Spectacle

by Jodie Lynn Zdrok

  “So … the murder victim. You’ll take her photograph, too? Or only if no one identifies her?” Nathalie pointed to the books.

  “We photograph all of them,” he said matter-of-factly as he crossed over to the desk. As if it weren’t fascinating to catalog bodies. As if every corpse that ever came through the morgue didn’t have a story to tell.

  Opposite the bookcase was the only wall adornment, a crude reproduction of a painting depicting an autopsy. A group of men stood around the body, as one man prepared to cut it and another rolled a cigarette.

  M. Gagnon invited her to sit and, if she wanted, to lay down the flowers on the edge of the desk. She did both. He settled into the desk chair opposite, gathering some papers and shuffling them more than they probably needed shuffling. He had a slight awkwardness he attempted to hide; he was trying, she concluded, to act older. His large blue eyes had a quickness that appeared to take in everything at once, like a bird.

  “An autopsy painting?” she said, gesturing toward it.

  “Ghastly, isn’t it?” M. Gagnon said, stroking his chin. “It was a gift from one of the street artists who sells his paintings around here. It’s a reproduction of something else, I think. In any event, we’re not here to discuss art, Mademoiselle Baudin.”

  Ah, he was one of those men. The sort who put on “official airs,” as Nathalie thought of them. Like the formal, irritable department store clerk on the second floor of Le Bon Marché who shooed her away for petting the fur coats. “What are we here to talk about?” Nathalie sat back, pressing against the chair.

  “We’re here to talk about the murder victim.” He pulled an inkwell closer. “It’s my duty to take down identification statements.”

  She swallowed, even though her mouth was dry. “I can’t identify her.”

  “You appeared to recognize her,” he said, holding her gaze. He clasped his hands and leaned forward slightly.

  Nathalie’s breath caught. She felt so exposed she might as well be sitting here with her dress gathered up to her knees.

  She couldn’t tell him what had happened, obviously. And until she figured it out herself, the best option was to pretend nothing out of the ordinary had taken place. She needed to get out of here before he asked too many questions.

  “I don’t know her and never saw her before today. May I go? I have work to do.” Nathalie knew he’d assume housework or the laundry or something other girls her age did. Not “write a column for the most popular newspaper in Paris.” Never would he think that, as of two weeks ago, a sixteen-year-old girl wrote the daily morgue report. No other woman, of any age, had ever written for Le Petit Journal. M. Patenaude, the editor-in-chief and a longtime friend of Papa’s, gave her the job because Maman wasn’t able to work after the fire and wouldn’t for some time. If ever.

  He took the pen out of the inkwell and began writing. “I have work to do, too. In fact, I’m doing it right now. Shall we?”

  “Yes, sorry. I have to do something by a certain time, and I have—” I have more questions than answers right now. “Let’s continue.”

  “Your affect was … bizarre.” He glanced at the print on the wall and then back at her. “You went from observing to having an expression that was distant yet somehow astonished. Almost as if the ill-fated girl got up from the slab and walked toward you.”

  “The girl did no such thing,” Nathalie said, struggling to keep her voice steady. “Or you’d have seen it, too.”

  M. Gagnon clenched his jaw. He stared at her the way her teachers did when she’d spoken out of turn.

  “That was discourteous. My apologies.” She shifted her weight in the chair. “I’m not myself today, and I’m in a rush.” To get out of here. To think. To calm myself down from whatever it is that happened in there.

  “We’re almost done here,” he said, tapping the sheet of paper. “You also said something. I couldn’t hear it from behind the glass, but the people around you did, judging by their reactions.”

  The reversed vision filtered through her mind once again. The muted cries, the victim struggling, the blood dripping into the cuts.

  How could she explain what she didn’t understand herself?

  She noticed her hands trembling and tucked them under her legs. M. Gagnon waited, pen hovering over the paper. She had to give him some kind of answer.

  “I thought I recognized her.” Perspiration tickled her brows. “I—I realize now I was mistaken.”

