The Alchemy of Murder

by Carol McCleary

  “Suit him up,” Perun says again.

  Dubois follows Vlad through the galley and down a back corridor where the diving suits are stored. He knows the diving suits are not perfect because they’ve lost workers to the invisible enemies.

  “They’re so tiny, they get in sometimes … don’t they?” he asks Vlad.

  “You know what the leader always tells us, don’t you? They’re just sleeping. When they wake up inside you, they’re hungry. And we are their meat.” He howls with laughter as he unhooks a hanging suit.

  Dubois’ throat is dry, his heart pounding. He wants to run and hide, but he knows he would not make it to the quay alive. His hands go into the sleeves of the suit. His pinkie throbs and he can’t massage it. “What kind of bacteria is in the incubator?” he asks.

  Vlad shrugs and ignores the question. The spore colonies are numbered—and only Perun knows which species of bacteria correspond to a number. The one thing for certain is that they are all deadly.

  The large, round brass helmet is the last to go on. It’s heavy and claustrophobic. Vlad leaves the porthole open in front of the helmet so Dubois can breathe while the helmet is being sealed to the body suit.

  “We usually pump air into the suit through a hose, but the opening where the hose is attached in the room is contaminated.”

  “How will I breathe?” Dubois is sweating. The metal helmet feels like a big rock on his head.

  “With the bladder.”

  The “bladder” appears to Dubois to be a bulging leather bag. “What is that?”

  “A gold beater’s bag—a cow’s intestine.” Vlad laughs again. “It’s filled with oxygen. Aeronauts use them when they go so high there isn’t enough air to breathe. The oxygen bag will be connected to your helmet with the hose. You carry the bag in with you and can set it down to work. The hose is long enough to reach wherever you go in the room.” He showed him how to adjust the circulation.

  After he’s suited up, Vlad attaches a chain around his waist.

  “What’s that for?”

  “The end gets attached through a hole in the door we keep sealed. Sometimes a worker can’t make it back. We use the chain to pull him out.”

  Dubois starts to say something and Vlad cuts him off by shutting the helmet porthole. He guides Dubois to a door that opens into a small alcove. Inside the alcove is another airtight door leading to the incubator. Once Dubois is in the alcove, Vlad shuts the outer door and Dubois enters the incubator.

  Trays are scattered on the floor. The dust harboring billions of invisible deadly microbes is so fine it goes airborne with every step he takes in the heavy suit. He stands in the middle of the small room and stares around helpless, not really knowing what to do. He realizes Vlad had not given him either a broom or a dust pan. He’s breathing heavy and his courage snaps. He goes back to the airtight door. It is locked. He jerks the handle and bangs on the door.

  Dripping with sweat, he feels entombed in the suit and breathing comes hard. He turns and sees Perun and Vlad. They are in the laboratory, watching from the safe side of the glass wall. Perun stares at him stonily. Vlad is laughing.

  He can’t breathe! He adjusts the oxygen regulator but it gives no relief. He stares at the air bag. It’s going flat. A hole had been sliced in it, allowing his life’s air to leak out. He staggers toward the window and jerks to a stop. The chain. It won’t let him go any farther. He tries to get it off but it’s locked on. And Vlad has the key.

  He understands.

  The chain was put on him so he couldn’t break out through the glass window to the laboratory. He screams and waves at Perun. “I know!” he screams.

  Perun can’t hear him. But he can see Dubois’ anguished, twisted features through the helmet porthole.

  Vlad says, “He’s trying to tell us he can’t breathe.”

  “He can breathe. All he has to do is take off the helmet, take it off.” Perun taps his head. He speaks the words slowly, mouthing them so Dubois can understand.

  Dubois’ thoughts are convulsing and he struggles to understand what Perun means. Tapping his head was the real clue. Take it off? If he takes off the helmet to breathe, he will inhale bacteria.

  What did Vlad say about the microbes when they get inside you … they wake up hungry.

  57

  Nellie & Jules

  I am waiting on the platform when Jules arrives with a porter pushing a cart loaded with two very large bags.

