Beyond Rue Morgue Anthology (32 page)

A wrought-iron staircase led upward.

The pig was first up it. The man second. Poe third. “Don’t touch it!” And I came close after, backward, making sure I did not step on the empty bottle of sulfuric acid lying there, still hissing. I kept the oriental giant in my sights the whole way. Even with his animal intellect he knew better than to follow, and I fear I would have put a bullet in him with not a vast amount of provocation.

I pulled aside a red curtain sticky with grime and heard screams ahead. Shrill, girlish screams, and those of men—and of a dwarf, for all I knew.

A cigar-smoking man hastened to pull up his trousers, probably convinced I was a policeman. He stood with his hands in the air and just as quickly his trousers fell.

In another room a fat woman, suddenly shrieking as she saw me, rolled her doughy frame off the bed, revealing a skinny old man secreted in the pillows under her.

My cheeks did not blush so much as burn.

As I followed Poe and pig, each doorway I passed was a window into debauchery. If this was where so-called gentlemen came for their treats, then their play was beyond anything I would have credited, had I not seen it with my own eyes. My education with Poe had been extensive, but this was tantamount to setting foot on another world—not unlike his fantastical account of a trip to the moon.

Pistol in hand, I gaped into unexpectedly grand, if faded, salons with walls adorned with voluptuous nymphs lolling on clouds and men—or gods—endowed with the envy of Priapus. Through another open door I saw a man biting the cloth off sumptuous bosoms while a second woman wore a strapped-on phallus in lurid pink. Then there were the
tableaux vivants
—the Crazed Nun, The Naval Officer’s Homecoming, The Naughtiest Boy in School—which added theatricality to ardor, setting copulation and flagellation in a variety of frankly highly unlikely settings for the purpose of pepping up the proceedings. I will not dwell on the proliferation of nakedness or the contortions exhibited, but will remark only that the excitement of the physical organs of both genders was not only evident, but in the main exposed to view with little attempt to recover dignity, or any semblance of embarrassment.

So
this
was the dwarf’s abode? One of the
maisons d’abattage
or “slaughterhouses” I had heard about, where a man took a number and waited in line for a woman who had up to sixty
passes
a day? Where adulterers from the mansions of the Champs-Élysées, or off-duty soldiers with a
franc
in their pocket came to roll their clothes into a ball?

A door slammed and the pig squealed. I elbowed past a square-shouldered female sucking an opium pipe.

Ahead of me, the man in the peaked cap was yanking the leash so hard that the pig was standing on two legs, its corkscrew tail vibrating excitedly. He slapped its ears as if admonishing a disobedient infant. In front of him, Poe was holding open a door, the room beyond him thick with darkness.

I snatched a candle from the pipe smoker. Holding it aloft, I joined my friend, who had now lowered to his knees. I shone it over his shoulder. Its glow made a halo of his cloud-white hair, and fell beyond, picking out a shape in the far corner of the room.

A shape I immediately recognized as the dwarf’s all-encompassing scarlet cape. A tiny human being was under it, knees tucked up to its chest, trembling, its lungs clearly gasping for air after the exertion of running through the streets, and a kind of throaty sobbing emitting from it in bursts. As my candle entered the room, the hooded head sunk down so that its face was even more completely hidden in shadow.

Poe crept toward the huddled figure on his hands and knees.

I caught his shoulder with my free hand. “Be careful. He might be armed.” I drew my dueling pistol, but he placed a hand on the barrel and pushed it away.

“Stand back,” he whispered. “As far back as possible.”

Reluctantly, I obeyed. The candle went with me, and the pistol went back in my coat.

The retreating amber glow threw Poe’s shadow longer over the filthy floorboards and onto a grim, stripped bed, its mattress a continent of stains and mildew. The shape, the scarlet bundle, sat sandwiched between it and the peeling wall. The dwarf did not move as Poe moved closer. It merely continued to shudder.

My hand slid into my waistcoat and derived some small comfort from the butt of the Denix.

He moved closer still. I wished I could be sure that this wasn’t some damn foolish action of a madman I was watching. The death—the second and
final
death of Edgar Allan Poe, more than worthy of his outlandish fiction: at the hands of a maniac dwarf.

