FEMME FATALE Read online

  I would give a great deal to know what inevitable stages of

  incident produced the likes of Irene Adler. Show me a

  method of forming more women so, and I would show more

  interest in women.

  —SHERLOCK HOLMES, GOOD NIGHT, MR. HOLMES,

  CAROLE NELSON DOUGLAS

  FROM THE CASE NOTES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES

  I have resolved to keep this record for Watson’s benefit, since I was less than forthcoming about my sudden trip to the United States of America and the reasons for it. I may, or may not, ultimately show it to him.

  It appears that his attempts to spin tales from some of my cases promise to become routinely published. Much as I may gently mock his literary efforts, or at least his impulse to turn the sober facts of my investigations into “thundering good tales,” I bow to the inevitable.

  Despite the presence of murder on Miss Nellie Bly’s agenda, I am not pursuing her particular commission on these teeming shores. I have, in fact, a trifling though tasty puzzle to solve for the Astor family, which has generously sponsored my voyage. Although I was in a sense lured here by a mermaid, no siren song can lure me onto self-destructive shoals, and the wax is firmly installed in my ears.

  When I encountered the American courtesan known as “Pink” in Paris, I never believed for a moment that she was what she wished to seem. Nor was I particularly surprised to find her established here in America as a newspaper reporter under the lively pseudonym of Nellie Bly.

  While I had no time to waste in surmising her origins then, the small callus on the first joint of her right middle finger betrayed itself as a cradle for the pen, and not even the most ardent invitation-penning society woman builds such a callus; only a writer. Watson, in fact, is developing the beginnings of the same sign of vigorously unleashed fancy. I assume the typewriter will soon banish this telltale mark to an antique footnote. At least the eccentricities of typed lines are almost equal to the betraying individuality of handwriting.

  At one time I might have considered Miss Bly the most prepossessing young woman I have ever met. Even now I can see Watson the Married Man stroking his mustache and weaving subplots of a romantic sort for his most unromantic old chambermate.

  Alas, I am annoyed rather than intrigued by such naked feminine ambition, and he will no doubt twit me again for the chronic suspicion with which I regard the so-called gentler sex. You see, I do not believe that common delusion for a minute.

  I must confess to harboring a professional curiosity about another enterprising woman, to whom the blatant is an impossibility and whose deepest ambitions remain a mystery. This is the woman whose murky history Miss Bly offered to me as the usual snare and delusion to which mortal man is supposed to surrender. I am given to understand that her vague personal history from an early age in the States is somehow involved in a bizarre murder, or several. At least Miss Nellie Bly devoutly hopes so.

  No creature on earth is more secretly bloodthirsty than a ladylike woman.

  Ah, Watson, old fellow! I have been forced to conceal so much from you lately, all in the cause of Queen and country, which you would never deny me. Still, it is a shabby way to treat a loyal companion. Hence, my penitence through these pages. Also, this record will help me to think. There is something about your undemanding presence, old fellow, that always puts me into the mood for intense cogitation, almost more than my pipe and shag. Even the completely irrelevant questions you ask stimulate my mind by their very banality.

  So I will continue to address you here, in theory and across leagues and leagues of ocean, and thereby enter into a dialogue with myself.

  I suppose I should characterize the city of New York. It is dirty, loud, bustling, and tall, Watson, buildings lurching skyward like mushrooms after a rain. It is just this straining for height that strikes me the most about this metropolis of nearly three millions of people.

  There is also the sense that this city is all business. Everything is new and growing. There seems at first little history to celebrate. Then one realizes that the inhabitants have dragged their history behind them, as snails their shells, even as they also have left it and the Old World behind.

  Everyone here appears to be an immigrant of one sort or another, and all of these immigrants, instead of being absorbed into something older and greater than they, shape the city to their own presence. New York must reflect them and support them and bow to the sheer impress of their numbers. Quite a backward way of building cities, I believe, but then this is a backward country, thus far, at least.

