A/N: This chapter is pretty dark. I don't think it's too graphic, but it is violent and contains scenes of torture. This is part of the problem with WH13, making someone with a violent past so appealing. For much of this fic, Helena has felt her past as an enormous weight. In the previous chapter and this one, I wanted to show why. The next chapter, however, is much happier, and I'm posting it at the same time.
He attended to his duties, Inspector Michaud did, but sending her a brief note every month or two about his progress, or lack thereof, in apprehending her daughter's killers likely wasn't one of them. Helena doubted that other inspectors were so considerate of victims' families. Their duty was to solve the crime, not to inform mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, of developments in the investigation. This was something Michaud did of his own volition, of that she was sure. She couldn't imagine other inspectors confessing, in an English so stiff she thought she could hear it creak, the failure of their efforts unless they were required by their superiors to do so, and no police force would willingly disclose such an abysmal record of an investigation as that of the murders of a maid and an eight-year-old girl during an attempted robbery.
For the first few months, the notes, sent to her in care of her brother (which showed commendable foresight on the inspector's part, at least in that small respect, since Helena maintained no fixed address once she returned to England - without Christina, there was no need), acknowledged that mistakes had been made but reassured her that an arrest or arrests were imminent. The suspects had been spotted in various establishments they were known to frequent, but they had managed to elude capture. A former member of the gang had come forward with information about where his confederates might be hiding, but before he could be questioned more closely by the inspector, he was stabbed to death in a quarrel over a prostitute. Other robberies with similarly violent attacks upon those who were alone in their homes had since occurred, but the surviving victims' accounts were often confused and the reports of suspicious characters loitering in the area turned out to be unfounded.
A few months became six, then 12, then 15. Although Charles delivered the notes to her whenever they met, which was infrequently, by the time the first anniversary of Christina's death had come and gone, Helena was no longer reading them. Charles was, however, and he related to her the most recent mishaps of the investigation despite her increasingly indifferent reaction to them. She had learned all she needed to know when she was still reading Michaud's notes, their names. Lebecque. Poule. Raymond. Lebecque was the organizer, the one who planned the thefts, who brought in the men needed for the job. Poule was his second-in-command, clearly subordinate but no less ruthless. Raymond was Lebecque's nephew, little more than a youth, usually the one who observed a household's comings and goings, identifying the times when the house was empty, or nearly so. Michaud had speculated in one of his notes that it was Raymond who had mistakenly identified the LeComptes as the family recently come into an inheritance, but Helena hadn't cared who made the error, just as it made no difference to her whether Lebecque had killed Christina or had shrugged in resigned acceptance as one of his men emerged, covered in blood, from her bedroom. They were all guilty.
It was ever present, the feeling that she was being honed, worked ceaselessly against a grindstone, the unrelenting force of her rage pressing her against the constant futility of Michaud's efforts to arrest the killers. She sensed that at any moment she might hurl herself, like a spear, into the rundown cafés and saloons, the rented lodgings and crowded apartments of family in which Lebecque and his men were said to congregate, sleeping or drinking or planning their next robbery. She couldn't be any less successful than the Sureté, yet she remained in London despite her increasing frustration, completing her fair share and more of retrievals and working in her off-hours on her time machine. She had always dreamed of the possibility of traveling through time, correcting the errors of the past and ensuring that the future was a continuous improvement upon the present. Developed to its fullest potential, it could make the Warehouse obsolete. One could destroy a pair of pruning shears before they became impregnated with a head gardener's virtually homicidal fit of temper at a subordinate. There would be no need to sequester artefacts like so many incendiary devices because there would no longer be artefacts, at least none of the harmful variety.
While the perception of time might be befogged by romanticism and religiosity, it was, at its simplest, a measurement, and measurements were a creation of science, not God. If time was, in one sense, the measurement of the motion of objects through space, what would happen to time if such a basic equation were manipulated and motion reversed, time collapsed? Charles, of course, being of both a more moralistic and crowd-pleasing bent had interest in a time machine only to the extent that it served as an instrument for his criticisms of economic and social injustice. She had so tired of the Eloi and the Morlocks, begging him to devote more of the novel to the workings of the time machine itself, but he had refused, claiming that it wasn't a technical manual he was writing. So she had left him to his Time Traveller and his Weena and built prototype after prototype. The temptation to avail herself of artefacts had been difficult to resist; it would take an enormous amount of energy to achieve what she envisioned, more than her jury-rigged generators could produce. But there was no harnessing the power of an artefact, one could only suffer it or extinguish it. The fact that her machines weren't up to the task she had set for them didn't mean that she lacked the proper materials; it meant that she lacked the proper theories. In order to do better, she would have to think better, and that was what she held to through years of failed experiments . . . until Christina died. Then it wasn't that her theories were wrong, the universe itself was horribly, horribly wrong.
She argued her case with Caturanga, pointing out that the regents had permitted her on previous occasions to use artefacts in her experiments. "Those experiments, if successful, would have benefited the mission of the Warehouse," he dispassionately replied. "If memory serves, a number of your inventions have been of use in our work." He paused, giving her a consoling smile. "A great number."
Helena wasn't to be consoled. Why wouldn't a time machine benefit the Warehouse, she demanded. To prevent an artefact of dubious value from being created or to retrieve one before it could fall into the hands of a miscreant, how was that not beneficial, she stormed, pacing back and forth across Caturanga's office. With the exception of the chessboard on a table only slightly bigger than it and which was shoved against a wall to allow him passage from desk to door, there was no hint of the man apart from the senior agent. Perhaps there was no man separate from the agent; she was beginning to think it given how obdurate he was about not approaching the regents.
