City of Light

Chapter FIFTEEN



Paris



1:35 PM



Since boyhood, Ian had taken nibs of charcoal, scraps of paper, and hidden from his schoolfellows to sketch. Faces were his favorite, and he seemed to have been born with a certain ability to capture them. He had been gifted even before James had taken him under his wing and shown him a bit of technique. Before James had given him his half-dried pots of paint and those tired brushes whose bristles had gone unruly with too much use.

Ian had been accustomed to psychological torment in his youth, mostly come in the form of insults and slurs from the other children in town. They had sometimes thrown lumps of coal at him and, in return, charcoal had been his own weapon of revenge. His portraits were almost always the product of anger, firm strong lines of black across the white page, the ugliness of the person’s spirit evident in their face. James had looked at these sketches and seen both the raw talent and the emotion behind it, which was even rawer. “The world isn’t merely savage,” James had told him, his hand on his shoulder, his face full of understanding. “It’s savage, yes son, yes indeed. But not merely.”

James taught Ian to see the subtlety in human faces. They would walk, the worldly man and the younger man, through the parks of London and they would find a bench on a well-traveled sidewalk. They would observe the people strolling past and then James would nudge him and say “That one,” and they would both begin to sketch. London streamed by them, one face at a time, and James had taught Ian to draw fast, without revision or judgment, saying that sometimes our truest read on a human face is our first.

After so many years of being observed himself, and not often kindly, Ian had reveled in the role of being the observer. James held a high standard, so a compliment from him was much to be cherished, and one day he had picked up one of Ian’s castoff sketches, which he had allowed to fall to the pavement beneath his feet. It was a portrait of a baby in a pram, no more than a dozen hasty lines seized before the child had been rolled from view, but James had smiled at it and said “You have an eye.”

An eye. James Whistler had said he had an eye. He may as well have anointed his head with oil.

The tubes of paints were now dried beyond rescue, the brushes all tossed into a rubbish bin. If James strolled past Ian in this moment, crouched like this by the edge of the street, he likely wouldn’t know him. It had been painful to Ian to realize that any interest he had ever held for James was fleeting. Artists look deeply but they do not look for long. Once they have captured something, they let it go. Their eye flitters to a new subject, a different face, and there is a cold detachment at the core of any creative impulse. Ian came to understand this in time. The sting of James’s betrayal had gradually faded and Ian was now able to see his brief friendship with the man for what it was: the greatest gift of his lifetime.

As he had predicted last night in the bar, the work required on the tower was not especially taxing. Ian had been assigned to one of the tile-layers, told to go along behind the man on hand and knee, scraping any splattered dots of mortar from the tiles. The pattern was a black and white herringbone, hypnotic when viewed from close range, and the morning had sped by quickly. When the church bell struck one, they had all been released for an hour, herded into the wailing elevator which carried them back down to the street. The other sewer rats had scattered, no doubt half of them off to spend their morning wages on lunchtime beer and thus unlikely to return for the afternoon’s labors. The managers were trying to be kind when they decided to grant a partial day’s pay to each man as he left the tower. The coins pressed into the grimy palms had undoubtedly been intended to insure that each worker could buy himself a proper lunch. That he would at least face the afternoon with enough food in his belly to keep him from getting light-headed and prone to a fall. They were engineers, logical men. They did not understand that when one gives a coin to a sewer rat, what one has most likely purchased is his absence.

Ian had used his own money on bread and cheese from the street vendor on the corner and then, walking slowly back toward the tower with at least thirty minutes of leisure still his own, he had paused to observe each sidewalk artist that he passed. They were all focused on the tower and Ian wondered how many bad paintings of the damn thing there would be before the Exposition was over. He imagined one hanging over every bar in Europe and in half the middle class homes as well. The Parisian artists favored pastels over oils and he picked up abandoned slivers of chalk as he wandering among them, arriving back at the base of the tower with a dozen colors collected in his pocket. He stooped, heedless of his already aching back, and set to work on a blank piece of sidewalk.

