FEMME FATALE Read online

  “I don’t know,” Irene said slowly, finally acknowledging that an original identity underlay all she had made of herself today, realizing and declaring it for the first time. “But I do know I used to be . . . one . . . of you,” she finished with a smile.

  16.

  Unburnt Bridges

  I’m cool and determined as any salamander, ma’am, Won’t

  you come to my wake when I go the long meander, ma’am?

  —MOLLY BRANNIGAN, IRISH FOLK SONG

  “One of us?”

  Salamandra brushed the cinders from her hair.

  “You do seem to understand more than most the . . . depth of our illusions.” She glanced at me, who had been just now introduced to her. “Ah, Miss Huxleigh. Right you are to look bewildered. I may not seem to be in mourning, but I tried to go on, after Sophie’s death. How could I expect an attempt on my own life? With Sophie’s death . . . who is not to say the spirits spoke their wishes at last?”

  “It was murder,” Irene said, her tone final. “Spirits had nothing to do with it.”

  Salamandra regarded her. “You are a skeptic, yet you say you’re one of us. We live a half-life, half believing our own notices. We are all Gypsies, aren’t we? Mountebanks and illusionists, believing too much in our own duplicity. Now we are to believe in murder. And that we somehow suddenly sow death. Tell me how, so I have hope to redeem Sophie’s loss.”

  “I don’t know,” Irene repeated.

  “You saw me burning. People see me burning every night and pay good pence to see it again the next night. You saw . . . me perishing. And intervened. Why? How? What gift have you to penetrate our delusions?”

  “I am one of you,” Irene said, shrugging.

  Salamandra stared at her, as if an adamant gaze would elicit truth. “And this one?”

  She referred to me, and not idly.

  “She is most assuredly not one of you,” Irene said with a wry amusement, “and will not be beguiled. Nor will she allow me to be beguiled.”

  Salamandra took my measure, and retreated as she would not have from a red-hot needle.

  “I should be seared flesh by now,” she admitted. “That I am not is due to you two. Tell me what you want to know.”

  What an amazing conversation!

  In minutes Salamandra had accepted Irene as the fully grown incarnation of the jig-dancing child known as “Rena.” Salamandra reminisced with Irene about Rena and Tiny Tim. I was a mere onlooker to this reunion of long-lost fellow performers.

  “I recall watching your fiery illusions from the wings,” Irene admitted, “but why did Sophie give up performing with you? And what were you called when you both set the playbills on fire, so to speak?”

  “Oh, we were a popular pair. Twin flames. ‘Gemini Burning’ we called ourselves. We traveled a good deal in those days. We were all either in town or out of town. And you . . . little Rena! You were our doll-baby. We tended you and taught you and applauded you. Do you remember the time Sophie tried to teach you to drink arsenic?”

  Irene visibly struggled to recall this appalling incident, then shook her head. “That was a long time ago. So . . . who were my parents?”

  Salamandra paused to consider a matter she had not thought upon for perhaps twenty-five years. “Why . . . no one, little Rena. The child performers were pets of all the adult performers—whether any performers are adults is a question I leave to future generations to answer—unless the adults in question were curmudgeons like Rufus Pope. What an unlikeable cuss he was! Vinegar for blood. But aside from an ogre like that, you were the darling of every playbill you appeared on. And Tiny Tim, too.”

  “Was I always a jigger?”

  “Oh dear me, no! You played the harp—”

  “Harp!”

  “A sweet gilded tiny one. You sang, too: ‘Crying cockles and mussels, alive, alive oh,’ ” Salamandra trilled with enough vibrato (what Irene called an “amateur warble”) that my friend winced with almost physical pain. Vibrato, she had always said, was a symptom of an untrained voice.

  “Was I Irish, then?” Irene asked a bit warily.

  Salamandra did not even notice the child rearing its curly head to ask after its origins.

  “Heavens, no. Or, perhaps more accurately, who knows? Such songs always went over well, especially when piped from childish lips.”

