by Kim Newman
‘Kate Reed,’ said Irene. ‘You’re the clever one.’
‘Irene Adler,’ said Kate. ‘You’re the slippery one.’
Irene laughed behind a half-veil.
She had returned to the stage – as an actress, not a singer – to tour South America, one-upping Sarah Bernhardt by playing not just Hamlet but also Macbeth, Othello, Romeo and Prince Hal. Every time she appeared in a capital city, national treasures went missing and revolutions broke out. Last year, she made a rare return to her home state to work in Fort Lee, motion picture capital of the United States. For the IMP company, she starred in a series of cinematographs recreating the scandals of her youth in such detail that boards of censorship convened in every territory to suppress them. More detailed still were versions of these flickers in the private collections of plutocrats who each thought they had the only prints.
Irene cut a glamorous figure, but had to work at it with powder, stays and artificial hair colour. The adventuress suffered the indignity of having lived so much in public she could not easily lie about her age. She was fifty-two – five years older than Kate. The willowy Unorna seemed younger than she could possibly be… while the straight-backed, tightly buttoned Mrs Eynsford Hill was youngest of the group but conducted herself like an elderly dowager. There must be a reason for that.
These women had been with the Opera Ghost Agency at different times, in different trios. Before and after Kate.
Her fellow Angels had returned to the Orient – Clara Watson to China, to pursue her disquieting hobbies and enthusiasms, and Lady Yuki to Japan, to strike more names off her list. It would be months before they heard the news about the Persian, if they ever did.
Irene called herself ‘last of the first’ – which wasn’t quite true. Trilby O’Ferrall, the artists’ model, had died young… but Countess de Chagny, the former Christine Daaé, was still alive. She had many children and grandchildren to show for her advantageous marriage. Her gouty husband was above ground too, though the Count made a show of withdrawing from public life in fury at the exoneration of Captain Dreyfus. De Chagny probably forbade his wife from mourning the Persian.
Even with umbrellas, they were all getting wet.
No one wanted to leave first.
Kate had only spent six pell-mell months with the Opera Ghost Agency, tackling Guignol and the Légion d’Horreur, Belphégor and the Louvre mummies, the Cruel Pleasures of the Duc de Blangis, and other cases. Some Angels served longer. Sophy Kratides, La Marmoset, Ayda Ferguson, Mun Zhi Fan, Christina Light, Hagar Stanley, Ailsa Auchmuty, Riolama. Others were in and out of the Agency inside a week. Some had glittering or alarming solo careers. Others were mysterious even to the dossier-compiling know-it-alls of the Diogenes Club. Grunya Constantine, Ysabel de Ferre, Elsie Venner, Adelita Muñoz, Marie-Madeleine de Broutignol, Edith Rabatjoie, Hannah Caulder, Gilberte Lachaille, Lois Cayley.
Angels came and went as often as performers on a variety bill, but the Persian was the constant. He sat in the Café de la Paix in the mornings, available to le tout Paris, and the world revolved around his table. Anyone could approach with a problem, which he would faithfully pass on to Monsieur Erik for consideration. He was the only man whose judgement the director of the Opera Ghost Agency respected. In Mazandaran, as chief of police, he was ordered by the Shah to dispose of Erik, a proverbial man who knew too much, but saved his life instead. That act of mercy bound them together.
It would have been easy for any of Erik’s enemies to walk into the café and shoot the Persian in the head or poison his coffee, but he took no special precautions. Even those who wanted the Phantom dead saw the Persian as protected – an institution of the city, a necessity for the conduct of business. The practical stage manager who implemented the plans of the remote director. Welcome everywhere in Paris, though he could not return to his homeland. Irreplaceable.
The Persian had everything but a name. Just as Erik had everything but a face.
He had faithfully corresponded with Kate, long after her spell with the Agency. He passed on scraps of information useful to her as a reporter or in the investigations she carried out for the Diogenes Club. Many of those nuggets came from Erik. The Phantom contrived to know everything that transpired in the criminal and occult underworlds of a dozen nations, though he seldom ventured far from his home on the shore of the artificial lagoon under the Palais Garnier.
Which, she only now realised, must be flooding.
If water was around the Zouave’s neck, it would also top the pipes of the Phantom’s organ.
