Entry #8: The Thief of Faces (1911)

The Man in the Iron Mask

The Man in the Iron Mask was arrested under the name of Eustache Dauger sometime from 1669 to 1670 and tended by the same jailer for 34 years. The prisoner’s face was never seen, because it was perpetually hidden behind a black velvet mask; the term “Iron Mask” referred simply to its inviolable nature. Theories about the identity of the prisoner persisted for more than a century after his death, and they were varied and numerous, ranging from a Marshal of France to the Italian diplomat under whose name he was buried. The writer Voltaire held that it was an illegitimate half-brother of King Louis XIV, born to Louis XIII’s wife Anne of Austria by Cardinal Mazarin. Alexander Dumas expanded on this theory in his novel by making the prisoner a twin brother to the King.

By far the simplest theory was that the Man in the Iron Mask was simply one of the political prisoners known to share a prison term with Eustache Dauger. When the Bastille was stormed by revolutionaries in 1789, a skeleton was reportedly found chained to a cell wall with an iron mask on the ground next to it. An inscription identified the prisoner as Nicolas Fouquet, Marquis of Belle-Île, a former superintendent of finances jailed by Louis XIV on charges of embezzlement. However, this theory was discredited, since Dauger was known to have served as a valet to Fouquet, and the Bastille was known to have contained only a handful of forgers and lunatics when it was stormed. It is now believed that the discovery was staged to make up for this.

*             *             *

Watching London react to the twentieth century was exciting. I saw gas streetlamps replaced with electric lamps. I saw horse-drawn carriages slowly give way to motorcars. I saw the largest city in the world slowly but steadily embrace all that the twentieth century had to offer.

My own metamorphosis was equally exciting. Following my adventure at Abu Simbel, I went back to the artisans who had built the automatic Novoscope reader and had them rebuild the moving parts of the Atlantean Planar Orrery, again under the strictest of confidence that they would only tell others enough to spread the reputation of Cooper, Banks, and Mackenzie as a group with pull in the occult world. I had recovered the two orbs from the Abu Simbel catacombs, which were the truly vital components of the Orrery that gave it its magical properties. With what I remembered of its mechanical workings, the clockmaker was able to produce a mechanism that replicated the function of the Orrery admirably. The new Orrery occupied a spare room that adjoined my office. The doorway sat at the center with the large orb set into its lintel, and it was surrounded by a rotating framework of rings that held the smaller orb. The mechanism was controlled with a panel of numbered dials, rather than the globe of the original, which enabled me to enter latitude and longitude coordinates straight from the Novoscope. There was also a clockwork timer built into the mechanism that could automatically disengage the connection behind me and re-establish it after a predetermined interval, usually a few days, which allowed me to return easily to my office after a mission without leaving an open channel that an intruder might exploit.

Unfortunately, I must have gotten something wrong in my recollection of the design, because as superbly crafted and exquisitely balanced as it was, the Orrery no longer was as precise in its destination as it had been that first time. When the Orrery was helping me reach my office from its hiding place, it had somehow reached into my mind and found the location I was trying to access, but that ability was now gone. The new Orrery would connect me to a door in the rough vicinity of the location I dialed into the control panel, but whether I appeared in the same room or the same city was a matter of luck. Of course, I was hardly in a position to split hairs on the issue of travel; no matter how precise, travel using the Orrery was still far more convenient and economical than paying for steamship passage.

When I arrived at the office one morning, I saw a slip of paper hanging from the Novoscope mechanism printed with the time, distance, and bearing of a relic event. Something must have happened while I was asleep. I locked the office door and took the slip to a world map on the wall of the Novoscope room. I plotted the event’s location on the map, which appeared to be in the middle of Paris, and my dead reckoning calculation confirmed it. I dialed the coordinates into the Orrery, and the orb moved into position to connect the Orrery’s doorway with one near the location of the event. I grabbed my attaché case full of useful relics and a stash of French francs from my money box, and I stepped through the portal to Paris.

I came out onto a lovely day in the Tuilerie Gardens and witnessed a scene entirely devoid of chaotic uproar. People were walking among the statues and flower beds. I think I even heard an accordion somewhere, although that might only have been my imagination. I stopped into a nearby café and bought a newspaper and a cup of tea, and I perused the front page in case last night’s event made the headlines, but no such luck. Whatever the relic was, its arrival on the world stage had gone largely unnoticed so far.

