by Kim Newman
Falke jerkily approached Assolant and came to an awkward standstill. White fluid leaked from one of his knee-braces.
Kate realised the Black Bat must be the inventor of the frog-man apparatus. If he’d concentrated on constructive uses of his inventions, he’d be recognised as a great man. He could help the lame walk and let men breathe underwater.
‘The Fellowship has lost three more,’ reported Falke. ‘Many traps are set, all over the cellars. I must be given more resources.’
Kate’s ears had pricked at the mention of traps.
Irene winked at her. They both knew who set traps in this building.
‘It is imperative we bring in this Phantom,’ said Falke. ‘The Ascent cannot go ahead until he has been removed.’
Ascent? Another A.
‘We have his women,’ said Assolant. ‘Without his cat’s paws, he’s nothing. A hollow mask.’
Kate knew that wasn’t true.
If Assolant lined up the Angels and shot them, Erik would still prevail. She trusted it wouldn’t come to that. She’d quite like to be on the prevailing team herself, rather than written off as a significant casualty.
What was the extent of this Fellowship? There must be more in it than Falke and Assolant. The Black Bat and the General were holdovers from the last century – like herself and Irene, she quietly admitted to herself. Falke was a genius and Assolant was cruel beyond reason, but neither could launch an attack on Unorna from the spiritual plane. They had to have a magician of their own.
So, some players had yet to show themselves.
‘I believe Alraune has a point,’ said Irene. ‘So many of the Agency’s old friends are here. One might almost think it a reunion. Do you figure all the folks Erik’s given black eyes have a club or a society? And they’ve finally had enough of just bitching about him and set out to get their own back? By shutting us all down.’
‘It’s more like we’re being swept aside or trodden on – an irritant in the way of huge plans,’ said Kate. ‘Nothing special, but annoying.’
‘That’s what I want on my tombstone, Katie. “Nothing special, but annoying”.’
‘I’m going with “Never Surrender”. Though, at the moment, it seems we have.’
‘Quiet, you!’ said Rollo.
The little man had a knife in either hand.
‘Are you our jailer now?’ asked Kate. ‘That’s the best you can hope for in this company, I imagine.’
Rollo fingered a sharp, curved paring knife. Ideal for peeling apples, it would do just as neat a job on a face.
‘You’re not my prisoners, my Angels,’ he said. ‘You’re my reward.’
Olympia, lurching a little as if her heart-clock were running down, laid a heavy hand on Rollo’s shoulder. Steel fingers clamped tight. He turned and slashed at her face, scoring a line which didn’t bleed, blunting his knife. She let him go and put her hands to her face. She pinched her wound shut and it healed over.
Rollo’s mouth hung open.
‘Don’t you know,’ said Irene. ‘Angels never bleed.’
Rollo looked at his knife and tried to stick it in Olympia’s chest. She caught his wrist and stopped his thrust. He strained, but she held him fast. The knife-point was inches away from her body. She kept hold and forced him to his knees, then wrenched his arm and made him drop the weapon. He yelped like a whipped dog. Mrs Eynsford Hill quietly snaffled the knife to go with the fork she’d stolen earlier. If she found a spoon, she’d have a dinner service.
None of Rollo’s comrades made a move to help him. The foyer was so cavernous, underlit and crowded he could probably be killed without anyone paying attention. Olympia or Alraune would do the job – maybe even Irene. The American might easily take Alraune’s sneer about ‘the grand old days’ as a challenge to show enough ruthlessness to keep up with this young, urgent, callous century.
The crowd stirred. Whispers went round. People shifted in half-scared, half-eager excitement. They reminded Kate of an audience who know a great star is about to make an entrance… or those flocking birds who sense a coming earthquake and fly off en masse.
Rollo didn’t complain at his ill-treatment – as if he knew no one would listen.
Assolant and Falke looked to the staircase which dominated the foyer. The Paris Opéra often threw parties entirely on the steps. Kate had never seen a more impressive set of stairs under a roof.
Bare-chested Nubians with long white silk kilts and hats like lampshades formed rows on the steps. They raised trumpets and blew a discordant fanfare. Kate would have expected this sort of spectacle on the stage, not in the lobby.
