The Usual Santas

by Peter Lovesey

  Machiavelli answered easily. “I received good advice to consider the third prince in this affair.”

  “A third prince?” Borgia asked.

  “The Prince of Peace. De Lorca could never have been more than yet another petty ruler. But you, my dear Borgia, you have the ability to unite Italy, perhaps, and finally bring peace to our ravaged country.”

  Borgia laughed. “I do not think I should be mentioned in the same breath as that other prince.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “By the way, did you ever solve that puzzle?”

  “What puzzle?” Machiavelli asked.

  “Why people give gifts at Christmas?”

  Machiavelli looked up at De Lorca’s decapitated body. “Yes, it’s all about what one receives from the giving.”

  At that moment, the bells in the nearby Cathedral rang out, a beautiful, clanging, insistent sound that filled their ears with the joyous announcement of the birth of the Christ child, one thousand five hundred and two years ago.

  “Happy Christmas, Niccolo,” said Borgia.

  “Happy Christmas, Cesare.”

  Cabaret aux Assassins

  by Cara Black

  Cara Black is the author of sixteen books in the New York Times bestselling Aimée Leduc series: Murder in the Marais, Murder in Belleville, Murder in the Sentier, Murder in the Bastille, Murder in Clichy, Murder in Montmartre, Murder on the Ile St-Louis, Murder in the Rue de Paradis, Murder in the Latin Quarter, Murder in the Palais Royal, Murder in Passy, Murder at the Lanterne Rouge, Murder Below Montparnasse, Murder in Pigalle, Murder on the Champ de Mars, and Murder on the Quai. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and visits Paris frequently.

  To Sherlock Holmes [Irene Adler] is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex . . . There was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.

  —“A Scandal in Bohemia”

  Nice, 1914

  Eighteen-year-old Neige Adler’s hooded dark-brown eyes narrowed behind her rimless spectacles as she paused in the shadows of the fringed areca palm. Her mother, barely in view, lay reclined on a wicker chaise, her eyes closed, her face sunken, her hands folded atop her chest, and Neige knew she’d come too late.

  “I’m sorry. So sorry,” said the hired nurse, taking Neige’s arm and guiding her across the villa’s sunporch. “Your mother didn’t want you to know how ill she’d become. She passed away a half-hour ago, very peacefully.”

  A tear welled in the corner of Neige’s eye. No matter their differences, Neige had loved her mother. And Irene Adler had reciprocated in her own eccentric fashion; those whirlwind weekends in the Swiss Alps, a bottle of perfume on Neige’s sixteenth birthday, and the promise to take her daughter on an extended vacation, though that never did happen with Irene always rushing off for her next tour.

  “Merci,” Neige whispered to the nurse, who left her alone in the room to grieve.

  She approached the chaise, gently set down her portmanteau and crossed herself. Her mother looked tranquil at last.

  Neige slumped down onto a wicker ottoman. In the distance, the peach-washed tobacco-tiled buildings of Nice sloped toward the turquoise Mediterranean. Hot air hovered in the cloudless Provençal sky. Outside her mother’s villa window, small lemon-colored finches twittered on the balcony railing. The scent of orange wafted from the orchard below.

  Growing up, Neige had seen little of her mother, an actress who once sang at La Scala before nodes had developed on her vocal cords. Irene then took up acting and had toured constantly. But she never performed at Piccadilly or Broadway, where the parents of Neige’s schoolmates attended the theater. My théâtre public love me on the Continent, my dear, she’d always told Neige. Raised in a convent boarding school, Neige spent holidays with either Léonie, her mother’s former housekeeper, or school friends. She knew nothing about her father, and had learned not to ask.

  Yet her mother’s last telegram had promised answers to those unspoken questions. Now Neige’d never fully understand where she came from.

  Bereft and disappointed, Neige pinned a stray hair into her chignon and fanned at the stifling humidity. She was a true orphan now, though she’d always felt like one. Below the window, an awninged trolley bus trundled over the cobbled street fronting the villa.

