Introduction

Paris 1898—the fin de siècle, a turbulent era when passions run as high as prejudice. In the midst of the infamous Dreyfus Affair, as anti-Semitic riots erupt all over Paris, Inspecteur Michel Devaux has a baffling murder to solve. Is it a crime of politics or a crime of passion? As death follows death, Devaux traces their tangled threads from the privileged classes to the seamy Paris underworld. Help comes from unlikely sources: a crime lord, a clairvoyant, a crazy woman who feeds the cemetery cats, and an old friend from the Foreign Legion. Devaux’s calm harbor amid chaos is his friendship with the talented, beautiful American artist, Theodora Faraday. But as he struggles with his own horrific past, Devaux is reluctant to accept her help—because he's falling in love with her.

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Excerpt

Chapter One Excerpt – Bitter Draughts

Moral wounds have this peculiarity—

they may be hidden, but they never close…

always ready to bleed when touched,

they remain fresh and open in the heart.

Alexandre Dumas

Michel Devaux woke at the soft click of the door opening and lay silent and unmoving. He knew at once he was safe, lying in Lilias’ bed, but he wouldn’t have survived long as a legionnaire or a detective if he’d been oblivious to faint sounds. The soft scuffles were the maid, come to revive the waning fire. Allowing himself to drowse, he inhaled the aroma of applewood smoke that drifted toward him. He always left Lilias before sunrise—easy enough in January. For a courtesan of her stature to have an affair with a police detective, a common flic, was déclassé and might diminish her appeal to her wealthy clientele. Still, she’d granted him her favors for over a year now.

Turning onto his side, he watched Lilias sleep. The flames gave a soft glow to the room and gilded her auburn hair as it spread across the pillows. In the rosy light she looked so innocent. Michel guessed her a little older than his thirty-two, but she would defy age for a long time, her high cheekbones accenting the fine structure of her face. Brighter light would reveal fine lines at the corners of her eyes, but he admired the added character they gave her expression. Even her youthful face would have shown her clever and urbane, her gaze mocking, her feline smile provocative.

He never knew what to expect at their assignations. Lilias was inventive, dexterous, passionate, and demanded the same from him. She often treated him to the erotic temptations he imagined her affluent patrons enjoyed, but also to the unpretentious warmth of a lover who was a friend. Her enticing games piqued his arousal but her tenderness was even more welcome. And her intelligence was the most stimulating facet of all.

When the maid withdrew, Michel rose and padded naked down the hall to Lilias’ modern chambre de bain, an elegant play of pale marble, sinuous wrought iron, and wallpaper of cool celadon green. Running hot water into the basin, he sponged off the scents of his night. The dark rose fragrance of her perfume lingered on his skin, mingled with sweat and the musk of sex. He drizzled soapy water across his shoulders, winced, and laughed a little. There were scratches, souvenirs of their fervor.

Lilias knew when he wanted tenderness and when he needed ferocity, a bright heat to escape the ugly murkiness settling over Paris.

Escape cannot last.

Michel pushed the thought away. He dried his face and regarded himself in the mirror. Lilias called him her handsome flic, but he thought his visage austere. Grey eyes, brown hair, straight nose. He touched lips less severe after a night of bites and kisses. He was glad his countenance pleased her, as hers did him, but it was mutual passion and an answering intelligence that kept their affair alight.

As Michel finished shaving, he heard Lilias stir. After a moment, she sauntered into the bath clothed in a sheer peignoir of chiffon and lace, her ruddy nipples and russet mons tempting beneath the delicate fabric. She slid her arms around him, laying her cheek against his back and purring nonsense syllables. He closed his eyes and savored the warmth of her slender body through the tantalizing abrasion of the lace against his skin.

“Stay,” her soft murmur became articulate.

“If I do, the neighbors will see me leave.”

“I don’t care.” Her fingers teased over his ribs, hovering briefly on the scar from last year’s gunshot wound, then glided down to stroke the muscles of his thighs. His cock stirred and she peered around his shoulder. Brown eyes met his in the mirror, her gaze both lazy and defiant. “Stay.”

He had the time. What better way to spend it?

Michel lifted her in his arms and carried her back to bed.

***

The snow-muffled streets gleamed white under the arc lamps as Michel walked from this exclusive enclave near the Opéra Garnier toward the Palais de Justice. Despite the cold, a peaceful blanket of white protected his warm mood, and he savored his contentment along with the soft crunch of snow under his boots. Rare in Paris, its beauty would melt away all too soon.

