Femme Fatale (37 page)

“How old was I when this happened?”

“Not as young as she, but she was born old and knowing where the ladder out of the gutter stood. Still, she paid a pretty price for taking the wrong ladder a couple of times. A pretty price. You have children?”

The abrupt subject change startled even the unflappable Irene. “No. I don’t. Not . . . yet.”

“A bit old for it, aren’t you?”

“Perhaps.” Irene regained command of herself now that the conversation had touched on something she never permitted to be pawed in public: her personal life. “But that is my business, and my husband’s.”

“Caught one, did you? Wealthy and well placed?”

“Healthy and well intentioned. And he caught me.”

Suddenly those small, pencil-point-sharp eyes the odd color of obsidian drilled into my face. “You look a respectable woman.”

“I am a respectable woman! I am a parson’s daughter.”

“Parsons. We don’t have much of that title here. Preacher will do. So you are satisfied that Miss Rena here has a decent husband and reputation?”

“Godfrey . . . her husband, is more than decent. He is a prince among men, wise and kind and a brilliant barrister and—”

The woman waggled her small stubby hand, so like a child’s that I was tempted to clasp it to still the tantrum that was stirring in that small and mightily angry breast.

“Parsons and barristers. I don’t know much about some folks, but your friend is dressed to meet a queen and I hope that she has come by that as honestly as women can these days.”

“More than honestly. She struck a business deal for it. Such things are all business with her, and while I cannot condone too great an interest in the material things of life, Irene is an operatic performer and must be allowed her extravagances, especially when she is clever enough to earn them without sacrificing a scintilla of her integrity.”

“
Hmmmph!
” The woman sounded annoyingly unconvinced.

“I am working,” Irene put in, “as an investigator for the Pinkertons.”

So much for integrity. That was a blatant lie, ladled directly atop my stirring defense of her.

“My dear Lena,” Irene said, making me glance around the tiny room looking for a new person, “I am so touched that you worried, and still do, about my moral state, but I assure that I am the most indecently respectable married lady in Paris, London, and perhaps New York City. I have had a respectable career singing opera, and whatever you may think of my leaving the variety stage to apprentice in voice with the maestro, it resulted only in respectable things.”

Trust Irene to realize that the woman’s venom was on her behalf, not aimed at her guest.

“Is it true?” the imperious little figure demanded of me, like a dowager doll come to life.

“Of course. I would never associate with a demimondaine.”

“Another foreign occupation, I take it, like parsons and barristers.”

“Not like those at all,” I said, horrified. “A demimondaine is a French expression for a woman whose respectability has been
compromised by the shadows. Irene’s never has. I would swear to it.”

“Ain’t many women who haven’t been compromised by the shadows.”

A silence held in the room. I reflected that I had been in many places I shouldn’t have been with Irene over the years, including the presence of death at its most brutal. This was perhaps the strangest, a rooming house in New York City, the bawls from the street below coming as faint as seagulls’ cries, and a dwarf sitting in a rocking chair and demanding answers like a judge.

“Thank you, Nell,” the object of our argument said drily, “but I can defend my own reputation. I am, however, most interested in Mina’s. I remember her vaguely, but you, Lena, as our elder, would know more frankly what became of her. I was still at an age when my elders thought it best to keep things from me, I’m sure, for I remember less of my life in those days than I do of my infancy.”

“And better that you should,” the woman murmured, fidgeting on her seat, not like the restless child she recalled to me, but rather like an old woman in constant pain. Perhaps she was a bit of both.

“The early days for you were suet pudding, Rena. It didn’t hurt that you were the daintiest thing under a checked bonnet in vaudeville. Everyone doted upon you . . . and don’t ask me where you came from, because one fine day you were there and that was that.”

“Whom did I live with? Who tended me?”

“Why, you made the rounds, and whoever could best keep you did so. The first year you slept in a tray in Sophie’s trunk. I believe a photograph was made of you in your makeshift bed. They even put it on the playbills. ‘Little Miss Rena. Born in a trunk, a perfume tray for a pillow.’

