by Nina Allan
She agreed with the casting agent that she would travel to the German capital the following month to take a screen test. That would not commit her to anything, and in the meantime she could work out a plan.
* * *
—
“You’ve sometimes had swords and muskets here in the shop, haven’t you, Konni?” she said. “Have you ever heard of a thing called a stiletto?”
“A stiletto? You mean the weapon?” He did not ask her why she would be interested in such a thing, though she could see the question in his eyes as clearly as if he had spoken it aloud. She smiled, thinking that this was exactly what her character would do in the film: smile, and tell no one. Konni had known her since she was born. He would believe what she chose to reveal, and let that be enough.
“I’m doing research for a film I’m going to be in. Might be in, anyway,” she said. “Nothing is definite yet. But I want to make a good impression when I go for the screen test.”
She told him about the spy thriller, and about the assassin, Rita, who routinely used the stiletto as her weapon of choice. “The casting agent told me you could kill someone with one of those things without spilling so much as a drop of blood. Do you know if that’s true? It sounds unlikely to me.”
Konni was nodding his head vigorously. “No, no, it’s perfectly true. For an experienced swordsperson, anyway. The trick is to pierce the heart in a single thrust. Stops beating then, you see, stops pumping. Hence no blood. The cause of death would become obvious as soon as you examined the body of course, but the killer could be miles away by then, and leaving very little evidence behind them. Clever, if you like that sort of thing. The stiletto has been a staple of Italian melodrama for centuries. Interesting that someone has chosen to use it in a modern context.”
“Have you ever seen one, Konni?”
“Of course I have. They come up on the market quite often, though armory has never been a specialism of mine.”
“I know this might sound like a strange request,” Nelly said, “but do you think you could get hold of one for me? I want to think myself into the part – to try and imagine what it might be like, to use a weapon like that, to kill someone. At the moment I have no idea how it feels even to hold a sword in my hand.”
“You’re not planning to murder anyone, are you?”
They both laughed and laughed, then Konni made Turkish coffee, serving it in Liza’s favorite gold-rimmed coffee cans. Nelly sipped her drink, wondering if Konni would remember this conversation later, when news came to him of the sudden and violent end of Mason Gehrlich, killed by an unknown assassin with a sword through the heart.
Mason had enemies, yes – men like Mason always did – but such a death, coming out of the blue, like something from the pages of Shakespeare, or Christopher Marlowe, or John Webster?
Yes, Konni would remember, but he would say nothing. Of that, Nelly felt certain. He had known her all her life. He was like a second father to her.
* * *
—
What a lovely thing it is, she thought. What a sweet little sword.
The blade was triangular, tapering to a needle-fine tip. Like a bee sting, Nelly mused. A sleeping man would barely feel it. He would simply go on sleeping – for all eternity.
If there was one thing she knew about Mason, it was that he slept like the dead.
“It’s sixteenth century,” Konni explained. “Forged on an anvil. The craftsmanship is exceptional. Go on, feel it. You won’t cut yourself. One of the characteristics of the stiletto is that it has no sharp edges.”
He passed her the weapon, and she folded her fingers carefully about the handle. She experienced a sudden, tender warmth at the core of her, a sense of empowerment that was different from sex, different from money, different from everything.
It was similar to the power she felt within her when she was onstage, only earthier and more grounded, a deeper shade of red.
“Is this a dagger that I see before me?” she murmured softly.
“Suits you,” Konni said. “I hope they find you a splendid costume to go with it.”
Nelly laughed aloud. She believed in the spy movie, suddenly – she believed in herself as the star of it. The Duchess, she would insist they named her, not the Scorpion. The Scorpion sounded too predictable. This was her part, after all, surely she should have a say in what she was called?
There were things she would have to do first though, and time was moving fast.
“I’d like to buy this, Konni,” she said. She pressed the dagger’s point against the pad of her thumb, not hard enough to break the skin, just hard enough to prove that it could be done. “I’d like to take it with me, to Berlin.”
If this were a play, the audience would guess everything in an instant. They would know the Duchess was lying to the old man, that she meant to use the dagger to kill her husband. They would be meant to guess, though, that would be the whole point. The old man would be the dupe, the innocent party, the only man in the theater who didn’t know the truth.
“You’re not in trouble are you, Nelly?” Konni said. He peered at her over his glasses.
“Of course not. I’m nervous because of the screen test, that’s all. I’ve never done anything like this before and it’s a big chance for me. I want to make the most of it. You do understand?”
Konni was silent, and as the seconds ticked by Nelly thought about how the years they had known one another – the years of Liza’s illness, the day the telegram came about Adrian, her father’s funeral – had really all been leading up to this moment, the two of them in this room. Truth or dare.
“Well, Nelly,” Konni said at last, “I won’t sell you the dagger, but I will give it to you as a present. For good luck. It can be our secret.”
* * *
—
She had known from the start that she could not kill him at home. If Mason’s body were to be found even within a mile of Golovinsky Street, Nelly would be the first to be suspected. Like Nyall Lysander, she would hang. The thought of such a fate – not so much her death, but the utter loss of dominion over her life – made the hairs at the nape of her neck freeze like thorns.
