City of Light (City of Mystery) (36 page)

Armand had paid the
man, both for his services and enough to secure two passages across the
channel.  For when Henry awakened, which wouldn’t take long since the amount of
chloroform on the handkerchief was very slight, Gerard would toss him about a
bit, at least enough to knock out of the boy any more half-baked notions about
blackmailing Armand Delacroix.  Whenever Gerard was satisfied that a sufficient
degree of reason was dawning in Henry’s bloodied head, he would then clean him
up and escort him back to London himself.

And then Armand had
remembered the gloves.

He went back for
them, only to find Henry convulsing in his dark corner, his shoulders heaving
and shuddering beneath the red satin jacket.  It took Armand a minute to
realize what was happening.  That Henry, without ever regaining consciousness,
had become nauseated from the chloroform.  That he was now, thanks to the
stuffing of Armand’s own scarf into his mouth, choking on it.  Armand cried out
for Gerard’s help and fumbled to loosen the gag.  But he had done entirely too
fine a job of knotting it and besides, the boy was thrashing, further sealing
his doom with each spasm that gripped his body.

By the time they
freed him, it was too late.  Gerard’s thick fingers against the boy’s neck only
confirmed what Armand already knew.  

They could scarcely
abandon the body in a room rented under his own name.  Nor could they transport
it through the city.  The Seine, conveniently close with a sewer opening just
at hand, was the only solution.  With Armand standing guard at the mouth of the
alley, Gerard carried Henry down the short slope to the water.  As Gerard
stooped to release the body, Armand’s chest had grown tight with emotion.  The
scene was too familiar and it awakened a past he was loathe to contemplate. 
For the envelope of memory is tightly sealed for a reason, is it not?  When we
rip it open, we do not always know what we will find. 

Armand had leaned
against the wall of the alley, gagging himself, overcome with the stench of the
sewer and his own nerves. This is not what he had wished, not at all what he
had planned.  He had awakened that morning a simple businessman and would
return to his pillow a murderer.  And his victim was Isabel’s only brother.

Isabel.  That was
another thing.  She must never know.  Her faith in him was already fading and
if she knew he had sent her precious Henry floating down the Seine, there was
no way of predicting what form her rage would take.  She needed a diversion,
something to sufficiently occupy her mind so that she wouldn’t wonder why
Henry’s whining letters from London had abruptly stopped.

Armand had peeked
around the corner of the alley and watched the current slowly claim the form of
Henry Newlove.  Watched it carry him toward the center of the river and
finally, mercifully, from his view.  “We should have weighed him,” Gerard had
said.   “We should have found a rock.”

The next Sunday
Armand took Isabel to a café.  His selection of a place to dine was not by
chance.  Even before Henry’s lips had spewed the name, Armand had never
entirely lost his fear of Rayley Abrams.  He had the man followed as a matter
of course, just as he made it his business to know the habitats and habits of all
the men he was blackmailing.  Rayley’s almost ridiculously ritualized life had made
him the easiest of the lot to monitor, and now all Armand had to do was put
Isabel in his sight lines and hope that he would notice her. This part should
be easy.  The man was ugly, lonely, a foreigner. A single smile from a woman
like Isabel would be enough.

She protested, of
course.  She had heard rumors among the housemaids of a mysterious figure who
had entered Armand’s bathroom as a boy and departed as a girl, and she asked
him many questions.  She did not mention Henry by name, but it was clear enough
where her suspicions lay.  She looked at him differently – he could not have
just imagined this.  She looked at him now not merely with resentment, but with
a little fear.  

Their argument had
been brief.  But we’ve been through all this, she said.  We know this one and
what he’s about.  Armand had persisted.  He asked so little of her now, he
said, and they were so very near the end.  Soon she would be a free woman,
coins in her purse.  She had sighed, nodded, then turned her chair and her
attention toward Rayley in her careful, practiced way.  A tilt of the chin.  It
could have been an invitation or merely the gaze of a woman looking into the
street. Abrams had fallen to it like a starving dog to a bone and Armand,
pretending to be absorbed in his paper, had almost smiled.  The bit about
sketching him had been Isabel’s idea.  A nice touch, he must admit.

Life is a strange
labyrinth.  At some point we move from child to man, from the acted upon to the
actor.  We are no longer bent to the will of others but begin to bend others to
our will.  The fears of youth subside, and with them, a bit of our soul.  But sometimes
we realize that those we are chasing may also be chasing us, that we are the
observed as well as the observing.  For in that very moment, with Rayley eating
his tart and Isabel sketching him, Armand’s eyes had fallen on a certain
article in the London Times.  He read it every day, even though only one
newsstand in Paris carried the morning edition, and now here, just below the
fold on last page was a headline whose enlarged print all but shouted the words
BRITISH STERLING, FRENCH GLORY?  It hinted of money changing hands, prominent
British men underwriting the mounting costs of the French Exposition, and while
it stopped short of naming the men, or even speculating why they might be
inspired to invest these monies, the writer had gotten enough of the
particulars correct that a thin film of sweat began to emerge on Armand’s skin
as he read.  His own name was mentioned, describing him as a liaison between
the French and British.  Liaison.  The word implied too much.

The byline on the
article had read “Patrick Graham.”

And so he had made
sure that both Abrams and Graham were invited to the party at the Hotel
Normandy and he had not been surprised that they had found each other in that
sea of people.  He had sent Isabel to chat them up. Through his investors he
knew that the press would be invited to climb the tower and he wanted Isabel
standing beside Graham when this invitation was extended.  

Isabel had returned from
the jaunt reiterating her claim that Abrams knew nothing.  “Not as smart as he
looks,” she had first said, with a light little laugh.  And then she had paused
and added “But that’s actually quite unfair. What I should have said is that
you have nothing to fear from him.  The detective is sensitive, bookish.  Much
like you were when we first met.” 

