The Best Paranormal Crime Stories Ever Told (50 page)

Although they grew their women tall and beautiful in America. Solid women, with high cheekbones and flashing eyes.

He followed her to her hotel, then watched her, meeting her first on the Champs Elysées, then finding her in the Tuileries, regaling her with stories of his novel—every young man in Paris these days had a novel—his notebook clutched in his hand . . . .

Decker stopped. Those memories, the things he saw, they weren’t his? He frowned, trying to see something else, trying to remember when he had first met her. The date—

He dreamed of her. He dreamed of her,
after
he had found her. Six months into his stay in Paris.

Six months.

But he had never seen her, touched her, laughed with her. He hadn’t really encountered her until he saw her half-naked foot hanging off the walkway, her shoe dangling over the sparkling waters of the Seine.

Only it wasn’t her shoe. The killer changed the shoes. That was his little joke. He tossed her sensible shoes in the water and gave her little Parisian heels, delicate shoes that he had bought just for this purpose . . . .

Not Decker.
Him
,

Etienne Netter, whose apartment in the Seventh Arrondissement had been in his family for six decades. His parents long dead, his mother distressed when he came home from the War with “haunted eyes.”

“But at least I am home, Mother,” he said plaintively, when so many young men had not come home. She had not seen what he had seen, how the blood turned French fields into mud, all for the sake of a few meters of advancement that would probably be lost the following day.

They said the Americans changed it all, with their energy and their numbers and their willingness to get killed. The Americans, big and hearty, like their women, who were stupid but lucky and somehow managed to end the war.

They liked him, these American women. They thought him their pet Frenchman. They thought his accent “quaint,” his smile “romantic,” his desire to write novels “almost American,” even though the French had been writing novels before America was a country.

He charmed them, relaxed them, promised them he would show them the sights—and he did. He did. He showed them their own venal faces in the Seine before he raised their skirts, ripped off their stockings, and proved to them that French men hadn’t lost all of their dignity in the trenches.

His mother, before she died, said he had lost his soul on the battlefield, that he had come home a shell, not a man at all, filled with dark compulsions not French. She tried to take him to church, but he would not go, not even to her funeral, after she had died, stepping in front of one of the automobiles that she so despised for ruining the lovely streets of Paris.

Stepping—that is what he told the police. She had lost track of where she was in the conversation, and she had stepped—

But she had not stepped. She had stumbled, after a shove, after she called him a monster, and said she wished he had died on the battlefield along with his soul.

Sometimes he thought she was right. He had seen the darkness coming for him those early days in the woods, lurking beyond the tanks and the flying machines, past the machine guns with their rat-a-tat-tats and their spray of bullets, the bodies falling, falling, falling in the mud. Beyond that, the darkness rose over the fields and extended across Europe, and he saw it coming toward him, then filling him, until there was no room for anything else.

He could pass on the darkness—he had done so with that beautiful American—but as he watched the hope die in her eyes, he remembered how that felt, and he could not, he would not, let her live with that. So he took the life from her, knowing (although she did not know) that it was no longer worth living.

He had taken her St. Christopher’s medal because it should not touch darkness. He had left the medal and the ring she wore in the poor box at Notre Dame. He did such things, venturing into churches only for that, then escaping before the darkness polluted them as well.

Sometimes he thought he should have stumbled in front of that automobile instead of sending his mother there. Sometimes he thought he should have died, just as she said, in the mud-and-blood soaked fields, along with his friends. Sometimes he thought.

And sometimes, he did not.

Decker could not look at what he had written. He stacked the paper inside one of his folders and tied it shut with a ribbon, just like he used to tie the pages of his novel inside the folder, proud of his day’s work.

This day—this night—he was not proud. He was spent.

He had seen things he had hoped to never see again.

Corpse Vision, the old man’s grandson had called it.

Whatever it was, Decker despised it, much as the man he had written about, this Etienne, had despised the darkness in himself.

As Decker walked to the Dôme the following night, the folder under his arm, he saw the darkness lurking. It hid in the shadows, wearing uniforms he did not recognize—that symbol the grandson had drawn—marching in lock-step.

Nightmares seeping backwards.

But Etienne had been a nightmare seeping forward.

Decker winced. He did not want to think about it.

He hadn’t had a drink in three days. His alcoholic wave was over.

He also hadn’t been to the
Tribune
in three days. He wondered what Root would think, what Thurber would say. Maybe they were already searching for him, although no one had come to his room at the Hôtel de Lisbonne—or if they had, he had been too absorbed to hear their knock.

This time, Decker arrived before the old man. Decker sat at the old man’s table, sipping coffee and eating ham, cheese, and bread, much to the disapproval of his waiter, who wanted to serve the coffee long after the meal was done.

Know-it-all Hemingway sat in a corner, scribbling in his journal. He did not look up as Decker came onto the terrace, and Decker did not call attention to himself.

But as he looked at Hemingway now, he saw something that startled him—an insecurity, a fear, so deep that Hemingway might not have known it existed. Superimposed over Hemingway—like a ghost in a Dadaist painting—was an old man with a white beard and haunted eyes. He hefted a shotgun and rubbed its barrel against his mouth.

