City of Light (City of Mystery) (6 page)

He made his way to the
center of the front row and lowered himself decisively into the only empty
seat, waving Carle over to the corner.  Rayley’s presence on the front line of the
interrogation seemed to startle the officers, just as he intended.  And he further
seized the advantage by asking, “Might I go first?”

Without waiting for
an answer, or even the translation of his question, Rayley turned toward the
housekeeper and said “I apologize for the inconvenience of having to use an
interpreter, Ma’am, but I am a guest in your beautiful city and regrettably
unskilled in your language.”   Carle’s translation earned Rayley back a
cautious nod from the woman, who had a simple country face.  Something in her
manner gave Rayley a flutter of optimism.

“Was the night of
the murder, by chance, an evening that Mr. Martin normally had at leisure?”

Carle repeated the
question.  The woman looked surprised, then nodded.

“Then why was he in
the kitchen?”

A peppering of
French, then Carle said “The master of the house brought home a business associate
for dinner unexpectedly. The lady of the house asked the cook, Mr. Martin, if
he would agree to stay and prepare the meal, then take his leisure on the
following evening.  He agreed.”

“And if there had
been no unexpected visitor, what would have happened?   I suppose what I’m
asking is, how would the family typically dine on the cook’s night off?”

The officer in the
chair beside Rayley pointedly shifted his weight and the others began to
exchange glances.  Their shock at having the interrogation usurped and their
mannerly restraint in the face of what seemed to be utterly trivial questions
would only last so long.  Rayley knew he would have to focus his thoughts very
carefully.

“She says,” Carle
reported, “that the family would either dine out on such an evening or the maid
Jeanne Marie would prepare a light meal of stew or soup.”

“Ah, just as a
family would manage the situation in London,” Rayley said, with what he hoped
was a winning smile.  He was torn between his need to charm the housekeeper and
his need to get on with the questioning before the French had him dragged from
the room. “So normally on a Monday night, Jeanne Marie would have been in the
kitchen alone?”

The officer beside
him stilled and gave Rayley a little sidelong glance.   At least someone sees
where I’m going with this, Rayley thought, as the woman listened to Carle’s
latest question and then nodded.

“And in London,”
Rayley went on, “the cook’s night off is also the night that certain kitchen housekeeping
tasks are performed. The most thorough scrub of the week, the cleaning of the
silver, that sort of thing.  Might I assume it works the same way in a Parisian
home?  That anyone familiar with the household routine would have expected
Monday night to yield a kitchen full of silver and a young girl alone in the
room?”

One of the advantages
of having to wait for the circuit of translations was that Rayley had plenty of
time to observe the faces of the two women in front of him.  The housekeeper
was maintaining her slightly quizzical frown, as if surprised to find herself
in the presence of what appeared to be an English clairvoyant.  But at the
mention of the household silver, the maid Jeanne Marie had jerked upright in
her chair and gone, Rayley observed with some satisfaction, blanc comme la
neige.  She was very young and remarkably ugly, but he supposed neither of these
things precluded her from having a lover.  Or from plotting with that lover to
steal from the very household that employed her. 

The murmuring of the
policemen around him was enough to indicate a general light was dawning on them
all.  To take matters further on his own would be impolite and unnecessary, so
Rayley merely smiled at the housekeeper and said “Merci, madame.”  The man to
his left, whom he shortly realized was the same Claude Rubois who had
originally examined the girl, sprang on the trembling Jeanne Marie like a wolf,
and she promptly spewed out her whole story.  Rayley could glean a fair amount from
context and the tone of her voice, but Carle later filled in the blanks.  The
boy who had come to the door had been not her lover, but her brother.  And yes,
the two had planned for him to perform his heist of the family silver on an
evening when they believed she would be the only one in the kitchen.  Jeanne
Marie had no way to warn her brother that the unexpected dinner guest had meant
a change of plans and thus that the luckless Mr. Martin would also be present.
When he found the cook washing clams at the sink the boy had panicked,
performing a clumsy murder when a simple turn-and-run would have sufficed.  Emerging
from the pantry to find their perfect crime had fallen to disaster, his sister
had felt she had no alternative but to cover for him.  She had shooed the boy
from the kitchen, wiped down the knife he had used, concealed it among its
fellows, and then – small but fatal error – had washed her hands before
summoning help. 

