Femme Fatale (32 page)

“Clearly. On the basis of this incontestable logic we will begin searching for my mythical mother here in New York City, using as a starting clue that ridiculous scrap of a letter glued onto Madam Sophie’s trunk. We will take that miserable scrawl as Gospel, Nell, and we will proceed as if it were Holy Writ. I am determined to come up with a mother of mine to present to Miss Nellie Bly. I hope she is . . . someone most unlikely. In fact, I believe that we can arrange for it to be so. I will follow the path of ludicrous logic that our friend Pink has laid out for us, and I will see that it points to a candidate so outrageous that even Pink will not dare print the supposition.”

I clapped my hands. “You will build an incontrovertible case, that is—”

“That is sheer nonsense. Anything may be proved, Nell, if you stretch to do so. By the time I am through, Pink will deeply regret her expedition into my past, and hopefully refrain from bothering others with her meddling.”

“You are truly angry with her,” I said in a more sober tone.

“I am angry with the world of the sensational press, that will not let even the poor dead women in Whitechapel and Paris rest in peace. It is admirable that Pink has made her way so well in that world, but her zeal makes her forget the privacy that every human being is due. Since I am here . . . since we are here, we are in an admirable position to teach her that lesson.”

“You don’t . . . think that you really are the ‘darling daughter Irene’ in that letter, do you?”

“I? I assure you I must have been an infant with a lusty set of lungs that would have tried the patience of the deaf. I was no doubt, Nell, the unforeseen result of an immoral alliance between a chorus girl and some would-be man-about-town. We must be realists about that, even, or especially, you.”

“Is that why you are so unlike the other women of the performing sorority, whose first role is mistress and whose stage exploits are only secondary?”

Irene sighed. “I don’t know, Nell. I only know that I have a most fierce hostility toward selling myself, any part of myself, even my past.”

“Then you are more nobly born than most in this day and age,” I said stoutly.

She smiled at me then, a sad, tender, almost (dare I say it) maternal smile. “You have come a long way in dealing with the unpleasant facts of life, Nell. I am not sure if I am entirely happy about that. This last trial—”

“I am now less likely to believe the surface of anything, that is
true,” I said quickly, reassuringly. We both had so much to protect the other from now. “I should not like to be less able to deal with the realities of life than Nellie Bly.”

“You mean Pink.”

“I mean Nellie Bly, who goes into madhouses and sweatshops and brothels, all in the name of good, one must believe. I wish she were posing as a prostitute now, instead of plaguing you with figments of a past that matters to nobody! What is her purpose?”

Irene sat upon the upholstered chair and picked up the cigarette case. “You have asked a key question. She is terminally curious, for one. And she has a hot heart for the downtrodden.”

“You and I are not downtrodden!”

“And she likes to set forces in motion . . . one antagonistic segment of society against the other. The working poor against the slumlords; the unprotected woman against the masher, the seducer. It makes for strong stories, Nell, and she is ambitious to both change the world and women’s downtrodden role in it.”

“Is that bad?”

“Not necessarily, but sometimes it is unmerciful.”

For a moment Irene reminded me of Portia pleading the case of the merchant Antonio. I wondered why an opera had never been made of
The Merchant of Venice
; Irene would make a superb Portia . . . and then I hoped that Mr. Sherlock Holmes had not come to the same conclusion and drafted Sir Arthur Sullivan and Mr. Wilde to accomplish that very feat—
The
Man was indefatigable!

But so was I!

“We will take this search seriously, then?” I asked.

“Deadly seriously.” Irene shook out her lucifer and drew thoughtfully on the lit cigarette in her hand. “However much Pink intended to draw me into an embarrassing hunt for my own American antecedents, she has involved us in a nefarious case of multiple murder. Though my youthful memories are dim, I do . . . feel very deeply about Sophie and Salamandra. And Tim.
I did know them, as much as my infant self was capable of, and I am beginning to remember even more. Pink is right that
something
is bedeviling these people from my past. So, under the . . . guise of hunting my supposed mother, we will be able to investigate the thread that connects the two sisters’ terrible deaths. I believe someone who hates their professions is at work here. They were slain by their own illusions, by their own tricks, if you will, turned tables upon them. Someone clever is behind this, and someone quite mad.”

I shivered a little, I couldn’t help myself.

“My dear Nell!” Irene was leaning forward, wreathed in smoke like Hamlet’s father’s ghost. “Perhaps such a subject is too much for you after Paris and Prague and Transylvania.”

“No. You misunderstand. I find myself eager to stop such madness, as we did so magnificently in Paris and Prague and Transylvania.”

She eyed me skeptically, and I was much flattered. No one had ever taken me seriously enough before to suspect me of prevarication. Or boasting.

