Irene Adler: Chapel Noir Part 50

I peeked from Elizabeth's sleeping alcove window, but could spy only the bowed figures of hurried pedestrians on the street below, no watching figure.

I had changed from the heavy men's clothing into my nightshirt and dressing gown. The voluminous and familiar cottons felt like a feminine coc.o.o.n sheltering me from the crude realities of the previous night. My very body had seemed bruised by the welted wools, as my mind had been blasted into some state from which I feared it might never return.

None of us had returned to bed.

Elizabeth, enamored of her alien garb, had kept it on for an hour or two before surrendering to the common comfort of nightwear. Her attire surprised me: a simple cotton flannel white gown edged with factory-made crochetwork and a plaid wool dressing gown.

Irene had retired to her room and emerged in a crackling black-green taffeta dressing gown that covered her like the glittering carapace of an exotic tropical beetle. A Worth creation, of course. I found it odd that she should seek shelter in such a costume after what we had found, after what she had led us all-including the renowned consulting detective-to find.

She occupied an upholstered armchair before the fire Elizabeth had coaxed into predawn life, saying nothing, not even smoking her vile small cigars. She sat like an empress on a throne, as if her court robes were too heavy to permit motion, as if only her mind stirred behind her impa.s.sive face. It was as dread and cold as Sherlock Holmes's features had been when he had consigned us to the entry salon of the Musee Grevin last night.

I almost considered her as an actor onstage and in place, waiting for the curtain to open to begin the next, or last, act of the current drama.

And suddenly I understood, not only Irene but, G.o.d help me, Sarah Bernhardt. They both had absorbed the conviction and strength of the often larger-than-life women they had so often portrayed on the stage. Judith from the Bible or Theodora the Byzantine Empress. They were not about to step away from such towering roles to flutter and bow and sc.r.a.pe in real life. If they had a tendency to regard life as a drama, at least they would play a leading role, no matter how modestly cast by society and custom. I had never thought before that perhaps the corrupting power of the theater was not upon the emotions of the audience, but in giving the players a taste of lives that had not been ordinary.

Finally, after an hour, Irene bestirred herself. She asked Elizabeth to order breakfast over the internal telephone system. Elizabeth met my eyes as she gave her instructions to the kitchens far below. We neither of us had an appet.i.te, and neither expected to for some time.

But Irene had been right. After the waiter had delivered covered trays of steaming foodstuffs and our round table was laden with plates of porridge and raisins, sausage, fish, omelettes, and pastries, in addition to pots of coffee, tea, and chocolate, it was as if the world had turned a notch and in that motion some order had been restored to a sadly askew universe.

I found myself accepting a cup of bitter coffee while Elizabeth poured cream into it. Certainly more than ordinary remedies were called for this morning.

We each ate what we could in silent concentration. None of us finished whatever we touched.

At last Irene rose and, rustling like a flock of rooks in her taffeta gown, she set the half-empty plates back on the trays and moved them to the desk while I removed the beverage pots.

"Now," she said, sitting at the cleared table, "we must decide our next move."

"Next move!" I repeated. "Irene, we have been surely set aside after this last atrocity. Although you can take secret satisfaction in knowing that you led the great Sherlock Holmes to the scene of the crime, I have never seen a murder more made for the police and such professional investigators as Sherlock Holmes. You say that we are already being watched. It would be wisest to return to Neuilly and leave this series of slaughters to the gendarmes."

"Secret satisfaction is most underrated, Nell," she replied, a deadly gleam in her eye.

"I agree with Nell," Elizabeth said, sounding subdued for once. "I don't understand how you knew to lead us to those two terrible sites last night, but this entire puzzle has multiplied beyond any understanding. Many elements smack of the London horrors of last autumn. Others seem part of their own mysterious pattern."

"Not so puzzling," Irene said. "Like all leaps of logic, my path last night was actually quite forthright once you understand what trail of bread crumbs I was following. Sherlock Holmes may be able to detect and follow actual bread crumbs, or cork crumbs, or drops of blood, in this case. I must use my head rather than my nose, or my eyes, or my magnifying gla.s.s." She rose to rustle into the other room and returned with the tracing of the Paris map she had made the previous night.

She spread it out until it covered the table scarf like a great white wrinkled serviette, that strange bare-bones map she had drawn. I couldn't help thinking of some uncharted constellation from the heavens, all dots and connecting lines.

"Not so amazing," Irene insisted. "All three murdered women ended up in the Paris Morgue, though only one, the last, was on actual display. The authorities were too concerned about the prominent persons involved at the maison de rendezvous to allow those first victims public exposure, and they already knew their ident.i.ties. The anonymous young woman from the catacombs near the Eiffel Tower seemed safe to flaunt . . . and thus she was, though her throat had been cut like those of the first two women.

"Yet she was covered to disguise the nature of the mutilations." Irene glanced at me. "Nell, you read the descriptions of Jack the Ripper's rampages?"

