Chapel Noir

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Why—?” Elizabeth asked in a husky whisper.

  “I wish to find another disturbed wine cellar, and perhaps another scene of a crime.”

  “Why? Jack the Ripper is captured.”

  Irene was silent as we jostled over damp stones that made a slight sucking sound under our spinning wheels, like sticking plaster being pulled from a wound.

  “Baron Rothschild,” Irene finally answered, “had said that anything he could provide was at my disposal. I sent for maps of Paris days ago.”

  “We did not see them arrive,” I noted suspiciously.

  “I did not wish to be premature, but I have never been satisfied by the condition of the wine cellar beneath the brothel.”

  “It was dark, damp, dirty, and full of dusty bottles and smoky-smelling wooden casks,” I enumerated with some heat. Albeit whispered. “A typical wine cellar.”

  “Yes . . .” she agreed slowly enough to tacitly disagree.

  “It did connect to the sewer,” Elizabeth pointed out with gusto. “I have always found that deliciously interesting. Is that what intrigues you, Irene?”

  “Yes. Except that I don’t think what we glimpsed was part of the infamous sewers of Paris.”

  “Oh!” Elizabeth sounded bereft. “If Jack the Ripper had been using the sewers of Paris, it would have been so . . . dramatic.”

  “Jack the Ripper was dramatic enough with his vanishing act in the byways of Whitechapel. But I admit that Paris is as intriguing a city underground as it is above ground. Those who excavate for the new underground train system in London may not like what they dig up. If I have calculated correctly, on a street near the Parc Monceau we will find another oddly altered cellar. I admit that mathematics is not my forte, although I have a certain flair for the merciless logic of music. If I have not done my sums properly, this expedition is useless. I can only hope that my formula will prove accurate.”

  The carriage lurched forward, then back, in that time-tested motion that indicates arrival by putting passengers’ stomachs into a semblance of seasickness.

  Irene hopped down to the street and drew a five-franc coin from her waistcoat pocket, which she tossed up at the driver, who caught it as it flashed into his upraised hand. It was astounding what skills being an opera singer had given Irene. I fully believe she could have become a sharpshooter like Annie Oakley, should she wish to. Perhaps it was all those trouser roles she had played that suited her dark soprano voice.

  Even Elizabeth seemed struck mute by her coin trick.

  It was, of course, a completely man-about-town gesture. That was why Irene did it, as part of her role, not from any personal need to show off. So few understood that about a consummate performer: the individual is subsumed into the part and then into the whole of the production. Irene only played the prima donna when she was cast—or had cast herself—in the role.

  Once the cab had clattered off in search of another fare, and I’m sure it would be a long one, Irene’s jaunty air vanished. She eyed the empty street.

  “I am hoping for another innocent-looking entry to the lower levels,” Irene said. “Let us walk and look high and low. Mostly low. Looking tipsy would be useful, as well.”

  She lurched into a shambling gait, still in full stride, swaggering from one side of the street to another, stumbling into doorways and testing them for entry.

  Tipsy. I watched Elizabeth follow in Irene’s footsteps, so to speak, but in another direction. She was most unconvincing and looked disabled rather than drunk.

  I attempted no such nonsense. I would be the sober friend hoping to see these two tipplers home.

  We were in luck that the traffic on this street was scarce. Residents kept their noses indoors.

  One of Elizabeth’s more dramatic but pathetic lurches brought her across my path, where I “steadied” her. Him. I clapped him hard upon the back. “Steady, fellow,” I grumbled in as low a voice as I could muster. “Do you miss the warmer work inside that maison?” I whispered, as she straightened at my command.

  “Warmer indeed, Nell,” she responded with a disgraceful wink. “I almost hope that Irene doesn’t find a path to the chill cellars below.”

  I pushed her away in disgust, as my role called for. I began to see the attraction of pretending to be someone other than oneself. It excused a purely honest reaction that must be stifled and concealed in polite society.

  We heard the sound of approaching steps.

  “Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques, “Irene began singing in a tiddly basso.