  Irene’s deep intake of breath produced far more vibrato than she would have permitted on any stage in her next words. “Surely someone took responsibility for my comings and goings? Some . . . guardian.”

  “Well, you know that is funny. I never thought of it before. We show folk are a tolerant lot. We are always changing names and addresses and specialties. We just never think too much about the practicalities. All I remember, my dear, is that you were present in the theater when you were needed, and absent when you were not.”

  “Surely I was . . . paid for my infant capers! Who received the money?”

  Again Salamandra shrugged. “All I can say is we all—with the exception of Mr. Pope—we all considered it our duty and pleasure to look out for your little head and feet backstage and onstage, and that you always did your numbers as required and were a very untroublesome child, acting much older than your tender years, at least in your zeal and performance, and really quite, quite too adorable for words.”

  Irene looked ready to explode with aggravation. She had not come all this way to learn that she had been a beautiful baby.

  I intervened to keep the interview, for that was what this conversation really was, on ground that might prove rewarding.

  “Are there no laws, er, Madame Salamandra, that govern the employment of such young children in such an unrespectable venue as the sensational stage?”

  “Goodness no, Miss Huxleigh! Children may work as they are wanted and where their parents send them, and I hope matters are as simple and straightforward where you come from. No doubt there are bluenoses about who would sniff that a stage is a worse place to work than a shoe factory. I would stand up to any one of them to say that our labors are as light as our recompense sometimes is, that we enjoy mystifying a work-weary public and are the least-abused laborers in the nation, for we give joy and collect coins and must never toil from dawn to dusk as the factory drudges do, but trip the light fantastic every evening and at weekend matinees. And wear very pretty clothes. Who could ask for a better life, or livelihood?”

  I confess that for a moment this thrilling speech had me considering converting to the fire-breathing school, although there may be some who would be so unkind—or honest—as to say that I already had.

  Irene waggled her fingers at me and shook her head. I instantly understood that she considered this line of questioning fruitless, for now, at least.

  “Enough of my mysterious origins,” she said, waving one hand like a magician. “What we must answer here is the nature of the very odd attack on you. You are coated, of course, with fireproofing formulas?”

  This was news to me. I had no idea that one could avoid flames—perhaps even those eternal ones of Hell?—with formulas . . . except for the Ten Commandments, of course.

  “Naturally.” Madame Salamandra also waved a dismissive hand. “It was not my flesh that was the medium, but my form.”

  “Ah. Your clothes. Aren’t they, too, treated in fireproof chemicals?”

  “Naturally.”

  “And they are kept—?”

  “In my dressing room. Of course.”

  “Of course.” Irene stood. “May we see this place?”

  “Certainly.” Madame Salamandra gathered the blanket around her slightly charred form (reminding me of an Indian advertising a Buffalo Bill Wild West Show) and led a procession from the manager’s office to deeper into the bowels of the theater.

  This was not terrain unfamiliar to me, thanks to my association with a former prima donna like Irene. I soon found all the under-stage odors assaulting my senses: the potent perfume of mustache wax and crêpe hair, of oiled face paints
and rouge, of spirit gum and spirits of a more powerful, and liquid, sort. . . .

  Madame Salamandra’s dressing room was a semi-common one for the women of the playbill. A number of costumes ranging from silly to bizarre hung from a single metal pipe.

  Salamandra paused by a filmy array of pastel gowns in such colors as jonquil, pumpkin, scarlet, and crimson.

  “Meant to imply flames,” she noted.

  “And this night you wore the—?”

  “Tulip. A gay assemblage of gold and orange, with crimson panels.”

  Irene lifted the thin, layered muslins. “What substance would make these suggestively flammable fabrics literally so?”

  Madame Salamandra fidgeted. “I can think of but one thing.”

  “Naphtha?” Irene offered.

  “Why, yes! How did you know?”

