A Lady in Shadows Read online

  “Oh, the poor soul,” exclaimed Madame Vogler, and I hurriedly opened the garden door.

  Geraldo all but fell into my arms.

  “Thank you,” he sobbed, his speech wheezing and blurred. “Merciful Madonna, thank you.”

  I was not his “merciful Madonna,” but his gaze clung to me almost as if I had somehow interceded on his behalf and saved him from a fate worse than death.

  “What happened?” I asked. “Elise, get me some bandages and a basin. Is that kettle still hot?”

  “Devils,” gasped the wounded young man. “They were like devils. Shouting, screaming at us, calling us murderers, but they were the ones who wanted to kill. What is it they think we have done? We did not kill the poor president.”

  “Sit down,” I said, and arranged for him to be seated as closely as possible to the lamp. There was so much blood that at first it was difficult to determine the extent of the damage, but it looked as if most of it was coming from a lesion on the forehead, right above his left eyebrow.

  “We had to flee across the roof,” he said. “Monsieur Marco went back when he had helped me down the wall. He took a washing line from one of the lofts . . . I was so afraid it would break.”

  “Where is Monsieur now?” Marco had become the owner of Chez Louis some years ago and had chosen to let the restaurant keep its more French-sounding name. Still, someone had apparently known that he had Italian roots.

  “He stayed. He said . . . he said he had to keep an eye on the restaurant.”

  That sounded worrisome, but there was nothing we could do for our plump little café host now, other than hope and pray.

  When I had washed the blood away, a cut was revealed that was almost nine centimeters long but luckily not all that deep.

  “It needs stitching,” I said. “Would you allow me to do it, or would you prefer to wait for my father?”

  His eyes widened again into the wild stare that had made his arrival so frightening.

  “Will it hurt?” he asked.

  I thought quickly. We had a little ether, but it was probably better and safer to use nitrous oxide.

  “Have you heard of laughing gas?” I asked.

  He nodded. “I was at a variety show once, in Napoli.” It was as if the recollection of his home sapped his last strength, and his lips, plump and full like a child’s, began to quiver. “People could pay to come up on stage and try it, but I did not have the money . . .”

  “Under the influence of the gas, you will not feel pain,” I assured him. “You will probably just find my stitching entertaining. Afterward, the pain will be significantly reduced.”

  “Then . . . I would be grateful if it could happen quickly.”

  I brought him down to the laboratory. The sight of glass beakers, Bunsen burners, and our ancient microscope unfortunately did nothing to calm his fears, but it was much easier to create sterile conditions here where the tiles, tables, and floor could be wiped down with alcohol or sprayed with carbolic acid.

  I prepared the gasbag, filled a test tube with ammonium nitrate, and placed it over the Bunsen burner. The gas bubbled up through a water-filled rubber hose and gradually filled the bag.

  “Please have a seat,” I said to my tense patient and indicated the long zinc-topped workbench. It was not the first time it had served as an operating table. Geraldo hauled himself up to sit obediently, if somewhat nervously.

  “Breathe in through your mouth and out through your nose,” I said, and held the mouthpiece of the gasbag toward him. “Can you manage that?”

  He nodded. Silence descended while we watched Geraldo’s breathing. His concentration on the mouthpiece was so intense it made him squint almost comically, but he settled visibly right away. I did not think this was solely the effect of the gas—it was as if the effort to control his respiration in itself had a calming effect.

  “You may lie down now,” I said. “But continue to breathe through the mouthpiece.”

  He was slow now and beginning to show the effects of the nitrous oxide. Elise and I had to help him get his legs up on the table, and Madame Vogler folded a clean cloth and placed it under his head.

  “Elise,” I said, “you have to hold the bag.”

  Elise nodded. She had grown used to assisting with various emergency procedures, though it was the first time she had stood in as an anesthetist. That was usually my responsibility when my father performed surgery at home.

