Femme Fatale (44 page)

I can’t say that I was sorry that Pink had proved herself to be so treacherous, only that Quentin had been a key element in that revelation.

While I was mulling over the immediate past, it soon became evident that Irene’s mind was on the future, and her own mysteriously distant past.

“I will have to take your word on the indisputable intelligence of pigs,” she said finally, blowing out a sinuous wreath from her post-breakfast cigarette that would from now on remind me of deadly ectoplasm. “You are, after all, the country-bred woman. It is time, I think, to visit a person Professor Marvel mentioned to me and who is quite apropos to your upbringing and also to my vaunted but perhaps false, or concealed, origins. I refer to the Pig Lady of Hoboken, New Jersey.”

35.

A Sinister Surname

“That blackguard Svengali!”
“That’s the man! His real name isAdler; his mother was a
Polish singer.”

—
TRILBY
, GEORGE DU MAURIER, 1894

Our trip to New Jersey would have been a holiday outing were not so much in question. We took a ferry, which brazenly advertised itself as the first in the United States . . . at some laughably recent date in the early part of the century. In England there are rowboats older than that lumbering ferry boat! Once across the Hudson River, we would be in the quaint hamlet of Hoboken.

“You must understand, Nell,” Irene told me while we stood at the ferry boat’s eastern rail to watch the tall profile of Manhattan Island slip behind us, “that some of the people who perform on the popular stage are . . . uniquely gifted. They are not merely singers and dancers.”

“What you mean is that their talents tend to the peculiar, like Professor Marvel’s immense grasp of trivia.”

“Yes. And I also mean that a good many of them, like Thumbelina,
have turned curses into talents, have made seeming marvels from what ordinarily would be considered great misfortune.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I merely warn you that the Pig Lady, whom I remember quite clearly despite my admittedly fuzzy recollection in other matters, followed a profession she was born to, as I was to singing. Only her career was shaped by what most people would consider tragic abnormalities. The important thing to keep in mind is that she found a place in the world despite these handicaps.”

“You mean that she is deformed, that she really does resemble a pig?”

“I am one who considers what people may do, or have done to them, can deform their characters in far worse ways than what nature may have done to deform their features or limbs. Anna Bryant is the kindest woman I ever knew. She never for a moment held my looks against me, which is more than I can say for some women blessed with beauty but determined to claim it all.”

“You warn me so that I don’t embarrass her.”

“I warn you so that you don’t embarrass yourself. I see now that I grew up among quite unique people and yet took their variety and odd camaraderie for granted. Children will do that. You must understand that some of them overcame enormous odds and changed handicaps into assets, however bizarre.”

“How did you remain so . . . so—?”

“Ordinary? I don’t know. I was in their keeping, but I wasn’t theirs. And when I was about fifteen or so, I suddenly went from having a pretty and true little voice to having a Voice. I cannot tell you how that discovery changed me, and changed everything. It led
me
then, my Voice. I couldn’t not use it and it told me loud and clear that it and I were no longer suitable for light entertainment.”

“That is when you were ‘sold’ to the maestro?”

“They resented my defection to the legitimate stage, but I desperately needed a good singing tutor at that point, and was lucky
enough to find the maestro. I could no longer stay up late to perform feats of breath-holding or between-act turns before the curtain. That’s when I began working for the Pinkertons and studying opera every moment I could.”

“And that is all the training you had? One American tutor?”

“The maestro possessed a remarkable musicianship, Nell. He was already past sixty when I began training with him, but his ear was as acute as an F-sharp, and his hands were strong and nimble on the violin. I should have been working on this level years earlier, but he had an amazing method of hastening my progress.”

“And what was that?”

“You will doubt me.”

“I never doubt you. Well, not often. Tell me.”

“It was why my friends in the theater distrusted him so. They felt he was one of them, but had pretensions and denied their common background.”

“They felt he was a fraud, but why? Surely the progress of your voice argued for his genius.”

“It was his methods they distrusted.” Irene stared at the long, island panorama passing before our eyes, her smile fond. “Perhaps because those methods were as eccentric as they themselves were. One’s own oddities always look worse in others. The maestro had much time to make up for in my haphazard musical education, and many bad habits to cure.” She turned to me with a shrug. “How do you think I learned the gentle art of mesmerism, Nell? He hypnotized me, to free my voice of my conscious control, and he taught me to do the same to myself, and, incidentally, others. It has proved a most useful skill, as you may remember from an adventure or two we have shared.”

“Hypnotized you! And the results were benign?”

“Completely! I made remarkably fast progress. In fact, that is how I got my last name, I remembered during that sleepless night after Delmonico’s, so there is no wonder that it can’t be found in the birth records of New Jersey.”

