Chapel Noir

by Carole Nelson Douglas

“And what is that,” Elizabeth asked.

  “The panorama building that is shaped like a ship.”

  “Well, there it lies at anchor, dead ahead,” Irene said in a voice like Long John Silver, pointing. Everyone on the exposition grounds gawked and pointed and shouted to each other like sailors on shore leave.

  I made out the interesting shape of the ship at the very edge of the Seine, and also a long line of people waiting to pay their entry fee and snake into the attraction. I was fated instead to view more of the usual vulgarities.

  We stood in line at the entrance kiosk until our coins were taken, and I must confess that as we passed beyond the entry gate we found ourselves in an Arabian Nights environment where each few steps whisked us like a magic carpet to different distant and exotic sites. Representing the width and breadth of France’s colonial empire, the exhibit surprised at every turn with its sights, sounds, and, unfortunately, smells.

  “I had no idea,” I found myself murmuring.

  “No idea of what, Nell?” Elizabeth inquired.

  “That France had a foot in so many regions of the world, on so many continents.”

  “It’s not just the British who have marched in jackboots over the face of the Earth.”

  “Well, no, but I thought that after we defeated Napoleon . . .”

  “I am grateful that you did not defeat Washington,” she said with a smile. “This is quite a picture, though, scenes from the Americas to the Congo to Algeria to Java.”

  “And smells,” I added, waving a gloved hand in front of my face as odors of fried rice and saffron wafted past us.

  “This section,” Irene said, “is quite popular for those who tire of the French cuisine in the cafés that dot the exposition. The food is sure to be genuine, as the performers and workers live on these grounds.”

  I noted that as the daylight ebbed, people from the panoramic ship were ambling from the riverside to the many foreign restaurants interspersing the exotic theater buildings. Already the swooping and soaring and notched and curved rooflines were becoming profiles against the pale sky, and the air was tinged with the chill of dusk. At the Tunisian cafe, crowds huddled to wait for coffee so thick and black as it poured into ornate cups that its odor clung to the scene forty feet around like a rich scented Oriental ointment to a wound.

  Sound was as powerful as smell in the darkening dusk. I winced at the whining and percussive tones of Egypt and Algiers and the tinkling bells of Java.

  At that moment I became aware of a European threnody amid the uproar, an off-tune screeching and eerie wailing. I looked around.

  Irene, too, had lifted her head to hear better, picking out the wild yet somehow familiar discordance from among the strains of foreign music wafting around the buildings, gardens, and cafés.

  “You recognize that, too. What is it, Nell?”

  “Violins, badly played. I am sorry to say that the sleuth of Baker Street apparently murders that instrument when he is not on the trail of more punishable offenses.”

  “The violin? Sherlock Holmes plays the violin?”

  “I would not call it playing, sawing rather. And I did not see the crime while it was being committed, but he was the only person visible in his rooms . . . unless his physician friend has secretly accompanied him and was the culprit in torturing horsehair and catgut.”

  “Nell!” Elizabeth remonstrated. “Please don’t put the poor honest fiddle in those terms. I prefer not to know how many creatures have suffered to bring music to the ages.”

  “Music!”

  By now we had followed the sound to its source between the theater of Cairo and an edifice as delicate yet towering as an Oriental headdress.

  “Gypsies!” Irene exclaimed, delighted to have diagnosed the source of the sounds.

  Indeed. We viewed a Gypsy encampment complete with surging campfire, circled wagons, and a poor swaybacked horse.

  A crowd had gathered around the heat generated by the huge bonfire and were tapping toes and clapping hands to encourage the swarthy-skinned Romanies cavorting around the roaring fire, men and women together, while lean wolfish dogs nipped at flying hems from the fringes.

  The fiddlers were three middle-aged men with dark curling hair and beards and sweat streaming down from one nest of unkempt hair into the other, and finally onto the checkered varnished surfaces of their instruments.

  A most unappetizing display.

  “Surely the Gypsies are not a colonial holding of France,” I shouted into Irene’s ear.

