Angels of Music (11 page)

Then, the Persian had been
Daroga
, a humble chief of police – something detectives, criminals and assassins of his current acquaintance tended to forget. He knew all too keenly that a trained detective of the Dunsinane Constabulary might look askance at a witness who claimed to have found the victim’s butchered body then impulsively executed the nearest suspects before they could be questioned. He also knew such a solution would be a tricky sell to superior officers when time came to write out an arrest warrant – especially if the person of interest happened to be a newly crowned king. In his experience, absolutist tyrants didn’t bother even with transparent cover-ups like smearing blood on the dead patsies. The Khanum wanted her people to know how messily her enemies died. She made no song and dance about regretting her crimes or getting bloodstains off her nightgown.

* * *

The after-show ball was held in the great foyer of the Palais Garnier so members of the company – and special guests – could make entrances at the top of the imposing marble staircase then descend at an even pace so all eyes could admire their costumes. All well and good for those who had been in the opera, but guests from outside had to be spirited through the stage doors and the wings up to the first floor so they could appear as if by magic and parade down to the party.

A lone bagpiper – who said he was Scotch, though his hair was dyed red and he spoke with an Albanian accent – stood at the foot of the stairs, setting distant dogs to whining with tuneless skirls. Eventually, Monsieur Rémy, secretary to the Director, paid the piper to stop. The Persian was grateful the functionary got to him with coin before Erik did with a strangling cord.

With a simple tartan eye-mask and matching sash, the Persian mingled with the celebrants. All around were people in costume – Macbettos, Lady Macbettos, witches in sets of three, the odd Hecate (not actually present in the opera), Bancos, Duncanos, chieftains, ladies in waiting, ladies who were fed up and no longer waiting, ghosts of kings despatched and apparitions of kings yet to come.

The Persian counted seven sets of witches… including competing trios of artistes from the Alcazar d’Hiver and Le Chat Noir who were certain to belabour each other’s tall hats with prop besoms before chucking-out time.

The most entertainingly ill-behaved
beldames
were tourists from out of town, the consorts – some said wives – of an Eastern European nobleman. According to the weekly gazetteer of notable visitors, they were the Countesses Dorabella, Clarimonde and Géraldine. Two dark, one fair, all surpassingly beautiful. Their Count was on a boring business trip to London. Determined not be seen dead in that drizzly hole, they occupied an entire floor of Le Grand Hôtel. With a line of credit from the House of de Rothschild Frères, the red-lipped hoydens haunted the high-priced shops of Paris, a city worth the sacking. They reputedly picked up and tossed aside lovers the way other women went through hairpins. A rash of mystery illnesses, nervous collapses and religious conversions afflicted their cast-offs.

There were surely enough unattached – indeed,
suddenly
unattached – politicians, guardsmen, poets and financiers in the house to keep the Countesses busy for a few nights. But if one sighted a likely prospect, they all were interested and fellows were being forever nipped and pinched and dragged into antechambers for brief, debilitating liaisons. The three wore long white shrouds and jewelled headdresses and went barefoot on the marble floor. The Persian wondered why they didn’t freeze their toes off. He kept well out of their way.

The decadent Des Esseintes had got his Shakespeare mixed up and come as Cleopatra, attended by bare-chested pageboys painted gold. Louis-Amédée, Marquis de Coulteray, was the most impressive Duncano, blood-boltered from head to foot and licking gory lips. On his arm, got up as Hecate, was Joséphine Balsamo, Countess Cagliostro. The Persian still instinctively put her first on the list of suspects for any and all mysterious crimes committed in Paris. She never apparently aged, which was one of the characteristics of the traditional vampire – though he couldn’t imagine her lowering herself to drink anything less effervescent than champagne or putting on bat-wings and hopping from one chimney pot to the next.

Giovanni Jones stalked through the crowd with an oversized cardboard dagger stuck out of his back. In a company where several guests dressed as the proverbial spectre at the feast, the baritone made the extra effort to secure the role for his own.

The Persian recognised a comely Prince Hamlet as Ayda Heidari and patted his pockets to make sure his wallet and watch were still about his person. Then he remembered
Les Vampires
liked to send an obvious thief into a crowd to make people do exactly what he had just done so the pickpocket you
didn’t
recognise knew where to strike. Ayda saw his aghast look and came over to say she was off-duty tonight.

