Siren

by Tara Moss

  Yes…

  She had worn her favoured rubber-soled boots, and they did not betray her presence as she moved furtively through the darkness in near silence, passing the ghostly shapes of unused sets and lighting equipment, covered with filthy white sheets. There was a skerrick of light ahead, and Mak moved towards it. She could hear the performance taking place only metres away onstage.

  She had to find the dressing rooms.

  Where are you, Adam?

  Mak rounded a corner and stopped in her tracks.

  Shit. Caught out.

  She had stumbled upon a young man. The two locked eyes. Her heart leaped into her throat, but Makedde soon realised that he was even more alarmed to see her than she was at being discovered by him. He had been leaning over a props table, and when he heard her, he whirled, and nearly knocked over a rack of clothing.

  Adam?

  The man she had startled was perhaps thirty, and much darker than Adam. The nose was different. This man was handsome in his own way as well, she thought, but there was a hardness about him, especially in his eyes, which were dramatically lined with kohl. He had none of the freshness she’d seen in the photographs of Adam. Even with dyed hair, this could not be him. Dammit. For a second there, she had thought it could actually be that easy. How foolish of her to imagine that she could solve the mystery of Adam Hart’s disappearance by spotting him backstage on her first night in Paris.

  The moment lingered strangely, neither speaking.

  ‘Pardon…’ Mak said, and flashed her best disarming smile.

  The man—who was not Adam—continued staring at her with something like suspicion, even fear, and it dawned on her that his alarm had to do with his being interrupted during some type of sensitive moment. His manner was strangely furtive: he gripped something in his hand and walked slowly backwards, a look of naked guilt in his expression. Mak stole a glance at his fingers, but could not make out what he was holding.

  ‘Parlez-vous Anglais?’ she asked clumsily, in her most nonthreatening tone.

  Rather than grilling her—the impostor—on her reason for being backstage, the man scampered away, and a piece of clothing fell off a hanger where he had been standing. A white doctor’s coat. His reaction struck her as so odd that she stood confused for a time, before hanging the coat up on the props rack again. Next to it was a satin dressing gown, and a suit jacket, both with the curiously worn air of stage costumes.

  Mak paused, unsure what to make of the kohl-eyed man’s response. Would he bring reinforcements to boot her out?

  CHAPTER 43

  Arslan is mad.

  Lucien the illusionist sat before a mirror, practising his magic close-up, tilting the mirror at every possible angle to see what the most observant audience member could. He would be onstage for his next routine in twenty minutes.

  ‘Oui,’ he whispered to himself in an occasional chant of approval as he deftly moved the coin from finger to finger.

  Lucien needed to keep his hands soft and nimble. The techniques of sleight of hand required daily practice, and he had grown to look forward to this peculiar ritual of his, and taken to practising this way in times of stress. The concentration it involved took him away from the petty rivalries that inevitably sprang up amongst the ‘family’ of the troupe, the problems of money and sex and the horrors of the unknown. The future. In his act he could pretend to predict the future but in reality he had no such insight. He did not know where they would end up. He did not know what would become of him if the troupe disbanded. He did not know his future. What he knew was that he could do this: pinch drops, French drops, the Downs coin roll—his coins rolling down each hand effortlessly, bobbing up and down like ponies on a carousel. Precise. Perfect. Total control.

  As a child he had discovered magic. It was the only thing about him that had ever held his mother’s attention. And when she went away, it was his escape from loneliness.

  Arslan is mad, he thought again.

  His half-brother had always been prone to madness. His twin, Yelena, was quiet and lacked confidence, but Arslan had enough boldness and aggression for all of them combined. It was because of their mother. It was her fault that he was that way. They all knew.

  French drops, pinch drops…

  The show would go on, as it always did. For a while there would be an extra member of the family. And then he, Lucien predicted, he would be gone. Perhaps.

  The show will go on…

  Lucien dropped his coin. He scowled. A stranger was backstage; an attractive blonde. She did not belong here. He stood and approached her.

  ‘Pardon, monsieur. I was just looking for the ladies room, and I seem to have got myself all lost…’ Makedde lied, shrugging her shoulders playfully.

