Angels of Music (8 page)

Sophy Kratides was first to point out that La Marmoset’s London rival might be all well and good should you need one variety of cigar ash distinguished from another but was of singularly little practical use in more pressing matters. Coming to London as a naïve Greek lass, she had been seduced by a scoundrel, Harold Latimer, who imprisoned her in the household of a loathsome, tittering fellow named Wilson Kemp. The rogues starved and tortured Sophy’s brother, to make him sign over family money due to her. The Great Detective Sherlock Holmes amused himself by picking at threads dropped by a Greek interpreter and arrived at the scene of the abduction too late to prevent the murder of Paul Kratides. Furthermore, Mr Holmes, his reputedly cleverer brother and the dogged bobbies of Scotland Yard didn’t trouble to prevent the culprits leaving the country, spiriting Sophy along with them.

The impotence of such vaunted upholders of the law inspired her to a harsh assessment of herself. She detested being bundled up like a parcel and written off as a fainting damsel in distress. So, she made her first venture into extrajudicial execution, arranging the scene so the official verdict was that Latimer and Kemp had quarrelled and stabbed each other to death. Discovering unexpected talent and an inner reserve of Greek fire, she turned professional and rose to the first rank of a lucrative trade newly open to women in this changing century – assassination.

Unorna, the so-called Witch of Prague, bore the stigmata of
heterochromia iridis
. Her eyes were different colours – one a clear cold grey, the other a deep, warm brown so dark as to seem almost black. Born on the 29th of February in a bissextile year, she had only just passed her sixth birthday but was a grown woman. The girl with the strange eyes had made a profound study of the occult. Her home city was the site of the magical feats of Rabbi Loew, Johannes Kepler, Scapinelli and Dee. In Prague, the golem was vivified, the Voynich Manuscript decoded and the Philosopher’s Stone hidden. Raised in the alchemical tradition, Unorna was apprenticed to the dwarf sorcerer Keyork Arabian. Latterly, she roamed the world, adding to her store of arcane knowledge. She learned the power to cloud men’s minds in the mountain lamaseries of Tibet and collected strange orchids from the mangrove swamps of the Andaman Islands. She read the Scroll of Thoth in the secret vaults beneath the great pyramid and tracked the
wendigo
through the forested territories of the Canadian North-West. An adept of the art of mesmerism, she commanded the attention of Erik – whose mastery of the field was formerly unrivalled – by outstaring him. She offered her services to the O.G.A. in exchange for tutelage in certain practices of Australian aborigines. The Phantom, she believed, had mastered the disciplines known as the Voice, the power to persuade, and the Shout, the power to destroy.

It is often said that men like Erik never change, never learn – for, as geniuses and prodigies, why should they? But Irene Adler’s declaration of independence, Trilby O’Ferrall’s fading talents and Christine Daaé’s ultimate defection persuaded him to moderate his puppet-mastering. Wind-up dolls had their uses, but clockwork women could only achieve so much. Olympia was not one of his favourite agents, though she was effective in some cases. Impossible to seduce or strangle, the dancing mannequin was fetched out of her cabinet on occasion to tempt and trap gentlemen who were inclined to emulate Bluebeard and stock their cellars with murdered wives. For all that, she was pretty but dull. Erik understood what Trilby’s previous tutor meant when – with her declarations of devotion hollow in his ears – he declared, ‘Ah, but it is only Svengali talking to himself again.’

With the Witch of Prague, our Phantom could not work his spell… so, with La Marmoset and Sophy, he would not. Opera itself was changing. Traditionally, producers conducted themselves like the late Emperor, peering down at an army from a hilltop, imposing their iron will upon underlings who would pay the butcher’s bill on the battlefield. Many an impresario kept a portrait or a bust of Napoléon in his study, and would in private moments turn his hat sideways and put his hand inside his buttoned jacket to see how it felt. Now, a new breed of director whispered suggestions rather than barked orders, coaxed with sugar lumps rather than broke with the whip. Work was done in collaboration rather than by decree. Erik’s first Angels of Music were biddable chorus girls; now, he dealt with potential or actual prima donnas.

