A Lady in Shadows Page 24

  Christophe was in top form. As far as I could tell, he and Aristide Gilbert were responsible for almost seven of this edition’s pages. In the front-page article, he described how Gilbert had hidden “dozens” of photographs of dead young women and somehow made it sound as if Gilbert single-handedly murdered all of them. There was even a drawing that depicted “the scene in the darkroom where Mademoiselle Death finds the murderer’s self-slaughtered body.”

  So far, there was nothing in it that I did not already know, give or take a wildly exaggerated hypothesis or two. But in “the following article on page 5: The drowned wife,” the apparently quite effective Christophe had dug up information about Gilbert’s past that I did not think even Marot knew of yet.

  THE DROWNED WIFE

  Alice Anderson was just seventeen years old when she first came to the resort town of Hyères to improve her health. Here she met Aristide Gilbert, who was working as a bathing assistant at a facility run by English Doctors Griffin and Madden. She fell head over heels for the young Frenchman, and some months later they were married, in spite of the doubts felt by Miss Anderson’s parents. We now know just how right they were to doubt. When the beautiful young Englishwoman drowned in 1890, at the age of twenty, Mr. and Mrs. Anderson expressed their fear that this was not just a tragic accident, as her husband claimed. Gilbert, however, escaped prosecution because a relative, Madame C. Aguillard, swore under oath that he had been visiting her at her home (she was elderly and bedridden) on the day that Alice Gilbert drowned during a bathing excursion. Varonne Soir has now sensationally come into possession of a letter from photographer Gilbert to Madame Aguillard, now deceased, which reveals that this alibi was false! The letter is printed in its entirety on page 12.

  What kind of man was Death’s Photographer? How many killings did he have on his black conscience before he took his own life? Read more on page 12!

  Naturally, I immediately turned to page twelve. The newspaper had arranged for “the six-page-long letter of confession” to be photographed, so you could see the wavering, emotional handwriting and the many deletions. I would have to compare them side by side to be sure, but I thought I recognized the handwriting from the letter Aristide Gilbert had written to me.

  Dear Aunt Celeste,

  Two people can hardly be more destined for each other, and yet be more remote than we are. No. Than we were.

  My Alice is no longer. The darkness took her, and there was nothing I could do.

  She was ill last winter, a cough that would not quite loosen its grip, perhaps that was why. In any case, it began again. She had headaches and could not sleep, she took no pleasure in anything, did not feel comfortable indoors or out, had only the slightest appetite for food and drink, and turned away from me in bed. I apologize, dear Aunt, but you were married for more than twenty years, after all, you know how it is between a man and a woman. Or how it should be.

  When she came to Hyères for the first time, it was for the sake of her health; that was how we met. Every day during the two months she was with Dr. Madden and Dr. Griffin, she bathed, and I was her dipper every time. Where she had been terrified to have her head underwater in the beginning, she now tried to get me to hold her down a little longer—“Just a few seconds, dear Ari”—and then a little longer still. She called it her daily rebirth. “It is like wandering through the Valley of Death and coming out on the other side,” she said one day. “I am sure that the resurrected souls feel this way when they are freed from their fleshly prison.” Dear Aunt, I know it is blasphemous, but I felt then as I think John the Baptist must have felt when he offered believers a new life. It was only later that I understood that what she experienced was not a resurrection but rather something that should happen between a man and a woman and not between a woman and the dark cold water.

  When we became man and wife, it ceased for a while. She was satisfied. And heaven knows, I was too. Oh, my Alice.

  But then she became ill. And she was sure that the only thing that could restore her good health was the baths. Dear Aunt, I was afraid. She would have gone by herself if I did not go with her. I thought that I could at least make sure that she returned. And she was so grateful. She clung to me before and after her body shuddered, and everything between us was fresh and new as if it was the first time.

  I will remember that day as long as I live. The last one. Because neither she nor I have really lived since then.

  It was at the beginning of November, and the water was warmer than the air. The season was over. The machines had been pulled up on land for the last time, shutters had been hammered across the windows in the boathouses and bathing cabins. The wind had been blowing hard for several days, but now it had died down, and the sea was completely still, heavy, and silklike to look at.

  “Today we can do it,” Alice said triumphantly. “You can’t say that it is too windy today!”

  “But it will soon be winter,” I objected.

  “All the more important, then, that I regain my health.”

  I could not resist her. There was a light in her face, and I did not want to be the one to extinguish it.

  We were the only people in the world, it seemed to me. Our footprints in the white sand were the only ones, our voices the only sound one could hear except for the screams of the seagulls.

  “My love. This has to be the last time this year.”

  “Yes, yes,” she said, as if she would promise anything. “Hurry up. I have not slept well for several nights; how am I supposed to get well if I cannot sleep?”

  “I thought you were doing better.”

  “Yes, a little, perhaps. But only thanks to the baths.”

  We changed in one of the abandoned cabins. She was still using the same blue-and-white costume as the very first time I saw her. Still just as slender, still just as young, it seemed to me, though I had had days and months and years together with her. For better or for worse, as it says.

