by Yves Fey
Theo pressed a hand to her own throat, swallowed hard. “That is Mélanie.”
“No!” Madame Besset cried out.
There was no doubt, but Theo said nothing more. Madame Besset drew back and glared at her in accusation. Michel knew that look. How dare Theo be alive when her daughter was dead? What right did she have to be whole and unharmed, and not some blackened remnant? Anger was easier than grief. It did not matter whom she hurt, if it kept grief away.
“Madame Besset, as Mélanie’s mother, you must make the formal identification.” It was the truth, and he guided her gently towards the clerk. Theo meant to follow them but stopped when he shook his head. Once he had settled the poor woman in the chair and made certain she was calm enough to fill out the brief form, he returned to Theo. “I may ask one of the men to escort her home. I think it wiser.”
“Whatever she wants,” Theo answered quietly. Michel knew she had asked the same questions of herself, and that there was no real answer. She had been brave and resourceful to have escaped. And lucky. She would stay with Madame Besset unless Mélanie’s mother could no longer bear to look at her.
Theodora asked him how many had died and how many had been saved through the break in the wall. After he answered, she said, “If I do not have a chance to speak to the other rescuers today, please tell them how grateful I am.”
“I will,” he promised.
“And what of Alicia?” she asked.
“Alicia?” He did not know the name.
“The little girl I carried to the wall. The child Mélanie gave me.”
“Ah. All the children were taken home by relatives.”
“But she was an orphan.”
“Then someone from her orphanage came,” he assured her. “No child was unclaimed.”
“I am glad she is safe,” Theo said.
A wail rose up. They both turned to see Madame Besset weeping. Shock and anger had given way. Now there was only pain. Theo hurried to her side. Gently, she helped the distraught woman to stand then guided her from the charnel house of the Palais de l’Industrie.
Michel turned back to find himself confronted by another family searching for answers to their tragedy. In reply to their furious questions, he began the litany again. “Ether was used to lubricate….”
Chapter Eighteen
But, yes, I've wept too much! The dawns are dismal.
Every moon is pitiless, every sun bitter.
~ Arthur Rimbaud
MICHEL had spent the entire night helping with the identification of the fire victims. Many of the bodies were claimed, if only by process of elimination. The Consul of Paraguay had the same idea that Michel had suggested, and dentists had been summoned to examine the cadavers’ teeth. He was almost asleep on his feet when an equally exhausted Cochefert appeared and handed him a hot café au lait.
“Drink it, Devaux,” Cochefert said. “Then take a carriage to the Montmartre cemetery. There is a murder to investigate. A child.”
“Yes, sir.” Michel drank the scalding liquid gratefully, handed the cup back, and left.
He drowsed fitfully in the carriage but forced himself to sit up when they turned onto the Boulevard de Clichy. Soon they turned up the short street to the entrance of the Cimetière Montmartre at the western base of the butte. Less than a century old, this was the second largest cemetery remaining inside Paris.
The carriage pulled into the circular driveway. Michel stepped out onto the gravel and drew a deep breath. The smell of living things was an infinite relief—new grass, spring flowers, tree bark, even dark earth. The dawn light was cool and grey, the green of the leaves lush even in the dimness. The grass gleamed, wet with dew. His senses were parched, and he breathed deeply, taking in the scents like water for thirst.
Turning, he saw a gendarme come over the crest of a low rise shored up by a grey stone wall. Behind it on his left, slabs and mausoleums were set along wide branching pathways. On the right, another section was tucked under the bridge that led up the hill to Montmartre. Michel climbed the steps to greet the gendarme. He wasn’t unseasoned but he looked greenish. An odor of vomit clung to him. This was going to be bad. Weaving among the trees and tombstones, Michel saw three more officers and a young man standing beneath a tree nearby and went to meet them. They were not looking at the body—another warning of the ugliness awaiting him.
Then he saw the corpse.
