Chapel Noir (42 page)

“It is where all Paris goes to see the dead,” she corrected me, “as all Paris goes to Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower and the World Exposition and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Do you see yet?”

“Not yet, but . . . All Paris does not go to the rue des Moulins.”

“All Paris that matters does. The men who run the city and the country and the world.”

“But the catacombs are not places that draw the public.”

“Not yet.” Irene smiled bitterly. “Give the Parisians time to realize that these gruesome sites are worthy of exploitation. The Rothschild maps and papers indicate that most of these are not the usual Christian catacombs dating back to Roman days. They contain bones from cemeteries displaced by the city’s growing from a few hundred thousand to two millions of people in this century. These dead date back only to the seventeenth century. Still, they are the dead, they are French, and all Paris hastens to morbid occupations during this last decade of our century. Perhaps the taint of fresh blood in the catacombs will finally bring them the public recognition they deserve.”

“It’s true that the bloody and sensational attract public attention,” I admitted. “They always have.”

“But the bloody and the sensational have never been so much a part of the public consciousness, thanks to newspapers that trumpet the worst on every corner.”

“The newspapers do not invent the atrocities they report.”

She eyed me with a glance as challenging as forged steel until I was forced to temper my opinion.

“Some of them do . . . invent, I suppose. Sometimes.”

“More likely foment than invent,” she conceded. “Were people not so greedy for news of other people’s misfortunes, there would not be money to be made in sensational journals.”

“The morgue is free,” I pointed out.

“Yes, and what began as a plan to aid in identifying unclaimed bodies—often
les inconnus de la Seine—has
become a permanent exhibition of the macabre. At least London has no such tradition.”

“I can’t imagine the British permitting such a thing. Too many of the bodies are unclothed, though that fact makes the ones which are presented in clothing so much more interesting.”

Irene muffled a laugh in the cup of her hand, incidentally warming her writing fingers. “You are right, Pink. When it comes to naked death, the British would object more to the impropriety of the nakedness than the morbidity of gazing at corpses. But the French . . . they would find some wisps of garments even more intriguing. And the Americans . . . well, they would be appalled by both.”

“You realize that your summation of the British character, which I find so annoying, has exactly described Nell. She is quite agreeable to gruesome ghost stories, but appalled by the lust for life.”

“I admit that I am surprised by how well she handles sheer grue, better than I. Perhaps I have more imagination than she. As for the lust for life, isn’t that something that most women are encouraged to forsake?”

“Most ladies,” I said disparagingly.

“No doubt that is why you work so hard to be taken for anything but. Yet you are as conventional in your way as Nell.”

“How can two women of such vastly different experience and roles in life be in any way similar?” I demanded.

“Because you are both more than you appear to be. But that has always been the weakness, and power, of women. Now. Watch while I draw the final lines on our map.”

She did so, effectively ending my arguments because I was so intrigued by her midnight mapmaking session.

I watched the straight, angled line she drew north from the Eiffel Tower, using the edge of Krafft-Ebing’s
Psychopathia Sexualis
as a ruler! I frowned at where the line ended, somewhere near the rue Pigalle, beyond the Paris Opéra.

She then lifted her full dressing-gown sleeve and carefully positioned the book at the other side of map. She dipped the pen a last time, shook off the excess ink, and drew a line from the Paris Morgue that met the end of the other angled line.

“You see?”

“I see you have created a triangle with a base between the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame, or the morgue and somewhere south of Montmartre.”

“The mount of the martyrs,” she mused, “where all the raucous night life of Paris cavorts until dawn, watching the shocking cancan dancers and drinking absinthe. And where have you been in all this?”

“Where you have gone. And Nell.” I blinked. “Nell accompanied you to the tower and the nearby catacombs, and to the morgue. I went with you to the tower and the nearby World Exposition grounds, and to the catacombs near Notre Dame. How odd. There’s a symmetry. . . . And why have you taken only one of us to certain locations?”

“I wished to find out if I was being followed, or one of you.”

“All along? We have been followed everywhere?”

“Not at first. But later, everywhere. I believe so.”

“I cannot believe that anyone would follow Nell. Or me, for that matter. And have you concluded who was being followed?”

She nodded. “I.”

I sat back, out of ideas, a rare state for me. I am extremely quick-witted. I have to be in my profession.

“Well. Nell must be right! It must be that Holmes man. He is oddly taken by you. I noticed he kept one eye on you during the entire interrogation of James Kelly.”