Erik, a master architect, must have designed his lair with the possibility of flood in mind. However, even he couldn’t have predicted this season’s rains and the rising of the Seine and its tributaries. First, to the southeast, the towns of Lorroy and Troyes were all but swept away. Then, swollen rivers combined into a rushing torrent which threatened the city. Icebergs formed overnight and dashed into jagged chunks against bridge supports. These shot through the water like missiles – smashing boats, breaking legs. Sewers overflowed. Liquid filth tainted food supplies and fouled the air. The Métro was closed, its tunnels turned to underground aqueducts. The Eiffel Tower, which Kate still thought hideous, rose from a shallow lake.
She hoped the Phantom had a dry bolthole somewhere.
Kate looked down at the Persian’s grave. The rain was battering the floral tributes. Newly turned earth was becoming swamp. Something showed in the mud.
For a queasy moment, Kate thought the body was floating to the surface.
‘What is that?’ she asked.
Mrs Eynsford Hill handed Unorna her umbrella and knelt carefully by the grave. Unorna held up two brollies to shelter the English woman. With gloved hands, Mrs Eynsford Hill pulled something out of the ground.
Oilskin wrappings peeled away from an object the size of a shoebox.
‘I believe it is a music box,’ said the English woman. ‘How enchanting.’
It was an ornate cabinet. Painted panels depicted clowns and harlequins.
A key turned…
The box began to tinkle, imitating a pianoforte.
‘Now, what is that little tune?’ asked Mrs Eynsford Hill.
Kate recognised the opening melody of the second movement of Haydn’s Symphony No 94 in G Major. The notes instantly brought back a childhood mnemonic. She had made many stubby-fingered assaults on a solo piano arrangement of the piece…
Papa Haydn’s dead and gone… but his mem’ry lingers on…
Irene was alarmed.
‘Toss it away, now!’ she shouted.
When his mood was one of bliss…
Without question, Mrs Eynsford Hill drew back her arm like a shot-putter and lobbed the box across the cemetery. She had a powerful throw.
He wrote jolly tunes like this…
A long pause as the box turned over and over in the air.
BANG!
The box exploded like a big firework. Flaming fragments rained onto graves, hissing as they were extinguished in puddles.
A stinging stench of sulphur caught in Kate’s nostrils. Her eyes watered. Her ears rang.
‘What was that frightful racket?’ Mrs Eynsford Hill asked, as if someone had dropped a tray of tea things.
‘A surprise?’ suggested Irene, bitterly.
‘Haydn’s Surprise Symphony,’ said Unorna.
Kate hadn’t expected to come under fire at a memorial.
‘I used to hurt my nails slamming down that loud chord,’ she said. ‘My governess despaired of me. I don’t have a wide enough reach.’
Had it been a particularly ill-judged joke? Or a serious assassination attempt?
‘That charge would have taken your hands off,’ Irene said to Mrs Eynsford Hill. ‘Maybe your face.’
‘Who would do such a thing?’ the English woman asked. ‘Explosives in a cemetery are in exceptionally poor taste.’
‘You could make a list,’ said Irene. ‘We all have enemies, I daresay. As Angels of Music and o
n our own account. And our successor Angels will have added plenty of fresh names… which we can ask them about.’
‘We can?’ asked Kate.
Irene tried to use her umbrella as a pointer, but it turned inside out. She tossed the broken thing away. Rain splashed off her winged headdress. The veil stuck to her strong, handsome face.
Kate looked where Irene pointed.
Three women had appeared in the graveyard, lurking in long green waterproof hooded cloaks – as if waiting for Macbeth, Perseus… or a fourth for bridge.
Angels, of course. The current trio.
The dossiers were slim so far, but Kate knew their names.
Alraune, Olympia, Thi Minh.
II
‘IT IS A pleasure to meet you,’ Olympia said to her. ‘I hope we shall be the best of friends.’
Irene Adler winced as the Angel took her hand.
The vault was warm and dry – and pleasantly lacking in exploding booby traps. Alraune ten Brincken, the weird German girl, had a key to the tomb, which bore the family name of de Boscherville. The whisper was that the creature who’d grow up to be Erik was born in Saint-Martin-de-Boscherville, a town near Rouen. No one was interred here, yet.
