Читать книгу Yesterday Never Dies - Brian Stableford - Страница 8

CHAPTER THREE

THE THREAT OF INFECTION

When I got down from the fiacre, I paid off the driver. There was no point asking him to wait. If it turned out that I could not find Dupin, I could walk home easily enough; the night was fine and mild, considering the time of year, and brightly moonlit. I was not afraid of footpads at such a distance from Montmartre and Belleville.

I went to the door of the concierge’s lodge at the coaching entrance of Dupin’s building, and knocked on it with the pommel of my stick, in a peremptory manner. There was no answer—which did not surprise me. I knocked again, and waited a further half minute before calling out: “It’s me, Dupin—let me in.”

I would have added an extra incentive had I got no response with my self-identification alone, but I eventually heard movement on the other side of the door, and then a voice said: “Go home. I’ll come to see you tomorrow afternoon.”

“I need to talk to you,” I said.

“It’s not a good time,” he replied. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get to the theater. Tomorrow afternoon, without fail.”

It was obvious that I had to deploy the extra incentive after all. “I saw the ghost,” I said, and baited the hook further by adding: “Thibodeaux’s ghost.”

Had I been wrong in that deduction, the cast of the hook and line would have gone wrong, but I knew before he had finished hesitating that I could chalk up one hit, at least.

“Are you wearing gloves?” he asked, finally, unable to prevent himself yielding to temptation.

“Of course,” I said.

“Don’t take them off,” he instructed. “In fact, stay in the vestibule, such as it is. Believe me, my friend, you really won’t want to come any further.”

The stink hit me as soon as he opened the door. He was right; I really didn’t want to go any further—but I did want to talk to Dupin. I stepped inside, and let him close the door behind me. He moved swiftly then to take up a position on the threshold of the inner doorway of the minuscule vestibule—one of only two others inside the lodge—but not swiftly enough to prevent me catching a glimpse of the bed-alcove at the far side of the inner room into which the vestibule opened.

Madame Lacuzon, Dupin’s concierge and protective dragon—the “old witch,” as she was known in the neighborhood—was lying on the bed, quite inert. Her eyes were closed, but her face, although drawn, seemed peaceful enough.

The stink was many-layered, but the sharpest stratum was a combination of cleaning fluids, including phenol. I could also smell camphor, and I could identify the distinctive label of a bottle of Raspail’s Elixir on the bedside table. To judge by the other odors, the old woman had suffered from both vomiting and diarrhea, over a fairly protracted period of time—but Dupin had had an opportunity to clean up, and to deploy the measures against the threat of infection that Raspail recommended in his manual of hygiene.

I was profoundly glad that I had not arrived a few hours earlier.

“What wrong with her?” I asked.

“I don’t know. As François Raspail insistently points out, the same symptoms can often be generated by different causes. It might have been picked up by contagion, or it might have been something she ate—thanks to two consecutive bad harvests and the consequent economic problems, the quality of food in Paris has deteriorated markedly of late. I feared for her life at one point, but I think she is over the worst now; if there is no recurrence of the symptoms, I should be able to get her to take an adequate supply of liquids over the next few hours.”

“Did you call a doctor?” I asked.

“No,” he replied, curtly. Madame Lacuzon, I suspected, was not the kind of person to put her trust in licensed physicians—or, indeed, anyone at all apart from Dupin.

“Was it one of Raspail’s tiny parasites, do you think?” I asked. I had always been uncertain as to whether Raspail’s theory of infection was really credible, given that every orthodox physician in Paris, and many of the unorthodox ones, were dismissive of it—especially the Royalists, who hated Raspail’s Republican guts.

“I don’t know, I tell you,” he retorted, with more asperity than might have been warranted. “Any physician would doubtless be able to conjure up some Latin name to pass off as a diagnosis, but it would merely be a device to cover up his ignorance. We have no means, as yet, to search for and identify microbes, if they are indeed the primary agents of infectious diseases—but I was sufficiently familiar with the symptoms to know that it was vitally necessary to settle her gut and protect her from dehydration. I’ve contrived to keep feeding her water, and eventually managed to dose her with kaolin and morphia to line her stomach and settle its spasms. She might yet have another fit—for which reason I will not leave her, at least until morning. With luck, though, she will sleep now until the blight has passed. How did you know that she was ill?”

“I guessed,” I told him. “Once I knew that you had expected to see more at the theater than the opera, I could only think of one thing that could keep you away: mortal danger to someone you would never trust to anyone else’s care. I don’t know exactly what Madame Lacuzon—Amélie—is to you, but I know that she’s no mere concierge.”

“She would do the same for me, and more,” Dupin said, stiffly. “Who told you about Thibodeaux?”

“A woman clad in a domino sitting in a box opposite mine, with Pierre Chapelain and Jana Valdemar. He would not introduce her, on the grounds that she was his patient; evidently, she wanted to remain incognito, or she would not have been wearing the mask. She said that she met you at the theater—the old theater, that is—in 1834, in the Green Room, with Lucien Groix and someone named Thibodeaux, She said that you would be able to deduce her identity. I hope that she did not spoil your experiment by letting the name slip. That is why you were keeping me in the dark, I take it—as an experiment?”