Michel had thought that anything would bring temporary relief from the ghastliness of the burned cadavers, but he had been wrong.
A young girl, perhaps ten or eleven, was propped against a granite tombstone. The skin of her abdomen had been sliced round and laid between her wide spread legs. Her intestines decorated her like a thick, glistening necklace, framing her tiny maimed breasts and open belly. Her nipples had been removed and lay in her open palms. They had been burned. Other red burn marks glowed, intimate and lurid against her white skin. Her eyes had been cut out. Michel didn’t see them. The killer might have committed some obscenity with them, or kept them as a memento.
Michel closed his eyes. He took a deep breath. Another. Exhaustion made it difficult to fight the heave in his guts. For a moment, he literally could not make his feet obey him and move forward. The horror of it stripped his defenses. She was a child—a child barely older than his sister had been when she was raped and murdered by Versailles soldiers. Fury and revulsion knotted inside his belly as the old images superimposed their agony on the present. Vengeance, the urge to murder, he understood too well—but not the lust to destroy innocence.
Look past the grotesquerie. Look past the twisting pain of memory.
Catch her killer.
Michel opened his eyes. He made himself approach. He found, if not the calm he wanted, a cold anger that awakened him. The little girl had not been killed here, or the ground would have been drenched with her blood. She was posed carefully, as an artist might. That did not mean the murderer was an artist, but Michel did think he considered his murder art. The killer wanted to shock, to horrify. But he also wanted to mesmerize. It might not be enough to have admired her after he first arranged her. He might need to see her again or to see the shock of those who discovered her. Michel told three of the officers to explore different sections of the cemetery. It was probably useless, as it would be easy to slip away between tombs in the dim morning, but it must be done. A bridge nearby arched over two sections of the cemetery. Michel thought he saw a figure move out of sight, but it might be only a swaying branch. He gestured a young officer he knew, Inspecteur Hugh Rambert, to go have a look.
He nodded toward the young man standing beneath the tree. “He found the body?”
“Yes,” an officer answered. “His name is Averill Charron.”
A Revenant. He knew the young man’s poetry. Morbid poetry did not make a murderer, or there would be a thousand in Paris alone. But a morbid sensibility in a man who had supposedly discovered a corpse needed to be questioned
Perhaps she was his latest poem.
Michel told one of his remaining men to allow only police to enter the cemetery, the other he set to guard the corpse. Then he went to Averill Charron. The poet looked to be in his early twenties. Only slightly shorter than Michel, he was trim and fit, if not in a blatant way. His defensive posture straightened as Michel stopped before him. His fair skin looked pasty from shock.
“Monsieur Charron,” he said. “I am Inspecteur Devaux.”
“Inspecteur,” Charron replied tersely.
He was tense, sullen, frightened. Natural enough. His eyes were curious, the irises tinted a crystalline blue with only the thinnest dark rim to set them off from the whites. They were even lighter than those of the beautiful blonde, Theodora, who frequented the group. Charron was beautiful too, beautiful enough for it to have caused him problems. Perhaps he wanted the problems? Perhaps not. It was probably irrelevant, but Michel laid the thoughts out in his mind like pieces of a jigsaw, to be shifted until they formed a pattern. He chose a r
elevant question. “Do you recognize this girl, monsieur?”
Charron looked over at the corpse, looked away. He hesitated a little too long before answering. “I’ve never seen her before.”
“You have seen her,” Michel insisted.
Charron frowned, shook his head. The confusion seemed genuine, yet he spoke a little too carefully, not looking at Michel. “She seems familiar, that’s all.”
“Familiar?” Michel put all his skepticism into his voice.
Now Charron looked at Michel defiantly. “This is not some scene from Zola.”
Surprised, Michel paused. It was exactly what he had been thinking earlier. In Zola’s novel Thérèse Raquin the murderer went to the morgue to look for the body of his victim. Michel waited a heartbeat before inquiring, “So, I have not found my Laurent?”