He did not draw the tower. Certainly not. He turned his hand instead to the face of Henry. Not the regrettable Henry of late, but rather his brother at the age of two or three, back when the boy had the face of a cherub. His mother had worked in the mills and she had given him Henry to watch. “Take care of your brother,” she had said, a directive tossed out casually from a woman who was tragically ill-suited to her parental role, but an order that Ian had taken to heart. He and his best friend Charles – his only friend, if the truth be told – had dragged the child with them as they climbed the riverbanks, throwing stones into the canal, chasing squirrels with branches. Henry had no choice but to grow up quickly, to become a small echo of his older brother and their resemblance was impossible to ignore.

Ian had managed to keep Henry alive on their forays about the town and countryside, had shielded him from the taunts of the other children far better than he had managed to shield himself. Ian supposed you could take the fact Henry had survived to the age of eighteen as evidence he had completed the task that his mother had so carelessly assigned him. But on another level he knew he had not taken care of Henry at all.

The rumor was that Henry had come to Paris. And if he had, there was only one explanation for why. He had followed Ian here, just as he had followed Ian his entire life. And then what had become of him? Ian had been to the morgue every day for the last three weeks but he had not found his younger brother on display. He had entered the heavy doors each morning with his heart in his throat, fear overriding his logical mind. Because Armand wouldn’t do that, would he? He might hurt other people, but only if he had to, and Armand would never hurt Henry. Not Henry, who might talk a grand game and bluster and brag but who, at heart, was still no more than a child. The same child he had always been, struggling and scrambling to keep up with his elders, calling after the bigger boys “Wait for me, wait for me.”

Henry was an innocent. Harmless. His talk was just talk and no one knew that better than Armand.

Ian believed this and yet he could not stop himself from going to the morgue, day after day. And day after day he had seen them there, the scattered boys come from small towns all over Europe, propped up, open eyed, staring out at a world that had treated them badly, a world which had brought them to this premature and ignoble end. All those boys who might have been Henry... but who weren’t.

Henry was alive. Ian had to believe that. Alive, and most probably in London, with the rumor he’d come to Paris just that, a rumor. This was the primary reason Ian was so determined to get back to London. To see his brother and to assure himself that he was not, as it so often seemed, completely alone in this cold world.

“Pretty child,” a man’s voice said, and Ian looked up to see one of the movers, leaning against a tall wooden crate as he waited for the elevator to descend. “Yours?”

Ian shook his head. “My brother. Years ago.”

“Ah,” said the man. “Well, sorry to say, but your brother is about to be trod upon, pretty as he is. Midday break is over and a load of furniture is going up.”

Ian stood and gazed at an enormous rectangular crate which had been wheeled by dolly to the base of the elevator. “Is that a mirror for one of the restaurants?”

The man shook his head and spat, the tobacco-brown glob landing just above Henry’s rosy forehead. “Painting. Going straight to the top, to Monsieur Eiffel’s aerie.”

“So the aerie is real?” Everyone in the Paris had been talking about Eiffel’s private apartment, perched at the very apex of the tower, but Ian had not been entirely convinced. It seemed too much like the way people speak of Heaven, another place whose existence cannot be verified but which the downtrodden comfort themselves with promises they will someday see.

“Oh, it’s real, all right,” the man said, turning as the elevator arrived with a rattle and the doors were slowly cranked open. “Nothing but the finest going up there. It took the three of us to get the velvet settee in this morning, but this thing….” He broke off and whistled to two men standing to the side and they ambled up to help him move the awkwardly-large crate into the elevator.

“What is it?” Ian asked.

“Told you,” the man said, as they struggled to get the corner through the elevator doors. “A painting.”

“But what kind?”

“Don’t know,” the man said, stepping back to let his assistants ease the crate toward the back of the elevator. He held the door as they went back for other, small boxes. “A rich man’s painting, that’s what kind it is. Here, there’s a tag. It’s a Whistler Blout, according to the writing. Does that name mean anything to a young artist like yourself? You know a man named Whistler Blout?”

