Thrilling Tales of the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences

by Pip Ballantine

  “Heard about that play. Involved an orgy onstage.”

  He waggled heavy eyebrows, and she rolled her eyes, flapping a dismissive hand.

  “Oh la la,” she groaned, “Simulated orgy. C’est la France, after all. Allons-y!”

  “Allen who?” Anne-Marie sighed, pinched the bridge of her nose for patience. “It’s French for let’s go, you ignoramus. Honestly, did any of your cultural training pierce your gorilla skull? We’re going back to the bakery, and then I’m going to Montmartre to ask after Ned Gilly.”

  He huffed like an angry bull, his huge fists twitching at his sides. Anne-Marie pointed out a closed, waiting carriage in which they could talk privately. Joe hailed it but didn’t help her up. Once inside, he hunched in a corner, tense and red with rage, refusing to talk until the horses’ hooves clopped on the cobbles.

  “Look, love. You don’t want to make me mad. Much as I appreciate your take-charge attitude and haughty Frog act, it’s clear you ain’t a professional. Next step’s to talk to his friends, toss his flat. Not head right into a whorehouse and start jawin’. Not as I mind whores.”

  Anne-Marie shrugged, her indifference causing him to sit up a hint straighter. Exactly as she wanted.

  “Agent Tipping, just because it took the Ministry twenty years to activate me doesn’t mean I’m unprofessional. Considering the French government doesn’t know I’m on her Majesty’s bankroll and keep a cache of illegal weapons, ‘jawin’ with whores’, as you say, is better than charging around like a bull in a China shop or stooping to burglary. The murders must’ve occurred before dawn. Do you think Ned Gilly was dragged from his bed, or do you think he was caught on his way home from the cabaret?”

  Joe rubbed the stubble on his jaw and gave her a measuring sideways glance. “Possible.” He paused, then added, “You’re not what I expected. Pretty thing like a plump hen, all ruffled and lacy but sharp as a schoolmarm and walks like a...”

  “I’m wearing four knives and still have my gun.”

  “Bloody good that’ll do us if your aim hasn’t improved. I read your evaluations.” He shook his head and then looked her over from head to toe. “You just don’t seem like a Ministry girl, is all.”

  She flicked her fingers at him. “That’s the whole point of keeping me here on inactive duty; no one should suspect I’m anything but a middle-aged Parisian baker. My mother was a Ministry agent, and my father was a French spy. I’d have been in the field already, if not for being mostly blind and having a useful pair of ears. I know I appear out of shape, but I’ve kept busy with several important fact-gathering missions to earn my keep. It will take more than murder and courtesans to give me the vapours.”

  “You think they’ll let us walk into the Folies Bergere at breakfast, just like that?”

  “Not you. Just me. You may go rustle around flats, if you wish.”

  A single eyebrow arched. “And let you handle your first interrogation alone?”

  She smirked and adjusted her glasses. “These ladies are my customers, monsieur. I know the way to their hearts.”

  Anne-Marie balanced a tower of lavender boxes in one hand, knocking on the unmarked door with the other. When it opened a crack, she bustled right in.

  “Petit dejeuner.” Anne-Marie opened the top box, continuing in her best street French, “Compliments of an anonymous gentleman.”

  A few sleepy-faced girls hunched over thin porridge at a long table, only to look up licking their lips as soon as the scent of hot bread and powdered sugar wafted from the open boxes.

  “You bake these?” one of the girls asked, mouth already stuffed with pain au chocolat.

  “Bien sûr,” another girl said. “Runs a boulangerie on Lepic, oûi? I saw her giving milk to a cat with kittens, once.”

  Anne-Marie smiled and urged them to eat, making polite conversation as more and more girls appeared and fell to the pastries. After her brief time with Joe, she was more than happy to slip back into French. She knew a few names, had been sure to bring their favourite treats. Finally, when they’d mostly forgotten she wasn’t one of them, she settled down between two girls and nudged the redhead on her left.

  “Did you hear about Ned Gilly?” she asked, pulling a box of éclairs closer.

  The girl shrugged and helped herself to a sweet. “What about him?”

  “He was found dead yesterday morning. At Notre Dame.”

