City of Light (City of Mystery)

by Kim Wright

  The files were a bit of a mess, since the science of fingerprinting seemed to have arisen in several different cultures at once. There were reports of the successful use of the technique in China, India, Argentina, Scotland, and, of course, France. Britain had its own share of champions of the procedure, ranging from a cousin of Darwin’s, Francis Dalton, who was apparently taken quite seriously in the scientific community, to a fellow named Henry Faulds, who apparently was not.

  Faulds, in fact, had written to the Yard personally the year before, in the midst of the Ripper hysteria, urging that the detectives there use this new tool in their pursuit of Jack. His long and rambling letter surprised Davy, since he’d never seen it during the Ripper investigation, and he suspected that neither had Trevor. Of course, to be fair, most of the mail regarding the Ripper case had been sent by crackpots of the most bizarre order and very little of this so-called advice had made its way to the desks of the actual detectives. Despite the fact he was a physician and a missionary who had first seen the technique used in China, It would seem that Faulds had been regarded as just another eccentric, and that his letter had been buried deep within the bulging file. The man’s hyperbole and tendency to repeat himself had likely not helped his cause.

  In contrast, Dalton’s reports were written in the sort of measured prose that implied a more conventionally educated mind. Faulds may been summarily dismissed, but Dalton’s work in fingerprinting was apparently well-funded and ongoing. It would be a fine thing, Davy thought, to be able to rely on British science rather than French – a fine thing if Dalton’s claims were not quite so disturbing. Apparently, fingerprinting was only one element of Dalton’s broader theories on body typing and his overall plan, it seemed, was to use his research to prove that the Anglo-Saxton race was innately superior to all others. Scotland Yard could scarcely align themselves with a man like that, no matter how much they might want to use his research.

  Besides, the claims themselves seemed suspect. Dalton allegedly had 8000 sets of fingerprints in his personal collection, and wrote that he had collected the vast majority of them within the past year. An impressive number of specimens, certainly, but would 8000 be enough to allow a true scientist to draw such wide-reaching conclusions? Dalton claimed that no two humans have the same set of fingerprints and that, unlike most of our bodily features, our fingerprints do not change with the passage of time. Davy had sunk back in his seat, mystified. If, by his own admission, Dalton had only had these fingerprints in his possession for a year, how could he conclude so definitively that fingerprints remain the same as a person ages?

  If only there had been someone else here to talk to, someone to help him sort if all out.

  Davy had spent the last twenty minutes of his journey in a fitful, unsatisfying nap. When the train had at last heaved into Paddington Station, he had jumped off and had hired a lad with a cart to help him haul the ledgers back to Scotland Yard. Scotland Yard, where he now sat with lighted candles all around him, like a priest about to embark upon some sort of unholy sacrament.

  Trevor and the others did not know that Davy had this flask and these glasses in his possession. With so much to report about his inspection of the Cleveland Street property, this liquor chest had seemed at the time too trivial to mention. In fact, if Davy had been asked, he could not have explained the impulse which had prompted him to seize only this one item from among the piles of evidence and bring it back to the forensics lab. But he suspected – at least if he could manage not to muck it all up in the process – that he had before him an important part of the puzzle whose solution would lead them to Rayley Abrams.

  Davy began to grind small flakes of carbon with a mortar and pestle. When they were as fine as dust, he sprinkled the mixture over the part of the glass where Hammond’s thumbprint had so definitively come to rest. Mickey had claimed with great confidence that Hammond was the only one to use this liquor case and Davy was banking on the boy’s statement. A whiff of the brandy in the flask did seem to suggest, even to a man with Davy’s limited experience of luxury, that this was a rarified quaff, indeed likely to have been held back for Hammond’s private enjoyment, while his clients and the boys were nudged along the path to perdition with cheaper gin and lager.