  The nurse returned. “About the funeral arrangements . . .” Neige began. She knew her mother would have left no instructions—god forbid she think so practically. Neige had always been the responsible one, ever since she was a child.

  Before she could finish, the nurse handed her a carpet bag. “Your mother left this for you. She gave it to me last week, just in case . . . It was very important to her that you examine its contents.”

  Inside lay a tooled leather journal, a sagging album of photographs and a stack of frayed theater programs. As Neige unbound the journal, folded paper written in dark blue ink with her mother’s concise dipped script spilled out. She picked it up, smoothed the thick sheets, and began to read.

  ***

  My dearest daughter,

  If you are reading this, I can no longer tell you the truth in person. So I must do my best in writing. Not my first choice, but considering what a coward I’ve been, perhaps it’s for the best. I know you’ve always disapproved of my lifestyle, and I’m sure you won’t like what you learn about my past as you read on, but then, we don’t always get what we deserve in life, which I am unexpectedly grateful for. I know you want to know more about your father, but I must explain that in my own way, by telling you another story first.

  Before you were born, and a few years after as well, I worked as an agent for the ministry in Paris.

  Neige blinked, and her hand trembled lightly. Her mother had been a spy? How could such a secret have been kept from her?

  But Irene Adler had always been a private woman. Like a set of Russian nesting dolls, one of her identities could be pulled apart only to find another beneath. Neige took a breath and continued to read.

  You weren’t even a gleam in your father’s eye when all this began. I’d fallen on hard times after my opera career came to an abrupt end, and a bank collapse ruined my late husband’s investments. I was stranded in Paris in the frigid, wet Parisian January of 1896, living in a tiny chambre de bonne I could barely afford.

  Thankfully, certain ministry officials remembered that I’d once outwitted Sherlock Holmes, during our brief encounter in Bohemia. Dr. Watson’s accounts never mentioned my later involvement with the prominent detective. But Watson didn’t like me—he was a jealous, crafty man. So simian! Most of the time, he set out to make himself look good. I never cared to find out more about Watson’s odd friendship with Holmes.

  Holmes himself, however, had often crossed my mind . . . I had been so impressed by his mental acuity. He was the only man, aside from my dear, departed Norton, whom I could never call a fool.

  That bitterly cold night was our final performance of The Importance of Being Earnest at the Théâtre Anglais. Just after New Year’s Day, I’d auditioned and landed the role of Gwendolyn—all when Oscar Wilde was the talk of London. It was a limited-run engagement. Performing was such a stimulant—the gaslight reflecting off fellow actors’ faces, the soft fluttering of my peacock-feather fan, the roar of laughter and applause from the audience. I knew it was my true calling. But more than occasionally, it failed to make ends meet.

  Holmes was in the audience that night, which I didn’t realize until just before curtain call.

  Neige paged through the album to find the faded theater program. There was her mother, hair swept up like a Gibson girl, in a bustle dress with a shimmering peacock-feather fan in hand. So young, vibrant. A striking beauty. Neige winced. She’d inherited her father’s looks, whoever he’d been.

&
nbsp; After our performance, a distinguished, gray-haired man in a black opera cape appeared at my dressing room door, bearing a gigantic bouquet of rare Canaan lilies.

  “Madame Norton, please accept this modest offering and my compliments, past and present,” he said. “Your performance was as pure and unsullied as lilies in the field.”

  The unmistakable deepness of the voice alerted me. But the man stood quite tall, taller than I remembered Holmes, and he had a much rounder figure. His wide face was that of a different man.

  “Please do come in, Monsieur . . .” I trailed off, puzzled.

  “Duc de Langans,” he finished as he moved swiftly inside the door, belying his bulk, and raised a finger to his lips. His dark eyes glittered, and my chest pounded ahead of my realization: This was indeed Sherlock Holmes.

  “I wonder if you would enlighten me . . . Duc.” I smiled. “I find little comparison between myself and these hothouse flowers. A wild desert scrub, battling the wind and blossoming in rain, seems more apt.”

