Femme Fatale (30 page)

“You cannot fool me, Irene,” Pink said hotly. “There’s a thundering good story here, worthy of a dime novel practically, and this one I will have. If it agitates your snooty Continental sensibilities, Madam Norton, that is too bad, but that is what you get for embarking on a public life.”

“You are so unfair, Pink!” I felt my cheeks warming to match her nickname. “It is you who embarked on a public life, though
you hide behind a pseudonym. Irene merely became a performing artist, and then the public life came to her. If you possessed a gift as sublime as her voice you would not need to be stirring up matters in the public print.”

“ ‘Clementine’ sublime?” she mocked. “I saw it on a playbill.”

“And what did you
write
at an age as early as that? A, B, C?”

“Enough, Nell,” Irene urged me. “We are not debating callings or talents, but rather ethics, and people have been arguing that subject since the Greeks.” Irene regarded our guest, our former associate, our betrayer.

“You hinge your entire campaign to lure myself—and now Sherlock Holmes, of all unlikely people—to your shores to provide fodder for your newspaper forays, on one unproven fact. That somewhere, somehow, a mother of mine is involved, is imperiled even. You have not made your case.”

“Sophie and Salamandra performed with you years ago. They mothered you as best they could, to hear the late Salamandra tell it.”

“That makes neither one my actual mother, and you must admit that there’s no physical resemblance whatsoever. Even if I grant that they looked out for my young self in a big-sisterly way, each was barely old enough to be my mother.”

Pink scowled, an expression too new to damage her fresh face, but, give her enough disappointment and time, and it would.

She untied the artist’s folio and drew out a photograph, one obviously taken for journalistic purposes.

“Sophie had a trunk,” Pink said. “I don’t know where it’s gone, or why she kept it, but it had traveled with her for some time.”

The word “trunk” made us both sit up. How common trunks are, how long they are kept around after there is any immediate use for them. We both knew what buried and forgotten treasures they may hide, such as enormously valuable violins.

I recalled the treasured instrument Sherlock Holmes’s visit to
Neuilly had unearthed from Irene’s old trunk. What had Pink found in another such survivor of the years and lives of someone else not known to us?

We fear old trunks, and are fascinated by them, because so many are forgotten, along with what memories lie within them.

Pink smiled sadly. “She was ‘born in a trunk,’ Sophie said once, when I was arranging for the ill-fated séance. That’s an expression in the States, among the theatrical folk, being born in a trunk. Sophie’s trunk had been around so long and the surface was so scarred and scratched that she had pasted it over with travel posters and playbills of where she had been when she was younger. The entire surface was covered, these typeset papers acting as crude graffiti. Even now I could smell the faint reek of boiled animal glue. She had used whatever paper was at hand and no longer useful. It looked like something Jules Verne’s Philéas Fogg had toted around the world on his one-hundred-and-eighty-day jaunt, had he the room for a whole trunk.”

Pink leaned forward to hand a sepia-toned photograph to Irene.

“I had an ace
World
photographer jump through hoops until this one pasted-on letter came up close enough to read.”

Irene squinted at the photograph, then rose and took it to the shaded lamp on the desk, where she squinted some more. “Nell, you are good at close-work. Decipher this for me.”

I rose and approached the photograph. Penmanship twice as large as life scrawled angularly across the brownish surface, so the ink looked like dried blood. I made out each word, one by one.

“else to do.”

Irene nodded at me. She had reached the same interpretation of the spidery pen scratchings. The ink seemed too dry to flow much longer, but I made out: “I leave my—”

I did not say “darling daughter Irene” aloud, but both of us took in this phrase in silence.

“to . . . kinder hands than have dealt with me. I leave my”

And there the scrap of letter, yellowed by the elderly glue dried on its underside, ended.

Irene looked at Pink. “How many ‘Irenes’ has the city of New York seen in the past thirty years, do you suppose?”

Pink would not be denied her “evidence.”

“This scrap was stuck around the side of the lid. On the front was a playbill featuring Tiny Tim and Rena the Ballerina.”