  The dark dust settled over the fingerprint, rendering it gratifyingly visible, showing precisely the sort of whorls and arches that the fingerprint files had promised. Davy took up the piece of clear tape he had cut from the roll in the coroner’s office and pressed it evenly into the dust. The French documents had not provided much counsel on how long it took to “lift” a fingerprint but Davy didn’t want to rush the process. He hummed a few bars of “God Save the Queen” to calm his nerves while he waited.

  Paris

  10:05 PM

  The string quartet wedged in the corner of the parlor offered vigorous assurance that Madame Seaver’s soiree would be, if nothing else, very loud. Trevor found the crush of the crowd and the volume of the party a relief, since it allowed him to merely nod at people as he passed them without feeling any compulsion to try to speak. His plan was to weave his way through the series of rooms, going first one way and then the other, moving briskly and with a quizzical frown on his face, as if he was in search of a particular person, some refreshment, or even the loo. As he brushed past the guests, it would give him the opportunity to observe them without necessarily being observed in return.

  The party offered, to put it mildly, a fascinating variety of human specimens. A mixture of French and English bubbled through the room, the voices animated with excitement. As promised, Annie Oakley held court in a far corner, with party guests literally waiting in line for the chance to meet her. Oakley was far more feminine than Trevor would have guessed from the description of the woman as a female cowboy, but, evidently conscious of what it took to please her public, she was dressed in buckskin and boots, her long hair tumbling around her shoulders and a brown suede Stetson dangling down her back.

  Her presence here seemed to determine the theme of the party, for half the men were also wearing western hats. Everyone was awash in enthusiasm over the idea that Oakley and Buffalo Bill would shortly be leading a procession of cowboys, Indians, and cattle of various ilk down the Champs-Elysses for the official opening for the Exhibition. Trevor remembered Rayley’s letter about the party for Gustave Eiffel and how so many of the people in attendance had been outfitted in clothing that paid tribute to the tower’s design. Now it was the American west, a place Trevor would venture to guess few people in this room had ever seen. The Exhibition did indeed seem to be making good on its promise to bring the whole world to Paris. In his walks to and fro through the party, Trevor had found himself at one point briefly waylaid by a very drunk man named Paul Gauguin who had insisted upon telling him of the wonders of some place called Tahiti.

  “Such seclusion offers a man the chance to reinvent himself,” Gauguin had declared, while Trevor had struggled to think where on earth this Tahiti might be. He was fairly sure it wasn’t Europe and the word didn’t sound American either, despite the fact that Gauguin was among the men wearing Stetsons, a ludicrously large one that kept slipping over his impassioned blue eyes. Trevor was eventually able to deduce that Tahiti was somewhere in the South Pacific and that the island was establishing a pavilion in Paris for the Exhibition. Apparently many small unknown nations were joining the Americans in their pavilion-building quest, hoping to use this fine Parisian stage to introduce themselves to the wider world. The international pavilions were like the Eiffel Tower – not yet complete - but apparently there had been enough in the Tahitian one to enchant the imminently enchantable Gauguin. He had also announced himself to be a painter, hardly a remarkable status in this circle of self-proclaimed artists. In his very limited interactions with the other guests, Trevor had already met three musicians, an actress, two painters, a sculptor in the medium of glass, a ballerina, and a magician.

  It was scarcely ten and he was exhausted. The manic energy of the
party had been originally diverting, but now made him feel as if the very life force was being sucked from his body. First the tower, now the cowboys, and undoubtedly the next great Parisian event would be a tribute to the pavilions of the South Pacific, with the guests clacking together coconuts and braiding large vulgar flowers into their hair. The French were so childlike in their quest for novelty, Trevor thought with a roll of his lip, so quick to abandon tradition in favor of the ever-changing nouveau. Their worship of the modern was indiscriminate and fawning, at least in contrast to his own cautious British reserve, and Trevor wondered once again how Rayley had felt here, if he had somehow managed over time to come to terms with the French mentality. Trevor rather doubted it. The whole damn country was in poor taste.

