The Left Hand of Justice (3 page)

Lambert shook his head. Corbeau frowned. Spiritual energies rarely erupted without provocation, in her experience. It would have been comforting to believe that this was one of those rare occasions, but that left the other two, which had not only occurred within the same geographical area, but within the same week.

Corbeau handed him the shirt from the wardrobe, and he meekly shrugged it over his shoulders. He looked up at her as if to say something, but before he could, footsteps thundered up the stairs. Madame Bernard and Joseph, Corbeau guessed from the familiar sound of their footfall. But they weren’t alone.

“Inspector—” Madame Bernard said, bursting into the room. A man rushed in on her heels—a tall, angular man with fiery eyes and an important manner. He wore an expensive coat and boots, and his white collar peeked out from beneath his pointed chin.

“I thought you said you didn’t call for a priest!” Corbeau cried.

“The Lord summoned me.”

The priest was younger than Corbeau and looked eager to prove himself.
To whom,
she wondered.
And how had he known to come?
Corbeau’s heart raced. If this got back to the chief inspector, she’d be out on her ear without a hearing. The priest didn’t look like the sort who would suffer an interloper. His nails were clean, his robes crisp, and he was cracking his knuckles in anticipation of a fight. With the devil or with her, it wouldn’t matter.

“It was thoughtful of Him,” Corbeau said carefully, “but unnecessary. Monsieur Lambert was having a nightmare, nothing more.” She breathed a sigh of relief that all signs of the extraordinary had dissipated. In the doorway, one-footed Joseph smirked. She turned to the widow Bernard. “You can tell the others that it’s safe to return. Monsieur Lambert has finished throwing his things around.”

Lambert looked sheepish. The priest looked irate. Corbeau glanced around the room again. She might have solved Lambert’s problem—for now—but it wouldn’t be the last incident—not until she figured out what was triggering them. And now that the Church was involved, she would have to find a way to work around both it and the new chief inspector. Another set of footsteps coming up the stairs shook her from her thoughts. When Vautrin himself entered the room, her heart sank.

“I came as quickly as I could, Father.”

Unlike the priest, the new chief inspector had seen his share of action. It showed on his weathered face and in the hard layer of muscles that lay under the softer layer he had acquired as growing administrative duties had overtaken street-level police work. His dark eyes were cruel, and, more often than not, he appeared as if he’d just stepped in something unpleasant.

“Why?” Corbeau asked. A mistake, but she couldn’t help herself. Vautrin had closed down the Bureau of Supernatural Investigations, saying that such incidents were the purview of the Church, not the police. And yet here he was. With the priest.

The chief inspector looked around, his eyes narrowing as they fixed on her. Another set of footsteps reached the landing, and a third man joined them—young, inexperienced, and pressing his thin frame against the wall as if it would keep any ghosts from seeing him. One of Vautrin’s new hires, then. At most, a month’s experience on the streets, and less than none dealing with the supernatural. The three men edged her out of the way, surrounded Lambert, and began some sort of inspection.

“Chief Inspector, you have no—”

Vautrin turned to her, his voice a sharp-edged knife. “I didn’t expect to see you here, Madame.” He refused to call her Inspector. He had refused from the moment they had been introduced. The Bureau of Supernatural Investigations had offended Vautrin’s religious sensibilities. The presence of a female agent offended him on all levels. The prefect might not have allowed Vautrin to dismiss Corbeau outright, but Vautrin was doing his level best to make her wish that he had. “You have no business here,” Vautrin said. “The Bureau no longer exists, and you’ve been relieved of your investigative duties.”

“The owner of the property requested my presence,” said Corbeau.

Madame Bernard straightened, lifted her chin, and fixed Vautrin with a defiant gaze.

“That very well may be. But demonic possession is a matter for the Church.”

“There are no demons here,” Corbeau said, as Vautrin’s man laid hold of Lambert and shoved him up against the wall. Getting nowhere with Vautrin, she approached the priest. “He didn’t react to holy water, and—” She turned back to Vautrin. “Even if there were a demon, Chief Inspector, you said yourself that the Sûreté has no business—”

Anger flashed in Vautrin’s deep-set eyes. His square jaw clenched and he drew a sharp breath. “His Majesty desires the police to take a greater role in guarding public morality, and I intend to follow through on this desire, whether Claude Javert agrees or not.” He spat out the name as if it tasted foul.

