by Sarah Smith
Something had to go wrong, and it did.
Amber; suspicions fall on Reisden
“ARE YOU A SPY for the Austrians?” Milly asked him. “Maurice Cyron, the old windbag, is going round all the salons saying you are.”
In the last year their friend Milly Xico had begun writing and acting in moving pictures. The camera loved her but would never capture her: that foxy red hair, that distinctly Milly odor of perfume, cheap cigarettes, and dog, and those cynical blue eyes, which saw everything in Paris.
“You should spy for the Russians, they pay best. Do you believe this is what the Russians hand out to ‘lady shapers of opinion’?” Milly extended an arm, model-style, showing off her new jacket, sheepskin covered with colorful red embroideries that swore fashionably at her hair. “Men journalists get parties, vodka, caviar. Us ladies get pretty toys. Amber—I have more earrings than I can count, I have necklaces, all courtesy of Ambassador Izvolsky…” She twirled her long necklace of silver and Russian amber. “Isn’t it pretty? As if we’d never heard of pogroms. It sickens me, we’ve got to be nice to the Russians because they’re our allies.”
Perdita ran her fingertips broodingly over the amber necklace Milly had just given her.
“But what did you do to Cyron?” Milly asked Reisden. “Why is Maurice Cyron telling every Army man in Paris you’re a spy?”
“Who is Maurice Cyron?” Perdita asked.
They both stared at her. “Don’t you two ever do anything but have sex?” Milly asked. “Doesn’t he ever talk to you? Men. Nicky, he doesn’t tell her a thing. Tell her who Maurice Cyron is.”
“Cyron is the adopted father of a man I know,” Reisden said. “A very long time ago, I gave André what Cyron considered bad advice, and he’s disliked me for it ever since.”
“Cyron is the glory of France, chérie, he’s a national hero,” Milly said to Perdita. “And if your darling Sacha made an enemy of him, your darling Sacha is foutu.”
They were all sitting round the kitchen table, eating bread and cheese for a Sunday lunch. Milly scooped herself a piece of Brie and spread it on a round of bâtard. “What did you tell André?”
“To become an actor.”
“Chouette, that must have been a thousand years ago!”
“He was still in the cavalry, and I was sixteen.”
“But who is Cyron?” Perdita said.
“Cyron,” Milly said to Perdita. “Who is Cyron? Has darling Sacha ever mentioned that the Germans fought the French? Cyron was a guerrilla fighter. When the Germans invaded, the rest of France surrendered in six weeks. But Cyron, he never surrendered, never, never, never. He fought the French right up until the end of the German occupation. So everybody loves him.”
Nick-Nack, Milly’s pug, snuffling for scraps, looked up adoringly. Milly spread a round of bread with cheese and dropped it for him.
“He’s an actor too,” Reisden said.
“He has a theater,” Milly said, “he does military plays, yes, they’re awful, but he’s hugely popular with the audiences. It’s ridiculous, he’s old now and fat and he looks like a big potato with a little potato for a nose, but he has audiences!”
Toby, in Perdita’s arms, was gumming at her amber necklace. “No, baby,” she said, pulling the necklace away and tucking it into the neck of her blouse. “If he’s such a hero and he’s going round saying these dreadful things about Alexander, does that mean people are going to believe him?”
“Yes,” Reisden said soberly.
Nick-Nack, who had swallowed all the bread at once, began to cough and retch. Reisden picked the pug up and thumped him; a horrible bolus shot out of his mouth and splatted on the kitchen floor. Toby giggled delightedly. Nick-Nack blinked watery eyes, wriggled to be put down, and headed for it to swallow it again.
“His audiences are all Army people,” Milly said. “They stick together. They love France and the Army like a dog loves vomit. Don’t you, Nicky? You love it because it’s yours.”
Toby was making blatting noises with his lips, trying to spit like Nicky. “Oh, don’t learn, love,” Reisden murmured. “Such a bright child, but please don’t learn to throw up like a dog.”
