The Curse of the Grand Guignol (23 page)

Opium! Of course! That explained
the drugged state of the girls. She felt calmer though her heart
was still beating out a violent tattoo. Yes, Kiki visited her
sister every day. Surely she would not leave her sister in a place
where she suspected she was being violated. If Delgardo was
drugging his research subjects – and she still believed he was
behind the disappearance of Xenia – then where would he put a
subject who had possibly died and…

“Is there a morgue in the
hospital?”

“All hospitals have a
morgue.”

“Do you know where it is?”

“It’s usually to the rear of the
operating theatre. Why?”

Her throat suddenly swelled. “I
think it would be a handy place to hide a body.”

Fedir and Mahmoud caught up to
them as they trotted briskly across the forecourt. Someone tried to
stop them entering the morgue but Mahmoud pinned them back. There
were seven trolleys with bodies covered with sheets. Xenia was on
the fourth trolley. She appeared to be as rigored as the others but
a mirror test indicated she was still breathing. Her eyes were
unstaring, the pupils no bigger than pinpoints, and her pinched
skin showed signs of severe dehydration but she was still alive –
barely.

“Get her to her feet,” directed
Dr Watson. “She needs oxygen in her lungs.”

While Fedir and Mahmoud
supported her arms and walked her as best they could to kick-start
the heart’s pump, the Countess raced off to find some drinking
water. She returned several minutes later with a cup of cold tea
someone had not had time to drink. Xenia didn’t have the strength
to swallow so they used a spoon and forced it into her mouth.

Since Salpetriere was the size
of a small village it was not difficult to bring the landau around
to the rear of the hospital, load Xenia, and ferry her home without
being observed. Dr Watson stayed with his patient. Fedir stayed by
his sister’s side. Mahmoud remained with the Countess who had some
unfinished business to take care of. Fearlessly, she marched to the
asylum and threw open Monsignor Delgardo’s door without knocking.
He was standing by the window, smiling, as if he had been expecting
her.

“A pleasure to see you again, la
comtesse. Please, do come in. Have you returned to admire the
butterfly?”

She gripped the invitation
tightly in her trembling hand. It stopped her strangling him. Her
benign smile was more faux than his. “I have come to invite you to
a Gobolinks party. I will be holding it on the afternoon of the
eighth. I do hope you can come since it was you who put the idea
into my head.”

He used a letter opener to slice
open the envelope and check the details of the party. “Splendid!
Splendid! Rue Bonaparte. An afternoon gathering will leave me free
to attend the opening of the new plays later in the night. Will
there be many guests?”

She reeled off the names,
omitting the inspector. “My
maître de maison
,” she indicated
Mahmoud poised stiffly in the doorway, hand on his dagger, “will
act as judge along with La Noire.”

Delgardo studied the Sikh
briefly before returning his gaze to the butterfly. “There’s
something you can do for me with regards someone special. Would you
care to walk with me? We can talk as we go.”

Mahmoud followed several paces
behind them.

“I do hope Davidov will not be
in one of his frightful moods,” said Delgardo conversationally. “He
has been extremely tiresome of late. Something is eating away at
him. I have urged him to seek help. I think Radzival will win the
poetry prize. He had aspirations in that direction once. Alas,
poverty forced him to take up the position of librarian. To be poor
is not a tragedy. To be born wealthy and end up poor is
tragic.”

“He was born wealthy?”

“His family had business
interests all over the Continent. They lost everything after that
Canal Scandal. His father committed suicide. His mother ended up in
a madhouse, not here, somewhere in Montmartre. I believe his three
sisters ended up here when the authorities began rounding up
prostitutes. Before my time. Yes, tragic. You can tell he has good
breeding. He stands straight and looks you in the eye. Crespigny is
hopelessly in love with him. Quite the Greek tragedy there. I hope
I have not shocked you. You give the impression of being a woman of
the world.”

She tried - and failed - to
temper her tone. “Crespigny cannot stand him!”

Knowing he had shocked her made
him laugh. “We always despise that which we covet.”

She had paid no heed to where
they were walking, and it came as an even greater shock to find he
had led her downstairs to the lower level of the asylum. They were
standing outside Coco’s cell.

