Free The Alchemy of Murder by Carol McCleary Page A

irritated words bounced off their backs as they moved down the dark passage.
    “Messieurs, you are here at the bequest of the minister. I, of course, will honor his desire to have you view a suspected miasma area. However, I want it understood that you have both been warned to cover your face to protect yourselves from the miasma and have failed to do so.”
    “Thank you, Monsieur Doctor.”
    Only Roth’s sideway glance noticed that Pasteur’s quiet thanks was made with a smirk.
    The director’s concern about Pasteur’s health was, of course, false. Nothing would have pleased him more than Pasteur droping dead in the sewers, thus not only proving his theory of miasmic contagion, but ridding the medical world of its greatest critic.
    To Pasteur, the laboratory was a battleground in a war against two enemies—combating the jealousy and ignorance of the medical professional, and a fight against microbes that caused disease and destroyed millions of lives every year. In the past decade, the institute had battled microbes that caused gonorrhea, typhoid fever, leprosy, malaria, tuberculosis, cholera, pneumonia, meningitis, tetanus, anthrax, rabies, plague, and other demons. Pasteur developed vaccines to prevent some of the diseases. The war was a personal one—he lost two young daughters to microbic diseases.
    Pasteur asked Roth, “Do you remember what the Bible says about the invisible killer we hunt?”
    “I believe so. Revelations speaks of the Fourth Horseman: ‘Behold a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, hunger, and the beasts of the earth.’ The beasts of the earth are microbes.”
    “Last night, one of the radical newspapers depicted the Fourth Horseman riding through an impoverished neighborhood, cutting down poor people with a bloody scythe. Do you know whose face the horseman bore?”
    Roth shook his head, but did in fact know.
    “President Carnot. His pockets were stuffed with money from factory owners. The radicals accuse our president of masterminding the death of the poor with this contagion.”
    “Nonsense, of course.”
    “Yes, but people threatened by the contagion are willing to believe anything. Truly, the wrath prophesied by the Bible has visited us many times, spreading deadly scourges in its wake. God only knows what the world would be like if progress had not been retarded by these invading beasts. Now these creatures threaten us again.”
    “Do you think we can stop them?”
    Pasteur paused for a moment and gazed at the sewer river. “The creatures are in a struggle of survival with mankind. To defeat them we must find their Achilles heel. But we must be on our guard every step of the way. I lost Thuillier when I sent a team to study the cholera outbreak in Alexandra six years ago, hoping to stop it before the cholera took ship to Marseille. One tiny mistake and poor Thuillier was struck down by the bacteria. Mistakes are deadly. ”
    Wearing a nosegay into the sewers was not one of Dr. Pasteur’s safety precautions. Those which the director and his assistant wore were scented with perfume and a bit of alcohol, in the belief that the scent destroyed lethal vapors.
    “Medieval,” Pasteur muttered at the sight of the nosegays.
    Michel grinned when he saw the director and his assistant put on the nosegays. He and hundreds like him had spent a lifetime in the sewers without being stricken by the fumes, although he did tell the visitors to tuck their handkerchiefs around their collars. They had assumed it was to keep out the chill but soon found the real reason sewer men wore kerchiefs around their necks: Large spiders and giant centipedes clutched the ceiling and occasionally fell.
    “ Mon Dieu !” Michel stopped and looked at Roth in panic. “If the insects grow so large down here, how big are the invisible animals you are looking for?”

11
    A faint glow