As I sat at my sidewalk table at the café, I looked around the area for anything that might have triggered a relic. Of course, the Musée du Louvre was right across the street, right in the middle of my area of interest and full of artistic treasures from throughout history, but it was still a huge building. Any of the paintings in it could have become a relic in the middle of the night without anyone noticing, and if some night watchman witnessed the Venus de Milo moving or something, he might have gone home without telling anyone.

I finished my tea, left some money for the garcon, and headed over to the Louvre, which was closed for the day to members of the public. I knocked on the door until someone opened it.

„Le musée est fermé.“

„Ah, bonjour. Parlez-vous anglais?“

“Of course.”

“Excellent. May I speak to the museum administrator, please?”

“May I ask what this is about?”

“I’m investigating a matter of some delicacy, best discussed in private.” I showed him the Pinkerton Badge. “Can you fetch the administrator, please?”

“Very well. One moment.” He grudgingly let me in and went through a door marked “Private.” After a few minutes, an older man in a nicer jacket came to greet me.

“Good day, monsieur. I am the museum administrator. I was told you had a delicate matter to discuss.”

“Yes. I received word of an incident that occurred here last night. Have you heard about anything unusual taking place here lately?”

“I have heard of nothing like this. Where did you hear such news?”

“I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to discuss my sources. Was there anyone in the museum overnight?”

“Yes, the night guards patrol the museum after hours. If an incident occurred, they will know.”

“May I speak with them?”

“Certainly. Follow me.” He led me away from the public area of the museum and into a cramped office, where a man in a guard uniform sat behind a desk filling out paperwork. The two of them spoke in rapid French for a moment, and then the guard gave me a look that implied he had just scraped me off his boots.

“What do you want?”

“I’ve been led to understand that something out of the ordinary took place here last night. Have you had any reports of unusual activity?”

“Why? What have you heard?”

“Only that something odd took place here last night.”

“There was nothing odd here! Everything is normal! Who are you? Are you from a newspaper?” He seemed defensive. I had clearly struck a nerve. I decided to try and play a more sinister angle. Maybe I could get him to reveal some details about the event.

“No, I’m not with the paper. I represent a private firm. My employers sent me to investigate the goings-on here. Are you sure that everything is normal?”

“Absolutely sure. We will hear back from the photographers soon, and then we will put these rumors to rest.”

“You had better tell me what happened from the beginning.” I could see the conflict in his face. He clearly had a problem that needed solving, but he didn’t want to show weakness to a stranger, especially a nosy American. “Look, I’m not here for anyone’s head. I was sent to help you solve your problem. The more you tell me, the more I can do for you.”

He still wasn’t pleased about having to deal with an interloper, but he relented. “This morning, one of our resident artists found a painting to be missing. We believe that it was taken to be photographed. We sent a runner to the photographers earlier, and he should be back soon.”

“Can you take me to the place where the painting ought to be?”

“Perhaps later.”

Just then, a young man came crashing into the office, out of breath. I couldn’t quite make out what he was saying between his gasping and my loose grasp of the language, but it seemed that the painting wasn’t at the photographers after all. The guard chief called the administrator into his office, and after a heated and shocked discussion, the administrator went to his own office and collapsed into his chair and buried his face in his hands. One of the day guards was sent to the gendarmerie to inform them of the theft.

As the police filtered into the building, I followed the guard chief to the spot where the missing painting used to be. He led me to a gap between two paintings, occupied only by four metal pegs.

“Can you tell me what painting was stolen?”

“Of course. La Joconde.”

“Excuse me?”

“The Mona Lisa.”

So I wasn’t hearing things. Someone had used a relic to steal the Mona Lisa, probably the single most famous painting in the world. I quickly swept the area with the Sextant, but there was no lingering aura.

“I assume your night guards are beyond reproach.”

“Naturellement, but the police are talking to them anyway.”

“Of course. Were there any other museum staff here last night?”

“I do not think so.”

“Hmm. Well, it wasn’t going to be easy, was it? Thank you very much for your time. If I make any progress, I will keep you and the administrator informed.”

“Merci, monsieur.” The guard chief went back to his post, and I started my investigation. The best thing I could do was to let the police do their work and keep myself aware of their activities, but if they found the culprit first, the relic might disappear into the French legal system, and innocent people might be hurt. I would have to pay close attention to the official investigation and be ready to leap into action once evidence of the relic turned up.

