Angels of Music (42 page)

Kate was closer to her idea of an Angel. Though the word made her shudder, they were both Victorians. Dry old sticks who outlived scandals to become respectable. Even Irene’s disgraces were quaint now. Pictures that might once have toppled thrones were on postcards.

Elizabeth was more like the new girls. Trim and unflappable, subsisting on air instead of food. She was sort of a wind-up doll, too. Like poor, dear Trilby, she’d made the mistake of
taking lessons
.

Unorna was something different – hard to place.

Irene was glad the witch was on their side.

Alraune poured generous measures of sherry (for Elizabeth) and brandy (for the rest of them). Only Olympia didn’t drink. Preferring her own rye whiskey, Irene poured a measure from her flask into the little silver cup which screwed over the stopper.

‘I always like a nip after I’ve almost been blown to smithereens,’ Irene said. ‘Bottoms up, ladies.’

She took a burning swallow.

‘The bomb was to maim, not kill,’ said Alraune. ‘A coffin full of dynamite would have been more effective.’

‘A lovely thought,’ said Irene. ‘Most people just leave flowers.’

‘It was a message,’ said Unorna. ‘We have been warned off.’

‘I heard it loud and clear,’ said Irene. ‘A telegram would have done just as well.’

‘Anyone who thinks a bomb will warn us off doesn’t know us very well,’ said Kate.

‘Doesn’t know
you
very well, perhaps,’ said Irene. ‘They’ve completely got the measure of me.’

‘You don’t mean that,’ said the little Irish woman. ‘The Irene Adler I’ve heard about wouldn’t be scared off by such low tactics.’

‘The Irene Adler you’ve heard about got older and creakier and would like to lie on a divan eating Swiss chocolates with a cold compress on her forehead. She’s had quite enough derring-do for one lifetime, thank you very much.’

Kate smiled indulgently. She didn’t take Irene’s protests seriously.

Irene had cause to rue that Irene Adler Kate had heard about. The Irene Adler foolish men dreamed up and made fools of themselves over. Irene only really got in trouble when she got herself confused with that imaginary Irene Adler.

‘How did the Persian die?’ Kate asked the others.

‘He was gravely ill,’ said Alraune. ‘He had been for some time.’

‘That’s not an answer.’

‘No,’ admitted the German girl.

Irene couldn’t help but stare at Alraune’s waist-length tangle of hair. It was thick and somehow twiggy, with beads braided in. Along with her huge eyes, the wild mane made her look alarming.

‘Was there an autopsy?’ asked Unorna. ‘Is Dr Dieudonné still coroner?’

‘I don’t know that name,’ said Alraune. ‘But… no, there was no autopsy, no police investigation. Just a death certificate. A sick man dies. If not of his sickness, then what does it matter? The rains fall. The river rises. Doctors are busy. The morgue is full. Many have lost their livelihoods in the floods. Many have lost their lives. Not all by drowning. When a body is found floating with its head bashed in… it’s best to write it up as if he fell in the water and bumped on floating wreckage. Otherwise, the Prefect of Police would have to take men off shoring up barricades and erecting dry walkways to investigate. For a murderer, the flood might be a blessing… like a curtain to hide behind.’

‘So you reckon he was iced?’ said Irene.

Alraune shrugged bony shoulders and bit her sensual lower lip. She was not a come-right-out-and-say-it kind of a girl.

‘I was in Paris when this happened,’ said Eynsford Hill. ‘I saw the body before it was washed and wrapped. The Persian had chronic bronchitis.’

‘He
was
a cougher,’ said Irene.

‘It is nothing, my Angels,’ said the English woman in the Persian’s voice. ‘Just a little tickle in the throat.’

‘Those cigarettes he smoked,’ said Kate. ‘Turkish tar.’

‘There was blood around his mouth,’ continued Elizabeth, in her own – if not her original – voice.

‘Which you’d expect,’ said Kate.

‘And in his eyes.’

Thi Minh gripped her throat as if invisible hands were throttling her.

‘I’ve seen enough men hanged to know about the blood in the eyes,’ said Irene. ‘So the Persian was choked?’

Elizabeth, who talked about the death of a friend as if she were considering a menu for afternoon tea, nodded.

‘He was carefully strangled,’ she went on. ‘With a rope or a wire, there’s a ligature mark. A red weal. Something broader, like a scarf or a pillow, spreads the pressure. The throat is crushed, but not bruised. But there is no way to stop blood vessels in the eyes bursting.’

