A Lady in Shadows

  “Will they find him?” she asked at last. “Or don’t they care?”

  “They will look,” I said. “They will seek the killer, but I cannot promise that they will catch him.”

  Her little-girl face was distorted in a crooked, mocking grimace.

  “If it had been one of them,” she said. “Those posh ladies. Then they would look. And keep on looking until they found him.”

  When Fleur Petit had left, I resumed my interrupted examination and turned my full attention to the lesions. Now that I could clean away the blood, it became clearer what I was dealing with. There were, I determined after close observation, eleven cuts in all. The majority were between twenty and twenty-five centimeters long and looked like they had been made with a knife, albeit an unusually sharp knife. There was no tearing of the skin, no ragged edge to the wounds, no sign that the knife had been turned in the process. One of the wounds caught my attention in particular—a thirteen-centimeter-long vertical cut beginning about six centimeters below the navel and continuing down toward the genitalia. There was something precise and symmetrical about it, in contrast to the other more frenzied-looking slashes, and this was what made me train my retractors and magnifier on this particular wound. It was deep, and there seemed to be an unusual amount of congealed blood, and though I could not be entirely sure before Papa arrived and we could open the corpse together, I was almost entirely certain that my hypothesis would be confirmed.

  In Rosalba’s abdomen there was no longer a uterus—and consequently, no unborn child.

  A sigh went through the Commissioner’s entire heavy body when he sank into the faithful embrace of our plush-covered mahogany armchair. Even with a not especially active imagination like mine, it was easy to conjure an image of two lovers meeting after a long separation.

  “A horrible night and a horrible day,” he said. “So much violence, so much hatred. It is not often that I feel the desire to inconvenience the Almighty with my entreaties, but right now I am praying earnestly that we will be spared more of these meaningless, random attacks.”

  The doors leading out to the garden were open, and the evening sun fell in golden bands across the worn Bokhara carpet on the floor of the salon.

  “Amen,” said my father quietly from his own chair, though he was not a very religious man himself.

  Geraldo had left the house a few hours earlier, reported Madame Vogler, headed in the general direction of the border. Monsieur Marco had miraculously escaped the riots with no more than a few bruises, but Chez Louis was an empty shell, stripped of its inventory, and hardly a single glass or plate had survived the night. Our recently consumed evening meal had therefore been fetched from the charcuterie in Rue Perrault and consisted primarily of bread, pâté, and cornichons.

  I felt exhausted, although a quick bath had provided some restoration. For once I had no desire to discuss lividity or cause of death. My thoughts instead turned to August and his upcoming visit—he usually spent every other Sunday with us and the rest with his grandmother in Heeringen. He had promised—or perhaps, more correctly, threatened—that he would teach me to ride a bicycle. Could that be accomplished in one day?

  August. Fiancés. Marie Mercier.

  I had not yet spoken to Papa as I had promised. I had put it off, and Rosalba Lombardi’s autopsy and the rest of the hectic day had made it easy to forget. I considered postponing the problem yet another day, but the seventh of July would be upon us before we knew it, and since Papa and I had carried out the autopsy together, the Commissioner might think Papa was already informed.

  “We have received an invitation,” I began, but for now kept the envelope with the careful script to myself.

  The Commissioner jerked in his seat. He threw a pleading look at me, but I had already decided to be implacable.

  “It is probably best for you to tell him yourself,” I said.

  “What?” said my father as he straightened from his slumped position.

  And so the Commissioner had to tell him. The engagement. Marie Mercier. The wedding on the seventh. He hoped we would come, it would mean a lot, we were, after all, his oldest friends.

  Papa listened in silence, his face expressionless. His long, lanky figure remained completely still, a waxen image, a scarecrow, a marionette whose puppeteer had thrown it carelessly in a chair.

  The Commissioner ran out of words. Still there was no reaction from my father.

  Finally, he cleared his throat. “I will only ask once,” he said, “and only because you are my best friend. Is it wise, what you are doing?”

  The Commissioner smiled faintly.

  “You think I am an old fool bedazzled by a beautiful and much younger woman? My friend, in that case I am a happy fool. But I think . . . I think, dear friends, that this is the wisest decision I have made in my life.”

  An expression passed across my father’s face—sadness, perhaps even jealousy. Upstairs on his bedside table he still kept the picture of my deceased mother, and though I hoped that his loneliness would one day be alleviated by another woman, I did not really believe it.

  “Then I thank you for the invitation,” said Papa. “We would be delighted.”

  The Commissioner slapped his thighs so hard that there was a faint echo.

  “Good!” he exclaimed. “Excellent! Thank you. Thank you so much.”

  “It is we who thank you.”

  We heard the street door open. It was Elise, returning with the evening edition of the newspapers. She came up the stairs with light, eager steps.

  “There has been unrest and trouble everywhere,” she said when she came in, with reddened cheeks and still with her shawl over her shoulders. “Not just here. Lyon, Paris, Marseille . . . Everyone is so angry. ‘Patriotic rage’ they call it. But they are calling for ‘calm and dignity.’ ” She handed both papers to Papa instead of placing them in the rack as usual. “And then this was lying in the entryway,” she said, and handed me an envelope.