I wandered around the Louvre, keeping an eye as the police took fingerprints and conducted interviews with the museum staff. Suddenly, there was a hue and cry, and policemen began swarming in one direction like a school of uniformed mackerel. I ran to keep up, flashing the Pinkerton Badge every so often to keep them from obstructing me, until I arrived at a storage closet. One of the constables had found a body, bound at the wrists and stabbed in the heart. I took a discreet look with the Sextant, and there was the clear imprint of a relic on the corpse. A relic may not have killed this man, but one had definitely been used on him.  

A museum employee was summoned, and he identified the man as Vincenzo Peruggia, a fellow employee. I ran back to the front office and requested everything from the museum’s records about Peruggia, looking for the man’s home address. I quickly copied it down and rushed there. Hopefully, I could find some clue in his lodgings that could lead me to the man who killed him and stole the Mona Lisa. Perhaps they knew each other and had planned the theft together. I pictured the two of them meeting in secret to plan the robbery, and then the thief killing his inside man to avoid having to split the loot. Peruggia could have discovered the theft in progress and been killed while trying to alert the guards, but he would have had no reason to be there at night. This felt like an inside job.

I found my first evidence of the nature of the relic when I arrived at the building where Peruggia had a room. I found the building’s caretaker and asked him if he had seen Peruggia in anyone’s company, but he hadn’t seen him with anyone. However, he did remember that signor Peruggia had seemed in a particular hurry when he came home early that morning. Which I thought was odd, since he’d been cooling in a broom closet at the Louvre at the time.

Interesting. Someone had impersonated Peruggia to gain access to the museum after hours. All the more reason to search Peruggia’s flat for potential evidence. I showed the caretaker the Pinkerton Badge, and he was only too willing to unlock signor Peruggia’s flat so I could have a look around. Once I had the place to myself, I scanned the room with the Sextant, and I found a strong aura in a locked trunk. I looked around the room for something with which to pry the trunk open, but I had no such luck. Ironically, the living quarters of a thief seemed to contain little in the way of breaking and entering tools. I made do with a candlestick and a small box as a makeshift hammer and anvil to smash the padlock, and after maybe fifteen minutes of effort, I opened the latch and lifted the lid. I got a glimpse of an enigmatic smile, and then I felt an arm clamp around my neck like a boa constrictor, and then the room went black.

When I came to, I was tied to a chair, and a man was standing over me that looked an awful lot like Vincenzo Peruggia. He had opened my case, and he was admiring some of the relics. He especially seemed to be admiring the Rod of Asclepius.

“I must say, signor, that you have an impressive collection here. It would be an honor to add it to my own.”

“You stole the Mona Lisa. I’m not going to let you steal anything else.”

“My friend, I have stolen many things. This is far from the first,” he said as he admired the Rod of Asclepius, “and it will not be the last.” He set down the Rod, and he took my hat off and put in on his own head.

“It doesn’t fit you,” I said.

“Don’t worry. It will.”

He took a metal mask out of the trunk, and he carried it toward me slowly. He looked like he was trying to scare me. Frankly, he was doing well. The mask looked like some kind of helmet, barely big enough to fit over my head. The inside of the mask had a gag, which would make it impossible to cry out and difficult even to breathe. Not that I would want to breathe too much, since the smell was enough to raise bile in my throat. It smelled like the real Vincenzo Peruggia had died with the helmet still on his head, and he was probably the latest in a long line of victims. With my limbs bound to a chair in a dead man’s apartment, there was less and less I could do to keep myself from joining them.

The thief fastened the mask around my head, forcing the gag between my teeth. As the clasp closed, I had a vision of a young man in beggar’s rags having a black velvet bag forced over his head in a palace bedroom, while another rather similar young man in rich clothes and an older man in red robes looked on. As visions and emotions flashed across my mind’s eye, I realized what this relic was.

I remembered the story of the Man in the Iron Mask. It was one of the great unsolved mysteries of the 18^th century. He had been a political prisoner with his features permanently hidden beneath a velvet hood. There was never a real iron mask until the storming of the Bastille, when the revolutionaries found one in a prison cell next to a skeleton. Somehow, the mask had been imbued with the power to make one man the exact image of another, possibly by the belief of the revolutionaries in the duplicity of the monarchy. Once the mask was locked over someone’s face, his captor would be transformed into him, with enough memories to be able to impersonate him even to his own family. The effect would be undone if the captor removed the mask himself, but if the victim was killed, the change would be permanent.