“That is proof of nothing, Pink, but your dramatic imagination. No doubt that is an advantage in the newspaper trade, where facts fly fast and loose, but in the detective business, it is even less than the ever-despised coincidence.”

“Still, you have a dead mother somewhere.”

“I don’t doubt it. Many of us do.”

“Don’t you see? You were left with Sophie and Salamandra. Dixon was their last name. They were as much mother as you were going to get. And they are dead now. Both of them. Murdered. I was going through Sophie’s things after her death, when I saw her trunk of many playbills again, and claimed it as a memento.”

“A fine bequest, Pink, but if this letter meant anything to Sophie, she wouldn’t have pasted it on the lid of a trunk, but kept it secret.”

“Perhaps ‘darling daughter Irene’ had left the country by then. Certainly all contact had lapsed. Why didn’t you keep track of the only family you had ever known as a child?”

Irene’s usually piercing gaze wavered and moved toward the window. She followed it an instant later to present us with her unrevealing back as she finally spoke again.

“I told you, Pink. I forgot much about that time. Perhaps that was because I had so many more things to remember than a child in an ordinary household would. My ‘family’ was a constantly changing cast of ‘acts,’ all unique and interesting, but very transient. I had lines and songs and melodies and dance steps to remember, from earliest babyhood. Is it any wonder that I failed to remember?”

Pink Cochrane shuffled the papers and photograph back into the folio, tying the strings into dejected bows.

“Perhaps you held your breath so long in the role of Merlinda the Mermaid that all memories bubbled up to some unseen surface and burst. I see that I can expect no help whatsoever from you in deciphering your own history.” She stood. “So be it. I will print whatever I find, if it is sufficiently interesting, and if it is not, according to you I shall make it up, so it
will
be interesting! Let’s make a race of it, Irene, and see who finds the truth first.”

Pink spun with a sharp rustle of taffeta petticoats and marched out of the room.

As soon as the heavy door swung to with a bang, Irene stared after her with the amazement of someone watching their own image misbehave in a mirror.

“Bother the girl! She is so determined to make her mark on the world that she never for a moment thinks what harm her careless revelations will cause.” Irene began pacing, her own skirts rustling in ceaseless agitation. “We are forced to outthink and outrun her, or face the consequences of being declared to be what she thinks we are.”

“I doubt I am included in her agenda, Irene.”

“Who knows where her campaign for sensational speculation will stop? And is it possible that Sherlock Holmes leaped to accept her invitation into the contest? Would he cross the Atlantic, Nell, simply to embarrass me? Is our rivalry that petty and impassioned? I would not cross so much as a rain puddle to discommode him. Why should he bother? He did not strike me as a man who put much stake in relations, not even that highly placed brother of his.”

“Why would you ask me about the possible movements and motivations of Mr. Holmes? The less I see, or think, of him the better.”

“You did, Nell, finesse him into taking you into his confidence during part of our last and most murderous matter.”

“I ‘finessed’ him into using me for a flunky! An errand girl. A magician’s assistant at best.”

“You learned nothing interesting during your brief association?”

“The varieties and uses of cork? How many disgusting motes a magnifying glass may find upon a cellar floor? That even a madam will stoop to subverting an official investigation?”

“Oh? Madam Portiere interfered with Mr. Holmes’s investigation at the
maison de rendezvous
? I didn’t know that. How so?”

By now she had sat down again and reverted to her usual pacifier, the cigarette case.

“Really, I’d rather not say. I saw a great deal during that interlude that I know I should not have, and wish to forget, forever!”

“Wishing does not make one forget, or remember,” Irene said ruefully, blowing out a thin stream of smoke. I would never see a cigarette smoked in future without recalling’s Pink’s vivid description of the fatal ectoplasm emerging from Madam Sophie’s dying throat.

“Pink was so engaged in her large family’s history, and histrionics, growing up,” Irene mused, “that she can’t imagine a child who is born grown-up, or learning early that nothing stayed the same and was therefore worth remembering.”

“In my childhood, everything stayed the same!” I burst out.

“And therefore was well worth putting behind one. The fact that Pink still lives with her mother at the ripe old age of five-and-twenty is very telling.”

“I live with you!”

