The Left Hand of Justice

by Jess Faraday

  She poked at the spectacles with the toe of her boot. When they didn’t bite, she used a rag to pick them up again. The spectacles had seemed to take on a life of their own—as if they had been seeking connection with her skin. That was it, exactly, she realized, her pulse beginning to race with the excitement of discovery. The first time she had seen the mesh was on Armand Lambert’s torso. She’d have bet money that, at one time, he had used one of Kalderash’s devices. The mesh was probably how the devices connected to the body. But what was the nature of the connection? She didn’t have time to speculate now. She knotted the rag tightly around the spectacles and tucked the bundle into her shoulder bag for later examination.

  After giving the laboratory a final glance, she extinguished the lights and made her way up the staircase. Back in the corridor, she lit the lamp on the stand near the front door, holding it out in front of her as she followed the footsteps down the hallway toward the rear of the house. The intruders had definitely carried her this way. Closer examination revealed a toe scuff along the wall, a hairpin, and what might well have been a light spatter of blood. Everything stopped abruptly just before the back door. They had subdued her, then, it seemed, and wrestled her outside, not bothering to shut the door behind them. Standing in the doorway, Corbeau looked out.

  The rear of the house opened into an alley, where the footprints disappeared into a mess of mud and water spreading out in both directions. Using her hand to shield the lamp from the rain, Corbeau looked up and down the alley. No street-level windows faced out from the adjacent houses, and only a few on the top floor of the adjoining buildings. These remained firmly shuttered and would probably have been shuttered when Kalderash had been taken. Between this, the pouring rain, and the natural inclination of city-dwellers to see and hear nothing that might come back to haunt them later, Corbeau doubted she’d get a word out of the neighbors. Stepping inside again, she locked the door once more.

  It was then she noticed a second staircase, with more signs of disturbance leading up to the next floor. The stairs were narrow. Corbeau’s shoulders nearly brushed the plaster on either side, and the wood creaked in protest of her every step. A thick crimson-hued Persian carpet lay over the worn planks of the landing. On the other side of it was a single door—the one space, Corbeau speculated, Kalderash had designated for her personal comfort.

  The room was cramped, with a steeply pitched ceiling that followed the roofline down toward the street. A single bed sat against the back wall, and next to it, a small bedside table with a book. On the far wall—if anything in this chamber could be considered far from anything else—a round window looked out over the street. A modest wardrobe stood beside it, and on the other side of the wall, a low chest of drawers.

  Some struggle had occurred here, as well, though it hadn’t been as intense as the battle of the basement. The top two drawers were open, their contents slopped over the sides. The bedclothes hung down over one side of the bed, and a chair was overturned. But the little attic had somehow escaped the wholesale destruction visited upon the front room. Any search had been cursory, secondary to the chase. Had Kalderash escaped her captors and run upstairs? Given two hulking intruders and one delicate inventor, Corbeau doubted it.

  No. There had to have been a second abductee.

  Corbeau righted the chair and turned toward the bed. The blankets had been pulled down hastily, and she could see the indentations Dr. Kalderash’s small bones had made in the mattress. She averted her eyes from this unintentional intimacy, forcing her thoughts back to the scene. The second person had hidden under the bed. Though that person was long gone, he—or she—might have left something behind. Corbeau knelt, pushed the covers away, and set her lamp on the floor. Something was there, back toward the wall, amid the dust. She flattened herself on the floor and eased beneath the bed, tickling at the object with her fingers until she found it. Sighing, she emerged with a brown cloth cap.

  “Joseph?”

  It was the boy’s cap, she was certain of it—from the frayed spot on the brim to the medal of St. Christopher that he always wore on the band. The patron saint of children and travelers. Corbeau had given it to him herself.

  She slumped against the bed.

  What had Joseph been doing there?

