by Kim Newman
‘Those cigarettes he smoked,’ said Kate. ‘Turkish tar.’
‘There was blood around his mouth,’ continued Elizabeth, in her own – if not her original – voice.
‘Which you’d expect,’ said Kate.
‘And in his eyes.’
Thi Minh gripped her throat as if invisible hands were throttling her.
‘I’ve seen enough men hanged to know about the blood in the eyes,’ said Irene. ‘So the Persian was choked?’
Elizabeth, who talked about the death of a friend as if she were considering a menu for afternoon tea, nodded.
‘He was carefully strangled,’ she went on. ‘With a rope or a wire, there’s a ligature mark. A red weal. Something broader, like a scarf or a pillow, spreads the pressure. The throat is crushed, but not bruised. But there is no way to stop blood vessels in the eyes bursting.’
Irene had a pang. What a terrible, quiet way to go. Not just killed, but tidied away.
‘It was murder, then,’ said Kate.
‘We cannot prove it,’ said Alraune. ‘But we know it.’
Irene had not seen the Persian since the business with God. After quitting Paris a second time, she suppressed any stray thought of the Persian or his friend behind the mirror. Now, that stung more than she liked. She’d left many people – mostly, but not exclusively, men – behind on her route from where she started to wherever she was going. It was best not to dwell too much on how they might feel about her departures… whether they remembered her as the woman or that woman. Mentally, she’d wrapped the Persian and Erik up together in a bundle and decided she could do without the pair of them. A shabby thing, she realised too late. She should have spared time to look out for a friend.
She glanced towards that mirror. It would be almost a window if the light were turned down in the vault. Now, only darkness showed beyond the gaps in the silvering.
She remembered a mask. And yellow eyes.
Irene lumped Erik in with other masterminds she’d run across – Bloody James Moriarty, Blessed Sherlock Holmes and the Lord of Strange Deaths. Not to mention bright sparks like Antonio Nikola, Dagobert Trostler, Dr Mabuse, Augustus Van Dusen and the Face. More and more of the bastards were around these days. On both sides of the fence, and straddling the middle. Genius inventors, master crooks, great detectives, overmen, big fish. Her world was getting crowded with them. They formed secret societies, syndicates, leagues, cabals. They fought their own wars and made their own alliances. She had always skipped from shadow to shadow, a small creature trying to avoid being noticed, squashed or eaten. Colossi were banishing the shadows and spoiling the game. Since her girlhood, masterminds had been getting smarter… and worse.
She’d thought Svengali, the mesmerist who first tinkered with poor Trilby’s head, a bad ’un. Between the fluences of Svengali and Erik, Trilby got so discombobulated she eventually couldn’t keep on breathing without someone telling her to… and just stopped, like an unwound watch. At least Svengali was nakedly honest about what he wanted. A step up from poverty and obscurity. Hot meals and a comfortable bed.
Henry Higgins, the dilettante who raised Elizabeth Eynsford Hill from the gutter, wasn’t poor, obscure or hungry. He made a freak of a flower-seller – in essence, Olympia with a pulse – to settle a silly argument. Higgins didn’t even fancy the girl and settled an idiot on her for a husband.
Irene had known some bad women. Jo Balsamo, for a start… but also Lady Brentwyche, Altar Keane and Sjena De’Ath. None of those skirts scrambled folks’ brains just to show off how clever they were. Except maybe Countess de Cagliostro, who was scarcely human.
‘The Persian… dead,’ said Unorna. ‘It’s wrong.’
‘It was him without question,’ said Alraune.
‘I don’t mean to dispute that,’ continued the witch. ‘He is dead, I know that. But he should not be. The pattern is broken by his removal from this plain. He was an important individual. One does not just kill such a man and expect no consequences. The larger world must take notice.’
Irene thought of the Persian. And how he had spent his life.
A thing she had noticed about masterminds is that they liked to keep a toady about to reflect their light back at them. Stooges to egg them on, puff them up and calm them down. A nicer – or, at least, more down-to-earth – guy handily smoothed things over if the great man went too far. Often, these boobies were required to write up their patrons the way Boswell did Johnson – to make calculating machines seem human, admirable or interesting. Sometimes, second bananas were with the firm to get prime movers through the door. Hearty, unassuming ass-kissers like Dr Watson, Basher Moran or Colonel Pickering were welcome in places which wouldn’t stand for skull-faced killjoys who corrected your grammar and terrified the maids. Number Two Men rode coattails like Christmas sleighs but brought more to the teams than they got credit for.