“Your darling Sacha is applying for citizenship and trying to work with the army,” Milly said to Perdita. “But is he really French? Does he go to the Théâtre Cyron and stand up and shout ‘Bravo!’ and make Cyron repeat all the big speeches? Does he worship at the glory of Cyron? Does he love our friends the Russians? It isn’t enough to be a citizen. You have to be someone’s dog.”
“Or someone’s pawn,” Reisden said. “Without turning canine and telling André not to act, which would have been approximately no use even then, what can I do that Cyron wants?”
“Can you get him Alsace-Lorraine back?”
Perdita looked confused.
“Never mind, darling Sacha will tell you about Alsace-Lorraine. Honestly, do you two ever get out of bed?” Milly scratched her dog’s ears. “How about reconciling André and his wife?”
“André is married?” Reisden said, startled. “To what?”
Milly rolled her eyes. “To a dear little eighteen-year-old Cyron picked out for him.”
“Eighteen?” Reisden said. André was nearly forty.
“She’s an heiress. Coal mines near Montfort. She’s pretty, even. And mad for sex. She actually likes André. But he--”
“Right.” André would prefer something a thousand years old with eyes of fire. And an interest in appearing onstage. André had given up on anything but stage life long ago.
“You’re his friend.”
“I acted for him.”
“You acted for him, you’re his friend. Sabine has Cyron turned round her little finger. Tell André how wonderful married life is. Make him believe it. Get him to like her. And then get Sabine to tell Cyron to support you.”
“Milly, this is not something I’m good at.”
“You’ll be perfect,” Milly said, “you’re so married.”
Richard, Toby, and the Grand Necro
MARRIED, HE THOUGHT.
PERDITA was going to America.
Her New York agent had dropped her after she’d married; married women with children don’t tour. But recently he’d sent her a letter. How was she, what was she doing, he’d talked to someone who’d heard her play at a Women’s Party concert in Paris. He had a couple of concerts, nothing big, the pay was nothing, it wouldn’t be worth her while, but if she was interested and free and could get to America—
Please, she’d said. I know we can’t afford it, Alexander. Please.
“Of course we can afford it.” They couldn’t, but they would.
He chose to think of this expedition as simply what she said it was, Perdita having a chance to play the piano in front of audiences. He refused to wonder why Ellis had thought she’d say yes.
But better for her to be away from Paris while he was being accused of being a spy. “Take Toby,” he said.
“Do you think? Won’t you miss him?”
He would miss Toby unbearably. He would miss her. He would worry about her liking America too much.
“I’ll see Uncle Gilbert while I’m there,” she said hesitantly.
“I don’t suppose I can convince you not to?”
She shook her head.
“Don’t bring Toby with you when you see him.”
“Uncle Gilbert knows you’re not coming back to America,” she said. “At least let him see Toby.”
Perdita wrote to Gilbert every week; he knew that. She had sent Gilbert a curl of Toby’s hair. She sent pictures. He wanted to protest keep Toby away from Gilbert, I don’t want Toby knowing anything about the Knights.
It would be cruel not to let Gilbert see Toby. But-
I left, he thought. I’m dead. I can’t go back. Gilbert will understand that. My son isn’t going back either.
Gilbert would have to understand.
“Tell me about your friend André?” Perdita asked. “Is André
another Glory of France?”
“Not in the least, which was why Cyron disapproves of his acting. André runs the Grand Necropolitan, the horror theatre.”
“I’ve heard of that! I always wanted to go there.”
“You don’t really.”
“Those things don’t frighten me.”
He considered. Perdita’s eyes should insulate her from most of what went on. “André likes to frighten his audience. If it’s too much, tell me; I’ll take you home.”
“I’m not a kid, Alexander. Let’s go.”
***
The Théâtre du Monde, to give the Grand Necro its official name, was in the most sinister neighborhood André could afford, down the hill from the Place Blanche, the center of Parisian whoredom. The Necro was the smallest theatre in Paris; it followed that it wasn’t profitable. But now the lobby had been redecorated in elegant green and gold: moss-green upholstery, green velvet curtains, luxurious armchairs in Louis Seize style. When André had still been doing amateur theatricals, he had directed his titled friends in comedies in château drawing rooms. The new Necro looked like one of those private spaces, precisely what a château theatre dreamed of being: apart, that is, from the little carved skulls grinning secretly from the arms of the chairs.