“I brought you down here hoping
you might take Mademoiselle Kiki home in your carriage. She is
bereft and cannot walk of her own volition. Her sister, one of my
patients, died suddenly this morning. Another tragedy. I hope that
is not asking too much of you?”

Kiki was curled up in the foetal
position on the empty bed in the tiny cell where the Countess had
last seen Coco. The petite
saltimbanque
was drowning in her
own tears. Her eyes were red raw and swollen and she didn’t seem to
know where she was.

Gently, Mahmoud scooped up the
featherweight and carried her up the stairs, across the forecourt,
to a waiting hackney cab by the gate. Dazed with grief, or possibly
drugged, she hardly stirred.

The Countess paused on the
stairs, feigning what she hoped would sound like a mixture of
worldly curiosity and female ignorance. “What is it that you do
down here, Monsignor Delgardo? Is this part of your research into
megalomania?”

He shook his head and looked her
in the eye. “The girls in these cells are opium addicts. They are
undergoing a cure. My research is with men. It is men who tend
toward megalomania.”

With that statement in mind, the
Countess bid the monsignor goodbye and was about to join Mahmoud
and Kiki when she spotted Little Marianne watching from the
garden.

“Wait for me here,” she directed
Mahmoud before catching up to the crab-like creature in the shadow
of the asylum, out of view of Delgardo’s window.

“I have a present for you,” she
said, extracting a cigarette and lighting it.

Little Marianne filled her puny
lungs with tobacco. The Countess thought the old woman was nowhere
near as mad as she seemed. It was probably a thing much less mad to
live in a madhouse than to live on the streets of Paris.

On the spur of the moment, prior
to leaving home, the Countess had crammed Little Mary into a carpet
bag and brought the bag with her. “This is yours if you tell me
where Coco is.”

Little Marianne’s mad staring
eyes bulged covetously. She looked around furtively before
whispering, “She is lying next to the other one.”

“Other one? Of course! In the
morgue?”

Little Marianne nodded and the
Countess thrust the carpet bag into the bony old hands before
rushing away. Mahmoud watched her race across the forecourt back to
the hospital. He was tempted to race after her but the whimpering
girl slumped in the seat of the hackney cab forced him to stay
put.

The Countess was about to check
the trolleys when she heard a noise behind her. It was Little
Marianne; cradling the Mary puppet as if it were a baby, rocking it
in her arms and singing a lullaby; a strange far-way look in her
mad unblinking eyes.

Turning her attention back to
the trolleys, the Countess noticed the sheets all lying flat.
Someone had removed the dead bodies between her first visit and
this one.

“Coco’s dead, isn’t she?”

The Countess didn’t know how to
answer that, not because she was in the habit of sparing people’s
feelings regarding death which she accepted as a corollary to life,
but because she didn’t know if it was true or not. She patted
Kiki’s hand consolingly and gazed at the road unfolding before them
as they rumbled toward the Canal Saint-Martin. A hackney cab could
only take two passengers so Mahmoud had taken a separate hansom and
returned home.

“I don’t know what’s real and
what isn’t,” mused Kiki wearily as her doll-like head came to rest
on the Countess’s shoulder. “Sometimes I think that what I do on
stage is real and that the rest of my life is a dream. Sometimes I
think I’m not real either. I think I might be a dream too. I dream
about going to America. La Noire wants to go back to America.
Davidov wants to go too. America is the land where dreams come
true. I’m scared my dream will never come true. I’m scared nearly
all the time. Kasper, Klaus and Karl say there’s going to be
another revolution. I’m scared of that too. I don’t want to die on
the barricades. I don’t want to be a wife. I don’t dream about
being married. I dream about being famous. I want people to
remember me. No one will remember Coco.”

Kiki began to weep. Tears
stained the Countess’s sleeve and left a damp patch. She wondered
if Kiki was grieving for Coco or for herself.

When they arrived at the Quai de
Jemmapes a reanimated Kiki leapt nimbly from the hackney cab and
ran straight to Le Cirque not Bobo, presumably to tell the three
circassiens that her sister was dead. The Countess wondered if the
three men would remember Coco and weep.

Raoul Crespigny was a study in
solitude, sitting
en plein air
on the deck of Bobo, smoking
a cigarette. He acknowledged the Countess with a wave of his hand
and seemed pleased for her to join him. She was uncomfortably
honest at the best of times. Right now she felt like being brutal.
Xenia had just escaped being buried alive. Coco had gone to an
early grave, a victim of misfortune and man’s megalomania.