Plumes of flame, reflected to infinity in the mirrors and polished gilt trim, puffed out of dragon-mouth mortars. More of Falke’s ingenuity?
Someone shimmery appeared at the top of the stairs.
‘Antinea,’ went up the cry. ‘Antinea, Antinea…’
Kate did not recognise the startlingly beautiful young woman.
The Queen of Atlantis wore a gigantic headdress of peacock feathers. Her sheer aquamarine sheath would have been too risqué for the Folies Bergère. She was decorated like a potentate’s Christmas tree. More jewels hung off her than A.J. Raffles and Arsène Lupin could steal in their whole careers. Six little attendant girls with fish-masks and scaly leotards held a twenty-foot train.
‘Oh no,’ said Irene, ‘not her!’
Kate looked to Irene for further explanation.
‘As I live and breathe, Joséphine Balsamo!’
‘Countess de Cagliostro?’ asked Kate.
‘Yeah, that’s the hussy. Another old friend.’
VII
‘DAMN IT, SHE’S still young,’ said Irene, bitterly. ‘She really is one of those.’
‘Those?’ prompted Kate.
‘The frozen-in-time people. Not like you or I… No looking in the glass for grey hairs or tiny wrinkles… no worries about an extra glass or petit-four adding to the avoirdupois.’
The Countess de Cagliostro hadn’t aged since the Affair of the Marriage Club, the best part of (cough) forty years before. Two thirds of Irene’s life had passed since then. A few heartbeats for Jo Balsamo.
‘You don’t think she’s really Cagliostro’s daughter? She’d be over a hundred and fifty years old.’
‘Didn’t you read the stop press, Katie? Jo Balsamo doesn’t claim that any more. Now, she’s supposed to be Antinea. Eternal Queen of Atlantis. Which means she’s been around for thousands of years. And has picked Paris as capital of her new Atlantean Empire.’
‘Come on, Irene! She has to be a fraud!’
‘Of course she is, but she’s an old fraud… and doesn’t look it. She’s the same woman all right, the besom we saw off in the seventies. No mistaking those eyes. How does she do it? Smearing on a tincture of royal jelly and bee-venom? Maybe she was born that way, to age from birth to young womanhood and then set… like a pudding. Old as sin in her heart but fresh as a daisy in bloom on the outside.’
The store-room was cramped and mouldy. Water had got in, ruining a collection of papier-mâché animals. The Communards had used this part of the building as a jail. When the opera company took back the house, they didn’t trouble to change locks or take out grilles in the doors. So it was easy to use the store-rooms as cells again.
Welcome to the Dungeons of Atlantis – don’t mind the damp.
Rollo, the leering little beast with the bald head and the hairy wrists, had shoved them into three adjacent rooms. Elizabeth was in with Olympia (almost completely wound down). Thi Minh (jaunty as ever) and Alraune shared a cell with a pile of broken musical instruments. Irene and Kate were stuck with Unorna (still dead to the world).
‘I wish she were awake,’ said Kate, nodding at the witch.
‘Do you?’ asked Irene. ‘Unorna is one of them too. Look at her face. You’d swear she was nineteen… but she was an Angel twenty-five years ago. With her, it’ll be sorcery or alchemy. Face cream made from the fat of unbaptised babies. Baths of vir
gins’ blood.’
Kate was doubtful.
‘Unorna’s not the only one in the Agency,’ Irene continued. ‘There’s Olympia too. She can’t change. If her face wore out or fell off, it could be repainted. She can be touched up like a picture.’
‘Erik is supposed to keep spry with a potion stolen from the Shah of Persia,’ said Kate.
When young and gay and foolish, Irene seldom thought about getting old. She’d heard the whispers that Erik could thwart the years but not pressed for details. Now, it was too late.
‘The Lord of Strange Deaths is unageing,’ said Kate. ‘He has a philtre, too. Dr Nikola has been chasing the secret for a long time.’
More damned masterminds.
‘There are others,’ Kate continued, warming to the subject. ‘Over a dozen different people have made convincing claims to be the Wandering Jew, tarrying till the Second Coming. Countess de Cagliostro is supposed to have been a lover of Saint-Germain, who swore he reached the age of five hundred by subsisting on a diet of sour milk, chicken breasts and gold flake…’
‘At this point, I couldn’t afford the chicken breasts.’