Where had the money come from? The heiress wife, of course. The eighteen-year-old heiress wife, who adored André.
“Monsieur le Baron, Madame la Baronne!” André’s assistant, Ruthie, half-ran up to greet them, a harried little gray dove of a woman with glasses and a streak of gray in her brown hair. “He heard you were coming tonight. He asked me to show you our new Egyptian mummy, but I won’t make you endure that if you don’t want to.”
“Thank you, Ruthie. Perdita, Miss Ruth Aborjaily, one of the few sane people in this or any theatre. Ruthie, this is my beloved and talented wife, Perdita.”
“He’s put you both in the President’s box,” Ruthie warned Reisden. “He has something special planned for you.”
“I don’t suppose he’d leave it out?”
“It’s really very funny,” Ruthie said dubiously.
“Yes, I would be afraid of that.”
They sat in the President’s box, well back in the shadows. “If I tell you to duck,” Reisden said, “duck.”
“What’s going to happen?”
“Anything, beloved. André is ingenious.”
The house lights went down, and down, and down, until nothing was left but pairs of red safeties, spider eyes in the cavelike dark. One pair blinked slowly, like a well-fed predator. André had always been good at details.
And in the dark theatre a ghostly, foggy spotlight lit a skeletal hand creeping from behind the curtain, and he appeared: the Master of Ceremonies of the Grand Necro, skeleton-tall, his face white makeup painted like a skull:
“I, Necrosar, King of Terrors of the Grand Necropolitan Theatre du Monde!” The hollow, overprecise voice rang through the theatre. “Present Monsieur Jules Fauchard, the Most Assassinated Man in Paris! Together with the company of the Grand Necropolitan Theatre!” Necrosar moved forward with the mincing delicacy of a spider, jerkily, as if he were on strings. “Appearing tonight only! In a new—original—piece—in honor of our friends from Jouvet Medical Analyses--It’s Enough; or, A Domestic Crisis Resolved!”
Reisden leaned toward Perdita. “Necrosar?” he murmured. “That would be André.”
***
André had been a cavalry officer once. Maurice Cyron had destined André to join the Army like his father the Count de Montfort and his grandfather the Count and his great-grandfather the Count before him; to ride in charges, die valiantly, and leave a grand tomb at Montfort. André didn’t challenge Cyron, no one did, but he had been pitiable as a cavalryman; he had actually lost his horse once; he had hidden in closets, writing plays.
That was how things had been when Reisden, who was still at school then, had somehow got cast in one of André’s house-party plays, The House of the Skull.
Working in André’s plays had been addictive. Reisden had been sixteen, hadn’t had the least interest in school, had cut out to act. He’d been the juvenile straight man in three or four plays and the actual lead in one when he’d been invited out to Montfort castle for a weekend.
And that had been the disastrous weekend when André had tried on a decomposing frock coat from the Montfort attics and instantly, irrevocably, had become Necrosar.
Reisden had never seen anything like it.
A greenish tattered coat, a top hat, gloves; absinthe-milky whiteface and black lipstick from Cyron’s own makeup box; but the rest of Necrosar, the voice, the puppet-walk, had come instantly. André had practiced for a half hour with Reisden for an audience and then gone to show his stepfather the character he’d found.
Cyron had shouted at him. “Take it off!” The lipstick had been fingernails down a blackboard to Cyron; the lipstick, the epicene stiff slink, the air of secret, sinister knowledge. The confidence of it all. The rightness. Even a sixteen-year-old could see it.
But a sixteen-year-old hadn’t known enough not to say so.
“Why not?” Reisden had asked Cyron. “He’s doing what you’re doing; he’s acting. And he’s good.” Cyron had roared with anger, not only at André but now at Reisden too. Cyron didn’t take criticism well. Reisden didn’t take bullies at all. Cyron had sent Reisden away from Montfort in disgrace on Saturday afternoon.