Irene had a pang. What a terrible, quiet way to go. Not just killed, but tidied away.

‘It was murder, then,’ said Kate.

‘We cannot prove it,’ said Alraune. ‘But we know it.’

Irene had not seen the Persian since the business with God. After quitting Paris a second time, she suppressed any stray thought of the Persian or his friend behind the mirror. Now, that stung more than she liked. She’d left many people – mostly, but not exclusively, men – behind on her route from where she started to wherever she was going. It was best not to dwell too much on how they might feel about her departures… whether they remembered her as
the
woman or
that
woman. Mentally, she’d wrapped the Persian and Erik up together in a bundle and decided she could do without the pair of them. A shabby thing, she realised too late. She should have spared time to look out for a friend.

She glanced towards that mirror. It would be almost a window if the light were turned down in the vault. Now, only darkness showed beyond the gaps in the silvering.

She remembered a mask. And yellow eyes.

Irene lumped Erik in with other masterminds she’d run across – Bloody James Moriarty, Blessed Sherlock Holmes and the Lord of Strange Deaths. Not to mention bright sparks like Antonio Nikola, Dagobert Trostler, Dr Mabuse, Augustus Van Dusen and the Face. More and more of the bastards were around these days. On both sides of the fence, and straddling the middle. Genius inventors, master crooks, great detectives, overmen, big fish. Her world was getting crowded with them. They formed secret societies, syndicates, leagues, cabals. They fought their own wars and made their own alliances. She had always skipped from shadow to shadow, a small creature trying to avoid being noticed, squashed or eaten. Colossi were banishing the shadows and spoiling the game. Since her girlhood, masterminds had been getting smarter… and worse.

She’d thought Svengali, the mesmerist who first tinkered with poor Trilby’s head, a bad ’un. Between the fluences of Svengali and Erik, Trilby got so discombobulated she eventually couldn’t keep on breathing without someone telling her to… and just
stopped
, like an unwound watch. At least Svengali was nakedly honest about what he wanted. A step up from poverty and obscurity. Hot meals and a comfortable bed.

Henry Higgins, the dilettante who raised Elizabeth Eynsford Hill from the gutter, wasn’t poor, obscure or hungry. He made a freak of a flower-seller – in essence, Olympia with a pulse – to settle a silly argument. Higgins didn’t even fancy the girl and settled an idiot on her for a husband.

Irene had known some bad women. Jo Balsamo, for a start… but also Lady Brentwyche, Altar Keane and Sjena De’Ath. None of those skirts scrambled folks’ brains just to show off how clever they were. Except maybe Countess de Cagliostro, who was scarcely human.

‘The Persian…
dead
,’ said Unorna. ‘It’s
wrong
.’

‘It was him without question,’ said Alraune.

‘I don’t mean to dispute that,’ continued the witch. ‘He
is
dead, I know that. But he should not be. The pattern is broken by his removal from this plain. He was an important individual. One does not just kill such a man and expect no consequences. The larger world must take notice.’

Irene thought of the Persian. And how he had spent his life.

A thing she had noticed about masterminds is that they liked to keep a toady about to reflect their light back at them. Stooges to egg them on, puff them up and calm them down. A nicer – or, at least, more down-to-earth – guy handily smoothed things over if the great man went too far. Often, these boobies were required to write up their patrons the way Boswell did Johnson – to make calculating machines seem human, admirable or interesting. Sometimes, second bananas were with the firm to get prime movers through the door. Hearty, unassuming ass-kissers like Dr Watson, Basher Moran or Colonel Pickering were welcome in places which wouldn’t stand for skull-faced killjoys who corrected your grammar and terrified the maids. Number Two Men rode coattails like Christmas sleighs but brought more to the teams than they got credit for.

Erik, let it not be forgotten, would be dead in an unmarked desert grave if it weren’t for the Persian. Sidekicks also got literally kicked when an overman needed a man to be over. Irene remembered Cochenille, the ill-made doll… but also sorry specimens like the Gecko, the pock-marked fiddler who trotted after Svengali like a mongrel who’s grown to love the slapping hand, and Bunny Manders, the nance who fagged for that bounder A.J. Raffles at Eton and never grew out of it.

Just as minions deserved more credit, they should also earn more blame. Without them, masterminds couldn’t get away with as much.