  “Ready for an adventure into the French countryside?” Jules asks with such delight, it makes me wonder what he’s up to.

  “I usually find my investigations are trips through Dante’s Inferno at the time I experience them. They only become ‘adventures’ when I am warm and safe and describing them to friends … afterward.”

  “You are a very interesting woman, Nellie. Someday I will use you as a character in a book.”

  I beam. Sometimes Jules says things that warm the cockles of my heart.

  “We had better board.” He offers me his arm. “Where’s your luggage?”

  I hold up my valise. “This is it.” I enjoy watching him look at his own heap of bags and back at my single valise. “Don’t you recall, Monsieur Verne, that Phileas Fogg launched his trip around the world with only a carpetbag containing two shirts, three pairs of stockings, and a lot of money?”

  “Do you know what I like about you, Nellie?”

  I beam even more. “What?”

  “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

  * * *

  THE RAILWAY CARRIAGE is uncomfortably warm and the steady rhythm of its wheels lures me into a gentle sleep. When I awake, Jules is still sitting in the exact same position as when we departed, smoking his pipe and reading.

  Not far from the city of Paris, the French countryside unfolds in a series of rolling hills. Thatched roof-huts and oxen pulling plows give the scene a European Currier & Ives feel. I was raised in Pennsylvania countryside not too unsimilar to these scenes. Even though the rustic area is picturesque and charmingly cozy, behind the quaint exterior is a great deal of hard work, sometimes from daybreak to nightfall in the foulest weather. And poverty. Few small farmers have more than two coins to rub together. The clothes on their backs are usually handmade and the food on their dinner tables grown on the farm. It is a hard life, sometimes a cruel one. Poor farmers are not often better off than slavish factory workers.

  * * *

  AS I STEP off the train, a cool, soft breeze brushes my cheek. The fresh air is a welcomed relief from the stuffy train car. Other than an office for selling tickets, the railroad station consists of nothing but a narrow wood platform open to the elements.

  Jules speaks to the ticket seller. After a few minutes he returns.

  “We need to hurry. I arranged passage with that coach.” He points across the road. “It’s the only one serving the station. The village is about an hour from here and the driver expects rain. We have to get there before the road becomes unpassable.”

  Listening to Jules and the driver converse, I realize what Jules meant when he said many people in the country do not speak French good enough to testify in court without an interpreter. I’m able to follow only the general drift of the driver’s remarks.

  In the privacy of the carriage, I ask Jules, “What made you pick this village we’re going to?”

  “Our driver has transported a man that fits Perun’s description back and forth from the village a number of times. He hasn’t seen him since he took him to the train station several months ago, soon after carrying to the village a package from Institut Pasteur. He’s carried other deliveries to Perun, but remembers this one package in particular because of Pasteur’s name on it.”

  “What does he say the man looks like?”

  “His description is as vague as yours—perhaps in his thirties or forties, with a heavy beard and long hair. No red scarf, but wearing the scarf of a revolutionary outside of Paris would probably attract more attention than the man wants. Someone at the vil
lage has to know our man.”

  “If they’re willing to talk.”

  “With a few francs most people will talk.”

  Dark clouds gather as daylight is slipping away. The road is a series of ruts and the going is much slower. Tall, unkempt hedges used as fencing are on both sides of the road.

  “There’s one more thing,” Jules says. I can tell by the lift in his voice and the twinkle in his eyes whatever he has to say amuses him. “The village we are going to is very small and poor. There is only one inn, one room for rent.”

  “Really … you telegraphed the inn?”

  “The driver told me. One room. And it’s available because he has not taken anyone out to the village since Perun left.”

  “There’s only one room in the whole village?”

  “Yes … one small inn, one small room.” He purses his lips and contrives a studious expression. “There’s one other thing.”

  “Yes…”

  “We shall have to register as husband and wife. Otherwise they will not rent us the room.”

