The Left Hand of Justice (17 page)

“It was that Gypsy woman,” he sputtered. “Surely even Javert suspects as much.”

“Yes, everyone seems to have a reason to want Dr. Kalderash to be guilty. The problem is, there are so many other suspects to choose from.”

With the same terrifying quickness he’d exhibited in Lambert’s room, Vautrin leaped for the shovel. She swung, but he caught the handle in one hand and deflected the blow with his thick shoulder. He pushed her back toward the wall, and this time, she knew that once he pinned her there, he wouldn’t stop. Letting the shovel go, she dropped to the ground and rolled out of the way. Before Vautrin could turn around, she was out the door, disappearing into the cold, black rain.

Despite the rain, the Rue des Rosiers wasn’t completely deserted, thanks to the newly installed streetlamps shining like beacons through the downpour. Paris had installed gas lighting around the city a little less than ten years ago, and Corbeau wondered how much of the vast reduction in crime in the meantime had been a result of it or, as Vidocq had claimed, to the activities of the Sûreté, which had come into existence at roughly the same time.

From the corner, Corbeau could see that Dr. Kalderash’s house was dark. No light shone in the windows, nor was a single lantern hung, despite the legal obligation to do so. Apprehension gathered in her belly as she pushed her way past small groups of people hurrying to get out of the rain. Javert wanted Dr. Kalderash arrested for a crime that hadn’t happened. Sophie and Vautrin wanted her out of the way as well—and they had an entire organization of devotees behind them. Hermine Boucher might have wanted Dr. Kalderash back for reasons only the heart could understand, but from what Kalderash had said, the woman was both unstable and violent.

Dr. Kalderash had nowhere to turn. Corbeau had become a police agent in order to right wrongs and to protect the innocent. If anything happened to Maria Kalderash, Corbeau would never forgive herself. She had to tell her what she had found in the carriage house. She had to warn her.

She flung herself onto the doorstep, banging on the door with her fist.

“Doctor!” Thick sheets of rain swallowed her cry, but she struck the door until the windows shook. She pressed her ear to the wood. No one was moving around inside. “Doctor!” she called again.

Her hands stiff with cold, she fumbled in her bag for her lock picks. After a few false starts, the lock gave way, and she found herself in the hallway, dripping dirty water onto the tiles. She tucked the picks back into the bag and closed it. “Dr. Kalderash?”

The thick silence swallowed her voice. The house was still, as only an uninhabited dwelling could be. No one had been there for quite a while, yet the servants’ door was open, and light was coming up from below, casting the corridor in soft shadows. Corbeau flattened herself against the doorjamb and listened, but the basement was as silent as the rest of the house.

Suddenly, the front door slammed shut with a bang. Seconds later, she felt the chill in the air and smelled the rain. The back door was open. Locking the front door behind her, she grabbed the lamp from its table, grit crunching under her boots as she made her way toward the back of the house.

The back door stood wide. It hadn’t been forced. Careless scratches around the lock told her someone with less skill than she had picked it. Turning the lamp down, she shut this door as well and pulled the bolt. More grit scratched under her boot-soles as she turned. She lifted her lamp to reveal a trail of muddy footprints down the hall. The intruders hadn’t bothered to wipe their feet once they’d popped the lock. She knelt down for a closer look. Two sets of muddy boot tracks led from the back door to the front room. Men’s tracks. Stout men wearing stout boots. There had been a scuffle near the doorway of the front room. Then they’d doubled back and left the way they’d come.

The house was suffused in an eerie calm that turned the hairs on Corbeau’s arms to pins. Something bad had happened here. And whether it had happened as a result of her action, or her failure to act, it was her fault. Forcing herself to breathe, she followed the tracks back down the hall to the front room, where she had, just that morning, interviewed Dr. Kalderash.

She eased the door open, holding the lamp in front of her. Thinking better of it, she set the lamp back on its stand in the hallway and turned it off. Thick curtains hung over the front window, but Corbeau didn’t want to risk accidentally shedding light beneath them or through a gap. Instead, she took her tinderbox from her coat pocket, lit her candle stub, and slipped inside.

