Floats the Dark Shadow

by Yves Fey

  “His choice of entertainment is peculiar,” Michel said, “but he seems lucid.”

  “Appearances can be deceiving. Many of the patients here can assume the semblance of sanity.”

  “He is insane?”

  Urbain Charron hesitated. “Unstable. The brilliant often are.”

  Michel wasn’t sure why the doctor was stirring up doubt, but he was. Only, the man appeared uncertain how far to go. “Why did you presume I’d come about your daughter?”

  The doctor glared at him, his eyes like chips of ice. “I have no intention of discussing these matters with you.”

  Michel could not demand it at this point, but he allowed himself a final prod. “The murder victim is one of several kidnapped children. I would like you to confirm your whereabouts on the evenings in question.”

  Urbain Charron swelled with outrage. His large hands closed into brutal fists, and he looked about to strike Michel. That would be grounds for arrest. But Charron guessed his intent and subsided. “You are insulting…” Charron said in a sibilant hiss, “…but the murder of children may justify it. My secretary will be instructed to give you the information you need—as long as you come and go before I arrive in my office. I do not wish to see you ever again.”

  Michel took his leave. Charron had said the murder of children, but he could have inferred more than one death from the kidnappings Michel had mentioned. Early next week he would gather the information Urbain Charron had so generously offered. Either the doctor was smug in his innocence, or he’d arranged alibis to cover the crimes. Michel could confront him again once he possessed more information.

  A vile man. A glutton for power.

  Taking another fiacre back to the Palais de Justice, Michel pushed this new puzzle piece around in his mind. Urbain Charron revolted him. The malicious torment he inflicted on the helpless women at the asylum had no direct relevance, but that, combined with his vivisection experiments, convinced Michel he was capable of almost anything. The doctor could easily be the evil genius behind these crimes, moving his son about like a pawn. Even if he was not involved with the kidnapped children, having such a father would warp any man. Had Averill Charron suffered ugly abuse at his father’s hands and now inflicted it on children as powerless as he once was?

  What would it be like to have such a man for a father? Both Michel’s fathers had loved and protected him.

  The fiacre stopped outside the Dépôt. Michel got out—and staggered. He stood exactly where his adoptive father’s body had lain. Feigning calm, he forced himself to walk to the wall of the quai, to stare blindly at the Seine. Almost every day of his life, he walked past this place. He lived in Guillame Devaux’s house. Michel had expected the March anniversary of the Commune to trigger guilt. He had been on guard. Now, unexpectedly, gratitude had left him vulnerable, and a single misstep unleashed the flood of pain.

  Reality disappeared in the onslaught of memory. He heard the bomb explode outside the Palais de Justice. He saw Guillame Devaux lying dead in the street, his face contorted with agony, his body scattered in pieces. The man who had saved Michel’s life had died because of him. He had loved Guillame Devaux as a father, and had come to hate him for not being his true father.

  ~

  Michel had been eighteen. Old enough to know better, young enough not to care. The Commune cast a long shadow and Michel had found its darkness brighter than the pallid light of everyday life. He’d still felt bound to the past, to the Communards he’d worshipped with a boy’s fervor. He’d still felt bound by blood to his cousin Luc, who had been the glowing symbol of that worship. Now Luc, hero of the Commune, had returned. Luc, who was dashing, articulate, brave—and utterly ruthless.

  In 1883, Paris was again a shambles, the mammoth stock market crash only a year behind them. Wild speculation and borrowing had spiraled out of control. Banks all around France had collapsed and finally l’Union Générale floundered. The Catholic bank blamed its demise on the Jews and Freemasons, as if its own gluttonous greed, its falsified reports, had no bearing. France plummeted headlong into a recession that would last another decade. Guillame Devaux, brigadier of the Sûreté, had helped keep the peace in turbulent Paris. But keeping the peace meant oppressing the people. He’d spoken soberly of the perils of anarchy and warned of worse bloodshed, but the words Michel had once found wise constricted him like a straightjacket.

