The Alchemy of Murder

by Carol McCleary

“Medieval,” Pasteur muttered at the sight of the nosegays.

  Michel grinned when he saw the director and his assistant put on the nosegays. He and hundreds like him had spent a lifetime in the sewers without being stricken by the fumes, although he did tell the visitors to tuck their handkerchiefs around their collars. They had assumed it was to keep out the chill but soon found the real reason sewer men wore kerchiefs around their necks: Large spiders and giant centipedes clutched the ceiling and occasionally fell.

  “Mon Dieu!” Michel stopped and looked at Roth in panic. “If the insects grow so large down here, how big are the invisible animals you are looking for?”

  11

  A faint glow broke the darkness ahead as they followed Michel.

  “That’ll be the lamp of my partner, Henrí,” he said.

  How these netherworld workers found their way through the dark maze of stone tunnels was a mystery to match the one surrounding the Sphinx. But when they came upon the hanging lantern, Henrí was nowhere to be seen.

  “He’s been here,” Michel said. “May have gone up for a bite.” Michel pointed at an opening in the tunnel ceiling. “That’s the waste hole.”

  It was an ordinary round hole above the river of sewage.

  Paris, being an ancient city, still disposed most of its waste directly through a hole from the ground floor of apartment buildings. Residents carried their chamber pots to the hole to dump. The hole Michel pointed to was the outlet for a tenement house in the impoverished neighborhood where Black Fever first erupted.

  “Did any frogs die in this area when the fever broke out above?”

  Michel shook his head. “No, Monsieur, not that I ever saw. But I did see dead rats.”

  The health director came up beside them as the sewer worker shined his bull’s-eye lantern up at the hole. He stepped on a frog and looked down at the bloody mess and grinned to his assistant. “Doctor Pasteur has always professed that microbes attack us like an eleventh plague of Egypt. Now we know he is wrong. It is another plague of frogs that God has sent.”

  His assistant found the humor appealing, or considered it expedient to do so, but neither Pasteur nor Roth gave it any thought. Pasteur was busy telling Roth where to obtain samples to be placed into sterilized glass bottles in the leather case he carried from a shoulder strap. When Pasteur worked he fell into a deep concentration and was not tolerant to interruptions.

  “We should also take one of the frogs,” Roth said, grabbing one of the slimy creatures. “Perhaps the miasma is from their bad breath.”

  Pasteur was concentrating too intently on the environs of the sewer to react to Roth’s witticism, but the sarcasm did not pass the director whose look told Roth he wished he could quash him underfoot as he had the frog. Pasteur turned his attention to the sewer worker and asked about life under the city.

  “It’s dangerous work,” Michel said. “When it rains, the waters can roar through the tunnels like flash floods. Even with normal water levels, you can slip into the channel and be swept under in a second.” He turned and stared at the cunette as if he wondered whether Henrí had been swallowed by it.

  “Are the smells worse in the summer?”

  “Much worse. Sometimes gas forms that can explode if you strike a match to light a pipe. Factories pour chemicals down the sewers that can burn a hole in your skin or make a fire in your lungs when you breathe.”

  “But you’re not afraid of miasma?”

  “Monsieur Doctor, I’ve been working in the sewers for over twenty years. If these vermin you gentlemen talk about haven’t gotten me by now, I don’t suppose I taste good to them.”

  Twenty years in the sewers. And his father before him. Not an unusual practice to follow one’s père into a profession. Even an executioner was a hereditary occupation in France.

  Human excrement came through the ceiling opening and plopped into the water. The director pointed down at it.

  “Monsieur Pasteur, you should take some of this merde back to your laboratory and examine it under your microscope. Perhaps you will find in it the plague of microbes that you believe threatens the city.”

  “It’s a puzzle,” Pasteur said, completely ignoring the director. He had the faraway look of a swami in a trance when he fell into deep thought.

  “Merde is a puzzle?” The director raised his eyebrows.

  Pasteur stared at him as if he had just become aware of the man’s presence. “No, no, the frogs.”

  “The frogs?”

