The Art of Detection (23 page)

     ‘Very well,’ I answered equably. ‘Then tell me about these gentlemen on the stage.’

     The boy’s face remained taut for a minute, then slowly relaxed into a grin. ‘You caught that, did you?’

     ‘That all the ladies are men wearing frocks and make-up? Certainly.’

     ‘You must’ve heard about them before. That’s why you wanted to come here.’

     ‘I will admit, I heard something of the sort. But I would have known in any case. It’s hardly a new act, you know. London had trans-vestites of both varieties long before Victoria was on the throne. The Romans in Londinium probably watched a similar performance.’

     He had no answer for that, although as he sat watching the stage, I knew that a part of his mind was taken up with the idea that former generations had flavours of sin that were not so very different. Such an idea invariably takes the young by surprise.

     The song ended, the overhead light changed subtly, and Ledbetter sat forward in his chair. I watched curiously as the entire cabaret held its drinks and came to attention. The lights dipped to nothing, there was a sound of machinery and motion, and a minute later the lights rose again, glittering off the polished bars of a golden bird-cage a good ten feet tall. It swung gently a few feet from the boards, then descended, and as it lowered the lights gradually revealed a person seated on the cage’s swinging perch. The moment she became visible, the audience erupted with applause, hooting and whistling their appreciation. The woman’s pretty head remained inclined in modest recognition; when the cage touched ground, its door fell open, and she stepped out into the fanfare, head still looking at the ground.

     She was small and exotically handsome, her theatrical make-up emphasising the large eyes and full lips Nature had given. A gold-and-pearl head-piece wrapped her head like a bandeau, but with cross-pieces that connected over the crown of her sleek ebony hair and continued down on either side to make ear-pieces. Her dress was long and golden, the slippers peeping from beneath its hem were gold, her finger-nails were painted gold, even her warm coppery skin seemed to glitter; the white explosion of a lengthy feather boa around her throat only emphasised the overall colour.

     When the tribute had begun to fade, she took a step forward and threw back her arms and her head, showing for the first time a pair of blazing green eyes. She opened her mouth, and the band came in precisely on the first beat.

     Her signature song was, of course, ‘The Bird in the Golden Cage’, a tune that I had first heard when I was not much older than Martin Ledbetter, in those gay
fin de siècle
days that the Twenties already seemed determined to emulate, if not surpass. The notes emerged from the singer’s throat completely unhindered by any trace of masculinity; if one closed one’s eyes, one would hear only a saucy and self-assured woman at the height of her powers; when the song had ended, I applauded as freely as the rest.

     Ledbetter leant over to speak in my ear. ‘That’s Billy Birdsong. Just returned from half a year in Europe.’

     ‘Ah yes, Miss Birdsong. I have heard of her.’

     ‘Originally William,’ he said, pouncing on the words as if he had caught me out. I suppose he still expected me to be shocked at the daring sins of his generation, sins previously unseen upon the earth.

     I concealed my smile, and said merely, ‘Of course. However, good manners require that one accept at face value whichever identity a person presents. Wouldn’t you agree, “Mr Ledbetter”?’

     He gave me a sharp glance, then turned back to the stage.

     The chanteuse was no operatic voice, but her contralto range was true, and had clearly been trained. She was pleasing on the eyes, her jokes were clever if on the racy side, her costumes remarkable, and I could easily understand if this home-grown talent had made a successful conquest among the sophisticates of Europe.

     At the end of her set of songs, she retired from the stage amidst whistles and hoots, and the dancers settled in for the more mundane talents of other singers.

     It was here that Ledbetter justified his salary.

     He stood up and said, ‘Be back in a minute.’

     As the young man did not appear to be using his disappearances to ingest any substances more illicit than the alcohol on the table, I wondered if he had a medical condition that should be seen to. When he had not returned in a reasonable time, I further began to wonder if perhaps I had been abandoned--I will admit that I even felt at my inner pocket to reassure myself that my note-case was still with me.

     However, I had neither been robbed nor abandoned; indeed, it turned out that I was being served well by my hireling, who had gone to fetch the evening’s entertainment.

     I rose at the approach of Ledbetter’s companion, taking the delicate hand and bowing deeply over it as my guide made the introductions. The singer’s green eyes danced with pleasure.

     ‘Marty here told me I had an admirer from a far-off land. I just had to come see.’

     Billy Birdsong was a fine womanly figure of a man, five feet four inches of smooth racially mixed skin over a dancer’s muscles and pleasingly languid bones. Modern dictates of fashion made re-forming the male form less of an engineering feat than it had a generation before--these days, even women were required to appear boyish. The casual drape of a sheer scarf around the singer’s neck concealed the masculinity of the throat, and she navigated with assurance on heels higher than many women dared.

     I invited her to sit while Ledbetter summoned up a new bottle of champagne and another glass. Miss Birdsong fluttered her eye-lashes with only the slightest exaggeration of femininity, and said, ‘You are from England, Mr Sigerson?’

     ‘London, yes.’

     ‘I was there for most of February.’

     ‘Pity, the spring can be quite lovely. Alas, I was in India then, or I would surely have seen you. Where did you perform?’

     She told me, acted gratified that I had heard of the place, and set about the sort of conversation that is required of professional ladies. She was, however, distracted. Before a minute had passed, her avid attention to my description of the Suez Canal slid sideways--only momentarily, and only those green eyes shifted--but clearly she was searching her surroundings for something, or someone. And not finding them.

