Irene Adler: Chapel Noir Part 31

-RICHARD VON KRAFFT-EBING, PSYCHOPATHIA s.e.xUALIS.

FROM A JOURNAL.

"Here, Pink."

Irene Adler Norton had emerged from her bedchamber with a heavy step and matching expression. Our breakfast table, already cleared by the hotel staff, was bare except for a Belgian lace cloth.

On that elegant surface she laid a volume so slim compared to most that I took it for a book of poetry.

I reached for it, but her hand claimed its closed cover in warning. "This is a dangerous book."

I could only imagine the most lurid possibility. "It contains witchcraft?"

My answer softened her stern expression into a faint smile. "Don't we all wish that life was so simple? That we could encounter Macbeth's three witches and hear our futures foretold? No, this book contains great evil, but nothing that is the least bit supernatural. I almost wish that it was."

At that she drew out a side chair to sit at the table. I examined her face closely.

"Did you send Miss Huxleigh . . . Nell, on an errand so you could show me this book confidentially?"

She hesitated in answering. Her mood held the same sober air of concentration I had noticed last night when, having viewed the anonymous body found near the Eiffel Tower, we stood outside the examining room at the Paris Morgue. This was a woman of unsurpa.s.sed vitality and finesse, but in this moment and that one, she was so subdued that I sensed a much deeper vein to her character.

This confused me. I had never before met a woman I so admired, or so wished to be like. Yet at this moment, I realized that I did not know her at all. I wondered if anybody truly did.

And, of course, I was positively itchy with envy. Why wasn't I worth diverting to such an enthralling errand as meeting with the renowned and most superior Sherlock Holmes, of attempting to outfox Sherlock Holmes himself? Surely I would be more up to the job than dear but sadly sheltered Miss Penelope Huxleigh! In a strange way I resented Irene's instinct to protect her English friend. On the other hand, I would never have been admitted as easily to the Paris Morgue without Irene's connections, though I would have managed it somehow on my own eventually. I have never failed to cross any barrier, however forbidden.

"Miss Pink," Irene said at last with a sigh, employing the name as a good rider uses a crop on a horse: barely touching the twitchy hide and yet getting a finer performance with that delicate goad than from all the harsh blows such beasts of burden have suffered through human history.

Oh, she is formidable, in ways I can barely yet imagine!

"You recognize the extravagantly vile wounds that were inflicted on that poor woman," she went on, her voice as slow and soft as a lullaby. Again, her unnatural containment warned me that we were in deep waters. "We have been privileged to know the worst, which is denied to most women-for their own good, we are told. Now you must know more, and know worse. We cannot continue without your reading that book. Do you wish to, after what we have seen?"

I am used to rushing into situations and seeking answers, then calculating the consequences afterward. Irene's somber tone and expression made such behavior seem hopelessly shallow.

I reflected. My headlong race toward knowing life in all its beauty and ugliness had brought me to this place and this moment. No doubt it came from being on my own at an early age. Although my wits were quick, there was so little that girls or women were expected or allowed to do once they had lost the protection of a father or a husband. This had forced me to plunge down avenues most women would cringe from. There I discovered an unexpected freedom and the means to support myself without eternal servitude in the factories or shops.

Now I was poised to learn even more of what most women never suspected and far more than many men knew. Did I want to?

Yes. I glanced at the battered and mottled posterboard surface guarded by Irene's graceful fingers. They never fell into a position that did not look as if she was about to execute a Chopin polonaise on a Biedermeier piano.

Pure evil, she said, lay beneath her lightly balanced fingertips. Evil ready to rush through the portal of my eyes and suffuse my mind. I had seen so much, why should I not know more? Not for me the glaring innocence that shrouded Nell's perceptions like a floor-length bridal veil! I reached for the book, and Irene's fingers melted away at my gesture.

A sense of heady power gripped me. Opening the pages as I pulled the book toward me, I found myself shocked sooner than I had expected to be. This devil's tome was written in German! Like most Americans, I only speak one language. Plain English and lots of it. I glanced up in confusion.

