Angels of Music (46 page)

The General strolled over to the Angels, spurs clinking. He was, as Irene might have guessed, not a tall man. Though an infantry officer, he liked to be on a horse as often as possible – so he could look down on people. Civilians, women, Jews and other lesser breeds. The cold eye in the mutilated half of his face rolled as he noticed Unorna.

Assolant gestured with his revolver.

‘There are strict edicts against looting,’ he said. ‘Posted all over the city.’

The raiders – four of them, all tall and made taller by fin-topped helmets – crossed the café to back up the General. They moved deliberately, as if unused to being out of the water. Their packs were portable breathing apparatus, like that used by miners or firemen. Their masks rattled with exhalation. One frog-man bumped into a table, and made a show of knocking it over as if he’d meant to, battering it away with a powerful swipe. Like most masks, their headgear limited peripheral vision. Something worth remembering.

Their side-arms were bulky compressed air pistols with arrowhead darts stuck out of the barrels. Spearguns. Axes and knives hung from toolbelts. One frog-man carried a staff tipped with three sharp prongs. Neptune’s trident.

Close up, Irene was relieved that their eyes were plain men’s – though they seemed to bulge, magnified by the glass goggles.

‘You women are subject to immediate arrest,’ said Assolant.

A tiny flicker of his good eye as he passed Kate gave him away.

He knew who she was. He had expected to find her here.

With regards to other Angels, he was doing a job – carrying out someone’s orders. With Kate, it was personal. She had been there when the
Légion d’Horreur
was smashed. If he couldn’t ventilate the Japanese Angel who’d ruined his face, he’d take it out on her Irish friend.

‘These, I suppose, are policemen?’ said Kate.

Assolant hissed at her. The mug with the trident angled it at Kate’s stomach as if waiting for an order to charge.

The General looked at the other women.

Olympia stepped forward and said, ‘It is a pleasure to meet you.’

Assolant backhanded the doll’s face.

He hurt himself, of course. He should have hit her with his pistol.

‘I hope we shall be the best of friends,’ she said.

Assolant’s white tangle of scars slowly reddened. He sweated cold fury.

Irene was tense. She saw Elizabeth palm a fork from a place setting.

Good girl. Given the choice, a table fork was better than a cake knife against an importuning gentleman. More likely to pierce than break. Though those frog-hides looked too thick for a simple stab.

‘What have you done to this woman?’ asked the General, meaning Unorna.

‘She has been overcome with the vapours,’ said Elizabeth. ‘We are endeavouring to give aid and succour.’

‘Are you now?’

‘If you could alert the medical corps, we’d appreciate it,’ said Kate.

Assolant picked up a spoon with his left hand and looked at it.

For a moment, Irene was worried he’d stab Kate’s with it.

He breathed on the spoon and polished it on his sleeve.

‘Is this silver?’ he asked, handing it to Kate.

She looked at it and said, ‘I don’t think so…’

Suddenly ramrod-stiff, the General aimed his pistol at Kate’s face.

‘You stole that spoon!’ he said, enraged. ‘I saw it! You are a dirty looter! You are all dirty looters!’

As one, the frogmen took a step forward. They squeaked and left ducky footprints, but weren’t at all comical. The trident hovered near the small of Kate’s back.

Assolant thumb-cocked his revolver. He rested the barrel against a lens of Kate’s glasses.

‘It is within my rights to have you executed.’

‘I
F YOU SHOOT
me, I daresay you’ll receive a strongly worded telegram from the British Ambassador.’

Assolant’s grim mouth didn’t twitch, but he stopped pointing a gun at her eye.

‘You are to come with me,’ he said. ‘All you…
women
. You are looters and profiteers.’

Kate hadn’t forgotten the private pleasures of General Assolant and his cronies in
le cercle rouge
. And he hadn’t forgotten she
knew
about him.

He hadn’t even the smidgen of decency to be ashamed of what he was – a cowardly, blundering sadist. But he did fear what might befall him if his true character were known to the world. He ached to ascend to a position of untouchability, so he might again murder who he fancied with impunity. He’d once had a taste of that power, and quivered with a dried-out drunk’s thirst for the long-abjured bottle.