  “Surely not. But they are chronic trespassers, and I think they have squatted here in more ways than one,” she shouted back. With the noise and the crowd I doubt anyone heard us, or that anyone cared if the Gypsies came here uninvited. What else did Gypsies do after all, and there were plenty of coins to be had here, even now spinning in amongst the flashing boots.

  This appeared only to encourage the dancers, who whirled ever faster, the women’s many-petticoated skirts spinning wide despite their bulk to show grimy bare legs and feet, some with gold rings on their toes!

  The men were even more unfettered, squatting like dogs into crouches, only keeping themselves upright by the swift kicks of their legs. One came kicking in this energetic yet repugnant fashion toward our group, his fiery gaze fixed upon us.

  I had never seen a more primitive display until I sensed a presence behind me and turned around.

  Oh, goodness. A figure loomed behind me in the dimming light like a statue, a vest of bones visible upon its chest, its dark, firelit visage framed by grease-slicked black hair and topped by a single feather, like a quill inserted into a plum pudding.

  My frozen horror had communicated itself to my companions without my uttering a word. Irene and Elizabeth turned as one to view our new “shadow.” Neither seemed appalled.

  “Red Tomahawk, I presume?” Irene inquired with her typical sang-froid, a French phrase for unshakable calm. “How did you find us?”

  Red Tomahawk. No doubt Buffalo Bill’s “scout.” The names of the American Wild West are unmistakable. The Indian turned to gaze up at the Eiffel Tower. “I climbed a hill and looked down upon the multitude. Three white women I was to find.” He shrugged.

  Three white women he had found. And his “hill” had been one of elevator cars whose cramped quarters I loathed. Amazing that an inhabitant of the endless open should adapt to such a device better than a city dweller like me.

  “There are multitudes of white women here,” Irene said, adapting his expression.

  “There were once many more multitudes of buffalo on the prairie. I mark my one, or two, or three and find them.”

  “The buffalo have vanished,” Irene pointed out.

  Red Tomahawk shook his head. “Multitudes are everywhere I go now. Many white people. I can still look. Find. Among the multitudes.”

  “Is there an exhibit of an Indian village?” Elizabeth asked eagerly. As she had explained to me long ago, Americans from Pennsylvania were as bewitched by frontier tales as gullible Europeans. England, of course, is not part of Europe proper, or improper.

  He grunted, assent I assume, to Elizabeth’s question, but stood for a moment frowning at the Gypsy encampment, the wild dancing, the circling curs, the discordant music.

  “Not here. Next to the Persian mansion by the tower.”

  It struck me that perhaps this Gypsy scene presented elements of Indian life, from what I have read of their activities before going on a “warpath.”

  “Have you seen Gypsies before?” I asked, struck by the intent way he stared at their wild activities.

  Instead of answering, he sniffed the air with the disdain of a drawing-room fop and declared the cryptic phrase, “much firewater.”

  At that he turned and walked away, leaving us to do nothing but follow after.

  “Firewater?” I asked my companions when we were far enough away from the Gypsy cacophony to hear each other.

  “Raw hard liquor, Nell,” Elizabeth answered with zest. “T
hat’s what the Indians named it when the frontiersmen first offered it to them in trade. I fear the red man is as likely as the white man to overdrink.”

  “Don’t forget,” Irene said, “that James Kelly was driven by drink.”

  I blanched, regarding this as a warning that a Red Indian was still a suspect for the role of Ripper. This Red Indian?

  “How do they get their names?” I asked nervously.

  Elizabeth grinned in the light of flickering torch. “I think it has something to do with deeds.”

  “And I am right in thinking that a tomahawk is a sort of hatchet?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Oh.”

  At least the figure of our guide was hard to lose even in these milling masses of people. He was not particularly tall—more ominous proof that a Red Indian could indeed have prowled Whitechapelbut his fringed shirt and trousers and quilled head ornament would hardly give him the nondescript appearance that the Ripper had taken such advantage of.

  I mentioned this to my companions.

