by Kim Newman
As a young man, Buquet had been chief of La Firme, the rowdiest of claques. His hooligans disrupted many a performance with fireworks, fought running battles with rival factions in the auditorium and the Place de l’Opéra, and were paid handsomely to applaud Carlotta and hiss her rivals. A difference of opinion as to whether the ballet should be given in the first or second act inspired La Firme to such a riot at the premiere of Tannhäuser that Wagner permitted no further Paris productions in his lifetime. Curiously, this commended Buquet to the Management, who were glad of the excuse not to deal with the impossibly demanding German. An invitation was extended and, following the example of crook-turned-thieftaker Vidocq, the master of the mob crossed the lines, transferring allegiance from the stalls to the house.
This was far from the first suspicious death Simon Buquet had come across in the course of his duties.
He summoned Macquart to stand guard and prevent the corpse being hauled off to the barges. Then, he roused a call-boy who was asleep on a coil of rope in the wings and entrusted him with a scribbled note he insisted be given only into the hands of Monsieur Richard or Monsieur Moncharmin.
As an afterthought, he allowed that once the note was delivered, the lad should fetch the police.
The sun rose.
The terrible news spread around the house almost at once. Emotions were loudly expressed. Opera folk vented feelings so broadly that, in comparison, an Italian at a wedding seemed like an Englishman playing poker. Shock, at the loss of a colleague. Amazement, at his sudden fall, in the moment of his greatest triumph. Terror, that no one could now think themselves safe from the vampire.
Weeping and wailing came from the ladies’ rehearsal room. Garron had been a favourite with the chorus. His precipitate rise to fame had stirred ambitions in passed-over understudies. What roles might they command if certain divas patronised the restaurant where Giovanni Jones ate that fatal stew!
Enquiries arrived by messenger from baritones – asking with some tact if and when auditions were to be held for the suddenly vacated plum role of Lord Ruthven in Der Vampyr. Deliveries of black flowers came from the Great Anatole’s many admirers. Crowds of women in tartan and black gathered in Place de l’Opéra to mourn.
As under the Hôtel Meurice after the death of Count de Rosillon, a frenzy of rats swarmed in the sewers and tunnels beneath the Opéra. Extra catchers were called in but superstitiously refused to work. Rats in a place visited by a vampire were vicious beyond the norm.
Through the fog of hangover, folks struggled to remember the end of the previous evening’s festivities. When had they last seen Anatole Garron? Was he dizzy from the success of Macbetto and giddy at the prospect of Ruthven? Or momentarily sober, a bat-wing shadow falling across his face as an omen of doom. At the ball, had he come to blows with croaking, accusing Giovanni Jones?
Everyone agreed that the baritone had joined d’Aubert and Falke, stout comrades of his student days, in impromptu renditions of the songs of his youth. Those who paid attention thought the Great Anatole might have been interested in toasting an immediate future with the slender, calculating Ayda Heidari?
Some whispered Garron left the ball quietly, following a figure dressed like a tartan cousin of Poe’s Red Death up a spiral staircase. Others proclaimed the baritone made his grand exit with the irrepressible Countesses, declaring that he would stand them all the drink they could wish for. He had meant champagne, of course – but had some creature or creatures taken him at his word and greedily drained him of blood?
Monsieur Richard and Monsieur Moncharmin were shaken. As soon as the production was announced, queues formed outside the ticket office. Advance bookings for Le Vampire had been taken this morning. Money might have to be refunded…
VIII
THE ANGELS WERE sanguine about the news. The Persian visited Dressing Room 313 and found them idling.
‘I told you the Scottish play was bad luck,’ said Unorna.
The seeress often acted as if each fresh misfortune were foretold to her… though, for some reason, she had omitted to mention the horror in advance of its occurrence.
The Persian had the beginnings of a sore head. He had drunk more than a few of those revolting champagne-and-whisky cocktails.
This business with Garron did not help.
