Femme Fatale (19 page)

I was surprised to find such an island of domestic history in this huge, rude city.

“Tim!” Irene said, surprised into using the name.

He was surprised, too. “I haven’t been called aught but ‘Timothy’ for twenty years.” He frowned his youthful brow, for he was barely thirty, and squinted at Irene as if she were a stamp in a collector’s magnifying lens.

“Is it . . . little Rena? Little Rena the Ballerina? En point at the age of three?”

He spread his arms and stretched out his fingers. Irene matched his gesture and suddenly grew three inches as she lilted onto her toe-tops.

“Dear Lord, you’re back! Rena the Ballerina.”

“Merlinda the Mermaid.”

“And such a singer. I’ll never forget making a duet of your ‘Clementine,’ you in a checked sun bonnet and boots the size of ships. ‘In a cavern, in a canyon—’ ”

“ ‘Excavatin’ for a mine—’ ”

“ ‘Dwelt a miner, forty-niner—’ ”

“ ‘And his daughter, Clementine,’ ” Irene produced a ceiling-shaking operatic finale.

The former Tiny Tim spun a formerly flat-footed Irene under his arm, while he sang: “ ‘Big ole bootsies, on her tootsies, for to hold up Clementine.’ ”

“ ‘Oh, my darling,’ ” they chorused together, contralto and tenor. “ ‘Oh, my darling Clementine, Thou are lost and gone forever, dreadful sorry, Clementine.’ ”

The Dear Lord help me, but I could see these two as tiny children pantomiming this very schoolroom nonsense. And I couldn’t help giggling. Perhaps it was hysteria.

The former Tiny Tim turned to me at once. “They loved us, the audiences. They tittered and gushed and applauded and threw bouquets of tea-roses. Then I would sit down and drum my head and hands off, and she would dance a jig to it all. We were . . . what? All of three and six.”

What they reminisced about suddenly struck me full force. “You sang for your suppers, both of you, at so young an age? Why, that’s indentured servitude!”

Tiny Tim descended upon me like a fairy-tale giant, a laughing boy-giant, and swept me into the same irresistible pirouette Irene had performed.

“Theater folk are fairy folk, don’t you know, miss?” he said, or sang perhaps. My head was spinning too much to tell. “Small and fading fast. Magic.”

He dropped my gloved hands and I stood there waiting for my head to settle.

“I’m a little drummer boy no longer,” he finished, shrugging.

“Yet you still live here, where we all did,” Irene pointed out.

“ ‘Did’ is right.” He sat on one of his upholstered chairs, laid his pomaded hair against the antimacassar. “I’ll never forget the thrill of it, being so young and so acclaimed, but it was a passing fancy. A man must do daily work for his living, and I’m no exception.”

“Then no one else we knew still lives here?” Irene pressed, following him to the chair.

He sobered instantly, and the performer’s mask dropped to reveal a melancholy man behind it.

“No. Not now that Sophie is dead.”

“Sophie? I
remember
her. Well.” Tim could hardly guess what a revelation this was for her. “Sophie lived here recently? And has just now . . . died?” Irene’s voice had dropped into a soft, lower register I did not often hear, except when she was deeply touched. “I only just . . . missed . . . her?” Her plaintive tone reminded me of a fretted child.

He nodded, his head leaning back as if resting from his impetuous excursion into past and such very youthful glories.

Child prodigies, I thought, had the bitter lot of soon outliving their best days.

“Sophie,” Irene was repeating as if every intonation of the name’s syllables was a lost memory. “Only dead recently.”

“A freakish sort of death.” Timothy shook his head, his eyes still closed. “At a séance. I was there, God help me.”

“Sophie!” Irene looked at me, as if demanding that I at least disbelieve what she could not avoid knowing for truth. “That . . . the dead medium we heard of . . . that was Sophie?”

The fact shocked her.

What shocked me was to see her so horrified.

Who was Sophie, and what had she been to Irene, or to little Rena the Ballerina, who was some father’s “darling Clementine”?

13.

Smoke Rings

Fire resisters, who traditionally appeared on the bills of
magicians or ventriloquists, even found their way to the
séance room
.

—RICKY JAY,
LEARNED PIGS AND FIREPROOF WOMEN

Who was Sophie?

“A fire resister,” Irene told me in the hansom cab she had hailed to take us back to our hotel.

She herself certainly was not subscribing to fire-resisting, whatever it was, in the hansom, for she had struck another match on her clever little cigarette case. Soon the snug compartment was filled with enough smoke and sulphur to mask the departure of the Devil through the vampire trapdoor in a stage floor.

I coughed pointedly, but Irene’s eyes were growing dreamy over the wisps of smoke she breathed out like an elegant dragon.

“Sophie and Salamandra,” she went on. “I remember now! They were twin sisters and both fire resisters. They could walk on hot iron or coals, swallow flames, soft-cook raw eggs in the burning
oil cupped in their bare palms. It was a stunning demonstration and quite outdrew the ventriloquists and prestidigitators who often shared the playbill with them.”

“The only useful application of such a gift is for cooking eggs,” I answered, “and I would prefer a pan-basting for my eggs, rather than someone’s sweaty hand.”

“Oh, there was no perspiration involved, though other liquids might have been. Certainly there was some trick to it.”

“And you don’t know what the trick was?”

“It was worth one’s life to know too much of arcane practices then. These arts have been passed down since the Middle Ages, or even ancient times. Family livelihoods depend upon them, have for generations.”

