City of Secrets (22 page)

Which was why Oliver Drummond was attempting to overcome his own professional scruples to help him get it done.

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When Oliver had given up his job with the Pinkerton agency to go to work for Madeleine Malcolm, he had kept up his old contacts, on the chance that one of them might come in handy some day. So when he spotted Paul Bertaude, whom he had last seen at a Chicago political rally, in a Montmartre café, he sat down in the one across the street and thought that day might have come. He waited, not wanting to intrude if Paul were working on a case, but within five minutes Paul had seen him and had come across the street to talk.

Paul was about Oliver’s age, but he was unmarried and therefore available to travel in the course of his work. His French mother had handed down her slim, dark good looks to her son, and Paul had always looked more at home in Berlin or Rome or Paris than in St. Louis. He was based in Paris now, he told Oliver, and was waiting now for some information to arrive which he needed for his current case. Oliver ordered an absinthe for him, and the two men spent half an hour catching up with each other’s activities since they last met. Finally Oliver showed him the photographs taken at Florence Wingate’s salon. Paul did not recognize Viktor Kemeny, but he did know the other man.

“It looks like Aristide Dalou,” he said immediately, then looked more closely at the photograph. “Yes, I’m sure it is. He’s one of those bored young aristocrats always out looking for excitement. He used to wear an earring, and you see, there’s a mark on his earlobe that might be a hole. Where was this taken?”

Oliver told him. “Yes, he’d fit in at an affair like that, if he was in the mood for it. It’s the sort of thing that would have bored him five years ago, but if he were there pretending to be someone else, he’d have thought it good fun. Not much here,” Paul said, tapping his forehead, “but he knows people, and he can be bribed.”

“Where can I find him?”

“His favorite café, more than likely. It’s the Chien Noir, the Black Dog, in the Latin Quarter. He pretends to be a student at the Sorbonne, and loiters around there trying to look like a man with important matters on his mind. How’s your French, by the way?”

“Comme ci, comme ca.”

Paul winced at the accent. “So I see. Well, Drummond, come with me. I will find this Dalou for you.”

This turned out to be not so simple a task as Paul had envisioned, however. They did indeed spot Dalou in his café, but he saw them first, got up, and disappeared through the back door of the building into the shadowed walks and guarded doors of the Sorbonne.

“What scared him off?” Oliver said.

“God knows. Maybe he owes somebody money and thought we came to collect.”

They split up to make a circle around the university grounds, but met again at the other side without either of them having seen their man.

It was then that they heard the explosion from the boulevard Saint-Michel. They didn’t even look at each other before they ran off together in that direction, and when they came around the corner, Oliver saw Devin Grant in the middle of the street and came to an abrupt halt. Grant saw him too, but when Mrs. Malcolm suddenly came out of a café, ashen-faced and terrified, Grant turned to her. She clutched his arm, and he seemed to be reassuring her that he was unhurt. Then she and Paul spotted Dalou at almost the same instant.

“There he is!” Paul shouted in English and lit out after the boy. Mrs. Malcolm cried out too, and when Grant didn’t move, she made as if to go after him herself. Oliver, trusting Grant to take care of her, ran off after Paul.

They chased Dalou down to the river, where he suddenly dodged between two horse buses, and by the time Paul and Oliver had gone around the back of the second bus, Dalou had disappeared again. Oliver cursed his luck and his middle-aged legs in equal measure.

“Well, at least I know what he really looks like now,” he said, stopping to catch his breath. “Thanks, Paul.”

“Don’t thank me yet,” Paul said, grinning as if he enjoyed chasing petty criminals through alleyways. “I’m not going to let that
vaurien
get away from me so easily. Come on.”

So Oliver went, following Paul through Montmartre and most of the rest of the city, in and out of places that seemed so foreign to Oliver that they might have crossed a frontier somewhere. Late that afternoon they finally drove their quarry to earth, almost literally, in the cemetery of Père-Lachaise. The sun was low on the horizon by then and cast long, eerie shadows on the tombs and monuments. Oliver held back for a moment at the gate. He hated cemeteries. But Paul was relentless, almost triumphant, Oliver realized with astonishment.

“Come on, then.”

