by Kim Newman
Well, maybe…
Clara was annoyed. She didn’t have as many dresses with her as she’d like. Expelled from China with only a few negotiable jewels, she couldn’t pay European couture prices. She’d asked for a dressmakers’ allowance on top of her salary. The Persian countered that any clothing needs would be met by the costume department. As a result of long-standing agreements, many resources of the Opéra were at the disposal of Erik. Kate thought it’d be funny if Clara were to swan about dressed as Emilia di Liverpool or Maria Stuarda. For her own part, she’d fish out her travelling sewing kit and make invisible repairs.
The English woman examined the rents in her dress, touching her own unmarked skin, feeling her unbroken ribs. She was white as porcelain all over. Did she bathe in arsenic or bleach?
‘This was not a warning,’ said Yuki. ‘Snakes do not give warnings. They simply strike. This is an invitation.’
‘To a tea-dance?’ sneered Clara.
Kate remembered the dance she’d seen at the café. The apache flinging his girl around, beating her up to music.
The girl got her slaps and slices in, though – and that’s how the man liked it.
‘Couldn’t we just cut off the clown’s head?’ asked Clara, wearily. ‘And burn down his bloody playhouse. That would solve the Guignol problem. No theatre, no theatre murders.’
‘Easy to say, hard to do,’ said Kate. ‘Too many Guignol masks around. It’d be a risky call picking which head to chop.’
‘Chop them all. Pile up the heads.’
‘You should be in show business, Clara. I know exactly the company for you.’
Childishly, Clara poked out the scarlet tip of her tongue and pulled a Gorgon-face. Kate couldn’t help laughing.
The Persian again defused the exchange of unpleasantries.
‘Angels, please. This is not a school-room. Seemliness is required. This latest development is a cause for concern. Monsieur Erik will take any action against his Agents very hard. There would be… counter-actions.’
‘So we can be the first casualties in a war of the masks?’
‘Miss Reed, the Opera Ghost Agency will not allow that to happen.’
Yuki was fascinated by the tears in her sleeve. ‘A personage who can do this will be difficult to stop.’
VI
KATE SPENT THE next few days trying to determine if any connection existed between Guignol and the Georges Du Roy circle.
Representing herself (not untruthfully) as an interested foreign journalist, she paid calls on distant associates among the Paris press. She spent dusty hours in newspaper archives and government records offices. If nothing else, her French was improving. She had promised to send reports to the Gazette on anything that might interest English readers. Without telling the Persian, she had drafted an article on the Guignol craze, with a description of her evening at the Théâtre des Horreurs. It was supposed in London that entertainments in Paris were spicier than home-grown fare. Newspapers were duty-bound to describe in detail the frightful, salacious attractions the British public was spared.
She left her carte de visite at the dreary Hôtel d’Alsace, Oscar Wilde’s digs. The concierge said the poet was too poorly to receive even a fellow exile. Back on Rue des Beaux Arts, she could identify his room from a twitching curtain. Kate missed the Oscar of old. His passion for gossip might have opened up the mystery like a paper flower. Wilde was out of prison but in Paris; Zola was in London to avoid prison. The lesson was that upstart genius should be put firmly in its place.
It wasn’t lost on her that Wilde and Henry Wilcox were guilty of essentially the same crime. Wilde was formally sentenced to hard labour and informally to humiliating exile, yet no one even tried to prosecute Wilcox. Consorting with rent-boys – even she, a partisan, said Oscar was a fool in his choice of bed-mates – got an Irishman chased out of England. Consorting with their figurative (and sometimes actual) younger sisters didn’t prevent Wilcox from driving an Irish woman out of the country. Any excuse to be rid of the mouthy micks, she supposed.
Kate fancied she occasionally saw Guignol out of the corner of her eye. At Madame Mandelip’s, Clara reluctantly admitted to the same impression. Could they both be followed by the same clown? Or were masks handed out to minions? Yuki said she was no longer being tailed. Was Guignol warier of the Japanese Angel than the others?