As for what would happen to Harry – the idea that he might end his days begging on the street was too dreadful to contemplate. The evening after acquiring the stiletto she went round to Harry’s apartment and presented him with fifty thousand crowns in cash, together with the diamond earrings Mason had given her on their first wedding anniversary.
“In case anything happens to me,” she explained. “There’s enough here for you to keep on the apartment until you’ve finished your studies. The earrings would fetch another twenty thousand. Only be careful where you trade them – they could be traced.” She felt in her bag for her notepad, scribbled down the address of Konni’s shop then tore off the sheet and folded it inside the case with the earrings. “Konni will look after you. Tell him I sent you. He’s a good man.”
“What’s all this about, Nelly? Are you planning to walk out on me?”
Harry’s face, the quiet hurt in his eyes, the shrouded desperation that had marked his expression when first they met.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Nelly said. It was terrifying, how much they needed each other. A world without Harry would not be incomplete so much as rotten in its foundations. “This is just a precaution. What if I were ill, or had an accident? I’d go out of my mind with worry if I thought you couldn’t manage. I should have thought of this earlier – I can’t imagine why I didn’t. It’s only for a short time,” she added. “Just until we’re free.”
His expression darkened again. “Whenever that might be,” he said.
“Not long now.” She knelt by his chair, began stroking his thighs. “I have a plan. Trust me.”
“The only plan we need is you walking out of that house and not looking back.”
�
��I don’t see why we should have to live like—” Beggars, she had been about to say. “I don’t see why we should have to struggle. I want what’s mine, that’s all. Please try and understand.”
Harry sighed, then Nelly kissed him and the whole subject of Mason and when they might be rid of him slipped sideways and fell away. Just before she began to undress, it occurred to Nelly that it wasn’t about the house any more, or the things inside it, but about the Duchess.
The final act was approaching, the end of the play. Nelly found herself transfixed by the drama, as if she were in the audience and not onstage. How will it end? she kept wondering. She tried to think herself back to the early days of her affair with Mason, when she was still able to convince herself that the rush of excitement she felt upon seeing him might one day be transformed into love.
Once sexual attraction wore off, what you were left with was an ordinary person – like the princess and the frog, only in reverse. Whether that person turned out to be your lifelong companion or your sworn enemy seemed mostly down to chance.
I hate him, Nelly thought. She could not remember feeling hate before, not really, and the violence of the emotion surprised her. The only person who seemed to understand it was the Duchess.
* * *
—
There was a woman, Rosa. Nelly knew her vaguely through the theater – she occasionally took parts as flower-sellers or harlots, violated servant girls – but really she had been a friend of Adrian’s. Rosa had a small child, and earned her living serving in bars, though Adrian had hinted that she had once worked as a prostitute in real life. It took Nelly a while to track Rosa down, but eventually Wishart, who ran the box office, told her he’d spotted her working the bar at the Ponchinello, in the banking district.
It’s like fate, Nelly thought. The banking district. Given world enough and time, Mason would probably have begun an affair with Rosa all by himself. Not that she could afford to leave it to chance. She felt embarrassed, having to ask Rosa to do what she needed her to do, if only because it meant Rosa would know that Nelly had heard and believed the rumors about her. She comforted herself with the idea of the money she would be paying her, enough for Rosa and her son to live on for many months. Years, if she was careful. And Mason was good looking. At least there was that.
“I want a divorce,” Nelly explained. “This seems like the easiest way of getting one.”
“Let me get this straight,” Rosa said. She was making a good show of not recognizing Nelly. A just punishment for her presumption, Nelly conceded, and one that carried the additional benefit of making their temporary association a great deal less risky. “You’re offering to pay me to have sex with your husband?”
Nelly nodded, then swallowed. Her mouth felt awfully dry all of a sudden. “It need only be the once.”
“You’ve got a real nerve, you know that?” Rosa said. She was a striking woman, with lustrous blue-black hair and lavender eyes. She was also too thin, the reddened skin of her hands hinting at a life that Nelly had managed entirely to avoid. Nelly lowered her eyes. Shame stained her cheeks and burned her stomach, like acid. The Duchess would not feel ashamed, Nelly knew. She would see this woman as a tool, to be used as she saw fit and then discarded.
“I’m sorry to ask, but I’m desperate. You’re the only person I can think of who can help me. I can’t go on like this much longer – I can’t bear it.” She let the tears rise up, huge, crystalline tears, the kind that had won her all those rave reviews in the role of Violetta.
“You’re good, I’ll give you that.” Rosa glanced back over her shoulder. The woman covering for her at the bar was looking daggers. “When do I get the money?”
Nelly let out her breath in a rush. “I’ll give you half now.” She felt in her bag for the envelope. “You’ll get the rest by messenger the morning after.”
Rosa slipped the packet of money inside her dress. “You’re very trusting, aren’t you?”
“I trust you.”
“Because of your brother?”
Nelly looked at the floor.
