Angels of Music (34 page)

‘I know you were suborned to this by Orloff. You are on probation, but you keep your jobs… except you, Rollo. You enjoyed this too much. Go find other employment and take your knives with you.’

Rollo shrugged, gathered up a selection of implements and departed.

‘Orloff,’ said Guignol, drawing out the name, ‘you are a mockery of a man, barely a human creature. We have a vacancy for you. You’ll find your gorilla suit in the costumes closet. It’ll be sewn on. The mask will be fixed to your face with glue, permanently. And you’ll gibber amusingly, play the star role when we stage “Murders in the Rue Morgue” and submit entirely to my will… or else you’ll share the fate of your predecessor Sultan. Do you understand me?’

Orloff, white with terror, sank to his knees, surrounded by parts of his patrons. They were now literally a Red Circle.

‘Now, I want this stage washed and this mess cleared,’ ordered Guignol. ‘Tomorrow night, and every night, we have a show to put on. The
Théâtre des Horreurs
does not go dark!’

T
HE
A
NGELS SAT
with the Persian in the Café de la Paix. Yuki ate ice cream and Clara drank China tea.

Kate was still irritated.

The job was done – the Red Circle sundered, the Montmartre murders stopped – and the client satisfied.

She had thought she understood why Clara betrayed her, but it turned out that the Englishwoman had shammed her way into the Red Circle. Now, Kate was bewildered again. It had made so much sense for Clara Watson to defect. She was a self-declared connoisseur of torture. Whatever was wrong with Du Roy was wrong with her too – perhaps far more so. Erik had taken her on precisely because of this defect.

‘What was it, Clara?’ she asked. ‘Why were you so set against them?’

‘The
Légion d’Horreur
were bourgeois hypocrites – salivating in secret, rather than proudly taking their pleasures in the open. Besides, I wanted to see a true artist perform… and I have. I shall treasure the memory.’

‘Guignol?’

‘Oh, he’s adorable… but no. Not Guignol.’

Clara raised her teacup to Yuki, who dipped her head modestly.

‘Grace. Elegance. Minimalism. Mutilation. Execution. Perfect.’

Kate would never understand. For her, horrors were just horrors.

She looked up at the frontage of the Opera House and fancied a gargoyle was up there, watching over them.

She’d never understand him either. As a reporter, as a detective, she needed only to know the facts; only as Kate Reed did she want to know more.

The Persian laid a dossier of press cuttings on the table.

‘Now,
les filles
, another matter has come to the attention of the Agency. Kate, you will be interested. In the Louvre, guards have been assaulted. It is rumoured that treasures have disappeared. Some talk of a curse upon the building. A strange figure has been seen, drifting through the halls by night, cloaked and silent, wearing the headdress and golden death-mask of a pharaoh…’

‘Mr Carter, if the headline is big enough, it makes the news big enough.’

Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles,
Citizen Kane
(1941)

A
TICKET HAD BEEN
delivered by
pneumatique
. The Special Performance would commence, unusually, at half past ten in the morning.

He entered his box via the trapdoor. Plush upholstery matched the velvet curtains, soft and rich in the electric lamplight. A phonograph apparatus stood on a trolley. A programme lay on his chair. It was an unfamiliar design – not from the Paris Opéra, but a theatre in Chicago.

The half-hour chimed. He cranked the phonograph and raised the needle-arm to the revolving cylinder. After a few seconds’ hiss, an anonymous voice issued from the bell.

‘Good morning, Monsieur Erik…’

He opened the programme as indicated by a tasselled bookmark. A full-page rotogravure portrait showed a plump, smiling, expensively dressed patron.

‘The man you are looking at is Charles Foster Kane, the American millionaire and press magnate. Kane believes his financial and political interests, and those of the United States of America, would be served by war among the Great Powers of Europe. Presently, he is summering at Royale-les-Eaux, a spa town north of Dieppe where he has substantial holdings, ostensibly to acquire works of ancient and modern art for his private collection. In truth, Kane has convened a gathering of powerful, like-minded or simply malign individuals and plans to found a cartel dedicated to bringing about a catastrophic conflict.’

Kane had small, piggy eyes; a ridiculous nose, perhaps artificial; fat, complacent cheeks; and an impertinent double-flick of a moustache.