Maybe the Persian ought to have been held to account for the Phantom… but Irene was old and smart enough to know things were never as simple inside the house as they looked when peeped at through the curtains.

She remembered her own marriage. Had she been the mastermind and God her minion? That made her cringe. Godfrey Norton was someone else she tried not to think of.

‘What about… him?’ Kate asked, nodding at the mirror. ‘What’s the Phantom had to say for himself?’

Thi Minh capered expressively.

‘M. Erik is… indisposed,’ said Alraune.

‘What does that mean?’ asked Irene.

‘They’ve heard nothing from him,’ said Elizabeth. ‘And the way below is impassable.’

‘Impossible?’ asked Kate.

‘Impassable,’ restated Elizabeth.

‘I knew that,’ said Kate. ‘It’s just you’re the only person I’ve ever met who could make “impossible” and “impassable” sound like different words.’

‘This is no time for making light.’

‘No,’ said Kate. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘We opened the mirror at the opera house yesterday and sent Olympia down,’ said Elizabeth.

‘It is a pleasure to meet you,’ said Olympia, to no one new.

‘She doesn’t need to breathe,’ said the English woman. ‘And she’s waterproof.’

That made her sound like Erik’s ideal girlfriend. It was a wonder he hadn’t replaced all the Angels with battery-powered ballerinas.

‘She swam through flooded tunnels to the underground lagoon,’ continued Elizabeth. ‘The little house on the lagoon is swept away. She found Erik’s coffin floating, like an abandoned punt. But he was nowhere to be seen.’

‘I hope we shall be the best of friends,’ said Olympia.

Was Irene imagining it or did the doll sound sad now?

‘The
pneumatique
is out of order,’ said Elizabeth. ‘As are telephone, tickertape and telegraph. All lines of communication with Erik are broken.’

‘I’d know if he were dead,’ said Unorna. ‘And he isn’t.’

Irene recalled that Erik was an expert with breathing tubes. A strong swimmer, he could scythe through dark waters while wearing full evening dress, using his cloak like the fins of a manta ray.

‘At the very least, he is busy,’ said Alraune. ‘Like all Paris.’

‘How stands the Agency?’ asked Kate.

‘Suspended due to flooding,’ said Alraune. ‘Like all Paris.’

As the only serving Angel who could hold a conversation, the German girl was in a pickle. Irene had a notion Alraune was used to being alone – or at least lonely. A chilly creature, she was attractive yet off-putting. Foster daughter of another mastermind, Professor ten Brincken. Rumours about them circulated in Germany. None pleasant.

Alraune was an alchemical name. It was German for mandrake, the weed popularly believed to grow under gallows, sprouting from the last ejaculate of hanged men. Distillate from the root had the power to cloud men’s minds. Irene suspected Alraune’s distinct musk had the same property.

Unorna said mandrake was bad luck. She sounded like a fairground gypsy with a grudge, but Irene knew enough to take her seriously. When Irene was in Bohemia, Prince Willy von Ormstein – cause of so much of her trouble, though she admitted she’d gone along with it – officiated at a reception for the Witch of Prague. Unorna had supposedly just saved the city from goblins or golems or somesuch. The witch had buried
her
mastermind, the dwarf sorcerer Keyork Arabian. She was a rare truly free woman.

‘It is up to us to pool our talents and identify the murderer,’ said Kate.

‘Oh, we know who the
murderer
is,’ said Alraune. ‘That’s easy. It’s Fantômas, the anarchist.’

Kate’s eyes widened.

Thi Minh held fingers in front of her face like an eye-mask and crouched down, looking around warily. She made a bomb of a fist and let it explode, puffing out her fingers and waving them around.

Fantômas was another headline-grabber… always stealing jewels from uncrackable safes or assassinating people said to be impossible to get to. He might be a mastermind. He was certainly a master of disguise, one of those fellows who might be anyone or no one. But he was unusual – a freak among freaks. Even his peers disliked him. Unlike, say, Raffles or
Les Vampires
, he was more interested in making trouble than money. And, unlike the Lord of Strange Deaths – whose declared aim was to end European influence in the Middle- and Far East – he had no real political purpose. Just chaos and carnage. An exploding music box among floral tributes was just his style. He was Jack the Ripper on an industrial scale. Instead of merely slicing a few throats, he took a razor to cities, nations, continents. Irene hadn’t been as scared of Professor Moriarty as she was of Fantômas. It would take more than being pushed over a waterfall to finish him off.