  Defiant, he’d wanted words of passion, of rebellion. At her trial, the Commune’s great heroine, Louise Michel, had cried out, “You decree that any heart which beats for freedom has the right to nothing but a lump of lead. I now claim mine. Let me live and I will go on crying for revenge. I shall avenge my fallen brothers. If you have any courage, you will kill me!"

  Twenty-five thousand Communards had died or been executed, but they had not given Louise Michel her lump of lead. She had been deported. Now, twelve years after the fall of the Commune, she’d returned to Paris, her fiery spirit unquenched. Continuing her fight against oppression, she’d led a huge demonstration at the Esplanade of Les Invalides. Afterwards, a huge crowd marched across Paris. Loaves of bread were looted from bakers' shops. Louise Michel was charged with instigating the looting. Ever fearless, she’d turned herself in to the police.

  Montmartre was in an uproar. Their heroine was arrested because some tag-alongs had stolen bread. Who could blame them? They stole because they were starving! Anger simmered hotly under the cold, heavy lid of fear. Everyone believed the protesters would go to jail—or worse, be gunned down just as during the Commune. The cafés were filled with furious arguments and songs of revolution.

  Michel had shared their zeal. He remembered sitting in Le Rat Mort on a cold, wet day, drinking red wine and feeling like a man. Surrounding him were tables filled with the glorious riffraff of Montmartre—musicians, artists, poets, radical journalists and even more radical anarchists. Craziness became the ultimate sanity, bourgeois sobriety the death of the spirit. Michel’s hair had grown long and shaggy. He tossed it out of his eyes as he quoted Kropotkin’s Anarchist Manifesto, “We demand bread for all, work for all, freedom and justice for all.”

  That was when his cousin reappeared, sliding into the chair beside him. “For words such as those,” Luc said, “Kropotkin was sentenced to five years' imprisonment.”

  He looked a little like Michel’s true father, with finer bones and a more olive coloring than Michel had inherited. Luc’s easy surface charm barely concealed an inner ferocity. Michel responded to both instantly. The past was not dead. It was alive, here, now, with this man. Michel had found his true family again.

  Luc filled him brimful of tales of woe and triumph. He told Michel how he’d fought at Père Lachaise cemetery, the final bastion of the Communards. Michel envisioned the thick early morning fog that gave way to drizzling showers. He saw the cherry trees dripping rain like tears. Then the army blew open the gates and rushed upon them. The Communards fought hand to hand with the enemy amid the tombs. Most died in the battle. Those captured were lined up against a wall and shot. Luc claimed he was the fabled last man on the barricade, that he fired the last shot before he walked off into the mist. Paris wasn’t safe, so he took a new name and vanished.

  “Where did you go?”

  “Many places, Algeria, Madagascar, Dahomey. I was dealing guns two years ago in Abyssinia. I had a partner, but he took sick, Arthur Rimbaud.”

  “The poet?”

  Luc smiled. “A poet? Oh, I doubt that. Rimbaud was a cold-blooded, mercenary creature. He read nothing but books on engineering.”

  Filled with hero worship, Michel believed him. Now he thought his cousin knew what stories would thrill him, as he had when Michel was a child. Of course, Luc told him stories about his parents, things he barely remembered, things he never knew. And, of course, they talked politics. The dream of anarchy—the triumph of the honest poor over the corrupt rich.

  “What would be the perfect revolutionary act?” Luc asked him one day.

  “Fo
r me? To rescue Louise Michel.”

  Luc smiled. “And how would you achieve that?”

  “She goes to trial in June.” Michel had fantasies, but he knew they were just that. “She will be heavily guarded.”

  “In shackles.”

  That stirred his anger. “We could organize—”

  “—and be gunned down in the streets, as always.”

  “A distraction then. A disruption.”

  Luc waited.

  “A bomb.” A spear of ice pierced Michel. He knew that Luc had led him to the idea.

  “A bomb in the Palais de Justice.” Luc’s eyes glittered.

  Michel hesitated. “An explosion to cause panic and in the chaos rescue Louise Michel?”

  “Yes, of course.” Luc leaned closer. “And how would you do it? Do it and escape?”

