When the building caught fire there were lions and tigers
running around the streets of New York. . . . Firemen shot
the snakes as an act of compassion as they were being
incinerated in their glass cages. . . . A heroic fireman rescued
the 400-pound fat lady by carrying her down a ladder.
—NEW YORK CITY FIRE MUSEUM EXHIBIT ON THE BARNUM & BAILEY
FIRE, DOWNTOWN MANHATTAN, 1865
Irene lit a cigarette and gazed long at the match-flame as if bidding adieu to an old friend, and then shook the lucifer out.
Her first inhalation on the cigarette resembled one, long, heartfelt sigh. Her exhalation reminded me of the macabre “ectoplasm” mediums gagged back at the gullible folk who paid to talk to or see their own dead.
“Two women,” Irene said, looking around our hotel parlor, avoiding the gazes of Pink and myself. “Dead. Two sisters. Sophie and Salamandra. What do they have in common? For God’s sake, what do they have in common that they should die such horrible deaths only days apart?” She finally focused on one of us: Pink. “Say it is something else other than my own poor self, please, Pink. I do implore.”
The brave little newspaper girl was pale and visibly composed herself to speak. The violent death by fire at the New Fourteenth Street Theater had shaken even one who had posed as a sweatshop worker, a prostitute, and a madwoman for the sake of the all-important “story.”
“They were both performers in the shadowy world of exotic phenomena,” Pink said at last.
“Good,” Irene encouraged.
“They were—”
“They were,” I interrupted, suddenly afire with insight, “killed by the means of their own illusions. Ectoplasm. Fire.”
“Better.” Irene smiled sadly at me, both proud of my acuity, I sensed, and beyond pride. “And don’t forget the odd demise of Washington Irving Bishop. He too died while performing, by the very oddity that had fashioned his early fame, catalepsy. Was there anything else similar?”
“They all performed with you, knew you,” Pink riposted, a bit maliciously.
“You knew them!” I put in, not to be outdone by Pink.
“Not quite,” Irene corrected both of us. “They had known me at an age so early I barely recall it.”
“There is no denying it,” Pink urged. “You are the common link.”
“It would seem so,” Irene agreed, darkly.
Only I who knew her could see how shaken she was by the most recent tragedy.
Each time she inhaled upon that annoying cigarette, I saw the banked fire at the ashen end of the tobacco burn bright. Each time she exhaled, I saw a thin thread of ectoplasm snaking toward the ceiling.
Death by smoke of a sort, and death by fire. What else was there? Water? And then I remembered Merlinda the Mermaid and grew very afraid.
“These are not the first deaths,” Pink said, a tone of confession in her voice.
“The first death was in Eden,” Irene responded, “when Cain slew his brother Abel out of jealousy. What do you mean by the first death in this case?”
“I mean—” Pink twined her fingers and turned them inside out, so her palms were facing us. I had seen the very same behavior in a schoolroom miss who had been up to something forbidden. “I had meant to tell you sooner, but then you and Nell arrived so fast on the heels of the séance death and there didn’t seem to be any time—”
“There is always time for truth,” Irene said. Her utterly sober demeanor offered Pink no chance to charm her way out of censure on this issue.
“Sometimes truth must be administered in small doses.”
“Not with Nell and myself.” Irene crushed her half-smoked cigarette in a crystal tray, then leaned forward to present her case, like Godfrey in court: steady, concentrated, impossible to ignore.
“Pink, I do understand that you feel yourself shabbily treated during our European enterprise. I even understand that a startling new story is as much life’s blood to you as a new operatic score would be to me. But murder is not a parlor game, surely you saw that in Paris and beyond. You cannot afford to keep me in the dark in the name of some bizarre game of one-uppance. However these deaths may touch upon my past, no personal interest I might have exceeds my obligation as a human being to see that no more harm comes to anyone. The time is far past when you dare withhold facts or even theories from me, from us. This is much too serious a matter.”
