Tales of the Shadowmen 3: Danse Macabre

by Jean-Marc Lofficier

  When he had been a lowly detective sergeant, Commissaire Lapointe had lived on the Avenue Parmentier and had come to know the alleys and twitterns of the neighborhood well. He had developed relationships with many of the settled bargees and their kin and had done more than one favor to a waterman accused unjustly of a crime. They had respected Lapointe, even if they had not loved him.

  A heavy-set man in a dark Raglan overcoat and an English cap, Lapointe was at once saturnine and avuncular. Lighting a Cuban cheroot, he descended from the footplate of his heavy police car, its motors humming at rest. Turning up his collar against the morning chill, he looked with some melancholy at the boutiques and restaurants now crowding the old wharfs. “Paris changes too rapidly,” he announced to his long-suffering young assistant, the aquiline LeBec, who had only recently joined special department. “She has all the grace and stateliness of an aristocratic whore, yet these stones, as our friend de Certau has pointed out, are full of dark stories, an unsavory past.”

  Lapointe had become fascinated by psychogeography, the brainchild of Guy DeBord, who had developed the philosophy of “flaneurism” or the art of dérive. DeBord and his followers had it that all great cities were the sum of their past and that the past was never far away, no matter what clever cosmetics were used to hide it. They had nothing but contempt for the electric trams, trains and cars which bore the busy Parisians about the city. Only by walking, by “drifting,” could one appreciate and absorb the history which one inhaled with every breath, mixing living flesh with the dust of one’s ancestors. Commissaire Lapointe, of course, had a tendency to support these ideas, as did many of the older members of the Sûreté du Temps Perdu and their colleagues abroad. This was especially true in London, where Lapointe’s famous opposite number, Sir Seaton Begg, chief metatemporal investigator for the Home Office, headed the legendary Whitehall Time Center, whose very existence was denied by Parliament, just as the Republic refused to admit any knowledge of the Quai d’Orsay’s STP.

  LeBec accepted these musings as he always did, keeping his own counsel. He had too much respect to dismiss his chief’s words, but was also too much of a modern to make such opinions his own.

  Reluctantly, Lapointe began to move along the freshly-paved quay until he had reached the entrance to a narrow canyon between two of the former warehouses. Rue Mendoza was no different from scores of similar alleys, save that a pale blue STP van stood outside one of its entrances, the red light on its roof turning with slow, almost voluptuous arcs while uniformed officers questioned the inhabitants of the great warren which had once housed grain and now was the residence of publicity directors, television producers and miscellanous media people, all of whom were demanding to know why they could not go about their business.

  Behind him on the canal, Lapointe could see a faint mist rising from the water and he heard a dozen radios and TVs, all tuned to the morning news programmes. So far, at least, the press had not yet got hold of this story. He stubbed out his cigar against a masonry-clad wall and put it back in his case, following the uniformed man into the house. He told Le Bec to remain outside and question the angry residents as to their whereabouts and so on. There were no elevators in this particular building and Lapointe was forced to climb several storys until at last he came to a landing where a pale-faced young man, still in his pajamas covered by a blue check dressing gown, stood with his back to the green and cream wall smoking a long, thin Nat Sherman cigarette, one of the white Virginia variety. He transferred the cigarette from right to left and shook hands with Lapointe as he introduced himself.

  “Bonjour, M’sieu. I am Sébastien Gris.”

  “Commissaire Lapointe of the Sûreté. What’s all this about a fancy dress party and a dead girl?”

  Gris opened his mouth, but there was no air in his lungs. His thin features trembled helplessly and his pale blue eyes filled with helpless fury. He could not speak. He drew a deep breath. “Monsieur, I telephoned the moment I found her. I have touched nothing, I promise.”

  Lapointe grunted. He looked down at a pretty blonde girl, her fair skin faintly pockmarked, who lay sprawled in the man’s hallway, a meter or so from the entrance to his tiny kitchen filling with steam from a forgotten kettle. Lapointe stepped over the body and went to turn off the gas. Slowly, the steam dissipated. He took a large paisley handkerchief from his pocket and mopped at his head and neck. He sighed. “No name? No identity? No papers of any kind?”

