The Left Hand of Justice

by Jess Faraday

  “Where are my manners? May I take your coat?”

  The damp wool fell away as he eased the garment off her shoulders, and the warmth of the fire crackling in the fireplace surrounded her like a gentle cocoon. Javert laid the coat across the back of his own chair.

  “Trousers,” Javert remarked, taking in her borrowed clothing. “I’ve never understood why women insist on such ridiculous excesses when it comes to dress. Corsets, bustles, all that boning—it seems contrary to nature. And to movement itself. This suits you.”

  “It would suit a lot of women. But as a priest, you know how much energy the Church puts into suppressing both women’s nature and our movements. Fashion both restrains a woman and makes her decorative.”

  Javert nodded. “Point taken, Inspector. Perhaps one day you’ll be in a position to do something about it. Won’t you sit down? Now, about that arrest warrant.” He turned, took a stack of papers from the desk, and began to leaf through them, as if he had the document already drawn up and waiting—which, knowing him, he probably did.

  “Actually, the situation has changed.” Corbeau reached into her shoulder bag, fingers tingling as they brushed the tightly rolled metal mesh. She pushed it aside, found the sleeve she’d taken from Madame Boucher’s dress, and laid it across her knee. “You do recognize this.”

  Javert’s eyes went wide as he registered the fabric of the garment, the cut of the sleeve, and the distinctive beadwork of the dress Hermine Boucher had been wearing the night of her disappearance. “Where—where did you find it?”

  “The question is, why didn’t you find it? If your men had so much as glanced inside Madame Boucher’s carriage, they wouldn’t have been able to miss it. Here’s your umbrella back, by the way.” He didn’t protest as she pressed the broken mass of silk and baleen into his hand. Rather, he continued to stare at the sleeve as if it were a specter. “It was stuffed inside the seat cushion of the carriage. No one kidnapped Madame Boucher, Monsieur. She disappeared of her own accord, with the assistance of three servants, one of whom the chief inspector took into custody this morning.” When he remained silent, she added, “If that wasn’t enough, your favorite suspect was herself kidnapped earlier today. It’s inconvenient, I know.”

  Javert swallowed. Blinked. A clock on the bookshelf softly chimed the quarter hour. “This is an interesting development.”

  “I thought you might think so. Since your goal all along was to apprehend Dr. Kalderash rather than to recover Madame Boucher, I thought you might be behind it. But you wouldn’t draw attention to your side projects by banging down an innocent person’s door in the middle of the day.”

  “My side projects?” Javert had regained some of his composure, but not enough to be convincing.

  “Does the Left Hand of Justice sound familiar? Or perhaps the Department of the Unexplained?”

  To his credit, the prefect didn’t blanch or panic. Instead, he heaved a great sigh, running a hand over his face as if he were very, very tired. “Inspector, you look as ragged as I feel. Would you care to discuss this over a spot of late supper?”

  Without waiting for an answer, he left the room and returned shortly with a tray of bread, meat, cheese, and sliced apples. He set the tray on the table, along with plates, glasses, and a bottle of rather nice red wine. Corbeau’s stomach growled. She hesitated but, when he insisted, began to fill her plate while he poured the wine.

  “You found the plans, then, when you were interviewing Dr. Kalderash,” Javert said. Corbeau didn’t answer. Instead, she bit off an inelegant mouthful of light, crusty bread that couldn’t have been older than that morning and washed it down with wine. “She stole them from me.”

  “I know.”

  “I can’t emphasize how important it is that I recover those designs.”

  “Important enough to arrest an innocent woman for a crime that didn’t happen?”

  “There was always the chance,” he said weakly.

  “A chance that would have disintegrated like wet paper if you’d bothered to examine the situation a little more deeply.”

  Javert sighed again, shoulders slumping, and dropped his head. Corbeau almost felt sorry for him. “I wasn’t intending to hold her forever. Those plans are property of the Office of the Prefect. She stole them.” He narrowed his eyes. “Where did you say you found them?”

  “I didn’t say I found them.”

  “Did you also find the device? Has she completed a prototype?”

