Chapel Noir (45 page)

“I hope,” he was saying further, “that Madam Norton will explain herself to us after our exploration of the world of wax is over.”

“And I hope,” she said, “that it will no longer be necessary to explain myself after our exploration.”

I aimed the lanternlight ahead of us to encourage more movement and less discussion. If we were to meet monsters in this macabre place, I’d prefer to get it over with.

Still, as my meandering light glinted off men in jackboots and braided uniforms, my heart almost stopped. The gendarmes had anticipated us! We would be arrested. Disgraced. Unmasked. I gasped.

A hand grasped mine on the lantern, then trained it upward.

There, floating well above the floor, was a figure in an encrusted gown, surmounting by a high peaked headdress.

“His Holiness,” Irene’s voice came sardonically, “being carried by the princes of the church. A papal cortege to greet the hoi polloi as they enter the museum.”

“Most unbecoming of a churchman,” Nell said, sniffing as only the English can. “Pomp and adulation.”

“Most like the Archbishop of Canterbury,” Irene put in. “France is a Catholic country.”

“So I see.” Nell sounded as if she wished she hadn’t.

I suspected that if Irene’s expedition was as successful as she hoped—or feared—we would all confront what we wished we hadn’t.

As I cast my lanternlight high and low, I glimpsed the truly impressive element of this entry to the museum. The many columns had waist-high bases surmounted by carved decorations to a height of six feet or more before they soared to the dark ceiling where rococo capitals gleamed like gilt palm-tree fronds.

Behind this double row of columns that acted as a sort of silent honor guard leading to the museum’s actual display rooms stretched an arcade of gilt-framed mirrors. So every wax figure, every flesh-andblood visitor was reflected back and forth until we all mingled into one confusing “crowd scene.” Add the shiny marble floor beneath it all dimly reflecting everything wax and genuine, and the effect was of walking through a mirrored box. What is real, what staged, indeed? I have never experienced such a sensation of suspended reality. Even glimpsing my companions distracted me, made me momentarily take them for heart-stopping phantasms. In such an environment a monster, a killer, could slide up behind one in a mirror, could strike and be gone before the blood from his blade even began to flow.

I wished I, too, carried a little pistol, as Irene did, and I was glad to have the eminent consulting detective among our number.

The lanternlight kept picking out rich details—rattan pedestals holding potted palms, velvet-upholstered benches. Really, the effect was more of the lobby of a luxury hotel than that of a museum.

My lantern moved past the base of a pillar to cast a spotlight on a man and woman chatting just beyond it. She sat, hatted and caped, he stood, hat in hand, hand resting on the bench’s top rail.

I expected them to turn and berate us for illuminating their private tête-à-tête, but of course they were wax and could not move.

“Oh!” Nell was pressing her hand to her heart, a quite odd gesture when wearing male dress. “They look just like us. I mean, like we would look if we were properly attired.”

Sherlock Holmes had already drawn near to examine them. “A pretty trick, to import ordinary anonymous wax figures to deceive the spectators. Such a dodge might be employed in the service of more serious matters. . . .” His hand paused atop the gentleman’s bare head as if in secular benediction.

Then he turned to Irene. “Do you have a destination in mind? Or are we to enjoy the entire contents of the museum at our ill-lit leisure?”

“I do,” she said, “but I do not exactly recall its location. If you will bear left with me . . .”

She turned and strode into the dark faster than I could keep up and aim the lanternlight ahead of her. Her Sherlockian boldness amazed, both in her assumption that I would keep up and light her way, and her indifference to whether I managed it after all.

I also had to hope that the place was as deserted of the living as it seemed to be. On the hard floors our footsteps were impossible to muffle.