The stone cubbyhouse was furnished like a windowless parlour. A hospitality table with liquor and glasses. A phonograph on a stand. A framed poster of Christine Daaé as Marguerite. Other pictures of young women. Irene was surprised Erik had got hold of that photograph of her. Masks and cloaks hung from a rail. A wall-mounted mirror, duplicate of the one-way glass in Dressing Room 313, was trying not to look like a secret door. The Opera Ghost Agency maintained nests like this all over the city. Hideouts and observation posts.
‘It is a pleasure to meet you,’ Olympia said to Kate Reed. ‘I hope we shall be the best of friends.’
‘Watch out,’ Irene warned. ‘Her shake’s like getting caught in a wine-press.’
Too late. Kate’s fingers were crushed too.
Irene could usually ignore the twinges in her knuckles. Not now. All her pains demanded attention. Even – no, especially – the ones doctors said she imagined. Like nails through her eyes.
After that close brush with the music box bomb, she was sensitive.
‘It is a pleasure to meet you,’ Olympia said to Unorna. ‘I hope we shall be the best of friends.’
Unorna held her hand up palm out like a Red Indian and said, ‘Blessed be.’ When she was called a wise woman, it wasn’t just a polite way of saying witch.
‘It is a pleasure to meet you,’ said Elizabeth Eynsford Hill, mimicking Olympia’s pure soprano. ‘I hope we shall be the best of friends.’
Irene knew about the English woman’s strange education. Another victim of thoughtless mastermindery.
Olympia would not be put off. She didn’t even gabble her words to get it over with.
‘It is a pleasure to meet you,’ she said to Elizabeth. ‘I hope we shall be the best of friends.’
‘She’s a doll,’ said Irene.
‘Really, Miss Adler, you are addicted to Americanisms,’ said Kate.
‘I am American,’ she said. ‘And it’s not slang. She really is a doll.’
Kate caught on and looked closely at the dancer.
Irene recognised the model. She was hardly likely to forget the Marriage Club, even after all these years. The face was the same, though the hair was different – bobbed, like a boy’s. The slim figure was bulked out by what might have been armour plate under the dress.
‘Coppélius and Spallanzani,’ she observed.
‘Their design,’ said Alraune, ‘repaired and improved by a new firm, Gaillard and Quentin. To Erik’s specifications. He once constructed automata himself, for a Sultan in Constantinople.’
Since Irene’s day, the Phantom had apparently become chattier, sharing yarns of his past with Angels. Or else Alraune came to the Agency well-informed.
The German girl was a sly one. And she didn’t stand up straight.
Kate touched Olympia’s face. The doll didn’t mind.
‘That’s not porcelain,’ she said. ‘Is it rubber or silk over sponge?’ She took her hand away, shuddering. ‘She’s warm. How can that be?’
‘Fire in her heart,’ said Alraune.
‘Not a figure of speech, either,’ said Irene. ‘I reckon she runs on acid batteries. No need to wind her up every day.’
The art of simulacra had come on by leaps and bounds since Coppélius and Spallanzani worked for Countess de Cagliostro. Their to-order brides were squatting monkeys with cymbals compared with Olympia. The new living doll had many more points of articulation. She breathed like a real girl. Her unblinking eyes sparkled, moist with a fluid – transparent oil? – which might be taken for tears. That whirring and ticking which gave away the old contraptions was muted. Irene made a mental note to pick up a few hundred dollars’ worth of shares in Gaillard and Quentin. If electric servants or soldiers caught on like Ford automobiles, fortunes would be made.
‘Do such things have souls, I wonder?’ said Unorna. ‘Or are they tin homunculi – summoned from the void for use and dispelled afterwards.’
‘Souls – pah!’ said Alraune.
Irene sensed something uncanny in the German too. Alraune was flesh and blood all right – if fashionably bony. But something was missing.
Angels all had something extra. But most had something missing too.
