The Curse of the Grand Guignol

by Anna Lord

  “We arrive early to Salpetriere and stop for breakfast in garden after we buy bread from boulangère on corner near to gate.”

  “Did you notice anyone following you?”

  “No,” he said and then again after a short pause, “no.”

  “I think I am being followed,” she explained quickly, “by a tall man in a black cloak. He may have followed you too.”

  “We go by hansom cab.”

  “He may have followed in his own hansom. He may have dressed differently.”

  Fedir gnawed on his fist. “I must go. I must find her.”

  “Yes, but wait a moment. Answer me. Who did you speak to while you were there?”

  “Just man who gave me tour. I pay him and he take me round the hospital and asylum. First, I walk with Xenia in garden and – Wait! Now I remember. Old woman she come up to us in garden. She want cigarette.”

  “Did she scuttle like a crab and hang her head?”

  “Yes.”

  “Little Marianne.”

  “I see her watching Xenia when I go on my tour. Xenia go on different tour so no one know we together.”

  “But someone may have seen you together in the garden, perhaps from a window.”

  “I must go,” he repeated anxiously. “I must find Xenia. I must go at once.”

  He was growing increasingly agitated and his head, shaking from side to side in disbelief, began to wobble as though he couldn’t accept what was happening; it was as if all his fears were destabilizing him.

  “You cannot go alone. Dr Watson is still sleeping. The inspector lives too far away to get here in time. Take Mahmoud!”

  Fedir reacted violently to the suggestion, though he had never yet questioned his mistress in all the years he had known her. “No! I not trust him. He will get in my way. He will make things worse.”

  “There is no time to argue. Do as I say. Take Mahmoud. Check the lower level of the asylum. There are cells down there. The doors have no locks. Check the wing with the prostitutes. It is behind the hospital. Tell people you are searching for my maid. Explain to Mahmoud that I sent Xenia there to look for someone I thought I recognised. Go!”

  The dressing-room door opened and Mahmoud entered looking squarely at Fedir. “I heard everything. You can trust me. I can help you.”

  The Countess checked the time on the Ormolu clock while the two men stood face to face, staring wordlessly at each other. It was ten minutes before ten. Time was ticking.

  “I planned to go to Salpetriere today to give Monsignor Delgardo his invitation. I will meet you by the statue in the forecourt at midday. That gives you two hours. Hurry!”

  Dr Watson woke for the first time in weeks without any tightness in his chest but it didn’t last long. News that Xenia was missing sent him into a straight-jacketed panic. Things got worse when the Countess garbled on about what she had witnessed in the lower level of the asylum, and worse still when, during breakfast which consisted of a slice of unbuttered toast washed down with a cup of lukewarm tea, a package arrived wrapped in brown paper tied with string.

  “I’ll unwrap it,” he said firmly, picturing mutilated body parts belonging to Xenia.

  “It’s addressed to me,” she argued wilfully, bracing herself. “I’ll unwrap it.”

  Trembling fingers tore away the wrapping and she stared speechlessly at a queer looking puppet that seemed familiar in all the worst ways.

  “It’s Little Mary!” she laughed, relief flooding her when recognition hit home.

  “The antique marionette belonging to Monsieur Grimaldi?”

  “Yes, I left it with him. It was the only one I didn’t buy.” Suddenly her blood ran cold. “But how did he know where to send it?”

  Dr Watson checked the address on the brown paper and frowned. “No time for vague conjecture now. It’s getting on for half past eleven. Let’s get our coats on.”

  Neither spoke as they rattled toward the thirteenth arrondissement. She was wondering how Monsieur Grimaldi knew she lived on rue Bonaparte and Dr Watson was wondering if the string was the same sort that was used to tie the five victims.

  They arrived at Salpetriere fifteen minutes late. Not having a maid or manservant to navigate the intricacies of the morning toilette had set them back. The housemaid did her best with the corsetry and lacing, the stockings and button boots, the hair pins and hat pins, but she was only fourteen years of age and not accustomed to the accoutrements of a lady.

