Angels of Music (25 page)

Before quitting London, Kate secured a letter of introduction from the Ruling Cabal of the Diogenes Club to the Director of the Opera Ghost Agency. What the Club was for Britain, the Agency was to France: an institution, itself mysterious, dedicated to mysteries beyond the remit (or abilities) of conventional police and intelligence services. Status as a (temporary) Angel of Music afforded a degree of protection. She was grateful to be in the employ of an individual more terrifying than any colossus of capital. Those who’d happily see impertinent females skinned alive, beheaded by a Lord High Executioner or bankrupted by a libel suit thought twice about crossing Monsieur Erik.

Yuki casually tapped the pavement with her parasol – a fetish object she clung to after nightfall, though a stout British brolly would be more practical in this drizzle-prone city – and drew Kate’s attention to the red paint footprints. The gorilla was the first living signpost on the route to the
Théâtre des Horreurs
. The prints – spaced to suggest a wounded, staggering man – led to the juggler, who kept apple-size skulls in the air.

The shill wore a
papier-mâché
mask. She had seen the face often the past few days – on posters, in the illustrated press, on children scampering in the parks, on imitators begging for a sou in the streets.

Guignol.

All Paris, it seemed, talked of the capering mountebank. Mention was made of his padded paunch, his camel’s hump, his gross red nose, his too-wide grin, his terrible teeth, his rouged cheeks, his white gloves with long sharp nails bursting the fingertip seams, his red-and-white striped tights, his jerkin embroidered with skulls and snakes and bats, his shock of white hair, his curly-toed boots, his quick mind, his cruel quips, his shrill songs…

Kate understood Guignol to be the French equivalent of Mr Punch. Both were based on Pulcinella, the sly brute of Neapolitan
commedia dell’arte
, changed in translation. This incarnation should not be mistaken for any of his like-named or similar-looking ancestors. This Guignol was new-minted, essentially a fresh creation, a sensation of the day.

The juggler was not the real Guignol – if there even was a ‘real’ Guignol. He was skilled, though, keeping five skulls in the air.

He stood aside, not dropping a skull, to let Kate into Impasse Chaplet.

The racket of Rue Saint-Vincent dimmed in the cobblestoned alley. She heard dripping water and her own footsteps. What she first took for low-lying mist was smoke, generated by a theatrical device.

At the end of the cul-de-sac was a drab three-storey frontage. It could have been an abandoned warehouse, though gas-jets burned over the ill-fitting doors and firelight flickered inside.

Originally, the building was a convent school. The mob who attacked it in 1791, during the anti-clerical excesses of the Reign of Terror, were sobered to find nuns and pupils freshly dead amid spilled glasses of poison. The headmistress, intent on sparing them the guillotine, had ordered arsenic added to their morning milk. Since then, the address had been a smithy, a coiners’ den, a lecture-hall and a sculptor’s studio. Doubtless, the management of the
Théâtre des Horreurs
exaggerated, but the site’s history was said to be steeped in blood: a duel between rival blacksmiths fought with sledgehammers; a police raid that left many innocents dead; a series of public vivisections ended by the assassination of an unpopular animal anatomist whose lights were drawn out on his own table; and three models strangled by a demented artist’s assistant, then preserved in wax for unutterable purposes.

A dozen years ago, the impresario Jacques Hulot bought the place cheaply and converted it into a theatre at great expense. The bill offered clowns, comic songs and actors in purportedly amusing animal costumes. Patrons found it hard to laugh within walls stained with horrors. After a loss-making final performance, Monsieur Hulot slapped on white make-up and hanged himself in the empty auditorium. Cruel wags commented that if he had taken this last pratfall in front of paying customers, the fortunes of his company might have been reversed. The showman’s adage is that the public will always turn out for what they want to see – a lesson not lost on the heirs of Monsieur Hulot, who transformed the
Théâtre des Plaisantins
into the
Théâtre des Horreurs
. A space unsuited to laughter would echo with screams.

Kate was not alone in the alley. Yuki had strolled past the juggler, but doubled back as if seized by idle curiosity. She joined a press of patrons who needed no bloody footprints to mark the way. Kate noticed their pale, dry-mouthed, excited air. These must be
habitués
. Clara should be along shortly. Kate let others surge ahead, towards doors which creaked open, apparently of their own accord.

