The Alchemy of Murder (35 page)

“He was attacked by other prisoners?”

“Perhaps by an interrogator,” he says evasively. “It was ultimately concluded that Perun was innocently involved in the delivery of the pamphlets and he was finally released. We can assume he was a bitter and angry young man.”

“Ripe for revolution.”

“Exactly. Many of these young revolutionaries become ‘converted’ in an almost religious sense after they experience an injustice. In fact, his co-conspirator, Andrei, also from a family of
de facto
serfs, swore vengeance of the bourgeoisie in his childhood after his favorite aunt was raped by a large landowner who escaped prosecution. Perun joined the conspiratorial group led by Sofia and Andrei, and prepared the bombs that they tried to kill the czar with.

“One of their compatriots was captured and they knew he would ultimately identify them under torture. They also knew the czar was regularly driven through the streets of St. Petersburg over certain roads. They came up with a grand scheme to rent a store on the street, mine under the road, and place explosives to ignite when the carriage arrived. Perun had also designed hand-held nitro bombs, resembling snow balls that exploded on impact.

“Andrei was arrested. He boasted to the police that the czar would be dead within three days. The chief of police begged the czar to stay out of harm’s way for a few days until they could arrest the other conspirators, but the czar refused to be intimidated by a group of young radicals. The radicals attacked the czar’s carriage. The street explosives failed and even the nitro bombs, thrown at the carriage by terrorists under the command of Sofia, didn’t harm the czar, though some of his guards were wounded.

“Because so many attempts to kill him had failed, perhaps the czar himself had begun to believe in his own invincibility. Refusing to heed his protectors after the attack, he insisted upon returning to the scene where his guards were wounded. He was on foot, inspecting the wounded, when a revolutionary ran up to him and threw a nitro bomb at his feet, killing himself and the czar.”

“And Perun?”

“Most of the conspirators were found, arrested and executed, including both Andrei and Sofia. Perun and others escaped and made their way to France, Italy, and Switzerland. Those groups have close ties with radicals still in Russia. As you may have heard, revolutionaries have also tried to assassinate Alexander III.”
*

“Is that why you’re in Paris? Because the revolutionary movement in Russia is supported by radicals here?”

“I’m in Paris for personal reasons.” He hesitates and then rises from his chair and goes into the other room. He returns with the picture of the woman and two children I’d seen on the fireplace mantel. His eyes are moist and his voice impassioned as he shows me the picture. “My wife, Natasha, son, Sergo, and daughter, Natalia.

“They were on the train bound for Moscow that Sofia blew up. She called herself an intellectual, but could not read a train schedule. I was a policeman, a supervisor in St. Petersburg at the time. My wife had taken the train so our children could visit with their grandparents.” His voice shakes.

“There were seven conspirators involved in that train explosion. Five of them were arrested and executed after the assassination of the czar. One I tracked to Switzerland. He met an untimely death.” Chernov’s big hands squeeze open and shut.

I shudder, imagining that the man’s “untimely death” occurred between those two big paws.

“Perun was there, too, involved in another conspiratorial assassin group. But I missed him. I heard he left for America.”

“America! He might be my man. When did this happen?”

“I followed the trail to America. It ended at the Haymarket Square in Chicago, about three years ago.”

“The bombing!”

He nods. “Someone turned an otherwise peaceful anarchist rally into a nightmare by throwing a bomb that killed seven policemen.”

“I followed the trial. No one knows who threw the bomb. The police simply arrested eight anarchist labor leaders who had organized the rally and tried them for murder. Four were hanged, one committed suicide, before Governor Altgeld courageously pardoned the other three awaiting execution.”

“My investigation revealed that the bomb was thrown because the anarchists involved in the American labor movement were not considered violent enough by an international group of anarchists operating out of Switzerland.”

“So they sent Perun, to America, to stir up trouble.” I shake my head. “Just as they stirred up trouble when the czar was getting too lenient.”

