FEMME FATALE Read online

  “Quality and taste are rare enough to be deeply appreciated when they prevail.”

  “ ‘Quality and taste’ are not on our menu here, Nell. We must explore the other side of the footlights. Perhaps that is too sensational a task for you after our Transylvanian travails.”

  “Not at all,” I hastened to add, realizing that I was treading on dangerous ground with Irene, though I didn’t know why. “Such sideshows shall seem tame to me after what we encountered in Paris and the Carpathian mountains. I only meant that these self-advertised wonders are all likely frauds.”

  “That could be said of the majority of people.” Irene stood, tearing a section of advertisements from the paper and folding it into a size to fit into her reticule. “Don’t you agree?”

  “No! Yes! Oh, I don’t know what I mean, except that I didn’t intend to offend you, and apparently I have. I don’t say that everyone is a fraud, although more than I would like indeed are.”

  “And some frauds,” Irene added a trifle sternly, “may prove more genuine than presumed models of respectability.”

  I affixed my new broad-brimmed hat to my chignon and gathered my gloves. It was better to begin our outing than to stand here arguing.

  Irene accepted my accoutering as a peace offering and said no more as she also pinned on her hat and donned her gloves.

  In minutes we were seated on the jolting bench of an omnibus festooned with almost as many advertising bills as passengers.

  The fragrance of the stable mixed with odors from the many street hawkers’ carts. Sixth Avenue was chaos. We lurched as our omnibus driver forced his lumbering vehicle past dray wagons and the carriages and hansoms it dwarfed. The edges of the cobblestones nearest the walks were mobbed with peddlers’ carts and hordes of what are called street Arabs in London: ragged, dirty children selling pencils and crude messenger services, picking pockets when they could.

  The combined clatter of all this lusty traffic could be heard all the way up to attic rooms on the fifth floor, I’m sure. And with the streets laid out as straight as a raceway, nothing slowed or softened the rush and noise of so many people all in a hurry to get elsewhere. With that goal I could surely sympathize!

  “You are unusually quiet, Nell.” Irene’s voice boomed like the opera singer she was over the hubbub. “What do you think of old Gotham?”

  Apparently this was a pet name for the world’s rudest, roughest city.

  I wasn’t about to bellow out my criticisms, so I merely shrugged, grimaced, and nodded, looking as mad as my fellow travelers, I’m sure.

  We departed the omnibus on a grubby street lined with marquees here and there, and with people clustered around odd windowless doors.

  “Stage doors,” Irene told me as we stumbled arm in arm over unmentionable effluvia to the relative safety of the sidewalk. “They wait for a favorite player to emerge after the matinee.”

  We paused, allowing the street’s constant flow to rattle past and the pedestrians to break stride around us as if we were an awkward logjam in a river.

  Irene looked around, getting her bearings. I saw that she knew this street. She inhaled deeply, unaware perhaps of the odors of foreign food that wafted from many of the peddlers’ carts.

  “Ah,” she said, “this takes me back to Saffron Hill in London. Remember, Nell, our first rooms there?”

  “Yes, but not often.”

  “You prefer living in France, at last?”

  “I prefer living in Neuilly, which is a charming and peaceful village, and a locale scented only by peaceful country blooms.”

  “You will not find ‘peaceful blooms’ on the sidewalks of New York,” she said, putting her arm through my elbow as if to protect and compel me, both at the same time.

  In moments she had steered us expertly crosswise through the pedestrians, so we stood at the foot of another set of stairs, this one topped by a small wall, on which sat a single pot with a geranium plant. Shabby, of course. Even nature withered in this unnatural hothouse of a tenement they called a city.

  “I haven’t been here in a long time,” Irene said slowly, as much to herself as to me. “I don’t know what, or who, I’ll find still present. Perhaps only ghosts, only spirits. Yet I must start somewhere. . . .”

  She squeezed my forearm, as much to give herself courage as me, I think, and together (how could I escape such a firm or perhaps desperate grip?) we mounted the stairs and entered a door into a common hallway.

  “Irene, I believe this establishment is—”

  “A boardinghouse. A quite respectable, old theatrical boardinghouse.”