  Elizabeth rushed to the wall she leaned against to prop her up, and hush her up.

  An ill-dressed man lurched past us, his unshaven face slack with alcohol poisoning, his working-man’s blouse and trousers wrinkled and . . . odiferous.

  Irene’s song faded at our attentions, and the man’s bleary look returned to the cobblestones his feet stuttered over. In a few instants only the small scuffles of his distant boots could be heard.

  Irene leaned back against another barred door, frowning. I pushed the annoying deerstalker up on my forehead so I could see more than the checked umbrella edge of its brim, which clashed abominably with the pattern of my jacket.

  “I doubt we shall find anything so convenient as a door,” I said.

  “I would hate to have to take you two through the kitchen to the wine cellar. You would not fool a gnat.”

  “You mean Elizabeth would not,” I said.

  “I am unbelievable?” she answered. “You cannot even act drunk.” Our raised walking sticks were about to cross like swords, until Irene stepped in between them, and us.

  “If you are coming to fisticuffs in the street, please do it in male voices at least.”

  Irene glanced up at the first-floor level around us to make sure that no shutters or windows had opened.

  “Now.” She jerked our hats down on our heads and restored our walking sticks to an upright position at our suited sides. “What I seek will look more like a workman’s hole than a door, I have concluded. Look for a niche a rat could disappear into.”

  A rat! The idea was not appetizing.

  Elizabeth bent to survey the grilled windows below street level.

  “Kitchens and sculleries,” I told her.

  “Perhaps not all.”

  So we continued down the deserted street, now crouching instead of lurching, all the better to peer into darkened arches of half windows sunk into the foundation of the buildings.

  I heard a rasp of metal, and turned to find Irene kneeling in the filthy gutter. I did not care for her “walking-out” clothes in masculine form, but even they did not deserve what prostration in a gutter of Paris would do to them.

  “This cellar is unoccupied,” she whispered when we came to her assistance. “Help me with this grille. It is old, rusted, and, best of all, loose.”

  We applied gloves to metal mesh, then removed our gloves for a better grip. Together we tugged and grunted like dray-wagon drivers. Behind our mufflers and under our hats, threads of perspiration ran unseen. The itching had become torture.

  Still, I could feel the grille within my fists wiggle, then jerk, and finally pull loose so abruptly we all fell back on our heels.

  We sat and gasped for a while. I must say that I knew the satisfaction that only achieving the impossible imparts.

  “Now we must lift the grille out of the way,” Irene said at last.

  Elizabeth groaned softly, but we all grabbed on to an edge again and thereafter wrestled the piece as large as a fire screen to rest against the stone foundation.

  Finished at last, we gazed into the featureless hole we had bared.

  Large as it was, it did not promise a dignified entry even for those wearing trousers.

  Irene leaped down into the shallow well surrounding it. “I shall go first. I have the pistol. Who will come next?”

  “I!” Elizabeth trumped me.

  “I don’t know how far below the floor is,” Irene cautioned, even as she folded herself
in the most astoundingly limber way and disappeared through an opening the size of a painting frame.

  We heard a thud, an “oof,” and a “Hurry!”

  Elizabeth shrugged, exchanged a glance with me, and started to go feetfirst through the gap. This proved to be a mistake. She was soon clinging to the well edge, her upper half visible and her nether regions apparently flailing for purchase.

  “Oh!” Her eyes grew round and she gazed into mine as if she were drowning. With a great jerk, her hands gave way, and she had been swallowed by the dark hole below.

  I hardly thought going facefirst would work any better, but by now I was the lone person left on the street. I heard the click of something approaching and turned in panic.

  A lean, mangy dog had paused in trotting past to regard me with hungry yellow eyes.

  I jumped down into the well, then crouched against the hole, wondering if I could back into it and thus keep my eyes on the devil dog watching me as if ready to chase a rat into a hole.

  I managed to wiggle my posterior somewhat over the waiting gulf, while keeping my hands and feet attached to terra firma.

  Now I was wedged width-wise in the hole with no way of advancing or retreating! The dog could chew upon my face and hands at its leisure.

