Conjurer (23 page)

John durand returns home to find his wife gone. He questions the servants; no one knows where she's gone; nor had she given word as to when she would be expected to return. Her maid simply says, “She didn't believe you'd be home so soon, sir. She believed you'd gone to your club when you failed to arrive for dinner”—as if that were answer enough.

Durand orders a cold supper prepared, then goes to his own rooms to wash off the city's dirt; and while he does, he is visited with an eerie sense of existing in two places, two bodies.

One self appears to him to be sensible and pragmatic as it carefully unties a cravat, removes a jacket, and walks across a handsomely accoutered dressing room. The other self has lost all semblance of sanity, all claim to hope. This being doesn't reside in a princely home on a pleasing street. Instead, it creeps through the gutters and clings to shadows, pulling its hair and gnashing its teeth. This self is drowning in self-loathing and despair.

Standing in front of a looking glass, he's aware of examining the two creatures that share his body. The one his wife and friends witness daily; the other is known only to him. Durand picks up a silver-backed brush in order to smooth his hair, then watches the mirror-hand move toward his head. So effortless, the action seems, so prudent and serene. So stunningly deceptive.

He replaces the brush, pulls on a different jacket, walks to his desk, dips a pen in ink, rapidly puts ink to paper, blots it, then folds his completed missive in half, in quarters, and finally eighths, firming the creases with desperate hands.

Finished, he returns to his dresser, hides the letter, then rummages within a drawer until he finds the object he needs. His fingers tighten around it as if it holds magical powers. Then he slips it into his pocket, walks silently down the stairs, and goes out into the night.

It's martha who first observes the women's clothes scattered here and there across the floor in the outer chamber, and Kelman who notices that the door to the bedroom has now been firmly shut. “Oh!” Martha gasps. She draws back and bites her lip, then moves her glance to a less incriminating section of the carpet while Kelman spins on Eusapio's assistant.

“Your master is not alone? You knew this and yet permitted us to accompany you?” The words reverberate with disgust, as if Kelman were saying
How dare you insult this lady by placing her in proximity with a whore?
—which are his thoughts precisely.

“You insisted, Mr. Kelman,” the assistant fights back. “I told you that the hour was inopportune.”

“You didn't say he was engaged with a … with a—” Kelman is so enraged his words stop in his throat. “Miss Beale. Let us go. My many apologies for permitting you to witness this most reprehensible—”

But Martha's next gasp arrests him. Keeping her eyes on the floor, she's recognized the dress tossed so carelessly near a chair. And with the dress, the shoes, and with the shoes, a reticule … Her face drains of color. “I must leave this place,” she murmurs. “Please … This is very wrong.”

John durand strokes the Derringer pistol concealed in his pocket, and its cool metal momentarily consoles him, inspiring confidence and resolution. When he doesn't handle the pistol, when his fingers grab the air near his thighs, or when he pauses to wipe his brow, all the caverns of Hell open before his eyes; and he knows himself to be forever damned.

He strides on and on and on, grinds his teeth until his jaws bulge, then sobs aloud and pushes forward, rounding a corner and crossing another street. In the distance he notices a man and a young girl buying hot cooked potatoes from a street vendor. The sight arrests him, and he watches them intently: the girl wonderfully, ardently attentive—and so grateful for this gift of food.

When the lame man and the girl proceed on their way, Durand turns and follows them.

“Please, Thomas … Mr. Kelman …” Martha repeats. “… Please … The business we intended for
Signor
Paladino … Let us postpone it …” The tremulous urgency of her tone and her continued concentration on the discarded clothing give Kelman a sudden and unwelcome revelation.

“Do you recognize these articles?”

She hunches her shoulders in misery. “I think so …” Her head bows farther; her spine bends in both regret and disbelief … “I think … I think they belong to Emily Durand … I may be mistaken, however …” Martha's words falter as she suddenly realizes that she is not. It is Emily Durand they've discovered in Paladino's rooms; Emily, the epitome of breeding and sophistication and power.