  Joseph had a new leg. Dr. Kalderash was in the business of making prosthetics. The Church of the Divine Spark concentrated its healing work in the slums, like the Montagne Ste. Geneviève. What had Joseph said about his flashy new apparatus? That it, and his shoes, had been a reward for a job well done? Joseph was an enterprising kid. Corbeau probably wasn’t the only one who employed him as a messenger. Damn. She let out a long, wretched breath, thinking of the trouble she could have saved herself if she’d only pressed Joseph a little harder about his new limb.

  Who the devil would have taken both Kalderash and Joseph? They had come to the house seeking something completely different. But what?

  Corbeau heaved herself to her feet. Bit by bit, she began to put the room back together, searching for clues as she went. She folded the clothing on the floor and stacked it on the bed. She righted the overturned washstand and set the basin back in place. The wardrobe was unlocked but intact. Inside, the inventor’s few dresses hung neatly, with two pairs of shoes in a row on the bottom. Next to the wardrobe, half-concealed beneath a dressing gown near the chest of drawers, was Javert’s umbrella, of all improbable things. The silk was torn in two places and several of the baleen ribs had snapped. She smiled briefly, thinking of Joseph clouting his attacker over the head with it. At least she hoped that’s what happened.

  But she was really interested in the wardrobe. It would look uninteresting to the casual eye, but Corbeau had hidden her share of contraband. Uninteresting places were the best, and a wardrobe lent itself to hiding in more ways than one. She pushed the thin selection of dresses to one side and knocked on the back panel, then along the bottom. There were no false compartments, no sliding panels. She ran her hand along the underside. Still nothing. Sighing, she put a shoulder to the side of the wardrobe and shoved it away from the wall, smiling as her fingers found the evidence she was looking for. “There you are.”

  Someone had glued a large piece of paper to the back of the wardrobe—that day, Corbeau guessed; the line of glue was still liquid in some places. There was another, larger sheet folded into quarters beneath it. Kneeling down, Corbeau slipped a finger beneath the paper and carefully lifted it away. Then she teased out the lump it had concealed.

  She unfolded the paper and spread it out on the floor, to reveal a set of schematics for some kind of device. Sketches showed a flexible tube that fit over a person’s arm. Smaller devices were embedded between the layers of the sleeve and connected to one another with wires. Notes accompanied the sketches, written in a tight, small hand. Corbeau squinted at the words until they swam before her eyes. For a moment, she considered giving the strange spectacles another chance. Then she realized she couldn’t read the text because not all of it was in French.

  It was only when she came to the bottom right-hand corner of the drawing that she found words she recognized. There, in a clear French hand, which stood out from the foreign text like a shining beacon, were the words LEFT HAND OF JUSTICE. Beneath it were two signatures: one, which she could make out as Dr. M. Kalderash, and the other, as clear as day: Claude Javert. And then PROPERTY OF THE DEPARTMENT OF THE UNEXPLAINED, OFFICE OF THE PREFECT OF POLICE.

  It was dated the previous year.

  So that was why Dr. Kalderash had been so frightened when Corbeau had knocked on her door. She’d thought that Javert had sent her. And she’d been correct. There was a stamp in the lower right-hand corner of the schematics, right below the signatures. The bell, book, and candle were configured differently from the insignia that Corbeau wore, but it was easy to see how someone might confuse them.

  Corbeau quickly folded the document and stuffed it into her bag. Her heart pounded. What was the Left Hand of Justice, and why was J
avert so desperate to get the plans back? The name suggested police applications. Was it a weapon? That would explain a lot. And what was the Department of the Unexplained? Why had Vidocq never mentioned it? Hadn’t Sophie said something about Javert wanting to put the Bureau of Supernatural Investigations back together? What did she know? And did the Left Hand actually exist, or only in the minds of its creators?

  Corbeau took out the documents Javert had given her that morning and glanced at the date on the schematics. At the time Kalderash and Javert had drawn up the plans, Kalderash had been in the country for about a year. She and Hermine Boucher were together for almost that long, which meant these plans had come into existence just before Dr. Kalderash had left Javert’s employ and gone to work with Madame Boucher.

