A Lady in Shadows Page 11

  “As you can see, we are delighted with the Limoges,” said Marie—slightly strained, it seemed to me. “Won’t you sit down?”

  By then, I had realized that Marie’s invitation had a purpose beyond tea and cake and a courteous, if somewhat belated, “thank you for the present.” The real reason for the visit sat across from me now, incarnated in Fleur’s slight schoolgirl figure. The initial polite phrases glanced right off her, like drops of water that scatter and evaporate in a hot pan, and in fact it did not take long before she cut right through Marie’s attempts at light conversation.

  “They haven’t found him,” she said.

  There were shadows under the alert eyes and a fragility to her features, which made me wonder if she was able to sleep at night.

  “No,” I answered. “I heard as much.” Rosalba Lombardi might have left the professional jurisdiction of Papa and the Commissioner long ago and now belonged under Inspector Marot’s, but I still followed the case as well as I was able. After more than two months, there was still no decisive lead in the hunt for Rosalba’s killer.

  “I think they’ve given up trying.”

  “I shouldn’t think so. Inspector Marot is a very determined man.”

  Fleur made a dismissive gesture. Her hand was no larger than a child’s, I thought. Though she was clearly in her adult persona today, there was still a youthfulness about her that spontaneously provoked a desire to protect her, even in me.

  “I found this.” She placed a pink envelope on the table. “Rosalba had stuck it to the bottom of a drawer, and they did not discover it when they searched her room.” She pushed the envelope toward me. “It seemed as if they were more interested in making a mess than in actually searching. As if it was just supposed to look as if they were thorough.”

  I sighed and opened the envelope. The hourly wage that Varbourg was able to pay its constables was not high. At times their commitment to their work matched it.

  Inside, separated by thin sheets of tissue paper, lay six postcard-size photographs. Four of them were hand tinted, the last two black and white. They were all of Rosalba Lombardi, and she was not wearing much in the way of clothes.

  The first four, the tinted ones, were playful and piquant, in a way almost childish, in spite of their erotic character. Rosalba posed up against a column, naked except for boots and a hat. She promenaded wearing only stockings and a corset in front of a backdrop with a not especially well-executed landscape painting, accompanied by a small white poodle. She sat on a picnic blanket, entirely undressed, and held a filled wineglass up toward the beholder. In a close-up, she hugged a huge basket full of grapes that only half hid her breasts, and bit playfully at a bunch she was holding up in the air. It made her neck look so impossibly soft and graceful that a swan would have cause for envy.

  The two final pictures were different, and not just because of the unadorned black and white. For one thing, Rosalba was clearly pregnant—further along, it seemed to me, than the four months we had guessed. Furthermore, she was not alone.

  She had been placed in a bathtub and equipped with a large sponge, with which she was pretending to wash herself. But whereas in the tinted pictures she had been coquettish and clearly comfortable in her state of undress, she now sat in one end of the tub and attempted to pull her knees up to her chest, despite her pregnant stomach. She held the sponge against her bosom as if she was trying to hide it. Her gaze did not flirt with the camera—instead it was fixed rigidly on the figure observing her from an armchair at the end of the tub. It was a man—which was about all you could tell with any degree of accuracy. He was elegantly dressed in top hat and cape, and sat balancing a silver-headed cane across his knees. But between the collar of the cape and the brim of the hat there was no face, no head, just a white sack with gaping dark eye sockets and a grotesquely painted charcoal smile that looked more like the mouth children might give a snowman than any human expression I had ever seen.

  I looked up and met Fleur’s intense gaze.

  “Why are you showing me this?” I asked.

  “Because it’s him.”

  “Him?”

  “Yes. I am convinced. Can’t you see how afraid she is?”

  I looked at the two black-and-white pictures again.

  “Have you shown these to the police?”

  “Yes.”

  “But . . . why have they not been added to the evidence file, then? Didn’t they want them?”

