The Left Hand of Justice (20 page)

Javert cocked an eyebrow. “What’s her name?”

Now it was Corbeau’s turn to look away. Clearly her disastrous personal life was not as closely kept as she’d endeavored. And yet, what an astonishing lack of judgment had been in his voice. He seemed to be disappointed rather than shocked, and more disappointed in the fact of her professional lapse than in anything else.

“It seems we’re both at fault in this situation, Monsieur,” she said, the fatigue in her voice now matching that in his. She met his eyes. “Will you help me?”

“Do I have any choice?”

“You have the choice between doing the right thing and making this a lot harder and a lot more unpleasant than it has to be.”

He cocked his head, regarding her with a mix of resignation and admiration. Then he nodded. “Very well, Inspector. Where do we start?”

By the time Corbeau departed Javert’s tidy rooms above the haberdashery, the prefect had promised not only to send a handful of his best to meet her at Madame Boucher’s mansion, but also to have them detain Chief Inspector Vautrin, if they found him. Corbeau wasn’t certain Joseph and Dr. Kalderash were actually at the mansion. If they were, she had been close enough to rescue them herself just a few hours ago. The thought made her grind her teeth. On the other hand, if they were being held somewhere else, Corbeau would be back where she had started nearly twenty-four hours before—nowhere. No, not even
there
. At least when Javert’s carriage had discharged her onto the pavement in front of Oubliette, she’d had an address and a suspect.

The haberdashery disappearing behind her, she followed the street past the Rue Charlemagne, where His Majesty had founded the new Lycée less than a decade before. Buildings of white and brown stone rose up on either side of the narrow lane-like canyon walls, magnifying the echo of her hurried footfall against the slick cobblestones. The air was thick with the smell of rain, and moisture formed halos around the well-kept gaslights, but at least for now the precipitation had stopped.

As the Rue St. Paul approached the Seine, it angled slightly downward before flinging itself wide onto a bustling nighttime market. Corbeau stopped to adjust her appearance. The borrowed shirt and trousers felt good against her skin. Not only were they clean, but they provided a freedom of movement she had been sorely missing. She pulled her bag closer and tucked her hair up under the cloth cap that had come with the trousers and shirt. She bent down and scooped up a bit of mud from between the cobblestones. Smudging it on her cheeks and hands, she checked her reflection in a darkened shop window and nodded satisfaction. The suggestion of disguise wouldn’t hold up to close scrutiny, but it should be enough to allow her to walk the crowded street unquestioned and unmolested. Her height and build would strengthen the illusion; darkness would perfect it. She took a deep breath and stepped into the throng.

A lively traffic carried her along the street, as energetic an hour before midnight as in the middle of the day. All along the riverside, customers haggled with merchants in slapdash stalls and over the sides of boats pulled up to the quay for just that purpose. Corbeau caught the whiff of chestnuts roasting on a brazier and, below that, the mingled smells of spilled beer, tobacco, and sewage. Strains of a violin darted in and out of the sounds of lapping water and commerce.

Lambert was dead. Vautrin had killed him, most likely to keep him silent regarding the truth about Madame Boucher’s disappearance. But why had Madame Boucher done her disappearing act in the first place? Had she endeavored to bring sympathy to her cause? Or perhaps she had learned of Vautrin’s ambitions and feared them? Had she known that her disappearance would cast suspicion on her former lover? If Javert hadn’t wanted Dr. Kalderash for his own purposes, the newspapers and police would have only been too happy to take up the cause. Or perhaps this had been Madame’s purpose all along—some kind of twisted revenge against Dr. Kalderash for leaving? Corbeau cursed, causing the people walking in front of her to glance her way and move aside.

Stepping past them, she turned her thoughts to Dr. Kalderash. The inventor had cited violent jealousy as her reason for leaving Madame Boucher’s milieu. It certainly seemed possible. But it could also be just one part of the truth. The more she thought about it, the more she was sure that Kalderash had told Madame Boucher about the Left Hand of Justice. They had been in love—Kalderash had been adamant about that. And Kalderash had been running from Javert. Lovers could be mind-bogglingly indiscreet, especially in that first, heady rush of emotion, when the object of one’s affection seems unassailably perfect and the end of love is inconceivable. Of course Kalderash had told her rescuer what she was hiding and why. The question was, what did Madame Boucher do with the information?

