Irene Adler: Chapel Noir Part 52

"Certainly not! We did away with all that idol-worshiping folderol with King Henry VIII."

"Who did away with a goodly number of wives. I wonder if any of them are Catholic saints."

"Only two were beheaded," I pointed out, "and neither of those was suitably saintly, since adultery was their crime."

"And so was failing to bear sons," Irene added, "which I believe was the truer and greater flaw."

"Listen, ladies," Elizabeth put in. "We are not here to argue religious history. Will someone tell me what this saint feast-day calendar means?"

"I'm thinking of the religious symbol scribbled on the catacomb wall," Irene said.

I immediately produced my drawing of the strange letter P overwritten with an X.

To my surprise, Irene drew a much finer representation from the Rothschild packet.

"This image is near-Eastern and it is ancient," she said. "It's known as the Constantine Cross. This early Christian sign was used in the catacombs in Rome, and it was adopted by the first Holy Roman Emperor, Constantine, in the fourth century, when he saw a flaming cross in the sky and converted to Christianity. It is formed of the first two Greek letters that spell the name of Christ, the Chirho. This was the form he described."

"So-" Elizabeth turned the calendar pages to face her. "You're saying there's good reason to suspect a religious link to these crimes, and to attribute that link to Christians rather than Jews."

"Or to the rituals of the Christian rather than of the Jewish faith."

"Christian rituals do not involve killing!" I pointed out indignantly. "Not even of animal sacrifices."

"What of the body and blood of Christ that is drunk and eaten as wine and host?"

"That is Papist doctrine. Heresy! Our Church does not accept the literal consuming of the Savior's body and blood. That is . . . disgusting."

Irene nodded. "I know the Anglican Church broke with traditional Roman Catholic doctrine on many issues, but Christianity is the only world religion whose chief deity became human and was horribly tortured and killed, as well as His disciples and many of His followers through the centuries. Church history is a saga of martyrs and saints, no matter how many are struck from the ecclesiastical calendar by the religious revisionism of maritally troubled monarchs on one small island in the north Atlantic sea."

"This is the most I have ever heard you say of religion in our long a.s.sociation, Irene, and it is a terribly unjust summation."

She shrugged. "I'm no theologian, Nell. I would ask you to turn to the calendar for the month of May for this year and look up the saint honored on the thirtieth, which is tomorrow. I believe this is one Papist saint you will instantly recognize."

I did so, with Elizabeth hanging over my shoulder in a most annoying way.

I shuffled through the sheets of winter and early spring before May showed its face, a richly gilded medieval ill.u.s.tration of a hunting party from the Duc de Berry's Book of Hours.

Elizabeth rudely jabbed her fingertip onto the month's last day.

"Joan of Arc! Warrior maid and martyr and as French as they come!"

Worlds Fair and Foul

Jules Verne dreamed of travelling around the world in

eighty days. At the Esplanade and the Chamb de Mars

you can do it in six hours.

-BULLETIN OFFICIEL DE L'EXPOSITION UNIVERSELLE DE 1889,

22 DECEMBER 1888.

"A pity Mr. Holmes cannot join the hunt," Irene noted the next afternoon, "but I believe he will still be occupied today with some most absorbing reading, particularly if German is not his long suit in languages."

"Ha!" Elizabeth burst out in a most hoydenish manner, clapping her hands. She finally saw Irene's surrender of the book yesterday for the clever diversion it was.

"Long suit?" I asked Irene.

"An American expression, Nell, referring to holding almost all the cards of a particular suit in a game."

"You said this was not a game."

"True, but it is for whoever has been watching these atrocities and our pursuit unfold."

"You believe that this . . . butcher regards these murders as entertainment?"

"No, but such murders involve an element of perverse gamesmanship with the forces of order and law. If Jack the Ripper really wrote those notes to the papers in London, then he relished taunting the police. Here it is different. Here the police are not being taunted, but the unofficial investigators."

