Chapel Noir (35 page)

“Well, ma’am.” He doffed his hat with the same panache as he took his final bow at the end of four hours of Wild West Show. “If you are a friend of Bram, and say you need my help, I am at your disposal. For half an hour today, at any rate. I am the toast of Paree, you see, and kept running eighteen hours a day to this soiree and that, not to mention rounding up two daily shows.”

“I am most grateful for your valuable time, and your help.” She took his arm as if they were strolling into supper together at Kensington Palace. I could see that the veteran Indian scout was in the hands of a veteran herder of
Homo sapiens
.

“Excuse us, Bram,” he said to our guide, who nodded and remained behind.

He had not exempted me.

So I slipped into step behind them, like a child content to be seen and not heard, as they moved into the trampled central arena. I noticed that although Irene was in deep conversation with the showman, she managed to avoid treading on the clumps of animal dung littering their path. Buffalo will be buffalo.

I struggled to walk in her pristine footsteps. “I walk a great deal” indeed! No wonder Buffalo Bill had taken a liking to her. She pretended to nothing, but apologized for nothing either.

I must remember that technique in future.

“You must forgive me. I have lived in Europe since I was eighteen,” she began.

“Only a fortnight ago, surely, Madame.”

“You have been overhearing too many Frenchmen, Colonel.”

He laughed, but would not let it go. “I deal in herd animals, but I know each one. Each has a scar, a gait, a shape. A hallmark. Pardon me for putting it so plainly, but you have a hallmark like no other. I have seen you before. Not recently. In the East. Can you swear differently to this old scout?”

She was silent while they walked through the muck as if ambling in a château garden.

“The late ’seventies, do you think, Colonel?”

He nodded. “I was performing in my dime-novel plays on the Eastern seaboard then.”

“Perhaps . . .
perhaps
you recall Merlinda the Mermaid and the Treasure of Blackbeard.”

They stopped. Buffalo Bill stared at Irene Adler. Then he doffed his hat, made a deep Cavalier bow, and slapped his befringed leg with the brim so a small, astounded cough of dust rose in the air between them. His laugh was as loud as a thundering herd.

“I’ll be damned! Held her breath for five minutes in that huge tank of water, hair longer than mine weaving like seaweed, that fancy spangled tail waving like prairie grass in a windstorm. Five minutes underwater, eyes open, in plain view. And hauling up those jeweled gewgaws all the while. I clocked you, Madame Mermaid. It was five minutes. How’d you manage it?”

“How’d you manage scalping Yellow Hand?”

“Battle bloodlust.” He sighed. “I don’t deny it, but the West was wild then. Men are capable of more than they think.”

“Good? Or bad?”

“Both, ma’am. And women, too, I guess.”

She nodded, as if he had cleared a hurdle she had set up, and abruptly changed the subject back to the first matter. “I was training to become an opera singer. I needed money for lessons. In opera, breath control is paramount. Merlinda helped me to become one who sang instead of swam for her supper, and the critics have always noted since then that my breath control is peerless.”

“Grand opera or Wild West roundup. It’s all a show, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is, yet I am now involved in matters that are not a show but all too real. And the bloodlust you mention is being exercised on helpless women.”

He stopped again. “You’ve shot in self-defense?”

She nodded, once.

“Killed anything?”

“Not yet. But we were shot at the other night, near Notre Dame.”

He glanced back at me, his eyes unerringly focusing on mine as if hitting a target. He had always known I was there, eavesdropping. He had heard every step and breath I took, I realized. He had never been unaware of me.

“Two women, out alone, at night?” He sounded skeptical.

“I was dressed as a man.”

The silence was deafening.

“We had been at the Paris Morgue,” Irene added, piling one incongruity atop another.

“Like no other,” Buffalo Bill quoted himself at last. “You are going after Yellow Hand.”

“In a sense. But I will take justice instead of a scalp.”

“Actually, his name was Yellow Hair. The newspapers made it Yellow Hand. Guess they figured an Indian wouldn’t be named Yellow Hair. Oddly appropriate name, given Custer was known for his long yellow hair.”

