City of Light

Chapter TWENTY



Paris



4:15 AM



What he had told Rayley Abrams had been absolutely true. All of his clients were asking for Isabel.

This was something Armand Delacroix had not foreseen, that so many people would have been so dismayed at her abrupt disappearance. In a business that valued youth above all else, Isabel was aging. In a city that demanded novelty, she was a known quantity. Any mystery she might have brought to the proverbial party had long since faded.

And yet they asked for her. At the parties and in the streets and cafes. But where is Isabel, they would inquire. They would hope that she was well. Would he tell her that they had sent their regards?

It was a surprising complication, Armand thought as he wandered through the dark and silent house. The servants were still an hour or more from waking, and Marianne would likely doze until noon. He called her by her new name exclusively now, for this was an essential part of the game. When a person assumed a fresh identity, they must dive in wholeheartedly, like a sinner seeking rebirth beneath baptismal waters. None of this business of calling them one name in private and another in public. That made it too easy to make a mistake.

In fact, learning to automatically respond to a new name was an adjustment of the mind not unlike learning to speak a foreign language. Each time Armand went back and forth between England and France there was a point – invisible to the naked eye perhaps, but as real as this brandy glass in front of him now – when he would cease being English and become French. One person would recede and the other would step forward. Marianne had cried the first time he told her this, and he knew that for one so young, the adjustment must feel like a death. She would understand it in time. For the parts of our identity that we leave behind are never gone, but merely sleeping. They can rouse and reassert themselves whenever needed. What was it that the philosopher said? “We cannot change, but we can expand.” Anyone with an interesting life knows the truth of this.

Yes, he liked this deepest time of night, when Marianne was tucked into her bed, the servants had all retreated behind their closed doors, and the house was still. He did not light a lamp to guide his steps, for he had been blessed since boyhood with a gift for seeing in the dark. Besides, he did not wish to wake anyone who would feel compelled to assist him in such minor tasks as refilling his glass or clipping his cigar. Armand appreciated solitude and, to his mind, did not get enough of it. He pushed open the glass doors and stepped out onto the small balcony located just off his bedroom, then looked up with approval at the wispy moon. He liked Paris as well, especially this time of year. It would never completely be his home, but when a man is more than one person, then he must have, by definition, more than one home.

Armand settled into a woven chair and put his feet on the unsteady ottoman before him. He had much on his mind tonight and may well push through to the first light of dawn.

Isabel had disappeared the same night that she’d also, under protest, provided him with an alibi. The night they took the detective. So that had been….Armand paused, blew out an explosion of smoke with a gentle cough. They were coming into the third day that she’d been missing. An unexplained absence of this length was noteworthy, even for a woman as mercurial as Isabel. They did not share living quarters, for she had made it plain that her willingness to accompany him to Paris was contingent upon her having a home of her own. In a way, she had always been as private as he. But he still had means of monitoring her. Earlier today he had slipped her maid a handful of coins and told the old crow to alert him at once should her mistress return. Yes, she was to send a messenger even if it was the middle of the night.

For he simply must find a way to get Isabel back. At least for a few months, through the busy summer of the Exposition, when she would be expected to play hostess at his salons. Her role in his success, he was now prepared to admit, was larger than he would have guessed. It was Isabel who lent beauty and grandeur to this business and he supposed, as he paused to consider the situation from a different angle, that her age could be as much an advantage as not. The men seemed reassured by the continuity of her presence. That was why they all asked about her, even when they were standing on the sidewalks in front of their places of business, churches, opera houses, the homes they shared with their wives. She was the one who stood proof that it was possible to sustain the game for years. Proof that it could be sustained at even the highest levels of society. A woman come from Mayfair, the sort who had been painted by Whistler.

Ah, Whistler. Armand tilted back his head, stared again at the moon. His nice, tidy little world had begun to unravel on the very day that James Whistler had first been commissioned to paint a portrait of Isabel Blout.

And the bitch of it all was that it had been his idea.