"Us? You believe so?"

"I would swear to it. The killer may not see beyond the unexplored needs that drive him to these acts, as Krafft-Ebing made clear, but someone else is watching."

"Watching us?"

She nodded. "And probably Mr. Holmes as well, which is why I'd like him someplace far away today and tonight."

"And today and tonight we will-?"

Irene pulled the map of Paris to the top of our papers. The first thing one saw now was the triangle of lines that she had drawn, the Paris Morgue to the maison to the catacomb near the Eiffel Tower.

With a few swift strokes and the ruler she etched an upside-down triangle above it, beginning at the maison in the rue des Moulins near the Paris Opera. Her new lines extended the bottom triangle's sides up to the Musee Grevin on the right, and the b.l.o.o.d.y cellar of last night on the left near the Parc Monceau.

"You see the pattern?" she asked.

"Triangles," Elizabeth burst out too quickly.

Before the dawning look of disappointment could settle on Irene's features, I put my hands to my face, covering my eyes. "Wait! I see something I have vaguely seen before." I took away my hands so that the new lines on the map should strike my eyes with a fresh impact.

"It's . . . the bodies we viewed were seen on the left of the map, at the morgue and the wax museum, which are almost directly above each other. And the places we saw where the bodies were dead, or killed, are on the left, with the cellar almost directly above the Eiffel Tower.

"And the rue des Moulins is in the precise middle. This pattern is maddeningly familiar . . . but what!"

"I am sure you would perceive it in time, Nell," Irene said, beaming upon me as if I were a prize pupil. Elizabeth looked particularly exasperated.

"But we have no time," Irene concluded.

Her fingertip touched the Eiffel Tower, the Paris Morgue, the Musee Grevin above it and finally the park.

"It's a box waltz," I blurted out as I followed the pattern.

"Or," she corrected, "if you see lines that begin and end instead of an enclosure like a box. . . ."

I would not be denied my prize, but quickly sketched a figure over the streetmap. "The four sites are the end points of the X on the Chi-rho."

Irene applauded. I was not aware of Elizabeth doing anything but sulking.

"But where, and what," I wondered, "does the maison on the rue des Moulins have to do with it?"

"If you were to draw the P behind the X, Nell, you would find that the maison de rendezvous is located on the P's central staff, just below where the curve begins."

"Someone has been playing games of geography and calendars with us?" Elizabeth asked indignantly.

"Oh, it's not a game," Irene said quickly. "It is a serious and revolting ritual."

"And from this pattern," I asked, after adding the P, "you know where to begin a hunting party for the next atrocity? Where shall that be?

'Where else? The catacomb was near but not exactly at the Eiffel Tower, which is on the side where deaths occur. The Tour Eiffel is an unfulfilled site. But don't call it a hunting party, Nell. First must come 'scouting' the wilderness. We will merely be out enjoying the l'Exposition universelle with le tout Paris."

Even I had to admit that l'Exposition universelle was nothing short of a fairyland of a world's fair, filled with exotic food, music, and sights so vast and varied that one became quite dizzy just to look at it all.

Not to mention getting a crick in the neck, for everything loomed above the milling throngs, most especially the Eiffel Tower, tarted up in a coat of scarlet paint.

The Esplanade des Invalides stretched along the glittering Seine, which had become a mirror for the exposition's frenetic lights and motion, presenting all the jumbled sights of the French colonial pavilions with their air of an Oriental fairyland, not to mention the displays of various countries and cities.

The entire scene, darkened only by the flood of visitors snaking among the kiosks and fountains and pavilions, gave me the odd impression of a collision between Mount Olympus and the Tower of Babel.

No one regarded our trio as we wove through the jumble of people and noise. Besides boulevardiers in their frock coats and top hats, there were many men in the shorter-jacketed lounge suits that were becoming popular city wear, and women in walking suits and skirts and shirtwaists, as well as boys and girls in short pants and skirts.