“You have swallowed Nell’s romantic delusion, I see. The man is all brain and no blood. I assure you that if Mr. Sherlock Holmes is keeping one eye on anyone, it is not for reasons of admiration, but of mistrust. He does not tolerate meddlers, as he calls us, and only permitted our presence because our disguise conveniently set off Kelly’s mania.” She smiled. “He may also realize that he is almost as much out of his depth in this case as Nell is.”

She tapped the pen nib on the apex of the triangle. “Is this not where sits the house we all have in common located in the rue des Moulins?”

I leaned over the map, staring. “I am new to Paris. I am not yet acquainted with all the streets and their locale. You are saying that the bordello is near the apex.”

She tapped the nib on a site half an inch below the apex. “Here. In the ninth arrondissement. The twenty arrondissements of Paris are laid out so artfully, like the concentric circles of a snail’s shell, with the smallest numbers starting at the center of the city, then rotating outwardly in order around that hub. The English would never use such a scheme. But we are interested in the direct geometry of logic, not the circuitous paths of art. And that is what makes the murders and events so interesting. This double murder at the
hôtel de rendezvous
did not have any connection to a catacomb and did not result in a display of the bodies at the Paris Morgue.”

“You believe that the display of the bodies is as much a part of the crime as the killing?”

“I believe that there is a ritual behind them, and behind that ritual, however brutal, a reason. Perhaps the first bodies were intended to be displayed elsewhere, but you found them too soon.”

I shivered again. “You mean that the killer was still lurking in the house when I opened that door.”

She nodded.

“Then it might not have been James Kelly! Yet he is mad and just the sort of man Krafft-Ebing would find a likely candidate.”

“For the Ripper. Perhaps this Paris killer is not the Ripper.”

I rubbed my aching temples. “Then Sherlock Holmes has Jack the Ripper in custody for the crimes committed by someone entirely different?”

“Perhaps. We have read the Book. We have learned such killers are commonplace, or at least not uncommon. And here is where the jackal press has worked to conceal rather than reveal. On the one hand, any public atrocity gruesome enough is game for trumpeting to the world. On the other, should an Eminence be involved, or the crime be too obscure, it is buried from view like the victims. We get a very select view of things, only what the authorities wish the public to know.” She sat back. “We must revisit the scene of a crime. I am convinced that the game is not over yet.”

“When?”

“Now.”

“Why are you letting me accompany you?”

“Because you will be useful later.”

“Is that all?” I felt another chill, not from the night air, but from the implacable intent of this woman. I had only glimpsed that steel of soul in one other person: Sherlock Holmes, oddly enough. One was an artist, one a scientist, and yet they shared the same will and dreadful purity of purpose.

“Is not the chance of saving one life from a horrible death enough?” she asked me now.

“Yes.” But I wished to be regarded as an equal in the hunt. Of course, Irene Adler Norton had no more idea than Sherlock Holmes or Buffalo Bill Cody that I was a hunter also, and worthy of their company.

“I will go as well,” said a voice behind us.

Penelope Huxleigh stood at the open door of her chamber, already dressed in some plain dark stuff. I realized that she had been awake and listening to us for a long time.

Irene stood up. “Capital, Nell! Bring your chatelaine. I will fetch my pistol and dress at once.”

“What will I carry?” I asked.

“Your wits about you,” Irene said. “And I will lend you my lead-headed cane for the rest.”

41.
The French Connection

Once he said that reding a description of the tortures visited upon their victims by the Red Indians had tempted them to imitate them
.
—
RICHARD VON KRAFFT-EBING,
PSYCHOPATHIA SEXUALIS

I was so angry that I had been left to sleep, supposedly, while Irene made maps and Elizabeth made herself a part of our company, that I did not even object when Irene decreed that we all must dress in male garb.

“As long as there is a pocket for my chatelaine,” I said stiffly.

“Oh, Nell,” Elizabeth said, “men have ever so many more pockets than women. You could carry three chatelaines.”

“One is sufficient.”

Our dressing session, and my redressing one, was interesting, to say the least.

Our pantaloons and stockings fit under the coarse, uncomfortable trousers Irene produced, and she permitted us to wear our walking boots, which she said were not that much different from men’s shoes.

I kept my corset and camisole on, though she and Elizabeth used only camisoles under . . . well, what can I say? She felt that men’s white starched shirt collars would be both too noisy and too visible for our uses, so we were given dark sailors’ jerseys to wear, which required pulling over our heads. Hers and Elizabeth’s were part of her fencing wardrobe. I thought I recognized mine from Godfrey’s long-ago impersonation of a seaman during our Monaco adventure.