  “Irene, I have never known the words ‘respectable’ and ‘theatrical’ to sit cheek by jowl before.”

  “Here in New York they do, I assure you,” she said sternly. “You are entering my past, my world, willingly, Nell, as a companion, not as a critic, I hope.”

  “A critic? I? Heaven forbid.”

  “I believe it did, at least once. ‘Judge not lest ye be judged.’ ”

  I was so astounded by Irene, who mentioned God about as often as pigeons do, quoting Scripture, that I had nothing to say. The admonition was well given, and well taken. Since I had seen real sin at such close quarters during my ordeal in Paris and beyond, I found I had lost my zeal for finding it in my immediate vicinity.

  Irene was admitting me into her holiest of holies, her inner sanctum, not willingly, but because for some strange reason she needed me there. So . . . I would endeavor to reserve judgment for my own private thoughts and meditations. And my diaries.

  She was watching me like a policeman suspecting me of coveting a peddler’s apple. I nodded my agreement, knowing that I would now have many an occasion to bite my tongue, which was not used to being harnessed. But this was foreign ground and perhaps foreign feelings would be part of the price for treading it with my oldest and dearest . . . and only . . . friend.

  We moved past a pigeon-hole sort of secretary built into the wall, with numbers on the compartments and letters and newspapers jammed into them, and past a stairway leading to an upper story.

  Between the stairway and the wall was a door, and on this Irene knocked as if she had a right to.

  She knocked again, and finally the door was opened by . . . Mrs. Hudson, that white-coifed, white-capped brusque old Scots soul who had opened the door to 221B Baker Street on an occasion (I recalled with blushes) when I had very good reason to go snooping there. I smothered a gasp of surprise. Of course the lady was not Mrs. Hudson, but was much the same type. It is amazing how alike the gatekeepers of the world are, from the women who control domestic portals to the men who guard the entrances to public buildings, or those that have become public by becoming crime scenes!

  “Good day to you. And who is it that I have the honor of addressin’, Mrs.—?” Irene began in a voice that was tinged with an Irish brogue.

  “McGillicuddy,” came the answer Irene had obviously anticipated.

  “Well, Mrs. McGillicuddy,” Irene went on as if appearing in the opening scene of a play, “I am a former resident of the house. Me friend and meself are back in the city after many years and hoped an old acquaintance of days gone by might still be in residence.”

  “ ’Twould not be an Irish tenor you’re seeking, miss?”

  Irene did not correct her form of address. “Ah, ye’ve found me out. ’Tis my cousin, of course. He was always musically inclined, but to other instruments than his voice.”

  “The pipe and flute, then?”

  “The drums.”

  “Drums!?”

  “I don’t know how long you’ve been livin’ here, Mrs. McGillicuddy, but he was famous for it when he was a boyo. Tiny Tim, d’you recollect?”

  Here the landlady laughed like a barker at a circus, loud and hearty. “That was more’n twenty years gone, girl, almost longer than you’ve been tripping the light fantastic yerself.”

  “Time flies, ma’am, and us with it. So he is no longer in residence?”

  “
Oh, Mr. Timothy Flynn is here, yes, but he’s another kind of drummer now. Men’s furnishings, don’t you know?”

  “I do now,” Irene said with a roguish smile I would swear was dimpled. I had never noticed a dimple on her before! “Would he happen to be in?”

  “I don’t spy on the comings and goings of my lodgers, miss, but his room number is nine, a floor up. You, and your . . . er, friend here are as welcome to knock as I am when the rent is due.”

  “More a caller cannot ask. ’Tis glad of your blessing we are, and if Mr. Timothy is not in, perhaps I can leave my card on the way out.”

  “A card is it?”

  “Well, a note I would pen on some stray paper or other.”

  Mrs. McGillicuddy nodded like the Queen at Windsor accepting an introduction to a prominent tradesman.

  On that the door closed and we began trudging up the stairs. “Tiny Tim,” I hissed in the dimness. “He was present at the fatal séance. You think he is a witness . . . or a suspect?”