We were all dressed as ourselves at last! I wore my favorite checked coat-dress, which was a feminine fitted version of a gentleman's country ulster, I suppose, and most practical for city sight-seeing.

Irene could never forgo being smart unless she was in disguise, and then she reveled in wearing the most tawdry, unflattering costumes possible.

Today her dark buffalo red gown was subdued except for a puff of sleeve from shoulder to elbow and a central design from neck to hem of widening black pa.s.s.e.m.e.nterie cord design. It was only on the exposition grounds that I realized that the gown's lacy vertical design exactly mimicked the pierced cast-iron shape of the Eiffel Tower itself!

The artistic soul ever seeks points of reference in even the most common things. And, of course, the fashionable new French color paid tribute to Buffalo Bill!

Elizabeth's dress was charmingly reminiscent of an English riding habit with a bodice b.u.t.toning to the side and a mannish green silk tie over the white-linen collar and chemisette. When I mentioned this fact before we left the hotel, she got on her high horse. The style, she stated, more resembled fashions at the time of the French Revolution and nothing English at all.

Well! I hated to tell her that English riding habits of today are descended from women's dress during the aftermath of the French Revolution early in the present century, which is more importantly known to world history as the English Regency period. I hated to tell her, but I did.

I was the only one of our trio to wear a small-billed cap that resembled the long-enduring bonnet. Irene and Elizabeth both wore the new wide-brimmed hats, which required dagger-length hatpins to stay put. It only struck me later that this may not have been a matter of fashion, but of prescient self-defense.

I only mention our attire to point out that we in no way stood out among the many similarly garbed women who walked the same aisles, sidewalks, and parklands that day and night, except for the contents of our cleverly concealed skirt pockets.

I carried my larger notebook and pencil in one pocket, and my chatelaine m.u.f.fled in cotton flannel in the other. (Sherlock Holmes's odiously impolite comment that my rattling chatelaine announced my presence had not fallen on deaf ears.) Irene's right pocket held her small pistol. She also carried G.o.dfrey's sword-stick. Why he left it at home I shall never know. Elizabeth carried a smart ladies's walking stick that was also st.u.r.dy enough to crack craniums as well as knuckles.

These were the only accessories that hinted at our true purpose in visiting these hurly-burly surroundings.

At first, our wanderings were solely instructional. We took the moving sidewalk to the machinery building. This was much more pleasant than a ride in an elevated car, for it was entirely open and utterly horizontal. I predicted to my companions a far more universal future for this step-saving device than for the box that plummets people down in small enclosed cages.

Impressive as the machinery building was with its arched gla.s.s ceiling higher than even Notre Dame's soaring stone nave, I called my American companions' attention to the fact that the entire fashion for airy metal-supported roofs on everything from this behemoth of a building, the world's largest, to French department stores and train stations in every world capital, stemmed from the marvelous Crystal Palace designed for London's 1851 World Exposition almost forty years earlier.

This was all incontestably true, but they did not seem properly impressed.

Elizabeth, like an overgrown child, was eager to forsake the educational exhibits for the louder, more crowded, and infinitely more lurid features of the global villages and the food and souvenir kiosks.

Hence it was that we all three bought rather atrocious silk scarves in a sepia tone that pictured the Tour Awful amid a rather busy design of the various exposition erections.

We also suffered the scents of delicacies from many lands wafting from stands and braziers, along with the pungent contributions of the exotic beasts brought to the civilized world's doorstep, if one can consider Paris truly civilized.

"Oh!" I declared in some distress as we rounded a corner to confront a sadly familiar scene.

"Oh indeed," Irene said. "The Musee Grevin made a superb effort to reproduce this scene."

Granted, and at least the original didn't involve dead bodies, for which I was supremely grateful. The Cairo market scene before our eyes was complete with European travelers, draped natives, and overburdened donkeys, only all were live.