Siren (22 page)

It was past nine o’clock on Sunday evening, Paris time, when Makedde entered the Cité Chaptal, a little cul-de-sac in the sleazy red-light district of Pigalle. She had rushed from Charles de Gaulle airport to drop her bags at her Montmartre hotel, and literally run the few blocks to the theatre. Slightly out of breath, she stopped on the cobblestones and frowned, lifting her furry collar to her chin.

This is it?

She looked at the address she’d scribbled down for the venue the troupe would be performing at—the site of the original Grand Guignol theatre, from which they took their inspiration—and looked back at the street sign.
Yes, this is the place.
She’d read up on the history of the troupe and its Parisian base and was disappointed to find that the infamous alley now appeared to be much like any other Parisian laneway. It was nothing but a plain cobblestone street leading to a small theatre with an uninspiring façade.

The original Théâtre du Grand-Guignol?

The venue had first acquired a reputation in 1897, when
the French playwright Oscar Méténier bought the little building, a former church, to present his naturalist plays. Méténier was a police employee who spent the final moments with prisoners who’d been sentenced to death. His controversial plays reflected his experiences, and were known for their violence and horror. Mak had previously been aware of the place only through the celebrated diaries of Anaïs Nin, one of her favourite writers, who frequented the Grand Guignol with her lover, Henry Miller, in the early 1930s.
What a place. What a history.
Yet in the cold Parisian evening, the geographical heart of this unique genre of horror was deceptively banal. The original theatre had been closed in the 1960s, and was at present being used as an acting school called Theatre 347. Various plays were performed at the venue from time to time, with Le Théâtre des Horreurs evidently the only troupe trying to revive the Grand Guignol genre.

Mak’s flurry of research on the troupe had resulted in numerous contradictions and mysteries—stories of fainting audience members and outrageous publicity stunts—but she was certain of one thing: five years earlier, right in the alley where she stood, a young man named Jean-Baptiste Trevillie had been attacked with acid after watching the Théâtre des Horreurs’ adaptation of
The Final Kiss
. It was evidently a brutal copycat crime. The quiet cobblestone alley had been witness to both history and horror.

Mak felt a vibration in her pocket. Distractedly, she raised her phone to her ear and listened to a voicemail message. Familiar, comforting tones reached her from across the world. ‘Hi, Mak. It’s Bogey. I’m back in Melbourne. I hope everything’s going well in Paris, and that it isn’t too cold for you. Look, I wanted to say there’s a big design fair on in
London this week. I was going to fly over for it, and I thought, perhaps, if you’re still in Paris…’

Mak smiled, temporarily forgetting her case.

‘…I could come over and see you for a few days before you have to head home? If that would be something you’d be into…or…’

‘
Oui
!’ she blurted aloud, as if he could hear her, and hung up, giddy.

Bogey? In Paris? That was a wonderful thought.

She would call him later. In the meantime, she hoped to catch the second half of the show Le Théâtre des Horreurs were performing. Hopefully, Adam Hart would not be far away.

Was he already nearby?

Makedde paid her money and took her seat alone in the little theatre in the Cité Chaptal during the brief interval.

The theatre was intimate, almost claustrophobic, with a small stage masked by a heavy red curtain. Above her, two enormous angels hovered eerily, a patina of dust and the wear and tear of age showing on their stern faces and billowing robes. Makedde could faintly smell traces of mildew and smoke beneath the stronger scent of overly perfumed patrons. The room was filled to about half capacity. Mak heard a mix of languages and accents as mid-week theatre-goers, tourists, Grand Guignol fans and lovers of the bizarre clustered in the former chapel. A metal spring showed through the fabric of the seat to her right, and she could not help but feel that the tattiness of the venue somehow lent further charm to the atmosphere. This space—so much more interesting than the bland exterior—had really
seen
things.

The lights were dimming, the evening’s performance about to continue.

Out of the darkness, a warm red glow seeped through the curtains and spread across the crowd. The old theatrical curtains were pulled back to reveal a band dressed in old-fashioned tuxedos, bringing to mind another era. The drummer, a woman with close-cropped hair, wore an amusing 1920s-style moustache. Her drum kit declared: LE THÉÂTRE DES HORREURS.

Mak was terribly curious about the content of the show, but this was much more than a night of bizarre theatre for her. The real action, she hoped, would be backstage or in the audience itself. Where would Adam Hart be? In the dressing rooms? In the audience? Or would she need to follow one of the performers after the show to find him? Her first order of business was to get herself backstage. Neither the vaudeville troupe nor the venue appeared particularly high-budget or security-conscious. Mak felt her skills would be more than up to the task. As two eerily similar-looking burlesque artists slinked onto the stage holding signs that declared LE THEATRE DES HORREURS and THE THEATRE OF HORRORS respectively, Mak stood up and began to make her way to the back of the theatre.

