Camera Obscura Read online

  TWO

  The Corpse

  Now that she was alone at last she stood still for one long moment. The air in the room was hot and filled with unpleasant scents. She still did not look at the corpse. She glanced around the apartment – cheap furniture, a print on the wall, incongruously, of Queen Victoria – blood. On the walls, on the rickety old sofa, on the floor – the stench of it strong in her nostrils. A drop of blood had hit the lizard queen's portrait and ran down it like a tear. She went to the window.

  Looking down at the Rue Morgue, shadows moved far below, spectators robbed of their moment of excitement. How easy would it be to keep a lid on what had happened here? To the smell of blood, add machine oil, foliage, rot – the smell of a jungle somewhere far away and hot. This last did not belong in this, her city.

  Her city. She remembered days running in the alleyways, hunting for scraps, hiding from the urban predators. Had it ever been her city? She was not born there and, later, had not lived there, yet here she was. She glared at the lizard queen's ruined portrait, deciding the blood added, not detracted, from the painting. She remembered the lizards' court. Her second, unfortunate husband had often taken her there. His death…

  She wouldn't dwell on it. The barest hint of wind coming through the window, and she realised her face was wet, that the atmosphere in the room had made her sweat. Looking down – was that a shadow moving up the wall, climbing cautiously, some animal well used to shade making its slow and careful way up to this place of death? She watched but could not be sure. She turned away from the window, taking a last deep breath of air fresher, at least, than that inside, and looked at last at the corpse.

  That first glance only took a moment, and she turned her head, breathing hard through her nose. She closed her eyes, but the image of the corpse was waiting for her in the darkness behind her eyelids, and she felt the room begin to spin. She opened her eyes and looked again, and this time she did not look away.

  A man lay on the floor at her feet.

  One side of his head had been caved in. What remained of the face seemed to belong to a man hailing from Asia, though it was hard to tell with certainty. His skin had taken on a waxy aspect. He was lying in a pool of blood, the fingers of one hand – his left – curled into a fist, the other loose, one finger stretched out as if pointing. She half-expected to see a message scrawled in blood, on the floor or the wall, some cryptic riddle to lead her to the man's killer, but there was none, and it would have made no difference either way since she was not overly concerned with who killed him, but only of what they had taken from the man after his death.

  The head wound was ordinary enough. She let her gaze wander further down, past the neck, towards the chest and stomach… yes. She knelt beside him, feeling sick. And now her hands were on him, studying the gash in his corpulent belly. The skin was hairless and the belly-button pronounced, and the man looked pregnant, even in death, as if his stomach had contained a womb and a foetus inside it – though there were none there now.

  He had been gutted open, with a long, sharp knife. The flaps of his stomach looked like the torn pages of a book. She took a deep breath and plunged her hand into the corpse, searching, knowing even as she did it that she would find nothing but intestines and blood.

  And now there was a sound coming from the open window, a small rustle as of a creature of some sort trying to enter without being noticed, and she turned.

  A shadow was perched on the windowsill. She stared at it, her bloodied hand going to the knife strapped to her leg. The shadow on the windowsill moved and gained definition, an impossible apparition that would have frightened the residents of the Rue Morgue to death.

  She said, "It's about time you showed up." She brought up her knife and suspended it above the corpse, then plunged it in. Perhaps something still remained inside the man. She had to make sure.

  When she looked away again the shadow had moved from the window and came crawling towards her. For a moment they were a tableau – corpse, woman above him with bloodied knife, a crawling, enormous cockroach symbolising death approaching or fleeing, she couldn't decide which. The mechanical cockroach whistled plaintively. The woman said, "That's hardly an excuse."

  The thing whistled again, and the woman said, "Well, you're here now, at least. See if you can find anything."

  The cockroach approached, feelers shaking. As it came closer the faint whirring sound of gears could be heard. It was about the size of a small dog. Its feelers moved and another whistling sound came out of its matt-black body, and the woman said, "You're the forensic automaton, Grimm, so why don't you tell me?"

  The automaton she had called Grimm crawled closer to the body. The woman stood up, cleaning and sheathing her knife, and looked down. Probable cause of death – strike to the head with a blunt instrument. Mutilation inflicted post-mortem – the killer or killers knew what they were looking for and had come away with it.

  She watched the little automaton crawl over the corpse. It buried its head in the man's glistening belly, its legs pushing it deeper into the corpse until it almost disappeared inside, making little whirring noises all the while. She walked back to the window and breathed in the air from the outside: air that carried nothing worse with it than the smell of smoke and dung and rotting rubbish.

  THREE

  A Spark of Electricity

  After a while she went through the deceased's effects. They were few enough. Grimm was still studying the body. Right now its pincers were busy digging deep inside the man's head, and bits of brain dulled their colour when they emerged. The lady had examined the man's clothes but had come to no conclusions. The clothes were not new nor were they foreign.

  The man's pockets were almost entirely empty. She found a handful of coins, a packet of loose tobacco, almost empty, and a matchbox to go along with it – no identity card, nothing to suggest who the dead man may have been or where he came from. She looked at the matchbox – the cheap print on the cover advertised a tobacconist in Montmartre. She put it in her pocket.

