The Ladies of the Secret Circus

by Constance Sayers

  “Teddy,” said Gaston, referring to Barrow’s mother’s embarrassing moniker of Teddy Bear-row.

  “Boucher! You haven’t changed a bit.” Barrow pulled Gaston into a tight, almost violent embrace that seemed to rattle the slight Frenchman.

  “Nor you, my friend.” Gaston turned to Lara. “This is Mademoiselle Lara Barnes. Lara without a u.”

  “My mother was a fan of Doctor Zhivago,” said Lara, feeling the need to explain the odd spelling.

  “Lara,” said Barrow, emphasizing the a in her name in a clipped upper-crust English accent. Barrow’s smile was quick, and his hands were warm and large. “It is wonderful to meet you. Let me guess, I am not what you expected?” He turned his head expectantly, waiting for her response.

  Lara wasn’t quite sure how to answer. “True, I expected more tweed.”

  “She said your name was ridiculous,” said Gaston wryly, rubbing his chin as he studied his phone.

  “So when did you two last see each other?”

  Barrow looked at Gaston, and they both seemed to blank. “What has it been? Twenty years?”

  “Nineteen eighty-five, I think,” agreed Gaston.

  “And neither of you say you’ve changed?” Lara raised her eyebrow. “Liars.”

  The two men looked at each other and laughed. “Un peu,” said Barrow, bringing his fingers together.

  “We are great liars,” agreed Gaston.

  Dismissing the small talk, Barrow rubbed his hands together. His worktable was in disarray, and he began clearing it. “I have been waiting all week to see the painting.” He looked at them, disappointed to see only luggage trailing behind them. “Did you bring it?”

  Gaston lifted the suitcase onto the table and unzipped it. Removing the wrap, he slid the canvas out and presented it to Barrow like a swaddled newborn.

  Lara leaned over the portrait while Barrow donned gloves and began to carefully unwrap each layer. If Lara closed her eyes, she could almost hear the audience whispering and murmuring to each other while the horse galloped around the arena. The sophisticated dress of the seated patrons was a reminder that the circus in Paris during this time was not the same as its traveling American carnival cousins, like the Margot or even the Rivoli. Here women wore pearls and furs. Circuses in France were considered art and were treated as such. While not as prestigious as a trip to the opera, a night at the circus was still considered a glamorous evening out.

  “Beautiful job removing the frame, Gaston,” said Barrow, taking the painting in his gloved hands.

  “It was a later frame,” said Gaston. “Likely the 1940s. Monstrous bastard.”

  “Ugly, too,” added Lara.

  Barrow spun around to another table with a lamp, just missing a stack of art books that sat on the floor. He pulled out a loupe and began to study the painting carefully, examining every edge and adjusting the light in places. Lara held her breath. If he didn’t think this was a real Giroux, then her Paris adventure was over barely thirty minutes after it began. Lara blinked, trying to keep her heavy lids open after the flight. The room was silent as Barrow turned the light as he went. She wondered if they should have dealt with the painting tomorrow, allowing themselves to rest for a day while they held on to the magical idea that they might be in possession of a famous missing masterpiece.

  In the corner was a box of hardback books. Lara picked up the top one. Émile Giroux: A Perspective by Edward Binghampton Barrow. While Lara had been a music major in college, she’d minored in art history. Yet until she heard Gaston talk about Giroux, she couldn’t recall seeing any of his works. Then she spied The Vampire. There wasn’t an art student in the world who didn’t recognize The Vampire.

  Thumbing through the book, the photos of Giroux’s work showed a range of styles. His early paintings right out of school were classic and traditional. Then Giroux migrated toward cruder paintings, longer legs, elongated heads. The work was rich and vibrant—the colors leaping off the page—yet Lara didn’t care for them as much as Giroux’s earlier work. She kept flipping the pages as Giroux shifted to an attempt at cubism. Here, Lara thought he excelled. His portraits were deeply angled, exaggerated, yet displayed perfect perspective. The subjects were close-up. The deep angles were shaded with objects. Inside a cheekbone or a crease of the eye were tiny symbols that represented the moment, the time, or the subject. The paintings were intricate, textured, yet beautiful. Lara could see that his color choices were either tightly coordinated or elegantly contrasted. The final folio of photos showed Giroux—a striking man with long brown hair in a style that looked like he couldn’t be bothered to cut it. He had light round eyes and small pursed lips; his skin was pale. The photo of him, slouching in an uncomfortable chair, head cocked and resting in his hand, was taken by Man Ray. The date: April 8, 1925.

