Irene Adler: Chapel Noir Part 32

"Bram Stoker," Nell said, writing with intense concentration, "mentioned crossing the Atlantic with Buffalo Bill. I wonder if any Red Indians were on that voyage as well."

Irene was thinking aloud about the present, not the past. "The World Exposition grounds around the Eiffel Tower teem with foreign exhibits. Is there an American Indian display, do you think?"

While Nell visibly racked her brain on this most unexpected topic, Irene leaned toward me to whisper: "We must also consider the shots fired at us near Notre Dame. They missed, of course, but now I wonder if that was the idea. Were they meant to draw us to, or away from the catacombs? Yet that incident merely leads us to a new fact: cowboys and Indians and shooting displays are the heart of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. Isn't it in Paris now? When was it in London?"

My breath felt stolen away. No one had dreamed of an American Indian stalking the streets of London and Paris! Yet I had grown up on bloodcurdling tales of Indian depravities against the Wild West settlers, of innocent women and children subjected to the most cruel tortures and atrocities before, and after, death.

True, that era was almost over in America, but could some traveling warrior have gone as mad as the men in Herr Krafft-Ebing's book? How soon we forget the utterly b.e.s.t.i.a.l remnants of primitive humanity that survive in our civilized midst despite our best efforts to stamp out such depravities! Simply because the American East was nurturing a seaboard string of major cities to rival European capitals, we could not forget the seething heart of savagery still beating in the American West, in our heartland prairies and western reaches, mostly conquered but still only a generation removed from unparalleled fierceness.

With such possibilities as this, the notion of suspecting someone as civilized as Sherlock Holmes, or Bram Stoker, of being the Ripper became as ludicrous as it should have seemed from the first.

"Bram Stoker," Nell mused coincidentally, "is a most unlikely candidate anyway, despite his presence in the disreputable house where the first Paris murders occurred. Most of the Ripper suspects were well under five-foot-five."

"As were the victims," Irene reminded us. "Except for Mary Jane Kelly, the lady of five-foot-seven who called herself Marie Jeannette at times, and claimed she had been taken to Paris by a gentleman client."

"Kelly," said Nell, a.s.siduously pursuing her confounded list. "There was a suspect named Kelly. He went to France very shortly after Mary Jane's death, and the police were most interested in his movements. He was an upholsterer by trade, but had fallen into lamentable work and personal habits." She looked up from her list at last, to our stunned faces.

"What? What!?"

Penelope Huxleigh may have been the most annoyingly innocent woman left in France, and perhaps on the planet, but she was not, in the end, stupid.

"Oh," she said finally, realizing that she had almost overlooked a d.a.m.ning connection in the case. She put her hands to her heat-pinked cheeks.

At last I had a partner in the girlish art and agony of blushing.

Sins of the Son

He presented a mixture of primordial delirium of persecution

(devil, antichrist, persecution, poisoning, persecuting voices)

and delusions of grandeur (Christ, redemption of the world) with

impulsive, incoherent actions.

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

I found him soaked and shivering near the statue of the Virgin.

It was past the early services and before the next. No one was near. The great cathedral pillars soared around us like stalact.i.tes and stalagmites the ages had shaped into a vast cavern of frozen wax turned to stone by some poor excuse of a Midas.

I had been nurtured in this world of incense and beeswax candles and sanctimony, but the savagery of the steppes and the sweeping riders of the East is in my veins and my holy water is now blood and not wine.

"What is it?" I crooned, holding him as Mother Church does sinners.

His teeth were chattering, his fabled strength a limp rag. So does the G.o.d of Christians magnify weakness.

"I am crucified," he whispered in the language that we share.

It is hard to offer spiritual advice to a demon.

"Tell me your trouble." I care for no one. Well, one. But that is an aberration I will deal with later.

"Tell me your trouble," I crooned. He is a beast, after all, and responds to simple things. Simple sins. Simple falsities, simple lies.

"I am torn! I am torn," the tearer cries. Terror.

"Hush. How?"