The Persian, perhaps, was subtly influential in this change. With the Phantom behind the mirror, he was charged with day-to-day business, issuing emoluments and expenses, meeting with clients, even approving or vetoing cases taken on by the Opera Ghost Agency. He had Erik’s trust.

Most mornings, the Persian would be in the Café de la Paix from eleven o’clock till noon, drinking bitter coffee, eating almond biscuits, and reading the papers. Those who wished to engage the Agency were invited to approach him.

On a day in late September, the Persian sat at his usual table, sipped his usual coffee, nibbled his usual biscuit and unfolded his usual
Figaro
to find an unusual envelope slipped into the newspaper. Impressed in the black wax seal was the outline of a bat.

The mark of
Les Vampires
.

Inside was a card which bluntly stated:

‘The Grand Vampire wishes to meet with the Director of the Opera Ghost Agency, on a confidential matter.’

The Persian tapped the stiff card against his teeth.

A rare occasion, he concluded.

For this, Erik must come up from his cellar.

D
ISGUISED AS A
provincial schoolmistress on her first trip to Paris, La Marmoset strolled through the
Quartier Latin
. In character, she tutted at the prices displayed in shop windows and steered well away from the idlers, loungers and probable footpads loitering on every corner. She envisioned the scrubbed, attentive faces of her class back in Tôtes and thought of the lessons she would give upon her return. She was determined to see the worst Paris had to offer, so she could caution her charges against moral peril.

Young men all around were leering at her, she had no doubt. Even with the autumn chill, many wore blouses unbuttoned to the waist and impractically tight britches. They lolled and swore and scratched and smoked and ogled. She felt a rising prickle in her chest, but suppressed the fervour of disgust. For the sake of the children, she would know something of sin. And she would know it before 14.39 on Friday, when her train home left Gare Saint-Lazare. She had an authentic return ticket in her purse – though the schoolmistress would have ceased to exist by the time the train pulled out.

In Place Saint-Michel, she approached a sleek, slick fellow idling by the statue of the Archangel trampling the Devil. As likely a prospect for sin as any, and cleaner than most. She asked for directions to the
Musée des Thermes
. He offered to escort her there. As they strolled, they talked… and the schoolmistress fell away from the Queen of Detectives like leaves from a tree.

La Marmoset kept up with the criminal underworld, of course. She recognised her new beau as Vénénos, Vice-President in Charge of Poison in the Cabinet of
Les Vampires
. A rising man. His superiors were well advised to watch what they ate or drank in his company, though his signature was the use of less obvious means of getting poison into a person. He gave those condemned by
Les Vampires
cause to fear tobacco, soap, tooth-powder, toilet paper, moustache wax, postage stamps and adhesive bandages. Sometimes, even word that Vénénos was out to get a named individual was enough to drive a prospective victim to suicide on the principle of getting the agony over with quickly.

This negotiation was delicate.

The Phantom of the Opera and the Grand Vampire were shadowmen, seldom in the company of even their closest intimates. They preferred to issue dictates through speaking tubes from behind magic mirrors.

After discussing and rejecting several venues, La Marmoset and Vénénos settled on Suite 13 at the Hôtel du Libre Échange as suitable for the parley. The establishment normally catered to bourgeois husbands and wives conducting respectable assignations with acknowledged mistresses and lovers.

The meeting of Opera Ghost and Grand Vampire was set, naturally, for midnight.

Business concluded, La Marmoset pulled on the schoolteacher again and slapped Vénénos as if he had made an abominable suggestion. She stalked off, blushing violently. His surprised face was a memory of missed opportunity she would take to her spinster’s death bed.

At the Hôtel du Libre Échange, special arrangements would be needed. Monsieur Morillon, the manager, would have to be terrified into removing heart-shaped pillows and explicit Japanese prints, then paid off to hang thick black drapes over the frilled pink pretties festooning the suite.

La Marmoset would have paid a hundred francs to see Erik and the Vampire cosy in a love nest with champagne and oysters, but stifled the thought.

One giggled at masked men at one’s peril.

Was she not a woman in a succession of masks? In her experience, all women were given – or
driven
– to masks. As a mere Princess of Detectives, she had learned to wear masks which did not seem to be masks. With a twist of a scarf or a touch of paint, she could be someone new, someone else entirely. A fat schoolgirl, a starving widow and a brazen harlot within the same hour, on the same street. Often, she wore men’s clothes to enter places barred to her original sex.

