Camera Obscura Page 6

  She had questioned Viktor but he could tell her nothing more – couldn't, or wouldn't, but either way the result was the same. He'd shown her the cultures growing in his test tubes, grey swirls sprouting, forming shapes almost like an alphabet, carrying a meaning hovering just beyond her reach. And that was it.

  One last exchange: "Who was the agent in charge?"

  Viktor: "I'm not sure I'm at liberty to–"

  Grabbing him by the neck, her fingers closing on his throat – "Just a little squeeze, Viktor, and who'd put you together again?"

  "Tômas! It was Tômas!"

  Him? That mask-wearing murderer, that phantasm, shapeshifting like a thing from a British Penny Dreadful, changing his clothes, his hair, the colour of his eyes – at will, it seemed – second only to Holmes of Baker Street in his capacity as master of disguise – but without the Great Detective's honesty, his morals, a blank slate, Tômas, a creature of the gutters, a killer and one who enjoyed the killing, and yet–

  A valued agent of the Council, who knew well the value of such men.

  "A body-snatcher?" she said. "A suitable job for him."

  "No doubt," Viktor agreed, croaking the words. "Well, I won't keep you."

  She released his throat, left him to massage it. She saw the look in his eyes, knew its meaning. What makes you any different?

  I don't enjoy the killing, she wanted to say, but didn't. Perhaps, she thought, she feared it wasn't true.

  FIFTEEN

  Place Pigalle

  She let go of Tômas – for now. She would find him, later, and she would extract the truth from him, however much he threatened or fought. She had dealt with worse than him, before. And she let go of Viktor, too – cooperative Viktor who was still lying to her, still keeping her from the truth – she knew him, could read it in his shifty little eyes. He was only telling her what the Council wanted her to know, no more, no less. She was the Council's creature – well then, she would follow the scent blindly, and do as she was told – for now, for now…

  They were, all of them, the Council's creatures: serving the greater good, whatever that was, per the calculations and machinations of these strange, artificial beings. Viktor in his lab, Fanto – Tômas with his robberies and secret murders and body-snatching – even Q, gentle Q who lived underground and kept his misshapen eyes on things – the Council's eyes, leased, borrowed, sold.

  She settled back and the coach rattled on. To Pigalle, the one place guaranteed to be lit up this time of night. She had already passed through it once tonight. But then it had been too early.

  At that moment she missed Grimm. He was back in the

  under-morgue, and she had not even seen him – not stopped to check on him, that metallic, insect-like creature, another denizen of Paris' secret world. Yet faithful. Faithful and–

  No. Let go of Grimm. Let go of it all, the half-light, half-life of the catacombs, their smell clinging to her leather coat. Her ribs ached and her face felt swollen. She opened the window of the carriage, let the comforting smells of the upper city in, the smoke and manure and the curses and songs, the lights in the distance, growing closer – Pigalle, the place of merriment and drunkenness, of dancing and whoring and knifing, of carousing and robbing and killing.

  Her kind of place.

  And now there was a sound penetrating the night like a knife – a woman's scream, high-pitched, terrified – terminating so suddenly that the silence ached, and she was out of the carriage and running before the mute driver could bring it to a halt. Running, towards the dark mouth of an alleyway, Peacemaker out of its holster, running and knowing all the while that it was too late.

  She burst into the alley and saw a shape on the ground, a dark pool around it, and a shape standing above, turning to look toward her and she ran–

  A grey misshapen face, moonlit despite the darkness – a skull as white as moon rock, eyes in which the tendrils of galaxies swirled – the mouth open in a silent hungry grin–

  Man, beast, spirit, ghost – the knife a solid real object, too late – it slashed the woman lying on the ground. She fired, the gun making a loud noise in that small confine. Stars above, half-hidden by the city's perennial smoke. Stars looking down. The crazed grinning face turning to her, a crack in that elongated skull – the mouth opening, snapping at her, snap, snap! and she fired again.

  The figure on the ground moved, groaned. The creature took another hit from her gun and only grinned harder. Then – shouts behind her, the whistles of gendarmes. The creature waved a paw – a hand? – a sickle moon – goodbye, goodbye, and–

  Jumping – floating? – a shapeless grey cloud scaling the wall of the alley. A hiss in the night, a wordless promise, we'll meet again, my lovely.

  Soon, she answered him, firing all the while at the retreating grey shape, knowing it was useless. Soon, I hope.

  And it was gone. The night was ordinary once again. A woman lay by the alley's brick wall, amidst the rubbish of the adjacent restaurant – mussel shells, discarded, rotting meat, an empty turtle shell crawling with fat black flies, pools of rancid oil staining the ground like blood.

  Place Pigalle. A shout and feet running behind her, stopping abruptly. Violent sounds – it took her a moment to realise it was someone being noisily sick.

  Other, unhurried footsteps coming. She crouched down by the woman. Elderly, her dress revealing wrinkled skin, coarse-painted face, the sagging breasts rising and falling still, though almost imperceptively, with the body's last intake and outtake of air.

