The Alchemy of Murder (33 page)

As I stand mesmerized by the eerie
façade
of the cathedral, I experience the strongest desire to leave when a priest who could have stepped right off the pages of Victor Hugo’s great novel,
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
, approaches me.

He’s short and hunched from age and whatever burdens he carries. His face is small and wrinkled, deeply etched with the lines of a monkey, ugly, cynical, and amused, all at the same time. In a dusty brown habit, he appears less like a priest than the dried mummified remains of a medieval monk, found in the corner of a forgotten cell in an ancient monastery.

“Mademoiselle, please follow me.”

For the first time my belief that I’m to meet with the Red Virgin is shaken—she considers the Church as great a tyrant as the government and would hardly hide in one with a priest as a guide.

What have I gotten myself into?

*   *   *

W
E ASCEND STAIRS
in the north tower and cross over to the south tower, encountering gargoyles and carved monsters, not the least of which is the infamous striga—a kind of vampire who gazes unrelenting over the city, his chin resting on his hands.

A “vast symphony in stone” is what the incomparable Victor Hugo called the cathedral. In this sinister stone forest populated with creatures from nightmares, vicious dogs, serpents, and monsters, I sense a dark and haunted symphony written in blood with the quill of Edgar Allan Poe. A gothic tale with its mysterious subterranean passages, dark battlements, hidden panels, and trapdoors—one leading to Victor Frankenstein’s secret laboratory where he pieces together his modern Prometheus, and behind another, the strange matter involving
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

As my imagination rages on, we enter a chamber in the south tower housing a great bell, the thirteen-ton monster rung only on special occasions by Quasimodo, the beloved hunchback who made his first appearance in literary life on the foundling shelf.

A priest who has been reading by candlelight rises to his feet and permits the hood of his habit to fall to his shoulders. Instead of a man, Louise Michel smiles at me.

I raise my eyebrows at her priestly garb. “Didn’t you try to burn this very cathedral to the ground?”

She sighs and looks around a bit mournfully, as if my question could raise the very encasements against her.

“In the heat of passions roused by injustice, injustice itself can occur. No, I didn’t personally make the bonfire of choir chairs that very nearly took the life of Our Lady of Stone. Actually, I was busy handing out cans of petrol to others to create a wall of fire in the city and slow down the advance of the Versailles troops. When some of my comrades began to panic and flee, I began loading and firing a cannon myself.”

“Louise La Petroleuse,” the old priest mutters, as he shuffles away to leave us alone. I haven’t heard the name applied to her before and with my crude French, I translate it as best I’m able to, “Louise the Firestarter.” I nod after the priest. “Strange bedfellows? Or is he in disguise to plant an anarchist bomb?”

“He’s a real priest, but he’s also the one who thought of burning the choir chairs. He occasionally finds himself torn between his devotion to God and his sense of justice.”

“I certainly admire your choice of hiding places.”

“My comrades chose the sewers. Frankly, I would bed with the pope rather than face those damp environs.”

I take a seat on a stool and fold my hands in my lap. “After our last meeting, I had the impression you and your friends would rather murder me than talk to me.”

“If your death can further the cause to unchain the slaves of the bourgeoisie, I would drive a stake through your heart myself, Mademoiselle Bly.”

“That’s comforting to know. How did you find out my name?” The only person in Paris who knows my real identity is the slasher.

“I recognized you. Your picture once appeared in a radical French newspaper. The story claimed you are a fine example for women.”

“From your tone of voice, you don’t agree.”

“You haven’t started a revolution, you’ve joined the enemy. You work for a rich newspaper owner whose mercantile soul is rented by the sweatshop owners with their advertising. You write about crimes on the streets but not about the crimes governments commit by oppressing the people.”

“That’s not fair. I
am
a revolutionary, not with cannons, but by example. I’ve worked hard to get a position never held before by a woman. Other women have obtained newspaper jobs because of my performance, thousands more have been inspired to go into other trades and most importantly, millions of women now know it’s possible to be something besides a household slave. It’s only a beginning but most revolutions start with just a few people.”

“You can do more. You can turn your pen into a sword. The world is changing—here and in your country. The Revolution has started,
demoiselle.
Your country won’t escape it. Millions of American workers slave in mines and mills for starvation wages, while a few fat pigs get fatter off their sweat.”

“Progress is slow,” I continue to defend myself, “but the day will come when women will have the right to vote and be educated, when men and women injured on the job or laid off won’t face starvation. Just because I refuse to resort to violence doesn’t mean I haven’t turned my pen into a sword. It might be slow, but it’s permanent. Violence doesn’t bring change faster; it retards it.”

She shrugs. “I learned a bitter lesson when the Commune was overwhelmed. Thousands of my comrades were summarily executed on the streets. Blood flowed in the gutters and mass graves were dug to handle all the victims. We hadn’t dealt with the opposition in that manner. We fought when attacked, but never massacred. Now I adhere to the doctrine of propaganda by the deed. The killing of key leaders who keep the proletariat enslaved is just and desirable.”

“The man I seek doesn’t attack leaders, he murders innocent women.”

“That’s what you said, and that’s why I’m meeting with you. I’m not just an anarchist, but an advocate of the rights of women. I’d never condone the acts you spoke of. When we organized to fight the Versailles troops, Montmartre women, as well as men, took up arms. Prostitutes joined as willingly as did seamstresses and schoolteachers. When others objected to permitting prostitutes to fight for the Commune, I rose and argued that they were as much victims of exploitation as the poor and insisted they be allowed to join. When we women covered the cannons with our bodies and refused to move when Versailles officers ordered their soldiers to shoot, there were prostitutes among us.”

