Chapel Noir

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Indeed they had embraced bad taste, for here Gustave Eiffel’s tower stood, complete, the towering symbol of l’Exposition universelle that would continue drawing millions of gawkers to the Champ de Mars until early November.

  Whatever my opinion of this ungainly structure, it certainly is something to steer by, as old-time sailors used the Pole Star. Three hundred meters high (I will forever envision a matching guillotine of that height, thanks to Irene’s unwelcome information), it is the world’s tallest structure—it exceeds the highest cathedral spire—a show of mechanical modern hubris overstepping hand-hewn medieval piety.

  When our carriage stopped, Irene and I could not help sticking our bonneted heads out the open windows and gaping like peasants. The tower loomed over us like a gigantic red tack upholding the gray baize of the overcast Parisian skies, gaudy as a Chinese pagoda built for a Cyclops.

  From its very top, a lightning rod almost too tiny to see, the French tricolor fluttered in the upper winds.

  Though the tallest sight, the tower was not the only excess strewing the vast area. Domes, minarets, tents, huts, pagodas, and colonnades created a global village on the Esplanade des Invalides adjacent to the tower grounds. Behind and beyond and above it all loomed a massive domed pavilion backed by smokestacks flying pennants of smudge. The exposition celebrated, after all, industrial achievement, and industry is a thing of drudgery, machines, and smoke.

  It was only a moment after taking dazed stock of the scene thronging with workmen that I noticed the uniformed gendarmes infesting the parklands.

  Alas, the gendarmes also noticed us at the same time.

  Three immediately approached our coachman and ordered him to decamp to a nearby street.

  Irene, today attired in full Parisian splendor (that is to say a Worth walking suit in plum scalloped faille decorated with falls of jet beads and the newly fashionable broad-brimmed velvet hat supporting a flotilla of plumes instead of the modest bonnet that tied so sweetly under the chin like a child’s cap), burst forth from the carriage like Athena from her father Zeus’s forehead, and was as prepared to give any surrounding males a god-sized headache.

  She cast the names of princes and financiers as pearls before swine, but only achieved a result when the lowly syllables “le Villard” passed her lips.

  At that, our warders became our escort and we were soon threading our way amongst pieces of construction for the surrounding pavilions to an area a bit distant from the exposition grounds. I kept my parasol open and sheltering me from any view of the stiff and awkward mass towering above us. Irene kept hers closed and used it as a walking stick and pointer.

  It was also quite a novelty that I would feel encouraged to spy Inspector le Villard’s mustachioed face under its round-crowned hat, but so I was.

  He was most apologetic for our brusque greeting by the gendarmes, as well he should be, and nervously smoothed his curling mustache.

  Soon he was escorting us down some dim stairs into the bowels of an excavation. If I was not pleased to contemplate the tower itself, I was even less enthralled to visit some sewerlike delving in its vicinity.

  At a narrow, low portal, the inspector paused to light an oil lamp.

  “I am sorry, Madame, Mademoiselle,” he said in English at last. “I must advise you that an appalling sight awaits us beyond this point. Also, the ventilation is not as generous as at the maison de rendezvous. I would not conscience escorting ladies onto such a scene, but since you, on your own insistence, witnessed the atrocity of the other evening, your opinion of this site would be of use, if you are willing.”

  While Irene assured the inspector of our complete willingness, I was busy delving in my skirt pocket for my chatelaine, and particularly the vinaigrette. This time I was prepared: I had dosed two linen handkerchiefs with the contents of the vial. I handed one to Irene. The other I clapped to my own nostrils.

  Despite the breathtaking effect of my improvised mask, not only did I still detect the fetid scent of stale water and long-unturned earth, but an odd metallic tang that was quite unpleasant, which I attributed to the surrounding ironwork.

  I heard the distant tick of a clock, then realized how unlikely that was. Perhaps in the empty, dark passage I was hearing the second hand moving on the watch pinned to my bodice; certainly I could almost hear my heart beating.

