Femme Fatale (22 page)

Thus I remained when the “show” began, with much shrill trumpeting of instrument and voice.

The “flying carpet” was suspiciously unsupple. The “pigpoodles” oddly resembled King Charles spaniels crossed with pit bulls. I had heard the word “vaudeville” applied to such entertainments. I did not know its meaning, but the obvious origin was French and, well . . .

We sat through a mind reader who did not call upon us, and luckily so, as he would have been exposed . . . through a ventriloquist who made a flat-iron speak (it asked for a rest in the Arctic).

And then . . . Salamandra.

I admit it was an evocative name, like Sarah Bernhardt’s Théodora.

As for Salamandra, I must confess that when she appeared from above the stage seated on a swing of fire I was somewhat impressed.

Slowly she was lowered as assistants laid red-hot rails on a large box-frame filled with stones.

Salamandra drained the champagne flute in her hand, yet left enough liquid to turn the glass upside down and let it weep upon the stones before her feet.

Steam hissed upward, visible and audible to every eye and ear.

I sat forward, taking care not to brush Mr. False Arms’s elbows.

Irene had sat forward, too, but she was frowning.

Really, this was the most impressive . . . illusion.

The stones now glowed bright red, like the heart of an ember.

Salamandra’s bare feet touched toe to the stones, and then she stood.

Yet she did not move a muscle, not even a toe.

Applause and whistles erupted, and many more peanuts also broke out from their confining shells.

Perspiration erupted on my forehead. I was rapt. I could feel
the heat radiating from the insensible stones to the tender flesh of the woman’s bare feet.

I wanted to look away, but could not. Her expression was serene.

She began to walk down the avenue of red-hot stones as though it were cool summer grass.

At last she stood, bare of foot, on the bare wooden stage.

I admit I expected to be further amazed.

I watched the stage erupt in flames, watched the exotic Salamandra, draped like a Roman matron, swallow flames and tread barefoot on red-hot coals and juggle fire. At last she swept her robes tight around her body, bowed to the audience, and began to strut toward the hall’s curtained wings.

Only . . . a brazier in the background exploded into wings of flame as she passed. Then her entire figure was subsumed into the expanding illusion of fire and her hair lifted upward in fiery tongues, her draperies an inferno, the effect truly a human torch of excitement.

Save that Irene was standing and drawing me up with her. “That’s no illusion,” she cried. “Oh, my God! Water! We must reach the stage.
Salamandra!
”

Irene bounded into the aisle like a hound after a hare.

What could I do? Remain with Mr. Derby False Arms?

I followed as fast as I could.

I was far enough behind to see Irene rush infallibly up a short set of stairs on the far left linking the auditorium with the stage.

I followed, stumbling on black-painted steps not meant to be noticed by the audience.

Now we were not audience, but . . . unwilling attraction.

Irene seized the Maharajah’s flying carpet, apparently paused in mid-air in the wings.

While I gasped at the rug’s revealed frame, she rushed onto the burning stage floor, her boot soles drumming an up-tempo rhythm.

“Quick, Nell!” she cried. “Roll up the carpet. Remember Cleopatra!”

I found myself stomping over red-hot coals and feeling not a thing, one end of the carpet in my gloved hands. I understood without demur her reference to Cleopatra . . . unrolled before Caesar in a rug. Such are the benefits of an English education, even if it is at the knee of an obscure country parson. . . . Irene and I rolled, not unrolled in this instance, and in smoking seconds Salamandra was crushed in our curled carpet like Turkish tobacco in one of Irene’s dark Egyptian papers.

For once I was glad that I knew the arcane arts of rolling tobacco, for only smoke drifted up from the coiled carpet, and muffled cries.

“Well done!” Irene rode the roll of carpet like an equestrienne the back of a spirited Arab steed. The position was most unladylike, but effective. She rocked back from her position of triumph. Somewhere, applause sounded, and cast peanut shells seasoned the smoky air.

Irene coughed.

“Your voice!” I complained hoarsely.

“Bother my voice! Is she . . . all right? You look, Nell. I can’t.” So it was left to me to unpeel the fireproof lady, to see if she lived up to her advertisement.

I unrolled one end of the rug and saw her smoke-smudged features, wincing.

“Are you—?”

“Alive? Just barely, my dear. What has not been smoked has been smothered. I beg you, miss, free me.”

This Irene and I contrived, to the audience’s delighted applause. They thought our exploits a part of the show, can you credit it?

In the end we released a smudged and charred, but otherwise unharmed, Salamandra, and all three took a deep bow, myself drawn down into this ridiculous position by the fact of Salamandra’s firm hand in mine, quite cool and uncooked.

The show was over, and the local fire department had been called by stage managers who had recognized an extreme departure from the show’s script.

If not for Irene, and perhaps myself, Salamandra would have burned to death.

Irene stood in the wings, once her own personal sacristy, now bowed over as she tried to take smoke-free breaths.