"German is not unlike English," she a.s.sured me. "Let the letters and words and imagined sounds wash through your eyes and mind. You will begin to understand words and phrases here and there. Then I will translate, so you understand entirely. It is best to approach evil edgeways, out of the corners of your eyes."

I nodded, and did as she said.

The entries were short, only a paragraph or two or three, or a page or two at most, and numbered. Yet a pattern emerged, even in the runes of a foreign language. As I began to comprehend, I came to appreciate her method of introducing me to the unthinkable. Slowly, she drew her chair nearer, until we sat side by side, elbow to elbow, like fellow students. Her forefinger touched a word. She spoke its English equivalent. The pattern became clearer and clearer. Before I knew it, I understood all.

I sat back. My voice came in a hush. "Your grasp of language is magical. Surely you could have . . . eased Nell into this topic?"

"Mentally, yes. In terms of her emotions, no. She is a true spinster. I am a married woman and you . . . you are a woman who has forced herself into the dark side of such matters, for reasons I find vague, but undeniable. We are women of the world."

I lowered my eyes, unwilling to object to her a.s.sessment, yet regretting it. "A spinster. It implies a busy but rather benighted creature. Will Nell never be anything more than that?"

"She has already edged well past it, though she doesn't realize it. I believe it will take the proper gentleman to correct the condition. I am not going to force her to confront things that her upbringing and nature have not prepared her for."

"We are all indeed dependent on the proper gentleman still, in this day and age, aren't we? Is that why you married G.o.dfrey?"

Irene shrugged. "Improper gentleman are of no use to anyone but themselves. I once fancied myself as you, Pink, daring to live outside a woman's 'proper' role. My pursuit of an operatic career immediately put me into the shadowed sisterhood of women of the stage. Once everyone thinks the worst of you because you pursue what you are best at, you learn to live without needing the regard of anyone. Except yourself. That is the purest form of freedom. I did not cultivate wealthy sponsors when I sang, and I did not marry G.o.dfrey because the state was respectable."

"Why did you marry then?"

"Because . . . he accepted me not only as I was, but as I will be."

"I doubt any man will ever accept me as I am," I said rather glumly, for I am young enough to still covet gla.s.s slippers, even though they would be terribly uncomfortable.

"Perhaps one will," she said, "when you act like yourself."

I frowned at her, tempted to ask what she meant by that, tempted to make my own confession . . . but such frankness was dangerous, given my position. She leaned across the table to pat my hand.

"As for your own path, which you seem dead set upon but not much distraught on taking at the moment, much to Nell's distress, perhaps one must meet many improper gentlemen to recognize a proper one."

I blushed. I can't help it. I have been an unabashed blusher since childhood. I have also loathed this tendency all my life, but it has proven useful despite myself. A woman who cannot blush cannot be underestimated, and being underestimated has been my greatest weapon in a world full of improper gentlemen, and far too few improper gentlewomen.

I shut the book with a thump. "One ghastly thing is clear. Jack the Ripper is no legend. He is a commonplace. A common criminal, G.o.d help us. I admit I have glimpsed his shadow before in wife-beaters and confidence men and every manner of low, lecherous man, but never in so murderous a form."

"If he is not singular, something else should be evident."

I thought. I had put a brave face on it, but reading about vicious slaughters still made me quiver deep within, especially when victim after victim was more like me than not. Irene had a point, though, and I'd be d.a.m.ned if I should not prove bright enough to see it.

"If he is not singular," I repeated slowly, as if it were a mathematical theorem, "there is a reason and a pattern to what he does. It is revealed in this casebook. It is that he is . . . not so singular, and therefore-if you know how to look at it-he is predictable."

"Brava, Pink! Everyone who has approached Jack the Ripper has elevated him to a unique position: the worst monster the world has ever seen. But he is only the latest monster the world has seen. Once we know that, we know that he is not invincible."

"And you think that we two . . . three women, can catch him?"

Her eyes met mine, all banter ended. "I think that we must, for no one else will."

Nell rejoined us an hour later, her key sc.r.a.ping at the door lock like the wild nails of an ejected poodle.

Irene threw me a look and ran to ease the door ajar.

