Deadly Descent (28 page)

Paul stood silent for a moment, then followed them out the door. “But they're Mauvert's prime suspects, not ours. Let him find them.”

Chapter 28

Blind Justice

A knock on the door awoke Anne from deep sleep. For a moment she didn't know where she was. She rubbed her eyes, then heard birds chirping. No street noise. Must be the colonel's garden apartment. She pushed open the shutters. The rose beds were still shadowed. It was shortly after sunrise, a cloudy morning, and warm already. She padded to the door to find an embarrassed servant with a note. “Sorry to disturb you, Mademoiselle. The messenger insisted I give this to you immediately.” Anne thanked her with a smile and withdrew to read.

“Urgent!!”
Georges had scrawled.
“Come to Café Marcel in disguise. I need someone I can trust.”

An hour later, Anne approached the café in the brown smock and breeches of a young artisan, her complexion coarsened and darkened with powder, her hair pinned up and tucked under a cap. In the crowded serving room, she caught sight of Georges at a table sipping coffee. She hadn't seen him in almost a week. He had become LeCourt's shadow.

“What's going on?” Anne asked, sliding into a chair.

“Workmen found Simon Derennes in an abandoned cellar near the Palais-Royal!” Georges replied, shifting toward her. “Thought you'd want to know.”

“Dead?”

He nodded. “About a month ago. A thick, heavy door jammed, trapping him inside. Nobody could hear him.” He put on a wry face. “
Looks
like he went down there to bury a corpse. God knows why. The police are scratching their heads. So far, they're calling it a suspicious accident.”

Anne was stunned. An accident? Never! The Amateurs had hidden the man there for seven weeks. Starved him to death. “LeCourt's mixed up in this,” she said in a low voice, recalling what she had overheard on the café's balcony. “The corpse is the one we saw in the pit, isn't it?”

“Krishna's missing daughter, Nalini, as we suspected. He identified her from scraps of clothing and her ring.”

A tide of sadness swept over Anne. Since wearing the girl's costume, she had hoped desperately that the corpse might not be Nalini after all. She drew little solace from LeCourt's cruel punishment of Derennes.

Georges' brow creased with concern. “I sense a crisis among the Amateurs. LeCourt's upstairs with Krishna. Trying to calm him down, I suppose. The man was pale with rage!”

“Something dreadful is going to happen.” Anne's throat tightened. “Who's next? Pressigny, Michou, me?”

“That's what I'm trying to find out. I want these men followed when they leave.” A clock on the wall struck nine. “It can't last much longer.” Georges turned to Anne. “You follow LeCourt. He'll probably return to his apartment on Rue Goncourt, but I can't be certain and I still need to keep track of him.”

“That should be easy.”

“Be home before dark at the latest, or the colonel will be worried.”

“Yes, Sir, I understand.” She regretted instantly the sarcasm in her voice. There could be danger ahead and Georges was concerned for her.

A few minutes later LeCourt descended, elegant and collected as usual. He picked up a cognac at the bar and sat down to read a newspaper. Probably the Dutch one, Anne guessed.

Krishna came down a minute later, looking neither left nor right, his jaw locked in a fierce scowl. Anne felt sure he was bent on revenge, convinced someone besides Derennes had been involved in Nalini's death. He also ordered cognac and sat down alone, staring inwardly at some dark and bloody vision, clutching his glass as if he would crush it. When he left the café, Georges got up, glanced at Anne, and followed him.

LeCourt put the newspaper to one side, called for pen, ink, and paper. After writing for a while, he picked up the newspaper again, read it while sipping his cognac. A few minutes later, François Noir walked into the café and sat at a corner table with a glass of wine. His eyes casually swept the room. When LeCourt returned his paper to the rack, Noir retrieved it.

Meanwhile, Anne held Noir firmly in her gaze, committing to memory the shape of his body, the lines of his face. He gulped the remainder of his drink, put the newspaper back in the rack, then walked to the door.

Anne found herself in a quandary. What would Georges want her to do? Wait for LeCourt, who was most likely going to return to his apartment? Or, follow Noir, who had just received a secret message? In an instant she had decided. She got up, took a deep breath, and followed him out of the café into the busy street.