  Nevertheless I hold great hopes for it producing new and vast and vile varieties of crime. It was in this city, I suspect, that Madam Adler Norton first found employment with the Pinkerton Detective Agency of Chicago. I confess myself eager to learn more of this trusty organization, which has created on a nationwide scale what I founded on an individual basis: a private detective force that works outside the police apparatus, although sometimes in cooperation with it.

  I find it astounding that women were welcomed to its ranks as long ago as just after the American Civil War, shortly after you and I were born, Watson! Not many women were Pinkertons, I understand, but ten or so years later, one of them was Miss Irene Adler.

  My earlier pilgrimage to visit Baron von Krafft-Ebing in Germany, and my admiration for his splendid catalogue of the sort of killer he calls “lust-murderers” has, oddly enough, turned my mind to this lady.

  You know that I regard her as forming a class by herself among her sex. You mistake this for infatuation when it is merely fact. Among her achievements I number her newest astonishment: recruiting Nellie Bly to her service last spring. I could barely contain this intrepid reporter from trailing me back to Whitechapel and meddling in my laying Jack the Ripper to rest for all time.

  Madam Irene, at what was surely the most devastating moment of her life (unless I uncover any even more devastating moments here in New York), managed to bridle Miss Bly, turn her to her own purpose, and silence her at the spectacular end of the affair, to boot! I quote the King of Bohemia on only one subject: “What a woman!”

  This does not betoken any personal interest, I should soundly advise any Watsons into whose hands my private notes may ever fall. Rather it signifies my new quest to become the Krafft-Ebing of psychological types both elevated and debased. As a solver of crimes I am most rewarded when I encounter a mind and a personality worthy of the keenest steel. Given my slight handicap in personal knowledge of the female sex, I have concluded that the proper study of this consulting detective is woman, and the woman is the best subject for my elucidation.

  I know, Watson, that you still devoutly believe this lady to be dead, and therefore mourn the impossibility of my succumbing to her intellectual virtues, if not any other of her many more obvious charms, which you are far better suited to appreciate than I. One of my unwelcome tasks is not to disabuse you of this wrongheaded conviction until the time is right. I know you are set on telling her story with pen and paper, and it ends so much more dramatically with her plunging off a precipice, along with the train she and her new husband were taking through the Alps. I believe that storytellers of the sort you aspire to be have a weakness for endings that plunge off a precipice.

  Ever the romancer, Watson! Fiction is undoubtably your métier. Mine is fact, And I shall know all the facts that are to be learned about Madam Irene’s past, and likely future, before I quit this Continent.

  19.

  A Deeper Solemnity of Death

  Dr. Ferguson is a lightning autopsist and a sort of scientific

  Jack the Ripper.

  —THE NEW YORK WORLD, 1889

  The very next morning Irene surrendered and sent a message to Nellie Bly at the address she had given us.

  She addressed it to “Miss Elizabeth J. Cochrane,” to my great satisfaction.

  “Need we really resort to Pink?” I asked her after the messenger boy had left, content with his fistful of American dimes.

 
; “Yes. She is ahead of us here, though not for long, I hope. Now I know enough to bluff her into revealing what she knows to me.”

  “ ‘Bluff’? In what way do you mean that?”

  “In the sense of hoodwinking with apparently greater knowledge than one actually has.”

  “I wonder, then, if Pink, with all her vague hints and portents, isn’t already ‘bluffing’ us.”

  “You are quite right. We are all engaged on a game of ‘Blind Man’s Bluff,’ instead of ‘Blind Man’s Buff.’ ”

  “Only we are women, not men. I have played ‘Blind Man’s Buff’ in the schoolroom with my charges . . . and once with Quentin.”

  “Quentin? Did you really?”

  I had not intended to refer to that remote and rather embarrassing incident, but mention of the game brought him to mind, he who played the Great Game on the harsh slopes of Eastern lands nowadays. Where had he gone after Transylvania? Where had he gone after our disastrous reunion when I had utterly failed him, and myself? I could ask myself such questions, but I feared the answers. Would we ever meet again? Perhaps not, and it was all my fault.

  “Quentin,” Irene repeated quietly, her amber-brown eyes as soft and sympathetic as a rabbit’s, a most unusual expression for her.

  But she said no more, and for that I was most grateful.