He said the word “artist” with palpable sarcasm, stretching out the final syllable until it was almost a hiss, but Ian didn’t mind. God knows he had been called worst. “That’s not what the tag means,” he said, as the webbed door of the elevator closed in front of the man’s smug face. “It means the artist is James Whistler and the subject is Isabel Blout.”

London



1:45 PM



It took Davy a significant block of time to compose his telegram to Trevor. Knowing you must pay by the word generally has the marvelous effect of sharpening the mind, but this story was so outlandish that he had trouble keeping the message to his customary twenty words. Once he finally had an acceptable version of the morning’s events, he walked halfway across the city to make sure the telegraph office he used would have no connection to the one where the trouble had all started.

He ended up at a location suitably removed from Cleveland Street, and patiently waited in line. When his turn came, the man in the window refused to accept his piece of paper and rather made Davy dictate the message to him while he typed it through.

Cleveland boys dressing like girls, trained to pass as female in public. Highly valued. Hammond took boy-girl Tommy to Paris.

If the story confused the old duffer behind the desk, it was no more than what he deserved, Davy thought, as he enunciated one word at a time, all the while looking over his shoulder to make sure no one else overheard. But it seemed that telegraph operators were as immune to depravity as policemen, for when Davy had finally finished, the man merely looked up and said “And the name?”

“Do you have to pay to sign your name too?”

“Certainly.”

“Then I won’t sign it,” Davy said, sliding the coins across the counter with a sigh. “He’ll know well enough who it’s from.”

Paris



2:35 PM

“Did Detective Abrams have an opportunity to examine this second body?”

Carle nodded yes.

“And did he have reason, beyond the similar location in which the two bodies were found, to think the cases might be connected?” Trevor considered the corpses before him. “He obviously suspected as much, so I suppose what I’m actually asking is if he had managed to collect any proof.”

Here, an exchange between Rubois and Carle which resulted in a nearly simultaneous shrug, a synchronized gesture Trevor might have found amusing under other circumstances. The four men were standing in one of the private viewing rooms in the heart of the morgue, with the body of Patrick Graham on one marble slab and the body of the nameless young man on the other. It looked a bit like an amateur staging of the last act of Romeo and Juliet.

“We had the time line backwards,” Trevor muttered to Tom, who was standing impatiently behind him. “They found the boy dressed as the girl first, and then Graham. This casts a different light on the entire matter, does it not?”

Turning to Carle, Tom asked, “Was any blood drawn from the unidentified body for testing?”

“No,” Carle said, with a guilty little grimace that implied this was not the first time he had answered this particular question.

“All right, let’s reconsider what we have,” Trevor said. “The first body is found on April 12 and originally assumed to be the result of suicide. A jumper. Quite common. We have them in London too,” he added, and Carle obligingly explained this to Rubois, who nodded with calm resignation. Lunatics were undoubtedly flinging themselves off bridges and buildings all over the world at any given moment, and all the police could really do was mop up the mess. In the vast majority of these cases there was no crime behind the suicide, at least not of the sort that could be prosecuted. And the owner of this particular body, a boy dressed as a girl, undoubtedly had more reasons for wishing to end his life than your average jumper.

Trevor continued. “And Graham also first looked to be an accidental drowning victim, at least until you found the sort of bruising that implies a forced drugging. So it’s entirely possible that chloroform was used in the first case too, that both victims had been rendered unconscious before they met the water. But since the first body was embalmed as a matter of course, we have no way of testing this theory.”

There was a pause while Carle translated Trevor’s words. Rubois nodded and then, for the first time in nearly an hour, spoke himself, a blast of French that constituted the longest speech Trevor had ever heard the man make.

“He says that if we could prove chloroform was used in both deaths, it would link the cases closely enough to have them officially declared a double murder,” Carle said. “Which means they would be moved to a priority status. A greater number of flics assigned, that sort of thing.”