“The three plays for next week,”
she said, “which one do you think the murderer will re-enact?”

He met brutality with bluntness.
“The last one. Isn’t that what you think too? That’s why you went
to the Moulin Rouge last night. You wanted to see how easy it would
be to string someone up from the red mill after dismembering them.
And before you ask how I know you went there, Davidov is nursing a
vicious hangover and La Noire is in love with the Sikh. I cannot
wait for the Gobolinks party – grist to the mill!”

“I am searching for a ruthless
murderer and you make light of it.”

“Perhaps you should look closer
to home. That Sikh has the right build for the man in the black
cloak. Did Dr Watson happen to mention that someone in a black
cloak was watching the Hotel de Merimont the night of the
salonniere?”

She wasn’t about to grace his
badly veiled accusation with a civil reply. Even if the mystery
watcher was Mahmoud, she couldn’t imagine anything sinister in it.
Her aunt had always been a good judge of character and clearly she
trusted the Sikh. “Are you in love with Radzival?”

Startled, he threw back his head
and laughed uproariously, and totally unconvincingly. “Who told you
that?”

“Just answer me – yes or
no?”

“Yes! Does it offend you? Does
it disturb your feminine sensibilities?”

“You know very well it doesn’t.
If it did I wouldn’t ask. I wouldn’t even be speaking to you. Does
he return your affection?”

With a sudden jerk, he tossed
his cigarette into the canal and scowled melodramatically at the
water. “Unrequited love and hope are two sides of the same coin.
You cannot have one without the other.”

“You would do anything for
him?”

“Yes, but he has never asked me
for anything.”

“Would you lie for him?”

“Yes – why are you asking me
these questions?”

“Do you think he might be
Anonymous?”

Crespigny looked at her as if
she had just announced she was the killer. “Anonymous?”

“It’s possible, isn’t it?”

“No it isn’t,” he negated
stridently.

“He writes poetry, doesn’t
he?”

“Rhyming verse is not a crime.
Besides, it’s a far cry from iambic pentameters to naturalistic
horror. And he’s never been to the Grand Guignol. He loathes
it.”

“How do you know he loathes it?
Perhaps he dresses in a black cloak and hires a private booth and
watches in secret.”

“I know he loathes it because la
marquise goes every single night and she has often remarked that he
declines every entreaty to accompany her. She is his employer. Any
other lackey would go whether they liked it or not. But not
Casimir. He has principles. His family lost their wealth during the
Canal Scandal but it did not crush him the way it did so many
others. He rose above it.”

She shivered and hunkered down
beside him to get out of the wind. It was always colder blowing
across the water and she felt its icy tentacles reach inside her
clothes.

“Well, it’s interesting that you
should mention the Canal Scandal,” she said earnestly. “I am
starting to think the murders may be linked to the Panama Affair.
The murderer may be avenging himself on those who profited from the
corruption. Our murderer is choosing his victims for a certain
reason, and the fact they are all elderly and prosperous is
significant, though we cannot yet see what connects them. Our
murderer is cold-blooded and methodical but also theatrical and
creative. It is an unusual combination,
n’est-ce pas
?”

He shrugged indifferently. “I
cannot say. I don’t know any murderers. Perhaps they are all
cold-blooded, calculating and creative. You realize there is not a
single person in Paris who was not in some way affected by the
Panama corruption. Take the Humboldts. They used to be wealthy too.
They speak Yiddish. I heard them once when they were down in the
cellar and didn’t think anyone was in the cafe. I think they are
actually Ashkenazi-Jews. That would explain why they hate Jews so
much – we always despise what we hate about ourselves. And Davidov
was down to his last sous when la marquise financed his theatrical
enterprise. The love of his life left him for one of the corrupt
financiers. He never got over it. When he’s drunk you hear him
cursing the name Lulu. And Delgardo is Colombian. He once accused
the Canal Company of genocide. His countrymen died by the score –
tropical disease, mudslides, faulty explosives. The people who
perpetrated that should be on Devil’s Island. Instead, they got
away with murder. If someone is killing them
bon chance
I
say!”