“I’m sorry,” he said—but it was only a reflex. He was not sorry; and, in truth, I could not see why he should be.

“You have your result,” I said. “Even in your absence, with no expectations at all, and without having any more knowledge of Thibodeaux than a vague memory of hearing you mention the name, I saw the ghost in the box. So, I believe, did the lady in the domino—and she, too, knew that it was a ghost. Remarkable, is it not?”

“Remarkable,” he agreed, pensively. “I hardly expected to see it myself, given that the theater had burned down in the interim. Describe the apparition, if you please.”

“A man of about sixty, although his hair and beard were still uniformly black. Dressed as a good bourgeois, slightly behind the times—as is only to be expected. His skin seemed a trifle sallow as well as wrinkled, but that might have been an effect of the reflected limelight.”

“That could be anyone. Was there nothing more distinctive?”

“Yes. He had arthritis, probably in his neck, but definitely in his hands, I saw them quite clearly, in spite of the poor light, clutching the handle of his stick.”

“Ah!” said Dupin. “That does sound like Thibodeaux. Describe the stick.”

I struggled to remember, having paid no attention to that detail at the time. “It was wooden, I think, preserved by some kind of dark stain or varnish—dark brown, that is, not black. It was sturdy, and had a slightly curved handle set at an angle, not a pommel, so that it resembled an elongated lower-case letter ‘r’.”

“That’s Thibodeaux’s stick,” Dupin confirmed. “He had arthritic ankles too—for him, a walking-stick was no mere affectation, but a necessity. What else?”

“There was something odd about his eyes, but I’m not sure exactly what...almost as if he were not the only one looking through them. He was watching the climax of the dance of the nuns when I first caught sight of him, but I don’t know how long he had been there before I became aware of his presence. I might have missed the greater part of the apparition, in terms of its duration. When I did realize that he was there, he turned to look at me—or, more likely, at someone who was sitting in the chair where I was sitting—and he spoke.”

“What did he say?”

“‘Yesterday never dies, but such is the rhythm of time that one has to grasp its echoes on the wing’.”

Dupin nodded his head. “Thibodeaux, without a doubt,” he said. “His sentiment, his style. You did well, my friend—exceedingly well.”

“With regard to the observation and reportage,” I said, “I had a good teacher. With regard to the ability to see ghosts...that, I fear, might have been more a matter of infection.”

He frowned. “Why do you say that?” Perhaps he had taken me literally, in view of the manner in which he had spent his evening.

“I never saw ghosts before I met you, Dupin,” I said. “If consciousness is a refuge, as you’re so fond of saying, I was secure within it until I became your friend. Now, it seems, I cannot go six months without some dread intrusion of my sense of reality. Once touched by the Crawling Chaos, it seems—even as a mere innocent bystander—one is tainted forever.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, again. This time, perhaps, he meant it.

“Don’t be,” I said. “It’s a condition that requires company, if one is to endure it without going mad. Had you lost Madame Lacuzon tonight...but that’s by the by. Who was the woman in the mask?”

“Not having seen her, I can’t be sure,” he said, scrupulously, “but given what she said to you, it was probably Marie Taglioni.”

That name I recognized instantly, although I had never seen her dance. Marie Taglioni was, or had been, the most famous ballet dancer in the world: La Sylphide in person. She had retired now, though—to live as a recluse in Venice, if I was not mistaken as to what the newspapers had reported.

“No wonder Meyerbeer and Scribe dropped in to pay homage,” I said. “But why was she there? Even if she did see the mysterious Thibodeaux’s ghost, that can hardly have been the reason she came—and I cannot believe that she was eager to see a performance inferior to hundreds that she must have seen from the wings.”

“Was it inferior?” Dupin could not help asking, even though he seemed to be impatient to be rid of me now that I had described the apparition in full. I had no intention of letting him get off so easily.

“Inferior to the previous one that I saw; I cannot speak for the one you saw in 1834, with Thibodeaux and Lucien Groix—who was also there tonight. Something strange happened that night, I assume.”

“Slightly strange,” Dupin admitted. “Strange enough to bring us all back, it seems—even poor Thibodeaux. Meyerbeer was there too you say?”

“And Scribe—not to mention the Comte de Saint-Germain.”

“Saint-Germain! How on earth did he find out about it?”

“If by it you mean the ghost, I don’t think he knew anything about that. I think he was there for quite a different reason, having obtained information from one of his spies—some street-urchin or member of the Society’s menial staff—that Chapelain had gone to the theater, and barged into my box purely in order to look into his. I suspect that he was hoping to see Jana Valdemar, but she was absent until the interval, and he might not have seen her. Saint-Germain definitely knows that something is afoot now, though, because Groix came into the box while he was there, and although he gave nothing away, the mere fact of his extreme reticence put ideas into Saint-Germain’s head. Now that his curiosity’s aroused, he won’t rest until he’s figured it out.”