The front room was a disaster. Even in the flickering light of her candle, she could feel the echoes of violence in the overturned chairs in which she and Dr. Kalderash had sat that morning, the shattered end table where she had set her teacup. The papers once stacked on the desk near the window had been swept to the floor, scattered, and stomped with heavy boots that sullied the delicate rows of handwriting with mud. More papers, journals, and even books had been heaped into the fireplace in such quantity they’d smothered the fire. Only the acrid traces of paper-smoke lingered in the air to evidence a flame had once burned there. The silver samovar lay scratched and dented on the floor beside shards of the teapot and cups Corbeau had drunk from, amid a pool of cold, brown muck.

The intruders had been searching for something. They’d been angry—very angry—when they hadn’t found it. But who were they? And what had they been looking for? She wished she’d had a closer look at Dr. Kalderash’s papers when she’d been there earlier that day. Now it was too late. What hadn’t been obliterated was a jumbled mess that would take hours to sort out.

Had Dr. Kalderash been there to witness the destruction of her study? Had she fled when she’d heard the
scritch-scratch
of the picks in the back door? Or had the intruders taken her unawares? Corbeau shuddered at the thought of how a pair of large, angry men might take out their frustrations on the petite inventor.

She took a deep breath and closed the door behind her.

The footprints in the corridor told a story of struggle that had been fought, fiercely, just before the servants’ door. The door had been closed when Corbeau had been there that morning. It was ajar now, and no one had bothered to turn off the lights below. Kalderash had been in the basement when the intruders arrived—had been there, or had run down there after they arrived. They had dragged her up. Corbeau listened at the staircase again, but not even the air stirred in the depths. She snuffed her candle, put it back in her pocket, and followed the light down the stairs.

A soft wall of heat hit her face as she stepped off the last step. The wall lamps were blazing. She turned them down. Dr. Kalderash would not have left the gas on, had she merely gone out. She wouldn’t have let the brazier continue to burn, either. After ascertaining that the coals were hiding no important evidence, she doused them with the water from the washbasin that sat beside it on the table. The table that held the brazier and washbasin also held a soup bowl, a single set of cutlery, and a dry end of bread—so much for the kitchen that would normally be housed below stairs. The rest of the basement was given over to machines. She ran her hand over an iron torso cage with a small, locking box welded to the side. What looked like the study of a hand in metal sat near a pile of bolts, springs, and fabric. So many ideas left unfinished. It was as if the inventor had known she didn’t have much time and had tried to bring as many of her ideas to life as she could before…before what? Before fleeing the country? Before someone came for her?

The idea was unthinkably sad, but Corbeau forced the sentiment away and returned her attention to the crime scene. The clutter on the table farthest from the stairs was typical work debris—the residue of a quick mind occupied with higher things than tidiness. But closer to the doorway she found more evidence of a fight. They’d come upon Kalderash quickly, while she was close to the door and before she could escape either up the stairs or to the opposite side of the room. Metal scraps littered the floor there, scattered in all directions. And, bringing the lamp close, Corbeau could make out a woman’s faint footprint on the wall. Corbeau bit back a smile. Maria Kalderash hadn’t gone quietly.

Had the intruders come looking for the inventor herself, or for some object in her possession? The basement had been spared the search and destruction the front room had suffered. Yet one would think if the inventor were downstairs immersed in her work, the intruders would have searched the house quietly, rather than giving her notice and time to escape. Chances were later they’d have their hands too full with Dr. Kalderash to search the basement. What had the intruders been after? Why had they thought it even better to abscond with Dr. Kalderash? Where had they gone, and what had they done with her after that?

Corbeau could think of two people who might have taken her: Prefect Javert and Hermine Boucher. Hermine wanted her lover back. More importantly, if Sophie’s story were to be believed—and Corbeau wasn’t certain that it was—Madame Boucher needed Dr. Kalderash’s assistance suppressing her unwanted supernatural talents. Why Javert wanted the inventor, Corbeau could only speculate. But he wanted her badly enough to frame her for a crime that had never happened.

Corbeau turned to go back up the stairs. She was about to switch off the wall lamps when something in the rubble caught her eye. Crouching down, she extracted an elaborate pince-nez from the debris. She blew off the dust and held the instrument up to the light.