  I stitched the cut with care, but also as swiftly as I was able. The shorter the anesthesia, the milder the aftereffects. Geraldo was humming as I stitched. Occasional words emerged from the humming, luckily in Italian, because based on Geraldo’s own giggles, I sensed that the content might not have been entirely appropriate.

  “Thank you,” I said to Elise and her mother, once I was satisfied with my work. “Would you open the window and give us some fresh air?” I took the now deflated gasbag from Elise. She let go only reluctantly.

  “May I try?” she asked. “They say it is hilarious.”

  I shook my head. “It is for medicinal use only. Regardless of what Geraldo may have witnessed at the variety show, no one should inhale this for fun.”

  I bandaged the wound with surgical gauze treated with carbolic and felt quite uplifted and satisfied with the results of my effort. There was, I felt, a good chance that the cut would heal without infection and leave only a faint scar.

  I had been so intent on my task that the disturbance outside and my worry about my father had receded from my awareness. Now both reasserted themselves. Through the open window we could still hear shouting and noise and the tinkling of broken glass, though it sounded more distant here than upstairs in the salon.

  Geraldo had stopped singing. He raised his hand to his forehead, but I caught it before he could touch the bandage.

  “Please remain still. Do not attempt to sit up before you are ready,” I admonished him.

  The effect of the gas was fading, but he was not yet quite himself.

  “Mamma,” he moaned in his own soft native tongue. “I want to go home . . .”

  Two days later, he did just that, with an admonishment to see a doctor in ten days and have the stitches removed. Marco did not dare keep him in town, or even in the country, given the current atmosphere. But let us not get ahead of ourselves. The long, tumultuous night might have been coming to an end, but the day had barely begun.

  June 25, 1894

  In the morning, when the night’s unrest was tapering off, a message came from the hospital. My father was fine, but he had gone out to Petite Napoli, as the neighborhood between Pont d’Elise and Rue d’Artois was referred to colloquially. This was where a large part of Varonne’s Italian immigrant population lived, which had led to street fighting, attacks, and fires. I should not count on seeing him before evening.

  “Terrible,” said Madame Vogler. “What a horrific night.”

  Elise dared to go down to see if there was any bread to be had. She returned with four-day-old croissants, but reported that Monsieur Margoli, our local baker, was planning to have fresh brioche within the hour.

  “Anyone would think there had been a war,” she said, her eyes shining with distress. “There is rubble and broken glass everywhere, and it stinks of soot and ashes.”

  “Did you see Monsieur Marco?”

  “No,” she said. “But all the windows in the restaurant have been broken, and the mob dragged the chairs and tables into the street and set fire to them.”

  “Dreadful,” said Madame Vogler. “What is the world coming to?”

  Geraldo was still lying in my father’s bed sleeping, exhausted after his ordeal. Elise, Madame Vogler, and I made tea and ate stale, sticky croissants smeared with strawberry jam.

  I had just poured myself a second cup of tea when there was a knock at the door—not an aggressive drumming like the one we had experienced the night before, but nonetheless quite authoritative. The caller was a tired, middle-aged corporal of the gendarmerie, who had clearly had a trying night—two buttons were missing from his tunic, and one sleeve was blackened with soot. A little farther down the street, an entirely civilian hansom cab was waiting.

  “Mademoiselle Karno? The Commissioner requests that you and your father accompany me.”

  The Commissioner was not an officer of the police or the gendarmerie, but Varbourg’s Commissaire des Morts, the man ultimately responsible for all of the city’s dead. There was thus no reason to ask why our services were needed, so I simply informed the corporal that my father was busy with the living right now and was not expected home until later in the day.

  The man glared at me with visible irritation. He just wanted to carry out his orders and be done with it, I sensed.

  “Then we shall have to make do with you, mademoiselle,” he said. “If you would be so kind . . .”

  A job half done, it would seem, was better than nothing.

