Angels of Music (24 page)

‘Yes. I’m sorry to say.’

‘Then you’ll understand. It’s not that God has done anything… has given cause for suspicion… has ever been anything but transparent and kindly and loving. It’s that…’

‘Yes, I understand perfectly.’

Officially, Mr Calhoun had abandoned his wife and disappeared.

The Persian was unnerved by the way Irene and La Marmoset were together. They stoked each other’s fires.

‘May I have a cigarette?’ asked the detective.

* * *

After a month, La Marmoset turned in her report and her resignation.

‘I thought there was no such thing as a blameless husband,’ she said. ‘I was wrong. I have torn up my bill. There is no mystery to solve.’

Irene was near tears.

La Marmoset apologised again and left the café.

The Persian attempted to comfort Irene.

‘He is a monster,’ she said. ‘He must be.’

Nothing would break her conviction.

Even the Persian now saw only freakishness in Godfrey Norton’s decency.

It must be a mask.

The Angels, skilled and dispassionate, had drawn a blank. La Marmoset, predisposed to think the worst of husbands, had failed.

‘I hesitate to bring it up, but Erik has a suggestion. A last resort, as it were, but still a resort.’

‘Anything,’ said Irene.

The Persian didn’t want to say more, but Erik had spoken.

‘If you will consent to be hypnotised…’

Irene was horrified. The Persian knew how she felt about submitting to a mesmerist’s will. It was why she had left the Agency.

‘Under the fluence, Erik can sort through your memory,’ said the Persian. ‘He can turn up things you know that you do not know you know. You may have seen a clue others have missed. Ayda, Hagar, Ysabel, La Marmoset. They’re talented, but you’re closer to Godfrey. Something in the picture of your life together is wrong – a splash of dark where there should be colour. Erik can help you find it. He has done it before, with clients. I have seen a man sketch in detail a face glimpsed and forgotten years before. A woman recall in accurate particular the figures set down in a ledger which lay open on a desk in a room where she was attacked. In both cases, crimes were exposed and criminals brought to justice because of this.’

Irene was still unhappy about the idea.

In her day as an Angel, Erik used his skill to control his protégées – to make dolls of them. If he had set aside such methods, it was at least partially because using hypnotism meant he could not have Irene – or anyone with her spirit – as an agent.

It was only with her departure that the Persian realised Erik
could
change his mind.

Yet, the matter had come up again. Did Erik relish the chance to bring his errant Angel to book, to make her submit to him?

For Irene, the loss of control was terrifying. Perhaps the most terrifying thing she could think of.

But, in the end, she agreed.

The Persian wished that she hadn’t.

* * *

In Dressing Room 313, Irene sat before the long mirror. It was strange to see her back here.

The Persian turned off the electric light. A plain oval mask appeared in the mirror, lit from below, floating in the murk beyond the glass.

‘Irene,’ said Erik, the voice coming from everywhere in the room.

‘Erik.’

‘You are welcomed.’

‘Thanks,’ she shrugged. ‘Big of you to let me back in your country.’

Erik chuckled without warmth.

‘You must relax, Irene. You must not resist.’

‘Must I not?’

‘Your resistance is for show, I know. We are old friends, are we not? You have decided to let me help you. Please do not pretend you are unwilling.’

Irene looked at the Persian.

Should he stop this? Could Erik really help her?

Music began. A piano piece. A phonograph of one of Satie’s
Gymnopédies
. The Persian recognised the style of play. Erik had taken to recording himself on wax cylinders. He retained a love for novelties and gadgets.

‘Am I feeling sleepy?’ asked Irene, mocking. ‘Can I see the swinging watch?’

Could a mask frown?

‘Just look into the mirror and let the mirror look into you. Listen to the music, to the music between the notes…’

The Persian felt himself lulling away and scratched a thumbnail across his palm. He knew better than to let the Phantom bewitch him.

Irene looked at the mask in the mirror. Her hands fell into her lap. Her eyes did not close.

Irene’s face was ghostly in the mirror, superimposed on Erik’s mask. Relaxed, she looked younger, more like her old self.

She was ‘under’.

‘You have cause to suspect your husband of hiding shameful thoughts and deeds from you,’ suggested Erik.

‘No,’ answered Irene. ‘Not at all.’

The Persian was surprised. Irene had been so certain.

‘Godfrey Norton has done nothing to make you suspicious of him?’

‘He has not.’