  Deeper we went on inclined ground, the lamp casting watery lights on the rough but solid soil. The place had the close, subterranean feel of a crypt, and I was all too sure that it in fact had been turned to just such service, and only recently.

  Irene had been surprisingly silent. No doubt she much lamented the encumbrances of her woman’s dress in this rude area meant for workmen. No doubt that Inspector le Villard much regretted our submersion in this raw atmosphere.

  Then the tang that pierced the handkerchief pressed to my nose became more than metallic . . . it became the reek of a great quantity of fresh blood. My mind did an unwelcome quadrille. I felt I was standing on the other evening’s elegant threshold again, confronting inelegant death.

  The inspector’s lamp revealed a natural rotunda in the stone tunnel ahead, and I was startled to see . . . bones. Leg bones and arm bones piled like a library wall of parchment scrolls, with rows of jawless skulls interspersed in the shape of a cross, a design both reverent and macabre. I had braced myself to confront fresh death, not the stale toothpicks of La Mort’s last dinner in Paris.

  “This is part of the catacombs then, Inspector?” Irene asked, her voice muffled by my handkerchief.

  Catacombs! Of course.

  “Paris is underlaid not only by our famous sewers,” he said in English, “but by hundreds of kilometers of granite quarries first cut by the Romans. Just before the Revolution, the church and the police prevailed upon the inspector general of the quarries to move the bones into the catacombs. Paris was growing beyond the once-rural cemeteries, which were contaminated by poor burials and mass graves. People grew ill, and some churchyards’ ground level had risen ten to twenty feet from the volume of human remains.”

  I inhaled deeply and pointedly into my handkerchief to let the inspector know that I did not appreciate such lurid detail.

  He cleared his throat. “Most of the cemetery bones were moved into the catacombs south of the Seine. This site was unknown until the Tower workmen found it recently, but more undiscovered sites no doubt remain, housing nameless bones. However, the latest addition here is unfortunately all too fleshly.” His lamplight swept over the floor and a pale pile of rags that lay heaped there.

  This was coarse fabric, sailcloth as might be used under painters’ scaffolds, I thought at first. Irene took a deep breath next to me, pressing my makeshift barrier to her face. I realized that I was seeing a tumble of common linen petticoats.

  “Another woman?” Irene asked.

  “Another slaughter,” the inspector said somberly.

  “Who?”

  “We can only speculate. Perhaps a bread-seller, perhaps a prostitute.”

  Irene lifted the smelling-salts compress away from her face.

  I moved involuntarily to stop her, aware of the foul melange of odors she invited to invade her lungs.

  She inhaled so deliberately I saw the arch of her nostrils flare, like a hound’s.

  “Irene! The odor must be hellish in this closed-in place.”

  “It is. Like a battleground, I suppose. Blood and . . . guts. A certain rank dankness. And—” She stooped to the floor, gesturing the inspector’s light to a spot near her feet.

  Her fingers, bare now of gloves, swept through a dark puddle.

  I drew back, thinking of blood, and cringed to see her ruddy fingertips in the lamplight.

  “Wine,” she said. “Red wine.” Her fingers swept the stones again, then came to her face as she sought to identify what was on them. “And something stronger.”

  “Madame must not play the bloodhound,” the inspector said, as repulsed as I to see her crouching in such a ruin
ous place. “We will bring in the dogs shortly.”

  “Really?” Irene stood, wiping her fingertips on my fresh and freshly supplied handkerchief. “Bloodhounds are a dramatic touch, Inspector, but I doubt they will do much good. I should send for a sommelier myself.”

  With that she turned, clapped the handkerchief to her nose and mouth again, and led us out of that dreadful place.

  “A sommelier?” I challenged her when we had reached the open air and were now being roundly ignored. “That is a wine-waiter. I grant you that the French are very serious about their wines, but how could you suggest such a ridiculous thing?”