‘Your commission, should you be inclined to accept it, is to ensure this offensive organisation does not come into being and that Charles Kane is dissuaded from further meddling in the affairs of sovereign nations other than his own. As before, should you or any of your angelic associates be apprehended or eliminated, the Minister will profess never to have heard of such fantastical individuals. Long live France. This cylinder will perish within a matter of moments…’

A bar of magnesium fizzed blindingly inside the works of the phonograph. Box Five smelled like a burning wax museum. The cylinder resolved into molten residue.

The Special Performance was at an end.

T
HE YOUNG WIDOW
Gilberte Lachaille, following the Persian’s instructions, carefully made her way through the labyrinth beneath the Opéra. She avoided the rat-traps, and negotiated several ingenious devices set to inconvenience mammals somewhat larger than the average sewer rat. Out of respect for poor Gaston, she wore a black dress. She left off the veil because it was dark enough under the streets of Paris. Gilberte did not care to vanish entirely into the shadows – though, it occurred to her, disappearance might be the whole purpose of the invitation from Monsieur Erik.

In the absence of the fortune her late husband’s lawyers were withholding, she must find means of making a way in the world. Her hard-earned respectable name counted for little, though it was scarcely her fault – no matter what the Sûreté might imply – that her bridegroom proved incapable of surviving his own honeymoon. Without consulting her, the foolish soul had elected to fortify himself with a philtre to put ‘lead in his pencil’. He had misjudged the dosage, to everyone’s inconvenience – not least his own. For a reputed man of the world, Gaston turned out to be something of a stiff, in all senses of the term. Aunt Alicia said dead husbands were generally the best of the breed, but also conceded that society was liable to be leery of Gilberte for now. In Grandmama’s day, you had to bury at least two husbands in mysterious circumstances before being categorised as a ‘black widow’. In this impatient, young, electrified century, a single hasty funeral sufficed.

A skiff waited at the shore of the underground lake. She lifted her skirts and stepped in. No sooner was she settled than the boat began to glide soundlessly across the still surface. It was on a pulley, like a fairground ride.

Gilberte had heard whispers of the masked creature – Monsieur Erik, the Phantom – who kept a lair beneath the Opéra and retained the services of hard-to-place young women in a discreet agency which had been in operation for some years. Many and varied adventuresses had worked for the Phantom. The Angels might be fleeting but Erik’s primary lieutenant was always the Persian. This fellow was known to
le tout Paris
. Some believed him the true master of the Opera Ghost Agency.

The Persian stood on the jetty to which the skiff was pulled. Erik’s assistant wore a heavy coat with a good astrakhan collar, and a fez. Gold dotted his person – rings, stickpin, shirt-studs, cufflinks, spectacles-chain, fez tassels, watch and fob, two prominent teeth. Courteously, the Persian extended a hand and helped Gilberte ashore. She thanked him, modestly.

He pressed his palm to a stone. A wall parted to give access to a large, comfortably appointed room. Gas-lamps burned, susurrating like serpents. Gilberte stepped in and cast an eye over fine old furniture, assessing values to the sou. These were the quarters of a well-off gentleman. The subterranean chamber was naturally bereft of windows and thus oppressive for her taste.

A portion of the room was curtained off by a thick but translucent hanging. A man sat in the antechamber beyond, lit from behind as if in a silhouette theatre. Her eyes went naturally to this figure, whom she took at once for the fabled Phantom. She did not immediately take notice of the two other women in the room.

‘Madame Lachaille,’ said the man beyond the veil, ‘thank you for joining us this evening.’

It was a deep, mellifluous voice, precise and perfect. Through Mama, the contralto Andrée Alvar, she knew many singers. She recognised a musical quality in this voice. An odd catch suggested the speaker was compensating for a defect of the palate. Erik took care with certain consonants. Gilberte recalled the stories of the face some claimed to have glimpsed, and repressed a shudder.

She curtseyed as she had been taught – not submissively, but confidently. Grandmama would be proud. And Aunt Alicia. And Mama.

‘Gilberte, you will be working with these women. Mrs Elizabeth Eynsford Hill…’

Mrs Eynsford Hill was impeccably – if too simply – dressed, and as blankly beautiful as a couturier’s mannequin. The woman shook Gilberte’s hand, firmly. She had a steel grip in her good green kidskin glove.

