The Surete had offered a substantial reward, raided every low dive in Paris and sent brave patrols up onto the rooftops, but failed to catch the Grand Vampire.
La Marmoset found him within two hours.
Posing as proprietor of a confectionary shop in Place Pigalle, the chief of Les Vampires
wore a ginger wig and less startling false teeth. Perhaps this was his true vocation and being the Grand Vampire was a chore undertaken through a family obligation. Who
wouldn't want to pass their days surrounded by bonbons? No wonder he'd lost his original choppers.
The Queen of Detectives approached the counter and presented a sealed envelope. She browsed among jars of gobstoppers and mint sticks.
The Grand Vampire cast an eye over the letter, then nodded once.
The Opera Ghost Agency was now employed by Les Vampires.
Trust the Persian to ensure they got paid. After the attack on the opera, Erik might be of a mind to waive any fee and treat this as a personal matter. A former police chief himself, the Persian was more practical. As in the opera, the artist must always be paid. One of the few points on which La Marmoset agreed with Inspecteur d'Aubert was that too many amateurs were crowding into the detective business.
La Marmoset was disguised as a pampered woman of wealth and indulgence. Just in case anyone was watching – though she was pretty sure no one was – she stayed in character by purchasing an expensive box of imported Swiss chocolates. She also bought packets of sugared almonds for Sophy and Unorna, whom she thought of as the dear little daughters of the imaginary lady of leisure. She kept the receipt, which would be presented back to the Grand Vampire when his bill was tallied.
A German governess brought in two exceptionally spoiled lads, who ran around the shop hooting like owls, filching items they stuffed into cheeks or pockets. The ninny fussed with her reticule and looked with adoration at the little pests. The manager smiled tightly. By night, he could have annoying customers garrotted. Here, he was required not to have small children murdered. His smile got tighter. A single drop of sweat ran down his cheek.
La Marmoset left the shop.
Business necessities attended to, she hired a fiacre, instructing the driver to take her to Île de la Cité. Just as Paris must have the greatest opera house, the greatest museum, the greatest university and the greatest cathedral, so it must have the greatest morgue – and here it was, in the shadow of Notre Dame. On the lintel above the main door was an inscription: Liberté! Égalité! Fraternité! The building's many tenants were free of life, equal in death and brothers and sisters to clay. In the Morgue, les macchabées– the bodies of the unknown dead – were frozen by ammonia and displayed on tilted slabs. This was ostensibly so friends and relations could identify the deceased. Too often, grieving or hopeful relatives had to fight through crowds of morbid curiosity-seekers who thought it a jolly game to gawp at the sorry state we all come to.
The Morgue was one of the attractions of Paris. Some nameless corpses attained a post-mortem fame. This was where the wax mask of L'Inconnue de la Seine was made by an intern who chanced to notice her strange smile. The first replicas were sold outside the Morgue, to admirers who prized the impaled woman the way devotees admired actresses or singers. A death-mask to put up in a student garret or bourgeois home, alongside a portrait of Carlotta or Sarah Bernhardt.
The Queen of Detectives knew the Morgue well. Once, she had lain for half a night on one of the slabs to trap Bernard Hichcok, an elegant maniac who paid return calls on women he had strangled. Bribing his way in after hours, Hichcok brought flowers and liked to sit and make small-talk before impressing unwelcome kisses upon dead paramours. La Marmoset startled the villain by sitting up and clapping handcuffs on him. She told the wretch she had cleared a spot for his next visit – when, thanks to Madame la Guillotine, he would need a separate slab for his head.
The ghouls were out in force today. A dead celebrity always had the morbidly curious lining up around the building. Those who couldn't afford the price of a ticket to the opera might still catch Anatole Garron's final bow… And the better-off would pay to get to the front of the queue.
Two gendarmes held back the throng.
La Marmoset now wore the face she most often used on official business – essentially her own, with fifteen extra years of lines around her mouth and eyes – and was recognised by the policemen, who admitted her with respectful salutes. Her easy entry made the crowd more resentful.
'You, woman,' shouted a respectable-seeming fellow with a Vandyke beard, 'what do I have to do to get into this building?'
'You have to die, sir,' she replied.
Leaving the ghoul sputtering, she stepped into the foyer of the Morgue.