A crone in a booth doled out blue
billets
. Admission to this back-street dive was as costly as a ticket for the Opéra. Freshly painted-over figures on an otherwise faded board indicated the price had risen several times as the craze took fire. Erik, a partisan of the higher arts, might bristle at such impertinent competition. Another reason the Opera Ghost Agency had taken an interest in
l’affaire Guignol
?

Ticket in hand, Kate stepped under a curtain held up by a lithe woman in a black bodystocking and Guignol mask. She joined an oddly solemn procession, down a rickety stairway to an underlit passage. One or two of her fellows – other first-timers, she guessed – made jokes which sounded hollow in this confined space. The smoke-mist pooled over threadbare patches in the carpet. She couldn’t distinguish genuine dilapidation from artful effect.

Notices – not well-designed posters, but blunt, official-seeming warnings – were headed ATTENTION: THOSE OF A NERVOUS OR FEMININE DISPOSITION. Kate looked closer. THE MANAGEMENT TAKES NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR MEDICAL CONDITIONS SUSTAINED DURING PERFORMANCES AT THIS THEATRE… INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO FAINTING, NAUSEA, DISCOLORATION OR LOSS OF HAIR, HYSTERICAL BLINDNESS OR DEAFNESS, LOSS OF BOWEL CONTROL, MIGRAINES, CATALEPTIC FITS, BRAIN FEVER AND/OR DEATH BY SHEER FRIGHT AND SHOCK. Every poster promised NIGHTMARES GUARANTEED.

Two women in nurses’ uniforms required that everyone sign (in duplicate) a form absolving the management of ‘responsibility for distress, discomfort, or medical condition’, etc. Uncertain of the document’s legality, Kate folded her copy into her programme. Only after the paperwork was taken care of was the audience admitted into the auditorium.

It was about the size of a provincial lecture-hall or meeting-place. The chairs were wooden and unpadded. No one was paying for comfort. Unlike the grand theatres of London and Paris, this playhouse was not illuminated by electric light. The
Théâtre des Horreurs
was still on the gas. Sculpted saints and angels swarmed around the eaves. A relic of the convent school, the holy company was – after a century of alternating abuse and neglect – broken-winged, noseless, obscenely augmented or crack-faced. The house barely seated 300 patrons, in circle, stalls and curtained boxes.

Kate took her seat in the middle of the stalls, between an elderly fellow who might be a retired clerk and a healthy family of five – a plump burgher, his round wife and three children who were their parents in miniature. After the warnings and waivers, it surprised her that minors were allowed into the performance.

The elderly fellow was obviously highly respectable. He was tutting approval over an editorial in
La Vie Française
, a conservative Catholic publication, which breathed fire on all traitors to France. Treason was defined as saying out loud or in print that Captain Alfred Dreyfus, currently stuck in a shack on
Île du Diable
, was not guilty of espionage. To Kate, the oddest thing about the affair was that everyone seemed to
know
Dreyfus was innocent and that another officer named Esterhazy was the actual traitor. Papers like
La Vie
, published and edited by the powerful Georges Du Roy, still ruled it an insult to France to question even a manifestly wrong-headed decision of a military court. Dreyfus was a Jew, and the line the Anti-Dreyfusards took on the issue was virulently anti-Semitic. A military doctor pledging to a fund established to benefit the family of Captain Henry, who had committed suicide when it came out that he had patriotically forged evidence against Dreyfus, stated a wish that ‘vivisection were practised on Jews rather than harmless rabbits’. Dreyfus, his novelist supporter Émile Zola and caricature rabbis were burned in effigy on street corners by the sorts of patriotic moralists who would denounce the
Théâtre des Horreurs
as sickening and degrading. The gentleman reader of
La Vie Française
could evidently summon enthusiasm for both forms of spectacle – unless he had come to lodge a protest against Guignol by throwing acid at the company.

She looked about, discreetly. Yuki was seated in the back row, presumably so her headdress wouldn’t obstruct anyone’s view of the stage. In England – or, she admitted, Ireland – a Japanese woman in traditional dress would be treated like an escaped wild animal. The French were more tolerant – or less willing to turn away customers. After all, Yuki was plainly not Jewish. Clara had wangled a box. Kate caught the glint of opera-glasses. It was only fair she get the best view: she was the devotee of
contes cruels
.

