City of Light

City of Light - By Kim Wright


PROLOGUE

Paris

April 12, 1889

6:24 AM



When he first noticed her on the bank of the Seine, he thought that she was sleeping.

This was not uncommon. Paris served as a beacon for any number of young runaways from the country, boys and girls alike drawn there by what they imagined to be the excitement of the city. Or at least its anonymity. The chance to reinvent oneself, to begin again on a clean white sheet of paper, to escape the banal brutalities of the rural life. What they found instead were the banal brutalities of city life, which often necessitated spending the night in alleys, on benches, or down by the river.

But even when the officer drew close enough to see that the girl’s sleep was of the eternal kind, he was still not unduly alarmed. Suicides were common in the Seine. Bridges crisscrossed the river in steady patterned intervals, slanted like the laces of a woman’s corset, serving as a constant temptation to the unhappy. And young girls are so often unhappy, are they not? They grow restless and bored, they fight against the fates their parents have planned for them. They love boys who do not love them back…or sometimes it is more the case of boys who love too ardently, who demand things that the girls are not prepared to give, things they do not yet fully understand. And this, of course, opens the door to a whole new set of problems. The sort of problems that an inexperienced girl might imagine could only be ended with plunge into the river. Down to the water, that great absolver of so many sins.

Her eyes were open, which distressed the flic, who was new to the police force and had not yet become accustomed to the blank and accusatory stare of the recently dead. He moved quickly to push down her lids. The flecks of dried foam around her mouth suggested death by drowning, the realities of which are not nearly as romantic as unhappy young girls sometimes imagine them to be. She was still pretty, despite the film of spittle around her lips, the knotted tousle of her hair, the ill-fitting satin jacket which she had undoubtedly considered the finest thing she owned. But it gave her away, even in death. Showed her gaucherie, how desperate she must have been for glamour and how thoroughly she had failed to understand what Parisian glamour truly was.

The flic sighed and prepared to climb back up the bank to summon help. Drowning it surely was, and most probably by her own will. But there was still a ride to the morgue to be arranged, a quick autopsy, and paperwork. Always the paperwork. It bothered him to leave her like this on the bank, so pitifully alone, with her skirts snarled around her waist and her legs splayed rudely in the mud. Touching her went against procedure. Ever since the establishment of the forensics unit, the policy of the Parisian police was to leave bodies precisely as they were found. Evidence must be made available in case the detectives deemed it worth collecting, even when the story of the death was as short and plain as this one appeared to be. In truth, he shouldn’t even have closed her eyes.

But she was just a girl. Pretty, and dead, and not that far from his own age and although it was early now, the slow rise of the sun was beginning to splash the city with a rose-gold light. Within an hour the streets would be full of pedestrians. They would stop along the sidewalks and bridges to gawk down at the girl with her slender, dainty legs encased in their plum-colored stockings. Yes, he hated to leave her thus exposed and open to ridicule while he went for help. Help that would likely be slow in arriving, for there was no emergency here, was there? Forensics may not even come in such a case. Only the drivers of the mortuary wagon, those heartless beasts, and they would plop her on their stretcher with little regard for proper procedure and even less regard for the dignity of the dead.

He looked down at her and sighed again. She had not been in the water long. She was quite unspoiled. Without that red satin jacket – an unfortunate sartorial choice which would likely cause the authorities to draw quick conclusions about her life and thus her death – he might imagine her to be a virgin, someone’s sweetheart, a girl he would like to court. Impulsively, he bent back over her. Yanked at the skirt which, trapped beneath her hips and wound nearly around her waist, did not easily release.

With a quick glance around him - for his position above her body could give rise to any number of unfortunate speculations - he stooped lower and slipped a hand beneath her thighs to help free the skirt. Her body shifted. Flopped abruptly to the side and in a moment of sheer horror he imagined her gathering momentum and rolling right back into the Seine - even, most dreadful possibility of all, taking him along with her. He grabbed at her jacket frantically, pushed her chest into the mud to stop the slide, and then, in this moment where his body was almost on top of hers, in this absurd parody of love, he perceived her more clearly than he had before.

He froze, stared at her face.

It was impossible, and yet it was not to be denied.

He struggled to his feet. A noise escaped him. A roar of rage, or perhaps it was more of a scream. A sound that caught halfway up his throat and strangled him, closing off his air. Although he brought his whistle to his lips, he seemed to have lost the force to blow it and, with a final glance, he left her there on the riverbank and went scrambling back up toward the street.