Irene Adler: Chapel Noir Part 49

And death.

And I suppose that was why Irene had led us all here.

"Is it possible to enter?" Irene asked Sherlock Holmes.

"Not without attracting attention."

"No attention seems to be directed our way," she returned, eyeing the empty street.

"I would doubt that," he replied, "but whatever attention we have drawn probably does not wish to draw attention to itself, at the moment."

"We will crowd around," she decreed, "to conceal your actions."

So we three kept convivial if somewhat tilted company before the door while Sherlock Holmes produced a number of small metal tools from another of his disreputable pockets and set to work picking the door lock like a burglar born.

This was even more of a ripping adventure than I could have hoped for! Like Nell after her solo visit to Mr. Holmes, I was madly impatient for an opportunity to write it all down while the events were still fresh in my mind. Since I was not known for my endless note-taking, as she was, the recording angel in my mind would have to hold her horses. I wonder if she wore cowboy boots!

The door opened just a bit, like a dowager taking a very tiny breath before supper. I know I stood there stupefied, for I had never entered anywhere unlawfully before. Oh, I had entered unwanted, or under false pretenses plenty of times, but never . . . criminally.

It was testimony as to who were the seasoned sleuths among us when Irene wasted no time slipping through the widening opening, Sherlock Holmes on her coattails.

I took a last look 'round at the silent street before I followed Nell into the darkness within.

I immediately b.u.mped into Sherlock Holmes, who was waiting to secure the door behind me.

"Patience, Miss Pink," he said wryly. "We are only four foxes in a house with many hundreds of hens."

Although Mr. Holmes's a.n.a.logy of a henhouse might have suited our company of women and the American birth of two of us, we hardly stood in so humble an outbuilding but rather in a large soaring chamber lined with columns reminiscent of the Temple at Karnak of ancient Egypt.

"The museum is wired throughout for electric light," Irene noted briskly, "to preserve the wax figures from decaying in the warmer glare of other lighting methods. It is the first such building in Paris to boast this modern convenience. Would that the theaters were so equipped! Many an overweight tenor has nearly melted under the stage lights."

"You know a great deal about this place," Nell said a trifle suspiciously. She was very jealous of Irene's comings and goings.

"That is one thing G.o.dfrey and I did during all those carriage outings to Paris. We visited the Musee Grevin."

"Oh. You did not mention it."

"Oh. You did not ask."

"So you know the building," Mr. Holmes put in almost as sharply as Nell. I wondered what he was jealous of. "I am not used to being led by female intuition, Madam Norton. I presume you have some unshared knowledge that leads you to this place."

"Just the usual intuition," she replied airily. "I have always found intuition a supreme advantage upon the stage, and see no reason to ignore its advantages in real life."

"I will admit that I detected signs of a previous a.s.sault on the front door."

"Are they still here?" Nell whispered, wide eyes shining white in the light of the shuttered lantern I had been given custody of when Mr. Holmes had bent all his attention and both of his hands to the act and art of gaining entry.

"Ask Madam Intuition," he responded huffily.

I imagine that the great detective, used to working alone, much resented the company of this gaggle of false ganders. Yet we had led him to a scene with chilling implications about the Whitechapel murders. For if the same phrase that had been erased so quickly in Goulston Street-I wonder that it was not spelled "Ghoulston Street" after what we had seen tonight-was now appearing in French on the stone walls of catacomb-like cellars in Paris . . . well, what was the world of l.u.s.tmurder coming to?

"I hope," he was saying further, "that Madam Norton will explain herself to us after our exploration of the world of wax is over."

"And I hope," she said, "that it will no longer be necessary to explain myself after our exploration."

I aimed the lanternlight ahead of us to encourage more movement and less discussion. If we were to meet monsters in this macabre place, I'd prefer to get it over with.

Still, as my meandering light glinted off men in jackboots and braided uniforms, my heart almost stopped. The gendarmes had antic.i.p.ated us! We would be arrested. Disgraced. Unmasked. I gasped.

A hand grasped mine on the lantern, then trained it upward.

There, floating well above the floor, was a figure in an encrusted gown, surmounting by a high peaked headdress.

"His Holiness," Irene's voice came sardonically, "being carried by the princes of the church. A papal cortege to greet the hoi polloi as they enter the museum."

"Most unbecoming of a churchman," Nell said, sniffing as only the English can. "Pomp and adulation."

"Most like the Archbishop of Canterbury," Irene put in. "France is a Catholic country."

