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Chapter 2: Murder
As the night slowly lifted her heavy veil of mist to reveal the face of dawn, several officers of the Sûreté gathered on a street named Place Denfert-Rochereau, at a tunnel to the catacombs. A body had been discovered only hours ago, discarded at the crypt's entrance, with a cord tied in some strange manner around its neck. In the grey light of the morning, Michel Mifroid, Police Commissioner of the Sûreté, descended from a hansom cab at the crime scene. A man of towering stature and immaculate dress, his appearance impressed the officers. He did not go immediately to hear the report of the captain-in-charge, as would have been his usual protocol. Instead, to the shock of the policemen swarming about like ants, he reached back into the cab and gave his hand to a mysterious lady as she disembarked. Then, as if the two had arrived for an afternoon tea, they casually set to work analyzing the distorted figure of the corpse.
Mifroid donned a pince-nez and fingered the damp, fraying rags of the dead man's clothes. "Have you identified the victim?"
The officer whom he addressed stared at the woman accompanying his commissioner. "No, Sir. It seems that he was only a tramp seeking shelter in the catacombs."
"A grim choice of sanctuary." Mifroid turned to the young woman. "What do you make of this rope, my dear?"
She knelt with the commissioner beside the cadaver and gently removed her suede gloves. "I've never seen a knot like this." Experimentally, she touched the rope with her bare hands and tugged on the knot. The fibers of the chord were strong and sinewy. "It feels like jute fiber, Papa."
The captain-in-charge, who until this point had been consulting with another officer at the entrance of the tomb, finally looked up from his work and noticed the lady handling the dead body. "Excuse me, is this mademoiselle your daughter? And you've brought her to a scene of a murder? A woman's constitution isn't suited to police work, Monsieur Commissioner."
"Captain Lefevre, this is my daughter Alice," Mifroid announced as he stood from his examination, rising to his full, intimidating height. "I have been tutoring her at home at her own request since her return from a scientific American seminary for women. This is her first excursion to the field." He looked down at his progeny diligently at work. "My dear, do you feel at all nervous?"
"No, Papa." She never once looked up from her examination of the threads circled tightly around the neck of the corpse. In her studies, she had handled human bones, even examining their construction in slides under a microscope. She had learned various diseases and had studied illustrations of their grotesque consequences. But all this description is not meant to conjure an image of an unfeeling intellectual. In fact, the young woman who knelt beside the dead body, surrounded by members of the Sûreté, possessed an extraordinarily compassionate disposition. How she preserved it in the face of her ghastly studies, this author really cannot narrate. Perhaps, through the study of death and human suffering, it is truly possible for one to grasp the painful finality of our existence and empathize with the other transient souls of this world. However she managed it, Alice Mifroid mourned the sad fate of the deceased as she examined his body.
She casually brushed a soft tendril of hair away from her eyes as she continued her investigation, digging her fingers between the rope and the cold flesh of the corpse and feeling for the jagged, yielding texture of bruising and broken bones. Engrossed in her work, she was unaware of the effect of her presence on the policemen. Her romanesque profile and youthful color were certainly distracting to the younger cadets, while the senior officers seemed more put out by her intrusion into masculine domain. The captain who had brazenly chastised Mifroid returned to his work examining some muddy prints, mumbling something about the commissioner of the Sûreté probably having wished for a son. Another officer soon joined the rebuke, though.
"Monsieur Commissioner, we are unused to working with curious women dodging around. Please take your daughter home and have her continue her lessons from books the way that other ladies study. Really, Monsieur, this is most unusual."
The other officers stopped their forensics and stared at the man who had spoken so disrespectfully to their commissioner. Mifroid approached him with tight lips until the two men stood toe-to-toe, each man measuring the other.
The commissioner's strong frame towered over the other officer's, and his beady black eyes, hawk-like nose, and strong jawline emulated the visage of a bird of prey. The rough appearance of pockmarks and a few hardened wrinkles inspired fear and obedience in the men under his strict command. The pince-nez was a constant reminder of his superior intellect. The details mattered: his silver hair neatly combed with not a strand out of place, the gold buttons of his coat polished until they shone. In a word, the commissioner represented order.
"Monsieur, had your team determined that the content of this rope was jute fiber?"
The dumbstruck officer twitched. "No Monsieur Commissioner. We were trying to trace the style of the unusual knot. We haven't analyzed the rope's construction."
At last the young lady looked up from her place on the ground. "Perhaps the fabric of the rope reveals something about the knot. If the rope is made from jute, then maybe it and this knot's style come from the same place, from India."
The policeman stared. Mifroid clapped his hands as his daughter stood and replaced her suede gloves. Like vultures, the rest of the investigating team descended on the abandoned body and cut away the rope. They left its knot in tact, so that they could examine it more closely (and determine if it was indeed made of jute fiber). Alice joined her father, who at once asked her privately about her analysis.