We were short a jacket, for Irene owned only one man’s suit and the short Eton-style jacket she produced fit Elizabeth and not me. I was permitted to wear a mock-mannish plaid wool jacket from my own walking suit. Mufflers, caps, and hats finished off the ensembles, and a more pitiful trio I have never viewed in a full-length pier glass before.

“It will be darker outside,” Irene said, donning black-leather gloves and pulling a peaked cap low over her eyes.

At least all our hair was decently up, though our headgear completely obscured it, contrary to our previous guise of fallen women, where our hair assumed the same condition. Irene adjusted Elizabeth’s bowler lower over her ears and jammed down my tweed cap known as a deerstalker as well while pulling up my muffler, until only my nose tip and eyes peeked between louring barriers of wool plaid.

“Remember,” she urged, “stride. Step wide. And do not bunch together like geese, but rather strut like ganders. You fear nothing in the night.”

I feared a great deal in the night, but I feared being usurped in my place as Irene’s companion in crime-solving even more. How this brash young American girl had wormed her way so deeply into our alliance, presumed Pinkerton or not, I cannot say. If only Godfrey were here to make a trio instead of this immoral upstart! He would provide the strength and sagacity that only a man can offer. And then, well, then I thought of Quentin. Surely a man who had performed government service in the most wild and treacherous outposts of the British Empire, upon which even the sun feared to set, surely he could have provided the aid we might need, not a green girl of uncertain history and proven frailty.

Yet Irene had some reason for including her in our expedition. “Because I can use you,” she had said, her voice chilly, as if she felt Elizabeth might be one to use her instead, if she could.

But that must be my imagination! I am much troubled by imagination in one instance only. I always imagine the worst. In this case, I felt Irene was rushing in all directions without a calming influence. Godfrey’s, or mine.

James Kelly—debased creature!—was in the hands of the French, who are better at locking up madmen than almost anyone, as they have so many. Jack the Ripper would be Frenchified, a fate worse than death in my opinion.

So this outing was nothing more than a wild-goose chase, Irene’s abjurations for us to act like ganders to the contrary.

I scratched the rough wool collar at my neck. Men wore a great deal of coarse wool apparently. This was good for the sheep farmers of Shropshire, no doubt, but not for more tender skin.

I took a step, repelled when the thick fabric between my limbs rubbed together, almost hobbling me. Dreadful! No wonder men like Kelly went insane, walking around garbed like this all day.

Still, if Pink . . . Elizabeth, that is, could do it, so could I!

“Ready?” Irene asked.

We answered together, like soldiers, then glared at each other.

I was pleased to see Elizabeth’s shoulders twitch in her woolen jacket. She scratched her nose above the dark muffler, and then at her leg. We were as ready as geese in gander’s clothing ever could be. Irene led the way down the back stairs, and tonight we encountered no one.

A service entry opened on an alley-courtyard. The mist lapped at the stoop.

“Careful!” Irene whispered. “There’s a high step down, remember?”

The surrounding stonework shone as if sweating in the muted gaslight. It did not so much rain in Paris as drizzle, and the night was a blanket of invisible dampness.

Irene handed me her cane. I recognized the carved amber dragon’s head—Godfrey’s sword-stick! Even as my gloved hand wrapped around it, I felt faintly ill to think that Godfrey was out in the wild world without this form of defense. Surely we were safer in Paris.

“Do not touch pavement with the sticks until we have passed the watcher on the avenue.”

I had forgotten about the sinister figure Irene had pointed out earlier to Elizabeth. She stepped forward at a brisk but silent pace. I felt like a child jumping over puddles when I matched my gait to hers, but our pace was so swift and businesslike that within a minute we were turning into the street onto which the hotel faced. Looking neither right nor left, with Elizabeth and I paired behind Irene’s lead, we moved past the hotel’s raked five-story wings and into the light of the entry façade, with its flaring exterior side lamps and the glow of chandeliers within.

Here we were able to hail a cab, or Irene was, with a brusque upward signal of her hand.

The clop of the horse’s hooves as we wheeled away was as shocking as sudden applause on that empty street.

Irene turned to peer out the tiny, book-sized rear window. “No vehicle follows us. We have eluded our pursuer.”

“Your
pursuer,” Elizabeth said, careful not to raise her voice so the driver up top would hear feminine tones issuing from his three masculine passengers.

Irene, of course, could speak in a booming basso if she chose, but neither Elizabeth nor I were equipped to be convincing male impersonators, save by the dark of the moon.

“My pursuer is your pursuer now,” Irene observed.

“Where do we go?” I asked.

“Back to the rue des Moulins.”

“We would never pass muster as customers there,” I objected. “It is too well lit inside.”