"I flew with the hunter. Above the wooden rooftops, over the gilded dome of the church, over the marsh and the firs, the mountains and the spires, over the roof of the world. I see myself suspended over the dome of the Temple, tempted by the Devil to dash myself onto stones and sin. I see myself suspended over domes, great gilt domes in a great gilt city, on my own holy power, dashing the Devil onto stones and eternal fires. Will I be in Heaven, or in h.e.l.l? What is holy? What is power?"

"Both. Power is holy. Holy is power."

"And sin?"

"Sin is . . . salvation."

"Yes, yes! We sense that in my village. We must sin to be saved."

I couldn't restrain a shrug. I only recognized the first part of that sentence, to which we all serve life terms. We must sin or be sinned against. The rest is delusion.

He raked his hands-claws-into the tangled wet hair at his temples, his eyes as wild as a stallion's.

"I have come out of the wilderness, walking for months, to seek salvation. I have come to this stone city, and others like it, to find fellow sinners and fellow saints.

"But their wines are weak and their stomachs as well. The horses are fettered and the women . . . the women refuse, or demand pay! It was not like that in my village," he added drunkenly. "No one drank deeper, or rode faster or farther, or sang louder, or danced longer, or cursed harder, or loved more women, willing women, women who couldn't resist. . . ."

My glance lifted to the Virgin's simpering face. She resisted him, too, but he didn't see it.

"This is a foreign city," I consoled him. "You have come to learn about foreign cities, and what you may accomplish in them."

And so have I.

"I will go to a finer foreign city than any. I will be a power higher than any ruler. I will bring myself up so high that I will bring them all down."

He let himself sprawl against the wall, took a long draught from the thick pottery bottle in his hand. He drank as if it were water, when I knew that the slightest swallow was scouring liquid fire.

"I must go to the Gypsies," he said, "and stroke their horses and hear their violins and have their women. My mind screams from the silence of these cities, of these stone blocks, houses of G.o.d, and houses of women.

"I have sinned." He buried his shaven boy's face in his huge callused hands, in which he clutched a crude wooden cross. His anguish was genuine. It was most interesting.

He is a very young man with the broad shoulders of a boar, of only medium height but with brute strength that multiplies when fueled by his erratic emotions, or the always reliable liquor. Even he does not know his own age. He thinks he is around twenty, give or take a few years.

Peasants are so refreshing, unspoiled.

Sherlock the Shredder

A did not show the slightest trace of emotion, and gave no

explanation of the motive or circ.u.mstances of his horrible deed.

He was a psychopathic individual, and occasionally subject to

fits of depression. . . .

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

The light under my bedchamber door was the faintest sliver, but I was able to ascertain the time on my locket-watch by the mingled moonlight and gaslight sifting through in my window: 2:00 A.M.

Though my heart was pounding, my mind told me that such a phenomenon must be investigated.

I pushed my feet into my icy slippers and donned my dimity dressing gown, then slowly opened my door.

The heavy hinges did not squeak. I had long moments to examine the scene: Irene, hair down, poring over the Ripper papers and my notes by the light of an oil lamp.

I shuffled into the outer room, and she looked up, her finger already at her lips to demand silence.

The pleasure that filled me was immense. This was something she did not wish Elizabeth to know. Our old equilibrium seemed fully established again as I slipped into the empty chair at her side and raised my eyebrows.

Not only my painstaking list of the Ripper suspects and their specifics lay scattered over the table's surface. So did new pages filled with Irene's large, looping penmanship.

"What are you doing?" I whispered.

She whispered back. "Trying to determine which suspect was Sherlock Holmes."

My toes curled in my slippers. Not only was Irene confiding in me and not that upstart Elizabeth Pink, but she was attempting to implicate Sherlock Holmes in the Whitechapel horrors!

I really could not imagine a more blissful moment, except that Quentin Stanhope would walk through the pa.s.sage door and join us.

"Height is the key," Irene said. "Except for the last victim, who was attacked in her bed apparently, all of the victims were of short stature. You see what that means?"

"Ah, they were easier to attack."

"On the streets. And," she added to herself, "in the act."