The Curse of the Grand Guignol (28 page)

“Why are you wearing Coco’s
costume?”

“I will take Kiki’s place
tonight on stage. She is not well enough to perform.”

“But, but, you don’t know what
to do, what to say, how to act!” His dreams of fame and fortune
were sinking quicker than French cannons into the Moscow snow. His
moment of glory was meeting its Waterloo. “You cannot possibly
replace…”

Kiki cut him off. “I can’t do
it, Serge,” she said despairingly, her bottom lip trembling and her
eyes pricked with tears. “I cannot go out there. Not tonight. Maybe
never.”

Horrified, Davidov fell to his
knees at her side and took her two hands in his. “You don’t know
what you’re saying. You’re upset for Coco. I understand. Truly, I
understand.” His eyes flew quickly from Kiki to the Countess, from
the pale face to the painted one, and back again to his little
star. “Very well, the Countess can take your place for tonight. You
rest. Stay here. I can give you something to help you sleep. Sleep.
Dream. Dream of your sister. Dream of happy times. You will wake
refreshed and ready to perform tomorrow. Don’t move. I’ll be back
in a trice.” Reassuringly, he patted her hand before rushing
away.

A short time later he returned
with a glass of something colourless to which he added a couple of
drops of laudanum. Kiki promised to drink it as soon as she was
alone. The Countess took that as a hint to vacate the dressing
room. She picked up her belongings and allowed Davidov to usher her
to his private sitting room, but not before dipping her finger into
the glass to check the contents. It was white absinthe.

“Make yourself comfortable,” he
said unctuously, kow-towing now that he’d accepted Kiki would not
be performing and he was stuck with the vain aristocrat. He
despised blue-bloods and the sense of self-entitlement they exuded
as a birthright almost as much as he hated the anarchists. The
sooner the revolution came to Russia the better and they all shot
each other the better. Tsars and tsarinas the lot of them! They
liberated the serfs and then starved them to death. Here is your
free plot of land – that field covered with stones, that dry gully
full of thistles – but first you will have to toil four more years
for me for no payment to earn your freedom you ungrateful wretch.
Here, take this gun and man the barricades – I will be right behind
you!

Ha! The Marquise de Merimont
thought she could tell him how to run his own theatre because she
paid the bills. Why did you change that scene? I don’t think that’s
how the playwright meant it to be. It was better how it was at the
start - and then a shrug of her aristocratic shoulders and a
cavalier wave of her privileged hand. Do as you like. You always
do.

America would be different! The
Promised Land. They didn’t have tsars and tsarinas in America. No
blue-bloods, no lords and ladies, no counts and countesses…and no
anarchists either. Land of Hope and Glory.

“Make yourself comfortable,” he
repeated with an ingratiating smile and a slight bow of his head
before rushing away to make sure everything was as it should be for
the rising of the curtain.

The Countess was memorizing her
lines when a sharp rap sounded at the door and it flew open.
Monsignor Delgardo took one look, appeared embarrassed, and began
backing out awkwardly.

“I didn’t realize Monsieur
Davidov was entertaining. Forgive the intrusion.”

“Wait!” she cried. “Come in and
close the door.”

“Oh, it’s you! I mean, I didn’t
recognize…” He blushed profusely, jumping to all sorts of unholy
conclusions. “La comtesse, I didn’t mean to walk in on…”

“Oh, do shut-up, and close that
door. There’s a cold draught and I don’t wish to catch a chill. I’m
wearing this costume because I’m stepping in for Kiki tonight. She
is feeling fragile. Please sit down. I was hoping to speak to you
prior to the show tonight.”

It was an awkward moment,
growing more awkward by the minute. He didn’t know where to look,
but the pudgy hands folded in his lap seemed to provide focus. “If
you wish to speak to me about Kiki’s mental state then…”

“What I want to say has nothing
to do with Kiki. I have an acquaintance at the Vatican…” Pausing,
she sought to meet his gaze, netting him with unsparing
deliberation. He knew at once that his grand lie had caught up with
him.

“You know?” he said
pathetically.