‘There’s the blue flame of Kôr, a lost city in the heart of Africa. Bathing in it apparently confers immortality, though it burns rarely… and I’m not sure how one goes about bathing in a fire. It’s like drying yourself with a bucket of water. Féodor Dimitrius, a society doctor, charges handsome fees to reinvigorate rich old duffers with simian gland transplants. I wouldn’t pay a quack to cut me open and sew in a slice of monkey-meat.’
Irene couldn’t tell whether Kate Reed had made a special study or was just well-informed on curious matters which fell into the purview of the Diogenes Club. Possibly, the Irish woman was chattering to keep her spirits up.
‘And vampires, of course, survive the centuries. They drink blood.’
‘Didn’t Falke use some sort of mechanical sponge in his vampire murders?’
‘That doesn’t prove there aren’t vampires. The Diogenes Club have files on Mircalla Karnstein, Lord Ruthven and Count de Ville.’
‘I’m sure they have a file on me too. Don’t believe everything you read in it.’
Kate laughed, which struck Irene as peculiar even for her.
‘Cough it up. What’s funny, Katie?’
‘Your Diogenes Club file. No one reads it. They look at the pictures.’
Irene knew which pictures she meant.
‘They wouldn’t be so eager if I posed for those studies now,’ she said.
‘Oh, I don’t know… I’d say you were well-preserved.’
‘Pickled, you mean. Like herring.’
Kate giggled now, less hysterically.
‘Seriously, Irene – why does getting older burn you so much? Would you really wish to be like them? Antinea, Erik, Olympia, Countess de Cagliostro… even Unorna. Or Alraune, who’s as strange a flower as the rest of them. They may not wither, but they’re only half-alive – if that. Olympia’s a doll, for Heaven’s sake! If you had to wear a mask all your life, would you care if people thought you young or old?’
‘I’d like to have the choice, Katie.’
Unorna turned over in her sleep. She was stirring, as if coming out of the spell. But didn’t wake.
‘Do you think she’ll kill us?’ Kate asked. ‘Antinea?’
‘No doubt about it,’ said Irene. ‘She’s one of our old friends, like your General Assolant and Unorna’s Doctor Falke – chewing over defeats for decades. If I held a grudge the way these jaspers do there’d be a sight fewer opera critics, crowned heads, great detectives and diabolical masterminds. I reckon we’ll be the opening act for her coronation. At least we won’t be burned at the stake. It’ll be a water-themed death, for sure. Tied up in a slowly filling tank… weighted down and dropped in the Seine… or just chucked into that maelstrom where they were digging the Métro and sucked under. There are seven of us to get out of the way… eight, if they catch Erik.’
‘Can Olympia drown?’
‘Ever dropped a watch in a bowl of water? Olympia can stop.’
‘Mrs Eynsford Hill can hold her breath a long time. All those exercises of the diaphragm. Alraune might be able to thrive in water like a lily. I think she photosynthesises.’
Now, Kate was being larkish.
‘They’ll have thought of all that,’ said Irene. ‘Look how elaborate this is. Antinea’s Ascent has been a long time coming. She laid her plans and recruited her army and waited for rain. It’s not about us… or even Erik. We’re “other business”. You know what they say: “We pass this way but once so if there’s anyone you want to die a lingering death don’t miss an opportunity to do them in.”’
‘Who says that?’
‘Awful people like Jo Balsamo. Gack, how did it come to this? Is this what you expected when you turned Angel?’
‘I’m not sure I really count. I wasn’t with the Agency long.’
‘Me neither, but I don’t think that matters. Balsamo is making a Herodian point by wiping the lot of us out – the ones she knows and hates personally and the ones who came along and wore the wings after us.’
‘I think that’s why the Persian was murdered – to bring us together, as many of us as could get here easily.’
‘That’s how masterminds think. Sneaky and petty. Wasted cleverness.’
‘After we’re gone, she’ll try to collect the rest – the ones who couldn’t be here. She’ll send assassins. If it’s any comfort, I expect Lady Yuki will cut her head off for her. She’s the Angel of the Sword.’