  Slashed. "Tell me," she said, whispering to the woman. Watching tendrils of grey crawling over her wrists. The woman's eyes looking into hers, black eyes, as dark as a starless, moonless night.

  "Door," the woman said. The single word a whispered puff of air. "Door. K… key."

  She said, "Where?"

  The woman, dying: "Every… where."

  The eyes, closed now. The heart, the engine of the body quit. Remembering Viktor's lectures. Blood circulation stopping, brain functions terminating one by one. A silent machine, beginning to decay, impossible to fix. Nothing more nor less than death. She thought of doors, and keys.

  Behind her, footsteps stopped. A hand on her shoulder – gentle. A familiar voice: "We'll find who did this."

  Not looking up at him. "You won't."

  "Milady…" the title whispered, an exasperated sound. And something else… but what?

  "Why do you always have to turn up like this?"

  An English expression came to her mind and she began to laugh. "Like a bad penny," she said. "A bad penny–" laughing, the laugh becoming sobs. The Gascon's hands on her shoulders, drawing her up: "Hush, we'll find her killer, we'll find–"

  Lady de Winter, calming slowly against his shoulder. Whispering: "You'll find shit."

  SIXTEEN

  Microcosm

  She was sitting at a bar that had no name, drinking coffee laced with cognac, sugar and cream. Opposite her sat the Gascon. Gazing at her, in a way that she found disconcerting. Her first husband had been a noble, renouncing his title but not his ways. This happened after… the Gascon had been his protégé, for a while at least. They had both done wrong – to others, to themselves. To each other. The Gascon was stirring a spoon of sugar in the black depths of his coffee. A quiet bar, and quiet conversations carried in dark corners. Absinthe drinkers, artists, working girls at the end of a shift, and all she could think was: a lock and a key.

  To what? To where? And why?

  The Gascon: "What do you want us to do with Madame L'Espanaye's body?"

  She looked up at him. Not smiling, neither of them. For a moment she felt comfortable with him. They were both being professional, for once. She said, "Is that who she was?" and her voice was raw.

  The Gascon nodded. His eyes were deep-set, surrounded by black rings. She wondered what she herself looked like. "We have been attempting to track her down," he said – a slight note of apology in his voice. Going against her orders. "Unfortunately, w
e came too late."

  "Yes," she said. "I know how that feels."

  In the silence between them the dead woman pirouetted. Three years before, across the Channel, there had been a murderer who favoured the knife. But he had been a lizard boy, or so it was rumoured, just as they said the British had a human king who had returned from exile. Perhaps this hidden king of theirs had killed the lizard boy who had preyed on Whitechapel. Fairytale stories, she thought. And then she thought of the shape that was not a shape, the elongated skull grinning at her, the knife flashing, her bullets catching the creature again, again, and making no impact.

  As if it existed in more than one place at once.

  An odd thought. She pushed it away and drank her coffee – alcoholic, sweet. Warmth returning to her body – she didn't know that it had gone. And now she was shivering.

  The Gascon said, "Milady–" and then fell silent. He reached out a hand and covered her fingers with his own. To her surprise, she let him. "Did you see the attacker?" she said.

  He shook his head. Not a no, not a yes. A frown, a flicker of unease: "It was too dark. I cannot be sure what I saw."

  She nodded. Wrapped her fingers around the glass. Sailors in one corner of the bar. A short-legged boyish man who looked vaguely familiar, staring into a glass of absinthe in a separate corner. The Gascon returned his hand to his side of the table, took a sip of coffee, lit a cigarette. "The body," he said.

  Grimm will take care of it, she thought. "Leave it by the entrance to the sewers," she said. "And let no one touch it."

  "I saw shapes," he said abruptly. The cigarette sent out bluegrey smoke to hover between them – the victim replaced by her killer. "Swirls of grey moving on her arms…"

  "You saw her killer," she said – not asking, a simple statement. He stared into her eyes. "I don't know what I saw," he said.

  And there it was – his failure. A miracle world, she thought: where a lizard queen sat on the British throne, a shadowy assassin killed with books, where a corpse could be impregnated with an unknown device, where grey shapes flittered like the shadows of another reality… a fantasy? A world of science, rather: a world in which machines spoke and made plans, where stars were real, enormous things, full of potential, and promise, and threat – for who knew who, or what, lived beyond their own world, what other beings inhabited that vast realm beyond the Earth? Not angels, not gods, no burning sword or Garden of Eden. Science was the art of confronting the world as it really was. That it was strange there was no doubt. Humans continued to scheme and war and make love, to make mistakes and become confused and angry and murderous and loving, a vastly tiny microcosm, like Viktor's cultures in his test tubes in the lab. To refuse to see what was beyond did not negate its truthfulness.

  She said, "I know what I saw."

  "Then you are lucky," the Gascon said, and smiled, and for once there was nothing sarcastic in the expression, which was a little wistful, perhaps. "You always know what you see, Milady."

