by Anna Lord
“It comes with a queer little hat,” said Kiki, rummaging through the trunk. “Here it is! You put a lighted cigarette in this holder on the side and it makes it look like a steam-train hat. Coco loved this costume. When she whirled on the trapeze the smoke wafted back and forth. Everyone ooh-end and aah-ed. I was always so jealous. Try it on.”
The Countess disappeared behind the screen and emerged a short time later thrilled with the burlesque doll costume. “I am Countess Colombina!” she declared, swishing the fiery skirt.
“Turn around again,” Kiki directed, checking the Countess’s derriere. “You will have to hide the fake dove here at the back, under the flared skirt. When you shove the real dove into a box under the seat of the swing you can pull the fake dove out. Make sure you do it at the exact moment when Felix falls out of bed. The signal will be the cymbals. Everyone will be looking at him when the cymbals clash and he rubs himself the way men do when they wake up. You can do a quick swap then. Let’s do some make-up. Stage make-up needs to be much brighter than normal maquillage.”
Kiki got out some khol to emphasize the eyes. “How is your maid doing?” she asked as she drew some lines with an expert hand.
The Countess answered without thinking. “She showed signs of recovery today. She’s sitting up and taking food. But, but, how do you know about my maid?”
“I was there that day. At the asylum. That’s the day Coco died.”
“Oh, yes, of course. I’m sorry. I forgot. But, but, how did you know – that she was my maid?”
“Little Marianne told me. She sees everything that goes on there. She probably overheard your maid talking to someone. She was the one who told me Coco was dead. She took me to the morgue to show me. That’s when she showed me your maid. I ran to Coco’s bed to check I wasn’t dreaming it. Little Marianne told me your maid woke up and you took her home in a carriage. Later, I wasn’t sure whether it was true or whether I dreamed it. That’s why I asked just now how your maid was doing.” She reached for a powder pot. “Try this one. I think it is the right colour for your complexion.”
“I see, yes, well, Dr Watson expects her to make a full recovery.”
“I wish…I wish Coco could have made a full recovery.”
The Countess applied powder to her face without speaking; not that there was anything to say to such a wistful statement.
Kiki picked up several lipsticks. “Red or pink?”
“Red.”
“Coco was wearing that costume with the funny little hat when she fell. The rope on her trapeze came loose from the bar.”
“Whose job was it to check the rope?”
“Laszlo.”
The Countess turned her gaze to the millinery reflected in the mirror. “Who designed the hat?”
“Coco did. She was very clever. She could put her mind to anything. She made up all our trapeze routines in her head before we even tried them out. Coco et Kiki. That’s what we were called. The red suits you. Ca vous va!”
There was no time to return to rue Bonaparte. The Countess sent a stage-hand to let Dr Watson know she was busy with something and would meet him inside the theatre in time for the show. She was sitting in front of the dressing-table mirror staring at the queer little hat when a knock sounded at the door. It was Davidov. He was looking extremely pleased with himself but the happy look died in an instant.
“Why are you wearing Coco’s costume?”
“I will take Kiki’s place tonight on stage. She is not well enough to perform.”
“But, but, you don’t know what to do, what to say, how to act!” His dreams of fame and fortune were sinking quicker than French cannons into the Moscow snow. His moment of glory was meeting its Waterloo. “You cannot possibly replace…”
Kiki cut him off. “I can’t do it, Serge,” she said despairingly, her bottom lip trembling and her eyes pricked with tears. “I cannot go out there. Not tonight. Maybe never.”
Horrified, Davidov fell to his knees at her side and took her two hands in his. “You don’t know what you’re saying. You’re upset for Coco. I understand. Truly, I understand.” His eyes flew quickly from Kiki to the Countess, from the pale face to the painted one, and back again to his little star. “Very well, the Countess can take your place for tonight. You rest. Stay here. I can give you something to help you sleep. Sleep. Dream. Dream of your sister. Dream of happy times. You will wake refreshed and ready to perform tomorrow. Don’t move. I’ll be back in a trice.” Reassuringly, he patted her hand before rushing away.