I nodded, letting feeble explanations for my morbid curiosity go unsaid. I had grown up reading ghost stories in the dark of country nights. Perhaps that had given me an unaccountable taste for terror.

"Did he not," Irene went on, "this London monster, leave the bodies in plain sight, with no attempt to hide them? Did he not let them lie as he left them, with interior organs drawn out and draped around the corpses?"

I nodded.

"Did he not also on occasion lay out the pitiful belongings of these poor women, delving into their pockets as well as their bodies?"

I nodded again, sorry that I had swallowed more than coffee, sorry even for sampling that searing beverage, which burned my throat and stomach like an unspoken apology.

"Then one might say that display itself is a large part of the killer's need and desire, his pattern?" she went on.

This time Elizabeth joined me in nodding.

"There is one thing Jack the Ripper never did in London. Can you tell me what?"

"He never moved a body," I said slowly, remembering the pale bare corpse of last night, which would have been appalling enough to regard had it merely been made of wax. "That we know of."

"No. He never moved a body, although his last killing was a departure, moving from out of doors to within doors. Perhaps moving a body is only his next . . . refinement. And-?"

I glanced at Elizabeth, who shook her head.

Irene was building her case, like a barrister well satisfied by his witnesses' puzzlement, pacing before us, her hands hidden in her wide, sweeping sleeves.

She stopped in a rasp of whirling taffeta. "One thing the Ripper never did. He never went underground."

"That we know of," Elizabeth said. "He could have escaped the area by some underground means."

"What underground means?" Irene demanded. "London is not noted for an accessible network of sewers, as Paris is. There are no convenient yet mostly forgotten catacombs, and the excavation for the underground trains is too well watched. Especially absent is that subterranean honeycomb of granite tunnels that underlies forty percent of Paris."

"The Ripper is merely using what a new city offers," Elizabeth said.

This gave Irene pause. "Perhaps," she said quietly. "But I find the murders of the women at the bordello out of character for Jack the Ripper. And you notice that the wine cellar there had been disturbed in some fashion. Yet another underground site.

"Now, this disordered cavern we found last night on a line with the bordello. Perhaps it is even connected. We saw in the bordello wine cellar what seemed to be a branch of the sewers. I now believe it to be a flooded granite pa.s.sage instead. And the symbols found! No symbols decorated the sites of the London crimes."

"Except for the mysterious phrase about the Jews, which has been repeated here in French," Elizabeth said.

"Yes. One wonders why. Especially when one realizes that the 'juives' phrase that makes sense of the London scrawl 'Juwes' is the feminine form of the plural of 'Jews' in French, so the sentence really indicates that the 'Jewesses are the Men . . .' Well, Nell, I know you drew those markings last night. Mr. Holmes asked for your notations before he went to find a gendarme to sound the alarm at the Musee Grevin. I a.s.sume you managed to copy them somehow as you were extracting the pages before he took them?"

No-"

Her face lost all expression but horror.

"-but I had begun copying them over in a neater form as we cooled our heels at Mr. Holmes's orders in the salon des colonnes for what seemed like hours. I was hardly going to spend my time staring at the papal cortege. So, when he appeared before us in that highhanded manner and demanded my notes, I gave him . . . the first version."

"Oh, Nell!" Irene came and caught me by the elbows as if she would waltz me around the room in jubilation. "Most excellent! I had to bite my tongue almost clear through not to betray my anxiety when you ripped those pages out at his command. Yet I knew I could count on you to somehow resist giving Mr. Holmes what he wanted."

"Well, I gave him only a lesser version of what he wanted. I do not work for him, you know."

"Nor do I. Let's see those scrawls. They could be arcane signs left behind by some beggars' conclave who visited the same cavern, or they could relate directly to this latest killing."

I went to my chamber to fetch the notebook, which I had tossed on a table after removing it from the jacket pocket.

Irene lit the lamp while I was gone so my small drawings would be as visible as possible.

I frowned at the symbols. "This P with the X crossing the upright reminds me of a shepherd's crook for some reason. Why would a chamber with the strange sentence about the luwes' written in blood on its walls bear the sign of a shepherd?"

Irene's head snapped upright as if jerked by a leash instead of a sudden thought. "Why not the sign of the Shepherd?"

Elizabeth had stood to stare down at the symbol. "The papal cortege at the Musee Grevin . . . I saw that very symbol embroidered on one of the official's robes. I remember thinking how the papal crown-it's called a miter, isn't it?-resembled the headpiece of upper and lower Egypt in ancient times and how this"-she tapped the symbol-"struck me as almost a hieroglyph."

"You are saying this is a religious symbol?" I was dubious. "Why would a religious symbol be left in that cavern of blood and likely death? I cannot credit it, not even if it is a Papist symbol."