Pink cleared her throat. Her writhing fingers turned themselves to point back to herself. “I thought I saw a pattern in the earlier deaths, including one Abyssinia by snake-crushing a few weeks ago, but in truth I thought of it as an excuse.”
“An excuse?!” Irene spat out the words, then waited with a patience her tone had not predicted.
“Oh, fudge it, Irene! I suppose I must confess the worst.”
“The worst,” I repeated faintly. I glanced at Irene. What had this brash young woman done now? At least we would learn the scope of the damage, and I was certain there would be damage.
Pink went on in a flood of words: “I was reminded of the related killings in Europe and Baron Krafft-Ebing’s book on lust-murders, and I thought it would be interesting, story-worthy, really, to invite Europe’s most notable detective to try his hand at the matter.”
Irene turned to stone, and then to thunder. “You cannot mean—Pink!”
The girl swallowed, then spit out the truth in one great rush. “I wired Sherlock Holmes as well, saying that America and New York City had its own current onslaught of linked murders. Oh, what a story it will be! An Englishman on the Bowery! It will be the greatest coup since Oscar Wilde toured the States! I imagine Mr. Holmes could command a very active lecture circuit. He would be the toast of the booking agents. I must admit that my fellow citizens are wild for Englishmen with their noses in the air. I could accompany his investigations and report them daily in the World. The whole country would be talking about it.”
Irene had stood during this recital, and the more enthusiastic Pink grew about the idea, the more Irene took on the aspect of an Amazon queen.
“Pink,” she finally said, the name falling like a judgment from her lips. “You do understand that it would be quite a contest to determine which would be the more repelled and appalled by your notion and the harm it would cause: myself or Sherlock Holmes. He would no more embark on your imagined ‘lecture tour’ than he would climb a tree and throw coconuts on the people gathered below. Nor would I.”
“You worked for the Pinkertons once. Surely they would like a connection to a case this juicy.”
“We are not discussing the condition of a steak at Delmonico’s,” Irene answered, referring to the society restaurant that catered to all of upper-class New York, not that I thought any part of New York was upper-class at all, wealthy as portions of it may be. The Four Hundred indeed! In England we had a far shorter and more exclusive list of First Families than that!
“Besides,” Irene added more softly, “the Pinkertons no longer have a Female Department and would not appreciate your attempting to join it by default. At least we can rest assured that Sherlock Holmes will hardly cross the Atlantic at your beck and call.”
“No.” Pink paused, looking as guilty as any of my schoolroom charges ever had. “No,” she agreed sadly, “he most definitely would not.”
Irene nodded her satisfaction and sat again. I sighed my relief.
I was premature, as I have so often been in my life, which is informed by expectations of civility and restraint, rather than the extremes other people will go to at the slightest excuse.
“You’re quite right,” Pink went on. “He responded completely negatively to all my wires . . . until I mentioned your involvement.”
“What involvement? I was not even on this continent until days ago.”
“I explained that the murders involved your youthful years.”
“On what evidence?”
“Well, you were active on the popular theater circuit from an ea
rly age.”
“That is not ‘involvement,’ Pink. That is coincidence. I cannot believe that Sherlock Holmes would hie across the Atlantic on testimony as flawed as yours has proven to be.”
“I did not rely upon his regard for me to bring him to our doorstep. I relied upon his regard for you.”
There. It was spoken, what I had known for the past year: The Man harbored a deeply unwholesome admiration for my friend Irene. For my married friend Irene. I had long fought to conceal my secret evidence of such an unsuitable attachment. Now brash Nellie Bly had put it on record. Soon it would be in the newspapers, and then Godfrey would know, the whole world would know, and we would all be ruined.
Irene was not . . . unamused by this revelation.
“His ‘regard for me,’ dear Pink, is mere professional rivalry. I cannot see why you insist on bringing my enemies down on me when I came here on a mission of trust and a certain obligation to help you out, as you had recently helped me—” Irene finished by shrugging as wryly as a Frenchwoman, much sinned against, poor thing.