Erik, let it not be forgotten, would be dead in an unmarked desert grave if it weren’t for the Persian. Sidekicks also got literally kicked when an overman needed a man to be over. Irene remembered Cochenille, the ill-made doll… but also sorry specimens like the Gecko, the pock-marked fiddler who trotted after Svengali like a mongrel who’s grown to love the slapping hand, and Bunny Manders, the nance who fagged for that bounder A.J. Raffles at Eton and never grew out of it.
Just as minions deserved more credit, they should also earn more blame. Without them, masterminds couldn’t get away with as much.
Maybe the Persian ought to have been held to account for the Phantom… but Irene was old and smart enough to know things were never as simple inside the house as they looked when peeped at through the curtains.
She remembered her own marriage. Had she been the mastermind and God her minion? That made her cringe. Godfrey Norton was someone else she tried not to think of.
‘What about… him?’ Kate asked, nodding at the mirror. ‘What’s the Phantom had to say for himself?’
Thi Minh capered expressively.
‘M. Erik is… indisposed,’ said Alraune.
‘What does that mean?’ asked Irene.
‘They’ve heard nothing from him,’ said Elizabeth. ‘And the way below is impassable.’
‘Impossible?’ asked Kate.
‘Impassable,’ restated Elizabeth.
‘I knew that,’ said Kate. ‘It’s just you’re the only person I’ve ever met who could make “impossible” and “impassable” sound like different words.’
‘This is no time for making light.’
‘No,’ said Kate. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘We opened the mirror at the opera house yesterday and sent Olympia down,’ said Elizabeth.
‘It is a pleasure to meet you,’ said Olympia, to no one new.
‘She doesn’t need to breathe,’ said the English woman. ‘And she’s waterproof.’
That made her sound like Erik’s ideal girlfriend. It was a wonder he hadn’t replaced all the Angels with battery-powered ballerinas.
‘She swam through flooded tunnels to the underground lagoon,’ continued Elizabeth. ‘The little house on the lagoon is swept away. She found Erik’s coffin floating, like an abandoned punt. But he was nowhere to be seen.’
‘I hope we shall be the best of friends,’ said Olympia.
Was Irene imagining it or did the doll sound sad now?
‘The pneumatique is out of order,’ said Elizabeth. ‘As are telephone, tickertape and telegraph. All lines of communication with Erik are broken.’
‘I’d know if he were dead,’ said Unorna. ‘And he isn’t.’
Irene recalled that Erik was an expert with breathing tubes. A strong swimmer, he could scythe through dark waters while wearing full evening dress, using his cloak like the fins of a manta ray.
‘At the very least, he is busy,’ said Alraune. ‘Like all Paris.’
‘How stands the Agency?’ asked Kate.
‘Suspended due to flooding,’ said Alraune. ‘Like all Paris.’
As the only serving
Angel who could hold a conversation, the German girl was in a pickle. Irene had a notion Alraune was used to being alone – or at least lonely. A chilly creature, she was attractive yet off-putting. Foster daughter of another mastermind, Professor ten Brincken. Rumours about them circulated in Germany. None pleasant.
Alraune was an alchemical name. It was German for mandrake, the weed popularly believed to grow under gallows, sprouting from the last ejaculate of hanged men. Distillate from the root had the power to cloud men’s minds. Irene suspected Alraune’s distinct musk had the same property.
Unorna said mandrake was bad luck. She sounded like a fairground gypsy with a grudge, but Irene knew enough to take her seriously. When Irene was in Bohemia, Prince Willy von Ormstein – cause of so much of her trouble, though she admitted she’d gone along with it – officiated at a reception for the Witch of Prague. Unorna had supposedly just saved the city from goblins or golems or somesuch. The witch had buried her mastermind, the dwarf sorcerer Keyork Arabian. She was a rare truly free woman.
‘It is up to us to pool our talents and identify the murderer,’ said Kate.
