The Alchemy of Murder (16 page)

I quickly back out of the room, holding the vinegar sponge tighter to my nose. I’m saved from another sick ward as Dr. Dubois comes out of a room.

“Dr. Dubois, may I speak with you? We met last night at the cemetery.”

His eyebrows shoot up. “Ah yes, the prostitute … who is not a prostitute.”

“Exactly. I, uh, suppose the police told you who I really am.”

“Yes, a reporter. I have not had an opportunity to talk to the detective again, but his superior, Chief Inspector Morant, has sent word that he will see me today.”

“Doctor, I need your help desperately. I’m in terrible straights. I’m a foreigner, and I’m helpless.” I must work fast, before the Chief Inspector arrives. I hope saving a damsel in distress will appeal to the romantic nature Frenchmen are famous for. It’s obvious that he doesn’t know I was arrested and escaped last night.

“I don’t understand, Mademoiselle. How can I help you?”

“May I speak to you for a moment? In private … please?”

“I’m sorry, I have my rounds—”

“It’ll only take a moment, it’s a matter of extreme importance. If I tell you it’s a matter of life or death, it’s no exaggeration.”

“Well … I suppose I could spare a moment. There’s no real privacy in the hospital, but we can use this room.”

The stench in the room is worse than the smell from Madam Malon’s convenience hole. It smells more of decaying matter, the sort of odor I experienced at the German doctor’s shack on the pier. I envision Josephine and have to fight myself from leaving. It gives me the willies.

Hospital supplies, brooms, mops, and buckets are stacked along one wall. In the center of the room is a table with a microscope, metal and glass tubes, various containers of chemicals, and other equipment, along with a coffeepot on an oil burner and some cups. How anyone could take coffee from a room with this smell is beyond me.

On the floor underneath the table is a small wood crate with an
Alexandrie Egypte
shipping label. To my right is a set of white curtains. I can’t help but wonder what’s behind it.

“As I told you last night at the graveyard, I’m certain that the woman you inspected was killed by a slasher. He’s killing women and the police won’t help me find him. Now I’m afraid he’s after me. I have no one to turn to but you.”

The young doctor gawks at me.

“If you will listen to my story, you will see there’s more than my own sanity at issue.”

I quickly tell him about the murder of Josephine and my suspicions of Dr. Blum at Blackwell’s Island. He never takes his eyes off of me as I relate the tale. Perhaps he’s decided that I am in fact a madwoman and will lunge at him at any moment with a knife.

“Amazing,” is all he says after I finish.

“I need your help in finding the killer of my friend. I swear my only interest is in stopping him from murdering more women. Will you help me?”

“I don’t know what I can do to assist you. I’m a doctor, not a policeman.”

I take a deep breath and decide to go one step further, a step that might take me straight to the police.

“Doctor, the police believe my accusations about the slasher being in Paris will hurt the Exposition. Last night I booked passage on a steamship to America. They believe I’ve left. Please don’t give away the fact I’m still here. I need time.”

“Mademoiselle, I … I can’t do that, it would be most unusual.”

“Not really. I’m not asking you to lie to the police, merely not to volunteer any information about me. They won’t ask if you’ve seen me, they believe I’m gone.”

He shrugs. “Well, I suppose I have no duty revealing you were here, if no one asks.”

“Exactly. Now, Doctor, did you do an autopsy on the woman found at the graveyard last night?”

“Yes, this morning.”

“Did you find any signs of violence on her?”

“None.”

“None at all?”

“Nothing. Her internal organs had decayed and rotted in an extremely short time span. This is a symptom of that strange malady called Black Fever.”

“But I saw the woman minutes before she was dead. She didn’t appear sick.”

“The sickness was inside.” He hesitates and looks down as if he is contemplating telling me something of great importance. “Are you aware of what microbes are?”

“Some sort of germ. Doctor Pasteur studies them.”