  Grimm was still working on the corpse, emitting little whistles and clicks which she ignored. There was an Edison player on a table by one wall. She approached it but could find no perforated discs. She searched the apartment thoroughly then.

  Madame L'Espanaye's room first – distinguished by more Victoria prints, aerial shots of the Royal Gardens, commemorative china plates, a chipped coronation mug – the woman was obsessed with the royal lizards from across the Channel. Les Lézards. Her mouth made a moue of distaste.

  Madame L'Espanaye's interest in lizards evidently did not extend to her wardrobe, which was full of frilly, lacy, pinkishdirty, oversized gowns and negligees. That interested the lady a lot more. In the back of the wardrobe she found a box and inside the box a bottle of Scotch whisky, Old Bushmills, expensive and, if she recalled correctly, a lizardine favourite. It was three-quarters empty. Beside it was a roll of bank notes. They looked new. She ran her thumb through them, then put them in her pocket. Curiouser and curiouser.

  There was a dresser with a vanity mirror and plenty of rouge and white paint, and she could almost picture the senior L'Espanaye in her mind. She went through the drawers and found a small-calibre gun at the bottom-most one on the left, and it was loaded. The bed was large and unmade, the sheets rumpled. In the small adjacent washroom she found several bottles of pills and grimy walls, and when she ran the tap the water was brackish.

  She scanned the bedroom again but found nothing else of interest and moved on to Mademoiselle L'Espanaye's room. The daughter's was almost bare, the bed dominating the room, a single chair by the window, candles, many no more than stubs, standing like fat monks around the room, their wicks dead. She tossed the room and found nothing: it was as if no one had lived there and if they had, they'd left nothing behind them.

  Conjecture: the two women shared the master bedroom, and the dead man had been using the daughter's room.

  Grimm whistled from the other room, and so she
walked over and stared down at the man's corpse, which looked even worse now than it did before, thanks to Grimm. "Traces of what?" she said.

  The automaton spoke in Silbo Gomero, a technical compromise on communication that was also an assurance of confidentiality, since there were not many speakers of the whistling language, in Paris or elsewhere. The language had come from the Canary Islands, adopted by the Spanish who settled there and finally modified by Grimm's makers using a simplified French vocabulary. Grimm whistled again, and the lady said, "That doesn't make any sense."

  Grimm whistled, more insistent now, and she said, "What do you mean, watch?"

  Instead of an answer the mechanical insect crept closer to the corpse and extended a pincer toward it, gently touching the man's flesh. The lady watched. A small blue spark of electricity passed between Grimm and the dead man.

  The corpse twitched.

  The woman watched, her hand going to the butt of her gun without her being consciously aware of doing so. Grimm retreated from the body but it continued to twitch – and now its one remaining eye shot open.

  The woman took a step back and her gun was in her hand and pointing at the corpse – she watched a dead foot kick, and the finger that had been pointing at nothing was rising now, impossibly, and the dead man was pointing directly at her, his face twisted in a mask of grotesque agony, accusing her…

  The bullet took out the remaining eye and bits of brain exploded over Grimm and the print of the lizard queen. The pointing hand fell down, lifeless again. The body shuddered, once, twice, and finally subsided. The woman reholstered her gun and said, "Get rid of it."

  Grimm began to whistle then, apparently, changed its mind. It approached the corpse again, pincers extended like surgical saws. Together, woman and automaton worked to erase the crime that had taken place there, tonight, and as they worked, dismantling the lifeless body into its separate components, she wondered why it was left the way it had been – were they interrupted, or was the dead man himself a message scribbled into the stones of the Rue Morgue for her to find?

  FOUR

  Outside Rue Morgue

  When the work was done she left Grimm to dispose of the body parts – the giant insect secreting quicklime, squatting over the man's dismembered corpse digesting one piece at a time. She looked through the apartment again – there had been no sign of a struggle, and she thought it was a reasonable enough proposition that the two women who resided here had merely been absent – by chance? Or were they paid to make themselves scarce? She thought she'd be able to find them – assuming they were still alive…

  A locked-room murder. The apartment was four stories high. Well, Grimm had managed to scale it easily enough. And the window was open… The how of it scarcely interested her. The who, though, had become something of a priority.

  She washed her hands in the foul-smelling water in the sink, watching it turn red and pink and disappear in a gurgle down the drain, taking the dead man's blood with it. She dried her hands thoroughly and returned to the room and was relieved to see Grimm was almost half-way there. When it sensed her it turned, its feelers shaking, and emitted a burst of high-pitched whistles. The lady nodded, then said, "Take the samples to the under-morgue when you're done."

  She went back to the window, glaring out at the city below. Night was settling in and, if she guessed correctly, the Madame and Mademoiselle L'Espanaye would be hard at work. She pulled out the matchbox she had found on the corpse and looked at it again.

  Montmartre.

  She put it back abruptly and turned away from the window. Why was the name of the tobacconist familiar? She said, "I'm going for a walk."

  Grimm whistled, a sad lonely sound that followed her as she walked out of the door.

  Below, Rue Morgue was deep in shadow, its residents hiding behind their cheap walls. Windows were shuttered, as if excitement had given way, suddenly, to fear.

