Castle Rouge

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  We went on foot, by design. Irene said we must see Prague as a fugitive like James Kelly would, and Quentin agreed.

  It was quite the picturesque city, particularly this old section, although lamentably filthy.

  “How will we represent you and Pink at the brothel?” Quentin wondered.

  Irene considered while we walked, hardly noticing as we stepped around offal in the street. “Perhaps as relatives searching for some lost sister.”

  “And the sketch of Kelly?”

  “Her fiancé perhaps, also lost. They had eloped together, unwisely but well, then had become separated by the confusion of the city.” Irene was weaving her playlet now, embroidering on our story and our roles. “He fears she has been forced to support herself. You are…Pink’s fiancé. I am her older sister. We need not be searching for one of the dead women, only a fictitious girl who is in danger of becoming like her.”

  “Dead?” I asked.

  “A prostitute first. Then dead. I am sure the brothelkeepers and their residents are atremble at these violent deaths. They will not doubt our concern.”

  “And how,” Quentin asked, “will you explain the fact that I am English and you and Pink are American? They can’t have too many American girls seeking places in brothels here.”

  “You would be surprised,” I told him. “The harlot of exotic background is always an asset in a brothel. Or a European brothel, rather,” I amended, thinking that his experience was likely to be Eastern.

  He apparently read my assumption, for his complexion darkened again. “It is true,” he admitted, “that I am foreign to European espionage, and brothels. And how are you so expert in the subject?”

  Before I could retort that it was my profession, Irene directed her attention to a narrow street of four-story, tall-windowed buildings. “Is this the street where the brothel is?”

  I consulted my pocket watch. “Four-thirty. It is a good time to visit. The girls are just awakening from naps and getting ready for dinner later and the grande promenade. The attendants will be out in full force.”

  Indeed, the laundryman’s cart was drawn up before the building, and he was trundling his bags of fresh linen inside like Santa Claus with his sack of toys.

  We followed in the tracks of his clogs and found ourselves in a dark and musty hall where an old woman with a scarf crossed over her flat bosom served as a combination concierge and coatchecker.

  She called some Czech words at us.

  Irene immediately turned and began caroling back, only she mixed Czech, German, and English.

  “Ah, some English. Speak?” Using her trilingual approach and many gestures—to me, Quentin, herself, hand to heart, she inquired after “Madame” in French. A word that seemed to be universally recognizable. The old soul’s braid-topped white head nodded us within.

  Irene immediately went to a door, opened it, and peered down the dark stairs it revealed.

  The old woman shook her head violently and gestured us to another door.

  This one opened on stairs going upward and it we took, although Irene glanced longingly back at the forbidden door to the lower regions as we mounted higher in the house.

  “Information first and exploration later,” she told us. “The second floor. Madame.”

  The second floor offered either more opportunity to climb or a short hall with three steps ending at another nondescript door.

  This we approached, and Quentin knocked.

  It was opened by a girl of fifteen perhaps, dewy and wide-eyed, who opened it wider when Irene murmured the magic word, “Madame.”

  Within was a large cozy chamber in the Viennese style, filled with lighted tapers and sparkling cut-glass droplets and very over-stuffed furniture in designs like padded hearts for Valentine’s Day.

  Madame was plump, pretty, perhaps forty years old. Her curled reddish hair surrounded her beaming features like a Cupid’s coiled mop, and she was gowned in emerald brocade like a rather attractive sofa.

  I had never seen such a kindly looking madam, although all I had met were able to pretend beneficence toward their men customers.

  She bade us sit and perched at the very edge of her sofa as Irene pantomimed the melodrama of our common dear one, our loss, our concern, our need to ask questions. Again she resorted to three languages. Again she made herself understood.

  In two minutes the madam’s expressive face was limpid with sympathy.

  In three minutes Irene was rapidly whispering translated words in English to me and my ever-handy notebook. Quentin sat by, watching and reading my notes over my shoulder, nodding with sorrowful mein whenever Irene glanced his way.