‘Madame?’

It was an usher, wearing a cross look, evidently displeased by her impolitely timed exit.

Mak held her stomach, as if in agony. ‘
Où est la toilette
?’ she asked with an urgency that implied food poisoning.

With a sneer, he pointed her in the right direction, and she followed the signs towards the washrooms. At the end of a dark corridor were the facilities—unisex in the oldfashioned
French style. And on the other side, a door marked ACCÉS INTERDIT.

Prohibited access.

Mak grinned slightly, and pushed the door open…

Time for the hard decisions, Jack.

Jack Cavanagh sat across from The American, who waited patiently for instructions. Jack took his time, staring out his hard-earned office window, reflecting.

His career had already been an accomplished one by any standard, but he feared slowing down. Slowing would necessarily involve handing over the reins to someone else. He had long hoped control of the business would stay in the family. But it was clear that handing the Cavanagh empire on to his 31-year-old son, Damien, would be extremely problematic, despite his Wharton education and all his grooming for the position. Damien was his only child. What could Jack do? The shareholders would jump ship before Damien even got the chance to drive the whole thing into the ground himself.

Cobwebs and tar.

Jack Cavanagh had built his influential empire from the ground up, and had imagined that by retirement age he’d be able to enjoy a certain satisfaction at what he had built. He
knew what it was to work hard. He was the son of a janitor, not a mogul. He had watched his father toil excruciatingly long hours to save for his education. His father had been a smart man, but a man without opportunities. Jack had wanted to make his father proud.

Somewhere along the way, the dream went wrong.

Cobwebs…

‘Jack…?’ The American prompted.

He looked at The American with his mouth turned down, his guts uneasy. ‘I need you to…’ His voice quavered. He tried again. ‘Yes. We need Mr Hand. We need Ms Vanderwall gone.’

She was a problem. She had followed his son, and was agitating her police friends. And now, finally, she was out of the country. She had to stay gone.

Mr White, The American, nodded in response. ‘I’ll take care of it.’

Across the globe, in Algiers, Madame Q sat before a bank of computers ranged across an antique French oak table. An assortment of flowers arranged with expert aesthetic skill filled the crystal vase next to her. The Mediterranean Sea spread out before her, hot African sun beating on the white-painted windowsill.

It was from this tranquil North African location that she conducted her business through a careful web of contacts on a digital network fuelled by need, greed, power and secrecy. Madame Q was an agent of death for cash. For the right price she was able to facilitate hits for wealthy corporations and individuals. She was not interested in politics. She did not deal with governments. Ideals did not concern her. Ideals were best left out of it.

A message came in, from one of her Australian clients, Mr White.

REQUEST. SINGLE. LOCATION PARIS. HAND AVAILABLE?

Before she had a chance to reply that her agent Luther Hand would be available for the usual fee, another message arrived with an electronic beep. It was from the colleague who called himself Rob.

INTERPOL, was all it said.

Madame Q frowned. She knew what this meant. For some weeks she’d been receiving warnings that an Interpol net might be closing around her operation. So it seemed it was true?

She returned to Mr White’s request, and responded quickly. CONFIRM. SECURE FUNDS BY THIS AFTERNOON.

She would have to get the funds as fast as possible in case she got another update from Rob and needed to vacate her office in Algiers in short order.

Madame Q would set Luther up for the job, and hold as much of the money as possible. If the Interpol threat was real, Luther would be left to his own devices.

VANDERWALL.

Mr White’s reply was a name, not a code. Madame Q paused. She swallowed, her mouth feeling dry. This was a reference to a previous job, an assignment that had become complicated.

HALF RATE was her offer. Tense, she waited for a response. Half rate was still substantial; the client was wealthy and she hoped she could retain them after the dust had settled.

CONFIRMED. FUNDS DELIVERED ONE HOUR.

Mak pushed the door open and found herself in an unlit area backstage at the little theatre in Cité Chaptal.

Yes…

She had worn her favoured rubber-soled boots, and they did not betray her presence as she moved furtively through the darkness in near silence, passing the ghostly shapes of unused sets and lighting equipment, covered with filthy white sheets. There was a skerrick of light ahead, and Mak moved towards it. She could hear the performance taking place only metres away onstage.

She had to find the dressing rooms.

Where are you, Adam?