The Whistler portrait had been intended as the apex of their triumph. The chance to see Isabel standing there in clothing worth as much as the house she’d grown up in, the most beautiful and desired woman in London, the paragon of society wives. She had understood the joke at once. Her lips had twisted in that ironic smile he knew so well. Even George Blout had favored the notion. So nervous and skittish in the beginning, so afraid someone would guess the unlikely truth about him and his remarkable young wife. But having gone years without detection had given him confidence and brought an old man’s deeply buried resentments to the surface, until even George had been willing to enter into their sport. What a chance to thumb their noses to the society which had so long rejected them, or, much worse, the hypocrites who came calling at some times and snubbed them at others.

Isabel in a Whistler. The perfect jest indeed.

What Armand Delacroix and George Blout had both failed to anticipate was that Isabel would befriend the painter. It had occurred to Armand, and most likely to George as well, that she might seduce him, for Isabel seduced instinctively, with no more effort than it took her to breathe. A liaison between Isabel and James Whistler might even have proven useful at some point in the future, for the painter’s social connections were impeccable, far surpassing those of Armand. But a friendship between the two – who could have foreseen that, and the consequences it would wreck upon them all?

She had evidently shown Whistler some sketches, rough drawings she had stubbornly dragged with her from the early days of her youth. Those smudged pictures were the only thing that could still connect her to Manchester and she held them as a lawyer holds evidence, for some ongoing trial that she was conducting exclusively in her mind.

But when Isabel had shown them to Whistler, he had proclaimed her to be talented. Even the revelation of her great secret had not dissuaded him from wanting to help her. Who knows, it may have even charmed him more, artists being a uniquely tolerant lot. Whistler had accepted Isabel, in all her forms, as an acolyte, and he had stood beside her at the easel, guiding her hand through the motions, teaching her the differences between light and shadow. Shadow was the hard part, he told her. Once you mastered that, everything else in the picture became clear. They worked together two mornings a week, at a set time of ten in the morning. He took the appointment seriously. He was never late.

In short, James Whistler had given Isabel Blout the one thing no other man had ever attempted to give her: respect.

And it turned out, unlikely of unlikelies, that this is what she had truly wanted all her life.

For after only a few weeks under the artist’s tutelage she had announced to both her husband and Armand that, in her words, “This charade is over. I am simply no longer prepared to sustain it.”

Blout had panicked. There was no telling how far she would push this, how many subsequent revelations would come from the first. For Isabel was no longer herself. She had taken to roaming the parks of London dressed as a man. Drawing people, sometimes with Whistler at her side and sometimes alone. Her fingertips were perpetually stained, colors driven beneath the nails and crusted around her cuticles. She envisioned herself to be a budding artist, whose talent would dazzle the masses and allow her entrance into the sort of bohemian circle that would accept and celebrate her unorthodox past.

All she wanted, as she repeatedly said to any man who asked her and to quite a few who did not, was to be herself.

But that, of course, was the one thing she could not be.

Whistler panicked too. It was a fine thing to play at being professor and pupil two mornings a week, and he had come to care for the girl. But his livelihood came not from a bohemian circle of artists but rather from the British upper class. He did not wish to abdicate his profitable role as a society portraitist for the dubious distinction of being the man who had discovered the hidden talents of Isabel Blout.

It fell to Armand to reason with her, as indeed it always had. She would not always have to play the game, he told her, but she simply must play it a bit longer. The official story would be that Isabel ran off to Paris with Armand, a tale most people would readily believe. He was, after all, a handsome man close to her own age and London had been expecting Isabel to abandon George Blout for years. Wifely desertion may be scandalous, but it is scandal of a tolerable sort. George’s social circle would tsk about it over the soup course at their next dinner party, and then, with the arrival of the fish, they would move on to tsk about something else.

Granted, the portrait itself was a bit of a hot potato. The truth was built right into it, visible to anyone who had the eyes to look. The artist did not wish to see it destroyed – and nor would any sensitive person who had ever gazed upon its rather remarkable brand of beauty. But Whistler understood, as did George Blout, that a portrait like this was best shepherded into a private collection where it would never be widely viewed. It was not to be a pearl before swine but rather a pearl displayed in a very precise sort of setting.