  “You said midday,” muttered Dr Watson grimly, checking his pocket watch for the third time in ten minutes as he circled the statue in the forecourt.

  “Here they are now!”

  The sight of two men sprinting toward them minus Xenia sent hope plummeting. They had searched everywhere and thoroughly scoured the lower level of the asylum, poking their heads into all the cells. Likewise for the hospital and the wing that housed the prostitutes. They had even checked the latrines and cold-bath rooms. The only places they had not checked were the locked medicine cupboards, storerooms and attics. There was no sign of Xenia anywhere in this labyrinthine place which was actually larger and more populated than most French villages.

  “There is no reason to suspect she is still here,” suggested Dr Watson pragmatically, trying to sound like the voice of reason. “She may have met foul play on her way home.”

  “Mock me all you like,” said the Countess, glancing across the grassy sward to the window that she knew belonged to the office of Monsignor Delgardo, “but my intuition tells me she is still here.”

  “If I cannot convince you otherwise then there is nothing for it but to search and search again until we find her. But these two men need some breakfast.” He handed them some money. “Get some bread from the boulangère. We will wait here until you return.”

  In that moment the Countess could have hugged her dear friend, and almost did, but the shadowy outline of a figure in the window watching them held her back. She fingered the Gobolinks invitation in the pocket of her wool coat.

  “I’ll be back shortly.”

  Dr Watson guessed where she was going. “Don’t say something that will make it worse,” he warned. “Don’t accuse Monsignor Delgardo of a heinous crime without proof.”

  “Do not presume to lecture me!” she snapped, whirling back to stare him down, friendship taking second place to a flare of anger fuelled by fear.

  There is nothing more intimidating than a woman who thinks she is in the right and when that woman is fiercely intelligent it can be damned frightening, but he refused to buckle. “From what you told me this morning I’m guessing you think the girls in the cells are being violated. Am I right?”

  “Yes! For God’s sake, they were tied to their beds!”

  “And they were all emaciated and glassy eyed?”

  “Yes!”

  “All of even size and weight and similar in age?”

  “Yes! And don’t you dare say Delgardo is studying megalomania!”

  “I think he might be conducting tests, perhaps trying new medicines on the girls, possibly from the opioid family. Scientists and doctors test new medicines on like-subjects to get the doses right. The differing weight and size and age of a patient can interfere with the efficacy of the dose. If the subjects are kept still, unable to exercise, not fed much food; it is easier to measure heart-rate, etcetera. The results don’t suffer from variables.”

  Opium! Of course! That explained the drugged state of the girls. She felt calmer though her heart was still beating out a violent tattoo. Yes, Kiki visited her sister every day. Surely she would not leave her sister in a place where she suspected she was being violated. If Delgardo was drugging his research subjects – and she still believed he was behind the disappearance of Xenia – then where would he put a subject who had possibly died and…

  “Is there a morgue in the hospital?”

  “All hospitals have a morgue.”

  “Do you know where it is?”

  “It’s usually to the rear of the op
erating theatre. Why?”

  Her throat suddenly swelled. “I think it would be a handy place to hide a body.”

  Fedir and Mahmoud caught up to them as they trotted briskly across the forecourt. Someone tried to stop them entering the morgue but Mahmoud pinned them back. There were seven trolleys with bodies covered with sheets. Xenia was on the fourth trolley. She appeared to be as rigored as the others but a mirror test indicated she was still breathing. Her eyes were unstaring, the pupils no bigger than pinpoints, and her pinched skin showed signs of severe dehydration but she was still alive – barely.

  “Get her to her feet,” directed Dr Watson. “She needs oxygen in her lungs.”

  While Fedir and Mahmoud supported her arms and walked her as best they could to kick-start the heart’s pump, the Countess raced off to find some drinking water. She returned several minutes later with a cup of cold tea someone had not had time to drink. Xenia didn’t have the strength to swallow so they used a spoon and forced it into her mouth.