Instead of experiencing shock and outrage at such illicit behavior, however, Martha's thoughts undergo an odd metamorphosis, and she begins to take pity on this proud woman.
What must she be feeling
, Martha asks herself,
sequestered in another room while Thomas and I cast censorious glances at her clothes
—
and at her foolhardy choice in partners? Wrong as her decision seems, wrong as it is, shouldn't Emily be given a chance to defend herself?

Martha doesn't express these unconventional thoughts, though; what she says is a simple “I would prefer to question
Signor
Paladino tomorrow—when he is not entertaining.”

Daniel and ella finish their warm potatoes and move on with John Durand trailing close after them the way a dog follows a butcher's boy, sniffing the air, ears alert, searching for a sign.

“But why, Cousin Daniel?” he hears. “Why do you fear you cannot count on Mr. Robey's commissions much longer—”

“Hush, Ella. Remember, we're in a public place.”

“But why?” Ella persists almost as loudly as before.

“Ella, please. We must take care. Remember what I told you?” Then he relents, continuing with a hushed but reasoned “I believe something powerful is troubling the man. A wasting disease, I suspect … He asked if I knew of an apothecary who could be ‘trusted.' He put particular emphasis on the word—as one who does not desire his motives known.”

“Oh, cousin!” Ella whimpers. “Does he mean to end his life—?”

“Ella, you must not take on so. Your voice calls too much attention to us.”

Durand moves closer. He fingers the Derringer; and the self who is the man with a fine home on a fashionable street succumbs to the self who has no name, no allegiance, no mercy for his own sorry state or that of his fellow earthly travelers.

“But what will become of us, cousin? What will we do without Mr. Robey?” Ella continues to protest.

“He hasn't deserted us yet, child. And we must pray he does not.”

“Oh, but Cousin Daniel!”

“Peace, child, peace—” As the tailor speaks, John Durand slides the pistol from his pocket and takes aim.

The Silver Snuffbox

T
HOMAS KELMAN STANDS BESIDE THE
man's lifeless body. It's a little after seven in the morning, and the light still dim and gray and sunless. The alley is strangely devoid of daytime activity—only an undertaker's cart, the steaming and woolly horse that pulls it, the two men who will haul away the corpse, and the day watchman who happened upon the scene.

Kelman studies the watchman as he rephrases his question. “And the body was in this precise position?”

“I never touched him” is the anxious reply.

“I didn't ask if you'd touched him. I asked whether you found him lying in this exact fashion.”

The day watch is a young man, thin and frail and scrawny-necked beneath a coat cut for a larger person. He gazes at the mica-flecked stone of a wall and refuses to look at the ground, although from the tremor troubling his left eyelid, it's clear his mind's eye sees the dead body—sees it over and over and over again.

“All that blood under the head,” he replies at last. “I got some on me boots.” The boy's pinched nostrils flare; a pallid sheen of nausea douses his face. “I've never seen a man shot before …”

Kelman waits while the young man composes himself. “When you arrive for work, you replace a night watchman, do you not?”

The watch shifts his nervous gaze from one quarried stone to another. “Sometimes,” he mumbles.

“Sometimes you shirk your responsibilities? Or sometimes the watch you relieve has already departed?”

“The second one.” The reply is muted; the boy lowers his narrow head. Speaking to such a person as Thomas Kelman can bring little good, but a great deal of harm if certain folk were to learn that a potential snitch walked among them. “The night man's a good fellow, though … Been a member of the constabulary since I was dressed in nappies. Us younger fellows have learned a lot from him.”

“But he never reported hearing a weapon fired? That's quite an explosion during the still of the night.”

“The neighbors didn't say nothing, neither,” the boy retorts, then adds a hopeful “Maybe the fire gangs were out … When there's a blaze raging, you can't hear yourself think. What with the shouting and the horses and bells and whatnot.”

Kelman studies the day watch's face. It's still blue-gray and shiny with physical revulsion. “Have you seen this man before?”

Unwillingly, the boy's glance returns to the corpse. “I don't think so, sir … But I don't really know … What with his body all twisted up, and his head—”

“Yes, the bullet entered the skull near his right ear. What about his clothes?”