Mak rounded a corner and stopped in her tracks.

Shit. Caught out.

She had stumbled upon a young man. The two locked eyes. Her heart leaped into her throat, but Makedde soon realised that he was even more alarmed to see her than she was at being discovered by him. He had been leaning over a
props table, and when he heard her, he whirled, and nearly knocked over a rack of clothing.

Adam?

The man she had startled was perhaps thirty, and much darker than Adam. The nose was different. This man was handsome in his own way as well, she thought, but there was a hardness about him, especially in his eyes, which were dramatically lined with kohl. He had none of the freshness she’d seen in the photographs of Adam. Even with dyed hair, this could not be him.
Dammit.
For a second there, she had thought it could actually be that easy. How foolish of her to imagine that she could solve the mystery of Adam Hart’s disappearance by spotting him backstage on her first night in Paris.

The moment lingered strangely, neither speaking.

‘
Pardon…
’ Mak said, and flashed her best disarming smile.

The man—who was not Adam—continued staring at her with something like suspicion, even fear, and it dawned on her that his alarm had to do with his being interrupted during some type of sensitive moment. His manner was strangely furtive: he gripped something in his hand and walked slowly backwards, a look of naked guilt in his expression. Mak stole a glance at his fingers, but could not make out what he was holding.

‘
Parlez-vous Anglais
?’ she asked clumsily, in her most nonthreatening tone.

Rather than grilling her—the impostor—on her reason for being backstage, the man scampered away, and a piece of clothing fell off a hanger where he had been standing. A white doctor’s coat. His reaction struck her as so odd that she stood confused for a time, before hanging the coat up on the props
rack again. Next to it was a satin dressing gown, and a suit jacket, both with the curiously worn air of stage costumes.

Mak paused, unsure what to make of the kohl-eyed man’s response. Would he bring reinforcements to boot her out?

Arslan is mad.

Lucien the illusionist sat before a mirror, practising his magic close-up, tilting the mirror at every possible angle to see what the most observant audience member could. He would be onstage for his next routine in twenty minutes.

‘
Oui
,’ he whispered to himself in an occasional chant of approval as he deftly moved the coin from finger to finger.

Lucien needed to keep his hands soft and nimble. The techniques of sleight of hand required daily practice, and he had grown to look forward to this peculiar ritual of his, and taken to practising this way in times of stress. The concentration it involved took him away from the petty rivalries that inevitably sprang up amongst the ‘family’ of the troupe, the problems of money and sex and the horrors of the unknown. The future. In his act he could pretend to predict the future but in reality he had no such insight. He did not know where they would end up. He did not know what would become of him if the troupe disbanded. He did not know his future. What he knew was that he could do this:
pinch drops, French drops, the Downs coin roll—his coins rolling down each hand effortlessly, bobbing up and down like ponies on a carousel. Precise. Perfect. Total control.

As a child he had discovered magic. It was the only thing about him that had ever held his mother’s attention. And when she went away, it was his escape from loneliness.

Arslan is mad
, he thought again.

His half-brother had always been prone to madness. His twin, Yelena, was quiet and lacked confidence, but Arslan had enough boldness and aggression for all of them combined. It was because of their mother. It was her fault that he was that way. They all knew.

French drops, pinch drops…

The show would go on, as it always did. For a while there would be an extra member of the family. And then he, Lucien predicted, he would be gone. Perhaps.

The show will go on…

Lucien dropped his coin. He scowled. A stranger was backstage; an attractive blonde. She did not belong here. He stood and approached her.

‘
Pardon, monsieur.
I was just looking for the ladies room, and I seem to have got myself all lost…’ Makedde lied, shrugging her shoulders playfully.

Damn.

This isn’t Adam, either
, she thought, faced with a slender man swathed in a Victorian coat who stood glaring at her, clearly unfriendly. He looked somewhat like the man she had startled only moments before: dark, handsome, exotic; he even wore the same black kohl around his eyes. But this man was not about to scamper away. Mak recognised him from
photographs on the troupe’s website. He was the resident magician, Lucien. She had disturbed his rehearsal, and he appeared plenty angry about it.

‘I am lost,’ she lied again, shrugged and tried to push past him, palms in the air in a gesture of peace.

He grabbed her elbow.

‘Hey!’ She thought to kick out, to scream…

Just then, there was the sound of the quick clicking of heels, and two petite burlesque dancers appeared, rushing through the narrow backstage corridor clad in corsets, fishnets, small top hats and platinum-blonde wigs. They looked like twins. When they saw the magician holding Mak’s elbow, their eyes became wide.

