FEMME FATALE Read online

  “Have you always taken notes so assiduously?

  “Of course.”

  “Have you always worn such checked coats?”

  “Well, no. This is new.”

  “Then so is your uncanny imitation of Miss Huxleigh. I had no idea you admired her so much.”

  “I don’t! She is a perfect pickle of an Englishwoman and I am nothing like her.”

  At this he smiled slightly. “Of course not. The admirable Miss Huxleigh is an utter original. I would almost call her Bohemian, but that would offend her belief in her complete conformity to the world’s opinion.”

  “I thought it was Irene you admired.”

  “You must realize that I have neither the time nor inclination for the art of admiring women.”

  “If you are going to waste an instant on such a pursuit, you should know that Nell, despite a few stabs at playing a useful role in life, is not a modern woman.”

  “Fortunately so! What is most interesting about her is that she little knows her own self. She is so stout-hearted precisely because she fears so much.” He chuckled, actually chuckled, although it was an almost mechanical sound. “I shall never forget her rather touching attempts to flirt with me in one of my less prepossessing disguises once in order to save her friends. It is something Watson would have done, had he been born a woman. Loyalty”—and here he regarded me as severely as a schoolmaster—“is the most sublime of the virtues.”

  “I am loyal, first and foremost, to my readers.”

  “Hmmm. It is interesting that they are the most distant individuals from yourself.” His glance released me as he examined the curtains again.

  “How did you discern the size and condition of the man who stood behind these panels?” I asked.

  “By the size of the shapeless footprints. And there is a hand print high on the drapery. The impression was deep and the fingers appear crooked, as if he clutched the cloth in a death-grip. He was nervous, very nervous for a veteran of séance manipulations, if indeed he was, so I assume that he knew from the first that murder would result.”

  “How do you know that he was nervous?”

  He smiled again, to himself. “Velvet records the emotions of those who wear or touch it. Dampness in the fingers or palms impresses a perfect image on the nap. I learned that trick from a reluctant colleague once, or perhaps I should say a dedicated competitor.”

  “I thought you had no equal.”

  “No equal, but would-be rivals: the police, for instance, who resent their professionalism being outdone by a mere amateur.” He shook his head at the scene before us. “If I were to go to the New York police and seek their suggestions on this case, which I would never do, they would no doubt regale me with Bertillon measurements of known stranglers, utterly unaware that this strangler was an amateur himself.”

  “Bertillon measurements?”

  “A system invented early this decade by a Frenchman. It uses calipers and compasses to identify criminals through an enormous number of inane measurements of their physical bodies, including the skull, as if what is in the head is less lethal than its outward dimensions. Mostly nonsense, of course, except for identifying a man whose measurements are already recorded, and even then offers much possibility for error. Since the system is amazingly time-consuming and cumbersome, it has become the darling of police forces the world over.”

  “I have never heard of such a technique.”

  “And I hope that few will ever hear more of it in future. Now, could we but make every criminal nervous and arrange an encounter with velvet in every case, we would have an excellent scientific means to match murderers to crime scenes, as I have noticed that the minute whorls on the fingertip offer amazing variety. I believe some attempts have been made in India and Japan to systematize the phenomenon, and I intend to experiment once I am back in Baker Street with my equipment at my own fingertips.

  “For now”—he eyed the curtains again—“the best course is to investigate the shady theatrical world that supports these shoddy illusions that pass as everything from bald entertainment to something so elevated as spiritual solace by communing with the dead.”

  I shuddered a little. Perhaps by being stranded on the threshold I was subject to drafts. Perhaps dead spirits really did linger on this scene of mysticism and murder.

  “If one really could conjure the dead,” I ventured, “I imagine that your cases would provide a virtual chorus of corpses.”

  “The dead never frighten me, Miss Cochrane. It is what the living have done and may yet do that does.”

