City of Light (City of Mystery) (33 page)

A shudder gripped
Emma.  Her legs were cramping with the cold, and her breathing was becoming shallow
and ragged.  How much longer could this river go on?  And in the very moment
that she thought this, she drifted into something.  Not a boulder, but Tom’s
arms.  He righted her in the water, but her legs were weak and they stumbled
together toward the shore.  

“Didn’t you hear
it?” he said. “The bell for the half hour?”

She shook her head,
teeth chattering. With their limbs gone numb, it took some effort for them to
climb up the bank, short as it was, and then they each sprawled for a moment on
the muddy shore to catch their breath.

“I didn’t hear
anything,” Emma finally said.  “Fingers too far in my ears, I suppose.”

“We’ve got to keep
moving,” Tom said. “Otherwise we’ll take a chill.  If you had heard the church
bell and stopped, you would have come to shore just there, at that point in the
river where the woman in white is sleeping.  Close enough to where I pulled up,
so I don’t think there’s any need to make separate counts.”

Emma nodded and
struggled to her feet. They began walking back up the riverbank, trying to keep
a steady trod and each silently counting every step.  After a few minutes, Tom
stopped at a section of the bank that had a greater congregation of people,
some of them awake and moving in the darkness.

“Where are you?”

“1,138.”

“I’m at 1,123.  Not
too much of a discrepancy.  Let’s split the difference at 1,130.  Wait here a
minute, I have an idea.  Hold the count.”

Emma nodded and he
climbed up the bank and out of sight.  She repeated 1,130 over and over in her
head and struggled to fight the impulse to lie down and rest.  For Tom was
right.  The simple act of walking, even slowly, was returning life to her
body.  She could move her fingers and toes now and her lungs were expanding
into deeper and more productive breaths.

Tom was shortly
back, wearing dry clothes and carrying a shapeless armful of cloth.

“Here,” he said. “I’m
sure Cousin Claude would be gratified to learn that his fine woolen boating
jacket was worth a pile of rags in an honest trade.  Get out of those wet
things at once.”  He went on to explain that he had managed to barter his clothes,
which were soaking wet but clearly expensive, to a man at the top of the bank in
exchange for his own.  And for good measure the man had thrown in his blanket,
which Tom now thrust toward Emma.  She recoiled at the smell.

“I can’t walk
through the heart of Paris like some sort of naked savage, with a blanket
wrapped about me,” she protested, even though it was tempting to shed her own
clammy and inconvenient outfit, with its long pants legs tripping her up at
every step.

“Agreed, but you can
certainly walk the bank wrapped in one, and your clothes will be partially dry
by the time the sun is up.  Come on, Emma, buck up.  This is no time to start
thinking like a girl.”

She turned to him
with a snap, her expression freezing him more thoroughly than the water of the
Seine.

“Very well,” she
said. “At least turn away.”

He faced up the bank
toward the street while she wiggled out of her wet clothes, draped the blanket
around her with as much dignity as she could muster, and gathered the sodden
shirt and pants from the bank.

“All right, let us
continue,” she said when she had finished.  “We were at 1,130 were we not?”

4:48 AM

Approximately 15,000
human steps from where Emma and Tom were methodically pacing the river bank,
Rayley Abrams was pulling the mattress off his cot and considering the dried puddles
of vomit below.

The rat on the wall
had given him an idea.  Perhaps it was not true that he was entirely
weaponless, for he had become quite adept at expunging chloroform from his body
in the last two days and the evidence of this newly-acquired skill was now crusted
to the underside of this mattress.  With a heave of his aching shoulders,
Rayley dragged the thin pad to the most well-lit part of the badly-lit room and
considered his options.  If there had been enough chloroform lingering in
Graham’s blood to kill a cage full of mice, would there be enough in his vomit
to momentarily disorient a man?

