Angels of Music (30 page)

‘Assolant and Du Roy were soldiers with the army of Versailles, young officers commanding
un escadron de mort
. They weren’t in the fighting, they carried out executions. It’s hard to credit now, but Mortain and Pradier were Communards. They began in politics as radicals, followers of Blanqui and social justice. As the Commune fell apart, they changed their spots. Père de Kern was a hostage, one of the few to survive. De Kern brought the others together, serving as intermediary. Mortain and Pradier betrayed comrades to the Squadron of Death and got free passes from Assolant and Du Roy. In the aftermath of Bloody Week, Mortain and Pradier were listed as spies for Versailles. It was claimed they only
posed as
Communards. Anyone who could say different was put against a wall. Assolant was promoted, but Du Roy did a spell in Algeria before leaving the army to begin his ascent as a man of letters and then in politics.

‘The five have been allies for nearly forty years. They look out for each other. If financial scandal threatens to engulf Mortain, a stern editorial in
La Vie Française
insists on his innocence. A chorister who accused de Kern of vile practices finds himself up before Judge Pradier on dubious charges and transported to the penal colony of New Caledonia. When Assolant is implicated in an attempted coup, Du Roy nominates him for further honours and accolades. In 1871, they were enemies. Now, they are closer than brothers.’

‘Interesting, Miss Reed,’ said the Persian. ‘But I am reminded of Mrs Watson’s objection of a few nights ago… that you would
like
these people to be guilty. You despise men of their class and position. It would suit your prejudices if they were outright monsters.’

Kate tried to take this into account. Investigating Henry Wilcox, she had at every turn questioned her own instincts. Erring on the side of wariness, she hadn’t put anything in print until she had two or more reliable sources. Unsubstantiated rumours were set aside, no matter how credible she found them. Here, she used the same method … all but ignoring a wealth of second- or third-hand stories, sticking to verifiable facts, even if evidence suggested records had been altered or destroyed. She was satisfied she had enough to indict Du Roy and his cronies on a raft of charges going back decades – though she wouldn’t have trusted the French (or British) courts to deliver a just verdict. What she couldn’t do was make a firm link between the
Légion d’Horreur
and the Montmartre murders.

The Persian looked to Clara, whose expression was hard to read.

‘I have decided to withdraw my objection,’ said Clara.

Kate noted the odd, legalistic turn of phrase.

‘On what grounds?’ asked the Persian.

‘I now believe Katie is right. These are the guilty men.’

‘You have proof?’

‘Of course not. These are not men who leave proof. It’s all feelings and intuition. You employ only women, and this is what you must expect…’

Kate wanted to slap Clara for that, even if she was a convert to the cause.

‘In quarters where people aren’t easy to scare, the names of these men give pause,’ explained Clara. ‘There are creatures out there in the dark, people you might call
monsters
, who are more terrified of Georges Du Roy than of… well, than of the Phantom of the Opera. They can’t be worried about a harshly worded article in
La Vie Française
or an inconvenient ruling in the Assembly. The others have evil reputations too.

‘Dr Johannes, the Satanist, says Père de Kern is the worst man in Paris. He doesn’t mean it in the inverted sense that a devout diabolist should abjure a moral churchman. Johannes means it literally. The Worst Man in Paris. Monsters aren’t born – they are made. The orphanages supervised by de Kern are factories for making them – cruelty, privation and hypocrisy applied systematically to warp young minds and bodies. De Kern has raised
generations
of them, an army of freaks. I would admire the enterprise, but for its utter lack of aesthetic qualities.

‘Assolant is a butcher, of course, and a blunderer. He killed more Frenchmen than Germans even before he was given the pull-string of his own personal guillotine in Bloody Week. Mortain and Pradier are make-weights. They have survived this long because Du Roy shields them. According to their cast-off mistresses, Mortain follows the leanings of the Marquis de Sade – a sure sign of the poseur among true practitioners of the Art of Torture – while Pradier is inclined to the pitiful vice of Sacher-Masoch.

‘They are the guilty men. Everyone I have raised this matter with says so. Then they cannot say what it is they are guilty of. Or will not, despite…
methods of extreme persuasion
.’

When she said ‘methods of extreme persuasion’, Clara shuddered with what Kate took to be delight. She was no poseur in her preferred art.