  Englishmen! Cold fish, all of them, this one particularly so. Still, now I knew that I sought a tall and lithe, yet stiffening shadow, a mature man who perhaps once had performed until arthritis had disabled him, and then had turned his talents to polite fraud, and now had killed his employer. Was this for some reason he alone knew, or for another, larger purpose that encompassed more deaths?

  Whatever his story, or purpose, I sensed that the nub of it, the center, the untold history, involved the child performer who had grown up to be Irene Adler Norton.

  Phineas T. Barnum and his ilk would have the public believe that his freakish featured acts—the conjoined Siamese twins, the sword swallowers, the dwarves—were suitable objects of wonder and entertainment. It struck me that such shows pandered to the worst instincts of both performer and audience, that parading disability as entertainment diminished the humanity of each, and that the attraction of the rope dancer or the fire eater—even of the water-breathing mermaid—was the ever-present possibility of violent death.

  And where there was possibility, there surely would someday be consummation.

  15.

  Smoking Ruin

  The vulgar gape and stare, and are fully prepossessed that the

  fair heroine is by nature gifted with this extraordinary

  repellent to fire. Several of this salamander tribe . . . may now

  be seen traveling from town to town.

  —R. S. KIRBY, WONDERFUL AND ECCENTRIC MUSEUM OR MAGAZINE

  OF MEMORABLE CHARACTERS

  I had never sat in the audience at a common entertainment before.

  The New Fourteenth Street Theater felt more like a hall than a theater. Obviously the performers had booked it for themselves. Just as obviously, the performers and their agents would pocket most of the profits.

  Anyone could rent a hall in these days, advertise it, and sell tickets. Not everyone would attend, but quite a few had come forth for the performance of the sole Salamander sister. Oh, that did sound rather fishy!

  The bottoms of my boots scraped across—I bent over to look, amazed—peanut shells. Indeed, folk all around me were either cracking their knuckles or breaking the backs of the humble peanut, one after another. Neither activity was exemplar of polite public behavior.

  But then the playbill displayed in front of the theater was hardly polite either. I had never seen such an assemblage of elaborate capital letters and exclamation points in my life!

  And all this large type, following rows of fine type, was interspersed with small illustrations of very bizarre (and tiny) people doing the oddest things with the strangest mechanisms.

  Around us thronged scores of people seeking entry to this shabby array of oddities.

  Irene led the way and soon we were slipping into whatever free seats we could. . . . Actually, Irene had led us far closer to the stage than I would have chosen.

  Beside me, Irene was as nervous as if she herself were slated to perform, but the program allowed for no such elevated artistes as opera singers.

  There was Maharajah Sing-a-poor and his flying Persian carpet direct from Ali Baba’s cave. . . .

  Little Dulcie and her performing pig-poodles . . .

  Oh, and Salamandra the Fire-Queen, who appeared to be a solid woman in flowing robes surrounded by an aura of living flames . . .

  Next to me in the audience, on the side Irene did not defend, sat a strange gentleman. Actually, he
was no gentleman, for he wore a derby hat that he apparently felt no need to doff, indoors or in feminine company.

  His elbows on the seat armrests nudged mine with ignorant rudeness . . . unless he was one of those pickpockets Irene had showed me on the omnibus in London years ago, who wore a false set of arms so his larcenous fingers could be at work behind them.

  I leaned away as far as I could to avoid the odious and possibly thieving contact, but Irene on my other side nudged me back.

  I pulled my elbows tight to my whalebone corset sides and thought of England.

  Thus I remained when the “show” began, with much shrill trumpeting of instrument and voice.

  The “flying carpet” was suspiciously unsupple. The “pigpoodles” oddly resembled King Charles spaniels crossed with pit bulls. I had heard the word “vaudeville” applied to such entertainments. I did not know its meaning, but the obvious origin was French and, well . . .

  We sat through a mind reader who did not call upon us, and luckily so, as he would have been exposed . . . through a ventriloquist who made a flat-iron speak (it asked for a rest in the Arctic).

  And then . . . Salamandra.

