II
Disguised as 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.
On the same principle, La Marmoset – present in the habit of a nun – made a show of drawing a pistol and firing in the direction of the perch from which the fatal shot had come. The response was a bullet in the dirt at her feet.
It was like one of those duels where the parties have thought better of some silly quarrel and choose to discharge in the air then share breakfast. Both women could have made their shots tell.
Neither Queen of Detectives nor Mistress of Assassins felt a need to take the matter further. The inquest was less a formality than usual. The executioner complained of blown-out brains spattered all over his nice shiny blade. The Sûreté wittered about tracking the killer's client but didn't put in any work on the case.
Justice had been served.
The Persian left the two new Angels alone together, though both assumed Erik was listening.
Sophy did not look like an assassin, which was among the reasons why she was a very good one. She had thick, dark hair and a way of arranging herself side-on to present a slender target. She could turn up an inner light that made her a centre of attraction in any room, and fade it down to become all but invisible. An enviable knack – to let people see but not notice you. La Marmoset usually had to employ the more tiresome, limited method of wearing a dress and hat which matched the wallpaper.
La Marmoset raised her veil to show her unadorned face. Sophy looked at her, from several angles, and nodded.
'Nice,' she said, 'but it isn't you.'
La Marmoset knew what the other woman meant and wasn't offended.
The matter of Mr Calhoun was raised.
'Your husband, you…?' The Greek woman made a twisting gesture with her hands and a
kkkrrkkk sound at the back of her throat.
Knowing she needed Sophy's trust, La Marmoset gave a single nod.
'Good,' said Sophy. 'Me also. He was no husband, my Harry Latimer, but… you know how such things happen.'
La Marmoset did.
'Your Mr Calhoun – justice was served?'
La Marmoset thought about it.
What had separated her from a policeman or an examining magistrate was that justice and law were beside the point. As a detective, she was interested in truth alone. What was done with truth was up to others. It had not been her decision to prosecute Frederick Hohner only for the crime which could easily be proven against him.
With Mr Calhoun, that was changing. She had tried and convicted and carried out the sentence herself.
'A court might not think it, but… yes. Justice was served.'
'Good. With Kemp and Latimer, also. We are friends now.'
The women embraced.
Both had crossed lines, from victim to avenger, from detective to (she admitted) murderess. Sophy had become more herself – indeed, only herself – after being taken for granted by men who presumed on her. They hadn't noticed Sophy in the corner as they argued about arrangements concerning her without consulting her. Even Paul Kratides didn't think to ask his sister whether their money was more important to her than his life. How surprised had Latimer and Kemp been to wake up with knives twisting in their bellies? Did they even realise who was ending their wicked lives?
With less clear-cut right on her side in the matter of Mr Calhoun, La Marmoset had become no one… though she saw her friend, in tiny moments of inaction, envied her fluid identity, her ability to take off one mask and put on another. For Sophy, there was too little joy in justice. The Opera Ghost Agency, which at least required her to do things other than kill people, was drawing her out of the numbed shock she still felt at her brother's murder.
La Marmoset and Sophy had worked together on complicated matters and, at the conclusion of every case, agreed.
Justice was still served.
Sometimes, it was down to Sophy to serve it. La Marmoset had never seen anyone better with a pistol or knife. Or at the tidying-up after.