  The air was cool, and I could see the goose bumps on her arms.

  “It’s too cold,” I said. “Let’s go home.”

  “No,” she said, though her teeth were chattering. “Ari, I beg you. It will only take a moment . . . and the water isn’t cold, not yet. Not really.”

  The water was in fact a few degrees warmer; we could both feel that.

  “See,” she said. “What did I say! Do it now, Ari . . . one of the long ones.”

  “The long ones” had gradually become sixty seconds. The normals were thirty seconds, and the short ones ten. I still counted, just as Dr. Madden had taught us back when I started. He, however, had never asked me to hold a patient underwater for more than ten seconds at a time.

  She willingly leaned back, supported by my right arm. With my other hand I pushed her under the water and held her there. I looked down at her, a shimmering, blurred image, while I slowly counted the seconds.

  “. . . fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine . . .” She hung limp in my arms and did not begin to fight until I reached “sixty!” and began to raise her up again.

  “No!” she scolded as soon as her face broke through the surface. “It’s too soon! You’re not doing it right! I said one of the long ones!”

  “That was one of the long ones.”

  “No. No, it wasn’t . . .”

  “My love. Why would I lie?”

  “You did not want to come down here. Now you want to go home quickly, and that is why you are cheating!”

  “I am not cheating!”

  “Then why isn’t it working?” She began to cry. “You don’t want me to be well. You don’t want me to be happy.”

  I held her close and tried to comfort her. What kind of talk was this, I said, when she knew very well that I loved her and would do anything for her. I stroked her back, her wet back, and the narrow shoulder blades, which I could feel through the fabric. But it was not enough; I could not hold her tight enough or long enough. She always wanted something more than me. Something else.

  “Do it a
gain,” she said. “And do it properly this time.”

  Lord have mercy. I did it.

  I held her under the water while I counted to sixty. And then to seventy. I thought that now it had to be enough. This time it had to be enough so we could go back, so I could get her to come home. She lay heavy and relaxed in my grip and did not resist. Not when I brought her to the surface either, not this time.

  I don’t even know when she died. If she let the water slip into her throat at once, or whether long seconds passed before it happened. When I worked for Dr. Madden and Dr. Griffin, there were rumors about a patient who had suffered a seizure at the very first dipping, somewhere in another health resort along the coast, but I don’t know if this was true, and I don’t know if this is what happened to my Alice. Would I not have been able to feel it? Would there not have been spasms, cramps? I held her in my arms, and I still could not feel it. I just know that when I raised her from the waters she was gone, and nothing I tried to do could bring her back to life.

  You will probably think that what I did next is unforgivable. I think it is. But fear gripped me because I knew what her parents would say when they heard. They would say: He murdered our little daughter. He killed her. He was only after her money, and now he has killed our darling girl. That was what I thought they would say, and I was right, that is precisely what they are saying now.

  How could I prove that they were wrong? Who would believe what I have just told you? That a young woman may fall so passionately in love with the darkness under the water that she worships it as Alice did? Who would believe that?

  So I left her.

  I left here there at the water’s edge, like something the storm had washed up, but there was no storm, only the still, dark waters that had taken her from me. I was trembling and weeping while I did it, but that does not lessen my guilt. I fetched my dry clothes from the cabin and changed. And then I pulled the wet ones after me and erased my tracks in the sand, every print, until only hers were left. The wind had risen again, and grains of sand tumbled over each other, one by one, and fell into the indentations so that the edges were blurred and the lie stood out more clearly: that only one person had walked here, that only one person had met the sea and found her death here.

  I am telling you this now because you are perhaps the only human being in the world who will believe me. You who have known me since I was a small child wriggling on my belly. You who have comforted me and kissed my scraped knees better, you who helped me learn my catechism, who said to Papa that he should leave me in peace, I was as I was, and I was a good boy even so. You who listened to me when I poured out my heart because I had fallen madly and hopelessly in love with a young English lady from Birmingham. You who cried at our wedding and blessed us both when no one else would.

  If you who know me and know the whole truth now cannot forgive me, then no earthly forgiveness is possible. And then I might as well let them lead me to the guillotine or let the sea take me as well.

  I hope this finds you in better health than when I saw you last. I do not know if we will ever meet again in this life, but if that is not to be, then take this as assurance that I love you now and always will.

  Yours in devotion—in this life and the next—

  Aristide

  I folded up the newspaper. It was so damp now that it tore. I shall have to buy a new one, I thought with the part of my brain that was still continuing to deal with the mundane.

  He must have received the forgiveness he sought—otherwise his aunt Celeste would not have perjured herself for him and given him a false alibi. Finally I understood, in part, at least, what Gilbert had meant by those cryptic words: I thought the water would be kinder than the other thing, I thought she would be fulfilled as my poor Alice was.

  He really had killed Fleur. I think it was only now that I entirely believed it in spite of the clear connection between her nails and his scratches. He had actually done it. This former bathing assistant had held Fleur’s small and weakened body underwater until she drowned. I just did not understand why.