  They argued about various targets within the Palais de Justice and about the structure of the time bomb. Michel could visit his adoptive father at will. He could saunter off and explore various parts of the building. Luc suggested the Café Louis, where the lawyers gathered for lunch. Somehow, he even acquired an advocate’s robe. “I will walk unseen among them.” He laughed. Michel argued that an empty trial room would be the ideal target. But there were seldom empty rooms. Cases piled up endlessly. Reporters flocked the halls along with the accused and their lawyers.

  Luc shrugged. “We can send a warning.”

  “They would clear the building, but what if they searched for the bomb?”

  “Stupidity can be fatal.”

  Michel had imagined killing. In fantasy, he’d climbed the ramparts, fighting to the death and taking the enemy with him. But even at the height of his rebellion, he was by then enough Guillame Devaux’s son not to want to murder anyone. Perhaps Marcel Calais’s son had also seen enough horror. He’d watched his mother starve to death. He’d seen bloody, bloated corpses in the street, crawling with maggots. He’d seen his sister raped and bayoneted. The soldiers had threatened him with the same before Guillame Devaux entered the abandoned building and saved him.

  He was also enough Guillame Devaux’s son to know of the million things that could go wrong when carrying out a crime.

  Luc scoffed. “Do you think we’ll blow ourselves up? We are not idiots.”

  The longer they talked, the more Michel resisted. The heroine of the Commune might be freed by a well-executed plan with many participants, but the most likely outcome would be slaughter in the streets. He felt both a coward and a fool when he expressed his doubt, but Luc only said, “I believe you are right. Rescue is impossible. Louise Michel might even refuse us. She is willing to be a martyr to the cause—to take that lump of lead into her heart.”

  “You thought all along it was a crazy idea,” Michel accused.

  Luc grinned at him. “I believe in crazy ideas. How else can I be an anarchist?”

  Without his glorious plan, however futile, Michel felt bereft.

  Leaning forward, Luc lowered his voice. “We cannot rescue Louise Michel, but nothing else needs change.”

  It had all changed for Michel. For a second he felt only confusion, then a cold weight sank to the pit of his stomach. “The bomb.”

  Luc’s smile was hard. “Propaganda by deed.”

  Michel argued fiercely, “In Le Révolté Kropotkin says a structure based on centuries of history cannot be destroyed with a few kilos of dynamite.”

  “A few kilos are a beginning. Wave after wave of us will crash down on them. In the end, we will obliterate them.”

  “Or they us,” Michel said.

  Finally, Luc just laughed at the idea of no one dying. “What does it matter? I will try to stay alive, but if I die killing them, I will become a martyr for those who follow.”

  “Many are innocent,” Michel protested.

  “There are no innocent bourgeois,” Luc said scornfully. Then, quoting Robespierre, “Pity is treason.”

  “Robespierre was a monster.” Suddenly Michel was furious. “Pity is human.”

  “You haven’t the belly for a revolutionary,” Luc sneered. “Your father would be ashamed of you.”

  “My father fought to build a new world. All you want is to destroy.”

  They argued and Michel stalked off in a rage. When he went back to Luc’s room the next day it was empty. Luc was gone. There was crumpled paper thrown away, bits and pieces of wire scattered about. There was a grainy substance Michel knew must be gunpowder. Luc planned to bomb the Palais de Justice. But when and where?

  His cousin had acquired an advocate’s robe. Luc had a sense of drama. He would not be able to resist walking invisible amongst the enemy. Michel knew where his father kept his extra weapons, knew the location of the key. He ran home, unlocked the drawer, and took out the weapon. His adoptive mother stood in the doorway, crying, not understanding what was wrong, only that something was. Then Michel looked up to find Guillame Devaux standing in the doorway. His father did not look perplexed at all, and Michel realized that he knew about Luc Calais. His belly became a black bottomless pit in the knowledge of his own stupidity and the enormity of his betrayal.

  “Where has he gone?” his father asked him.

  “The Café Louis.”

  “Stay here,” his father said. “Give me your word.”

  Michel almost refused. He almost lied. Yet to have his word trusted was a terrible gift. “I give you my word,” he whispered.

  And then Guillame Devaux was gone.