  “A wise man would agree.” His gaze lingered. “Yet when could those of my sex be accused of wisdom?”

  I beamed against my will. I did not remember Holmes, a man for whom logic and deduction ruled, possessing such charms, The air in the room was charged with an emotion I couldn’t define.

  I was so intrigued that I’d forgotten his outward appearance. The stagehand poked his head in, announcing, “Encore curtain call, Madame Norton, quickly please!” He glanced confusedly at the aged, portly gentleman sitting so close to me. When he left, I relented to a sudden, unexpected impulse and pulled Holmes—or rather, the Duc de Langans—close for an impassioned, though very brief, kiss.

  Holmes pulled away, and I feared I had misstepped. But to my surprise, he whispered “And here I’d thought you’d forgotten me.” As he turned to leave, his gaze clouded, and I wondered for a moment whether he hadn’t reappeared to gain reprisal for his earlier defeat.

  The stagehand ran back into the room and tugged at my sleeve, pulling me out to accept my applause. What ran through my veins was a thrill I had not felt since my opera triumphs at La Scala. To my surprise, I cared not about the reasons Holmes wore such disguise or his greater machinations, but the blaze of passion and intrigue that had re-entered my dull, work-sore life.

  Visions of a late brasserie supper of moules-frites, a belated New Year’s champagne toast, danced in my mind. But when I returned from my final curtain call, Holmes had disappeared. I lingered, foolishly hopeful, as my fellow actors repaired to a bistro to celebrate our final performance. A soirée I could ill afford. More disappointed than I cared to admit, I picked up Holmes’s bouquet from the dressing table, careful not to disturb the pots of powder scattered beside it.

  Outside the backstage entrance, no hansom cab was in sight; only the yellow glow of the gas lamps and wet, slippery cobblestones greeted me. Depressed, I pulled my cloak closer for the trudge to my room in hilly Montmartre. The journey promised to be especially long and arduous in the chill drizzle.

  Why had Holmes appeared in disguise? Employing me as part of a ruse, perhaps, to exit the rear of the theater. I clutched the flowers, heavy and ostentatious, ready to throw them onto the trash heap . . . I didn’t relish struggling with them on my upward trek through the steep streets to Montmartre.

  Under the rue du Louvre gaslight, I bent to relace my boots. As I did so, a sparkling object fell from among the lily stems. It landed with a small clink on the pavement; upon closer inspection, I discovered it was a glass tube with a white paper rolled inside. I uncorked it and shook out the paper, which read in small, spidery black writing:

  wait for me at place goudeau, s’il te plaît.

  How unlike Holmes to say please.

  I knew this tree-filled place, which fronted the old washing house—now an atelier for artists. It lay only a block from my apartment. Stuffing the piece of paper into my boot, I stood up and hurried toward Montmartre.

  Place Goudeau’s dark-green domed Wallace fountain, with its four cast-iron maidens, trickled in the night. The flickering gaslight caught the veins of water icing the cobbles. Anxious, I found a dark doorway and huddled in my cloak against the cold. A skeletal tree canopied the deserted place.

  From an open skylight in a sloping rooftop across the way drifted muffled sounds of laughter. A tall figure stole along the building. Then the Duc de Langans stood looming over me, silhouetted against the fretwork of black branches cutting across the starless sky.

  “Why the secrecy, Holmes?” I asked, catching my breath.

  “Bear with my pretense, Irene, for I have only a moment.” He took in my bedraggled appearance, so different from that of the costumed performer in makeup accepting accolades just hours before. I turned away from him, flustered.

  “I couldn’t ask earlier, with so many prying ears nearby,” he said. “I need information on Comte Charles Marie Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy.”

  A simple intelligence job . . . that was what this was all about? My initial excitement from seeing Holmes crumbled.

  “You say this name as if it should mean something to me,” I said, my breath emerging in frustrated staccato bursts of frost.

  “Perhaps you know him as Charles, Bijou’s new paramour?”

  Bijou was our revue’s contortionist, a mere acquaintance of mine, much younger, and eager to make friends in all of society’s echelons. I vaguely recalled that her latest beau was an officer.

