Chapter 1

The public viewing room of the Paris Morgue looked oddly like a theater. The walls were grimy plaster, furred with mineral deposits; the gaslit stage was marble, a white cheesy slab stained brown, separated from the audience by a glass pane running with moisture. Six corpses lay on it, dressed in the clothes in which they had been found, the bodies frozen and glistening. Seine water trickled under the slab, keeping them cold. Under the freezing chill and the smell of menthol and disinfectant, the air was unbreathable with the flowery whore's-talc of decay.

She was the colorful corpse, still drawing the eye: purple satin skirt spreading around her, red satin jacket, and several waterlogged postcards and parts of postcards, recognizable as Leonardo's painting, still pinned to her clothes. Over her heart her murderer's knife had ripped her jacket to pieces. Reisden remembered her on the steps by the Orsay, a wrecked beauty of a woman, standing with her eyes closed, singing in the ruin of a voice, kiss me, kill me, oh how I suffer, shuffling and swaying and holding out her hand for centimes. She had looked like trouble, and now, to someone, she was.

I wonder why he killed her, Reisden thought; I wonder how he came to it.

"How did you know her?" Inspector Langelais stood in the shadows at the side of the stage.

"She begged near the Gare d'Orsay, near where I work. She was the local colorful beggar. I gave her money."

"Jeanne Cavessi was her name," the inspector said. "A stage-performer once, back in the last Napoleon's time; in these last years, a woman of the streets. She had your card--?"

"I gave it to her once," Reisden said. "To put in the mirror of her grand salon. In her palace."

"Her palace?"

"Her imaginary palace." The Mona Lisa had described it to him: the tall wrought-iron fence around the park, the gardens; the rose salon, the grande salle with the mirrors, the withdrawing salon where no one but Victor Hugo had ever been, and the fourth salon: which will be a surprise to me, it has been so long, I forget it. "I collect hallucinations; I rather liked hers."

Langelais pursed his lips. "And this Artist, Her Artist, did you collect his hallucinations too? Is that why he wrote you?"

"I have no idea why he wrote me."

Limping, the inspector led the way out of the viewing room to one of the interrogation rooms, a bare cell painted the greenish ocher favored by French bureaucracy. Through the walls Reisden heard the rumble of the Seine. The two men sat on either side of a scarred deal table. Langelais leaned his cane against the table, took off his bowler hat. The ends of the inspector's white mustache were waxed and twisted, a style military men affected, and in his buttonhole he wore a service ribbon from the campaign of 1870, forty years ago. War hero, Reisden thought; entered the police force when the Prefecture had been virtually a branch of the army; now waiting to re- tire. The murder of "Mona Lisa," street beggar, was not being handled by the Prefecture's best.

Inspector Langelais took out a handkerchief and wiped his hands, then his nose.

"Do you remember when she disappeared, Monsieur le Baron?" he asked.

"About a week ago." The Mona Lisa had been singing Aida's farewell on the steps of the railroad station: O terra addio, wringing her hands and rolling her eyes in theatrical despair. He hadn't been in the mood and had gone round by the quai rather than spend five minutes listening.

And then she hadn't been there.

"Today you received this letter?"

"Yes, by the early post."

The inspector laid the photographic copy of the letter on the scarred table, then the original beside it, in a glassine envelope. It was written on the cheap greenish notepaper that is sold by the sheet in any post office, in purple ink and an uneducated scrawl. Cher mseur le Baron de Reisden,

You like me you have lovd a Womn of Knidness Greace & Beauty She us Not Recthd the End of the Rivr war She ws Mnt t Go It is not Rit tht Mona Lisa shd be in That Plasc like any Comun Folk Ples Help

Hr Rtis "'The end of the river--'"

"Her palace was there," Reisden said. "At the end of the Seine."

"Her imaginary palace.--You knew her very well."

"Not at all."

"You knew this man, Her Artist? She had spoken of him to you?"

"No."

"Why should he write you?" Langelais asked.

Because I know what he's thinking, Reisden thought without wanting to; because I can know. "I have no idea." Painfully, with a sputtering unfamiliar pen, son Rtis had copied the engraved letters of Reisden's calling-card. "He had my card. He may have taken it when he killed her."

