Femme Fatale (29 page)

Pink was on her heels and I on Pink’s.

Inside, catastrophe choked the air and shortly after, we inhaled the smoke. The house was shrouded with a haze beyond that generated by the men’s cigars.

We pushed against the tide of fleeing patrons down the central aisle toward the stage. Flames caught at the curtains like giant, fiery hands, and a massive scrim of smoke billowed over the entire stage. I recalled a parade of theatrical fires in the newspapers, a professional risk of the limelights, apparently.

We coughed, ran, cried, wailed. It was impossible to say who did what. In an instant we knew the same thing: the identical crime had been attempted again, and this time had succeeded.

I shut my eyes against the roiling billows of smoke and pictured Madame Salamandra again amidst her flaming costumes. Naphtha! Irene had named it. Hadn’t any stagehand prepared to detect it? Forestall it? Stop it?

I populated the thick haze with ghosts: a woman in black bowed down in mourning, and insisting the tiny child be called “Irene.” I glimpsed a warm, living woman enveloped in flame, defying reality, recalling the past in all its soft, melting sorrow.

Could we beat it out again, the fire? Could we reverse ill fortune? Could we retrieve any part of the past that some one, some
thing, was determined to forever deny Irene? And me? And Pink?

Could we keep little Rena from watching her entire world exploding in flames?

Stumbling, choking, weeping from smoke and frustration, I stubbed my toes on the dark side of the stage stairs. I reached for Madame Salamandra as I had once dreamed of my own dead mother.

And someone held me back.

Held us all back.

Firemen.

Men in boots stormed the stage, turning it into one vast drum, a tympanum. They dragged long, uncoiling serpents of canvas behind them, that spat streams of water at the theatrical flames.

They smothered flame to smoke.

Amid the smoke, Salamandra lay, ashen from her complexion to her dampened gown, bereft of breath, and of memory. Mother to us all somehow, we three. We grieved, but none more than Irene.

22.

Ashes, Ashes

When the building caught fire there were lions and tigers
running around the streets of New York. . . . Firemen shot
the snakes as an act of compassion as they were being
incinerated in their glass cages. . . . A heroic fireman rescued
the 400-pound fat lady by carrying her down a ladder
.

—NEW YORK CITY FIRE MUSEUM EXHIBIT ON THE BARNUM & BAILEY
FIRE, DOWNTOWN MANHATTAN, 1865

Irene lit a cigarette and gazed long at the match-flame as if bidding adieu to an old friend, and then shook the lucifer out.

Her first inhalation on the cigarette resembled one, long, heartfelt sigh. Her exhalation reminded me of the macabre “ectoplasm” mediums gagged back at the gullible folk who paid to talk to or see their own dead.

“Two women,” Irene said, looking around our hotel parlor, avoiding the gazes of Pink and myself. “Dead. Two sisters. Sophie and Salamandra. What do they have in common? For God’s sake, what do they have in common that they should die
such horrible deaths only days apart?” She finally focused on one of us: Pink. “Say it is something else other than my own poor self, please, Pink. I do implore.”

The brave little newspaper girl was pale and visibly composed herself to speak. The violent death by fire at the New Fourteenth Street Theater had shaken even one who had posed as a sweatshop worker, a prostitute, and a madwoman for the sake of the all-important “story.”

“They were both performers in the shadowy world of exotic phenomena,” Pink said at last.

“Good,” Irene encouraged.

“They were—”

“They were,” I interrupted, suddenly afire with insight, “killed by the
means
of their own illusions. Ectoplasm. Fire.”

“Better.” Irene smiled sadly at me, both proud of my acuity, I sensed, and beyond pride. “And don’t forget the odd demise of Washington Irving Bishop. He too died while performing, by the very oddity that had fashioned his early fame, catalepsy. Was there anything else similar?”

“They all performed with you, knew you,” Pink riposted, a bit maliciously.

“You knew
them
!” I put in, not to be outdone by Pink.

“Not quite,” Irene corrected both of us. “They had known me at an age so early I barely recall it.”

“There is no denying it,” Pink urged. “
You
are the common link.”

“It would seem so,” Irene agreed, darkly.

Only I who knew her could see how shaken she was by the most recent tragedy.

Each time she inhaled upon that annoying cigarette, I saw the banked fire at the ashen end of the tobacco burn bright. Each time she exhaled, I saw a thin thread of ectoplasm snaking toward the ceiling.

Death by smoke of a sort, and death by fire. What else was there? Water? And then I remembered Merlinda the Mermaid and grew very afraid.

“These are not the first deaths,” Pink said, a tone of confession in her voice.

“The first death was in Eden,” Irene responded, “when Cain slew his brother Abel out of jealousy. What do you mean by the first death in this case?”

“I mean—” Pink twined her fingers and turned them inside out, so her palms were facing us. I had seen the very same behavior in a schoolroom miss who had been up to something forbidden. “I had meant to tell you sooner, but then you and Nell arrived so fast on the heels of the séance death and there didn’t seem to be any time—”

“There is always time for truth,” Irene said. Her utterly sober demeanor offered Pink no chance to charm her way out of censure on this issue.

“Sometimes truth must be administered in small doses.”