  Poor Jules, he is expecting—no, I believe eagerly waiting for some sort of womanly shock from me. Instead, I bat my eyes demurely. “That will be fine, dear.” I let that sink in and then expose my cruel streak. “But, you will get awfully wet if they don’t have a stable.”

  * * *

  POVERTY IS PERVASIVE in the countryside we cross. People are smaller than in the city, as if their growth has been stunted. I say as much to Jules.

  “Most French farmers are as prosperous as their British or American counterparts. But you’re right, this is a poor area and the people here must scrape for bare subsistence. They probably enjoy meat only on holy feast days.”

  Outside a mud hut, I see a girl, probably no more than fourteen or fifteen, pretty as young girls are, but already looking haggard. She probably has not had a bath in her life nor owns a change of clothes.

  “She probably sleeps on a bed of leaves,” Jules says, following my gaze, “and will be ancient by the age of twenty-five—if she survives ten pregnancies between now and then.”

  “These people are still in the medieval age. I can see why the revolutionaries want to have a new social order.”

  “There are regions in America where people are as poor as these. Do you advocate revolution in America, too?”

  * * *

  IT’S DRIZZLING BY the time we approach a narrow, wooden bridge leading into the village. In the dusk it appears barely wide enough to hold our carriage. I hold my breath as we cross.

  The village is a cluster of mud and straw houses with thatched roofs. Candlelight flickers in some windows, but most are dark. Cows and goats stand wet and motionless in the pastures, while a scarecrow hops around, ignoring the drizzle as he pokes at things on the ground. A few horses raise their heads to see what is coming. Scattered about are enormously large oak trees.

  Planted at the end of the dirt road, like an afterthought, is an inn. It’s small, lacking in any grace, and as uninviting as its environs. Music filters out from the tavern as the door opens and a man staggers out. He takes the steps with drunken grace and sloshes in a mud puddle as he walks away. Peering from the windows are faces. The windows are dirty. So are the faces. About a dozen plain, drab cement headstones are stuck in the ground off the road to the right.

  “Charming,” is all I can muster as I step down from the carriage and into the mud.

  Off on a hill to the left, barely visible through the mist, are the ruins of what appears to be a medieval tower, built by some knight to defend this miserable little realm. The crumbling stone edifice is a gloomy sentinel looking down on the village.

  I inch closer to Jules. “We should have gone back with the carriage and returned in the morning. This place looks like it fell out of the pages of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.”

  “He’ll be back to get us at noon tomorrow.”

  “That might be too late.”

  “It’ll give us a chance to investigate the matter thoroughly.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  It starts raining and I awkwardly step over Jules’ bags that were deposited on the porch and enter. The smells of musty wine, moldy food, and dirt hit me. Seven or eight men are inside, a couple at the short bar and others around the two tables. The men are dull-faced, numb appearing, as if they have lost life’s battles and are now prisoners without hope. I regret to say that some of them appear rather dense, if not downright stupid. I suppose Mr. Darwin would say centuries of intermarriage is responsible for developing less than desirable specimens. Perhaps their brains have suffered the same malady from inbreeding as did the legs of Toulouse.

  No one offers to help bring the bags in, or acknowledges we have entered—except to silently stare.

  The innkeeper comes out from behind the bar, wiping his hands on his apron. He shouldn’t have bothered. The apron is fouler than his hands. He has a fat head, almost no neck, and eyes and lips that are lost in the heavy wrinkles of his face. His arms are short, like overstuffed sausages, and his stomach is as wide as it is long. A replica, about eighteen, I take to be his son, stands nearby pouring a mug of wine.

  Jules enters and begins negotiations for the room. I have seen cows sold with less discussion. I meet the stare of three men at a nearby table. They’re lifeless. I smile politely. The lips of one of them quiver, but are unable to form a smile. I feel sorry for these people in this village without cheer.

  Finally, we follow the innkeeper up a gloomy flight of stairs to a door at the top. He pushes it open and heads back down, brushing by, squeezing me between him and the wall. I gag from the smell of garlic and sour wine. He murmurs something that I take to be an apology. Poor Jules, he must follow him to retrieve the luggage … if it is still there.