‘There’s a new Number One suspect,’ said La Marmoset, who had talked with the gendarme posted to keep sensation-seekers and souvenir-hunters out of the rubbish yard and was thus au courant with the investigation. ‘It is but a short hop from Phantom to Vampire. It’s almost as if d’Aubert doesn’t want to solve the case.’
‘D’Aubert will have no more luck laying his hands on Erik than he did the Grand Vampire,’ said the Persian. ‘There was a whole world under Paris even before Erik started building his own cities and labyrinths down there. In my country, he was known as the Trickster or the Trapdoor Lover before ever anyone thought to call him a Phantom. Better men than the Inspector have tried and failed to find him.’
‘Perhaps,’ agreed La Marmoset, ‘but it is relatively easy to find you, Monsieur. I suggest you forego your eleven o’clock table at the Café de la Paix.’
The Persian saw the Queen of Detectives’ point.
‘Are there such things as vampires?’ Sophy asked. ‘When I was little, my brother frightened me with stories of a vrykolakas that lived in our stairwell. That thing gave me nightmares. It was just an old mop, with a ragged head that looked like wild hair, but I made Paul chop it up and burn it. The bad dreams stopped… for a time.’
‘My grandmother talked about djinni and ifrits,’ the Persian said. ‘I believed only in what I saw or could make or could find out. Now, I know there are strange things all around us… stranger even than men in masks and clockwork brides. But I am certain that Erik is no more a vampire than he is a ghost.’
‘Though he does sleep in a coffin,’ said Sophy.
‘…is seldom seen in daylight,’ said Unorna.
‘…habitually wears an opera cloak,’ said La Marmoset.
‘…lives among swarms of sewer rats and other vermin,’ said Sophy.
‘…does not age,’ said Unorna.
‘…mesmerises pale young women who grow paler in his company,’ said La Marmoset.
‘…and his teeth, in a certain gloom, resemble fangs,’ admitted the Persian. ‘I can see how the police might put these things together.’
At the ball, Dr Falke mentioned a previous Paris vampire scare. Twenty-five years ago – before the Persian or Erik came to the city. The creatures are supposed to live a long time. Had this vampire taken a quarter-century nap and woken up thirsty?
‘Yesterday, Garron was so alive, with fine prospects,’ said Unorna. ‘Now, he is thrown away and used up. He dared to invoke dread powers and this was his reward.’
Had the vampire been at the Opera House last night? That would limit the field to only six or seven thousand suspects – including waiters and attendants. Looking back, it was hard to think of anyone present – including Anatole Garron – who did not act as if they might be a murderer.
‘This does not speak well of our professional pride,’ said the Persian. ‘We were all at the ball, and yet the guest of honour was spirited away and murdered.’
‘Feh!’ said La Marmoset. ‘I am Queen of Detectives, not Queen of Bodyguards.’
She looked at Sophy, who shrugged. The assassin didn’t need to say that her field was causing mysterious deaths, not averting them.
‘There were vibrations in the aether,’ said Unorna, ‘but indistinct. What was to happen would not be stopped.’
‘Thank you, ladies… that’s all most helpful, I don’t think.’
‘Remember,’ said La Marmoset, ‘it is none of our business… the Director refused the Grand Vampire’s commission. These murders are d’Aubert’s to solve, which is as good as saying the vampire has a free pass for the season.’
The Persian had no argument.
A horn honked and a pneumat
ique popped up in its tube. This was how Erik kept in touch when he retreated to the deepest part of his labyrinth – the house on the shore of an underground lagoon where he maintained a pipe organ whose tones were not helped by all-pervading damp.
In a sad little hut decorated for a funeral was the coffin Sophy mentioned. There Erik slept, because – according to him – ‘One must get used to everything in life, even eternity.’ The Persian understood the narrow box also helped relieve rheumatic pain. He was perhaps the only person who remembered that the Phantom of the Opera was a sick man. He was strong and supple, but had too little meat on his bones. His skeletal appearance was due to congenital infirmity. Being Erik hurt… not just the soul-pain he poured into ‘Don Juan Triumphant’, but constant physical aches in his joints, his bones, his muscles. Having not much of a nose, he was susceptible to colds and chills. A doctor would probably advise that he not spend so much time in a basement with an open sewer running through it.
