The Adventuress (25 page)

“Were there any other signs about the body?”

“Other, Madame? Only a bruise at the base of the skull, where the knot had pressed during and after death. Some abrasions at the wrists. Perhaps the poor devil had lifted his hands at the last to fight the rope and his starched cuffs had grazed his skin.”

Irene inhaled deeply of the crimson rose, as if to perfume her thoughts. “Wrists. I was afraid of that. Perhaps, Doctor, his wrists were
bound
and later released.”

“Bound? But why? How could he—?”

“How could he indeed? And there was nothing on his person? No coins, no cards, no personal effects?”

“Not even tobacco flakes in his pockets, Madame.”

“Then how did you determine his identity?” I demanded.

The doctor smiled sadly. “It was a difficulty. His death was reported in the papers, of course, and his description. No one stepped forward. He was about to be buried in a pauper’s grave when a lascar from one of the ships in the harbor visited my office with a torn clipping of the death report and a note identifying the man as Claude Montpensier of Paris. The police there located his brother.”

“And he still had a pauper’s funeral,” Louise said thickly. “Uncle would not hear of him being brought back to Paris for burial, or of us coming to Monaco to attend his interment.”

“There was not time, child.” Dr. Jamac stood. “This balmy air does not permit long delay for the dead.”

“Do you know where he lies?” the American asked.

The old man shook his head. “No. It was out of my hands. All I have to offer are my memories.”

“And they are excellent, Doctor.” Irene advanced to take his hand. “I suppose that there was no signature on the note revealing his identity.”

“None.”

“And the lascar?”

“Gone. Surly, filthy sort of fellow. Looked as if he hardly understood English.”

After parting with the good doctor, we walked through the gardens and around the simple stone cottage to the front, where our open carriage waited to take us down the winding corniche road to Monte Carlo. Even the sun of a Cote d’Azur day could not banish the chill of early, wrongful death that touched each of us.

We settled in the carriage, looking, I’m sure, like a party of revelers. Louise tucked her rose at her waist, I fastened mine to a lapel, and Irene thrust hers into her hair at her bonnet rim, a gesture of dash and melodrama that suited her perfectly.

I remember the drive back, with the sun beating down on our hatted heads, the sea’s endless sapphire sparkling on our right and the rough foothills of the coast hunched at our left.

“Someone cared for him,” Irene said abruptly, turning from gazing at the sea. She smiled at Louise. “Enough to alert the authorities to his identity. It was good-hearted, but a mistake. Their first mistake. It has not been their last.”

“Who,” I asked Irene when we had returned to the Hotel de Paris and were sitting in the Nortons’ suite parlor, “who are ‘they’?”

“I don’t know. Do you?”

“Of course I don’t. I don’t even know that a ‘they’ exists. Nor do you.”

“They move in exceeding mysterious ways, it is true, dear Nell. But so does God, and you believe in His existence.”

“I will not be diverted into theological culs-de-sac. If you do indeed know something about these puzzling events, be so kind as to share your knowledge. Louise’s happiness may rest upon it.”

“My opinions are still forming.” Irene lay on the chaise longue, onto which she had thrown herself after donning combing gown and house slippers. She was never one to sit about in corsets and full dress if she could escape such confinement.

She drew a brown Egyptian cigarette from the small table at her side, inserted it into a mother-of-pearl holder she had bought in Paris and lit it with a lucifer, letting the smoke lift like a thin blue veil past her face before she spoke again.

“ ‘They’ are vague in number. Certainly the men who tattooed Louise, then accosted you and Godfrey on the train, are two of them. So was the lascar beneath Dr. Jamac’s notice fifteen years ago. And Claude Montpensier was one of them.”

“Claude Montpensier? Irene, you go too far.”

“Not far enough.” Godfrey entered the room in a smoking jacket of handsome emerald brocade.

“You approve of this wild surmising, Godfrey?”

“I approve of almost anything Irene does, wild or tame.”

“Almost?” she objected. The glitter in her amber-velvet eyes promised even wilder surmising to come. “Not only are Claude Montpensier’s death and the two seamen who accosted his daughter linked, but so is the tattooed sailor we found dead in London years ago, as well as the one we saw more recently in Paris.”

‘To join these persons and events, the connection would have to extend back fifteen years!”

“More, Nell,” Godfrey corrected me. “Perhaps twenty.”

‘Twenty,” Irene agreed. “Moreover, all these people were, I suspect, involved in the same scheme, and were on the same side in that scheme. One
thing
that strikes me is that their numbers are decreasing with time.”

“Save,” Godfrey reminded her, “for the addition of Louise Montpensier—if the tattoos are the password in this strange conspiracy.”

“Louise takes her father’s place,” she mused.

“Why wait so long?” he countered.

“Because, my almost-always-perceptive husband, affairs reach a head now. Perhaps Louise’s two ugly fairy godfathers hoped to protect her by waiting until the last possible moment to brand her with the mark of the conspiracy.

“ ‘Mark of the conspiracy’? Comes to ‘a head’?” They ignored me.

“And the uncle?” Godfrey’s head tilted close to Irene’s.

She let her head loll back and slitted her eyes in thought—or in an attempt to keep the cigarette smoke out of them. I had never seen her more resemble Lucifer at his feline laziest. “An unexpected problem. He was to have been a conduit to Louise, who would take her father’s place, but then... well, you have seen him. He would not take second place in anything, and this is clearly a joint venture.”

