The Left Hand of Justice (2 page)

He grinned. “A proper one, with hinges on the ankle and toes.”

“You steal it?”

“Naw,” he said, with mock offense. “It was payment for a job well done. The shoes, too.”

“What kind of job?”

“Now, Inspector, how could I get the kind of work that pays in shoes if I went around running my mouth to the police?”

She narrowed her eyes.

“We’ll talk about this later.”

He followed her long strides down the street, around the corner into an alley, where a man was snoring under a blanket on the front bench of an open cart. She’d thought to let Victor go home to his wife when he’d dropped her off earlier, but a little voice had told her she’d need him later. She was glad she’d listened. Corbeau laid her hand over the nose of the sturdy piebald harnessed to the front of the cart and whispered a few words of encouragement before giving the wheel a kick.

“Up, Victor!” she said sharply. “We’ve work to do!”

She wasn’t the only one in Paris who owed someone a favor. From the man’s grumbling, Corbeau guessed he was probably wishing he’d sold the blasted horse to the knacker. The animal hadn’t been possessed, as Victor had thought, but lack of it would have relieved him of the ability to take Corbeau around at all hours. And he wouldn’t owe her for having settled the matter.

“Where to now, Inspector?” he grunted after Corbeau and Joseph had settled themselves on the thin covering of straw in the cart bed.

“Montagne Ste. Geneviève,” Joseph said.

Victor turned around gruffly at the impertinent little voice. A sudden clap of thunder shook the air.

“As the boy says.”

“All right, then,” Victor said. “Let’s get this over with.”

Half an hour later, Victor’s cart skidded to a stop on the slick cobblestones before Joseph’s building, a tumbledown rooming house owned by his mother, the widow Bernard. A fat droplet of rain burst on Corbeau’s cheek as the widow stepped out of the shadows of the front door to meet them.

“Thank you for coming, Inspector,” she said, holding up a sputtering candle as Corbeau swung her leg over the side of the cart.

A sudden crash shook the house behind them. Victor’s horse started, and Corbeau barely had time to lift Joseph clear before the animal dashed off down the road, the cart careering wildly in its wake.

Gripping Joseph firmly by the hand, Corbeau followed the widow through the small crowd that had gathered. Women huddled beneath moth-eaten blankets. Sleepy-eyed men stamped feet rag-wrapped against the cold. Despite the hour, the cutting chill, and the tingle of the impending downpour in the air, their expressions made it clear that they’d rather take their chances on the dark, dirty street than inside.

“What is it, Inspector?” someone asked. Another cold drip fell on Corbeau’s face.

“A noisy spirit?”

“The devil himself?”

Corbeau kept walking. If she stopped to explain her theory—and that she’d seldom encountered either spirits or demons in her many, many years of investigating these kinds of disturbances—she’d be there arguing with them all night while some poor soul suffered.

Inside, the rooming house was all peeling paint and dark corners, the air thick with the mingled odors of sweat and burning coal. It was no palace, but thanks to Corbeau’s continued payments, the widow was close to owning it outright. Joseph’s mother might work until her fingers bled, but she and her children would never starve. That had to be worth something—perhaps even the right foot of a six-year-old boy.

As they crept up the stairs, Joseph clumping along at their heels, Madame Bernard’s tallow candle guttered and spat, emitting more black smoke than light. The widow was probably about Corbeau’s age, approaching thirty, with similar traces of early responsibility etched around her mouth and eyes, and a sprinkling of gray in her dark hair. Her thin build hid a stout heart; she hadn’t summoned Corbeau lightly—which made Corbeau even more wary of what she would find.

Suspicion prickled up Corbeau’s spine as they ascended the stairs together. When the air around them began to vibrate, Corbeau stopped. The sound was so low that probably only her trained ear recognized it as sound; others would sense only an inexplicable feeling of menace. It was a sensation Corbeau would always associate with the one true demonic possession she had witnessed. That had been her first year with the Bureau—long enough in the past that most days she could pretend she’d imagined the whole thing. But at times like this, she realized the terror of that day was permanently etched onto her heart.

“Has this been going on long?” she asked.

“An hour, maybe two.”