  Our guest (or tormentor) knocked late that afternoon.

  The room reeked of smoke, for Irene had puffed and paced, and paced and puffed throughout much of the day.

  I understood that all the amazing people we had met and tales we had heard since arriving in the States were churning through her mind like clouds in a windstorm.

  She was preparing for the next stage of the quest, or the battle: confronting Pink to provide the evidence of Irene’s so-called “mother.”

  I tried to imagine what I would think or feel if someone produced a live woman and introduced her as the mother I had always thought dead.

  But my reactions were not Irene’s.

  Irene admitted Pink, who was attired quite smartly in a city dress with a wide-brimmed hat of heliotrope velvet and pink taffeta, the whole feminine affair pinned into her chignon within an inch of its life.

  I was disturbed to see that Pink had adopted my Paris habit of carrying a large, flat artist’s portfolio for her papers. I discovered I was as temperamental as Irene about imitators, and was just as likely to be annoyed as flattered.

  “Ladies,” Pink greeted us in the brisk, businesslike manner she employed in her home city.

  She sat without invitation on a side chair, the large leather portfolio almost a tabletop on her knees.

  “Before you ask me the questions that are no doubt burning at the backs of your throats by now, I’d like you to read a small story of mine, from a few weeks back.”

  “Back?” I inquired. “You mean ‘prior to now’?”

  “I mean this all happened before we ever set eyes upon each other in Paris, or before we ever stared into the face of Jack the Ripper. Sensational news stories don’t just occur in Whitechapel, London, or in the cellars of Paris. We have plenty of our own right here on the streets of New York City.”

  At this she untied the strings binding her portfolio together and drew out a still-fragrant sheet of newsprint.

  “Either one of you can read it, or both would be better. Anyway, it’s the incident that got me on the trail of your mother, Irene, if there is such a being.”

  “You mean even you are not sure?” Irene asked.

  “I mean your past is as hard as a walnut on Christmas Day to crack. I don’t mean to tear my fingernails raw over it, so thought you might lend me a hand if I showed you the strange trail by which your past came to my attention.”

  “Show away,” Irene challenged, leaning back and looking amused, or worse . . . bored.

  Thus it was left to me to take the ink-impregnated papers from Pink’s dainty hand and skim the contents first before passing them on to Irene. I almost got the sense of a Borgia princess allowing the court taster to sample the menu first . . . but Irene was always onstage in some opera in her head, so I was very eager to swallow this intriguing information first.

  What I read was a newspaper story dated toward the end of the previous May. The date was after we had met the prostitute “Pink” and before Irene had discerned her real identity as the daredevil female reporter who wrote under the nom de guerre of Nellie Bly.

  Amazingly, it was a journalistic piece that had not been written by said Nellie Bly, but by a rival lady reporter. I read with deepening interest. Our Miss Pink was passing on a story she had missed while dallying with Jack the Ripper in London, and, along with us, in Paris, Prague, and points eastward.

  THE EXTREMELY STRANGE CASE OF WASHINGTON

  IRVING BISHOP AND THE IMAGINARY MURDER

  AT THE LAMBS CLUB

  by Nell Nelson

  (recorded by witness testimony after the circumstances revealed)

  The Lambs Club meets in a dignified white stone building in New York City, an august institution established in 1875. Along with the Players Club it is the most renowned gathering place of theatrical personages in the States, or at least in New York City. (Some are so unkind as to say that its sole purpose for being is to establish the notion that actors can be gentlemen and create a club. However, from what one hears of the revels and masques that are staged therein, sometimes with men in women’s dress, it is entirely too jolly to be genteel.)

  In this place has recently occurred an event more dramatic than any acted upon the stage. It has presented the public with a mystery of frightening dimensions, in that it involves the death of a dead man.

  A MAESTRO INVITED TO PERFORM WONDERS

  It began with a simple invitation to a wonder-worker on the 12th of May of this year, two eminent Lambs Club members, the actormagician Henry Dixey and Sidney Drew, another actor, invited a performer of a slightly different stripe to entertain their fellows.