Something was going on between Guignol and the Légion d’Horreur, but it was identifiable only by ellipses. That Du Roy and the others took no measures to suppress the Théâtre des Horreurs after the accusing tableau was singular. An unanswered public rebuke was extraordinary in a city where offhand remarks provoked duels, vitriol-douches and near-revolution. In Paris, poets started more café brawls than stevedores. Rival high-fashion couturiers slashed each other with scissors in the 8th Arrondissement. An unknown patriot shot Fernand Labori, Zola’s defence lawyer, in the back. Marquis d’Amblezy-Sérac, the minister charged with enforcing laws against duelling, fought – and won! – a duel in answer to a challenge from Aristide Forestier, a magistrate who insisted that the right of every Frenchman to try to stick a sword into or put a bullet through any other Frenchman with whom he disagreed was an unwritten yet enforceable clause of the Code Napoléon.
Did Guignol have something on Du Roy which kept him safe? A Lumière cinematograph of the French patriot sharing a bubble bath with Captain Dreyfus, Lily Langtry and the Kaiser? A suppressed family tree which proved the avowed anti-Semite was secretly a Jew? Or was Guignol the creature of the Légion d’Horreur, afforded token license because of appalling services rendered? The murders were part of it, but not – she was sure – the whole story.
As she asked her questions and looked through files, Kate was aware of a parallel investigation. Clara Watson was moving through shadier circles on a like quest, securing entry to the murkier dives of Paris to wring information from wretches and débauchées. Pursuing her own predilections, the English widow attended bare-knuckles bouts held among racks of skulls in the catacombs. She picked up whispered horrors from opium dens, salons of vice, black masses and condemned cells. She collected gossip from the Guild of Procurers, Les Vampires and a branch of the Suicide Club. Clara’s underworld voyages often crossed paths with Kate’s more respectable lines of enquiry. That suggested they were both getting warmer. Still, answers were elusive.
Other stories circulated, which Kate felt were connected. Henriette and Louise, two orphan sisters, were missing in Montmartre. Friends said they were running away to join a circus. No circus admitted to taking them in. Their pale little faces, idealised in illustrations, epitomised the disappeared. Even the Sûreté took an interest, but an array of famous criminologists – Alphonse Bertillon, Frédéric Larsan, Inspecteur Juve – failed to find the lost girls. After an afternoon at the Bureau of Missing Persons, Kate knew less appealing people vanished by the dozen in the quartier without exciting public interest.
At the Hôpital des Poupées, Yuki took over the window and arranged a display of kokeshi. Kate found the limbless wooden dolls disturbing, like human-headed fence-posts. Meanwhile, the Persian awaited regular reports from Kate and Clara.
After a week, the Angels were again in conference in the doll salon.
There was a little blood on Clara’s coat. She told them not to worry – it wasn’t hers. The English widow wasn’t leery of sailing into dangerous waters. Clara might be mad, but she was intelligent and – in her own way – cautious. She even did good detective work.
The Persian asked Kate for a report on the Légion d’Horreur.
‘Georges Du Roy and the others go back a long way,’ Kate said. ‘The real Bertrand Caillet was tried twenty years before the Commune. On stage at the Théâtre des Horreurs, he is arrested in 1871, during its last days. The play shifts the murderer’s story forward in time to contrast his crimes with the greater carnage of la Semaine Sanglante. It’s as if Guignol is telling us where to look.’
‘You see the hand of Guignol everywhere,’ said Clara.
‘Don’t you?’
The widow shrugged. ‘Perhaps.’
‘Whatever the point of the show might be – and I’ve no reason to believe it isn’t primarily the obvious one, to shock and appal and titillate – the Légion d’Horreur were all in Paris at the time of the Commune. I can’t prove it yet, but I believe this was when our five respectable fellows first met.
‘Assolant and Du Roy were soldiers with the army of Versailles, young officers commanding un escadron de mort. They weren’t in the fighting, they carried out executions. It’s hard to credit now, but Mortain and Pradier were Communards. They began in politics as radicals, followers of Blanqui and social justice. As the Commune fell apart, they changed their spots. Père de Kern was a hostage, one of the few to survive. De Kern brought the others together, serving as intermediary. Mortain and Pradier betrayed comrades to the Squadron of Death and got free passes from Assolant and Du Roy. In the aftermath of Bloody Week, Mortain and Pradier were listed as spies for Versailles. It was claimed they only posed as Communards. Anyone who could say different was put against a wall. Assolant was promoted, but Du Roy did a spell in Algeria before leaving the army to begin his ascent as a man of letters and then in politics.