The Persian took the scroll out of the container. The note was curt.
This was a moment without precedent. Erik had reconsidered.
The Persian understood. It wasn’t because he was now a suspect… it was because he now took the vampire as a personal affront.
The laundry chute of the Hôtel Meurice was neither here nor there. It was no business of the O.G.A. who used it to dispose of a random wastrel. But to kill the Great Anatole and leave him naked in the shadow of the Paris Opéra – and to stir up a bloodthirsty mischief of rats in the tunnels where the Phantom trod – was an affront which would not be borne. The vampire had dared trespass in Erik’s home. It might have been a calculated declaration of war.
‘Ladies,’ announced the Persian, ‘we enter a new profession. We are now vampire hunters.’
IX
THE SÛRETÉ HAD offered a substantial reward, raided every low dive in Paris and sent brave patrols up onto the rooftops, but failed to catch the Grand Vampire.
La Marmoset found him within two hours.
Posing as proprietor of a confectionary shop in Place Pigalle, the chief of Les Vampires wore a ginger wig and less startling false teeth. Perhaps this was his true vocation and being the Grand Vampire was a chore undertaken through a family obligation. Who wouldn’t want to pass their days surrounded by bonbons? No wonder he’d lost his original choppers.
The Queen of Detectives approached the counter and presented a sealed envelope. She browsed among jars of gobstoppers and mint sticks.
The Grand Vampire cast an eye over the letter, then nodded once.
The Opera Ghost Agency was now employed by Les Vampires.
Trust the Persian to ensure they got paid. After the attack on the opera, Erik might be of a mind to waive any fee and treat this as a personal matter. A former police chief himself, the Persian was more practical. As in the opera, the artist must always be paid. One of the few points on which La Marmoset agreed with Inspecteur d’Aubert was that too many amateurs were crowding into the detective business.
La Marmoset was disguised as a pampered woman of wealth and indulgence. Just in case anyone was watching – though she was pretty sure no one was – she stayed in character by purchasing an expensive box of imported Swiss chocolates. She also bought packets of sugared almonds for Sophy and Unorna, whom she thought of as the dear little daughters of the imaginary lady of leisure. She kept the receipt, which would be presented back to the Grand Vampire when his bill was tallied.
A German governess brought in two exceptionally spoiled lads, who ran around the shop hooting like owls, filching items they stuffed into cheeks or pockets. The ninny fussed with her reticule and looked with adoration at the little pests. The manager smiled tightly. By night, he could have annoying customers garrotted. Here, he was required not to have small children murdered. His smile got tighter. A single drop of sweat ran down his cheek.
La Marmoset left the shop.
Business necessities attended to, she hired a fiacre, instructing the driver to take her to Île de la Cité. Just as Paris must have the greatest opera house, the greatest museum, the greatest university and the greatest cathedral, so it must have the greatest morgue – and here it was, in the shadow of Notre Dame. On the lintel above the main door was an inscription: Liberté! Égalité! Fraternité! The building’s many tenants were free of life, equal in death and brothers and sisters to clay.
In the Morgue, les macchabées – the bodies of the unknown dead – were frozen by ammonia and displayed on tilted slabs. This was ostensibly so friends and relations could identify the deceased. Too often, grieving or hopeful relatives had to fight through crowds of morbid curiosity-seekers who thought it a jolly game to gawp at the sorry state we all come to.
The Morgue was one of the attractions of Paris. Some nameless corpses attained a post-mortem fame. This was where the wax mask of L’Inconnue de la Seine was made by an intern who chanced to notice her strange smile. The first replicas were sold outside the Morgue, to admirers who prized the impaled woman the way devotees admired actresses or singers. A death-mask to put up in a student garret or bourgeois home, alongside a portrait of Carlotta or Sarah Bernhardt.