“Exactly. I lost track of Perun after Chicago. I returned to Europe and ultimately to Paris because the Swiss were getting tired of being a home for exiled anarchists and many moved on to Paris. I hoped to find Perun here. I receive a small stipend from my government for keeping them advised on anarchists in general. But I’d be retired on a nice pension in St. Petersburg today, with my family, if Perun had not mixed a bomb that took away everyone in the world that I loved.” He pauses, to get control of his emotions. “Awhile ago, I asked if you’d heard of the Society of the Pale Horse. That is what this clandestine cell of fanatics call themselves.”

“The Fourth Horseman,” I whisper.

“Yes, the one that would kill with a sword, hunger, and the beasts of the earth. ‘And his name was Death and Hell followed him,’ is how the Bible reads.”

I get goosebumps. “Such madness … such murderous madness. What does Perun look like?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know! How have you been tracking him?”

“By name and deed—almost the same way you have been tracking your doctor. It’s easy for a man to change one’s appearance when it is equally fashionable to have hair, beard, and mustache of any length or be clean shaven. He’s known in the movement simply as Perun. His real name isn’t known outside the small core of fanatical anarchists and possibly the upper echelon of police in St. Petersburg.”

“Do you know where Perun is now?”

“Here in Paris.”

“Are you certain?”

“I have a source that’s proven reliable in the past. Something
big
is being planned here in Paris.”

We hear a knock.

“I hope you don’t mind, but I’m expecting a friend,” I tell Chernov.

“Not at all. However, it may be the woman who comes for my laundry.”

He leaves the table. I get up and pace the little breakfast nook, trying to contain my excitement and digest all that he has said. There’s no proof that Perun is my maniac from the madhouse, but my intuition is screaming he is.

I hear Chernov opening the front door and an exclamation. An explosion erupts that knocks me off my feet.

I sit on the floor, stunned, my ears ringing.

Smoke, a burned, bitter, chemical smell, pours through the doorway from the living room. Struggling to my feet I lurch to the doorway. The living room is full of smoke. The front part of the house is ripped wide open and on fire. Mr. Chernov is on his back, on the living room floor. There’s nothing to be done for him—what’s on the floor is hardly recognizable.

I cough my way to the kitchen door and stagger into the garden. A gate leads out of the garden to the alley-street at the rear of the house.

I cry uncontrollably. Poor Mr. Chernov is dead.

47

I stumble coming out of the alley and onto the street. My hearing’s stunned, my eyes sting, tears blur my vision. There’s great commotion around me, people shouting, running, but it’s all a fog. What is clear is that I have to get away before I’m detained by the police. A woman touches my arm and says something. I think she is asking if I’m injured. I mumble “no” and just keep walking—moving myself away from the turmoil, from poor Mr. Chernov, back in the direction I had come.

Tears keep coming, not just because of the sting from the smoke, but for Mr. Chernov. I hope he’s at peace and has joined his wife and children. Fire trucks rumble by, bells ring, the heavy hooves of the horses pounding the cobblestones. Slowly my hearing starts to come back. Someone else, a man, asks if I need help. I shake my head no and keep walking.

“Nellie!”

A carriage pulls up beside me. Jules opens the door and jumps down.

“You’re hurt!”

“No, no, not hurt. Just…” I couldn’t finish. My tears become sobs.

He puts his arm around me and assists me into the coach.

*   *   *

T
WO HOURS LATER
we are sitting in a café and talking. Jules had taken me home to change and freshen up. My clothes and face were blackened by smoke. Entering the building, Madame Malon stepped out of her flat to glare at me and quickly fled back inside, slamming the door behind her, after Jules gave her a menacing look and tapped his cane aggressively. He escorted me to the door of my garret and then went back down to give me privacy.

I told him how I had received a note from Louise Michel and that she directed me to the czarist agent.