***

Under a hot midday sun, thousands of people gathered around a raised platform in the large open space of Place de Grève. François Noir slipped behind the crowd, climbed up on a wall, and looked out over the sea of bobbing heads. Anne edged into the crowd where she could watch him without being noticed. His features, in contrast to the excited faces near him, seemed chiseled from stone.

Weaving through congested streets, she had followed him from Café Marcel to the right bank of the Seine. His gait and bearing told her he had served many years in the army. He seemed rather near-sighted and about forty years old, but he was lean and fit. At a shop in the Palais-Royal he had bought an apple, then continued eastward to the Place de Grève.

A sudden roar from the crowd drew Anne's eyes away from Noir. Everyone turned toward the street along the river.

“Here she comes,” cried a large, rough-faced woman, giving off a strong stench of fish. She was standing on a crate, craning her thick neck.

Anne felt the crowd give way to the harsh commands of uniformed men. She caught a glimpse of a cart entering Place de Grève. It came close enough for her to see a stocky young peasant woman seated with her arms tied behind her back and her hair cropped short. She was wearing a plain brown robe girdled at her waist. Her mouth was half-open, sucking in air. She stared straight ahead at the platform, her eyes wide with terror.

A shiver of horror ran through Anne's body. The spectacle was going to be an execution!

“What's she done?” asked a thin, older woman standing on the cobblestones next to the fishmonger.

“Killed her baby,” replied the woman on the crate, gingerly shifting position as the cart neared the platform. “She was a kitchen maid in the household of a judge. Riche is his name. She had a baby, claimed the judge's son was the father, and demanded money.”

The older woman and several by-standers clucked their disapproval.

“The mistress of the house, she's a devout lady,” continued the large woman, clasping her fingers together and rolling her eyes heavenward. “She had the servants thrash the girl, then ordered her and her bastard thrown into the street.”

The fishmonger looked around at the men and women hanging on her words. She lowered her voice to a loud whisper. “Can you imagine, the slut snuck back into the house with the baby, took a knife from the kitchen, cut the baby's throat, and put the bloody body on the dining room table!” She paused for a moment to share the dreadful image with her audience. Their mouths were agape. “The police caught her as she was about to jump into the river.” The fishmonger chuckled, “It didn't take the court long to decide that one.”

The woman's words echoed in Anne's ears. A plausible tale, she thought, embroidered by the teller. One of the grooms might have fathered the baby. The young woman's greed might have led her to accuse the judge's son in order to extort money from the family. But Anne withheld judgment. What the girl claimed had the ring of truth. Scullery maids were easy prey for men in noble households.

Thinking of the young woman in the cart made Anne shudder. She too had once ridden past gaping faces on her way to the scaffold. Judge Hammer's hawk-face flashed before her eyes. She banished him from her mind, then glanced at the platform the young woman had mounted. Whatever the provocation, she must have been deranged to have killed her baby.

“What's happening now?” asked the thin, older woman.

“She's tied to the post. A priest is standing in front of her holding up a crucifix.” The fishmonger's voice rose a step. “A man in black is pulling a hood over her head, tying it around her neck.” A low roar began to swell out of thousands of throats. “He's lighted the faggots….”

Anne could bear no more. She brought her fingers to her ears and turned away from the two women. She found herself staring at Noir. Slouched upon the wall, he was eating his apple as if watching the broiling of meat on a spit in the market. The roar reached a crescendo, then gradually dropped into frenzied babble. Anne sensed people around her shifting from side to side, craning for a glimpse of the flames.

Fantastic figures began to swim before her eyes. They came together in an eerie image of Antoine Dubois, his stiff, dead body tied to a post on the platform, surrounded by huge, leaping tongues of fire. Faint and queasy, Anne staggered out of the crowd into a deeply recessed doorway. She leaned against a wall, her breathing labored.

When she recovered, she saw Noir was on the move again. Apparently sated with the spectacle, he had left his perch and was pushing through the milling crowd toward the river. As he approached, Anne retreated to the back of the doorway and hid in the shadows.