Irene, ignoring my usual Church of England distaste for things Roman Catholic, was hovering over me now. "The shepherd is an Old Testament figure as well as a New, and might be considered a Jewish symbol as well as a Christian, although that X is reminiscent of a cross, and thus more Christian than Jewish if it represents more than the simple letter X. I have seen it before . . . I know! Near the ossuary in the catacomb where the poor girl was found. Very faint. I took it for some ancient marking, but these Paris catacombs are not ancient, except perhaps that under Notre Dame."

"We must take this drawing to a churchman," Elizabeth said.

At that moment a knock sounded on our door, sharp enough to have been made by a walking stick. Or a policeman's club.

A Confederacy of Paper

I have seen too much not to know that the impression of a

women may be more valuable than the conclusion of an

a.n.a.lytical reasoner.

-SHERLOCK HOLMES, "THE MAN WITH THE TWISTED LIP"

After an exchange of startled stares amongst us three, Irene swept forward to swing the door wide.

There, his walking stick raised to rap again, stood Mr. Sherlock Holmes. Attired in frock coat and top hat, he would have almost resembled a boulevardier had his b.u.t.tonhole sported a carnation, but it was thankfully empty of ornament.

The abrupt answer to his summons seemed to surprise him, or perhaps it was Irene in her dazzling Worth dressing gown (which really more resembled a ball gown, in my opinion).

"It is after noon." Shocked into announcing the obvious, his expression showed instant regret.

"A brilliant deduction," Irene agreed. "I cannot dispute it. None of us wears a timepiece and have been too busy to consult the mantel clock."

"I meant that you are late to rise."

"As we were late to bed, if you recall the events of last night."

"Forgive my untimely visit. I have perhaps considered too much the imperatives of this case and not enough of the habits of ladies."

"Our 'habits,' " Irene said, spreading her mandarin sleeves like b.u.t.terfly wings, "as you can plainly see, are domestic. We have, in fact, been reviewing the elements of the 'case,' as you call it."

He retreated a pace. "I will step down to the lobby and return later."

"There is no time." Irene dropped her tone of ironic banter. "Come in and perhaps you will answer some of our questions, as we may be able to answer some of yours."

"I have only one question, Madam," he said. As usual, in his acerbic tone the English form of the courtesy address seemed more demanding and less respectful than the French. "What is the ident.i.ty of the confederate who has been feeding you information on this matter?"

"Confederate?" Elizabeth burst out. "Only us."

His cool gray glance swept over us two so swiftly that we might have been barely visible.

"I mean your hidden confederate," he told Irene. "I at first suspected your husband, but from what hasty inquiries I was able to make yesterday, he does seem to be safely established in Prague, or he was, until days ago. Unfortunately he left the city so recently that he could not have returned to Paris without wings."

Irene stepped quickly past him into the hall, glancing sharply both ways. "Such matters are not suitable conversations for a public pa.s.sage. Come in, Mr. Holmes, and interrogate us as you will."

He hesitated as if crossing our threshold was equivalent to plunging into Caesar's Rubicon. He did not strike me as a man who hesitated often. But then again he must not confront three women in dressing gowns very often.

"You are not attired for company," he began to object.

"And have you not spent many profitable hours at home in your dressing gown, Mr. Holmes? I doubt very seriously that the manner of clothing has much to do with the quality of thinking among those wearing it. As you said, we have no time. Come in. Elizabeth, fetch Mr. Holmes some coffee. I believe it is still hot enough if he is able to take it black. Nell, clear the table of our papers. We will all sit down together peacefully and discuss the arts of slaughter."

I understood at once that she did not wish Mr. Holmes to see our maps and drawings, so I swept them into Elizabeth's sleeping alcove, letting the curtain fall slowly enough that he would surely see what the s.p.a.ce was. No gentleman could violate a woman's sleeping chamber without permission, and in this situation, Sherlock Holmes was clearly ill served by his gentlemanly approach. I do not doubt that he would not stick at returning as a burglar later to see what he wanted, but for now he was cast in the role of caller, no matter how urgent.

He did indeed sip the dreadful black coffee that Elizabeth brought him, and sternly kept his eyes from dwelling on our conjoined state of deshabille.

His manner brought to mind the madman Kelly's utter distress at our presence during his interrogation. I even remembered Bram Stoker's rather anxious diffidence in our presence, and he was both a man of theater used to seeing women in semidressed states, and a married man to boot. When we had been dressed as women of the streets, Sherlock Holmes had uneasily maintained his air of masculine authority, yet here and now, in our mostly respectable selves (I exempt Elizabeth, who however was suspiciously refined for a tart) . . . we had him at a disadvantage merely by wearing dressing gowns and having our hair down. I was struck by the fact that the more scandalously a woman attired herself, the more power she had over men. Most strange.

"Now," said Irene, her gown crackling like raven wings as she settled at the table, "I would be obliged if you would recount for me the latest intelligence on my husband's movements, since I find the post a rather belated source of information."

Sherlock Holmes cleared his throat. "I have, er, Foreign Office connections in Prague. I am told that your husband suddenly left the city three days ago by rail, bound for Vienna."

"This I knew. Is that all that Foreign Office connections can contribute?"