We sped past vignettes and tableaux that ranged from the familiar to the bizarre. Top-hatted and parasol-shaded European travelers shopped along a street in Cairo populated by overburdened donkeys, veiled women, and turbaned natives. This tableau evoked just such a village I had read of on the World Exposition grounds. A moment later we were peeping into the dancers’ dressing room at the Paris Opéra, with the ballerina in her satin toe shoes and knee-length tutu receiving a gentleman caller in evening dress. Next came a scene of human sacrifice in Dahomey, with nearly naked African men gathered to behead one of their own, bound and kneeling. The men’s skin shone like bootblack. Then it was the death of Marat in his bathtub. And then top-hatted gentlemen visiting the Eiffel Tower under construction, standing with their waistcoats and canes on the piled girders and angled, airy struts that form the structure, only a panorama of vacant sky behind them.

These glimpses, as sudden as the photographic cards that flash through a stereopticon, had the effect of lightning on the senses, and the quick fashion in which we glimpsed and then passed them almost made the wax figures seem to move. Certainly they were eerily lifelike.

“Ah.” Irene had stopped.

My light shone into a room, small and disordered.

At our very feet, a waxen man fell from the bed, his legs still under the blanket, his nightshirted torso lying on the floor, bloodied, the dagger haft growing from his heart like a stunted shoot.

His murderer stood behind him by the wardrobe, searching for something.

“How dreadful,” said Nell.

“The blood upon the scattered papers would not have fallen in that direction,” Sherlock Holmes noted with disdain.

“The exhibit is called ‘The History of a Crime,’ Irene said. “I think if we study it, we will discover the history of another crime entirely.”

“You have been mysterious long enough,” Mr. Holmes declared. “I am used to predicting the impossible. I do not think that is a function of being a retired opéra singer.”

“It may be a function of being a retired private inquiry agent for the Pinkertons, however,” Irene answered. “I will give you all a clue. This exhibit has seven vignettes. It is called The History of a Crime.’ I will let you imagine what might be the subject of the next six vignettes, and I will let you speculate how one of them would relate to one of the murders that have recently occurred in Paris.”

“Only one?” he asked sharply.

“Indirectly to all three—if there are but three, and I think now that there are not—and directly to one.”

She moved forward, I trotting after, shedding light on the second vignette. Another room showed the killer held down on the Oriental carpet by caped and capped gendarmes. Maidservants gawked in the background and men dressed remarkably like Inspector le Villard in frock coats, vests, and soft ties looked on.

“The arrest,” Sherlock Holmes announced.

Irene had already moved on, so I followed.

And my heart slowed, then sped up as the lanternlight revealed a scene so like one at which I had been present that I thought for an instant that everything since then and now had been a hallucination, and I had never left that pitiful scene.

Behind me Nell drew a breath she did not let out.

I sensed Sherlock Holmes coming to stand behind us all, easily seeing over our heads.

This room was no bigger than the others, but it seemed to swell until it was all I could see: the brick floor, the pale arched stone walls and ceiling, so like a cellar. The high, long, narrow board equipped with hooks that hosted a sad array of clothing—shoes, stockings, vest, singlet, trousers, jacket, hat. All that the victim on the low stone slab had worn.

Two top-hatted men stood on the corpse’s left. One pointed an accusing arm. One took frantic notes, reminding me of Nell in the cavern this very night.

On the right, the accused man shrank from the sight of his naked victim while a uniformed gendarme and an inspector in bowler hat and suit stood by to ensure his custody.

The body on the slab lay feetfirst toward us, the living, the spectators. The flesh was pale and slightly gray. A cloth covering all from neck to knee.

We all stood speechless, not at the waxen effigy of death, but at its sex. The dead man from the first chamber was now a dead woman. Of the head all that could be seen was the underside of a chin, the tip of a nose, both delicate and feminine and utterly horrific.

“Remarkable,” said Sherlock Holmes. It was the first time I had detected a note of awe in his tone.

He stepped into the tableau and bent over the body, obscuring it from us.

I blinked. He didn’t move for a few instants and for that time I thought he had been swallowed by the waxwork tableau never to emerge and move again.

When he finally straightened and stepped back, the lamplight showed him as pale the corpse.

“The woman is dead,” he said.

“Of course she’s ‘dead,’ ” Nell objected. “That is the entire idea of the scene. This represents a room in the morgue, does it not?”

