Amidst Dark Satanic Mills (Folkestone & Hand Interplanetary Steampunk Adventures Book 2)

by Ralph E. Vaughan

The man nodded slightly.

  “It is purely a personal matter, monsieur,” Slaughter said. “But my intentions are entirely honorable.”

  “Very well, monsieur,” the man sighed, shaking his head. The English, he thought. The females are stiff and the males are quite foolish. He moved the register book to a corner of the desk, opened it, and glanced across the lines of signatures. “When do you believe Mlle Devereaux registered?”

  “This morning, of course,” Slaughter replied. “Less than an hour ago. Her name should be right after mine, or close to it.”

  “I am sorry, M Slaughter,” the man said. “There are five names after yours, and none are the name you seek.”

  Slaughter turned the book toward him and scanned the names after his own. Three were male, and two were married couples.

  The manager pulled the book back, returned it to its place, then turned to Slaughter. “Perhaps you misunderstood the lady, perhaps she is at another hotel.”

  Slaughter started to protest, then thought better of it. “Perhaps you are correct, M le Directeur,” he said. “My apologies for the inconvenience.”

  “No apologies are necessary, M Slaughter,” the man said, a thin smile upon his lips. “Best of luck. Now, if you will excuse me.”

  Slaughter nodded and headed for the main entrance, his gaze flashing about the lobby, looking for a familiar face. The lobby was crowded, but he did not see the elusive Mlle Devereaux anywhere.

  He engaged the services of the third cab passing, this time a steam-powered hack. The lines of the carriage were not as graceful as those of a hansom, and the engine was bulky by the standards of the Empire, but there was a certain charm about the machine, with its shining brass trimmings in the shapes of flowers and vines. The driver did not control direction with either a columned yoke or a gear-linked wheel but by the direct expediency of modified reins, one end attached to either end of the front axel.

  “Please take me to the office of the Prefecture de Police on the Boulevard du Palais, monsieur,” Slaughter said as he climbed into the carriage.

  The driver, an old man in a top hat and with a pointed white beard falling onto his chest, leaned over slightly and called down: “I am sorry, monsieur, but I can only take you as far as the Pont Saint Michel. The police have closed the Ile de la Cite to all but official traffic, but you will be able to walk across the bridge with ease.”

  “Merci, monsieur,” Slaughter replied. “I appreciate your help.”

  Slaughter settled back. He heard the clank of levers, the soft hiss of steam, the click-click-click of gears engaging each other. He smiled faintly as he heard the old cabby call down to the machine, as if he still had a horse in the harness, and a more stubborn one at that. Slaughter shook his head. Science and technology were changing the world, but people remained the same.

  As the cab pulled into traffic, Slaughter caught a bright flash of blonde hair in a passing carriage, a glimpse of alabaster skin and a hastily ducked head. He thrust his head out the window, but the cab, propelled swiftly by a rear-mounted boiler, dodged between slower vehicles and careened around the corner.

  “Oui, monsieur?” the cabby enquired, seeing Slaughter.

  “Nothing, I thought I….” He frowned and shook his head. “It is nothing, monsieur. Continue.”

  The driver muttered something Slaughter did not hear, which, Slaughter decided, was probably for the best, and concentrated on navigating the flow of traffic, which increased tremendously as they ventured deeper into the French capital.

  Slaughter was almost certain the occupant of the cab was Marie Devereaux, even though he had no idea who Marie Devereaux really was. Or why she was interested in him.

  When they arrived at the Pont Saint Michel, Slaughter alighted, paid the driver and walked across the bridge. He showed his papers to a gardien de la paix, what passed for a bobby in Paris, and was pointed toward a massive brick building across from the Sainte-Chapelle and the Palais de Justice, the central law courts for the city. Many of the buildings on this ancient island were centuries old, but not that which housed the Prefecture de Police. Less than fifteen years ago, on 21 May 1871, when the rule of the Commune was being crushed, the last sol-disant prefect, Ferre, ordered the walls and furniture of the old prefecture to be saturated with paraffin and set alight. Unfortunately, for the criminals of the city, the old concierge, who had been ordered locked inside, escaped with most of the documents intact.