  “I don’t know.” Corbeau sat back in her chair, regarding him thoughtfully as she swirled the wine around the bulb of her glass. The wine was viscous, a sign of quality, and clung in an even film to the side of the glass. Rare pens, two floors on the Rue St. Paul, and fine wine to serve up to an unexpected guest—where was the money coming from? “How long did you and Dr. Kalderash work together?”

  “A little more than a year. Her research had come to my attention some time before that. We corresponded for several years, during which time I tried to convince her to come to Paris. She wouldn’t. You’d think her type wouldn’t mind pulling up stakes, but she claimed to be happy in her village, building better pitchforks and whatnot. Eventually, fortuitous events conspired to bring her to Paris.” Corbeau cocked an eyebrow. “Religious hysteria swept through her part of the country. Claiming she was a witch, her neighbors burned her out of house and home. An all-too-familiar story, but I don’t have to tell you that.”

  The slice of apple Corbeau was eating turned to sawdust in her mouth. “You call that fortuitous?”

  “It was for me. I smuggled her into Paris and brought her to work for the Department of the Unexplained. Her inventions funded the department almost entirely.”

  “What happened?”

  He considered her carefully. “We had a difference of opinion.”

  “You meant the Left Hand of Justice to be a weapon. She disagreed.”

  He bowed his head. “The plans are the property of the department. She had no right to take them. Do you have them with you?”

  “They’re safe,” Corbeau said.

  He tore off a piece of bread with his teeth, chewing slowly. “You’re not just going to hand them over.”

  “Tell me about the metal fabric.”

  He regarded her for one long, piercing moment. Then he said, “You looked at the schematics.”

  “It is for the sleeve, then.” Javert made an affirmative noise. “It must have cost more than your fancy pen. Why not something cheaper, like cotton?”

  The mesh somehow enabled Kalderash’s devices to connect to the body—this Corbeau knew. But it was the nature of the connection that she wanted to understand.

  Javert set his glass down hard on the desk. “Inspector, we don’t have time for this. For all I know, that woman has built the thing already. She could be trying to sell it to one of the many, many enemies of the King. Or to a foreign government. I don’t know if you understand precisely what could happen if she did.”

  “There is no prototype.”

  “How do you know?”

  Corbeau didn’t know, of course. But all things considered, it made sense. That length of spun, woven metal had not been intended for practice, and Corbeau hadn’t found anything on the premises that might have been.

  “The piece of fabric I found was uncut. As expensive as it must have been, she wouldn’t have commissioned much more than she needed. She’d have used something cheaper to get the fit and proportions right. I searched her rooms thoroughly and didn’t find anything like that.”

  Relaxing a bit, Javert refilled his glass. “You may be right,” he admitted. “So what do you propose to do?”

  “Me?”

  “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

  “I’m here to stop you from pursuing Dr. Kalderash as a criminal and to ask your assistance finding her—and Joseph, a young boy in her employ who was taken along with her.”

  Javert pursed his lips. He downed the contents of his glass and set it back
on the desk. He clearly wasn’t happy with the direction the conversation was taking.

  But if she had to, she could compel his assistance. “Who else is after them? Besides you, of course.” Javert’s brows drew tight. He hadn’t considered the idea, clearly, and now that he had, his conclusions disturbed him. “The people who took Dr. Kalderash and Joseph were looking for something. I’m willing to bet that they were after the plans as well. Who do you think it was? Vautrin? Now that he’s wormed his way to the head of Madame Boucher’s organization, I’m sure he’d have a lot of use for something like that.”

  “Vautrin? How—”

  “How did I know Vautrin was involved? Don’t insult us both, Monsieur.”

  Javert closed his eyes and sighed again. “Good God. Vautrin and the Left Hand of Justice. The very thought of it.” A thought he hadn’t considered, Corbeau realized from his reaction. “Are you certain he knows about it?”