“Adrian was the best man I ever knew,” Rosa said. “I’m doing this for him. Because he’d want me to help you.”
They stared at one another. Nelly tried to smile her gratitude, but found she could not. She had never before felt more distant from another human being. What she was doing to Rosa was wrong, so wrong that she had opened a gulf between them that could never be filled. Yet kings and emperors performed such actions every day. A queen or a duchess would not ask, she would demand on pain of death.
Nelly straightened her back. “He’ll be going away on business at the end of the month,” she said. “It has to be soon.”
* * *
—
A hotel that was not too far from Mason’s office, yet unlike the sort of place he might normally patronize. Not disreputable exactly, but down at heel. Nelly chose the Black Angel, a tall, narrow, suitably shabby pension, boxed in on both sides by cheap apartment buildings and overlooking the railway tracks. She explained to Rosa that she should behave exactly as she would under normal circumstances. “You won’t see the detective, but he will see you. When you leave, go by the back door – there’s a yard, with a side-passage leading back out on to the street. Go straight home. Someone will call on you later, with the money.”
“What if he wakes up? Your husband, I mean.”
“He won’t wake up. He sleeps like the dead, especially with a few drinks inside him. Just remember to leave the door on the latch. You’ll never have to see him again.”
Nelly had concocted a story in which Mason had been having an affair for many months, that the woman was the wife of one of Mason’s business associates, someone who – in spite of her betrayal – Nelly was fond of and did not want to see embarrassed. Far easier to hire a detective to catch Mason in flagrante with someone else, then threaten to unmask his mistress unless he complied absolutely with Nelly’s demands.
“I want the house,” she said to Rosa, by way of explanation. “Mason won’t care about the money, he just hates losing. If I were to simply ask him for a divorce, he’d fight me through the courts and I’d end up with nothing. I need to gain the advantage.”
“How much of what you’re telling me is actually true?” Rosa said. “I’m only asking because I know your brother wouldn’t thank me if I didn’t look out for you.”
She crossed and uncrossed her hands in their black gloves, and Nelly thought about how this moment might play out onstage. Act 3, Scene 2: Aronofsky Park. The DUCHESS and ROSA are sitting side by side on a wooden bench. The Duchess is wearing an expensive-looking gray overcoat and her mink stole. Rosa is wearing a red woolen dress coat with a velvet collar – stylish but insubstantial. The coats would pass more social comment than two pages of dialogue. The audience would feel sympathy for Rosa, but this was not her story, hers was just a bit part. Once her scene with Mason was over she would disappear from the stage.
“Don’t worry about me,” Nelly said. “I know what I’m doing.”
“You might think you do, but you should be careful. You know what people say about the best laid plans?”
“Will you do it? I need to know.”
“I can’t afford not to. But then you knew that when you asked me. You can still change your mind, though.”
“I won’t change my mind.”
“Very well, then. It’s your funeral.”
* * *
—
Funeral, Nelly thought. Funeral. She could not get the word out of her mind. She had put on long gloves, like Rosa’s, the black lace cloaking her arms like the strands of a mourning veil. She would buy new gloves for Mason’s funeral, she decided. Once the police had released his body for burial, no expense would be spared.
She imagined herself, pacing the empty rooms of the house on Golovinsky Street: the lamps dimmed, the curtains drawn, th
e tragic widow, glimpsed for a moment at an upstairs window then seen no more.
“She’s not accepting visitors at the moment,” Minna would say when people called. “I think she’s still in shock.”
Nelly paused in front of the painting, the Duchess Sophie and her lover, Nyall Lysander. Would they have gone back on their plan, had they known what was to come? Nelly doubted it. Some things are meant to be. If Schilling’s painting was about anything, it was about fate: the duchess, caught at the height of her power, the dwarf, saying this is what it means to be human. This is what it means to love, the way fire tears through trees. To know the awful future and still not falter. To grasp the universe and swallow it whole. To laugh in their faces when they come to take you to the scaffold.
* * *
—
ACT FIVE, Scene four: Angel Street, night. The DUCHESS stands stage left, facing away from the audience and watching the scene as it unfolds on stage. She wears a dark hooded cloak. The stiletto glints in her gloved hand. Enter MASON and ROSA from stage right. Rosa’s coat is part the way open, and we see she is wearing a beautiful expensive-looking pearl choker. Mason is visibly inebriated but still coherent. They come to a standstill in front of the Black Angel hotel.
* * *
—
Nelly was shivering inside her cloak, an old thing of Minna’s she had borrowed from the basement closet, hoping she could return it before it was missed. She longed for her stole, not just for the warmth of the fur but for the comfort of the identity it bestowed upon her. She had grown used to being admired, she realized. The sensation of being invisible was discomfiting.
Beggars lay huddled in doorways. Alongside the entrance to the covered market, a group of vagrants had a fire going. Nelly sat for a while on the fringes of the crowd, listening as an old man with a pockmarked face and a ruined nose recounted the story of his escape from the Siberian salt mines. She wanted desperately to be in Berlin, sipping a glass of champagne in a cabaret bar with a whole new life in prospect.