Nell rushed into the room as swiftly as my imaginary poodle. There the resemblance ended, though her bonnet was tied slightly askew and her cheeks were painted, with either fresh air or excitement, to that cherrylike shade that had given me my childhood nickname. Her hands were bare, the morning gloves she wore having been thrust through the ring on the chatelaine at her waist made for that purpose.

She spoke to neither of us, but bore her leatherette folio to the empty tabletop and let it fall to the surface with a huge, unseemly, un-Nell-like thump.

I had never seen her looking so attractive; she seemed ten years younger, a veritable schoolgirl.

"Oh, Irene, I have been scribbling on the omnibus all the way from the Hotel Bristol, trying to get every syllable down. Luckily my memory is excellent since my days in the Temple with G.o.dfrey."

"Days in the Temple with G.o.dfrey?" I asked, astounded by the phrase.

She paused in detaching the small silver notebook from her chatelaine. "Quick! I require pen, pencil, whatever!" she called almost imperiously, as she extracted her pince-nez from a small silver case on another chatelaine chain.

Irene ran to the desk beside the window while Nell opened the case and began pulling her footprint sketches onto the tabletop.

At last she looked up at me, over the schoolmarmish spectacles. "I was G.o.dfrey's typewriter-girl in the Inner Temple for several months. That was before he had met Irene, to speak of."

"You worked in the Temple?" I could not help sounding impressed. "You must have been one of the first women so employed."

"I was the very first typewriter-girl in the Temple," she answered with precision but no special pride. "That was only because G.o.dfrey had a very forward-looking mind and realized that the typewriter would soon become commonplace. Also, he was the only barrister who would hire me instead of a male clerk."

Irene had gone into her bedchamber in search of writing implements. Nell glanced to see if she had returned, then spoke confidentially. "Irene had her reasons for wishing to know of G.o.dfrey's movements at the time, thinking he was involved with an investigative project of hers."

So this was not the first time Irene had sent Nell to observe someone of whom she wished to know more! And Nell as a spy-? She did not strike me as the sort who would be any good at subterfuge, but perhaps that was the point.

Irene came flying back into the room, her hand clasping a homely bouquet of pencils and pens surrounding an inkwell.

"Wonderful!" Nell glanced at me. "You have the newspaper reports of the crimes at hand?"

Now it was my turn to hasten to my trunk, where I had stored the bulky papers.

When we three had all a.s.sembled back at our round table (I was beginning to feel rather like a knight), Nell was already seated and paging through the tiny sheets in her silver-sheathed notebook.

"I take it your expedition to Mr. Holmes's hotel was profitable," Irene said as she watched her friend pull a fresh sheet of paper from her portfolio and begin copying notes from the tiny book.

"Profitable, but I did not dare make a notation in his presence. He chanted this long list of descriptions of men seen with the women killed in Whitechapel. It's clear he knows the facts backward and forward, and many things that have not been pa.s.sed on in the papers.

"And he said that Ripper suspects had connections with other nations, including France. I was struck by how close, although differing, the various descriptions were. If we can list each suspect's particulars, we may create a portrait that would fit one man."

I was already shaking out the sleazy journals that doc.u.mented the Whitechapel horrors in the most detail and with the most ill.u.s.trations. After my visit to the Paris Morgue, the gruesome drawings of the dead women seemed like nursery drawings.

"And-" Nell looked up from her transfer-work, her face aglow with enthusiasm, "his very last words to me were to mention that he himself had been a suspect! May still be."

"Sherlock Holmes?" I demanded, unwilling to believe it.

Irene sat down with us, her face lost in speculation. "He would have been seen in the streets in disguise if he were trailing the Ripper. I doubt he would have confessed to you a serious suspicion."

"Ah! How better to mislead me?" Nell demanded. "I am not at all convinced that he is not a wolf in sheep's clothing. Who better to raid the flock than its purported shepherd?"

Even I had realized by then that our Miss Nell harbored a deep and ruthless prejudice against Sherlock Holmes, for some reason yet obscure to me.