Kate’s
frisson
was of another character.

‘Could any of the
Légion be
Guignol?’ she asked. ‘I mean, we’ve all assumed that the nimble masked performer is a younger man. There are drugs and potions. A Du Roy or a de Kern could quaff something to turn them into an agile imp for a few hours. Long enough to get through the show.’

‘But the curtain comes down on a condemnation of these men?’ objected Clara.

‘Does it? Or is that tableau a
boast
?’

Clara thought for a moment.

‘Or the snook cocked against the
Légion d’Horreur
might be a feint,’ suggested Kate. ‘Like the taunts of Hyde against Jekyll.’

‘Unlikely,’ said Clara. ‘These people have enough enemies without becoming their own dark shadows.’

‘That’s true,’ said the Persian.

Kate admitted it. ‘Guignol could be someone from their history – a survivor of Bloody Week, tipped alive into a corpse-pit by the Squadron of Death, crawling out with a mania for revenge. A subordinate thrown to the wolves to take the blame for crimes they got away with, back in town after years of fever and abuse in a far-off mangrove swamp or desert stockade. Or one of your army of freaks, Clara, shaped by harsh treatment into a broken
übermensch
. But if that’s the case, why not kill them? Ridicule seems feeble revenge.’

‘A Frenchman would rather be assassinated than made to look silly,’ said Clara. ‘The French, they are a funny race, they fight with their feet… they make love with their face.’

‘I’ve heard that before, more crudely put.’

‘I was trying to spare your delicate Dublin sensitivities.’

‘There are rhymes about the English too, in Dublin. Oh, and everywhere else they’ve run up their flag and marched about.’

‘So we are no nearer a provable truth,’ said the Persian, interceding again.

Since their last verbal fencing match, Kate realised – rather alarmingly – that Clara Watson
liked
her. She wouldn’t have thought the scarlet widow capable of such a feeling, and it was little comfort. One story put around about Clara was that in Benares she made arrangements to have her best friend infected with leprosy. As Angels of Music, Kate and Clara had to sing in the same register. They had taken to a banter each found amusing which outsiders mistook for hostility. It was a little like flirting.

‘Our Daughter of Erin might be in a mist,’ said Clara, ‘but this Child of Boadicea has yet to admit defeat…’

It wasn’t hard to imagine Clara in a carriage with head-lopping swords attached to its wheels. In China, she had probably had such an unlikely conveyance manufactured to order. She could easily persuade a tame warlord to line the road with peasants just to try it out.

‘Just say what you know, you sick witch,’ snapped Kate.

‘Why, Katie, such a tone! You’ve gone quite red in the face. I would be concerned for your health…’

‘It is time to tell,’ said Yuki, quietly.

Clara stopped simpering and put a card on the table. A white oblong marked with a red ring.

‘What is that?’ asked the Persian.

‘An invitation,’ said Clara. ‘Presented at the
Théâtre des Horreurs
after midnight on a certain night of the month, this secures entry to an unadvertised additional performance. The
cercle rouge
guest list is select. You can’t buy your way onto it. Not with money, at least. The names we’ve been discussing – some of them, at least –
may
be regulars, though whether as performers or audience I haven’t been able to tell. That’s ink, not blood, on the card. But it took blood to get it. The Grand Vampire, who you’d think beyond being shocked, told me he didn’t want ever to see the
après-minuit
again, but that I would most likely enjoy the show. Make of
that
what you will.’

The Grand Vampire was the chief of
Les Vampires
, Paris’s most daring criminal organisation. His position was so dangerous and hotly contested that the mask stayed the same but the man behind it changed regularly. The Opera Ghost Agency and
Les Vampires
had a wary truce. Some years before, a previous Grand Vampire had engaged the Angels of Music on a confidential matter, which the Agency had brought to a satisfactory conclusion.

Kate picked up the card. The circle was stamped into the thick paper and the red was some sort of gilt. Not easy to forge, though the design and printing department of the Opéra would have their methods.

‘How long do we have to wait?’

‘Only until tomorrow,’ said Clara. ‘I hope your delicate stomach is up to it.’

She flipped back through her notebooks.