"So I see." Nell sounded as if she wished she hadn't.

I suspected that if Irene's expedition was as successful as she hoped-or feared-we would all confront what we wished we hadn't.

As I cast my lanternlight high and low, I glimpsed the truly impressive element of this entry to the museum. The many columns had waist-high bases surmounted by carved decorations to a height of six feet or more before they soared to the dark ceiling where rococo capitals gleamed like gilt palm-tree fronds.

Behind this double row of columns that acted as a sort of silent honor guard leading to the museum's actual display rooms stretched an arcade of gilt-framed mirrors. So every wax figure, every flesh-andblood visitor was reflected back and forth until we all mingled into one confusing "crowd scene." Add the shiny marble floor beneath it all dimly reflecting everything wax and genuine, and the effect was of walking through a mirrored box. What is real, what staged, indeed? I have never experienced such a sensation of suspended reality. Even glimpsing my companions distracted me, made me momentarily take them for heart-stopping phantasms. In such an environment a monster, a killer, could slide up behind one in a mirror, could strike and be gone before the blood from his blade even began to flow.

I wished I, too, carried a little pistol, as Irene did, and I was glad to have the eminent consulting detective among our number.

The lanternlight kept picking out rich details-rattan pedestals holding potted palms, velvet-upholstered benches. Really, the effect was more of the lobby of a luxury hotel than that of a museum.

My lantern moved past the base of a pillar to cast a spotlight on a man and woman chatting just beyond it. She sat, hatted and caped, he stood, hat in hand, hand resting on the bench's top rail.

I expected them to turn and berate us for illuminating their private tete-a-tete, but of course they were wax and could not move.

"Oh!" Nell was pressing her hand to her heart, a quite odd gesture when wearing male dress. "They look just like us. I mean, like we would look if we were properly attired."

Sherlock Holmes had already drawn near to examine them. "A pretty trick, to import ordinary anonymous wax figures to deceive the spectators. Such a dodge might be employed in the service of more serious matters. . . ." His hand paused atop the gentleman's bare head as if in secular benediction.

Then he turned to Irene. "Do you have a destination in mind? Or are we to enjoy the entire contents of the museum at our ill-lit leisure?"

"I do," she said, "but I do not exactly recall its location. If you will bear left with me . . ."

She turned and strode into the dark faster than I could keep up and aim the lanternlight ahead of her. Her Sherlockian boldness amazed, both in her a.s.sumption that I would keep up and light her way, and her indifference to whether I managed it after all.

I also had to hope that the place was as deserted of the living as it seemed to be. On the hard floors our footsteps were impossible to m.u.f.fle.

We sped past vignettes and tableaux that ranged from the familiar to the bizarre. Top-hatted and parasol-shaded European travelers shopped along a street in Cairo populated by overburdened donkeys, veiled women, and turbaned natives. This tableau evoked just such a village I had read of on the World Exposition grounds. A moment later we were peeping into the dancers' dressing room at the Paris Opera, with the ballerina in her satin toe shoes and knee-length tutu receiving a gentleman caller in evening dress. Next came a scene of human sacrifice in Dahomey, with nearly naked African men gathered to behead one of their own, bound and kneeling. The men's skin shone like bootblack. Then it was the death of Marat in his bathtub. And then top-hatted gentlemen visiting the Eiffel Tower under construction, standing with their waistcoats and canes on the piled girders and angled, airy struts that form the structure, only a panorama of vacant sky behind them.

These glimpses, as sudden as the photographic cards that flash through a stereopticon, had the effect of lightning on the senses, and the quick fashion in which we glimpsed and then pa.s.sed them almost made the wax figures seem to move. Certainly they were eerily lifelike.

"Ah." Irene had stopped.

My light shone into a room, small and disordered.

At our very feet, a waxen man fell from the bed, his legs still under the blanket, his nightshirted torso lying on the floor, bloodied, the dagger haft growing from his heart like a stunted shoot.

His murderer stood behind him by the wardrobe, searching for something.

"How dreadful," said Nell.

"The blood upon the scattered papers would not have fallen in that direction," Sherlock Holmes noted with disdain.

"The exhibit is called 'The History of a Crime,' Irene said. "I think if we study it, we will discover the history of another crime entirely."

"You have been mysterious long enough," Mr. Holmes declared. "I am used to predicting the impossible. I do not think that is a function of being a retired opera singer."