  “Of course!” He snapped. “Haven’t you been observing the frogs and the rats, Monsieur Director? Why do the frogs live and the rats die?”

  Michel shined his lamp at something down the passageway. He moved toward whatever had caught his attention, then stopped and gasped.

  His partner Henrí was lying on the walkway with the upper part of his body propped against the stone wall. His mouth and eyes were wide open. A stream of black blood had run down from the corner of his mouth. A rat was eating away at his face, while other rats had torn apart his shirt and were burrowed into his stomach. His innards were exposed and blackened.

  Dead rodents lay beside him.

  12

  Nellie Bly, Paris, October 27, 1889

  The night is dark and thick in the alley behind the Moulin Rouge. The beacon atop the thousand-foot-high Eiffel Tower sweeps across the gloomy sea of fog as a fleeing ghost. Each time it flashes overhead, the blanched fog and mist take on a shivering pallor that gives life to the unliving.

  The alley’s quiet as a crypt.

  Fear sends wintry chills racing up my legs and back. Lord knows what lurks in this gloom. Pulling my wool shawl tighter, I hurry down the passageway to a corner where a street lamp creates a fuzzy hole of misty light. Huddling under the gas-light, I listen to the night for sounds, but only hear the rasp of my own excited breathing. The light makes it even harder to see in the fog and I step reluctantly into the darkness again. There’s a movement down the street, a stirring I sense rather than see.

  My feet keep moving, one in front of the other as if they have a mind of their own while I fight the urge to turn around and race to the safety of my hotel.

  I find myself at an ancient stone wall with an arched entrance wrapped in weeping moss. I’ve been led to a less than auspicious place to meet with a killer on a murky night—the Montmartre Cemetery.

  I’ve seen this stone garden from a distance in the daylight. Forested with small crypts adorned with cathedral glass and fine sculptures, it’s the resting place of many famous bones, but I don’t want to add mine to the pile.

  A morbid game is being played.

  I give the police whistle three good blasts and shout, “Help!”

  I should wait for gendarmes but a woman is in danger. I blow the whistle again. “The police are coming!” I shout out as I go through the entrance.

  When the Tower beacon flashes, crypt shadows shudder like stone ghosts rising from the ground. Most of the small mausoleums are about six-by-six and a dozen feet high, tiny palaces of the dead. Some larger ones have statuary and other sculptures worthy of a king. Anything could be lurking behind them. Even in broad daylight, you wouldn’t be able to see a person hiding in the crowded forest of stone edifices.

  MONTMARTRE CEMETERY

  I hear running steps and my courage melts. I get off the main path and kneel behind a crypt. Hovering over me is a stone figure, a melancholy young woman with bare breasts doomed to watch over a grave for eternity. She makes me think of Josephine. The sound fades but I stay crouching, my heart racing.

  This is a creepy, creepy place.

  I believe in the dead as well as the living and maybe that’s why graveyards affect me so. Gathering my courage again, I stand up and blow the whistle as hard as I can.

  The tower beacon flashes again overhead. I see the prostitute. Her white dress is ghoulishly radiant. She’s standing still with her hand held out as if she’s beckoning. The light passes and she vanishes.

  “Run!�
� I shout to her and blow the whistle again. “Run for your life!”

  Another figure emerges from the fog—shaped like a giant bat, it’s as black as Poe’s raven. I turn and run in a blind panic. I stumble over a gravestone, hitting the ground on my knees, in pain, but I get back on my feet to run, stumbling again until suddenly there’s nothing under my feet and I fall into a hole, bouncing off a dirt wall and hitting hard ground, the breath knocked out of me.

  It’s pitch black and my body hurts everywhere. I crawl, feeling dirt wall around me.

  I’m in a grave.

  I start screaming before I’m on my feet. Footsteps crunch above and I lose my breath. Dirt pours down at me as someone comes to the edge of the grave. A tall dark figure shaped like a giant bat looms above me as more dirt slides into the hole.

  He’s burying me alive.

  13

  “Who’s there?” A frightened voice asks from above.

