The Missing Italian Girl (34 page)

The concierge’s only response was to yell for a Louise. A head popped up by the railing on the second floor. “Yes?”

“Someone who wants to be shown around.”

Séverine was already resigned to the fact that this concierge, unlike most belonging to her profession, was not a gossip. She had to hope the chars were more talkative.

“I know you’re busy. I’ll be fine,” Séverine said, eager to please and get rid of her severe escort. “Thank you.” Before the concierge could respond, Séverine was on her way up.

Louise, in her fifties, short-haired, almost balding, and portly, was talkative, but, at first, not very helpful. Masking her purpose, Séverine began by asking the charwoman if she knew any stories that would amuse her newspaper readers, how families got on here, what it was like to bathe and to do the wash in a model community, and how she felt about the ten
P.M.
curfew. Louise had opinions on everything, especially the families. “Little devils,” she called their children, resentful of the dirt they dragged in and the noise they made.

“What about the bachelors?” Séverine asked, circling closer to the information she needed.

“Bachelors,” Louise said with a knowing smile. “You want to know about bachelors, don’t ask an old married woman like me. Go upstairs to Elise. She’s probably doin’ the toilets by now.”

Something in Séverine’s expression must have alerted Louise that she had made a slip, for as Séverine turned to go up the stairs, the charwoman caught her by the sleeve. “You ain’t going to repeat what I said, are you?”

“Heavens, no,” Séverine said innocently, as she wriggled away. “I just need to see more of the building.” And she needed to get to this Elise before Louise could warn her friend that she had given her away.

When she reached the landing of the next floor, she saw a charwoman on her knees, scrubbing.

“Elise,” she said softly.

“Yes?”

“May I speak to you?” Séverine said, approaching her.

With some effort the woman got to her feet, dropped the rag she had been using in the bucket and left the cloth she had been kneeling on beside it. She wiped a lanky strand of mousy brown hair from her eyes and pinned it into her scraggly bun. She had a pockmarked face and sad gray eyes. Although she was probably barely thirty, about the same age as the vibrant Clarie Martin, she looked worn down.

Séverine introduced herself as Augustine Petitbon and said that she had come to learn about the charwoman’s routines and work at the Cité Napoléon.

“You can see it,” she responded with a weary wave of her hand. “The stairs, the hallways, and the toilets at the end of each hall, four on each floor.”

“Do you live here?” Séverine asked, taking out her notebook, calculating that this question could lead to revelations about the woman’s life.

“Yeah. Over there.” Elise gestured toward a door across one of the bridges.

“Alone?”

“Yeah.”

“Could I see your apartment?” A private place for a private talk.

The woman shrugged. “I’ve got work—”

Séverine reached in her purse and took out a five-franc note. “Can I tell you a secret?” she said, raising her eyebrows.

“What?”

“I’d be willing to pay for some information.”

Elise stared at the banknote, which easily represented a few days’ work. She met Séverine’s eyes and nodded. “Let me dump out the pail, and I’ll take you to my place.”

Elise bent over, picked up her knee rag and her bucket, and plodded to the communal toilet at the end of the hall, where she wrung out and folded her rags and poured out the dirty water. Watching these slow, deliberate movements took every iota of Séverine’s patience. She fingered the money and prayed the woman knew the right bachelor.

Wiping her hands on her apron, Elise led Séverine across a bridge to her apartment. It was a single room with a one-burner stove, a window, and two gas lamps on the barren walls. There was a narrow bed and a wooden table with three rickety chairs, a pantry and armoire. Aware that Elise was observing her, Séverine felt compelled to remark that it was very nice.

“I’ve worked here five years. I’m saving to get a room with a fireplace. It’s cold in the winter,” she said, standing before Séverine, waiting to be handed the banknote. Once she got it, she went over to the table and wearily dropped into a chair. Séverine took this as a tacit invitation to join her.

“Well, then,” Séverine said, as she sat down, “let’s get started. What’s it like to live among bachelors who work for the Gas Company?”

Elise glanced aggressively at Séverine. “You’re not from the Moral Police, are you? Or sent by that building inspector?”

“Of course not!” If only this Elise knew the history of Séverine. She was as far from the Moral Police as you could get. But how to convince her? Séverine retrieved another wrinkled five-franc note from her purse. She assumed the inspectors did not give or take bribes. “Look,” she said, taking a chance by changing her story, “I’m not really reporting on life at the Cité Napoléon. I want to write a series on the violence that men do to women, and women do to men. It’s going to get some people angry, so I need you to keep what we say just between us.”