  I managed to push a foot over the abyss, but the sense of unanchored suspension nearly made me swoon.

  “Nell!” Irene’s voice urged from below.

  The mongrel began to growl, showing great yellow teeth.

  I hunched a shoulder, getting partway through before sticking again.

  By now my midsection was folded so upon itself that I could hardly take breath, much less scream for aid.

  I was caught fast in the opening, hopelessly jammed. My walking stick was wedged sideways in the well, useless.

  Someone seized my loose ankle and pulled. I gritted my teeth shut against a shout of objection. My shoe was pulling off my foot despite the sturdy laces.

  The dog edged nearer. I could feel its hot breath on my face. I could also smell it. The huge muzzle pushed toward me. I shut my eyes. A large wet, warm, tongue swabbed my features from north to south, what was visible of them anyway.

  My scream of revulsion was cut off when both my ankles were jerked sharply downward, and I popped through the aperture like a cork pried from a bottle neck. My stick whacked the opening as it followed me through.

  It was small comfort to be standing upright only because my companions bracketed me, to be facing utter dark, and to have a slimy, wet face that reeked of garbage.

  “There was a dog,” I managed to pant out.

  “Poor Nell,” Irene said. “There is always a dog.” She dragged me deeper into the dark, then suddenly there came a sharp scratching sound . . . had the fiendish dog—? But no, my friend had merely drawn a lucifer over the striking edge of its box. A will-o’-the-wisp of light danced against the darkness, and then a small stub of candle she also produced took flame and we could see each other again at last.

  “All right?” Irene asked.

  When we nodded, she immediately turned to let the feeble light play over the room we had entered. A cellar, empty, with a few broken sticks of wood on the floor and not much else.

  “Good,” Irene said. “Let us go deeper.”

  I followed, thrusting my walking stick ahead of me in the dark like the blind men one saw on the streets occasionally. The rhythmic tap of its tip on the hard-packed earth and stone was comforting in an inanimate way. I soon heard the echo of Elizabeth’s cane as she emulated me, and smiled.

  “Will anyone hear us?” I whispered suddenly.

  “My hope is that only the dead will,” Irene responded cheerfully from ahead.

  I could just glimpse her figure edged by a thin halo of candlelight.

  A draft at my ankles told me our course angled downward, as the catacomb near the Eiffel Tower had.

  I knew that this was a good sign for Irene, though it was most upsetting to me. Delving into dark places should be done by miners. Still, I would rather be part of this adventure than left sleeping at the hotel, which is what I fear would have happened had I not awakened ready to join the expedition.

  “Do you smell anything?” Irene asked.

  “Must,” I said. “Dust. Dirt. Damp. Rats and cats.”

  “Candle wax,” Elizabeth said, “but you are carrying it. And the scent of some liquor, not wine.”

  “Obviously,” I complained. “I have not spent enough time in brothels, where spirits and candles are plentiful and one may develop a ‘nose’ for the bouquet of corruption.”

  “Don’t mention ‘corruption,’ Nell,” Irene advised me sardonically from ahead. “That is what I most sincerely hope we find scant evidence of at the end of this passage.”

  “Scant?”

  “Well, no traces at all would not do our investigation any good.”

  I believe that I stopped moving. At least Miss Elizabeth crashed into me from behind, ramming my ribs with her walking stick.

  I mewed protest, all the sound I dared make under the circumstances. I would not be the one to bring the gendarmes down on us!

  “Feel the fresh, wet air!” Irene sounded like a passenger on a fly-boat on the Seine, one of those large double-decked steamers that ferried sightseers and travelers up and down the river’s crooked length.

  “We near the sewers,” I predicted under my breath.

  Apparently my comment was not as beneath my breath as I had intended, for Elizabeth rhapsodized the key word after me.

  “Sewers. Of course.”

  Irene led on, foregoing comment.

  In an instant the shaft had widened into a cavern, and she stopped, her small candle casting enough light to show the limits of the place.