     This intrigued me in a way her professional demeanour had not. Billy Birdsong was the most prominent person in the place; why should she give the most surreptitious of glances at her surroundings? She could easily rise up and gaze imperiously about, and no one would be taken aback.

     Either she did not wish to offend me, or she did not wish to be seen looking about. And although I could indeed have represented a potential source of patronage, her lack of interest made that seem unlikely.

     No; she was scouring the room for someone, a face she did not want to be seen searching out, and she was not finding that person. Furthermore, that absence made her increasingly anxious: While her eyes probed the corners of the balconies, her fingers sought out the large, beautifully mounted pink pearl she wore on a silver chain, tugging at it and rolling it between finger and thumb.

     When her hand rose to her mouth and her sharp little teeth began to work at the cuticles of the finger holding the pearl, I knew something was amiss.

     ‘Miss Birdsong,’ I began.

     ‘Call me Billy,’ she broke in. ‘Everybody does.’

     ‘Yes. Miss Birdsong, you appear to be agitated. May I be of any help?’

     At that, her gaze snapped back to me, her spine went straight, and her gnawed finger dropped away. ‘Agitated? Don’t be ridiculous,’ she protested, and laughed. ‘Why should I be agitated while I’m sitting with admirers and drinking their bubbly? Silly man.’

     One thing I am not is silly, and I believe she saw that, despite the setting and my proximity to the pick-pocketing ne’er-do-well at the other side of the table. She laughed again, a well-trained noise, finished her champagne, and rose to make a wide and easy circuit of the balcony before retreating down the stairs.

     But
la donna è mobile
, even when
la donna
is an artifice, and thus I was not in the least surprised when a note arrived, on scented paper and in an elaborately calligraphed script:

If you would like to buy a girl some dinner after her second show, come to the dressing rooms at twelve-thirty.

--BB

Ledbetter was, I believe, rather taken aback.

EIGHT

W
hat on earth are you chuckling at?” said a foam-clotted voice.

Kate looked up from the photocopied typescript to see her partner looking around the doorway from the hall, a toothbrush jutting from her lips at a jaunty angle. “You better not let Nora see you doing that,” she warned. “Granny Martinelli will rise up from her grave in horror if her great-granddaughter starts running around the house with a stick in her mouth.”

Lee went back into the bathroom and came out a minute later sans brush. She moved with deliberation around the foot of the bed, hands out to balance herself, her cane left leaning against the dressing table.

“I take it that story’s entertaining?” she asked as she lowered herself onto the bed. “You’re giggling like a schoolgirl.”

“It’s a hoot. Can you picture Sherlock Holmes in earnest conversation with a drag queen?”

That startled a laugh out of Lee. “Oh, come on now. Is this one of those porn stories that have Holmes and Watson in bed together?”

“Are there such things? The mind boggles. No, so far it’s all very decorous, although reading between the lines you begin to suspect a fair amount of leg-pulling is going on. And actually, so far there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that the main character even
is
Sherlock Holmes, although he’s every bit as pompous as the original. Far as I can see, the main reason for interest would be if it was actually written by Conan Doyle, which I wouldn’t know, although it sounds like it’s set in the early Twenties.”

“Early soft-core gay porn. Sure, I’d kill someone for that. In fact,” she said, rolling languorously over until she was taking up a large portion of Kate’s side of the bed, “I’d kill for some of the later kind.”

“Murder is not necessary,” Kate replied. She dropped the sheaf of papers to the floor, turned off the reading light, and before long had her partner giggling, like a schoolgirl.

KATE never failed to step back and wonder at the morning ritual. Even on those days when Nora was in a temper, when Lee was snappish with aches, when Kate herself was rushed out the door, there would be a moment when she would pause and savor the precious fact of the day. This Wednesday morning it came while she stood in the door of the sun-filled kitchen and bit into a cold, leathery, half-burned English muffin, Nora’s latest culinary venture. Lee, still in the thigh-length T-shirt she used as a nightie and hair awry, was holding the glass carafe of the coffeemaker up to the window to see if what it held was still drinkable. Nora, in her school clothes and hair brushed but nonetheless nearly as awry as her mother’s, was scowling with concentration at the complexities of spreading jam on muffin.

“Strawberry jam’s harder to get even than other kinds,” the child complained.

“That’s because they leave the strawberries whole instead of grinding them up,” Lee explained.

“Why don’t they grind them up?”

“I guess they want to give you the surprise of biting into a berry here and just jam there.” Lee had decided the coffee passed muster, poured it, and slid into the built-in table across from Nora. Her T-shirt rode up on the vinyl seating, and without thinking she tugged it down, disappointing Kate.

“Maybe I should just put more on and make it even,” Nora said.

“That might be too much jam even for me,” Kate told her. “Next time we’ll buy cheaper jam and it’ll go on even.”

“Okay.”

And that was the moment she held with her for the day: solemn child, sleepy partner, and a bubble of laughter rising in her chest. She kissed one sticky face and one coffee-flavored mouth, and let herself out of the house.

With one foot in the car, Kate heard someone call her name, and looked up to see the next-door neighbor coming up the block. Hadassah Levitson was one of the few people Kate had ever met who made her feel tall: She couldn’t have been more than five two. She also reminded Kate of a Jack Russell terrier, her nose in everything and absolutely fearless.