  “Because it is not ridiculous. I should very much like to know if the wine that was spilled here at the foot of La Tour Eiffel is of the same vintage as that stored and smashed in the cellar of the maison de rendezvous.”

  Before I could digest this unappetizing idea, Inspector le Villard caught up with us, looking harried.

  “Now that you have seen this, your presence is requested at the Hotel Bristol,” he said without so much as a bow. “Can your coachman take you there? It is in rue Faubourg-Saint-Honoré.”

  “Both I and my coachman are familiar with the rue Faubourg-Saint-Honoré,” Irene said. “We are expected no matter the hour?”

  “No matter the hour,” the inspector repeated grimly. “This is an affair well beyond the bounds of the usual channels. I am sorry, Madame, Mademoiselle, that you should be subjected to such sights, but we are all pawns in the hands of higher powers.”

  With a brisk bow of farewell, he returned to the lantern-bearing gendarmes clustered at the entrance to the death chamber.

  A wagon-lit waited nearby, its heavily harnessed pair of horses standing with their weight on three legs, heads bowed as if in sorrow.

  “She will soon join her more elegant sisters lying on cold stone beds at the Paris Morgue,” Irene said in a somber tone.

  “And whom will we join at the Hotel Bristol?”

  “It is the favorite hostelry of the Prince of Wales when he is in Paris.”

  I raised my eyebrows, though no one took note of the gesture. I was about as eager to take another meeting with Bertie as I was actually to encounter Jack the Ripper.

  The Hotel Bristol was, of course, fit to house a prince, even an English prince.

  A discreetly elegant facade of gray stone opened into a lobby carpeted like a Monet water lily painting: those costly carpets known as Savonneries, these woven in misty hues of blue and green that seemed too delicately tinted to dishonor by stepping upon.

  Marble pillars and floors should have made the vast place echo, but the thick, exquisite carpets, the even more exquisite rustle of silks and velvets and finest wool broadcloth, the hushed tones of the people who passed at a stately pace made everything seem muffled in great clouds of the fine silk net that is called Illusion.

  I am not sure if a footman or an equerry met us in the hotel lobby. Whatever his position, he was awaiting us, recognized us as we entered the vast space, and intercepted us before we took four steps into the marble-paved interior.

  Or rather, he recognized Irene.

  He bowed so profoundly that I could almost hear his heels click. “Madame Norton, I am to take you and your companion immediately upstairs for lunch.”

  His great height and lance-straight spine reminded me of Prince Willie, now King of Bohemia, and I suspected the man was German. Despite his military bearing and manner, he was dressed in a good-quality frock coat that did not look out of place in the imposing lobby.

  I wish I could have said the same for my ensemble, though I seldom allow myself to be troubled by notions of not dressing well enough for my surroundings. Simple, useful clothing will pass muster anywhere. And if I am taken for a nanny, or a duenna, or, in this case, as a lady’s companion, that is not so very different from my past and present role in life.

  I saw with some dread that we were to be conducted to our place of assignation in an elevated car. Although this was a fine and decent apparatus that went directly up and down, and not on an angle like the two terrifying, steam-driven, inclined American Otis elevators on the Eiffel Tower, rather like mechanical dragons to my mind, I found myself hesitating over the dark space between the solid if polished ground of the lobby and the varnished wooden floor of this mobile box.

  “Ladies,” our escort urged from behind us. This was one instance where male courtesy forced women to take the first risk.

  Irene, of course, had scampered over the gap like a cat leaping a puddle. I followed, feeling more uneasy than I had at either of our body-viewing expeditions. Imagine my emotions when a collapsible metal-mesh grating closed us off from the multitude in the lobby. In instants we lofted upward, causing such an uncustomary flutter in my innards that I crushed my doctored handkerchief to my mouth and feigned a polite cough, all the while inhaling heady fumes that made my eyes water and my senses clear.

  Upon our arrival in an upper hall cushioned with a thick runner of Turkey carpet, our escort led us to a pair of double doors, painted and gilded on every cursive surface.