She made a finer man than many born to it, she had been told.

Who was she really? She didn’t know any more.

That schoolmistress, burned along with her unused railway ticket, was as much a person as the woman who put her on and took her off like a bonnet.

No mask could be worse than the naked face of Mr Calhoun when a rage was on him.

Just once in her adult life had she dropped all her disguises and let a man see her true face. She had given up her independence, her profession, her reputation and her thousand names and faces to become one person… Mrs Calhoun. The man for whom she had made such sacrifice served her so brutally she needed to fetch her abandoned make-up kit to cover the bruises.

Like Erik, she finally had no face. Only masks – masks of paper, masks of paint, masks of skin.

She remembered Mr Calhoun’s final face – staring furious eyes and open screaming mouth as the waters closed over him, the anchor tied to his ankles pulling him down into the dark.

Standing by the Seine, she at last became the Woman Who Was No One.

Mrs Calhoun drowned with her husband. La Marmoset’s agency was wound up, her ties with the Sûreté and the Deuxième Bureau sundered. The earnings of her successful career were in her husband’s name, and she had contrived it so he was officially missing, not dead. Lawyers in America controlled his estate and would have no sympathy for her… Tampa Morel, the name signed to the marriage register, wasn’t an identity which would hold up in court, so legal access to her own fortune or her husband’s was impossible.

She thought of joining Mr Calhoun eternally, swimming down to cling to his corpse.

If The Woman Who Was No One dies, who would care?

She thought of
L’Inconnue de la Seine
… a case known to all detectives.

Some twenty-five years earlier, a young woman – believed to be not French – was fished out of the river, stuck like a specimen bug on a spar of driftwood. A presumed suicide by drowning. Her cold face smiled like the Mona Lisa, and her wax death mask became the template for replicas sold all over the city. That unnamed face was everywhere, even after all this time: in posters, bas-reliefs, prints sold to tourists and popular masks.

L’Inconnue de la Seine
, by virtue of an obscure and pathetic death, became a heroine of France. Even with all the publicity, no one came forward to identify her. La Marmoset thought that highly suspicious. Were
l’Inconnue
her case, she would not have so readily written it up as a suicide.

Having rid herself of Mr Calhoun, she was on the point of becoming the unknown’s sister – famous for being no one, for being dead, for losing all which could be lost.

Then, alone, she heard music from beneath the city – an impassioned solo organ recital, distorted eerily by echoes, broadcast by sewer outlets. Later, she would learn that the piece was ‘Don Juan Triumphant’, from Erik’s perpetually reworked, never-finished opera.

She knew of the Opera Ghost Agency and realised now that there was a place for her on its lists. The next day, she approached the Persian at the Café de la Paix. She wore one of her favourite disguises, though it was in truth a disguise no longer – a black veil and widow’s weeds. In introducing herself, she hesitated only when it came to giving her name.

‘I am… La Marmoset,’ she said. ‘Yes, that will do.’

The Persian didn’t press her. He had also misplaced any real name he might once have had.

She was first called La Marmoset by men – gendarmes, detectives, criminals, magistrates – who resented her involvement in what they took to be their business. To them, she was an interfering monkey. Nothing but a nuisance in skirts – clingy, chattering, agile and facetious. Each and every one of those men had come to speak the name with respect and even fear.

‘You were expected, Madame,’ said the Persian. ‘It is Erik’s pleasure to accept you as an Angel of Music.’

At that time, the Opera Ghost Agency was assembling a new trio.

In Dressing Room 313, La Marmoset was introduced to Sophy Kratides, whom she had once glimpsed from afar…

That had been a memorable morning. Frederick Hohner, condemned wife-murderer, was to be executed in rue de la Roquette, just outside La Grande Roquette Prison. As he climbed the steps to the guillotine, he was felled by a rifle-shot from across the prison yard. With his first conviction secure, the state had not troubled to prosecute Hohner on other charges… leaving seven women, at least, unavenged. La Marmoset reckoned the family of one of his other victims must have decided on a point of honour that he should pay for them too.