Angels of Music (29 page)

‘She means Georges Du Roy…’ said Clara.

Kate shrugged, not confirming or denying.

‘…and his circle,’ continued Clara. ‘Mortain, Assolant, Pradier, de Kern?’

Prosper-Georges Du Roy de Cantel, once humble Georges Duroy, had risen from the ranks. This was literally the case – he had soldiered in the Franco-Prussian War, the action against the Commune and Algeria. Mustered out, he worked as a reporter, then became editor and – through advantageous marriage – proprietor of
La Vie Française
, an upper-middle class newspaper. He added publications to his empire, including the vicious
L’Antijuif
. Everyone made the effort to forget his late father-in-law, from whom he inherited
La Vie
, was one of the Jewish financiers now cast as Satan in the Modern Testament of France. Kate had some respect for the earlier part of his career, when he was a fiery exponent of causes as well as a ferociously ambitious social climber. He had campaigned righteously against Panama Canal feather-bedding and unconscionably in support of the Dreyfus conviction, bringing down several governments. Moving from publishing into politics, he represented Averoigne in the Chamber of Deputies – though he had more influence through his papers than speeches made in the National Assembly. Presidents took suggestions from him as orders. Founder of one of several competing Anti-Semitic Societies, his editorials suggested he saw Jews under the bed… or behind every imaginable ill besetting the Third Republic. When it deigned to cover ‘the Montmartre Disappearances’ at all,
La Vie
pointed the finger at mad rabbis.

The Persian was unreadable. Did he think even Erik might hesitate to act against Du Roy?

‘You’d like it to be him, wouldn’t you, Katie,’ said Clara. ‘A proper villain for the melodrama. You were driven out of England because you crossed someone like Georges Du Roy. How much more satisfying to bring him down than to find out the killer is… well, Bertrand Caillet? A broken wretch, as powerless and low-born as his victims.’

‘Caillet?’ said the Persian. ‘The ghoul? I don’t see…’

‘He was in the play,
Daroga
. One of the
horreurs
. Guignol threw him out as an example… a small monster in a world run by huge ones.’

The Persian looked at Kate. ‘You’re basing your theory
on a play
?’

‘She was prompted by the play itself,’ Clara admitted. ‘At the end, Guignol brought on Du Roy and his gang and represented them as the Legion of Horror. The priest in the next box, who muttered “whore” with wet lips whenever Berma was tortured, went bright red at this outrage. I admit I was surprised. It was out of place. The notion of the
Légion d’Horreur
is quite funny.’

‘The rest of the performance was random nastiness,’ Kate said. ‘But this was pointed. Almost an editorial.’

‘Yes… disappointing. I thought Guignol was supposed to be a Pan-like unfettered spirit, not some mere bomb-throwing anarchist.’

‘You’re missing the point, Clara. It’s not the offence that’s interesting and suspicious – it’s the quiet.’

‘The quiet?’

‘Why hasn’t Guignol been called out? If Du Roy is no longer up to a duel himself, plenty of his faction is.’

‘There is no honour in French duelling,’ said Yuki. ‘Pistols –
tchah
!’

‘For some reason, Guignol is protected. He has a license to insult the people you would think would most be capable of shutting him up.’

‘She sees Freemasons behind it all… or Jesuits,’ said Clara. ‘She’s as bad as Du Roy and his Jews.’

That stung, but she pressed on.

‘I suspect that if we find out why the
Chevaliers de la Légion d’Horreur
tolerate the
Théâtre des Horreurs
we’ll learn what’s behind the murders. If it’s as big as it seems, I’ll tell you from experience no one will thank us for bringing it to light… if we’re even allowed to.’

The Persian smiled, very slightly – a rare thing for him.

‘Miss Reed, you misunderstand. Our Agency has not been commissioned to expose these murders,
but to end them
.’

A
N ITEM OF
business remained.

Kate showed the slashes in her sleeve.

‘You’ve been careless,’ said Clara.

‘In that case, so have you.’

Kate pointed, and Clara twisted her neck. Parallel cuts in her bodice opened like wounds, just above her hip.

Clara whistled. ‘I didn’t even feel a breeze.’

Yuki found the neat slashes in her kimono, like vents in her sleeve.

‘Only something sharp could do this without us noticing,’ the Japanese woman said. ‘Very fine blades. A skilled hand.’