The girl was led
away.  Fairly gently, Rayley was relieved to note.  The housekeeper, sobbing,
was taken off in a different direction.   A few more officers strode from the
room in a hurry, evidently off to arrest the girl’s brother.  Rubois slapped
Rayley on the shoulder, a gesture that startled him but he raised his eyes to
see the man’s chin nodding in an unmistakable gesture of “Well done.”  

And then they all
were gone, even Carle, and Rayley was left in the room alone.  What else could
he have expected?  He looked at his watch.  Barely four, but he felt an urge to
celebrate.  He could eat at a better restaurant tonight, be supposed, or
indulge in a complete bottle of wine.  But solitary celebration is a sad thing,
so instead he rose to his feet and headed toward the door.  There was a
telegraph office on the corner.  He couldn’t wait to tell Trevor.  

CHAPTER FIVE

Paris

April 20

5:40 AM

She was both
beautiful and smart.  A disastrous combination in a woman, one guaranteed to
doom her to a life of disappointment, and life had been disappointing Isabel Blout
now for thirty-one years. 

There appeared to be
only a certain amount of time she could spend with a man before ennui would
begin to set in, as slow and persistent as mold on a cottage wall.  Mama had
predicted - had promised, really – that a marriage between a groom of
sixty-four and a bride of sixteen would most probably fail to survive the
honeymoon.  But George Blout had lingered into an even older old age,
occasionally still rallying to demand a particularly distasteful variation of
his husbandly rights.  Her time with Andrew had been six years, five of them
delightful.    Randolph eight, but with an extended break in the middle.  Three
years with Carlo, two of them best forgotten.  James barely one, and their bond
was of a most unusual sort.  Unorthodox as it was, the intensity of that
singular year together expanded his presence in her memory and made him seem in
some ways the most significant of the lot.  Armand didn’t count.  She had known
him forever, since the fumbling days of childhood, and her business with him
was of a totally different sort.  

Anyone clever with
mathematics would see the problem immediately.  For a woman who began her
romantic life at sixteen, six and eight and three and one adds up to somewhat more
than Isabel’s current age of thirty-one.

Yes, regrettably
there had been a bit of overlap between the affairs and this had at times proven
painful for both Isabel and the gentlemen in question.  Others might blame her
for this pain and even for the familial and marital upheavals which so often
accompanied her arrival in a man’s life, but Isabel did not blame herself.  She
knew she had been dealt a most unusual and very tricky hand to play.  Beautiful
and smart.   A woman should be one or the other, not both, or else she is in an
impossible situation – attractive enough to draw men, but shrewd enough to see
through them.  Once a woman realizes the frailties of men, her life can quickly
assume a nightmarish quality.  It’s as if she is being given a series of gaily
wrapped presents, and yet she opens them only to find each one empty, until the
floor around her feet is littered with piles of tissue and  abandoned boxes. 

Isabel had traveled
a great distance.  Not just Manchester to Paris, obscurity to prominence, ignorance
to sophistication, or poverty to wealth, although these transitions, and many
others, were all certainly made along the way.  She often bemused herself with
the fantasy that she would someday return to the town of her birth.  She would
walk the streets in her finest clothes and wait to be recognized.  She
suspected it would take some time.  Manchester was a small town, but yet her
transformation has been so profound that she knew she may have to walk its
streets many times before the citizens would recall her name.  All those
spot-faced boys who’d thrown mud at her and sometimes worse, the ones that called
her The Princess for merely daring to be different, for wanting more out of
life than the men of Manchester could offer.  Her childhood tormenters would be
old now.  Worn down by too many children to feed and life in the mill.  They
might not know her at once but then, when understanding finally dawned…they
would see a woman resurrected. They would grab at the hem of her gown and beg
for healing.  They would reach to her like the lepers who tried to touch Jesus.