  The girl crossed herself with bitten fingertips. “Good riddance to bad rubbish. Great, nasty brute. Gave me this last week.” She pulled down the shoulder of her shift to show a yellowing bruise on her clavicle.

  “Did you know Badger Leeds and Dickie Edgington, too?”

  A younger girl nodded. “Dickie was my first. Didn’t pay.”

  “He wasn’t as bad as Badger was, with the cigar burns.”

  “Sound like a nasty bunch,” Anne-Marie said. “And all Englishmen, too.”

  The girls nodded, their mouths full and their fingers sugar-rimed.

  The youngest girl piped up with “Mistress hates the English. One of those three monsters killed her daughter, but we don’t know which one. We’re all glad they’re gone.”

  One of the other girls hissed at her, and she clapped a hand over her mouth.

  “Is your mistress here? I’ve been wanting to talk to her about some half-priced baked goods.”

  The girls stopped chewing and stared at Anne-Marie. The redhead beside her snorted and tossed her oozing éclair on the table. “Tastes funny.” She glared daggers at Anne-Marie. “But thank the anonymous gentleman for his kindness, just the same.”

  Anne-Marie shrugged and rose, leaving the ravaged boxes behind. The redhead followed her to the door, slamming it on her lavender bustle. Unless Joe found something better, her money was on the Folies Bergere and the cabaret’s mysterious mistress.

  Anne-Marie did her best thinking while baking. By the time Joe squeezed through the front door, her face shone with sweat and her arms ached from furious kneading. She led him into the office where she did the bookkeeping.

  “What’d you find?”

  “Don’t bark at me, monsieur. What did you find?”

  He sighed and emptied his pockets onto her spotless desk. “Receipts, bills, bits of his bloody poetry. No reason for the poor lad to be murdered.”

  “The girls hadn’t heard about Gilly’s death. Described him as a nasty piece of work. They didn’t care for Dickie or Badger, either. Said their mistress hates the English and one of the three dead was responsible for murdering her daughter.” Joe grunted and pawed through the crumpled papers, holding up a wine-stained bill.

  “He owed the Folies Bergere a decent sum. Payable to Madam Allemande last week. Guess it might be worth keeping the debt to get your revenge.”

  She tapped the piece of paper. “We know they were all customers. We know they were all suspects, according to Allemande. Should we visit Dickie and Badger’s flats next?”

  Joe removed his bowler to run a hand through wild brown hair. “Forget them. Worry about Gilly. We find how he was murdered, we know what happened to the others.”

  “Is that the usual Ministry procedure?”

  He bristled. “You correcting me? On the job less than a day, and you’re telling me what’s what?”

  She calmly raised an eyebrow.

  “Bien sûr, I’m telling you. This is my city, my home. Until you’re the head of the Ministry, I do not work for you. I work with you.” They locked eyes, and she refused to look away. He blinked first. “But in this case, I think perhaps I do agree. Did you bring a dinner jacket?”

  He grunted. “I can get one.”

  “Bon. Tonight, we’re going to the Folies Bergere, and you’re going to chat with the other Brits, see what they know.”

  “Let’s say I agree to it, just out of curiosity. What are you going to do tonight?”

  She grinned.

  “I’m going to pick every lock in the cabaret until I find Madam Allemande.”

  He thou
ght a moment and nodded. “Roight.”

  “You’re giving in, just like that?”

  “File says you’re good with locks, love. Besides, what man wouldn’t want to spend a night at the cabaret?”

  Anne-Marie looked him up and down, contemplating how one found a behemoth-sized dinner jacket in just a few hours and whether it was possible anyone would believe him a gentleman. “Are you sure you can pull this off? You never told me of your past training or specialties.”

  His grin was as crooked as his nose. “Don’t worry, pet. Undercover is my specialty.”

  That evening, as she went to turn the sign in the window from Ouvert to Fermee, Anne-Marie couldn’t help noticing the figure posing across the street. The suit fit him perfectly, and with his hair slicked back under a gentleman’s topper, he looked less like a bare-knuckles brawler and more like an aristocrat—or two aristocrats stuck together in a black sack. Seeing her gaping, he tipped his hat and grinned. She hurried upstairs to change into her own guise for the night.