“It does,” Irene said. Her tone was very heavy. “I would be interested in your diagnosis, Mr. Holmes.”

“I am sorry to say that your intuition has been alarmingly exonerated, Madam.” His tones were harsh, clipped. “This is not the wax figure that previously occupied this place. This woman was killed only hours ago, not here, killed and—or perhaps I should say, killed
after
. . . being horribly mutilated.”

My fears were confirmed: cold, false waxen flesh had been replaced by cold, honest human flesh. What kind of fiend would set such a stage for an unsuspecting public? Although the public that flocked daily to the Paris Morgue would no doubt thrill to news of a freshly mutilated corpse appearing in a museum devoted to mimicking life. Thanks to Irene, the public would be defrauded of its excitement, for this discovery would surely be kept secret.

“Now.” Mr. Holmes turned to us a face of such granite seriousness that I thought it should crack even as he spoke. “If you would be so kind, please leave me the lantern and to my business. I must collect what evidence remains before I inform the police and permit them to trample the entire museum like a herd of camels from the Cairo tableau. I suggest you join the waxen couple on the benches in the main salon until I am done.”

“You want no help?” Irene asked incredulously.

“You can give none that I need, and I must insist on sparing you any more intimate involvement with a case that bears the mark of the Fiend himself upon it. I would even hesitate to ask Dr. Watson to share such a task.”

He turned his back as if we no longer existed, as if we had all been frozen into wax figures in a museum and he was the only living being in the Musée Grévin.

43.
Calendar of Crime

Beyond the troubling but fascinating lull of sexual violence that hangs around the murders like Sherlockian fog, the killings remain so intriguing because the suspectwas not found
. . . .
—
MAXIM JAKUBOWSKI AND NATHAN BRAUND,
THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF JACK THE RIPPER

Dawn brought the merest moderation of light. Paris skies had opened a drizzling mouse-colored umbrella over her boulevards and streets. Everything reflected in the dull sheen that coated cobblestones and buildings.

I peeked from Elizabeth’s sleeping alcove window, but could spy only the bowed figures of hurried pedestrians on the street below, no watching figure.

I had changed from the heavy men’s clothing into my nightshirt and dressing gown. The voluminous and familiar cottons felt like a feminine cocoon sheltering me from the crude realities of the previous night. My very body had seemed bruised by the welted wools, as my mind had been blasted into some state from which I feared it might never return.

None of us had returned to bed.

Elizabeth, enamored of her alien garb, had kept it on for an hour or two before surrendering to the common comfort of nightwear. Her attire surprised me: a simple cotton flannel white gown edged with factory-made crochetwork and a plaid wool dressing gown.

Irene had retired to her room and emerged in a crackling black-green taffeta dressing gown that covered her like the glittering carapace of an exotic tropical beetle. A Worth creation, of course. I found it odd that she should seek shelter in such a costume after what we had found, after what she had led us all—including the renowned consulting detective—to find.

She occupied an upholstered armchair before the fire Elizabeth had coaxed into predawn life, saying nothing, not even smoking her vile small cigars. She sat like an empress on a throne, as if her court robes were too heavy to permit motion, as if only her mind stirred behind her impassive face. It was as dread and cold as Sherlock Holmes’s features had been when he had consigned us to the entry salon of the Musée Grévin last night.

I almost considered her as an actor onstage and in place, waiting for the curtain to open to begin the next, or last, act of the current drama.

And suddenly I understood, not only Irene but, God help me, Sarah Bernhardt. They both had absorbed the conviction and strength of the often larger-than-life women they had so often portrayed on the stage. Judith from the Bible or Theodora the Byzantine Empress. They were not about to step away from such towering roles to flutter and bow and scrape in real life. If they had a tendency to regard life as a drama, at least they would play a leading role, no matter how modestly cast by society and custom. I had never thought before that perhaps the corrupting power of the theater was not upon the emotions of the audience, but in giving the players a taste of lives that had not been ordinary.

Finally, after an hour, Irene bestirred herself. She asked Elizabeth to order breakfast over the internal telephone system. Elizabeth met my eyes as she gave her instructions to the kitchens far below. We neither of us had an appetite, and neither expected to for some time.

