The Left Hand of Justice Read online

  She sat back against the carriage bench. Rain pounded the roof, but the horses in the next room were peaceful. She found the clean smells of hay and leather calming.

  Imagine the strength of character Kalderash must have possessed, for her to press on when everyone who mattered was against her. Imagine what it would be like to have someone like that in one’s corner—someone who could stand on her own and had strength to share. Corbeau had never had someone like that in her life. She imagined Madame Boucher had found her presence to be quite a comfort at times, especially when her untrained, unwanted talents flared, and she no doubt felt like her world was falling apart.

  No wonder Hermine Boucher had preferred Dr. Kalderash—who had rejected her, soundly—to someone like Sophie, who depended upon her utterly. No wonder Hermine Boucher had pursued Dr. Kalderash to such a ruinous degree, even after Kalderash had left. Corbeau shook her head. As tiresome as her solitary life sometimes was, perhaps it was just as well.

  Taking up the lantern, she slid out of the carriage, feet first, and shut the door gently behind her. She was almost to the door when she heard the voices.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Her name…don’t know…”

  “Her name?”

  “Madame Pettit said to take her a tray.”

  “Well, she’s gone now. It’s all locked up.”

  “Look, there’s a light inside the carriage room.”

  Cursing silently, Corbeau extinguished the lantern and pressed herself to the wall beside the sliding doors. She held her breath for what felt like an hour, hoping the men would give up and return to the party. Otherwise, how would she explain what she was doing in there? Another few moments passed before she decided to venture a glance through the crack between the doors.

  As she peeked out, someone suddenly pulled the doors aside. A hand grabbed her by the collar and pulled her through.

  “You!”

  Corbeau recognized Vautrin a split second before he slammed her back against the door. The walls of the stable shook. One of the horses bellowed in panic. She locked her arm around Vautrin’s and slammed her palm against his elbow—not hard enough to break it, she noted with disappointment. She ducked his punch, but he pulled it back at the last minute and swept her legs out from under her instead. Corbeau sprang to her feet, fists raised, while the second man—who was indeed bearing a tray of food—looked on, appearing stupefied.

  “What the devil are you doing here?” Vautrin demanded.

  “I might ask you the same thing.” When he made no further move to attack, she lowered her hands and brushed off her trousers.

  “You’ve been relieved of your duties. You’re a trespasser here.”

  “I’m here on the prefect’s business. What’s your excuse?” Corbeau wouldn’t have been surprised to learn he was following the Boucher case on his own. As much as he liked to see his own name in the papers, he would have found such a high-profile case irresistible. It certainly would have explained why he had turned up at Lambert’s place that night. If so, Vautrin wasn’t as stupid as she had assumed. It was a frightening thought. “This is the carriage from which Madame Boucher disappeared,” she said.

  “Yes, yes, my men have already examined it.”

  “Really? And what did they find?”

  A vein throbbed at Vautrin’s temple. He wasn’t about to share information with her, his fierce expression said. And if she really were working for Javert, she could go straight to hell. But she could also see curiosity burning behind his dark eyes. Not even Vautrin could have missed the dress inside the seat cushion. He had to have come to the same conclusions she had. Although if that was the case, she’d have expected him to sit back and watch Javert make an idiot of himself, rather than to linger in the carriage house.

  Of course he might have come across information she and Javert had overlooked.

  “Have you interviewed the staff?” she asked. “Did you get anything sensible out of the footman the other night—Armand Lambert?” She relished the flare of his nostrils when she mentioned Lambert’s name. “I trust he’s been given the medical attention he needs.” Vautrin lunged at her again. She feinted to the side, grabbing a shovel that had been leaning against the wall, and brandished it. “Go on. Give me an excuse.”

  Corbeau couldn’t tell which set him off more, the mention of Lambert or the fact she had questioned him as a colleague might. The chief inspector always had a short fuse, but the murder in his eyes told her that something very wrong had happened to Lambert, and that Vautrin himself was likely responsible.