‘The five have been allies for nearly forty years. They look out for each other. If financial scandal threatens to engulf Mortain, a stern editorial in La Vie Française insists on his innocence. A chorister who accused de Kern of vile practices finds himself up before Judge Pradier on dubious charges and transported to the penal colony of New Caledonia. When Assolant is implicated in an attempted coup, Du Roy nominates him for further honours and accolades. In 1871, they were enemies. Now, they are closer than brothers.’
‘Interesting, Miss Reed,’ said the Persian. ‘But I am reminded of Mrs Watson’s objection of a few nights ago… that you would like these people to be guilty. You despise men of their class and position. It would suit your prejudices if they were outright monsters.’
Kate tried to take this into account. Investigating Henry Wilcox, she had at every turn questioned her own instincts. Erring on the side of wariness, she hadn’t put anything in print until she had two or more reliable sources. Unsubstantiated rumours were set aside, no matter how credible she found them. Here, she used the same method … all but ignoring a wealth of second- or third-hand stories, sticking to verifiable facts, even if evidence suggested records had been altered or destroyed. She was satisfied she had enough to indict Du Roy and his cronies on a raft of charges going back decades – though she wouldn’t have trusted the French (or British) courts to deliver a just verdict. What she couldn’t do was make a firm link between the Légion d’Horreur and the Montmartre murders.
The Persian looked to Clara, whose expression was hard to read.
‘I have decided to withdraw my objection,’ said Clara.
Kate noted the odd, legalistic turn of phrase.
‘On what grounds?’ asked the Persian.
‘I now believe Katie is right. These are the guilty men.’
‘You have proof?’
‘Of course not. These are not men who leave proof. It’s all feelings and intuition. You employ only women, and this is what you must expect…’
Kate wanted to slap Clara for that, even if she was a convert to the cause.
‘In quarters where people aren’t easy to scare, the names of these men give pause,’ explained Clara. ‘There are creatures out there in the dark, people you might call monsters, who are more terrified of Georges Du Roy than of… well, than of the Phantom of the Opera. They can’t be worried about a harshly worded article in La Vie Française or an inconvenient ruling in the Assembly. The others have evil reputations too.
‘Dr Johannes, the Satanist, says Père de Kern is the worst man in Paris. He doesn’t mean it in the inverted sense that a devout diabolist should abjure a moral churchman. Johannes means it literally. The Worst Man in Paris. Monsters aren’t born – they are made. The orphanages supervised by de Kern are factories for making them – cruelty, privation and hypocrisy applied systematically to warp young minds and bodies. De Kern has raised generations of them, an army of freaks. I would admire the enterprise, but for its utter lack of aesthetic qualities.
‘Assolant is a butcher, of course, and a blunderer. He killed more Frenchmen than Germans even before he was given the pull-string of his own personal guillotine in Bloody Week. Mortain and Pradier are make-weights. They have survived this long because Du Roy shields them. According to their cast-off mistresses, Mortain follows the leanings of the Marquis de Sade – a sure sign of the poseur among true practitioners of the Art of Torture – while Pradier is inclined to the pitiful vice of Sacher-Masoch.
‘They are the guilty men. Everyone I have raised this matter with says so. Then they cannot say what it is they are guilty of. Or will not, despite… methods of extreme persuasion.’
When she said ‘methods of extreme persuasion’, Clara shuddered with what Kate took to be delight. She was no poseur in her preferred art.
Kate’s frisson was of another character.
‘Could any of the Légion be Guignol?’ she asked. ‘I mean, we’ve all assumed that the nimble masked performer is a younger man. There are drugs and potions. A Du Roy or a de Kern could quaff something to turn them into an agile imp for a few hours. Long enough to get through the show.’
‘But the curtain comes down on a condemnation of these men?’ objected Clara.