"'You like me, you have loved ...,'" the inspector pointed out. "He believes you knew her well enough to 'help' her. That indicates he knows you."

Reisden shrugged.

"Perhaps someone you added to your collection. Like her."

"I don't collect people."

The inspector pulled at his mustache-points. "What does he expect you to do?"

"It sounds as though he expects me to bury her."

"Why?"

"I have no idea."

The inspector tented his fingertips doubtfully, rubbing the ends together.

"She had been in the Seine for several days," Reisden said, "but her body was discovered yesterday morning and the story was in the afternoon papers. The letter came from," he picked it up and looked at the cancellation, a slightly smeared RDULOUV over a red ten-centime stamp. "From the Hôtel des Postes on the rue du Louvre. From the time-stamp, he mailed it at ten last night. Louvre is the only all-night post office. Yesterday afternoon or evening he read that her body had been found and taken to the Morgue; he had my card, which he took from her body; he immediately wrote me. The Morgue disturbs him."

"But why did he write to you, Monsieur le Baron?"

"I really have no idea."

"Perhaps you had a--particular relationship with the lady?"

He was asking if Reisden had been her client. Reisden gave him two seconds of the look one gives to an absurd inquiry, if one is Monsieur le Baron and the inquirer is only a Prefecture policeman.

"Someone must have seen this man when he bought the notepaper," Reisden said.

"How do you know he bought the notepaper when he wrote to you, Monsieur le Baron?"

"A man who writes like this is unlikely to own any."

The inspector said nothing, a tactic designed to make the interrogatee say something. Rather to his surprise, Reisden said something. "Perhaps he simply needed to talk to anyone, and my name was the first to hand. He would want to talk."

He had wanted to talk.

Langelais blew his nose again, then folded his handkerchief elaborately. "Monsieur," he said, "I am afraid I must ask you one delicate question. In the investigation of a murder, one sometimes touches on--other events. Is it true that you," he hesitated, "killed your wife?"

Reisden said nothing for a long moment. "If you mean 'killed' but not 'murdered,' yes, it is true. My wife died in an automobile accident some years ago; I was driving the car."

"But you said at the time you had murdered her?"

"At the time I felt so."

The Inspector said nothing. Reisden said nothing. Everyone wants to know why; no one will ask. Just as well.

"You were in an asylum."

"Briefly."

The two men looked at each other. Shall I show him that it bothers me, Reisden thought; shall I pretend it does not; what would the normal man do? He tried to look neither defensive nor angry, the look of a man answering a question about his tailor or glovemaker; but that was not normal either, of course.

"You understand," the inspector said finally, "one must ask."

"I understand. But I don't know who killed this woman," Reisden said. "I don't know why he wrote to me."

"Perhaps he was an acquaintance in the asylum?"

Reisden smiled wintrily. "No."

"Or a patient at Jouvet?" The inspector examined Reisden's card. Dr. the Baron Alexander von Reisden, Jouvet Medical Analyses. The card did not say that Jouvet specialized in mental disturbances; it didn't have to. Jouvet was well known.

"I own Jouvet but I don't see patients. And as far as we can tell from our files, he isn't one of ours."

"Patients see you," the inspector pointed out.

"That may be; I don't know him."

"I think you do know him," the inspector said.

The inspector let the silence go on; Reisden looked back at him with the clear steady gaze of years of practice. You think I am guilty of something, Reisden thought; and I am. But don't look at me, look for this one.

"He's committed murder," Reisden said. "He wants never to do it again but he knows what he can do and he's afraid of it. He may write again: to you, me, the papers. He will write, he will try to explain himself," he said, "because he is a mystery to himself. He isn't ordinary, he isn't normal, he doesn't know what he is. --Catch him."

Use of this excerpt from The Knowledge of Water by Sarah Smith may be made only for purposes of promoting the book, with no changes, editing or additions whatsoever, and must be accompanied by the following copyright notice: copyright ©1996 by Sarah Smith. All Rights Reserved.