“Not with Nell and myself.” Irene crushed her half-smoked cigarette in a crystal tray, then leaned forward to present her case, like Godfrey in court: steady, concentrated, impossible to ignore.

“Pink, I do understand that you feel yourself shabbily treated during our European enterprise. I even understand that a startling new story is as much life’s blood to you as a new operatic score would be to me. But murder is not a parlor game, surely you saw that in Paris and beyond. You cannot afford to keep me in the dark in the name of some bizarre game of one-uppance. However these deaths may touch upon my past, no personal interest I might have exceeds my obligation as a human being to see that no more harm comes to anyone. The time is far past when you dare withhold facts or even theories from me, from us. This is much too serious a matter.”

Pink cleared her throat. Her writhing fingers turned themselves to point back to herself. “I thought I saw a pattern in the
earlier deaths, including one Abyssinia by snake-crushing a few weeks ago, but in truth I thought of it as an excuse.”

“An excuse?!” Irene spat out the words, then waited with a patience her tone had not predicted.

“Oh, fudge it, Irene! I suppose I must confess the worst.”

“The worst,” I repeated faintly. I glanced at Irene. What
had
this brash young woman done now? At least we would learn the scope of the damage, and I was certain there would be damage.

Pink went on in a flood of words: “I was reminded of the related killings in Europe and Baron Krafft-Ebing’s book on lust-murders, and I thought it would be interesting, story-worthy, really, to invite Europe’s most notable detective to try his hand at the matter.”

Irene turned to stone, and then to thunder. “You cannot mean—Pink!”

The girl swallowed, then spit out the truth in one great rush. “I wired Sherlock Holmes as well, saying that America and New York City had its own current onslaught of linked murders. Oh, what a story it will be! An Englishman on the Bowery! It will be the greatest coup since Oscar Wilde toured the States! I imagine Mr. Holmes could command a very active lecture circuit. He would be the toast of the booking agents. I must admit that my fellow citizens are wild for Englishmen with their noses in the air. I could accompany his investigations and report them daily in the
World
. The whole country would be talking about it.”

Irene had stood during this recital, and the more enthusiastic Pink grew about the idea, the more Irene took on the aspect of an Amazon queen.

“Pink,” she finally said, the name falling like a judgment from her lips. “You do understand that it would be quite a contest to determine which would be the more repelled and appalled by your notion and the harm it would cause: myself or Sherlock Holmes. He would no more embark on your imagined ‘lecture tour’ than he would climb a tree and throw coconuts on the people gathered below. Nor would I.”

“You worked for the Pinkertons once. Surely they would like a connection to a case this juicy.”

“We are not discussing the condition of a steak at Delmonico’s,” Irene answered, referring to the society restaurant that catered to all of upper-class New York, not that I thought any part of New York was upper-class at all, wealthy as portions of it may be. The Four Hundred indeed! In England we had a far shorter and more exclusive list of First Families than that!

“Besides,” Irene added more softly, “the Pinkertons no longer have a Female Department and would not appreciate your attempting to join it by default. At least we can rest assured that Sherlock Holmes will hardly cross the Atlantic at your beck and call.”

“No.” Pink paused, looking as guilty as any of my schoolroom charges ever had. “No,” she agreed sadly, “he most definitely would not.”

Irene nodded her satisfaction and sat again. I sighed my relief.

I was premature, as I have so often been in my life, which is informed by expectations of civility and restraint, rather than the extremes other people will go to at the slightest excuse.

“You’re quite right,” Pink went on. “He responded completely negatively to all my wires . . . until I mentioned your involvement.”

“What involvement? I was not even on this continent until days ago.”

“I explained that the murders involved your youthful years.”

“On what evidence?”

“Well, you were active on the popular theater circuit from an early age.”

“That is not ‘involvement,’ Pink. That is coincidence. I cannot believe that Sherlock Holmes would hie across the Atlantic on testimony as flawed as yours has proven to be.”

“I did not rely upon his regard for me to bring him to our doorstep. I relied upon his regard for you.”

There. It was spoken, what I had known for the past year:
The
Man harbored a deeply unwholesome admiration for my friend Irene. For my married friend Irene. I had long fought to conceal my secret evidence of such an unsuitable attachment. Now brash Nellie Bly had put it on record. Soon it would be in the newspapers, and then Godfrey would know, the whole world would know, and we would all be ruined.

Irene was not . . . unamused by this revelation.

“His ‘regard for me,’ dear Pink, is mere professional rivalry. I cannot see why you insist on bringing my enemies down on me when I came here on a mission of trust and a certain obligation to help you out, as you had recently helped me—” Irene finished by shrugging as wryly as a Frenchwoman, much sinned against, poor thing.

“He might actually have the insight to solve these bizarre crimes,” Pink offered.

“Here. In America? An entirely different social scene? Has he not already demonstrated himself as somewhat at sea when it comes to the murders of women? I cannot see that this fact has changed; in fact, I cannot see that Sherlock Holmes is at all subject to change. Englishmen are notorious in that regard.”

“And Englishwomen?” I demanded.

Her honey-brown eyes flashed me a glance bearing both humor and apology. “Pardon me, Nell, but the English are to the rectitude born, don’t you think? Of course you do, and you would be right. The English are always right, is that not so?”

“Well, yes,” I was forced to admit, “except when we are wrong. Which is seldom, naturally.”