Irregular Verbs (4 page)

Not looking at him, Geoff spoke to Attius. “You won’t have a family, you know, or land of your own. You’ll be all alone, and penniless.”

Attius looked doubtful for a moment, while Gallienus took a step toward the door. “Not for long,” he said. “With everything we know about chemistry, and mining—”

“And everyone knows the Romans loved change,” Geoff said. “That’s why they invented the steam engine.” A few of the boys looked to one another, brows furrowed. “And the compass, and the printing press. They just loved new ideas.”

“He’s just stalling,” Marcus said. “Upset at being tricked, so he hopes to keep us here till the police arrive.” He took a step closer, so that he and Geoff were nose to nose. “Step aside, Geoffrey.”

Geoff shrugged, moved aside to let the others pass through the doorway and then followed them into the reception room. Inside the light was starting to flicker as the fissure opened; after a moment four dark figures appeared within, three short and one tall.

“Now,” Marcus said.

Holding up a hand, Geoff said, “Just a minute. Why don’t you see where it is you’re headed?”

The figures in the fissure were fully visible now: a woman and three children, each dirty, dishevelled and gaunt with starvation. The eldest was a boy of about ten or eight; he wore a gladius at his belt, so oversized on him that the tip grazed the floor. When he saw the group awaiting them his hand went to the hilt.

“It’s all right, little boy,” Marcus said, then turned back to the others. “Get through, while it’s still open.”

The boy looked up at the woman behind him, then moved to stand in front of her and drew his sword with both hands. “Don’t worry, mother,” he said in deeply archaic Latin. “I’ll protect you.”

Marcus’s followers stood still, uncertain. Attius looked to Marcus, then to Geoffrey. “What do we do?” he asked.

The light of the fissure was starting to dim, and Marcus took a step forward. “He’s just a boy,” he said, reaching out to seize the sword.

“Not anymore,” Geoff said quietly. “He has to take care of his mother now, and his sisters. He’s a man.” He moved behind Marcus, took hold of his wrist and drew it away from the boy’s sword. Then, moving Marcus out of the way, he crouched to speak with the boy at eye-level. “Welcome, friend,” he said in the same early Latin the boy had spoken. “What is your name?”

The boy glanced over his shoulder, to where the light of the fissure was flickering. “My name is Quintus Rufinus,” he said, working hard to deepen his voice. “Tell me where we are.”

“It is a safe place,” Geoff said, “far from the dangers you have fled. You must make a choice, though: if you stay here you can never go back.” He straightened up to his full height. “Would you like to stay?”

Quintus gripped the hilt of his sword with both hands, looked back at his mother; the fading light flickered on her face as the boy turned back to Geoff, nodded twice.

Geoff’s hand paused over the Pompeii calendar, finally picked it up and dropped it into the box containing the few contents of his desk. He took a breath, turned as he sensed Wayne’s bulk filling the doorway.

“You leaving, then?” Wayne said, clearing his throat.

“Yeah. Sorry for the short notice.”

“Don’t worry about me. Where you going?”

“I don’t know yet.” Geoff shrugged. “I just know these kids need something the Centre can’t give them, and right now they’re getting it from the wrong place.”

Wayne nodded. “Fair enough,” he said. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with that mess the other day, would it?”

Turning back to his box, Geoff took a breath. “Why?” he asked. “Did you talk to the police about it?”

“Didn’t see any reason to—just an unscheduled fire drill, right?”

“Right.” Geoff stood still for a moment, turned around once more. “Wayne—could you go through the fissure? Go back?”

Wayne looked at him for a long time before finally speaking. “Would it make a difference?” he asked. “Would you go, if you could?”

Geoff shook his head. “No,” he said. “I’ve got a family to take care of.”