  The structure raised in place of the old gutted building was at once lavish and modern, almost a palace for a modest despot, for that was the position of the prefecture in Parisian society. The city had no mayor of its own, and the day-to-day activities of the great metropolis, even including sanitation, was determined by the offices of the Prefect, aided by the three hundred sub-officials in the building, as well as the eight thousand policemen, six thousand republican guards and about two thousand sapeurs-pompiers or firemen. This veritable army of law and bureaucracy was ranged against the sixty thousand criminals who called Paris home, of whom, more than three hundred were arrested nightly.

  It was, Slaughter had to admit, an odd arrangement, but there was no denying either the cleanliness of the city or the general sense of order, not counting the inevitable pickpockets and sneak thieves.

  Inside the Prefecture de Police he was directed to wait in an area just off the main lobby while a phone call was made. He paced the marble floor, glanced at some oil paintings on the walls—one of a police aethercraft equipped with a loud-hailer and multiple arc-lamps was particularly interesting—and shuffled through several newspapers, which were no more interesting than ones back home.

  “Ah, Inspector Slaughter, my apologies for making you wait so long,” said a short man in a black suit, with highly polished leather shoes on his small feet. “I was not immediately…”

  “Chief Inspector,” Slaughter corrected.

  The man appeared confused for a moment, then: “Again, my apologies, Chief Inspector Slaughter. I am Inspector Roget. I have been instructed to help you in any way I can.”

  “Thank you, Inspector,” Slaughter replied. “Do you already have a file on Professor Poulpe?”

  “Yes, indeed, Chief Inspector, but I regret I have not had a chance to translate it into English,” Roget explained. “Because he was formerly employed by the Federal government, his records were not here, and it was given to me less than an hour ago.”

  “That’s all right, Inspector,” Slaughter replied. “My governess was a French dragon who believed men who could not speak at least two languages were no better than ignorant savages; and were not much better than savages after learning another language.”

  “Dragon?” Then the man smiled. “My maiden aunt was just such a woman. Formidable!” He nodded knowingly. “Très bien, Chief Inspector, please come with me.”

  Roget conducted him to a small office with only a table and two chairs. Slaughter sat down, and Roget sat across. On the table was a pasteboard file folder, which Roget pushed to the man from Scotland Yard. Slaughter glanced at the first page, then reached inside his jacket and retrieved the papers given to him in London.

  “Have you seen the report from Mars, Inspector?”

  “No, I have not,” Roget replied, taking the papers, unfolding them. “Thank you, Chief Inspector.”

  Both men read silently for nearly an hour. Slaughter frowned as he set the file aside. “The personal life of Professor Poulpe seems remarkably sparse, as if many documents were removed.”

  Roget nodded. “Yes, I noticed that as well. Not just removed from his file before it was given to me, but replaced.”

  “Yes, I see what you mean,” Slaughter said, running his thumb along the edge of the file. “Governments are notoriously miserly in spending upon the oil that keeps the gears or bureaucracy turning.”

  “Yes, that is so,” Roget agreed with a nod. “Mine and yours.”

  “Buying supplies from a single source…”

  “Usually some minor off
icial’s brother-in-law.”

  “…and in such bulk as to stagger the mind.”

  Again Roget nodded.

  “Yet some pages do not match the others,” Slaughter pointed out. “The differences in the paper type and size are subtle.”

  “The minds of clerks are not subtle,” Roget said.

  “No, they are not,” Slaughter agreed. “And obscuring the man’s past in this manner smacks of subtlety.” He paused, regarding the man sitting across from him. “You are familiar with Section 6?”

  Roget nodded and coolly replied: “I am.”

  “Your government has a similar organization, I believe.”

  Again, Roget nodded. “The Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure. They are spectres…fantômes. How to say it in English?”

  “Spooks?”

  “Oui, just so,” Roget agreed. “We in the Sûreté try to have as little to do with them as possible.”

