Karl Marx Private Eye by Jim Feast

Author:Jim Feast
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PM Press

Chapter 10

Another utensil every detective must keep at all times is a pocket telescope. That along with a derringer, which Sherlock’s father had gotten him for his birthday and which he kept in his inner pocket.

Sherlock brought his telescope into play as he lay prone like one of the snipers in the British army display in the toyshop window, flat on the top of the pump room, gazing clear-eyed at a curtain across the way.

He hoped but could hardly bet on the toyshop’s second-floor drapery being drawn back to reveal the room’s secret treasures, but, as a rather minimal compensation, and depending on a third must-have item in the detective’s toolkit, he could jot down on his notepad who was in attendance at this after-hours, sub-rosa soiree.

Once François had descended to his shop, Sherlock moved his viewer downward and ticked off the guests as they walked in. All of them, excepting two outliers, had something in common. Yvette, another French maid, and three ill-dressed workmen—one of whom he recognized as a gardener and all of whom he gathered were from Alsace-Lorraine—were French. The first outlier, who didn’t fit at all, was Miss Chung, the laundry girl. Then he saw a second odd duck approaching and let out to himself, “What, oh? Here’s Swandra approaching. What is she doing mixed with all these Frenchies?”

After everyone was accounted for and the shop’s gas globes were turned off, François led them upstairs for their mysterious conclave.

Patience was the detective’s cardinal virtue. Stolidly, Sherlock sat, eye glued to a blank wall. Stuffiness was in his favor, he reflected. After a few minutes, Yvette, who apparently didn’t appreciate the closeness of the room, pulled back the curtain and raised the sash.

Sherlock had trained himself to engage in the instant mind-plate capture of a scene that appeared for a flash of a second, in this instance, for as long as it took to open the curtains, raise the window, and slide those curtains back together.

What happened was a double unveiling. With her pert face turned, all unknowing, toward him, Yvette yanked back the drapes while simultaneously, as he now saw revealed, François was doing the same with a tarpaulin on the floor. Sherlock saw a large cover, which took up most of the center of the room, being pulled away. That tarp was being pulled off just as Yvette opened the curtains. Under the floor covering was a vast diorama of Paris.

Sherlock first recognized the spire of Notre Dame like a single digit pointing up from the Île-de-France. There was the snaky Seine and the colossal hills of Montmartre and Belleville. But it was a city sadly littered with cotton balls, red tissue paper, and debris: a recreation of the battles during the last days of the Commune. The streets were filled with smaller versions of the tin soldiers seen downstairs, the National Guards trying to repel the Versailles troops from behind improvised barricades. The cotton balls were smoke from artillery pieces, the tissue paper sheets of flame around burning buildings, and the debris from edifices shattered or going down.

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