  Perhaps the people who had taken Dr. Kalderash and Joseph had been looking for these plans. Unable to find them, they had come upon Dr. Kalderash and thought the plan’s author was better than the plan itself.

  But who? Who had done this thing?

  Her thoughts kept returning to Javert. But Javert seemed to be going out of his way to bring Kalderash in by the book. It seemed unlikely that having gone to the bother of asking Corbeau to build a case, he would order a messy kidnapping. No. Javert wasn’t that impatient. And he wouldn’t draw attention to himself that way.

  Because he was hiding something, she realized.

  The prefect of police was a direct employee of the King, and the King was a reactionary zealot. If Javert was reassembling an organization to address the supernatural, he wouldn’t want the King to know about it.

  She remembered what the Conciergerie guard had said about a burglary some nights ago. Had Kalderash broken in to Javert’s offices to take her plans back? Javert wouldn’t risk raising the eyebrows of either the papers or his superiors with some not-quite-legal arrest. Nor could he legitimately go after Dr. Kalderash for burglary without exposing what he was doing. He needed an unrelated excuse to arrest her, even if she was innocent of the crime.

  Corbeau began to pace the length of the room. If Javert hadn’t taken Dr. Kalderash, there was a good chance Hermine Boucher had. Not only had Dr. Kalderash left their relationship unresolved, according to Sophie, but Dr. Kalderash had herself said that the goal of Madame Boucher’s organization was to “expel demons.” Had Hermine known about the Left Hand? Might she have seen it as a way to further her calling?

  Thunder cracked through the air. Rain battered the roof above and the streets below. The air was cold, damp, and suffused with the metallic smell of the storm. There was a third option, Corbeau realized, her blood running cold. Madame Boucher was no longer the Great Prophet of the Church of the Divine Spark.

  That position now belonged to Chief Inspector Vautrin.

  When he’d surprised her in the carriage house, she hadn’t been able to imagine why the man would involve himself with an organization like the Church of the Divine Spark. But something in what Sophie had said brought all the pieces together.

  The Church of the Divine Spark, like the Catholic Church, viewed supernatural phenomena as demonic activity. While Madame Boucher had taken a humanitarian approach, treating the afflicted poor, Vautrin—social climber and frustrated priest—had seen an opportunity to amass power. Worming his way into the core of the organization, he’d watched and waited. When Madame Boucher, the Great Prophet, had pulled her disappearing act, Vautrin had pounced. Whether Madame Boucher would have agreed or not, Vautrin now sat at the head of the Church of the Divine Spark.

  And if the Left Hand of Justice was a spiritual weapon of some sort, Corbeau was certain he would stop at nothing to possess it.

  She had to speak to Javert, and quickly. He had lied to her and built up a false case against an innocent woman. But if Vautrin had Joseph and Dr. Kalderash, it would take more than one disgraced Sûreté agent to rescue them.

  She put the chest of drawers back together, taking the time to search for false bottoms, extra panels, and anything else that might have been of interest. Her cheeks burned as she folded the inventor’s silky underthings and placed them back in their drawers. Someone else had gone through them before Corbeau had arrived, but perhaps feeling the same embarrassment they hadn’t done more than dump out the drawers.

  It was in the bottom drawer, which impatient hands had only examined in the most cursory way, that she found the other piece of the puzzle. There, sandwiched between folds of silk and cotton, was a length of folded fabric that glinted in the low light of the lamp. Corbeau brought it out and laid it open on the carpet. It was a tightly woven golden mesh, as thin and gossamer-light as spider-silk—the same as was fused to the back of the spectacles, embedded in Lambert’s torso, and very likely attached to Joseph’s new foot. As she ran her hand across it, the metal warmed and sucked at her skin, while her fingers raised delicate sparks as they traveled across it.