  Since Salpetriere was the size of a small village it was not difficult to bring the landau around to the rear of the hospital, load Xenia, and ferry her home without being observed. Dr Watson stayed with his patient. Fedir stayed by his sister’s side. Mahmoud remained with the Countess who had some unfinished business to take care of. Fearlessly, she marched to the asylum and threw open Monsignor Delgardo’s door without knocking. He was standing by the window, smiling, as if he had been expecting her.

  “A pleasure to see you again, la comtesse. Please, do come in. Have you returned to admire the butterfly?”

  She gripped the invitation tightly in her trembling hand. It stopped her strangling him. Her benign smile was more faux than his. “I have come to invite you to a Gobolinks party. I will be holding it on the afternoon of the eighth. I do hope you can come since it was you who put the idea into my head.”

  He used a letter opener to slice open the envelope and check the details of the party. “Splendid! Splendid! Rue Bonaparte. An afternoon gathering will leave me free to attend the opening of the new plays later in the night. Will there be many guests?”

  She reeled off the names, omitting the inspector. “My maître de maison,” she indicated Mahmoud poised stiffly in the doorway, hand on his dagger, “will act as judge along with La Noire.”

  Delgardo studied the Sikh briefly before returning his gaze to the butterfly. “There’s something you can do for me with regards someone special. Would you care to walk with me? We can talk as we go.”

  Mahmoud followed several paces behind them.

  “I do hope Davidov will not be in one of his frightful moods,” said Delgardo conversationally. “He has been extremely tiresome of late. Something is eating away at him. I have urged him to seek help. I think Radzival will win the poetry prize. He had aspirations in that direction once. Alas, poverty forced him to take up the position of librarian. To be poor is not a tragedy. To be born wealthy and end up poor is tragic.”

  “He was born wealthy?”

  “His family had business interests all over the Continent. They lost everything after that Canal Scandal. His father committed suicide. His mother ended up in a madhouse, not here, somewhere in Montmartre. I believe his three sisters ended up here when the authorities began rounding up prostitutes. Before my time. Yes, tragic. You can tell he has good breeding. He stands straight and looks you in the eye. Crespigny is hopelessly in love with him. Quite the Greek tragedy there. I hope I have not shocked you. You give the impression of being a woman of the world.”

  She tried - and failed - to temper her tone. “Crespigny cannot stand him!”

  Knowing he had shocked her made him laugh. “We always despise that which we covet.”

  She had paid no heed to where they were walking, and it came as an even greater shock to find he had led her downstairs to the lower level of the asylum. They were standing outside Coco’s cell.

  “I brought you down here hoping you might take Mademoiselle Kiki home in your carriage. She is bereft and cannot walk of her own volition. Her sister, one of my patients, died suddenly this morning. Another tragedy. I hope that is not asking too much of you?”

  Kiki was curled up in the foetal position on the empty bed in the tiny cell where the Countess had last seen Coco. The petite saltimbanque was drowning in her own tears. Her eyes were red raw and swollen and she didn’t seem to know where she was.

  Gently, Mahmoud scooped up the featherweight and carried her up the stairs, across the forecourt, to a waiting hackney cab by the gate. Dazed with grief, or possibly drugged, she hardly stirred.

  The Countess paused on the stairs, feigning what she hoped would sound like a mixture of worldly curiosity and female ignorance. “What is it that you do down here, Monsignor Delgardo? Is this part of your research into megalomania?”

  He shook his head and looked her in the eye. “The girls in these cells are opium addicts. They are undergoing a cure. My research is with men. It is men who tend toward megalomania.”

  With that statement in mind, the Countess bid the monsignor goodbye and was about to join Mahmoud and Kiki when she spotted Little Marianne watching from the garden.

  “Wait for me here,” she directed Mahmoud before catching up to the crab-like creature in the shadow of the asylum, out of view of Delgardo’s window.

  “I have a present for you,” she said, extracting a cigarette and lighting it.

