Marie-Claire smiled, but I thought of Poe’s mother, an actress too, he’d once told me. I didn’t know why I hadn’t thought before of his obvious connection to the world of theater. It was in his blood: literally so. She too had died of consumption — his “Red Death” to be — coughing up blood on stage as little Eddie watched, mouthing her lines, the audience not even knowing something was wrong as she slumped in agony, thinking the acting peculiarly good that night in Richmond during Romeo and Juliet. Inconceivable to think of it other than as a ghastly foretaste of Virginia and the tragedy to come. The first of a catalogue of losses that were to blight Poe’s life, and to this mind, the anvil that forged him. The reward being a great writer. But what a price. Too, too much a price, for any man…
C. Auguste Dupin took the fingers of Marie-Claire Chanaud and pressed his lips to them. Her arm was barely bone in her sleeve, the hand itself as fragile as the skeleton of a bird. Her skin white and untarnished, the perfection of a tombstone freshly carved. Her eyes lustrous with the burning of night.
“The curtain will rise,” said Guédiguian.
“The curtain has risen,” corrected my friend the detective with an expression I could not decide was one of fear or of singular anticipation. “Our characters are on stage. Our villain is waiting in the wings. After the interval, we shall begin Act Three. I simply hope we have not paid to watch a tragedy.”
I knew things were amiss whenever he asked me to talk rather than listen, and that night as the gliding Le Bon lit candles and Madame L’Espanaye served us a supper of oven-warm bread and Normandy camembert so ripe it ran from its skin, he demanded to hear my theory.
“Theory?”
“Yes, Holmes. Theory. Of this elusive Phantom. You have been silent. I hope you have been thinking, but possibly I’m in for a disappointment.”
“Well…” I had been caught on the hop. Again the schoolmaster and pupil. I lit a pipe of Altadis Caporal, an earthy tabac gris. “I think there’s a productive line of enquiry in the fact that Guédiguian, the manager, comes from Corsica. From what I have read, certain Corsican families who get money by extortion and intimidation operate within a secret code called vendetta—members are obliged to kill not only anyone who besmirches the family honor, but anyone in their family, too. Slights and grievances go back decades. There have been four thousand murders—”
“Mostly garrottings and stabbings, with the odd blinding.” Poe took the pipe from my mouth, filled his cheeks, and handed it back without a word. “The Corsicans are a predictable bunch. And they like the victim to know precisely why they’re doing it. Rarely cultivate a sense of mystery. Quite the opposite. But well done. We can now rule that out. Anything else?” He descended low into his armchair, crossed his legs and put his hands behind his head before expelling the smoke, which rose in an undulating cloud to the ceiling.
“I noticed a proliferation of tattoos amongst the men working behind the scenes. Also the swaying gait common to seamen. According to my researches, many of the stage crew are traditionally hired from ships in port. If a seafarer was seeking revenge against somebody — a captain perhaps, responsible for the loss of a ship… We could look at the records of shipwrecks, the names—”
“And entirely waste our time.”
“Forgive me, but why ask for my deductions, if you seek only to dismiss them?”
“I seek only to arrive at the truth. And they are not deductions, Holmes, they are suppositions. Flights of fancy. I have told you before that guesswork is the recourse of the buffoon or the police inspector. When we use my methods, we build our house on sound foundations or none at all.”
Poe flicked the tails of his coat and sat on the piano stool at his writing desk with his back to me. He lifted a candle-stick to his elbow, unscrewed an ink pot, and started to scratch with his pen, but the real purpose, I knew, was just that — to have his back to me.
I tapped my pipe bowl against the fire surround, but did not take myself off to bed as he perhaps wished. Stubbornly, I stayed. I hoped he might, as a clever man, draw some conclusion from that. But his pride excelled his wisdom that night.
“This Phantom…”
“Phantoms! Demons! Ghosts!” He rubbed the back of his neck without turning. “Do not desert C. Auguste Dupin for the realm of actors and unreason. If that is your desire, Holmes, I tell you now — go home to London. I have no more to teach you.”
A lump came to my throat. He was goading me, but I refused to rise to the bait. I would not be his mental punch bag.
“I intend to stay.”
Poe did not reply. He remained sitting with hunched shoulders and the sound of his scribbling nib in the candlelight. I intuited, however — intuition being only a hop and a skip from guesswork, as he might say — that his change in mood was not about me, and not entirely about the nature of the mystery that was testing us so sorely, either.
He crossed the room and yanked the servant cord. When Le Bon came he asked him to deliver a message by hand the following day. “To Colonel Guy Follenvie, postmaster at the Place de Ravaillac. Tell him to meet me on the opening night of La Traviata at the Palais Garnier on Friday. The details are enclosed. And remember to tell him to bring Madame Lop-Lop.”
“Madame Lop-Lop?” I sniggered, perplexed.
He ignored me. “Are my instructions clear, or are they not?” Le Bon said they were.
“I have an appointment tomorrow with a saddle maker, name of Hermès,” Poe continued, this incongruous piece of information as mystifying to me as the first. “Do not let me sleep after nine. I shall take coffee but no toast. Holmes can do as he pleases.”
His tetchiness with the negro confirmed what I had begun to suspect: from what Poe had said in the shadowy corridors of the Opéra Garnier, I knew he had turned over old soil, and that the bones of the most painful recollections imaginable, that of his long lost love, his first and only love, Virginia, had been unearthed. To my dismay, far from being a hero of vast intelligence and indefatigable vigor, the figure in the semi-gloom — Dupin, Poe — now looked like a husk of humanity. Not a god of the dark imagination or giant of literature, but instead a brittle insect crushable under foot.
I stepped closer. “Can I get you—?”
“No.”
Reluctantly, I left the room and went to my bed, but did not sleep.
Lying awake, I pondered whether, for all his absolute faith in the appliance of “ratiocination” and his unwavering dedication to that skill in his latter years, the Socrates to my Plato had increasingly built a dam to keep the vast lake of his inner feelings at bay, at no inconsiderable cost, and — after his sudden ill temper tonight — if unchecked or unheeded, one day that dam might burst.
My private concerns over my mentor’s wellbeing only contributed to my further ill ease as opening night drew closer. I slept badly, drank excessively, and by the time we arrived at the Opéra Garnier, my nerves were so jangled that the gas-lights of the boulevards swam in my face like Montgolfier balloons. The conflux of so many carriages dispensing their chattering cargo was so overwhelming, I felt palpitations. So unsure of my grip on my senses was I that I swear I saw a man in a peaked cap taking a pig for a walk.
“Lo! ’tis gala night…”
In the cab, Poe lifted a mahogany box onto his knees, unclipped the brass catches, and opened it. Wrapped in red satin lay two flintlocks I recognized immediately as Denix French dueling pistols.
“Our difference of opinion has come to this?” I mused, not entirely seriously.