  Irene opened the portfolio and produced the cabinet sketch of James Kelly. The particularly clever feature of having a fine artist draw it was that it seemed quite a natural thing to have, like the preliminary sketch for a portrait. Its presence not only allowed witnesses to quickly say yea or nay to the likeness, but lent an air of legitimacy to our supposed quest. This man we sought was not a criminal, but a lost dear one.

  It struck me for the first time that it was odd she had not made such sketches of Nell and Godfrey. Then I realized that she had not expected them to be seen beyond the moment of their abductions, if indeed they had been abducted.

  The madam nodded at the sketch and pointed at her extravagant upholstery. Irene began to describe something. From her hand gestures, I recognized the unmistakable silhouette of the siége d’amour designed for the Prince of Wales upon which I had found the two Parisian prostitutes horribly slaughtered.

  This two-tiered exquisitely made couch of love meant to accommodate a man whose bulk only slightly underweighed the average elephant’s was apparently a device not unheard of in other European establishments. (I never ran across the like in American brothels, but then we are descended from Puritans, and not princes.)

  I glanced at Quentin and saw that he had gotten the idea very well despite the foreign words used. In fact, his face betrayed a rather active curiosity, and I suspect that had we been men and not women, he could have described exotic Eastern versions of the same appliance and made all sorts of interesting cultural comparisons. It is amazing what the stuffy average Englishman gets up to away from home, which is no doubt why Bram Stoker was a credible Ripper suspect, even though he was Irish.

  I must admit that these speculations gave me a great itch to see more of the world, East and West and North and South.

  The sweet little Viennese torte of a madam was nodding sympathetically and spreading her arms wide enough to show off her impressive decollétage. I gathered we had the freedom of the house, at least until the gentlemen callers started assembling at seven or eight.

  We left with nods and bows, as if departing a very pleasant tea party.

  “What a lovely lady,” Irene exclaimed quite sincerely as we reassembled in the hall outside. “She is most distraught at the slaughter of the innocents in Prague and bids us ask wherever we will for our lost little lamb. Why am I surprised to find cooperation in the brothels and not in the palace?”

  “Innocents?” I remarked.

  “She operates, according to what I gathered, an amazingly benign brothel. She sees herself as a headmistress of sorts and this as a school for the girls’ betterment. Apparently several of her ‘graduates’ have become the cherished mistresses of men of influence.”

  I wrinkled my nose before I realized it was a “Nell” gesture. “I understand that you yourself were highly insulted at the notion of becoming the mistress of a man of influence.” Oh, what a “Nell” thing to say! Beware of wearing prim, checked coatdresses and taking notes!

  Quentin chuckled behind me, and I felt absurdly proud of myself.

  Irene laughed, at herself. “All right. But she is an uncommonly nice madam. My beloved Prague still has its old-fashioned niceties. This tells me that our inquiries will bear fruit.”

  So we waltzed up more stairs and through more doors into more overupholstered suites of rooms. The girl
s were plump and pleasant. They giggled at Quentin’s presence but managed to refrain from drawing their dressing gowns closed because of it, or keeping their lips buttoned.

  Camilla had been found dead near the door to the cellar. Her throat had been cut and she herself left in a crumple of bloody linens.

  Yes, this man in the sketch had been there that night, but only on the ground floor. He had come in with Tabek, the laundry man, and seen the Madame on business. He did not look like a customer, being poorly but cleanly dressed and servile in manner. He had not looked at the three girls who had seen him, but kept his eyes on the floor and his lips muttering something. Prayers? No, something in an alien language. French? Oh, no, French was not alien. French was the language of love…and commerce.

  All these things Irene translated for me and my notebook and Quentin in her rapid sotto voce as she interrogated the girls in whatever bits of language that would do the job. I must admit I was pretty impressed by her way with foreign words and her method of miming when common language failed. Her theatrical history made her a superb interviewer, and I wondered how Sherlock Holmes would do in the same instance…not half so well, I’m sure! And she got all this without the aid of her devilish locket and mesmerizing skills. Call me a modern woman, but I don’t like the trappings of séances and mentalist stage acts and had already exposed a phony mesmerist back home.

