by Kim Newman
‘What do we do with him?’ Unorna asked.
Sophy drew a thumb across her throat.
Unorna wasn’t sure she was ready to go that far. Sophy already had the beginning of a retinue of ghosts – smoky, indistinct, unindividuated. Her kills, either spirits or memories. The more ghosts there were, the more likely it was that Sophy would sense them. She wasn’t as spirit-blind as La Marmoset or Madame Van Helsing. Eventually, she would feel their unwelcome touch.
There were consequences beyond the legalities. Murder was not good for what was called karma in the East. Unorna had qualms about coldly executing this murderer, though he would doubtless go to the guillotine if handed over to the police and courts. She didn’t want Sophy or La Marmoset to add to burdens which could become crushing. Killing his friends hadn’t made Falke better. He was more a wretch now than before.
‘There must be another way,’ she said.
La Marmoset stood back from Falke.
He slid off the stool and rat-scurried across the floor, reaching for a peculiar black device: a leather bag with steel-tipped tentacles.
‘Don’t let him use that,’ said Sophy, sharply. ‘It’s the vampire-machine! It’s how he kills them.’
Too late! Falke hugged the thing to himself, and jammed two spikes into his own throat. The bag began churning and writhing. Some device inside was pumping.
A dribble of blood came from a long, trailing tube.
Unorna and La Marmoset tried to wrestle the device off him, but he held on tenaciously.
Even Sophy joined the effort.
Falke coughed, spitting blood. The spikes were fish-hooked deeply into his neck.
They managed to get Falke off the floor and onto a divan.
‘There must be a switch,’ said La Marmoset.
She tugged at tubes, but the contraption kept working. The floor was slick with blood.
Unorna sensed other presences in the house. Not ghosts, but perhaps not fully living people, either. Shadow-folk… masks.
She heard a susurrus of hissing.
In the doorway stood the Countesses Dorabella, Clarimonde and Géraldine. They wore flimsy, immodest gowns and were barefoot, but it was obvious they were dangerous.
They might file their teeth and sharpen their nails. Or else they grew fangs and claws.
Quick as cats they were, and just as nasty when crossed.
‘Stand down, Angels,’ said Countess Dorabella. ‘We’re here for him.’
La Marmoset turned to them. The face of L’Inconnue gave them pause.
‘It’s just a woman, dressed up,’ said the Countess Géraldine. ‘That detective.’
Sophy had a gun in her hand. The Countesses laughed at that.
‘Les Vampires hired us too,’ said the Countess Dorabella. ‘We are neglected by a brute of a husband, and must lower ourselves to paid employment. They set you to catch the murderer and us to hunt the Black Bat of the Rooftops. It turns out our quarries were the same.’
‘We found him first,’ said the Countess Géraldine.
‘We found him best,’ said Sophy.
‘We will take him from you,’ said the Countess Dorabella. ‘He is ours.’
‘We’d like to see you try,’ said La Marmoset.
All three Countesses hissed through bared teeth at that. Unorna saw they were strong, heartless and determined.
And out for blood…
So, she decided to give it to them.
She picked up the gushing outflow tube of the vampire-machine and aimed it like a hose. A jet of blood squirted across the room. She played it across the Countesses’ faces. It got in their mouths, their eyes and their hair. It striped across their gowns, which clung stickily to them.
The effect was extraordinary.
The Countesses’ eyes seemed to come alight with red flame. Suddenly, they were mad – like kittens doused with burning oil. They shrieked and tore at each other, licking and biting and frothing.
La Marmoset and Sophy hauled the shaking Falke upright. Unorna was able to direct the fountain blood more squarely on the Romanian women.
Savage Carpathian she-wolves would have served each other more mercifully.
The Countess Dorabella had the Countess Clarimonde’s eye out; the Countess Géraldine’s mouth was clamped around a red weal on the Countess Dorabella’s upper arm, teeth worrying the wound; the Countess Clarimonde had her talons out and was shredding the back of the Countess Géraldine’s gown.
Falke, incidentally, was a dead weight.
Nothing more could be done for him… or to him.