  “Let’s think about this. Dr. Kalderash fled the Bureau of the Unexplained and flew straight into Madame Boucher’s arms. There would have been some pillow talk, I’m sure.” She glanced again at the portrait above the mantel. “Even you don’t keep everything from your wife. Vautrin rises to the inner circle—they’re calling him the Great Prophet now, you know. Don’t you think someone would tell the Great Prophet about the new weapon that’s going to help the Divine Spark rid the world of demons?”

  “God.” He ran his hand over his face again, shaking his head. When he spoke, his voice sounded exhausted and old. “Vautrin can’t get his hands on this technology. Even you can see this, Inspector.”

  “He doesn’t have it. But he may have Dr. Kalderash. You’re going to help me get her back.”

  “And then you’ll give me the plans.”

  She finished her wine in one long pull. “If you help me find Dr. Kalderash and Joseph, get them to safety, and drop the charges against Dr. Kalderash, I’ll make sure your superiors never know that you and Dr. Kalderash were going into the business of making supernatural weapons.” His eyes flashed dangerously. Corbeau set her glass on the desk. “Or I could take everything I know to the Ministry of the Interior, including the fact that the chief inspector holds a high position in a heretical—perhaps even revolutionarily inclined group—a fact of which you have had full knowledge for some time, but have done nothing about.”

  His long, strong fingers clenched the arm of his chair. If he’d had a dagger at hand, it would have been sticking out of her eye by that point—facts that only convinced Corbeau the risk she was taking was both necessary and right. He seethed. “Those plans belong to me.”

  “Or perhaps you’d prefer Hermine Boucher get ahold of them. I noticed you omitted reference to her little club when you enlisted my help finding Kalderash.”

  “I was hoping to protect you.”

  “You were hoping to protect yourself. Tell me, Monsieur, where do you stand on the forceful suppression of supernatural energies?” When he remained silent, she said, “It’s not important. What is important is that these fanatics, either under Madame Boucher’s command or Vautrin’s, have taken an innocent woman and a little boy. It’s going to take more than me to affect a rescue. That’s where your help comes in.”

  “You seem to have this all figured out.”

  “I’m just doing my job,” Corbeau said.

  Javert smiled hatefully. “Speaking of your job, blackmailing the prefect of police is not going to get it back for you.”

  Corbeau’s stomach clenched. That was why she’d taken the case in the first place. She’d lost sight of that fact. But her ambition wasn’t important anymore. There was too much at stake, and too much innocent blood on her hands already. “At this point, Monsieur, I’m more concerned about justice.”

  “God help us all.”

  “Which reminds me, you were right when you said you thought the Montagne Ste. Geneviève incidents were related. The three victims—Lambert, Fournier, and Bertrand—all worked for Madame Boucher. They were the ones who helped her disappear. At the time of their outbursts, they had all been taking a preparation meant to suppress flares of spiritual energy. And they had all been running from something.”

  “Someone’s covering their tracks,” Javert said.

  “That was my thought. My money’s on Vautrin. He stood to benefit from everyone believing Madame Boucher had been taken, but more importantly, from her staying gone. I don’t suppose you have any news about Armand Lambert?”

  “Lambert…Ah, yes, you asked me about him earlier.” Javert closed his eyes and shook his head. “They found his body this afternoon. It wasn’t a natural death.”

  “Vautrin.” Corbeau let out a long breath and sat back in her chair. Several moments ticked past on the clock on the bookshelf. The air had gone from comforting warmth to stifling. She pulled at her collar. “How long have you known about his involvement?”

  “I planted him there a year ago. I thought it would be useful to have someone keeping an eye on Dr. Kalderash.” Corbeau stared. The thought of someone deliberately putting that poisonous man anywhere near Maria Kalderash made her blood boil. “He did that, but he also…developed ideas of his own.”

  “And you didn’t pull him immediately?”

  “I was watching him. Though at the time I couldn’t imagine…he’s such a stickler for religious law.”

  “Which includes the Church’s position on supernatural phenomena. He may have gone in with the best intentions,” Corbeau said, “but when he saw an opportunity to further his religious agenda, he grabbed it with both hands.”