The Queen of Detectives knew the Morgue well. Once, she had lain for half a night on one of the slabs to trap Bernard Hichcok, an elegant maniac who paid return calls on women he had strangled. Bribing his way in after hours, Hichcok brought flowers and liked to sit and make small-talk before impressing unwelcome kisses upon dead paramours. La Marmoset startled the villain by sitting up and clapping handcuffs on him. She told the wretch she had cleared a spot for his next visit – when, thanks to Madame la Guillotine, he would need a separate slab for his head.
The ghouls were out in force today. A dead celebrity always had the morbidly curious lining up around the building. Those who couldn’t afford the price of a ticket to the opera might still catch Anatole Garron’s final bow… And the better-off would pay to get to the front of the queue.
Two gendarmes held back the throng.
La Marmoset now wore the face she most often used on official business – essentially her own, with fifteen extra years of lines around her mouth and eyes – and was recognised by the policemen, who admitted her with respectful salutes. Her easy entry made the crowd more resentful.
‘You, woman,’ shouted a respectable-seeming fellow with a Vandyke beard, ‘what do I have to do to get into this building?’
‘You have to die, sir,’ she replied.
Leaving the ghoul sputtering, she stepped into the foyer of the Morgue.
It was chilly out, but colder within. The stench of lye and ammonia wasn’t pleasant. No amount of refrigeration could entirely suppress decay, so a whiff of rot was in the air too. A small kiosk sold strong pastilles and scented cigarettes, which – from experience – she knew were no use in covering the noxious smells. Her heels clacked on the stone floor and her breath frosted. She wrapped her scarf tighter.
Garron, of course, was no macchabée. His identity was known. He was here in his capacity as murder victim. The Count de Rosillon was on ice too – unsolveds could be kept almost indefinitely. It was ten hours to freeze a man solid, including his guts; a woman took a little quicker, prompting misogynist jokes among the staff.
La Marmoset climbed a small staircase to a lecture theatre. Another gendarme stood guard, bayonet fixed.
‘Pleasure to have you back on the beat, mademoiselle,’ he said, saluting.
‘Can’t say I’ve missed this place, Patou.’
‘Not my favourite watch either. But it’s safer duty than hunting the Black Bat up among the chimney-pots. Inspecteur Legris fell off the Musée de l’Orangerie and broke his leg.’
Patou held the door open for her.
The rank of benches in the theatre were less plush than the tiers of seats at the Opéra, but an eager audience was gathered for Garron’s final appearance. Harsh, fizzing electric light showed the scene in unforgiving detail. A prop rather than a performer, the baritone lay naked on a dissec
ting table, innards exposed by a Y-shaped incision.
Dr Dieudonné bent over the body, hands in his chest cavity as if squeezing the lungs.
La Marmoset remembered, as her toes lost feeling, how the cold of the Morgue bit. Dr Dieudonné took sensible precautions against the conditions in her workplace. Her long hair was pinned up under a small cap and she wore a plain apron over trousers and stout boots. A few moments watching the coroner at work made La Marmoset revise her opinion. She might still hold her position through patronage, but she deserved the job. She was precise and professional.
Perhaps Dr Dieudonné was older than she looked. After all, just now, La Marmoset looked older than she was.
‘…As in the case of de Rosillon, almost all blood is absent from the body.’
Dr Dieudonné pulled her hands out of the corpse and wiped strands of gristly tissue off on a towel.
Sophy and Unorna were in the front row. They had saved a place beside them. As La Marmoset made her way down to her spot, she glanced at the audience. The theatre was crowded with police officials, representatives of the Management of the Paris Opéra (Monsieur Moncharmin, but not Monsieur Richard), reporters and sketch-artists from a range of publications, nosy politicians, well-connected cranks and ghouls (was that veiled connoisseur of horrors really the Countess de Cagliostro?), witnesses like Simon Buquet and Jean Macquart, and an examining magistrate who had already fallen asleep.