‘There’s a way out through the roof,’ said Sophy.
They left Falke and the Countesses in their bloody mess and hurried upstairs.
La Marmoset took off her wig and peeled away the face of L’Inconnue. For a moment, Unorna saw her real face – unmemorable as it was – but as she walked along the passage she applied paint and freckles to create a new mask. An unfamiliar woman emerged – a secretary or shopgirl.
Sophy lingered a moment by a rack of cloaks, helmets and devices.
‘His wings,’ she said. ‘And other things we could use.’
A noise from below suggested the Countesses might have settled their differences and tired of the stale blood of the dead. They would be coming for a reckoning.
‘Angels with wings,’ mused La Marmoset.
The Countesses, spattered with blood, were at the end of the passage.
Sophy took a bat-winged ball from a rack, twisted its top, and pitched it. It burst to release clouds of thick, foul smoke. The Countesses choked on it.
Leaving behind the rest of Falke’s gear, Unorna, La Marmoset and Sophy made it up through a skylight onto the roof.
The sun was rising. Unorna had an idea this would confine the Countesses – night-birds, or bats or whatever – to the shadows of the house. They could pursue no further. When they recovered from blood delirium, they might or might not want to take up the fight again. She thought it most likely they’d tell themselves it was a draw and leave well enough alone. The Angels would have new stratagems to deal with them if they pressed the matter.
‘Is it over?’ asked Sophy.
Unorna looked to La Marmoset.
‘This is an act curtain,’ said the Queen of Detectives. ‘But the opera never ends.’
XVII
THE CAFÉ SAINT-FLOUR Musette, once the haunt of Le Gang de Schubert, had become better known as the Brasserie des Martyrs, patronised by Baudelaire and Vallès. Now, it was the Divan Japonais, decorated in a supposed Japanese style which strayed all over the Orient. The crockery was Chinese willow-pattern. The waitresses wore hobbling kimonos. Tiny trees grew out of porcelain pots. Paper lanterns hung from the ceiling.
La Marmoset thought it appropriate to have this meeting where she now knew the story began. Dr Falke’s house was only a few minutes’ walk from his old watering hole. He had never really got beyond his student days.
As befits a Phantom, Erik hadn’t deigned to communicate since the conclusion of the case, but the Persian assured the Angels that their patron was pleased with the outcome. He didn’t hold the deaths of two baritones against them. The Opéra could always find more baritones.
The Grand Vampire had no cause to complain. He had hired the O.G.A. to stop Inspecteur d’Aubert’s campaign against Les Vampires. Being dead, he was no longer making a nuisance of himself. Inspecteur Bec, his replacement, was a more live-and-let-live policeman. If Les Vampires didn’t bother him, he was inclined to leave them alone too. The Sûreté had learned its lesson. It was a devil to make charges stick when witnesses suddenly became scarce and even the sorely aggrieved were unwilling to co-operate in cases against the organisation.
Unorna showed Sophy how to take tea in the Japanese fashion. The young woman was well travelled. In Falke’s house, she had impressed La Marmoset. At a point when the methods of detection – the rational vision of the world espoused by Madame Van Helsing – were of limited use, her sensiti
vities came into their own.
The Countesses had left Paris. Apparently, a terse note signed with the letter D had been delivered to the House of de Rothschild Frères, terminating their line of credit. They packed their long trunks, leaving behind heaps of new clothes in lieu of a settlement of their hotel bill, and took an express train to Transylvania to await punishment when their master came home.
Dr Geneviève Dieudonné arrived late in the afternoon, just as the sun was setting. Ayda Heidari, representing Les Vampires in an unofficial capacity, joined the party soon after. All the masterminds – Erik, the Grand Vampire, the brains of the Sûreté – were happy to move on and not think about l’affaire du vampire. It was left to the women to put the last pieces of the puzzle together.
‘The case is still open,’ said Dr Dieudonné. ‘With Bec in charge, I doubt there’ll be new developments. I performed Raoul’s autopsy, and – thanks to your report – can at least put the method of murder on the record. They showed me that mechanical blood-sponge device, but wouldn’t let me cut it up to see how it works. It’ll end up a curiosity in some museum of horrors.’