‘Oh, we know who the murderer is,’ said Alraune. ‘That’s easy. It’s Fantômas, the anarchist.’
Kate’s eyes widened.
Thi Minh held fingers in front of her face like an eye-mask and crouched down, looking around warily. She made a bomb of a fist and let it explode, puffing out her fingers and waving them around.
Fantômas was another headline-grabber… always stealing jewels from uncrackable safes or assassinating people said to be impossible to get to. He might be a mastermind. He was certainly a master of disguise, one of those fellows who might be anyone or no one. But he was unusual – a freak among freaks. Even his peers disliked him. Unlike, say, Raffles or Les Vampires, he was more interested in making trouble than money. And, unlike the Lord of Strange Deaths – whose declared aim was to end European influence in the Middle- and Far East – he had no real political purpose. Just chaos and carnage. An exploding music box among floral tributes was just his style. He was Jack the Ripper on an industrial scale. Instead of merely slicing a few throats, he took a razor to cities, nations, continents. Irene hadn’t been as scared of Professor Moriarty as she was of Fantômas. It would take more than being pushed over a waterfall to finish him off.
‘Isn’t Fantômas an imitator of Erik?’ said Kate. ‘He wears evening clothes and a mask. He strikes from the shadows and issues press releases, just like Erik’s black-edged notes. Even the name sounds like Phantom.’
‘Once an imitation has been perfected, it makes sense to smash the original,’ said Elizabeth. ‘So there is only one.’
‘It is a pleasure to meet you,’ said Olympia. ‘I hope we shall be the best of friends.’
The doll sounded distressed. Or was she the same every time, like a wax cylinder? One heard her differently, depending on mood or context.
‘I understand that this Fantômas used to go by the absurd name of Gurn,’ said Elizabeth. ‘He may well have been born with it. I can conceive of no reason anyone who didn’t have to would call themselves Gurn. When I was an Angel, the Agency had a contretemps or two with him. He came off poorly, which might be a spur to his present mission against us. Then, he was little more than a common ruffian. Before he put on a mask and took up all this nihilist nonsense.’
Irene had heard of an incident at Royale-les-Eaux. Half the villains of the world blamed the other half for what happened in the casino there, but she’d discerned the dainty beating of Angels’ wings. Gurn had lost his first stolen fortune in that debacle – which was enough to put the Agency in his sights.
‘How do you know Fantômas killed the Persian?’ asked Kate.
‘He has issued threats,’ said Alraune. ‘Sent letters to the Opera House… put notices in the papers… painted his mark up all over the city. He accuses Erik of being a creature of the 19th century, who deserves to be swept away with the debris of the old world. Fantômas is a spectre of the New Age. No opera… just Phantom. He wants to see civilisation burn and dance in the ruins.’
‘Or flood,’ said Irene. ‘And splash about.’
‘He has strangled before,’ said Elizabeth. ‘You recall the case of Lord Beltham. Fantômas is a master of the night-time noose.’
‘So is Erik,’ said Irene. ‘Remember the Punjab lasso?’
The Phantom learned rope tricks from the Thuggee in India, during his youthful grand tour. Most people look at the Taj Mahal, visit art galleries, have unwise love affairs and send home cheerful postcards. Wherever he visited, Erik picked up ingenious murder methods.
‘You’re not suggesting Erik killed his only friend?’ said Kate.
‘His only male friend,’ corrected Irene. ‘And no… this is another player of the great game issuing a challenge, knocking over a pawn so as to get his attention. Using Erik’s trademark as a taunt. I am only surprised Fantômas didn’t get the Persian under a chandelier and drop it on him.’
Kate looked disgusted.
‘This isn’t how I think,’ said Irene. ‘It’s how they do. Masterminds.’
Unorna nodded her agreement. She understood the shadow worlds, perhaps more than any other Angel.
‘Erik used to make explosive devices like that music box too,’ said the witch.
‘So far as this Fantômas is concerned, we’re not even on the board,’ Irene continued. ‘Or else he’d have fitted us for red rope chokers. He thought Erik wouldn’t care enough if he only downed an Angel… so he killed a man. They’re fighting a duel.’
‘And we’re supposed to do what?’ said Kate. ‘Hold coats?’