“But I am not your mother, nor would I wish to be.”

“Would I be such a bad child?”

“Not at all. Far too good for the likes of me.” Irene laughed; the distress of the past few previous minutes had evaporated with her cigarette smoke.

At times like these, I could not begrudge the habit its soothing effects.

I laughed as well. “Pink is such a, an overenthusiastic girl, Irene, like Quentin’s lovely niece, Allegra. But unlike Allegra, she is dangerous because she has a public forum. She resembles one of these fanciful figures that is blown about by the wind.”

“A whirligig, you mean? How apt, Nell! The entire city of New York strikes me as a whirligig. It has changed so much in less than a decade.”

“Then you prefer London.”

“I prefer Paris. And, in returning to Paris, as a subject of discussion, I still wish to know what bribe the madam of the
maison de rendezvous
offered our Mr. Sherlock Holmes.”

As much as Irene may have wished to know (and it must have been considerably, as she had not let the dropped thread of our conversation lie unnoted for long), I did not wish to tell her.

“He is not ‘ours’ in any respect beyond that of a mutual nuisance,” I said.

Her laughter rang out even heartier, an aria of merriment. I felt quite proud of my small success in improving her mood. None of Irene’s apparent reactions could fool me after all these years of association. I knew that this unsettling exploration of her past was perhaps the most difficult journey of her life.

“She offered him money,” Irene guessed.

“No.”

“Introductions to Parisian men of influence.”

“No.”

“Escargot and goose liver paté with truffles.”

“No! Irene, how can you combine such a vile roster of inedibles? It is more revolting than any atrocity we have witnessed in the past two months.”

“Culinary crime can be gruesome,” she admitted with a grin. “All right, Nell. I must state the unthinkable. Madam Portiere offered Mr. Holmes her own, fair, fat, grimy hand, so to speak. The madam of the house in exchange for him declaring it free of the taint of murder.”

“No! Well, yes, in a way! It was worse than that.”

“How could anything be worse than that?”

I pictured the blowsy madam reclining in state on her green satin chaise longue like a frog on a lilypad. “I believe—and I may have misheard, for I was most unhappy to be in her receiving room, or perhaps I should say, her parceling-out room—I believe that she offered him a . . . a brace of companions.”

“A brace!? Gracious, Nell, that is the funniest thing I have heard in ages. After all, I only offered him a shabby old violin. And what did he say?”

“Very little. Would that all men could be so firm in resisting temptation. I must give him credit for that.”

“Ah, but Nell, that was not temptation. The poor madam misjudged her man. You saw what will tempt him, and even then he resisted.”

“The violin, you mean. You’ve always said he was indifferent to women.”

“Not indifferent . . . something other.” She smiled at me. “You must have been mortified to witness such a crass attempt at a transaction.”

“I was mortified to hear human flesh bartered so casually. I thought the days of slavery were past, even in this benighted nation, but Quentin said it continues all over the globe, despite the British presence.”

“Much continues despite the British presence, including yours, Nell,” Irene pointed out gently. “You are right in assuming this to be a wicked world. The women in Madam Portiere’s house are presumed to be there of their free will, but how free is that will when reasonable work that pays reasonable wages is so hard to find? When other women are forced into such work more directly, that is called ‘white slavery.’ As irritating as it is to find Nellie Bly taking my own unhappy history as subject matter for a ‘story,’ I must admit that she does much good in exposing the
plight of ‘lonely orphan girls,’ as she once labeled herself. I just wish that she would leave this ‘lonely orphan girl’ alone!”

“Did you ever really think of yourself as a ‘lonely orphan girl,’ Irene?”

“Yes,” she said, surprising me by her sober tone, “but that was after I left America to make my way in London. I knew no one, I was a foreigner, and the theater directors were prejudiced against Americans.”

I thought back to the day Irene had rescued me, hungry and homeless, from the London streets to feed me on tea and stolen muffins. Was it possible that she had seen my plight and taken mercy because she too was alone and friendless? I had always accepted her as my guardian angel, awed by her energy, her sophistication, her American nerve, and her beauty. I had never considered that such a blessed creature may have needed me as much as I had needed her.