  The artist was dressed in brown, his clothes warm and worn. For a poor artist, Lara imagined how cold April could be in Paris. A smile formed at the corner of her mouth as she recalled the journal entry where Cecile described all of the men in Montparnasse wearing brown jackets. Her description of the man in this photo had been so accurate that he could have stepped right out of her journal.

  Seeing him, Lara wanted Sylvie on the Steed to be his creation. He looked dreamy and romantic, worthy of painting Cecile. She’d brought the journal with her, finding it hard to be away from it. Now that she was in Paris, she felt it was almost guiding her, Cecile’s voice beckoning her on. With her free time, she’d planned on retracing her great-grandmother’s steps—touring the cafés of Montparnasse, the markets at Rue Mouffetard and the Bois de Boulogne—places where Cecile had stood and lived.

  A steady tick of the clock was the only sound in the room. Barrow took a long time studying the EG signature before he turned the painting over to look at the back, running his hand over the wood frame that shaped the canvas. He tilted Sylvie on the Steed under the light, scanning each inch of the edge of the picture.

  Gaston had begun to whistle, and both Lara and Barrow looked up at him, annoyed.

  “Well?” Gaston leaned over the table, joining Barrow.

  “You were right. The signature looks correct, although it is not perfect, but the canvas and the painting style are pure Giroux. I’ve seen this exact canvas type and paint in every one of his other works.”

  “But?” Lara dreaded what was coming next. There was something in his voice.

  “Well, while there were rumors that in the year before he died, Giroux had been a frequent guest at Le Cirque Secret and that three paintings had been commissioned, the problem is that all of them are missing, so sadly I have nothing to compare this painting to. The lore around these paintings is high, so the scrutiny it would face will be great. Without another verified painting from the series as a reference, I’m purely going on dating and the materials used. But on first glance, those things match up. If this were to be one of the missing paintings, I cannot tell you what a huge find this would be in the art world. It will just take time to verify it.”

  “All of the paintings are missing?” She put the biography back in the box where she’d found it.

  “You haven’t told her?” Barrow looked at Gaston, shocked.

  Gaston patted his friend on the back. “You, my friend, are the expert on Giroux and the occult. I thought you could do it greater justice.”

  “I’ll start at the beginning,” said Barrow, his voice animated. “Le Cirque Secret is a longtime legend in Paris. From oral history, we think it existed for two years—1924 through 1926—but no physical evidence of the circus’s existence remains.”

  Lara recalled the elaborate posters, tickets, and memorabilia of Le Cirque Margot that still hung in the Kerrigan Falls Historical Society office. “Surely something exists.”

  Barrow shook his head gravely. “It has been the material lacking in my research on Giroux. The lore was that guests would receive a special ticket by delivery for the night’s performance. People went to the location printed on the ticket, only to f
ind that nothing was there—just an empty field or abandoned courtyard.” He paused dramatically. “Until there was something. The circus would appear out of nowhere. If you had a ticket in your possession, you saw it in front of you. Legend has it, however, that if you were standing next to someone without a ticket, they couldn’t see anything and thought you were mad.”

  At the dinner table the other night, Louie Favre had told roughly the same story. From reading Cecile’s diary, she felt that the wicked tickets Cecile had described were the culprit. Elements of what Cecile had written matched this story.

  Gaston shrugged. “Well, it was the Jazz Age, Teddy.”

  “He means they were all drunk,” said Barrow, rolling his eyes. “This one here is a nonbeliever.”

  “They were also trying to outdo each other, so it could have been some cheap carnival in Bois de Boulogne,” said Gaston. “You have to admit, it might have just been some stage magic.”