“What ‘venture’?”

“Then, too,” she said, “somehow the blackmail of the duchess is connected.”

“The duchess as well? Irene, this is too much,” I expostulated.

“Really,” Godfrey said, “even I must balk at including the duchess. You go too far at last.”

“And the prince,” she intoned dreamily. “His role is key, if somewhat foggy. I must know more about his courtship of the American-born duchess.”

Godfrey leaned forward to remove the cigarette holder from her languid fingers. The last sinuous strands of smoke floated past their faces. He regarded her with an expression I could not interpret.

“I really think, my dear Irene, that you must put surmising aside for a while. It cannot be good for your constitution,” he admonished, a smile tugging at his lips.

Her eyes suddenly widened. “I am tired,” she said. Her glance found me. “And obviously too lost in my speculations to answer your astute questions, Nell.”

“Of course,” said I, rising. “Too much sun and too much smoke will addle the brain. I plan to rest before dinner and suggest that you both do so also.”

“An excellent idea,” Godfrey said in a voice like French silk.

“I will certainly take your advice under consideration,” Irene said.

I thought her answer most evasive but said nothing. I saw them as I left the room, Godfrey’s face close to Irene’s. They watched me leave with a curious intensity, like matched leopards too lazy to bound after an innocent passing gazelle.

While I did not comprehend the odd change in their moods, I stole quietly away to a most refreshing nap.

By day, the casino in Monte Carlo had the atmosphere of a church or a theater when no service or performance is scheduled. Visitors still milled about in the high- ceilinged grandeur, yet the building’s very vastness and rich ornamentation made the enterprise seem strangely deserted.

The casino was no church, but rather a Temple of Gaming. (I was still speechless from regarding the most recent decorative addition—the new ceiling fresco of the bar, which boasted an excessive number of nude ladies puffing on cigars and cigarettes, each one taking modest pains to keep
her feet
concealed!) The various rooms, known by the French as
salles,
bristled with high oriel windows and half-shell niches, with pillars, Palladian casements, massive paintings of a secular—even a pagan—nature, and huge gaming tables covered with green baize.

Irene and I eyed the empty bustle within the main
salle,
the Duchess of Richelieu at our side.

“I hate what gambling can do to those who are too foolish to stop!” our noble guide said passionately, upon observing the lethargic gamblers still slumped at the tables, driven to wager until their heads should nod onto a pillow of green baize. “But I am told that on this rock—the two million gold francs the casino has brought to the Grimaldi treasury—lies the security of the entire principality and its citizens.”

Irene strolled among the tables, watching the fall of dice, the collapse of losing hands of cards, the fateful spins of the red-and-black wheel of fortune.

I followed her through this bizarre foreign temple, where money changed hands in the form of colored chips and no discernible reason governed the process but luck. The duchess seemed amused by our awe of the great perpetual-motion gambling machine, the eternal inner clockworks of the icy white-marble exterior that baked in the Mediterranean sun.

We paused at a roulette table, the duchess remaining slightly behind us that we might better view the action.

“Sarah is an inveterate gambler,” she noted, sighing. “She spends her money as liberally as she has spent herself on the stage and lives far beyond her means. Still, she comes here to risk even more capital. Eager as I am to see her, I hate to see her ride this fickle wheel of fortune. But then... she is Sarah. She will do as she wishes.”

“The theatrical life,” Irene said with a nostalgic smile, “often encourages excess off the stage. So much emotion is spent in make-believe that real life can seem tame by contrast. I imagine that Sarah winning and losing at the wheel is as artful a performance as any she has given on the boards.”

“Oh, yes. Losing is always a tragedy.” The duchess lowered her eyes. “Sometimes it is even a real tragedy. As with Louise’s father’s death. You know that Eleanora Duse never gambles anymore? Do you know why?”

I shook my head, awed that our guide knew Duse, the Italian tragedienne and mistress of heartfelt emotion.

“It happened at this very table.” The duchess swept a hand past the oblivious seated souls. “A desperate young woman—a child, really—lost and lost again. Losers are common; few are noticed in the mob. Duse noticed, however, being ever alert to the human drama. The girl’s face grew more ashen, her eyes sank into banked fires. A final loss, and she reached into her reticule and dragged out a colored vial. She threw back her head and drank. In moments she collapsed, dead of some poison. Duse’s death scenes have been even more wrenching since but she has never gambled here—or anywhere else—again.”

“But why did the poor girl destroy herself?” I asked, shocked. “Who was she? Why would one so young be so set on gambling?”

“Duse survives, and the story, but not the origin of its true, tragic heroine. She was likely some well-brought- up young woman introduced to the pleasures of wagering by a worldly man. Losing more than she should have, she caught the gambling fever and wagered more than she had, until she could not face her losses. Obviously, she had counted on one favorable turn of the wheel to redeem all. When it didn’t—Who knows where she came from, or where her body lies? She is a lesson for the history books, at least, because she was young and presumably beautiful and her death was such a waste. And because Duse witnessed it and was touched.”

“Les inconnues de la roulette, ”
Irene murmured.

“Your pardon?” said the duchess.

“I was only thinking, Your Grace,” Irene said, “that there are many for
ms
of self-destruction for tender and willful young women. Some are prettier than others.” We had passed through the
salles privées.
The chatter of roulette balls, dice and gamblers’ tongues muted to a patter like distant rain as the duchess led us into a richly appointed office.