  M. Gagnon wrote something down, and it was more than what she’d just said. He scratched his chin with the pen and looked up at her. “Are you sure?”

  “I am,” she said, making an effort to sound confident. Give the right answers so you can go. “It bothered me to see her. She is—was—close in age to me. I’m sure I reacted to that.”

  M. Gagnon’s features softened. “I understand,” he said.

  “Yet you still don’t believe me.” Nathalie tilted her head. “Do you?”

  The softness dissipated like morning mist. M. Gagnon dropped the pen. Leaning back with arms folded, he took in what seemed like four lungs’ worth of air before letting it out through his nose, eyes boring into her the whole time.

  Nathalie sat up straighter and stared back at him. If she didn’t convince him, then what? She could be here for hours. That’s all she needed, to submit her article late. As it was she didn’t know how she was going to focus on writing and—

  “You aren’t a very good liar, Mademoiselle. There’s something you’re not telling me.”

  Nathalie had no response for this, because if she were in his position, she’d be just as skeptical.

  “I’ll ask one more time.” His voice was careful and controlled, yet not unkind. “Can you identify the victim?”

  Why did he have to be both handsome and aggravating? “No, and it doesn’t matter how you phrase the question or how many times you ask. I’ve never seen her before today.”

  He cocked his head, bemused. “Mademoiselle Baudin, I must say … you are very—”

  A loud rap on the door interrupted him. He excused himself and crossed the room. Before he could open the door, a second knock followed. Then, a man’s voice: “Christophe?”

  He opened the door and went into the hall, leaving the door open a crack. Just enough for Nathalie to pick up on the urgency in their whispers.

  “My God, Laurent.” M. Gagnon’s voice stepped above the murmur. “Already?”

  Shortly thereafter he poked his head back into the room. “Thank you for your time, Mademoiselle Baudin.” He held the door open with a shrug. “I’m sorry to end our meeting so soon. A critical matter demands my attention.”

  “Certainly,” she said, standing up. She picked up her satchel and bouquet. As she approached M. Gagnon, she couldn’t help but observe that his woodsy-orange cologne, in the midst of all this death, was full of life and freshness.

  “Oh, and you can go out the back door,” he said, pointing to the door the men had carried the body through. When they reached the door, he pushed it open for her. She tried too quickly to adjust her satchel strap and dropped the bouquet.

  “My goodness.” She stooped down to gather the flowers. “So clumsy. I’m sorry.”

  He knelt down to help her. “We begin and end with Madame Valois’s flowers,” he said, handing her the bouquet. He might have been smiling, but she was too embarrassed to look.

  “And so we do,” she said as they both stood up. She glanced at the blooms, still unable to recall the moment she bought them. Perhaps it would come back to her later.

  Nathalie stepped onto the street and slid past a vendor.

  M. Gagnon called out after her. “Be safe, Mademoiselle Baudin.” His tone was far less formal now, tinged with a measure of concern. “Paris is no place for a young woman to be wandering alone right now.”

  3

  Nathalie brushed some crumbs off the table with her pencil again. She’d been brushing incessantly, crumbs or no crumbs, after every few words of her morg
ue article. The words swam across her journal like confused fish.

  She thought she saw blood.

  And it was only ink.

  Again and again.

  Finally she finished writing. She closed her journal, deciding to let the article sit before reading it through one more time.

  Although she’d finished nibbling her pain au chocolat a while ago, she hadn’t yet been ushered along. Jean, her favorite waiter, saw that she was working and let her be.

  A sparrow hopped over to the crumbs, pecked away at them until they were gone, and tilted its head.

  “I think you ate more of it than I did today. A waste of my favorite sweet.” Those chocolate-filled croissants flirted with her sweet tooth whenever she came to Café Maxime. Her friend Agnès loved them, too.

  That reminded her. She had a postcard to write out to Agnès, who’d already sent a postcard and a letter. Maybe tomorrow. She was in no condition for that today.

  She picked up the journal to put it in her bag. As if on cue, the postcard she’d received four days ago fell out. She read it once more.

