FEMME FATALE

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Oh? Madam Portiere interfered with Mr. Holmes’s investigation at the maison de rendezvous? I didn’t know that. How so?”

  By now she had sat down again and reverted to her usual pacifier, the cigarette case.

  “Really, I’d rather not say. I saw a great deal during that interlude that I know I should not have, and wish to forget, forever!”

  “Wishing does not make one forget, or remember,” Irene said ruefully, blowing out a thin stream of smoke. I would never see a cigarette smoked in future without recalling’s Pink’s vivid description of the fatal ectoplasm emerging from Madam Sophie’s dying throat.

  “Pink was so engaged in her large family’s history, and histrionics, growing up,” Irene mused, “that she can’t imagine a child who is born grown-up, or learning early that nothing stayed the same and was therefore worth remembering.”

  “In my childhood, everything stayed the same!” I burst out.

  “And therefore was well worth putting behind one. The fact that Pink still lives with her mother at the ripe old age of five-and-twenty is very telling.”

  “I live with you!”

  “But I am not your mother, nor would I wish to be.”

  “Would I be such a bad child?”

  “Not at all. Far too good for the likes of me.” Irene laughed; the distress of the past few previous minutes had evaporated with her cigarette smoke.

  At times like these, I could not begrudge the habit its soothing effects.

  I laughed as well. “Pink is such a, an overenthusiastic girl, Irene, like Quentin’s lovely niece, Allegra. But unlike Allegra, she is dangerous because she has a public forum. She resembles one of these fanciful figures that is blown about by the wind.”

  “A whirligig, you mean? How apt, Nell! The entire city of New York strikes me as a whirligig. It has changed so much in less than a decade.”

  “Then you prefer London.”

  “I prefer Paris. And, in returning to Paris, as a subject of discussion, I still wish to know what bribe the madam of the maison de rendezvous offered our Mr. Sherlock Holmes.”

  As much as Irene may have wished to know (and it must have been considerably, as she had not let the dropped thread of our conversation lie unnoted for long), I did not wish to tell her.

  “He is not ‘ours’ in any respect beyond that of a mutual nuisance,” I said.

  Her laughter rang out even heartier, an aria of merriment. I felt quite proud of my small success in improving her mood. None of Irene’s apparent reactions could fool me after all these years of association. I knew that this unsettling exploration of her past was perhaps the most difficult journey of her life.

  “She offered him money,” Irene guessed.

  “No.”

  “Introductions to Parisian men of influence.”

  “No.”

  “Escargot and goose liver paté with truffles.”

  “No! Irene, how can you combine such a vile roster of inedibles? It is more revolting than any atrocity we have witnessed in the past two months.”

  “Culinary crime can be gruesome,” she admitted with a grin. “All right, Nell. I must state the unthinkable. Madam Portiere offered Mr. Holmes her own, fair, fat, grimy hand, so to speak. The madam of the house in exchange for him declaring it free of the taint of murder.”

  “No! Well, yes, in a way! It was worse than that.”

  “How could anything be worse than that?”

  I pictured the blowsy madam reclining in state on her green satin chaise longue like a frog on a lilypad. “I believe—and I may have misheard, for I was most unhappy to be in her receiving room, or perhaps I should say, her parceling-out room—I believe that she offered him a . . . a brace of companions.”

  “A brace!? Gracious, Nell, that is the funniest thing I have heard in ages. After all, I only offered him a shabby old violin. And what did he say?”

  “Very little. Would that all men could be so firm in resisting temptation. I must give him credit for that.”

  “Ah, but Nell, that was not temptation. The poor madam misjudged her man. You saw what will tempt him, and even then he resisted.”

  “The violin, you mean. You’ve always said he was indifferent to women.”

  “Not indifferent . . . something other.” She smiled at me. “You must have been mortified to witness such a crass attempt at a transaction.”

  “I was mortified to hear human flesh bartered so casually. I thought the days of slavery were past, even in this benighted nation, but Quentin said it continues all over the globe, despite the British presence.”