“Don’t be frightened.” The master of the macabre spoke so softly now I could hardly hear him. “We are not here to harm you...”

He rested back on his heels and reached out one hand. A slender hand, a womanly hand, with the long fingers of a pianist. Or so he was told by a gypsy reading palms in Philadelphia.

My finger dug down for the trigger.

I expected the dwarf to galvanize as the hand grew closer, but it did not. I expected the Phantom to jump forward, to grab, to bite, to resist, to run in sudden desperation to escape—but it did none of these things. Somehow satiated, repentant, inactive, or resigned to its fate, it only breathed. And its breath was a thin kind of mewling.

I imagined the grotesque mockery of human physiognomy that would be revealed under the hood, but what I did not—
could
not—imagine was that, when it was pulled back, the face was that of a little girl no more than eleven years of age.

The gentle mewling continued as she rocked back and forth, the candlelight picking out in silver the pearls of tears coursing down her pretty cheeks as I stepped into the room.

When we left the building at dawn a battalion of street sweepers had begun their daily grind, moving as a mechanical phalanx down the width of the cobbles, brooms sweeping the dirt in front of them in semicircles, pushing all the rubbish into the gutter with the same rhythmic motion of reapers in the field. We saw them on every road on our way home, working like puppets. But all I could think of was the dingy room that lit up as I walked in to it, a faded sampler and a map of the world on the walls, furnished as it was with a rocking-horse, an abacus, a wooden Noah’s Ark, and a family of china-headed dolls, in a vile parody of a nursery.

* * *

“The pig is a much maligned species.” Poe took a curl of sugared orange peel from the tray proffered by Le Bon and dropped it into his open mouth, the sunlight from the window making it a curling sliver of gold. “Just because it lives in its own feces, people presume it is dirty. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact it is very clean, and highly intelligent. More intelligent than a dog, and it has a more acute sense of smell than a dog, which is why I have undertaken experiments in their relative use to the police. Unfortunately they are not as loyal and obedient as dogs, but once on track are far more reliable than an average black-and-tan Beauceron—though perhaps not as manly at a law enforcer’s heel. However, because of their poor eyesight they can detect food with astonishing precision: the reason why for centuries they have been employed to forage for truffles up to three feet underground. The female is used because the smell resembles the male reproductive organs. Dogs, I’ve found, are, by and large, not sexually excited by fungus.”

“Madame Lop-Lop...” I elaborated for the benefit of Guédiguian, who perched his coffee cup on the arm of his chair as I added cream to mine.

“Madame Lop-Lop indeed.” Poe sipped his own. “She was used to great effect in uncovering explosives being shipped via Marseilles by a gang of anarchists. They can be trained, you see. In this case, with a reward of food over several weeks, trained to sniff out explosives. Soon afterward she retired, as did Colonel Follenvie, who received a bullet in the leg and took on the old sow as a pet. But her usefulness as a bloodhound was proven. The best snout in Paris. Reason enough to lure her out of retirement for one last case. I devised a concoction of chemicals, tactile enough to stick to the sole of a shoe. Then I knew we could trace our Phantom wherever he, or she, fled...”

Guédiguian shook his black locks with their sheen of macassar oil. Poe’s racing intellect and breathless reasoning often left people bewildered bystanders. Today was no exception.

“There were distractions. There always are. The wasteful detritus of any investigation. The tenor Loubatierre being absent and refusing to give an explanation: that confounded me until I had Le Bon follow him, and found he was visiting his ailing father at the mad house in Bicetre. He simply wished to keep the stigma of insanity in his family a private affair. The other being the dramaturge Beckstein’s unrequited love for Madame Chanaud. It was he who sent the mysterious flowers with no card: camellias in symbolic celebration of her role on stage. On our first visit to the theater I noted he wore a pale pink camellia flower in his buttonhole—Lady Hume’s Blush, if I’m not mistaken—a secret signal to our
ingénue
that he was in love with her. If she did but care, or even notice...