It was Trevor’s turn to nod. It was beyond dispute that some cases got more attention than others, both from the media and the police. Anyone who had worked on the Ripper investigation could attest to that. If they had a prayer of finding Rayley, they must emerge from this room with at least enough evidence to prioritize the case in the eyes of the Rubois’s superiors and thus demand more flics in the hunt. Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to rattle the cage of the newspaper men as well. After all, Graham had been one of their own, and if they caught wind that his death had been more than a drunken fall into a shallow river, the papers could certainly be expected to respond with their usual mindless hysteria and volleys of exclamation points. And for once, a media frenzy might prove useful to Trevor’s larger plan. On the eve of the Exhibition, the French could hardly afford a public panic over a pair of unsolved murders, even if the victims were the most disposable of creatures - a foreign journalist and a homosexual whore.

“Might I examine the bodies?” Tom asked.

Permission was swiftly granted and Tom approached the first table and began to unwrap the cloths draping the young man’s body. He had been not merely embalmed but packed in ice as well, a procedure that undoubtedly had required repeated reapplications and thus indicated to Tom that the police, or at least Rubois, had gone to considerable effort to keep the body in pristine condition. Unfortunately in the process, some patches of flesh had actually frozen, so the ice may have altered as much as it preserved.

“What are you looking for?” Trevor asked, as Tom peered through a magnification glass at the corpse’s right hand.

“Some sign of a struggle,” Tom said. “This boy wasn’t as burly or strong as Graham but it’s still possible he put up some resistance.”

“His mouth is very full,” Trevor said.

“I noticed that too,” Tom replied, glancing up at the face. “But there doesn’t seem to be any bruising, so I think we can assume his plump lips are merely a gift of nature.” In the background was the low and steady murmur of Carle translating their conversation for Rubois.

“Note his hair,” Trevor said. “Quite long for a man, evidently grown to a length that can be brushed back in a manner to simulate a woman’s –“

“He was wearing these when he was found,” Carle interrupted, turning Trevor’s attention to a pile of women’s clothing on a chair in the corner, with what appeared to be the hide of a large squirrel resting on top. Coming closer, Trevor realized it was a shank of curly brown hair. “The illusion,” Carle said “was very effective. The flic who found the body was completely convinced that the victim was a young woman until he moved to cover her exposed legs and in the process realized…He described it as a great shock.”

“I can imagine that it was,” Trevor said, going through the garments one at a time. The boy’s face was rounded and feminine, the artificial hair was soft and abundant, and the clothing quite dainty. Only the boots would have given him away. They were cut and laced in the manner of a lady’s footwear, with a narrow heel and pointed toe, but they were rather too large to be entirely convincing, at least not when Trevor held one in his hand and examined it at close range. But then again, the men who had dealings with the boy were most likely not looking at his feet.

“The morgue workers have named this body The Lady of the River,” Carle said quietly.

“See here, Trevor,” Tom called from the table. He had been glad when the other three had moved to study the clothing, for it had given him the chance to pry open the mouth unobserved. Rigor was advanced and it had been a graceless procedure, leaving the deceased no longer serene and composed on the table, but now in the position of a beached cod, chin thrust rudely forward, mouth agape.

“Throat very swollen, lacerations on the inside of the lips,” Tom said, remembering to offer the magnification glass to Rebois, so that as ranking officer, he could have the first look. “Caused by something going in or out with significant force,” Tom added, as Rubois stooped to peer into the silent scream of the boy’s mouth. “Most likely either a powerful penetration of the throat or an exceptionally violent form of nausea.”

“What sort of weapon would be used in such an attack?”

“Really, Welles, don’t be thick.”