  "I see what is there," she said, simply, and let it rest. She pulled out her gun and began loading it with bullets. The Gascon smiled again, and now it was back to business as usual, softness melting between them like a mirage. "And a bullet is always a cure for mystery," he said.

  She smiled back, cold again, and said, "That's right."

  Though it wasn't. There had been something familiar about the creature in the alleyway, some markers she was missing… but the bullets hadn't killed it. Why?

  She didn't know. She said, "Thanks for the drink," and got up to leave.

  The Gascon, still sardonic: "Where are you in such a hurry to?"

  Lady de Winter: "I have to find the younger L'Espanaye. Or have you forgotten her?"

  His smile, mocking, growing larger. "I have not."

  "Oh."

  "Would you like to speak to her?"

  "I thought I told you to leave this investigation alone."

  He shrugged. "So you did. It must have slipped my mind."

  "Where did you find her?"

  "Working the adjacent alley," he said. "We were on our way for the mother when–"

  "How is she?"

  "Complaining. Apart from that she's keeping quiet."

  "Complaining about what?"

  "The competition."

  She let it pass. "Where are you keeping her?"

  "The station by the cemetery."

  "Then let's go."

  He mock-saluted her, rose from his seat. He left a handful of coins on the table top, stubbed out his cigarette, and offered her his hand – which she ignored.

  SEVENTEEN

  Broken

  Along Boulevard de Clichy, the nightlife bright still in these early hours, bright lights and glimpses of naked flesh, like sordid promises. Drunks outside, drunks inside. Music, competing. Past the Moulin Rouge and the turning windmill, past the mouth of the cemetery – gaping, dark – into the station house, cheap stale coffee, cigarette smoke, urine from the cells, vomit, someone crying quietly, a couple of manacled men in flamboyant dress chatting across a desk.

  The young woman behind the table in the interview room looked worn out. Her youth had been scrubbed from her, leaving oddly old eyes in that still-unlined face. She glared up when they entered, said nothing. A cigarette was smouldering in an ashtray on the table that looked as if it had never been cleaned.

  "Mademoiselle L'Espanaye?"

  "Who the hell are you?" Turning to the Gascon, a plaintive tone – "Why did you bring her here?"

  He gave her his customary shrug, open palms facing up, and sat down in a chair.

  "She don't look like no whore. She looks like–" Mademoiselle L'Espanaye examined her opponent critically, concluded – "like a machine is what she looks like."

  Snorting. "Losing all our business to the bloody machines."

  The Gascon, in a whispered aside – "I'm afraid she's rather single-minded about her topics of conversation."

  Milady, not bothering to whisper: "That's going to change."

  Mademoiselle L'Espanaye scratched her head. A strand of red hair fell down on her face and she blew it away irritably. "Machines, machines, machines. Make them look a little like women and the punters suddenly think they're better?"

  "Mademoiselle L'Espanaye," Lady de Winter said. The woman gave her a dismissive look, said, "What do you want?"

  Milady, standing up, kicked back the chair – the gun, newly loaded, exposed in its holster. Observing the young woman taking it in. "I'm going to ask you some questions. You are going to answer them." She gave her a slow, measured smile and watched the woman swallow. "Clear?"

  Mademoiselle L'Espanaye, turned to the Gascon, a plea in her eyes. The Gascon looking elsewhere.

  "Clear?"

  Mademoiselle L'Espanaye, a little girl voice. "What do you want to know?"

  "I want to know why there was a dead body in your apartment."

  Watching her. Did she know? From the woman opposite, no visible reaction. "What are you talking about?"

  Too cocky – as if she knew something they didn't, and was enjoying it.

  Well, that was about to change.

  "His name was Yong Li," Milady said. "And someone gutted him open with a knife. Was it you – or was it your mother?"

  Ah – reaction. "You leave my mother out of this!"

  "Tell me about him," Milady said.

  A shrug. The eyes hostile, still taking her measure. She sat down slowly, faced Mademoiselle L'Espanaye. "I'm waiting."

  "Don't know what you want me to tell you." Sullen. "Sometimes we take on lodgers. To help pay the rent, see. Even a shithole like Rue Morgue costs. Don't know nothing else."

  She'd had enough. "We have your mother next door," she said. "Would you like to see her?"

  She had gone back to the alley. A guard on the street, no one inside. In the shadows, Grimm, slowly working, summoned by the mechanism inside her bracelet. She stroked his head and said, "Leave me the face. And one of the arms."

  An old weddi
ng ring on one finger.

  Transported what remained of the head back to the station, the gendarmes cursing her, but quietly. "And don't touch it!" she'd said. "Whatever you do, don't make contact with the body."

  "What have you done to my mother? You let her be!"

  The Gascon murmured something inaudible. Milady, reaching over, a graceful hand to assist the younger woman. "Come with me."

  Mademoiselle L'Espanaye, brushing away her hand. Following her nevertheless, a tough child-woman – let's see how tough you are, she thought, but said nothing as she led her out of the door and to the next room – opening the door for her, waiting for her to step inside–