  “You think they were exaggerating?” Barrow looked over at Gaston, offended.

  “Things just don’t appear out of nowhere,” said Gaston.

  From experience, Lara knew that they did. Suddenly a wave of exhaustion hit her. While Gaston had slept soundly on the airplane with an eye mask and earplugs, she had tried to read, then watched the movie, and then ate the morning croissant with a paper cup of coffee, never sleeping a wink due to the excitement of this adventure.

  Barrow took off his glasses. “Normally, I agree with you, Gaston, but there were enough people who said they attended the circus. Something was there. They all described the same thing, yet there is no actual, physical proof of its existence. No promotional posters, tickets, or photos. There were no permits for it to be in the city. The thought was that the circus moved so as not to pick up notice from the police. No records whatsoever other than word of mouth and small snippets written in passing in biographies—and I have collected every one of them.”

  “No photos, really?” Lara knew she had seen countless photos of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald in Paris. If this circus had been so famous, surely someone had snapped a picture of it.

  Barrow pointed his glasses at Sylvie on the Steed. “When I was writing Giroux’s biography, many scholars told me the paintings had never existed at all. Your painting may be the greatest proof of the existence of Le Cirque Secret yet.”

  But it wasn’t just the painting. Lara reached into her messenger bag and pulled out the envelope with the old journal. “I don’t think the painting is the only proof of its existence.”

  Gaston looked puzzled. Lara hadn’t told him about the journal.

  Barrow touched the envelope tentatively, sliding the book out.

  “Here.” Lara handed him her written notes. “It’s what I’ve been able to translate, but some of the pages are in bad condition. It’s a journal. I think it may be my great-grandmother’s journal. It tells the story of a strange circus, similar to what you just described.” She pointed to the warped and faded paper. “It might be nothing.”

  “Looks like water damage of some sort,” said Barrow. “I have some software that can enhance this.” He touched it tenderly. “Where did you get it?”

  “My family owned a circus in America called Le Cirque Margot. After it closed, a lot of the people went to work for the Rivoli Circus in Montreal. The other night, I was at one of the Rivoli’s performances and someone handed this to me,” said Lara. That the “someone” had been a monkey named Mr. Tisdale was information that Lara decided to omit. “It appears to be from 1925. It matches the story that you just told me.”

  “The Rivoli Circus out of Montreal?” Barrow’s eyes lit up.

  “You’ve heard of it?” She leaned forward.

  “I have,” said Barrow. “I know it well. I’ve attended their performances over the years.”

  “Take it,” said Lara. “You might be able to confirm that it is from 1925. I have my copy of the notes. You might be able to translate a few of the things I couldn’t.” She opened up the diary and showed him a few notes on the pages.

  “Why don’t we finish this discussion over lunch?” Gaston looked over at Lara and seemed to read her mind. She was starved. “Hopefully our hotel rooms will be ready after that.”

  Barrow made a copy of Lara’s journal translation before sliding the original back in the envelope and placing it in the locked safe along with the wrapped painting. “I know a great spot for lunch,” said Barrow. “We can finish our discussion there.”

  As the trio walked up Rue de Richelieu to a little restaurant tucked behind Opéra-Comique, Lara was so exhausted that she felt like she was staggering. With its cozy red velvet banquettes and low chandeliers, the restaurant looked like it had remained frozen in time from the Belle Époque period. Any moment, Lara expected women to arrive in velvet dresses with their hair pinned up and men in waistcoats. Vintage opera costumes and photos of opera stars decorated the walls. With its atmosphere, Lara imagined the place was a delight in the winter.

  The waitress walked by with a chalkboard displaying the lunch specials. Barrow ordered the carpaccio de Saint-Jacques followed by the côte de boeuf, and Gaston the snails and the turbot. Lara chose a “tiramisu” of tomatoes with Parmesan and chicken ravioli, which consisted of two large pasta sheets formed into one giant raviolo containing shredded chicken smothered in an onion-and-cream sauce topped with the floral taste of thyme. All three had wine—something Lara didn’t typically drink at lunch. Barrow chose a Bordeaux, Gaston a Sancerre, and Lara a Meursault, the rare, oaky wine produced by a commune in Côte de Beaune.