‘What about Falke’s body?’ asked La Marmoset.
‘That’s a bit of an issue, actually,’ said Dr Dieudonné. ‘It wasn’t where you left it. Most of the evidence you described – the mechanical wings, the masks and cloaks – were gone.’
‘He was dead,’ said Sophy. ‘I’m sure.’
‘Are you a qualified coroner?’
‘No.’
‘Then you’re not sure. Though you’re probably not wrong. You won’t be surprised to learn the most popular theory with the sensationalist press is that the Vampire Black Bat of the Rooftops can’t be killed.’
‘He’s not up there anymore,’ said Ayda. ‘We would know.’
‘There was some delay in having the police go over the house,’ said Dr Dieudonné. ‘Possibly, other official bodies got there first and rooted around in Falke’s treasury of inventions. In which case, in a year or two, Moroccan rebels will learn to fear flocks of night-flying Foreign Legionnaires.’
‘I knew we should have taken some of his toys,’ said Sophy.
‘Do you really want a flying Phantom?’ asked Ayda.
Sophy shrugged. La Marmoset knew Sophy was taken by the notion of flight. Falke had offered her wings. She would always wonder what she had missed.
Probably, a painful fall to Earth after the fashion of Icarus.
Even if Die Fledermaus was still somehow alive, he was finished with Paris. La Marmoset had put together most of the story and understood what had driven him mad – his own culpability as much as his friends’ cruel joke.
‘What about her?’ asked Unorna.
The Witch pointed to the wall where, between snarling Japanese demon masks, hung a bas-relief of L’Inconnue de la Seine… unknown no longer, if only within their limited circle.
Caralin Trelmanski.
‘Shouldn’t we say who she was?’ suggested Sophy.
‘We know her name,’ said La Marmoset. ‘But we don’t know who she was. Unorna and I don’t use the names we were born with.’
‘Or the face, in your case,’ said Unorna.
‘But that doesn’t make us unknown. As L’Inconnue, she’s famous… as Caralin, she’d just be nothing. The victim of a prank.’
‘More than one prank,’ said Dr Dieudonné. ‘I looked for her. At the Morgue, we have had several bodies on ice for decades… she isn’t one of them. After her face became famous, she was lost. I hate to think of what kind of admirer would steal her, but such things happen. It may be she was taken away to preserve her from the badauds. Falke may have done it, to give her a proper burial or keep her as a memento in a trophy room we’ve not yet found.’
‘Or she could have walked away,’ said Ayda. ‘And there are such things as… vampires.’
Dr Dieudonné smiled over her tea.
‘She had a stake put through her heart,’ said La Marmoset. ‘Traditionally, that keeps vampires in their place.’
‘According to the autopsy report, Falke bungled the impalement,’ said Dr Dieudonné. ‘He was a law student not a medical student. He shoved his stake through her lungs. Nasty way to die, for a human being…’
‘If there are vampires, your group should change its name,’ La Marmoset said to Ayda. ‘You came out best this time, with a Black Bat of the Rooftops for competition. If you were up against a Mircalla Karnstein or a Lord Ruthven, who knows how it would have ended?’
‘We were confident of success,’ said Ayda.
‘Why?’ asked La Marmoset.
‘Because, for once, Les Vampires were watched over by Angels.’
ENTR’ACTE: THE CASE OF MRS NORTON
‘IRENE ADLER,’ SAID the Persian.
‘Irene Norton,’ said the woman who had sat at his table. ‘I’m a married lady, now.’
‘I’d heard. My congratulations.’
‘Thanks.’
The Café de la Paix was busy, as ever. It was the hour when he accepted approaches. The Opera Ghost Agency had nothing much on, and the current Angels – Ayda Heidari, Ysabel de Ferre and Hagar Stanley – were idle. That was not good for them – or Paris.
He smiled to see Irene. She was, he admitted, one of his favourites.
But she was not expected.
‘Was there not an… understanding between you and Monsieur Erik?’ prompted the Persian. ‘You were to confine your activities to other countries?’
