As I bent to restore order among the tumbled canvases, I found what Irene sought, charcoal sketches and portraits whose paints had been watered down to transparent, ghostly slashing lines: an old woman with a face as fine as Spanish lace, an urchin as impudent as our thief, a vulgar blonde dancing girl: these played through my hands like the face cards from an ancient deck as I tidied the mess.
He had skill, the man with the face of a comic professor, but all of his subjects seemed to be wearing masks that were melting. I feared that his likeness of Irene would offer the same jaundiced distortions, a far cry from the pretty, facile pen-and-ink portraits of the newspapers.
This artist’s eye was utterly democratic, almost perverse: the faces of debauched aristocrats, haughty, top-hatted beggars, worn shopgirls and dissolute cancan dancers peered back from his small canvases. Then I uncovered one with a jolt of recognition! Quentin Stanhope, as we had first encountered him near Notre Dame—bearded, bone-deep desperate, sitting in some murky café with a glass of opalescent, poison-green liquor before him, a burnt-out cigar on a chipped plate and a small box of matches between his fingers.
I crouched there, staring at this seeming apparition from the attic of my mind. Ordinarily I was one to announce a discovery to the world; yet I was not often privileged to be the exclusive caretaker of anything, even knowledge.
Now I froze in contemplation. Why shouldn’t my fingers let the canvas fall face-forward into the pile I had already examined? Why shouldn’t Quentin Stanhope remain buried in his unconventional past? More to the point, why should Irene pursue him until he ran where he did not want to go?
Whether I would have concealed this find from my friend, and whether I would have kept that secret for long, I cannot say. A pair of disembodied gloved hands reached down to gently extract the work from my grasp.
“Now this is a fine piece,” Irene said in bartering tones as she straightened again. “Exotic. Do you know the subject? Ah, merely another anonymous face captured in the bistros. Recently? Seen once, and never again? Oh, yes. Around Montmartre. How much?”
“Irene, I—” Perhaps she did not hear me. I hadn’t yet managed to rise.
“Forty francs, Monsieur—!” her artful voice rebuked above me. “Twenty. Thirty if you can tell me where to find the gentleman. Ah, it does not matter. Art is supposed to be elusive, is it not? Twenty-five, then.”
The clink of coins reminded me to ensure that my reticule was firmly clasped in my hand. I would have to carry it about like a dead rat until I could return home and repair the broken strings.
“No, no wrapping, Monsieur,” Irene insisted. “This piece is too fine to hide. We shall take great care with it, I assure you.”
By the time I rose and straightened my skirt folds, Irene was holding the canvas at arm’s length, dreamily studying its subject. The artist himself had risen to conduct the transaction, and stood no higher than five feet! I blinked. He resembled a nasty, masquerading boy, with his beard, cigar, hat and—I cannot describe it any other way—the appreciative leer that he fixed upon Irene, and... as I rose, myself!
Grinning, he tilted his sketch pad so that only Irene could see it. She lifted one eyebrow. “An original approach, Monsieur; I have never before seen myself portrayed as an advertisement for absinthe. I look as deadly as La fee verte herself.”
Thus the French characterize this lethal liquor of the bistros, as the Green Fairy, a femme fatale of addictive, toxic beauty. I snatched a glimpse of the sketchpad: Irene’s features looking quite wicked.
She remained nobly indifferent to the familiar fellow as we strolled away. Little did he suspect that Irene had bought his work for its subject rather than its feeble execution, this cheeky creature who signed his work by the overlong name of Toulouse-Lautrec. I hoped never to see such a signature, or its owner, again.
“A splendid likeness, Nell,” Irene rhapsodized over Quentin’s sordid portrait as we strolled away. “A mere phantom of loose lines but quite an uncanny evocation. This artist will make a name for himself. I knew we should find some trace of Quentin in the district, but to unearth a portrait—quelle chance, as our French hosts would say. Now we will certainly find him!”
She turned a discerning eye on me. “Do not fret about the urchin; they are as common in Montmartre as fleas. Oh, and I have not given you proper credit for finding Mr. Stanhope again. You show a positive genius for stumbling over him in one form or the other. Certainly we will encounter some genuine clue to his whereabouts before the day is over! Well, what do you say to that? Is it not marvelous?”