  He was sitting at the bakery table when she emerged, her cheeks hot with a blush.

  “Don’t laugh.”

  He looked up, face blank. “Why would I?”

  She smoothed her hands down the black leather corset and over her fitted trousers. They were far too tight, blast it all. Thanks to the bakery’s bounty, her stealth uniform barely fit. But she couldn’t sneak undetected into the cabaret in her usual frilly dresses, so she would just have to hope her pants didn’t split up the back. Still, it felt good to put on men’s boots and pack her waist belt with gear she hadn’t had call to use in years, guns and knives and poisons and gadgets. She was ready.

  But was he?

  “What’s your play?” she asked, and he stood and bowed.

  “Reginald Cumberbatch,” he spoke in a manner that gave her a start. “A humble shopkeeper on holiday from London.”

  The stuffy accent was flawless.

  “Touché. Undercover really is your specialty.”

  He grinned. “You underestimate me.”

  She tried to bow in mock apology, but the seams on her pants creaked dangerously.

  “Of course I underestimate you, monsieur; that means you’re a good agent. We’ll meet back here at midnight. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.” Joe went to open the door, but she stopped him with a tentative hand on his jacket sleeve.

  “Wait.” Her fingers hovered over the Ministry-issued ring, a slightly different fashion than the one she had been assigned twenty years ago. “How do these new rings work? If I’m in trouble, will it alert you?”

  He nodded. “If you push it, I’ll know.”

  “But how will I know if you’re in trouble?”

  He pulled back his jacket to show a pair of derringers, their chased brass accented with wood so polished that they’d clearly seen their share of Ministry action.

  “I never am,” he said in his usual, gruff manner.

  Anne-Marie slipped into the shadows like it was a warm bed on a cool night. She was out of shape but bristling with determination. The air was brisk against her cheeks, and the exhilaration of her mission kept her moving.

  When she’d been at the Folies Bergere earlier, she’d noticed convenient climbing niches in the bricks outside. She skittered up with a prowler’s grace, glad that she’d kept her hands from going soft. As part of her dedication to keeping Ministry training on her mind, she gave herself the same birthday gift every year: a midnight trip past the Louvre security to enjoy the works of art on her own. She used a different and more challenging entrance strategy every year, and she’d touched the Mona Lisa with bare hands more than anyone since Da Vinci himself.

  At the top of the building, she pulled herself onto the roof of the Folies Bergere and skittered over to a cracked window. Wrenching it open, she squeezed through. It was an attic of the most depressing sort, with rows of small and dingy beds meant for servants.

  Anne-Marie’s soft-soled boots whispered across the boards and down the stairs to the next level. The long hallway housed themed rooms decorated in glitzy excess. Perfume hung heavy in the air, and Anne-Marie held a handkerchief over her sensitive nose.

  As she crept down the next staircase, the air warmed, and the sound of voices and music thumped through the cracked walls. The song ended to thunderous applause, and a woman’s voice boomed as if heard underwater. Anne-Marie stopped, one hand to the wall.

  “Mes amis, are you ready to meet Madame Allemande’s Jewels of Paris?”

  Whistles, stomps, and applause answered her.

  Anne-Marie looked up and found a copper tube bolted to the ceiling, pointing down the dark hallway.

  “Oh, la la! These girls need more of a welcome that that!”

  The voice had definitely come from the tube, and Anne-Marie followed it as it snaked past red velvet curtains and disappeared into another wall beside a narrow door. She had the lock picked in moments, opening it silently onto a hall lit by green lanterns.

  “The Folies Bergere is proud to present... the can-can!”

  Anne-Marie hurried faster when she realised she didn’t just hear the echo of the pipes but the actual woman’s voice. Just ahead, a door was cracked, showing a thin line of light. Gun in hand, she pushed it open just enough to see inside.

  The room was large, lit with gas-lamps and filled with ornate parlour furniture, bizarre statuary, and a low, annoying ticking sound. A strange hodgepodge of scents made Anne-Marie’s nose twitch: oil, metal, and expensive perfume. She slipped through the door and hid behind a sofa.