It ruffles Wrists of Posts?As Ankles of a Queen

Michel mused on the two lines of the curious poem Theodora Faraday had shown him. That was all he could remember of it now and that a woman, Emily Dickinson, wrote it. Delighted with the recent snowfalls, Theo had him read several poems about winter and had him practice one for their lesson. He smiled, a warm flush of pleasure stealing through him at the memory. She was creative, his beautiful American friend, and not only with her paintings. He’d been most amused the time she helped him dismantle and clean his gun in English. She couldn’t help lamenting the Colt the Sûreté had confiscated from her.

“You are a dangerous woman,” he’d improvised in English.

“Very much so,” she’d affirmed.

Michel gave a short laugh, his exasperation at her recklessness mingling with admiration for her courage. That courage had saved more than one life.

With the new trouble brewing in Paris, he wished she still had her weapon.

Michel practiced some of that practical English lesson as he walked. The streets grew ever busier as he approached the Seine, workers rolling vegetable and milk carts toward the great market of Les Halles, the belly of Paris. Reaching the river, he paused for a moment to watch the barges moving beneath the bridges of the city, and then crossed to the Île de la Cit.

Before making his way to the detectives’ offices, he stopped for breakfast at a nearby brasserie. The enjoyable ritual kept him on amiable terms with his neighborhood shopkeepers and restauranteurs. They wished each other Bonne Année although they were five days into 1898. He ordered his usual fare of café au lait, eggs, some crusty bread and ham. He couldn’t think without a hearty breakfast, and the owners were happy to indulge his eccentricity. Especially hungry this morning, he devoured it all and asked for a second coffee.

Usually Michel took any leftover ham to the feral cats lurking behind the Palais de Justice. Since the frigid weather had set in, he’d switched to buying a large packet of scraps from the butcher, his unofficial supplement to their official ration. They did not know it, but they were working cats, expected to control the rodent population scurrying about the courthouses. Michel thought the cats seemed thinner this winter. Their ration had never been generous, and he supposed their main meal of rat was leaner as well.

Shouts broke into his musings. Two men sitting in the corner of the brasserie scraped back their chairs, slammed their fists on the table.

“Émile Zola is a traitor! As much as this vile Jew!”

“You are a fool! A dupe! Dreyfus is innocent!”

Michel tensed as the argument escalated. He’d hoped to be spared the vicious invective of the Dreyfus Affair over breakfast at least, but escape proved impossible. Yesterday dozens of Zola’s latest pamphlet had been waved aloft in triumph or trampled in the street. France’s premier novelist had been bombarding the journals with articles for weeks. Last month’s “Letter to Youth” had set the city rumbling. Yesterday’s “Letter to France” had it bellowing. There had already been riots and there would be more.

At first, Michel had believed the Army’s declaration that there was incontrovertible proof that Dreyfus had sold military secrets to the Germans. Three years ago to the day, Captain Dreyfus had been publicly degraded, stripped of his rank and honors, and sent to rot on Devil’s Island. Hell on earth. Michel knew such places from his time in the Foreign Legion. Three years was a lifetime—and the Army wished Dreyfus would die as soon as possible.

If Zola was right, the Army had presumed Captain Dreyfus guilty because he was a Jew and devised evidence to fit the charges. The more suspicion was roused that the conviction was wrongful, the more evidence they’d fabricated to protect the officers at fault.

“Brûle en enfer!” one man cried, echoing Michel’s thoughts of hell.

“Ferme ta gueule!” the other yelled.

Michel wished they’d both shut their mouths, but they ranted on. One proclaimed all Jews traitors to the core, the other labeled the Army a coterie of corruption. He tried to swallow his anger with the coffee but tasted only his own bitterness. Unasked, the elderly owner came to Michel’s table and brought him more hot milk, casting a worried eye at the continuing tirade.

“Traître!”

“Imbécile!”

Yelling, they jumped up, throwing back their chairs. The owner of the brasserie bleated at them to leave even as he took a step behind Michel. Assuming his official mien, Michel rose swiftly and moved between them. “Time to go,” he said. They glared at him belligerently, irate but not drunk. “You are welcome to kill each other outside.”

One became sheepish and quickly departed. The other man fumed for a moment, then spat, “Jew lovers,” and fled.

Michel shrugged off the owner’s thanks and set the chairs back in place. “Nothing broken.” Told his breakfast was free, he refused with a polite smile, paid, and left.

Once outside, he backtracked toward Notre Dame. Across from the cathedral, a vast pit yawned where the city had commenced mending the sewers. The workers had yet to arrive and quiet reigned. Michel was agnostic, but the age and beauty of the cathedral, the sense of devotion, offered comfort. He stood beneath the portals, letting the cold form a shell to encase the heat of his anger.

Why must France be forever at war with herself? The wounds of the Revolution, of the Commune, had never healed. The loss of empire, the shame of defeat at the hands of the Prussians rankled for two decades. The French could not admit they’d fought a stupid war against soldiers better trained and better equipped. It must have been betrayal. It must have been a Jew.