  Daylight was a dubious blessing. Had it still been night, the sight that met us might have led even a rational soul like mine to fanciful fears of the shadows. Now nothing was hidden. Every gruesome detail was revealed by the morning light, with the sort of prurient clarity certain painters lavish on pseudoclassical half-naked damsels in distress.

  She had been found in a narrow yard used by a coal merchant for storage. A length of corrugated roofing ran along one wall, and beneath it fifty or sixty coal sacks had been piled in a row. The coal dust had blackened the wall indelibly, and the cobblestones were greasy with soot and so uniformly black that only the contours of the coins revealed that there were in fact cobbles. Against this sinister backdrop, the sprawled limbs of the young woman appeared alabaster white, and the deep copper glow of her hair was a brutal shock of color, a lone sea anemone in a primal, lightless sea.
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  Her skirts had been rucked up around her waist, leaving her legs, belly, and crotch exposed, and she was wearing neither stockings nor shoes. Someone had slashed open her lower abdomen with a number of forceful incisions, several so deep that they had penetrated the abdominal cavity. The glistening coils of the colon were plainly visible.

  “I’m sorry,” the Commissioner said quietly. “It is not a pleasant sight.”

  I appreciated the fact that he did not add “for a young lady.” I fought hard to be perceived as my father’s assistant, a professional who merely happened to be female and twenty-one. I knew that the Commissioner did respect my knowledge and my skills, but he had known me since I was a little girl in pigtails, and he still called me “sweet Madeleine” most of the time. His protective instincts were kept in check only by an act of will.

  “I would be grateful if you would perform the necessary in situ examination, Mademoiselle Karno,” he said with a formality that was directed at the various representatives of the gendarmerie. “We would like to bring her to the morgue as fast as is appropriate before the so-called gentlemen of the press show up.”

  “I would have thought they had enough to keep them occupied elsewhere today,” I said. “But I’ll work as quickly as I may.” There was already a smaller gathering at the gate, and most of the windows above us had been flung open. Men in shirtsleeves and suspenders leaned out to get a better view, jostled for the privilege by women with their hair still in untidy nighttime braids and even several gaping children sporting only runny noses and nightshirts. If it had been a normal Monday morning, most of the adults would have been at work, but since the factories and workshops and mills were closed for the day because of the presidential murder, we had a large and interested audience. Although the corrugated roof fortunately blocked a part of the view, the fact that a violent crime had been committed in the coal merchant’s yard would not long be a secret to the general population of Varbourg.

  I opened my father’s spare bag, now mine, unwrapped the thermometer from its travel case, and performed an initial measurement of the air temperature. The night had not brought any coolness, and here in the still air between the tall sooty walls the mercury crept up to indicate 33.1°C.

  “Is the photographer coming?” I asked.

  “He has been sent for.”

  In spite of this, I took out my drawing pad and began to sketch the body’s position—the arch of the upper body across the toppled coal sacks, the loose-limbed opened legs, the rucked-up skirts. Photographs are a wonderfully objective source of evidence that may be useful in any court case, but my own sketches give me something more. They sharpen my powers of observation and push emotion into the background, and later they may help me to recall colors, depth, and detail that the camera’s flattened black-and-white representation does not have the power to re-create.

  The Commissioner waited, patient and silent, while my charcoal stick flew across the paper. First two general overviews, then details: the lesions, naturally, but also the feet—bare, and pointed like a dancer’s—the hands, not clenched, just with faintly curled fingers. And the face.

  In view of the brutality of the attack, one might have expected a contorted grimace, wide staring eyes, a gaping mouth. There was nothing of the kind.

  Her eyes were closed. I could not make out even a glimmer under the thick, dark lashes. Her features were relaxed, almost smiling, her lips only slightly parted. She had the classic oval face of a Botticelli Madonna, the forehead smooth and high, the chin soft and feminine. Her lips were full, her cheeks round. Despite the lividity, one could still imagine the warm glow her skin must have had when she was alive, now faded and yellowed, like paper left too long in the sun. There were no marks or lesions on her face. No broken nails or traces of blood on her hands. From the waist up she was flawless, serene, without disfigurement. In contrast, her lacerated abdomen was brutal.