Elise’s eyes roved suspiciously between the money and Séverine’s face.

Séverine bit down lightly on her lip before taking the plunge. “I’m particularly interested in finding out about the man I’ve seen going into the Gas Company, the one who had acid thrown in his face.”

“Acid?”

“Burned, all up one side.”

Elise shook her head, puzzled. “Are you talking about Michel?”

A name! Not wanting to frighten off the charwoman, Séverine braced herself to remain calm. “Michel who?”

The woman shrugged. “Michel Arnoux.”

“And you know him how?” With two gloved fingers, Séverine edged the banknote toward Elise.

Elise placed her hand over it. “I like the clerks. They’re cleaner than the stokers or the lamplighters. Smarter, too. More educated.”

From the way that the charwoman refused to meet her eye, Séverine assumed there was more to her relationship with Michel Arnoux than a mere passing acquaintance. Séverine could not believe her luck. Or was it simply, once again, her unfailing instincts? “So the man with the burnt face and the closed eye,” she said carefully, “is Michel Arnoux.”

“Yes, but no woman did that to him. It was the anarchist who did it. The one who threw the bomb in the fancy café.”

“When?” It was Séverine’s turn to be puzzled. The only recent bombing was the explosion in Pyotr’s cart.

“You know, the famous bomb, years ago.”

“The Hotel Terminus?”

“Yeah, that one.”

At last, a new clue. Despite the wig, the hat, the heavy dress, Séverine felt light, as if she could soar. Of course, she remembered the 1894 bombing. Everyone did. Thrown into a crowded café on a cold February night. The explosion that had terrorized Paris. Séverine dropped her hand to her skirt and clawed at it, reminding herself not to show her excitement. She was on the verge of uncovering a motive: revenge.

“Was he bitter about what happened?” she asked, almost holding her breath. “Did he talk about that night?”

“Well, not so much about the lamp that caught fire on their table. But about his fiancée, the one he lost. The one that was so perfect, so good. Except she couldn’t have been that good. She couldn’t bear to look at him any more, even after he saved her.” The tone was bitter. Whatever her relationship with Arnoux, she would never live up to the phantom of his imagination. Elise kept flattening out the banknotes against the rough wood of the table. “A pretty little blond thing,” she added. “At least according to him.”

“Do you think he hated all anarchists for what one of them did to him?” Séverine pressed.

“Oh, yes. He said, all the time, his life would have been so different. He should have been a manager. He should have had a real apartment. He should have married … that woman.” Her hand stopped. Her voice drifted into silence. Something must have happened. Some hope must have been dashed. Perhaps the hope that by marrying a bitter, mutilated man she would improve her life, enjoy a warm apartment in the winter.

Séverine decided that a show of sympathy was probably the best way to pry more information out of the charwoman. “Oh, my poor dear, was he ever violent with you?” She reached for the woman’s hand.

“No,” Elise said, pulling away. “He used to be nice to me.”

“
Used to be?”

Elise began chewing on one of her broken fingernails.

“What happened?” Séverine urged. What had brought Michel Arnoux to Pyotr’s café?

Elise closed her eyes, as if deciding whether or not to answer.

“Did he hurt you? We can—”

“No! It’s not like he hit me. I don’t want you to think that.”

“Well, then.”

Elise nodded to herself before beginning slowly. “It’s the way he talked. It was bad enough that he kept telling me about his fiancée or how he could have become a big shot. But after that fire happened in May, when all those ladies got burned, he couldn’t stop talking about it. How their bodies were charred, how their jewels melted right into their flesh, what they smelled like.” She shook her head with distaste. “He went to see them every day they were laid out after the fire. He tried to get me to go. It was as if, as if … he liked it.” She wrinkled her nose as if she could smell the flesh burning and shot Séverine a glance of horrified perplexity.

“Does he still talk about the Charity Bazaar fire?” Séverine asked, perfectly aware that he did.

The charwoman shook her head. “We don’t talk anymore. I couldn’t stand it. It’s too gruesome.”

Séverine stood up. She had gotten what she needed. The room was stifling, and she was perspiring heavily under her wig. “Thank you, you’ve been very helpful. And it is very important that you tell no one what we’ve been talking about.” She glanced at the banknotes under the guard of Elise’s fingers. Her only guarantee.

