Angels of Music (2 page)

It was circulated in the proverbial circles that those who wished to engage the Opera Ghost Agency must first make contact with the Persian or, for more delicate matters, Madame Giry, the Keeper of Box Five. These loyal operatives would convey the details of the case to the Phantom himself. Often Erik was already well apprised of matters in which prospective clients wished him to take an interest. Thanks to an intricate array of tubes and shutters, he could eavesdrop on gossip uttered in any box, dressing room or lavatory in the house. Few matters of moment troubled the city without being discussed somewhere within the Paris Opéra. Once a case came to Erik’s attention, it was his decision – unaffected by the scale of fee on offer – whether a commission was accepted or declined.

If accepted, a bell sounded.

B
ELLS WERE FOREVER
ringing around the house, to summon artistes, dressers, musicians, commissionaires, wine-waiters, clerks, servants, composers, scene-shifters, rat-catchers, chorus girls, washer-women. Bells were sounded to alert the audience when a performance was about to commence or resume. Not to mention the cow-, sheep- or goat-bells rung by percussionists when pieces with rustic settings were given. Only a finely tuned ear could distinguish individual tones among such tintinnabulation. But our three girls knew their bell. When it tinkled, anything they happened to be doing – no matter how important – was set aside in their haste to make their way to a dressing room at the end of a basement corridor which had apparently been abandoned as too far from the great stage for convenience.

When Erik rang the bell, Christine Daaé was in a scuttle-shaped bathtub, all a-lather, singing scales… Trilby O’Ferrall was posing in a sunlit upper room for a class of impoverished art students who’d pooled meagre funds to purchase an hour of her time… and Irene Adler was practising her lock-picking blindfolded, working away with hairpins and clever fingers.

Within moments, the tub stood empty, the students disappointed and the lock unpicked. The girls nipped swiftly to answer the summons, using dumb-waiters, trapdoors and other byways known only to intimates of Charles Garnier. They arrived simultaneously at Dressing Room 313. The Persian looked up from the latest number of
La Petite Parisien
and flapped a hand at them, the smoke from his Turkish cigarette making a question mark in the air. The trio arranged themselves on a divan before the large, green-speckled mirror. Christine and Trilby were still wriggling into suitable clothes. They helped each other with hooks and buttons. Irene coolly replaced the pins she had been using as lock-picks. When the Persian turned down the gaslight, it was possible to discern a chamber beyond the mirror’s thin silvering. A slender shadow stood there, extravagantly cloaked and hatted, violin tucked under his chin. Erik extemporised the sort of ‘hurry up’ trill used to encourage unpopular acts to get off the stage in
salles des variétés
as the girls concluded their business with a minimum of pinching and tutting.

‘What’s the ruckus this time, Bright Boy?’ asked Irene, whose speech still bore the pernicious influence of her native New Jersey. ‘Is some mug tryin’ ta knock over the Louvre again?’

‘Could it be a plot to bring down the government?’ asked Trilby.

‘Or set off dynamite under Notre-Dame?’ asked Christine.

The Persian exhaled a smoke ring. ‘Nothing so everyday, ladies.’

All eyes turned to the mirror. Trilby, by a degree the prettiest of our trio and a long chalk the most vain, fussed with her short brown curls, accompanied by a teasing little violin tune. She noticed the others looking at her, smiled sweetly and put her hands in her lap as if about to listen dutifully to a sermon.

The violin was set down and a sepulchral voice sounded, conveyed into the room through a speaking tube with a woodwind tone.

‘Our client,’ said Erik, ‘is most exalted. In fact, a president.’

‘The President of the Republic!’ exclaimed Christine, saluting.

With the shortage of male chorus – thanks to the brutal levies of the Franco-Prussian War, the Siege, the Commune and
la Semaine Sanglante
– the boyish Daaé frame was often gussied up
en travestie
in braided uniform. She was better at close-order drill than any lad in the company. Off duty, as it were, she often favoured military tunics. Though born in Sweden, she had been raised mostly in France and was a true patriotess. She could have posed for the image of Marianne if, unlike the often-painted Trilby, she were not addicted to the fidgets.

‘It can’t be that maroon in the White House!’ said Irene Adler.