“I know there is no Monsignor
Jorges Delgardo connected to the Vatican.”

“Then you probably also know I
am not a monsignor either,” he confessed, twisting the hands in his
portly lap.

She nodded. “Why the
charade?”

“Monsignor is an honorific, not
an appointment. It is easy to fabricate. No one ever checks. It is
highly respected, high enough to obtain certain privileges without
question, and yet not so high as to draw unwanted attention.”

“I checked. It sits midway
between Pope and Consecrated Virgin, just after Preceptor but
before Archimandrite. Are you also
not
a doctor?”

“I have a medical degree,” he
assured. “I did my training in Colombia. But it would have been
impossible to gain a position at Salpetriere without the right
connections. By claiming to be a monsignor and forging papers from
the Vatican, I was able to secure a senior post almost at once. My
field of study is actually megalomania. I was not lying when I
claimed to be doing research in that area.”

“So you wanted access to mental
patients? Is that it?”

“Yes and no. That was not what
motivated the subterfuge at the start.”

“Does your subterfuge have
anything to do with the girls in the lower level?”

“No, no, not at all, well not at
the start. That happened by chance when Davidov approached me to
take Coco out of the squalid over-crowded wing where the
prostitutes were housed. He begged me to try and cure her of her
opium addiction. He wanted Kiki to star in his show and as a
sweetener he offered to pay for Coco’s treatment. He offered me the
private booth gratis as an extra incentive. The programme was going
well and I began to include other opium-addicted prostitutes
without him knowing he was funding them too. I had to keep my
programme secret for that reason. Coco was more difficult than
most. She had disordered thoughts concerning self-hatred and
self-harm. Suicide was an obsession with her. She had tried to kill
herself several times before she even came into my care. Whenever
Kiki visited her sister it was worse. I discouraged Kiki from
coming. But she used to sneak in. I always knew when she had paid a
visit.”

The Countess sat down, crossed
one leg over the other, and then re-crossed them back again. Her
skirtless legs seemed to be as deranged as her thoughts. “I’m
afraid you still haven’t explained why you needed to go to such
lengths to pretend to be something you are not. You said your
subterfuge initially had nothing to do with your research into
megalomania and nothing to do with your opium cure, so why did you
want to secure a position at Salpetriere so desperately?”

“You met Little Marianne?”

“Yes.”

“She is my mother.”

The Countess’s shock was
profound. She took a moment to recover. Well, the age of the two
subjects was right. He was in his fifties and Little Marianne
appeared seventy years of age or thereabouts. But something didn’t
sit right. “She does not look Colombian or Amerindian. And she
doesn’t speak Spanish or Creole. She speaks French with a perfect
accent, albeit croakily.”

“As we grow old we revert back
to our mother tongue. Languages we have acquired later in life fade
from memory.”

“Were you born in Colombia?”

“Yes, but my mother was born in
France. She came to Colombia when she was twenty. She arrived with
her husband on her honeymoon. He was a surveyor working for the
railroad. It was 1849 and the California gold rush spurred the need
for a railway. That was long before the Panama Canal was started.
Her husband died a year later. By then she had met my father and
fallen in love. As soon as the mourning period was observed, they
married and I was born.

She began to exhibit signs of
mental illness when I was a boy but I didn’t know it. My father had
heard of the excellent work being done at Salpetriere and he sent
her there. She never returned to Colombia. My father stopped
speaking about her and I grew up never knowing what had happened to
her. I think it was this gap in my life that attracted me to
medicine, particularly psychology, because there were rumours she
was mad.

I never married. Looking back I
realize I was afraid the rumours were true. Eventually, I travelled
to France to find out for myself. You can imagine my shock when I
discovered she was still alive. Mental hospitals a decade or so ago
were brutal and primitive. It was worse for women. If she had not
been mad when she entered, she would soon have been made mad.

I decided then and there at our
reunion to look after her, to make up for the lost years. The only
way I could do that was to secure a position at the asylum. She is
not dangerous. You have seen her for yourself. I know you gave her
a doll. She carries it everywhere. If you expose me, she will be
locked up again and they will take away the doll.”