  Little Marianne filled her puny lungs with tobacco. The Countess thought the old woman was nowhere near as mad as she seemed. It was probably a thing much less mad to live in a madhouse than to live on the streets of Paris.

  On the spur of the moment, prior to leaving home, the Countess had crammed Little Mary into a carpet bag and brought the bag with her. “This is yours if you tell me where Coco is.”

  Little Marianne’s mad staring eyes bulged covetously. She looked around furtively before whispering, “She is lying next to the other one.”

  “Other one? Of course! In the morgue?”

  Little Marianne nodded and the Countess thrust the carpet bag into the bony old hands before rushing away. Mahmoud watched her race across the forecourt back to the hospital. He was tempted to race after her but the whimpering girl slumped in the seat of the hackney cab forced him to stay put.

  The Countess was about to check the trolleys when she heard a noise behind her. It was Little Marianne; cradling the Mary puppet as if it were a baby, rocking it in her arms and singing a lullaby; a strange far-way look in her mad unblinking eyes.

  Turning her attention back to the trolleys, the Countess noticed the sheets all lying flat. Someone had removed the dead bodies between her first visit and this one.

  Chapter 14 - Kiki et Coco

  “Coco’s dead, isn’t she?”

  The Countess didn’t know how to answer that, not because she was in the habit of sparing people’s feelings regarding death which she accepted as a corollary to life, but because she didn’t know if it was true or not. She patted Kiki’s hand consolingly and gazed at the road unfolding before them as they rumbled toward the Canal Saint-Martin. A hackney cab could only take two passengers so Mahmoud had taken a separate hansom and returned home.

  “I don’t know what’s real and what isn’t,” mused Kiki wearily as her doll-like head came to rest on the Countess’s shoulder. “Sometimes I think that what I do on stage is real and that the rest of my life is a dream. Sometimes I think I’m not real either. I think I might be a dream too. I dream about going to America. La Noire wants to go back to America. Davidov wants to go too. America is the land where dreams come true. I’m scared my dream will never come true. I’m scared nearly all the time. Kasper, Klaus and Karl say there’s going to be another revolution. I’m scared of that too. I don’t want to die on the barricades. I don’t want to be a wife. I don’t dream about being married. I dream about being famous. I want people to remember me. No one will remember Coco.”

  Kiki began to weep. Tears stained the Countess’s slee
ve and left a damp patch. She wondered if Kiki was grieving for Coco or for herself.

  When they arrived at the Quai de Jemmapes a reanimated Kiki leapt nimbly from the hackney cab and ran straight to Le Cirque not Bobo, presumably to tell the three circassiens that her sister was dead. The Countess wondered if the three men would remember Coco and weep.

  Raoul Crespigny was a study in solitude, sitting en plein air on the deck of Bobo, smoking a cigarette. He acknowledged the Countess with a wave of his hand and seemed pleased for her to join him. She was uncomfortably honest at the best of times. Right now she felt like being brutal. Xenia had just escaped being buried alive. Coco had gone to an early grave, a victim of misfortune and man’s megalomania.

  “The three plays for next week,” she said, “which one do you think the murderer will re-enact?”

  He met brutality with bluntness. “The last one. Isn’t that what you think too? That’s why you went to the Moulin Rouge last night. You wanted to see how easy it would be to string someone up from the red mill after dismembering them. And before you ask how I know you went there, Davidov is nursing a vicious hangover and La Noire is in love with the Sikh. I cannot wait for the Gobolinks party – grist to the mill!”

  “I am searching for a ruthless murderer and you make light of it.”

  “Perhaps you should look closer to home. That Sikh has the right build for the man in the black cloak. Did Dr Watson happen to mention that someone in a black cloak was watching the Hotel de Merimont the night of the salonniere?”

  She wasn’t about to grace his badly veiled accusation with a civil reply. Even if the mystery watcher was Mahmoud, she couldn’t imagine anything sinister in it. Her aunt had always been a good judge of character and clearly she trusted the Sikh. “Are you in love with Radzival?”