I shuddered at the comparison: a dead cavalry colonel known for his yellow hair. The Indian known as Yellow Hair present at the battle, then later killed and scalped by a white scout and buffalo hunter and Indian slayer who now led a world-famous entertainment centered around buffalo and Indians . . .

“I have lived in Europe for a long time,” Irene repeated, returning to her circuitous introduction of this topic. “I am ignorant of the ways of the frontier that you know so well, that you forged. I need to ask some ignorant questions. Will you forgive me that?”

“I’ll tell you what. I will, if Merlinda the Mermaid will make an appearance at my command performance for the French president next month.”

“Colonel Cody, that was a long time ago! I do not even sing opera anymore.”

“Old skills never die.”

“I have no costume, no tank.”

“If I can cart my whole show across the Atlantic, I can come up with a few hundred gallons of water in a glass box.” He eyed her as if inspecting a steed. “And I’m willing to bet that your hair is as long and your breath control is as peerless as it ever was. It was the darnedest thing I ever saw.”

“Very well,” Irene said, “but you won’t like my questions.”

“Questions never killed a man. But first I’ve got a thing or two to tell, or ask, you.”

“Yes?”

“About that shooting near Notre Dame. At night? What? Gaslights still around there? Not electric lights?”

She nodded.

“Misty, though, fog thick as mohair coming off of the river?”

She nodded again.

“You two were silhouettes in the fog. Not recognizable.”

“Unless someone knew who we were. . . .”

“Had followed you from the morgue, you mean. I was taken there. Now that’s a show. They think my outfit celebrates death. Hmmph. This morgue’s at the rear of the cathedral. Quite a system: church and then the morgue at the back door, so to speak. You see anyone following you?”

Irene shook her head.

“You look?”

“As best I could without being overly obvious.”

He grunted. “Didn’t shoot with a pistol. Revolver. Would have had to have been close enough to spot, and you were looking, right?”

She nodded, listening hard.

“Rifle. Only possible weapon. You hear the bullets hit?”

“Stone. They scored stone. Perhaps I could find the places in daylight, but it would be difficult.”

“It doesn’t make sense, Madame Mermaid. Not at all. No one could expect to hit a target under those conditions, not even Miss Annie Oakley.”

“A warning?”

“You don’t get any warnings on the prairie.”

“But here?”

He nodded. “So what kind of critter are you hunting?”

“You performed in England in 1887?”

“A triumph, three command performances for Queen Victoria. It’s why we’re here at this World Exposition in Paris now.”

“And the next year, in 1888?”

He grinned. “Three hundred years after the Spanish Armada tried to take England, and failed, we had knocked them dead on their own turf and were back in the States, playing along the seaboard where the English lost America a bit over a century ago. History is a lesson and an irony. It was another triumphal tour. Why?”

“That was the autumn in which Jack the Ripper was terrorizing Whitechapel in London.”

“He was a wild one.”

“But he took no scalps.”

“Not . . . quite. Took a lot more.”

“There have been recent deaths in Paris.”

“Pulled up stakes and moved on, hmmm?”

She nodded, watching him as narrowly as an American eagle on a poster. “Mutilations. After death. Less . . . anatomical, more gruesome.”

“Aha.” He buried his goatee in his hand as he thought. “These Indians of mine come from a talent agency. Some are a bit wild to control, but so are the horses and the buffalo, and the cowboys, too, for that matter.”

“Did any Indians leave your show while you were in England?”

“You’re following the wrong trail. There’s a lot of rot about the Indians been written. They have their ways and they are not ours. But what is ours? How alike are you and me? Or me and that girl? Or a French count and an Indian chief? Whoever shot at you wasn’t an Indian.”

“Perhaps not, but it takes nerve to use Paris pedestrians for target practice. Or blithe ignorance. Perhaps someone from another culture, from a savage past, is being used by someone quite civilized.”

“Wouldn’t be the first or last time.” He thought again. “Was a couple Indians who deserted, only you can’t call absent actors ‘deserters.’ That’s what we all are now. Actors. Like you. Opera. Wild West Shows. A couple Indians didn’t go back to the States with us after that England tour in eighty-seven.”

“Do you remember their names?”

