methods are usually unnecessary in private practice, though some women gain a sense of security with the confinement.” Charron turned on the vibrator again. The woman on the table jerked at the sound. She stared at Charron with hatred and then at the mechanism with abhorrence mixed with longing. He smiled slightly and turned it off. “This current portable instrument is far superior to previous models. It delivers five thousand pulses per minute and will quickly induce paroxysm. Women suffering from less severe cases of chronic hysteria can have their symptoms quickly alleviated by this suitably professional approach. While some need only come monthly to your office, others will feel compelled to have treatment weekly or even more often.”

An eager murmur swept through the men as they considered how many lucrative patients they would be able to alleviate with the vibrator.

Charron turned on the vibrator, pressing it between the woman’s labia until she moaned through the gag. He turned off the instrument and parted the woman’s labia further. “You can see that her sexual organs are engorged and lubricated. The clitoris is erect. She is close to paroxysm. Like most hysterics she cannot achieve a natural release through union with the male but must have this perverse stimulation.”

The woman flushed and her breathing grew more rapid. She looked desperately from one face to the next. Most of the men showed nothing more than scientific curiosity. Others showed disgust. A few were aroused and hiding it as best they could. Urbain Charron’s expression was somber, but his eyes gleamed. He turned on the device again, then waited, deliberately, Michel thought. Shame, fear, and lust flashed across the woman’s face. With the gag she could not form words, but she began to whimper. Charron pressed the buzzing head of the device against her exposed clitoris. Helpless, the woman thrust up, trying to attain more stimulation. Her eyes widened and a choked scream began building in her throat.

Michel turned and left the room, feeling tainted.

A few minutes later, Urbain Charron emerged. “That was most unprofessional.”

“It depends on your profession. I am with the Sûreté.”

The doctor stared, eyes filled with wariness. He swallowed hard. “My daughter?”

That was a curious first response. But he had lost one daughter. Did he fear to lose the other? “No.”

Charron frowned angrily. “Has my wife been injured?”

“No. I apologize.” Michel already detested the man, but there was no point in making him fear for his family’s lives. “I’ve come to ask about your son.”

The wariness returned full force. Charron assumed an air of disdain. “What has the Sûreté to do with drunks?”

“Very little, except when they place themselves in the center of a murder investigation.”

“What?” Urbain Charron looked stunned, then outraged. This time his response did not appear fake, which disappointed Michel immensely. But he expected his killer to be good at deception.

“Your son didn’t tell you he found the corpse of a child in the Montmartre cemetery?”

“No!” Charron snapped. “What was he doing there?”

“Seeking inspiration for his poetry. Or so he says.”

“How typical. How degenerate.” At first Urbain Charron had been angry, now he became calculating. Modulating his voice to a soft, patient, and subtly threatening tone, he said, “You cannot trust him, Inspecteur. My son is…not well. His perception is distorted.”

“His choice of entertainment is peculiar,” Michel said, “but he seems lucid.”

“Appearances can be deceiving. Many of the patients here can assume the semblance of sanity.”

“He is insane?”

Urbain Charron hesitated. “Unstable. The brilliant often are.”

Michel wasn’t sure why the doctor was stirring up doubt, but he was. Only, the man appeared uncertain how far to go. “Why did you presume I’d come about your daughter?”

The doctor glared at him, his eyes like chips of ice. “I have no intention of discussing these matters with you.”

Michel could not demand it at this point, but he allowed himself a final prod. “The murder victim is one of several kidnapped children. I would like you to confirm your whereabouts on the evenings in question.”

Urbain Charron swelled with outrage. His large hands closed into brutal fists, and he looked about to strike Michel. That would be grounds for arrest. But Charron guessed his intent and subsided. “You are insulting…” Charron said in a sibilant hiss, “…but the murder of children may justify it. My secretary will be instructed to give you the information you need—as long as you come and go before I arrive in my office. I do not wish to see you ever again.”

Michel took his leave. Charron had said
the murder of children
, but he could have inferred more than one death from the kidnappings Michel had mentioned. Early next week he would gather the information Urbain Charron had so generously offered. Either the doctor was smug in his innocence, or he’d arranged alibis to cover the crimes. Michel could confront him again once he possessed more information.