“And Graham?” 
Armand had asked.

She had shrugged.
“Now that one is far smarter than he looks.  But then, he’d almost have to be,
wouldn’t he?”

She claimed that
Graham had asked her nothing about the pool of investors, that he had all but
ignored her while instead dancing attendance on some American reporter. But
then the next morning another article had appeared in the London Times, and
this one was above the fold.  It was a first-hand account of the grandeur of
the Eiffel Tower, mentioning the gold trim and marble tile, the hand-blown
light fixtures and miraculous elevator. The article ran beside a photograph of
the American girl clutching the railing with Paris barely visible behind her.

All well enough, except
for the final paragraph: “But from where is the money for all this French finery
coming?  Some say it is our own Bank of London.  And we shall offer you names
of these British investors on the morrow.”

Awkwardly stated,
but the intent had been clear.  Even a braggart like Graham would not have made
such a boast to the readership of the Times if he was not prepared to deliver
on his promise.  He was merely stretching out the suspense to build
anticipation in his readership, to ensure that even more of them would buy
papers, as he said, on the morrow.  Evidently he had somehow gotten a list of
the names of the investors which was, of course, merely a prettier way of
saying he had gotten a list of the names of Armand’s clientele.  

A second murder is
different than a first.  Not easier, just different.  As he crushed out his
cigar and set aside his empty glass of brandy, all Armand could think to
compare it to was a loss of virginity.  He was not eager to add a third death to
his resume, especially not one which would draw the wrath of Scotland Yard, but
Detective Abrams was choosing to be stubborn and this game, like all others,
must eventually draw to its close.  Armand’s long practice in splitting in his
mind, usually accomplished at some invisible marker halfway across the channel,
would undoubtedly make the task easier. Charles Hammond would never have killed
a man, but for all practical purposes, Charles Hammond was himself dead.  He
had ceased to exist on the day the London police raided a brothel at 229
Cleveland Street. And it would appear that Armand Delacroix was prepared to do
whatever was necessary.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Paris

7:15 AM

“Let them sleep,”
Geraldine said, as Trevor’s eyes drifted toward the hall for the third time since
they had set down together to breakfast.  “There’s little you can do before the
police station opens at nine so Tom and Emma may as well indulge in a bit more
rest. They need it.”

“True enough,” said
Trevor. “We all do.  I didn’t sleep especially well myself.”

“Neither did I,”
said Geraldine.  “A strange bed in a strange city and then the diversion at the
party.  It took me hours to drift off despite my exhaustion.”

Trevor nodded
distractedly, and shoved another bite of croissant into his mouth.  People
could say what they wanted about the French, and heaven knows he had said plenty
himself, but they did manage to produce some rather fine bread.

“I need to send that
telegram to Davy as early as possible,” Trevor said.  “Even if a courier
catches the next boat, it will be late afternoon before we have the print in
hand.”

“Go down to the
telegraph office if you must, and then return,” Gerry said. “But in the meantime,
Trevor, there’s no harm in letting those poor children sleep.”

Paris

7:20 AM

A gull landed at her
shoulder and gave the blanket a curious peck, startling Emma awake.  When her
eyes opened to behold the bird’s shiny black eyes and beak, which was resting
no more than two inches from her nose, Emma had startled with a shriek, causing
Tom, who was curved around her, to sit up in one abrupt motion.

“What is it?”

“Oh my God,” said
Emma, rolling onto her back. The bird had flapped away at the sound of her cry and
it had taken her a moment to remember where she was. “We’ve slept far past six,
I should think.  The sun is too high.”

“We’re like Romeo
and Juliet,” Tom said, stretching. “More light and light it grows.”

“Don’t you dare make
jokes,” Emma said, awkwardly trying to adjust the blanket to cover her calves
and ankles.  “We must find a place for me to dress.  See here, your pants are
nearly dry.”

“If you can manage
it, dressing under the blanket offers your best chance for modesty,” Tom said,
swiveling to look around them.  “Not many of our neighbors seem to be stirring. 
I’ll see if I can learn what time it is.”

He strode up the
embankment toward the street while Emma threw the blanket over her head and
pulled on Tom’s shirt and pants.  By the time she finished, he was back.

“Change of plans, I’m
afraid.  It’s past seven and Auntie and Trevor will doubtless be stirring
before long.  If you truly want to keep our nocturnal activities a secret I
suggest we return to the apartment before they awaken.  We can walk out the
seven thousand odd paces after breakfast.”

“Bosh,” Emma said,
crouching to roll up her pant legs.  “Trevor will whisk you off to the police
station the minute he’s put down his fork and will have you doing a thousand
tasks, just as he did yesterday. How do you plan to get away from him for long
enough to join me?”

“Trust me,” said
Tom.

They walked up to
the street and Tom waved for a cab.  There were a fair number of people about,
not as many as the evening before, and Emma felt momentarily self-conscious in
her odd outfit with her half-wet hair streaming down.  But the river district was
much like London’s East End, in that it was a part of town where a person would
have to strive every hard indeed to be the oddest on the block.  A few people
looked at her but their gaze slipped off as smoothly as if she had been oiled,
their curiosity only fleeting.

And the river
district was like the East End in another way too.  Few cabs ventured there, so
after a few minutes of ineffectual waving, they opted to walk to the next
avenue.  The church bell peeled the half hour as they passed and Tom winced.  

“We can only hope
they’re both so knackered they’ve slept in,” he said.   “And truly, Emma, you
needn’t worry about me escaping Trevor’s clutches.  I’m rather good at slipping
away on my own and I promise I’ll be back from the station as soon as
possible.  He’ll send me to wire the telegram to Davy, will he not?”