  “Oh, pooh, Nell,” Elizabeth answered in that unmannerly way of hers. “Buffalo Bill has them all dress up in full ceremonial regalia for the Wild West Show, but many have adopted citified dress while traveling. Long Eagle, who left the show to stay in England last year, was known all over London for his tall beaver hat. Don’t believe everything you see at an exposition. It’s all show.”

  Red Tomahawk stopped near the river’s edge and turned to face the length of the colonial exhibit. The Gypsy fire glowed like an ember far enough away that only the occasional whine of violins drifted to our ears, but the line of exotic buildings had darkened into a ragged escarpment.

  I noticed then that people were streaming out of the area, toward the Eiffel Tower.

  “Ceremony starts,” our guide said. “Buffalo Bill will come soon.”

  I gathered we were to wait here until the famous scout climbed a hill and found us.

  Suddenly the sound of hooves came pounding from the far end of the Esplanade. Ranks of mounted soldiers were galloping up the now-deserted walkway, a fearsome sight in the dusk.

  Then, as if the sky had split like a theatrical curtain, a red-andyellow glow like a great celestial bonfire cast a lurid light on everything around us.

  Red Tomahawk gave a long, low sound of admiration as these coursers pranced past us, ridden by black men in colorful plumed uniform, all illuminated by the unearthly glow.

  I looked to the left to see the Eiffel Tower’s tall scarlet silhouette glaring like a sunset. Strings of electric lights like gilt braid circled its tiers and outlined its huge foundation arches.

  Above it all shot bright white heavenly rays from the great lamp atop the tower, a lamp as powerful as a lighthouse beam, which reflected on the many islands of heroic sculpture and fountains dotting the grounds. Its man-made lightning glanced off the glass domes and crystal roofs of the mammoth buildings also erected for the occasion, the machinery pavilion and the various pavilions devoted to art as well as industry. We stood in the midst of an electric fairyland.

  The colonial area, however, only basked in the reflection of the exposition lighting. The passageway was still darkish and felt miles away from the crowds and illumination surrounding the tower and extending far back from the river.

  Before us, still on parade now that the mounted vanguard had passed us, came Indian, Chinese, and Arab foot soldiers in their colorful, exotic garb, marching in unnerving order.

  Before this display of military might could make me uneasy, along came a troupe of planned disorder, the theatrical performers displaying their wares . . . themselves.

  Robed figures in frightening masks dashed from side to side to confront the watchers. Algerian dancers, women veiled everywhere but their torsos, performed lascivious motions and managed to progress forward at the same time. The Javanese dancers who followed were clothed completely in stiff, jeweled robes, masks, and whole pagodas of headdresses that rose perhaps two feet above them. The music changed with each company that danced past, so the cacophony was earsplitting.

  Palanquins were carried past, drums beat as black people from the Congo in wildly clashing figured robes danced past us, and finally came a lurching group of people waving banners and paper parasols and lanterns, banging on gongs until I thought my head would split open down the center as if from a tomahawk blow.

  Behind them all came the endlessly long, undulating, gaudy form of a huge dragon, a kind of gigantic puppet/kite carried and manipulated by a band of puppeteers beneath the writhing silk construction, their churning legs like those of a centipede.

  As the parade passed, the watching crowd flowed into its wake, laughing and running, skipping and dancing, all heading to the fount from which all light and noise flowed, the Eiffel Tower.

  We three—four, of course; I was forgetting our silent, stoic scout—remained to watch a few stragglers pass. The scene of such recent hectic merriment grew dim again, and quiet.

  “Magnificent,” said a voice behind us. “I’d give my eyeteeth to have that Senegalese cavalry in my show, eh, Red Tomahawk?”

  “Good horses,” Red Tomahawk agreed. I gather he was not as impressed by the riders.

  Of course I had turned to view the last exotic foreign visitor on my menu that night: Buffalo Bill.

  His light-colored hat and fringed shirt and trousers, accoutered with a wide, studded belt and other strange accessories, reflected highlights of pink from the inescapable Eiffel Tower, which made me think of water-thinned blood.

  “I am glad you could join us,” Irene said.

