The Alchemy of Murder

by Carol McCleary

  —JULES BERTAUT, Paris

  9

  Tomas Roth, Paris, October 25, 1889

  “We’ve come to find a murderer.”

  The remark was so unlike Dr. Pasteur, it gave Roth pause as they gently rocked back and forth in the carriage. It was after eleven on a gloomy Saturday night as the three of them—Dr. Louis Pasteur, a sewer worker named Michel, and Tomas Roth, Pasteur’s assistant—made their way to the dark river beneath the city’s boulevards.

  Michel—who was to be their guide into this strange world beneath the city’s streets—looked askance at the great scientist sitting across from him. Pasteur, caught up with his own thoughts, didn’t notice the concern.

  “A killer who creeps in dark places and strikes without warning, or mercy.”

  Pasteur was not talking to his companions, but to the night outside the carriage window.

  Just hours ago the Minister of the Interior, the man entrusted with the safety of the nation, had personally come to the institute to implore Dr. Pasteur to leave the security and comfort of his laboratory and make a secret examination of the sewer system.

  “No work you’re doing for mankind is as important to France as discovering the source of this contagion. If you do not find and destroy this disease there will be no Paris and perhaps no France.”

  A compassionate man, the terrible burden placed on Pasteur weighed heavily.

  The examination had to be under the cover of darkness and cloaked with secrecy.

  “We must not fuel the panic that is already spreading as fast as the contagion.” The statesman’s voice cracked from the strain as he pleaded with Dr. Pasteur for his help in fighting a microbe so small, it couldn’t be seen by the naked eye.

  * * *

  MIST LINGERED IN the night air, creating wet penumbras in the glow of the gas lamps they passed. The cold hand of winterkill was already hard upon the land, stripping trees into skeletons and wilting plants.

  When they picked up Michel several blocks back he knew nothing of the reason for the mission, only that he was needed to take them into the sewers.

  In the carriage behind them was Dr. Brouardel—the Director of Health—and his assistant. Separate carriages reflected the different stances that the health department and the Institut Pasteur had taken about the contagion.

  “A damnable time to be on the streets,” Pasteur said.

  “The time of the wolf,” Roth muttered, using an old expression of peasants.

  Roth had been Pasteur’s assistant for six months; long enough to know that it wasn’t the wintry night that disturbed Pasteur. It was their destination—the Montmartre, the city’s tawdry bohemian quarter, a place Pasteur would not visit voluntarily. He would rather be back in the quiet citadel of his laboratory than mingling with the long-haired, shaggy-bearded painters and poets—purveyors of art and revolutionary plots that smelled of cheap beer and black cigarettes.

  Roth leaned back and rested his head against the seat and listened to the murmuring prattle of carriage wheels and the clopping of hooves. With half-closed eyes Roth watched Michel. He was not the two-legged sewer rat Roth had expected.

  The sewer worker’s beard was scruffy and matched his brown hair that was in need of a cut. Unkempt strands hung from beneath his wool cap, but his clothing was surprisingly clean, if well worn. Black rubber boots that came above the knees were the only evidence of his occupation. With his long hooked nose and deep-set eyes, the man had the predatory mien of a pirate captain. His face, pitted as though shot by a scattergun loaded with pox, was dark, giving him a morose and grisly appearance. For a man who spent most daylight hours breathing sewer air, he appeared robust and surprisingly healthy.

  The worker had been hesitant to board the stately carriage the minister sent to carry them to the site. The poor fellow sat stiffly, hardly touching anything around him, except to clandestinely feel the plush velvet side panel beside him.

  His reticence came not only because he was in a gentleman’s carriage, but because he was in the presence of a man acclaimed as an asset to the whole nation, if not the world. Only this year the grateful French people presented the great microbe hunter with the institute that bore his name.

  The carriage pulled to a stop at a curb and Roth lent Dr. Pasteur a hand as he disembarked. The great scientist had suffered another stroke two years ago. At sixty-seven years old, his short hair and beard were white and his agility had limits, but he still looked into places where no one else could see.

  As his laboratory assistant, half his age, it was Roth’s job to perform the physical tasks his condition made difficult. Roth carried a wood case which contained the sterilized implements to gather samples and glass jars to store them. It would be his task to gather the specimens.

  Dr. Brouardel and his assistant stood a bit aside from Roth and Pasteur. It made no difference to Brouardel that they were all here at the bequest of the minister—he carried the burden with ill grace.

  Two prostitutes approached as the men gathered on the street. “Out for some fun tonight, Messieurs?” one asked.

  Michel shooed them away. “This is official business.”

  “That’s the only kind we do,” the other tart said.

  With the night wet, the bohemians who gave the quarter its licentious reputation had retreated from the terrasse tables of sidewalk cafés. They crowded inside smoke-filled café salons to argue politics and art with the passion most men reserved for their mistresses.

  Montmartre had also exposed its darker heart as street toughs called apaches came out of the narrow passageways to hover under the gaslights along Boulevard de Clichy. Two of these criminals—thugs—loitered a few doorways down, eyeing them as the smoke from their cigarettes curled up into the falling mist. Their hats were pulled down close to their eyes to make identification difficult, while their pants legs flared at the bottom to make it easier to get knives out of their boots.

