Irene Adler: Chapel Noir Part 26

"No, I have not done that. Yet."

"Nell was right to call you a minx."

"I accept the t.i.tle with pride."

"You will keep silent about this evening's expedition."

"Yes. If I also go."

She breathed out an expletive that was m.u.f.fled by her vocal intensity. I believe it was French. "You have no idea where I go, to do what."

"That is why it will be a terrific adventure."

"I am not taking Nell, who has accompanied me into a crypt beneath Prague and into the presence of two drowned men. Why should I take you?"

"Because I have found you out and must be silenced?" I inquired innocently. I can still produce a girlish tone. It is my third most effective weapon.

"An impudent minx."

"Thank you."

"You are not dressed for it."

"Tell me what to wear?"

"Your darkest, most nondescript clothing. Something in which you could pa.s.s as Nell."

"I have just the thing in wool plaid, a very muted charcoal-andtan plaid."

"Very well. Be fast about it."

She left me then, for the other room, leaving me to hook myself into my corsets and boots unaided. My fingers flew through the arduous tasks, while my heart beat with triumph. I was sure that Irene Adler Norton was going somewhere that no decent woman would visit at this hour. And she had planned to go alone. What a woman!

Were there more like her, my job would be so much easier.

I slipped into the outer chamber, where she awaited me at the door. I noticed then that the curtains had been pulled and pinned closed, to keep the light at bay. She had planned this expedition down to the smallest detail.

Except for my restless mind and keen ears.

Once we were in the hotel pa.s.sage she led me to the rear servants' stairs.

"Soften your steps," she advised me sternly.

Indeed, the servants' stairs were uncarpeted, so we tiptoed down their endless turns like naughty children. At last we exited into the night, onto damp cobblestones and into a cool mist.

"Where are we going?" I dared to ask when we were a distance from the hotel and I saw her raise a cane to hail a cab on the main boulevard.

With her high top hat and m.u.f.fling scarf, not to mention movements that were uncannily masculine, we had suddenly become a Parisian couple on the way home from the theater or opera or ballet.

"Someplace your bloodthirsty American soul will treasure," she answered gruffly, in a voice alarmingly male. "The Paris Morgue."

I allowed her to a.s.sist me into the hesitating hansom, my heart pounding like a debutante's. The Paris Morgue. Was there ever such a thrilling destination for a not-so-innocent American abroad?

My struggles to survive in America had taught me the pointless scrabble to earn a few dollars through hard labor. I used to call myself "little orphan girl," even though my poor widowed mother was alive. In fact, I had supported her from a very young age. During my sojourn as a factory girl, I learned that the only light in such drudgery was the delusion of "catching a mash." Many a working girl met a man on the streetcar and accompanied him to a bar, got drunk, and had a great "fall," only to repeat the pointless recreational round the next weekend. Having no money left one at the mercy of others' charity. I myself almost lost my tonsils for no reason in a hospital charity ward. I enjoyed more comfortable living conditions during a stay in the Magdalen Home for Unfortunate-fallen-Women, but no freedom. In the French maison, although some, including Miss Nell, may consider my role sordid, there was not only comfort, but pretty clothes and superb food on top of it. Now that I had been "reformed" by Irene, I slept in a first-cla.s.s hotel and met famous men. I also was privileged to join the hunt for the kind of beast not merely content to buy women's virtue, but compelled to brutalize their bodies for the mere sin of needing to survive as best their skills and society would let them. I took the atrocities of Jack the Ripper very personally indeed.

Notre Dame was a mountainous silhouette against the electrically lit mists that wafted from the river Seine. Gas and electric lighting now mingled on the Paris streets as the newer form overtook the old. We were set down beside its stone bulk on Irene's command, and walked to the Ile de la Cite's end to enter the Paris Morgue by its rear, riverward door.

My escort was as commanding as any man. Mention of an Inspector le Villard's name spurred a bored but officious lemming of a guard to scurry off in search of an even more offensive bureaucrat.