Irene's tolerant laugh expressed her familiarity with this puzzling att.i.tude. "Certainly Sherlock Holmes harbors a certain subtle disdain for women that is common to his gender, yet fortunately uncommon for a man of his relative youth and good health. Sherlock Holmes as the Ripper . . . it would be an international scandal, far too shocking to be true, I fear. Yet the book indicates that men who have no reputation with women at all may be deadlier than the most notorious rake."

"The book, Irene?" Nell asked, looking up from her copy work.

"The German volume I purchased near Notre Dame from the bookseller's stall the other day. I have had time to read a bit of it since then."

Nell's imperious Roman nose wrinkled rather charmingly. "Psychopathia s.e.xualis. Even the Latin t.i.tle sounds drearily scholarly and pretentious. Why can the t.i.tle not be in German, like the text?"

"I believe the science of the mind it studies is described in Latin terms so that doctors and scholars worldwide may understand it."

"And only them, of course!" Miss Huxleigh was waxing indignant, an att.i.tude she had mastered many years before meeting me. "What do they say, these international solons, with their secret societies and arcane books and terminologies?"

Irene looked at me, as if to say that my turn under Nell's interrogative scorn had come. She leaned back, her eyes half-closed. I guessed she expected to learn something from our continuing discussion. She was like a general disposing troops and then surveying the battle and their efforts from some lofty hilltop, piecing together a larger picture than the foot soldiers could ever see.

So. How was I to tell an utterly innocent woman some years my senior about the degradations detailed in Mr. Krafft-Ebing's obscure and no doubt rightly vilified book?

"The volume is a study of murderous madmen," I began.

"Oh. You read German?" Nell sounded most miffed. "I only read English myself." She made it sound totally sufficient for any sensible person.

"Not well, but the book makes some interesting points. It seems that awful as the Whitechapel Ripper's acts are, many men have performed them before. And the point is this: that though these men are utterly, revoltingly mad and capable of insanely brutal acts, most of them move among their fellow creatures very quietly, being the last sort of person you would suspect."

"Like Sherlock Holmes!"

"I would not call him 'quiet.' No, these men are so common as to be unnoticeable. No great intelligence, yet possessed of an awesome cunning when engaged in their mania. They are diffident around women rather than the opposite. Yet when they are compelled to their repugnant crimes, nothing holds them back. Even . . . remember the dreadful letter supposed to be from Jack the Ripper? Telling how he kept and ate one of the women's kidneys?"

"Yes," Nell said with a shudder. "He misspelled the word 'kidney' rather awfully. 'Kidne,' I believe, was the horror. Even a child would not make such a crude mistake."

"Exactly, Nell," Irene put in. "I believe that Pink was not remarking on the Ripper's grammar and spelling, but rather his cannibalism. According to this most interesting book, that is not uncommon among such men."

"But . . . the men in the book must be from Germany. There is no connection between the suspects in the Whitechapel killings and that country, only America"-this was pointed out with an accusing look at both of us-"Russia, Poland, and France."

It was plain from Miss Huxleigh's tone that she regarded all four of these nations as barbaric when weighed against the excellencies of the British Empire.

"How interesting," Irene noted ironically. "I have myself sojourned in America, Poland, and France."

"Say," said I, "I must object to your implying that America harbors vicious killers left and right."

"Oh, and what of your savage Red Indians?"

"They are all mostly working for Buffalo Bill nowadays," I returned jokingly, "and making a pretty penny at it. But you mustn't believe all those mock chases and shoot-outs in a Wild West Show. That's long past in the United States."

"Did the Indian savages not scalp innocent women and children as well as the white men who fought them? And are they not masters of torture? I have heard tales of that."

"Tales," I began, ready to defend my native land, but Irene Adler Norton sat up suddenly.

"It's true. Not many years ago in America some women on the frontier died horribly at the hands of the Indians." She looked at me. "Suffering wounds not unlike those on the woman in the morgue."

Nell's head was bowed to her list, her lips pursed in schoolroom concentration; otherwise, she might have asked how Irene and I knew the details of those wounds.

I saw that our discussion had delivered the unexpected dividend that Irene was waiting for: an utterly original perspective on the killings that had plagued London and now had apparently immigrated to Paris.