  “Oh yes.” Fleur smiled bitterly. “Very much. But it was not to . . . what did you call it? . . . add them to the evidence file.”

  I blushed. It was only now that I grew truly uncomfortable with the pictures, now that Fleur’s sarcasm made it crystal clear what men used such things for.

  “I would not let them take them,” she said. “I could see . . . that they would just make the rounds among the men. She is dead. Murdered. I could not bear the thought of all those knowing grins, the vulgar remarks, their grasping fingers, and all their moaning and grunting. She had enough of that when she was alive, didn’t she? Can’t you understand that?”

  I folded my hands in my lap and observed the pearl buttons on my gloves as if I had just discovered that they were there. I could not make myself look directly at this wary, knowledgeable woman-child who had experienced so much more of life’s darker side than I had.

  “Yes,” I mumbled. “I understand. But why not the Commissioner, then? I know you are familiar with his character. He would not . . . grunt.”

  “I asked. Or rather, Marie asked on my behalf. He referred me to Marot. Mademoiselle Karno, I know you found Marie’s little Louis and helped to save his life. Can you not also find . . . him?” She pointed with a sharp chopping movement at the man with the snowman’s grin. “Tear that wicked mask off him. Make sure that he is punished. The guillotine is too good for a man like that!”

  I did not know what to say. In her voice churned not only the hatred she felt but also her despair and sorrow. She probably did not understand what unrealistic demands she was making, how much she overestimated my abilities and options. Even if I did by some miracle manage to find this man, he might have nothing at all to do with Rosalba’s death. Fleur had no logical evidence, only her own stubborn conviction and her interpretation of a facial expression in a photograph. There was, I feared, no relief to be had even if we were to tear off the mask of the voyeur in the obscene picture. I took a deep breath and told her more than I should have.

  “Do you know that both the fetus and the placenta were removed?” I asked. “And that it most likely was this, and not the subsequent lesions, that killed your friend?”

  She was silent for so long that I inadvertently looked up. Her face was pallid.

  “No,” she whispered. “They didn’t say anything about that.”

  “Fleur, you said yourself that Rosalba was very worried about the future,” I said. “Is it possible . . . could you imagine that she had found a person who was willing to carry out this extremely risky operation for her—and that it simply went wrong? That this was a tragic accident, and that the awful circumstance under which she was found was just a clumsy attempt to confuse the police?”

  Fleur began to cry in her uniquely silent, sobless way, like a child who knows she will be scolded if she “whines” and therefore has taught herself to let the tears flow without a sound.

  “No,” she said. “She would not have done that. She had felt life, don’t you understand? It would have been a deadly sin. She would burn in hell forever. Burn in hell! No. She did not do that. He was the one! He was the one who killed her!”

  But I could tell from the very fervor of her denials that she was no longer as certain as she had been.

  “You must find him,” she said. “Will you promise me that?”

  She was so small. So furious. In such despair. I discovered that I did not have the power to leave her without giving her some vestige of hope.

  “I promise you that I will search,” I said. “I cannot p
romise you that I will find him. In return, you must also promise me something.”

  “Anything,” she said simply.

  “If I find him, then you must be content with whatever retribution the police and the justice system can provide you with. Even if the verdict is not murder.”

  “He killed her!”

  “But perhaps not intentionally.”

  “But . . .”

  “If you will not give me your word, then I cannot help you.”

  She stared angrily at me, but she was no longer as pale as before.

  “Fine,” she said, lifting her small stubborn chin. “You have my word. And you can keep the pictures for the time being. I expect to hear from you as soon as you have news!”

  “If there is any news, how do I reach you?”

  “Leave a message with the caretaker in Rue Vernier. Or ask Marie—she usually knows where I am.”

  They exchanged a tender, complicit look. Marie extended a porcelain dish full of tiny meringues toward me.

  “Cake?” she asked.