  Thank God it’s not the voice of a killer.

  “Help me—get me out of here!”

  “Don’t move.” A match strikes and a lantern flares. It’s a man wearing the bat-like cape of a gendarme.

  My lips quiver and knees shake. “Please help me out of here.”

  “How did you get in there?”

  “I fell in running from a killer.”

  “What killer?”

  “A man chasing me. Help me out and I’ll explain.”

  The gendarme leaves without a word. One moment he is shining his lantern into the grave and the next he is gone.

  “Don’t leave me!”

  I can’t believe he would just leave me. I vault up and fall back down. After several attempts, I finally grab and claw my way until I get one elbow and then the other over the edge and belly up with my feet kicking air. Although I am weak and shaky and have a terrible urge to vomit, I’m free.

  The rumble of steel-banded wagon wheels over cobblestones and a bell clanging are a welcome sound. A police wagon has entered the graveyard. An officer swinging a bull’s-eye lantern materializes in the fog. More bat-caped men are behind him. The gendarme had gone for help.

  The officers gather around me, several talking at the same time. Who am I? What am I doing here? What’s this about a killer?

  On their heels comes a plain-clothes policeman. He rudely flashes a lantern in my face. “What are you doing here, Mademoiselle?”

  Shading my eyes with my hand, I tell him, “My name is Nellie Bly, I’m an American newspaper reporter. A woman has been murdered.”

  “Murdered? Where?”

  “Here, in the graveyard.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I was following the killer. He’s in black clothes with a red scarf.”

  “Spread out,” he tells the men, “make a search. Stop anyone you find.”

  “Who are you?” I ask him.

  “I’m Detective Lussac from La Sûreté.”

  “Over here!” a gendarme cries. “A woman. She’s not moving.”

  My heart sinks when I see her. She’s sitting on a grave with her back against a gravestone, eyes wide open as if she sees the unspeakable. Blood has dripped down to her chest from the corner of her mouth. Her white dress is stained with large dark blotches of blood.

  Detective Lussac pulls out his pocket watch and kneels beside the body. He opens the cover and the inside crystal covering the watch face. He checks her wrist for a pulse and then places the watch next to the woman’s gaping mouth as an officer holds a lantern next to him. I pray her warm breath will fog the glass.

  “No breath, no pulse, she’s dead,” Lussac says.

  I turn away and sit wearily down on the footstone of a grave. Fighting back tears, I stare down at the ground. I can’t help but feel that if I’d been quicker, braver, smarter, or stronger, I might have saved her.

  Lussac is suddenly beside me, examining me with the probing eyes policemen the world over possess. He forces a smile, exposing a left incisor that’s black. I avoid his eyes and brush dirt from my dress to gather my thoughts. Experience has taught me never to trust a policeman’s smile. It only means they are trying to get what they want with sugar before they use vinegar.

  “You’re a newspaper reporter? A woman?”

  I’m sure women reporters are an even less substantial species in France than buffalos, if they exist at all. In the best French I can muster, I start to relate my tale of following the slasher to Paris. He curtly interrupts me and takes me out of listening range of the uniformed officers.

  “Now tell me your story.”

  I get started and he interrupts me again and writes a note. He gives it to an officer who hurries away on horseback.

  “Continue,” he says.

  Through tight jaws, I give the most sketchy details possible because my gut tells me not to trust him. As I’m finishing with my tale, the caretaker of the graveyard arrives.

  “The grave is an authorized one,” he tells Lussac, “for a funeral tomorrow.”

  While they’re talking, another man is directed to Lussac, a conservatively dressed young man wearing a charcoal-colored long coat, high stiff collar, and top hat. He appears to be about thirty years old, of average height, light hair, and a mustache that falls short of handlebars. He carries the prematurely grave air of a young professional. I hope he’s not a reporter—the man in black is my story.

  I strain to hear the conversation between him and the detective and am only able to pick up the fact that he’s a doctor.