He came, a monocle in one eye, wearing a rusty black suit.

"Madame Norton. They said your visit would be unconventional."

When Irene nodded, he eyed me.

"My secretary, Miss Huxleigh," she said.

On cue, I dug into my skirt pocket to produce the notebook and pencil that are ever my companions, proud that my own natural impulses made me a perfect subst.i.tute for the absent Nell. The thought of that worthy but innocent woman's name made me almost chuckle, save that a morgue is not a fit place for chuckles. Hysterical laughter, perhaps, but not chuckles.

The official lifted the eyebrow that was not engaged in scowling to hold the monocle in place.

"I cannot, unfortunately, show you the bodies of the two files de joie."

Files de joie. Girls of joy. For whom? Not for themselves, certainly.

Irene's expression was hardening into protest when the man spoke further.

"The gendarmes and surgeons had finished their inspections, and we could not hold them from their families and a decent burial any longer. However, the woman from the Eiffel tower is unclaimed, and you may see her. The sight is gruesome," he added, smiling like a s.a.d.i.s.tic stork.

Irene nodded, looking resigned.

He led us through a series of clammy rooms.

"Electrically powered refrigeration," Irene whispered in my ear, her words icy. Despite the artificial chill, Death's foul breath tainted the air.

Finally, we stopped outside an ajar door. Inside I saw a small bare chamber. Upon a stone slab lay a naked woman.

I had expected to see death. To see naked death.

I had not expected the vicious a.s.sault of those conditions on my senses.

The river roared in my ears like an ocean. The floor heaved and swayed beneath my feet. Irene's hand clawed into my forearm, whether to brace me or herself, I cannot say.

Monsieur Bureaucrat melted like paint in my vision and wavered like a raindrop on a pane of gla.s.s as he left us to our macabre mission.

"You have influence with the Prefecture," I said, concentrating on the minutiae so the grosser facts of our surroundings should not overwhelm me.

"Not much," she said tightly. Her eyes met mine. "You are a woman of the world."

"Miss Huxleigh, Nell, is rather more unworldly, I think."

"You are right. I cannot subject her to what we will see here. She has more strength than is apparent, but I am unwilling to disillusion her of certain civilities."

"She has an unsuspected taste for the Gothic, you know."

"I know." Irene pushed aside her dark m.u.f.fler and smiled. "But this is more than Gothic. It would make sense only to a worldly woman, and you are that, are you not?"

"Of course," I said. It was true. I had seen much that most women had never suspected. But I had also done less than one might imagine.

Irene Adler Norton's remarkable brown-gold eyes seemed to burn like the electric lamp outside the primitive chamber as they measured the truth and the misrepresentations that have always been twin aspects of my soul.

"You may wish this revelation, Pink, but I am responsible for your presence. Can you withstand this?"

"I don't know. I can try."

"Honestly said." She took a deep breath, one so deep that I thought it would never end. "The refrigeration process eliminates much that is unpleasant, and therefore real. We will not need Nell's smelling salts here. Would that there were as useful a defense for the sense of sight."

She took my wrist again, gently. "You have some knowledge of Jack the Ripper. I have greater knowledge. I have riffled through an entire chapbook of Jack the Rippers, and anything we may imagine about him and his ghoulish pursuits and ghastly killings is insufficient. I believe the wounds upon these women are fouler than anything anyone might have imagined about Whitechapel, than anyone might suspect.

"We have the privilege to see the truth, to face it, and to try to stop the evil that kills so vilely. I have decided that you can survive what would drive most women mad, and many men. Can you?"

"I . . . don't know."

"The truth, Pink? At last?"

"The truth at last."

I swallowed. I had vowed to see life in all its ugliness. I had given myself up to witness what most people hoped never to meet in even their nightmares. Irene Adler Norton was offering me a new variety of nightmare, and I realized that we both would never be the same if we met it face-to-face.

But what is the use of living, if one cannot face death?

