Chapel Noir (6 page)

Irene did not blink at this revelation. “Have you had some of the brandy yet?” She nodded at the libation.

The girl shook her head.

“It was meant medicinally. I think you should sip it. Nell, can you—?”

By now I had realized that the young woman was in shock, as who would not be to find oneself unexpectedly in a brothel, however opulent?

I slipped quietly to the sofa and sat beside her. Lifting the delicate glass like a medicine vial, I brought it to her lips.

“You must try some. I know it will taste strong and nasty, but you will feel better for it.”

The girl glanced at me, then obeyed. After a tiny sip, her hand reached up to take the glass stem. I felt the tremor as its custody transferred from my hand to her own, but at least she had released a measure of that paralytic grip she kept upon herself.

As I returned to my chair I noticed that Irene was nodding approvingly at me.

“Not too much,” she advised the girl. “You want to clear your head, not cloud your memory. Now. We have been told nothing of what is wrong here. We rely on you.”

The brandy appeared to have been a hair too effective. “Pink” shook her charming head as if awakening from a bad dream. “Why are you here?” she demanded. “You cannot be from the police. They do not let women do that sort of thing on the Continent.”

“And they do in the United States?” I demanded myself, surprised.

“Of course they do, Nell.” Irene did not glance at me. She was still concentrating on the girl. “I was an agent for the Pinkertons when I lived in America, and also in England, for a time.”

The girl clutched at the familiar word. “A Pinkerton. They have sent a Pinkerton to a Pink? How crazy, but then this whole place is crazy . . . of course, it doesn’t help that I am just learning the language.”

Pink laughed so hard she sputtered into the brandy glass, then coughed violently, until her eyes watered and she hiccoughed.

I recognize incipient hysterics when I see them and rose to go to her, but Irene shook her head at me.

“Is that why you’re wearing man’s dress?” Pink asked Irene through her tears and hiccoughs. “I feel like Alice in Wonderland. If you were a White Rabbit instead of a lady Pinkerton in man’s dress . . . I’m sorry. I’m not usually such a fool. But it was pretty dreadful. The most awful thing a body could ever see. Quite retchingly dreadful.”

By now I was not anxious to know the details Irene had been sent to ferret out.

“Tell me,” Irene said, sitting back in the chair to draw her elegant cigarette case from one pocket and a matchbox from another.

The letter
I
worked large in diamonds shone like a heavenly constellation against the glorious blue-enamel case as Irene removed a thin brown cigar. The case was a priceless Fabergé creation, but seeing it always made me shudder. It reminded me of the two people I most detested in the world: Sable, the Russian spy who had given this poison-armed trinket to Irene, and Sherlock Holmes, who had discerned and disarmed the lethal gift while we had watched. That Irene should use this object, and even treasure it, struck me as foolhardy beyond belief.

Pink watched her light the slender cigar in one hand by a lucifer from the other with wide eyes. “Does that taste good, really? I would like to try.”

“So you shall.” Irene leaned forward to extend the small dark cylinder to her. “Just . . . sip.”

That poor young thing put the smoking thing between her dainty lips and drew a shallow breath. Soon she was coughing again, while I cast Irene a disapproving look.

“It takes practice,” Irene said, retrieving the tiny cigar and drawing thoughtfully on it until she was able to exhale a thin stream of smoke. “Now that your mind has contemplated other matters, perhaps it can return to the dreadful recent past with an objective eye.”

Pink, clutching my handkerchief to her mouth, nodded. “I pride myself on an objective eye, Mrs. Norton, is it?” She straightened on her sofa cushion, posture alone drawing her spine taut as a bowstring.

Her hands no longer trembled.

“I have found murdered women in this house, two stories below. I was the first to find them, and to alert the inhabitants. I’m afraid I screamed.”

“You are sure they were murdered?” Irene asked.

Pink regarded her blankly, then spoke.

“They were more than murdered.” Pink tossed back a great swallow of the brandy. Her voice came clear and sharp, precise yet angry. “They were butchered like carcasses one sees hanging in Les Halles, the great open marketplace of Paris. I only recognized them for women from the shreds of clothing clinging to . . . what was left.”

As suddenly as this, I knew. I had solved a petty mystery that had been niggling at me all night: the French phrase
“Abbot Noir
.” The Black Abbot in English.

I had felt foolishly reassured that a churchman was involved in the matter, even though he be Roman Catholic and the hue of his habit be black. But the inspector and Irene had not been speaking of my mythical head monk at all. Not
“Abbot Noir
,” but
“abattoir,”
a word I did know even if I did not expect to hear it spoken in polite society.

Abattoir
.

The French word for slaughterhouse.