She took three teaspoons and slipped them between her fingers, then made a fist. The spoons were spatulate claws. She scratched the air, to demonstrate.

Kate supposed Yuki could do more damage with spoons than the average
apache
with stilettos.

She remembered the sharp-nailed fingers of Guignol, three little daggers poking through ruptured gloves.

‘I saw… I think I saw Guignol,’ said Kate.

‘A man in a mask,’ said Clara. ‘He could have been anyone.’

‘I saw him too,’ said Yuki. ‘The real Guignol. The one from the theatre. Different costume, different
mask
… but the same eyes.’

The Persian did not show concern.

‘I think we can take it that we’ve been warned,’ said Kate. ‘All of us are alive only because Guignol let us live.’

Yuki put the spoons down. Despite the counted coup, she still fancied her chances in a parasol-against-claws duel.

Well, maybe…

Clara was annoyed. She didn’t have as many dresses with her as she’d like. Expelled from China with only a few negotiable jewels, she couldn’t pay European couture prices. She’d asked for a dressmakers’ allowance on top of her salary. The Persian countered that any clothing needs would be met by the costume department. As a result of long-standing agreements, many resources of the Opéra were at the disposal of Erik. Kate thought it’d be funny if Clara were to swan about dressed as Emilia di Liverpool or Maria Stuarda. For her own part, she’d fish out her travelling sewing kit and make invisible repairs.

The English woman examined the rents in her dress, touching her own unmarked skin, feeling her unbroken ribs. She was white as porcelain all over. Did she bathe in arsenic or bleach?

‘This was not a warning,’ said Yuki. ‘Snakes do not give warnings. They simply strike. This is an invitation.’

‘To a tea-dance?’ sneered Clara.

Kate remembered the dance she’d seen at the café. The
apache
flinging his girl around, beating her up to music.

The girl got her slaps and slices in, though – and that’s how the man liked it.

‘Couldn’t we just cut off the clown’s head?’ asked Clara, wearily. ‘And burn down his bloody playhouse. That would solve the Guignol problem. No theatre, no theatre murders.’

‘Easy to say, hard to do,’ said Kate. ‘Too many Guignol masks around. It’d be a risky call picking which head to chop.’

‘Chop them all. Pile up the heads.’

‘You should be in show business, Clara. I know exactly the company for you.’

Childishly, Clara poked out the scarlet tip of her tongue and pulled a Gorgon-face. Kate couldn’t help laughing.

The Persian again defused the exchange of unpleasantries.

‘Angels, please. This is not a school-room. Seemliness is required. This latest development is a cause for concern. Monsieur Erik will take any action against his Agents very hard. There would be… counter-actions.’

‘So we can be the first casualties in a war of the masks?’

‘Miss Reed, the Opera Ghost Agency will not allow that to happen.’

Yuki was fascinated by the tears in her sleeve. ‘A personage who can do this will be difficult to stop.’

K
ATE SPENT THE
next few days trying to determine if any connection existed between Guignol and the Georges Du Roy circle.

Representing herself (not untruthfully) as an interested foreign journalist, she paid calls on distant associates among the Paris press. She spent dusty hours in newspaper archives and government records offices. If nothing else, her French was improving. She had promised to send reports to the
Gazette
on anything that might interest English readers. Without telling the Persian, she had drafted an article on the Guignol craze, with a description of her evening at the
Théâtre des Horreurs
. It was supposed in London that entertainments in Paris were
spicier
than home-grown fare. Newspapers were duty-bound to describe in detail the frightful, salacious attractions the British public was spared.

She left her
carte de visite
at the dreary Hôtel d’Alsace, Oscar Wilde’s digs. The
concierge
said the poet was too poorly to receive even a fellow exile. Back on Rue des Beaux Arts, she could identify his room from a twitching curtain. Kate missed the Oscar of old. His passion for gossip might have opened up the mystery like a paper flower. Wilde was out of prison but in Paris; Zola was in London to avoid prison. The lesson was that upstart genius should be put firmly in its place.

It wasn’t lost on her that Wilde and Henry Wilcox were guilty of essentially the same crime. Wilde was formally sentenced to hard labour and informally to humiliating exile, yet no one even tried to prosecute Wilcox. Consorting with rent-boys – even she, a partisan, said Oscar was a fool in his choice of bed-mates – got an Irishman chased out of England. Consorting with their figurative (and sometimes actual) younger sisters didn’t prevent Wilcox from driving an Irish woman out of the country. Any excuse to be rid of the mouthy micks, she supposed.