‘Yes, Katie,’ said Clara, ‘the disappearances tend to be in the week leading up to each month’s
après-minuit
… and the bodies are often found during the few days
after
the special performance.’

They all looked at each other.

‘For myself, I shall spend tomorrow shopping for a new hat,’ said Clara. ‘It doesn’t do to attend a theatre twice in the same outfit. Also, I understand that
chapeaux
with veils – if not full masks – are customary for
cercle rouge
audiences.’

‘You buy a hat,’ said Katie. ‘I’ll get a revolver.’

‘Very sensible. No dramatic critic should be without one. A lead corset might also be a wise investment.’

K
ATE HAD NOT
been joking. She needed a gun.

Yuki could walk into a lion’s den – taking those tiny steps because she was hobbled by her traditional dress – with nothing but her parasol and come out with a large rug. Clara’s stylishly tailored topcoat had neat pockets in the lining, filled with a range of cutting, slicing, throwing, sawing and gouging implements. Kate was the least dangerous of the Agency’s current roster. The little apple-peeling knife she’d been keeping up her sleeve would be little use against Guignol and the whole
Légion d’Horreur
.

The Persian gave her a chit to present to Monsieur Quelou, Chief Armourer of the Paris Opéra. He had his own subterranean domain, with sandbags against the walls and the smell of gunpowder in the air. Besides the swords, spears and axes required by Wagner’s warriors and Valkyries, the House maintained enough functional rifles, pistols and small cannon to defend the building against the Mob… which Kate suspected was most likely the plan. It didn’t take a Gatling gun to execute Tosca’s boyfriend and few productions in the classic repertoire required field artillery, but Quelou kept those too. Erik had lived through the Siege and the Commune. He also had cause to be wary of angry, torch-bearing crowds. There was little about the building and its protocols he hadn’t had a skeletal hand in designing.

Quelou first offered her a pair of pearl-handled custom pistols, suitable for Annie Oakley – scarcely a subject for musical drama, Kate thought. The guns felt light to her, more for show than showdown. After consideration, she settled for a plain, battered ‘British Bull Dog’ Webley. She knew the model – issued first to the Royal Irish Constabulary – and it fit nicely into her reticule. The gun gave her bag enough weight to use as a club if she wasn’t in a position to haul out the iron and fire it.

The armourer gave her a lecture on the gun’s use. She put on ear-baffles and fired at a straw target with a photograph pinned to it. It was an autographed picture of Emma Calvé, reigning diva of the Opéra Comique – the Paris Opéra’s great rival. Kate put a bullet in La Calvé’s throat. Her eye was good and the gun was sighted properly.

Before she left, Quelou cautioned her, ‘Mademoiselle, take care… don’t feel
invincible
.’

She thought she took that on board. Within a quarter of an hour, his words haunted her.

Outside, in the Place de Opéra, she relaxed slightly. After so much time spent in Montmartre, it was a relief to be in a more civilised district, without
apaches
in every alley. Looking up at the imposing façade of the Palais Garnier, she even had a comforting sense that Erik was nearby, watching over his Angels. Strange that such a creature should be her patron, but she was used to strangeness.

She sat at a pavement café table and drank bitter coffee while nibbling a crescent-shaped pastry. Pretty girls – from the company’s chorus and corps de ballet – chirruped and chattered all around. Likely fellows tried to talk with them, getting mostly short shrift.

She opened a copy of
L’Intransigeant
, a virulently anti-Dreyfusard paper left at her table. She scanned for items of interest, catching on paragraphs and translating them in her head – she was a long way from fluency, but could now read complicated passages with something like ease. She found a piece by Henri Rochefort, a supporter of Du Roy, about the civilian judges who ruled that Dreyfus was allowed to appeal against his military conviction. ‘They should have their eyelids cut off by a duly trained torturer,’ wrote Rochefort, ‘and large spiders of the most poisonous variety placed on their eyes to gnaw away at the pupils and crystalline lenses until there is nothing left in the cavities now devoid of sight. Then, all the hideous blind men would be brought to a pillory erected before the Palais de Justice in which the crime was committed and a sign would be placed on their chests: “This is how France punishes traitors who try to sell her to the enemy!”’ With public discourse on this level, the stage blood and trilling screams of the
Théâtre des Horreurs
were almost quaint.