Thi Minh, the little Annamite tumbler, was mute. Once, Erik would no more take on a bird without song than a dancer without legs… but Irene supposed things changed. The girl from Indochina was eloquent with face and hands. She should have been in motion pictures. She looked a perfect little French miss: tiny rouge-free face, chic plain white dress, fashionably boyish bobbed hair. Irene could envision her tied to railroad tracks by a wicked guardian or abducted by sinister cultists – though, even if producers in Fort Lee were hacks, she had to admit the real world turned out to be just as full of scenarios of peril, escape, pursuit and treachery. Thi Minh wouldn’t be here if she couldn’t undo a knot or evade a cult.
These new Angels weren’t like Irene’s generation. Trilby and Christine. They were too thin. Underdressed, even with rain-cloaks. And unpainted. They didn’t look healthy at all.
Kate was closer to her idea of an Angel. Though the word made her shudder, they were both Victorians. Dry old sticks who outlived scandals to become respectable. Even Irene’s disgraces were quaint now. Pictures that might once have toppled thrones were on postcards.
Elizabeth was more like the new girls. Trim and unflappable, subsisting on air instead of food. She was sort of a wind-up doll, too. Like poor, dear Trilby, she’d made the mistake of taking lessons.
Unorna was something different – hard to place.
Irene was glad the witch was on their side.
Alraune poured generous measures of sherry (for Elizabeth) and brandy (for the rest of them). Only Olympia didn’t drink. Preferring her own rye whiskey, Irene poured a measure from her flask into the little silver cup which screwed over the stopper.
‘I always like a nip after I’ve almost been blown to smithereens,’ Irene said. ‘Bottoms up, ladies.’
She took a burning swallow.
‘The bomb was to maim, not kill,’ said Alraune. ‘A coffin full of dynamite would have been more effective.’
‘A lovely thought,’ said Irene. ‘Most people just leave flowers.’
‘It was a message,’ said Unorna. ‘We have been warned off.’
‘I heard it loud and clear,’ said Irene. ‘A telegram would have done just as well.’
‘Anyone who thinks a bomb will warn us off doesn’t know us very well,’ said Kate.
‘Doesn’t know you very well, perhaps,’ said Irene. ‘They’ve completely got the measure of me.’
‘You don’t mean that,’ said the little Irish woman. ‘The Irene Adler I’ve heard about wouldn’t be scared off by such low tactics.’
‘The Irene Adler you’ve heard about got o
lder and creakier and would like to lie on a divan eating Swiss chocolates with a cold compress on her forehead. She’s had quite enough derring-do for one lifetime, thank you very much.’
Kate smiled indulgently. She didn’t take Irene’s protests seriously.
Irene had cause to rue that Irene Adler Kate had heard about. The Irene Adler foolish men dreamed up and made fools of themselves over. Irene only really got in trouble when she got herself confused with that imaginary Irene Adler.
‘How did the Persian die?’ Kate asked the others.
‘He was gravely ill,’ said Alraune. ‘He had been for some time.’
‘That’s not an answer.’
‘No,’ admitted the German girl.
Irene couldn’t help but stare at Alraune’s waist-length tangle of hair. It was thick and somehow twiggy, with beads braided in. Along with her huge eyes, the wild mane made her look alarming.
‘Was there an autopsy?’ asked Unorna. ‘Is Dr Dieudonné still coroner?’
‘I don’t know that name,’ said Alraune. ‘But… no, there was no autopsy, no police investigation. Just a death certificate. A sick man dies. If not of his sickness, then what does it matter? The rains fall. The river rises. Doctors are busy. The morgue is full. Many have lost their livelihoods in the floods. Many have lost their lives. Not all by drowning. When a body is found floating with its head bashed in… it’s best to write it up as if he fell in the water and bumped on floating wreckage. Otherwise, the Prefect of Police would have to take men off shoring up barricades and erecting dry walkways to investigate. For a murderer, the flood might be a blessing… like a curtain to hide behind.’
‘So you reckon he was iced?’ said Irene.
Alraune shrugged bony shoulders and bit her sensual lower lip. She was not a come-right-out-and-say-it kind of a girl.
‘I was in Paris when this happened,’ said Eynsford Hill. ‘I saw the body before it was washed and wrapped. The Persian had chronic bronchitis.’
‘He was a cougher,’ said Irene.
‘It is nothing, my Angels,’ said the English woman in the Persian’s voice. ‘Just a little tickle in the throat.’