Isabel looked
different, she knew.  Sounded different. Moved differently and carried fans and
furs and ivory-handled parasols, all the talismans of her new life.  But,
despite the trappings of change, her real journey had been an interior one.  For
the past fifteen years, Isabel had been her own artwork, her own invention, her
own opus.  She had created herself out of nothing, and this had taken a
tremendous amount of energy.

The men she would be
meeting at the tower… They were not the sort with whom she would normally
trifle. The reporter, that boy, the kind of man who would still be called a boy
when he turned fifty.  And the other, the detective.  She had noticed his
solitude at the café Sunday last.   She had known who he was, of course, since
Armand made such a fuss about gathering information on people, especially people
who might prove useful at some point in the future.  Especially those who’d come
from London, who might carry gossip and rumors about their heads like lice. 

She had been
instructed to spy on him and, as Armand so charmingly put it “to find the dirt.” 
Armand believed there was always dirt.  But it had been the detective’s
palpable solitude that Isabel had first noted. Perhaps she had even dreamed
about him afterward. She did that frequently - dreamed of men she had only seen
in passing.

It occurred to
Isabel, as she dressed in the shadows of early morning, that she herself might
have been for the first time in her life genuinely lonely as well.   For it was
not only curiosity about the tower which drove her down the marble steps of her
apartment and out through the heavy oaken door.  It had been some time since
she had seen as much worship in a man’s face as she had seen in the
detective’s.  Perhaps she was merely nostalgic for England or perhaps she was
homesick for her own youth, the borders of which seemed to be receding even
farther in the distance.  She would not take him as a lover.  He was too ugly,
too small and serious and there was a high probability that he might expect the
sort of things that she was ill-prepared to give.  But she would take him as a
mirror.  She would hold him out from her at arm’s length and admire the image
of her that was reflected in his sad and eager eyes.        

6:02 AM

Working the early
shift at the morgue was hardly the best job in Paris, but the workers shuffled
in as the church bells struck six - silent, sleep-grogged, and resigned to
their fates. Two unidentified bodies had come in during the night and would
require embalming for display. Two more had gone unclaimed for more than a week
and would thus be buried beneath generic crosses in the small cemetery across
the street, deemed the Pauper’s Garden.

The burials were
especially dispirited tasks, since each one marked a failure for the French
police, who prided themselves on body identification.  But with the starting
date for the Exhibition nearing and more people streaming into Paris each day,
the count would certainly keep rising and, given the fact that many of the
visitors were foreign -  vagabonds, gypsies, criminals, and itinerates seeking
work - it was unlikely that many of the bodies which would arrive at the morgue
in the next few months would ever be named or claimed.  The police and the
morgue workers were braced for an onslaught of corpses, and some were concerned
that the demand might be more than the patchy soil of Pauper’s Garden could
bear.  There was talk of procuring land for a second cemetery, for just as the
city was opening new hostels and cafes in anticipation of the visitors, so must
they create accommodations for the anticipated dead.     

But of course, even
within the republic of the morgue, some bodies received preferential treatment
- such as the corpse which had been held in its own marble vault since it had
been found on the banks of the Seine on the morning of April 12.  This body had
been embalmed, but it had not been put on display with the others, nor was
there any talk of carting it out to Pauper’s Garden.  At the insistence of the
supervising detective, it was even packed in ice to preserve it as perfectly as
possible, although in anticipation of what fate, no one could say.  The marble
vault kept the ice frozen rather well but even so, it had to be completely
changed twice a day, with the origin of each new work shift and even now, two
workers were headed toward the vault pushing a wheelbarrow.  It was a tedious
task, for large quantities of ice were not easily obtained at 6 AM in Paris,
but this was what had been ordered and what the morgue workers must do.