If Madame Boucher really had been on a crusade, she had to have known that, at some point, she would encounter resistance. She had to have seen the potential for a weapon like the Left Hand of Justice. Perhaps this potential, rather than simple jealousy, had precipitated Dr. Kalderash’s departure—just as it had precipitated her departure from the Department of the Unexplained. Now, if she could just figure out at what point Vautrin had decided to step out of his role as Javert’s informant and start down the road of his own dark ambitions.

The crowd seemed suddenly, unbearably close. Rain and night had cleansed the air, but she choked on it all the same. She pushed her way out of the crowd, heart racing, and leaned against the corner of a building, elbows on knees. Eventually the sensation passed and she rose, drawing a long, cool breath.

“We meet again, Inspector.” Corbeau whirled, but before she could put a face to the gravelly voice behind her, a thick arm coiled around her neck, while another snaked through her elbows, pinning her arms. The voice was familiar, the words hissed through missing teeth. The man sounded pleased. She suddenly recognized the distinctive voice, and her heart sank.

“I’ve got the money. Tell Jacques—”

“It’s too late for that now.” The man flexed his arm and pulled her tighter to him, a low chuckle rumbling in his chest. Corbeau gasped for breath. A veil of stars clouded her vision, but in her mind’s eye she could see the smug, jowly, pockmarked face of the man she’d left bleeding on the floor of Oubliette the night before.

“Get someone to stitch your face up?” Her voice came out a ragged wheeze. The man chuckled again as he began to drag her back into the alley, her boot heels leaving parallel ruts in the mud. In front of her, the market crowd continued to surge and flow, the people that comprised it blissfully unaware of what was happening in the alley a few short yards away. The shadows closed around them; if anyone had seen her, they didn’t see her anymore.

Once out of sight, the man tightened his arm to the point Corbeau was half convinced he was trying to crush her windpipe. But Jacques was a businessman. A dead debtor was not only useless; the body was a liability. But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t give her something to think about, even if she gave him every last coin in Javert’s pouch. She flailed against the man’s iron grip, but to no avail. He waited patiently as she continued to struggle and gasp until finally her limbs went heavy, she slumped against him, and the shadows of the alley swallowed them whole.

*

“Inspector.”

Cold water hit her face. Corbeau sputtered and blinked. She tried to move, but her limbs were bound tight. She was tied to a chair. Her cap had come off, and her hair lay plastered to her neck, dripping cold water down the back of her shirt. She struggled against the ropes, pulling side to side until the chair overbalanced and teetered onto two legs. Hands caught the chair and righted it before she hit the ground.

“I apologize for the ropes,” Ugly Jacques said. “But they’re for your protection. André hasn’t quite forgiven you for what you did to him at Oubliette. He’s looking for an excuse to finish what you started, and I wouldn’t want you to inadvertently give him one.”

“Shit,” Corbeau said.

Jacques laughed. “Normally, I don’t approve of strong language from women, but in your case, I think it’s warranted.”

They were in a windowless room—a basement, she surmised. The only light was from a lantern, which, from the angle of the shadows, was hanging on the wall behind her. That had to be where the entrance was. Boxes were stacked along one wall, the chair the only furniture. They were under a business, then, or a warehouse. Somewhere that would be closed for the night and abandoned.

“I have the money,” she said.

He chuckled and pulled out the pouch Javert had given her, tossing it into the air and catching it. Ugly Jacques wasn’t as objectively unattractive as his name led a person to believe. He had the muscles of a laborer and the scarred hands and reshaped nose of a fighter. The nose suited him, though. Without it, his light, wavy hair might have seemed angelic and the twinkle in his blue eye something other than malice.

“This?” he asked, tossing the purse again. “There were a few sous in here, but not nearly what you still owe.”

Corbeau craned her neck to glare at André. Now,
André
was ugly—especially when he was jingling her coins in his jacket pocket. Laughing, he spat out a great oyster-like gob, which landed at her feet. Corbeau turned back to her captor.