But Irene had been right. After the waiter had delivered covered trays of steaming foodstuffs and our round table was laden with plates of porridge and raisins, sausage, fish, omelettes, and pastries, in addition to pots of coffee, tea, and chocolate, it was as if the world had turned a notch and in that motion some order had been restored to a sadly askew universe.

I found myself accepting a cup of bitter coffee while Elizabeth poured cream into it. Certainly more than ordinary remedies were called for this morning.

We each ate what we could in silent concentration. None of us finished whatever we touched.

At last Irene rose and, rustling like a flock of rooks in her taffeta gown, she set the half-empty plates back on the trays and moved them to the desk while I removed the beverage pots.

“Now,” she said, sitting at the cleared table, “we must decide our next move.”

“Next move!” I repeated. “Irene, we have been surely set aside after this last atrocity. Although you can take secret satisfaction in knowing that you led the great Sherlock Holmes to the scene of the crime, I have never seen a murder more made for the police and such professional investigators as Sherlock Holmes. You say that we are already being watched. It would be wisest to return to Neuilly and leave this series of slaughters to the gendarmes.”

“Secret satisfaction is most underrated, Nell,” she replied, a deadly gleam in her eye.

“I agree with Nell,” Elizabeth said, sounding subdued for once. “I don’t understand how you knew to lead us to those two terrible sites last night, but this entire puzzle has multiplied beyond any understanding. Many elements smack of the London horrors of last autumn. Others seem part of their own mysterious pattern.”

“Not so puzzling,” Irene said. “Like all leaps of logic, my path last night was actually quite forthright once you understand what trail of bread crumbs I was following. Sherlock Holmes may be able to detect and follow actual bread crumbs, or cork crumbs, or drops of blood, in this case. I must use my head rather than my nose, or my eyes, or my magnifying glass.” She rose to rustle into the other room and returned with the tracing of the Paris map she had made the previous night.

She spread it out until it covered the table scarf like a great white wrinkled serviette, that strange bare-bones map she had drawn. I couldn’t help thinking of some uncharted constellation from the heavens, all dots and connecting lines.

“Not so amazing,” Irene insisted. “All three murdered women ended up in the Paris Morgue, though only one, the last, was on actual display. The authorities were too concerned about the prominent persons involved at the
maison de rendezvous
to allow those first victims public exposure, and they already knew their identities. The anonymous young woman from the catacombs near the Eiffel Tower seemed safe to flaunt . . . and thus she was, though her throat had been cut like those of the first two women.

“Yet she was covered to disguise the nature of the mutilations.” Irene glanced at me. “Nell, you read the descriptions of Jack the Ripper’s rampages?”

I nodded, letting feeble explanations for my morbid curiosity go unsaid. I had grown up reading ghost stories in the dark of country nights. Perhaps that had given me an unaccountable taste for terror.

“Did he not,” Irene went on, “this London monster, leave the bodies in plain sight, with no attempt to hide them? Did he not let them lie as he left them, with interior organs drawn out and draped around the corpses?”

I nodded.

“Did he not also on occasion lay out the pitiful belongings of these poor women, delving into their pockets as well as their bodies?”

I nodded again, sorry that I had swallowed more than coffee, sorry even for sampling that searing beverage, which burned my throat and stomach like an unspoken apology.

“Then one might say that display itself is a large part of the killer’s need and desire, his pattern?” she went on.

This time Elizabeth joined me in nodding.

“There is one thing Jack the Ripper never did in London. Can you tell me what?”

“He never moved a body,” I said slowly, remembering the pale bare corpse of last night, which would have been appalling enough to regard had it merely been made of wax. “That we know of.”

“No. He never moved a body, although his last killing was a departure, moving from out of doors to within doors. Perhaps moving a body is only his next . . . refinement. And—?”

I glanced at Elizabeth, who shook her head.

Irene was building her case, like a barrister well satisfied by his witnesses’ puzzlement, pacing before us, her hands hidden in her wide, sweeping sleeves.