A few moments later she slipped out, tugged her cap down, and followed him across the bridge to the left bank, then south on Rue Saint-Jacques, as if bound to him by an invisible cord.

***

At Montsouris, a desolate area just south of the city, Anne began to feel uneasy. She might lose sight of her prey. Noir sometimes disappeared in the lengthening shadows cast by the lowering sun. He led her through small clusters of hovels surrounded by ill-kept gardens in the hollows of the uneven, bushy terrain. The men, women, and children she saw there were wearing rags. Many were deformed.

Giant windmills stood on distant hills like sentinels. In front of her, the land rose to the warren of limestone quarries that had been dug inside the rocky hillside for centuries and later abandoned. She had heard the quarries sheltered smugglers and criminals and, recently, bones from the city's crowded cemeteries.

She glimpsed beggars returning for the evening from their roosts in the city. They joined other, sinister-looking men in small groups around fires, their low murmuring punctuated by bursts of harsh laughter or angry, drunken shouts. She let herself imagine the schemes being laid there, even murder, and the vile tricks and deceit being shared and celebrated. Did the evil, almost palpable here, differ much from what was being plotted or applauded in the drawing rooms of country manors and town houses only a few miles away? Pressigny and the Société des Amateurs came to her mind.

She was jarred from her moralizing by the sudden realization that her man had vanished. He had climbed up a narrow path into a dense grove of stunted trees. Cautiously, she made her way through the grove to a small clearing at the base of a steep limestone bluff. Noir was nowhere in sight.

To the right, a narrow wagon road skirted the bluff, then cut through another grove in the direction of the highway to Paris. In front of her, a rough stone wall closed off the entrance to an abandoned underground quarry. Shepherds and their flocks must have sought shelter there years ago. Someone was still using it, she reckoned. Its large wooden door was in good condition, and the grass in front of it was worn down. A small high window was the only other opening.

She paused at the edge of the clearing. Had Noir taken the road to the right, or had he entered the shelter? She decided to watch the entrance. For what seemed like an hour, she sat there concealed among the trees but saw no one come or go. Meanwhile, the grove grew dark and menacing. Perhaps, she thought, it would be best to give up the chase and return to the city while she still felt safe.

An urge to check the shelter, however, drew her forward. Cautiously, she edged out of the woods and listened. The delicate rustling of leaves mixed with faint sounds from the beggars in the distance. She crept slowly around the clearing to the edge of the bluff and inched her way up to the wall. Quietly, she tried to open the door. It was locked. She glanced up at the small window. Unglazed, but perhaps wide enough for a thin person to squeeze through.

She stepped back, debating her next move. Without warning, a foul-smelling woolen hood fell over her head and jerked tight around her neck. Powerful hands grasped her arms, bent them up behind her back, tied them together, and pushed, half-carried her forward. A heavy key turned in the lock. The door groaned open, then closed behind her.

She shuffled thirty or forty paces through a strong scent of hay and manure. The powerful man halted, renewed his grip on her arms. She winced with pain. He knocked, another door opened. She was shoved into a room, its air heavy with the odor of burning lamp oil.

“Look at what I caught outside,” said her captor in a low, coarse voice, tinged with alarm.

The cord was loosened on her neck and the hood pulled off. The ropes on her arms were roughly untied. She found herself standing in the middle of a small, square chamber cut out of the rock. The ceiling was low. The air was musty and damp. A lamp flickered on a plain table between a pair of wooden stools.

Two men were glaring at her. The one who had surprised and overcome her was Jacques Gros—short, thickset, with virtually no neck and a small bald head. At first glance, Anne thought he appeared childish or simple-minded, but this impression quickly changed as she studied his mean, squinting eyes.

The other man was François Noir—taller, older, and slightly stooped. He turned to his companion. “Hold him, Jacques, while I look through his coat.”

He found her wallet. “Joseph Beaufort, artisan, Rouen,” he said, holding up the false residence card Georges had given her. “What are you doing here?” he asked sharply. “Why did you follow me?”

Lowering her voice, she began to stammer with a heavy Norman accent, “I'm new in Paris. Heard I could make some money if I ran into the right people in Montsouris.”