  “When I got your message day before yesterday, you saw I answered ‘yes’ in Pony Express time,” he answered. “A manhunt on a World Exposition ground is too intriguing to resist. And who is the third of your party? I don’t believe we’ve met.”

  The famous scout’s attention to the courtesies surprised me, but Irene introduced me as if we were at a tea party.

  “My pleasure, Miss Huxleigh,” said the man Irene had addressed as Colonel Cody, much to my relief. Apparently Red Tomahawk had no more formal name, and I would have to avoid addressing him completely. “I salute you. We are not surprised to see so many doughty women on the frontier, but here in the Old World there are few with the true grit to face off a villain the likes of Jack the Ripper.”

  There was nothing I could do in answer except smile politely.

  I had no intention of facing off the likes of Jack the Ripper and had all the hopes in the world that such plainsmen as Buffalo Bill and Red Tomahawk could do it for me. I was here only as a chaperone, really, and because I could not bear the anxiety of not knowing what was happening with Irene when she thrust herself onto such treacherous and terrible ground.

  “Now, don’t you worry, Miss Huxleigh,” he consoled me quite unasked. “If I thought we were really facing any danger, I’d have asked Miss Annie Oakley along. And Madam Irene is not relying on us old Wild West hands alone.” He turned to her. “When are the reinforcements coming?”

  “Anytime now,” she assured him. “I thought it best they not be seen by the parade viewers.”

  “The police will be here?” I asked in relief.

  Irene was silent a moment too long. “I thought it best to call in the police only if we are successful in finding the culprit.”

  “Then who are our reinforcements?” I asked.

  She nodded beyond me, and we all turned. A party of men in dark lounge suits was moving through the dusk toward us. I glanced back at Irene.

  She lowered her voice and spoke only to me. “The Rothschilds still have the greatest interest in catching this man, and this ensures that these murders are not used to foment political unrest.”

  Much as I was pleased to have armed men among us, I was surprised by their number, perhaps seven or eight.

  I glanced around. The area was deserted except for our company. I noticed with a pang that the ship-shaped panorama was outlined by the same gold strings of electric lights as
decorated the Eiffel Tower and cast a glittering reflection of itself on the Seine’s fluttering waters.

  It looked so festive, and what we were about to do was so grim.

  The Indian suddenly uttered some unintelligible words to Buffalo Bill, who nodded, then spoke softly to Irene and whoever stood close enough to hear.

  “Red Tomahawk and I have paid a visit to the site near here where the young woman was killed, and also to the cellar you told me of. He has seen signs, and tells me he wishes to start by visiting the camp you just saw. I will have to explain Gypsies to him.”

  Gypsies! Now that was an idea. They were everywhere, after all, and wild, unreliable people. And terrible violin players as well. Why should not a Jack the Ripper hide among their nomadic tribes?

  Red Tomahawk took the lead, and we all moved quietly in his wake, not speaking.

  I was surprised to notice that the Gypsy bonfire was no longer visible. When we reached the site everyone and everything was gone, even the charred wood from the fire.

  All that remained to testify to the Gypsy camp’s passage was a dark burnt circle on the bare ground.

  46.

  An Exhibition in Terror

  He who is possessed of the spirit belongs not to himself, but

  to the spirit who controls him and who is responsible for all

  his actions and for any sins he may commit.

  —PRINCE YUSUPOV

  While Irene conferred with the Rothschild agents, Elizabeth pestered me with questions.

  “Who are those men with Irene? Are they French detectives? They speak the language, but they look more like Pinkertons.”

  You should know, I thought uncharitably. I only wished the girl would honor us with some honesty at last. Yet I could not ascribe much frankness to Irene, not that I blamed her. Her work with the Rothschilds had replaced her Pinkerton assignments in America, and being active in a larger enterprise was something her performer’s soul craved as deeply as Sherlock Holmes evidently craved puzzles and pipes as well as other less benign things.

  I well understood that my presence here was due solely to Elizabeth. Like a relentless kitten, she always insisted on going everywhere and getting into everything. She would never have permitted Irene to escape unaccompanied on this bizarre scouting expedition, and for some strange reason Irene felt far less protective of Elizabeth than she did of me.