“Am I the only one you called?”

“Yes, Inspector.”

“No priests?”

“No, Inspector. No police, either. Only you.”

Given the one-time competition between Bureau agents and His Holiness’s exorcists, and the uncomfortably close relationship His Majesty was forging with the Church, the last thing Corbeau wanted to encounter at the scene was a priest. Except, perhaps, for a fellow Sûreté agent. Though intervention from the prefect’s office had kept Vautrin from sacking her with the rest of her colleagues, Corbeau wasn’t at all certain her benefactor would continue to protect her if she was discovered violating the chief inspector’s order to leave supernatural matters to the Church.

On the second-floor landing, the widow Bernard paused to pull her shawl tighter around her shoulders. Corbeau rubbed her hands together. The temperature had dropped noticeably between the ground and second floors. Shivering—and not entirely from the chill—she laid a hand on her truncheon and followed Madame Bernard to a door at the end of the hall.

“Right here, number four.”

Corbeau tensed as something crashed against the door. She swallowed.

“When you’re ready,” she said.

With a determined nod, the widow chose a key from the ring chained to the waistband of her skirt.

The air inside the apartment thrummed with the menace Corbeau had felt in the stairwell, only here it was strong enough to rattle their bones. Objects—a tin cup, a chamber pot, a Bible—floated through the air, describing wobbly orbits around the room’s perimeter. No wind had been blowing when Corbeau arrived, but on the opposite wall, grimy curtains whipped in and out of an open window. A shirtless, sweating man stood at the center of the chaos. He was younger than Corbeau, but tall and athletically formed, with curly dark hair recently trimmed and thick, dark chin stubble. His large, dark eyes twitched toward them, then rolled back into his skull as he shuddered violently.

The hair stood up on Corbeau’s arms—an irrational response. She had to get ahold of herself.
Nothing more than an atavistic fear of insanity shared by peoples across time and space.
That’s what Vidocq had taught them, and in most cases, it was enough to put panic in its place. To Corbeau’s experience, undiscovered spiritual talents were often at the root of the disturbances the academically minded described as insanity, and which the superstitious interpreted as demonic possession.

Still, it paid to be cautious.

“Bell, book, and candle, if you please, Madame,” she said, without looking away. “And take your son with you.”

The widow Bernard didn’t question why a police inspector was asking for a priest’s tools. She simply seemed happy to be dismissed. Normally, that would have been the point. Familiar-sounding objects and rites comforted the superstitious and kept them out of the way. In the past, people had been more comfortable thinking there was a demoniac in their midst—an evil they already believed in and could understand—than hearing about uncontrolled spiritual energies erupting from unsuspecting individuals. But with the waves of religious hysteria traveling through the areas recently, would that continue to be the case?

“Hello,” Corbeau called. The man’s head jerked toward her. His upper lip curled, and he let out a low, rumbling snarl like a dog. Corbeau sucked in her breath and straightened. “That’s enough. You can stop now.”

He did. She let out a long, tense breath. Six times out of seven, an outburst of spiritual energies could be halted simply by informing the perpetrator the energies were part of him. But first, one had to command the subject’s attention—not an easy thing when the subject was using his mind to toss the place. Corbeau took a step forward. The tin cup flew out of its orbit and whizzed toward her face. Corbeau lifted her truncheon the second before the cup hit her forehead. It glanced harmlessly off the baton and floated back toward the edge of the room.

“This isn’t what you think it is,” she said, raising her voice above the feral noises vibrating in the walls and floorboards. “You’re not under attack by the Evil One or anyone else, though it probably feels like it.” A chamber pot hurtled toward her. Corbeau ducked, and it crashed against the doorjamb, spattering the walls with dark urine. A candle end flew at her next, then a shoe. “I can help you if you let me. But you have to stop throwing things.”

The man cocked his head. The animal noises stopped. Corbeau felt some of the tension in her shoulders release. Was it really going to be this easy? The last two incidents hadn’t been. She had gone through all the standard steps, and when those hadn’t worked, she’d sprinkled some holy water, recited a few prayers in Latin, and given the perpetrators a couple of the white pills from her bag. She’d left them both asleep in their beds, not knowing whether she’d actually solved anything.