‘Did you enjoy the opera?’ he asked.

‘Too much blood,’ she said, and was whirled away, pounced on by a duchess of a certain age who mistook her for a young lad – or perhaps didn’t much care who was inside the doublet and hose. Opera balls were notoriously licentious.

With a threefold pincer movement, the Countesses trapped the singer Gravelle under a twenty-foot statue of Salome holding a severed head on a plate. As they competed to lick him all over, his bass baritone rose to tenor yelps. One of the Countesses bit his earlobe too enthusiastically. A knot of gawkers obscured the view, which was just as well.

The Persian was surprised to see the bold vampire hunter Inspecteur d’Aaubert holding court by the buffet table, in full dress uniform with plumed hat and sword. A very fair woman in a simple green dress was at his side.

Making it his business to drift closer to the group, the Persian overheard the Inspector expressing confidence in the likeliness of an early arrest in the stone-cold murder at the Hôtel Meurice.

‘The nights of
Les Vampires
are numbered.’

‘Our old friend must be missed,’ suggested a tall gentleman who had a Viennese accent.

‘Of course,’ said d’Aubert. ‘The Count de Rosillon was a fine fellow, very high up in… you know… intelligence.’

The policeman made gestures which suggested but did not outright state that the victim was a dauntless servant of the state murdered for getting too close to exposing a treasonous conspiracy.

‘You surprise me, Raoul,’ said the tall gentleman. ‘The Camille I remember would be the least likely to be accused of association with… intelligence.’

The Persian took a drink – champagne sacrilegiously diluted with Scotch whisky – and attached himself to the group. The Phantom might have refused the request of the Grand Vampire, but it was a good idea for the Agency to keep up on the latest Parisian crimes.

None of d’Aubert’s cronies were suspicious characters – which, experience suggested, was what made them worth watching.

The Viennese wore a smart black cloak. A fanged bat-mask was pushed up into his hair so he could drink. He had a pencil-stroke moustache and arched eyebrows. Beside him was a square-faced, square-shouldered woman in middle-age with iron-grey hair, determined eyes and pince-nez. The Austrian was affable and easily distracted but this lady – whom the Persian took to be Dutch – was grimly intent on pinning the policeman down.

‘My learning I have placed at the disposal of the Sûreté,’ she said, ‘but my letters unanswered go. Impertinent sergeants turn me aside when in person I call on your office. Realise you not how ridiculous is your theory of vampires? Why, a fact accepted by all European science is that…
such things, they cannot be
!’

D’Aubert looked trapped. He must have hoped for a nice evening off at the opera.

The blonde in green rescued the Inspector by talking to the Persian.

‘We haven’t met,’ she said, ‘but I know who you are. You are a retired police chief from the East, aren’t you?’

The Persian was surprised. Few noticed him as more than a slinking background figure.

This lady was rather dazzling, too. Very sharp smile. Pearly teeth.

‘I’m the new coroner,’ she said, extending her dainty hand, ‘Geneviève Dieudonné.’

The Persian clicked his heels and pressed his moustache to her knuckles. Her fingers were slightly cool.

‘A
retired
police chief,’ snarled d’Aubert. ‘I suppose you’ve a theory about the de Rosillon murder too. A great many amateurs buzz about this case, like flies on… on substances flies like to buzz on.’

‘I only know what I read in the papers, Inspector,’ the Persian said. ‘I am happily retired and content to leave murders and vampires to active officers.’

‘An example it would do some very well to follow,’ responded the policeman, looking pointedly at the Dutch woman.

‘I am Michel Falke,’ announced the Viennese. ‘Dr Falke.’

‘Another coroner?’

‘A lawyer, though I do not practice. I have an interest in crimes of this stripe. Twenty-five years ago, when I was first in Paris, vampire rumours were rife. Doubtless you remember, Raoul? Mysteries were a passion with our little circle at the Sorbonne. Even then, you were a bloodhound.’

Inspecteur d’Aubert was eager for those old rumours to be aired. Or perhaps he didn’t care to be reminded of his student enthusiasms.

Beneath his suavity, Falke was taut as a bowstring. His eyes gleamed when he spoke. The Persian wondered if he were another adept of mesmerism.