  “It’s rumored Esterhazy has gambling debts,” said Holmes. “Serious ones. Keep watch on him, Irene. Find out his habits at the Military ministry offices; secure invitations to his gambling dens. There is one above the printmaking shop and another behind closed doors at the Cabaret.”

  “Who’s employing you, Holmes?”

  “I cannot answer that, Irene. Please. Only you can be my eyes and ears. I won’t ask any other favors.”

  Why did I feel I would come to regret this charade? “Tell me who it is I would be helping, Holmes,” I persisted. “A rich client or King and Country?” Unbeknownst to Holmes, I had already offered my intelligence-gathering services to a relative in the French Ministry named Meslay, though he had never exercised it. A conflict of interest here could prove disastrous.

  “Irene, I’m begging you to trust me.”

  He took my silence as a tacit agreement and palmed a wad of francs into my coat pocket. For a brief moment, he found my frigid hand, clutched it with his own warm one, and kissed it.

  “I’ll find you again soon,” he said. And with a swirl of his cape, he was gone.

  This involved much more than gambling, I was sure, or Holmes would’ve simply sent in a paid spy to do the work. I paused at the café below my building and purchased a small tin of coffee and a few lumps of coal, using a fraction of my payment from Holmes. The night and the long walk had chilled me to the bone. In my narrow Montmartre garret, I stuck the Canaan lilies in a chipped decanter on the table, lit a small fire, and banked the coals. I nestled against the bricked fire flute and kept toasty as I gazed out on the slate-gray Paris rooftop view from my window. This was the first time I’d burned charcoal since prices soared in the frigid 1896 winter. And, even in my fatigue, I relished my warm bed. After putting my apprehensions aside for the night, I slept.

  Neige’s knuckles whitened as she tightened her grip on the journal. Her mother, an agent for the infamous, reclusive Sherlock Holmes? What different lives they had led.

  “This way, dear, rest yourself in the salon,” said the nurse, taking Neige’s hand. “I’ll prepare your mother now.”

  Neige sat down on a cane backed chair to a welcome cup of tilleul, the tisane infusion of linden tree flowers and leaves. She thought of the nurse washing her mother, preparing the shroud. Tears rimmed her eyes. There was so much she hadn’t known of this woman whose body lay beyond in the honey glow of the veranda. Searching for answers, she r
eopened the journal and turned the page.

  As I drank my weak coffee the next morning, I fingered my parents’ obituary. They’d perished in a Trenton blizzard some years before. My only tie to America was gone. Back on the boards again, my old washhouse Ma would have said about my career, had she still been alive. I thought back to my childhood in the New Jersey shore, so different from the Right Bank of Paris.

  But that was a lifetime ago. No one’s left in America for you, dear Neige. France, my adopted country, is your country.

  I lodged in Montmartre when it was still a village ridging Paris. Not only was it a bohemian center of painters, anarchists, and writers, but the cobbled and packed earth streets made it cheap. Dirt cheap.

  The tinny music of the barrel organ grinder floated down the street. His grinning half-wit son, seated on the cobbles, turned the crank. They often slept in the nearby viaduct. I tossed the boy a few centimes whenever I passed by, if I could afford it. I filled a pitcher with icy water and shivered as I washed my face in it.

  Only when I returned to my room did I discover a previously overlooked envelope under my door. Inside was written:

  finally, a job for you . . . expect me in the morning. meslay.

  Startled, I rubbed a cloth over the table, put my few belongings to rights and pinched my cheeks for color. Why was this happening now?

  My first husband, Norton, had had a brother-in-law named Meslay, a young French Army officer who recruited him for the occasional mission. Only after Norton’s tragic death under the wheels of a runaway carriage did I learn that he’d also assumed the unofficial role of Parisian emissary to King George—a pawn of two governments. We hadn’t lived cheaply, and I had often wondered how his salary matched mine without a regular government position. But now, my fortunes had been reversed, with neither ministry nor world stage willing to keep a widow without means on their payroll.