  “Apparently I absorbed much backstage lore as a babe. These muslins would not be hard to submerge into some liquid substance that encouraged flammability. They would air-dry soon. And would there be no odor or stiffness to betray such a lethal bath?”

  “No. These formulas we use in the fireproof business are undetectable when dry. I see what you imply: I donned my own death when I put on my costume tonight. But who would plan such a vicious end for me, and why?”

  “Whoever killed your sister,” Irene replied. “As for ‘why,’ that is always the query first asked, and last answered.”

  17.

  Origin of the Species

  Many cases depend upon reasoning back to events of years

  ago—family secrets, vengeance visited even onto the second

  generation. In a sense the past shapes those who become

  victims or villains in the melodramas of my cases.

  —SHERLOCK HOLMES, GOOD NIGHT, MR. HOLMES,

  CAROLE NELSON DOUGLAS

  “Irene—?” I ventured in our hansom on the way back to our hotel.

  “Say no more, Nell,” she warned, puffing away on one of her signature little cigars as if to offer the horse-drawn conveyance the additional advantage of steam. “I have heard more tonight than I wish to hear in half a lifetime. My own!”

  “If wishes were fishes, then beggars would ride—”

  “And so we do. We ride. And we beg for answers. Say no more.”

  “Apparently your ‘half a lifetime’ is what is in question.”

  Irene put her palms to her ears like an obstreperous child.

  I admit that image gave me pause. I must remember that I was dealing with two Irenes now. One was the adult and impervious, sometimes even imperious, and well-defended one who had humbled a king and a consulting detective in the process of protecting her liberty and her integrity.

  And then there was the babe barely out of arms, that mewling infant she had been in a barely remembered past . . . helpless, alone, pushed into the limelight before she even knew the word, or the words . . . Mama and Papa. She would never know them.

  Although the eight years we had known each other had seen our roles and relationship shift through many changes, I had never before felt more the nanny . . . and more the ineffectual friend, the burden.

  It was an odd juxtaposition that made me feel both useful and helpless.

  “Oh!” Irene exclaimed after long thought. “That Nellie Bly is up to something that I do not like! Unfortunately, she is also on to something. There is a reason that these theater folk are marked for death, and so far the only link I can find is myself! A self I barely remember, and do not wish to.”

  “I can understand that. Well, I can try to understand that. I recall little of my own youthful years, yet I am sure that they were sadly predictable. I was, after all, a widowed parson’s daughter in Shropshire. I suppose certain . . . sheep have had more inspiring histories. Your youthful years are not. Predictable, that is. Normally I do not advocate the unpredictable, but in your case, this may have been an advantage.”

  She gaped at me, and I felt strangely rewarded. “You advocate the unpredictable, Nell? The unconventional upbringing? The unanswered questions in regard to origin?”

  “But need anything go unanswered? I think not. Certainly the Sage of Baker Street would not allow for such eventualities. Are we to ask for less?”

  “ ‘The Sage of Baker Street,’ Nell? Surely you exaggerate, although he would never think so. At least that is one boon we face here. We need not worry about the peripatetic Mr. Holmes tracing us to the New World.”

  “He would, if I may say so, be quite out of his depth.”

  “As we may be.”

  “Never! That would be giving that self-serving Nellie Bly the upper hand, and I will never do so.”

  “Self-serving, or serving an audience larger than self? I admit that I am somewhat confounded, Nell. A performer, even an elevated performer like an opera singer, may touch an audience of two or three thousand at once. A New York City journalist in these days may reach an audience of two or three hundred thousand.”

  “One is art,” I said stoutly. “The other is commerce.”

  “Hmmm. I think our modern world is blending both into a new enterprise, and also makes of death a new sensation.”

  “You refer to murder?”