Posing as me, the thief would be able to walk right out of this apartment and flee Paris unmolested with his ill-gotten goods in tow, along with my entire case full of relics. If the mask transferred the right memories to the thief, he would be able to infiltrate Cooper, Banks, and Mackenzie and help himself to whatever relics he wanted. However, if my guess was correct, the thief’s own greed would be his undoing.

I watched through the mask’s eye holes as the thief’s features twisted and warped, until his face was a duplicate of my own. He admired his new look in a mirror on the wall, taking a moment to adjust the angle of my hat on his head. He then turned to me and drew a knife from his belt, approaching me with an eye to do to me what he had done to poor Vincenzo Peruggia. As he neared, though, he faltered, closing his eyes as though beset by a terrible headache. His brow furrowed, and his eyes closed tighter as he dropped the knife and sank to the floor clutching his head. By absorbing my memories, he had also acquired the understanding of the Apothecary and its relics that allowed me to do my job, and the knowledge was driving him insane. I hadn’t seen a man in that state since 1863, when the Ottoman privateers pursuing us for the Apothecary pried it open and peered into the very heart of it.

I rocked the chair back and forth, eventually managing to tip it over. My vision blurred somewhat as the mask rang against the floor, but I regained my senses and worked my way to the knife the thief had dropped. I got it into one hand, and I was slowly able to cut my bonds without drawing too much of my own blood. As soon as my hands were free, I got the infernal mask off of my head and rose to my feet, plucking my hat from the thief’s head as he writhed in agony.

“Signor Peruggia, or whatever your name is, I’m afraid that you chose the wrong man to impersonate. You’re not the only man to have received the knowledge you now possess, and every one of them but me was killed or driven mad by it.”

He looked up at me with abject terror in his eyes. He scrambled into a far corner of the room, and when he got to his feet, he had a revolver in his hand. His hand was shaky, but his aim was steady enough. “What manner of man are you? Are you some sort of demon?”

If he pulled that trigger, there was no telling what he would hit, but it was likely enough to be me that I didn’t want to take the chance. I tried to keep talking as I felt among my relics for the one I needed. “I am no demon. I’m just a man with a job to do. Right now, my job is to retrieve that mask. I don’t want to have to hurt you, sir.” As surreptitiously as I could, I pointed the Tesla resonator at the revolver, pressed the first control, noted the position of the needle, adjusted the knob to match, and pressed the second control. I heard the snap and tinkle of breaking metal, and the weapon fell to pieces in his hands.

He stared in shock at the destroyed revolver for only a second, and then panic took hold and he lunged at me. However, I still had the knife that he had meant for me, so I was able to get him sitting calmly on the floor. After a few minutes, he had calmed down enough that he was willing to talk to me. I promised him that if he would only tell me how he had come by the mask and to what purpose he had put it, I might be persuaded to help him escape his predicament. Once he became convinced that his sanity and future lay in my hands, he began to tell his story.

As he had said earlier, the Mona Lisa was far from the first thing he had ever stolen. He had been a small-time cutpurse in Paris in the early 19^th century, before I was even born. He spotted the Iron Mask in an old revolutionary museum, and he stole it that very night. He had been fascinated by the stories told about the Mask, especially Dumas’ recently published version, and it seemed likely to me that it was his near manic belief in its invented history that had caused the Mask to manifest as a relic.

He told me that he first noticed the effects of the Mask when he used it to silence a man whose house he was robbing, and he suddenly found himself transforming into the victim. After he had finished divesting the man’s home of its valuables, he removed the mask and fled the scene, and after he was well away, he found that he had reverted to the face he had been born with. This incident led to a string of experimentation with the powers of the Mask, and once he discovered that he could keep someone’s face permanently if they died while wearing the Mask, the string of experiments turned to a string of murders.