  Damn.

  This isn’t Adam, either, she thought, faced with a slender man swathed in a Victorian coat who stood glaring at her, clearly unfriendly. He looked somewhat like the man she had startled only moments before: dark, handsome, exotic; he even wore the same black kohl around his eyes. But this man was not about to scamper away. Mak recognised him from photographs on the troupe’s website. He was the resident magician, Lucien. She had disturbed his rehearsal, and he appeared plenty angry about it.

  ‘I am lost,’ she lied again, shrugged and tried to push past him, palms in the air in a gesture of peace.

  He grabbed her elbow.

  ‘Hey!’ She thought to kick out, to scream…

  Just then, there was the sound of the quick clicking of heels, and two petite burlesque dancers appeared, rushing through the narrow backstage corridor clad in corsets, fishnets, small top hats and platinum-blonde wigs. They looked like twins. When they saw the magician holding Mak’s elbow, their eyes became wide.

  ‘Hi,’ Mak said, and smiled broadly, acting the role of dumb tourist. ‘I like your outfits.’

  ‘Qui est-elle?’ they asked Lucien in unison, stopping. Who is she?

  Mak had to think fast. If she drew too much attention to herself, or her search for Adam Hart, she could send him into hiding. ‘Toilette?’ she asked, and giggled, pointing her finger this way and that, indicating that she needed directions.

  Together, the dancers pointed back the way she had come.

  Mak took the opportunity to flee the magician’s grasp. She left the eclectic trio with their mouths open, hands on hips, as she made her way back to the doorway through which she had entered.

  Dammit.

  Crestfallen, Makedde returned to her seat. She felt a wave of jetlag wash over her. She needed to stay awake through the remaining performances, but it could get tough. She’d been running on adrenaline since arriving, and now that she had not located Adam backstage, nor spotted him in the watching crowd, the tiredness took hold of her. Perhaps he was not even at the theatre, she thought. Bugger. That meant she would need to wait at the stage door in the winter cold, possibly for hours, just to be sure. And again the next night, and the next, until she had some luck.

  She had barely missed him in Brisbane and, for all her attempts to contact him online, Adam remained beyond her reach. According to Tobias, he was not responding to anyone. Mak had to reason with him in person if she was to bring him home.

  Onstage the burlesque dancers entered, parading before the curtain with placards which announced the next item in the program.

  The Final Kiss.

  Mak perked up a touch. She recognised this as the play that had been suggested as the sick inspiration for the acid attack in the alley outside the theatre five years before. It was somewhat surprising to her that the troupe continued to perform that particular play, all things considered, although the piece did have a revered place in the Grand Guignol tradition. Le Baiser dans la Nuit, or The Final Kiss, was considered a Grand Guignol classic, the plot inspired by the infamous acid attacks dubbed ‘crimes passionels’ that took place in Paris in the early 1900s. The combination of shocking violence, sordid affairs and jilted lovers made the acid attacks front-page fodder, perhaps in the sam
e way the Stiletto Murders in Sydney had managed to grab sensational media attention in Australia. The heinous nature of those crimes and the beauty of the female victims, some of whom were models and actresses, fascinated the public. It seemed there would always be an insatiable appetite for beautiful victims cruelly cut down. Schadenfreude. The original version of The Final Kiss, Mak knew from the troupe’s website, had a central character who was a glamorous model, though the plot was more complicated than simply that of victim and perpetrator. The beauty, in fact, was shown to be a beast.

  Mak was surprised when the curtain parted to show a female character with her face wrapped in bandages, her long dark hair hanging glamorously down her back as she was attended by a doctor and a nurse in a homely setting, something like a small living room. Normally, this role was played by the male. It seemed this one-act adaptation of the famous Maurice Level play had swapped the roles of Henri and Jeanne.

  ‘Her attacker had a very cool head. Exceptionally cool,’ the doctor was telling the nurse assistant, as she helped him change the dressings. Thus far, the poor woman patient had said nothing, though her body language made clear her physical discomfort. Audience members strained to one side in an unsuccessful attempt to see the woman’s disfigured face.