  “To murder.” Irene was silent for longer than her usual wont. “I remember Sophie now. A child’s memories are as tender as a violet in the snow. A flashing picture here, a remembered scene there. The little Rena who danced is mostly lost to me. I don’t doubt her existence, but it is nothing to me. I remember Tiny Tim, standing beside me, and towering even then in my tiny Alice mind. In my kittenish, wide-eyed sense of wonder. He was the Big Boy. The one who went before me. And then . . . he was gone, Rena was gone. Where? Nellie Bly says I had a mother. Why is there no memory? Why is she fainter than the fireproof sisters and Tiny Tim growing large?”

  “She was not ever there, Irene, as my dead mother was not there. She was utterly absent, that’s all. I at least had a father to remember until I was almost twenty, and I could presume to a memory of my mother.”

  “I had no father,” Irene declared. “Nor any mother who would accept the title. The rational conclusion is obvious. I was, like Godfrey, a complete bastard.”

  There was nothing I could say to this shocking declaration, except one thing: “Then who would kill to keep you so in the public record and your own mind?”

  For once, my friend Irene Adler had no answer.

  I could not believe that I had accomplished this wonder.

  We dined quietly that night in the hotel dining room.

  How accustomed I was becoming to being a woman out on my own! No one glanced askance at us, but then this was the United States and Irene had forsworn smoking after the meal at my request.

  This did not prevent her from ordering a half bottle of wine with our dinner and then taking out her Russian blue-enamel cigarette case when the coffee came, to play with it. The glittering diamonds of the cover’s serpentine I slanted across the enameled blue sea like a bright white sail.

  I marveled again that she so favored a once poison-equipped object originally meant to take her life. Or did she treasure it because Sherlock Holmes had disarmed it before it could hurt her? I could not imagine any woman much treasuring what Sherlock Holmes did or did not do . . . the man was that aloof and that annoyingly cerebral, in the way of a too-smart-for-his-own-good boy, a type I had often seen in my governess days. I wondered again why boys discovered arrogance at such an early age, and why so few girls seemed to discover it at all.

  Across from me, over her strong-smelling coffee, Irene laughed.

  I looked up.

  “I agree, Nell, Sherlock Holmes is most annoyingly arrogant.”

  “I said no such thing!”

  “But you have always thought it.”

  “And how can you agree with me when I have said nothing?”

  “Because your emotions were as plain upon your face as your thoughts.” She picked up the case, turned it in her fingers. “It is exquisitely made, and beauti
ful, that is why I love it. So much in life is neither exquisite nor beautiful. Such transcendent objects remind us of the perfection we never find, in ourselves or in others. The artist who crafted this transcends my admiration of it, he even transcends the base and lethal use an enemy tried to make of it . . . transcends even the brilliant, single-sighted way one Sherlock Holmes unveiled and disarmed the corrupt purpose it had been adapted to: my own death.

  “He would not appreciate this object as Keats’s ‘thing of beauty and a joy forever,’ our Mr. Holmes.” She smiled again. “Yet he much admired the cleverness of both the maker, and the one who made it into something as subtle and poisonous as a living serpent. And,” she added casually, “he liked showing off to me. He is not quite all mental icewater, Nell. Almost, but not quite. And that is how he disarmed himself to me in that moment. So I see many makers in this object now. The artist. The assassin. The savior. And the survivor. Sometimes I think they exchange roles without knowing it, which makes things even more intriguing.”

  “It is a sinister memento of a bad time,” I said.

  “Yet . . . do you not keep your Gypsy boots?”

  The reference startled me. It is true that a pair of colorful leather-worked boots sat at the bottom of my cupboard at Neuilly. Now that she had mentioned it, I could not for the life of me say why I had saved this unlikely souvenir of the worst time of my life. She missed nothing, my friend Irene, and sometimes I could throttle her for it.

  “They are . . . folk art.”

  “This is”—she flourished the immensely more costly cigarette case—“aristocratic art. Both serve better as reminders of bad times, and how we overcame them, than as decorative objects.”

  “You are saying that decorative objects can be useful as well?”

  “I am saying that they must be, Nell, even when they are only human.”

  18.

  The Dictating Detective