"Because you're not trying to travel through time, you're trying to raise your daughter from the dead, and there is no benefit to the Warehouse in that." He had the same look on his face as Charles had when she insisted that they take Christina's body back to London for burial, which expressed no impatience but rather an indulgence worse than pity, suggesting as it did that she was ignoring an indisputable truth. "You would put the Warehouse itself at risk trying to resurrect her, and I can't let you do it." He paused again, and this time there was no consoling smile, only a reflection of her misery in his eyes and in the lines of fatigue around his nose and mouth. "I know you've endured much -"
She cut him off, her voice not sounding honed and hard like a spear but broken, as if she might sink onto the chair across from his desk and weep until her tears, like a river, carried the both of them away. "You have no idea of what I've endured."
They never talked of it again. She didn't put aside the possibility of using artefacts to power her time machine, only that she would ask for permission.
Stymied (if only temporarily) in her efforts to produce a functional time machine, she sullenly continued to accept the assignments Caturanga gave her, but the retrievals, in their unrelenting trafficking in the worst of human behavior - the cupidity, the utter idiocy - provided her no relief. Neither liquor nor opium tempted her, and the physical intimacies she had once enjoyed were repellent to her. The fleeting pleasure she would find in another - if she could find it - promised to corrupt the pleasure she could still take in her memories. There was precious little she could remember about Christina that wouldn't ultimately leave her standing next to her daughter's corpse and lifting the sheet from her face. She would not compromise the fragments she had left by forging a spurious connection, no matter how brief, with someone else.
There was no sharp divide between waking and sleeping for her. It seemed to her that she never rested, that she returned from a retrieval to lie in her bed only to rise immediately to go out on another assignment. It seemed equally true to her that she had fallen into some purgatorial slumber that wouldn't end until the world itself ended, that she would never open her eyes until Christina, whole and laughing, was in front of them. So she was as surprised as Caturanga when she entered his office some weeks after their argument to request a leave of absence. She would be staying in Paris for a period of time, she told him. As soon as she said it, however, she realized she wanted nothing more than to go there, wanted it with all the hunger she couldn't summon for food or the company of others or a quiet moment empty of the screams that sounded only in her mind.
"To assist in the investigation," he said finally.
She could have said yes, reminded him that she was one of the best agents he had, that he had ever had, clever and inventive - because brilliance didn't always suffice in this work - persistent and tireless. Or she could have shouted in fury that it had been over a year since Christina's death and her killers remained free and then cursed the inspector's incompetence, letting Caturanga assume that she intended to take charge of the investigation herself. Instead she stared at him until he looked down at his desk, hands beginning to knead each other. When he spoke again, he spoke factually, as if she were planning to do no more than tend to her garden, had she one. "You have a week's paid leave. If you're gone for longer than four weeks, we'll find another to fill your position. If you return to the Warehouse after that time, you'll have to apply for reinstatement, and it will go before the regents."
"It won't take me four weeks," she said quietly.
"You'll need to surrender all Warehouse-issued devices," he continued, appearing not to have heard her. "Once you're on leave, you're a private citizen, and we'll take no steps in an official capacity to assist you, should you encounter . . . any difficulties."
"And in an unofficial capacity?" She laughed disbelievingly, sarcastically.
He looked up at her, beneath brows so furiously drawing together in displeasure or, possibly, concern that they seemed to draw his skin taut at the temples. "You'll get no help from us, Agent Wells."
She didn't need his help or the Warehouse's, and she had seen enough of Michaud to know that he would interfere should he learn of her presence in the city. She needed no one's help navigating Paris, more familiar with the haunts of its criminals than the equally charmless area, albeit charmless in a different fashion, in which her cousins lived. More than one retrieval had led her to Paris. As an artefact's power became known, it wasn't uncommon for the artefact to be stolen from a hapless holder and spirited across the Channel to become the latest prized possession of a dissipated royal or a wealthy businessman. A Warehouse agent had to be quick to intercept it as it passed through the hands of various middlemen, and she had tramped the streets prostitutes strolled at night and haunted the crumbling warehouses on the quays of the Seine.
Once she arrived in the city, she rented a room in a "hotel" popular with certain prostitutes and their clients. The rates charged were laughable for the condition and furnishings of the rooms, few of which contained little more than a bed and nightstand, but Helena knew she wasn't paying for luxuriousness or comfort. She was paying for the silence of the clerk who took her money but not her name and of the cleaning women who would remove the chamber pots, the soiled sheets, and any other evidence of what had occurred in the rooms. She asked for a room close to the back entrance of the building, which added to the price, and she asked for a table and chair in addition to the bed, which also added to the price, but money was of no concern to her. It had meant little to her before Christina's death, other than to ensure that her daughter had the best that she could provide her; it meant even less to her now.
She unpacked the trunk she had brought with her, of a modest size but peculiarly heavy. The clothes within it were not new, unremarkable in style and material, and in dark colors. Having laid them neatly on the bed, she then lifted the bottom panel from the trunk, which revealed only another panel. She felt for a latch and pressed it; removing the extra panel, she viewed the contents of the hidden compartment dispassionately. She had thought of them as tools when she had placed them in the trunk, and she had used many as tools on retrievals, although none of them were among the devices that the Warehouse formally issued to its agents. Her compliance with Caturanga's prohibition on making use of Warehouse-issued devices, despite the fact that several were her inventions or refinements of existing devices, had been meticulous. There was nothing, not the names on her travel documents or the items in her trunk, that connected her to the Warehouse. Looking at the tools now, running her fingers along their blades, their sharpened points, their mallet-like heads and claw-like ends, she recognized that they might be considered weapons as well, were, in fact, weapons. She could think of no other way to describe the pistols in the compartment, the knives and daggers, the tubular parts that, once assembled, fashioned a rifle of her own design, which had an accuracy over exceptionally long distances that could be measured in fractions of an inch.
