City of Light

Chapter ONE



Paris



April 14, 1889



2:10 PM



The man was angry. Beneath his well-cut clothes and the exaggerated, almost absurd courtliness of his manner, he was clearly little more than a bully. The woman sitting opposite him at the café table was beautiful, but the way she clinched a glove in her left hand betrayed her anxiety and, even if it had not, the slight sucking in of her lower lip would have likewise given her away. Her husband was not kind to her, this much was clear, but if Rayley’s limited experience of women had taught him anything, it was that they often gravitated toward men who were not kind.

Rayley Abrams had come here every Sunday, to this same café, since he had arrived from London five months earlier. The food was good, of course, but the food was good nearly everywhere in Paris. The true reason he was drawn to this particular courtyard was because it offered the perfect venue for people watching and for eavesdropping on the conversations of strangers. Well, perhaps eavesdropping was not the proper word; despite his best efforts, Rayley understood barely a dozen phrases in French. But it was almost as if his failure to grasp the words made it easier to understand the intent behind them.

For some things are far clearer in a foreign language, are they not? Rayley did not know, for example, precisely what the angry man was saying to the beautiful woman and this very ignorance of the surface reality of their conversation freed him to plunge deeper, to notice gestures, body movements, subtle shifts in their facial expressions, to hear the rise and fall within the cadence of their lovely and incomprehensible voices. They were a striking couple – without question the most beautiful people in this beautiful café in the most beautiful city in the world on a beautiful afternoon in April.

The woman glanced in his direction, and Rayley swiftly dropped his gaze back to the pages of his small red leather journal. He had fallen into the habit of bringing it along on these Sunday excursions, but not because of any need to make note of his impressions. Hardly. His memory for detail was legendary among his fellow detectives at Scotland Yard and Rayley, in fact, had often teased his friend Trevor Welles for the man’s compulsive need to record every interview, every theory and conjecture. But now, miles and weeks out of London, Rayley found himself carrying a journal almost identical to the one Trevor had kept when they had worked together on the infamous and infamously unsolved case of Jack the Ripper. For a journal, Rayley had found, also served as a companion. When he was writing in it, he did not feel so noticeable and awkward here at his solitary table on the Rue Clairaut.

He was not lonely. He would never use that word. Being invited to study with the Parisian police was undoubtedly the greatest honor of his career and he knew how much Trevor and the others were depending upon him returning with a full knowledge of the latest techniques in forensics. It was the singular subject - save perhaps for those most minor sciences of fashion and cuisine - in which the French had surpassed the English, and Rayley must not muff his chance. His hosts had obliged him with a translator, who, if not inclined to gossip or chatter, did manage to convey the bulk of what Rayley needed to know in the laboratory. His work days were full of activity, but Sundays always seemed to stretch out flat and wide before him, much like the famed avenues of Paris, and he had created certain rituals to hasten the passing of his leisure. The long walks, the lunches at this café with a journal at the ready, his game of observing the people around him and imagining that he knew their lives.

Rayley let his eyes lift from his notes. The woman was no longer looking at him. Most likely she never had been at all, rather simply gazing into the street beyond him.

Now that he considered the woman more closely, he wondered why he had been so quick to declare her lovely. Taken in pieces, there was nothing exceptional about her. Her hair was brown, as hair so often is. Her skin was smooth and pale, but not without flaw. Not without a slight pucker at the corner of her eyes which, along with the parenthetical lines around her mouth informed him that she was not a girl, but closer to his own age. Twenty-eight, he guessed, perhaps even a well-tended thirty-two. Her color of the eyes was blue, but not remarkably so, nothing to prompt comparisons to sapphires, or oceans, or the sky. She had been clever enough to echo their color in her gown, which was cut in what he had come to think of as the French fashion, with the skirt narrower than those worn by the ladies of London, the neckline high and austere, the shoulders a bit broader. Another trick for the eye, a style designed to make the waistline of even a plump matron appear as narrow as that of her daughter.

He wondered what the woman would look like if she smiled. Not likely to find out anytime soon, for she had returned to her soup, dragging her spoon through the broth in a somewhat dispirited fashion, as if she were searching there for something she didn’t really expect to find.

Observing without being observed in return was his profession and his passion. The detective had once again gone undetected, which was the whole aim of the game, so Rayley couldn’t say why he picked up his journal with a similar expression of defeat. Of course she hadn’t been looking at him. Women rarely did. He had hardly needed to cross the channel to confirm what he’d always suspected, that women of any nationality were unlikely to find him handsome, that his visage was in fact thin and owlish, with heavy spectacles and a weak chin. He’d managed to avoid reminders of his ugliness well enough in London, but here in Paris the task proved nearly impossible. The entire city was besotted with itself, hanging mirrors on every wall, creating reflections of reflections, as if the collective civic desire was not merely to provide a confirmation of its glory, but rather to render the beholder dizzied with rapture, unsure of what was real and what was illusion.

“Monsieur?”

