Chapter 14: The Secret of the Sûreté
Early one bright afternoon, Captain Joseph Lefevre marched with sharp strides to the prefecture, a dossier under one arm. Much like his revered commissioner, the captain maintained a uniform worthy of great respect. His brass buttons shone in the sunlight as the tails of his uniform whipped around in the autumn wind. His shoes even made a pleasant clicking sound on the cobblestones. He smiled to himself as a band of young ladies along the road stopped to watch the handsome captain clip past. With soft brown eyes and a curling moustache, his appearance was more charming than his personality—as his unfortunate wife well knew.
Approaching the prefecture, he nodded to the officers on guard duty. They saluted the captain and swung open both of the heavy doors, and Lefevre entered without ever having broken his stride. The interior smelled of shoe polish and leather. He marched down a long, echoing corridor and rapped on the commissioner's door.
"Come in, Lefevre," commanded the voice from inside.
The captain entered with a quick salute, impatient to debrief the commissioner regarding his latest assignment. He knew he had badly bungled the investigation of the "catacombs corpse," and hoped to redeem himself in this new task. He found Commissioner Mifroid seated at his large oak desk, between two banker's lamps with green shades. Papers were stacked in three neat piles along the desk's edge, and five more piles, each one waist high, towered along the right wall. The blinds were drawn over a large bay window behind the desk, and bars of blinding afternoon sunlight lay over the entire scene. With his back to the window, the commissioner's figure was in shadow but for the bankers lamps, which lit his face from below.
"Sit down, Lefevre," Mifroid commanded, gesturing with a free hand to an armless chair behind the open door.
Lefevre sat.
Mifroid continued writing on some papers and added them to one of the piles on his desk.
Lefevre licked his lips, eager to begin their conference.
At last Mifroid sighed, straightened his uniform, and looked directly at Captain Lefevre. "Now, Captain, what is your report?"
Finally, here it was! Lefevre sat straighter in his armless chair and began: "The target is moving, Monsieur Commissioner. When you requested surveillance, we began with a single patrol man in front of the address." He opened the dossier and drew out a street map. "The patrol circled the block where the address was located, then circled the adjacent block, repeating this every quarter hour," he continued, indicating the path on the street map with his index finger. "The target was immobile until two days ago. Then she left the house and hailed a cab."
Mifroid leaned closer. "Where did she go?"
"She took a direct route across town to the Rue Scribe."
The commissioner rolled his eyes and sighed. "Lefevre, you know Alice is my daughter, and you know that my home is on the Scribe."
Lefevre looked up from his diagram, ready for the clincher. "But Monsieur Commissioner, the patrol man alerted our mounted standby, who followed your daughter. She didn't go to your house. She accessed a gate on the northwest side of the Opera Garnier."
Startled, the commissioner drew back in his chair. Lefevre suppressed a smile; it was precisely the reaction he was hoping for.
"Captain, where does that gate lead?"
Lefevre consulted the notes in his file. "We do not yet have that information, Monsieur Commissioner."
"Well, didn't your men follow her?"
"Negative, Monsieur. You stressed that the target must not become aware of our surveillance. The target closed the gate behind her when she entered, which relocked the gate. My men believed that attempting to open the gate and follow her would have alerted her to our presence. Also, the lock could not be picked."
"Explain."
This was the rough spot. Lefevre licked his lips and began the response he had rehearsed. "The mechanism inside the lock is iron, too heavy for our fine tools. But it's also very complex, so firmer material was also useless—"
"Captain," interrupted the commissioner, "I want to know whether that gate leads into the Opera or into the sewers. It's immaterial to me whether you learn this by entering the gate yourself or by consulting some architectural or municipal plans."
Lefevre's fingers curled his greasy moustache. Plans! He should have thought of that angle! "I…"
The commissioner dismissed the matter with a waive of his hand. "How long was Alice inside?"
Lefevre checked his file. "About ninety minutes, Monsieur."