‘There
are
vampires, you know,’ Falke continued. ‘In my homeland, the Karnsteins preyed for centuries on the peasants around their estate… and the undead stalk Europe still.’

‘Nonsense and stuff,’ said the older woman. ‘Such rot I have heard from my deluded husband these many years long. We have no place for folkish tales in this Century Nineteen.’

‘This is Professor Van Helsing,’ explained Dr Dieudonné.

‘I have heard of—’

‘Not
him
,’ said the woman. ‘You are thinking of my mad husband, the head-of-fatness who sets stock in such things. Abraham is in the news often, for breaking into churchyards and abominably mistreating the dead. I am Professor Madame Saartje Van Helsing, occupant of the Erasmus Chair of Rational Philosophy at the University of Leiden.’

‘The Professor is a debunker,’ said Dr Dieudonné. ‘She banishes ghosts not with bell, book and candle but with the clear light of logic.’

‘Is not
this
house haunted?’ asked Falke. ‘One hears stories of a Phantom.’

The Persian choked a little on his drink.

Madame Van Helsing took in a deep breath, obviously to deliver a stern lecture on the non-existence of phantoms… when a fanfare sounded. All attention was drawn to the top of the stairs.

Erik made an entrance.

The Persian was astonished. The
Macbeth
craze had reached further than he would have thought possible.

The Phantom wore a kilt, a sporran, a tartan sash and a tam o’ shanter with a feather stuck in it. Dirk and claymore were thrust in his belt. Even his tartan socks had little tartan tags on them. His mask was red and trailed blood-coloured ribbons over his mouth.

He was accompanied by three pretty witches. Unorna wore a
papier-mâché
nose and a stuck-on wart to set off her pointy hat. Sophy was green in the face and showed striped stockings. La Marmoset had sculpted her hair up into horns and sported black lipstick and cheeks hollowed by paint.

They were an extraordinary group, but no more than any other present.

As Erik descended the stairs, the crowd’s attention was drawn to the scandalous Countesses’ latest jape. Having dropped the used-up Gravelle on a divan, they were swarming all over Franz Liszt. Tugging at his long white hair and fumbling with his cassock, they hissed impertinent questions about how a heroic libertine of his reputation could in old age become a monk. The Persian recalled that the composer, now extremely infirm, was an ordained exorcist. Could he get rid of these tantalising temptations with holy water and the sign of the cross? Or would he even want to?

Upstaged, Erik stood in a corner, looking ominous – his usual trick at masked balls.

The Angels scurried over to the Persian and his new acquaintances.

T
HEY WERE NOT
on a case, but minds could not be turned off like gaslights.

La Marmoset was in costume, but not in disguise. No imaginary person buzzed around in her brain. It was rather soothing. Was this how Erik felt with his mask on, in his shadows, untroubled by the need to show a face to other people?

Unorna and Sophy kept quiet, but took in tiny details. They were learning the method from her.

‘Now
that’s
suspicious activity,’ said the Queen of Detectives.

‘What is?’ asked the Persian.

‘Everything…’

She made a gesture which encompassed the whole room.

‘Those Romanians…’ said Unorna. ‘Tchah! We know of them in Prague.
Tsigane
, harlots and thieves!’

Unorna meant the Countesses, who had abandoned an elderly composer to rush at a young army officer. They took turns trying on his helmet and fiddling with his sword-handle, while laughing so shrilly that his gold braid and medals shook.

‘They are thoughtless and foolish,’ said Sophy. ‘They should have a care not to be presumed upon by scoundrels.’

All three women had jewels stuck randomly in their hair and hung off their persons, like ripe red apples hung from Christmas trees. The coffers of their husband must be deep… and he must be a tolerant, careless fellow to let such kittens off the leash. Or else he didn’t yet know about his ladies’ Paris holiday.

‘I believe that’s why they are here,’ said the Persian. ‘They can afford to be presumed upon and so are…’

The Persian introduced Inspector d’Aubert, Dr Dieudonné, Professor Van Helsing and Dr Falke.

‘I know La Marmoset of old,’ said d’Aubert. ‘How are you, Madame?’

The policeman looked sheepish. He probably expected aggressive advice on catching the murderer. From experience, she guessed he had long since exceeded his annual quota of listening politely to important people who would easily solve the case themselves if only they would lower themselves to take such a poorly paid position as policeman.