  The sewer worker jerked his thumb at the two men. “They spit in the soup so only they can enjoy it. The city should sweep them all into the sewers.”

  Pasteur gestured with his cane at Michel. “Come, Charon, lead us down to your dark river so we may find a killer.”

  Michel gave Pasteur a quizzical look as he opened a rusted iron door to reveal damp stone steps leading down to the sewer. The poor man did not know what to think. With anyone else he probably would have thought they had lost their mind, but this was Dr. Pasteur.

  He squinted at Roth in the darkness and whispered, “Who’s this killer Monsieur Doctor talks about?”

  “You’ve heard of microbes?” Roth asked, already knowing his answer.

  He shook his head no.

  “Little animals invisible to the naked eye, so small they can only be seen under a microscope. They get inside people and cause sickness and death, like the Black Fever that’s inflicting so many.”

  “Yes, the fever. That I know about, it’s killing my neighbors.”

  “Some people believe that it’s caused by microbes from the sewer. That’s what we are looking for, those little animals that get people sick.”

  Michel scratched his eyebrow. “It’s God that causes sickness.”

  * * *

  GUIDED BY THE yellow light of an oil lamp, they followed Michel down the grim stone steps. Roth was careful to keep an eye on Pasteur and let him lean on his arm. Behind them were Doctor Brouardel and his assistant who followed closely behind him like an unweaned pup. At the bottom Michel turned to Pasteur, “How will we know when we come across these animals you’re looking for if we can’t see them?”

  “We’ll take samples of the sewer water back to the laboratory. Billions live in a single teaspoon of water and we have to find the one that has singled out mankind to kill. The only way we can do this is with our microscopes. It won’t be easy to find the right one—all cats are grey in the dark.”

  Once again Michel tossed back a look that clearly expressed his belief that all maladies were in the hands of God.r />
  The sewer tunnel was a half-moon vault of blackened stone with the grim ambience of a dungeon. Perhaps the height of two men and a dozen feet wide, the middle of the tunnel was consumed by a cunette—a channel of sewer waters several feet wide. On each side of the channel was a narrow walkway fouled by debris left behind when the tunnel flooded.

  “How many kilometers of tunnels are under the city?” Pasteur asked Michel.

  “Hundreds of lieues,” he said, using an old-fashioned measurement. A lieue was equal to about four kilometers.

  Air in the tunnel was humid. The dankness was expected, but the smell was not. One would expect that a waterway that carried the excretions of one of the largest cities in the world would smell worse than Hades. But the moist air had the smell of damp laundry that had been left to mold.

  Pasteur inquired, “How often do the walkways flood?”

  “Whenever you don’t expect it. Water on the streets becomes a raging river down here. Lost a friend a couple of months ago when he slipped during high water. Found him days later—what the rats left of him.”

  In an aside to Roth, Pasteur asked, “Do you recall the role the River Styx played in the Trojan War?”

  “Yes, of course. Achilles was invincible, except for his heel. The single weakness was created when he was a baby. His mother, the sea nymph Thetis, held him by his right heel and dipped him into the River Styx to make him invulnerable. The magic water covered all of his body except the heel.”

  Even though Roth was fairly new to the institute he was used to these random queries from the scientist whose mind was never at rest.

  Pasteur pointed his cane down the tunnel. “The heel, the vulnerable heel … we have to make certain that our city’s weakness isn’t in the sewers.”

  For certain, the sewers of Paris held an unusual place in the hearts and minds of Parisians because so much French history—and mystery—had occurred in them. They had long been the lurking place of criminal masterminds and revolutionaries—Jean-Paul Marat hid from the king’s men while plotting the Revolution of 1789, suffering a skin disease that he attributed to the sewers; Jean Valjean saved the life of Marius and dueled with the relentless Inspector Javert in Les Misérables; and anarchists now crept through them to plant bombs under public buildings.

  A fitting place for a killer to hide, the sewer was a netherworld of darkness and shadows, with small islands of hazy light created by feeble oil lamps set no closer than a hundred paces. A lonely place with only the sounds of drips and rushing water.

  Grey-green frogs leaped out of their way as the men came down the walkway. Something floated by, a doll-like creature, with tiny hands and legs. Roth saw it for only a second before it disappeared in the dark waters. It was the body of a newborn, or a prematurely born child, thrown into the sewers no doubt because the mother couldn’t afford a burial. Roth glanced at Pasteur and knew immediately that he had seen the child. Nothing escaped his attention. If the killer was here, Pasteur would find it.

  “The frogs, were they here before the recent storm?” Pasteur asked Michel.

  “They’re always here, they like this area. Been here as long as I’ve worked the tunnels. And before storm waters swept them away, there were dead rats lying about.”

  “And how long have you worked in the sewers?”

  “Since my father brought me down when I was fourteen.”

  “Have you ever become sick from the fumes?”

  “Never, and the same for the men who work with me. You can ask my work mate, Henrí. He’s been working the sewers for over ten years and has never been sick.”