Granted, it didn’t
seem likely.  Perhaps the drug lost its properties over time, perhaps
especially rapidly when exposed to air.  And Gerard was certainly far larger
and stronger than a cage full of white mice.  If Rayley could find a way to
make himself bleed…He could chew his own wrists, he supposed, or entice one the
damned rats into doing the task.  Bleed onto a piece of cloth – he still had most
of his clothing, after all – and hope that it held enough chloroform to subdue
Gerard. 

The darkness of the
room also worked to his advantage.  Rayley’s eyes had long since adjusted to
the gloom – in fact he suspected he would be struck blind with the brightness
if he were ever to return to the sunlit world.  But he had noted that both
Gerard and Armand had paused upon entering the cell and stood for several
seconds, clearly disoriented, waiting for their own eyes to adapt.

It was an
opportunity, was it not?  A brief moment in which Rayley would be able to see
far better than Gerard.  Perhaps he could crouch by door with the
chloroform-soaked cloth in his hands and when the man entered he could spring -

No, no.  That was no
good.  After all, by his own efforts, Rayley had managed to reduce the amount
of chloroform in his system so, even if he did find some way to bleed onto his
knickerbockers, any effect the drug still held would be diffuse.  Not enough to
kill a cage full of lab mice and certainly not enough to make a twenty-stone
thug go weak at the knees.  If Rayley were to spring on Gerald in the darkness
and throw a pair of bloodied knickerbockers over his head in all likelihood
such an act would merely piss the man off.

There had to be
another way.  For the first time since being taken into captivity, Rayley felt
strong enough to explore the cell.  He tried to walk but within seconds of his
hand leaving the security of the wall, his legs buckled.  Very well then, he
would explore on his hands and knees.  Gerard had most considerately left a tin
cup of water near the cot.  Rayley fingers almost immediately came upon it and he
gulped half of it down, saving the rest for troubles to come.  

He began to crawl
about the floor.  It was a comfortless concrete affair, and the first corner he
came to was slimy with seepage from the river.  Rayley lowered his head and
sniffed.  Yes, most definitely sewage and stagnant water.  Would Trevor and the
others ever find this godforsaken place on their own?  Just the thought that
there was someone out there looking for him had given him a flicker hope…but
this cell was so obscure, so dank and hidden. Rayley crawled on, using one hand
to trace the edge of the wall.  In the second corner, nothing but more river
muck.  In the third…

Damn.  A dead rat. 
Despite their days of forced cohabitation, Rayley still recoiled from the
vermin.  No, upon consideration, perhaps not a rat.  The size and shape was
right, and, from the best he could gather, even the color.  But the fur had
been too soft.  Cautiously, he brought his hand back to the item on the floor
and lifted it.

It was a woman’s
glove. 

Rayley scuttled,
rat-like himself, back to the mattress, which still lay on the floor, in the
room’s only puddle of diffused light.  He rolled back upon it, exhausted from
the effort of his journey around the cell, and squinted at the glove.  He was
still wearing his glasses, he realized with some surprise.  They had not come
off in the beating, further evidence that Gerard’s restraint had been noteworthy. 
And the glove - it appeared grey in the shadowy room, or perhaps plum colored,
a thought that made Rayley go cold with fear.  He could visualize Isabel’s
hands clutching the brass rail of the Eiffel Tower elevator, her face splitting
into an expression of pure joy as they had climbed higher and higher above the
city.  Was this her glove?  Had Armand at some point brought her to this
wretched room?

But no.  That made
no sense.  As Armand himself had so clearly pointed out, if he had Isobel in
his possession, there would be no need to keep Rayley alive.  Rayley had always
known somehow, that his fate was blended with that of Isobel, from the first
moment he had spied her in that café.  Rayley shut his eyes, indulging in the
memories of Isabel as if each one was a gulp of cold water from a tin cup.  At
the time he had concocted the fantasy that their fates were woven in the manner
of lovers.  Now he knew that they shared a different, darker sort of destiny,
for the moment that Isabel Blout was captured would be the exact moment that Rayley
Abrams would be condemned to die. 