  I admit it was an evocative name, like Sarah Bernhardt’s Théodora.

  As for Salamandra, I must confess that when she appeared from above the stage seated on a swing of fire I was somewhat impressed.

  Slowly she was lowered as assistants laid red-hot rails on a large box-frame filled with stones.

  Salamandra drained the champagne flute in her hand, yet left enough liquid to turn the glass upside down and let it weep upon the stones before her feet.

  Steam hissed upward, visible and audible to every eye and ear.

  I sat forward, taking care not to brush Mr. False Arms’s elbows.

  Irene had sat forward, too, but she was frowning.

  Really, this was the most impressive . . . illusion.

  The stones now glowed bright red, like the heart of an ember.

  Salamandra’s bare feet touched toe to the stones, and then she stood.

  Yet she did not move a muscle, not even a toe.

  Applause and whistles erupted, and many more peanuts also broke out from their confining shells.

  Perspiration erupted on my forehead. I was rapt. I could feel the heat radiating from the insensible stones to the tender flesh of the woman’s bare feet.

  I wanted to look away, but could not. Her expression was serene.

  She began to walk down the avenue of red-hot stones as though it were cool summer grass.

  At last she stood, bare of foot, on the bare wooden stage.

  I admit I expected to be further amazed.

  I watched the stage erupt in flames, watched the exotic Salamandra, draped like a Roman matron, swallow flames and tread barefoot on red-hot coals and juggle fire. At last she swept her robes tight around her body, bowed to the audience, and began to strut toward the hall’s curtained wings.

  Only . . . a brazier in the background exploded into wings of flame as she passed. Then her entire figure was subsumed into the expanding illusion of fire and her hair lifted upward in fiery tongues, her draperies an inferno, the effect truly a human torch of excitement.

  Save that Irene was standing and drawing me up with her. “That’s no illusion,” she cried. “Oh, my God! Water! We must reach the stage. Salamandra!”

  Irene bounded into the aisle like a hound after a hare.

  What could I do? Remain with Mr. Derby False Arms?

  I followed as fast as I could.

  I was far enough behind to see Irene rush infallibly up a short set of stairs on the far left linking the auditorium with the stage.

  I followed, stumbling on black-painted steps not meant to be noticed by the audience.

  Now we were not audience, but . . . unwilling attraction.

  Irene seized the Maharajah’s flying carpet, apparently paused in mid-air in the wings.

  While I gasped at the rug’s revealed frame, she rushed onto the burning stage floor, her boot soles drumming an up-tempo rhythm.

  “Quick, Nell!” she cried. “Roll up the carpet. Remember Cleopatra!”

  I found myself stomping over red-hot coals and feeling not a thing, one end of the carpet in my gloved hands. I understood without demur her reference to Cleopatra . . . unrolled before Caesar in a rug. Such are the benefits of an English education, even if it is at the knee of an obscure country parson. . . . Irene and I rolled, not unrolled in this instance, and in smoking seconds Salamandra was crushed in our curled carpet like Turkish tobacco in one of Irene’s dark Egyptian papers.

  For once I was glad that I knew the arcane arts of rolling tobacco, for only smoke drifted up from the coiled carpet, and muffled cries.

  “Well done!” Irene rode the roll of carpet like an equestrienne the back of a spirited Arab steed. The position was most unladylike, but effective. She rocked back from her position of triumph. Somewhere, applause sounded, and cast peanut shells seasoned the smoky air.

  Irene coughed.

  “Your voice!” I complained hoarsely.

  “Bother my voice! Is she . . . all right? You look, Nell. I can’t.” So it was left to me to unpeel the fireproof lady, to see if she lived up to her advertisement.

  I unrolled one end of the rug and saw her smoke-smudged features, wincing.

  “Are you—?”

  “Alive? Just barely, my dear. What has not been smoked has been smothered. I beg you, miss, free me.”

  This Irene and I contrived, to the audience’s delighted applause. They thought our exploits a part of the show, can you credit it?