Officier de la Paix Louverture folded Quartidi’s Père Duchesne into thirds, fanning himself against the Thermidor heat. The news inside was all bad, anyway: another theatre had closed, leaving the Comédie Francaise the only one open in Nouvelle-Orleans. At least the Duchesne could be counted on to report only what the Corps told them to, that the Figaro had closed for repairs, and not the truth—which was that audiences, frightened by the increasing number of fires and other mishaps at the theatres, had stopped coming. The Minerve was harder to control, but the theatre-owners had been persuaded not to talk to their reporters, to avoid a public panic. No matter that these were all clearly accidents: even now, in the year 122, reason was often just a thin layer of ice concealing a pre-Revolutionary sea of irrationality.

On the table in front of him sat his plate of beignets, untouched. He had wanted them when he had sat down, but the arrival of the group of
gardiens stagières
to the café made him lose his appetite. He told himself it was just his cynicism that caused him to react this way, his desire to mock their pride in their spotless uniforms and caps, and not the way they looked insolently in his direction as they ordered their cafés au lait. Not for the first time Louverture wondered if he should have stayed in Saint-Domingue.

The
gardiens stagières
gave a cry as another of their number entered the café, but instead of heading for their table he approached Louverture. As he neared, Louverture recognized him: Pelletier, a runner, who despite being younger than the just-graduated bunch across the room had already seen a great deal more than they.

“Excuse me, sir,” Pelletier said. Though it was early, sweat had already drawn a thick line across the band of his cap: he must have run all the way from the Cabildo. “Commandant Trudeau needs to see you right away.”

Louverture nodded, glanced at his watch: it was three eighty-five, almost time to start work anyway. “Thank you, Pelletier,” he said; the young man’s face brightened at the use of his name. “My coffee and beignets just arrived, and it seems I won’t have time to enjoy them; why don’t you take a moment to rest?” He reached into his pocket, dropped four deci-francs in a careful pile on the table.

“Thank you, sir,” Pelletier said; he took off his cap, revealing a thick bristle of sweat-soaked blond hair.

Louverture tapped his own cap in reply, headed for the west exit of the Café du Monde; he lingered there for a moment, just out of sight, watched as Pelletier struggled to decide whether to sit at the table he had just vacated or join the group of young gardiens who were, assuming that out of sight meant out of hearing, now making sniggering comments about café au lait and
créole
rice. When Pelletier chose the empty table Louverture smiled to himself, stepped out onto Danton Street.

It had grown hotter, appreciably, in the time since he had arrived at the café; such people as were about clung to the shade like lizards, loitering under the awnings of the building where the Pasteur Brewery made its tasteless beer. Louverture crossed the street at a run, dodging the constant flow of velocipedes, and braced himself for the sun-bleached walk across Descartes Square. He walked past the statue of the Goddess of Reason, with her torch of inquiry and book of truth; the shadow of her torch reached out to the edge of the square, where stencilled numbers marked the ten hours of the day. He doffed his cap to her as always, then gratefully reached the shadows of the colonnade that fronted the Cabildo, under the inscription that read
RATIO SUPER FERVEO
.

“Commandant Trudeau wishes to see you, sir,” the gardien at the desk said. The stern portrait of Jacques Hébert on the wall behind glowered down at them.

Louverture nodded, went up the stairs to Trudeau’s office. Inside he saw Trudeau at his desk, looking over a piece of paper; Officier de la Paix Principal Clouthier was standing nearby.

“Louverture, good to see you,” Trudeau said. His sharp features and high forehead reminded those who met him of Julius Caesar; modestly, Trudeau underlined the resemblance by placing a bust of the Roman emperor on his desk. “I’m sorry to call you in early, but an important case has come up, something I wanted you to handle personally.”

“Of course, sir. What is it?”

Trudeau passed the paper to him. “What do you make of this?” It was a sheet of A4 paper, on which were written the words
Elle meurt la treize.

“‘She dies on the thirteenth,’” Louverture read. “This is a photo-stat. There is very little else I can say about it.”

“Physical Sciences has the original,” Clouthier put in. His round face was redder than usual, with the heat; where Trudeau let his hair grow in long waves, Clouthier kept his cut short to the skull, like a man afraid of lice. “They barely consented to making two copies, one for us and one for the Graphologist.”

