V
At the end of each evening, the rubbish of the Palais Garnier – champagne bottles, torn programs, scribbled-on scores, broken toy bats – was carried to a yard behind the building. By dawn, a pack of children would have picked through the garbage for saleable or edible scraps. These efficient, meticulous, cunning little creatures could turn a profit from almost anything discarded by the Paris Opéra. Sometimes, little remained to be carted off to the barges which went up and down the river, removing the detritus of the greatest city in the world to foul islands of refuse upwind of fastidious folk who didn't want to know of such places.
The Opéra yard was the sweetest-smelling rubbish tip in Paris, thanks to the heaps of discarded flowers. Many of the corps de ballet simply returned to florists at quarter-price the nightly bouquets sent by their admirers in the Jockey Club. More sentimental girls let tributes adorn their dressing rooms a few days before tossing them away. The children were careful with the flowers. Single uncrushed blooms were prized. They could be sold on the streets as boutonnières– or, if cadet vampires were involved, waved in front of the noses of tourists to distract them while tiny hands lifted watches and purses.
On the morning after the Macbeth ball, the children discovered a man among the flowers. Nothing more could be stolen from him. He was white as marble, naked, smiling. A deep red crescent was cut across his throat.
The children all recognised the dead man…
Around the corner, Simon Buquet was sharing a smoke with Macquart, the old soldier who kept the stage-door. A rag-picker marched up, tugged Buquet's sleeve and offered to sell him some news. It was, she said, very important news. The little perisher's solemn look persuaded him not to cuff her round the ear. He dropped a few coins into her outstretched hand.
'The Great Anatole is dead, m'sieur,' she said. 'Killed by the vampire!'
Knowing the child wouldn't dare make up something like that, Buquet allowed her to lead him to the rubbish yard. Though white as a fish belly, the dead man was who she said he was. Buquet judged that he had bled out, but no blood pooled around him. As one would expect of a vampire's victim. Buquet crossed himself and paid the bearer of bad news again. She ran off with her tribe.
Buquet found a horse blanket to throw over poor Garron.
Officially in charge of a scenery construction gang, Simon Buquet was the house's top bully-boy. A less-refined establishment would call him a chucker-outer or a trouble-stopper. A patron who tossed bottles at an unpopular comedian found an interview with Monsieur Buquet but a brief stop-off en route to an urgent appointment with his dentist. He was kept busy ensuring that the house was relatively free of posh tarts, pickpockets, bogus performers' agents, embittered former employees and the more obvious ticket touts. Vendors of pirated song-sheets, pesterers of ballerinas and troublemakers in the employ of rival houses knew to stay well out of his way. The house was still haunted, but Buquet's crew could do little about that. A wary truce existed between them and the Opera Ghost.
As a young man, Buquet had been chief of La Firme, the rowdiest of claques. His hooligans disrupted many a performance with fireworks, fought running battles with rival factions in the auditorium and the Place de l'Opéra, and were paid handsomely to applaud Carlotta and hiss her rivals. A difference of opinion as to whether the ballet should be given in the first or second act inspired La Firme to such a riot at the premiere of Tannhäuser that Wagner permitted no further Paris productions in his lifetime. Curiously, this commended Buquet to the Management, who were glad of the excuse not to deal with the impossibly demanding German. An invitation was extended and, following the example of crook-turned-thieftaker Vidocq, the master of the mob crossed the lines, transferring allegiance from the stalls to the house.
This was far from the first suspicious death Simon Buquet had come across in the course of his duties.
He summoned Macquart to stand guard and prevent the corpse being hauled off to the barges. Then, he roused a call-boy who was asleep on a coil of rope in the wings and entrusted him with a scribbled note he insisted be given only into the hands of Monsieur Richard or Monsieur Moncharmin.
As an afterthought, he allowed that once the note was delivered, the lad should fetch the police.
The sun rose.
The terrible news spread around the house almost at once. Emotions were loudly expressed. Opera folk vented feelings so broadly that, in comparison, an Italian at a wedding seemed like an Englishman playing poker. Shock, at the loss of a colleague. Amazement, at his sudden fall, in the moment of his greatest triumph. Terror, that no one could now think themselves safe from the vampire.
Weeping and wailing came from the ladies' rehearsal room. Garron had been a favourite with the chorus. His precipitate rise to fame had stirred ambitions in passed-over understudies. What roles might they command if certain divas patronised the restaurant where Giovanni Jones ate that fatal stew!
Enquiries arrived by messenger from baritones – asking with some tact if and when auditions were to be held for the suddenly vacated plum role of Lord Ruthven in Der Vampyr. Deliveries of black flowers came from the Great Anatole's many admirers. Crowds of women in tartan and black gathered in Place de l'Opéra to mourn.
As under the Hôtel Meurice after the death of Count de Rosillon, a frenzy of rats swarmed in the sewers and tunnels beneath the Opéra. Extra catchers were called in but superstitiously refused to work. Rats in a place visited by a vampire were vicious beyond the norm.
Through the fog of hangover, folks struggled to remember the end of the previous evening's festivities. When had they last seen Anatole Garron? Was he dizzy from the success of Macbetto and giddy at the prospect of Ruthven? Or momentarily sober, a bat-wing shadow falling across his face as an omen of doom. At the ball, had he come to blows with croaking, accusing Giovanni Jones?
Everyone agreed that the baritone had joined d'Aubert and Falke, stout comrades of his student days, in impromptu renditions of the songs of his youth. Those who paid attention thought the Great Anatole might have been interested in toasting an immediate future with the slender, calculating Ayda Heidari?