  Greetings from Bayeux!

  The water wheel is prettier in person. You’ll see for yourself—next year, I hope!

  Weather still glorious. Grandmother still baking daily. Roger still a pest.

  Me, I still wish you could have come.

  Bisous,

  Agnès

  Nathalie flipped the postcard over and traced the water wheel illustration. Next year. Maybe.

  She rubbed her temples and closed her eyes for a moment. The blood. The knife. The silent screams. The cuts.

  The sparrow chirped at her ankle, bringing her back to the present with a start.

  Don’t go there. Stay in the present. Observe what’s around you.

  She swiped the last of the crumbs onto the ground and looked around. She’d been so lost in thought she hadn’t noticed the people around her until now.

  The café, which had a magnificent view of Notre-Dame, was bustling in spite of the heat. Nathalie caught pieces of conversation all around her. Two spirited, younger girls she recognized from school discussed the shopping they planned to do after lunch. A group of refined older men behind her puffed away on cigarettes, reminiscing about the Paris of their youth. One went on and on about how the renovation-minded Prefect of the Seine, Hausmann, “ruined the city” in the 1850s and ’60s to make boulevards. That, the man sniffed, “did nothing but turn Paris into one big, daily traveling circus.” Another complained about the foundations being laid for the “outlandish eyesore” that Eiffel had designed. Some people had made a fuss about the structure, saying it was going to be hideous, but Nathalie thought the tower project sounded thrilling. Although it was little more than pillars so far, in a couple of years it would be the grand gate to the Exposition Universelle.

  Nathalie slipped Agnès’s postcard into her journal and was about to call Jean over when a pang of guilt struck her. Agnès was one of her dearest friends, and already Nathalie was falling behind in their correspondence for the summer. She pictured Agnès waiting for the mail, disappointed yet another day.

  She reached into her bag and took out a Seine River postcard. It already had the stamp affixed, a sign of her good intentions two days ago. She stared at it for what seemed like an hour but certainly could not have been. Could it? Time was oily and ungraspable this afternoon.

  Putting her pencil to the card, she spilled the thoughts out as they came into her mind, not pausing once.

  Greetings from our favorite café!

  I just finished eating a you-know-what and am settling in to write my article. Jean says hello.

  My day, what I recall of it, has been the strangest imaginable. I have something to tell you and will do so in a letter. I’m still shaking, so apologies for the penmanship.

  Much more soon,

  Nata

  As soon as she finished writing, she got up from the table, squeezed between a pair of sprawling potted plants, and dropped the card into a post office box.

  By the time she sat down, she regretted what she’d written. Too mysterious and vague. But she couldn’t very well say what had happened in that tiny space. Nor could she pretend it was just another summer day in Paris.

  I probably should have. Agnès is going to think I’ve gone mad.

  Nathalie studied the post office box, trying to calculate if there was any way her lengthy arm could fit into it, when she heard the word “morgue” from the table beside her. She glanced at the well-dressed young couple on her left and shifted position to hear them better.

  “A streetwalker, probably,” said the woman.

  “Not necessarily.” The man loosened his ascot tie. “She could be a foreigner.”

  “Or maybe the killer is a foreigner.”

  He paused. “It does seem rather German in its execution.”

  “Or Russian,” she said, sipping her wine. “They’re savages anyway.”

  “Those cuts were precise, not savage. He could be a surgeon of some sort.”

  Just then Jean came over to them, and they asked his opinion as to who the victim and killer might be. Lovers’ quarrel, he guessed. That turned into Jean sharing some of the talk he’d overheard at the café today, and the three of them gossiped so long another waiter had to “ahem” a reminder that another table needed more wine.

  People want to make sense of things, M. Patenaude had explained when he hired her. What they don’t know, they invent.

  What should I invent? I’ll say it was my imagination.

  Some kind of vision? No, a hallucination from the heat. It must have been that. The uncertainty jabbed at her. Over.

  And over.

  And over again.

  Her eyes fell on the yellow blossoms wilting by the minute. No matter how many times she revisited the morning, she simply couldn’t recall buying them.