  “In that at least we are brothers,” Slaughter said.

  The Sûreté detective smiled as much as his Gallic temperament and sensibilities would allow. “You suspect their hand in this?”

  “I don’t know, but it would make sense,” Slaughter replied. “If Poulpe were doing secret work for your government, they would want to obscure not just his work but his life, to make it more difficult for investigators like us…or others.”

  “There is sense to your argument,” Roget allowed.

  “Then le fantômes in the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure may have a file of their own, by which we could follow back the thread of his life,” Slaughter said. “Understand what work he was doing and how it contributed to his disappearance.”

  “And how such a learned man came to an inglorious death in a Martian canal.” Roget picked up the lithograph of the daguerreotype aether-facsimiled from Mars, gazed at the neat little hole in the man’s forehead, and sighed deeply. He put the image on the table. “If there is such an information file as you suggest, we shall never see it…yet…”

  “Yes?” Slaughter encouraged. “What is it, Inspector?”

  “They may be another hand involved.”

  “When Professor Poulpe vanished, he had to go somewhere, had to do something that provided him with funds.” He tapped the file. “The money he had on account with Crédit Lyonnais has not been drawn upon.”

  “If the information is reliable,” Slaughter said.

  “Oh, I think so, Chief Inspector,” Roget asserted. “One may turn traitor against his native land or blaspheme the name of our omnipotent God, but to even trifle with the bank…”

  “Yes, I see what you mean, Inspector,” the man from Scotland Yard mused. “Pity the poor fool who crosses the Bank of England.”

  “Exactement!”

  “Then whose hand do we feel?”

  “Professor Poulpe is not alone in vanishing the last year or so,” Roget said. “There have been others…scientists, engineers, men with specialized learning or talents. A covert agency is recruiting.”

  “People who disappear usually have reasons for doing so that have nothing to do with ‘covert agencies’,” Slaughter said.

  “Oui, that is quite true.”

  “A bad marriage, debts, enemies, crimes of all sorts…”

  “…une insatisfaction vague de la vie.”

  “True,” Slaughter agreed. “Sometimes a bloke takes a look at how his life has turned out, walks out the door, and never comes back. Or he just slits his wrists and is done with it.”

  “Suicides, yes, murders, too, hidden from discovery.” Roget sat back in his chair, clasped his hands together on the table, and gazed at his counterpart from England. “No doubt you are correct for the vast majority of disappearances, men leaving for their own personal reasons who never want to be found, or are murdered in response to their actions…‘hoisted on their own petards,’ you would say in your own vernacular, but I speak of a very small percentage, less than a handful, who have good lives, good jobs, good reputations, who have no possible reason for leaving their lives behind…and yet they do. I believe Professor Jean Louis Poulpe was just such a man.”

  “That he became the target of a ‘covert agency’?”

  Roget looked about the small, bare room, jumped out of his chair, opened the door slightly, and peered into the hallway. He eased the door shut, then returned to his chair and leaned forward. Slaughter found himself also leaning forward, infected by the man’s sudden sense of caution and secrecy.

  “Tell me, Chief Inspector Slaughter,” Roget murmured. “Have you ever come across mention of…MEDUSA?”

  “Outside the mythological reference?”

  Roget nodded.

  “No. What is MEDUSA?”

  “What indeed!” Roget whispered sharply, his pale lips twisting into a wry smile. “It is a shadow in the darkness, a mist in the night. The name was whispered to me last year by an Apache I arrested in the Montmartre district, member of the notorious gang, I topi grigi. In an attempt to avoid prosecution, he told me that his gang had been contracted to commit certain crimes by an organization his chief referred to as MEDUSA.”

  “Could he provide any details?”

  Roget shook his head. “Vague assertions that this MEDUSA group was financing various crimes around Paris, using the Apache gangs for kidnappings. They were foreigners for the most part.”

  “Did anything come of it?” Slaughter asked.

  “The man, Furille was his name, committed suicide while in custody,” Roget said. “The chief of I topi grigi, Mitterrand by name, was murdered the same night, garroted.”

