Irene Adler: Chapel Noir Part 45

The street below lay knee deep in mist, as if a river of fog had flooded the cobblestones. Streetlights resembled drowned trees in a mere. No vehicles moved at this hour, not on such a sheltered byway.

The row of chic shops opposite were shuttered, the residence windows above them all dark with drawn curtains.

As I stared, uncertain, I saw that the black arch of one doorway was doubly dark. A figure sheltered in its shadow! With the mist-flooded street I couldn't see its feet, nor tell whether it was a trousered man or skirted woman, though why a woman would be out at this hour in such a deserted place beggared explanation. Yet I viewed a cloaked and hooded figure, more womanly than a hatted or capped man . . . more like a monk.

I s.h.i.+vered at the vague and sinister outline. Someone watched, whatever it was.

Now I was s.h.i.+vering not only from the cold floor on my bare feet, but from the icy inner recognition of surveillance, from the fog of mystery that seeped into our cozy suite and restless minds like smoke.

This time I paused to find and don my slippers in the dark. When I returned to the main room, Irene had marked several more sites on her map. I began to discern a pattern.

"The Eiffel Tower." She nodded. I indicated a spot a half an inch away. "The unsuspected catacomb where the third murder victim was found. But what is this mark over here by the Seine?"

"Notre Dame."

"Where we were fired upon! With the Wild West Show in town-"

"That was not lost upon me either," she said. "But what else wasis-at this same spot?"

Being shot at was such a novel experience that I could think of no other to link with the site.

Irene shook her head, her chestnut hair rippling red-gold in the lamplight. She looked no more than twenty, save her expression was older than time.

"The second undiscovered and likely ancient catacomb," she reminded me.

"Under the cathedral, of course. But . . . there was nothing there."

"Spilled spirits, candle wax. Or do you think those bones had held a recent soiree?"

"No body was there, I mean."

"No. No body."

"And this mark?" I touched another.

"Your former residence."

The ink had been still wet and my fingertip was blackened. "Two bodies there."

"And a wine cellar with signs of disturbance."

"But minor enough signs that the broken wine bottle could have been dropped by a careless servant, weeks ago even."

"Or Kelly could have waited down there. After installing the Prince's . . . couch." She leaned back, set the pen down, thought visibly. "You found the women at what time?"

"Just after eight. We have our second meal of the day before seven."

"It lasts more than an hour?"

"You think the girls would let anyone rush them? The food is as exquisite as that given to our n.o.ble guests. We are expected to work long into the night. It helps if we are plied with viands and wine."

"So the two dead women would have been tipsy?"

I shrugged, hard-pressed to explain the life of serving men's needs to a woman who had only ever served her own, as men themselves do.

"Not so much tipsy," I said, "as indolently mellow. Gay yet somehow removed, complacent."

"I cannot think of a better formula to create the perfect murder victim," Irene said angrily, careful not to raise her voice with ire. "The women of Whitechapel were drunk as well. I can quite understand their need to dull sensation. I cannot have anything but a contempt beyond expressing for a man who would prey upon such helpless victims, however impaired his mind might be."

"But he was clearly mad. Thanks to your book recording such cases, we know more about the methods and motives of such killers than the London police. I don't think even Sherlock Holmes, despite seeing Kelly's mania with his own eyes, fully understands the man's hatred of women as we do."

She met my gaze. "We understand more than we might wish to."

I lowered my eyes. "I am . . . amazed that your contempt does not extend to me."

"For the role you play? Never."

Her answer equaled the ambiguity in her eyes. She regarded me with an intensity I had never encountered in another person, as if she had always seen far more of me than I had ever seen of her.

The words "role" and "play" echoed in my mind with a mockery her overtone had not given them.

I had the distinct sense that she did harbor contempt for me in some way, and it was not for anything obvious. To me, at least. I cannot explain how shocked and ashamed I felt, although I could not say why.

And yet we sat alone in the night, and she confided in me, as I did not in her. And I felt more shame. The worst shame was that I could not admit it.