We had been through a scene from Grand Opera, and no one here could recognize that reality except policemen and firefighters.

What chain of events had we interrupted?

A fire resister nearly killed by fire.

Her medium sister dead of a ghost.

Certainly these were not matters for Inns of Court barristers now laboring in France. Godfrey had been right to recommend my making this journey.

I had now become furious at the brutal death nearly inflicted in the public eye, in my eye.

I went to Irene, touched her hunched shoulders.

She straightened like a ventriloquist’s dummy. “Nell? This is far more sinister than I imagined my past to be. Salamandra was almost killed before our eyes, as her sister died recently before other eyes. I can no longer deny it, or Pink’s allegation. These crimes are somehow personal to me.”

“Nonsense,” said I. “This evil act was prevented. By us. You. I think we should repair to the backstage manager’s office and see to . . . um . . . Madame Salamandra. She is obviously the focus of this attack, not you or your past.”

Crowds made the halls, already dim and narrow and now smelling of smoke as well as pomade, into cramped alleyways.

By now, Irene had recovered her performer’s instincts. She pushed and wove her way to a door barred by a large, blue-serge-clad Irish policeman.

I knew I observed an operatic confrontation: Irene, the clever village girl against the stern solid wall of authority.

“My dear sister,” Irene cried in a voice to wring hearts and possibly brass buttons. “I must see her! Does she yet live?”

“And what is your name?” the policeman demanded.

“Sophie,” Irene declared.

He nodded, as if recognizing a password, and stood aside.

Irene wasted no time in pushing past him, and, seizing my wrist, in drawing me with her.

The office door swung shut behind us.

Before us lay a room papered in playbills, with a desk deep in unsorted papers, and even a large mirror on one wall. Its centerpiece was a woman attired in smoky cerements, looking as if she’d escaped from Hell itself.

“Salamandra?” Irene asked.

“You called yourself ‘Sophie,’ ” the other woman said in a small, sad, and husky voice. “I heard through the door.”

“Forgive me. I needed a password, like Ali Baba in the cave of the forty thieves.”

Salamandra’s great blue unfocused eyes fixed on me. “I was burning,” she said, “quite against cue. I saw you worrying at an Oriental rug. Should I know you?”

“You should know
me
!” Irene interrupted, setting herself between me and this woman of fire so her face was plain to see.

Salamandra’s eyebrows, I saw, had been singed to stubs, like a forest rubble after the fire. Her blue eyes were red-rimmed.

Irene took a deep breath.

Salamandra gazed at her. “I do not know you.”

“She,” I put in, “first saw the fire was real.”

“The fire is always real,” Salamandra admonished me, her eyes
softening her tone. “But something had seared the robes I wear. Perhaps an error by the stage crew.”

“Perhaps,” said Irene, “an error by the person who killed your sister.”

Salamandra stared at Irene. “Person? The police said she choked on the ectoplasmic matter she expelled. It was an accident in their eyes.”

“It was convenient to call it an accident. Was your burning robe an ‘accident’ here? Tonight?”

“Such mishaps do occur, given the volatile nature of our performances.”

Salamandra sank onto a chair that had turned its back on the large looking glass. Her gown was charred from neck to hip, as I saw in the mirror, so close had the flames come.

“No accidents happened,” Irene said. “Not to your sister, and not to you.”

“Who are you?” Salamandra stared through lashes that had been singed to a short frizz.

“I don’t know,” Irene said slowly, finally acknowledging that an original identity underlay all she had made of herself today, realizing and declaring it for the first time. “But I do know I used to be . . . one . . . of you,” she finished with a smile.

16.

Unburnt Bridges

I’m cool and determined as any salamander, ma’am, Won’t
you come to my wake when I go the long meander, ma’am?

—MOLLY BRANNIGAN, IRISH FOLK SONG

“One of us?”

Salamandra brushed the cinders from her hair.

“You do seem to understand more than most the . . . depth of our illusions.” She glanced at me, who had been just now introduced to her. “Ah, Miss Huxleigh. Right you are to look bewildered. I may not seem to be in mourning, but I tried to go on, after Sophie’s death. How could I expect an attempt on my own life? With Sophie’s death . . . who is not to say the spirits spoke their wishes at last?”

“It was murder,” Irene said, her tone final. “Spirits had nothing to do with it.”

Salamandra regarded her. “You are a skeptic, yet you say you’re one of us. We live a half-life, half believing our own notices. We are all Gypsies, aren’t we? Mountebanks and illusionists, believing too much in our own duplicity. Now we are to
believe in murder. And that we somehow suddenly sow death. Tell me how, so I have hope to redeem Sophie’s loss.”

“I don’t know,” Irene repeated.

“You saw me burning. People see me burning every night and pay good pence to see it again the next night. You saw . . . me perishing. And intervened. Why? How? What gift have you to penetrate our delusions?”

“I am one of you,” Irene said, shrugging.