Corbeau’s ears pricked up. Claude Javert, the prefect of police, had come to his position straight from the Jesuits. Well known for his efficiency and uncompromising logic, Javert and the zealot Vautrin should see eye to eye on His Majesty’s moral crusade. Could it be that they did not? Corbeau wanted to ask, but the dangerous light in Vautrin’s face warned her off. “How does a nightmare violate public morality?” she asked instead.

He glared at her for a moment longer, then turned to the priest. “Well, Father, what’s your opinion?”

“Mmm?”

The priest gave a grunt and a nod. Vautrin’s man unbuttoned Lambert’s shirt. The sedative she had given him was beginning to take effect. He looked at the priest, confused, as the priest lifted his arm. Something glittered near the thatch of dark hair beneath the arm—something metal, something golden—that appeared to be part of the skin itself.

“What on Earth—” Corbeau began to say.

“The devil’s mark,” said the priest, shoving Lambert’s arm away in disgust.

“That’s rubbish! There’s metal under there, grafted right into the skin.” Corbeau stepped forward, but without warning, Vautrin sprang at her, pushing her back with the strength of a runaway draft horse. They slammed into the wall, Vautrin pinning her to the wall by her neck with his truncheon. “Let go of him!” she cried again.

“You have no authority here, Madame,” he hissed, his thin lips just inches from her chin.

“By your own definition, neither do you.”

“God’s authority is behind me.”

“Then why didn’t He tell you about the other two incidents?”

Vautrin’s face paled. Corbeau felt a rush of triumph. He hadn’t known about Bertrand and Fournier. And, from the way his lips were pursing themselves bloodless, she could see that he desperately wanted to have known. He probably considered it his sacred duty. His hands tightened around the ends of the baton, making it tremble on her windpipe. It was clear how badly he wanted to push it all the way to the wall.

“What now, Chief Inspector?” The young officer’s question probably saved Corbeau’s life. Vautrin turned. The truncheon eased away from Corbeau’s throat, but he stayed in front of her, blocking her way.

“Take him down to the wagon.”

“But—” Corbeau said

Vautrin’s face whipped back toward her, and he slammed the baton up below her chin. Grasping Lambert by the arms, the priest and the young officer moved him forward. Lambert stumbled, his limbs now clumsy and leaden from the sedative. A different kind of guilt balled up in Corbeau’s stomach. She might not have caused Lambert’s outburst with her clumsy medicine, but she had enabled Vautrin and the priest to take him away without a fight. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw something glint in the lamplight on the floor near the bed.

“You may have friends in high places, Madame,” Vautrin growled so low that she was the only one who could hear him, “but breathe a word of this to anyone, and I’ll slit your throat myself.”

He gave the baton a final push before tucking it back into his belt and pulling his coat around him. Madame Bernard held Joseph close as Vautrin swept out of the room after the priest. When their footsteps had safely reached the bottom of the stairs, Corbeau slumped against the wall, rubbing her throat.

“Inspector?” Joseph asked after a moment.

“There,” she said hoarsely. “By the foot of the bed. Made of glass. Bring it here.”

Pulling free of his mother, Joseph crossed the room and retrieved the object, a small phial. Corbeau turned it over in her fingers. A drop of clear liquid slid from one end to the other. She sniffed at the opening, jerking back at the sudden onslaught of familiar scents: valerian, mugwort, poppy, and a few other things she couldn’t identify. It was a strange combination—not one that a ghetto healer would think to put together.

But something an alchemist would.

“What is it, Inspector?” Madame Bernard asked.

Corbeau’s heart pounded. Her cheeks went hot, and as she turned to this woman to whom her debt would never be extinguished, the weight of her guilt was a crushing band around her chest. Another alchemist was working the streets of Paris, and it appeared they were building on her work—work she thought she’d destroyed all evidence of nearly a decade before.

“Inspector?”

It couldn’t be. She sniffed the phial again, but she had made no mistake. On the night of her arrest those many years ago, Corbeau had consigned her books and notes to the fire. She had taken a chair to her distillery. Nothing remained of her past, and those who remembered her as the Alchemist were few, far between, and not available for consultation.