It was chilly out, but colder within. The stench of lye and ammonia wasn't pleasant. No amount of refrigeration could entirely suppress decay, so a whiff of rot was in the air too. A small kiosk sold strong pastilles and scented cigarettes, which – from experience – she knew were no use in covering the noxious smells. Her heels clacked on the stone floor and her breath frosted. She wrapped her scarf tighter.
Garron, of course, was no macchabée. His identity was known. He was here in his capacity as murder victim. The Count de Rosillon was on ice too – unsolveds could be kept almost indefinitely. It was ten hours to freeze a man solid, including his guts; a woman took a little quicker, prompting misogynist jokes among the staff.
La Marmoset climbed a small staircase to a lecture theatre. Another gendarme stood guard, bayonet fixed.
'Pleasure to have you back on the beat, mademoiselle,' he said, saluting.
'Can't say I've missed this place, Patou.'
'Not my favourite watch either. But it's safer duty than hunting the Black Bat up among the chimney-pots. Inspecteur Legris fell off the Musée de l'Orangerie and broke his leg.'
Patou held the door open for her.
The rank of benches in the theatre were less plush than the tiers of seats at the Opéra, but an eager audience was gathered for Garron's final appearance. Harsh, fizzing electric light showed the scene in unforgiving detail. A prop rather than a performer, the baritone lay naked on a dissecting table, innards exposed by a Y-shaped incision.
Dr Dieudonné bent over the body, hands in his chest cavity as if squeezing the lungs.
La Marmoset remembered, as her toes lost feeling, how the cold of the Morgue bit. Dr Dieudonné took sensible precautions against the conditions in her workplace. Her long hair was pinned up under a small cap and she wore a plain apron over trousers and stout boots. A few moments watching the coroner at work made La Marmoset revise her opinion. She might still hold her position through patronage, but she deserved the job. She was precise and professional.
Perhaps Dr Dieudonné was older than she looked. After all, just now, La Marmoset looked older than she was.
'…As in the case of de Rosillon, almost all blood is absent from the body.'
Dr Dieudonné pulled her hands out of the corpse and wiped strands of gristly tissue off on a towel.
Sophy and Unorna were in the front row. They had saved a place beside them. As La Marmoset made her way down to her spot, she glanced at the audience. The theatre was crowded with police officials, representatives of the Management of the Paris Opéra (Monsieur Moncharmin, but not Monsieur Richard), reporters and sketch-artists from a range of publications, nosy politicians, well-connected cranks and ghouls (was that veiled connoisseur of horrors really the Countess de Cagliostro?), witnesses like Simon Buquet and Jean Macquart, and an examining magistrate who had already fallen asleep.
Inspecteur d'Aaubert was also on the front row, but on the opposite side of the room. He still wore his dress tunic, with his plumed hat on his lap. The policeman hadn't shaved this morning, and looked in a sorrier state than his old friend on the table.
It did not take a Queen of Detectives to deduce that Raoul d'Aubert was unhappy at the involvement of the O.G.A. He would be unhappier still if told who was paying their bill. Urgent, delicate negotiations had been conducted with his superiors, and the Agency were recognised consultants on the murders. The Sûreté would likely come in for a severe press barracking about the vampire. The promised early arrest in the de Rosillon case hadn't happened and Inspecteur d'Aubert was seen drunkenly singing Schubert with the victim an hour before the second murder.
La Marmoset felt sorry for the luckless flic, but also noticed his furtive, almost sneaky attitude. Little in his prior record suggested the ineptitude d'Aubert had shown on this case, and he was rigidly suppressing a bad case of the shakes. He looked more like a suspect than the investigating officer.
D'Aubert knew both victims. He had been at the Sorbonne twenty-five years ago, a contemporary of de Rosillon and Garron. Perhaps he was deliberately following a false scent in his war on Les Vampires? The Grand Vampire was an awfully convenient culprit. He was guilty of so much else it wouldn't even be much of a miscarriage of justice if he got his head lopped off for these murders.
'Dr Dieudonné,' said La Marmoset, raising a hand, 'may I ask a question?'
'If you don't mind it being set down in the record,' said the coroner.
A gnomish secretary was transcribing everything in shorthand.
