Afraid the opera manager might become aggressive, I got up and stood between them, holding him by the upper arms. He barely made a show to get past me as soon as he saw in my eyes that everything Monsieur Dupin the detective knew, I knew. I think he saw the plain disgust there. As Poe had said earlier, I was fairly inept at masking my emotions. And didn’t care if he did see.
“I do not sit in moral judgment. That is between you and your Maker, if you are foolish enough to believe in one.” Poe stood at the window, the profile of his supercilious nose against the sunlit panes. “Over weeks and months you visited this child. You knew her in every carnal and intimate fashion. Sometimes you took a toy or doll. She didn’t understand she was the merest plaything to you, an object to satisfy your lust. To her, you became special. She looked forward to your visits. I will not say you hurt her, though many others did. On the contrary, perhaps you were the first to show her the illusion of love. Perhaps that was your downfall. You thought nothing of her, but she loved you. And, in time, came to be sad when you left, and one afternoon followed you.
“That day, having crept into the opera house, invisible, she espied you with Madame Jolivet in all her finery. A beautiful woman adored by the gentleman she thought was hers. She thought, ‘Why not me? Would he truly love me if not for her?’ The hatred and envy festered in her. She was an orphan. She had not known love, and all her young life had only known those who wanted to use her as a commodity. She saw prettiness and wanted to make it ugly. She wanted those bright, successful women who lit up the stage, and your life, to feel as mutilated and destroyed as she herself was by the countless men who passed through her room. She wanted—”
“Stop!” Guédiguian wrapped his arms around his head. “Stop! In the name of Heaven and all its saints — must you torture me? I am not a criminal!”
“You took what was not yours.”
“As a hundred men do in Paris every day!” He scowled. “And worse!”
“I say again: your morality, or lack of it, does not interest me. You can discuss that with a priest, or some other ne’er-do-well. I am, however, interested in your culpability. In respect of your… addiction — and I am far from able to pronounce on anyone’s addiction to anything — setting in train the events that have generated such pain and anguish.”
“Then I am culpable. There. I have said it. Could I have known? No! Could I have stopped it, had I known — perhaps! But I did not know! I. Did. Not. Know! How could I? She—”
“Say her name.”
“Don’t tell me what to—”
“What was her name?”
Guédiguian crumbled. His shoulders heaved and he let out a strangled moan. I helped him to his chair. He slumped in it like a sack.
“Édith.”
“Édith Dufranoux,” said Poe. “She came with it, according to Madame Floch. But if you ask me, her real name, like her true family, is lost on the winds of time.”
Guédiguian wiped a slime of spittle from his lower lip. His eyes could no longer meet ours. I wished I felt an ounce of pity for him.
“You see, monsters come in all shapes and sizes, Holmes,” said Poe. “They do not all wear wolf skins. Some wear the utmost fashion in respectability. You do not need to open the covers of a book of horror stories by Poe. You need only look in the mirrors of the Opéra Garnier.”
“You are not privy to my mind, Dupin,” Guédiguian spat.
“I very nearly am. Do not be sure about that. I am the Man of the Crowd. I walk in many shoes. That is my business. To understand pure logic one must understand its opposite, perversion, when pure instinct is unleashed, unrestrained. The tragedy is, you could not have known the harvest your libidinous appetite would reap.” Poe’s words took on a melancholy tone as he stared out of the window at a passing world blissfully unaware of the dark, impish secrets we discussed. “You were haunted by the phantom of all kisses: obsessive love.”
The opera manager covered his face with his hands.
“What will happen to her? The police…”
“The police know nothing,” said Poe. “About you, or about her. As far as Bermutier is concerned, the Phantom of the Opéra Garnier escaped from their clutches, disappearing forever. A mystery unsolved. I bade him persuade his gendarmes not to divulge any details of the crime to the presse, but that may be a vain hope that some juice does not seep out of the apple barrel…
“As for the girl, earlier this morning I took her to a woman I know at the Hôtel Dieu, the last bastion of ‘La Couche,’ as it is known, the old Hôpital des Enfants-Trouvés created as a refuge for the abandoned waifs of the city, amongst other things to prevent them being purposefully maimed and sold as beggars. I have no idea whether she has a chance there of a ‘proper’ or ‘decent’ future — whatever that is. She may end up a wastrel or die of cold and hunger on the streets, or drowned in the sewers, or be sold to peddlers and mountebanks for money-making purposes. Or become an opera singer. I can only say that for now she has food and water, the prospect of friends and even adults who do not despise her, and schooling in the ways of Christianity. For a while, at least, she will be safe. Beyond that, her life is her own.”
“Can I see her?”
“If you do, I will see to it that everyone in Paris knows what I know.”
The opera manager choked and swallowed. “Did she — did she say anything about me?”
Poe glared at the man. “She asked if she would go to the guillotine for her crimes. She said she wouldn’t mind if she did. She said she had no fear of dying because she was dead already.”
Guédiguian closed his eyes. I cannot remember clearly what he said after that, but he was a man diminished, and the conversation over. In a fatuous gesture to make amends, he proposed, mumbling and almost incoherent, that he would donate some of the opera’s profits to the poor, to the workhouse, perhaps expecting us to cry “Bravo!” Poe greeted it with the silent disdain it deserved, and I think thereafter Guédiguian found it difficult to sit much longer in our presence. It took every atom of politeness I could muster to shake his hand, but for all his insistence that he had no morality, Poe did not.
I attempted to give back the gift he had brought us — people often did, as C. Auguste Dupin accepted no fee for his services— but Guédiguian showed me his palms. He did not want it and was now eager to go. When the door closed after him I was left with it in my hands.
“Stradivarius,” Poe commented. “You should take it up. There is a power in music ‘to soothe a savage breast.’”
He took the rolled-up play bill Guédiguian had brought advertising La Traviata—a memento of our adventure, he had said — unfurled it briefly, glimpsing the name of Marie-Claire Chanaud as Violetta, then placed it next to the violin case.
“You knew it was a child all along,” I said, gazing into the fire to stop my upset from showing. “Poe, I am constantly amazed at your capacity for casual cruelty. You were prepared for me to… to ridicule myself by talk of a… a maniac dwarf?”
“To feel ridiculous is a very small price to pay, my dear Holmes. It was necessary for you to appear to deduce that fact convincingly in order to send Bermutier on a hunt for the proverbial wild goose. Before condemning a child to the punitive forces of law and order, I needed to know why it had chosen such vehement and intractable actions.”
“Then you see yourself above the law?”
“Not above. Parallel to. Let us debate this another day. Today I find it tiresome. Let us just say I wanted the whole picture to be complete. I am sorry I allowed you to feel foolish—je suis desolé!—but it was to that end, I promise. I would never be cruel unless it was for the greater good. Well, almost never.” And my anger could almost never sustain itself when I saw that dark twinkle in his eye.