“They wanted to bill you as a dwarf like me for a while, you were so quick to dance and sing ahead of your age. But I kicked
up a fuss. If I had a future only as a freak, I wanted to be the one with top billing. You would grow up . . . and grow.”

“And Mina grew up with me, in the theater?”

“With you? Heavens no! There was no ‘with’ for Mina! She was for herself first and last. Even when it came to her sister. It got her in trouble, being so forward, and I’ll give you credit; you were never no trouble, nor got in any. How that annoyed Mina! Quite infuriated her. Her face would turn scarlet, then her fists and feet would hammer whatever—or whomever—they could.”

Phoebe’s wheezing chuckle quickly became a cough.

“Perhaps we’re tiring you,” Irene suggested. She could never stand to hear a cough. It reminded her of times when her voice had suffered and she couldn’t perform. “We could leave and call another day.”

She sounded truly alarmed. Indeed, Lena’s small thick body had doubled over. As coughs racked it, the rocking chair swung wildly back and forth, not a comfortable seat like Old Dobbin’s but more like a runaway horse’s.

Irene and I hastened to her side, offering sips of lemonade and pats on the back, but she soon straightened, tear tracks running willy-nilly on her cheeks and chin.

“Ah!” she dismissed it. “It’s from all that sawdust for the acrobatic acts. Where was I? Oh, yes. You wanted to know if anyone took an interest in you as a child.” She settled back, closed one tear-swollen eye, looking rather notorious, and said, “Of course they did, and particularly when you were not a small child any longer, but I doubt you wish to know much about that kind of scum.”

She frowned, shut her eyes, and went on. “I saw a lot nobody expected me to. Partly it’s because I’m a dwarf, and they expect me to be deficient in most everything. Partly it’s because I’m a dwarf and am easy to overlook, quite literally. I would have made a good Pinkerton detective,” she said, suddenly grinning at Irene. “Oh, at first everyone would notice me, but then they’d realize
my condition and pretend not to see me. It would never occur to them that I could see—and hear—them perfectly well.”

“You had an invisibility cape,” Irene suggested, “only it didn’t work until after you had made your grand entrance.”

“Exactly! What a bright girl you always were. And you were right earlier. You did have your set of fairy godmothers, just like that Sleeping Beauty in the old story. When Mina had her troubles, they enclosed you like a wall of briars. That’s why I couldn’t understand why they simply turned around then and turned you over to the maestro.”

I was most intrigued by this “turning over” to the “maestro,” but Irene seemed least interested in that part of the story.

It never failed that what I regarded as most vital she considered most trivial, and vice versa. In fact, we should not have got on as friends at all, save we were so different that there was no point in attempting to win the other to our own vantage point.

On the other hand, what Irene accepted with the most casual disinterest was often what most deeply concerned her. It was if she feared that showing what she cared about could most destroy it. Perhaps that came from long sojourn in hostile environments . . . the inbred jealousies of the theatrical set.

I had never forgotten the sopranos who put ground glass in her rouge pot at La Scala, where Irene made her first grand opera debut as Cinderella. Instead of flaunting a lover’s largesse in jewels onstage, as most of the other divas did, she had persuaded a former American client, Mr. Tiffany, to play fairy godfather by lending her a stunning diamond corsage for the performance. Could it be that the maestro was the key to the entire affair, to her past and the present murders? Oh, not at all likely! Such a notion was the feeble woolgathering of a spinster’s limited imagination.

Irene had another question for our petite hostess. “Going back to my early years, did I ever have a fairy godmother from outside our theatrical set?”

“Like Mrs. Vanderbilt! Now that’d be a story! I fear not. We
did have a few do-gooders about the place. That was before the Salvation Army became such a big presence. Still, those ladies were made for some kind of army. I remember one, all in black. Made me think of a nun. She came to see to the children. Had a great weakness for them, would swoop you up and rock you like a baby when you were already three years old or so. You seemed to like her. You were always pulling on her bonnet strings. She had a beautiful face, like a madonna with doll eyes, blue as cobalt glass . . . they were always giving me dolls as they thought I looked so sweet hauling around a toy as big as myself.”

Irene glanced at me: again we encountered a rumor of the Woman in Black. “And do you remember a name?”