She had justified their inclusion because this was a retrieval she was on, a more complicated and dangerous one, possibly, but a retrieval all the same. She was charged with or, rather, she had charged herself with the responsibility of securing unpredictably malign elements whose presence threatened the safety and well being of countless citizens. Taking out a very small-barreled pistol, like a derringer but a far more reliable performer, and tucking it into the pocket of her skirt, she had to ask herself, however, how far she would go to "secure" Lebecque and his men.
On the packet across the Channel and on the train to Paris, she had mulled over the best method for flushing her daughter's killers from their hiding places, and the implicit metaphor suggested the most powerful motivation, fear. As for what a lone, seemingly defenseless woman could say to induce that fear, that posed another problem. If the threat of being apprehended by the Sureté wasn't enough to have sent them scattering like mice through the streets of Paris, there was nothing more ominous that she could frighten them with. If only H.G. Wells had written the kind of story so popular among Americans, the Western with its sheriff-hero promising to hang the outlaws or die trying. The specter of a Morlock or Martian wouldn't be enough to frighten Lebecque or Poule. As she had grimaced at herself in the train window, her and Charles' pseudonym suggested an answer that wasn't dependent on fantastical creatures from the future or another planet. It was possible that H.G. Wells could accomplish what Helena Wells couldn't.
The sun hadn't completely set and, for some, especially those who lived and worked on these streets, Paris didn't come alive until nightfall. Opening a metal box that had a lock of her own design, she sorted through her small stockpile of banknotes and francs. She had exchanged money before getting on the packet, but most of it had gone toward renting the room. She would need to exchange a greater amount tomorrow. If necessary, she could wire her bank in London for a letter of credit. Spinning a franc on the table, she thought that invisibility, despite what she and Charles had imagined, did not come cheaply or accidentally. She hoped she would have enough.
Her pistol in one pocket, money in another, she left the hotel to find a certain café, which was better known for the information that was bought and sold over its tables than its meals. The café had gone through a succession of cooks, each as inept as his or her predecessor, which had only convinced her that the proprietors didn't want customers lingering over a dinner or dessert. Nonetheless, she took a seat at a table with uneven legs and ordered a pastry, asking to speak with Pierre. Pierre was one of the putative owners, although she suspected he was merely the face, the unshaven, chinless face of a shadowy group of businessmen, criminals, and politicians who were rumored to have invested in the café, each having his own purpose for trafficking in information. It was possible that Pierre would recognize her from a retrieval that had occurred several years ago, when she and her partner were in pursuit of an artefact that was purported to transform any metal the possessor touched into gold, but she had been heavy with Christina at the time - "waddling like a duck" her partner had described her in disgust, unhappy at being partnered with a woman, an unmarried one with child at that - and she had looked very different then. Happy was the word that flitted across her mind, and she bit into the inedible pastry so hard in reflex that she felt her teeth grind against her tongue. It was safer, in all respects, not to let her mind wander while she was in the café.
Pierre emerged from the back, rubbing the skin that sagged and folded in upon itself, falling away from his nubbin of a chin. His eyes narrowed upon seeing her, and he gruffly asked her what her business was with him. He showed no signs that he recognized her.
- I have something of interest to certain people, she said in a fluent French, which wasn't so fluent that she would be mistaken for a native speaker. Pierre wouldn't care; he paid attention to nationality only when it involved currency. - A little girl and a maid were killed in a bungled robbery over a year ago. Their killers have never been caught, and the little girl's family still grieves.
- People are killed all the time and their killers are never caught. How is this of interest to anyone?
- Because the little girl is a niece of a famous English writer, and he is tired of waiting for the Sureté to act. He's hired his own men to find the killers.
Pierre turned his head and spat on the floor. - Why should anyone be worried about what some English writer does?
Helena rose, dropping a few coins on the table for the inedible pastry. At the sound of the coins, Pierre rapidly swung his head around and watched her as she placed more coins and banknotes on the table. - Tell 'anyone' that he should be worried. The men are here, one was just with me bragging how the writer told them that he didn't care what they did to the killers as long as his niece's death was avenged.
Pierre looked up and considered the ceiling before looking down to stare at the money on the table. - Who is the writer?
- H.G. Wells.
He shrugged, the name meaning nothing to him. - What do you get from this? He sneered. - What do you care which man is on top of you?
- I always prefer the man with more money. She smiled, but it held no warmth. - If 'anyone' wants me to tell these men where he's certain not to be found, he needs to come see me at -'s hotel. And tell him he's to bring with him three times what you see here.
Helena repeated her story in even less reputable establishments than the café, in saloons and gaming rooms, dark places along the Seine where customers for various illicit commodities met with their purveyors. At some places she left money, at others her hand never left the pocket in which she carried her pistol. She returned to her rented room in the early morning hours only to drag herself from the bed as soon as the sun rose. She needed to find the brokers with whom she could discuss renting space in one of the warehouses by the river.
She didn't ask herself why needed to rent a space, just as she hadn't asked herself why she was bringing a small armory with her in her trunk. Each retrieval demanded its own strategy, although she also never asked herself what her strategy for this peculiar retrieval was. She found an agent who promised her that he could secure her just the space her husband was looking for (it was always easier to negotiate if she said she was acting on behalf of a man). The space was small, but the warehouse was on the bank of the river, just as her husband desired - he could open the back door, the agent said jovially, and fall into the Seine - and it was tucked away from the streets. If it was privacy her husband wanted, the agent assured her, it was privacy that he would have. The agent was momentarily at a loss when she asked whether sound traveled easily from the space. Assuming an expression of wide-eyed incomprehension, Helena explained that her husband's work was "noisy." With much nodding of his head, as if he completely understood the nature of the work that she had only seconds before invented for her nonexistent husband, he held a finger to his lips before saying that the space would be like a tomb, that not even the cries of the dead could be heard from it.