Kate fancied she occasionally saw Guignol out of the corner of her eye. At Madame Mandelip’s, Clara reluctantly admitted to the same impression. Could they both be followed by the same clown? Or were masks handed out to minions? Yuki said she was no longer being tailed. Was Guignol warier of the Japanese Angel than the others?

Something
was
going on between Guignol and the
Légion d’Horreur
, but it was identifiable only by ellipses. That Du Roy and the others took no measures to suppress the
Théâtre des Horreurs
after the accusing tableau was singular. An unanswered public rebuke was extraordinary in a city where offhand remarks provoked duels, vitriol-douches and near-revolution. In Paris, poets started more café brawls than stevedores. Rival high-fashion couturiers slashed each other with scissors in the 8th Arrondissement. An unknown patriot shot Fernand Labori, Zola’s defence lawyer, in the back. Marquis d’Amblezy-Sérac, the minister charged with enforcing laws against duelling, fought – and won! – a duel in answer to a challenge from Aristide Forestier, a magistrate who insisted that the right of every Frenchman to try to stick a sword into or put a bullet through any other Frenchman with whom he disagreed was an unwritten yet enforceable clause of the Code Napoléon.

Did Guignol have something on Du Roy which kept him safe? A Lumière cinematograph of the French patriot sharing a bubble bath with Captain Dreyfus, Lily Langtry and the Kaiser? A suppressed family tree which proved the avowed anti-Semite was secretly a Jew? Or was Guignol the creature of the
Légion d’Horreur
, afforded token license because of appalling services rendered? The murders were part of it, but not – she was sure – the whole story.

As she asked her questions and looked through files, Kate was aware of a parallel investigation. Clara Watson was moving through shadier circles on a like quest, securing entry to the murkier dives of Paris to wring information from wretches and débauchées. Pursuing her own predilections, the English widow attended bare-knuckles bouts held among racks of skulls in the catacombs. She picked up whispered horrors from opium dens, salons of vice, black masses and condemned cells. She collected gossip from the Guild of Procurers,
Les Vampires
and a branch of the Suicide Club. Clara’s underworld voyages often crossed paths with Kate’s more respectable lines of enquiry. That suggested they were both getting warmer. Still, answers were elusive.

Other stories circulated, which Kate felt were connected. Henriette and Louise, two orphan sisters, were missing in Montmartre. Friends said they were running away to join a circus. No circus admitted to taking them in. Their pale little faces, idealised in illustrations, epitomised the disappeared. Even the Sûreté took an interest, but an array of famous criminologists – Alphonse Bertillon, Frédéric Larsan, Inspecteur Juve – failed to find the lost girls. After an afternoon at the Bureau of Missing Persons, Kate knew less appealing people vanished by the dozen in the
quartier
without exciting public interest.

At the
Hôpital des Poupées
, Yuki took over the window and arranged a display of
kokeshi
. Kate found the limbless wooden dolls disturbing, like human-headed fence-posts. Meanwhile, the Persian awaited regular reports from Kate and Clara.

After a week, the Angels were again in conference in the doll salon.

There was a little blood on Clara’s coat. She told them not to worry – it wasn’t hers. The English widow wasn’t leery of sailing into dangerous waters. Clara might be mad, but she was intelligent and – in her own way – cautious. She even did good detective work.

The Persian asked Kate for a report on the
Légion d’Horreur
.

‘Georges Du Roy and the others go back a long way,’ Kate said. ‘The real Bertrand Caillet was tried twenty years before the Commune. On stage at the
Théâtre des Horreurs
, he is arrested in 1871, during its last days. The play shifts the murderer’s story forward in time to contrast his crimes with the greater carnage of
la Semaine Sanglante
. It’s as if Guignol is telling us where to look.’

‘You see the hand of Guignol everywhere,’ said Clara.

‘Don’t you?’

The widow shrugged. ‘Perhaps.’

‘Whatever the point of the show might be – and I’ve no reason to believe it isn’t primarily the obvious one, to shock and appal and titillate – the
Légion d’Horreur
were all in Paris at the time of the Commune. I can’t prove it yet, but I believe this was when our five respectable fellows first met.