I squared my shoulders, a fruitless gesture, and nodded to the chamber awaiting us. To the naked woman who would never feel the chill of the Paris Morgue's marvelous refrigeration system.

Would that I were not chilled to the bone and the soul myself.

Irene turned to enter the room, and I followed.

Just as I had when I discovered the bodies in the maison de rendezvous, I forced myself to study the larger surroundings before I let my eyes dwell on the object of our pity and horror.

The smallness and meanness of the viewing chamber struck me first. An arched ceiling made it seem like a tunnel, or a crypt or a wine cellar, save that the walls and ceiling were whitewashed to a deathly pallor.

The black bar of a wooden rail sat high on one wall, and from a series of iron hooks articles of the victim's dress dangled like clothes on a macabre washline. High-b.u.t.ton shoes as well as limp stockings, grimy bloomers, petticoat and ap.r.o.n, striped bodice and mended jacket hung from the long line of hooks. To see one woman's entire habiliment strung out like this was both chilling and pathetic. The mottled brown-red on the bloomers and corset cover looked at first glance like some overblown floral fabric until one realized that blood had been the dye.

There was only the faintest putrid odor. I was glad no man was here to see me shiver from the cold, from the room's centerpiece that finally became the only thing I had not studied.

The body lay on a stone bier, a slab perhaps two feet high from the floor, on its back, a dingy linen cloth draped from shoulders to knees.

Her face was pale, as I had expected. I had not expected it to look so ordinary, to seem so capable of animating in an instant, the eyes opening, the lips parting, vision and breath restored . . . stirring to acknowledge my presence.

She was neither particularly pretty nor plain. Her face was framed by brown hair pulled back without the relief of softening curls.

The dark line at the base of her neck resembled a fine cord from which perhaps some trinket had hung. It took an act of will to see it for the thin chasm between life and death drawn by a fine steel blade.

"Throat cut, as with the Ripper," Irene said.

I realized that she had been studying me as I observed the room and its occupant.

"It looks so . . . clean," I said.

"They have washed away the blood for photographs, no doubt. I wonder how much they washed the face."

"Why?"

"She does not look like a woman of the streets, but rather a laundress or some other toiler. A prost.i.tute would have used cheap paints, and I'd think the morgue authorities would leave them in place if they wished her to be identified."

"You are saying they don't wish her to be identified?"

"I am saying I would like to know if her face was ever painted or not. And men are so strange about such matters. They might have cleaned her face in an attempt to give her the dignity owed the dead, never realizing they were washing away the chief means of recognizing her. If she was a prost.i.tute and if she wore paint."

"What of the . . . wounds."

She nodded at the linen that seemed to dissect the body into a magician's illusion of a sawed-in-half lady: the dead white feet and lower limbs, the bare shoulders, neck, and head.

Who had sawed her unseen in half, and how?

Irene bent over to lift up the top of the linen covering.

I curled my gloved fingers into my palms until I felt a dull fire like invisible reins being wrenched from my grasp.

I heard a strangled moan. Mine. This woman had no b.r.e.a.s.t.s, merely gaping holes where slick underlying tissue showed through.

I imagined the medical men and police investigators who had seen these mutilations wincing at the sheer savagery of the wounds, despite their endless exposure to the worst that may be done to the human body.

Still, only a woman could feel such personal devastation at seeing a portion so unique to her s.e.x hacked away.

For some reason my mind went to the corset with its trailing gray laces hung above her head, to the roses of blood blooming along its upper edge, smearing the limp corset cover.

Had she survived these injuries, these items would be an empty mockery of her woman's dress.

Irene's face was frozen into an expression of utter self-control. She glanced at me as if judging my own command of myself, then let the linen down so gently it settled back on the abused body like the mistiest veiling.

Her hand moved to the bottom edge, then her eyes consulted me. Last, she consulted me vocally.

"Are you able to continue?"

"No such choice was given her. Yes."

Her glance was already on the linen she lifted.