"It may be a function of being a retired private inquiry agent for the Pinkertons, however," Irene answered. "I will give you all a clue. This exhibit has seven vignettes. It is called The History of a Crime.' I will let you imagine what might be the subject of the next six vignettes, and I will let you speculate how one of them would relate to one of the murders that have recently occurred in Paris."

"Only one?" he asked sharply.

"Indirectly to all three-if there are but three, and I think now that there are not-and directly to one."

She moved forward, I trotting after, shedding light on the second vignette. Another room showed the killer held down on the Oriental carpet by caped and capped gendarmes. Maidservants gawked in the background and men dressed remarkably like Inspector le Villard in frock coats, vests, and soft ties looked on.

"The arrest," Sherlock Holmes announced.

Irene had already moved on, so I followed.

And my heart slowed, then sped up as the lanternlight revealed a scene so like one at which I had been present that I thought for an instant that everything since then and now had been a hallucination, and I had never left that pitiful scene.

Behind me Nell drew a breath she did not let out.

I sensed Sherlock Holmes coming to stand behind us all, easily seeing over our heads.

This room was no bigger than the others, but it seemed to swell until it was all I could see: the brick floor, the pale arched stone walls and ceiling, so like a cellar. The high, long, narrow board equipped with hooks that hosted a sad array of clothing-shoes, stockings, vest, singlet, trousers, jacket, hat. All that the victim on the low stone slab had worn.

Two top-hatted men stood on the corpse's left. One pointed an accusing arm. One took frantic notes, reminding me of Nell in the cavern this very night.

On the right, the accused man shrank from the sight of his naked victim while a uniformed gendarme and an inspector in bowler hat and suit stood by to ensure his custody.

The body on the slab lay feetfirst toward us, the living, the spectators. The flesh was pale and slightly gray. A cloth covering all from neck to knee.

We all stood speechless, not at the waxen effigy of death, but at its s.e.x. The dead man from the first chamber was now a dead woman. Of the head all that could be seen was the underside of a chin, the tip of a nose, both delicate and feminine and utterly horrific.

"Remarkable," said Sherlock Holmes. It was the first time I had detected a note of awe in his tone.

He stepped into the tableau and bent over the body, obscuring it from us.

I blinked. He didn't move for a few instants and for that time I thought he had been swallowed by the waxwork tableau never to emerge and move again.

When he finally straightened and stepped back, the lamplight showed him as pale the corpse.

"The woman is dead," he said.

"Of course she's 'dead,' " Nell objected. "That is the entire idea of the scene. This represents a room in the morgue, does it not?"

"It does," Irene said. Her tone was very heavy. "I would be interested in your diagnosis, Mr. Holmes."

"I am sorry to say that your intuition has been alarmingly exonerated, Madam." His tones were harsh, clipped. "This is not the wax figure that previously occupied this place. This woman was killed only hours ago, not here, killed and-or perhaps I should say, killed after . . . being horribly mutilated."

My fears were confirmed: cold, false waxen flesh had been replaced by cold, honest human flesh. What kind of fiend would set such a stage for an unsuspecting public? Although the public that flocked daily to the Paris Morgue would no doubt thrill to news of a freshly mutilated corpse appearing in a museum devoted to mimicking life. Thanks to Irene, the public would be defrauded of its excitement, for this discovery would surely be kept secret.

"Now." Mr. Holmes turned to us a face of such granite seriousness that I thought it should crack even as he spoke. "If you would be so kind, please leave me the lantern and to my business. I must collect what evidence remains before I inform the police and permit them to trample the entire museum like a herd of camels from the Cairo tableau. I suggest you join the waxen couple on the benches in the main salon until I am done."

"You want no help?" Irene asked incredulously.

"You can give none that I need, and I must insist on sparing you any more intimate involvement with a case that bears the mark of the Fiend himself upon it. I would even hesitate to ask Dr. Watson to share such a task."

He turned his back as if we no longer existed, as if we had all been frozen into wax figures in a museum and he was the only living being in the Musee Grevin.

Calendar of Crime

Beyond the troubling but fascinating lull of s.e.xual violence that hangs around the murders like Sherlockian fog, the killings remain so intriguing because the suspectwas not found. . . .

-MAXIM JAKUBOWSKI AND NATHAN BRAUND, THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF JACK THE RIPPER

Dawn brought the merest moderation of light. Paris skies had opened a drizzling mouse-colored umbrella over her boulevards and streets. Everything reflected in the dull sheen that coated cobblestones and buildings.