The waiter had pushed over a cart and was drawing back the gleaming copper hood to reveal a selection of desserts, plump pastries with such colors and aromas that Rayley was immediately shamed by his earlier gloom. What man could be downhearted in the midst of such bounty? “Je veux…” he began, pointing at a cherry tart and the young man nodded, plopped the plate in front of him with an abrupt little clatter, and disappeared.

Je veux. One of the few French phrases he knew, but undeniably the most useful. Since his arrival in Paris, he had been reduced to the position of a child, a toddler pointing his chubby finger to demand a toy. Reduced to the most primitive of longings, able to say only “I want, I want,” without the skill to clothe the nakedness of this need among further explanations and descriptions. Rayley picked up his fork.

The couple across from him had abandoned any pretense at conversation. The woman now turned her attention to a notebook much larger than the one Rayley carried. She sketches, he thought. She is one of those innumerable Parisians who feels compelled to capture their city in chalk and charcoal. The woman drew swiftly, decisively, her hand making broad strokes across the notebook, her expression serious. The man was reading a newspaper, leaning back gracefully in his iron chair, one leg crossed over the other at such an angle that Rayley could observe the pink blossoms crushed and impressed upon the soles of his shoes. There was a flower market nearby and the wind coming from the river carried stray petals through the air, so many that the floor of this open courtyard was scattered with dots of white and rose and gold. Such a surfeit of beauty, Rayley thought. Enough so that we trod upon flowers, enough so that no one notices the waste.

The clouds had shifted and the sun was stronger now. It fell across his face. Rayley closed his eyes, pushed his tongue against the roof of his mouth, let the tartness of the cherries dissolve into the cream beneath them and the crunch of the crust beneath that. One could so easily become intoxicated on sheer sensation, he thought. One could become drunk with desire. Because even though his analysis had failed to yield a single arguable reason why the woman across from him might be called beautiful - or at least notably more so than any other lady in this courtyard - something in her had drawn and held his attention. He sat very still, waiting for the flavors to dissipate. The cream first, then the crust, and the cherries he swallowed last of all. Je veux, he thought. Of all the pastries on this tray, of all the pedals in this street, of all the pleasures in this bright and spinning city, I want her.

When he opened his eyes, she was gone.

He put his fork down on the table. This was another of his private little brags, that he could taste something without devouring it in its entirety, that he was capable of moderating even the most exquisite pleasure. He had always known what it meant to have enough, and again he thought of Trevor, how lacking in restraint the man was, always reaching across the pub table to grab the unfinished portions of Rayley’s own meal, saying guiltily, “You don’t mind, do you, man?” as he popped the last bites into his mouth. Trevor would go to fat before he was forty, to gout by fifty, and probably the grave shortly thereafter, but Rayley missed the man and indeed all the lads back in London. Their cheerful crudity, their slaps and farts and beer and bawdy jokes. The French were pleasant enough, he supposed, careful to see to the needs of their esteemed guest and fellow criminologist. And yet the first day, when he had presented his credentials, branded with the golden crest from Her Majesty the Queen, had he imagined that the lips of the chief coroner had turned up in a slight sneer?

He certainly hadn’t imagined the snickering he’d heard later in the lab, the whisper of “Veek-tor-e-ah” drawn out in that damp French hiss, that sound that could make the names of the saints seem vulgar. The Queen was not popular here in Paris. Her refusal to attend the Exposition Universelle had been taken as a slap in the face, and Rayley shifted again in his seat, looking over his shoulder at the broad gray base of Eiffel’s half-constructed tower. With its four steel legs dug into the red soil, the base reminded Rayley of some great claw, a severed talon prepared to uproot anything that stood in its way. The tower was little more than a machine posing as art, but the French were very proud of it and everything having to do with their upcoming world’s fair, their paean to scientific advancement and republican government. A tribute to everything that was modern and egalitarian and free-thinking, and thus the opposite of Veek-tor-e-ah and the thin bookish detective who’d come cross the water bearing her seal.

The French police found him pretentious and old-fashioned, this much he knew. He was never invited for a drink after work and they must stop off for a drink after work, must they not? All detectives did. Part of him wondered if their cool reserve might result from the fact he was Jewish, but this was unlikely, since the size and prosperity of the ghetto stood proof to the claim Paris was an ecumenical city, with opportunity – if not friendship - for all. Once he had started to ask his translator what was the French word for “camaraderie” before he had caught himself just in time. How they would have snickered over that.

The tart before him remained a nearly full red circle, only a single bite missing as proof of his presence, his carefully monitored appetites. Rayley checked his bill and left coins, undoubtedly too many. Closed his little journal and returned it to his breast pocket. Rose and walked past the table the woman and the man had so recently vacated. For just a moment he indulged himself there, let his hand drag along the back of the chair where she had been sitting, glanced down at the cutlery and dishes she had touched, the glass she had lifted to her lips.

And then he saw the picture she’d been sketching, a single sheet raggedly ripped from a notebook, left behind in what must have been a hasty departure.

Without thought, he picked it up and turned it over.

It was his own face. She had been drawing him.