  Corbeau’s thoughts turned back to the schematics for the Left Hand of Justice. There had been a sleeve, a flexible sleeve that fit over the arm. Could the metal fabric be meant for this? It would make sense, given that Kalderash had hidden the schematics not far away. Corbeau smiled. Considering many men’s squeamishness about feminine necessities, the lingerie drawer had been an excellent hiding place. She refolded the cloth and carefully tucked it into her bag as well. She shut the drawers and sat back down on the bed to think. Dr. Kalderash and Joseph were in trouble and needed her help. But she had no idea where to find them. What she did have, though, was something that Javert was after—something with which she could compel him to assist her in finding them. That was just what she intended to do.

  And she’d take him his damned umbrella back while she was at it.

  Chapter Eleven

  Claude Javert, Prefect of Police, kept his lair amid the narrow, winding streets around the new Lycée Charlemagne, the grounds of which had once been home to the Jesuit order from whence he emerged. Conveniently, both the house and the Lycée were situated almost equidistant from Javert’s current offices at the Conciergerie and the home of his quarry on the Rue des Rosiers.

  Javert’s home comprised the second and third floors above a milliner’s shop on the Rue St. Paul. The shop’s large front window was dark, the milliner’s extravagant creations casting weird shadows in the light of a nearby streetlamp. The apartments above rose from the wooden shop front in an orderly configuration of light-gray stone, tall windows, and black iron balconies. The street was hardly wide enough for three people to walk abreast, but it was quiet, evenly paved, and clear of debris.

  The Conciergerie clock struck half past ten as Corbeau approached the building. The first row of windows above the milliner’s shop was dark, though a light burned in one of the front rooms on the third floor. It was admittedly a little late for calling, but this wasn’t a social visit. With any luck, Corbeau would soon have Javert’s admission that he’d sent her on a false errand and his subsequent promise of assistance. He might even be able to give her a hint about who else was after the Left Hand of Justice, and where they might be keeping Dr. Kalderash and Joseph. She ducked inside the door next to the milliner’s and ascended a dark staircase. At the top of the stairs she knocked at his door.

  The last time she had seen the prefect, in the cramped darkness of his carriage, in the small, dark hours and pouring rain, he had been an imposing sight. Now, in his dressing gown and slippers, he seemed diminished. His shoulders were thin beneath the robe and pajamas, and the sparse hair on his chest was gray.

  “Inspector!” he said warmly, though he couldn’t hide his surprise.

  “I tried to find you earlier at your office, but—”

  “Oh, yes. I heard about that. I was out of the building at the time.” Brightening, he said, “I assume you couldn’t wait another moment to start on that arrest warrant. Do come inside.”

  He led her to what would have been a parlor in another home. Here, the room resembled what she imagined his office must look like. A desk dominated the small chamber, papers stack
ed neatly beside the blotter, an oil lamp turned up bright enough for work. Bookshelves lined the walls. He had set his writing instrument down on the blotter near the ink bottle when her knock had sounded. As he ushered her in, he took it up again and replaced the cap.

  “May I?” she asked.

  “Please.” He handed it to her. “It was a gift from the head of my order.”

  “The Jesuits?”

  He graced her with an evasive smile. “It has an internal ink reservoir. It’s one of the few of its kind in existence. The French government has just patented the design.”

  She turned the instrument over in her hands, admiring the ruby-tipped gold nib. The barrel had been lovingly carved from a dark, exotic wood that felt both solid and silky beneath her fingers. It had likely cost what she’d make in two years. Reluctantly, she handed the pen back to him. He gestured toward two chairs that sat before the desk, taking the other after she was settled.

  His parlor was a masculine room, all wood, straight lines, and business. But a framed portrait of a woman hung over the fireplace, and below it, a sprinkling of gold-touched statuettes spread over the mantel.

  “My wife,” Javert said, following her eyes.

  She was a pleasant-looking woman, some years younger at the time of the portrait than Javert was now. She had a plump, smiling face and eyes that danced with a lively intelligence. Corbeau wasn’t sure which surprised her more: that Javert had a wife or that she would appear both comely and kind. “Congratulations.”