  “Anything else, Mademoiselle Baudin?” Jean appeared over her shoulder with a smile.

  Yes, can you bring my memory back? Oh, and I saw a murder scene take place. Backward. Let me tell you about it.

  That sounded like something Aunt Brigitte would say.

  “Just the check, Jean. Thank you.”

  Aunt Brigitte, who was in an asylum.

  * * *

  Nathalie darted across Quai Saint-Michel, breathless after a close call with a horse-drawn carriage, and crossed the bridge leading to the Île de la Cité. She made her way toward Notre-Dame, which stood directly in front of the morgue, and took in its grandeur against the cloudless blue sky. She’d seen the medieval cathedral hundreds of times yet remained in awe of those majestic towers. When she was young she’d named some of the gargoyles on the very top, above the band of statues, and still greeted them whenever she passed by. Out of habit she looked up at Abelard, Tristan, and Bruno. Abelard leaned forward and shook his head at her disapprovingly.

  No. It’s not real. You’re still seeing things.

  She turned her attention to her article, reviewing it as she walked. She paused beside the bronze statue of Charlemagne on horseback.

  She’d had to remove herself from the dream, or vision, or whatever it was, in order to clear her thoughts well enough to write the piece. Words typically danced from her pencil; today they’d tiptoed across the paper.

  End each article big, M. Patenaude advised on her first day. So big they can’t wait to buy the paper the following day to read your next column.

  After listing the corpses that remained from the previous day and the addition of the body of the sunburned man, Nathalie hesitated. She wasn’t accustomed to providing such gruesome details, but she knew M. Patenaude would want an elaborate description.

  The most noteworthy corpse of all was that of a young woman pulled from the Seine, a murder victim. Her youthful features, sliced into horrible distortion, betrayed no sign of the terror she suffered before her untimely death at the hands of what can only have been a cold, disturbed soul.

  That was it. Two summary se
ntences. Leaving so much unsaid. Presenting it as if she hadn’t somehow witnessed the murder taking place. Reporting it in a detached voice, as if it didn’t unsettle her down to her bones. Someone else wrote that column.

  Or so it felt. Or so everything felt since she’d touched that glass. In her body but not. In her head but not.

  She read the final sentence one more time and started walking again.

  “Attention!”

  Nathalie’s eyes jumped from the journal to a haggard man leaning against the statue base; she hadn’t noticed him and almost stepped on his foot. “Pardonnez-moi.”

  “Don’t worry, little girl.” His voice was gentler than his face suggested.

  Little girl? No one had called her that for years.

  Odd.

  Nathalie ignored him and continued walking.

  “A little girl,” he called after her. His voice was lower now and had a mechanical cadence. “One who carries dead flowers and has gaunt, ugly legs. I can see them through your dress.”

  Nathalie stopped but didn’t turn around. Her orange dress was linen, layered, and ankle-length, not at all see-through.

  A chill tickled her neck.

  “I can see everything. You might as well be wearing nothing at all.”

  He’s insane.

  “Look at me, I’m St. Francis of Assisi! I have no clothes!”

  Don’t look.

  The man cackled.

  Half a dozen pigeons took off from the ground behind her, making her jump. She continued on her way as the man rambled. After she’d taken a few more steps, he shrieked like the child who’d startled her in the morgue. Nathalie peeked over her shoulder to see him undressing, one garment at a time.

  It was like her first time visiting Saint-Mathurin Asylum all over again.

  Her parents had gone to visit Aunt Brigitte without Nathalie, as usual. The asylum was no place for a girl, they said (yet again) when she asked (yet again) if she could go. Just the day before, during a visit to Aunt Irene and Uncle Thomas outside Versailles, her cousin Luc had called her a baby (she was eleven, so that had been very insulting). She was thus particularly indignant that day about being “too young.” So Nathalie claimed she’d spend the afternoon with Simone, which she did whenever her parents went to Saint-Mathurin. Instead she followed her parents, staying just far enough behind to watch where they went.