“Anyway, unimportant! The crucial fact, as Holmes now knows, was Marie-Claire saying that the intruder’s face was level with her shoulder. Common sense dictated that only three possibilities existed: the figure was on its knees (unlikely in the extreme); it was a dwarf (which I considered
highly
fanciful); or else it was a child. From her description I had no doubt the infiltrator wore the traditional mask of Papageno the bird-catcher, birdlike itself. Confirmed when we were told the name of the previous production at the Garnier:
The Magic Flute.

“The problem of the bolt on the Stage Door then presented itself. Yes, a wire from outside poked through the crack could yank up the bolt to allow entry—any pickpocket in Pigalle could show you that trick in five minutes—but why and how was the bolt
shut immediately afterwards?
At that stage I could not dismiss the notion that Christophe might be an accomplice. Which is why I could not tell you, my dear Holmes, of my plan on opening night. Your most minute gesture or reaction might have betrayed to the doorman the fact that the
prima donna
was not in her dressing room, and as a direct result our elusive Phantom may have been alerted and the chance of capture jeopardized.” Poe saw my displeasure. I could not disguise it. “Do not sulk. You thereby give the evidence that my decision was correct. It is not a fault, my good friend, but an observation and an accurate one: you wear your heart on your sleeve, and could no easier lie or deceive than you could remove the beating heart of a starving orphan. Where was I?”

“The bolt,” said Guédiguian. “Which was locked.”

“Which was locked because Christophe locked it. The man had not seen the
Fantôme
enter or leave—or rather he
did
see it leave, in that he saw the door open and close. Mystified, and thinking he would be blamed for being inattentive when the screams went up, he simply threw the bolt himself and claimed, because he had to, that the door had been closed the whole time. Self-protection being the most powerful of motives.

“My plan then was simplicity itself. The first priority was to remove Madame Chanaud from any possibility of danger. To that end I arranged that she be secreted in your office with two armed guards on opening night. I then went to a saddler to acquire protective clothing, impenetrable to the acid, and a plaster mask, lest the perpetrator see me in the mirror.

“That the criminal was a child I was certain, but a child is not a natural aggressor, it is a natural victim. What was the catalyst for such monstrous acts as these? I needed to know and my fear was that the clod-hopping police force would get in the way. It was imperative to misdirect them, and so I invented the ruse of the underground ‘lake’—a fabrication. The most cursory investigation into the building of the Opéra revealed that when Garnier first cleared the ground, water constantly bubbled up from the swamp below. All attempts to pump the site dry failed miserably. Wells were sunk, eight steam pumps were put into operation, to no avail. The only solution was to construct an enormous concrete tank, called the
cuve,
to relieve the pressure of the external groundwater and stop any of it rising up through the foundations. But there is no
lake,
no labyrinth—”

“And no Phantom,” I added. “Just an insane and frightened child.”

“Do you want cream?” Poe addressed our guest. “Sometimes the bitterness of black is too much for a person to take. I confess to having no such qualm. It’s the sweetness that I often cannot take. The universe is black. Blackness is reality. It’s a flavor I prefer untarnished.”

I had no idea if he thought he was being amusing, but Guédiguian gave a polite smile as if he was.

“Well, the main thing is, thanks to you and Monsieur Holmes, Madame Chanaud sang Violetta on opening night.”

“So I believe,” said Poe. “That was the precise intention.”

“And I have to say she was magnificent.” Guédiguian puffed his chest. “You can never be sure with the
claque,
but the whole of Paris is enraptured by her. I’ve never seen a success like it. She said to tell you her dream had come true after all. And to say when she sang her final aria, Monsieur Dupin, she sang it for you.”

Poe tilted his head in the most miniscule acknowledgment, his eyes a little shinier than they were before. He shifted in his chair and examined his cuffs.

“I feel I have endured an earthquake, or a volcano,” said Guédiguian, standing. “I felt at times the lava might consume me. But now all is well. The threat has passed. The mystery is solved. And what a mystery! It remains only for me to thank you for saving my business.” He extended a hand to Poe, but the writer only stared at it.

“A pity I cannot save your soul, monsieur.”

The opera director took a faltering step backward.

“Monsieur Guédiguian, if I were truly covering my tracks, I should enquire as to the motive for the crime. That would be the thought and action of an innocent man. Though I doubt you would know too intimately the actions of an innocent man, would you?”