  The stench was an overwhelming bouillabaisse with an underlying most unpleasant fishy odor. Among the unhappy blend my nose recognized blood, sweat, and urine, the worst that one might encounter in scenes of animal husbandry in the country and in the most debased slums of the city.

  The “fresh” air of the sewers hung like a fetid blanket over the scene, intensifying the conjoined reeks as toilet water will vivify a sachet of dried rose petals. Only this was the odor of rot.

  I squinted at the uneven walls, hoping to see no neat piles of bones, hoping to avoid the vision of any rag piles on the floor.

  And I was rewarded on both counts! Unaccountably, I felt a sense of disappointment. If there was nothing, whatever notion of Irene’s had brought us here was worthless.

  Another lucifer was struck with that peculiar scraping sound that is so oddly animal-like. I suppose it reminds me of rat claws within the walls.

  Irene now held two lit candle stubs, and held one out to us.

  Elizabeth rushed to claim it.

  Now a double light danced off the dimpled stone walls. I was surprised to see odd letters and symbols scribed here and there in charcoal. Such unlettered scrawls! One looked like a “P” with an “X” through it. Another resembled a backwards “R.” Most of the marks were nonsensical wavy lines.

  “A beggars’ refuge, do you think?” Elizabeth asked Irene.

  Irene was already advancing on the dark like a duelist, her candle held at arm’s length. Parts of the walls were quite bare of anything other than moss and mold, but a swipe of her light revealed something more as a dustcloth will unveil a scratch in the mahogany.

  This scrawl was long and wavering, at waist height, and it seemed etched in blood, not char.

  Irene went close to inspect it, with Elizabeth and I close behind merely for the comfort of company.

  Such was the drawing’s length that she ordered Elizabeth to use her candle to trace it to the other end. Elizabeth only stopped five feet away.

  “Les juives . . .” Irene whispered in perfect French. “. . . sont des gens.”

  She straightened from bending to read the roughly drawn letters.

  “Mon dieu!” The written words seemed to have marooned her in the French language. �
��C’est—” She bent to read again, walking along crouched toward Elizabeth. “que l’on ne bldmera,” she muttered. Then, “pas pour rien,” she finished intoning with the solemnity of a religious celebrant as she stood alongside Elizabeth. Perhaps the candle gave me the unlikely religious impression, for Irene was not given to ritual or invoking the Godhead in any language.

  “Do you know what this is? What this means?” she asked in an awed hush.

  “No,” I admitted. “Tell us.”

  “There was always something foreign about the phrasing,” she went on more to herself than us. “And the haste in erasing it—”

  The soft grating sound of a step in the passage behind us stopped her like a falling guillotine. I glimpsed her hand thrusting into her jacket pocket as she hissed, “Douse the candles.”

  Elizabeth pinched her flame out with her fingertips. I blew mine out an instant later.

  I had also glimpsed a shadow in the passage.

  The broad swath of an unshuttered lantern splashed into the cavern like a barrel of spilled water, suddenly touching parts of all of us.

  The figure that held it was stooped like Quasimodo and wore smudged workman’s clothing. He was not much above a beggar, from my one glimpse, and the stubble on his face below the usual peaked cap made him look a debased sort indeed. Perhaps we had been discovered by one of the occasional residents of this pest hole.

  Irene cocked the pistol.

  What a cold, sinister sound that was, yet it did not shake our unwholesome visitor, who stood teetering on the rubble at the passage end.

  He reached into his own pocket, half-torn from its mooring on the baggy denim.

  Irene lifted the pistol higher, following his gesture.

  From that poor excuse of a pocket he pulled a small clay pipe. He began to spout something French about chiens and fumering. Perhaps he was saying that he would like to have smoked dog for dinner. I have no idea!

  Suddenly Irene shrugged in that Gallic manner she had so mastered and stepped back to permit the man entry into our . . . pit.

  But he stayed where he stood, lighting the pipe with a lucifer and then sucking on the dreadful thing until the bowl glowed cheerful as an ember. A smoky scent slowly masked the dreadful odors steaming around us.