And so it was mutually decided that Isabel would go to Paris with Armand. She would pose as his lover and use her beauty and charm to help him establish a Parisian branch of his business. Even before the disaster at Cleveland Street, the opportunities in London had been paling, and Armand had vowed not to make the same mistakes in Paris. He would not throw the net so wide. Not a brothel this time with dozens of men coming and going, but rather just a few very specialized procurements for the wealthy. All Isabel would have to do is help him through the Exposition, when there was so much money to be made and then, then…

Then she could go where she pleased and do whatever she wished. Vienna. San Francisco. Calcutta. Pretoria. Milan. It was all the same to Armand. He would give her money and he would give her freedom. She could take Henry with her if she wished.

Armand had most sincerely meant this promise. He and Isabel had been together in this quest from the beginning and he could have done none of it without her. It was not his intent to keep her in eternal thralldom and he would release her from any obligation once the Exhibition had passed. From there she could call herself whatever name she chose, paint whatever she wished, speak whatever truth moved her, travel to any city that beckoned.

As long as it wasn’t London or Paris.

Armand sipped his brandy. It had been a good plan, but now it had all somehow fallen apart. The table had been tipped and any bets which had been placed on it had slid to the floor, cancelled forever.

For Paris was a changed place from just a year ago. Too many reporters and far too many lawmen. He could not fault himself for failing to predict Isabel’s transformation at the hands of Whistler, for that had been a true stroke of fate, but Armand knew he should have seen this part coming. He should have anticipated that as the Exposition neared it would bring not only money, but scrutiny. Newspapers from all over the world had sent writers hungry for stories, determined to find some angle on the fair that had not yet been explored. Nations sent not only their jewels, their art, their scientific advancements, but also men to guard these assets – defenders of every sort, from police captains in uniform to Mafia thugs. No movement in Paris went unmonitored, no aberration escaped analysis.

All the fuss made it rather difficult for a man to conduct his business.

Armand Delacroix had spies of his own, so he had known of Rayley’s arrival within days of the man setting foot in France. On a rational basis, he knew it was unlikely that Scotland Yard had sent a detective to net a small fish such as himself, a man whose only crime was transporting young whores across the channel to meet the burgeoning needs of Paris. Isabel had told him he was being foolish. There was no reason to believe that Scotland Yard either knew or cared that Armand Delacroix and Charles Hammond were the same person or that the pretty boy from Manchester had grown into a man of international business.

Which was all most likely true, at least last autumn, when Rayley Abrams had blown into Paris on a cool wind. Armand’s informants had reported that Rayley was merely working in the forenics lab, studying methodology with the French police. Autumn had turned to winter, and winter to spring, with the tower ever rising and Armand’s coffers growing fatter. For if procuring sexual entertainment for gentlemen was a profitable business, it could not compare to the profit potential of blackmail.

No one knew of this. No one. There was a time when he would have told Isabel, for there was a time in which they had shared everything. But that had changed. She saw him more as a jailer than a friend now, as evidenced by the fact she refused to live under the same roof. As evidenced by the fact that they frequently argued, the one thing that in their long and storied history together, they had never done.

So all Isabel really knew were the things that everyone knew: The Exhibition was running low on funds. Private investors were being sought and Armand, a man with moneyed friends on both sides of the channel, was in a uniquely favorable position to forge the right sort of deals. Had she not been so distracted with what she described as her “slavery,” Isabel was certainly clever enough to have determined the rest. That the patrons Armand had assembled did not expect to profit from their investments, nor to be paid back for their loans. All they expected was that their activities at the white brick house tucked away in a small side street off the Boulevard Saint-Michel would never be discovered. They wanted their secrets to remain secret.

They paid significant sums for this assurance, half of which Armand obligingly turned over to the Exhibition committee and half of which he pocketed. There was talk of a small plaque somewhere at the base of the tower, in tribute to these selfless and visionary men who, be they of French or British birth, were willing to put aside nationalist squabbles and pledge their personal monies to assure that the Exposition Universelle would be a rousing success. It amused Armand no end to consider this, that the world’s largest phallus should be embellished with a list of the wealthiest pedophiles in Europe.

So it had all worked well for a while. Funding for the Exhibition, steady employment for the poor, sexual novelty for the rich, and unlimited profit for Armand Delacroix. He had recovered from his first blow and despite the troubles with Isabel, despite the damned reporters and the damned coppers everywhere babbling each in their own foreign tongues, it might have continued to work.

