City of Light

Chapter TWENTY-SEVEN



Paris



2:49 PM



Arrest warrant in hand, Trevor, Rubois, Carle, and a half dozen flics climbed into a police wagon and headed out in search of Armand Delacroix. To his gratification and surprise, Trevor had been handed a set of paperwork by Rubois before they left the station. It was embossed with a seal, some sort of document that Trevor could only assume temporarily afforded him the privileges of the French police.

But at the white brick house on the Boulevard Saint Michal, they found nothing but a handful of servants and a twelve year old boy in knee breeches, who was in the back yard lazily swirling on a swing. Marianne, evidently, caught in his more natural form, and the police swept up the child along with the others, herding them toward a second wagon for transfer back to the station. Repeated shouted assurances that they were being carted in as witnesses, not suspects, did nothing to calm the excitable flock, who were weeping and wailing as if they were standing witness to the Biblical end of days. The cook, forced to abandon a half-baked chicken, had proven especially vocal.

“You will be all right,” Trevor said at one point to the boy, who was standing solemnly to one side. The child blinked slowly, as if he did not understand what Trevor was saying. But he couldn’t have forgotten his English so quickly, so it was more likely a matter that he understood Trevor well enough, but simply did not believe him. Waiting amid the loudly lamenting servants the child remained silent, and when it was time to board the wagon, he climbed in passively, prepared to be transported to this unexpected new fate without protest or even a question. Trevor gazed after him sadly as the wagon lumbered up the street. It was hard to predict what life held in store for the boy known as Marianne.

After that, the remaining officers reassembled and reentered their own wagon. Through Carle, Trevor managed to convey to Rubois that it might be a wise move to return to the river. That was their agreed-upon meeting place, after all, once Emma finished with the posters and Tom with the addresses. And Gerry would be waiting there too, of course, her mind undoubtedly churning with possibilities. Considering her nature, Trevor feared he may have already left her too long on her own.

3:01 PM



Henry was dead. This was the private shame Armand Delacroix had lived with for the past two weeks, but did the entire city of Paris have to know it as well?

His nightmare had rendered him unwilling to return to sleep, so Armand, who had never held to traditional hours of work and rest, had risen from his bed and taken to the streets. Under the circumstances, it was probably not a bad idea to make a few social calls. All those men who claimed to miss Isabel so badly…they needed to be reassured that business would proceed as usual, that Armand had options still available for their perusal. If not Marianne, then someone else. Perhaps even a boy who looked like a boy if that was how their inclinations lay, for he was hardly one to judge. In a time of crisis, as this most surely was, it was essential that Armand cement the trust of his most important clients, and that he bring any lost sheep resolutely back to the fold.

He had gone first to see a trader of bonds, an unpleasant blowhard with strong ties to the financial community of Paris and thus to the Exhibition. After a brief chat with the fellow – and an invitation to Armand’s next soiree on April 29 – Armand was back on his rounds and making his way toward the office of a minor politician, a man whose own pockets were not particularly deep but who had proven connected to a wide spectrum of potential investors. And as he had paused at the corner of a residential street, Armand had seen it.

Do You Know This Girl?

If you did, the poster advised you to immediately contact the French police. Some business about a reward.

Armand felt as if he had been struck with a blow to the head. He reeled. He may have staggered. The world spun, bright and terrifying, before his eyes.

Henry had resurfaced. He had come, for all practical reasons, back from the dead, pointing a milky white finger at the head of Armand Delacroix. The police most certainly knew they didn’t have a girl, that what they had was a boy, a boy dressed as a girl, and thus a rather interesting sort of fish to catch. As he tried to regulate his breath, his hand clutching the very lamppost that held the damning poster, Armand felt that it was all closing in on him somehow. Isabel was still missing and Cleveland Street had collapsed. And now here was Henry, loosened from the water and in the hands of the police.

He couldn’t go back to the house at the Boulevard Saint Michal. If the police were onto him, then that would be the first place they would look. He must get money, he thought, he must go to his bank before it closed at five and he must withdraw all the funds at his disposal and then he would go…where? Somewhere. Across some border, into Italy or Austria, Germany or Spain. Someplace where Charles Hammond and Armand Delacroix did not exist.