Some whispered Garron left the ball quietly, following a figure dressed like a tartan cousin of Poe's Red Death up a spiral staircase. Others proclaimed the baritone made his grand exit with the irrepressible Countesses, declaring that he would stand them all the drink they could wish for. He had meant champagne, of course – but had some creature or creatures taken him at his word and greedily drained him of blood?
Monsieur Richard and Monsieur Moncharmin were shaken. As soon as the production was announced, queues formed outside the ticket office. Advance bookings for Le Vampire
had been taken this morning. Money might have to be refunded…
The Angels were sanguine about the news. The Persian visited Dressing Room 313 and found them idling.
'I told you the Scottish play was bad luck,' said Unorna.
The seeress often acted as if each fresh misfortune were foretold to her… though, for some reason, she had omitted to mention the horror in advance of its occurrence.
The Persian had the beginnings of a sore head. He had drunk more than a few of those revolting champagne-and-whisky cocktails.
This business with Garron did not help.
'There's a new Number One suspect,' said La Marmoset, who had talked with the gendarme posted to keep sensation-seekers and souvenir-hunters out of the rubbish yard and was thus au Courant with the investigation. 'It is but a short hop from Phantom to Vampire. It's almost as if d'Aubert doesn't want to solve the case.'
'D'Aubert will have no more luck laying his hands on Erik than he did the Grand Vampire,' said the Persian. 'There was a whole world under Paris even before Erik started building his own cities and labyrinths down there. In my country, he was known as the Trickster or the Trapdoor Lover before ever anyone thought to call him a Phantom. Better men than the Inspector have tried and failed to find him.'
'Perhaps,' agreed La Marmoset, 'but it is relatively easy to find you, Monsieur. I suggest you forego your eleven o'clock table at the Café de la Paix.'
The Persian saw the Queen of Detectives' point.
'Are there such things as vampires?' Sophy asked. 'When I was little, my brother frightened me with stories of a vrykolakas that lived in our stairwell. That thing gave me nightmares. It was just an old mop, with a ragged head that looked like wild hair, but I made Paul chop it up and burn it. The bad dreams stopped… for a time.'
'My grandmother talked about djinni and ifrits,' the Persian said. 'I believed only in what I saw or could make or could find out. Now, I know there are strange things all around us… stranger even than men in masks and clockwork brides. But I am certain that Erik is no more a vampire than he is a ghost.'
'Though he does sleep in a coffin,' said Sophy.
'…is seldom seen in daylight,' said Unorna.
'…habitually wears an opera cloak,' said La Marmoset.
'…lives among swarms of sewer rats and other vermin,' said Sophy.
'…does not age,' said Unorna.
'…mesmerises pale young women who grow paler in his company,' said La Marmoset.
'…and his teeth, in a certain gloom, resemble fangs,' admitted the Persian. 'I can see how the police might put these things together.'
At the ball, Dr Falke mentioned a previous Paris vampire scare. Twenty-five years ago – before the Persian or Erik came to the city. The creatures are supposed to live a long time. Had this vampire taken a quarter-century nap and woken up thirsty?
'Yesterday, Garron was so alive, with fine prospects,' said Unorna. 'Now, he is thrown away and used up. He dared to invoke dread powers and this was his reward.'
Had the vampire been at the Opera House last night? That would limit the field to only six or seven thousand suspects – including waiters and attendants. Looking back, it was hard to think of anyone present – including Anatole Garron – who did not act as if they might be a murderer.
'This does not speak well of our professional pride,' said the Persian. 'We were all at the ball, and yet the guest of honour was spirited away and murdered.'
'Feh!' said La Marmoset. 'I am Queen of Detectives, not Queen of Bodyguards.'
She looked at Sophy, who shrugged. The assassin didn't need to say that her field was causing mysterious deaths, not averting them.
'There were vibrations in the aether,' said Unorna, 'but indistinct. What was to happen would not be stopped.'
'Thank you, ladies… that's all most helpful, I don't think.'
'Remember,' said La Marmoset, 'it is none of our business… the Director refused the Grand Vampire's commission. These murders are d'Aubert's to solve, which is as good as saying the vampire has a free pass for the season.'
The Persian had no argument.
A horn honked and a pneumatique popped up in its tube. This was how Erik kept in touch when he retreated to the deepest part of his labyrinth – the house on the shore of an underground lagoon where he maintained a pipe organ whose tones were not helped by all-pervading damp.
In a sad little hut decorated for a funeral was the coffin Sophy mentioned. There Erik slept, because – according to him – 'One must get used to everything in life, even eternity.' The Persian understood the narrow box also helped relieve rheumatic pain. He was perhaps the only person who remembered that the Phantom of the Opera was a sick man. He was strong and supple, but had too little meat on his bones. His skeletal appearance was due to congenital infirmity. Being Erik hurt… not just the soul-pain he poured into 'Don Juan Triumphant', but constant physical aches in his joints, his bones, his muscles. Having not much of a nose, he was susceptible to colds and chills. A doctor would probably advise that he not spend so much time in a basement with an open sewer running through it.
The Persian took the scroll out of the container. The note was curt.
This was a moment without precedent. Erik had reconsidered.
The Persian understood. It wasn't because he was now a suspect… it was because he now took the vampire as a personal affront.
The laundry chute of the Hôtel Meurice was neither here nor there. It was no business of the O.G.A. who used it to dispose of a random wastrel. But to kill the Great Anatole and leave him naked in the shadow of the Paris Opéra – and to stir up a bloodthirsty mischief of rats in the tunnels where the Phantom trod – was an affront which would not be borne. The vampire had dared trespass in Erik's home. It might have been a calculated declaration of war.
'Ladies,' announced the Persian, 'we enter a new profession. We are now vampire hunters.'