They were running out of time.
The clock was ticking toward the next Marionette Murder and yet the
Countess was no closer to a solution.

She had been pinning her hopes
on Monsignor Delgardo as the guilty party because of what had
happened to Xenia but as Dr Watson rightly pointed out, it could
have been anyone at the insane asylum who had poisoned her. And
once Xenia was pronounced dead, it would have been natural for her
to be taken to the morgue.

The Countess recalled the horrid
play Kiki told her about, the one staged by the gang at rue
Chaptal, where two old hags, jealous of a pretty inmate, had
blinded her with scissors. Why did she tell that story? She had
starred in several horrible stories of her own, so why recount a
story performed by a rival troupe? At the time it had seemed as if
Kiki was worried Coco’s life might be in danger. It had even seemed
as if Kiki was scared for her own life. But looking back - was that
it? What sort of mental state did you have to have to star in
naturalistic horror night after night? Did you have to be slightly
mad at the start or would it soon make you mad?

Doubts about Monsignor Delgardo
had increased when she discovered he was not a monsignor at all.
But his life story seemed genuine. Tears were gathering in his eyes
when he left her to ponder whether to expose him or not.

Morality, amorality, immorality?
What was the right thing to do? Was the right thing the same as the
best thing? Was morality fixed or shifting? Did it change with
time? Did it change according to expectation, need, status and
gender? Was cold-blooded murder ever justified? Did some people get
away with murder because they could?

If the killer was not Monsignor
Delgardo, then who?

The list of possible suspects
was not large. Her first instinct had been right. It had to be
someone intimately acquainted with
le Cirque du Grand
Guignol
.

The Countess crept onto the
stage and peered through a gap in the closed curtain. There, in the
front seat was Dr Watson and Mahmoud. Between them was a vacant
seat, presumably for her. Next along was Inspector de Guise still
in his Sherlock Holmes costume. He had brought two friends, a mousy
looking man and a woman with red hair. The stalls were full and the
crowd was growing restless. Three blond heads stood out like a
triptych of sun gods in the third row. The Humboldts had come to
see their darling cocotte perform.

Her eyes drifted to the private
booths on the first tier. Monsieur Delgardo would be in his private
box by now, and the Marquise de Merimont in hers. La marquise had
talked Monsieur Radzival into accompanying her to the theatre for
the first time. He had been so happy to win the poetry prize he had
acquiesced. Monsieur Crespigny had been thrilled. He had even had
the audacity to slap the stoic librarian on the back. Radzival had
blushed. It had been a touching moment between two solitary men who
suddenly realized they shared more than they knew.

Lazslo and Salvador began
moving items into place for the first comedy act.

Vincent, Hilaire and Felix were
putting the finishing touches to their comic costumes.

La Noire was smoking a
cigarette and peering through the curtain at the other end, soaking
up the manly contours of her dusky-skinned potential paramour.

The Countess removed herself to
Davidov’s sitting room to wait for her moment to strut and fret, or
at least be violated and strangled. She lighted a cigarette and
popped it in her hat to see if it actually worked and was amused at
the effect. A thin ribbon of smoke drifted up the ceiling while her
mind drifted back to the poems.

Delgardo’s terrible effort she
could understand. He had wanted his subterfuge to remain a secret.
He had not wanted to call attention to any emotion whatsoever.
Butterflies spoke for themselves. They transcended poetry.

La marquise’s effort was
strange; her poem seemed to diminish one word at a time until the
moment it died. Her entire demeanour had altered after Davidov
announced he would be taking the show to America. Instead of
looking pleased with her investment, it was as if her life was
suddenly made bankrupt.

Davidov’s Golem was odd.
Judenhass. Was he a Russian-Jew or a Russian Jew-hater? Jewishness
was certainly on his mind.

Dr Watson didn’t really enjoy
party games. He would have scribbled off the first thing that came
into his head. Tit for tat. Oddly, his poem touched on the idea of
vengeance. These killings had something to do with righting
wrongs.