  I was not surprised by the richness of our surroundings, not even when we were ushered into a reception area that would have done a London town house proud.

  And to think that this was only in Paris.

  Fine oil paintings stacked two and three high on the lofty walls allowed portraits of aristocrats to gaze across to country-estate scenes. The gilt frames jousted with the array of costly trinkets on the marble-topped tables dotting the room, beside enough upholstered sofas and chairs to accommodate a regiment.

  On one of those seats sat a common laborer who did not know enough to rise when we entered the room. Instead, he showed a mostly toothless grin and nodded with revolting familiarity.

  Irene’s head was tilted to examine a particularly large and fine portrait of a family in eighteenth-century garb.

  “Irene, there is a strange man in the room,” I whispered under the velvet brim above her right ear.

  “I know. He was the first thing I noticed.”

  “And should have been the last! What is such a low fellow doing here?”

  “Could he be a witness, do you think? Why else are we here, if not to testify to what we have seen in the past two days?”

  “Testify? Surely we have seen nothing worth testifying to. And surely they could have had this fellow come by the servants’ stairs.”

  “I did not wish to stare when we entered, Nell. Perhaps you could describe him to me and I could determine what he is doing here from his appearance.”

  “So I am to stare, then?”

  “You know you stare so subtly. And your powers of description have much benefited from the exercise of keeping a diary.”

  That was true, so I fussed with the handkerchief, played with my chatelaine, consulted my lapel watch and otherwise made many useless movements that conveyed I was doing everything but observing our fellow loiterer.

  He seemed ill at ease, as well should anyone sitting in those worn, homespun clothes upon the exquisite petit-point upholstery.

  “A typical French street peddler or laborer,” I told Irene in a swift aside, as we made our way around the chamber, she studying the oil portraits, I creating a word portrait of our unlikely companion.

  “Workman’s boots, scuffed and cut. A stiff-crowned cap. Rough trousers. One of those silly short jackets that should be on sailors.”

  “And his features and peculiarities?” she asked, sotto voce. An opera singer can execute a sotto voce that is as soft as falling snow.

  I was forced actually to regard the man’s face.

  “A French nose.”

  “Which is?”

  “Large.”

  “Ah. Like an English nose.”

  I was too busy doing my duty to object. “Bony, raw hands. His are kneading his knees.”

  “Perhaps they trouble him.”

  “Or he is nervous to be in such fine surroundings.”

  “Anything mor
e to his face than a nose?”

  “Clean-shaven save for an untidy, unduly thick mustache, but then a workman cannot afford the meticulous upkeep of facial adornments. Of course one cannot see his mouth. The ears are . . . ears.”

  “Age?”

  “Perhaps fifty. His eyebrows are liberally sprinkled with white, and the mustache is milk-pale in the middle, though what hair I can see is dark. That is so odd, Irene. Why is men’s facial hair so often at odds with the hair on their heads?”

  She shrugged, but before she could answer, the sound of a door cracking open made us turn to face the room. The far door stood ajar, our guide in it. He nodded to the workman, who sprang up and vanished through the door without a word.

  “Irene!”

  “Yes, Nell?”

  “That, that . . . ill-kempt individual was allowed in before we were.”

  “Yes, Nell.”

  “And we are to wait?”

  “Yes, Nell, but not for long.”

  “I cannot see why even so debased a person as a royal rake would invite a common French workmen into his presence before two respectable English ladies.”

  “You forget that I am neither English nor respectable.”

  “You would be, if you had been born in England and had never gone on the stage. This is outrageous. Is this how Bertie treats a . . . an imagined paramour? He has no manners, not to mention morals.”

  “True, but we are not waiting for Bertie. What time does your clever little watch say?”

  Irene was not about to insert a pin into her silken Worth bodice, no matter how useful it was to know the time.

  “It is eleven minutes after 1:00 P.M.”