A short time later he returned with a glass of something colourless to which he added a couple of drops of laudanum. Kiki promised to drink it as soon as she was alone. The Countess took that as a hint to vacate the dressing room. She picked up her belongings and allowed Davidov to usher her to his private sitting room, but not before dipping her finger into the glass to check the contents. It was white absinthe.
“Make yourself comfortable,” he said unctuously, kow-towing now that he’d accepted Kiki would not be performing and he was stuck with the vain aristocrat. He despised blue-bloods and the sense of self-entitlement they exuded as a birthright almost as much as he hated the anarchists. The sooner the revolution came to Russia the better and they all shot each other the better. Tsars and tsarinas the lot of them! They liberated the serfs and then starved them to death. Here is your free plot of land – that field covered with stones, that dry gully full of thistles – but first you will have to toil four more years for me for no payment to earn your freedom you ungrateful wretch. Here, take this gun and man the barricades – I will be right behind you!
Ha! The Marquise de Merimont thought she could tell him how to run his own theatre because she paid the bills. Why did you change that scene? I don’t think that’s how the playwright meant it to be. It was better how it was at the start - and then a shrug of her aristocratic shoulders and a cavalier wave of her privileged hand. Do as you like. You always do.
America would be different! The Promised Land. They didn’t have tsars and tsarinas in America. No blue-bloods, no lords and ladies, no counts and countesses…and no anarchists either. Land of Hope and Glory.
“Make yourself comfortable,” he repeated with an ingratiating smile and a slight bow of his head before rushing away to make sure everything was as it should be for the rising of the curtain.
The Countess was memorizing her lines when a sharp rap sounded at the door and it flew open. Monsignor Delgardo took one look, appeared embarrassed, and began backing out awkwardly.
“I didn’t realize Monsieur Davidov was entertaining. Forgive the intrusion.”
“Wait!” she cried. “Come in and close the door.”
“Oh, it’s you! I mean, I didn’t recognize…” He blushed profusely, jumping to all sorts of unholy conclusions. “La comtesse, I didn’t mean to walk in on…”
“Oh, do shut-up, and close that door. There’s a cold draught and I don’t wish to catch a chill. I’m wearing this costume because I’m stepping in for Kiki tonight. She is feeling fragile. Please sit down. I was hoping to speak to you prior to the show tonight.”
It was an awkward moment, growing more awkward by the minute. He didn’t know where to look, but the pudgy hands folded in his lap seemed to provide focus. “If you wish to speak to me about Kiki’s mental state then…”
“What I want to say has nothing to do with Kiki. I have an acquaintance at the Vatican…” Pausing, she sought to meet his gaze, netting him with unsparing deliberation. He knew at once that his grand lie had caught up with him.
“You know?” he said pathetically.
“I know there is no Monsignor Jorges Delgardo connected to the Vatican.”
“Then you probably also know I am not a monsignor either,” he confessed, twisting the hands in his portly lap.
She nodded. “Why the charade?”
“Monsignor is an honorific, not an appointment. It is easy to fabricate. No one ever checks. It is highly respected, high enough to obtain
certain privileges without question, and yet not so high as to draw unwanted attention.”
“I checked. It sits midway between Pope and Consecrated Virgin, just after Preceptor but before Archimandrite. Are you also not a doctor?”
“I have a medical degree,” he assured. “I did my training in Colombia. But it would have been impossible to gain a position at Salpetriere without the right connections. By claiming to be a monsignor and forging papers from the Vatican, I was able to secure a senior post almost at once. My field of study is actually megalomania. I was not lying when I claimed to be doing research in that area.”
“So you wanted access to mental patients? Is that it?”
“Yes and no. That was not what motivated the subterfuge at the start.”
“Does your subterfuge have anything to do with the girls in the lower level?”