“I only hope that Sherlock Holmes is not taking Miss Pink’s summons seriously,” she added, settling back into her chair like an irritated dragon, with a temperamental huff of smoke.

“Oh, I doubt that,” I said, although I did not. When it came to Mr. Sherlock Holmes, no one could be more skeptical than I. Clever and mad killers were exactly
The
Man’s cup of tea. Or cocaine.

25.

Playing Parts

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women
merely players
.

—SHAKESPEARE,
AS YOU LIKE IT

Once my friend Irene Adler Norton resolved to involve herself in a “case”—even if it was her own!—she was as committed to it as a diva is to an opera role.

Many mistake an operatic performer for an actor, when, in fact, many gifted vocalists who perform in grand opera are far from actors.

Irene explained to me once that a singer is a technician, a living instrument. The playing of any instrument involves emotion as well as expertise and musicality, but none of this requires acting.

Acting uses the emotions as a musician uses an instrument and is quite a different discipline, she said. She herself was a singer-actor. Or an actor-singer, depending on the role. Her new “closet opera” about the wives of Henry VIII was custom-made for a singer-actor like herself, which was why she was so excited about the project.

Precisely why I was so unexcited about the project: it had been
initiated by Sherlock Holmes! Considering this while thinking of Irene’s definitions of performance, I had to decide whether Sherlock Holmes was a detective-actor, or an actor-detective. He thrived, as Irene did, on disguise, on reshaping himself to deceive others. This was more than an exercise in vanity, although it had that aspect.

It was a certain natural defense, like the chameleon’s, that permitted each of them to penetrate rungs of society that would never accept them on their apparent aspects. Thus I had seen Irene masquerading as a rather befuddled old woman, when she was the exact opposite, and Mr. Holmes as a dashing and romantic figure, when he was the utter opposite of that! Did such charades release the
actor
’s urge to play the Other to perfection? Or did it release the
detective
’s need to disguise his or her function to perform the role required?

Ah, I was what I was, and only and always what I was, neither actor nor detective. Except that I seemed to be changing anyway, although I would fool no one.

I suppose my role was to record the alterations of others, and admire or admonish, as the case demanded. I was still a governess, though my “charges” were presumed adults, and I was becoming an unreliable observer, because the act of observing had become the art of acting, even though my only role was myself.

Enough! Only Casanova could make sense of such speculations, and that was because he never made sense!

Thus the next day I found myself playing the perfect amanuensis in the cluttered rooms of Professor Marvel.

“Rena?” this elderly and rotund individual had exclaimed when Irene and I came knocking unannounced on his boardinghouse door.

The area surrounding Union Square alternated theaters and
halls with boardinghouses, and in one of them Professor Marvel was waiting for us as for a cue.

“My dear Merlinda,” he added, bowing to the fact of Irene’s serial identities in the theatrical world. “I never forget a face.”

“Or anything else, for that matter,” she said, accepting his gesture of invitation to enter his rooms.

I had indeed come very far, for I no more blushed at barging into strangers’ living quarters, even if they were men, than I did at mounting the steps of an omnibus.

“My goodness, you are a woman grown. Am I that old?” he added plaintively.

I studied our host (though he had offered no refreshment, which makes him
not
a host). This tall, gangly man, rather round in the middle, had an intelligent face that was also foolish. Perhaps it was the eternally raised eyebrows, the wide eyes, the slightly apologetic smile.

This was a man who would not intimidate in any arena, save that Irene had told me that he knew more than any man in the world and demonstrated that fact nightly at various theatrical houses around New York. He had also been, she said, her sole tutor.

“I heard,” he said, sitting and flipping up his jacket skirts quite laboriously, “that you had abandoned us for Europe.”

“I sang opera abroad,” Irene said modestly. “It was my first passion.”

He lifted a professorial finger. “I demur, my dear. It was your last passion. You had always sung quite exquisitely from the age of three on, but it wasn’t until you were introduced to the maestro that it became clear that your voice was born to evoke bravas from the crowned heads of Europe, or even Newport. But what am I thinking of? Two lovely ladies have called. Would you like a cookie?”

I looked around the neat but shabby room, sniffed a decidedly stuffy scent, and decided I would rather eat at a public restaurant, which for me was an enormous concession.

“Thank you, no,” Irene said, with that tact and swift assessment so typical of her. “I am here on a sentimental journey, to revisit the scene of my youth.”

“Odd,” he said with a foolish frown. “You were never a sentimental child. I don’t see why you should start now.”

“What was I?” Irene asked, so lightly that I realized the answer was important to her. “I admit that my early years are a blur. I seem to have been a motherless child.”

From the way she intoned the words “motherless child,” I sensed that she was putting them into a context I could never understand.