  “Much continues despite the British presence, including yours, Nell,” Irene pointed out gently. “You are right in assuming this to be a wicked world. The women in Madam Portiere’s house are presumed to be there of their free will, but how free is that will when reasonable work that pays reasonable wages is so hard to find? When other women are forced into such work more directly, that is called ‘white slavery.’ As irritating as it is to find Nellie Bly taking my own unhappy history as subject matter for a ‘story,’ I must admit that she does much good in exposing the plight of ‘lonely orphan girls,’ as she once labeled herself. I just wish that she would leave this ‘lonely orphan girl’ alone!”

  “Did you ever really think of yourself as a ‘lonely orphan girl,’ Irene?”

  “Yes,” she said, surprising me by her sober tone, “but that was after I left America to make my way in London. I knew no one, I was a foreigner, and the theater directors were prejudiced against Americans.”

  I thought back to the day Irene had rescued me, hungry and homeless, from the London streets to feed me on tea and stolen muffins. Was it possible that she had seen my plight and taken mercy because she too was alone and friendless? I had always accepted her as my guardian angel, awed by her energy, her sophistication, her American nerve, and her beauty. I had never considered that such a blessed creature may have needed me as much as I had needed her.

  “If Sherlock Holmes dares to show his face on these shores,” I said with renewed vigor, “I shall stab him with my hatpin until he slinks all the way back to London.”

  “Please, dear Nell! You don’t wish to damage your very formidable hatpin! I doubt Sherlock Holmes will be such an ingenuous fool as I was to come running at our lady reporter’s beck and call. A man who can resist a brace of Paris filles de joie is not about to fall victim to any blandishments from Nellie Bly!”

  I joined in her hilarity. I don’t know which was the more amusing image: Nellie Bly seducing Sherlock Holmes, or him impaled on my foot-long steel hatpin with the Venetian glass parrot finial.

  I laughed until my corset stays felt like the medieval torture implement known as an Iron Maiden and my mind’s ear could hear Casanova’s raucous admonitions to “cut the cackle!”

  “That’s better,” Irene said. “We’ll sleep upon Miss Pink’s challenge and plot our course in the morning.”

  23.

  The Detective in Spite of Himself

  The stage lost a fine actor, even as science lost an acute

  reasoner, when he became a specialist in crime.

  —DR. JOHN H. WATSON, “A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA,” 1891

  SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

  FROM THE CASE NOTES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES

  The key to Miss Nellie Bly’s little problem is of the simplest sort that turns upon a single notch or two.

  The murderer has left an imprint on the scene of the first, or possibly second, crime, the strangling of the medium. (The death of the snake charmer—Watson, are you listening? This is meat for your hungry pen—may have been the first, or even the death of the famous cataleptic mind reader.)

  My first inquiries among assorted spiritualist mediums produced the hardly earth-shaking news that Madame Zenobia, otherwise known as Sophie Dixon, probably used an assistant, either in disguise at the table with the genuine attendees, or hidden. No one had any idea who such a person might be. Such employees are plucked from the roster
of unemployed performers, and come and go with alarming rapidity. The skills involved are minimal, although it took some sleight of hand to strangle Madame Zenobia in the presence of witnesses.

  I see that telling hand print on the velvet every time I close my eyes. The height of the impression, the depth of the grip, the odd clawlike configuration where the fingertips made their mark . . . and the nails, close-clipped but still cutting into the malleable nap of the rich cloth. . . . These are all the observant detective’s dream.

  The only problem is finding the exact physical type that matches this indelible impression, and then discerning that person’s motive.

  Fortunately, I’m the unwanted recipient of all of Miss Bly’s researches and theories, so well know the cast of characters, their usual settings, and their connection to the woman whose life sits at the center of these two, and possibly three, deaths so far. Irene Adler, like a Hindu god, has had many incarnations from a young age, including Rena the Ballerina . . . ‘Little Fanny Frawley, the petite pistolera’ . . . and the pièce de irrésistance, Merlinda the Mermaid. From these playbill phantasms, I can erect the renaissance woman you and I encountered two years ago in St. John’s Wood. She is not only a superb vocalist, actress, and intellect, Watson, but also a dancer, a “sharp-shooter” as they say in the Wild West Show, and possibly a swimmer, but even more likely a phenomenon of that vocalist’s skill called “breath control.” In her case, it was a complete five minutes underwater in a glass aquarium. The mind boggles at what criminal pursuits such a gift could be put to use exploiting.