‘Does it? Or is that tableau a boast?’
Clara thought for a moment.
‘Or the snook cocked against the Légion d’Horreur might be a feint,’ suggested Kate. ‘Like the taunts of Hyde against Jekyll.’
‘Unlikely,’ said Clara. ‘These people have enough enemies without becoming their own dark shadows.’
‘That’s true,’ said the Persian.
Kate admitted it. ‘Guignol could be someone from their history – a survivor of Bloody Week, tipped alive into a corpse-pit by the Squadron of Death, crawling out with a mania for revenge. A subordinate thrown to the wolves to take the blame for crimes they got away with, back in town after years of fever and abuse in a far-off mangrove swamp or desert stockade. Or one of your army of freaks, Clara, shaped by harsh treatment into a broken übermensch. But if that’s the case, why not kill them? Ridicule seems feeble revenge.’
‘A Frenchman would rather be assassinated than made to look silly,’ said Clara. ‘The French, they are a funny race, they fight with their feet… they make love with their face.’
‘I’ve heard that before, more crudely put.’
‘I was trying to spare your delicate Dublin sensitivities.’
‘There are rhymes about the English too, in Dublin. Oh, and everywhere else they’ve run up their flag and marched about.’
‘So we are no nearer a provable truth,’ said the Persian, interceding again.
Since their last verbal fencing match, Kate realised – rather alarmingly – that Clara Watson liked her. She wouldn’t have thought the scarlet widow capable of such a feeling, and it was little comfort. One story put around about Clara was that in Benares she made arrangements to have her best friend infected with leprosy. As Angels of Music, Kate and Clara had to sing in the same register. They had taken to a banter each found amusing which outsiders mistook for hostility. It was a little like flirting.
‘Our Daughter of Erin might be in a mist,’ said Clara, ‘but this Child of Boadicea has yet to admit defeat…’
It wasn’t hard to imagine Clara in a carriage with head-lopping swords attached to its wheels. In China, she had probably had such an unlikely conveyance manufactured to order. She could easily persuade a tame warlord to line the road with peasants just to try it out.
‘Just say what you know, you sick witch,’ snapped Kate.
‘Why, Katie, such a tone! You’ve gone quite red in the face. I would be concerned for your health…’
‘It is time to tell,’ said Yuki, quietly.
&nb
sp; Clara stopped simpering and put a card on the table. A white oblong marked with a red ring.
‘What is that?’ asked the Persian.
‘An invitation,’ said Clara. ‘Presented at the Théâtre des Horreurs after midnight on a certain night of the month, this secures entry to an unadvertised additional performance. The cercle rouge guest list is select. You can’t buy your way onto it. Not with money, at least. The names we’ve been discussing – some of them, at least – may be regulars, though whether as performers or audience I haven’t been able to tell. That’s ink, not blood, on the card. But it took blood to get it. The Grand Vampire, who you’d think beyond being shocked, told me he didn’t want ever to see the après-minuit again, but that I would most likely enjoy the show. Make of that what you will.’
The Grand Vampire was the chief of Les Vampires, Paris’s most daring criminal organisation. His position was so dangerous and hotly contested that the mask stayed the same but the man behind it changed regularly. The Opera Ghost Agency and Les Vampires had a wary truce. Some years before, a previous Grand Vampire had engaged the Angels of Music on a confidential matter, which the Agency had brought to a satisfactory conclusion.
Kate picked up the card. The circle was stamped into the thick paper and the red was some sort of gilt. Not easy to forge, though the design and printing department of the Opéra would have their methods.
‘How long do we have to wait?’
‘Only until tomorrow,’ said Clara. ‘I hope your delicate stomach is up to it.’
She flipped back through her notebooks.
‘Yes, Katie,’ said Clara, ‘the disappearances tend to be in the week leading up to each month’s après-minuit… and the bodies are often found during the few days after the special performance.’
They all looked at each other.
‘For myself, I shall spend tomorrow shopping for a new hat,’ said Clara. ‘It doesn’t do to attend a theatre twice in the same outfit. Also, I understand that chapeaux with veils – if not full masks – are customary for cercle rouge audiences.’