Irene tucked the portrait under the arm not occupied with her reticule and parasol. Its addition to her accoutrements made her an instant habitué of Montmartre.
Her high spirits only increased my vague feeling of dread. Why was I so reluctant to see Quentin again? His flight should have buried forever any illusions I might cherish about his character or his seriousness.
Irene’s shrewd gaze waited upon my response. I saw in an instant that her chatter was no more than compensation for my introspection, my odd momentary paralysis. I straightened my shoulders and reached up to do the same for my bonnet. Quentin believed that I had developed an adventuresome nature. Today, in Montmartre, we would discover just how adventuresome I was.
I nodded to the crooked, climbing path ahead, and we walked on.
The afternoon grew long, and warm, and interminable, and then hot. I donned my pince-nez to consult my lapel watch. Surely there was a limit to how long respectable women could linger in Montmartre, and twilight was its borderland. At the least Godfrey would fret.
“Irene, we must return to the carriage,” I protested as we climbed yet another winding lane to yet another row of shops and lodgings. The aged stucco cracked away from the corners of the buildings, so that they seemed to have a skin disease. In these shadowed streets the scents of garlic and human excrement mingled uneasily. Cats were thin and wary. Hoarse dogs barked.
Irene flourished her painting like a badge. “Here, Madame? This gentleman? Have you seen him, Monsieur? Our poor friend. Yes, much fallen in the world. He may be ill.”
Our search met indifference unless Irene evoked cooperation with sou coins. I began to squint toward the roofline; by the sky’s paler hue, daylight must be slipping out of sight behind Sacré Coeur. My thin boot-soles burned at the long admonishment of the cobblestones, but Irene on a hunt felt no fatigue.
“When you are searching for a needle in a haystack, Nell, it is utterly necessary to inspect every shaft of straw.”
She paused at a surprisingly respectable door and pulled the bell. A pansy-faced maid answered, listened politely, glanced at the painting and nodded cheerfully.
“Oui.”
One word, but it proved Irene’s stubborn optimism and put a dampness in my palms that gloves of the sturdiest Egyptian cotton could not absorb.
“Above,” the little maid added, “the attic.” I gazed up past the house’s steep peak, six stories above us. The sky had paled to an anemic aquamarine color, a blue so bland that it seemed no more than dissolving watercolor.
Irene handed me the portrait. “You can be trusted to take proper care of this, I think, Nell.”
We began to climb the common stairs at the girl’s innocent invitation. “Monsieur L’lndien,” she had said. As we left the maid’s sight, Irene produced her revolver from her reticule.
“Surely we do not need that, Irene?”
“When one is sure that one does not, the need is greatest.” She spoke softly.
“What kind of place is this? The entrance, the maid—it seemed respectable.”
“It is. Some of the bourgeoisie find it fashionable to live in Montmartre now, but such folk occupy the lowest level. The longer the climb the poorer the occupant.” Irene nodded to a nondescript door on the next landing. “A washerwoman lives here, perhaps, who dances the cancan. We must reach the last floor.”
The stairs grew steeper. I clutched the portrait to my side,
wondering what our quarry would think of our purchase, of our pursuit. I had lost count, but my protesting lower limbs screamed that we must have climbed five flights by now. The street din faded as we rose, the paint thinned on the walls and disrepair became utter neglect.
It was again an ascent into greater deprivation. Irene had paused, obscuring my view. Or shielding me with her body.
“Carefully, Nell,” she whispered, nodding to the mean little door before us. There the stairs ended. There we must enter, or leave unsatisfied.
Irene listened. Others may pay attention, but Irene had made listening into an art. Perhaps it was due to her musical training, for she gave the appearance of hearing on several levels at once—hearing not merely the footfalls or voices or the creaking furniture springs that one would expect, but sensing movement, sensing presence as an animal might.
Her entire attention was devoted to listening so fiercely that she seemed to see beyond the wretched wooden door. Only when her posture subtly relaxed did I believe that there was nothing to hear.