  I suddenly remembered how affected he had been when he had had to photograph her body. He had been sick, had vomited. He had perhaps not counted on having to confront in the light of day what he had done in the evening darkness.

  Then a fairly obvious question hit me. How on earth had the newspaper got hold of this letter?

  I might as well have accepted Christophe’s offer of a ride home. I would have been less wet now, and it would have saved me the trouble I now had to take: to seek him out.

  When Varonne Soir turned on its electric sign for the first time at the beginning of December 1891, it had been an event that attracted several thousand people. For a while, there had been a small daily crowd waiting for the switch-on—at five in the winter months and seven in the summer—staring up at this wondrous and entirely free entertainment. Now people had become more blasé. There were other incandescent signs, and when someone did stand staring these days, citizens of Varbourg smiled indulgently and mentally categorized the gaping spectators as “from the country.”

  In the darkness and the rain this evening, no one had stopped. Nor did I, though the sign was worth a peek or two. Perched on the roof, it stretched across almost the entire length of the building and was so cleverly designed that, as the incandescent bulbs automatically went on and off, it looked as if a golden trail of fire ran across the sky and lit the torch of enlightenment that was the paper’s trademark. It flamed cheerfully for a few moments, and then the whole performance repeated itself. The reflected glow from the yellow, orange, and red bulbs painted colored streaks in the puddles and across the dark, wet cobblestones.

  At this time of day—or evening, rather—the newspaper’s pompous headquarters were humming with activity. In spite of its name, Varonne Soir came out in two editions, an early one that was on the streets by one in the afternoon, and a late edition timed, at eight o’clock in the evening, to catch both those heading home after work and the crowds going out for a meal or an evening’s entertainment. The newspaper Christophe had given me was so fresh off the press that the paperboys were still clustered around the gates to the loading bays, waiting to have their bags filled. As soon as this was accomplished, they would race off, and you could hear their shouts through the rain: “Death’s photographer! Read about the women he murdered!”

  For the journalists and the editors, that edition was already history. They were beginning to convene again to plan tomorrow’s early edition, and this was why I was hoping to meet Christophe here.

  The young man at the reception desk did indeed helpfully suggest that I should be able to catch “Monsieur Christophe” before the editorial meeting at eight thirty. He willingly gave me directions to “go up the steps to the third floor and then to the left” and otherwise just turned me loose. I think I can therefore say that I succeeded in surprising my public nemesis entirely.

  He was sitting at his desk in a corner of a large room holding fifteen or sixteen similar desks, most of them in a row by the windows so as to make the best use of the daylight. Right now, there was of course no daylight to be had, and at the occupied tables—all of them, more or less—reporters were reading, writing, or making notes, each in his own little bubble-like sphere of light cast by the green-shaded brass lamps that seemed to be standard inventory here.

  Here, in his professional surroundings, he looked more serious and less of a dandy. True, the boater hung on a hook behind him, and he wore no jacket, only a gray silk waistcoat and shirtsleeves, while he was hammering away at an apparatus that must be one of the new Remington typewriters that seemed to have taken over most of Varbourg’s offices in the past decade. It was very loud, and I could not help thinking that a clear and elegant handwriting would not only have been more aesthetically pleasing but also easier on the ears.

  He did not look up until I had nearly reached his desk. When he recognized me, he hastily pushed back his chair and got up.

  “M
ademoiselle,” he said. “This is . . . unexpected.”

  “Good evening,” I said politely. “Are you busy?”

  “Ahh . . . never too busy to speak with you,” he answered gallantly. “But I was left with the impression that you preferred not to speak with me.”

  “Perhaps you are familiar with John Stuart Mill’s thoughts on utilitarianism?” I said. “At the moment, it so happens that it will contribute to the common good here in Varbourg if you and I help each other. I am therefore prepared to consider you if not a friend, then at least as a potential ally.”

  “If you say so.”

  “You have something I would like to see. I too have information and evidence that will be of interest to you. Is there somewhere we can talk without being disturbed?”

  The letter from Aristide Gilbert to Celeste Aguillard was in its original form almost six pages long. I wanted to see it, not because of the contents, which I was already familiar with, but to compare the handwriting to that of the unfinished letter that Bruno had brought me.

  Achieving this took some hard bargaining.

  “You speak of utilitarianism, mademoiselle, but what do you have that could be useful to me?” he began.

  I had given it considerable thought on the way here.

  “Are you aware,” I said, “that the public decency laws are being misused in order to conduct experiments on this city’s so-called public girls?”

  “What kind of experiments?” he asked.

  I explained. He frowned.

  “You mean that . . . that this Althauser . . . impregnates these women?”

  “Yes.”

  “With this—what was it you called it?”

  “Insemination. It comes from semen, the Latin word for—”

  “Thank you, I can follow you that far,” he said quickly. “Can you prove it?”

  I no longer had Rosalba’s file—Althauser had secured it for himself. But I still had some names and addresses I could look up, and perhaps Estelle Audran would be willing to tell her story with a bit of persuasion and payment.