He impersonated people to gain access to their valuables. He did it to undo the effects of his own aging. He did it to usurp their place in the world, to take over their lives and loves. Sometimes he did it out of sheer vanity, for no other reason than that they had a face that he liked and wanted for himself. He had done it so many times that he no longer remembered his given name. As he persisted in this way of life, the transformations began to take a greater and greater toll on him. No matter how young a face he stole, they all aged eventually, and more quickly than was natural, as if his very soul was rejecting the changes being forced upon it. The use of the Mask had started as a curiosity, and then it had become a compulsion, but it was now a vital necessity.

As I saw him quivering and blubbering on the floor before me, I saw in him a twisted reflection of myself, and not only because he looked exactly like me at the time. This man had fallen under the sway of a relic when I was still in short pants, and now he was a mere shell of a man, little more than a gibbering wreck. I used relics all the time, and by all the evidence I would outlive the thief by a long way. I could only hope that I wouldn’t turn into this myself in a hundred years’ time. When I looked at him, I could only think that there I went but for the grace of God, if there was even such a thing.

“There you are, then,” he said at last. “I’ve told you everything about me. Now, what do you intend to do?”

I couldn’t simply turn him over to the police, not with him still wearing my face. Besides, I couldn’t afford to be known as the man who recovered the Mona Lisa. I needed to remain in the shadows to do my job. On the other hand, letting him go unpunished for his numerous crimes was out of the question. And finally, I wanted to find some way to clear his mind of the Mask’s influence. Not only did I need to wipe any relic-related knowledge from his mind, but I also couldn’t bear to let him suffer the effects of a relic that had so polluted his soul, no matter what he may have done to deserve it. No one deserved such a fate, not even the most twisted criminal.

“First things first,” I said. “I need to try to erase from your mind the knowledge you have taken from me. Tell me, what have you learned about these objects?” I indicated the relics he had laid out.

“I don’t know,” he said. “The knowledge is all jumbled up. I can know things if I am presented with context for them, but I can’t simply recall it on demand.”

“What can you tell me about this?” I said, showing him the Rod of Asclepius.

“It carries a healing energy that repairs wounds. Can it heal me?”

“No. This item only works for physical wounds. I have nothing here that will surely cure you, but there is one that has a chance.” I reached in and drew the Titania’s Kiss from my waistcoat.

“The fairy stone?” he said. “Do you think it could work?”

“I think it could work, but I can promise nothing. However, this option comes with a catch.”

“Name it. I’ll do anything.”

“While you sleep, you must do your best to hold these thoughts in your mind: you must forget all that you have learned about these objects, and you must return what you have stolen. I don’t care how or when, but you must make amends for what you have done. Do you understand?”

He gulped and wiped the sweat from his brow. “What if I don’t? What if I forget?”

“You won’t forget, because I’ll be watching you.”

He nodded, lying on the floor and closing his eyes. I took out my watch and pressed the stone against his forehead, keeping it there for twelve minutes. Twelve minutes of contact with the stone would send him to dance with the fairies for nearly two years. I could only hope that it would be enough to wipe myself from his mind entirely without rendering him entirely non compos mentis. Of course, if it did, I told myself, it would be no great loss to the world, but it would be neater all around if it didn’t. After twelve minutes passed, I packed up my case of relics, found a spare piece of sacking for the Iron Mask, and left for my appointment with the orrery, leaving the nameless thief asleep on the floor of his stolen flat.

I got back to work at my office at Cooper, Banks and Mackenzie, and two years later, I picked up a paper to catch up on the news from the continent. After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, the Mona Lisa had finally been recovered and returned to the Louvre. According to the article, a man named Vincenzo Peruggia had been caught trying to sell the painting to a gallery in Florence. When questioned, he claimed that he had stolen the painting to bring her back home to Italy. He was hailed as a patriot and given an 18-month prison sentence, but he served barely half of that. He later married and had three children.

It wasn’t necessarily the ending I would have chosen for him, but it seemed right. The thief had been given a second chance at life, more than most people got. Somehow, I found it fitting that a man without a name would eventually be buried under the name of a formerly unknown Italian, exactly as had the wearer of the original Iron Mask.

I eventually took a trip to Italy to meet with Signor Peruggia. He clearly had no memory of me, and he still had my face, though it had been altered by wrinkles and laugh lines. It seemed that the knowledge he had taken from me was gone from his mind and back where it belonged. With any luck, he had forgotten about his past lives as well and completely regressed to the Peruggia identity. As I finished checking up on him and bid him farewell, I only hoped that someone someday would take the same care with me.