Irene was bending over her papers again, making marks.

"That is?" I asked.

"We are back near the Eiffel Tower. This spot is the global village and Buffalo Bill Wild West Show. You see the connection?"

"You are drawing a line between the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame."

"Not Notre Dame, per se, although it is a stop on the journey."

"But this dot is right where Notre Dame is."

"No, it is not. It is a few hundred paces beyond Notre Dame on the ile de la Cite, at the very end of the isle. It is the Paris Morgue."

I gasped. I had forgotten about the morgue. "But that had nothing to do with the crimes. It is merely where all the dead go."

"It is where all Paris goes to see the dead," she corrected me, "as all Paris goes to Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower and the World Exposition and Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. Do you see yet?"

"Not yet, but . . . All Paris does not go to the rue des Moulins."

"All Paris that matters does. The men who run the city and the country and the world."

"But the catacombs are not places that draw the public."

"Not yet." Irene smiled bitterly. "Give the Parisians time to realize that these gruesome sites are worthy of exploitation. The Rothschild maps and papers indicate that most of these are not the usual Christian catacombs dating back to Roman days. They contain bones from cemeteries displaced by the city's growing from a few hundred thousand to two millions of people in this century. These dead date back only to the seventeenth century. Still, they are the dead, they are French, and all Paris hastens to morbid occupations during this last decade of our century. Perhaps the taint of fresh blood in the catacombs will finally bring them the public recognition they deserve."

"It's true that the b.l.o.o.d.y and sensational attract public attention," I admitted. "They always have."

"But the b.l.o.o.d.y and the sensational have never been so much a part of the public consciousness, thanks to newspapers that trumpet the worst on every corner."

"The newspapers do not invent the atrocities they report."

She eyed me with a glance as challenging as forged steel until I was forced to temper my opinion.

"Some of them do . . . invent, I suppose. Sometimes."

"More likely foment than invent," she conceded. "Were people not so greedy for news of other people's misfortunes, there would not be money to be made in sensational journals."

"The morgue is free," I pointed out.

"Yes, and what began as a plan to aid in identifying unclaimed bodies-often les inconnus de la Seine-has become a permanent exhibition of the macabre. At least London has no such tradition."

"I can't imagine the British permitting such a thing. Too many of the bodies are unclothed, though that fact makes the ones which are presented in clothing so much more interesting."

Irene m.u.f.fled a laugh in the cup of her hand, incidentally warming her writing fingers. "You are right, Pink. When it comes to naked death, the British would object more to the impropriety of the nakedness than the morbidity of gazing at corpses. But the French . . . they would find some wisps of garments even more intriguing. And the Americans . . . well, they would be appalled by both."

"You realize that your summation of the British character, which I find so annoying, has exactly described Nell. She is quite agreeable to gruesome ghost stories, but appalled by the l.u.s.t for life."

"I admit that I am surprised by how well she handles sheer grue, better than I. Perhaps I have more imagination than she. As for the l.u.s.t for life, isn't that something that most women are encouraged to forsake?"

"Most ladies," I said disparagingly.

"No doubt that is why you work so hard to be taken for anything but. Yet you are as conventional in your way as Nell."

"How can two women of such vastly different experience and roles in life be in any way similar?" I demanded.

"Because you are both more than you appear to be. But that has always been the weakness, and power, of women. Now. Watch while I draw the final lines on our map."

She did so, effectively ending my arguments because I was so intrigued by her midnight mapmaking session.

I watched the straight, angled line she drew north from the Eiffel Tower, using the edge of Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia s.e.xualis as a ruler! I frowned at where the line ended, somewhere near the rue Pigalle, beyond the Paris Opera.

She then lifted her full dressing-gown sleeve and carefully positioned the book at the other side of map. She dipped the pen a last time, shook off the excess ink, and drew a line from the Paris Morgue that met the end of the other angled line.

"You see?"

"I see you have created a triangle with a base between the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame, or the morgue and somewhere south of Montmartre."