“Then you’re willing to help me bring this madman to bay?”

“I can offer little help, for many reasons. People make a mistake in assuming that anarchists are all part of a unitary organization, but that’s not true. Anarchy is a social philosophy shared by millions of people. And there are hundreds, if not thousands, of different anarchy organizations. I have no more knowledge or control over a fellow anarchist planting a bomb under the carriage of a cabinet minister than I do about what you have for breakfast this morning. And I have another, more pressing problem. I have to return to England and continue the fight from there. The bourgeois swine who runs my wonderful France has decided to imprison me in a madhouse if they catch me.”

I start to say something and she holds up a forefinger, like the schoolmarm she once was.

“But I do hear rumors.”

“What sort of rumors?”

“All sorts. Some true, some false, some exaggerated. The man you seek may be Russian.”

“Russian, yes, that would fit. We called him the German doctor, but in America, many foreigners get labeled ‘German’ simply because there are so many different immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe. What—”

“That’s all I can tell you. You could put me on the rack and gouge my eyes with hot pinchers and I could tell you no more. You have to seek your answers elsewhere. Here.” She hands me a piece of paper with writing on it.

S
.
I
.
C
HERNOV, 292
R
UE
A
NTOINE-
J
OSEPH

“Who’s this?”

“A bourgeois swine—a Russian who spies for the czar’s Third Section, the Russian political police. The revolutionaries that they don’t murder, or imprison to torture, are kept track of by the political police.”

“What will he tell me?”

“If the man you seek is Russian and he is in Paris, this man will know.”

“Louise, I—”

“Don’t thank me, I’d rather cut off both my arms and legs and blind myself than be an informant. I do this not for you or your exploitative employers. You see this scarf?” She pulls open the monk’s robe to reveal her black clothes and red scarf. “Some of the blood that makes this scarf red belongs to the prostitutes of Montmartre. When the stand was made at the barricades in Place Blanche they fought bravely and died defending the square. Not one was shot in the back.”

Anger has made her features strong and defiant. “Gilles de Rais. That’s who you are dealing with. Now leave before I change my mind.”

As I get up she speaks, “Mademoiselle Bly, if this man is what you say, he has no heart, no conscience, and he will kill you. And if he is an anarchist, the men you met last night at my table will kill you before you can stop him. To them you are a bourgeois swine. He is their comrade.”

I nod my head and leave. I’m not sure if she was trying to warn me or scare the life out of me—either way, she succeeded. Unfortunately I wasn’t paying attention to the route the priest used to bring me here. So, I will use the logic that if I stay on these cold, stone steps going down, they will eventually bring me to the bottom.

I can’t help wonder … why did she have me leave alone first? She knows I don’t know my way. I understand that she’s torn by conflicting emotions and loyalties. Her duty to the cause of anarchism and her sense of outrage that a madman is killing women are in conflict, but she also bluntly expressed her disapproval of me and my ways to help society. And what did she mean by
before I change my mind
?

Never have I’ve been so eager to leave a church. I believe I held my breath the whole time. Yet if I had to do it again I would for now I know the name of the slasher—
Gilles de Rais
.

46

An inquiry in the telegraph office across the bridge reveals there’s no telephone for the Procope where I’m to meet Jules in a couple of hours, so I send a telegram to the café with the Chernov information and advising Jules I’m going there.

Since we were going to the Institut I call there and ask for Pasteur’s assistant, Monsieur Roth. I’m told that Roth is in a lab in a building without a phone. I decide to leave the same information as the telegram, with a message asking Roth to pass it on to Jules.

*   *   *

T
HE ADDRESS FOR
S. I. Chernov is a two-story wood house on a street that’s little more than an alley.

The house is modest, needs a little paint and care, but it’s not a derelict. An older man answers the door, a gentleman perhaps in his early sixties, short, stumpy, bald, a cannonball with arms and legs.

“
Bonjour
, Mademoiselle.” His lifted eyebrows pose a question.

I suddenly realize I hadn’t given thought about what to say to the man and stand there tongue-tied, searching for one of those lies that come so easy to me.

“Perhaps you are at the wrong house?”

“Monsieur Chernov?”

“Yes.”

“Monsieur … what I’m about to say to you will sound strange, but I beg you to hear me through because of the singular importance of the matter.”

His eyebrows go up even higher. “It is still morning, Mademoiselle. I usually find strangeness hides its head until after dark.”

“I’m sorry. I realize this is very abrupt and I haven’t even introduced myself. I’m an American newspaper reporter, Nellie Bly. I’m in Paris, doing a story about a series of killings. I’ve come to suspect that the killings are the work of an anarchist, perhaps a Russian one. I was given your name as an agent of the Russian police in the hopes that you might assist my investigation.”

My words fly at him without spaces between them. After the last word hits him, I keep my lips tightly shut and pray he’ll talk with me.

He stares at me, his own mouth a little agape. He blinks a couple of times. His eyes are large and brown and they look at me hard. Very hard. He seems to be on the brink of ordering me from his premises or…?

“Tea, Mademoiselle?”

I let out a deep sigh. “Yes, thank you.”

We pass into a foyer and through a living room.

The living room is sparsely furnished—a comfortable couch, a rocking chair, a straight back chair, and two small end tables. Newspapers and magazines are everywhere, in tall piles in the middle of the room, stacked up against the walls, covering the tables, and the two chairs. The fireplace mantle has a single picture on it, that of a woman and two small children.