A cigar-smoking man hastened to pull up his trousers, probably convinced I was a policeman. He stood with his hands in the air and just as quickly his trousers fell.
In another room a fat woman, suddenly shrieking as she saw me, rolled her doughy frame off the bed, revealing a skinny old man secreted in the pillows under her.
My cheeks did not blush so much as burn.
As I followed Poe and pig, each doorway I passed was a window into debauchery. If this was where so-called gentlemen came for their treats, then their play was beyond anything I would have credited, had I not seen it with my own eyes. My education with Poe had been extensive, but this was tantamount to setting foot on another world — not unlike his fantastical account of a trip to the moon.
Pistol in hand, I gaped into unexpectedly grand, if faded, salons with walls adorned with voluptuous nymphs lolling on clouds and men — or gods — endowed with the envy of Priapus. Through another open door I saw a man biting the cloth off sumptuous bosoms while a second woman wore a strapped-on phallus in lurid pink. Then there were the tableaux vivants—the Crazed Nun, The Naval Officer’s Homecoming, The Naughtiest Boy in School — which added theatricality to ardor, setting copulation and flagellation in a variety of frankly highly unlikely settings for the purpose of pepping up the proceedings. I will not dwell on the proliferation of nakedness or the contortions exhibited, but will remark only that the excitement of the physical organs of both genders was not only evident, but in the main exposed to view with little attempt to recover dignity, or any semblance of embarrassment.
So this was the dwarf’s abode? One of the maisons d’abattage or “slaughterhouses” I had heard about, where a man took a number and waited in line for a woman who had up to sixty passes a day? Where adulterers from the mansions of the Champs-Élysées, or off-duty soldiers with a franc in their pocket came to roll their clothes into a ball?
A door slammed and the pig squealed. I elbowed past a square-shouldered female sucking an opium pipe.
Ahead of me, the man in the peaked cap was yanking the leash so hard that the pig was standing on two legs, its corkscrew tail vibrating excitedly. He slapped its ears as if admonishing a disobedient infant. In front of him, Poe was holding open a door, the room beyond him thick with darkness.
I snatched a candle from the pipe smoker. Holding it aloft, I joined my friend, who had now lowered to his knees. I shone it over his shoulder. Its glow made a halo of his cloud-white hair, and fell beyond, picking out a shape in the far corner of the room.
A shape I immediately recognized as the dwarf’s all-encompassing scarlet cape. A tiny human being was under it, knees tucked up to its chest, trembling, its lungs clearly gasping for air after the exertion of running through the streets, and a kind of throaty sobbing emitting from it in bursts. As my candle entered the room, the hooded head sunk down so that its face was even more completely hidden in shadow.
Poe crept toward the huddled figure on his hands and knees.
I caught his shoulder with my free hand. “Be careful. He might be armed.” I drew my dueling pistol, but he placed a hand on the barrel and pushed it away.
“Stand back,” he whispered. “As far back as possible.”
Reluctantly, I obeyed. The candle went with me, and the pistol went back in my coat.
The retreating amber glow threw Poe’s shadow longer over the filthy floorboards and onto a grim, stripped bed, its mattress a continent of stains and mildew. The shape, the scarlet bundle, sat sandwiched between it and the peeling wall. The dwarf did not move as Poe moved closer. It merely continued to shudder.
My hand slid into my waistcoat and derived some small comfort from the butt of the Denix.
He moved closer still. I wished I could be sure that this wasn’t some damn foolish action of a madman I was watching. The death — the second and final death of Edgar Allan Poe, more than worthy of his outlandish fiction: at the hands of a maniac dwarf.
“Don’t be frightened.” The master of the macabre spoke so softly now I could hardly hear him. “We are not here to harm you…”
He rested back on his heels and reached out one hand. A slender hand, a womanly hand, with the long fingers of a pianist. Or so he was told by a gypsy reading palms in Philadelphia.
My finger dug down for the trigger.
I expected the dwarf to galvanize as the hand grew closer, but it did not. I expected the Phantom to jump forward, to grab, to bite, to resist, to run in sudden desperation to escape — but it did none of these things. Somehow satiated, repentant, inactive, or resigned to its fate, it only breathed. And its breath was a thin kind of mewling.
I imagined the grotesque mockery of human physiognomy that would be revealed under the hood, but what I did not— could not — imagine was that, when it was pulled back, the face was that of a little girl no more than eleven years of age.
The gentle mewling continued as she rocked back and forth, the candlelight picking out in silver the pearls of tears coursing down her pretty cheeks as I stepped into the room.
When we left the building at dawn a battalion of street sweepers had begun their daily grind, moving as a mechanical phalanx down the width of the cobbles, brooms sweeping the dirt in front of them in semicircles, pushing all the rubbish into the gutter with the same rhythmic motion of reapers in the field. We saw them on every road on our way home, working like puppets. But all I could think of was the dingy room that lit up as I walked in to it, a faded sampler and a map of the world on the walls, furnished as it was with a rocking-horse, an abacus, a wooden Noah’s Ark, and a family of china-headed dolls, in a vile parody of a nursery.
“The pig is a much maligned species.” Poe took a curl of sugared orange peel from the tray proffered by Le Bon and dropped it into his open mouth, the sunlight from the window making it a curling sliver of gold. “Just because it lives in its own feces, people presume it is dirty. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact it is very clean, and highly intelligent. More intelligent than a dog, and it has a more acute sense of smell than a dog, which is why I have undertaken experiments in their relative use to the police. Unfortunately they are not as loyal and obedient as dogs, but once on track are far more reliable than an average black-and-tan Beauceron — though perhaps not as manly at a law enforcer’s heel. However, because of their poor eyesight they can detect food with astonishing precision: the reason why for centuries they have been employed to forage for truffles up to three feet underground. The female is used because the smell resembles the male reproductive organs. Dogs, I’ve found, are, by and large, not sexually excited by fungus.”
“Madame Lop-Lop…” I elaborated for the benefit of Guédiguian, who perched his coffee cup on the arm of his chair as I added cream to mine.
“Madame Lop-Lop indeed.” Poe sipped his own. “She was used to great effect in uncovering explosives being shipped via Marseilles by a gang of anarchists. They can be trained, you see. In this case, with a reward of food over several weeks, trained to sniff out explosives. Soon afterward she retired, as did Colonel Follenvie, who received a bullet in the leg and took on the old sow as a pet. But her usefulness as a bloodhound was proven. The best snout in Paris. Reason enough to lure her out of retirement for one last case. I devised a concoction of chemicals, tactile enough to stick to the sole of a shoe. Then I knew we could trace our Phantom wherever he, or she, fled…”
Guédiguian shook his black locks with their sheen of macassar oil. Poe’s racing intellect and breathless reasoning often left people bewildered bystanders. Today was no exception.