“Not mine,” I said. “I assure you. Not mine.”
Come the morning, Peter reminded me our tickets on the ferry were for noon. He said he and his brother fully intended to return to England at the prescribed time. I said very well, but I was afraid I could not join them. My studies were of scant importance to me now, and my trickle of inheritance would be enough to sustain me. In any case, I wasn’t worried if it didn’t. The point was, I could not live with the mystery. The mystery of the girl about whom no-one cared or grieved but me. The mystery of the girl over whose corpse a vile old man bent in sensual enquiry. The mystery of the girl who, out of nowhere, said to me:
Elle mourra.
It will die. The flower will die…. But also — my God, why had I not thought it before? My stomach knotted as I watched the ferry depart—
She will die.
I returned to the morgue, where the flower girl’s corpse still lay naked, nameless and unclaimed, convinced more than ever that this flesh-and-blood ghoul was somehow implicated in her death.
The same odious morgue attendant recognized me from the night before, and seemed keen to avoid me. Minutes later I saw a few coins placed into his hand by one of the bereaved and he tugged his cap, which told me this rogue’s silence could be bought cheaply — and had. I gravitated to the other, slightly more savory employee at the wooden booth next to the stairs and described the man in pince-nez, whilst pointedly pressing coins into his palm. After which he whispered, yes, he had seen him, too. Several times.
“Comment s’appelle-t-il?” I asked.
The man’s eyes darted shiftily right and left. He coughed into his hand, turned the register towards me and ran a grime-encrusted finger down the line of signatures forming a column on the left.
“Dupin,” I read aloud.
It meant nothing to me. The only “Dupin” I knew was a mere fictional character, the brilliant detective in Edgar Allan Poe’s story The Murders in the Rue Morgue, a supremely far-fetched fantasy in which a devotee of the so-called science of “ratiocination” works out that the culprit in the gruesome murder of a mother and her daughter (whose throats were cut and bodies mutilated) is in fact, amazingly, the pet Orangutan of a sailor, trained to shave its owner with a straight-razor. I recalled the tale only vaguely and dismissed the connection as quickly as it occurred to me.
“Do you know anything about him?” I asked in French. “His profession?”
“Détective,” came the terse reply.
I smiled and gave him a few more centimes for his trouble. The old man of the morgue was disguising himself, clearly. Or he was a detective named Dupin, the factual basis of Poe’s story; or, again, a detective who took the name from Poe. All were possibilities, and all unedifying. The words came back to me:
Elle mourra.
In what dreadful capacity could the girl have known that she would die? And if it was her expectation, how could it feasibly be any kind of accident? Did the white-haired man know? Indeed, did he execute the deed? Was this man the murderer? What was his connection to her if not? And why did he visit this place of the dead with such incessant regularity … for now I saw Dupin in the ledger on page after page, back, long before she met her death, long before I even met her…
I was only aware of the footsteps on the stairs when they abruptly stopped. I spun round and saw a shadow cast by gaslight upon the stone wall, hesitating, frozen before descending. I recognized the fall of the cape, the cut of its upturned collar, the spill of the cravat. The very frame was unmistakable, albeit faceless. It ran.
I was up, after it in an instant, but the bats’-wings of the cape flew upwards to the light with supernatural speed for a man of his advanced years. By the time I emerged into the street, breathless and blinking into the sun, I saw only the door of a carriage slamming after him. I hailed another, almost getting myself trampled by hooves as the reins were pulled taut. We gave pursuit, my head in a whirl, my heart pounding as I urged my driver at all costs not to lose our quarry.
After ten or fifteen minutes, to my relief I pinpointed the distinctive St-Médard church on my right and that gave me my bearings. Leaving behind the medieval-looking streets of Mouffetard, we eventually turned from the rue Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire into the rue Cuvier, which I knew to border the famous Jardin des Plantes. My transportation pulled to a halt and I climbed out, paying swiftly in order not to lose sight of the man I pursued.
To my astonishment, at a leisurely pace he entered the Ménagerie, France’s largest and oldest public zoo, created during the Revolution for the unhappy survivors of the one at Versailles — those not devoured by the hungry mob — and a new population of animals rounded up by the armies of the Republic from far-flung lands abroad. He walked on an unerring path, seemingly impervious to the hooting calls of jungle birds and the pacing of lions. I followed until he came to a halt, his back to me, looking through the bars of a cage.
I approached him from behind, careful not to surprise him unduly until I was directly upon him, then yanked him round to face me.
The countenance of a negro grinned at me, his smile radiant in a sea of ebony. His curly hair had been covered by the hat and scarf, his age — which explained his athleticism — not much more than my own.
“My name is Adolphe Le Bon,” he said in immaculate English, with a pitch as basso profundo as I have heard in my life. “At your service, monsieur.” He touched the brim of his top hat. “A gentleman said to give you this.” He handed me an envelope from his inside pocket. “Bonjour. Or should I say; Au ‘voir?”
Whereupon he strolled away, in no particular hurry, and I found myself considering the contents of the letter unwrapped in my fingers — a jumble of proof-readers’ symbols and numbers amounting to nonsense — whilst gazing through the bars at the rubbery, wizened visage of an aged and enfeebled Orangutan.
What game was this? A game I was compelled to play, obviously. Downing coffee at a street café, I stared at the hieroglyphs on the sheet of paper, cursing that if only I had Dupin’s deductive power to decipher them — or those of his creator. Then I remembered — of course! —in another of Poe’s tales, The Gold Bug, a code showing the whereabouts of buried treasure is broken by elucidating which character predominates, and relating it to the order of frequency of letters generally in the English language. Even so, how did I know this was in English? I was in Paris. What was the order of frequency of letters of the alphabet in French? Then the notion came to me that this was not a code similar to that in The Gold Bug: it was the exact same code as in The Gold Bug.
I sped to an English book shop I knew in Saint-Germain, purchased their only copy of Tales of Mystery and Imagination and secluded myself in a corner. “As our predominant character is 8, we will commence by assuming it as the e of the natural alphabet…” Within minutes I had translated the cryptograph. What I held now in my hands was an address. But that was not all I had discovered.