Femme Fatale (24 page)

“One is art,” I said stoutly. “The other is commerce.”

“
Hmmm
. I think our modern world is blending both into a new enterprise, and also makes of death a new sensation.”

“You refer to murder?”

“To murder.” Irene was silent for longer than her usual wont. “I remember Sophie now. A child’s memories are as tender as a violet in the snow. A flashing picture here, a remembered scene there. The little Rena who danced is mostly lost to me. I don’t doubt her existence, but it is nothing to me. I remember Tiny Tim, standing beside me, and towering even then in my tiny Alice mind. In my kittenish, wide-eyed sense of wonder. He was the Big Boy. The one who went before me. And then . . . he was gone, Rena was gone. Where? Nellie Bly says I had a mother. Why is there no memory? Why is she fainter than the fireproof sisters and Tiny Tim growing large?”

“She was not ever there, Irene, as my dead mother was not there. She was utterly absent, that’s all. I at least had a father to remember until I was almost twenty, and I could presume to a memory of my mother.”

“I had no father,” Irene declared. “Nor any mother who would accept the title. The rational conclusion is obvious. I was, like Godfrey, a complete bastard.”

There was nothing I could say to this shocking declaration, except one thing: “Then who would kill to keep you so in the public record and your own mind?”

For once, my friend Irene Adler had no answer.

I could not believe that I had accomplished this wonder.

We dined quietly that night in the hotel dining room.

How accustomed I was becoming to being a woman out on my own! No one glanced askance at us, but then this was the United States and Irene had forsworn smoking after the meal at my request.

This did not prevent her from ordering a half bottle of wine with our dinner and then taking out her Russian blue-enamel cigarette case when the coffee came, to play with it. The glittering diamonds of the cover’s serpentine
I
slanted across the enameled blue sea like a bright white sail.

I marveled again that she so favored a once poison-equipped object originally meant to take her life. Or did she treasure it because Sherlock Holmes had disarmed it before it could hurt her? I could not imagine any woman much treasuring what Sherlock Holmes did or did not do . . . the man was that aloof and that annoyingly cerebral, in the way of a too-smart-for-his-own-good boy, a type I had often seen in my governess days. I wondered again why boys discovered arrogance at such an early age, and why so few girls seemed to discover it at all.

Across from me, over her strong-smelling coffee, Irene laughed.

I looked up.

“I agree, Nell, Sherlock Holmes is most annoyingly arrogant.”

“I said no such thing!”

“But you have always thought it.”

“And how can you agree with me when I have said nothing?”

“Because your emotions were as plain upon your face as your thoughts.” She picked up the case, turned it in her fingers. “It is exquisitely made, and beautiful, that is why I love it. So much in
life is neither exquisite nor beautiful. Such transcendent objects remind us of the perfection we never find, in ourselves or in others. The artist who crafted this transcends my admiration of it, he even transcends the base and lethal use an enemy tried to make of it . . . transcends even the brilliant, single-sighted way one Sherlock Holmes unveiled and disarmed the corrupt purpose it had been adapted to: my own death.

“He would not appreciate this object as Keats’s ‘thing of beauty and a joy forever,’ our Mr. Holmes.” She smiled again. “Yet he much admired the cleverness of both the maker, and the one who made it into something as subtle and poisonous as a living serpent. And,” she added casually, “he liked showing off to me. He is not quite all mental icewater, Nell. Almost, but not quite. And that is how he disarmed himself to me in that moment. So I see many makers in this object now. The artist. The assassin. The savior. And the survivor. Sometimes I think they exchange roles without knowing it, which makes things even more intriguing.”

“It is a sinister memento of a bad time,” I said.

“Yet . . . do you not keep your Gypsy boots?”

The reference startled me. It is true that a pair of colorful leather-worked boots sat at the bottom of my cupboard at Neuilly. Now that she had mentioned it, I could not for the life of me say why I had saved this unlikely souvenir of the worst time of my life. She missed nothing, my friend Irene, and sometimes I could throttle her for it.