And yet someone was producing her elixirs again. Or attempting to. And Vidocq was long gone.

“Excuse me, Madame,” Corbeau muttered.

She stuffed the phial into her coat pocket, brushing past Madame Bernard and her son in her rush for the stairs. Outside on the street, she forced herself to draw deep, steadying breaths of the freezing night air.

Corbeau pushed through the dispersing crowd, the bottle clenched tightly in her hand. The hard November wind whipped at her hems. She shoved her hands into her coat pockets as rain pelted her cheeks. People were going to die. Go mad and die. She might not have compounded the new formulae herself, but whoever had, was using her work as a foundation. Worse than that, Vautrin had his nasty fingers in it already.

And then there was the Church.

A crack of thunder shook the air. Lightning lit the street like daylight before plunging it back into darkness.

“Detective!” A woman’s voice cut through the storm. The gossipmongers were the only ones who called her Detective anymore—those low, skulking creatures always sniffing around for a tidbit to sell to the newspapers. It figured they would find her when the only information she had would incriminate her. She kept walking. “Detective!”

“If you want a story, talk to the chief inspector.”

The wind stretched out her words, chopped them up. It’d be interesting to see how the chief inspector would tell it, though it would never happen. As much as the man liked to see his name in print, whatever he had planned for Lambert wasn’t going to make the papers. It wouldn’t even appear in the internal documents that Corbeau would be expected to file.

She walked faster, but it only seemed to make the other woman more determined. Corbeau smirked as she heard high heels
clip-clop
over the cobblestones behind her. The woman had better watch out. One didn’t want to turn an ankle in this neighborhood.

“Bernadette!” the woman shouted.

Corbeau stopped. Bernadette Moreau—she hadn’t used that name since Vidocq had inducted her into the Sûreté. Turning, she exhaled with a mixture of relief and exasperation as she recognized the figure tottering out of the gloom toward her, darting around broken pavement and black puddles. “I told you never to call me that, Sophie.”

“You’ve been avoiding me for a month.” The woman pouted as she took Corbeau’s arm and began to pull her along. “I’ve missed you.” Her dress, coat, and reddish-blond hair were immaculate despite the hour. A cat-and-canary smile flickered at the edges of her painted lips. She might sell information to every leftist publication in Paris, but apparently it didn’t mean she didn’t like to be taken care of.

“I’ve been busy,” Corbeau said.

“Would it have killed you to wake me up when you left? A month ago?”

Corbeau felt a sudden wave of loneliness and guilt. An unkind person might say she was leading Sophie on by continuing to go home with her from time to time—except it had been going on so long, Sophie couldn’t possibly have expectations beyond the occasional bout of mutual physical relief. Could she? After all, she had accused Corbeau more than once of using their back-and-forth as a way of avoiding anything of deeper significance. It was probably true, but Corbeau didn’t have room in her life for anything significant. And the sex was enjoyable for both of them.

Corbeau touched the fur collar of Sophie’s coat. Had it really been a month already? It seemed that just last week she was ducking out of Sophie’s well-appointed apartment on Rue St. Dominique. She supposed it was about time they found each other again.

“You knew I wouldn’t stay,” she said.

Sophie regarded her for a moment then slipped her arm free. She cleared her throat. “This is the third incident in this area in a week.” She flourished a pencil and a small notebook. “Has the great Elise Corbeau any theories?”

“None that I’m ready to share with the press.”

“How about with an old friend?”

Corbeau let her gaze travel over the other woman’s neat features, her perfectly arranged hair and spotless clothing. She could have gone home with her right then—back to Rue St. Dominique, to Persian carpets, Turkish sweets, and heady perfumes. Some pampering and a long nap would do her good about then. She just had to say the word—it was written all over Sophie’s face.

But they’d been playing that game for years. If it hadn’t stuck by now, it wasn’t going to. It wasn’t fair to either of them to keep their connection limping along like this. And all things considered, Corbeau really could do without the reminder of her past.

“I know better.” Corbeau spun around and began to walk again. Sophie fell into step with her—no easy feat, considering how much longer Corbeau’s legs were and how much more adequate to the task her footwear was. “Whatever I say to you will end up in whatever rag you sell it to, and Vautrin will have my head. He’d have had it a long time ago if the prefect’s office hadn’t stopped him.”