The lenses were glass, like normal lenses. However, instead of being flat, they were convex on both sides, making them almost spherical. A golden mesh was fused to the back side of the lenses. Corbeau frowned. She’d seen the mesh somewhere before. Grasping the spectacles by the bridge, she held them up to her face. Suddenly the instrument leaped toward her eyes as if drawn by a powerful magnet. A current crackled over her skin with a hail of blue sparks. Yelping, she clawed them off. They fell to the floor with a clatter. Could this have been the object the intruders were hunting? Corbeau doubted it. They’d likely been sitting on the table in plain sight before the struggle had buried them. All the same, something told her it would be best for the object to not fall into the wrong hands.

She poked at the spectacles with the toe of her boot. When they didn’t bite, she used a rag to pick them up again. The spectacles had seemed to take on a life of their own—as if they had been seeking connection with her skin. That was it, exactly, she realized, her pulse beginning to race with the excitement of discovery. The first time she had seen the mesh was on Armand Lambert’s torso. She’d have bet money that, at one time, he had used one of Kalderash’s devices. The mesh was probably how the devices connected to the body. But what was the nature of the connection? She didn’t have time to speculate now. She knotted the rag tightly around the spectacles and tucked the bundle into her shoulder bag for later examination.

After giving the laboratory a final glance, she extinguished the lights and made her way up the staircase. Back in the corridor, she lit the lamp on the stand near the front door, holding it out in front of her as she followed the footsteps down the hallway toward the rear of the house. The intruders had definitely carried her this way. Closer examination revealed a toe scuff along the wall, a hairpin, and what might well have been a light spatter of blood. Everything stopped abruptly just before the back door. They had subdued her, then, it seemed, and wrestled her outside, not bothering to shut the door behind them. Standing in the doorway, Corbeau looked out.

The rear of the house opened into an alley, where the footprints disappeared into a mess of mud and water spreading out in both directions. Using her hand to shield the lamp from the rain, Corbeau looked up and down the alley. No street-level windows faced out from the adjacent houses, and only a few on the top floor of the adjoining buildings. These remained firmly shuttered and would probably have been shuttered when Kalderash had been taken. Between this, the pouring rain, and the natural inclination of city-dwellers to see and hear nothing that might come back to haunt them later, Corbeau doubted she’d get a word out of the neighbors. Stepping inside again, she locked the door once more.

It was then she noticed a second staircase, with more signs of disturbance leading up to the next floor. The stairs were narrow. Corbeau’s shoulders nearly brushed the plaster on either side, and the wood creaked in protest of her every step. A thick crimson-hued Persian carpet lay over the worn planks of the landing. On the other side of it was a single door—the one space, Corbeau speculated, Kalderash had designated for her personal comfort.

The room was cramped, with a steeply pitched ceiling that followed the roofline down toward the street. A single bed sat against the back wall, and next to it, a small bedside table with a book. On the far wall—if anything in this chamber could be considered far from anything else—a round window looked out over the street. A modest wardrobe stood beside it, and on the other side of the wall, a low chest of drawers.

Some struggle had occurred here, as well, though it hadn’t been as intense as the battle of the basement. The top two drawers were open, their contents slopped over the sides. The bedclothes hung down over one side of the bed, and a chair was overturned. But the little attic had somehow escaped the wholesale destruction visited upon the front room. Any search had been cursory, secondary to the chase. Had Kalderash escaped her captors and run upstairs? Given two hulking intruders and one delicate inventor, Corbeau doubted it.

No. There had to have been a second abductee.

Corbeau righted the chair and turned toward the bed. The blankets had been pulled down hastily, and she could see the indentations Dr. Kalderash’s small bones had made in the mattress. She averted her eyes from this unintentional intimacy, forcing her thoughts back to the scene. The second person had hidden under the bed. Though that person was long gone, he—or she—might have left something behind. Corbeau knelt, pushed the covers away, and set her lamp on the floor. Something was there, back toward the wall, amid the dust. She flattened herself on the floor and eased beneath the bed, tickling at the object with her fingers until she found it. Sighing, she emerged with a brown cloth cap.