A price was settled upon, and she spent virtually the rest of her money, including the money she had taken from her trunk earlier in the day and converted into francs. If she wanted to eat or, less necessary to her survival but a prudent course of action all the same, return to London, she would need to wire for more money. She wasn't sure she was interested in eating or returning to London, but eating was essential to completing the retrieval. So she bought day-old bread from a patisserie and trudged back to her room, in which she ate and thought about the warehouse space she had rented, not admitting to herself that those thoughts, violent and awash in blood as they were, were also more methodical in how the bloodletting would occur than a passing fantasy of revenge would seem to require.
She didn't undress before she went to bed, and she took from her trunk's hidden compartment a medium-sized black metal cylinder with a lens at one end. She pressed a switch in the cylinder's center and a light shone through the lens, albeit weakly; frowning, she started to unscrew a cap from the other end of the cylinder just as the light began to grow stronger. The muscles in her face stopped tensing, but her frown didn't entirely disappear. The illumination should have been better with the design improvements she had incorporated into the batteries. They were smaller, no longer than her pinky finger, but capable of generating and sustaining a stronger current. She had been working on a continuously recharging version but as there were still flaws in its performance, she hadn't packed the prototype, a decision she was beginning to regret as she continued to study the device, which she variously called an electric lamp, an electric candle, or, more prosaically, a light emitter. Charles preferred the term "electric torch"; she thought it overromantic and more than a little gothic, bringing to mind crazed villagers intent on hunting down the witches and changelings in their midst. But regardless of what it was called, the device should cast a better light, the batteries had been fresh. She pressed the switch to turn the emitter . . . electric torch off. The sea air must have degraded the batteries; she should have accounted for it. Shaking her head to clear her thoughts, Helena reminded herself that solving these sorts of puzzles were no longer her first priority. Why it wasn't working as well as she had anticipated wasn't important, that it worked was.
She turned down the lamp and crossed to the bed, drawing an evil-smelling blanket up to her neck as she lay down on the equally evil-smelling mattress. They would be coming for her, if not tonight then the next night or the night after. They wouldn't entirely believe her story about men hired by a famous writer, but they couldn't afford to dismiss it. They weren't negotiators; they would be prepared to beat the truth out of her if they couldn't sufficiently frighten her to volunteer it. The gun in her pocket, the electric torch at her side, she waited. Eventually the hotel grew quiet; the prostitutes had shown their last clients to the door and the other lodgers were out on business of their own, gone for the night. There was a heavy step in the hallway and another, a pause, as if the visitor were trying to judge whether he was too loud, and then more steps, lighter ones, but the wood was too old and it continued to creak. The gas jets in the hallway were always on, and although their light was feeble, as she carefully raised herself on an elbow, she saw the faint glow underneath the door disappear as someone stepped in front of it. She lay down again, trying to steady her breathing - he would expect her to be asleep - and listened to the sounds of him picking the flimsy lock, a few snicks and then a longer, cautious grating of metal being pushed back against itself.
She heard him enter her room, and she suspected he was letting his eyes readjust to the dark before he advanced. She could make out that he was tall and broad; she would need to be quick and certain of her movements since he could easily overpower her. He crept closer and she could smell him; he reeked of days-old sweat and this evening's rank tobacco. He was shifting something in his hand, a blade most likely. He would want to press her into the bed, ensure that he had covered her mouth, and then dig the blade into her throat, more to scare her than hurt her. The hurting would come afterward. She counted one, two, three, and swept the blanket to the side, pressing the switch on the electric torch and angling it up. The light flickered before it intensified, and she felt a surge of panic, but he was too shocked and then too blinded to do more than curse. Scrambling off the bed, but never relaxing her hold on the torch, Helena took her gun from her skirt pocket and aimed it at him.
- An elephant would have been quieter, she jeered.
Blinking, he took a step or two forward until she leveled at the gun at his chest, cocking the hammer back with her thumb. Since the light from the electric torch was already beginning to fade, he was more easily able to focus on what else she was aiming at him. - You think to hurt me with that toy. He sounded equal parts amused and offended.
- I wouldn't 'think' to hurt you. I would hurt you. The gun is more dangerous than it looks.
He might be slow-witted, but even he couldn't overlook the obvious comparison. He laughed, although there was a note of uncertainty to it. - Just as you're more dangerous than you look. He didn't try to advance toward her.
- Tell the man who hired you that next time he needs to come himself.
He hesitated, as if unsure whether he oughtn't to risk the danger of rushing her. She didn't wait for him to make up his mind; she pointed the gun down and shot one of his feet. The shot was quiet, hardly louder than the click of the hammer being drawn back, and he looked at the floor for a moment as though he were expecting a bullet hole. Then he yelled, more angry than injured it seemed, and she pointed the gun at his chest again.
- The second one goes into your heart or your gut. Either way you die.
The light from the electric torch died completely, and in the dark, she could feel the pent-up violence of his stare before he pivoted on the heel of the foot that she hadn't shot and limped to the door, cursing her without having to take a breath in between. The door slammed shut behind him, and only then did she bend to pick up the blade he had dropped. She could always use another weapon.