  His coat…

  Mak recognised the doctor character’s white coat as the one she had picked up and put back on the props rack after her strange encounter backstage. The doctor was not played by the dark, nervous man she had seen, but by a stockier, fairer actor who spoke English confidently for the largely tourist audience in a mixed American-French accent.

  ‘Leave me!’ the woman finally cried, her patience apparently at an end.

  The nurse and doctor reacted to her outburst as if it were expected. They finished changing the bandages and slipped out the door without a sound. Slowly, the patient stood and turned to face the front of the stage. The audience collectively held its breath. What they saw was a beautiful woman: a fine, hourglass figure dressed in a silk bias-cut gown, a vision of feminine allure under the stage lights. But above the glistening pearls around the woman’s neck was nothing but white bandages, her face covered like that of an Egyptian mummy. The audience watched her with grim curiosity as she moved slowly across the set. Her presence was electrifying: what, and whom, was under that gauze?

  This is her, isn’t it? Bijou.

  Mak suspected that under all those bandages was the beautiful actress Bijou. Mak had seen Bijou’s face in the posters outside the theatre and all over the troupe’s website, and in the flesh, onstage, her figure and manner were spectacularly feminine, though of course her face could not be seen. Could this be the woman Adam had fallen for? Not a dancer but an actress. She had been a stage performer for many years and would be much older than Adam. Patrice had been older, but this age gap was much wider. What was she like? Why did she choose to hide her beauty for this performance? Mak supposed that this role-reversal was intended by the troupe to be more impactful for the audience, knowing that not only had the woman been horribly injured, but that a special beauty had been purposefully destroyed. In this adaptation of the play, the beautiful woman had spurned the man by breaking their engagement, and he had brutally disfigured her in retaliation. This had been a more common element in the real-life crimes passionels cases. It seemed to Mak a less ironic choice than the ‘Beauty is the Beast’ theme of the original 1912 play, in which the vicious, beautiful model disfigured her male lover, a theme which would have been a surprising gender reversal in its day. Tonight’s performance, however, brought to mind actual cases in countries like India, where acid attacks still occurred.

  There was a knock on the stage door, and the woman moved to answer it.

  A man stepped onto the stage. Mak sat up and blinked.

  Oh!

  It was a handsome young man. He stood in the doorway in a dinner jacket. Mak sat forward, her heart speeding up. She fixed her eyes on him, and blinked again, disbelieving.

  Adam.

  It was him. Mak felt certain. He had the same wavy blond hair, the same youthful good looks. He had not bothered with disguises or an accent. Adam Hart sounded and looked just like an Australian onstage in Paris, straight out of one of Mrs Hart’s family photographs. Mak felt the urge to run up and snatch him away. There he is! He really had run off to join the circus. Amazing. And he was performing with them. If it were not for the fact that he had been stealing from his mother and worrying her sick, Mak might have felt happy for him. She would have understood if those accounting textbooks had become too much for him, and he’d had to break loose.

  But she had to bring him home. Now she had found him, all she had to do was convince him to leave the Paris stage behind to come back to Australia to live with his mother.

  This could be a hard sell.

  ‘Jeanne…’ he cried, bringing his hand to his mouth, reacting to the sight of the beautiful woman wrapped in bandages, his acting highly melodramatic.

  ‘Come in, darling,’ she enticed through the layers of cotton. The sound of her voice sent a chill through the theatre, at once an alluring purr and a repulsive hiss.

  Mak watched the scene unfold, wondering how the dynamic would work. Adam looked so innocent it was hard to imagine him inflicting this damage on his former fiancée. He did not look like a monster. The dialogue continued, the awkward exchange between former lovers, the man, recently acquitted of an irreversible crime, and his victim. The tension tightened expertly, Adam holding his own impressively, the two locked in an unnerving conversation.

  Finally, unexpectedly, she grabbed him.

  Mak knew what would happen next. The play demanded it.