“They are . . . folk art.”

“This is”—she flourished the immensely more costly cigarette case—“aristocratic art. Both serve better as reminders of bad times, and how we overcame them, than as decorative objects.”

“You are saying that decorative objects can be useful as well?”

“I am saying that they
must
be, Nell, even when they are only human.”

18.

The Dictating Detective

I would give a great deal to know what inevitable stages of
incident produced the likes of Irene Adler. Show me a
method of forming more women so, and I would show more
interest in women
.

—SHERLOCK HOLMES,
GOOD NIGHT, MR. HOLMES
,
CAROLE NELSON DOUGLAS

F
ROM THE
C
ASE
N
OTES OF
S
HERLOCK
H
OLMES

I have resolved to keep this record for Watson’s benefit, since I was less than forthcoming about my sudden trip to the United States of America and the reasons for it. I may, or may not, ultimately show it to him.

It appears that his attempts to spin tales from some of my cases promise to become routinely published. Much as I may gently mock his literary efforts, or at least his impulse to turn the sober facts of my investigations into “thundering good tales,” I bow to the inevitable.

Despite the presence of murder on Miss Nellie Bly’s agenda, I am not pursuing her particular commission on these teeming
shores. I have, in fact, a trifling though tasty puzzle to solve for the Astor family, which has generously sponsored my voyage. Although I was in a sense lured here by a mermaid, no siren song can lure me onto self-destructive shoals, and the wax is firmly installed in my ears.

When I encountered the American courtesan known as “Pink” in Paris, I never believed for a moment that she was what she wished to seem. Nor was I particularly surprised to find her established here in America as a newspaper reporter under the lively pseudonym of Nellie Bly.

While I had no time to waste in surmising her origins then, the small callus on the first joint of her right middle finger betrayed itself as a cradle for the pen, and not even the most ardent invitation-penning society woman builds such a callus; only a writer. Watson, in fact, is developing the beginnings of the same sign of vigorously unleashed fancy. I assume the typewriter will soon banish this telltale mark to an antique footnote. At least the eccentricities of typed lines are almost equal to the betraying individuality of handwriting.

At one time I might have considered Miss Bly the most prepossessing young woman I have ever met. Even now I can see Watson the Married Man stroking his mustache and weaving subplots of a romantic sort for his most unromantic old chambermate.

Alas, I am annoyed rather than intrigued by such naked feminine ambition, and he will no doubt twit me again for the chronic suspicion with which I regard the so-called gentler sex. You see, I do not believe
that
common delusion for a minute.

I must confess to harboring a professional curiosity about another enterprising woman, to whom the blatant is an impossibility and whose deepest ambitions remain a mystery. This is the woman whose murky history Miss Bly offered to me as the usual snare and delusion to which mortal man is supposed to surrender. I am given to understand that her vague personal history from an
early age in the States is somehow involved in a bizarre murder, or several. At least Miss Nellie Bly devoutly hopes so.

No creature on earth is more secretly bloodthirsty than a ladylike woman.

Ah, Watson, old fellow! I have been forced to conceal so much from you lately, all in the cause of Queen and country, which you would never deny me. Still, it is a shabby way to treat a loyal companion. Hence, my penitence through these pages. Also, this record will help me to think. There is something about your undemanding presence, old fellow, that always puts me into the mood for intense cogitation, almost more than my pipe and shag. Even the completely irrelevant questions you ask stimulate my mind by their very banality.

So I will continue to address you here, in theory and across leagues and leagues of ocean, and thereby enter into a dialogue with myself.

I suppose I should characterize the city of New York. It is dirty, loud, bustling, and tall, Watson, buildings lurching skyward like mushrooms after a rain. It is just this straining for height that strikes me the most about this metropolis of nearly three millions of people.