  The photographer arrived, and I stepped back so he could do his work. Varbourg’s police had only the one, a young man named Aristide Gilbert. He could not survive on police work alone, and had a portrait studio on a side street off Rue Germain, where the common citizen could have himself and his family immortalized for a relatively modest sum. Gilbert was no artist, no aesthete. He could not arrange and light his subjects so that the ladies could catch a glimpse of their own faded beauty, had no power to portray the glue manufacturer and the brick master with a dignity that suggested noble ancestors. He photographed what was in front of the camera. No more, no less. He would never be the preferred portraitist of the bourgeoisie, but his police photographs were technically without fault.

  “Mademoiselle Karno,” he said, and raised his derby politely. “Your father is not here?”

  “No, unfortunately not,” I said. “He is busy. But the Commissioner wanted the body brought in before . . .” I nodded at the gathering crowd on the other side of the wrought-iron gate.

  “I understand,” he said. “Is there anything special you wish me to photograph?”

  “The lesions, of course, but also the hands and the face.”

  He nodded and began to mount his apparatus on the tripod.

  While he worked, I crouched down and scratched at the sticky mixture of coal dust and ordinary dirt that covered the cobblestones.

  “Are there any footprints?” I asked the Commissioner.

  “Too many.” He sighed. “During the day, a lot of people have reason to be here, and it’s not possible for us to distinguish those of the killer from the others.”

  “The soles of her feet are completely clean,” I said. “I think I might extract some textile fibers from between her toes, that is all. And they will most likely be from her stockings.”

  “Do it anyway,” said the Commissioner. “If we succeed in finding the stockings, we might at least be able to prove that they are hers. Was she killed here?”

  “I should think not,” I said. “Because of the coal dust, it is difficult to determine precisely how much blood is here, but . . . it is not enough. I am sure lividity will tell the same story when we get her undressed.”

  A minor tumult had broken out by the gate. A clear young voice cut through the general susurration.

  “Monsieur le Commissaire! Let me see her!”

  The Commissioner turned his head sharply, and I saw that he recognized the person who had called out.

  “Will you excuse me for a moment,” he said, and headed toward the gate. He returned a little later followed by a sparrow of a young girl, small, light, with lively dark eyes and black hair and a body that, except for the breasts and a certain fullness around the hips, could have belonged to an eleven-year-old. She barely reached his chest.

  “Let me see her,” she repeated. “I have to see if it’s Rosalba!”

  When she came closer, I noticed that she was not quite as young as I had at first assumed—but rather my own age or perhaps even a few years older. She was wearing a flowered cotton dress that emphasized her little-girl proportions, and the heels of her button boots were of an extremely modest height. Her dark hair was put up in a simple chignon, and her face was almost free of makeup—a light touch of powder across the cheeks, that was all. It was mostly her hips and the faint crow’s-feet by her eyes that revealed that I was not, in fact, facing a schoolgirl.

  “You must wait a moment,” I said. “Mademoiselle . . .”

  “Fleur,” she said. “My name is Fleur.”

  It was only then that I realized she was probably a prostitute. Most young women would have presented themselves with their last name, but among the ladies of the night it was common to use only their first name or an alias.

  “Mademoiselle Fleur. You will have to wait a few more minutes before we can allow you near the body.”

  “Oh, oh. I must know, can’t you see that?”

  She was gray with emotion, and there were tear tracks on her powdered cheeks.

  “In a moment, mademoiselle. As soon as we are ready, I promise you.”

  The Commissioner cleared his throat and handed her his handkerchief. She took it but then simply held it in her hand, as if she had no idea why he thought she should need such a thing.