  “Great Prophet?” the other man ventured. More of a boy, Corbeau noticed. Not more than sixteen, and possibly quite a bit less. The tray was shaking in his hands.

  “Put it down and leave,” Vautrin said quietly. The boy seemed happy to do so.

  “You’re the Great Prophet?” Corbeau asked as the door slammed shut. “I thought that was Madame Boucher.”

  “Things change. Drop that damned shovel.”

  “Not on your life.”

  Shaking his head, he stepped back. He pushed a clump of hair back over his wide forehead and sighed. “You’re the Alchemist, I suppose.”

  “No, I just came for the hors d’oeuvres.”

  Vautrin’s mouth tightened, but he remained silent. Rain battered the roof as they glared at each other for a long, tense moment.

  So this was why Javert had chosen her rather than Vautrin to investigate Madame Boucher’s disappearance. If Corbeau hadn’t found evidence to the contrary, she could have made the case that Vautrin had done away with Madame Boucher himself, in order to seize control of the Church of the Divine Spark. Oh, how she would have loved to make that case. But by all appearances, Madame Boucher had spirited herself away. And Corbeau couldn’t understand why Vautrin, the most pious, sanctimonious zealot she had ever known, would involve himself in a heretical organization in the first place.

  But his involvement explained why he had been in the Montagne Ste. Geneviève the other night. He had been tying up loose ends. But was he helping Madame Boucher by getting rid of the people who could disclose that her kidnapping had been a sham? Or was he helping himself by picking off her allies?

  One thing was for certain—if Armand Lambert was still alive, he was in great danger. The same went for Claudine Fournier and Michel Bertrand.

  But this led back to the question of what Vautrin wanted with the Church of the Divine Spark. Did the group hold some attraction that would make it worth dirtying his hands with heresy? Or perhaps he was trying to co-opt it for a different purpose.

  How much did Javert know? His case, as presented, had hinged on Kalderash’s motive rather than on physical evidence—evidence that Javert’s men would not have missed if they’d undertaken the investigation in any serious way.

  Which meant Javert wanted Kalderash for some other reason.

  And now that it was clear that Kalderash was innocent, Corbeau was not about to let Javert—or anyone else—get their hands on her without a very good reason.

  She was surprised how quickly she was ready to rush to the inventor’s defense, considering she’d stormed away from Kalderash’s home swearing to write out an arrest warrant by day’s end. But Dr. Kalderash had already suffered so much injustice. A feeling of protectiveness swelled in Corbeau’s chest. She would be damned if Maria Kalderash would suffer further on her watch.

  “Well, well, well, Great Prophet,” Corbeau said. The handle of the shovel was slippery with perspiration, and her voice didn’t sound as brave as she’d intended. But she pressed him to see if she could provoke him into revelation. “That casts Madame Boucher’s disappearance in a rather different light, doesn’t it?”

  Vautrin’s face clouded with rage. Then he seemed to realize the position he was in. Corbeau was investigating at the behest of the prefect of police. And Vautrin had both known Madame Boucher and possessed a good reason for wanting her out of the way.

  “It was that Gypsy wom
an,” he sputtered. “Surely even Javert suspects as much.”

  “Yes, everyone seems to have a reason to want Dr. Kalderash to be guilty. The problem is, there are so many other suspects to choose from.”

  With the same terrifying quickness he’d exhibited in Lambert’s room, Vautrin leaped for the shovel. She swung, but he caught the handle in one hand and deflected the blow with his thick shoulder. He pushed her back toward the wall, and this time, she knew that once he pinned her there, he wouldn’t stop. Letting the shovel go, she dropped to the ground and rolled out of the way. Before Vautrin could turn around, she was out the door, disappearing into the cold, black rain.

  Chapter Ten

  Despite the rain, the Rue des Rosiers wasn’t completely deserted, thanks to the newly installed streetlamps shining like beacons through the downpour. Paris had installed gas lighting around the city a little less than ten years ago, and Corbeau wondered how much of the vast reduction in crime in the meantime had been a result of it or, as Vidocq had claimed, to the activities of the Sûreté, which had come into existence at roughly the same time.