André had come with him, brought the coat and hat and gloves, resigned his commission, and begun hunting for a theatre. A rumor had gone round that Reisden and André were lovers. (No; whatever André fancied, it wasn’t Reisden.) Reisden had acted at the Necro once or twice, but André had gone pro and Reisden had gone crazy, and their lives had diverged.
Onstage, Jules, the hero, was complaining to his “wife.” “What a day at the theatre! Today, that hard taskmaster André du Monde has killed me five times!—crushed, impaled, guillotined! It’s more than the mind can bear.” Jules clutched his forehead.
“Ah, mon pauvre ami!” the wife said. “What will help you?”
“My dear—I regret—I’ve got to kill the parlormaid.”
The wife rang the bell. “Sylvie? Monsieur Jules requires you.”
The audience shrieked happily as Jules attacked the parlormaid. Necrosar looked on from the side of the stage, nodding like a skeleton on springs.
“I feel better,” Jules said from below, “but not better enough. It’s a shame, but—the chauffeur too. He’s got to die.”
“How distressing, my husband! Who will drive the car?”
Now, as a father, Reisden almost sympathized with Cyron. He remembered; of course, it had been Victor who’d introduced them. Victor, friend of Oscar Wilde. Reisden at sixteen had been thin, esthetic, and almost excessively handsome; his tastes ran robustly to heterosexual but Cyron wouldn’t have noticed.
André, as the Count of Montfort, was supposed to marry and have a son. André hadn’t shown the slightest interest until Cyron had arranged it.
André’s tastes ran to who knew. One only hoped it still breathed.
And now André was having trouble with his wife.
Jules disposed of the chauffeur, then the cook. “Husband, are you feeling better?” the wife asked.
“Alas, no. It’s—”
“Not enough!” the audience shouted.
“But, my dear husband, we don’t have any more servants! How annoying!”
“I agree! One can replace servants,” Jules said, “but a loving wife like you—”
The wife gurgled and her heels drummed as Jules regretfully strangled her. The audience laughed. André’s theatre was all about families and death; it was what made the Necro convincing.
Jules was speaking. “It’s a continual crisis. Again, faithful servants to replace! Again, an amiable wife slaughtered! And why? Why? I ask myself, why?”
Necrosar was André, but why?
Perdita touched his sleeve. “I wonder what sort of woman m
arried your André?” she whispered.
“Indeed, love,” he murmured back. Who was this Sabine Wagny? Why had she married him?
Jules was now alone on stage with his slaughter. He surveyed the corpses with speculative dissatisfaction, letting the laughter build, then looked out past the fourth wall, toward where Necrosar was standing, an amused, skeletal audience.
“Him!”
Jules pointed at Necrosar.
“One man alone is the cause of my misery! When I go mad he’s always there!” Jules reached into his coat and produced a huge rubber knife. “Die, Necrosar, die!” Me? Necrosar mimed. Jules lunged at Necrosar with the wobbling blade and stage-stabbed him. André did a comic exaggerated death scene, grabbing at the curtain with one hand, holding the fatal dagger under his armpit with the other; he slid slowly down the curtain and sprawled on the stage, legs out stiffly, folded over, a skeleton with cut strings.
The audience laughed, but tentatively; Necrosar was supposed to be in charge.
“Finally!” Jules said triumphantly, striding back to center stage. “It’s—” and he held out his hands, palm up, for the audience to finish the punch line with him.
“It’s enough!” half the audience shouted, but the other half was cheering.
Because Necrosar wasn’t dead. Jerkily smooth, his head snapped up; Necrosar stood again in one long unnatural flourish like film run backward, undoing his own death. André must have practiced the move for hours. Necrosar advanced on Jules.
“Wait, wait.”
A tall man in well-cut black stood up in the audience. Reisden knew the actor, who had made a career out of playing gentlemen. “Oh my dear people, we really must talk about this. This one’s dead—This one too—How excessive.”
“It’s true,” Jules said repentantly, flourishing a gun at Necrosar. “Murder disturbs the harmony of family life.”
“It’s true,” the dead bodies murmured.