“I returned to Monsieur Chernov’s while you were cleaning up. A bomb blew out the front of the house. What saved you were the walls between you and the blast.”

I shudder at the thought of being ripped to pieces.

“I spoke to the officers on the scene. A neighbor returning to her home spotted a man near the apartment a moment before the blast, but was not able to give a description.”

“It was Gilles de Rais, who is also known as Perun.”

Jules gave me a look not unlike the one he gave me when I told him I’d been an inmate in a madhouse. “Why do you say that?”

“Louise Michel said the killer’s name is Gilles de Rais. He’s Russian and apparently he speaks fluid French. Monsieur Chernov said the man’s code name in the Russian anarchist underground is Perun. My guess is that he’s using the Gilles name in Paris as a cover.”

“Perun. Some sort of Slavic god.”

“The god of thunder and—and that sort of thing.”

“Do you think that the Red Virgin deliberately sent you to the Russian’s house to be murdered?”

“Of course not. She could have had me killed in the alley outside my room or a thousand other places. Not to mention Notre Dame. But I won’t doubt her anarchist friends tipped off the bomber that I was going there. This Gilles person doesn’t want me to trace him back to Russia.”

Jules rubs his chin, thoughtful. “I agree. Killing someone with a bomb isn’t Louise Michel’s style. If she wanted you dead, she would more likely hand you a knife and fight you one-to-one with her own knife.”

“Jules, I don’t understand. You don’t seem pleased by my information. We have a name for the killer. There can’t be more than one Gilles de Rais in Paris. We can now track him down.”

“Nellie, Gilles de Rais has been dead for at least the last four hundred years. He was a baron and marshal of France back in the 1400s. He had a distinguished military career, rode with Joan of Arc, and fought several battles at her side. He rose to be one of the richest and most powerful men in the country, maintaining a court that was more lavish than the king’s.

“Unfortunately, he was also quite mad. He became fascinated with black alchemy, certain that he could invoke the power of the devil and make himself master of the world. To achieve this end, he murdered many people—abducting, torturing, and murdering over a hundred children alone.”

“Good God.”

“His end came at a relatively young age, in his early thirties I believe, he was arrested, tried and hanged.”

“Louise tricked me … but why?”

“No, I don’t think that was her intent. I believe that she was truly aroused by your accusation that an anarchist was killing prostitutes. I suspect she didn’t call him Gilles de Rais to identify him, but was commenting upon his murderous character—just as a person in London might refer to an anonymous slasher as ‘Jack the Ripper.’”

I felt completely deflated. “And I thought I’d broken the case.”

“Perhaps you have, perhaps you have,” he murmured.

“How? I thought Gilles de Rais was Perun, but he’s dead—long dead. I assumed he followed me to poor Mister Chernov’s and blew him up to keep me from knowing his identity. It looks like I was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time—an anarchist deciding to do away with a policeman. Or maybe … Jules?”

He looks at me with that faraway look, as if he is staring beyond the now and into a book of secrets, but I decide to continue even though I know he’s not really listening.

“Maybe this Perun person, whoever he is,
was
trying to blow both of us up because he’s the slasher. He knew I would discover who he was once I talked to Chernov and he couldn’t have that happen. I was just plain lucky to escape. But, if I take into consideration what Chernov said about Perun, his profile might not fit the slasher’s.”

Jules comes out of his brown study pursing his lips. “Louise steered you to Chernov because she learned a Russian is involved. So, why can’t this anarchist Perun be the slasher?”

“Chernov told me Perun is an idealistic anarchist who is killing government leaders. The slasher is a homicidal maniac who kills women for pleasure. They don’t match up. Chernov also said something big is planned here in Paris and he’s certain Perun is behind it—as he was with the Haymarket bombings in Chicago. I don’t see the slasher being involved in an elaborate scheme to blow up the government. It just doesn’t fit his profile. He’s here to kill women, just like he did in New York and London.”