“Just ordinary clothes, sir. The kind most rich gents wear. Besides, they're all … They're all—”

“Yes, I know … There's a great deal of blood.”

“Never seen anything like it,” the watch repeats quietly.

“And I hope you never do again,” says Thomas Kelman. The voice is not unkind. He moves his focus away from the day watch and is again struck by how devoid of passersby and curiosity-seekers the scene is. Save for the undertaker's men and the watchman he's currently questioning, it's as if every denizen of the alley off lower Lombard Street has made a pact to stay away. It strikes him as odd indeed. Someone nearby, he feels, must have information concerning this slaying. And that person is deliberately choosing to stay away.

With the day watch gone, and the undertaker's horse pawing the ground, Kelman bends down and pulls the dead man's arms from beneath his blood-spattered torso and begins examining his pockets for some identifying object. The legs he leaves in a tangle of frozen wool.

The first pocket yields an intricately stitched handkerchief. Brand-new, from the look of it, with needlework that must have been a severe hardship on some poor woman's vision. Kelman places it in a satchel he has close by and moves to another pocket. The horse whinnies; one of the undertaker's men shifts his weight from one stout boot to another and seems about to speak, then apparently reconsiders as Kelman reaches into the second pocket and retrieves a silver snuffbox.

“A regular toff,” the undertaker's two men whistle in unison.

Or a thief
, Kelman thinks; although he doesn't voice the opinion. He turns the snuffbox over in his hand. Carved in the silver are the letters
J
ⁿ
Dur
ⁿ
d.

Kelman sits back on his heels while he studies the snuffbox, then leans cautiously forward and reexamines the clothes. They're finely made and of excellent material, but they also bear a countrified air as if the wearer eschewed city ways. No thief—no matter how much he desired to emulate those of the landed gentry—would attire himself thus. The man lying dead in the alley must be none other than John Durand.

Kelman's brain jumps back to the previous evening and the discovery of Emily Durand in Eusapio Paladino's rooms. Although Martha insisted on leaving without specifically ascertaining that it was Durand's wife who was keeping company with the conjurer, they both privately understood that to be the case. In light of this present discovery, Emily's action and Paladino's position look more than questionable; and Kelman quickly deduces what the populace will make of the news.

At length, he stands, but he does so slowly as if reluctant to set in motion the events he knows will follow. Then he gestures to the undertaker's men, who move forward in unison to heft the dead man into the cart. The horse whinnies at the quick shift in weight as Durand's body falls on the floorboards, but otherwise the scene remains eerily silent. And eerily empty.

The broadsheets spread the horrific news across the waking city. The
Citizen Soldier
, the
Spirit of the Times
, the
Daily Black Mail
, and other penny presses trumpet headlines that blare:
MURDER! WHO CAN BE SAFE?
and
WHENCE OUR CITY OF BROTHERLY LOVE
? as all of Philadelphia reels under the unspeakable notion that a prominent citizen can be gunned down while traversing its orderly streets. The coffeehouses and oyster cellars, the private drawing rooms and public street corners buzz with gossip, blame, and fear. By afternoon, the newspapers have discovered the greater scandal: Emily Durand had been in the Demport House Hotel with a lover on the evening before her husband's body was found. And that man is none other than the famous conjurer and mesmerist Eusapio Paladino, who is now in the custody of the constabulary on charges that he murdered his mistress's husband.

“Shouldn't we tell them, cousin Daniel? What we know? Shouldn't we be telling someone what we saw?” Ella's words tumble out in a high-pitched stream. “There in the alley?” she continues. “Where—?”

“No, Ella,” Daniel tells her. “No joy will come of our talking to the police.”

“But—” she persists.

The tailor, equally nervous, issues a firmer “No! No, we cannot” while the child, as if compelled by a higher force, repeats her anxious appeal:

“But the broadsheets are saying that Mr. Durand—”

“Stop it, Ella! Stop, at once!” Then Daniel immediately regrets his temper. “Child, I cannot go to the police. You know that.”