Castle Rouge (14 page)

She paused where the carriage had left us, spinning a black-lace-edged parasol on her shaded shoulder like the most fragile of social butterflies as we stood in the crowded square before the great medieval cathedral.

Smiling, she seemed to sense my disapproval and said, “We were watched here before, Pink, in the dark of night. We may be watched here again, even and especially in daylight.”

“You suspect the conspirators of remaining in Paris?”

“I suspect that some of them have never left it. Why should they? It is their conspiracy, and their city.”

I was frankly puzzled and had no parasol to twirl so fetchingly, but only my stout walking stick to rely upon.

Irene strolled on, managing to drop her crocheted reticule while pausing to inspect the side of an unremarkable building in the square before the cathedral.

I gazed at the fallen object, suddenly realizing that if it were crocheted, Nell must have done it. The woman was a bear for constant make-work and thus very annoying, yet I felt an intolerable poignancy in this mute, fallen reminder of both her presence and her absence.

A gentleman, or a man at least, immediately retrieved the article, presenting it to Irene with a bow.

“
Madame
.”

Hence came rapid French, which freed me to observe, as I couldn’t translate the words.

He was of the type known only in Paris as a
boulevardier
. a man of leisure, almost a dandy, dedicated to the arts, amusement, gossip, and flirtation. Like many French aristocrats who summered in the country or by the sea, his naturally olive skin had taken an even swarthier tint. Despite his agreeably regular features, the sun-beaten skin gave his pale eyes and teeth a piratical glint.

This man could be up to no good
, I thought.

But his Parisian
bonhomie
appeared to have found a perfect partner in Irene. After briefly doffing his straw boater, he settled his striped jacket on his frame and inserted himself between us as a well-met escort, bowing and chattering with an aplomb that was lost upon me, as my command of French was about as good as Nell’s. In other words, dreadful.

Irene accepted his company like a woman of the world accepting tribute. She gestured with her parasol at the passing parade, smiled, bowed, laughed, and nearly drove me mad with her utterly uncalled-for frivolity.

Truly, the woman had lost her mind, only now it showed itself as a complete disregard for reality.

I soon had enough. It was off to London and dogging Sherlock Holmes’s footsteps for me. Condescension was better than lunacy any day!

I was about to excuse myself to return to the hotel and pack when Irene suddenly turned to me and spoke in English.

“Wasn’t it near here, Pink, that the first shot stung the stone?”

“Here? Shot? When? Oh, the night we visited the Morgue.” I turned around to place the church in my memory. “About here, I suppose.”

Our escort chattered something and pointed upward, at the sky.

While we gawked, my glance passed over the featureless gray stones of the building beside us. Just above our heads, I spied a long white gash in the stone.

“
Exactement!
” our escort chortled with a small dance-step of exuberance.

In a moment he had seized both of us by the elbows and piloted us through a narrow door that had materialized before us like a magician’s cabinet.

The plunge from a Paris of sunshine and sparrows to the cool dark inside a stone building was shocking. While I blinked to adjust my eyes to the lack of light, I smelled and heard the strike of a lucifer.

Irene’s face was hellishly lit from below by the match she held to a candle stump she had extracted from the formerly elusive reticule.

Our escort was peering out through the sliver of door still open to the daylit square beyond the door.

“A bevy of French schoolchildren was just herded past like ducklings. We won’t have been seen,” he whispered in perfect English. So perfect that I knew at once this was Another Damned Englishman in our midst.

He turned to me. “I thought at first you were Nell.” His tone was almost accusing.

“I am—” I began, meaning to drop my pen name, Nellie, but Irene interrupted.

“We’ll explain later,” she promised. “First, you saw where the bullet marked the stone?”

“Yes,” he said. “A powerful one. Had that shot hit bone instead of stone—” He shuddered mockingly. “I agree with whoever diagnosed a rifle. Perhaps a heavy game rifle, or even an air rifle.”

“Our diagnostician,” Irene said, “was much perturbed by how a man would stalk the streets of Paris with a rifle in plain sight, even at night. The gaslights and the new electric lights do illuminate much.”

The Englishman considered for barely a moment. “Nothing simpler. It must have been an air rifle then.”

“I have never heard of such a weapon.”

“And well you should not have. It is an obscure one, known only to a few, and mostly those of us in the spy trade. Not the sort of thing an honest man would have anything to do with.”

“It shoots air?” Irene asked.

The man had quite a chuckle at her expense. “Lethal air, now that would be armament mighty nations would kill to possess, and someday perhaps they might. No, the air rifle is driven by air that expels the projectiles. It is a fiendish weapon, really, and can easily be disguised as a harmless walking stick.”

“Ah,” Irene nodded, “like a sword stick.”

“Exactly.”

“How can it be so slim, and how does it fire?”

“It can be a simple straight stick with a right-angle handle. The upper half can be curved, and I believe this was such a model.” He nodded at the scarred stone above our heads. “The straight model requires the shooter to hold it against his cheek and site down the length of the stick. The curved design allows the bearer to shoot from the shoulder, which is less obvious. Using such a model indicates a seasoned shot, or a shooter who doesn’t need the pinpoint accuracy of a lethal strike but something more in the way of a warning shot. Certainly he would not attract much attention with such a weapon after dark in Paris.”

“Why is this wonder not better known?” Irene asked next.

“It has its limitations. Really, assassination is what it’s best for.”

“Lovely,” said I.

He flashed me an assessing look. Apparently he was used to women who swooned instead of waxed sarcastic at the thought of personal danger.