  To find out even more about my quarry, whether it is the currently active murderer or the retired prima donna, I realize that I must haunt the theatrical boardinghouses.

  I toy with various amusing disguises to deceive these masters and mistresses of illusion, and with inventing the sort of “acts” I could perform on the variety stage. I am not often offered such a large palette of investigation to work upon. Really, I don’t know how you manage, Watson, to wring any excitement at all from my exceedingly staid profession. It is simply a matter of making logical choices.

  I could, of course, masquerade as a sharpshooter, although I do not have the long hair apparently necessary to the role in these parts, and no time to grow it, and my disguise kit is left at home with Mrs. Hudson. At any rate, I shan’t be able to prove my talents over the gravy and lumpy potatoes of American cuisine, though I could certainly spell out a serviceable B. H. P. on the landlady’s flocked wallpaper if required to prove my skill. Somehow that does not have the panache of the V. R. that adorns my Baker Street lodgings. Benjamin Harrison, president, abbreviated, simply does not offer the dash and visual grace of “Victoria, Regina,” much less the challenge of a perfectly balanced “V.”

  I do have my poker-bending trick, which always amazes you, Watson, but that is hardly enough to credibly play the role of strongman, although I could certainly find a convenient poker to distort in a boardinghouse.

  Baritsu seems an Oriental martial art too refined to be appreciated by the American taste for raw fisticuffs.

  I could always represent myself as a fiddler, but there is scant call for such a skill except in the orchestras, and the role I wish to play bespeaks a solo “act.”

  Ah. I have it. I will simply play myself and use the elementary tricks that set my dear friend Watson’s jaw a-dropping. I will be an “occupation” reader, instead of the usual mental sort. “The Mind-Boggling Body Reader, Shylock . . . hmmm, Shakespeare.”

  Ha! That will be quite a lark, passing myself off as an utterly honest fraud.

  24.

  Not Her Cup of Cocaine

  I do object to her resort to groundless statements that affect

  other people in her efforts to concoct a sensational romance

  such as you seem to suppose that your readers relish. I know

  her to be a blackmailer and a newspaper imposter.

  —LETTER TO THE WORLD ON NELLIE BLY, FROM EDWARD R. PHELPS,

  NOTORIOUS LOBBYIST, 1888

  “I’m taking as a starting point, Nell, Pink’s impertinent conclusions about myself. One, that I had a mother.”

  “Much as I find Pink impertinent, I can’t argue with her conclusion in that case.”

  Irene was enjoying striding about the parlor, as if moving meant taking action, and perhaps it did. “Two, that my mother was American.”

  “I object,” I said, unintentionally imitating some of Godfrey’s legal opponents in Court. “Her derivation is not clear. I will posit that she lived in America at the time you were born, as it would be rather silly to have you elsewhere and then make a long, wretched Atlantic crossing simply to deposit you in a trunk near Union Square.”

  Irene sent me a conspiratorial smile. She much appreciated my joining in her game, and tracking down her possible mother had to be a game; otherwise it was a heartbreak.

  “Two,” she said, pausing in her pacing. “She lived in America . . . shall we say the East Coast? I was always given to understand that I had been born in New Jersey, Nell, which would be a good deal away from theatrical trunks in New York City’s Union Square.”

  “ ‘New Jersey’ has quite an English ring, of which I heartily approve. We have the Isle of Jersey, you know. Lillie Langtry was born there.”

  “Precisely why I could not have been. Lillie Langtry and I are utter opposites, therefore it’s plain we were born on utterly opposite shores.”

  She was talking like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, utter nonsense with utter conviction. I joined in, fancying I heard Casanova intoning “Off with their heads!” in the distance.

  “Indeed,” I concurred. “Lillie Langtry was the mistress of a king. You refused to be the mistress of a king. Lillie Langtry has no performing talent. You have many performing talents. Lillie Langtry sells soap. You sell . . . Worth gowns. Clearly you come from very different places.”