Dalou had gone in by the northwest gate, and they found him sitting on a bench near the tomb of the victims of the Commune—maybe he found it inspiring, Oliver thought grimly—smoking a cigarette, confident that he had given them the slip. Paul and Oliver came up behind him, glanced at each other and, on Paul’s signal, came around either side of the bench and sat down. Dalou moved to get up, but a firm hand on either side pulled him down again.

“Who are you?” Dalou asked, his pale eyes darting nervously from one of them to the other. He reminded Oliver of a cat trying to decide which of two large dogs would do him the most damage. “If you’re the police, you’ve got nothing on me. I didn’t do it.”

Paul raised an eyebrow. “What, didn’t throw that bomb? Of course you didn’t. Who would be stupid enough to believe you capable of something like that?” His contempt was evident; Dalou’s face went red.

“Who are you, then?”

“Friends of Teddy Malcolm,” Paul said. Oliver caught the flash of recognition in those feline eyes before Dalou blanked it out. Paul pulled a fifty-franc note out of his pocket and waved it in front of Dalou. Paul had told Oliver that Dalou’s family had disinherited him, and his ideals weren’t holding up well under his new poverty. Sure enough, Dalou’s eyes lit up.

“Where is he?” Oliver asked, in English. Dalou understood but replied in French.

“Dead.”

“How?”

Dalou shrugged. “How else? They shot him, the dogs. Threw his body in the Seine.”

“Who did?”

“Another foreigner. Who cares.”

“Did you see this?”

“No, heard about it later.”

“How do you know it’s true?”

“A friend told me,” Dalou said, offended that anyone would think his friends capable of an untruth. Paul laughed and gave him the note, which Dalou quickly pocketed. Then Paul brought out a hundred-franc note. Dalou grabbed at it, but Paul pulled it back.

“Everything you know about Malcolm—
vite
!”

Dalou wasted no time complying with this demand. Oliver thought he would happily betray all of his so-called friends for a hundred francs. Malcolm had arrived in Paris in the autumn, Dalou said, in the company of a couple of foreign anarchists—English, or maybe American. They’d gotten in touch with the
Chiens Noirs,
the Black Dogs, an anarchist group that met at the cafe of the same name. Dalou had belonged for a while, but they were all too serious, always talking about whom they were going to assassinate next, not that they had actually killed anyone, yet. They were all talk. Foreigners always were.

“Who was the leader of the group?” Paul asked.

Dalou shrugged. “No one knew. One of the English took charge, but he wasn’t the leader. That one never came to the café.”

“Who else belonged?”

“No one. Everyone. Every day rumor said this one or that was the new leader. A man might put out the rumor that such a one—someone he disliked—belonged, just to get the man arrested and out of the way for a while.”

Dalou laughed. “Me, I think the gang put about all the rumors just to keep the police busy.”

“When was the last time you heard anything of them?”

“Not for months. They’ve gone under cover. But the new rumor is they really are going to assassinate someone this time.”

“Who?”

Dalou looked at Paul with the contempt of one who could not be bothered with such trivial affairs. Oliver couldn’t help being fascinated by the twisted morals of this youth, who was just stupid enough to be dangerous. Paul, however, did not seem to think him worth further effort. He gave Dalou the banknote and promised him more if he could report anything more useful.

“How do I find you?”

“I’ll find you,” Paul said.

He glanced at Oliver, and the two men rose and walked away down the path. Dalou lit another cigarette and stayed where he was.

They heard the bell that signaled the closing of the gates. Paul and Oliver stopped just outside the main gate, next to a sign that offered a private burial place of two square meters for 1,000 francs. Oliver wondered if Teddy Malcolm—or the body thought to be his—was buried here somewhere, in the
fosse commune.
He had never thought to find out about that.

It was dark by the wall, where tree branches hung over from the cemetery. Oliver shivered and moved toward a streetlight that had just been turned on.

“Do you think it’s true?” he asked Paul, “about the assassination plot?”

Paul shrugged. “It could be. One hears the same rumor at least once a week.”

“But who’s the target?”

“Probably some minor government functionary. Just high up enough to draw attention to the gang’s demands—whatever they may be this time—or maybe just to make a noise. They like to do that.”