‘Hi,’ Mak said, and smiled broadly, acting the role of dumb tourist. ‘I like your outfits.’

‘
Qui est-elle
?’ they asked Lucien in unison, stopping.
Who is she?

Mak had to think fast. If she drew too much attention to herself, or her search for Adam Hart, she could send him into hiding. ‘
Toilette
?’ she asked, and giggled, pointing her finger this way and that, indicating that she needed directions.

Together, the dancers pointed back the way she had come.

Mak took the opportunity to flee the magician’s grasp. She left the eclectic trio with their mouths open, hands on hips, as she made her way back to the doorway through which she had entered.

Dammit.

Crestfallen, Makedde returned to her seat. She felt a wave of jetlag wash over her. She needed to stay awake through the remaining performances, but it could get tough. She’d been
running on adrenaline since arriving, and now that she had not located Adam backstage, nor spotted him in the watching crowd, the tiredness took hold of her. Perhaps he was not even at the theatre, she thought.
Bugger.
That meant she would need to wait at the stage door in the winter cold, possibly for hours, just to be sure. And again the next night, and the next, until she had some luck.

She had barely missed him in Brisbane and, for all her attempts to contact him online, Adam remained beyond her reach. According to Tobias, he was not responding to anyone. Mak had to reason with him in person if she was to bring him home.

Onstage the burlesque dancers entered, parading before the curtain with placards which announced the next item in the program.

The Final Kiss.

Mak perked up a touch. She recognised this as the play that had been suggested as the sick inspiration for the acid attack in the alley outside the theatre five years before. It was somewhat surprising to her that the troupe continued to perform that particular play, all things considered, although the piece did have a revered place in the Grand Guignol tradition.
Le Baiser dans la Nuit
, or
The Final Kiss
, was considered a Grand Guignol classic, the plot inspired by the infamous acid attacks dubbed ‘
crimes passionels
’ that took place in Paris in the early 1900s. The combination of shocking violence, sordid affairs and jilted lovers made the acid attacks front-page fodder, perhaps in the same way the Stiletto Murders in Sydney had managed to grab sensational media attention in
Australia. The heinous nature of those crimes and the beauty of the female victims, some of whom were models and actresses, fascinated the public. It seemed there would always be an insatiable appetite for beautiful victims cruelly cut down.
Schadenfreude
. The original version of
The Final Kiss
, Mak knew from the troupe’s website, had a central character who was a glamorous model, though the plot was more complicated than simply that of victim and perpetrator. The beauty, in fact, was shown to be a beast.

Mak was surprised when the curtain parted to show a female character with her face wrapped in bandages, her long dark hair hanging glamorously down her back as she was attended by a doctor and a nurse in a homely setting, something like a small living room. Normally, this role was played by the male. It seemed this one-act adaptation of the famous Maurice Level play had swapped the roles of Henri and Jeanne.

‘Her attacker had a very cool head. Exceptionally cool,’ the doctor was telling the nurse assistant, as she helped him change the dressings. Thus far, the poor woman patient had said nothing, though her body language made clear her physical discomfort. Audience members strained to one side in an unsuccessful attempt to see the woman’s disfigured face.

His coat…

Mak recognised the doctor character’s white coat as the one she had picked up and put back on the props rack after her strange encounter backstage. The doctor was not played by the dark, nervous man she had seen, but by a stockier, fairer actor who spoke English confidently for the largely tourist audience in a mixed American-French accent.

‘Leave me!’ the woman finally cried, her patience apparently at an end.

The nurse and doctor reacted to her outburst as if it were expected. They finished changing the bandages and slipped out the door without a sound. Slowly, the patient stood and turned to face the front of the stage. The audience collectively held its breath. What they saw was a beautiful woman: a fine, hourglass figure dressed in a silk bias-cut gown, a vision of feminine allure under the stage lights. But above the glistening pearls around the woman’s neck was nothing but white bandages, her face covered like that of an Egyptian mummy. The audience watched her with grim curiosity as she moved slowly across the set. Her presence was electrifying: what, and whom, was under that gauze?

This is her, isn’t it? Bijou.