Surprised in turn, Charron flushed. “No.”
“I am glad to hear it.” The scoffing tone earned him another angry glare. Michel remembered reading the novel as a youth and asking his adoptive father if such things happened. Guillame Devaux had said they did indeed. Killers came to the morgue. They returned to the scene of the crime. When Michel first started as a detective, he looked closely at the too helpful young man who said he had discovered a murdered prostitute and proved him her killer. However illogical, the guilty sometimes reported their crimes. Some killers were horrified by what they had done, trapped in a coil of terror and guilt. Others thought themselves too clever to be caught. Charron might be either. There was no blood on his clothes, but he could have changed them. Michel asked, “Did you touch her?”
“No!” Charron’s teeth chattered a little. He clenched his jaw to stop them. “I thought of taking her pulse, but it was obviously pointless.”
“Taking her pulse,” Michel repeated.
“I am a medical student.”
Interesting. The cuts on the body didn’t look surgical, but they could be deliberately crude. Michel scribbled a note, to unnerve Charron if nothing else. There was some bit of information eluding his brain. It would come. “Why were you here so early, Monsieur Charron? Were you visiting a grave?”
“No.” He took a moment to gather himself before answering. “I go to the cemeteries sometimes to write poetry. The quiet… The mood….”
The explanation he gave was entirely plausible for who he was. That did not mean it was the truth. Michel continued to probe. “How often?”
“Some weeks, several times,” he said defensively. “Sometimes not for several months.”
“To the Montmartre cemetery in particular?” Michel asked.
“Montmartre. Montparnasse. Père Lachaise.”
“Père Lachaise,” Michel repeated, memory tugging him.
“Yes.” Charron’s tone sharpened. “I went to visit the memorial of the Commune.”
Michel knew the reference was meant to antagonize him. Charron would assume that a policeman would despise the Communards. Michel felt a pang in his chest, thinking of the plain stone monument in the cemetery. Keeping his expression impassive, he quoted, “Aux Morts de la Commune.”
“Yes,” Charron replied. For a moment he seemed perplexed, then took up his litany. “I go to the Batignolles to pay my respects to Verlaine. I go to Montparnasse to visit Baudelaire.”
“And today?”
“J'ai voulu communier avec Hugo.” Charron’s acerbic reply called on his earlier reference to the Commune, on Victor Hugo’s liberal sentiments, and on his own desire to commune with the dead. The poet playing word games.
“You got up before dawn because you desired communion with Victor Hugo?” Michel asked flatly.
Charron sighed heavily. “No, I couldn’t sleep. Tuesday I was at the fire. It was horrible—my sister’s arm was broken in the panic. I helped attend to the burn injuries. Finally, I went home but I couldn’t sleep. It was no better last night. I didn’t want to stare at the ceiling again. I’ve been walking in Montmartre most of the night—”
The rambling stopped abruptly. “Can anyone verify that?” Michel asked.
Charron bit his lip. After a moment he said, “I went to the Cabaret du Néant for an hour perhaps. Otherwise, I avoided people.”
The Cabaret of Nothingness, where the patrons sat at coffin tables and watched an optical illusion in which a man dissolved into a skeleton. Would someone who had just murdered a young girl dally with such nonsense? Or did he go there before, for inspiration? As a secret joke? In any case, he might have an alibi for an hour at least. “What time?”
Charron shrugged. “Two?”
Michel could smell the absinthe on his breath. However, the scent was faint, and he didn’t seem to be drunk or even hung over. He might have been shocked sober. “Tell me, Monsieur Charron, do you believe that a poet must arrive at the unknown through a relentless disordering of his senses?”
Charron stared at him. “You read Rimbaud’s poetry, Inspecteur?”
“In Paris, even chimneysweeps read Rimbaud.”