He looked around, tried to remember who he was, where he was. Not to panic, he thought. Nothing was so deadly as panic. The clock on the corner said just past three, which gave him nearly two hours to get the money and he could easily be gone from Paris by dusk. Armand pushed off of the lamppost, his hand dragging across the picture of Henry Newlove’s face – pulling it, tearing it – and began to walk down the street. But Henry was waiting for him on the next corner too, and also watching from across the street, his eyes accusing, his lips in a pouty sneer. “Outrun me, will you?” he seemed to be saying. “There is no point. I am on every avenue and boulevard, just waiting for you to pass.”

Yes, get the money, Armand thought, desperately trying to hold onto a sequence of logical thought. Get the money and get out of Paris. But first you must do something about that inconvenient Detective Abrams.

3:16 PM



Henry was dead.

He had known it and he had not known it, not fully, not until he had taken the elevator down to the street.

Ian had not seen the poster at once. He had spent his afternoon breather precisely as he had spent all his brief moments of leisure - taking the broken bits of pastel from his pockets, finding a bit of shade, and settling down to draw. Today he had found himself sketching the face of one of the men who worked beside him, a broad ruddy fellow, porcine but friendly, a layer of tile. A random human face, one of any you might pass in a day, but James had taught him that there was a particular challenge in drawing strangers, for you had to give them an imagined history when you didn’t know what their true one might be. Ian had finished the outline of the man’s head and was beginning with the curve of his brow when he happened to glance up at the kiosk before him.

He did not immediately react. Did not flinch or make a noise. He rose as if in a dream and walked towards the poster. Stooped and read the fine print. The body of a girl, it said, but there was no doubt that the face before him was Henry’s. Found on the morning of April 12, it said, perhaps the only part of the brief description which Ian did not on some level expect. For this meant that his brother had been dead for more than two weeks. That Henry had been dead even before the afternoon Ian sketched Rayley, before the party for the Exhibition, before they climbed the tower, before Graham was drowned.

It was a level of betrayal that Ian would not have guessed was possible. Armand had not only killed Henry, the child he had promised to protect, but after killing him he had been able to go convincingly about his everyday life. He had taken Isabel to cafes and to parties, he had swirled champagne and laughed and kissed her forehead, all the while knowing that she would never see her brother again.

Ian dropped his pastels, which bounced at his feet and scattered, small stubs of color against the broad gray expanse of cement. He pulled the poster from the kiosk and slipped it inside his shirt, then went to the elevator. For once he was unaware of the noise of the ascent. As he emerged on the first level he noted, as if he were watching them from a great distance, the movements of the other workers and the chatter of their voices. There was even more activity on the second level, welders and painters and men on ladders hanging globes that would someday be filled with light. So many people, each with their own faces, their own scars and worries and each absorbed with their own tasks, this was the key thing. Ian looked around him slowly, and waited until he was sure that no one was looking back.

And then he burst up the final staircase, the highest and thinnest of them all. The one that led to his sanctuary. The spiral was tight and the center post was slightly swaying, requiring a man to twist his body, forcing him to climb unnaturally, almost in a sidestep. The afternoon sun shone wickedly bright on his face, blinding him, making it hard to see the small steps, so that Ian stumbled, not once but twice, with one hand holding the slender railing and the other clutching his brother’s picture to his chest. It was an ascent which might have frightened a man who had anything left to lose.

3:37 PM



This time was different. His prison door had opened on several occasions during his three days of captivity, each time bringing a sudden searing light to the small cell. It was always frightening, always jolting Rayley from his reveries which were becoming ever deeper and more disorienting, his dreams so persuasive that at times he wondered if he were already dead. Perhaps this was what death was like – all solitude and memory, the sense that one was a hollow vessel, floating atop a dark sea.

But this time was different. This time it was only Armand who entered, and there were none of the man’s false pleasantries, none of his questions or innuendos. He advanced upon Rayley decisively, the cloth already in his hand and, most tellingly of all, he left the cell door open. One way or another, Rayley knew his imprisonment was coming to an end.