But April had brought both the crisis in London and the subsequent arrival of Henry Newlove. And for the second time in a year, Armand’s whole world had fallen straight to hell.

He had been in London when the word came that the bobbies had raided Cleveland Street. He had not bothered going by the premises – there was certainly nothing there to salvage – and fortunately Tommy had been with him when he heard the news. The two of them had instead walked straight to the docks, strolling their way up the gangplank into steerage on the next transit boat scheduled to leave. The paperwork was not a problem. Even if the channel officers had been looking for a man named Charles Hammond – and they probably weren’t, at least not yet - he had his French passport in the name of Armand Delacroix, bestowed upon him by a grateful civil servant, a man who also happened to be a member of the Exposition committee. A minor in his company, a child declared to be his niece, would need no papers at all.

Armand could only assume that the other boys had scattered after the raid. Gone back to wherever they’d come from, which would have meant Henry had returned home to Manchester. The boy had no papers, after all, so his chances of following Armand to Paris seemed remote – so remote that Armand had ceased to worry about it by the time the boat struck the dock in Calais. It was a pang to lose his London brothel, but Paris was proving far more profitable and Armand was already considering making it his primary home.

So it had been a shock indeed to see Henry standing in the street outside his home a few days later, a shock to see him stepping from the shadow of an obliging tree to confront Armand with a single word: “Why?”

“Why?” was the question Henry Newlove had been asking all his life. He was a sullen lad, prone to fits of self-pity and rage. It was as much his temper that had driven him from the ranks of the boy-girls as the faint velvety fuzz of hair on his chin. There were ways around the physical changes. Certainly ways around the facial hair and deepening voices, even methods to conceal the protrusion at the base of a boy’s throat, the width of his wrists and the gracelessness of his hands. Physical femininity was far easier to feign than psychological, and Henry had never developed the sweet pliability of the other boy-girls. He had been constitutionally incapable of flirtation or charm.

In fact, save for the fact he was Isabel’s younger brother, Armand would have sent Henry Newlove packing years ago. He was certainly handsome enough to draw a steady stream of business, blessed by the same genetic gods which had smiled so radiantly down on Isabel. He had wide blue-grey eyes and full lips, the kind favored by many clients. But none of this would have been enough to counteract his outrageous demands had Isabel not been there to constantly intervene on his behalf. Armand had let him remain in the ranks of the boy-girls longer than any prudent man should and, when the velvet fuzz on Henry’s face finally turned to wool, even had created a position for the boy as the procurer and trainer of new talent.

Isabel had been the one to suggest they put him at the postal and telegraph office. The delivery of messages around the city required the services of innumerable adolescent boys, so the pickings were lush, and Henry, who had a good mind when it wasn’t mired in petulance, had proven a reasonably effective tutor. He should have been gratified, but it had never been enough. Henry was always asking Armand why he couldn’t have this room or that new suit of clothes. Why he couldn’t go to a certain dance or operetta, why he shouldn’t come to Paris to live with Isabel.

Armand had pretended to mull this last idea, as much to content Isabel as Henry, but he had never seriously considered inviting Henry to Paris. The boy’s frequent explosions of anger were problematic enough in the controlled atmosphere of Cleveland Street and would be the undoing of them all in the more politically precarious world of the Exposition Universelle. So it had been with the most abject horror that Armand Delacroix had perceived Henry Newlove stepping out from under a tree on a lovely April morning and saying “Why?”

Armand’s only salvation, ironically, was the fact Isabel had refused to live with him. Henry had managed to find his way to Armand’s house easily enough; in light of the soirees which were regularly held there, the place was well known among men of a certain persuasion. Isabel’s home was smaller and more discreetly located. The longer Henry went without being able to find his sister, the more likely he was to give up and return to London.

Armand had taken him to luncheon. It seemed safer than allowing him inside the house, where Marianne would shortly be awakening and coming down to breakfast. Henry’s resentment of her, and the place she clearly held in Armand’s future plans, was so intense that Armand feared he might actually attack the child. If Isabel had been mercurial, Henry was plutonian. Just as impulsive and unpredictable, but darker, wilder, meaner. Heaven help them all if he found his sister, and thus the means to stay in Paris.