The Church and the Army had closed ranks against the intellectuals and the liberal politics of the Republicans. France was ready to eviscerate herself again over this Dreyfus affair. An innocent man would be the scapegoat for every injury France had suffered.

Bellows would become blows. Blows would draw blood.

Chaos and death would once again rule Paris.

Michel’s ire cooled, but the ache in his gut told him that grief gnawed at him still. He felt trapped in the horrors of his childhood and the disaster of his own rebellion.

He’d been six in 1871, when his parents and sister had died. His mother starved to death in the siege of the Franco-Prussian war. In the aftermath of that debacle, his father joined the Commune, hoping to find justice for the working class, only to be slaughtered in the streets with thousands of his fellow Communards. A rebel orphan, Michel might have been shot like his father and tossed in a mass grave or raped and gutted by the Royalist guards like his sister.

But Guillame Devaux, Brigadier of the Sûreté, had found him. Instead of death Michel was given a new home, a new name, a new father.

A home he’d scorned. A name he’d betrayed. A father he’d all but murdered.

A shudder swept through him. Fool. Why stand in the cold, battering himself with hellish memories? Turning up his collar, Michel set off for the offices of the Sûreté, stopping briefly at the butcher’s shop for the cats’ scraps. Concentrating on his errand, he walked past the medieval clock tower of the Conciergerie and crossed the street so he could overlook the Seine. Despite his own warning, guilt ripped through him as he neared the exact place on the pavement where his adopted father had died, blown to bits by the bomb he’d carried outside the walls of the Palais de Justice. Michel halted, his heart knotting tight in his chest.

It should have been me.

Michel had to pass this point almost every day, but the pain he believed he’d mastered had attacked with renewed savagery as the hatred roused by the Dreyfus Affair devoured Paris. He understood all too well the cost of such hatred.

Hatred, rage, had driven him to hunt down the bomber, his anarchist cousin Luc, and kill him on the sands of Algeria.

Movement across the street dragged Michel back to the present. Hugh Rambert was lounging outside the detectives’ bureau. Michel’s malaise eased at the sight of his partner, and he managed a smile. Rambert’s husky boyish looks and soft-spoken manner made him a good interrogator, easily coaxing testimony from hesitant witnesses. The good nature his face promised was no illusion, though he had a righteous temper that he struggled to control.

Rambert hurried across the street, a smug smile tugging the corners of his lips. “You’re late, Inspecteur Devaux.”

“I am leisurely, Inspecteur Rambert, having wisely completed all my paperwork.” Michel knew the only reason Hugh had come this early was because he hadn’t finished his own much detested forms. “I have nothing to attend to this morning.”

“So you thought,” Rambert countered. His smile faded and concern surfaced in his eyes. “When I arrived, I found a man stamping around outside, trying to stay warm. He wanted to talk to you, only you, and I had to persuade him to wait inside. Then the chief came and recognized him. He took him into the office and sent me to keep watch for you.”

“Does the man have a name?”

“Monsieur Balsam. Jewish, I think?”

“Yes.” Michel frowned. The hateful scene in the brasserie returned to worry him.

“You look troubled. Do you suppose someone’s threatened him?”

“It would not surprise me,” Michel said. “Saul Balsam’s a reporter—one I respect. He might have discovered some crime.”

“Or some political scandal?” Rambert suggested. “He did not want to talk to Cochefert.”

A political—or police—scandal could make Balsam prefer to stamp around outside rather than face the chief. “I’d best find out.” view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

How is the Dreyfus scandal similar to or different from the division in current politics? In what ways are the involvement of the Church, the Army, and the Police different or the same?

Prejudice takes many forms. How do society’s biases effect Solange, Zeb, Michel, Theo, and Averill? What of the characters own biases? Where are they aware and where are they blind?

Women did not get the right vote in France until 1944, but the French often idolized women who defied convention. What differences do you perceive towards women’s emotional independence in Theo, Carmine, Solange, and Lilias? How much do they defy, accept, or exploit society’s expectations?

What path do you envision for Theo as an artist? She comes of age in a world with decades of cultural and artistic innovation and considers herself a modern artist in a modern world. But “Modern Art” was born with Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1907. How do you think she will respond to the new art movements that are barely a decade away?

Which of the murderers do you find the most reprehensible? Which the most sympathetic?

Very little information is available about the clairvoyant, Léonie Leboulanger, but she was the original source of Alfred Dreyfus’ knowledge of the secret document held by the Army. Captain Dreyfus was cruelly confined and overzealously guarded on Devil’s Island. Communications were severely restricted. Can you imagine any way in which she could have come by her knowledge other than her psychic abilities? To what purpose?

Questions from the author

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