“You are probably right.” Charron gave a short, harsh laugh. “Yes, I believe a poet must seek the unknown. He must break the bonds of convention by any means possible.” He paused and looked at Michel intently. “Every class has conventions which imprison the mind, the soul, as tightly as a coffin.”
“And must he become monstrous?” Michel prodded him once again with Rimbaud.
“He must become a seer.”
The missing bit of information flashed in Michel’s mind. “Dr. Urbain Charron is your father?”
“Yes.” Hearing the name, the younger Charron’s nostrils quivered as if they scented rottenness.
So, there was trouble at home. Michel had heard of something unpleasant about the father. Work with the criminally insane? Or with prostitutes? Vivisection? He would have to look into that. “You are following in his footsteps?”
The Revenant’s face became a mask. “I am not at all sure it is the right field for me.”
“No?”
“No,” Charron responded icily. “I’m not fond of blood.”
It was an effort not to murmur touché. Michel doubted it was true but it was an excellent retort. Instead, he told Charron he was free to leave. There was no reason to charge him, but he would be investigated, discreetly.
The officers returned from searching the cemetery and bridge with nothing to report. Bertillon’s men were arriving with equipment to photograph the body in situ. It was another of his innovations, one that Michel considered more useful than the complex system of measurements. He gestured for the men to wait, glad that Bertillon was not with them. He wanted to survey the scene without any distractions.
First he examined the girl head on, the way the killer had presented her. Even disfigured as she was, it was apparent she had been pretty. Had she been raised within the demimonde and sold accidentally or deliberately to a sadist? Snatched from the street? Michel could not help but think of his vanished children, but not one of their bodies had been found and this girl was blatantly displayed. Curious, he began to circle around the grave, wondering if the killer had only posed her from the front, or if, like a sculptor, he had considered her body from other angles. He could not tell. Two trees and some low bushes framed the gravestone against which she was placed, and ivy crawled everywhere. She would be partially visible from the back, but that might not be a deliberate act. Then he stopped. Pushing aside the bushes, he moved closer to the back of the gravestone.
In the center was a cross marked in thick black charcoal. Rising off to one side were strange smears like wings.
Chapter Nineteen
Darkness, woe, come flooding back….
~ Paul Verlaine
‘ABRUPTLY, even while weeping with distress, he precipitates himself into new debauches and, raving with delirium, hurls himself upon the child brought to him, gouges out the eyes, runs his finger around the bloody, milky socket….’
Theo shut Là Bas, feeling queasy.
Violence against children was unforgivable.
Theo glowered at the book, then slid it back into her knapsack. She would finish it—eventually. The present had its own violence. Averill had come late yesterday to tell her of his gruesome discovery in the cemetery, but she suspected that what he told her only hinted at the hideousness. Theo wanted to comfort him, but she felt so hollow herself she could not find the right words. There were no right words, only platitudes that quivered like rickety bridges over the blackest suffering.
Theo rose from her bench in the garden behind Notre Dame and walked to the willow overhanging the stone embankment. Parting around the island, the Seine flowed past. Impatiently, she looked toward the Left Bank, the world of the Sorbonne, of students, printers and poets and artists, as bohemian in its way as Montmartre.
Where was Carmine? Mélanie’s voice echoed in her mind. “She is always late just because she thinks punctuality is bourgeois.”
Theo had seen Carmine only once since the fire, after taking Madam Besset home. They were both subdued, almost silent. Neither of them had been able to cry. Theo almost wept when she identified Mélanie, but could not indulge in tears when Madame Besset’s loss was so much greater. She wondered where Mélanie would be buried. She should have a beautiful sculpture over her grave, a Greek maiden like the ones she painted.
Clouds drifted overhead. The spring breeze, moist and cool, caressed her skin. It carried a subtle scent of bright green grass, a bolder one of golden marigolds, even a hint of primrose. Theo let the natural perfumes comfort her. The memorial service for the victims of the fire had failed to do so, and the grisly Là Bas only aggravated her anger.