“He took it,” Corbeau said. “Check his coat.”

Ugly Jacques laughed again. “And I should believe you because you’ve dealt so honestly with me so far? Really, Inspector, I’m disappointed. I do you a favor, and this is how you repay me.”

“You don’t understand!”

Whether he did or not was immaterial, of course. Jacques didn’t care why she needed the money. If Joseph and his mother owned their house outright or slept in the streets, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference to him. What Jacques did understand was that Corbeau owed him money, and lots of it. As he strode back and forth across the length of the stuffy little room, fingering the knife at his belt, she could almost hear the conflict in his mind. On one hand, the longer she avoided payment, the more interest accrued. On the other hand, no matter how much interest accrued, if he let payment slide, he might not see a penny. As satisfying as it would be to maim, or even kill her, doing either would likewise ensure he would never get his money. Feet shuffled on the dirt behind her. A third man.

Corbeau began to panic. Even if they didn’t hurt her badly enough to keep her from crawling out of that basement, eventually, she had to get to Dr. Kalderash and Joseph. And she had to stop Vautrin. She felt someone press up against her back and hoped it wasn’t André. Her hopes were scuttled when she felt his soft, rough laugh through the back of her head and his shovel-like hand stroking her throat.

“If you kill me, you’ll never get your money,” she said.

Ugly Jacques stopped pacing and turned. “It’s true. On the other hand, the way prices are rising, by the time you pay me back, it won’t be worth anything anyway. And André has put up with so much from you. It’s not fair that he not get to have his fun.”

Corbeau’s heart stopped. They both knew that André had taken the money from Javert’s purse. And she was pretty sure they both knew what sort of fun André would have once Jacques and the others left her alone in the basement. Yes, it made sense. Jacques wouldn’t endanger her livelihood with a beating. But he would make his position clear; he would assert his masculine authority through André in the time-honored tradition. She began to struggle again, to the great amusement of the hulking beast behind her.

“I can have the money for you in an hour’s time.” Javert didn’t live far. He would give it to her. He had to give it to her.

Ugly Jacques smiled, his teeth unnaturally straight and sharp. “I’m afraid the terms of our agreement have changed.”

“Half an hour,” she said. “Come with me.”

André’s cracked, dirty fingertips began to caress her lips. She wanted to bite them, but he could have snapped her neck as easily as swatting a fly. She pulled against the ropes again but stopped when she realized that if she tipped over at this point, it would only make things easier for them. Jacques continued to watch her with the interest of a boy pulling the wings off a fly. He would have been the kind of boy to pull off the legs, too, one by one. A cold drop of perspiration slid down her back. But panic was not the answer.

She calmed her breathing. It would be a mistake to show fear at this point. She steeled her body and began to build a wall around her mind. While Jacques’s thug exacted his punishment, her thoughts would be wandering Boucher Mansion, trying to figure out where they were keeping Dr. Kalderash and Joseph.

So deep was she in thought she nearly missed the sudden change in Jacques’s demeanor, the furrowed brow, the flick of his hand, and the rush of cool air as André stepped back from her as if burned.

“Of course, now that I think about it, Inspector, it occurs to me that you have something I want even more than money, and even more than revenge.”

André’s disappointment was palpable.

Corbeau frowned. He c
ouldn’t
mean the Left Hand of Justice. Jacques was the master of his domain, but it was one of petty criminals and small-time vice. Not that he wouldn’t love to have a weapon like the Left Hand of Justice at his disposal, but Corbeau knew he didn’t have either the connections or the reach. “I’m listening.”

“It’s not so much a thing as a service.” Jacques grew serious. He squatted down to her level, the arrogance leaving his expression. In the light of the lantern behind her, he almost looked human. “You’ll forgive my dramatic and heavy-handed manner,” he said. Corbeau would forgive him nothing, but curiosity and her instinct for self-preservation ensured she would listen. “I don’t have to tell you how late you’ve been with your payments. And I had to make sure you weren’t holding out on me. Business is business.” Corbeau met his supplication with a cold stare. He sighed. “I understand that you’re investigating the disturbances in Montagne Ste. Geneviève. One of the victims, Claudine Fournier, is very dear to me.”