But no one had summoned her back.

“That’s right,” she continued. She wiped one palm on her coat and crept closer. “You’re doing this. And if you want me to help, you have to control yourself. What’s your name?”

The man’s breathing quickened. His eyes rolled back in his head and he began to shiver. Just like the others, and unlike anything she’d encountered with the Bureau. Yet there was something familiar about these incidents. Something about them echoed long-ago memories Corbeau had worked hard to forget. Memories from a different time, a different life, when she had gone by another name and Sûreté agent Elise Corbeau had yet to come into existence.

She shook her head.
Impossible
, she scolded herself. That was nearly a decade in the past, and she’d covered her tracks twice over.

Corbeau swallowed again. The baton was slippery in her hand. She fingered open the buckles of the bag at her waist. If this was an outburst of latent spiritual energies, the procedures Vidocq had taught them should suffice. All the same, she slipped her hand inside, unstoppered the bottle of holy water, and wet her fingers just in case. Keeping the truncheon between the man and herself, she touched a wet fingertip to the middle of his forehead and two others above his eyebrows. His skin was hot and damp, but he didn’t jerk away from the holy water.
No demon, then
, she noted with relief. His eyes closed and the trembling decreased. She let out a long breath.

“What’s your name?” she asked again.

“Lambert. Armand Lambert.”

“Monsieur Lambert, I’m Detective Inspector Elise Corbeau. You’re experiencing a spiritual disturbance of your own making. It’s frightening, but you can control it. Do you understand?” She coaxed a pill from the pillbox in her bag. “Here. Take this.” He placed it on the back of his tongue and swallowed. “Breathe deeply. Don’t open your eyes until I tell you to.”

Lambert squeezed his eyes shut tighter and drew a shaking breath. Corbeau removed her hand from his forehead and collected her thoughts. From her experience, this sort of outburst was most common in highly strung adolescent girls. But the two recent cases had been adults: one man and one woman. The incidents had also taken place in the slums of the Montagne Ste. Geneviève, just a brisk walk from this very building.

She could remember similar disturbances clustering in a single area only one other time. The disturbances had had nothing to do with demons. Rather, they had been caused by greed—people’s greed to develop supernatural talents they did not necessarily possess, and the greed of Moreau the Alchemist for their money. By the time the Sûreté founder Vidocq had kicked down her laboratory door, her concoctions had driven many to the madhouse or the grave. Guilt and panic crept up her throat once more. She pushed them down.

This was different. It had to be. She had destroyed her laboratory, her store of ingredients, and her notes. At Vidocq’s side, she had dismantled the networks of people who had distributed her potions and tinctures; every last one was in prison or dead. And when her debt to society had been paid in full, Vidocq had erased all traces of Moreau the Alchemist, and Elise Corbeau, Agent of the Sûreté, had been born.

That was over with. Done. These new incidents could not possibly be related.

This was not her fault.

She returned her attention to the young man in the center of the room. He had released some of the tension in his shoulders and was starting to shiver.

Like the other victims, Armand Lambert was an adult. He spoke in a city dweller’s clipped staccato; he hadn’t come in from the country to work the factories like his neighbors had. His hands were smooth and unstained, and his tidy brown curls suggested he was used to keeping himself well groomed. A servant, perhaps. A clerk or shop assistant. No longer employed, judging by the three-day stubble on his chin. Like the other victims, his possessions were minimal. Corbeau opened the wardrobe. He was wearing his only set of clothing.

Like the other victims, Armand Lambert was running from something.

“How are you feeling now, Mr. Lambert?” Corbeau asked. Lambert blinked and opened his eyes. He looked better, more in control. He was breathing easier. Unlike with the last two victims, she might actually get some information out of him. One by one, his possessions began to drop out of their orbits, falling harmlessly on the bed, the chair, and the floor. “Has this happened before?” Lambert nodded. Corbeau felt a pang of sympathy. It must have been terrifying for him. Had he thought himself haunted? “Some people think that everyone has untapped spiritual powers—powers that are only waiting for something to trigger them. Have you experienced any sort of major upset in your life recently? The death of a loved one, for example?”