  “No dinner will be necessary,” Jules says to the man as they are going down the stairs. “We had a late lunch.”

  That’s a big lie. My stomach is well aware that we had an early lunch. However, the thought of what might pass as food in this place, well … I’d rather starve.

  Our room is small, with a single tiny window. I would open it to get the dank, musty smell out, but rain savagely beats upon it. A yellowish, brown stuffed chair, frayed and stained, sits by the window. I cringe at the thought of sitting in it. A small round table is next to it. A cockroach—creatures I hate—walks across it. I decide to continue holding my valise as I examine the bed. The mattress is frumpy, stuffed with rags and hay. What color the bedding might have once been is a mystery. I choose not to even think when it was last washed. I know it’s ridiculous, but I sense bedbugs looking up at me, licking their lips—tiny vampires starving for fresh blood—my blood.

  I will not sleep on that bed or use their dirty lice-infested gray blankets. Nor will I sit on that chair. I’ll stand up all night if I have to. I fight down a heat of anger starting to boil in me.

  It was poor planning on Jules part to bring us into this disgusting place so late we have to stay the night. He should have known how primitive it might be. But I must keep my temper in control. I close my eyes, take a deep breath and start coughing to death. I must have inhaled a billion little dust bugs! No need for dinner, I think I just had mine.

  Reluctantly, I set my valise on the floor and open the dirty window. Fresh air should change my mood—besides this room needs a wash.

  From the window I see the innkeeper’s son hurrying toward a barn. He comes out riding a skinny, swayback old nag that looks like a candidate for a glue factory. The boy and horse head off in the direction of the rail station. They’re stopped by an old woman. I can’t make out the words, but from the body language the old woman appears to be pleading with him. He shakes his head no and urges the horse to pass her. When she turns toward me, I’m positive she’s crying. The door bangs open and I jump back startled.

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you.” Jules is huffing from carrying both pieces of luggage up the stairs.

  “I’m going
downstairs and insist upon clean blankets.”

  Jules has the bad grace to laugh. My jaw sets and I clinch my fists.

  “Do you really think that creature downstairs would understand the meaning of fresh linen? Or have such a thing?”

  He’s right. I’m deflated and with no place to sit down.

  “I, on the other hand, Mademoiselle, am a seasoned traveler.” Jules opens one of his suitcases. Inside are clean, fresh, soft white blankets bearing the embroidered name of his hotel and two beautiful pillows.

  “Jules! You’re a genius!” I clap my hands with delight. “I don’t suppose you have dinner in the other bag?”

  “A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, a little cheese, some sausage, and thou.”

  “And I see you have fresh towels and a bar of soap.” I’ve never been so happy. I curtsy. “Monsieur, you are truly a man for all seasons. I am forever in your debt.”

  He comes so close I can feel his male aura. “Yes, you are…” He gently straightens the collar on my dress.

  I look into his eyes and see a man that I know I want to love.

  His arms go round me and his lips meet mine. I find myself wanting more. I wrap my arms around his neck, pulling him closer, deeper into me. I’ve lost all thought and senses. All I know and feel is this kiss—this incredible kiss that I never want to end. I feel his hands on my cheeks and he slowly pulls us apart. Our breath mingles with each other’s.

  “Jules…”

  “Hush…” He gently caresses my cheek and then kisses my lips again. As his lips caress my neck, my breathing becomes labored, my body ignites. Oh, I do want him. His hands separate my clothing from my breasts and I find myself shuddering from delight as his tongue wraps around my nipple. I want more and find myself bending down and kissing the top of his head as he sucks my nipples.

  My knees go weak and he gently holds me and brings me down to the floor. I don’t know when or how he had done it, but one of the soft white blankets is laid out on the floor—ready for me. That’s when I guess one could say, “my senses came to,” and a phrase my mother repeated many times shrieks in my brain as if to snap me to attention. “Remember, Pink, making love is making babies.” But, much to my surprise, I find myself pushing aside all those years of indoctrinated rules. I want Jules to make love to me.