Still, her glance cautioned me as she tried the latch.
It squealed like a piglet. I nearly dropped the canvas, which would have added to the explosion of sound in our tiny cul-de-sac. The stairs narrowed into plunging grayness below us. We seemed to be balanced atop a soaring tower.
Irene listened again, then pushed the door fully open. The flimsy wood banged to a stop on some piece of furniture behind it. I wanted to push past the uneasy perch of the stairs, but Irene did not move. I sensed her surveying the room in the gathering twilight. We had stayed too late in Montmartre. This was worse than the eerie Old City in Prague!
“I-I—” I began, meaning to intone her name, not express an opinion.
“Shhh!” She edged finally through the door.
I followed, glad to have my feet on a level, even if it was raw wood undressed by so much as a rag rug. A meager row of windows spit blurred squares of ebbing daylight onto the floor. The smell of old, and distinctly odd, food lingered like rank perfume. I sensed other odors, vaguely animal, definitely wrong.
Irene moved silently to where the raked attic ceiling almost met the floor and swung the casements as wide as possible. Light like skimmed milk pooled on the floorboards. I saw two narrow cots against the opposite wall. A chest. A basin on a small table between two casements. A slop pail.
I had not yet left the doorway. There I stood, dangling between two alternatives equally loathsome: that rude, unlovely room and the twisted stairway that led to it.
“He is gone, Nell.” Irene’s normal speaking tone nearly startled me into leaping off the threshold and down the yawning throat of steps.
“You are certain?”
She nodded, the revolver still loosely clasped in one hand.
And then I heard a rasp, like a fingernail being drawn across faille silk. “Oh, Irene...”
“No one is here.” She sounded almost angry in her disappointment. “Nothing remains. Except for that bundle of discarded rags—” She moved toward it.
I heard again—no, sensed—movement. Subtle, hidden, threatening movement.
“Irene—?”
“I know, Nell.” Her voice was taut, in a higher register, thin, anxious. “I have heard it from the first moment we entered.”
“What... is it?”
“I don’t know, but I doubt that it’s human.”
“Ohhh!” If she expected that intelligence to reassure me she was mistaken.
“Rats, perhaps,” she speculated casually.
I leaned against the filthy doorjamb, my knees suddenly as supportive as water. “Shoot them!”
“Nell.” Irene sounded amused, even relieved. “They cannot hurt us. I will just inspect that bundle, and perhaps the trunk, and we can leave.”
She walked briskly toward the cots while visions of fleas and even more disgusting vermin hopped in my head. My skin crawled. My hair itched. My hands burned on the edges of the canvas, so tightly did I hold it.
Something moved again, at every step Irene made, an unseen mirror of her motions. Something slow, hidden... and intelligent.
She bent over the uncertain darkness on the floor, pulled up a length of cloth, and drew back then against a cot, a recoiling melodrama heroine. The gesture was madly unlike Irene.
“W-w-what?” My teeth chattered now, although it was hot under the eaves and perspiration trickled invisibly down my spine in an unpleasant serpentine tracery.
She was backing away as if she did not hear me. “A dead man,” she muttered. “Dressed as a native of India. A terrible death.”
Speechless, I clung to the portrait, rejecting time and truth, refusing to believe that a man I had seen only two days before should lie lifeless in this squalid attic.
Irene glanced at me, her pale face pocked with the holes of her eyes and mouth and not beautiful at all, unless a skull is so. “Not... him. The beard is white and the face so swollen and dark, my God—stay back! It could be... plague.”
“Quentin was ill even before the poison,” I began, appalled at the specter she had raised: an alien disease, with all of us exposed. One man dead of it, and Quentin gone, unable to be told. Unable to tell us what it might be. Plague. “What can we do?”
“Remain calm.” Irene seemed to be advising herself as much as me. I had never known her to be so uncertain. It was like seeing Queen Victoria screaming at a mouse—unlikely and frightening.
“I am calm,” I said with an emphasis that I am sure fooled no one for a moment, not even the corpse. “But I still sense something here—”
“Rats,” Irene repeated. “The man has been dead for some time. Rats will come, especially to a garret like this. He looks so ghastly. Perhaps they have been here already.”