  While they waited for the wine to arrive, Barrow skimmed the copy of Lara’s journal translation. Pushing the paper aside, Barrow took off his glasses and rubbed his face.

  “So, what do you think?” She sensed that he couldn’t wait for her and Gaston to leave so he could devour the journal and her notes. He kept coming back to it, pulling it over to refer to it and then pushing it away toward the salt and pepper shakers.

  “I am speechless, Ms. Barnes,” said Barrow. “You don’t know how long I have searched for answers on these missing paintings. I believe it is not an exaggeration to say that I am the foremost scholar on Giroux’s work.”

  “Modest,” said Gaston, chuckling as he tore off a piece of bread and pointed it at Barrow. “But true.”

  “In my book, I was forced to write that while the paintings might exist, they could also be hearsay; stories people told. This could be the final, missing chapter of Giroux’s life and work. His life—and my scholarship, frankly—is not complete without The Ladies of the Secret Circus. Jacques Mourier, the writer at Le Figaro, was the only journalist to attempt to investigate the existence of Le Cirque Secret. He received a ticket to one performance and wrote the only existing article about the circus for the paper.”

  Lara recalled the article in Cecile’s journal. Sylvie had read the article to her while they were at the market at Rue Mouffetard. Taking the notes from Barrow’s side of the table, she shuffled them to find the entry. “Here.” She pushed the notes at him. “They reference his article in the journal.”

  He read the pages, rubbing his neck in disbelief. “Poor Mourier drove himself crazy trying to get another ticket just so he could see it again. The performance had left him with more questions. Who ran it? How did it work? The police didn’t know. The city of Paris didn’t know. Mourier said that he saw the ladies of the circus out in Montparnasse frequently, but they would never discuss the circus with him or anyone else. And then, of course, there were the disappearances.”

  “Disappearances?” Lara’s throat caught and she drank some water. At the gala, Louie Favre had mentioned the disappearances. Peter Beaumont and then Todd had gone missing. Was there a connection?

  “Each time the circus showed up somewhere, dozens of men went missing. Mourier thought that is why it kept moving, avoiding authorities. He even considered that a serial killer was working at the circus—either that or a ritual killing—but without proo
f of the circus, they couldn’t connect the disappearances to it. In the end, Mourier might have been onto something, because the disappearances stopped when the circus did.” Barrow lifted his glass and looked out at the street. “I have to tell you. Part of me is apprehensive about getting my hopes up again. The pursuit of this circus can drive you mad.”

  The wine arrived quickly, followed by their entrées.

  “Do you remember what Zelda Fitzgerald said about the Secret Circus?” Gaston sipped his wine. “That after the performance she left through the mouth of the Devil. She turned around to take one last look and there was nothing but the cold night air.” He raised his eyebrow. “I read that somewhere?”

  “My book, you bastard,” laughed Barrow. “You read it in my book. Patrons entered through a giant Devil’s mouth—it was all high theater. There were rumored to be animals turned into humans and vice versa, spell casting, devils. But you have to remember, magic and the occult shows were all the rage in the 1920s. Harry Houdini would die right around that time, having spent his last years debunking other popular occultists, from spirit painters to mediums.”

  “But you have to admit, my friend,” said Gaston. “It all sounds crazy.”

  “Look, I’m not saying that it couldn’t have been a tall tale,” admitted Barrow. “Liquor flowed freely then. The first war had left a city full of old people and women. So many young men had been killed. Paris had changed. Montparnasse was near the Sorbonne, so rent was cheap there, and the run-down first-floor apartments were easy for sculptors to get their art in and out, but Picasso was the first real artist to leave Montmartre and come to a studio on Boulevard Raspail. Then the Americans flocked here… jazz… writers and artists and even more alcohol. Prohibition was alive and well in America, but not here, and it was relatively cheap to live in Paris. The elements that created the Second World War were a slow drumbeat in the background. A Devil’s Circus? Yes, I could see how it could be a lovely romantic notion for a city such as this one had become.”