  “Convenient, that,” Slaughter muttered.

  “One suicide, one murder, the remainder of the gang…” Roget shrugged. “In a single night, I topi grigi went from one of the most powerful to almost extinct…all after a man mentioned the name MEDUSA to me.”

  “Were you able to run it down at all?”

  “Only in the sense there is a conspicuous void,” Roget replied. “Most of the crime in Paris is normal…you understand what I mean? The robberies and the burglaries, the kidnappings for ransom and the mayhem for revenge. They are all committed by the usual suspects, but, as with the vanishings, there are always a small number of crimes that seem too well planned for any known villain, money and loot taken which never turns up in any illicit fund or any pawnbroker’s back room, thefts which are beyond the skills of any criminal known to us. Behind the best crimes there is a shadow.”

  Slaughter nodded in agreement. There was nothing in the man’s assertions that was unknown to him. When a crime was committed, it took no great skill to look at the open safe and know the hand of the particular cracksman, the marks left by the tools to know the face of the housebreaker, or even the individuality of the blackmail note to nick the proper Venusian villain. But, increasingly, there were crimes committed in London that were by no known hand, clues that led nowhere. There had always been gangs in London, always would be, whether their chiefs ruled from rookeries or from glass-walled towers, but they were all familiar faces, known to the police and informants, even when the deeds could not be proven to a jury of blank-faced sheep in the Old Bailey. Slaughter had long suspected a new player in London’s underworld, but it frightened him that the face was continually wreathed in shadows.

  “And in this void, you see a bogeyman named MEDUSA?”

  Roget frowned at the unfamiliar English word.

  “Le croque-mitaine,” Slaughter supplied.

  “Oui, le croque-mitaine” Roget agreed. “But what frightens me most, my friend, is that Furille died while in custody. A suicide? A man who was bargaining for his freedom, knowing I had interest in what he had to say. It is senseless!”

  “You think he was murdered?” Slaughter said softly. “By an agent within the police?”

  “I do,” Roget replied. “But it is a closed case and there is no evidence. None. I cannot speak of it. There is also the death of I topi grigi chief Mitterrand, well-guarded by compete
nt minions, and yet he is garroted with ease.”

  Slaughter tapped the file before them. “And there is this.”

  “Yes, there is that,” Roget agreed. “Only a government employee could have wrought the changes we noted, someone who also takes the coin of MEDUSA.”

  “I don’t know how to proceed from here,” Slaughter admitted. “The best information we have about Poulpe is probably the report of the crime itself on Mars, but none of that helps us here. I need to find out what path he followed that led him to Mars, and, ultimately, his death, but to do that…” He slapped file and table in frustration. “I can’t tell from this where he lived or whether he had any family.”

  “Oui,” Roget said. “Professor Poulpe had family, a daughter.”

  Slaughter looked at Roget in surprise. “There is nothing…”

  “Shortly after Professor Poulpe vanished, I was contacted by his daughter,” Roget explained. “Mlle Poulpe wrote me a letter.”

  “It is not in the file,” Slaughter said. “Do you recall anything of what she wrote?”

  Roget reached inside his coat and withdrew an envelope, which he gave to Slaughter.

  “I cannot explain why, but I did not forward Mlle Poulpe’s letter for filing when the case was closed,” Roget said as Slaughter withdrew the single sheet and started to read. “I was perhaps reacting to the way in which I was frustrated by an absence of clues, perhaps because I felt it was being prematurely closed, and for no reason other than expediency.”

  “You were the investigating detective then?”

  Roget nodded. “When your government contacted mine, the Sûreté was asked to provide a liaison.”

  “You were assigned?”

  “I volunteered,” Roget said. “No one recalls the case was mine. They think I merely want to work with Scotland Yard.”

  “Did you meet her?” Slaughter asked.

  “Alas, no,” Roget said regretfully. “And that was the only letter I received. It is postmarked Marseille, but enquiries there were not successful. No one knew a Mlle Poulpe.”

  “Well, I suppose I have done all I can do here,” Slaughter said, passing back the letter.