  He pulled away from the growing circle of guests listening to Gauguin rhapsodizing about the natural nobility of partially-clad Tahitian women, and his eyes momentarily locked with Annie Oakley’s. She too had stepped back from the crowd for a moment of solitude among the deep red curtains, and as their gazes met, Trevor and Annie exchanged a small, ironic smile. It was the code of two people who knew themselves to be outsiders, even if one of them was the center of attention and the other was most emphatically not. She’s an imposter here too, Trevor thought, and she has the wit to recognize the fact. Earlier that afternoon, Emma had told him that it was rumored that until she had begun to tour with Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley had never been west of Ohio.

  Speaking of Emma, where was she? When they had all four entered the front foyer where a squadron of maids had stood ready to take their wraps, Emma had rather defiantly let her borrowed blue velvet cloak slide off her shoulders and onto the floor in a heavy puddle. The abrupt gesture gave the effect that she was a Venus emerging naked from the foam and it signaled that her plan for dealing with the potential discomfort of this evening was the exact opposite of Trevor’s. While he hoped to blend in, Emma clearly intended to stand out. As a maid stooped to retrieve the blue cloak, Trevor and Tom had exchanged a look of wordless amazement. Was this truly the maid from Mayfair, the schoolmaster’s daughter they had often teased for being too serious? And then Emma had sailed off into the crowd unescorted, without so much as a backward glance at either man. Geraldine’s extreme self-satisfaction had been perhaps the most difficult part of the scene to bear.

  One of the circulating waiters paused before him, elevating a large tray of cocktails for Trevor’s perusal. A wide mouthed glass with some manner of red liquid, a pale green concoction in a tall slender goblet. The one beside it emerald, and the next, even more horrifyingly, was bright blue. One appeared to be made of milk and cinnamon, while another bore layers of gold, ranging from a pale yellow at the top of the glass to dark amber at the bottom. Trevor saw nothing he could easily indentify as gin, brandy, or beer. He would have dismissed them as cocktails designed for the amusement of ladies, but the men around him appeared to be gulping them too. Trevor supposed he should carry a drink of some sort in his hand, since nothing marked a lawman faster than abstinence in a social setting. He didn’t think anyone at the party thought of him as anything other than Geraldine’s nephew, if indeed anyone had stopped to think of him at all, but still…

  He scooped up the palest drink on the tray, since he could not quite shake the impression that the jewel-toned ones were some variation of the poisonous brews that had done in the Borgias. He sampled it carefully, but was unable to hazard a guess of what plants might have yielded their juice to create the violet-tinged flavors inside the glass. Sloe berries? Pomegranates? Some fortified cherry liquour?

  And just then he saw Emma gliding past him on the arm of Armand Delacroix.

  Geraldine had also noted the movement of Emma and Delacroix across the room and like Trevor, she reacted with alarm. As Marjorie Mallory had predicted, Isabel was not present, and Delacroix had spent the first part of the evening escorting his alleged niece around the party, introducing her to nearly everyone in sight. But now the child was devouring pastries over by one of the food tables and Delacroix appeared to have been snared by Emma. Or had it happened the other way around?

  Geraldine looked to the right. Trevor was standing guard, some ridiculous pink drink halfway to his lips. She looked to the left. Tom too was sidling toward them. So good, at least they were all aware of Emma’s position in the room. They had originally planned to draw Isabel into a discussion of other socials which had been held in honor of the Exhibition, hoping that in the process of talking about parties they’d attended together, she would also be divulging the dates in which Armand had been in Paris. If Emma was careful to be subtle with her questioning, presumably the same strategy would work just as well with Armand himself.

  Since Emma was well-monitored by the men, Geraldine drifted over to the dessert table where the Marianne was steadily popping petit fours into her mouth.

  “Good, aren’t they?” Geraldine ventured.