  The woman’s body has been placed on the back of a police wagon and the young doctor examines it under lantern light while the detective stands by. I edge closer and ask, “Detective, have there been slasher slayings in Paris? Besides this one?”

  His features turn stern and officious. “These are difficult times. People are out of work and hungry. There are more plots to overthrow the government than radicals to carry them out. The one good thing is the Exposition. Millions of francs are being spent for French products and the whole country shines in the glory of it. A mad killer loose in the city will frighten away people.”

  The young doctor interrupts. “Monsieur Detective, I’ve finished examining—”

  “Yes, we can talk over here.” He takes the man out of earshot.

  Kicking myself for not heeding Jones’s warning about talking to the police, I perch next to a snarling gargoyle on a gravestone and wait, cold and weary. My nervous system has been galloping like a team of fire wagon horses and I need to be taken into the barn and rubbed down.

  The huddled conversation breaks up and the detective starts toward me with a purposeful stride that reads trouble for me. Before he reaches me, the mounted officer he had sent with a message rides up. The messenger jumps from his horse and hands Detective Lussac a piece of paper. I use the officer’s momentary distraction to approach the doctor, who’s putting back on his coat.

  “Bonsoir, Monsieur.”

  He gives a small bow. “Bonsoir.”

  “Are you from the coroner’s office?”

  “No, Mademoiselle, I’m from Pigalle Hospital.”

  “The wounds … are they horrible?”

  “Wounds?”

  “The knife wounds.”

  “There are no wounds, Mademoiselle. No bleeding.”

  “No bleeding? I saw the stains—”

  “Dirt.”

  “Dirt?”

  “Stains from the wet ground. There are no wounds to the body.”

  “No wounds.” My mind is getting as difficult to maneuver as my tight jaws. “Then how did he kill her?”

  “He?”

  “The—the maniac who killed her.”

  “Mademoiselle, I don’t know what you’re talking about. The woman has no signs of violence. An autopsy will reveal more, but I suspect she’s the victim of the fever that’s struck down so many people.”

  It’s a cover-up! Lussac has told him to keep mum about the horrible wounds. My feet spur into action faster than my mind can keep up with them. In
a flash I’m at the body and jerk off the sheet. Close up, under the lantern light, there’s no doubt—the dark stains are dirt. There’s no blood except the dark liquid she expelled from her mouth.

  “She wasn’t slashed.” I speak aloud to myself and a response comes from Lussac.

  “Exactly, Mademoiselle.”

  Detective Lussac has two officers flanking him. He nods to the doctor. “Dr. Dubois, Chief Inspector Morant will contact you tomorrow. Merci.”

  The doctor raises his eyebrows. “The Chief Inspector of the Sûreté? For such a lowly death?”

  Detective Lussac glares at me as he answers. “The matter has taken on national importance because of wild accusations by a foreigner.”

  Dr. Dubois raises his eyebrows. “Strange, but of course I will be honored by the Chief Inspector’s visit. Au revoir.”

  Detective Lussac turns to me as soon as Dubois leaves. Whatever instructions he received are ill tidings for me. But I don’t waver before his officious glare. “The man in black killed her. He’s simply outsmarted you by his clever method.”

  “And what is that method, Mademoiselle?” He looks to the officers at his side. “Perhaps this imaginary killer called down a bolt of lightening from God!”

  “I know what I saw.”

  “And what exactly did you see?” The detective throws up his hands in frustration. “A man who had similar clothes and beard to someone you saw over a year ago in New York? How many men in Paris wear the same type of clothes and groom their beards in a like fashion?” He steps closer and jabs a finger in my face. “Tell me, what act of violence did you observe? Tell me one single act that you witnessed tonight.”

  “I … I’m an experienced reporter. My instinct—”

  “Police operate from facts, Mademoiselle, not the intuition of a woman who should be home caring for babies and her husband’s needs instead of causing problems for the police. We know what you want. The truth doesn’t matter to your scandal-hungry newspaper that writes its headlines in blood.”

  That did it. “Detective Lussac, you’ve been rude. I’ll be speaking to your superior.” I turn on my heel to leave.