‘It is a perfect pleasure to make your acquaintance, Madame Lachaille,’ said Mrs Eynsford Hill, in English. ‘I foresee we shall become fast friends.’

Her diction was classroom perfect, with a musical lilt as if she were hitting notes rather than uttering words.

Gilberte responded, also in English, ‘That is my hope also.’

The woman paused, and repeated, ‘That is my hope also,’ parrot-fashion. It took Gilberte a moment to realise she had been perfectly imitated. Not just vocally; Mrs Eynsford Hill’s expression had been Gilberte’s, down to the trick of lowering the eyes while missing nothing.

‘I beg your pardon. For such insolence.’

Now Mrs Eynsford Hill was ‘doing’ Erik. She spoke in masculine French, as if from beyond the curtain. As the Phantom, the Englishwoman pulled back her chin and sucked in her cheeks to create a deeper voice. Even those odd consonants were there.

‘Elizabeth is showing off,’ said Erik. ‘It is one of her tells. Having discovered the extent of her talents, she needs an audience. Like many of my Angels, she has a theatrical inclination.’

‘You are a widow, I perceive,’ said Mrs Eynsford Hill, in what Gilberte now took for her own – if not her
original
– voice. ‘I myself, sadly, am not.’

‘My condolences.’

The other Angel cooed for attention.

‘This is Riolama,’ said Erik.

If the Englishwoman was so ordinary she seemed strange for the absence or concealment of lively qualities, this creature was a picture-book fairy come to life.

Riolama might have been taken for a child, though her large, active eyes were adult. Well under five feet tall, she wore a shimmering white-grey shift of fabric Gilberte could not identify (spider silk?), had a wild but untangled fall of dark hair and did without shoes. Her feet were not dirty.

The girl sprang from a tall stool and bent close to Gilberte, flitting like an inquisitive monkey or a bird. She was making up her mind, apparently. After a few seconds, she pecked a kiss at Gilberte’s cheek and darted away, back to her perch, pleased.

‘Rima likes you,’ said Mrs Eynsford Hill. ‘She’s from Guyana, where the
guano
comes from. Or Venezuela, where various violent volcanoes are venerated. The territory is under dispute.’

The bird-girl tucked her head under her arm, then smiled. Gilberte felt a chill – it was her own once-upon-a-time smile, which Grandmama had schooled her out of. For their own good, girls do not show teeth. In this company, evidently, teeth were acceptable. Indeed, perhaps mandatory.

If whispers were true, the lipless Erik had no choice but to smile and smile. Beyond the curtain, behind the mask, was – she had heard – a skull with yellow eyes. The Phantom could take first prize in a grinning contest with the mediaeval clown Gwynplaine and the Bohemian Baron Sardonicus.

Gilberte was struck that the Englishwoman and the exotic girl both resembled her. Might she be reunited with unknown sisters? Her father, rarely mentioned by the female relatives who raised her, could conceivably have sojourned in London or Caracas.

She had an inkling Mrs Eynsford Hill was not as high-born as her too-correct accent would suggest. In Gilberte’s experience, the upper classes were as slovenly as the lower orders in their speech – only their vocal tics and mispronunciations tended to be called mannerisms rather than mistakes. Like Gilberte, the Englishwoman had been taught how to speak to impress others rather than express herself.

‘Ladies,’ said Erik, ‘if we might proceed. It is best we talk English. It is not, of course, a musical language, but it is in this instance the tongue of our enemy.’

Gilberte had high marks in English.

Curtains parted to reveal a screen. The Persian worked a cinematograph projector and images came to life.

The mode was more Lumière than Méliès – snatches of actuality caught by the camera, rather than a staged artifice. A fat man in a straw hat grinned next to a half-crated statue twice his size, like a big game hunter proud of his latest bag and eager to gloat among his clubmen.

‘This is Charles Foster Kane,’ said Erik. ‘He is an American.’

‘All too plainly,’ commented Mrs Eynsford Hill.

In another scene, Kane – in a shiny silk hat and a fur coat that looked like a whole bear – stood outside the ruins of a castle in Spain. Workmen carried away and crated up huge stone blocks.

‘Mr Kane has an acquisitive nature,’ continued Erik, ‘and a limitless source of wealth. A gold-mine in Colorado.’