“But you knew the Salamander sisters?”

“I even saw them perform. ‘Salamander’ is an ancient term for a fire dragon. Sophie was always Sophie, but Salamandra was christened Amanda, I believe, and only adopted the more mysterious name when she joined the act. I’d like to discover when it became a solo attraction, and why Sophie turned to séances instead of flames.”

“Does it matter?”

“It might be the reason Sophie was murdered.”

“Isn’t the likeliest reason a disgruntled client? She was a fraud.”

“All performers are frauds, Nell. They weave artful illusions. Sophie and Salamandra wove more imaginative illusions than most, but I consider them little different from myself.”

“Irene! The grand opera is a respected art form that requires its performers to perfect the human instrument of the voice to celestial levels.”

“And then only to sing heavenly notes about ‘rather lurid stories,’ as you once put it, Nell.”

“That was long ago, when we first met. I did not understand then that opera singing was the most elevated of arts.”

Irene smiled upon a perfect levitating ring of smoke she had
produced. “This is a skill as well, Nell. It takes practice. I must master my instrument, in this case my breath and lungs and the humble cigarette. Most people cannot do what I just did.”

“And why would they want to?”

“To amaze. Amuse. Divert. Opera is no grander.”

“Surely you cannot compare blowing smoke rings to the hours and years of practice a world-class operatic voice demands! You put them in yourself. I saw you lilting through endless scales on the old piano in Saffron Hill when we shared rooms there. You must not belittle your art.”

“Nor should I upraise it on the backs of others. I respect the talents and the hard work of these novelty performers, Nell. I must. I grew up amongst them.”

“Ah! Is this what that nasty Nellie Bly knows?”

“Pink knows. It is not so hard to trace when you look. Even Buffalo Bill recalled my Merlinda the Mermaid act. Quite a compliment from a master showman like himself.”

“Merlinda? The Mermaid? I know nothing of such things. You would not take me to see Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show encampment at
L’exposition universelle
in Paris, but only Pink, who now repays you by turning your past into a riddle to lay before her readers. What is this about mermaids?”

“I’d forgotten you weren’t there when Colonel Cody brought it up. That was the first time my American past raised its head.”

“Your American past was being an inquiry agent for the Pinkerton’s.”

“But before that, I was a prodigy in . . . assorted areas.”

“Like Tiny Tim! That was what he was blathering about! I thought him mildly demented, to tell the truth. You actually danced some hornpipe on the stage at the age of three?”

“Sailors dance hornpipes. I jigged.”

“No! You would never perform some low Hibernian jig.”

“I did, and a hornpipe later, in a cunning little sailor suit.”

“You were barely past a babe in arms. Who would sell you into such servitude at so early an age?”

“The mother I did not have, apparently.”

This silenced me. I saw then that Pink’s quest to unearth Irene’s origins truly might be less of a galloping girl’s reporter’s ambition and more of a threat to all I thought sensible and stable in my life, and Irene’s.

“Does Godfrey know?”

“Know what, Nell?”

“About mermaids, and . . . jigs?”

“No. No one knows, except those I knew then, and Pink perhaps, a bit. And now you.”

“Oh, dear.”

“Oh, dear what?”

“I do so hate secrets. I am not good at keeping them.”

“But don’t you keep a few yourself?” She smiled knowingly, yet gently enough to have me writhing in shame.

She couldn’t know, of course, where the root of my secrets lay, in herself and the private papers of a physician named (so pedestrianly) Watson. But she guessed another one, with a less pedestrian name: Stanhope. Oh, to think of it is to blush and then to bite my lip and stiffen my spine. And then to despair. And anger.

“Nell.” Her gloved hand tightened on my forearm. “I’m glad you’re here with me. Events are forcing me back into a past I did not so much escape as fold away into a trunk in the attic of a house I never expected to return to. I could stand company.”

“Events are not forcing you, Nellie Bly is.”

“ ‘Nellie Bly’ is a pseudonym, as ‘Salamandra’ is. It has been adapted for the presenting of mysteries to the public. It is the manifestation of an art form, or a craft, at least. I cannot condemn her, our Miss Pink, but neither need I assist her, especially not in the unraveling of my own past. We must anticipate her, Nell.”

“I will truly be useful in this matter, not some burden who must be hied off to America to forget certain events in Transylvania?”

“Ah. Godfrey gave you that impression, did he?”

“He gave me the impression that the only reason he is not here is that I need a change of scenery more.”

“The reason you are here,” she said, her grip on my forearm tightening to painful intensity, “is that I need you more than anyone. You knew me before Godfrey did. Somehow, I feel, that you can better know me before I knew myself. Godfrey understands that without even thinking it. Which is why I married him, and why you worked for him. But he is not here now. We are.”

We. I felt a flare of guilty secrets, and then a certain pride. Were we not the match of Nellie Bly and her eternal nose for news? Were we not the match of Sherlock Holmes, and his endless omniscience? Were we not friends, before either of them had darkened our doors or our doubts or our necessities?

“I will go where your past takes us,” I vowed. “And try not to complain.”

“That would be appreciated.” Irene stamped out her cigarette on the cobblestones as we thumped down from the hansom cab in front of our hotel. “And the next place my past takes us is to the New Fourteenth Street Theater tonight, for a performance of the remarkable incendiary illusions of the incredible Salamandra.”

Oh, dear
.

14.