She didn't sleep the rest of the night. She wasn't afraid that he would return with reinforcements; whichever one had sent him, Poule or Lebecque, would be more cautious . . . and respectful. She didn't sleep because she might have let the man who had killed her daughter leave with no more deadly an injury than a minor flesh wound, a graze along his foot. She was on a retrieval, she reminded herself; there was no cause to regret being merciful. And how merciful was it, really, to shoot someone in the foot? She hadn't wanted to incapacitate him - she needed him capable of delivering a message - but she had also wanted to show him, them that she wasn't to be trifled with. Her mission was to capture Christina's killers, not execute them. She was here, as she had told Caturanga, to assist Michaud in his efforts. Yet if that were so, she would have informed Michaud of her arrival, inserted herself into the investigation. In fact, she should be scribbling a note to Michaud now explaining how she was certain, almost certain, that she had Lebecque or Poule, perhaps both, virtually within her grasp. But she didn't write the note, and she fell into a restless sleep just as the sun was rising. She dreamed of shooting her intruder in the other foot, his knees, his shoulders . . . .
It was late afternoon when someone knocked at her door. Shadows were beginning to form in the corners of the room. She was sitting at the table, cutting the pages of a book she had bought earlier in the day. Her pistol, filled with bullets, was in her pocket, but she didn't think she would need to use it. Not this time. She called out to her visitor to enter, and he entered confidently, as if they had been friends for many years and his dropping by to see her was something he did frequently. He smelled better than her visitor of the night before, and though his clothes were a workingman's coarse shirt and trousers, the ring on his right hand was nothing a mere workingman could afford. The band was gold, the stone semi-precious, an amethyst, if she had to guess. He took the chair across from her without introducing himself, without waiting for an invitation.
- How much do you want? He could have been a bricklayer or a street sweeper. His hands, resting on the table, were scarred and calloused. His features were ordinary; he would be hard to distinguish from a hundred other laborers. Nothing about him suggested that he would be the type to command other men. They would follow him only because he spoke for another. He would be Poule, not Lebecque.
- It's not money I want. She sliced and separated pages 85 and 86 of her book. It was a copy of Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. She hadn't bought it to read it.
- Of course you want money. Everyone wants money. Just tell me your price.
- You won't want to pay it. She smiled at him indulgently, as if he were teasing her and, for the moment, she was playing along with the joke.
- Probably not. But we can negotiate. He smiled in return, showing two rows of broken teeth.
- I want you and Monsieur Lebecque to surrender to the Sureté for the murders of Christina Wells and Adrienne LaPlante. I will deliver you to Inspector Michaud myself.
He uttered a short, disbelieving laugh. - Are you mad? What is this? I thought you had information to sell about the men some Englishman hired to kill us. His sallow complexion grew red, and he knocked back his chair, standing and leaning over the table, hands planted on its surface as though he were ready to leap across it and strangle her.
For a second or two, she stared at her knife. It wasn't really the sort of knife that one would use to cut the pages of a book. It was too long and the blade was too wide. Cutting the pages of a book required little more than a letter opener, and she was using a dagger. With a rapid, downward thrust of her arm, which carried all the force she could muster, she plunged the blade into the back of Poule's right hand, pinning it to the table. It was a very sharp blade made from a very hard steel, and the table's wood was cheap and soft. She had been pricking at it with the blade all afternoon.
Poule screamed. He instinctively tugged at the hand only to scream again. She observed him impassively. - Bitch. Whore. His teeth, broken and fragmented as they were, were grinding together.
- You murdered my daughter. She watched as tears beaded on his eyelashes. He was in pain. - Tell me where I can find Lebecque, and I'll remove the knife.
He was sweating. His cheeks were wet where his tears hadn't yet tracked. - I'll take the knife out myself, and then I'll make you scream. You'll beg me to kill you before I'm through with you. He set his jaw, the yellow nubbins of his teeth sliding into the gaps and crevices in the neighboring dentin, and placed his left hand on the hilt of the knife. He was strong enough to pull it out, but his right hand would be useless. Virtually one-armed, he would find it difficult to kill her. She could shoot him to defend herself, but she would rather not.
- Tell me where I can find Lebecque. From the space between the bound pages and the column that joined the front and back covers of the book, she withdrew a letter opener. It was dull and nicked, but the point of it was sharp. She paid no attention to Poule's groans as he tried to remove the knife, taking more interest in balancing the letter opener on the palm of her hand.
With a scream that was also a shout of triumph, Poule jerked the knife free. His hand bleeding, arm dangling at his side, he rushed her with the knife raised clumsily in his left hand. - Bitch. Whore. I'll gut you now. I'll -
She stepped into his lunge as if it had been an embrace and jammed the letter opener into his neck. It did have a very nice point . . . .
Screams were nothing that alarmed the hotel's management or its patrons, but a dead body would be considered a violation of the rules. Dead bodies were difficult to dispose of without alerting the police, not to mention the dead person's vengeful family members or friends. No amount of money, had she it to offer, would be enough for her to be allowed to stay. So she packed her trunk, which, though heavy, wasn't large, and carried it quietly down the back stairs several hours later. Poule she left in the room, lying where he had fallen, undisturbed except for one small thing, and that small thing, with the ring still on it, had been put in a metal box that she had taken from her trunk. It was a perfect fit. One might think she had packed such a box for precisely such a purpose. Wrapped around the finger was a note with an address.
She had taken the box to the man behind the counter - it might have been the same man from whom she had rented the room or a different one, they all wore the same bored, indifferent expression - and gave it to him with a few francs she had found in yet another of the trunk's hiding places. - Please see that this reaches Monsieur Lebecque. He'll want to attend to it immediately.
- I know of no Monsieur Lebecque. He looked at her impassively.