‘Ireland hasn’t got a president, more’s the pity,’ muttered Trilby – born in Paris of an Irish father and a French mother, never to set foot on the green sod from which she inherited her complexion. ‘Just the cursed God English, and their fat little German Queen.’

‘Our client is far more respected than a mere head of state,’ said Erik. ‘She is
la Présidente
. Apollonie Sabatier,
née
Joséphine-Aglaé Savatier. Her salon may be more vital to
la vie parisienne
than any government building, museum or cathedral.’

‘Salon?’ queried Christine.

‘He means whorehouse,’ explained Irene. ‘What Miss Potato’s Limey oppressors call “a knocking-shop”.’

Trilby good-humouredly stuck her tongue out at Irene.

‘I’ve heard of Madame Sabatier,’ said Trilby. ‘She’s one of those Horizontal Giantesses.’

‘Indeed,’ continued Erik. ‘The most upstanding, indeed paradoxically vertical of the nation’s
grandes horizontales
. You will have seen her portrait by Meissonier, her statue by Clésinger.’

‘That Baudelaire freak was nuts about her,’ said Irene.

There was a pause. It would be easy to conceive of a yellowish, skeletal brow wrinkling in a frown, a lipless mouth attempting a moue of displeasure, a glint of irritation in sunken yellow eyes.

‘What did I say?’ whined Irene. ‘Everyone knows the guy was ga-ga for the dame. Did you ever see Baudelaire? Weirdest-looking turkey this side of the state fair, mooning over this overpriced sporting gal. Most ridiculous thing you ever heard of. Just like Beauty and the Beast!’

An exhalation of impatience hissed through the speaking tube.

The Phantom had a particular, personal dislike of the Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont fairy tale known far and wide as
La Belle et la Bête
. When the management attempted to revive André Grétry’s
Zémire et Azor
, a once-popular
opéra comique
inspired by the story, the production was dogged by a run of bad luck. At the end of the dress rehearsal, the luckless tenor cast as Azor discovered that the inside of his beast mask had been cruelly coated with indissoluble glue. The prank became unpleasantly apparent when he attempted to tear off his mask to take a bow. No understudy would take the role on opening night, and the piece was replaced at the last moment by a less controversial item from the repertoire, Daniel Auber’s
Fra Diavolo, ou L’Hôtellerie de Terracine
.

Irene thought over her comments about ugly geniuses smitten with beautiful women, looked again at the silhouette beyond the mirror, and paled in rigid terror. She had spoken without thinking, which was unlike her.

Without the benefit of ‘music lessons’, Irene was less schooled than Christine and Trilby in the discipline expected of Erik’s operatives.

Eventually, the hissing became a normal susurrus, and Erik resumed.

‘It is true that the Salon Sabatier has been the haunt of poets and artists.
La Présidente
has admirers among our greatest creative minds.’

‘I know all about the minds of poets and painters,’ said Trilby. ‘Filth and degeneracy is what goes around in their clever little brains. Enough scribblers and daubers have trotted after me. Ought to be ashamed, so they should.’

Trilby spat in her hand and crossed herself. It was something her father often did when pledging to creditors that funds would be available by the end of the week, just before the O’Ferrall
ménage
moved to a new, usually less salubrious address.

‘Our client requires us to display great sensitivity and tact,’ decreed Erik.

‘None of the tittle or the tattle,’ said Christine.

‘Exactly. In the course of this investigation, you might well become privy to information which
la Présidente
and her particular friends…’

‘Johns,’ put in Irene.

‘…would not wish to be generally known.’

‘Have you noticed how these fancy fellers
always
think their wives don’t know a thing?’ said Trilby. ‘Bless their hearts. They’re like tiny children. Wouldn’t they be surprised if they knew what their missuses got up to while they’re tomcatting about town?’

All three laughed. Christine, it had to be said, frequently did not quite ‘get’ the meaning of her friends’ comments – especially when, as was their habit, they spoke in English – but was alert enough to conceal occasional ignorance by chiming in with musical giggles. Her chief trait was adorability, and foolish fellows were already composing remarkably poor sonnets about the smallness of her nose with ambitions towards epic verse on the subject of the rest of her anatomy. Trilby was older than the others, though no one would ever tell to look at her. Her greater experience of the artistic life inclined her to be protective of her baby sisters. Foolish fellows in her presence tended to be struck dumb, as if she were a vision at Lourdes. Sometimes, a glazed look came into her eyes, and she seemed a different, more ethereal, slightly frightening person.