  “Clearly. On the basis of this incontestable logic we will begin searching for my mythical mother here in New York City, using as a starting clue that ridiculous scrap of a letter glued onto Madam Sophie’s trunk. We will take that miserable scrawl as Gospel, Nell, and we will proceed as if it were Holy Writ. I am determined to come up with a mother of mine to present to Miss Nellie Bly. I hope she is . . . someone most unlikely. In fact, I believe that we can arrange for it to be so. I will follow the path of ludicrous logic that our friend Pink has laid out for us, and I will see that it points to a candidate so outrageous that even Pink will not dare print the supposition.”

  I clapped my hands. “You will build an incontrovertible case, that is—”

  “That is sheer nonsense. Anything may be proved, Nell, if you stretch to do so. By the time I am through, Pink will deeply regret her expedition into my past, and hopefully refrain from bothering others with her meddling.”

  “You are truly angry with her,” I said in a more sober tone.

  “I am angry with the world of the sensational press, that will not let even the poor dead women in Whitechapel and Paris rest in peace. It is admirable that Pink has made her way so well in that world, but her zeal makes her forget the privacy that every human being is due. Since I am here . . . since we are here, we are in an admirable position to teach her that lesson.”

  “You don’t . . . think that you really are the ‘darling daughter Irene’ in that letter, do you?”

  “I? I assure you I must have been an infant with a lusty set of lungs that would have tried the patience of the deaf. I was no doubt, Nell, the unforeseen result of an immoral alliance between a chorus girl and some would-be man-about-town. We must be realists about that, even, or especially, you.”

  “Is that why you are so unlike the other women of the performing sorority, whose first role is mistress and whose stage exploits are only secondary?”

  Irene sighed. “I don’t know, Nell. I only know that I have a most fierce hostility toward selling myself, any part of myself, even my past.”

  “Then you are
more nobly born than most in this day and age,” I said stoutly.

  She smiled at me then, a sad, tender, almost (dare I say it) maternal smile. “You have come a long way in dealing with the unpleasant facts of life, Nell. I am not sure if I am entirely happy about that. This last trial—”

  “I am now less likely to believe the surface of anything, that is true,” I said quickly, reassuringly. We both had so much to protect the other from now. “I should not like to be less able to deal with the realities of life than Nellie Bly.”

  “You mean Pink.”

  “I mean Nellie Bly, who goes into madhouses and sweatshops and brothels, all in the name of good, one must believe. I wish she were posing as a prostitute now, instead of plaguing you with figments of a past that matters to nobody! What is her purpose?”

  Irene sat upon the upholstered chair and picked up the cigarette case. “You have asked a key question. She is terminally curious, for one. And she has a hot heart for the downtrodden.”

  “You and I are not downtrodden!”

  “And she likes to set forces in motion . . . one antagonistic segment of society against the other. The working poor against the slumlords; the unprotected woman against the masher, the seducer. It makes for strong stories, Nell, and she is ambitious to both change the world and women’s downtrodden role in it.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “Not necessarily, but sometimes it is unmerciful.”

  For a moment Irene reminded me of Portia pleading the case of the merchant Antonio. I wondered why an opera had never been made of The Merchant of Venice; Irene would make a superb Portia . . . and then I hoped that Mr. Sherlock Holmes had not come to the same conclusion and drafted Sir Arthur Sullivan and Mr. Wilde to accomplish that very feat—The Man was indefatigable!

  But so was I!

  “We will take this search seriously, then?” I asked.

  “Deadly seriously.” Irene shook out her lucifer and drew thoughtfully on the lit cigarette in her hand. “However much Pink intended to draw me into an embarrassing hunt for my own American antecedents, she has involved us in a nefarious case of multiple murder. Though my youthful memories are dim, I do . . . feel very deeply about Sophie and Salamandra. And Tim. I did know them, as much as my infant self was capable of, and I am beginning to remember even more. Pink is right that something is bedeviling these people from my past. So, under the . . . guise of hunting my supposed mother, we will be able to investigate the thread that connects the two sisters’ terrible deaths. I believe someone who hates their professions is at work here. They were slain by their own illusions, by their own tricks, if you will, turned tables upon them. Someone clever is behind this, and someone quite mad.”