“A lovely weapon indeed,” he responded. “The trick is that you must use an air pump to prime it. After that you have twenty shots before it fizzles. For those twenty shots you have one of the most murderous weapons on the planet. It is light, noiseless, easily disguised in public use and capable of pushing any type of bullet through an inch of wood planking at fifty yards at a pressure of four-to-five-hundred pounds. But the things have a range of three hundred and fifty yards, so are chillingly versatile. I have long wanted one, for they are of English invention and date to midcentury or before. I understand that the individually constructed ones are far superior to those manufactured, but have not been able to put my hands on one of those. As you can imagine, collectors and assassins snap them up like turtles do dragonflies. It is interesting.”

“What could be more interesting than the history and mayhem of the air rifle?” Irene wondered a trifle sarcastically.

“That the bullet hit just above your heads. I can’t believe that anyone who knew about and went to the trouble to acquire an air rifle would fail to use it accurately. This was definitely a warning shot.”

“A warning shot, or a herding shot?”

He smiled at Irene’s question, showing his teeth like a sauve shark. “All warning shots are herding shots. So where were you two herded that night?”

Irene pressed forward against the dark, the small candle flicker illuminating only narrow stone walls.

“After this passage, there is a cavern,” she said, “and then a catacomb.”

But in a few steps she stopped.

Rough piles of rock obstructed the way. As she lifted the candle, the light revealed that the low tide of rock had swelled into a barrier wall.

“We passed this way only a few nights ago, unobstructed, Pink and I.”

“Pink?” the Englishman eyed me with incredulity.

“Pink,” I repeated firmly.

His attention had returned to the dark narrow walls. “Here. The candle.”

Irene obliged.

“Another bullet mark. And likely the last. The way is too narrow to miss from here on.”

“Thank you,” Irene said sardonically. “But there was a lot more way before us the last time we were here. Someone has loosened the stones to block any entry now.”

He nodded, his silly hat casting a silly shadow on his serious face. “It took more than a few men to loosen that torrent of stone. These work buildings are apparently deserted.”

“I don’t believe the authorities, civil or religious, know of the underground catacombs yet,” Irene said. “Or perhaps they do and simply don’t care, as the bones may be Pagan.”

“This area of Paris is not noted for catacombs,” he agreed, turning a dazzling smile on me, “They run south of the river Seine. I believe we have mystified the charming Miss Pink for long enough. I will scout a discreet exit, then perhaps we can go somewhere more civil to discuss our business.”

“Indeed. We will expect you at the hotel for tea. I shall give you the address.”

“Indeed,” he mocked her. “I am most anxious to learn what is worth calling me forth from the ruby mines of Afghanistan. Madam. Miss.”

With a bow he tunneled into the darkness behind us and was gone.

“A rifle,” Irene said. “The second such diagnosis. It confirms Buffalo Bill’s, though with a perspective from an opposite corner of the world. Most interesting.”

“Who
is
that rude Englishman?” I demanded. “This is Paris. I prefer the French.”

“I am sorry. I have found Englishmen to be not only ubiquitous, but uniquely useful. You must admit that I play no favorites.”

I shrugged. Her various alliances with the French Rothschilds, the English, and now the American plainsman clearly showed her to be a woman of international acquaintance. Perhaps she was merely an unemployed opera singer. They are used to multilingual performances.

I eyed my trunk longingly after we returned to our hotel room.

Sherlock Holmes was an arrogant, opinionated, aggravating Englishman, but I sensed that he was truly on the scent of the Ripper, while Irene’s heart and mind had been subdivided and sent in every direction at once.

This one time, my money was on the Brit.

Meanwhile, Irene had ordered tea sent up to our room!

The cart and waiter arrived first. The Franco-English dandy came along on the waiter’s departure, almost as if he had been waiting for that exit.

“My dear Irene!” He kissed both her hands after he knocked and entered our rooms, and threw his boater atop my trunk. “My God, this form of dress is annoying.”

“Robes do not do in Paris unless you are playing Othello in Verdi’s amazing opera,” Irene said.

He threw himself into a chair, his long, loose limbs lying athwart it. “Your message arrived via the Rothschilds, though I was supposed to be unfindable. What can be so urgent?”

She sat before answering, behind the tea table, in the role, I realized, always taken by Nell.

She lifted the teapot cover, as if to ascertain that the water was steaming. When she drew back, small beads of moisture dewed her forehead like tears.

She set the cups on their saucers. Three.

I did not drink tea, but I don’t think that mattered then, to her or to me.

She gazed into the small silver ewer of steamed milk, enumerated the flat dishes holding slices of lemon, the bowl swollen with lumps of sugar.

“Nell is missing,” she said, pouring tea into cups and then milk.

He sprang up like a Jack in the box.

“My God, no!”

“Godfrey is missing.”

He fell back as if shot, silent.

Irene moved the tea service like chess pieces on a board of sterling silver. Her eyes never left the tabletop. “It has something to do with Jack the Ripper.”

“He is a monster, but an individual one.”

“I am not so sure.”

“He is many monsters?”

“We have two people missing. More than one person has accomplished this.”

“Or…the incidents are unrelated.”

She nodded. “Sugar?”

“I take salt in my tea.”

She met his eyes for the first time. “So also do I…now. It is an eastern habit, is it not?”

“Afghani.”

She waved a languid hand. “What am I to Afghan or Haemon to Hecuba? I need you in Bohemia.”

“Nothing easier.”

“And beyond Bohemia.”

“Nothing easier. Will it lead to Nell?”

“Last suspected to be in Verdun.”

“Paris, then Verdun?”

She nodded.

“Eastward then. I know it. Know it well.”

“I know you do.”

He suddenly glanced at me, and I saw the
boulevardier
was a fool’s masque slipping from the face of a warrior.

“And Miss Pink?”

“My comrade in arms.”