Mak suspected that under all those bandages was the beautiful actress Bijou. Mak had seen Bijou’s face in the posters outside the theatre and all over the troupe’s website, and in the flesh, onstage, her figure and manner were spectacularly feminine, though of course her face could not be seen. Could
this
be the woman Adam had fallen for? Not a dancer but an actress. She had been a stage performer for many years and would be much older than Adam. Patrice had been older, but this age gap was much wider. What was she like? Why did she choose to hide her beauty for this performance? Mak supposed that this role-reversal was intended by the troupe to be more impactful for the audience, knowing that not only had the woman been horribly injured, but that a special beauty had been purposefully destroyed. In this adaptation of the play, the beautiful woman had spurned the man by breaking their engagement, and he had brutally disfigured her in retaliation. This had been a more common element in the real-life
crimes passionels
cases. It seemed to Mak a less ironic choice than the
‘Beauty is the Beast’ theme of the original 1912 play, in which the vicious, beautiful model disfigured her male lover, a theme which would have been a surprising gender reversal in its day. Tonight’s performance, however, brought to mind actual cases in countries like India, where acid attacks still occurred.

There was a knock on the stage door, and the woman moved to answer it.

A man stepped onto the stage. Mak sat up and blinked.

Oh!

It was a handsome young man. He stood in the doorway in a dinner jacket. Mak sat forward, her heart speeding up. She fixed her eyes on him, and blinked again, disbelieving.

Adam.

It
was
him. Mak felt certain. He had the same wavy blond hair, the same youthful good looks. He had not bothered with disguises or an accent. Adam Hart sounded and looked just like an Australian onstage in Paris, straight out of one of Mrs Hart’s family photographs. Mak felt the urge to run up and snatch him away.
There he is!
He really had run off to join the circus.
Amazing.
And he was performing with them. If it were not for the fact that he had been stealing from his mother and worrying her sick, Mak might have felt happy for him. She would have understood if those accounting textbooks had become too much for him, and he’d had to break loose.

But she had to bring him home. Now she had found him, all she had to do was convince him to leave the Paris stage behind to come back to Australia to live with his mother.

This could be a hard sell.

‘Jeanne…’ he cried, bringing his hand to his mouth, reacting to the sight of the beautiful woman wrapped in bandages, his acting highly melodramatic.

‘Come in, darling,’ she enticed through the layers of cotton. The sound of her voice sent a chill through the theatre, at once an alluring purr and a repulsive hiss.

Mak watched the scene unfold, wondering how the dynamic would work. Adam looked so innocent it was hard to imagine him inflicting this damage on his former fiancée. He did not look like a monster. The dialogue continued, the awkward exchange between former lovers, the man, recently acquitted of an irreversible crime, and his victim. The tension tightened expertly, Adam holding his own impressively, the two locked in an unnerving conversation.

Finally, unexpectedly, she grabbed him.

Mak knew what would happen next. The play demanded it.

‘Look at me,’ Bijou urged him. ‘Look at what I have become…’ As she said these words, she unwound the bandages, strip by strip, exposing a face nightmarishly disfigured and eaten away. The audience gasped, as did Adam. ‘Now I’m going to punish you!’

Mak squinted. The pearls. Were those Glenise’s pearls?
This is her. This is the woman with great legs. The ‘star’.

Mak watched, riveted. Adam was pinned against the couch, and though clearly stronger than she, his character was so overwhelmed by the vision of horror he had created by his own hand that he sat dumbfounded as she drew a vial from her pocket.

‘We’ll be the perfect lovers…made for each other!’ she screamed at him.

My God.

The vial.

That face sprang back into her mind: the man backstage, the look of naked guilt, the hand closed around
something…

Makedde had no time to think or to question her instincts. Before she even realised what she was doing, she was running up the aisle towards the stage. ‘Stop! Stop the play! Someone stop her!’

The actors looked up, startled. Members of the audience cried out in confusion, some yelling for Makedde’s mad progression to the stage to be halted. She hurled herself up onto the elevated proscenium and landed on her knees. A man ran out from behind the curtain and tackled her before she got any further. Mak fell hard onto her right elbow, sending pain shooting up her arm, but she managed to reach out and grab Bijou’s ankle with her left hand.

‘No! It is real acid!’ Mak yelled at her, and the vial slipped, having already been opened, ready to be poured on Adam, ready for the climactic moment of violence.

No!

The contents of the vial spilled out on the stage, but instead of coloured water touching the skin harmlessly, the contents splashed Makedde’s hand with a sharp burning.

Acid!

There was confusion; scorching, searing pain. The skin on Makedde’s hand was puckering, blistering in agony. She cried out and grabbed her wrist, standing.

The pain hit with blinding force, and she screamed at the top of her lungs. All around her, the sounds of chaos dispersed for a moment, the theatre audience dropping into stunned silence. With her vision blurred and blood pounding in her temples, Mak looked out across a hundred eyes, each looking back at her, blinking, confused. The full realisation of what had happened came to her. She was onstage. They
could not know if it was some strange act meant to shock them.