She had no more money to give him. She had wired to London earlier in the day, but the soonest that a Parisian bank would release funds to her would be tomorrow. She looked down at her shoes, turning alternatives over in her mind. The shoes, not new or well cared for before she had come to Paris, were stained; most of the splotches and streaks were from her walking amidst the refuse that clogged the streets or covered the floors of the hovels she had visited like carpet, but some were fresh and reddish in color. Removing the ring had been a less precise business than she had hoped for. She tilted her head and smiled at the man, hardly a clerk, probably only somewhat less murderous than Lebecque and his men. She didn't intend it to be received as a pleasant smile.
- There's a package in my room for him. He's expecting it, and he'll want to see that it has remained untouched. Before he shows up here tomorrow with his . . . associates . . . I suggest you search your memory because I believe you'll discover that you do know of him. If you send him what I've given you, he'll richly reward you. If I have to find someone else to deliver it, and it arrives late, he'll be very, very unhappy with the helpfulness of this establishment's . . . staff.
His expression was just as impassive as before. There had been no twitch of an eyelid, not even the flutter of a muscle in his cheek, but the francs that she had placed on the counter next to the box were gone as was the box itself.
She spent what remained of the night in the space she rented in the warehouse, using the electric torch to inspect the room. It was small, but its walls were as thick as the agent had promised. Windows had been set into the outside wall that didn't face the river, high up, close to the ceiling. The glass was veiled with cobwebs, but it would let in light. Good, she would need light. There was a door in the back wall, and when she opened it, she saw the uneven planks of a crude dock that jutted into the Seine. The electric torch was beginning to dim, and she shook it in frustration. Light bounced off a lantern set on a chair in a darkened corner. She took a box of matches from the trunk and lit it. It didn't contain much kerosene, but she could purchase or otherwise obtain more tomorrow, and the chair would be useful too. If she looked around the warehouse tomorrow, she would likely find other things she could borrow. A table would be nice, as would a tarp and rope. She would need to prepare quickly, however. Once Lebecque discovered Poule's body, he would be on a mission to find her. She wanted him to find her but only when she was ready.
What she needed to be ready for she no longer had to ask . . . .
The heat and the pressure were building. Helena thought that if she looked down at her body, she would see it riddled with holes, and if she looked around the laboratory, she would see walls buckling under the force. She felt that she was drenched in sweat, but the arms holding up Christina's gown looked dry. Her arms ached from holding up the gown, but she couldn't release it. Standing in this room, knowing that she was going to be sundered by the energy that the artefacts and that she, as the conduit for the Warehouse, was releasing, she couldn't help but feel that whatever agony she would experience as every cell of her was shattered was better than what she was being forced to relive, experiencing it as she had over a hundred years ago, the freshness of the emotions intensifying the pain of what she couldn't undo.
The gown suddenly dropped from her fingers, and she would have cried out with relief if she had been able to unlock her jaw. But the relief was short-lived because her hands, fingers worming through the items Michaud had hoarded for a lifetime, were unearthing a new object. When Helena saw what it was, she tried to resist pulling it from the tub, but one hand clenched around the hilt and yanked it free, other objects, equally as rusted and pitted, tumbling away. Her jaw unhinged, and she screamed and screamed, the sounds lost in the noise as the laboratory walls began to crack.
Whereas she had lived each minute, each second previously, now the images came at her with the speed of a film shuttled through a projector. A clichéd comparison in the century she was currently living in but a prescient one at the end of the nineteenth century. She had heard of the pioneering efforts in "moving pictures," but neither the concept nor the process interested her; she considered it an adaptation of an existing technology, more or less, and she had seen no useful application of it for the Warehouse. The regents wanted no record of how retrievals were accomplished, and, in this matter at least, she and the regents would have been in accord. The last stage of this special "retrieval" would be completed without witnesses.
The address she had wrapped around Poule's finger was the address of another warehouse some distance from the one in which she was renting space. The note had also provided a date and a time; even if Lebecque and his men couldn't read, they would likely have a working knowledge of numbers. It wouldn't take them long to figure out the contents of the note. She had also given the same information to Michaud by means of another messenger, a boy who possessed a malnourished child's spindly body but the cynical eyes of an adult. It was possible that Michaud would pay no attention to his note, especially as he would have no knowledge of who had written it (Helena had paid the boy extra to remain silent if Michaud pressed him for details on the note's author). The solemnness with which he had promised that he would arrest her daughter's killers, however, suggested that he would dismiss no information out of hand, regardless of how mysterious the source.
It was also possible that Michaud would capture Lebecque at the other location, but Helena was gambling that Lebecque would not come to the rendezvous alone. He would want to eliminate the threat swiftly and completely; he would come in force. She was also gambling that he would risk the lives of the men he brought with him rather than hazard his own, much like a general would choose to survey the battlefield well behind his forces. He would ensure the safety of his own retreat under the guise that, like a general, it was his strategic genius that made the difference between winning and losing, between leaving a house with bags full of jewels and cash and leaving it empty-handed. To find out if her own planning had been sound, Helena visited the café that was a far more reliable venue for news than for food. Sitting at yet another of its rickety tables, she ordered another pastry and asked for Pierre.
The scene was brief, a glimpse of Pierre's face, as unshaven and as unwashed, but registering a caution when he saw her that it hadn't had before, his wary admission that a "mutual acquaintance" had been rudely surprised by the Sureté, his reluctance to accept another message from her, which consisted of an address, a date, a time, and one word, "seul." When she placed money on the table for him (it wasn't for the pastry), he left it untouched.