“Yes, little creatures so small we can’t see them without a microscope. Do you know anything about the Black Fever?”

“Not really.”

“Well, it would take millions of them to cover your fingernail. The only way to know their presence is by the darkness of the blood. It turns black as the microbes consume the oxygen that gives our blood its rich, red appearance. In a way they kill themselves.”

“I don’t understand.”

“They can only live and grow in the presence of oxygen—the blood in our bodies. Once inside they grow and divide. One bacterium becomes two, then four, eight, doubling every twenty or thirty minutes. Billions of them crawl into the lungs, heart, liver, and kidneys. They even make their way to the head, infiltrating the fleshy membrane that encases the brain. Everywhere they go, they multiply, doubling and redoubling, untold billions, a wildfire of growth. It’s hard to believe, but if the food supply was unlimited, the incredible doubling process would create a mass of microbes the size of the planet Earth in a few days. Fortunately for us, our bodies die from them eating our oxygen and then they die also.”

“That’s incredible.”

“Yes. As you can see from the microscope here, I have an interest in them. In fact, I have the only microscope in the hospital.” He proudly gestures at the instrument. “Because of her strange symptoms and lack of physical trauma, this is a case in which I suspected that a microbe was the villain. But in checking her blood and tissue under my microscope, I detected none, probably because they’re too small to see even with my scope.”

“Do you have a theory as to what caused her death?”

“Of course. Her condition was derived from miasma.”

“Sewer fumes?”

“Yes. Paris has over two million people. Catacombed throughout the city is hundreds of kilometers of tunnels carrying rivers of sewage.” He stands up and paces our little space. “Sewage creates noxious gases that can kill when inhaled.”

“But all big cities have—”

“Yes, yes, but no doubt a unique combination of virulent matter has come together in the area where this prostitute lived.”

“And where might that be?”

“La Poivrière, the Pepper Pot district, one of the areas in which the poor are compressed like Norwegian sardines.”

“So you are saying sewer smells kill. But even as I stand here, everything in this room seems to stink of the sewer.”

He smiles, as if I made a point. “That’s because of the decay.”

“Decay?”

“The decay of her internal organs.” He pulls back the curtain.

A naked body, cut wide open, is on the table. I stand paralyzed, as if my feet are glued to the floor, staring at the body. It’s Josephine all over again and my head swoons and the room spins. The next thing I know he has my arm and leads me into the hallway. After the terrible stench in that room, the hallway smells fresh. He apologizes profusely as I lean against the wall and regain my breath.

“I deal with death so often it’s of no matter to me.”

“Doctor, is that—the body—?”

“Yes, as I said, I did an autopsy.”

“You’re saying this woman died from sewer fumes?”

“That is my conclusion, yes.”

“Did you find any marks on her body, like a cut or scratch?”

“No.”

“How about a needle mark, something, anything?”

“Needle marks?… No. Why do you ask?”

“Because I still have a hard time believing she died from sewer fumes. I saw her. She was healthy. Maybe she died from a poison of some sort?”

“Poison?” He looks at me like I lost my mind. “Mademoiselle, as I explained to you, she might have appeared healthy to you, a layperson—but she wasn’t. All the signs point to miasma.”

“What was her name?

“Simone Doche. Why do you ask?”

“Out of respect. I saw her alive and hate to keep referring to her as just another dead body.” I think for a moment. “This Black Fever, is it still raging in the Pepper Pot?”

“Yes, but she could have picked it up anywhere.”

He pulls out his pocket watch and frowns as he stares at the time. “Mademoiselle, you should leave. I expect Monsieur Chief Inspector at any moment.”

My heart leaps to my throat. I forgot about the police official’s promised visit. “Yes, yes … I have one more favor to ask. Her home address.”

“Mademoiselle, do not even think of—”

“Please, I must hurry.”

23

Dr. Dubois insists on guiding me to the hospital’s rear entrance where bodies in gunny sacks on the loading platform are being loaded onto a funeral wagon. “Paupers who died of the fever,” he says.