  August 28, 1894

  “Onykia ingens, gentlemen,” Dr. Althauser said, and tapped the large, beautifully colored poster a few times with the tip of the pointer. “Discovered and named in 1881 by Edgar Albert Smith from the British Museum during an expedition to the Straits of Magellan with the good ship Alert. Also known as the greater hooked squid in English. In French it does not yet have a name beyond the Latin. What can we say about this organism, gentlemen?”

  Dr. Althauser professed to teach by the Socratic method and conducted his classes more like cross-examinations than lectures. But I had quickly discovered that there was no doubt as to who possessed the correct answers.

  I did not complain—at least not about that. For me it was a victory just to be here.

  This was my third lecture with Althauser, and though his dismissal of Erich Falchenberg had affirmed my right to be in the class, he still had not looked at me once. One might argue that he could not gaze with equal intensity and interest at all the more than forty students who followed his lectures, but as the only woman, I stuck out like a white duck in a flock of crows, and it must take conscious effort not to glance at me now and again. In spite of his Socratic leanings, he had not addressed me once—possibly because that would require looking at me—and in a way I was no more visibly present than back in the days when I used to hide in the highest gallery of the operating theaters at Saint Bernardine in order to observe the surgical procedures.

  Althauser tapped the poster once more.

  “Janvier. Yes, you. What do you observe?”

  “A . . . squid,” Janvier said hesitantly.

  Althauser tilted his head and considered his victim. “A squid. Yes, verily. Describe it.”

  “It has . . . tentacles.”

  “Like every squid, yes. In this case ten. Or to be more precise, eight arms and two tentacles. What more?”

  “Fins.”

  “How do they look?”

  Janvier was perspiring. “Almost a bit . . . triangular.”

  “No, Janvier, they are not triangular. They are joined to form a perfect parallelogram with equal sides, or in other words, a rhombus. Unlike, for example, the sagittate fins more common among cephalopods. So: rhomboid fins. What else? Malleau? Would you continue?”

  Malleau stood up. “Head, beak, arms, and gills protrude from a funnel-shaped mantle. The skin of the mantle looks as if it is covered in spots, as with the common European squid, Loligo vulgaris, but these appear more . . . prominent. Warts?”

  “Correct, Malleau.”

  “In addition, it looks as if the tentacles are equipped with claws or hooks . . .”

  “Likewise correct.”

  “If the professor permits . . . How large is it?”

  “About half a meter long. Excellent. We have now described the animal’s exterior, and that is of course critical to categorizing and identifying it correctly. But as physiologists there is something far more vital that interests us.” With a practiced flick of his pointer, Althauser turned the poster over to display an illustration of a partly dissected specimen. “As you can see, the mantle has been opened, and the gills, the digestive system, and the reproductive organs are visible. Villeneuve, would you be so kind as to identify them?”

  Villeneuve walked helpfully up to the board and took over the pointer.

  “Beak, oral cavity, intestines . . .” He stopped.

  “The reproductive organs, Villeneuve?”

  Villeneuve looked. Suddenly someone in the class began to snicker. He whispered briefly to his neighbor, who likewise had to repress his laughter.

  “Perhaps it is helpful to learn that it is a male squid, Villeneuve?”

  Villeneuve kept searching. I too had noticed the condition that was the cause of all the merriment, but Villeneuve had not. Perhaps he mistook the organ in question for a tentacle and had not realized, in the nervous fervor of his predicament, that the creature in that case now sported eleven arms, and that the eleventh “arm” was significantly longer than the others, was, in fact, longer than the entirety of the body.

  The merriment spread, and Villeneuve began to blush but still had not seen the light, so to speak.

  Finally, Althauser took the pointer from him. “The creature’s penis, Villeneuve.” He jabbed at the eleventh arm with a certain firmness. But it was not Villeneuve he was looking at now, it was me. After having ignored me entirely through the three previous lectures, he now regarded me with an intense gravity that actually made the snickering cease.

