the lady persisted, “but you really do look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”
The game was obviously up. Even etiquette could not excuse a blatant and transparent lie.
“As a matter of fact, Madame,” I said, “I have—but the experience was transient, and the phantom did not appear to mean me any harm.” I looked her in the face then, almost challenging her to find a permissible conversational countermove.
“In that case,” she said seemingly quite unperturbed, and probably having obtained the conformation she wanted, “I’ll wish you bonsoir. Sleep well, Monsieur Reynolds.”
The masked face disappeared from the portière. I heard Chaplain rap twice on the wall of the carriage’s compartment with his cane, and the coachman, meekly obedient, flicked the horses lightly with his whip, instructing them to move off. They obeyed.
I was, however, in no mood to go meekly home to my bed, to sleep—if I could—and then to wait for Dupin to call on me at his leisure. I wanted to see him, and I wanted to see him right away, if I could find him. I was not so certain of my powers of deduction as to take it for granted that I could find him, but there was only one place I could think of to look, and I certainly intended to try it before admitting defeat.
When the fiacre finally collected me, I told the coachman to take me to the Rue Dunot, where Dupin’s lodgings were. I did not expect to find him at home, in the strict sense of the term, but I did think that he would be in the house, and that he would open up to me, even if he would not do so to anyone else.
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