5.
The Abbot Noir

The disorders of the room had, as usual, been suffered
to exist
—
EDGAR ALLAN POE, “THE MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE
”

Not very much later, the girl’s brandy glass was empty, and Irene’s slender cigar had shriveled into a pyramid of silver ashes impaled by a dark dead stub in one of the empty crystal goblets.

Much as I deplore the stench and the mess of the smoking ritual and much as I abhor spiritous liquors, I had to admit that these masculine vices had put raw emotion at a distance.

“Stay here,” Irene told Miss Pink, who was much calmed for having unburdened herself of her dread cargo of horror. As for me, had someone offered, I would have indulged in a glass of the contents of the decanter, and I only drink spirits under severe duress.

We left the room. The men guarding either side of the door leaped to confront us, their Gallic faces so eager for news they resembled agitated poodles.

It would have been laughable had not we heard such grim tidings.

Irene wasted no time on preliminaries. “This was her first day . . . night at the house. She did not know, or even recognize, the dead women. I understand that is quite understandable.” Both men nodded, dropping their eyes. “Apparently there has been an atrocity on a scale of The Murders in the Rue Morgue.’ You know the story?”

Inspector le Villard nodded. “I am a student of the methods of foreign detectives, as you know, especially Miss Huxleigh’s countryman.”

I shuddered for the first time that evening to hear a reference to
the
man, that all-too-ubiquitous consulting detective, Holmes.

“Even fictional detectives?” Irene asked.

“Mr. Poe’s setting was Parisian, and the investigator was French. C. Auguste Dupin,” he said as if savoring Napoleonic brandy. “You are right to invoke that long-ago tale. It is the closest thing to what has happened here, except for—”

“Yes,” Irene said. “I must see the murder scene. Miss Huxleigh can remain here with Mademoiselle Rose.”

“No!” For once the inspector objected before I could. “The scene is not fit for female sensibilities. You cannot see it.”

“If you wish me to elicit every shred of testimony from her, I must see what she saw. I must know what questions to ask. In such cases, with the shock, she may have seen more than she realizes.”

“That is true, but now that you have heard of the grotesquerie of it . . . I would not ask even my gendarmes to face such a scene, were it not necessary.”

“Commendable, but I am not one of your gendarmes.”

“You were not brought here for such viewing.”

“I was brought here, and now I ask what will help me perform the service you requested. Nay, demanded. You and your anonymous Great One.”

The inspector sighed and slapped the damp felt hat in his hands against his leg.

The shadowy superior murmured a torrent of French.

After some discussion between them, le Villard turned back to Irene. “You may go, but only because we must answer to your . . . sponsor. I will not be responsible for any hysteria.”

“There will be no hysteria.”

“Indeed not,” I interjected. “For I will go along.”

The Frenchmen began blathering again, hysterically.

Even Irene turned to me in disbelief.

I explained myself to Irene. “I have seen the body on Bram Stoker’s dining-room table, I have been to the chamber of the Paris Morgue with you, remember? I cannot allow you to confront such perfidy alone, or not alone, I should say. I owe it to Godfrey that you do not go off unsuitably chaperoned.”

She was not fooled by my invoking the proprieties, eternal pretext in my limited arsenal of argument. She laid a hand on my arm.

“I will be all right, Nell.”

“I know you will, for I will be there with you.” Then I added, “It would be cruel to keep me in the dark, when even that child has seen the truth, and survived.”

“Not without brandy afterward.”

“I will have brandy afterward if necessary.”

Irene’s further arguments never passed her lips. She knew that if I was willing to take spirits, I was serious indeed.

The inspector’s lively features had frozen into disapproving resignation. “Your presence was requested by an Eminent Personage. We must allow you to pursue actions you will deeply regret. I hope you will not try to misplace the blame.”

Irene glanced at me. “I never misplace blame.”

I inhaled as deeply as Miss Pink had a few minutes earlier. I must be prepared to face what I had demanded to see. I had no doubts it would be a vision of Hell.

The Frenchmen, stiff with disapproval and with funereal step, led us down the back stairs to the first floor. Their dark figures, etched into murky relief against the rays of the lamp they carried, looked as misshapen as latter-day Quasimodos. I began to wonder if they had changed into monsters once their backs were turned upon us. The narrow stair, the sound of our footsteps as regular as the pounding of coffin nails . . . in truth, the mention of the American fantasist Edgar Allan Poe, whose horrific stories I had read during my Shropshire days when ghost stories were my only entertainment, all combined to heighten my natural dread at facing death, and death in a particularly revolting form.

Still. I was a country parson’s daughter, and had seen much in my tending of the ill young and old in the parish that would surprise a dweller in large cities, where much ugliness is swept away into institutions.