“No, no, not at all, well not at the start. That happened by chance when Davidov approached me to take Coco out of the squalid over-crowded wing where the prostitutes were housed. He begged me to try and cure her of her opium addiction. He wanted Kiki to star in his show and as a sweetener he offered to pay for Coco’s treatment. He offered me the private booth gratis as an extra incentive. The programme was going well and I began to include other opium-addicted prostitutes without him knowing he was funding them too. I had to keep my programme secret for that reason. Coco was more difficult than most. She had disordered thoughts concerning self-hatred and self-harm. Suicide was an obsession with her. She had tried to kill herself several times before she even came into my care. Whenever Kiki visited her sister it was worse. I discouraged Kiki from coming. But she used to sneak in. I always knew when she had paid a visit.”
The Countess sat down, crossed one leg over the other, and then re-crossed them back again. Her skirtless legs seemed to be as deranged as her thoughts. “I’m afraid you still haven’t explained why you needed to go to such lengths to pretend to be something you are not. You said your subterfuge initially had nothing to do with your research into megalomania and nothing to do with your opium cure, so why did you want to secure a position at Salpetriere so desperately?”
“You met Little Marianne?”
“Yes.”
“She is my mother.”
The Countess’s shock was profound. She took a moment to recover. Well, the age of the two subjects was right. He was in his fifties and Little Marianne appeared seventy years of age or thereabouts. But something didn’t sit right. “She does not look Colombian or Amerindian. And she doesn’t speak Spanish or Creole. She speaks French with a perfect accent, albeit croakily.”
“As we grow old we revert back to our mother tongue. Languages we have acquired later in life fade from memory.”
“Were you born in Colombia?”
“Yes, but my mother was born in France. She came to Colombia when she was twenty. She arrived with her husband on her honeymoon. He was a surveyor working for the railroad. It was 1849 and the California gold rush spurred the need for a railway. That was long before the Panama Canal was started. Her husband died a year later. By then she had met my father and fallen in love. As soon as the mourning period was observed, they married and I was born.
She began to exhibit signs of mental illness when I was a boy but I didn’t know it. My father had heard of the excellent work being done at Salpetriere and he sent her there. She never returned to Colombia. My father stopped speaking about her and I grew up never knowing what had happened to her. I think it was this gap in my life that attracted me to medicine, particularly psychology, because there were rumours she was mad.
I never married. Looking back I realize I was afraid the rumours were true. Eventually, I travelled to France to find out for myself. You can imagine my shock when I discovered she was still alive. Mental hospitals a decade or so ago were brutal and primitive. It was worse for women. If she had not been mad when she entered, she would soon have been made mad.
I decided then and there at our reunion to look after her, to make up for the lost years. The only way I could do that was to secure a position at the asylum. She is not dangerous. You have seen her for yourself. I know you gave her a doll. She carries it everywhere. If you expose me, she will be locked up again and they will take away the doll.”
Chapter 17 - Countess Colombina
They were running out of time. The clock was ticking toward the next Marionette Murder and yet the Countess was no closer to a solution.
She had been pinning her hopes on Monsignor Delgardo as the guilty party because of what had happened to Xenia but as Dr Watson rightly pointed out, it could have been anyone at the insane asylum who had poisoned her. And once Xenia was pronounced dead, it would have been natural for her to be taken to the morgue.
The Countess recalled the horrid play Kiki told her about, the one staged by the gang at rue Chaptal, where two old hags, jealous of a pretty inmate, had blinded her with scissors. Why did she tell that story? She had starred in several horrible stories of her own, so why recount a story performed by a rival troupe? At the time it had seemed as if Kiki was worried Coco’s life might be in danger. It had even seemed as if Kiki was scared for her own life. But looking back - was that it? What sort of mental state did you have to have to star in naturalistic horror night after night? Did you have to be slightly mad at the start or would it soon make you mad?
Doubts about Monsignor Delgardo had increased when she discovered he was not a monsignor at all. But his life story seemed genuine. Tears were gathering in his eyes when he left her to ponder whether to expose him or not.