  The uniformed man confirmed this. “Just what you see, Monsieur le Commissaire.”

  Lapointe leaned and touched her face. He took something on his finger and inspected it carefully. “Arsenic powder,” he said. “And almost certainly cochineal for rouge.” He was growing depressed. “I’ve only seen this once before.” He recognized the work on her dress. It was authentic. Though unusually beautiful for the period and with an unblemished skin, she was as certainly an inhabitant of the early 19th century as he was of the 21st and, as sure as he was alive, she was dead, murdered by a neat cut across her throat. “A true beauty and no doubt famous in her age. Murdered and disposed of by an expert.”

  “You have my absolute assurances, Monsieur, that her body was here when I got up this morning. Someone has done this, surely, to implicate me. It cannot be a joke.”

  Lapointe nodded gravely. “I fear, Monsieur Gris, that your presence in this building had little or nothing to do with the appearance of a corpse outside your kitchen.” The young man became instantly relieved and began to babble a sequence of theories, forcing Lapointe to raise his hand as he dropped to one knee to inspect something clutched in the corpse’s right fist. He frowned and checked the fingernails of the left fingers in which some coarse brown fibers had caught. The young man continued to talk and Lapointe became thoughtful and impatient at the same time, rising to his feet. “If you please, Monsieur. It is our job to determine how she came to die here and, if possible, identify her murderer. You, I regret, will have to remain nearby while I question the others. Have you the means to telephone your place of work?”

  The young man nodded and crossed over to a wall bearing a fashionably modeled telephone. He gave the operator a number. As he was speaking, LeBec came in to join his chief. He shuddered when he saw the corpse. He knew at once why their department had been called in. “1820 or perhaps ’25,” he murmured. “What’s that in her hand? A rosary? An expensive gold crucifix, too? Poor child. Was she killed here or there?”

  “By the look of the blood it was there,” responded his chief. “But whoever brought her body here is still amongst us, I am almost certain.” He turned the crucifix over to look at the back. All he read there were the initials “J.C.” “Perhaps also her murderer.” With an inclination of his massive head, he indicated where the bloodstains told a story of the girl being dragged and searched. “Did they assume her to be a witch of some sort? A familiar story. Her clothes suggest wealth. Yet she wears too much makeup for a girl of her age from a good family. Was she some sort of adept or the daughter of an adept, maybe? What if she made her murderers a gateway into wherever they thought they were going and they killed her, either to be certain she told no others or as some sort of bizarre sacrifice? Yet why would she be clutching such an expensive rosary. And what about those fibers? Were they disguised? You know how they think, Le Bec, as well as I do.” He watched as his assistant took an instrument from an inside pocket and ran it over the girl’s head and neck. Straightening himself, Le Bec studied his readings, nodding occasionally as his instincts were confirmed.

  The commissioner was giving close attention to the series of bloody marks leading away from the corpse to the front door of the apartment. Again he noted those initials on the back of the crucifix. “My God!” he murmured. “But why...?”

  II. Monsieur Zenith: A Brief History

  “I suspect our murderer had good reason to dispose of the corpse in this way,” declared Lapointe. “My guess is that her face and body were both too well known for her to be simply dropped
in the Seine, while the murderer did not wish to be observed moving her through the streets of Paris, either because he himself was also highly recognizable or because he had no easy way of doing what he needed to do. And no alibi. So, if not one himself, he called in an expert, no doubt a person already known to him.”

  “An expert? You mean such people understood about metatemporal transcience in the 1820s?”

  “Generally speaking, of course, very few of our ancestors understood such things. Even fewer than today. We are not talking of time-travel, which as we all know, is impossible, but movement from one universe to another where one era has developed at a slower rate in relation to ours. Needless to say, we are not discussing our own past, but a period approximating our own present. That’s why most of our cases take us to periods equivalent to our own 20th or early 21st century. So we are dealing here with a remote scale, far removed from our own. Another reason for our murderer to put as alternative planes scales between our own and theirs.”