I hurry by the impoverished dead with a heavy heart, knowing that but for the grace of God go any of us. After flagging down a carriage, my respectable clothes receive a quick once over after I provide the address.

“Mademoiselle, that is in the Poivrière.”

“
Oui
, Monsieur, I do charity work.”

“
Mon Dieu
! In the Poivrière? Take care, fair dame, that your good work does not kill you.”

As the carriage rumbles along, the driver expounds on a multitude of reasons why a “dame,” a lady, should not go to La Poivrière, the Pepper Pot district. He doesn’t know that I am not unfamiliar with tough neighborhoods. I’ve done stories on New York’s skid rows of cheap cafés, flophouses, saloons, pawnshops, and dance halls—more appropriately called flesh halls—patronized by criminals and derelicts. The worst of Paris cannot be any more disagreeable than the Bowery and Hell’s Kitchen.

I have to admit, the best reason for staying away from the Pepper Pot was the one given by Dr. Dubois—the dreaded fever gripping the city might still be brutalizing this area. Still, I cannot let fear of a contagion keep me away.

My gut feeling is that Simone Doche knew the slasher for more than the few minutes preceding her death. When I close my eyes and relive the scene at the street carnival, I remember she waved to him as she started toward him. It appeared to be a wave of acknowledgment. Had he befriended her, as he had Josephine? If he had, Simone might have someone—a friend, roommate, neighbor, someone she confided in, like Josephine did with me. Someone I can talk to.

No matter what Dr. Dubois says, I refuse to believe she died from sewer fumes. If she had the fever, she would have looked ill, not strutting about, healthy as a horse only minutes before her death. What could this madman be up to? A new, strange puzzle has emerged and my intuition is screaming that the game he plays has taken on a wicked twist … but what?

The carriage stops in front of a tenement and the driver indicates this is the address I gave him. I no sooner step off the carriage after paying when it occurs to me to ask him to wait, but he’s already hurrying his horses on.

Down the street, two men come out of a building carrying a body rolled up in heavy cloth. My knees turn weak at the thought that I might be breathing in deadly sickness, but I remind myself there are other people on the street breathing the same air and they aren’t dead, or at least not yet.

The street maintenance crews don’t favor the area anymore than cabbies—the pavement is pockmarked with ruts and mud holes. Buildings are cracked, trim is often crooked or hanging precariously. Broken windows are stuffed with cloth or haphazardly boarded. In the block where I stand are two taverns, a wine shop, and one small store that sells vegetables and meat—a three to one ratio of demon spirits to food.

The men and women on the street look defeated by life. The stares I get from the men are both crafty and angry and I clutch my purse tighter. These aren’t the poor working people I toiled beside in Pittsburgh; they’re notches below the working class—performers of odd jobs, small crimes, beggars, and ragpickers. Clothing on both sexes is coarse and worn; shoes are mostly sabots of the cheapest, stiffest leather.

The black flag of anarchy hangs from several apartment windows along the street.

Places evoke feelings in us. I sense sorrow and suffering, anguish and anger. Poverty, strong drink, and violent emotions have left their mark on this street.

At the entrance of Simone’s apartment building a little girl of four or five plays with a dirty doll. Her mother sits at the foot of the steps, humming a lullaby while she rocks a baby in arms. She coughs in the baby’s face before looking up at me.

“A few sous,
s’il vous plaît
, for my baby.” Her plea for a few pennies for her baby brings me to a dead halt.

The little girl skips toward me with a big, happy grin. She might be physically tainted by life, but in her eyes and smile I can see her soul is still pure. Her nose is running and she takes her tiny hand and wipes it before holding it out to me. Her shoeless little feet are hard, crusty, and dirty. I doubt if she’s ever worn shoes. Her dress is torn and as vile as her feet. She’s skinny, that pathetic emaciation of a gutter child.