“You don’t think it might be ... some foreigner?”

Paul shook his head. “I doubt it. We don’t know enough yet, but there’s been nothing like that since the Empress Elisabeth was shot last year. It was a single assassin, however, who did that. As a rule, the bigger the gang, the smaller the target.”

“Will you report all this to the police?”

“Yes, I’ll have to do that. But don’t worry, my friend—I’ll keep my ears out for you.”

Oliver thanked him, repaid him his hundred-and-fifty francs, and they parted at the corner of the avenue Gambetta, where Paul caught a tram home, declining Oliver’s offer of a cab. They made a date to meet again, and as Oliver settled back in his cab, he tried to decide what he was going to report to Devin Grant. He couldn’t wait any longer for Grant to make the first move. Oliver was convinced now that the Prince of Wales really was in danger.

As he watched the streets broaden, then narrow again, as the cab approached the Place Vendôme, he remembered the look on Mrs. Malcolm’s face when she thought Grant had got in the way of that bomb. This time, he would not go to her first with his suspicions. In fact, he didn’t think he’d tell her about them at all.

The next morning brought splendid motoring weather, or so said Laurie, who had no more experience with motoring than Maddie did. Daisy had earlier confided in Maddie that her father had taught her to operate a Panhard motor, but she begged Maddie not to mention this skill to Laurie, so Maddie only smiled at him and said she was sure he must be right and they depended on him to explain how the motor worked.

Laurie and Daisy, unable to sit still in the lobby of the Ritz to wait for Devin to arrive with the Daimler, dashed out to the square every five minutes to see if he was coming, then came back in again to ask if Maddie supposed he might have had a breakdown already.

Maddie preferred to wait in the cool, quiet lobby, leafing through
L’Illustration
and pretending that she was looking forward to the same light-hearted little adventure that her young friends expected. In a way, she was, but her eagerness was mixed with apprehension. Something was going to happen, she thought, not like what had happened in the Latin Quarter, perhaps, but

being alone with Devin Grant could be dangerous in more than one way. She ought to have refused this excursion, but instead she had involved Laurie and Daisy in it, too. How did things get out of her control like this? Why was she just sitting there waiting for the inevitable?

She kept her hands busy with the magazine, but her restless foot tapped impatiently on the carpet, and she had to remind herself to unclench her teeth in order to speak. Her voice sounded decidedly strained to her, but Daisy did not seem to think it out of the ordinary.

Daisy had brought special motoring clothes which, she said, were all the thing in London, even providing extras for Maddie so that they were both now swathed in loose-fitting, pearl-gray cotton dust-coats buttoned up over their day dresses and provided with capacious pockets for the goggles Laurie insisted they wear to protect their eyes. Louise had done up both ladies’ hair with extra pins and attached gauze motoring veils to their hats, which could be wrapped firmly around their faces should the wind prove too brisk. Daisy had looked in the mirror and declared that she looked like a gray mushroom, but Laurie later told her she looked splendid. His opinion fortunately carried enough weight with Daisy that she willingly posed, glowing, for Laurie’s camera and he for her Kodak.

At two minutes past nine, a hooting noise from the square caught Laurie and Daisy unawares, and they bounded out again, leaving Maddie to follow along on her own. Outside, Devin was getting down from the driver’s seat of a silver-painted 12-horsepower Daimler, whose engine he left running as he helped Daisy up. When he took Maddie’s hand, he squeezed it a little harder than necessary and smiled. It was a warm, open smile, and it put her a little more at ease—or a little more off her guard. She reminded herself of that possibility as she took her place in the car, staring straight ahead of her as she waited to start.

A large portion of the Ritz staff appeared at the door of the hotel to avail themselves of this novel form of entertainment, maintaining their dignified expressions only with difficulty when Daisy leaned over the side of the contraption to wave her parasol at an urchin who tried to climb onto the boot for a ride. Devin tipped the doorman generously to ensure his equally attentive welcome on their return, climbed back into the Daimler, and let out the clutch.

Maddie was surprised at how high up the seat was, and because it was not enclosed like a carriage or a hansom cab, she felt not only as if she might fall off, but that she would do so before the whole world, which seemed to be watching them as they drove out of the Place Vendôme.