  “I don’t know what I think yet, Nell, except that I hope that Mr. Flynn is in. We don’t have time to waste, I think.”

  The number nine of the door had loosened on its single brass screw and now more resembled a six.

  Irene raised her gloved knuckles, took a breath deep enough to deliver an aria, and knocked, sharply.

  In half a minute the doorknob turned.

  I sensed a door into a mysterious past swinging open, a door into secrets and shame and, if possible, murder many years later. What had Irene, the prima donna of the Imperial Opera at Warsaw, to do with drummer boys turned hawkers on the streets of New York? I might soon know more than I wished.

  A tall and lanky figure was silhouetted in the light from the window beyond the door.

  Once, recently, I would have questioned the propriety of two women entering a strange man’s rooms. Now I only felt a fervid eagerness to learn what he knew, propriety be . . . pickled!

  I walked in behind Irene, my skirt hems and hers hissing over the uncarpeted floor like serpents.

  The room was humble, but homespun. I was startled to observe doilies on the chair arms and head rests. A rag rug that bespoke some weeks of woman’s work lay before the fender by the small fireplace. Photos and posters were affixed to the walls. A bureau hosted cabinet portraits of a man and woman dressed in the clothing of mid-century.

  I was surprised to find such an island of domestic history in this huge, rude city.

  “Tim!” Irene said, surprised into using the name.

  He was surprised, too. “I haven’t been called aught but ‘Timothy’ for twenty years.” He frowned his youthful brow, for he was barely thirty, and squinted at Irene as if she were a stamp in a collector’s magnifying lens.

  “Is it . . . little Rena? Little Rena the Ballerina? En point at the age of three?”

  He spread his arms and stretched out his fingers. Irene matched his gesture and suddenly grew three inches as she lilted onto her toe-tops.

  “Dear Lord, you’re back! Rena the Ballerina.”

  “Merlinda the Mermaid.”

  “And such a singer. I’ll never forget making a duet of your ‘Clementine,’ you in a checked sun bonnet and boots the size of ships. ‘In a cavern, in a canyon—’ ”

  “ ‘Excavatin’ for a mine—’ ”

  “ ‘Dwelt a miner, forty-niner—’ ”

  “ ‘And his daughter, Clementine,’ ” Irene produced a ceiling-shaking operatic finale.

  The former Tiny Tim spun a formerly flat-footed Irene under his arm, while he sang: “ ‘Big ole bootsies, on her tootsies, for to hold up Clementine.’ ”

  “ ‘Oh, my darling,’ ” they chorused together, contralto and tenor. “ ‘Oh, my darling Clementine, Thou are lost and gone forever, dreadful sorry, Clementine.’ ”

  The Dear Lord help me, but I could see these two as tiny children pantomiming this very schoolroom nonsense. And I couldn’t help giggling. Perhaps it was hysteria.

  The former Tiny Tim turned to me at once. “They loved us, the audiences. They tittered and gushed and applauded and threw bouquets of tea-roses. Then I would sit down and drum my head and hands off, and she would dance a jig to it all. We were . . . what? All of three and six.”

  What they reminisced about suddenly struck me full force. “You sang for your suppers, both of you, at so young an age? Why, that’s indentured servitude!”

  Tiny Tim descended upon me like a fairy-tale giant, a laughing boy-giant, and swept me into the same irresistible pirouette Irene had performed.

  “Theater folk are fairy folk, don’t you know, miss?” he said, or sang perhaps. My head was spinning too much to tell. “Small and fading fast. Magic.”

  He dropped my gloved hands and I stood there waiting for my head to settle.

  “I’m a little drummer boy no longer,” he finished, shrugging.

  “Yet you still live here, where we all did,” Irene pointed out.

  “ ‘Did’ is right.” He sat on one of his upholstered chairs, laid his pomaded hair against the antimacassar. “I’ll never forget the thrill of it, being so young and so acclaimed, but it was a passing fancy. A man must do daily work for his living, and I’m no exception.”

  “Then no one else we knew still lives here?” Irene pressed, following him to the chair.

  He sobered instantly, and the performer’s mask dropped to reveal a melancholy man behind it.