"The mount of the martyrs," she mused, "where all the raucous night life of Paris cavorts until dawn, watching the shocking cancan dancers and drinking absinthe. And where have you been in all this?"

"Where you have gone. And Nell." I blinked. "Nell accompanied you to the tower and the nearby catacombs, and to the morgue. I went with you to the tower and the nearby World Exposition grounds, and to the catacombs near Notre Dame. How odd. There's a symmetry. . . . And why have you taken only one of us to certain locations?"

"I wished to find out if I was being followed, or one of you."

"All along? We have been followed everywhere?"

"Not at first. But later, everywhere. I believe so."

"I cannot believe that anyone would follow Nell. Or me, for that matter. And have you concluded who was being followed?"

She nodded. "I."

I sat back, out of ideas, a rare state for me. I am extremely quick-witted. I have to be in my profession.

"Well. Nell must be right! It must be that Holmes man. He is oddly taken by you. I noticed he kept one eye on you during the entire interrogation of James Kelly."

"You have swallowed Nell's romantic delusion, I see. The man is all brain and no blood. I a.s.sure you that if Mr. Sherlock Holmes is keeping one eye on anyone, it is not for reasons of admiration, but of mistrust. He does not tolerate meddlers, as he calls us, and only permitted our presence because our disguise conveniently set off Kelly's mania." She smiled. "He may also realize that he is almost as much out of his depth in this case as Nell is."

She tapped the pen nib on the apex of the triangle. "Is this not where sits the house we all have in common located in the rue des Moulins?"

I leaned over the map, staring. "I am new to Paris. I am not yet acquainted with all the streets and their locale. You are saying that the bordello is near the apex."

She tapped the nib on a site half an inch below the apex. "Here. In the ninth arrondiss.e.m.e.nt. The twenty arrondiss.e.m.e.nts of Paris are laid out so artfully, like the concentric circles of a snail's sh.e.l.l, with the smallest numbers starting at the center of the city, then rotating outwardly in order around that hub. The English would never use such a scheme. But we are interested in the direct geometry of logic, not the circuitous paths of art. And that is what makes the murders and events so interesting. This double murder at the hotel de rendezvous did not have any connection to a catacomb and did not result in a display of the bodies at the Paris Morgue."

"You believe that the display of the bodies is as much a part of the crime as the killing?"

"I believe that there is a ritual behind them, and behind that ritual, however brutal, a reason. Perhaps the first bodies were intended to be displayed elsewhere, but you found them too soon."

I s.h.i.+vered again. "You mean that the killer was still lurking in the house when I opened that door."

She nodded.

"Then it might not have been James Kelly! Yet he is mad and just the sort of man Krafft-Ebing would find a likely candidate."

"For the Ripper. Perhaps this Paris killer is not the Ripper."

I rubbed my aching temples. "Then Sherlock Holmes has Jack the Ripper in custody for the crimes committed by someone entirely different?"

"Perhaps. We have read the Book. We have learned such killers are commonplace, or at least not uncommon. And here is where the jackal press has worked to conceal rather than reveal. On the one hand, any public atrocity gruesome enough is game for trumpeting to the world. On the other, should an Eminence be involved, or the crime be too obscure, it is buried from view like the victims. We get a very select view of things, only what the authorities wish the public to know." She sat back. "We must revisit the scene of a crime. I am convinced that the game is not over yet."

"When?"

"Now."

"Why are you letting me accompany you?"

"Because you will be useful later."

"Is that all?" I felt another chill, not from the night air, but from the implacable intent of this woman. I had only glimpsed that steel of soul in one other person: Sherlock Holmes, oddly enough. One was an artist, one a scientist, and yet they shared the same will and dreadful purity of purpose.

"Is not the chance of saving one life from a horrible death enough?" she asked me now.

"Yes." But I wished to be regarded as an equal in the hunt. Of course, Irene Adler Norton had no more idea than Sherlock Holmes or Buffalo Bill Cody that I was a hunter also, and worthy of their company.