  The air rising from the sewers, miasmic vapors, was the reason that brought them to this place.

  An influenza pandemic called the Russian flu had rolled off the steppes of Asia and across Europe. The contagion stalled in Paris as a deadly strain called Black Fever erupted. Sewer fumes were suspected as the source of the disease.

  Hardest hit by the Black Fever were neighborhoods of the poor and downtrodden areas that could spawn food riots even in better times. The black flag of the anarchists had been raised amidst an outcry that the poor of the city were dying as a result of a plot by the rich to rid the world of poor mouths to feed.

  10

  Coming behind them, Dr. Brouardel overheard the sewer worker say that he and his coworker, Henrí, had not been sick after years of working in the sewers.

  “It’s understood that sewer workers are not affected by the miasma.” The medical director’s irritation bounced off their backs as they continued treading the narrow walkway next to the stream of sewer. His remark carried both a note of authority and vexation because he had determined the cause of the epidemic to be sewer fumes. The basis for the director’s conclusion was propinquity: the sewers below were emitting fumes, people above were dying, a fortiori, the sewers were the cause.

  The theory that disease was spread by miasmic fumes had become quite popular since the new age of the microscope demonstrated that sewers were a rich soup of microbes. But Pasteur never accepted or rejected a theory until it was tested in a laboratory, and no one had scientifically demonstrated that sewer vapors carried deadly microbes. To the contrary, the smells had been around for thousands of years, since man had built cities.

  The fact that Pasteur had not acquiesced to the causation Brouardel opined to the city’s newspapers infuriated the director even more than his customary intolerance toward Pasteur. But it wasn’t just Brouardel who held ill will toward Pasteur—medical practitioners resented the fact that people believed Pasteur was a medical doctor. In fact, he was a chemist. They were also infuriated at Pasteur’s accusation that doctors spread infection from one patient to another by their failure to sanitize their hands and instruments.

  “Just as immunity can be acquired to smallpox by exposure to it,” the director went on, “the sewer workers are able to resist the miasma.”

  “There’s no proof,” Pasteur muttered.

  “My clinical examinations are proof!” the director snapped.

  Voilá! There it was—the essence of the dispute between the scientist and the medical profession. Doctors believed that causation and treatment were to be determined by their examination and questioning of a patient. The idea that one could place blood or tissue samples under a microscope and determine the course of treatment was alien to them. They did not want Pasteur’s microscope getting between them and their patients.

  More of the director’s irritated words bounced off their backs as they moved down the dark passage.

  “Messieurs, you are here at the bequest of the minister. I, of course, will honor his desire to have you view a suspected miasma area. However, I want it understood that you have both been warned to cover your face to protect yourselves from the miasma and have failed to do so.”

  “Thank you, Monsieur Doctor.”

  Only Roth’s sideway glance noticed that Pasteur’s quiet thanks was made with a smirk.

  The director’s concern about Pasteur’s health was, of course, false. Nothing would have pleased him more than Pasteur droping dead in the sewers, thus not only proving his theory of miasmic contagion, but ridding the medical world of its greatest critic.

  To Pasteur, the laboratory was a battleground in a war against two enemies—combating the jealousy and ignorance of the medical professional, and a fight against microbes that caused disease and destroyed millions of lives every year. In the past decade, the institute had battled microbes that caused gonorrhea, typhoid fever, leprosy, malaria, tuberculosis, cholera, pneumonia, meningitis, tetanus, anthrax, rabies, plague, and other demons. Pasteur developed vaccines to prevent some of the diseases. The war was a personal one—he lost two young daughters to microbic diseases.

  Pasteur asked Roth, “Do you remember what the Bible says about the invisible killer we hunt?”

  “I believe so. Revelations speaks of the Fourth Horseman: ‘Behold a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And p
ower was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, hunger, and the beasts of the earth.’ The beasts of the earth are microbes.”

  “Last night, one of the radical newspapers depicted the Fourth Horseman riding through an impoverished neighborhood, cutting down poor people with a bloody scythe. Do you know whose face the horseman bore?”

  Roth shook his head, but did in fact know.

  “President Carnot. His pockets were stuffed with money from factory owners. The radicals accuse our president of masterminding the death of the poor with this contagion.”

  “Nonsense, of course.”

  “Yes, but people threatened by the contagion are willing to believe anything. Truly, the wrath prophesied by the Bible has visited us many times, spreading deadly scourges in its wake. God only knows what the world would be like if progress had not been retarded by these invading beasts. Now these creatures threaten us again.”

  “Do you think we can stop them?”

  Pasteur paused for a moment and gazed at the sewer river. “The creatures are in a struggle of survival with mankind. To defeat them we must find their Achilles heel. But we must be on our guard every step of the way. I lost Thuillier when I sent a team to study the cholera outbreak in Alexandra six years ago, hoping to stop it before the cholera took ship to Marseille. One tiny mistake and poor Thuillier was struck down by the bacteria. Mistakes are deadly.”

  Wearing a nosegay into the sewers was not one of Dr. Pasteur’s safety precautions. Those which the director and his assistant wore were scented with perfume and a bit of alcohol, in the belief that the scent destroyed lethal vapors.