  Lapointe was discussing the worlds of the multiverse, separated one from another by mass rather than time. Each world was of enormously larger or smaller scale to the next, enabling all the alternate universes which made up the great multiverse to coexist, one invisible to the other for reasons of size. Not until the great French scientist Benoit Mandelbrot had developed these theories had it become possible for certain adepts to increase or decrease their own mass and cross from one of these worlds to the other. Mandelbrot had effectively provided us with maps of our own brains, plans of the multiverse. This in turn had led to the setting up of secret government agencies designed to create policies and departments whose function was to deal with the new realities.

  Now almost every major nation had some equivalent to the STP in some version of its own 21st century, apart from the United States, which had largely succeeded in refusing to enter that century in any significant sense and was forced to rely on foreign agents to cope with the problems arising from situations with their roots in the 21st century.

  “But you are convinced, chief, that the murderer is French?”

  “If not French, then they have lived in France for many years.”

  Used not to questioning his superior’s instinctive judgments, Le Bec accepted this.

  As their electromobile sped them back to the Quai d’Orsay, Lapointe mused on the problem. “I need to find someone who has an idea of all the metatemporals who come and go in Paris. Only one springs to mind and that is Monsieur Zenith, the albino. You’ll recall we have worked together once or twice before. As soon as I get back to the office, I will put through a call to Whitehall. If anyone knows where Zenith is, then it will be Sexton Blake.”

  Sexton Blake was the real name of the detective famously fictionalized as Sir Seaton Begg and Lapointe’s opposite number in London.

  “I did not know Monsieur Zenith was any longer amongst us,” declared LeBec.

  “There is no guarantee that he is. I can only hope. I understood that he had made his home in Paris. Blake will confirm where I can find him.”

  “I understand, chief, that he was in earlier days wanted by the police of several countries.”

  “Quite so. His last encounter with Blake, as a criminal, was during the London Blitz. He and his old antagonist fought it out on a cliff house whose foundations were weak. The fictional version of the case was been recorded as The Affair of the Bronze Basilisk. Zenith’s body was lost in the ruins of the house and never recovered, but we now know that he returned to Jugo-Slavia where he fought with Tito’s guerillas against the Nazis, was captured by the Gestapo before he could smoke the famous cyanide cigarette he always kept in his case and was found half-dead by the British when they liberated the infamous Milosevic Fortress in Belgrade, HQ of the Gestapo in the region. For his various efforts on behalf of the allied war-effort, Zenith was given a full pardon by the authorities and in his final meeting with his old adversary Sexton Blake, both men made a bargain–Blake would allow no more stories of Zenith to be published as part of his own memoirs and Zenith would not publish his memoirs until 50 years after that meeting which was in August 26, 1946. Both men have been exposed to the same effects which conferred longevity upon them, almost by accident. That 50 years has now, of course, passed.”

  “And Monsieur Zenith?” asked Le Bec as the car hummed smoothly under the arches into the square leading to their offices. “What has happened to him?”

  “He has become a kind of gentleman adventurer, working as often with the authorities as against them and spending much of his time in tracking down ex-Nazis, especially those with stolen wealth, which he either returns in whole to their owners or, if it so pleases him, pays himself a ten percent ‘commission.’ He will now sometimes work with my old friend Blake. His adventures will take him across parallel universes where he assumes the name of ‘Zodiac.’ But he still keeps up with his old acquaintances from the criminal underworld, mostly through a famous London thieve’s warren known as ‘Smith’s Kitchen’ which now has concessions in Paris, Rome and New York. If anyone has heard a hint of the business here, it will be Zenith.”

  “How will you contact him, chief?”

  Lapointe smiled almost to himself. “Oh, I think Blake will confirm I know where he will be later this morning.”