A vile man. A glutton for power.

Taking another fiacre back to the Palais de Justice, Michel pushed this new puzzle piece around in his mind. Urbain Charron revolted him. The malicious torment he inflicted on the helpless women at the asylum had no direct relevance, but that, combined with his vivisection experiments, convinced Michel he was capable of almost anything. The doctor could easily be the evil genius behind these crimes, moving his son about like a pawn. Even if he was not involved with the kidnapped children, having such a father would warp any man. Had Averill Charron suffered ugly abuse at his father’s hands and now inflicted it on children as powerless as he once was?

What would it be like to have such a man for a father? Both Michel’s fathers had loved and protected him.

The fiacre stopped outside the Dépôt. Michel got out—and staggered. He stood exactly where his adoptive father’s body had lain. Feigning calm, he forced himself to walk to the wall of the quai, to stare blindly at the Seine. Almost every day of his life, he walked past this place. He lived in Guillame Devaux’s house. Michel had expected the March anniversary of the Commune to trigger guilt. He had been on guard. Now, unexpectedly, gratitude had left him vulnerable, and a single misstep unleashed the flood of pain.

Reality disappeared in the onslaught of memory. He heard the bomb explode outside the Palais de Justice. He saw Guillame Devaux lying dead in the street, his face contorted with agony, his body scattered in pieces. The man who had saved Michel’s life had died because of him. He had loved Guillame Devaux as a father, and had come to hate him for not being his true father.

~

Michel had been eighteen. Old enough to know better, young enough not to care. The Commune cast a long shadow and Michel had found its darkness brighter than the pallid light of everyday life. He’d still felt bound to the past, to the Communards he’d worshipped with a boy’s fervor. He’d still felt bound by blood to his cousin Luc, who had been the glowing symbol of that worship. Now Luc, hero of the Commune, had returned. Luc, who was dashing, articulate, brave—and utterly ruthless.

In 1883, Paris was again a shambles, the mammoth stock market crash only a year behind them. Wild speculation and borrowing had spiraled out of control. Banks all around France had collapsed and finally
l’Union
Générale
floundered. The Catholic bank blamed its demise on the Jews and Freemasons, as if its own gluttonous greed, its falsified reports, had no bearing. France plummeted headlong into a recession that would last another decade. Guillame Devaux, brigadier of the Sûreté, had helped keep the peace in turbulent Paris. But keeping the peace meant oppressing the people. He’d spoken soberly of the perils of anarchy and warned of worse bloodshed, but the words Michel had once found wise constricted him like a straightjacket.

Defiant, he’d wanted words of passion, of rebellion. At her trial, the Commune’s great heroine, Louise Michel, had cried out, “You decree that any heart which beats for freedom has the right to nothing but a lump of lead. I now claim mine. Let me live and I will go on crying for revenge. I shall avenge my fallen brothers. If you have any courage, you will kill me!"

Twenty-five thousand Communards had died or been executed, but they had not given Louise Michel her lump of lead. She had been deported. Now, twelve years after the fall of the Commune, she’d returned to Paris, her fiery spirit unquenched. Continuing her fight against oppression, she’d led a huge demonstration at the Esplanade of Les Invalides. Afterwards, a huge crowd marched across Paris. Loaves of bread were looted from bakers' shops. Louise Michel was charged with instigating the looting. Ever fearless, she’d turned herself in to the police.

Montmartre was in an uproar. Their heroine was arrested because some tag-alongs had stolen bread. Who could blame them? They stole because they were starving! Anger simmered hotly under the cold, heavy lid of fear. Everyone believed the protesters would go to jail—or worse, be gunned down just as during the Commune. The
cafés
were filled with furious arguments and songs of revolution.

Michel had shared their zeal. He remembered sitting in Le Rat Mort on a cold, wet day, drinking red wine and feeling like a man. Surrounding him were tables filled with the glorious riffraff of Montmartre—musicians, artists, poets, radical journalists and even more radical anarchists. Craziness became the ultimate sanity, bourgeois sobriety the death of the spirit. Michel’s hair had grown long and shaggy. He tossed it out of his eyes as he quoted Kropotkin’s
Anarchist Manifesto
, “We demand bread for all, work for all, freedom and justice for all.”