The Affair of the Bassin Les Hivers

III

A broken rosary, a silver crucifix bearing the initials j.c., a few coarse, brown fibres, some photographs of the corpse seen earlier at Les Hivers… One by one, Commissaire Lapointe laid the things before him on the bright, white table-cloth. He was sitting in a fashionable cafe, L’Albertine, situated in the Arcades de l’Opera whose windows looked into a square in which a beautiful fountain played. Outside, Paris’s haut-monde strolled back and forth, conversing, inspecting the windows of the expensive shops, occasionally entering to make purchases. Across from him, sipping alternately from a small coffee cup or a glass of yellow-green absinthe, sat a most extraordinary individual. His skin was pale as alabaster. His hair, including his eyebrows, was the colour of milk, and his gleaming, sardonic eyes resembled the finest rubies. Dressed unusually for the age, the albino wore perfectly cut morning dress. A grey silk hat, evidently his, shared a shelf near the cash-register with Lapointe’s wide-brimmed straw.

“I am grateful, Monsieur, that you found time to see me,” murmured Lapointe, understanding the value the albino placed on good manners. “I was hoping these objects would mean more to you than they do to me.

Evidently belonging to a priest or a nun-”

“Of high rank,” agreed Zenith continuing to look at the photographs of the victim.

“We also found several long black hairs, traces of heavy red lipstick of fairly recent manufacture.”

“No nun wore that,” mused Zenith. “Which suggests her murderess was disguised as a nun. In which case, of course, she is still unlikely to have worn lip-rouge. It was not the young woman’s?”

“Hers was from an earlier age altogether.” Lapointe had already explained the circumstances in which the corpse had been discovered, as well as his guess at the time and date when she was murdered.

“So we can assume there were at least two people involved in killing her, one of whom at least had knowledge of the multiverse and how to gain access to other worlds.”

“And at least one of them can be assumed still to be here. Those footprints told us that part of the story. And some effort had been made to wrest the rosary from her fingers after she had arrived in Les Hivers.”

“The man-shall we assume him to be a priest?” Monsieur Zenith raised the rosary as if to kiss it, but then sniffed it instead. “J.C.? Some reference perhaps to the Society of Jesus?”

“Possibly. Which could lead us to assume that the Inquisition could have been at work?”

“I will see what I can discover for you, Monsieur Lapointe. As for the poor victim…” Zenith offered his old acquaintance a slight shrug.

“I believe I have a way of discovering her identity also, assuming she was not what we used to call a ‘virtuous’ girl,” said Lapointe. “I have already checked the police records for that period and no mention is made of a society disappearance that was not subsequently solved. Therefore, by the quality of her clothes, the fairness of her skin, condition of her hair, not to mention her extraordinary beauty, we must assume her to be either of foreign birth or some kind of courtesan. The cut of her clothes suggests the latter to me. There is, in that case, only one place to look for her. I must inspect our copy of De Buzet.”

Zenith raised an alabaster eyebrow. “You have a copy of the legendary Carte Bleue?”

“One of the two known to exist. The property of the Quai d’Orsay for almost two hundred years. Of little value, of course, in the general way. But now-it might just lead us to our victim, if not to her murderers.”

Monsieur Zenith extinguished his Turkish cigarette and rose to leave.

“I will do what I can to trace this assumed cleric and if you can discover a reasonable likeness in La Carte Bleue, we shall perhaps meet here again tomorrow morning?”

“Until then,” declared Lapointe, standing to shake hands. He watched with mixed feelings as the albino collected his hat and stick at the door and strolled into the sunlit square, for all the world a flaneur from a previous century.

Later that same day, wearing impeccable evening dress as was his unvarying habit, Monsieur Zenith made his way to a certain unprepossessing address in the Marais where he admitted himself with a key, entering through a door of peeling green paint into a foyer whose interior window slid open and a pair of yellow, bloodshot eyes regarded him suspiciously. Zenith gave a name and a number and, as he passed through the second door, pulled on a black domino which, of course, did nothing to disguise his appearance but was a convention of the establishment. Once within, he gave his hat and cloak to a bowing receptionist and found himself in those parts of the catacombs made into a great dining room known to the aristocrats of the criminal underworld as La Cuisine de Smith. Here, that fraternity could exist unhindered and, while eating a passable dinner, could listen to an orchestra consisting of a violinist, a guitarist, double-bassist, an accordionist and a pianist. If they so wished they could also dance the exotic tango of Argentina or the Apache of Paris herself.

Zenith took a table in an alcove under a low stone ceiling that was centuries old and blew out the large votive candle which was his only light.

He ordered his usual absinthe and from his cigarette case removed a slender oval, which he placed between his lips and lit. The rich sweetness of Kashmiri opium poured from his nostrils as he exhaled the smoke and his eyes became heavily lidded. Watching the dancers, all at once he became aware of a presence at his table and a slender woman, whose domino only enhanced her dark beauty, an oval face framed by a perfectly cut ‘page-boy’ style. She laid a hand lightly on his shoulder and smiled.

“Will you dance, old friend?” she asked.

Although she was known to the world as Una Persson, Countess von Beck, Zenith thought of her by another name. He rejoiced inwardly at his good fortune. She was exactly whom he had hoped to meet here. He rose and bowed, then gracefully escorted her to the door where they joined in the rhythms of The Entropy Tango, that strange composition actually written for one of Countess Una’s closest friends. In England, she had enjoyed a successful career on the music hall stage. Here, she was best known as a daring adventuress.

Arranging their wonderful bodies in the figures of the tango, the two carried on a murmured conversation. When the final chords rose to subtle crescendo, Zenith had the knowledge he had sought.

At his invitation, Countess Una joined him, the candle was relit and they ordered from the menu. This was to prove dangerous for, moments after they began to eat, a muffled shot stilled the orchestra and Zenith noted with some interest that a large calibre bullet had penetrated the plaster just behind his left shoulder. The bullet had flattened oddly, enough to tell him that it was made of an unusual alloy. Countess Una had recognised it, too. It was she who blew out the candle so that they no longer made an easy target.

They spoke almost in chorus.

“Vera Pym!”

Who else but that ruthless mistress of Paris’s most notorious gang would ignore Smith’s rules of sanctuary, respected even by the police?

But why had she suddenly determined to destroy the albino?

Zenith frowned. Could he know more than he realised?