'Not at all,' said La Marmoset. 'Would you say Anatole Garron met his death in exactly the same way as Camille de Rosillon?'
'I would.'
'It follows that both were killed by the same person?'
'It is most likely. Though the method is sufficiently unusual that it might be a system practised by a group or cult, like the Thuggee stranglings of India.'
'A group or cult like Les Vampires?' prompted d'Aubert.
'We're familiar with the handiwork of that society in this building,' said the doctor. 'They aren't usually this imaginative. Generally, their creativity goes into masks and costumes. When it comes to killing, they favour tried and tested methods. Guns, knives, poison, blunt instruments.'
'Were the dead men bitten?'
'I see where you're going, Mademoiselle La Marmoset… and you raise an interesting ambiguity. In both cases, the throat was cut with something sharp, like a straight razor or a bayonet. The wound was sawed, as if merely inflicting fatal injury weren't enough. In my notes on de Rosillon, I floated the suggestion that this might betoken a need to punish the victim or assuage some sadistic impulse. Those remain tenable theories, but in the case of Garron, I notice something else pertinent to your question…'
Dr Dieudonné indicated the neck wound, which was deep enough to show the bone.
'It strikes me that the severe cutting of the throat might serve to conceal or erase another wound. Perhaps not fatal, but highly telling.'
'A bite?'
'I should say a puncture or punctures. With Garron, there's a discoloration here, at the edge of the wound…'
She tapped with a scalpel. The audience craned to look.
'It's slight, but there's something here. This was definitely not made with the same weapon that slashed the throat. Perhaps – I say perhaps– it is due to a bite. There's an inflammation which even suggests venom, as if he were bitten – let's use that word with caution – by a snake or stung by an insect. The lack of blood to test means it'll be difficult to determine if this is the case or not.'
'Mosquitos are the vampires of the insect world, are they not?' ventured Rochefort of
L'Intransigeant.
'Rare in France in September,' said Dr Dieudonné. 'And I should say I can't rule out the possibility that this wound is entirely unconnected with Monsieur Garron's death. He could have nicked himself shaving or been pricked with a tie-pin the day before he was killed. I will look again at the Count de Rosillon and see if I can find any similar marks.'
The coroner looked at her audience.
'Can I make an appeal – which I know the gentlemen of the Fourth Estate will blithely ignore – that we do not use terms like "vampire" overmuch? These are appalling crimes. Two men have been done to death. Ascribing the murders to monsters out of childhood fables does a disservice to all-too-real victims. It is beyond my duties to dictate the course of the investigation, but I would respectfully warn against wasting time looking for bat-creatures when a cunning, contemptible human murderer is at large.'
Dr Dieudonné was impassioned and rational.
'What about his smile?' asked Grévin of Le Charivari, without looking up from his sketch-book.
The dead were usually slack-faced, but Garron was smiling broadly. With no colour in his cheeks and lips, it was a strange, pale smile, but a smile nevertheless. His death mask might set off another craze. Considering his fame, would he become Le Connu de la Scène, named and notorious successor to L'Inconnue de la Seine?
'I noted a similar expression in the de Rosillon case. An unusual circumstance. I can't think what would account for it.'
'I can,' said a voice from the back of the room…
La Marmoset turned and saw Dr Falke, dressed as if for a promenade, with a mint-striped stock and pearl stickpin. He gestured for attention with a silver-topped cane. The Viennese lawyer had expressed an interest in the de Rosillon case. Now, with another old friend on the slab, he popped up again.
What a helpful fellow, she thought. Helpful fellows always bear watching.
'Would you share your insight, sir?' suggested Dr Dieudonné.
'With pleasure. Vampires have proverbial powers of fascination, do they not? Before they strike, they beguile – like the cobra…'
A reptile known for venomous fangs, La Marmoset remembered.
Most of the room had turned to look at Dr Falke. Pens scratched down notes.
'Could it be that these men were sought out by deadly seductresses? It would account for their state of undress as well as their expression of ultimate bliss. Might the victims not welcome – even enjoy – the attentions of their murderess? If we must look for a vampire, we should seek out a female of the species.'
For the first time, Dr Geneviève Dieudonné was shocked.
One might almost think she was accused of being the guilty night-creature.