But no, the idea is too repulsive. It is madness. Only a madman could conceive the notion of murder as “the greatest pleasure.” Reclus was mad.
And Dupin?
Dupin, if he has become a killer, must be mad, in the same, seemingly rational way as the man he sent to the guillotine, the man who infected him with his terrible, repulsive idea.
Already, in the day and night that have passed since the mesmeric séance of which I have written, fresh reports have reached New York of still more killings in France: two sisters, this time, their throats savagely chewed by an unknown creature.
Yet how can I tell the police what I know? More importantly, how can I convince them? A letter is easily dismissed, and if I made the effort of traveling to France to speak to the people in power there, I should probably find myself locked up. I can imagine how Dupin would respond, with a mocking, pitying smile: “A dead man told you I had killed him? And do you often converse with the dead? This is common in America? My dear friend, I fear you are suffering from a fever of the brain…”
Dupin has the ear of the French police, as I do not, but I have something else. I have the ear of the public, in this country and abroad. My readers will not like this story as much as they liked “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” I admit, I do not like it so much myself. Yet it must be told. I must beg my readers to supply the necessary ending.
THE PURLOINED FACE
By
STEPHEN VOLK
My Dear Lestrade
I doubt you expected a further package from me for Scotland Yard’s Black Museum, given that last time you heard from me I was at death’s door. But the chill in my bones has passed and my doctor, a brusque devil, with none of the bedside manner of Watson, has told me to get air in my lungs and sun on my face. Whilst in that endeavor this afternoon, I experienced to my alarm something which brought back vividly to life one of the strange cases I investigated with the remarkable C. Auguste Dupin, long cloistered in fusty memory.
The local cinema is not a place I frequent often. I simply wanted somewhere to rest my feet, and can’t say I even took note of the film that was playing before I entered the gloom. What unfolded on screen I found both sordid and spectacular, at times a turgid melodrama, but punctuated with moments of the most lurid terror.
It slowly dawned on me as I saw that wretched underground lake, the abducted girl swept away in a gondola by the Phantom to his lair, that this was an adaptation of a novel I knew all too well. A beautiful soprano in love with a disfigured madman, a tepid variation on Beauty and the Beast: if only the truth, I thought, were as comforting in its roles of monster and victim. And when, in the Bal Masqué scene, the Phantom appeared as the Red Death from Poe’s story of that name, the irony tore an involuntary laugh from my throat, somewhat distracting some members of the audience, who hushed me with frowning sibilance.
The gross travesty of what really happened at the Paris Opera first appeared in the pages of Le Gaulois back in the first decade of this century, but now this motion picture, starring the renowned “Man of a Thousand Faces,” was spreading that fallacy to the world, projecting it in huge images, with organ accompaniment, for all to see. As I sat there watching the audience squirm and shriek at the monster’s unmasking, I thought: If only they knew the truth…
You hold it in your hand, Inspector. Unmask it, if you dare. But I warn you, a decent man will be shaken by what he reads.
Holmes
Many mysteries came to the door of the man in the Rue de la Femme-sans-Tête. The district we lived in, the Île de la Citée, once thronged with thieves, whores, and murderers, but was now hemmed in by the gray edifice of the Préfecture de Police, law courts, and offices of civil servants, a bastion against the unrestrained and malevolent. Safe, but also strangely chill. He and I often yearned to stray into areas of the dissolute, vulgar, and unpredictable. At other times tales of the aberrant and profane beat a path, unbidden, to our door.
To relieve his inveterate boredom — and for the purpose of my further instruction in the science of “ratiocination”—Poe had set up a mirror at the window by which to observe the street below. When the brass bell rang unexpectedly at the porte-cochère on that particular April morning, echoing through the apartment, he asked me to report my observations in the short time it took for Le Bon to descend the stairs and return with our visitors.
“A man and a woman,” I began, squinting down at our guests. “She seems nervous, delicate, uncertain…”
“‘Seems’ is not a fact,” Poe interjected.
“Very well. I’d say from their relative ages he is her father. She wears a coat from Le Bon Marché and a black veil over her face, which indicates she is in mourning. I deduce therefore it is her husband who has died, mysteriously, and it is for that reason they have come. The man is around fifty-five years of age, rotund, and bears an uncanny resemblance to Balzac. Well-fed, and well off, by the cut of his jib. Overcoat worn over his shoulders in the manner of a Hussar. A definite military man. From his sallow skin tone and black hair there is Indian blood in his family tree, or Eurasian, possibly. And — hello? — a dash of red on his cravat. Blood? Good grief, perhaps the perpetrator of the deed is presenting himself to us with all the brazen aplomb of a murderer who thinks he is beyond the powers of detection…”
“Brilliant! That was truly instructive.” Poe jumped from his chair and combed his thin, paper-white hair in the mirror. “Instructive in how to arrive at an entirely erroneous conclusion. Remind me not to ask you to fetch me black peppercorns in a field of rabbit droppings.” I tried not to affect the disgruntlement of a schoolboy handed back homework that fell ruefully short of the mark. “That is not blood on his cuff, but strawberry conserve. To be exact, the one served with a kipferl at the bijou boulangerie on the Rue Bertrand Sluizer. Furthermore, he uses mustache wax by Marie Helene Rogeon, is a Corsican, has three brothers, lived in Avignon, the son of a shoe-mender, ran a ballet company, married a woman called Mathilde, and has five children. All girls. None married. Though one is the fiancée of a locomotive driver.”
“Heavens above!” My head was spinning. “How on earth…?”
Poe’s laugh was high and shrill as he slapped me on the shoulder. “My dear Holmes, forgive an old Southern gentleman his petty amusement! How could I resist teasing you when such an opportunity presented itself? I saw from the reflection that the man is Olivier Guédiguian, manager of the Opéra de Paris. The reason I know is very simply I have met him before, at the very boulangerie I mentioned: his habitual haunt for petit dejeuner. During our conversation he imparted a good deal about his life. At the time he was worried about a malignant superstition having a grip on his stage workers that some kind of, ahem, specter was causing damage and maladies of all descriptions. I was able to convince him that it was nothing but a series of accidents and coincidences, each perfectly explicable in its own right, but overall signifying nothing. And certainly nothing supernatural—the very word being a contradiction in terms. Metaphysics and philosophy! Why will people waste my time with trivialities!” We heard footsteps on the stair. “And by the way, the dress is from La Samaritaine, not Le Bon Marché.”
I was speechless in the briefest pause before Poe’s negro servant opened the double doors and ushered Monsieur Guédiguian and his female companion—veiled companion — into our presence. A parrot called Griswold squawked a few bars of the “Marseillaise” before chewing on a ball of nuts. There is no brass name-plate with Dupin etched on it down below, but it is curious that those who need his assistance always find him, one way or another.