‘What about her?’ asked Irene, nodding at Unorna. ‘She needs a doctor.’

‘I will judge what this foreigner needs,’ said Assolant. ‘You are to carry her.’

It fell to Olympia to pick up the sleeping Angel. The automaton came in handy for the heavy lifting.

Gustave held the door open. Kate thanked the
maître d’
for his courtesy.

Outside, it was night – and snowing, though slush quickly melted to swell the pools around Place de l’Opéra. A few fires burned in buckets and braziers, but the street lamps weren’t lit. The blackout was even more of an affront than the rising river. It was as if Paris had been turned off.

She heard shouts, cries, shots, screams and crashes. Kate recognised the racket. She had been in wars like this before. Small bands fighting street to street, not whole armies meeting on an open battlefield. Pundits envisioned a coming conflict, where the great powers would roll out the wonderful, mechanised weapons – colossal dreadnoughts, submersible destroyers, bomb-dropping airships, heavy guns mounted on automobiles, clouds of poison smoke – they were itching to test on real, bleeding people.

This could be an overture to that grand opera.

The guards by the roped-off chasm were joined by frog-soldiers. They had swept up from below and established a beach-head.

‘You will come to the opera house,’ said Assolant.

‘Will we now?’ said Irene.

Assolant shot at a dead cat floating past. The poor thing exploded with a plop of fur and guts.

The report was just a crack, lost in the open air and night-sounds.

What with everything else, no one came to investigate. Chances are they’d only have saluted the senior officer and let him carry on with whatever he was doing. Had General Assolant gone over to the other side, or was there only one side with two faces?

Thi Minh was first on the
passerelle
. Kate followed, as indicated by a trident prod. Frog-men waded at either side of the plank, aiming spear-shooting contraptions at the Angels.

They had been taken prisoner. If Assolant had permission to execute them, he would have done it already.

The General had been a small fish in the
Légion d’Horreur
, a minnow next to sharks like Georges Du Roy or Père de Kern. This action couldn’t be Assolant’s idea – and he certainly wasn’t taking orders from Louis Lépine, Prefect of Police, or Justin de Selves, Prefect of the Seine. The army only grudgingly recognised civil authority at the best of times.

Someone
was above Assolant.

Not Fantômas. Kate no longer believed the anarchist had killed the Persian.

A subtler hand was behind this. One of those masterminds Irene went on about. Or just a brute with money and influence.

Frog-men were stationed outside the opera house.

Now she’d seen their diving gear up close, Kate knew they weren’t just freshwater pirates. It took money and resources to equip them.

Regular troops in shabby uniforms did scut-work like shoring up sandbag barriers. Smartly dressed Camelots du Roi strutted like beardless field marshals, not doing a hand’s turn but giving the impression they were high up in the chain of command. Kate hoped Oscar and Max were on the sick list. They’d relish revenge for their dip in the freezing waters.

The co-operating forces – frog-men, soldiers, Camelots – were identifiable by bright green armbands. Kate had noticed Max and Oscar wearing them earlier. The General had one too. On the band was a curlicue motif. A crown of seashells surmounted the letter A.

For Assolet?

Anarchy?

Army?

Antichrist?

L’Action Française
?

Irene nudged Kate and pointed at a banner hung above the entrance of the Palais Garnier. That same green A, but huge – and professionally woven, which indicated planning.

Système A
hadn’t sprung up overnight.

‘A for Antinea,’ Irene suggested.

‘…or Atlantis,’ Kate countered.

‘Something fishy, at any rate,’ said Irene.

Kate was too weary to groan.

A frog-man shook his speargun in a ‘shut up, you’ gesture, and Kate and Irene got a move on. A signal rocket went up from another quarter of the city. Soldiers and frog-men turned to take note.

A couple of Camelots gallantly helped Thi Minh off the
passerelle
, though the acrobat scarcely needed assistance. She seemed unconcerned at any probable peril. As an active Angel, it was a point of pride to show no fear. Kate wasn’t sure she could hold fast to the principle. She was retired from the Opera Ghost Agency. Then again, the Diogenes Club didn’t have a tradition of panicking and pleading in tight spots – and she was still on their register.