“Lord, no! We were informal around the stage life, and all of us had stage names and nicknames on top of that. Besides, she was not from the stage.” Phoebe frowned, the fretful expression making her look like a grandmotherly child. “But I recall . . . she liked to take you by the hands and dance around, and she would point her toes quite professionally. She had the smallest, daintiest feet, almost like mine then.”

Irene listened, enchanted. “You saw her feet?”

“Yes. She must have lifted up her hems. She was very playful with you,” Phoebe nodded, smiling. “She treated you like a child, as none of the others did. She was even kind to me. I remember her bending down so gracefully, it was a like an angel leaning down from heaven, not someone thinking I was too short, or too stupid, to understand anything that happened above my head.”

“I doubt much was above your head,” Irene noted with a knowing smile.

Phoebe smiled back. “You’re right about that. I’d have had ripe material for blackmail, had I been so inclined. People spoke in front of me as if I were the town idiot.”

“And you remember nothing more about the mysterious woman in black and why she would be visiting the performers backstage and why she’d play with us, with children?”

“
Hmmmmm
.” Phoebe put a forefinger to her lip as if to prevent herself from speaking prematurely. She shook her ponderous head from side to side. “I think so little about the past. I am not fond of those days, or these even. And I saw a great deal that a child my age should not have.” She looked up to regard Irene. “Our lives were amusing and hard and satisfying and frustrating. So were the lives of the women who watched over us. Sometimes they did not watch over themselves so well. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Irene nodded soberly.

Well, I didn’t! And I didn’t want to ask and appear stupid, or worse, naïve. The conversation was moving into those half-spoken areas where one needed a code book to decipher the real meaning. I hated it when people talked in that veiled way in front of me, but I also understood that they talked that way to spare themselves, as well. That there were some subjects so shocking, so socially forbidden, that they could only be broached sideways, and softly.

“We were children,” Irene said contemplatively. “Worldly children. Perhaps that’s why I forgot so much. . . . Or perhapsnot.” Her voice had hardened. “We aren’t children now. Tell me what you think, what you remember.”

“I was abandoned as an infant.”

I gasped at those harsh words, and Phoebe quirked me a smile. “I’m sorry, Miss Huxleigh. I can see you have a kind heart beneath your stern exterior, but one look at me after I slipped my mother’s anchorage and it was obvious I would be crippled.”

“You are not crippled!” I interjected. “You do not even use a cane.”

“And I was not expected to live,” she went on quietly. “I never knew my parents, or my mother, for I doubt I had a father who would have stayed around for holy matrimony, and perhaps my mother was a dwarf as well.”

“Who would—?” I choked on my next thought.

“Who would what?” Phoebe asked.

“What kind of man would take advantage of a woman with such a physical disability?”

Phoebe laughed, and it was not a nice laugh. “A man who thought she would get no attention from any other man. I’ve seen them myself.”

I kept silence after that. No matter what I had seen that defied all belief in Paris and Prague and Transylvania, the New World also offered its ancient travesties.

Phoebe leaned forward to look me hard in the eyes. “You are a good soul, Miss Huxleigh, and if I’d had you for a nanny no doubt I’d never know whereof I speak. But I didn’t, and that’s that.”

She eyed Irene again, as an equal, perhaps as a fellow conspirator. I was not. I was still an innocent even as I kept my ears wide open for any news that would relieve me of that increasingly annoying position. I hated being always on the fringes of the discussion, always the last to know.

“There were inconveniences like ourselves,” she told Irene, the two women so physically different leaning in like gossiping flowers in the same bed to hear each other’s tales. Her voice lowered, so I had to lean far forward myself to hear, and then only picked up half the words.

“Inconvenience,” Phoebe whispered with a certain cynical emphasis. “A way out . . . everyone knew and no one admitted . . . disappeared . . . one woman . . . notorious . . . potions . . . physician . . . baby-seller . . . savior . . . abortionist.”

I had never heard that word, abortionist. I would have to ask Irene when we left.

I looked at her face. The expression was as intent and dark as I had ever seen it, except when she was enacting bloody murder on the stage. She was not acting anything now. I did not know her.