  “In its erect state, this penis is, as you can see, longer than any other part on the animal, in fact, longer than the animal itself. Sixty-seven centimeters, gentlemen. That makes Onykia ingens unique. Relative to its body size, it has the longest penis of any animal we know.”

  During this entire speech he kept his eyes stiffly focused on me. I did not understand why. Did he think that if he pronounced the word “penis” enough times, I would disappear?

  I endured his gaze as calmly as I could. I did not look away, I did not show the discomfort I felt. I am even fairly sure that I did not blush.

  “Is there anyone present who can explain why the Onykia has such an unusual reproductive organ?” he asked. “What about you, Mademoiselle Karno? Can you give us an explanation?”

  I took as deep a breath as my corset permitted.

  “No doubt there is an evolutionary advantage. It permits fertilization to happen deep inside the female’s body, whereby as little reproductive material as possible is lost.”

  I knew nothing whatsoever about squids, but the thing had to have some kind of purpose.

  Malleau could not quite stop giggling. Especially not when I used the word “fertilization.” Althauser ignored him.

  “Excellent, mademoiselle,” he said with a small nod, as if I had passed an exam. I exhaled.

  “Gentlemen, in the aquarium in the adjoining room you will find twenty-five squids. Perfectly common European squids, I regret to say, but you may learn something even from such ordinary creatures. I want you to undertake a thorough vivisection of the animals, do detailed measurements, descriptions, and drawings of all the critical physical organs. Afterward you should perform whatever tests you consider pertinent. Let us hope that will be sufficient to solve this week’s assignment, which I will present to you once our time in the laboratory is up.”

  How he perceived me now, I was not yet certain—but it was apparently a step in the right direction. He looked at me, he spoke to me. Apparently one of the criteria for my continued presence here was that I could hear the word “penis” without making a feminine fuss. A somewhat peculiar key to the world of learning, and yet again . . . perhaps most fitting.

  Vivisection requires that one cuts into something living. I understood that perfectly well, yet still it took an act of will when this living being stared back at me in concrete form. I looked down at the squid that I and Villeneuve—my partner for this exercise—h
ad managed to pin to a varnished wooden board. A dark maroon flush shot across the animal’s leatherlike mantle, and even without a fevered imagination, it was tempting to conclude that this play of colors expressed something very like feelings—fear, anger, aggression. The lower half of the board, Villeneuve’s left hand, and part of his sleeve bore witness to the defensive powers of squid ink. Several of the ten arms shook and writhed and grabbed at everything in their vicinity.

  “Can’t we kill it first?” I whispered to Villeneuve.

  He did not look as if he thought the task of opening up the live animal was any more appealing than I did. He was very young, more or less redheaded, with an accent that suggested he came from a rural background. After a momentary blush when he discovered with whom he had to share his squid, he had shown neither hostility nor excessive curiosity toward me, and it did not seem as if he held me responsible for his somewhat embarrassing incident earlier in the day.

  “If it is dead, we cannot observe the processes,” he said. “Janvier claims we need to study its circulation. He also said that we needed to find its . . . that is . . . um . . . scrotum, but I think he was just teasing . . .”

  I glanced at the workbench next to ours. Malleau and his partner had already cut open the mantle on their squid and had pulled it aside so that the internal organs were displayed. Malleau was sharp—in every way. His features were narrow and intense, his profile pointed and almost birdlike. From the very first day it had been clear that he assumed he was the most intelligent student in the entire class, and he might be right.

  I was on the verge of offering Villeneuve the scalpel and asking whether he wanted to make the first incision when I became aware that Dr. Althauser was standing a few meters away, studying me.

  “Do you find it difficult, mademoiselle?” he asked, with a gentleness that was somehow also a warning. This was how one would address a young lady, not a student. If I ever manage to get him to stop calling me “mademoiselle,” I thought, then I will have won. The day he calls me by my last name like the others . . . only then will we be on an equal footing.