When the absurdity of his question struck him, Trevor flushed. He glanced toward the French, but for once Carle had tactfully neglected to translate and Rubois, who had handed the magnification glass back to Tom, merely stood in his customary military stance with his hands clasped behind his waist. Tom noted Trevor’s discomfort and quickly added, “For the record, my vote would be nausea, which often follows the administration of chloroform. When it’s used for women in childbed, we’ve been told to keep a nurse by the patient’s head, so that if she becomes nauseated the nurse can turn her face to the side and avoid any chance of asphyxiation.”

“It’s possible for a person to choke to death on their own regurgitation?”

“Certainly, if they’re unconscious.”

“See if there are similar lesions on Graham.”

Just as Tom nodded and turned toward the second body, there was a rap at the door. A flic in uniform entered and went straight to Rubois with what appeared to be a telegram. Not the same color paper as a British telegram, Trevor noted, but folded and sealed in the same way. With a glance, Rubois handed it to Carle who handed it to Trevor who held it for a minute, let out an explosive sigh, and then handed it to Tom.

“Read how young Davy spent his morning. Dear God, on the way back to the apartment remind me to stop and buy the biggest bouquet of roses in Paris for Emma, for she was surely right.”

Tom quickly scanned the telegram and then looked up at Trevor, his brow wrinkled in uncertainty.

“Don’t you see what it means?” Trevor asked. “We have two men, Charles Hammond in England and Armand Delacroix in Paris, both of whom are allegedly procuring funds for the Exposition Universelle. There is no satisfactory explanation for how these men, both of common birth and lower-class background, might have to come to move in the elevated social circles required for such work, or why they might be so successful at obtaining investments from wealthy patrons. And now we learn that Charles Hammond’s infamous Cleveland Street brothel supplied not merely young boys, but young boys whom he had trained to dress and act as girls. Bizarre as this fact may be, we must add to it the even more incredible fact that a boy dressed like a girl has been recently pulled from the Seine in Paris. Obviously, the boy in front of us didn’t float here all the way from London. So what can we conclude?”

There was a rapid fire barrage of French from Carle to Rubois and even Tom was scrambling to keep up with Trevor’s line of reasoning.

“That there is a similar brothel in Paris, also offering boy-girls to their clients?” Tom stammered.

“Yes, yes of course,” Trevor said impatiently. “But the facts also seem to imply that -“

“Chantage,“ said Rubois.

“Blackmail,” Carle repeated.

“Blackmail,” Tom said, looking from one corpse to another, as if he expected them also to concur. “Yes, of course, how could we be so slow to see? The monies procured for the Exhibition weren’t freely-given contributions, but actually a guarantee of silence.”

“Perhaps some of the funds made their way into the hands of the Exhibition organizers,” Trevor said, with a quick glance at Rubois. It would do him no good to risk offending his hosts by implying that French authorities connected to the Exhibition were accepting bribes. “At least enough to ensure a level of protection. But a hefty part of it undoubtedly went straight into the pockets of Hammond or Delacroix, as payment to ensure that certain facts would never become public knowledge. Facts linking a group of prominent men, both British and French, to a brothel that supplied children for their sexual use.”

“Their unspeakably deviant sexual use,” Tom said.

“Quite,” said Trevor. “Carle, please ask the Detective if he can spare us the afternoon for a lengthy consultation. Tell him I have reason to believe a case we were working on in London plays a hand in this matter here before us. If we unravel one, I have no doubt the truth of the other will come tumbling out along with it.”

“Do you think Rayley suspected any of this?” Tom asked.

Trevor slowly and thoughtfully shook his head. “I doubt it. He would have put something about it in his notes, have taken the time to write or send a telegram, no matter how busy he was. I think it’s far more likely that it was Patrick Graham who was on to them, poor bastard, and that’s why he is the one lying on this slab.”

“The Detective says he is grateful for your assistance in this matter,” Carle spoke up.

“Tell him that that the gratitude is entirely mine,” Trevor responded. “For if we can trap his Armand Delacroix I have no doubt we shall find our own Charles Hammond as well.”

Tom nodded. “You believe the two are working together?”

“Tom,” Trevor sighed. “Don’t be thick.”