  Our last stop was the first place that had caught her interest: that chill-inducing stairway into darkness.

  Irene cajoled a lit candle in a holder from the ancient door-keeper. Apparently the madam’s goodwill had sifted down even to the ground floor.

  “What do you expect to find down here?” Quentin asked.

  He was amazingly willing for Irene to lead the expedition, unlike the average Englishman needing to be first and foremost in all things, like Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

  On the other hand, Prague was Irene’s territory, like New York was mine, and God-knew-where was Quentin’s. There was no sense in our jousting her for sleuthing rights. Still, it’s not the average man who can wait and let a woman lead.

  I think he also bowed to her emotional superiority in the hunt: her husband’s and her friend’s lives were at stake. However much he may have cared about either, and I was very curious to know the exact history of Quentin Stanhope and Penelope Huxleigh, he had no obvious right to lead the expedition.

  Irene moved one hand against the slick cellar wall as she held the candle aloft and descended.

  We followed, step by step. They were wooden and poorly built, not even level.

  “What are you looking for?” Quentin repeated.

  “What we found before,” she answered. “Ask Pink.”

  He did. I explained the cellar beneath the French brothel where the first two Paris prostitutes were found slaughtered in the elegant rooms above. I mentioned the spilled wine and the guttered candle stumps.

  “So you believe this Kelly drank down his courage before going upstairs to wreak bloody havoc?” he asked.

  “It’s possible,” I said, “he had a fierce drinking problem.”

  “It’s also possible,” Irene added, “that Kelly was already used to subterranean debauchery and slaughter. This is the trail that we followed through Paris. This is what we found in the tunnels under the Old Town.”

  “You are speaking of a secret underground…conspiracy.” Quentin sounded doubtful. “Like the Masons, who draw on the highest in society, only this one draws on the lowest.”

  “Exactly!” Irene spun to face us, stopping our precarious progress. “You have put into words what I only sensed, Quentin. This is a secret society, a…sect of the lowliest elements. In Whitechapel the rumor soon went around that the highest in the land had met in that low district to plot and carouse and kill, but the police list of suspects always centered on the poorest, most ignorant elements in the area, and there were many. Sensation would like to believe that the rich and eminent are secretly debauched and vicious, and some indeed are. But who is most likely to resort to raw slaughter and primitive rites with candles and cheap spirits? James Kelly was mad, he was a killer of one woman that we know of; he was a lost, ignorant soul. He was not an aristocrat.”

  She hastened down the last few steps and rushed forward into the dark. Her candle flickered over a littered floor not unlike the tunnels leading from the Rabbi’s famous tomb…carpeted in rat droppings, blobs of candle wax and, in the corner, one of the bone-pale pottery jugs we had found the other night.

  Quentin bent to pick it up. “If we knew what spirit had filled this bottle we might know where to look for your James Kelly and Jack the Ripper.”

  “Spirits indeed,” Irene said both ruefully and triumphantly. “What genie from what bottle do we seek? And, when released, what has that mysterious jinn made men do?”

  “And women,” I added. “The ones in Paris participated in their own despoilment.”

  “So,” said Quentin grimly, “do Arab brides.”

  “Tomorrow,” Irene said, lifting the crude bottle as if in a toast, “we visit the rail station and hopefully will let the genie out of this bottle for good.”

  39.

  Killing the Cobra

  Eye to eye and head to head,

  …This shall end when one is dead.

  —RUDYARD KIPLING, “RIKKI-TIKKI-TAVI”

  “Godfrey, we must go.”

  “I agree, but how?”

  “Down through the cellar you found during your exploration. You thought you saw signs of smuggling, that there may be a tunnel out of the castle.”