Mifroid grew quiet. What had she done behind that gate for over an hour?
Uncomfortable in the silence, Lefevre cleared his throat. "Er.. egress was through a northern door of the Opera, opening onto the Boulevard Haussmann."
"What?" Mifroid stood so quickly, his chair nearly tipped over. "So she was inside the Opera! Did your men find out where that door led?"
Again the captain's fingers twirled his moustache. "Their mission was to follow the target, Monsieur Commissioner."
"Which means 'no,'" Mifroid sighed, slumping back into his chair. "It's probably just as well. If they had entered the Opera without a warrant, Moncharmin would have given us trouble." He drummed his fingers on his desk in thought.
Lefevre continued to pull on his moustache.
Mifroid stopped tapping and leaned forward. "Continue your surveillance, Lefevre. If she enters the Opera again, follow her if you can. Make a report— and follow her everywhere!"
The meeting clearly over, Lefevre stood and saluted before replacing his hat and leaving the office, his step not quite as sharp as when he'd arrived.
Mifroid rose from his chair and paced the cramped room, digesting Lefevre's account. When his wife had told him that Alice had been discovered on the road, attempting to run away, he had suspected that his daughter was bitter about being withdrawn from the Catacomb Murder case. He even wondered if she hadn't gone mad. At the crime scene, she had been very astute, identifying fractures and injuries later confirmed by the morgue, but then she was suddenly deluded into thinking that the Opera Ghost had committed the crimes and lived beneath the Garnier in a house! It was impossible to deter her. He had considered placing guards to keep her inside the biologist's apartment, to protect her from future wanderings, but he hadn't forgotten her sharp observations that morning on the Place Denfert-Rochereau. Alice might pick up another lead, and he knew that she would follow it to the end, to prove to him that she could handle the investigation. It would certainly embarrass the Sûreté if a young woman solved one of their most difficult cases. Mifroid also worried that, in her naïveté, she would mistakenly allow the murderer to get the upper hand. These musings lead him to initiate the surveillance, and Lefevre, who had expressed a deep aversion towards Alice, was of course too eager to assist.
Yet for all his predictions and estimations, Mifroid could not understand what had happened with the gate, or even how Alice had found a way to open the lock. For her safety, and for the case, he might soon have to proceed beyond surveillance.
Alice was amazed to find Mechnikov well again after barely a week. His composure, too, had returned, and he no longer spoke heartrending soliloquies about death or the futility of his profession. In fact, very soon he returned to his experiments, and Alice felt secure in broaching the subject of a face.
She was preparing his lab instruments for another test, and his assistants had not yet arrived. Mechnikov was occupied with finding a book in his glass cabinet.
"Monsieur, I'm interested in learning about disfigurement," she began as she wiped a Petri dish with a coarse rag. "Your library doesn't have much information."
"Disfigurement?" he parroted, turning to her with a wrinkled face, the way one looks when finding a bad smell. "The principal danger from microorganisms is mutilation of the internal organs, not cosmetic damage."
Alice winced. "Yes, Monsieur. But might even cosmetic damage cause other complications? Respiration? Mobility?"
"So there might be value in knowledge about disfigurement" he nodded. "That is understandable, and there has been some research in the field. What in particular did you want to know?"
"What causes defects from birth? And can these be reversed?"
He found the book he would reference for the experiment and drew it out of the cabinet. "Do you mean when the disfigurement has affected the full body?"
"Well, I—" she turned back to her work, her cheeks suddenly growing hot. "I suppose I don't know," she mumbled. She scrubbed the table vigorously with her rag. "If the body appears to have an ordinary shape—two arms, two legs—but facial cartilage is lacking, would this disfigurement be expected to have affected the rest of the body as well?"
"Mobility would be virtually impossible, if the joints had no cartilage," he replied, frowning. "But I reckon whether the entire body were affected would depend on the cause of the disfigurement. That was what you asked initially, correct?"