A small orchestra played sepulchral music. Refreshments included measures of wine served in black goblets marked poison and sweetmeats in the forms of skulls, eyeballs and creepy-crawlies. Kate bought a sugar cane shaped like a cobra and licked its candied snout. She was used to keeping an itemised list of out-of-pocket expenses. She trusted the Persian, Erik’s representative above ground, was less of a fussbudget about petty cash than the editors with whom she was used to dealing.

A lifelong theatregoer, Kate had filed notices on the stuffiest patriotic pageants and the liveliest music-hall turns. She’d been at the opening night of Gilbert and Sullivan’s hit
The Mikado
– which Yuki professed never to have heard of, though everyone asked her about it – and the closing night of Gilbert’s disastrous ‘serious drama’
Brantinghame Hall
. She knew Oscar Wilde, though she’d not yet found the heart to seek him out in his exile here in Paris. She’d laughed at the patter of Dan Leno and the songs of Marie Lloyd, stopped her ears to Caruso’s high notes and Buffalo Bill’s Indian whoops, gasped at the illusions of Maskelyne and fallen asleep during Irving’s
Macbeth
. She’d seen a train arrive in puffs of steam and the Devil disappear in clouds of smoke at the
Salon du Cinématographe
. She did not expect to be much impressed by a French spook show.

The nurses took up a station at one side of the stage, joined by a tall man in a white coat. He had a stethoscope around his neck. Kate wondered if this ‘doctor’ ever had to do more than administer smelling salts or loosen tight collars. The warnings and the medical staff were part of the show, putting the audience on edge before the curtain went up. Not immune, she admitted a certain
frisson
. The smoke-mist was thinner in the auditorium, but her head was fuzzy. Opiates mixed with the glycol might account for ‘nightmares guaranteed’.

The music stopped. The house gas-jets hissed out.

In the darkness… a chuckle. A low, slow, rough laugh. It scraped nerves like a torturer’s scalpel.

Rushing velvet, as the heavy stage curtains parted. A drum beat began, not in the orchestra pit. With each beat, there was a squelch…

A series of flashes burned across the stage. Limelights flaring. Sulphur wafted into the stalls.

The scene was set: a bare room, whitewashed walls, a table, a boarded-up window.

The beat continued. A drum wasn’t being struck.

A middle-aged woman lay face-down. A grotesque imp squatted on her back, pounding her head with a fire-poker. With each blow, her head reddened. Spatters of blood arced across the white wall…

Was this a dummy, or an actress wearing a trick wig?

The imp put his whole weight into his blows, springing up and down, deliberately splashing that wall. Kate even smelled blood – coppery, sharp, foul.

The imp flailed. Blood – or whatever red stain was used – rained on patrons in the first two rows. Kate had wondered why so many kept hats and coats on. A few were shocked, but the
habitués
knew what to expect. They exulted in this shower of gore.

Murder accomplished, the imp tossed away the now-bent poker.

The orchestra played a sinister little playroom march. The imp went into a puppet-like caper, as if twitching on invisible strings. He took a bow. Applause.

Guignol, in all his mad glory. Eyes alive in his stiff mask.

‘A disagreement with the
concierge
has been settled,’ he squawked.

His harsh fly-buzz voice was produced by the distortion gadget Punch and Judy men called a swazzle. It was rumoured that Guignol, whoever he was behind the mask, had his swazzle surgically installed. When he laughed, it was like Hell clearing its throat.

Already, before the show had really started, Guignol’s costume was blood-speckled.

‘Welcome, pals, to the
Théâtre des Horreurs
. We’ve much to show you. We are an educational attraction, after all. For the world is wild and cruel. If you are alarmed, upset or terrified by what you see, tell yourself it is fakery and sham. If you are bored or jaded, tell yourself it’s all real. Many have said they would die for a chance to go on the stage – how heartless would we be not to grant such wishes?’

It was only a mask. If its expression seemed to change, it was down to shadows etched into the face by limelight. But the illusion of life was uncanny.

Guignol was the theatre’s third mask, rudely pushing between the Tearful Face of Tragedy and the Laughing Face of Comedy.

The Gloating Face of Horror.

Erik, who spoke with musical perfection from behind a dark mirror, was also masked. Could this whole affair be down to a squabble between false faces? The monsters of Paris contesting the title of King of the Masquerade?