  “God, what a mess.” He tipped the bottle over his glass, but all that proceeded from it was a few sediment-laden drops. He set the bottle aside. “You never did tell me what you were doing at Madame Boucher’s house this evening.”

  “It’s an interesting story. The Divine Spark offered me a job.”

  “Oh?”

  “Vautrin is taking the group’s good works to the world. They intend to create medicines to suppress supernatural energy on a large scale.”

  “They needed an alchemist,” Javert said. Corbeau nodded. “But did Vautrin really seek you out for this position?”

  Corbeau laughed. “Vautrin can’t stand working with me even in a legal capacity. He sure wouldn’t willingly bring me into some organization he was intending to take over.”

  “Then who? Vidocq went to such lengths to destroy your criminal records and set you up with a new identity. Who else knew?”

  Corbeau glanced at her glass then looked away. “There was…someone,” she eventually said. “Someone who, it appears, believes in the movement and genuinely wanted to bring me in. Someone who thinks that suppressing these natural energies on a large scale is a desirable thing, and that I, too, would believe in the cause once I understood what they were trying to do.”

  Javert cocked an eyebrow. “What’s her name?”

  Now it was Corbeau’s turn to look away. Clearly her disastrous personal life was not as closely kept as she’d endeavored. And yet, what an astonishing lack of judgment had been in his voice. He seemed to be disappointed rather than shocked, and more disappointed in the fact of her professional lapse than in anything else.

  “It seems we’re both at fault in this situation, Monsieur,” she said, the fatigue in her voice now matching that in his. She met his eyes. “Will you help me?”

  “Do I have any choice?”

  “You have the choice between doing the right thing and making this a lot harder and a lot more unpleasant than it has to be.”

  He cocked his head, regarding her with a mix of resignation and admiration. Then he nodded. “Very well, Inspector. Where do we start?”

  Chapter Twelve

  By the time Corbeau departed Javert’s tidy rooms above the haberdashery, the prefect had promised not only to send a handful of his best to meet her at Madame Boucher’s mansion, but also to have them detain Chief Inspector Vautrin, if they found him. Corbeau wasn’t certain Joseph and Dr. Kalder
ash were actually at the mansion. If they were, she had been close enough to rescue them herself just a few hours ago. The thought made her grind her teeth. On the other hand, if they were being held somewhere else, Corbeau would be back where she had started nearly twenty-four hours before—nowhere. No, not even there. At least when Javert’s carriage had discharged her onto the pavement in front of Oubliette, she’d had an address and a suspect.

  The haberdashery disappearing behind her, she followed the street past the Rue Charlemagne, where His Majesty had founded the new Lycée less than a decade before. Buildings of white and brown stone rose up on either side of the narrow lane-like canyon walls, magnifying the echo of her hurried footfall against the slick cobblestones. The air was thick with the smell of rain, and moisture formed halos around the well-kept gaslights, but at least for now the precipitation had stopped.

  As the Rue St. Paul approached the Seine, it angled slightly downward before flinging itself wide onto a bustling nighttime market. Corbeau stopped to adjust her appearance. The borrowed shirt and trousers felt good against her skin. Not only were they clean, but they provided a freedom of movement she had been sorely missing. She pulled her bag closer and tucked her hair up under the cloth cap that had come with the trousers and shirt. She bent down and scooped up a bit of mud from between the cobblestones. Smudging it on her cheeks and hands, she checked her reflection in a darkened shop window and nodded satisfaction. The suggestion of disguise wouldn’t hold up to close scrutiny, but it should be enough to allow her to walk the crowded street unquestioned and unmolested. Her height and build would strengthen the illusion; darkness would perfect it. She took a deep breath and stepped into the throng.

  A lively traffic carried her along the street, as energetic an hour before midnight as in the middle of the day. All along the riverside, customers haggled with merchants in slapdash stalls and over the sides of boats pulled up to the quay for just that purpose. Corbeau caught the whiff of chestnuts roasting on a brazier and, below that, the mingled smells of spilled beer, tobacco, and sewage. Strains of a violin darted in and out of the sounds of lapping water and commerce.