  “I saw a quantity of boxes lying about,” he conceded, “and sensed some movement of air, but it merely might have been a chink, Nell.”

  We again huddled over the usual breakfast of stew scooped up with hard bread. Godfrey looked gaunt and tired this morning. “I saw marks in the softer areas of the cellar soil, the marks of many men carrying burdens in. The imprints were deep, as if the contents were heavy. Some boxes had as many as six sets of boot prints, so you can imagine the weight.”

  “Gold, do you think?”

  “More likely silver, given the region. And there’s the rub. Silver is not worth enough to smuggle.”

  “Other goods.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Why do the Rothschilds want this property at the end of nowhere?”

  “This is a modern world, Nell. ‘Ends of nowhere’ will be somewhere soon enough. Look at the American West. There is hardly an unclaimed inch of it left already. Few regions in Europe remain that are remote enough to still acquire. Transylvania is one of them.”

  Like a barrister born, he warmed to his subject. “You wondered why the Ripper would relocate his crimes to Prague. We don’t have a map, but imagine this point is London, this Paris, this Warsaw.” He swiftly marked imaginary spots on the figured cloth atop the table. “Here is the Black Sea and Russia, there Turkey. You see; Prague is the navel of Europe, almost dead center. That has not been lost on the Rothschild interests.”

  “But the eastern parts of Europe are still mired in peasant ways. These primitive countries cannot hold a candle to England or Germany or France in any area, commerce or culture.”

  Godfrey smiled faintly, perhaps at hearing me link France with England among Europe’s more civilized nations.

  “That held true yesterday, Nell. Today’s faster rail and telegraphic services make it possible for these more backward nations to catch up, and certainly those business interests first on the scene will lead the pack.”

  “So why did Tatyana allow you to conduct Rothschild business with the Count?”

  Godfrey pushed what little he had eaten away. “It must be obvious that Tatyana desires to strip Irene of all that she holds dear.”

  “Obvious, yes. Understandable, no!”

  “For some reason Tatyana has cast herself as Irene’s rival. Perhaps it was the defeat that Irene handed the Russian interests during the last adventure in Prague. Perhaps it was Ire
ne’s ill-advised midnight visit to tell Tatyana what would be what.”

  “Perhaps,” I put in, “it was Irene’s wrongheaded scheme to send you as delegate and spy to Tatyana. I was present then as your secretary, Godfrey, and I tell you that the creature displayed an unwholesome interest in you even then. I believe that is genuine enough, and that it is the only reason Tatyana wishes Irene ill.”

  A faint flush of anger touched his pale cheekbones. “The woman means to seduce me, that is certain. I have never before met such a forward creature.”

  “Sarah Bernhardt,” I said promptly.

  “Sarah Bernhardt is a paragon of female reticence compared to Tatyana. If you recall, this Russian woman’s spyname was Sable, after an animal native to Russia that is prized for its rich fur coat. The sable is also a relative of the weasel, which means that it is elusive but quick and lethal at the kill.”

  “Sable seems a much more trivial code name than Tiger and Cobra,” I answered, referring to the noxious Colonel Moran and our own dear Quentin Stanhope and perhaps boasting a bit about Quentin.

  “Are you forgetting another furred, lithe, and weasel-like animal, my dear Nell? The mongoose.”

  “Messalina!” I said quickly, remembering with an unexpected pang my menagerie left behind in Neuilly to the attendance of others and the little beast that Quentin had given me.

  “A Messalina, indeed,” he said, referring to the wicked and power-mad Roman empress. “An animal which always fights and usually kills the king cobra.”

  I felt the room fleeing to the edges of my senses. I was not swooning, but experiencing something worse, fear for another that outweighed any fear for myself. Now I understood why Godfrey’s most desperate hope was that Irene not find us.

  I could only pray that Quentin had proved impossible to find himself, that he knew nothing of our plight, and that, Cobra or not, he, too, would never venture within striking range of the treacherous Sable.