Morality, amorality, immorality? What was the right thing to do? Was the right thing the same as the best thing? Was morality fixed or shifting? Did it change with time? Did it change according to expectation, need, status and gender? Was cold-blooded murder ever justified? Did some people get away with murder because they could?
If the killer was not Monsignor Delgardo, then who?
The list of possible suspects was not large. Her first instinct had been right. It had to be someone intimately acquainted with le Cirque du Grand Guignol.
The Countess crept onto the stage and peered through a gap in the closed curtain. There, in the front seat was Dr Watson and Mahmoud. Between them was a vacant seat, presumably for her. Next along was Inspector de Guise still in his Sherlock Holmes costume. He had brought two friends, a mousy looking man and a woman with red hair. The stalls were full and the crowd was growing restless. Three blond heads stood out like a triptych of sun gods in the third row. The Humboldts had come to see their darling cocotte perform.
Her eyes drifted to the private booths on the first tier. Monsieur Delgardo would be in his private box by now, and the Marquise de Merimont in hers. La marquise had talked Monsieur Radzival into accompanying her to the theatre for the first time. He had been so happy to win the poetry prize he had acquiesced. Monsieur Crespigny had been thrilled. He had even had the audacity to slap the stoic librarian on the back. Radzival had blushed. It had been a touching moment between two solitary men who suddenly realized they shared more than they knew.
Lazslo and Salvador began moving items into place for the first comedy act.
Vincent, Hilaire and Felix were putting the finishing touches to their comic costumes.
La Noire was smoking a cigarette and peering through the curtain at the other end, soaking up the manly contours of her dusky-skinned potential paramour.
The Countess removed herself to Davidov’s sitting room to wait for her moment to strut and fret, or at least be violated and strangled. She lighted a cigarette and popped it in her hat to see if it actually worked and was amused at the effect. A thin ribbon of smoke drifted up the ceiling while her mind drifted back to the poems.
Delgardo’s terrible effort she could understand. He had wanted his subterfuge to remain a secret. He had not wanted to call attention to any emotion whatsoever. Butterflies spoke for themselves. They transcended poetry.
La marquise’s effort was strange
; her poem seemed to diminish one word at a time until the moment it died. Her entire demeanour had altered after Davidov announced he would be taking the show to America. Instead of looking pleased with her investment, it was as if her life was suddenly made bankrupt.
Davidov’s Golem was odd. Judenhass. Was he a Russian-Jew or a Russian Jew-hater? Jewishness was certainly on his mind.
Dr Watson didn’t really enjoy party games. He would have scribbled off the first thing that came into his head. Tit for tat. Oddly, his poem touched on the idea of vengeance. These killings had something to do with righting wrongs.
Which brought her to the inspector’s poem. Tu quoque. It had been a while since she’d heard that Latin phrase. Philosophically, two wrongs did make a right. Was he thinking about the notion of revenge in relation to the killings?
Radzival was a clear winner. His library angel was lovely. It touched on the serendipitous notion that one can pick up a library book and find something that one has been searching for all along. There was tragic simplicity in the imagery too.
As for Crespigny, the muse really had deserted him. His poem had been entirely plagiarized. Was he really as bad as all that? When he told her about Anonymous, she had believed him, but what if none of it was true? He had eavesdropped on their conversation in the cloak room. He knew they were looking into the murders. He’d had several minutes to invent something. And who better to invent a story than a writer? They invented things for a living. Anonymous might be a fabrication to deflect from the fact he scripted all the murders himself. He supposedly destroyed all the evidence so there was only his word to go by. In reality, he was quite articulate. He always seemed to know the right thing to say. He was never lost for words.
If Crespigny was the killer they were hunting, he might even manage the killings on his own without the help of the troupe. He could easily pretend to be holed up in his sitting room and then slip out of the theatre unnoticed when everyone is distracted, perhaps already in disguise. Respectable and articulate, he could lure the victims to some spot in advance of the act and then kill them using the tool of the rag and bone men.