On the first story we were led again to the wide passage. A rich flocked wallpaper of oriental design glinted gold back from the walls as our guiding lamp passed. Dragons writhed in the flickering twilight, and roofs like piled hats seem to shimmer with worms instead of tiles.

By the time we came to the painted and gilded door where two gendarmes stood at attention, my hands were cold and clasped before me. Just like . . . Pink’s, I realized, and I had seen nothing yet.

“The first to see has the least to fear,” Irene whispered in my ear.

I noticed that her face was pale, her features drawn into the same falsely serene control I had seen on Pink’s young face.

The man who had never identified himself nodded to the guards. One swept open a door with military precision, never glancing inside.

The stench that rushed out to greet us was unfortunately familiar, though stronger than any I had encountered before. A charnel-house reek of unfettered blood and bowel.

All six of us recoiled involuntarily from that awful odor.

Grim-faced, Inspector le Villard held up the lamp. “It is not too late to retreat.”

Irene’s answer was to take the heavy light from him and step inside the door.

I followed, fumbling with both hands in my pocket for my silver talisman and one of the many objects that ornamented it.

“We are on the banks of the river Seine again, Nell,” Irene muttered.

I knew instantly what she meant, seeing again the sopping dead body of the sailor, reeking of death and damp. We were to breathe through our mouths.

Yet the notion of taking that fetid overwhelming scent into our lungs . . . I thrust my find to Irene. A slender glass vial capped in silver on both ends.

“Rub the perforated end on your nostrils.”

She recoiled from the strong scent that assailed her. I answered her confused look.

“Smelling salts. You should not be able to detect any other odor for some minutes.”

By then she had inhaled as deeply as a Regency dandy ingesting snuff, and I did the same. I noticed the Frenchmen behind us exchanging rueful glances, and turned to offer them a medicinal whiff. But men are foolishly fearful of being thought womanly, and they refused my remedy with terse headshakes.

The salts had not only driven all other odors from my nostrils, they had cleared my senses and stiffened my spine. I was now free to join Irene in gazing on the scene Pink had stumbled into.

I remembered most clearly the strange barber’s chair she had mentioned. The lamp abetted us by picking out the swirls of gilt wood that defined its outré shape.

Gold winked from elsewhere in the chamber. It was as richly overdecorated as the room upstairs.

Irene had lowered her gaze to the floor and was studying the wood parquet visible between the Savonnerie carpets scattered before the furniture. An unusual black background to the florid French designs gave the chamber a properly sober note, and made a dramatic canvas for the even more elaborate furniture.

And what strange furniture it was, even for Paris! A dressing table with a towering rococo mirror. A chaise longue. Some upholstered chairs and small tables. The room was accoutered like a bedchamber in every respect . . . except that there was no bed.

I may not know much of worldly matters, being a spinster, yet even I knew that it was most unlikely that a brothel, however elevated its clients, was not likely to have a bedroom without a bed.

“Have you taken photographs?” Irene asked the men lurking in the doorway still open behind us.

“This is not a scene to commemorate, Madame.”

“You will rely on memory, then, and notes?”

“We will photograph the bodies at the morgue, when the full extent of the wounds can be shown.”

I was abstracting my notebook and pencil from my other pocket as they spoke. The activity kept me from observing the gruesome centerpiece of the room.

“If you will leave us,” Irene was saying, as I drew the items from the folds of my skirt.

“Impossible!” Inspector le Villard said.

“It is quite possible,” she rejoined, “and necessary if we wish to examine the scene without supernumeraries present.”

He jerked as if avoiding a dash of cold water at being called a spear-carrier on a stage where he was accustomed to being in utter charge.

“The First Gentleman of Europe who insisted on our assistance would want us to have all the facts,” Irene continued. “We can best assemble them if left to ourselves.”

Although I was not sure who the First Gentleman of Europe might be, Inspector le Villard was sufficiently impressed to pale. “This is outrageous, Madame! This scene is not fit for females to see, and to leave you alone with such carnage—!”

“Apparently it is fit for females to be the object of such carnage. I assure you that Miss Huxleigh and I will neither swoon nor disturb the scene.”

A brave speech, but I noticed that Irene’s complexion looked a trifle green and felt in my pocket for the smelling salts.

The other man murmured to the inspector, and they withdrew, not without muttered French imprecations on Inspector le Villard’s part.

As soon as the door closed silently behind them, Irene turned to me.

She met the uplifted vial in my hand with surprise, then a quick sigh of relief. We both inhaled mightily at the tiny perforated ending.

“No photographs!” she objected to our absent guides. “Of course not. They do not wish to implicate the aristocrat who was expecting to dally with these ladies.”

“Ladies? Bodies? Plural? How can you tell?” I glanced sidelong at the contorted piece of furniture piled with contorted limbs, clothing, and bloody bits of things it was best not to identify.