  A thin woman in a taffeta gown of emerald green stood with her back to the room as she spoke into an amplifying box, the source of the copper pipe. She paused to peer through two holes at eye level in the wall, watching the cabaret on the other side. After another round of deafening applause, the woman turned and spoke to an empty corner.

  “I see a new Englishman out there. Perhaps he’ll be the one to finally admit to murdering my poor darling Lizette. We know just what to do with him, don’t we? Come, Maurice. Come, Fabrice. Murderers must be punished, n’est-ce pas?” Her accent and the way she spat “Anglais” marked her as a native Parisian. Anne-Marie felt panic rise behind her corset as she thought about Joe in the crowd, unsuspecting.

  Something large moved, some metal contraption that squealed and clanked and then... purred? Anne-Marie ducked around the sofa to see what sort of clockwork padded to the woman’s side, but a heavy weight landed on her back, shoving her flat. Her gun clattered to the ground, and she felt the bone-jarring weight of metal on her spine and arm as claws spread over her leather corset and wrapped around her shoulder. Pinned as she was, she couldn’t reach any of her weapons. Struggling to turn her head, she saw a blinking yellow eye and a demonic, gibbering face.

  Footsteps rounded the sofa. Anne-Marie could barely see the woman looming over her, a metal creature at her side.

  “Ah, the curious baker. Inject her, please, Maurice.”

  Anne-Marie felt the cool pinch of a needle in her arm and struggled to turn over, to reach the knife in her corset, to do anything but lay there helpless like an idiot. She failed. Numbness spread quickly from her belly to her extremities as the injection took effect.

  “You wish to know what happens to meddling Englishmen who enter my city unwanted? Who hurt my girls and refuse to pay my bills? Do you know which of those monsters murdered my poor daughter? If you are on the side of the English, you will meet their same fate.” She leaned close, sniffed deeply, and sneered. “Half English, at least. You stink of tea and broken promises. Come. My pets will show you the most beautiful views in Paris.” Her grin was skeletal, mad, her wrinkled lips painted red. “Starting with the tunnels in the catacombs.”

  Just before her eyes fluttered shut, Anne-Marie remembered her tracker ring and managed to push it with her clumsy thumb.

  “If I’m in trouble, will it alert you?” she had asked Joe.

  “If you push it, I’ll know.”

&nbs
p; But how long would it take for Joe to receive the signal? How long?

  It was the wind that roused Anne-Marie, tearing at her hair; that, and the odd, mechanical movement of whatever carried her. Her body instantly recognised that she was very high up, that she was uncomfortably dangling from rigid arms. Although her instinct was to go stiff and fight, she recalled Madam Allemande’s words and the rusty stains dappling the cobbles in front of Notre Dame just that morning. She opened her eyes on a moonlit night, the stars impossibly close.

  She thumbed the switch on her tracker ring again and again. Why had Joe not come when he’d promised her he would? Was her partner cozied up to some cabaret girl in the Folies Bergere, unable to hear or see the tracker’s alarm amid the dizzying crowd?

  But no. A soft beeping told her exactly why she had not been rescued. She let her head loll sideways, and her vision filled with the tails of a dinner jacket. Joe jounced ahead of her, tossed over the back of a clockwork beast like a sack of cake flour. The creature was like nothing she’d ever seen, with a twisted, nightmare body like a monster out of a painting by Hieronymous Bosch. Two horns sprouted from its head, while great silver wings sprung from its back with razor-sharp feathers; Joe flopped between them, unconscious. Taloned feet squelched through the cathedral’s gutter, marching toward the grand spire.

  Anne-Marie let her head fall the other way, her eyes following the riveted seams upward to the same hideous goblin face and gold-glowing goat eye she remembered from Madam Allemande’s quarters at the Folies Bergere. It was so very familiar, and yet so very wrong. Glancing down to judge the distance to the cobbles, she solved the mystery behind the Englishmen’s deaths.

  Plated in grey metal that matched the original stone, the demonic automatons were nearly identical to the famous monsters that guarded the cathedral. No wonder no one had noticed them, then—they were part and parcel of Paris, of Notre Dame. Anyone spotting animated grotesques on the roof would assume they’d had too much to drink and go home to sleep it off.