  Good.

  She walked alone, and the soft sound of her moving feet was the only break in the silence of the street. She watched the shadows, her hand on the butt of her gun. She was not disturbed.

  She decided to walk for a while. She had always liked the city best when it was dark and silent. As a child she–

  She turned at the sudden sound and the gun was in her hand and the shadows shifted and then eased back. She smiled, without humour, and walked on.

  She thought about the dead man. He had carried something inside his own belly, a foreign object that had somehow been inserted into his flesh, and valuable enough that it had been ripped out of him savagely and carried away. The man had no identity, as yet, and neither did his killers. And as for his cargo…

  She thought about Grimm touching the corpse, that little spark of electricity that had set the dead man rising. She had to conclude that, though he was human on the outside, his inside may have been a different matter. Well, it was of little concern right now. No doubt the doctor would be engrossed by Grimm's samples, down in the under-morgue…

  She passed out of Rue Morgue, breathing a sigh of relief, though the entire neighbourhood was the same, dark and dank and dismal. She headed for the Seine, finding her way with ease through the narrow, twisting streets. The old city morgue used to sit at the end of that street, she remembered, lending the road its name. Thoughts of the corpse niggled at her. She had seen plenty of bodies but nothing like the one Grimm was busy erasing from existence.

  After a while the streets became wider and more prosperous. She found an open café and went inside, into the gloom of candles and smoke. She ordered a coffee and sat down by the window and glared at the night.

  The door of the café banged open, then shut, and a shadow slipped into the seat opposite her. She raised her eyes and stared at the smiling Gascon.

  "Milady," he said. "What a pleasant surprise."

  She glared at him. The Gascon signalled to the waiter, mouthed, "Coffee."

  Ignoring her.

  "You followed me," she said.

  "Surely a coincidence," he said, and now his smile hardened. "Of all the places–"

  "What do you want?"

  The Gascon shrugged. And now the smile melted away, having never reached his eyes. "That murder is mine," he said.

  "What murder?" she said, and was pleased to see the flicker of anger that passed over his face.

  "You wouldn't," he said.

  She sipped her coffee. The hot liquid revived her. She stared at the man evenly, waiting him out. He looked away first.

  "The Republic has law," the Gascon said at last. "You can't cover up–"

  "Can't?" she said. And now she stood up, dismissing him. "Stay out of my way," she advised. "And forget about the Rue Morgue. There is nothing there for you now."

  He looked up at her. She examined him, feeling a vague sense of unease. Why was the Gascon still pursuing the case?

  "I can help you," he said. His voice was soft. She smiled, showing teeth, and walked away without answering him, her back to him all the answer she needed to give, and the door banged shut behind her.

  FIVE

  Across the River

  She could have taken a coach or one of the new baruch-landaus but instead she walked, not feeling an urgency any more, but wondering what it was that had been surgically inserted into the dead man's belly. It was not a case of murder, she thought, but theft. She found the Seine and followed it for a while, watching the ruined Notre Dame cathedral growing larger as she approached, a wan yellow moon rising above it. Lizard boys hung around the broken-down structure at all hours: hair shaped into ridges over otherwise bald domes, skin tattooed into lizard stripes, tongues forked where they had paid some back-room surgeon to split them open. Dangerous, yes, but predictable.

  She crossed the river, looking down at the Seine snaking its way through the city, a lone barge still floating down it at this late hour, carrying pails of garbage, and she thought – there were a hundred different ways to disappear forever in this city.

  She walked aw
ay from the river, into the maze of neverending streets, her feet sure on the ground, knowing their way, the ground like taut skin stretched over the body of a giant lizard. She thought the dead man must have come into the city very quietly, but not quietly enough – had slipped in and found the apartment in the Rue Morgue, thinking it was safe – he must have waited, must have made contact with person or persons still unknown, and waited to conclude the transaction – for she was sure that's what it was – but had somehow faltered. Or not. Perhaps he knew all along how he would end up, a gutted fish in a Parisian market where everything was for sale.

  She walked for a long time, her long legs carrying her easily, swiftly, along the ancient narrow streets. She knew them well. As a kid she had run through them, had lain in wait for the apple cart owner to turn away for just one crucial moment – for a dark shadow of a girl to swoop and make a grab and run away, laughing. She had looked through rubbish piles for clothes and food, and hid in the abandoned places, the tumbledown houses where others roamed, the animals in human guise who preyed on those who had the least of all… a far cry from the home she could no longer remember, the place where she'd been born, so far away, where the sun always shone, where her mother had come from, the same mother who had died so quickly here, in this new land of white men and gleaming machines. She had first killed in a place just like this, a dark alley where a man was bent over a child – a boy who was a friend, as much as the other small humans on the street could be called that – and she had snuck behind the man and cut his throat with her knife, feeling nothing but a savage satisfaction, and the boy – he was still alive – had staggered away from under the corpse and down the street, clothes drenched in blood, some of it his own. She never saw him again, and there had been other predators, other animals on the streets of this most glorious Paris, city of equality, fraternity and liberty, this city of the Quiet Revolution.