  In the end we released a smudged and charred, but otherwise unharmed, Salamandra, and all three took a deep bow, myself drawn down into this ridiculous position by the fact of Salamandra’s firm hand in mine, quite cool and uncooked.

  The show was over, and the local fire department had been called by stage managers who had recognized an extreme departure from the show’s script.

  If not for Irene, and perhaps myself, Salamandra would have burned to death.

  Irene stood in the wings, once her own personal sacristy, now bowed over as she tried to take smoke-free breaths.

  We had been through a scene from Grand Opera, and no one here could recognize that reality except policemen and firefighters.

  What chain of events had we interrupted?

  A fire resister nearly killed by fire.

  Her medium sister dead of a ghost.

  Certainly these were not matters for Inns of Court barristers now laboring in France. Godfrey had been right to recommend my making this journey.

  I had now become furious at the brutal death nearly inflicted in the public eye, in my eye.

  I went to Irene, touched her hunched shoulders.

  She straightened like a ventriloquist’s dummy. “Nell? This is far more sinister than I imagined my past to be. Salamandra was almost killed before our eyes, as her sister died recently before other eyes. I can no longer deny it, or Pink’s allegation. These crimes are somehow personal to me.”

  “Nonsense,” said I. “This evil act was prevented. By us. You. I think we should repair to the backstage manager’s office and see to . . . um . . . Madame Salamandra. She is obviously the focus of this attack, not you or your past.”

  Crowds made the halls, already dim and narrow and now smelling of smoke as well as pomade, into cramped alleyways.

  By now, Irene had recovered her performer’s instincts. She pushed and wove her way to a door barred by a large, blue-serge-clad Irish policeman.

  I knew I observed an operatic confrontation: Irene, the clever village girl against the stern solid wall of authority.

  “My dear sister,” Irene cried in a voice to wring hearts and possibly brass buttons. “I must see her! Does she yet live?”

  “And what is your name?” the policeman demanded.

  “Sophie,” Irene declared.

  He nodded, as if recognizing a password, and stood aside.

/>   Irene wasted no time in pushing past him, and, seizing my wrist, in drawing me with her.

  The office door swung shut behind us.

  Before us lay a room papered in playbills, with a desk deep in unsorted papers, and even a large mirror on one wall. Its centerpiece was a woman attired in smoky cerements, looking as if she’d escaped from Hell itself.

  “Salamandra?” Irene asked.

  “You called yourself ‘Sophie,’ ” the other woman said in a small, sad, and husky voice. “I heard through the door.”

  “Forgive me. I needed a password, like Ali Baba in the cave of the forty thieves.”

  Salamandra’s great blue unfocused eyes fixed on me. “I was burning,” she said, “quite against cue. I saw you worrying at an Oriental rug. Should I know you?”

  “You should know me!” Irene interrupted, setting herself between me and this woman of fire so her face was plain to see.

  Salamandra’s eyebrows, I saw, had been singed to stubs, like a forest rubble after the fire. Her blue eyes were red-rimmed.

  Irene took a deep breath.

  Salamandra gazed at her. “I do not know you.”

  “She,” I put in, “first saw the fire was real.”

  “The fire is always real,” Salamandra admonished me, her eyes softening her tone. “But something had seared the robes I wear. Perhaps an error by the stage crew.”

  “Perhaps,” said Irene, “an error by the person who killed your sister.”

  Salamandra stared at Irene. “Person? The police said she choked on the ectoplasmic matter she expelled. It was an accident in their eyes.”

  “It was convenient to call it an accident. Was your burning robe an ‘accident’ here? Tonight?”

  “Such mishaps do occur, given the volatile nature of our performances.”

  Salamandra sank onto a chair that had turned its back on the large looking glass. Her gown was charred from neck to hip, as I saw in the mirror, so close had the flames come.

  “No accidents happened,” Irene said. “Not to your sister, and not to you.”

  “Who are you?” Salamandra stared through lashes that had been singed to a short frizz.