Decker looked away.

The old man—his old man, not the spirit surrounding Hemingway—sat at the table, his grandson beside him.

Decker didn’t ask where they came from. He didn’t remark on their silent entrance. Instead, he handed the folder to the old man.

The old man untied the folder, opened it, and scanned the pages, handing them one by one to his grandson.

Decker read upside down, embarrassed by the words, their lack of cohesion, their meandering viewpoint. When the grandson saw the name Etienne Netter, he stood.

“My thanks,” he said and bowed to Decker. Then he walked away, leaving the pages beside Decker’s plate.

Decker did not touch them. The old man picked them up and put them back in the folder, which he tied shut, making a careful bow.

“It is more than I could have hoped for,” he said. “You have saved lives.”

Decker shook his head. “I didn’t do anything.”

“This man, this Netter, he is a new breed. You have heard of Jack the Red, no? Saucy Jack?”

“The Ripper,” Decker said. “Decades ago. In London.”

“The first of his kind, we think,” the old man said. “If there had been one such as you, perhaps he would have been stopped.”

“He was stopped,” Decker said. “He only killed five.”

“That we know of,” the old man said.

He set the papers under his own plate, then extended his hand. “I am Pierre LeBeau. I run
Noir
, the central newspaper in the City of Dark.”

Decker couldn’t take the misstatements any more. “City of Light,” he said. “We call Paris the City of Light.”

LeBeau nodded. “Light has its opposite. You have seen the dark. You write of it. You know what is coming.”

“Only because you tell me that it is,” Decker said. He sipped his coffee, pleased that his hand remained steady. “How come I’ve never seen your paper?”

“As I have said, you kept your most important eye deliberately closed.” LeBeau put his hand on top of the folder. “The paper has grown since the War. Before, we were a single sheet. During, we ran four. After, we grew to five, then ten, now eighteen. We need an English language edition. We will start with four pages on the expatriate community.”

“More meeting the boat,” Decker said. “More puff pieces.”

“No puff, as you say,” LeBeau said. “Warnings, perhaps. Stories that do not run in your
Tribune
or the
Herald
, things only hinted at in the fictions your friends write for the
Transatlantic Review
.”

“Who would read it?” Decker asked, surprising himself. Normally he would ask about pay before readership.

“People like my grandson,” LeBeau said.

“Where did he go?”

“He will take Etienne Netter and extinguish his darkness. Then he would help the police find justice.”

“He’ll kill him?”

“No,” LeBeau said. “But this Netter might wish he were dead when my grandson has finished with this. For Netter will realize what he has done and why, and with the revival of his soul, he will feel remorse so painful that death will be the only way out. Yet death will be impossible for decades. It is our smallest but best measure of revenge.”

Decker felt a chill run down his back. The conversations with LeBeau, as circular as they were, were beginning to make sense.

“We will pay triple what you earn at the
Tribune
for the first six months,” LeBeau said. “Raises every quarter thereafter if you continue to perform.”

“Perform?” Decker asked.

“You must follow the darkness,” LeBeau said. “See where it will lead.”

“And if I don’t?”

LeBeau smiled. “I shall buy you your next drink. You will become one of the—what do they call it?—casualties of the licentiousness of Paris. There will be no novel, no more hack work as you call it, no more typing. Only drinks, until one day not even the drinks will work. You will go to a sanatorium, and they will try to help you, but you will be one of the hopeless ones, the ones who has rotted his mind and his body, but has not managed to destroy the vision that has haunted you since you touched that kitten decades ago.”

It no longer surprised Decker that LeBeau knew so much about him. Nor did LeBeau’s description of his future surprise him. Decker had seen it already, as his father drank more and more, until finally his grandfather drove his father away to “a hospital” where they would “help” him. No one had ever seen him again.

His mother would not speak of him. She had lived too close to his darkness. She feared it for her son.

But running from it hadn’t worked. He had simply become a drunk in Paris instead of in Milwaukee. Even if he had no magic vision, he had a future like the one LeBeau had described.

And the writing had taken away the urge to drink.

Even if the things he wrote had chilled him deeper than anything else.

“I never met her, did I?” Decker asked the old man. “Sophie. I never did meet her.”

LeBeau looked at him. “You met her. Her spirit, after she had died. She wished she had been with you instead of this Etienne. She used your similarities to pull you in. She wanted him stopped. She did not want him to harm anyone else.”

It sounded good. Decker wasn’t sure he believed it, but he wanted to. Just like he wanted to believe that
Noir
existed, that he would be paid three times his
Tribune
salary, that his Corpse Vision actually had a purpose.

“I suppose I can’t tell anyone what I’m doing,” he said.

LeBeau shrugged. “You can tell,” he said. “They will not believe. Or worse, they will not care, any more than you care for them.”

LeBeau glanced at Hemingway, still scribbling in his notebook. Decker looked too. Hemingway raised his head. For one moment, their eyes met. But Hemingway’s were glazed, and Decker realized that Hemingway had not seen him, so lost was he in the world he was creating.