Irene, in years the youngest, was a harder nut to crack, and men thought her handsome rather than pretty, as dangerous as alluring. She put it about that she fled her homeland after knifing a travelling preacher for whom she had been shilling. It was considerably more complicated than that. She often imagined returning to New York on the arm of one of the crowned heads she had seen in the rotogravure. In her copy-book, she had already designed an Adler coat of arms – an American eagle, beak deep in the side of a screaming naked Prometheus. A foolish fellow who stepped out with her tended to find some unknown
apache
had lifted their note-case, snuff-box, cuff-links and watch during the course of a delightful evening with a disappointing curtain.

‘It is a matter of a man and his wife which has been brought before us,’ announced Erik. ‘The man of some distinction, the woman an unknown.’

The Persian undid the ribbon on a large wallet, and slid out clippings from the popular press, a wedding brochure, photographic plates and other documents. These were passed among the girls.

Some excitement was expressed at a reproduced portrait of a handsome fellow in the uniform of a brigadier of the armies of the late Emperor. There was cooing of admiration for a curly moustache and upright sabre. With a touch of malice, the Persian handed over a more recent likeness, in which the golden boy was all but unrecognisable. These days, the soldier was an enormous, shaggy-browed, weathered hulk, a pudding of flesh decorated with innumerable medals.

‘You recognise Étienne Gérard, retired Grand Marshal of France, still reckoned one of our most influential citizens,’ said Erik. ‘No one is as canny as he when it comes to badgering the right politician to change a procurement policy or effect a strategy of preparedness.’

‘He started shouting “the Prussians are coming, the Prussians are coming” just after von Blücher bloodied his nose at Waterloo,’ said Christine. ‘I had an uncle like that.’

‘Of course,’ said Trilby, ‘the Prussians really were coming.’

‘That doesn’t make the old man any less a booby.’

‘You’re behind the times, Chrissy,’ put in Irene. ‘Gérard stopped tooting that particular trumpet a few months back. He’s a changed man since he got hitched to this little social-climber. Now, he’s big on beating swords into ploughshares and insisting the French people have no greater pal than Bismarck.’

The wedding brochure commemorated the joining-together of Grand Marshal Gérard with his bride, Poupée Francis-Pierre.

‘He’s over ninety and she’s what… sixteen?’ said Trilby.

‘Precise details about Madame Gérard’s age, background or qualities are hard to come by,’ said Erik. ‘Such information is one objective of our investigation.’

‘I heard she was a dancer,’ said Christine, looking at a studio photograph of the bride. ‘Looks like she’s made of porcelain. You’d think she’d
snap
if the old goat so much as touched her.’

‘Is she one of
la Présidente
’s dollymops?’ asked Irene. ‘Some addlehead dotards go for that rouge-cheeked widdle girlie act.’

‘Madame Gérard is
not
a former ornament of the Salon Sabatier,’ said Erik. ‘Indeed, she is the cause of some consternation among the girls there. Before his nuptials, the Grand Marshal, despite his advancing years, was an especially favoured and enthusiastic regular customer.’

‘Tarts like ’em old and rich,’ said Trilby. ‘They can’t do much, but pay well over the odds.’

Irene laughed, and Christine joined in.

‘Though not of an artistic temperament,’ continued Erik, ‘Grand Marshal Gérard found Madame Sabatier’s establishment more to his liking than many rival houses run to cater to more military tastes.’

‘Boots and whips,’ shuddered Irene.

‘Subsequent to his wedding, he has not visited the Salon.’

‘No wonder. He’s getting poked for free at home.’

‘
La
, Irène, you say such things,’ tittered Christine.

‘Madame Sabatier reports that losing a longstanding patron to marriage is an accepted risk of her business. However, she takes pride in the fact that, with this single exception, her clients have returned within three months of their honeymoons, and been more generous than before in the matter of recompense and gifts, usually with an added exhortation to increased discretion.’

Christine laughed out loud, musically. ‘The Madame is deluded. Look at Gérard’s life, all the way back to the last century. All those exploits and adventures. He’s obviously a reckless romantic.’