“I do not intend to go inside,” Irene said in her deepest contralto, “I wish to go beyond it a good ways, but on the same axis.”

“Why—?” Elizabeth asked in a husky whisper.

“I wish to find another disturbed wine cellar, and perhaps another scene of a crime.”

“Why? Jack the Ripper is captured.”

Irene was silent as we jostled over damp stones that made a slight sucking sound under our spinning wheels, like sticking plaster being pulled from a wound.

“Baron Rothschild,” Irene finally answered, “had said that anything he could provide was at my disposal. I sent for maps of Paris days ago.”

“We did not see them arrive,” I noted suspiciously.

“I did not wish to be premature, but I have never been satisfied by the condition of the wine cellar beneath the brothel.”

“It was dark, damp, dirty, and full of dusty bottles and smoky-smelling wooden casks,” I enumerated with some heat. Albeit whispered. “A typical wine cellar.”

“Yes . . .” she agreed slowly enough to tacitly disagree.

“It did connect to the sewer,” Elizabeth pointed out with gusto. “I have always found that deliciously interesting. Is that what intrigues you, Irene?”

“Yes. Except that I don’t think what we glimpsed was part of the infamous sewers of Paris.”

“Oh!” Elizabeth sounded bereft. “If Jack the Ripper had been using the sewers of Paris, it would have been so . . . dramatic.”

“Jack the Ripper was dramatic enough with his vanishing act in the byways of Whitechapel. But I admit that Paris is as intriguing a city underground as it is above ground. Those who excavate for the new underground train system in London may not like what they dig up. If I have calculated correctly, on a street near the Parc Monceau we will find another oddly altered cellar. I admit that mathematics is not my forte, although I have a certain flair for the merciless logic of music. If I have not done my sums properly, this expedition is useless. I can only hope that my formula will prove accurate.”

The carriage lurched forward, then back, in that time-tested motion that indicates arrival by putting passengers’ stomachs into a semblance of seasickness.

Irene hopped down to the street and drew a five-franc coin from her waistcoat pocket, which she tossed up at the driver, who caught it as it flashed into his upraised hand. It was astounding what skills being an opera singer had given Irene. I fully believe she could have become a sharpshooter like Annie Oakley, should she wish to. Perhaps it was all those trouser roles she had played that suited her dark soprano voice.

Even Elizabeth seemed struck mute by her coin trick.

It was, of course, a completely man-about-town gesture. That was why Irene did it, as part of her role, not from any personal need to show off. So few understood that about a consummate performer: the individual is subsumed into the part and then into the whole of the production. Irene only played the prima donna when she was cast—or had cast herself—in the role.

Once the cab had clattered off in search of another fare, and I’m sure it would be a long one, Irene’s jaunty air vanished. She eyed the empty street.

“I am hoping for another innocent-looking entry to the lower levels,” Irene said. “Let us walk and look high and low. Mostly low. Looking tipsy would be useful, as well.”

She lurched into a shambling gait, still in full stride, swaggering from one side of the street to another, stumbling into doorways and testing them for entry.

Tipsy. I watched Elizabeth follow in Irene’s footsteps, so to speak, but in another direction. She was most unconvincing and looked disabled rather than drunk.

I attempted no such nonsense. I would be the sober friend hoping to see these two tipplers home.

We were in luck that the traffic on this street was scarce. Residents kept their noses indoors.

One of Elizabeth’s more dramatic but pathetic lurches brought her across my path, where I “steadied” her. Him. I clapped him hard upon the back. “Steady, fellow,” I grumbled in as low a voice as I could muster. “Do you miss the warmer work inside that
maison?”
I whispered, as she straightened at my command.

“Warmer indeed, Nell,” she responded with a disgraceful wink. “I almost hope that Irene doesn’t find a path to the chill cellars below.”

I pushed her away in disgust, as my role called for. I began to see the attraction of pretending to be someone other than oneself. It excused a purely honest reaction that must be stifled and concealed in polite society.

We heard the sound of approaching steps.

“Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques, “Irene
began singing in a tiddly basso.

Elizabeth rushed to the wall she leaned against to prop her up, and hush her up.

An ill-dressed man lurched past us, his unshaven face slack with alcohol poisoning, his working-man’s blouse and trousers wrinkled and . . . odiferous.

Irene’s song faded at our attentions, and the man’s bleary look returned to the cobblestones his feet stuttered over. In a few instants only the small scuffles of his distant boots could be heard.

Irene leaned back against another barred door, frowning. I pushed the annoying deerstalker up on my forehead so I could see more than the checked umbrella edge of its brim, which clashed abominably with the pattern of my jacket.