‘I’m married. I’m through with activities.’
‘A fine point. Not one I would want to argue with our patron.’
Irene frowned. Her perfect mouth almost pouched into a moue.
She was older, of course. As was he.
Everyone got older – with a few mysterious exceptions, like the Countess de Cagliostro … and the Phantom of the Opera. The Persian understood Erik had stolen something from the Khanum which froze him in time.
It wasn’t just the tiny traceries around Irene’s eyes and the tighter corset. She was different. Her way of speaking was changed.
No longer an American eagle, she was an Englishman’s wife.
A Norton.
The Persian had followed her career, of course. Erik had him keep track of all the Angels, fallen or flown. Cuttings books were maintained. Irene had triumphed modestly as a singer, and immodestly as an adventuress. He knew of her liaisons with crowned and uncrowned heads, her coups in Europe and the Americas. She had amassed and lost several fortunes.
But all that was apparently done with. The cuttings book could be closed.
The Persian had been surprised to read notice in the London Times of her marriage to an English solicitor of no particular distinction.
Geoffrey Norton. No, Godfrey Norton.
That was that. Finis to Irene Adler.
Irene Adler had been the toast of Europe, habituée of courts, palaces and great opera houses. Mrs Godfrey Norton would queen it over a villa in a London suburb. Irene Adler made demands of ambassadors and princes. Irene Norton would approve menus and keep an eye on the servants. Church on Sunday morning, and roast dinner on the table after.
And children. Lots of brats, taking after the father – handsome, but running to fat.
‘I am not in town to tread on toes,’ she said. ‘God – my husband – has taken a position in Paris. With Liddle, Neal & Liddle, the bankers. He doesn’t know about the understanding and, speaking plainly, wouldn’t understand it.’
‘The mists part,’ said the Persian. ‘You announce your presence and wish to petition for leave to stay?’
‘Mists be damned, Daroga. I wish to petition Erik… as a client.’
The Persian ordered another pot of coffee.
‘It’s God, of course,’ said Irene. ‘I’m sure he’s keeping something from me. Something secret.’
The Persian lifted an eyebrow.
This Angel had fallen indeed. The Irene Adler he knew would not permit a man to keep secrets from her.
Of course, any man who could get Irene to marry him must be quite a character. The Persian hadn’t thought there breathed a man extraordinary enough to pull wool over her eyes, to give her the runaround she had given men in the life she said she was through with.
The English had songs about birds in cages – the sort of sentimental nonsense Erik wouldn’t consider music. Surely Irene’s eagle wings could not be clipped by something as mundane as marriage?
‘Something criminal?’ he prompted.
‘Something diabolical,’ she said. ‘It must be. He’s so calm. So sure of himself. So sure of me.’
‘What does he know about…’
‘My past? Everything.’
‘Everything?’
‘Everything. Well, except… a few things he wouldn’t understand. Things he wouldn’t believe. You know what I mean.’
‘Yes.’
‘I heard the Agency chased a vampire a few years ago. That sort of thing.’
Irene lit a cigarette.
‘What do you know about his past?’
‘What is there to know?’ she said, puffing. ‘He’s an English solicitor. He went to a school. He played something called rugby football. He joined a respectable firm. He has several aunts. I’ve met them. They’re authentic.’
‘And his present?’
‘After that business with the King of Bohemia, I had to quit England. We were newly married. God proposed we extend our French honeymoon and looked for a job here. Liddle, Neal & Liddle have a Paris branch. They needed someone to handle legal affairs. Boring transactions. Deeds and bonds and the like. God speaks French, by his own lights. So we’re here.’
‘Bienvenue à Paris.’
‘Ha ha ha. That’s exactly how God speaks French.’
The Persian saw Irene was as close to distraught as she could be. She finished her cigarette as if setting a record and started another. If any other woman – lately married, but a few months beyond the honeymoon – were to sing him this song, he’d assume her husband had taken his first mistress and advise her to pick up a fencing teacher or an unpublished poet.
But no one – not even an English solicitor – would marry Irene Adler and take a mistress.