  ‘Look at me,’ Bijou urged him. ‘Look at what I have become…’ As she said these words, she unwound the bandages, strip by strip, exposing a face nightmarishly disfigured and eaten away. The audience gasped, as did Adam. ‘Now I’m going to punish you!’

  Mak squinted. The pearls. Were those Glenise’s pearls? This is her. This is the woman with great legs. The ‘star’.

  Mak watched, riveted. Adam was pinned against the couch, and though clearly stronger than she, his character was so overwhelmed by the vision of horror he had created by his own hand that he sat dumbfounded as she drew a vial from her pocket.

  ‘We’ll be the perfect lovers…made for each other!’ she screamed at him.

  My God.

  The vial.

  That face sprang back into her mind: the man backstage, the look of naked guilt, the hand closed around something…

  Makedde had no time to think or to question her instincts. Before she even realised what she was doing, she was running up the aisle towards the stage. ‘Stop! Stop the play! Someone stop her!’

  The actors looked up, startled. Members of the audience cried out in confusion, some yelling for Makedde’s mad progression to the stage to be halted. She hurled herself up onto the elevated proscenium and landed on her knees. A man ran out from behind the curtain and tackled her before she got any further. Mak fell hard onto her right elbow, sending pain shooting up her arm, but she managed to reach out and grab Bijou’s ankle with her left hand.

  ‘No! It is real acid!’ Mak yelled at her, and the vial slipped, having already been opened, ready to be poured on Adam, ready for the climactic moment of violence.

  No!

  The contents of the vial spilled out on the stage, but instead of coloured water touching the skin harmlessly, the contents splashed Makedde’s hand with a sharp burning.

  Acid!

  There was confusion; scorching, searing pain. The skin on Makedde’s hand was puckering, blistering in agony. She cried out and grabbed her wrist, standing.

  The pain hit with blinding force, and she screamed at the top of her lungs. All around her, the sounds of chaos dispersed for a moment, the theatre audience dropping into stunned silence. With her vision blurred and blood pounding in her temples, Mak looked out across a hundred eyes, each looking back at her, blinking, confused. The f
ull realisation of what had happened came to her. She was onstage. They could not know if it was some strange act meant to shock them.

  ‘Help me!’ she shouted, beginning to feel woozy. ‘A man swapped the vials! This is no joke…’ Her voice trailed off and she sank to her knees.

  CHAPTER 44

  Arslan sat in a perfectly motionless panic, his arms and legs folded tightly into the standard position of an enterologist.

  Honte…honte…Shame…shame…

  From his hidden vantage point in the old stage box, Arslan watched as the gendarmes grilled Bijou about the dramatic incident that had taken place during the performance of The Final Kiss. There had been a shocked audience of witnesses in the theatre, and the French police had been tipped off that Arslan himself had swapped the stage vial of harmless coloured water for one containing real sulphuric acid. The woman who had leaped onstage was a private detective who had seen him make the switch before the show. He still did not know how she had ended up there, backstage that night. How had she known what he would do?

  ‘Non…c’est terrible!’ Bijou was crying, highly dramatic when emotional. She trembled and wept, one hand to her pale forehead, her distress genuine even though her demeanour inevitably brought to mind her persona of Grand Guignol scream queen.

  She knows. My mother knows.

  Finally, the Australian boy was gone. He had been questioned by police and then fled France, back to his own mother’s arms in Sydney, and he would not be coming back and getting between Arslan and Bijou and their enduring bond. This was what Arslan had prayed for, though it had not eventuated at all as he had hoped. With Jean-Baptiste, his last real rival for Bijou’s affection five years earlier, the troupe had remained undivided. His mother had been stoic in her resolve that none of them were responsible for the acid attack in the alley after their show, and it must have been a psychotic audience member who had wrought the terrible violence in homage to their play. She had been saddened by the fate of her severely scarred and maimed young lover, and they had soon after separated. But all was changed now. Bijou and the troupe were estranged from him, and from each other. Fractured. The gendarmes were suspicious of Arslan. He was wanted, and would have to remain on the run for who knew how long. Worst of all, his mother was not protecting him this time. She was not trying to dissuade them from making their harsh judgements against him.