She edged away, toward the sad puddles of waning daylight, toward the stairs.
A rasp again, across the wooden floor, similar to a heavy damask train dragging, snagging on splinters and still being drawn along. A womanly ghost in a court gown? I stared into the haze that heat and unfamiliarity and twilight made of this place. Then I saw something rising, something... probing the air. Something that lifted of its own accord, and lifted long, supple and rasping. Irene was backing directly into it.
I had no voice. I had no voice! My throat, my lips moved. My fingernails thrust through the stretched canvas with a wrenching sound. My foot had stepped forward without my willing it. Still, I could not speak.
Irene turned toward my motion, turned away from the silent shadow at her rear now looming as high as her hand, then her waist.
“There!” I screeched at last, pointing. “Shoot! Shoot!”
She whirled. Her silk skirt brushed, actually brushed the swaying shadow. What poised there was no thicker than her furled parasol, which suddenly thrust out like a rapier to engage something long and lethal. At the same time, the pistol spat red smoke in the dusk. Clap, clap, clap! A sound of admonishing hands. Her parasol hurled something limp into a shaded corner. I would have rushed to her side, but she flung a hand behind her to stop me.
For a long while I heard nothing but Irene panting softly and my blood thundering in my ears until these sounds were slowly snuffed by the spreading darkness. I could still see the pale edges of Irene’s gown, a bit of light threading through her hair and edging her profile. Her voice came husky, almost hoarse.
“A lamp sits on the table by the door, Nell. I’m going to toss you a box of lucifers. Stanhope’s box,” she added ironically. “I want you to light the wick and turn it up. Stay as close to the door as you can, but be quick and quiet about it.”
Something hurled toward me; I fought the impulse to dodge. The object hit the canvas I clutched to my bodice and slid down until my hand caught and cupped it against my skirt. I set the portrait against the wall and worried the small cheap paper box open. The wooden lucifer was tiny, fit for a doll’s hand. I struck it on the tabletop, breathing easier as warmth and light flared. It flickered out before I could even find the lamp Ir
ene had spied on the way in.
I underwent a second struggle to extract another miniature wand and produce another burning flare. This time I touched it to the wick, but it seared my fingertips and I dropped it.
Irene said nothing.
I heard nothing. I saw little beyond the hot circle of my struggle. I must not fail. The next lucifer licked at my gloved fingers, but I held on until sparks spawned light. When I dropped the lucifer, the lamplight remained and grew as I turned up the key.
“Bring it here.”
I approached Irene as if fearing to wake an infant—or a fiend. Irene handed me her parasol and took the lamp. She moved forward, putting me in darkness that iced my soul. Something on the floor commanded her attention. I edged nearer to view a dark, mottled, sinuous form coiled like massive loops of nautical cable. She bent down, the revolver at the ready, then straightened suddenly.
“Yes, thoroughly dead.” She moved more briskly to the bundle she had identified as a dead man, the possible plague victim.
“Irene—?”
She sighed. “Now I understand. Venom. Snake venom. Quantities of venom, from an indecently large snake.”
“Not like... Oscar?”
“Not like any serpent even Sarah Bernhardt dares to keep. A cobra, I think, but I will let someone else identify the species. And its presence explains that.” She stopped by the table where the lamp had rested. “I noticed it when I entered.”
I had not, but my eyes now took in all its sinister implications. Some sort of abandoned chest, I would have said but minutes before. Now I saw that it was a cage, perhaps two feet long, pierced with tiny air holes, a small door eloquently ajar. A scum-slimed saucer sat beside it.
Irene sniffed the contents fastidiously. “What did Oscar drink, before you bestowed him on Sarah?”
I shuddered. “Milk. A small saucer of watered milk.”
“Empty, save for dirty milk scum. The serpent must have been neglected these last days, been hungry.”
“But the dead man?”
“Did not live here. He came here. Perhaps he knew of the snake, perhaps not. The maid spoke of only one occupant.”
A Soul of Steel (A Novel of Suspense featuring Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes) Page 13