  III. Familiar names

  A broken rosary, a silver crucifix bearing the initials “J.C.,” a few coarse, brown fibers, some photographs of the corpse seen earlier at Les Hivers... One by one, Commissaire Lapointe laid the things before him on the bright, white table-cloth. He was sitting in a fashionable café, L’Albertine, situated in the Arcades de l’Opéra whose windows looked into a square in which a beautiful fountain played. Outside, Paris’s haut-monde strolled back and forth, conversing, inspecting the windows of the expensive shops, occasionally entering to make purchases. Across from him, sipping alternately from a small coffee cup or a glass of yellow-green absinthe, sat a most extraordinary individual. His skin was pale as alabaster. His hair, including his eyebrows, was the color of milk, and whose gleaming, sardonic eyes resembled the finest rubies. Dressed unusually for the age, the albino wore perfectly cut morning dress. A grey silk hat, evidently his, shared a shelf near the cash-register with Lapointe’s wide-brimmed straw.

  “I am grateful, Monsieur, that you found time to see me,” murmured Lapointe, understanding the value the albino placed on good manners. “I was hoping these objects would mean more to you than they do to me. Evidently belonging to a priest or a nun–”

  “Of high rank,” agreed Zenith continuing to look at the photographs of the victim.

  “We also found several long black hairs, traces of heavy red lipstick of fairly recent manufacture.”

  “No nun wore that,” mused Zenith. “Which suggests her murderess was disguised as a nun. In which case, of course, she is still unlikely to have worn lip-rouge. It was not the young woman’s?”

  “Hers was from an earlier age altogether.” Lapointe had already explained the circumstances in which the corpse had been discovered, as well as his guess at the time and date when she was murdered.

  “So we can assume there were at least two people involved in killing her, one of whom at least had knowledge of the multiverse and how to gain access to other worlds.”

  “And at least one of them can be assumed still to be here. Those footprints told us that part of the story. And some effort had been made to wrest the rosary from her fingers after she had arrived in Les Hivers.”

  “The man–shall we assume him to be a priest?” Monsieur Zenith raised the rosary as if to kiss it, but then sniffed it instead. “J.C.? Some reference perhaps to the Society of Jesus?”

  “Possibly. Which could lead us to assume that the Inquisition could have been at work?”

  “I will see what I can discover for you, Monsieur Lapointe. As for the poor victim...” Zenith offered his old acquaintance a slight shrug.

  “I believe I have a way of discovering her identity also, assuming she wa
s not what we used to call a ‘virtuous’ girl,” said Lapointe. “I have already checked the police records for that period and no mention is made of a society disappearance that was not subsequently solved. Therefore, by the quality of her clothes, the fairness of her skin, condition of her hair, not to mention her extraordinary beauty, we must assume her to be either of foreign birth or some kind of courtesan. The cut of her clothes suggests the latter to me. There is, in that case, only one place to look for her. I must inspect our copy of De Buzet.”

  Zenith raised an alabaster eyebrow. “You have a copy of the legendary Carte Bleue?”

  “One of the two known to exist. The property of the Quai d’Orsay for almost 200 years. Of little value, of course, in the general way. But now–it might just lead us to our victim, if not to her murderers.”

  Monsieur Zenith extinguished his Turkish cigarette and rose to leave. “I will do what I can to trace this assumed cleric and if you can discover a reasonable likeness in La Carte Bleue, we shall perhaps meet here again tomorrow morning?”

  “Until then,” declared Lapointe, standing to shake hands. He watched with mixed feelings as the albino collected his hat and stick at the door and strolled into the sunlit square, for all the world a flaneur from a previous century.

  Later that same day, wearing impeccable evening dress as was his unvarying habit, Monsieur Zenith made his way to a certain unprepossessing address in the Marais where he admitted himself with a key, entering through a door of peeling green paint into a foyer whose interior window slid open and a pair of yellow, bloodshot eyes regarded him suspiciously. Zenith gave a name and a number and, as he passed through the second door, pulled on a black domino which, of course, did nothing to disguise his appearance but was a convention of the establishment. Once within, he gave his hat and cloak to a bowing receptionist and found himself in those parts of the catacombs made into a great dining room known to the aristocrats of the criminal underworld as La Cuisine de Smith. Here, that fraternity could exist unhindered and, while eating a passable dinner, could listen to an orchestra consisting of a violinist, a guitarist, double-bassist, an accordionist and a pianist. If they so wished, they could also dance the exotic tango of Argentina or the Apache of Paris herself.