“Your last name? Adler, you mean. Are you saying it is not yours?”

“My mother, whoever she is or was, though insisting on my first name, left me no surname. The maestro named me after his own instructor in the arts of combining hypnotism and music, an oddly intense fellow he had encountered in Paris in the mid-fifties, even before I was born. This ‘Adler’ had quite impressed the maestro with his approach and had gone on to train one of the singing marvels of the time, a woman of absolutely no artistic background who apparently could not sing a true note before then.”

“You had no such handicaps,” I ventured.

“No, save for my naturally dark soprano that is not in fashion.” She leaned against the railing, gazing on the intimidating profile of the city of New York as if it were becoming a phantasm beyond her reach. “So what used to be my avocation has become my mainstay.”

“You mean investigating mysteries.”

“Even if they concern myself.” The smile faded as her thoughts darkened. “I would hate to think that the mystery of my origins has brought disaster and death to those who cared for me when I was too young to care for myself. I can easily live with having no past beyond the point I took a steamship to England. I cannot live with the possibility that these people face current danger because of me, and who I was, or was not.”

“Shall you be sorry at what you find?”

“I may be, but Pink was right to summon us. I’m somehow central to these appalling murders, which seem almost staged to demand someone’s attention, perhaps mine.”

“Pink! What do you suppose she is up to now that our paths have separated?”

“Nothing that bodes well for our mission. Once again we wish to expose this murderer, or murderers, and yet return my long-ago friends and myself to private life. Once again Pink has been drawn into my orbit by the morbid scent of the sensational, and
will find it necessary to expose my friends and my own private life to the public.

“In a way, Nell”—She eyed me with an apologetic expression I seldom saw on her face—“I am very glad Quentin is here to distract her from mischief. No doubt his government feels the same way, although it might be that I make a far better distraction for Pink, and serve us all up to expediency. However, I have had an interesting communication from him.”

“You? From Quentin?”

“Indeed, but it was about you.”

“Why should he write to
you
about
me
?”

She smiled roguishly. “To get back into both of our good graces. He has invited you on an outing to Coney Island.”

“Through you?”

“He wished to be sure that I was still not angry with him.”

“And did he not care whether I was still angry with him?”

She eyed me with what could only be considered a smirk. “Apparently he is confident that you are not.”

“Perhaps I wasn’t, but I am now! Why can he not write to
me
about me?”

“Nell, he is being the complete gentleman. Were your father alive, I am sure he would have written him on this matter.”

“My father is not alive and you are not my parent!”

“At any rate, I myself, as your friend, would urge you to go. After all, you may discover more of what Pink is up to.”

“I will not associate with Quentin merely to spy on Pink!”

“Then associate with him for yourself alone.”

“I have heard about Coney Island. It teems with gamblers, and loose women and thieves, and huge numbers of people in bathing costumes. . . .”

“And spectacular hotels and fireworks and the beautiful seaside. Besides, you would be safe with Quentin anywhere, Nell.” An expression crossed her face I couldn’t quite read, an exceptional
instance, perhaps, in which I should definitely
not
be safe with Quentin, but she was not about to voice it.

“You must go, Nell. It is an opportunity not to be missed, and there is nothing in the nature of the invitation I could object to even if I were the sternest English parent, even if I were Prince Albert himself.”

The notion of Irene in men’s dress as the late and inflexibly dignified Prince Albert was so ludicrous I had to laugh. And in laughing, I lost all high moral ground, and was suddenly forced to do what I most desired and dreaded in all the world: agree to see Quentin Stanhope, alone, in a strange country, at an isolated and bizarre and shiveringly notorious pleasure garden.

So my only sojourn on water that was kind to both my eyes and delicate stomach ended with dire anxieties and mad speculations that made me as internally queasy as whitecaps on the Atlantic.

I was not optimistic about visiting the Pig Lady in such an uneasy state, for I had never been adept at tolerating the abnormal, despite the intense dose of it I had faced during our last expedition to another land.

The residential streets of New Jersey were no more exotic than those of New York City. One faced a long brown and red row of four-story domiciles, most of them boarding houses, I assumed.

I absolutely thirsted for something Georgian with white pillars and pediments, but little of that vintage seemed to have survived in this new land of America, except perhaps in public buildings. I even began to long for the elaborate mansard roofs of Paris in all their rococo frivolity.

American boarding houses may have had a domestic goddess, like Mr. Holmes’s cherubic Mrs. Hudson in London, but they
were not on constant duty like a Paris concierge. After consulting a row of mailboxes in the tiny entry hall, Irene led our assault on a set of rooms that appeared to be at the end of a long and turning unlit staircase.