  Five minutes later he heard the explosion. From half a mile away, it was no louder than a gunshot. His word made no difference now. He ran to the Palais de Justice. The street outside and the courtyard leading to the café were almost impassable. But the police knew him and let him through. His father lay scattered in pieces—a bloody arm, a leg, the agonized head still attached to the cratered torso. He had found the bomb and carried it out of the café, hoping to fling it into the Seine.

  The police took Michel to the detective’s station. Overwhelmed with guilt, he went silently, but he did not think he could endure trial and prison. Dying would be easy, a cage unbearable. He told them he had warned his father. That at least was true. His father’s compatriots did not arrest him. They brought him brandy. They offered sympathy. At first, he wondered why they did not suspect his involvement, for he must have been seen among the anarchists. But no one treated him like a leper. Finally he realized that they thought he’d been acting as a spy. His father had covered for him.

  Michel thought his culpability would come out when they arrested Luc, but they did not capture his cousin. No one knew his true name. No one had seen him in Paris since the explosion. There were endless places Luc could have gone, but Michel only knew where he’d already been—Abyssinia, Algeria, Madagascar, Dahomey. Running guns, he’d said, but those names suggested a stint in the French Foreign Legion. Their troops had been used against the Communards, but after the slaughter, many desperate rebels had fled there.

  So Michel lied his way into the Legion.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  I have kissed thy mouth. There was a bitter taste on thy lips. Was it the taste of blood? But perchance it is the taste of love… They say that love hath a bitter taste….

  ~ Oscar Wilde

  THEO stood for a moment, stunned, then ran after Averill. The hall was empty, but she heard the front door slam. She would not chase him into the street. Clenching her fists, she sagged against the wall. She felt scraped bare, inside and out. Emotions raced along her nerves like fever chills, hot and cold ripples of anger, fear, and fierce desire.

  Closing her eyes, Theo drew a deep breath. She could not continue to prop herself up in the back hall. The dinner invitation would give her another chance to talk to him.

  She went upstairs to the guest room. Exhausted but too agitated to sleep, she paced and fretted, tried to read, paced again. “He loves me too,” she whispered fervently.

  Whatever problems there were could be dealt with if they faced them together. At last
she managed to doze fitfully until Bettine came to tell her it was time to change. After a sponge bath, she put on one of the dresses she kept here, a gift from her aunt. The taffeta skirt and bodice were striped in tints of pink and draped with fine net and white lace. Over them was a little corset of cerise satin embroidered with pink roses. It was a pretty dress and Theo knew she looked pretty in it, if more girlish than she liked. Bettine added some of the fragrant tea roses to her hair.

  When she took her seat in the dining room, Averill offered one apologetic glance then avoided her gaze. The first course of tomato aspic looked like jellied blood and quivered unpleasantly. Theo forced herself to eat it. Aunt Marguerite chattered. The cocaine had left her a mass of jitters. She hushed under her husband’s cold stare. Francine made an attempt to draw her father out, sulking when rebuffed. He frowned at Theo but refused even to look at Averill. Grand-mère looked disapproving of everyone, especially the son-in-law who had banished her new puppy from the dining room. Theo was grateful for the uneasy silence. Her headache had returned full force. The clink and scrape of silver against china grated on her nerves. The candle flames flickered too brightly, distracting as snapping fingers.

  Cod with pearl onions in a pale, bland cream sauce came next, valiantly garnished with parsley. Her uncle roused himself and began speaking of such current events as he deemed worthy for ladies’ ears. He looked at Theo pointedly, even as he continued to ignore Averill. Had he learned of their trip to the morgue? Or the murder? Getting embroiled in such events was considered crude by society—not mischance but inherent lack of character.

  As the fish course was removed and sweetbreads placed before them, Uncle Urbain addressed her directly. It was an accusation, if not the one she expected. “You could not resist joining the furor at the École des Beaux-Arts today, could you, Theodora?”

  “Yes, I was there.” She prickled with defiance.

  Her uncle seized the argument. “You seem quite proud of your selfish indulgence when you should be ashamed. Because of you and your ilk, the École has been closed for a month.”