“And Physical Sciences will tell you it is a sheet of paper such as can be bought at any stationer’s,” Louverture said, “and the ink is everyday ink, and the envelope—if they remember to examine the envelope—was sealed with ordinary glue. They will not tell you what the letter smells like, or the force with which the envelope was sealed, because these things cannot be measured.”

“Which is why we need you,” Trudeau said. “Concentrate on the text for the moment: the other parts will fall into place in time.”

“I take it there was no ransom demand?” Louverture said; Trudeau nodded. That was why they had called him, of course: his greatest successes had been in finding the logic behind crimes that seemed, to others, to be irrational. Crimes they thought a little black blood made him better able to solve.

“No daughters of prominent families missing, either, so far as we know,” Clouthier said. “We have
gardiens stagières
canvassing them now.”

Louverture smiled, privately, at the thought of the group at the café being called away on long, hot velocipede rides around the city. “Of course, the families of kidnap victims often choose not to inform the police—though rationally, they have much better chances with us involved. Still, I do not think that is the case here: if a kidnapper told the family not to involve the police, why the letter to us? Tell me, Commandant, to whom was the letter addressed? Did it come by mail or was it delivered by hand?”

“By hand,” Clouthier said before Trudeau could answer. “Pinned on one of the flames of Reason’s torch—a direct challenge to us.”

“Strange, though, that they should give us so much time to respond,” Trudeau mused. “The thirteenth of Fructidor is just under two décades away. Why so much warning? It seems irrational.”

“Crimes by sane men are always for gain, real or imagined,” Louverture said. “If not money, then perhaps power, as a man murders his wife’s lover to regain his lost power over her. The whole point may be to see how much power such a threat can give this man over us. Perhaps the best thing would be to ignore this, at least for now.”

“And let him think he’s cowed us?” Clouthier said.

“The Corps de Commande is not cowed,” Trudeau said gently. “We judge, sanely and rationally, if something is an accident or a crime; should it be a crime, we take the most logical course of action appropriate. But in this case, Officier Louverture, I think we must respond. If you are correct, ignoring this person would only lead him to do more in hopes of getting a response from us. If you are incorrect, then we certainly must take action, do you agree?”

“Of course, Commandant,” Louverture said.

“Very good. I have the Lombrosologist working on a composite sketch; once you have findings from him, Graphology, and Physical Sciences, the investigation is yours. I expect daily reports.”

Louverture nodded, saluted the two men, and stepped out into the hall. Clouthier closed the heavy live-oak door after he left, and Louverture could hear out his name being spoken three times in the minute he stood there. He hurried down the steps to the cool basement where the scientific services were and went into the Lombrosology department, knocking on the door as he opened it.

“Allard, what do you have for me?” he called.

“Your patience centre is sorely underdeveloped,” a voice said from across the room. “Along with your minuscule amatory faculty, it makes for a singularly misshapen skull.”

The laboratory was a mess, as always; labelled busts on every shelf and table, and skulls in such profusion that without Allard’s cheerful disposition the place would have seemed like a charnel house. Instead it felt more like a child’s playroom, the effect magnified by the scientist’s system of colour-coding the skulls: a dab of red paint for executed criminals, green for natural deaths, and a cheery bright blue for suicides. In the corner of the room Allard sat at the only desk with open space on it, carefully measuring a Lombroso bust with a pair of calipers and recording the results.

Louverture picked up a skull from the table nearest him; it had a spot of red paint and the words
Meurtrier—Nègre
written on it. “It is not my skull I am concerned with today,” he said.

“But it is such a fascinating specimen,” Allard said in full sincerity. He had asked Louverture repeatedly to let him make a detailed study of his skull: on their first meeting he had, without introduction, run his hands over Louverture’s head and pronounced that he was fortunate to have the rational faculty of the Frank and the creativity of the Negro.