  From the corner, Corbeau could see that Dr. Kalderash’s house was dark. No light shone in the windows, nor was a single lantern hung, despite the legal obligation to do so. Apprehension gathered in her belly as she pushed her way past small groups of people hurrying to get out of the rain. Javert wanted Dr. Kalderash arrested for a crime that hadn’t happened. Sophie and Vautrin wanted her out of the way as well—and they had an entire organization of devotees behind them. Hermine Boucher might have wanted Dr. Kalderash back for reasons only the heart could understand, but from what Kalderash had said, the woman was both unstable and violent.

  Dr. Kalderash had nowhere to turn. Corbeau had become a police agent in order to right wrongs and to protect the innocent. If anything happened to Maria Kalderash, Corbeau would never forgive herself. She had to tell her what she had found in the carriage house. She had to warn her.

  She flung herself onto the doorstep, banging on the door with her fist.

  “Doctor!” Thick sheets of rain swallowed her cry, but she struck the door until the windows shook. She pressed her ear to the wood. No one was moving around inside. “Doctor!” she called again.

  Her hands stiff with cold, she fumbled in her bag for her lock picks. After a few false starts, the lock gave way, and she found herself in the hallway, dripping dirty water onto the tiles. She tucked the picks back into the bag and closed it. “Dr. Kalderash?”

  The thick silence swallowed her voice. The house was still, as only an uninhabited dwelling could be. No one had been there for quite a while, yet the servants’ door was open, and light was coming up from below, casting the corridor in soft shadows. Corbeau flattened herself against the doorjamb and listened, but the basement was as silent as the rest of the house.

  Suddenly, the front door slammed shut with a bang. Seconds later, she felt the chill in the air and smelled the rain. The back door was open. Locking the front door behind her, she grabbed the lamp from its table, grit crunching under her boots as she made her way toward the back of the house.

  The back door stood wide. It hadn’t been forced. Careless scratches around the lock told her someone with less skill than she had picked it. Turning the lamp down, she shut this door as well and pulled the bolt. More grit scratched under her boot-soles as she turned. She lifted her lamp to reveal a trail of muddy footprints down the hall. The intruders hadn’t bothered to wipe their feet once they’d popped the lock. She knelt down for a closer look. Two sets of muddy boot tracks led from the back door to the front room. Men’s tracks. Stout men wearing stout boots. There had been a scuffle near the doorway of the front room. Then they’d doubled back and left the way they’d come.

  The house was suffused in an eerie calm that turned the hairs on Corbeau’s arms to pins. Something bad had happened here. And whether it had happened as a result of her action, or her failure to act, it was her fault. Forcing herself to breathe, she followed the tracks back down the hall to the front room, where she had, just that morning, interviewed Dr. Kalderash.

  She eased the door open, holding the lamp in front of her. Thinking better of it, she set the lamp back on its stand in the hallway and turned it off. Thick curtains hung over the front window, but Corbeau didn’t want to risk accidentally shedding light beneath them or through a gap. Instead, she took her tinderbox from her coat pocket, lit her candle stub, and slipped inside.

  The front room was a disaster. Even in the flickering light of her candle, she could feel the echoes of violence in the overturned chairs in which she and Dr. Kalderash had sat that morning, the shattered end table where she had set her teacup. The papers once stacked on the desk near the window had been swept to the floor, scattered, and stomped with heavy boots that sullied the delicate rows of handwriting with mud. More papers, journals, and even books had been heaped into the fireplace in such quantity they’d smothered the fire. Only the acrid traces of paper-smoke lingered in the air to evidence a flame had once burned there. The silver samovar lay scratched and dented on the floor beside shards of the teapot and cups Corbeau had drunk from, amid a pool of cold, brown muck.

  The intruders had been searching for something. They’d been angry—very angry—when they hadn’t found it. But who were they? And what had they been looking for? She wished she’d had a closer look at Dr. Kalderash’s papers when she’d been there earlier that day. Now it was too late. What hadn’t been obliterated was a jumbled mess that would take hours to sort out.