"Yes."
"Most birth defects are still a mystery, Mademoiselle. Who can say why one individual never grows more than a metre tall, or why one has stumps instead of hands?"
"Monsieur, are you suggesting that these disfigurements have no scientific source, that these poor souls are merely cursed?"
He sighed and placed a comforting hand on her shoulder. "God organized His universe around common principles. Science simply hasn't progressed far enough yet for us to understand all the mysteries of life. Someday we will, Mademoiselle. That's why it's important for us to conduct these experiments, so we continue to learn."
They both turned as a knock sounded from the front door.
"Ah! Our assistants have finally arrived," he announced excitedly as Alice put down her rag and left to open the door.
But the two men on the front step were not Dr. Mechnikov's assistants. She recognized one of the men as Armand Moncharmin from the Opera Garnier. The other was much taller and had a curling moustache.
It was Moncharmin who spoke first. "Oh, goodness! It's you, Mademoiselle Mifroid! We have come to speak to Doctor Mechnikov. Er… this is the correct address?"
The taller man started at the mention of her name. "Mifroid? The Sûreté Commissioner's daughter?"
Alice smiled pleasantly. "Yes, I'm Commissioner Mifroid's daughter. This is Dr. Mechnikov's residence. He's tutoring me in microbiology and we are conducting an experiment today. Do come in, please." She curtsied and led them into Mechnikov's parlor, then went to alert the professor.
"A strange girl—dabbling in police investigation, and now in biology?" Richard commented as he removed his tophat.
"Let's hope her 'experiments' interest her enough to keep her out of our business," quipped Moncharmin.
Both men stood again as the professor entered the parlor, still wearing his white lab coat.
"Forgive me, gentlemen," he said in greeting while shaking their hands. "I was not expecting guests today. As my student explained, we are preparing for an experiment."
Richard cleared his throat as the three of them sat down. "Then, uh, we won't keep you long, Doctor. We have come on rather unusual business, frankly. I am Firmin Richard, and this is Armand Moncharmin. We manage the Opera Garnier."
Mechnikov's unruly grey eyebrows rose in surprise, and he leaned forward in his chair. "Then it is truly unusual business, indeed. I'm neither a musician nor much of a patron, I'm afraid."
"What we require is your scientific expertise," Moncharmin confessed.
Mechnikov was nonplussed.
"No doubt you have heard of our… ghost problems," Richard explained. "We suspect that there might be some trickery involved. We've planned a séance for Friday night, to tempt this imposter to do something rash. I realize it sounds quite ridiculous. Actually we are inviting scientists—such as yourself—and other skeptics to help us catch this joker in his act."
"But this Friday is—"
"—the Thirteenth," Richard answered with a knowing smile. "The perfect ambience."
Alice entered the parlor carrying a tray of tea and small pastries.
"You are no doubt inviting the police as well?" Mechnikov inquired as she passed around the teacups.
Moncharmin nearly choked on his tea. "Certainly not! Er… excuse me, Mademoiselle," he said when Alice cast him a sharp glance. "It's just that the police have investigated the Ghost for at least a year and have found nothing. We need… fresh minds."
"And we prefer to keep our plans secret," Richard added, "if you take my meaning, Monsieur."
"What time will you begin this 'séance'?"
"We must gather before midnight, Doctor."
"I should like to bring my student with me."
The two managers exchanged glances. "The Commissioner's daughter? But she's already been involved in the investigation!"
"I assure you, Messieurs, she's quite perceptive."
"She's also quite nosy!" Moncharmin exploded.
Mechnikov raised a silencing hand. "I attend with my assistant or not at all. I give you my word that she will stay quiet the entire time and will not leave my side. Those are my conditions."
Richard's shoulders slumped, defeated. "Doctor, we need your service badly."
Mechnikov stood, placing his teacup on the table. The managers followed suit. "In that case, Messieurs, the two of us shall see the two of you on Friday before midnight."