“Could we stick to the matter at hand?” Louverture said.

“Of course, of course.” Allard put down his calipers, turned his full attention to Louverture. “My sketch won’t be ready for an hour or so, though.”

“Never mind that. What can you tell me about the man who wrote the letter?”

Allard picked up the notes he had been consulting, peered through his pince-nez as he flipped through them. “He is most likely not a habitual criminal, so he will lack the prominent jaw we associate with that type. He also likely possesses a need for self-aggrandizement—a man of whom more was expected, perhaps, with very likely a prominent forehead. The need for attention suggests a second child or later, so look for a round skull overall—”

“I wasn’t aware you could tell birth order,” Louverture said, putting the skull in his hand back on the table.

“You haven’t been keeping up with the literature. It was in last Pluviôse’s Journal—the mother’s parts, not yet stretched with birth, pinch the first child’s head, rendering it more pointed than later children. All else being equal, of course.”

Louverture nodded. “Yes, of course. And—the race—?” He was accustomed to tip-toeing around the subject; most of his colleagues seemed to feel they were doing him a favour by treating him as white to his face and black behind his back.

“A tricky question,” Allard said, apparently feeling no discomfort at the topic. In fact he was likely the least prejudiced man in the Corps, genuinely seeing black and white as scientific categories. “What we know shows significant forethought, which suggests a Frank or perhaps an Anglo-Saxon; the apparent motive, however, is irrational, which of course suggests a Negro. On the whole, I would tend to favour one of the European types. Why? Do you suspect . . .”

“It’s nothing,” Louverture said, letting the unspoken question hang in the air. It was the reason he had been given the case, of course: the fear that this was the work of irrationalists, believers in religion and black magic. The vodoun murders of three years previous had brought him here from Saint-Domingue, and though they had earned him his office and reputation, he had often heard whispers that like follows like.

“I can give you a sketch for each race, if you like,” Allard said. “It will take a bit longer, of course.”

“Take your time. The sketch will be of little use until we have a suspect to compare it to.”

Allard nodded abstractly, his attention returned to the model head in front of him. “As you say.”

Louverture tipped his cap in farewell, stepped out into the hallway and headed up the stairs towards his office, wondering how he might conduct an investigation in which he did not have a single lead. A cryptic threat to an unidentified woman, an unmailed letter delivered by an unseen hand. . . . Clouthier’s canvass would turn up nothing, of course; if the culprit did not want a ransom, he might just as easily take a poor woman, or even a prostitute.

By the time he reached his office Louverture had decided that Allard’s delay, as well as the no-doubt slow progress of the graphologist and of Physical Sciences, gave him the excuse to do just what he had first proposed: ignore the whole matter and hope the letter-writer went away, or at least provided him with another clue. He was disappointed, therefore, to open his office door and find the graphologist’s report sitting on his desk. Louverture settled into his chair, lit the halogen lamp, and began to read. Open curves, large space between letters: male. Confident pen-strokes: written cool-headed, without excitement or fear of discovery. He frowned. That did not square with the notion that the letter-writer was seeking to arouse a reaction from the police, but what other motive made sense? Correctly formed letters: well-educated in a good school. This seemed even more illogical. Anyone who received an education knew that all criminals were eventually caught, save those whose confederates turned on them first. Neat, precise capitals: a man of some authority.

Louverture closed his eyes, rubbed at them with thumb and forefinger. A confident man who nevertheless had a pathological need for attention, and felt neither fear nor excitement in taunting the police—as though the message had been composed and written by two different men. The writer, though, had not been coerced, since the letters showed no fear, so what sort of partnership was he looking at? An intelligent criminal with tremendous sang-froid, paired with an insecure, weak-willed . . . but no, it made no sense. The former would restrain the latter from any attention-getting activities, not assist in them; unless a bargain of some sort was involved, the cool-headed man having to gratify the other’s needs in order to gain something he required. Access to something he possessed, perhaps—or someone—