But they didn’t have
her yet.  He had to believe that, and besides, upon more careful examination,
this was likely not even her glove.  It had probably been on the hand of the
boy-girl and pulled off in some sort of struggle.

Rayley looked up at
the faint light above him and searched for inspiration.  He did not have much. 
A cot.  A bucket.  A tin cup.  His glasses.  A woman’s glove.  A high barred
window. The remnants of chloroform and the predictable visits from Gerard.  Could
it all add up to an escape plan or – same thing – some means of signaling his
location to Trevor?           

He could almost hear
Tom Bainbridge’s cultured voice drawling “You have nothing to lose, after all.”
 It was one of Tom’s favorite phrases and, now that Rayley stopped to consider
it, Davy and Emma had been known to utter it too.  It must be the motto of
youth, Rayley supposed, a motto born from the innocent belief that one’s life
was continually on the upswing, that circumstances have no choice but to get
better and then yet better again.   But he and Trevor knew what it meant to
have something to lose – in fact, they had both lost things they’d loved, had watched
their cherished dreams fall to dust in their hands.

And Rayley supposed
that even in his present desolate situation he still had something to lose. The
three loose teeth clinging to his gums, for example, and the relative
hospitality of his captors.  He remembered how Armand had reacted earlier, when
Rayley had momentarily choked.  A look of sheer panic had flitted across the
man’s face and Rayley had known, in that instant, that Armand Delacroix did not
want a dead Scotland Yard detective on his hands.

“You have nothing to
lose,” Tom would say, but as Rayley looked around the cell, he amended the
sentiment to “You have little to lose.”  A botched escape attempt would likely
earn him another beating, but they didn’t intend to kill him.  Not quite yet. 
This knowledge was his trump card - indeed the only card he held.             

5:10 AM

“7250 paces,” Tom
said, as he and Emma at last reached the bridge where their journey had begun. “That’s
how far we’ve come in a half hour so if we walk 7250 paces farther upstream we
should be at the approximate place where the bodies were released.”  He looked
at Emma, who was clutching the blanket around her and weaving slightly on her
feet. “But the key word in that sentence is ‘approximate.’ Don’t get your hopes
up too high with this little experiment, Emma. There are a thousand variables
which were beyond our control.”

“I suppose we’ll
know in 7250 more steps.”

“Wait,” Tom said. 
“Let’s rest here a minute under the bridge.  It’s still too dark to see much
and you’re so – well, we’re both so very tired.  Aunt Gerry was right.  If we
don’t sleep just a little, we’ll be in too much of a stupor to think.”

Emma looked around
her. “Sleep? Here?”

“Just a few minutes.
The church bells will wake us.”

Emma hesitated.  She
knew the truth of what he was saying, for in that parenthetical part of her
mind that watched from a distance, she could tell that not only were her feet
slow and clumsy but that her thoughts were likewise becoming less under her
control.

“Not even an hour,”
Tom said, kneeling to the ground and gesturing that she should sit beside him. “The
six o’clock bells will rouse us and the sky will be lighter then.  We can
better see our way.” 

Emma looked down at
him, suddenly remembering things she didn’t want to remember and feeling the
urge to weep.  Perhaps it was just exhaustion, or finding herself in this
strange and unreal place.  On a riverbank in Paris, naked beneath a tattered
blanket.  Standing before a man she might love but one that she would never
truly have.

“For a minute,” she whispered.

“Put your head on my
shoulder,” Tom said. “We can keep each other warm.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Paris

4:15 AM

What he had told Rayley
Abrams had been absolutely true.  All of his clients were asking for Isabel. 

This was something
Armand Delacroix had not foreseen, that so many people would have been so
dismayed at her abrupt disappearance. In a business that valued youth above all
else, Isabel was aging.  In a city that demanded novelty, she was a known
quantity.  Any mystery she might have brought to the proverbial party had long since
faded.