  Had Dr. Kalderash been there to witness the destruction of her study? Had she fled when she’d heard the scritch-scratch of the picks in the back door? Or had the intruders taken her unawares? Corbeau shuddered at the thought of how a pair of large, angry men might take out their frustrations on the petite inventor.

  She took a deep breath and closed the door behind her.

  The footprints in the corridor told a story of struggle that had been fought, fiercely, just before the servants’ door. The door had been closed when Corbeau had been there that morning. It was ajar now, and no one had bothered to turn off the lights below. Kalderash had been in the basement when the intruders arrived—had been there, or had run down there after they arrived. They had dragged her up. Corbeau listened at the staircase again, but not even the air stirred in the depths. She snuffed her candle, put it back in her pocket, and followed the light down the stairs.

  A soft wall of heat hit her face as she stepped off the last step. The wall lamps were blazing. She turned them down. Dr. Kalderash would not have left the gas on, had she merely gone out. She wouldn’t have let the brazier continue to burn, either. After ascertaining that the coals were hiding no important evidence, she doused them with the water from the washbasin that sat beside it on the table. The table that held the brazier and washbasin also held a soup bowl, a single set of cutlery, and a dry end of bread—so much for the kitchen that would normally be housed below stairs. The rest of the basement was given over to machines. She ran her hand over an iron torso cage with a small, locking box welded to the side. What looked like the study of a hand in metal sat near a pile of bolts, springs, and fabric. So many ideas left unfinished. It was as if the inventor had known she didn’t have much time and had tried to bring as many of her ideas to life as she could before…before what? Before fleeing the country? Before someone came for her?

  The idea was unthinkably sad, but Corbeau forced the sentiment away and returned her attention to the crime scene. The clutter on the table farthest from the stairs was typical work debris—the residue of a quick mind occupied with higher things than tidiness. But closer to the doorway she found more evidence of a fight. They’d come upon Kalderash quickly, while she was close to the door and before she could escape either up the stairs or to the opposite side of the room. Metal scraps littered the floor there, scattered in all directions. And, bringing the lamp close, Corbeau could make out a woman’s faint footprint on the wall. Corbeau bit back
a smile. Maria Kalderash hadn’t gone quietly.

  Had the intruders come looking for the inventor herself, or for some object in her possession? The basement had been spared the search and destruction the front room had suffered. Yet one would think if the inventor were downstairs immersed in her work, the intruders would have searched the house quietly, rather than giving her notice and time to escape. Chances were later they’d have their hands too full with Dr. Kalderash to search the basement. What had the intruders been after? Why had they thought it even better to abscond with Dr. Kalderash? Where had they gone, and what had they done with her after that?

  Corbeau could think of two people who might have taken her: Prefect Javert and Hermine Boucher. Hermine wanted her lover back. More importantly, if Sophie’s story were to be believed—and Corbeau wasn’t certain that it was—Madame Boucher needed Dr. Kalderash’s assistance suppressing her unwanted supernatural talents. Why Javert wanted the inventor, Corbeau could only speculate. But he wanted her badly enough to frame her for a crime that had never happened.

  Corbeau turned to go back up the stairs. She was about to switch off the wall lamps when something in the rubble caught her eye. Crouching down, she extracted an elaborate pince-nez from the debris. She blew off the dust and held the instrument up to the light.

  The lenses were glass, like normal lenses. However, instead of being flat, they were convex on both sides, making them almost spherical. A golden mesh was fused to the back side of the lenses. Corbeau frowned. She’d seen the mesh somewhere before. Grasping the spectacles by the bridge, she held them up to her face. Suddenly the instrument leaped toward her eyes as if drawn by a powerful magnet. A current crackled over her skin with a hail of blue sparks. Yelping, she clawed them off. They fell to the floor with a clatter. Could this have been the object the intruders were hunting? Corbeau doubted it. They’d likely been sitting on the table in plain sight before the struggle had buried them. All the same, something told her it would be best for the object to not fall into the wrong hands.