  I took it, assuming it might be from August. Even in Heidelberg they would have heard of the murder of our poor president, and possibly also of the disturbances here, so it was not impossible that he might be concerned for my safety.

  But it was not a telegram. The envelope was stamped with the motto and emblem of the University of Varbourg—Per veritatem and, for reasons best known to the founders, a stylized fish between two stylized waves. It was addressed to “Mlle Karno.”

  Inside was a brief letter from Professor Anton Künzli, dean of the Department of Natural Sciences. He thanked me for my application and wanted to see me for an interview in his office on Tuesday the 26th of June, at eleven o’clock.

  That was tomorrow. The letter had been under way for several days, judging from the date of his signature.

  An interview. I did not know if that was good news or bad. If my application had been approved, surely they would have sent a simple letter of acceptance. Much the same if I had been rejected, I supposed, only the other way around.

  My father exclaimed, “Those blasted journalists.”

  “What now?” asked the Commissioner.

  My father handed him the paper. At the bottom of the front page, under the dramatic descriptions of the presidential murder and the almost ubiquitous riots, a no less sensationalist headline screamed: “JACK THE RIPPER IN VARBOURG!”

  The journalist, bylined simply “Christophe,” had squeezed as much out of his few facts as possible. The body of a young woman, a fille isolée, had been found in a coal merchant’s backyard in Rue Colbert “with her belly slit open like a butchered animal.” As many might recall, he continued, no more than six weeks had passed since a young factory worker had been found in the border town of Bruc, abused in the same bestial fashion and with her throat cut. “Has London’s infamous Jack the Ripper crossed the Channel? Or has our own peaceful city fostered a monster of the same ilk? Police Inspector Marot refuses to comment on the case, and we have been similarly unable to prevail upon Le Commissaire des Mor
ts to comment on this ominous development.” The article was accompanied by two equally dramatic illustrations. One showed a masked assailant in the midst of attacking the factory worker Eugénie Colombe in some bushes behind the silk mill in Bruc. Poor Mademoiselle Colombe turned a desperate face toward the observer, and her hair and dress flapped in a strong wind that did not appear to trouble the assailant’s clothes or the bushes behind them. I spontaneously thought of a theater poster that was hanging everywhere in Varbourg right now to advertise a popular melodrama. The other sketch was a bit more realistic—the artist had clearly succeeded in having a look through the gate of the coal merchant’s yard, even if the body’s position and general appearance diverged somewhat from reality. Under the corrugated roof along the wall you saw a dark shadow and the glinting blade of a knife.

  I and the Commissioner both read over Papa’s shoulder.

  “He has no facts,” I said. “He is merely guessing.”

  “Not quite,” said the Commissioner. “The murder in Bruc is real. Do you think there is a connection?”

  “Hard to say,” my father muttered. “But we need to seek further information about it. I wonder who did the autopsy.”

  “I will send for a copy of the report,” said the Commissioner. “But the method is not identical. Not if it is true that the factory worker had her throat slit first and was maltreated postmortem.”

  “Most of Mademoiselle Lombardi’s wounds were also inflicted posthumously,” said my father.

  “But she was not decapitated.”

  “No. It looks as if she bled to death. It probably occurred in connection with the incision that gave him access to the uterus.”

  “Abhorrent.” The Commissioner looked as if he wanted to spit on the floor. “Who would tear a uterus and fetus out of a young girl?”

  “I don’t know,” said my father. “But it is unlikely to be Jack the Ripper.”

  June 26, 1894

  The University of Varbourg had its roots in a seminary from the 1600s, and the Department of Theology was still one of the university’s largest and most prominent. Not until Strasbourg had landed on the wrong side of the border after the Franco-Prussian War in 1871—and, with it, the university of that city—was it deemed necessary to expand the natural sciences from an atrophying footnote in the curriculum of priests-to-be to an actual department with its own students. As there was also a need to demonstrate patriotism and national pride following a smarting defeat, the new building achieved a pomposity worthy of a triumphal arch. My hurrying steps resounded between massively aspiring sandstone walls, and the steps by which the main entrance was reached were proportioned in such a way that any normal human was reduced to feeling like a child climbing a too-tall stool.

  It was four minutes to eleven, and I was arriving at the very last moment. I had left home in plenty of time, but the city was still marked by the riots, and it turned out that the streetcars on Line 4 were not running between Avenue Deuxième and Réunion Square. A great number of cobblestones had been pried up and used for ammunition, and one of the avenue’s trees had been chopped down by rampaging crowds. It was hard to determine a motive for this act beyond simple desire for destruction, and it meant that I was more than twenty minutes later than I had hoped to be. I reached the professor’s office a few minutes past eleven, out of breath, with red cheeks and completely damp with sweat under my corset.

  “Mademoiselle Karno? Anton Künzli.” The professor presented himself politely, with an ordinary handshake, and made no attempt to kiss my hand, which I appreciated. I hoped it meant that he perceived me as something more than merely female.