But over luncheon Armand was to get his second nasty shock of the morning. For Henry had come to Paris not in hopes of securing employment, but set on blackmail. Not just the blackmail of clients. Oh no, not at all. Henry had sat behind the crisp white tablecloth, swirling his wine with great affectation and little skill, sloshing a bit over the rim. And he had cheerfully announced to Armand that if the two of them couldn’t come to some sort of agreement, he was prepared to tell the authorities that the civic-minded Armand Delacroix and the whore-mongering Charles Hammond were one and the same.

“Turnabout’s fair play, yes?” he had said, while Armand had sat frozen in horror, a bite of trout almandine growing enormous in his mouth.

So there it was. The wily Henry had managed to ascertain what the distracted Isabel had not: that Armand’s true money was coming not from prostitution, but from blackmail. And he had traveled to Paris with one intent, to blackmail the blackmailer. A thousand pounds, he said. A thousand pounds or Scotland Yard shall know it bloody all.

“Scotland Yard?” Armand had repeated stupidly. The figure of a thousand pounds had been too ludicrous for comment, but he was surprised the boy would attempt to threaten him with a weapon so far from hand.

“There’s a Yard detective right here in France,” Henry had said with a smug little smile. “Name of Rayley Abrams. Maybe he’d like to know where the master of Cleveland Street has flown.”

Rayley Abrams. That name again. For someone whom Armand had never met, the man was turning out to be the most enormous pain in the ass.

“How do you know of Rayley Abrams?” he asked, dreading the answer even as he posed the question.

“I work at the telegraph office, don’t I? At your insistence, don’t I, Sir?”

It was in that final syllable that Armand knew he was caught. That final sarcastic “Sir,” the word twisting in the boy’s mouth like a rag. A lad with the morals of Henry Newgate wouldn’t hesitate to read a telegram before he delivered it, especially a telegram that was sent to or from Scotland Yard. In fact, now that one paused to consider it, running telegrams was the perfect side-job for a fledgling blackmailer. Henry undoubtedly knew as much about where the Cleveland Street case stood as any man on either side of the channel. And, just as he said, it was Armand himself who had gotten him the job, the one who had placed the very weapon in his hand.

Armand sipped his brandy, looked up at the transient moon. Even now, the memory of that luncheon made his stomach churn. He was an ethical man, was he not? He had tried for years to keep matters well in check, to ensure that no one was seriously hurt, that no one lost anything he could not afford to lose. But that day at luncheon with Henry had been the point of no return. For once the threat of blackmail has been loosened, it spills over everything. It is a splash of Bordeaux on a white table cloth – irretractable, the stain everlasting. The boy had sat before him, his fingertips pressing together in the church steeple of children’s rhymes, smiling, quite proud of himself.

But still, even then, Armand had not intended to kill him.

Henry had to be gotten rid of, but he was Isabel’s brother and Armand had known the boy almost since birth. He felt responsible for him too. Henry had to be gotten rid of only in the sense that he needed to be taught a lesson, spanked like the child he still was, and transported back to England. Within an hour of leaving their luncheon Armand had devised a plan of his own. He had several muscular and persuasive men already in his circle of contacts - such was the nature of the industry in which he toiled. It would be a simple matter to send instructions to one of them while Henry bathed upstairs.

For Armand had pretended to capitulate. He invited Henry to stay with him and apologized for not sending for him earlier. He persuaded the boy that to blackmail Armand was to fish in a very small pond when there was an ocean of possibility all around them. He said he knew the perfect client – old, and that’s always best, is it not? They demand so little and pay so handsomely in return. Had he brought his uniform with him? Henry had nodded eagerly. His first Parisian conquest would be a simple one.

When Henry had descended down the stairway in his boy-girl garb Armand had felt something he rarely experienced, a rush of conscience. For the boy had taken pains with the painting of his face, covering all evidence of stubble, and he wore his ill-fitting outfit with pride. It was a sad jumble of red satin, garish and ugly to Armand’s increasingly-demanding sartorial eye, but Henry had been in Paris fewer than twelve hours and had no basis for comparison. He expected some sort of reaction, so Armand had smiled broadly and given an appreciative nod.