“He might actually have the insight to solve these bizarre crimes,” Pink offered.
“Here. In America? An entirely different social scene? Has he not already demonstrated himself as somewhat at sea when it comes to the murders of women? I cannot see that this fact has changed; in fact, I cannot see that Sherlock Holmes is at all subject to change. Englishmen are notorious in that regard.”
“And Englishwomen?” I demanded.
Her honey-brown eyes flashed me a glance bearing both humor and apology. “Pardon me, Nell, but the English are to the rectitude born, don’t you think? Of course you do, and you would be right. The English are always right, is that not so?”
“Well, yes,” I was forced to admit, “except when we are wrong. Which is seldom, naturally.”
“You cannot fool me, Irene,” Pink said hotly. “There’s a thundering good story here, worthy of a dime novel practically, and this one I will have. If it agitates your snooty Continental sensibilities, Madam Norton, that is too bad, but that is what you get for embarking on a public life.”
“You are so unfair, Pink!” I felt my cheeks warming to match her nickname. “It is you who embarked on a public life, though you hide behind a pseudonym. Irene merely became a performing artist, and then the public life came to her. If you possessed a gift as sublime as her voice you would not need to be stirring up matters in the public print.”
“ ‘Clementine’ sublime?” she mocked. “I saw it on a playbill.”
“And what did you write at an age as early as that? A, B, C?”
“Enough, Nell,” Irene urged me. “We are not debating callings or talents, but rather ethics, and people have been arguing that subject since the Greeks.” Irene regarded our guest, our former associate, our betrayer.
“You hinge your entire campaign to lure myself—and now Sherlock Holmes, of all unlikely people—to your shores to provide fodder for your newspaper forays, on one unproven fact. That somewhere, somehow, a mother of mine is involved, is imperiled even. You have not made your case.”
“Sophie and Salamandra performed with you years ago. They mothered you as best they could, to hear the late Salamandra tell it.”
“That makes neither one my actual mother, and you must admit that there’s no physical resemblance whatsoever. Even if I grant that they looked out for my young self in a big-sisterly way, each was barely old enough to be my mother.”
Pink scowled, an expression too new to damage her fresh face, but, give her enough disappointment and time, and it would.
She untied the artist’s folio and drew out a photograph, one obviously taken for journalistic purposes.
“Sophie had a trunk,” Pink said. “I don’t know where it’s gone, or why she kept it, but it had traveled with her for some time.”
The word “trunk” made us both sit up. How common trunks are, how long they are kept around after there is any immediate use for them. We both knew what buried and forgotten treasures they may hide, such as enormously valuable violins.
I recalled the treasured instrument Sherlock Holmes’s visit to Neuilly had unearthed from Irene’s old trunk. What had Pink found in another such survivor of the years and lives of someone else not known to us?
We fear old trunks, and are fascinated by them, because so many are forgotten, along with what memories lie within them.
Pink smiled sadly. “She was ‘born in a trunk,’ Sophie said once, when I was arranging for the ill-fated séance. That’s an expression in the States, among the theatrical folk, being born in a trunk. Sophie’s trunk had been around so long and the surface was so scarred and scratched that she had pasted it over with travel posters and playbills of where she had been when she was younger. The entire surface was covered, these typeset papers acting as crude graffiti. Even now I could smell the faint reek of boiled animal glue. She had used whatever paper was at hand and no longer useful. It looked like something Jules Verne’s Philéas Fogg had toted around the world on his one-hundred-and-eighty-day jaunt, had he the room for a whole trunk.”
Pink leaned forward to hand a sepia-toned photograph to Irene.
“I had an ace World photographer jump through hoops until this one pasted-on letter came up close enough to read.”
Irene squinted at the photograph, then rose and took it to the shaded lamp on the desk, where she squinted some more. “Nell, you are good at close-work. Decipher this for me.”
I rose and approached the photograph. Penmanship twice as large as life scrawled angularly across the brownish surface, so the ink looked like dried blood. I made out each word, one by one.