‘I’m not ready to be avenged yet.’
Irene looked about the cell for any tools. She remembered Colonel Moran – Number Two to the late, unlamented Professor Moriarty – elaborating on the subject of getting out of tricky spots like this: ‘If you’re clapped in a cell, don’t bother trying to pick the lock. Spoilsports who build jails always put time and effort into locks. You usually don’t have a keyhole on your side of the door you can shove your stickpin into and scratch the tumblers. No, go for the hinges. No blighter ever bothers with hinges. Hit ’em with a hammer or handiest hammer substitute and they pop off. It don’t matter how locked the door is, ’cause you can open it the other way. So much the better if you’ve been imprisoned by conscientious housekeepers who oil their hinges properly.’
A soggy papier-mâché elephant didn’t seem a likely hammer substitute. And the hinges looked sturdy and unoiled.
‘I’m the Angel of Truth,’ Kate declared. ‘I became a reporter because I saw we were surrounded by lies… or, worse, mysteries. I wanted to tell the truth, to expose the liars and solve the mysteries. Hard experience taught me it wasn’t always possible or even advisable. Sometimes the truth won’t be believed or would drive people mad or hurt the innocent. But I was addicted, by then… addicted to finding out. That’s what brought me to the Diogenes Club, and the Opera Ghost Agency. If you find out a truth you can’t in all conscience share, there’s an obligation to do something about it. I won’t be drowned like an unwanted kitten.’
Kate’s little Irish face shone in the gloom. Irene wished she’d known her better – she could have used an Angel of Truth.
‘Erik called me the Angel of Larceny,’ she said. ‘He was being facetious. Have you noticed how few people notice he’s funny? Those pranks against the pompous. Cutting witticisms on black-edged paper. He was born with a smile, after all.’
‘He ran away from the circus so he wouldn’t be a clown,’ said Kate. ‘And came here in high seriousness. He could have haunted the Opéra Comique.’
Irene wondered about herself. What had Erik seen in her?
‘After all, was I just a thief? I didn’t think of it that way. I was what they used to call an “adventuress”… I wasn’t a good enough singer not to be. And I certainly wasn’t staying in New Jersey and marrying a civil engineer.’
‘Didn’t you marry a lawyer?’
‘We don’t mention him… the way we don’t mention you no
t marrying Mr Charles Beauregard of the Diogenes Club.’
Kate goggled at her.
‘Yes, Angel of Truth, I know the scores too.’
‘Charles was married,’ said Kate.
‘Widowed,’ corrected Irene.
‘I knew his wife. Pamela. I wouldn’t want to replace her.’
‘Godfrey Norton replaced me.’
Irene had never acknowledged that in public. She hadn’t mentioned her husband in years. Former husband.
God. She really had called him that.
The Persian and Erik had helped her make up her mind about him. No, her mind was already made up… they helped her settle on a course of action.
Desertion, it was called. That was what a truth-teller like Kate Reed would say instead of ‘course of action’.
Godfrey Norton was happier without her. He must be. Everyone else was. The crowned heads of Europe paid her no mind any more. Great detectives and master criminals had fresher fish to fry. Once, she had been the woman… now, she was barely a woman. She was a thief after all. She had stolen her own life.
‘I don’t think we’re supposed to get married,’ said Kate. ‘We are not wives and mothers.’
‘We?’
‘Angels. Adventuresses. Whatever you care to call us.’
‘Christine got married – to a Count, too. They have grown-up kids who wish they’d hurry up and die so they can squabble about the family loot. A brood of de Chagny grand-brats run about too. Sophy Kratides, Angel of Vengeance, has a fatherless daughter. Moria Kratides – dangerous little minx. Elizabeth is married, though she tries not to be in the same country as Freddy Eynsford Hill. Ayda Heidari, Angel of Blood, married a Scotsman called Ferguson and settled down in Sussex. Thi Minh is engaged to Jacques d’Athys, the explorer who fetched her back from Indochina as if she were a gewgaw picked up from a market stall. I suppose he might die from tropic fever before he gets her to the altar.’