‘Wait meekly – put in our place by that firework in the Persian’s grave – and sign up with whoever wins,’ suggested Irene. ‘And Fantômas says Erik is the 19th-century man.’
Red highlights burned on the Irish woman’s cheeks. Irene had known she would feel the sting at the oversight. Kate Reed, of all women, was offended at not being picked to be a murder victim.
Irene was angry too. She hadn’t expected that.
‘This will not pass,’ said Kate. ‘The Persian meant as much to us – more, I daresay! – as to Erik. Would any of us have stayed with the Agency for more than five minutes if we just had to take orders from behind that mirror? Despite what the world says, we did what we did for the Persian – not the Phantom! With Sophy Kratides retired and Lady Yuki in Japan, we lack our Angel of Vengeance and Angel of the Sword… but Erik called me the Angel of Truth.’
‘He called me the Angel of Larceny,’ said Irene, smirking.
‘Angel of Ill Fortune,’ said Alraune.
‘He called us all Angels of Something,’ said Kate. ‘Here’s my Truth – we won’t sit this out. Erik might be clinging to flotsam, for all we know… or washed down river and stuck in a midden. Unable to take his part in this duel that has cost us so dearly. So we shall find this Fantômas gobshite and bring him to book.’
‘It is a pleasure to meet you,’ said Olympia, with steely determination. ‘I hope we shall be the best of friends.’
‘What she said, sister,’ said Irene.
‘That’s the Irene Adler I was expecting,’ said Kate.
Irene had the feeling she’d been rooked. But she was angry and inspired too.
III
THE MÉTRO WAS fermé. Parisians were leerier of travelling underground than Londoners. It might be partially Erik’s fault. There was no risk of running into a Phantom on the Tube – though the Lord (and the Diogenes Club) knew horrors enough squirmed under London. Black swine in the sewers of Hampstead. Sawney Beane in brick caves below Russell Square. Paris had more prosaic doubts about its still-novel Métro. A fire on a recently opened line had trapped and killed eighty travellers. Gloomy commentators talked of ‘the Nécro’ and swore to stick to omnibuses. They weren’t running either, of course. Kate supposed folk like that had to stay home, hoping the waters receded before their larders emptied.
If time and a working in
ternational wire could be found, she should cable The Clarion to offer news and notes. All the other British dailies had correspondents here, snug on the upper floors of good hotels, firing off stories overheard in bars. Rescued animals were always popular. Papers which usually ran editorials calling for war against the degenerate French set up appeals, exhorting the generous public to donate used clothes to Parisians whose wardrobes were underwater. Kate thought a mountain of odd socks and worn-out mufflers would be little appreciated. It would take more than forty days of rain to make the average French citizen wear something unfashionable, let alone something British. If the baskets of clothes ever arrived, they would end up stuffed into holes to plug leaks.
The rain stopped for the moment, but vicious cold winds still blew. Dangerous-looking, improvised plank-and-trestle walkways called passerelles stretched across flooded streets. Determined souls grimly tottered on these like high-wire walkers with umbrellas and bulky coats. Lampposts tilted at strange angles, lights out.
The Angels made their way from Père Lachaise in fiacres. When horses baulked at flooded streets, they had to get out and consider other transport options. The master of a small boat offered to row them along a canal-like stretch of Boulevard Montmartre for an extortionate fare.
With each disaster, opportunists sprung up to make a fast franc. Or pursue other ends.
Had their anarchist enemy waited for this moment – while le tout Paris was waterlogged and distracted – to strike? Kate wouldn’t have put it past him to dynamite riverbanks and stop up sewers to make the flood worse. But even Fantômas couldn’t summon the rain.
At the crossroads of Boulevard Montmartre, Boulevard Haussmann, Rue Drouot, Rue de Richelieu and Boulevard des Italiens, a makeshift dam barred the way. Made of carts, broken furniture, barrels and an inside-out grand piano, it resembled the barricades the Paris mob put up in times of insurrection. A miserable gendarme sat on a lopsided rocking chair atop the pile, as if manning a position – but the personnel stopping boats and interrogating passersby were civilians. Well-dressed in blazers and student caps. Generally well-spoken, if irritatingly cheerful.