“Your hands,” he said, and Henry had glanced guiltily down. They were always a problem, even with the most feminine of boys, and Armand impulsively grabbed a pair of gray kid gloves from a table in the foyer, gloves he’d purchased for Marianne, or perhaps even Isabel. Henry pulled them on and, with no further comment, the two of them departed from the house.

Gerard was waiting for them down near the Seine, in a musty little room Armand rented for just this sort of unfortunate occasion. It was a simple matter to lure Henry there – he had been humming as they walked, the silly little bird – and to usher him inside where, in the darkness of the room, Armand doubted the boy had even registered the presence of danger. A hand with a white handkerchief came over his face and the boy slumped forward. They bound his wrists, Armand taking care to remove the expensive gloves before doing so, and tied the handkerchief across his mouth. His mouth. Henry’s beautiful and problematic mouth. When he awakened he would undoubtedly be displeased by this turn of events and would mount some sort of protest, put up some sort of struggle. Armand pulled off his own cravat and stuffed it beneath the handkerchief. Then he and Gerard had tumbled the boy’s yielding form into a corner and stepped out of the room to conclude their business in the daylight.

Armand had paid the man, both for his services and enough to secure two passages across the channel. For when Henry awakened, which wouldn’t take long since the amount of chloroform on the handkerchief was very slight, Gerard would toss him about a bit, at least enough to knock out of the boy any more half-baked notions about blackmailing Armand Delacroix. Whenever Gerard was satisfied that a sufficient degree of reason was dawning in Henry’s bloodied head, he would then clean him up and escort him back to London himself.

And then Armand had remembered the gloves.

He went back for them, only to find Henry convulsing in his dark corner, his shoulders heaving and shuddering beneath the red satin jacket. It took Armand a minute to realize what was happening. That Henry, without ever regaining consciousness, had become nauseated from the chloroform. That he was now, thanks to the stuffing of Armand’s own scarf into his mouth, choking on it. Armand cried out for Gerard’s help and fumbled to loosen the gag. But he had done entirely too fine a job of knotting it and besides, the boy was thrashing, further sealing his doom with each spasm that gripped his body.

By the time they freed him, it was too late. Gerard’s thick fingers against the boy’s neck only confirmed what Armand already knew.

They could scarcely abandon the body in a room rented under his own name. Nor could they transport it through the city. The Seine, conveniently close with a sewer opening just at hand, was the only solution. With Armand standing guard at the mouth of the alley, Gerard carried Henry down the short slope to the water. As Gerard stooped to release the body, Armand’s chest had grown tight with emotion. The scene was too familiar and it awakened a past he was loathe to contemplate. For the envelope of memory is tightly sealed for a reason, is it not? When we rip it open, we do not always know what we will find.

Armand had leaned against the wall of the alley, gagging himself, overcome with the stench of the sewer and his own nerves. This is not what he had wished, not at all what he had planned. He had awakened that morning a simple businessman and would return to his pillow a murderer. And his victim was Isabel’s only brother.

Isabel. That was another thing. She must never know. Her faith in him was already fading and if she knew he had sent her precious Henry floating down the Seine, there was no way of predicting what form her rage would take. She needed a diversion, something to sufficiently occupy her mind so that she wouldn’t wonder why Henry’s whining letters from London had abruptly stopped.

Armand had peeked around the corner of the alley and watched the current slowly claim the form of Henry Newlove. Watched it carry him toward the center of the river and finally, mercifully, from his view. “We should have weighed him,” Gerard had said. “We should have found a rock.”

The next Sunday Armand took Isabel to a café. His selection of a place to dine was not by chance. Even before Henry’s lips had spewed the name, Armand had never entirely lost his fear of Rayley Abrams. He had the man followed as a matter of course, just as he made it his business to know the habitats and habits of all the men he was blackmailing. Rayley’s almost ridiculously ritualized life had made him the easiest of the lot to monitor, and now all Armand had to do was put Isabel in his sight lines and hope that he would notice her. This part should be easy. The man was ugly, lonely, a foreigner. A single smile from a woman like Isabel would be enough.

She protested, of course. She had heard rumors among the housemaids of a mysterious figure who had entered Armand’s bathroom as a boy and departed as a girl, and she asked him many questions. She did not mention Henry by name, but it was clear enough where her suspicions lay. She looked at him differently – he could not have just imagined this. She looked at him now not merely with resentment, but with a little fear.