‘He is completely devoted to you and to your marriage?’

‘He is.’

‘Godfrey Norton loves you?’

‘Yes.’

‘He is an honest, industrious man, who thinks only of making a home for you, and of the family you will have?’

‘Yes.’

‘You will have a family? Children?’

No answer.

‘You have no reason –
no reason at all
– to doubt Godfrey Norton?’

‘No.’

‘Have you a reason to doubt yourself?’

No answer.

The Persian was heart-sick. Irene Adler had left their world – the world of exploits and adventures – for marriage and family. For love and happiness. To be Irene Norton.

And for Irene Adler, that wasn’t enough.

She couldn’t admit it to herself, and that had driven her to… something like madness. For Irene, mere
ennui
was a nightmare.

The Satie continued.

‘Irene,’ said Erik, raising his voice.

Irene’s hands rose to her face.

‘What? What did I say?’

‘Irene, you are right,’ said the Phantom. ‘You must leave at once, leave Godfrey Norton, leave your apartment, leave Paris.’

‘Leave God?’

‘You know this. You have always known this.’

‘Yes.’

Irene was not jittery anymore.

‘What is it?’ she asked him. ‘What did I tell you?’

‘Terrible things,’ said Erik. ‘Unspeakable things.’

She smiled tightly. ‘I knew it. It had to be.’

‘You have a way out,’ said the Persian. ‘Money, papers?’

‘Of course,’ she said, half-smiling. ‘I never go into a room without knowing the ways out. Always have an exit prepared. Do you still teach your Angels of Music that, Erik?’

Erik said nothing.

Irene stood. Her posture was different. She was alert again, electric.

‘Allah be with you,’ he said.

She kissed him on the cheek and left the dressing room.

The Persian turned on the light and made the mask vanish.

‘It was the only answer she would hear,’ he said to the man behind the mirror. ‘You have helped her.’

The phonograph recording finished.

The Persian was alone in Dressing Room 313.

* * *

‘You are the Persian?’ said the Englishman.

‘I am
a
Persian.’

The Café de la Paix was busy, as ever. It was the hour when he accepted approaches. ‘You are who I have to see to… to hire the Opera Ghost Agency?’

He looked up at the man. He knew him at once.

‘It’s my wife,’ the man said. ‘She’s missing.’

The petitioner hovered, not wanting to sit at the table until invited.

The Persian was sorry for him. But only one answer was possible.

‘I regret that we cannot take your case, Mr Norton.’

‘Slitting a throat … it’s like peaches and cream.’

Oscar Méténier,
Lui!
(1897)

I
F NOT FOR
the masked juggler, one might miss Impasse Chaplet. In such a gaudy district, it would be easy to walk past the ill-lit cul-de-sac, even with footprints stencilled on the pavement. Once, the red trail was enough to lead those ‘in the know’ to the
Théâtre des Horreurs
. Now, a less exclusive audience required more obvious signposts.

When lone tourists wandered into this
quartier
, basking crocodiles slid off mudbanks to slither after them, smiling with too many teeth. Kate Reed knew better than to stroll along Rue Saint-Vincent after dark, peering through her thick spectacles at grimy signs obscured by layers of pasted-up advertising posters. Holding a Baedeker’s Guide open was like asking for directions to the city morgue in schoolgirl French.

She walked briskly, as if she knew exactly where she was going – a habit learned as a crime reporter. Montmartre struck her as less vile than the Monto in Dublin or Whitechapel in London.
Les Apaches
had a swaggering, romantic streak. It was put about that the crooks of Paris tipped
chapeaux
and kissed hands when robbing or assaulting you, seldom stooping to the mean, superfluous twist of the blade or kick in the ribs you could expect from an Irish lout or an English ruffian…

…though, of course, she was here because of a string of unromantic disappearances and ungallant murders. The ‘superfluity of horrors’ promised by the playbills was spilling off the stage into the streets. On the map, red ‘last seen in the vicinity of’ and ‘partial remains found’ dots clustered suspiciously around Impasse Chaplet. The Sûreté shrugged at a slight rise in unsolved cases, so a local tradesmen’s association – which, at a guess, meant an organised criminal enterprise ticked off by poaching on their preserve – placed the matter in the hands of the Opera Ghost Agency.

Looking around for suspicious characters, she was spoiled for choice.