"The knot was tied so that the noose would lock quickly around the victim's neck. The victim could have died from suffocation, because his windpipe and jugular are completely collapsed around the point of contact with the rope. But his neck is also broken, and I think the knot permitted the murderer to finish his victim with just a skillful flick of his wrist." She paused in her review, allowing her father to digest the gruesome description. "This method of murder is unusual. To capture someone by lasso before being detected by the victim, to hold the rope in the right way so that the knot would slip tight, and then to snap the wrist so that the rope would pull the backbone apart… Certainly the murderer has had practice."
"Indeed, he has," confided her father quietly, his eyes staring up into the pale morning light as his mind looked into the past. "What you've described corresponds with what we found on Joseph Buquet's body at the Paris Opera, although the weapon was missing. That's why I was asked early this morning to supervise this investigation."
"The Opera Garnier?" Alice looked around at the scene in front of her. "But we're on the other side of Paris. Is our man moving about the city?"
Mifroid eyed the catacombs wearily. "Who can say how far those ghastly tunnels lead?"
Listening to the commissioner explain the intricate network of tunnels beneath the city, Alice drew near the entrance to the crypt. There, the stale morning air fell silent. From somewhere deep in the impenetrable darkness, a gentle sound very much like a chanted hymn reached her ears. It echoed faintly from those dreadful walls beneath the street, as if the dead were reading the requiem mass for their newest member.
"Should we try to follow him through the tunnels to the Opera?" She shivered in the crisp morning air and turned to her father, who had suddenly paled like the dead man they had just examined. Surely he heard the singing voice as well!
"It's too risky. I'll have some men guard the entrance tonight, but even the police shouldn't chance going inside. There are other vagabonds down there who might be dangerous. And we could very easily get lost."
There are, in this wide world, some things that frighten even commissioners of the Sûreté. His eyes were wide behind their pince-nez. As the reverent chanting grew louder and clearer, the police stared like madmen at the entrance to the catacombs.
Like a passing spirit, the singing suddenly faded into the wind, and the silence of the grave at last returned. The men shook themselves as if coming out of a dream. Not wishing to linger, they rushed to finish their forensics and to transport the body to the morgue. In the commotion, Commissioner Mifroid furtively pocketed the unusual rope of jute fiber in order to research the mysterious knot.
Riding home in the spreading daylight, Alice and her father talked about the murder and how they could find its perpetrator. The suggestion that the Paris Opera might still contain clues seemed a prospect worth pursuing. Neither of them mentioned the catacombs or the disembodied hymn they had heard from its depths. Instead, Alice inquired about the opera house's legend.
"How could anyone believe that there was a phantom in the Paris Opera?" She rolled her eyes. "It's almost the twentieth century. We're well past the age of myths and superstitions."
"Show business attracts superstitious types, I suppose."
She shook her head. "Even the newspapers presumed that the place was haunted, and that a ghost committed those strange crimes earlier this year, before I returned from the seminary. The entire Paris Opera staff is convinced. And there's also the deaths of Monsieur Buquet and the Comte deChagny, in the cellars beneath the Opera."
"My dear, I investigated the Comte's death, and as you know there was a feud between the two brothers. His drowning must be related to that." He narrowed his eyes. "Are you telling me that at your age you still believe in ghosts?"
"Never, Papa! I think that some person must have exploited the company's superstitions."
Mifroid frowned and looked out his window. "That's also what the Persian reported to Monsieur Faure during the investigation of the Comte's demise. Of course, as I have said, the Comte was murdered by his brother, and the other.. er.. 'incidents' attributed to the ghost were really just circumstantial accidents."
But Alice was relentless, and pulled a tattered newspaper clipping from her change purse. "This is a notice published in L'Epoque this morning. I think it's a message from the murderer. The name is exactly the same as that mentioned by the Persian during the investigation."
Mifroid stared at the paper. A single line with three words:
Erik is dead.
He could not believe it. "But certainly there could be other Eriks in the city…" he whispered to himself. "How could it be that the very name voiced by the Comte deChagny's brother is now printed in the paper?" For it was not only the Persian who had spoken of Erik. Indeed, Christine Daaé's lover, the Viscount deChagny, had raved like a madman, petitioning the commissioner's assistance against a man named Erik. Mifroid had never reported their conversation. To Alice, therefore, he only smiled condescendingly. "That raving Persian probably sent the message in order to give his story merit."
"But why would he create such a story, Papa? Let me talk to the Persian myself. If there is anything credible in his story, I'll investigate."
Mifroid laughed and passed the paper back to Alice. "My dear, remember that you are a young lady and not an officer of the Sûreté! I already told you that I investigated the incident personally and everything is already reported. Besides, the Persian is a lunatic. When you talk to him, you'll understand what I mean. He goes on about a torture chamber under the opera house, or something of that nature, and other unbelievable curiosities, like an underground lake!"
"All the same, Papa, may I visit him?"
Mifroid sighed. "Do not go alone."