Their argument had been brief. But we’ve been through all this, she said. We know this one and what he’s about. Armand had persisted. He asked so little of her now, he said, and they were so very near the end. Soon she would be a free woman, coins in her purse. She had sighed, nodded, then turned her chair and her attention toward Rayley in her careful, practiced way. A tilt of the chin. It could have been an invitation or merely the gaze of a woman looking into the street. Abrams had fallen to it like a starving dog to a bone and Armand, pretending to be absorbed in his paper, had almost smiled. The bit about sketching him had been Isabel’s idea. A nice touch, he must admit.

Life is a strange labyrinth. At some point we move from child to man, from the acted upon to the actor. We are no longer bent to the will of others but begin to bend others to our will. The fears of youth subside, and with them, a bit of our soul. But sometimes we realize that those we are chasing may also be chasing us, that we are the observed as well as the observing. For in that very moment, with Rayley eating his tart and Isabel sketching him, Armand’s eyes had fallen on a certain article in the London Times. He read it every day, even though only one newsstand in Paris carried the morning edition, and now here, just below the fold on last page was a headline whose enlarged print all but shouted the words BRITISH STERLING, FRENCH GLORY? It hinted of money changing hands, prominent British men underwriting the mounting costs of the French Exposition, and while it stopped short of naming the men, or even speculating why they might be inspired to invest these monies, the writer had gotten enough of the particulars correct that a thin film of sweat began to emerge on Armand’s skin as he read. His own name was mentioned, describing him as a liaison between the French and British. Liaison. The word implied too much.

The byline on the article had read “Patrick Graham.”

And so he had made sure that both Abrams and Graham were invited to the party at the Hotel Normandy and he had not been surprised that they had found each other in that sea of people. He had sent Isabel to chat them up. Through his investors he knew that the press would be invited to climb the tower and he wanted Isabel standing beside Graham when this invitation was extended.

Isabel had returned from the jaunt reiterating her claim that Abrams knew nothing. “Not as smart as he looks,” she had first said, with a light little laugh. And then she had paused and added “But that’s actually quite unfair. What I should have said is that you have nothing to fear from him. The detective is sensitive, bookish. Much like you were when we first met.”

“And Graham?” Armand had asked.

She had shrugged. “Now that one is smarter than he looks. But then, he’d almost have to be, wouldn’t he?”

She claimed that Graham had asked her nothing about the pool of investors, that he had all but ignored her while instead dancing attendance on some American reporter. But then the next morning another article had appeared in the London Times, and this one was above the fold. It was a first-hand account of the grandeur of the Eiffel Tower, mentioning the gold trim and marble tile, the hand-blown light fixtures and miraculous elevator. The article ran beside a photograph of the American girl clutching the railing with Paris barely visible behind her.

All well enough, except for the final paragraph: “But from where is the money for all this French finery coming? Some say it is our own Bank of London. And we shall offer you names of these British investors on the morrow.”

Awkwardly stated, but the intent had been clear. Even a braggart like Graham would not have made such a boast to the readership of the Times if he was not prepared to deliver on his promise. He was merely stretching out the suspense to build anticipation in his readership, to ensure that even more of them would buy papers, as he said, on the morrow. Evidently he had somehow gotten a list of the names of the investors which was, of course, merely a prettier way of saying he had gotten a list of the names of Armand’s clientele.

A second murder is different than a first. Not easier, just different. As he crushed out his cigar and set aside his empty glass of brandy, all Armand could think to compare it to was a loss of virginity. He was not eager to add a third death to his resume, especially not one which would draw the wrath of Scotland Yard, but Detective Abrams was choosing to be stubborn and this game, like all others, must eventually draw to its close. Armand’s long practice in splitting in his mind, usually accomplished at some invisible marker halfway across the channel, would undoubtedly make the task easier. Charles Hammond would never have killed a man, but for all practical purposes, Charles Hammond was himself dead. He had ceased to exist on the day the London police raided a brothel at 229 Cleveland Street. And it would appear that Armand Delacroix was prepared to do whatever was necessary.