She stopped in a rasp of whirling taffeta. “One thing the Ripper never did. He never went underground.”

“That we know of,” Elizabeth said. “He could have escaped the area by some underground means.”

“What underground means?” Irene demanded. “London is not noted for an accessible network of sewers, as Paris is. There are no convenient yet mostly forgotten catacombs, and the excavation for the underground trains is too well watched. Especially absent is that subterranean honeycomb of granite tunnels that underlies forty percent of Paris.”

“The Ripper is merely using what a new city offers,” Elizabeth said.

This gave Irene pause. “Perhaps,” she said quietly. “But I find the murders of the women at the bordello out of character for Jack the Ripper. And you notice that the wine cellar there had been disturbed in some fashion. Yet another underground site.

“Now, this disordered cavern we found last night on a line with the bordello. Perhaps it is even connected. We saw in the bordello wine cellar what seemed to be a branch of the sewers. I now believe it to be a flooded granite passage instead. And the symbols found! No symbols decorated the sites of the London crimes.”

“Except for the mysterious phrase about the Jews, which has been repeated here in French,” Elizabeth said.

“Yes. One wonders why. Especially when one realizes that the ‘
juives
’ phrase that makes sense of the London scrawl ‘Juwes’ is the feminine form of the plural of ‘Jews’ in French, so the sentence really indicates that the ‘Jewesses are the Men . . .’ Well, Nell, I know you drew those markings last night. Mr. Holmes asked for your notations before he went to find a gendarme to sound the alarm at the Musée Grévin. I assume you managed to copy them somehow as you were extracting the pages before he took them?”

No—”

Her face lost all expression but horror.

“—but I had begun copying them over in a neater form as we cooled our heels at Mr. Holmes’s orders in the
salon des colonnes
for what seemed like hours. I was hardly going to spend my time staring at the papal cortege. So, when he appeared before us in that highhanded manner and demanded my notes, I gave him . . . the first version.”

“Oh, Nell!” Irene came and caught me by the elbows as if she would waltz me around the room in jubilation. “Most excellent! I had to bite my tongue almost clear through not to betray my anxiety when you ripped those pages out at his command. Yet I knew I could count on you to somehow resist giving Mr. Holmes what he wanted.”

“Well, I gave him only a lesser version of what he wanted. I do not work for him, you know.”

“Nor do I. Let’s see those scrawls. They could be arcane signs left behind by some beggars’ conclave who visited the same cavern, or they could relate directly to this latest killing.”

I went to my chamber to fetch the notebook, which I had tossed on a table after removing it from the jacket pocket.

Irene lit the lamp while I was gone so my small drawings would be as visible as possible.

I frowned at the symbols. “This P with the X crossing the upright reminds me of a shepherd’s crook for some reason. Why would a chamber with the strange sentence about the luwes’ written in blood on its walls bear the sign of a shepherd?”

Irene’s head snapped upright as if jerked by a leash instead of a sudden thought. “Why not the sign of the Shepherd?”

Elizabeth had stood to stare down at the symbol. “The papal cortege at the Musée Grévin . . . I saw that very symbol embroidered on one of the official’s robes. I remember thinking how the papal crown—it’s called a miter, isn’t it?—resembled the headpiece of upper and lower Egypt in ancient times and how this”—she tapped the symbol—“struck me as almost a hieroglyph.”

“You are saying this is a religious symbol?” I was dubious. “Why would a religious symbol be left in that cavern of blood and likely death? I cannot credit it, not even if it is a Papist symbol.”

Irene, ignoring my usual Church of England distaste for things Roman Catholic, was hovering over me now. “The shepherd is an Old Testament figure as well as a New, and might be considered a Jewish symbol as well as a Christian, although that X is reminiscent of a cross, and thus more Christian than Jewish if it represents more than the simple letter X. I have seen it before . . . I know! Near the ossuary in the catacomb where the poor girl was found. Very faint. I took it for some ancient marking, but these Paris catacombs are not ancient, except perhaps that under Notre Dame.”