Dupin shrugged. “He’ll lose interest soon enough when he finds that there’s no money to be made.”

I wasn’t sure that that was true, but I let it pass. “Groix seemed annoyed—more agitated that I have ever seen him before. I assumed at first that it was because we hadn’t invited him to share the box. I would have let him, since you weren’t there, but he went off in a huff. I think he might have watched from one of the upper galleries. Saint-Germain was up there too.”

“I’m surprised that Lucien bothered, considering how busy he must be. In his situation, I think I’d be making preparations to flee to England or Italy, if and when it becomes politic. François Raspail doesn’t want his blood, but there are plenty or Republican firebrands who do.”

“Saint-German made the same observation. You’ve seen Raspail recently, then?”

“We met by chance last week and had a brief conversation over a glass of wine. We’ve known one another for a long time, as you know.”

“And Groix knows that you’ve talked?”

“Obviously, since he’s having Raspail followed—but I’m not in any danger of being named in Lucien’s files or mistaken by Raspail himself as potential Revolutionary; they both know full well that I steer clear of politics...as clear as one can in times like these. Never mind that. Is that all?”

“No—Lucien wants you to go and see him tomorrow anyway, urgently.”

Dupin frowned again. “If Amélie takes a turn for the worst...,” he said, but then thought better of it. “But she’ll be fine now,” he added, presumably to boost his own morale. “She’s asleep.”

He seemed so confident of that that he did not turn round—but I could see past his shoulder by leaning slightly to the right, and I did so, reflexively.

“No, she’s not,” I said, taking that inference from the fact that her eyes were open—although I realized my mistake almost instantly.

Her eyes were open, but she was not awake, Indeed, it seemed to me that there might even have been a sense in which they were not her eyes, for the moment. Whoever or whatever appeared to using them was staring directly to me, and I had a strangely sickening sensation that it was not for the first time.

My own words echoed sardonically in the breached haven of my consciousness: Once touched by the Crawling Chaos, it seems—even as a mere innocent bystander—one is tainted forever.

When Thibodeaux’s ghost had met my gaze, there had been something else therein. Now it seemed to be in Amélie Lacuzon’s eyes: the eyes of the “old witch,” who was, I suspected, a magnetizer as powerful as Chapelain or Saint-Germain, or perhaps a medium as powerful as Jana Valdemar.

Dupin had turned in response to my remark, and I assumed that he could see the open eyes as clearly as I could, but they still seemed to be staring at me. Automatically, he moved within the frame of the inner door so as to block my view—or perhaps to intercept the stare.

“Don’t worry,” he said, after a few seconds. “It’s not uncommon for habitual somnambulists to open their eyes while they’re asleep. I don’t think she’s actually going to try to move.”

“I thought you preferred the term somniloquist,” I said, feigning laconism.

“I prefer both terms to be used accurately,” he said. “‘Somnambulist’ when someone moves in her sleep, ‘somniloquist’ when someone talks.”

I didn’t want to get into a pedantic discussion, although I could have argued that the concierge had not really moved, but only stared—ominously, it seemed to me.

By the time that Dupin had moved himself, however, sufficiently for me to obtain another glance at Madame Lacuzon’s face, her eyes were closed again. She was, as Dupin had claimed, still asleep.

“It really would be best if you went home now, my friend,” Dupin continued, “not just because of the threat of infection, assuming that whatever Amélie has is infectious, but because I’m very tired, although I mustn’t go to sleep.”

“But I’ve told you everything, and you haven’t told me anything!” I protested. “Who is this Professor Thibodeaux? Why did you expect to see his ghost tonight? Why, come to that, did you go to the theater with him in 1834—and to see one of the ‘devil operas’ of which you’re so scornful?”

Dupin was having none of it, though.

“I promise that I’ll come to see you tomorrow, my friend,” he assured me, “as soon as I’m sure that it’s safe for me to leave Amélie alone—but probably not before noon. If anyone comes looking for me in the meantime, having failed to get any answer here, please make my apologies. When I see you, I’ll gladly tell you everything—everything I know myself, that is—about Blaise Thibodeaux, the resonance of time, and why he once told me that he would do his very best to appear at the Opéra-Comique tonight, dead or alive.”

I saw no point in raising further objections, in the circumstances, and gave in gracefully. “I’ll tell Madame Bihan that her cousin is ill,” I said. “I’m sure that she’ll lend you all the assistance she can.” Madame Bihan was my housekeeper, supplied on her cousin’s recommendation.

“Thank you,” Dupin said. “And I’m sorry, once again, for disappointing you this evening.” I had never before heard him apologize three times in such a short span of time—and, even more remarkably, that was the second time that I actually believed his assertion.

I walked home without encountering any footpads, deep in thought—even though I had little real substance to fuel my ruminations.

I gave Madame Bihan the information about her cousin’s illness, including Dupin’s assertion that she seemed to be over the worst, and went to bed, hoping—in vain, as it turned out—that I would be able to sleep peacefully now that I had unburdened myself to Dupin.