“else to do.”
Irene nodded at me. She had reached the same interpretation of the spidery pen scratchings. The ink seemed too dry to flow much longer, but I made out: “I leave my—”
I did not say “darling daughter Irene” aloud, but both of us took in this phrase in silence.
“to . . . kinder hands than have dealt with me. I leave my”
And there the scrap of letter, yellowed by the elderly glue dried on its underside, ended.
Irene looked at Pink. “How many ‘Irenes’ has the city of New York seen in the past thirty years, do you suppose?”
Pink would not be denied her “evidence.”
“This scrap was stuck around the side of the lid. On the front was a playbill featuring Tiny Tim and Rena the Ballerina.”
“That is proof of nothing, Pink, but your dramatic imagination. No doubt that is an advantage in the newspaper trade, where facts fly fast and loose, but in the detective business, it is even less than the ever-despised coincidence.”
“Still, you have a dead mother somewhere.”
“I don’t doubt it. Many of us do.”
“Don’t you see? You were left with Sophie and Salamandra. Dixon was their last name. They were as much mother as you were going to get. And they are dead now. Both of them. Murdered. I was going through Sophie’s things after her death, when I saw her trunk of many playbills again, and claimed it as a memento.”
“A fine bequest, Pink, but if this letter meant anything to Sophie, she wouldn’t have pasted it on the lid of a trunk, but kept it secret.”
“Perhaps ‘darling daughter Irene’ had left the country by then. Certainly all contact had lapsed. Why didn’t you keep track of the only family you had ever known as a child?”
Irene’s usually piercing gaze wavered and moved toward the window. She followed it an instant later to present us with her unrevealing back as she finally spoke again.
“I told you, Pink. I forgot much about that time. Perhaps that was because I had so many more things to remember than a child in an ordinary household would. My ‘family’ was a constantly changing cast of ‘acts,’ all unique and interesting, but very transient. I had lines and songs and melodies and dance steps to remember, from earliest babyhood. Is it any wonder that I failed to remember?”
Pink Cochrane shuffled the pape
rs and photograph back into the folio, tying the strings into dejected bows.
“Perhaps you held your breath so long in the role of Merlinda the Mermaid that all memories bubbled up to some unseen surface and burst. I see that I can expect no help whatsoever from you in deciphering your own history.” She stood. “So be it. I will print whatever I find, if it is sufficiently interesting, and if it is not, according to you I shall make it up, so it will be interesting! Let’s make a race of it, Irene, and see who finds the truth first.”
Pink spun with a sharp rustle of taffeta petticoats and marched out of the room.
As soon as the heavy door swung to with a bang, Irene stared after her with the amazement of someone watching their own image misbehave in a mirror.
“Bother the girl! She is so determined to make her mark on the world that she never for a moment thinks what harm her careless revelations will cause.” Irene began pacing, her own skirts rustling in ceaseless agitation. “We are forced to outthink and outrun her, or face the consequences of being declared to be what she thinks we are.”
“I doubt I am included in her agenda, Irene.”
“Who knows where her campaign for sensational speculation will stop? And is it possible that Sherlock Holmes leaped to accept her invitation into the contest? Would he cross the Atlantic, Nell, simply to embarrass me? Is our rivalry that petty and impassioned? I would not cross so much as a rain puddle to discommode him. Why should he bother? He did not strike me as a man who put much stake in relations, not even that highly placed brother of his.”
“Why would you ask me about the possible movements and motivations of Mr. Holmes? The less I see, or think, of him the better.”
“You did, Nell, finesse him into taking you into his confidence during part of our last and most murderous matter.”
“I ‘finessed’ him into using me for a flunky! An errand girl. A magician’s assistant at best.”
“You learned nothing interesting during your brief association?”
“The varieties and uses of cork? How many disgusting motes a magnifying glass may find upon a cellar floor? That even a madam will stoop to subverting an official investigation?”
FEMME FATALE Page 19