Unsteady on her feet and with a face frozen from windblown snow, Kate was grateful for helping hands. She thanked a curly-moustached Camelot. He smiled as if this were all a student lark.

All the Angels made it to the opera house without a dunking.

Unorna, as a witch, would presumably float. With the rest of them, things would go less happily.

When Assolant stepped down from the
passerelle
, the Camelots snapped off salutes.

Only now did it strike Kate as suspicious that so many sprouts of the upper crust had easy access to boats and barges. They had been waiting for rain.

Under the Third Republic, militarist and monarchist conspiracies abounded. Some faction or other was always on the point of staging a
coup d’état
. Rogue Jesuits incensed by the separation of Church and State. Stubborn Montagnards awaiting the second coming of Robespierre. Lunatic anti-Dreyfusards who marched on the Presidential Palace at the head of imaginary columns of troops. If the Angels of the day – Christina Light, Marahuna, Marie O’Malley – hadn’t prevented the release of a plague bacillus among the crowds gathered for the opening of the Exposition Universelle, France might have fallen under the dictatorship of the Brass Bonaparte.

Was this another attempted coup? She could see how it would work.

The National Assembly had carried on debating until the last lights went out, then adjourned. Président Fallières was floating about inspecting flood damage and pledging assistance to wet, ungrateful people. If he chanced to fall in the river and drown, a case could be made for instituting martial law. Then, it would be up to the army – which is to say, General Assolant – to decide how long the state of emergency would last.

Just now, she’d be grateful to find Fantômas, the Grand Vampire or the Clutching Hand behind it. Some villain who could be unmasked and brought to book. The Angels couldn’t deal with a mass movement. She wasn’t even sure they’d have the right to.

Given the general hullaballoo all over the city, the coup had already begun. This could be Year One of
L’Âge d’A
.

They were ushered into the grand foyer of the Palais Garnier.

A thousand candles burned, but the small flames did little to cast light around the vast space. Frog-men, Camelots, clerks and scurvy-looking types in fisherman’s wading britches – all sporting the green A – milled around purposefully. Women among them wore sparkly togas and headdresses which set off their armbands. Kate guessed many outfits were filched from the costume department. She was sure she’d seen some of the dresses in
Aida
and
La Juive
.

The opera house made a decent headquarters, Kate supposed. But the Louvre offered better pickings for looters and was far less dangerous. Last she heard, the museum was only haunted by an Egyptian mummy. Invading the house Erik took for his domain was a riskier proposition. The Phantom of the Opera knew this huge building better than anyone. Flood or no, he’d hide here indefinitely… and pick off insolent trespassers one by one.

Assolant must realise this. Such an affront would draw out Erik. There would be consequences, casualties, a reckoning.

Great schemes were in motion. But so were petty ones.

In the middle of the foyer, a large-scale map of Paris was unrolled on the floor like a carpet. Candelabra were dotted across it, dripping wax and casting light. Clerks with brooms moved blocks of wood as messages were brought in. Kate recognised an operations room when she saw one. Men in tailcoats crawled over the map of the city with pencils, shading in streets and squares.

Frog-men saw her taking an interest and got in the way.

Mrs Eynsford Hill artfully tripped, fell against a frog-man, apologised, and slipped again, hands scrabbling on his rubbery chest. She did a perfect impersonation of a complete twit, but managed to get a good look at the map.

Kate knew a quick glance was enough. With her trick memory, Mrs Eynsford Hill would know the disposition of the enemy forces – at least until the picture faded in a few hours’ time. Irene was using her noggin. She’d taken stock of the Angels’ individual talents and saw how they could be applied. It was cold and premature to think of such things, but if Erik needed to replace the Persian he should consider Irene Adler. If only so she could relish the daily squirm from Gustave as he showed her to what was now her table in the Café de la Paix. She’d run up a huge champagne tab and expect it to be written off every month.

Alraune had Olympia make Unorna comfortable on an upholstered divan. The witch was still sleeping. The German girl’s glittering eyes took everything in too.

What application might there be for
her
talents?

General Assolant talked with a small, tubby, balding fellow in a long leather coat. Kate had seen him before. The General directed the pig-eyed little man’s attention to the Angels. He grinned, crookedly. His bad teeth gave him away.