Strumpets and beggars importuned from doorways and windows. Barkers and panderers even stuck their heads out of gutter-grates, talking up attractions below street level. Here were cafés and cabarets, bistros and brothels, poets and painters, cutpurses and courtesans. Drinking, dining, dancing and damnation available in cosy nooks and on the pavement. Competing musicians raised a racket. Vices for all tastes were on offer, and could be had more cheaply if the mademoiselle would only step into this darkened side-street…

Montmartre, ‘mountain of the martyr’, was named after a murder victim. In 250
AD
, Saint Denis, Bishop of Paris, was decapitated by Druids. He picked up his head and climbed the hill, preaching a sermon all the way, converting many heathens before laying down dead. Local churches and shrines sported images of sacred severed heads as if in gruesome competition with the
Théâtre des Horreurs
.

A troupe of nuns sang a psalm, while a superior sister fulminated against sin. As Kate got closer, she saw the nuns’ habits were abbreviated to display legs more suited to the can-can than kneeling in penitence. Their order required fishnet stockings and patent leather boots. The sermon was illustrated with lashes from a riding crop – a chastisement eagerly sought by gentlemen for whom the punishment was more delightful than the sin.

A solemn gorilla turned the hand-crank of a barrel organ. A monkey in a sailor suit performed a jerky hornpipe. The ape-man’s chest-board proffered an art nouveau invitation to the
Théâtre des Horreurs
.

His partner – face shaved and powdered so that at first you might take it for a human child – wasn’t happy. The monkey’s arms were folded like a jolly tar’s, sewn together at the elbows and wrists. The stitches were fresh. Tiny spots of blood fell. The creature’s tail was docked too. It wasn’t dancing, but throwing a screaming fit to music.

A busker who so mistreated a dumb animal in London would be frogmarched by an angry crowd to a police station, though he could do worse to a real child and have it taken all in good fun.

She slipped a small blade out of her cuff – she had come prepared for this expedition – and surreptitiously sawed through the string which tethered the monkey to a
colonne Morris
. The creature shot off between the legs of the crowd, ripping its arms free, shedding clothes. The ape-man gave chase, clumsy in his baggy costume, and tripped over a carefully extended parasol.

Kate looked up from the parasol to its owner, who wore a kimono decorated with golden butterflies and a headdress dripping with flowers. Her sister Angel of Music had abetted her intervention. They weren’t supposed to acknowledge each other in the field, but exchanged a tiny nod. As ever, Yuki presented a pretty, stone face. Kate would not have suspected softness in the woman, but remembered monkeys were worshipped in Japan.

As Yuki walked on, Kate instinctively looked for her other shadow – and saw Clara frowning disapproval from across the road. The third Angel was strange, even by the standards of the English. Yuki’s background was outside Kate’s experience or imagining, but she was easier to warm to than Mrs Clara Watson. The beautiful widow might be the worst person in this affair, yet she was also in the employ of an agency devoted – in a manner Kate had yet to determine – to the cause of justice.

Kate and Clara both had red hair. She guessed her colleague was seldom bothered by lads cat-calling ‘carrot-top’ or ‘match-head’ at her. Kate kept her ginger mop short and tidied away under caps and bands. Clara let her luxurious, flaming mane fall loose. Kate had the plague of freckles which often came with her colouring. Clara’s skin was milk with rose highlights, flawless as the powder mask Yuki wore on formal occasions. Six inches taller than her sister Angels, Mrs Watson gave the impression of looking down on them from a far greater height.

Still, they were required to perform as a trio. In the circumstances, Kate could put up with the worrying wench. One did not become an Angel of Music unless one had a past… usually an immediate past fraught with scandal, peril and narrow escape. They had all quit countries where they were settled and fetched up in Paris. Clara, an Englishwoman who’d never set foot in England, was long resident in China, but had fallen foul of some mad mandarin
and
the colonial authorities. Her field of interest was prison reform … not in alleviating the sufferings of unfortunate convicts, but in heightening and aestheticising their torments. Yuki had come from her native Japan, where there was a price on her head. Of her crimes, she merely said she had ‘settled some family debts’. Kate was on the wrong side of the financier Henry Wilcox. She had written in the
Pall Mall Gazette
about his penchant for purchasing children as ‘maiden tributes of modern Babylon’. He was no longer welcome in his clubs – justice of a sort, though she’d rather he serve a long sentence in a jail designed by Clara Watson. Wilcox’s writ-serving lawyers and hired bully-boys made London unhealthy for her this season.