Séverine bid the charwoman good-bye and dashed down the stairs as fast as her heavy skirts allowed. She needed to go home. Get out of the awful clothes. Think. Write notes. Then go to Clarie Martin with what she had learned. She had struck gold.

19

H
OURS LATER, A BEEF STEW
simmering on the stove, Rose and Clarie carried Jean-Luc downstairs to play with his horsey in the courtyard. They had devised a plan that would allow Clarie to talk to Bernard alone and, at the same time, keep Jean-Luc from any possible harm. Clarie asked Mme Peyroud if they could borrow her stool for Rose to sit on in the courtyard as she watched their Luca. This was an unusual request. But it was an unusual day. Fortunately the concierge didn’t ask any questions before she retired to her lodge to prepare her own meal. After Clarie showed Jean-Luc how much fun the horsey would have riding over the cobblestones, she went upstairs to wait for her husband.

Within minutes, the doorbell rang. Puzzled, Clarie put her book down. Had Bernard forgotten his key? Or did he have Jean-Luc and the wooden horse in his arms? Clarie swung the door open to discover, much to her dismay, the audacious Séverine.

“I must come in.”

“No, you can’t. Bernard will soon be home and….”

Ignoring Clarie, Séverine stepped inside the foyer and pushed past her into the parlor. She swirled around. “We may both be in danger,” she said, with a certain imperiousness. “I know who the scarred man is, and I think I know what he has done.”

Even though Clarie was afraid of what Séverine had come to say, she had to listen. Fear thudding in her chest, she walked to one of the chairs by the reading lamp and gestured to Séverine to take the other. “How did you find out?” she asked, holding on to the arms of the chair as she slowly settled into the seat.

“I’m an investigative reporter. I investigate,” Séverine said briskly, as she yanked her gloves off, one finger at a time.

“And?”

“As I surmised, my dear, he is a clerk at the Paris Gas Company,” Séverine said with an impatience that Clarie assumed had to do with her guest’s less-than-gracious reception. “I waited on the corner of the rue Condorcet this morning until I saw him go in. Then I went to the Company housing on the rue Rochechouart and talked to a charwoman who knows him, shall we say, quite well.”

Séverine paused, eyebrows arched, waiting for praise or encouragement.

“Please go on,” Clarie urged. She had no time for Séverine’s dramatics. She was hardly breathing. The fireplace, the floral rug, the familiar walls seemed to be vibrating with the possibility that the worst was true: the man who approached her worked at the Paris Gas Company, a few blocks from her school. He lived nearby.

“His name is Michel Arnoux. And his friend told me that his face was burned in an anarchist bombing, the famous one at the Café Terminus. You know about that, of course?”

Clarie shook her head, still stunned.

“February 1894.”

“I was in Nancy, teaching,” Clarie whispered. “I remember something—”

“Well, it was quite notorious. This slightly crazed Emile Henry threw a bomb in a new posh restaurant as everyone was sitting around having a good time, drinking, eating, listening to the music. The place was packed, about 350 people. The explosion was so powerful, it went through the roof.”

“How awful,” Clarie said. “How many died?”

“Fortunately, only one. Many injured. What was really terrible is that all the anarchists were blamed for the act of one fool.”

Clarie stared at Séverine. “What was terrible is what happened to the person who died and people like this Michel Arnoux.”

“Oh, yes,” Séverine waved her hand dismissively, “that’s why everyone was so up in arms. Because Henry wasn’t aiming at the army, the police or the government. He targeted ordinary people. And what could be more ordinary than a clerk?”

Shocked by Séverine’s callousness, Clarie repeated: “What happened to this man, this ordinary clerk, was terrible.”

“And it gets worse,” Séverine went on, undeterred by Clarie’s disapproval. “Apparently he was there with his fiancée, got her away from the fire and, then, she rejected him because of his disfiguring wounds. I can see exactly the way it was. He must have been near the orchestra—that’s where the bomb went off—a special table for a special night. Something he could ill afford. Maybe he wore a top hat for the first time. Perhaps that’s when he asked her to marry him. Or, didn’t get the chance to ask before the explosion. Her rejection, that’s why he’s so bitter. Bitter enough to hate women, bitter enough to kill,” she concluded triumphantly.