  The girl, or perhaps actually the boy, merely glanced at Geraldine, apparently unsurprised at being addressed in English and irritated at having been interrupted, however briefly, in her assault on the buffet. Geraldine had seen the same sort of intense, compulsive eating in the pregnant teenage girls from the foundling home, whom she often employed to help Emma with the housework. When a young person had gone hungry at some point in their life and thus carried the fear that hunger might return at any time, it seemed they would always approach a bountiful display of food in precisely this businesslike fashion, determined to consume a much as possible in the least amount of time and resentful of any social construct, such as conversation, which might impede them in this mission.

  So Armand was evidently keeping Marianne, be she male or female, in the same state of malnutrition he had inflicted on his other young employees. Tom had explained it all to Geraldine during the channel crossing, but it was still a bit shocking to stand beside the child and to note her relentless attack on the sugary treats of the dessert table. Emma had distracted Armand and pulled him away from Marianne’s side, but there was no telling when he would be back and the iron bars of his control would once again descend around her. In the meantime, the child clearly intended to eat as much as possible.

  Geraldine popped a sweet into her own mouth and considered Marianne out of the corner of one eye. She was wearing gloves – bad form while dining and Geraldine was surprised that Armand would not have better schooled the girl in manners. After all, she was on display in hopes of attracting the attention of a certain class of men, although Armand was discreet and it was hard to determine which men in the room, if any, had fallen prey to the charms of this young and innocent-seeming creature.

  “I love sweets, myself,” Geraldine ventured, as soon as a browsing couple disappeared and she and Marianne stood once again alone at the table. “Sometimes I eat them until I simply can’t eat any more.”

  This earned her a small nod from the child, who also looked over her shoulder to make sure that Armand was still safely out of sight.

  “And sometimes I wish I could find a way to take them home with me,” Geraldine continued. “There are so many beautiful things here it seems a shame that I don’t have the room to sample them all at once.” She lowered her voice and edged a bit more toward Marianne in a conspiratorial manner. “Do you know what I sometimes do when I’m very naughty?”

  The girl looked up at her, a little blank-faced, as if she was having trouble imagining a situation in which a woman Geraldine’s age might manage to be naughty.

  “I slide a couple of them in my glove,” Geraldine continued. She herself had been sampling the bon-bons in the correct way, with her right glove removed and held in her left hand. She smiled. “Which do you think are the best?”

  “These,” Marianne said in a whisper, speaking for the first time. She pointed a calfskin-covered finger at some ornate chocolates topped with great doffs of cream.

  Geraldine reached with her ungloved right hand and plucked one from the tray and, with a sly wink at the child, who w
as staring at her in fascination, she slid it into her empty right glove. It was a messy affair and only the most naïve of people would believe that a society woman might steal food in such a fashion, but Marianne was not only naïve, but accustomed to hunger. She watched the chocolate disappear into the mouth of Geraldine’s glove and then, with another quick glance in the direction of Armand, tried it herself. She pulled off her right glove and reached.

  Tricking the girl into exposing her hands had been Geraldine’s game all along. She had grown up surrounded by doctors and scientists and was well aware that the parts of the body which indicate gender are not only those which one might expect. Men have a sinew in their throats that women do not, a protrusion foolishly called an Adam’s Apple, which could easily be concealed with a high-necked gown of the sort Marianne was presently wearing. The feet of men are almost universally larger than those of women, but this too is easily hidden beneath skirts and within cleverly-cut boots.

  But the hands. There is no way to disguise the fact that a man’s hands are shaped differently from a woman’s and that his wrists are thicker. Marianne snatched the chocolate quickly, but not quickly enough.

  “Mademoiselle Bainbridge?”

  Geraldine, who had never relished the fact that her unmarried status doomed her to an entire lifetime of being addressed as “Miss,” ”Senorita” and “Mademoiselle,” turned toward the butler who stood before her, a telegram on a tray. He explained, in tactfully slow and simplified French, that this message had been delivered to her apartment and that the maid had then brought it here.