  “No. Not now that Sophie is dead.”

  “Sophie? I remember her. Well.” Tim could hardly guess what a revelation this was for her. “Sophie lived here recently? And has just now . . . died?” Irene’s voice had dropped into a soft, lower register I did not often hear, except when she was deeply touched. “I only just . . . missed . . . her?” Her plaintive tone reminded me of a fretted child.

  He nodded, his head leaning back as if resting from his impetuous excursion into past and such very youthful glories.

  Child prodigies, I thought, had the bitter lot of soon outliving their best days.

  “Sophie,” Irene was repeating as if every intonation of the name’s syllables was a lost memory. “Only dead recently.”

  “A freakish sort of death.” Timothy shook his head, his eyes still closed. “At a séance. I was there, God help me.”

  “Sophie!” Irene looked at me, as if demanding that I at least disbelieve what she could not avoid knowing for truth. “That . . . the dead medium we heard of . . . that was Sophie?”

  The fact shocked her.

  What shocked me was to see her so horrified.

  Who was Sophie, and what had she been to Irene, or to little Rena the Ballerina, who was some father’s “darling Clementine”?

  13.

  Smoke Rings

  Fire resisters, who traditionally appeared on the bills of

  magicians or ventriloquists, even found their way to the

  séance room.

  —RICKY JAY, LEARNED PIGS AND FIREPROOF WOMEN

  Who was Sophie?

  “A fire resister,” Irene told me in the hansom cab she had hailed to take us back to our hotel.

  She herself certainly was not subscribing to fire-resisting, whatever it was, in the hansom, for she had struck another match on her clever little cigarette case. Soon the snug compartment was filled with enough smoke and sulphur to mask the departure of the Devil through the vampire trapdoor in a stage floor.

  I coughed pointedly, but Irene’s eyes were growing dreamy over the wisps of smoke she breathed out like an elegant dragon.

  “Sophie and Salamandra,” she went on. “I remember now! They were twin sisters and both fire resisters. They could walk on hot iron or coals, swallow flames, soft-cook raw eggs in the burning oil cupped in their bare palms. It was a stunning demonstration and quite outdrew the ventriloquists and prestidigitators who often shared the playbill with them.”

  “The only useful application of such a gift is for cooking eggs,” I answered, “and I would prefer a pan-basting for my eggs, rather than s
omeone’s sweaty hand.”

  “Oh, there was no perspiration involved, though other liquids might have been. Certainly there was some trick to it.”

  “And you don’t know what the trick was?”

  “It was worth one’s life to know too much of arcane practices then. These arts have been passed down since the Middle Ages, or even ancient times. Family livelihoods depend upon them, have for generations.”

  “But you knew the Salamander sisters?”

  “I even saw them perform. ‘Salamander’ is an ancient term for a fire dragon. Sophie was always Sophie, but Salamandra was christened Amanda, I believe, and only adopted the more mysterious name when she joined the act. I’d like to discover when it became a solo attraction, and why Sophie turned to séances instead of flames.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “It might be the reason Sophie was murdered.”

  “Isn’t the likeliest reason a disgruntled client? She was a fraud.”

  “All performers are frauds, Nell. They weave artful illusions. Sophie and Salamandra wove more imaginative illusions than most, but I consider them little different from myself.”

  “Irene! The grand opera is a respected art form that requires its performers to perfect the human instrument of the voice to celestial levels.”

  “And then only to sing heavenly notes about ‘rather lurid stories,’ as you once put it, Nell.”

  “That was long ago, when we first met. I did not understand then that opera singing was the most elevated of arts.”

  Irene smiled upon a perfect levitating ring of smoke she had produced. “This is a skill as well, Nell. It takes practice. I must master my instrument, in this case my breath and lungs and the humble cigarette. Most people cannot do what I just did.”

  “And why would they want to?”

  “To amaze. Amuse. Divert. Opera is no grander.”

  “Surely you cannot compare blowing smoke rings to the hours and years of practice a world-class operatic voice demands! You put them in yourself. I saw you lilting through endless scales on the old piano in Saffron Hill when we shared rooms there. You must not belittle your art.”