  He was Swiss, I knew, and his French showed his origins—the consonants rolled in a different way, and there was a rising, almost merry melody in even the most ordinary courtesy phrases. Perhaps that was why I immediately perceived him as kind. Though his face and physique still looked robust and relatively youthful, both his hair and muttonchop sideburns were brilliantly white and contrasted with a sunburned, weather-beaten appearance that I would not have associated with an academic. But he was of course a biologist, I remembered, and perhaps he still conducted field studies, in spite of his age and position.

  “Please sit, mademoiselle,” he said.

  “Thank you.” I sat down on one of the two chairs by his desk, and for once I sat precisely as the teachers at Madame Aubrey’s Academy for Young Ladies prescribed: on the foremost half of the seat, bolt upright, and without touching the backrest at any point. It was not the result of my training in “posture and manners,” however, so much as my general tenseness.

  The professor considered me for a moment, his gaze in no way hostile or vulgar, yet still assessing, I think, both my physical qualities and my demeanor. He wore spectacles that were probably meant to correct the presbyopia brought on by his advancing years, and he was looking at me over the rim, which somehow underscored the sensation of being weighed and measured.

  “Mademoiselle, you wish to be admitted to the medical school here at the university,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “I regret to inform you that the university cannot accommodate your wish.”

  It was a blow. Perhaps not an entirely unexpected blow, but still . . . The world was changing. Earlier that month the newspapers had been full of news about young Marie Skłodowska from Poland who had not only achieved two degrees at the Sorbonne, but had done so in record time as the best in her year in physics, and the second best in mathematics.

  “For what reason?” I asked, and did my best to keep both my expression and my tone neutral and passionless. If he harbored prejudice against the female intellect, an outburst of emotion on my part would only strengthen his conviction.

  “You are probably not naïve,” he said. “You know quite well that your sex raises certain questions.”

  “And they are?” I said, because I did not intend to make it easy for him.

  “Some think that an academic education poses a danger to the more susceptible female mind,” he said. “I am more concerned about my susceptible male students. I do not wish them to be . . . unnecessarily distracted.”

  I had not thought my back could be any straighter, yet now I felt my tense muscles pull back my upper spine another notch.

  “Professor. Is that fair? Should certain male students’ putative inability to concentrate exclude women from educating themselves on an equal footing with men?”

  “No,” he said. “Not if you ask me—and not if the woman in question harbors a genuine and deep-felt ambition to educate herself and is not seeking admission here for . . . other purposes.”

  “Which other purpose . . . ,” I began to ask, having literally no idea what he was talking about. Then, in midsentence, I realized what he was alluding to. “Oh . . .”

  “It has been known to happen,” he said. “It is a fact, mademoiselle, that inside the walls of this institution we have a broad selection of society’s more gifted and well-heeled sons, and I have to emphasize that they are here to be educated, not to find either temporary or more permanent female companions.”

  What a way with words he had. Friendly and helpful, still, and without batting an eye.

  “I am engaged to be married,” I managed to utter, among a selection of more explosive exclamations. “To August Dreyfuss, professor of parasitology at Heidelberg University. I can assure you that the sons of the bourgeoisie are entirely free from danger where I am concerned.”

  Now he was actually smiling, which made my blood pressure rise even further.

  “I seem to have insulted you,” he said. “That was not my intention.”

  “How would you feel if—” I bit my lip. “I do apologize, but if the professor were in my place, how would you react to such an accusation? And I apologize once more, but if the Sorbonne does not consider female students a threat to the male population, why should the flower of Varbourg’s youth be more vulnerable?”

  “Paris is a bigger city, not necessarily a wis
er one,” he said. “But I accept that you are not, or at least do not wish to be, a distraction. And though your formal education at Madame Aubrey’s has certain gaps as regards the natural sciences, I also accept your claim that the work you have been doing under the tutelage of your father has equipped you with a significant practical and theoretical knowledge of human anatomy.”

  “Why, then?”

  He held up his hands in an apologetic gesture.

  “The question of female students has been debated passionately for a number of years here at the university. As you no doubt know, this institution dates back to the seventeenth century. There is nothing in the charter that prevents the admission of women . . .”

  Probably because no one had been able to imagine that it would ever be an issue, I thought grimly.

  “. . . and the university administration does not want to prohibit it.”

  Well, that was something . . .

  “It has therefore been decided that it is up to the individual professor or lecturer if he wishes to take on female students. And I regret to say that we have not found a lecturer at our School of Medicine willing to take such a controversial step without an express order from the deanship.”

  I did not respond. Anything I might have tried to say would have escaped like steam from a pressure cooker, scalding, aggressive, and rash.

  “Mademoiselle, if you have such a burning wish to become a doctor—then why not the Sorbonne?”

  Because I could not leave my father to the abyss of loneliness he would sink into with me so far away. That the Commissioner was now getting married would not improve matters. And there was the money. If I were to go to Paris, it would be on August’s money, and that did not feel right.

  “It is not possible at the moment,” I said.