  Mr. Washington Irving Bishop was a world-renowned mind reader and he offered the interested Lambs Club members an effect he had performed for the Czar of Russia. First, they must choose one of their number to escort Mr. Bishop from the room. Then they must invent a murder, victim, weapon, and killer. The “murderer” was to act out the crime physically and then hide the “weapon.”

  This done, Mr. Bishop returned to the room with his escort, who swore that Mr. Bishop could neither hear nor see any part of the imaginary murder while absent.

  Another member, who had been in the room when the pantomime had been performed, was assigned as Mr. Bishop’s impromptu “assistant.”

  Blindfolded, Mr. Bishop grasped his assistant’s wrist, asking the man to think only of the fictional “victim.”

  In their midst, Mr. Bishop slowly turned like a top, then began dragging his assistant through the occupants of the room, both people and furnishings. His excitement mimicked that of a hunting dog on the trail. He trembled from toe to fingertip, the veins of his forehead distended. He lurched about the room in this manner. When he stopped to point to one person . . . it was indeed the very individual chosen to play the role of “victim.”

  Mr. Bishop repeated the same actions to indicate the chosen “murderer” and “weapon.”

  Amid applause and wonder, and some discreet scoffing, Mr. Bishop was asked to provide a further demonstration of his powers. For this next stunt, Clay Green, a comedy writer and the club secretary, complied with Mr. Bishop’s request to mentally choose a name in the club register. Still blindfolded, still lurching and trembling, presumably with effort, Mr. Bishop took Mr. Green in hand, located the book and even indicated the proper page. Begging Mr. Green to “concentrate,” he scrawled the letters that came to him, purportedly from Mr. Green’s mind, on a paper.

  Mr. Green frowned politely at the gibberish Mr. Bishop had produced. The name he had in mind was Margaret Townsend.

  But when Mr. Bishop’s scrawl was held up to a mirror, of course the word read “Townsend.” />
  A SUDDEN SWOON

  The crowd applauded as one, but Mr. Bishop, always an energetic, even frenetic figure, grew suddenly agitated and in a moment the great mind reader fell mindless to the floor.

  Applause turned to gasps and mutters of consternation.

  CONFESSION OF CATALEPSY

  “Do not worry, my friends,” said a portly fellow who stepped near the unconscious mentalist. “I am Dr. John Irwin. I’ve known Mr. Bishop for years and I am familiar with such ‘swoons’ as he may suffer. In fact, he is that most interesting and rare anomaly, a true cataleptic. Many today fear being buried alive, but Mr. Bishop has far more right than most to dread this awful fate. His disease inflicts without warning severe muscular rigidity, the suspensions of all sensation and an outward appearance of all life signs being extinguished.”

  Not long after that Mr. Bishop did indeed revive and was taken to a bed upstairs to rest. Rest was not his desire, however, and soon he insisted on repeating his last trick. He demanded that the club ledger be brought to his room and that Dr. Irwin act as his assistant.

  But the famed mentalist seemed past his powers. He only located the correct page with great effort, and when he stood to determine the chosen name, he collapsed, unconscious again.

  COMES THE CONSULTING PHYSICIAN

  Dr. Irwin called on Dr. Charles C. Lee, who had attended the mentalist before, but by 4 A.M. the following day all his efforts to revive the fallen man had failed, and he left.

  A most appalling and touching picture of the bizarre efforts to revive the dead man is available from Mr. Augustus Thomas, Mr. Bishop’s advance man, who was intercepted while strolling along Broadway by a friend who ran up, shouting, “Your star is sick at the Lambs.”

  Mr. Thomas sped to the scene, where he “found Bishop in a little hall bedroom on an iron cot where he had been for twelve hours, a tiny electric battery buzzing away with one electrode over his heart and the other in his right hand.”

  Mr. Thomas, chagrined at his famous client’s circumstances and “unconscious” condition, noted the two doctors smoking in an adjacent room, worn from the watch. Mr. Thomas sat beside his most famous client, studied the handsome face of this man of thirty-three years, even though Mr. Bishop was “to all appearances dead.” Then “a deeper solemnity came over his features,” and Mr. Thomas summoned the absent doctors to point out the change he had witnessed.