Another scene, Lebecque, not alone, but accompanied by a youth who was little more than a boy, entering the room at the warehouse - Helena had left the door open - holding a lantern high with one hand and a gun in the other. The room was filled with the flickering, oily light of several lanterns, and she stood in its center. She carried no electric torch with which to surprise him; she was only what she appeared to be, a slender woman of middling height, past the first blush of youth. A mere woman . . . clutching a wire in the folds of her skirt. The wire passed through a hinge of the door and its other end was tied around the trigger of a rifle, the rifle of her own design, with its long-range accuracy and very sensitive trigger. The rifle itself she had fixed to the top of a chair, a chair cloaked in the shadow cast by the door. The door was heavy, and she had spent more time than she had anticipated oiling its hinges, sanding and scraping its bottom until it would slam shut with the force of a prison cell door. She had experimented several times, letting loose of the wire and then counting the seconds until the door shut, the chair jerked, and the trigger clicked back - she had left the rifle unloaded during the testing, of course. Not perfect, but she was expecting, hoping, she wouldn't actually have to drop her end of the wire.
- Where are these men this writer was to have sent? She noted that Lebecque kept the youth behind him.
- There are no men. She shook her head, smiling. - There is a writer who mourns the loss of his niece but he hired no men to kill you.
- He can mourn your loss as well. Lebecque pointed his gun at her.
- You kill me, I kill your . . . nephew . . . is it? Helena held the wire out from her skirt.
Puzzled, Lebecque instinctively followed its line, letting both arms drop slightly. Raymond, curious too, edged around his uncle to take a closer look. That was when she fired the tiny pistol she had hidden in her skirt pocket, the bullet expending much of its energy passing through the material of her dress before it grazed Raymond's arm. It would look more serious than it was. Blood was already staining the sleeve of his shirt, and he was crying. Lebecque had let go of his gun and was clamping his hand over the boy's arm. Helena bent to pick up the gun, tensing her hold on the wire. All she had needed was a moment's inattention; it wouldn't do to lose her grip now and shoot them both dead. Not yet.
The next image was as full of color as the previous one had been dark, white flesh streaked with red. Lebeque was tied to a chair, his chest bare. Blood was seeping from several small incisions. Raymond, his wounded arm effectively if amateurishly bandaged, was tied to a chair nearby. He was moaning softly against the gag in his mouth. He wasn't one who would suffer his pain silently, which made him very unlike his uncle. Lebecque hadn't said a word since the . . . interrogation . . . began. Helena was at the table, considering the tools she had laid out on it. There were others that would cause far more pain and far greater injury than the small instrument, very much like a scalpel, she had been using, but she wasn't ready to move to them yet. She suspected she would need them when Lebecque came to the more difficult parts of his confession. With a grimace, she picked the blade up. Identify your enemy's weakness and persist in attacking it. When she drew the blade down the side of Raymond's face, his screams were loud enough to make Lebecque jump in his chair.
- Now tell me, why were you in the LeComptes' house?
And then she was sped, mercifully, forward, but mercifully only because she wasn't being forced to relive every minute, there was nothing merciful in being forced to witness what she had already done and what she had yet to do. She had succeeded in making Lebecque confess, confess in whimpers and sobs and curses and wails that would climb so high Helena could hear them still ringing in her ears. He sat slackly against the chair, his chest so covered in red, bright and dark, that she might have painted it. He was missing an eye and several of his teeth, one ear had been half-severed from his head. Her dress was wet in several places, marking places where his blood had splashed, and her dress was stiff in other places, marking where it had dried. The room was acrid with the odors of blood and urine and sweat.
Her hair had come unbound. It fell into her eyes, which was an irritant, although every time she swept it from her face, she left a little bit of blood on her cheeks and her forehead. She had wiped her hands many times - it was difficult to hold her instruments steady when her hands were slick - but she knew her nail beds were rimmed with dried blood. She would have to take a brush to them later. Her voice was hoarse; she had been taking him through the LeCompte robbery over and over. But as he had begun to scream whenever he saw her take some new instrument from the table, so she screamed when she dug it into his flesh. She hadn't had to use many of her instruments on Raymond after slicing his face. Lebecque had spoken willingly after that, lies at first, but after she had broken one of Raymond's fingers and then threatened to remove one of his eyes, Lebecque had admitted everything about the robbery and the murders, even things she knew hadn't happened. He told her that his men had not harmed Patrice and Georges' two little boys, who had also been in the house, perhaps hoping to placate her. It hadn't placated her, and she had been especially savage in her response.
He had yet to tell her what she most wanted to know, and the interrogation had wound down to this, her question and his reply, repeated over and over.
- Why did you kill my child?
- I don't know.
He had shouted it in defiance, said it with a jeering humor that had him smiling and showing her the gaps where his teeth had been, wept it, but it had never changed. He said it again now, his remaining eye slowly surveying her, from the tangled mess of her hair to the stained hem of her dress. - I don't know. We hadn't entered that house intending to kill her. We didn't even know she was there. Can you say the same? His eye looked down at his chest, scored with gouges and cuts. You keep calling me a beast. Look at me and tell me who's the beast.
- Why did you kill my child?
- I don't know. Do you want me to say that I'm sorry? I'm sorry a hundred times over. A million times.
- Why did you kill my child?
- Nothing you can do to me will bring her back. You can't bring her back. He hadn't said it derisively or triumphantly from that ruined mouth in that ruined face. He had said it as if he pitied her, as if he, some illiterate peasant from the countryside, knew more than she. He had said it, his one eye dark and staring into her own as Christina's eye had stared at her when she had lifted the sheet.