“Do I remember my own? Crazy Fox and Long Wolf. Long Wolf was quite the celebrity. Wore a black beaver top hat with his regular regalia. The English folk made quite a fuss over him. He said he had never seen a village so large and that he wished to learn its limits. Crazy Fox was another case. He had a taste for alcohol. Can’t blame him. I do myself.” The veteran scout laughed and shook his head. “You really think Jack the Ripper could be an Indian? What about those letters to the newspapers? They were full of Americanisms, but they weren’t written by any Indian.”

“The letters may have been from anyone but the Ripper.”

“Who?”

“Newspaper writers hoping to sell more papers. There’s quite a competition to outdo each other with sensational and sordid stories, in America, England, France.”

“These reporters do jostle for something to print. And I can tell you from doing a few hundred interviews that those folks invent up one side and down the other. Usually it’s to my benefit, though. Lies only add to your legend. Oscar Wilde found that out when he came to the States. He and his wife received us when we appeared in London. Love the way the English and the French are coming to us now. We have grown up as a country, Missus Norton. We are of consequence.”

She smiled. “We are. So you say that the Indians are . . . utterly subdued. They would not revert to their savage ways on foreign soil.”

“Their savage ways are not so different from our savage ways. I found that out when I took Yellow Hand’s scalp. On the prairie there’s only wind and God and what men do, and not all of it’s nice. Savagery has its reasons, you must understand that. They worship their gods with their particular sacrifices. And sacrifices are always human, one way or another. We celebrate the torture of a god-man on a cross. That so different from how a Jesuit died at the hands of the Huron two hundred years ago? Some of the Plains Indians mutilate the bodies of dead enemies. We think that’s savage. We kill ‘em and embalm ‘em and bury ‘em whole. Much more civil, right? But some Indian tribes think the cuts in dead flesh release the souls to the Great Spirit, keep evil ghosts from walking the land. Savagery? Or spirituality?”

“Spirituality seems an odd concept for Indians.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Sitting Bull is a warrior, yes, but he is much more of a spiritual leader. Once he stopped a fray by sitting down on open ground between hostile Indian and Army forces. They shot away at each other, but not a bullet touched Sitting Bull. After a while, both sides were surprised enough to sit down with Sitting Bull and talk treaty.”

“Impressive,” Irene said, “but when I lived in America I heard that women who have fallen into Indian hands—”

“They can be brutal to captives, but so were the Romans. And some whites have become Indian in captivity. The Indian has lost his lands, thanks in part to me. I’d like to see them get some recompense. The ones in my show are chiefs the government would like locked up as ‘hostiles’ on a reservation, like Sitting Bull. Look at my posters.” He gestured at the iron standards everywhere bearing colorful illustrations. “In my programs I say, The Former Foe—Present Friend, the American.’ Can’t make it plainer than that. The Plains Indians are the best light cavalry on the planet. I like working with them. They have been my enemy, but they are fine warriors. I have seen an Indian chief match the dignity of the Queen of England. She saluted our American flag at my command performance for her in London, one of three. Victoria Regina has been Queen longer than I’ve been on this prairie. Where would an Indian get the hatred to stalk and kill foreign women?”

“These were prostitutes. He might not understand that kind of citified corruption.”

“No, the Indians didn’t have brothels, but some had slaves, or prisoners of war, and those poor souls could be treated quite savagely, white or red, men or women. And some Indians, like the Apache, would rape as well as kill. But Indian women were also used by the white man. The word ‘squaw’ came to mean that, like ‘Jane’ or ‘Mandy.’ All were words for prostitutes on the frontier.”

“ ‘Jane’ or ‘Mandy’ were used as description for prostitutes in the West?”

“Now don’t you go telling Calamity
Jane
that. Could get dangerous.”

Irene, however, was thinking aloud.
“Mandy. Jane. Mary Jane. Mary Ann. Annie
. An Indian on his own in London might hear names like those, especially in a district like the East End that was riddled with prostitutes, and think that the white man’s privilege was his at last.”

“Not likely! Indians don’t think tit for tat like that.”

“But if one were mad?”

“Insane? I suppose it’s possible. Being cut loose in some of these European cities might do that. Or drink. But not likely. They’ve always stuck to themselves. That’s all they’ve wanted, and that’s the only thing we white men couldn’t let happen.”