She didn't know what she held in her hand but she brought it down on him, again and again and again, until his head hung limply on his chest and there was no need to ask him questions anymore. Turning toward Raymond, she saw that he was crying and working his mouth violently against his gag. She hooked her fingers over the cloth and brought the knife through it in a single stroke. He had fainted when he saw the knife darting toward him, and she waited, seeing his eyelids beginning to flutter after a few moments.
He looked up at her, fear fading and a dull, resigned certainty settling over his face. - I was so angry that day. I was so sure that this was the house with the jewels. Uncle asked me to search the bedrooms, and I saw her. She was sleeping, like a little angel. She was sleeping while I would have to go back downstairs and tell him that I had failed. It didn't seem fair.
He would have said more, but she gently placed her finger against his lips. She looked at Lebecque's bloodied form, at the boy, at the knife in her hands. Kneeling, she cut the rope that bound his legs to the chair and then she cut the rope that had bound his arms. She stepped back. He stood, wobbling, staggering a little. He spared one agonized glance for his uncle before he began to run. She heard his grunts as he labored to open the door, and then he was gone.
Helena felt her eyes being forced open; she hadn't realized that she had closed them. The cracks in the laboratory walls were growing wider, and there was a rumbling, outside the laboratory, that was growing louder. She had dropped the knife back into the tub, but she couldn't move her feet. It was just as well, she wouldn't willingly move them if she could. Lebecque had been right. She hadn't succeeded in bringing Christina back from the dead, although she had made use of every artefact that she had thought might help her. She had demonstrated no especial cunning in her "borrowing" of the artefacts; she was too obsessed, too frantic, almost, to divert the attention and care that would be required to mask her thefts from her relentless improving of her time machine. Yet neither Caturanga nor any of the other agents had seemed aware that artefacts were missing. It was as if the Warehouse itself were conspiring with her.
Several weeks after she had returned to London, she was called to the office in which the Warehouse's "public" business was conducted. It was a long, narrow room filled with desks that ostensibly were occupied by agents completing reports on goods they had recovered from ships and trains and carts, the latter most often used in the more remote parts of the island, hired to smuggle them in past customs officials. If requested, such reports could be produced, as could the agents. A secretary was seated on a stool behind a counter at which requests for reports and their agents could be made. The secretary had been an employee of the Warehouse for over 20 years without knowing that it existed. He knew only that he worked for the government, and that days could go by without him seeing or speaking to anyone. He filled his time smoking and reading newspapers. Today, however, he would remember, Helena knew, because today a visitor had arrived, and not just any visitor but one who spoke English with great seriousness, as though an incorrectly conjugated verb would be considered a breach of diplomacy.
His suit had been meticulously brushed, and the part in his hair was ruler-straight. She felt unkempt in his presence and recognized that it was no exaggeration on her part to think such. When she slept, she slept on the floor next to her time machine, and she hadn't changed her dress in days. "Inspector Michaud," she said gravely.
"Miss Wells." He inclined his head slightly, in deference to being in the presence of a woman, although Helena waved her hand irritably at the courtliness of the gesture. Woman, human, she was none of those any longer. "I thought to bring you the news in person. Your daughter's killers. . . they have been brought to justice. Guillaume Poule's body was found abandoned in an alley. Jacques Lebecque's body we found in the Seine." She said nothing. A small smile did nothing to lighten his expression. "I didn't think you would be surprised. Monsieur Poule was stabbed in the throat, but Monsieur Lebecque, he had been savaged before he died."
The secretary was staring at them, mouth hanging open. A single look from Helena sent him scurrying to a corner of the office in which he pretended to be busy straightening the papers on a desk. "He must have enraged his killer. Have you captured him yet?" Helena pushed a tendril of hair behind her ear. It felt greasy to the touch, and it smelled of burnt wire.
"No." Inspector Michaud revolved his hat in his hands. "We have heard reports of a woman, not unlike you in her appearance, asking after his whereabouts several days before he was fished from the river. Have you recently been in Paris, Miss Wells?"
"I have had no occasion to go there, Inspector. It is the place where my daughter was murdered. I have no desire to visit it."
He nodded. "I received a message informing me that I might find Lebecque and his men at a certain warehouse. It was written in a feminine hand, and I have kept it. I was thinking of asking the secretary for a copy of a report you would have written. Should I ask him?"
"You can ask him." Helena shrugged. "But I doubt that my reports will help you."
"Probably not," Michaud conceded. "The note I have, it has just a few words. But, no matter how repugnant Messieurs Poule and Lebecque were alive, their deaths are equally repugnant, and their killer or killers must be apprehended. I have to try, Miss Wells."
"I understand." She did understand and, if by some chance, he would amass enough evidence to arrest her, she wouldn't resist.
He inclined his head again, and she knew that he was done with her, for now. He gingerly set his hat on his head, he didn't want to disturb the part. "I believe I may have told you that I have a daughter. She is still young enough that when she suffers bad dreams, she cries out. She doesn't want her mother to comfort her, she wants me, and I sit with her until she goes back to sleep." He hesitated. "Tell me, do you still hear your daughter crying? Or have you been able to comfort her?"
"I fear she will always cry, Inspector. There is nothing I have done that has made her stop."
His gaze softened. "Then I am truly sorry for you, Miss Wells."
She hadn't seen him again. Perhaps he had, over time, accumulated sufficient proof to arrest her, perhaps Raymond had sought him out, once his terror had diminished, to identify her as his torturer and his uncle's killer. Perhaps Michaud had returned to the Warehouse and demanded that she be released to his custody. She would never know. As the surface under her feet began to fissure, her hands seemingly glued to the rim of the tub, she thought that he had at last succeeded. It was a rough justice to which she had been brought, but she was here to serve the end of her sentence.