ACT THREE: GUIGNOL
'My torments, all of those I have felt on the scene of Grand-Guignol, Chinese tortures, as complicated as they were treacherous, stood out, in a way, from a secret vocation with which I was morbidly fascinated since my tender childhood. An artist, a creator of a special genre, whose role is not to evaluate the succes, it seems to me like I cannot embody any other character but the one of a bloody victim from all the tragedies of human passion.'
-Guignol Actress, The Princess of Horror, 1897.
I
If not for the masked juggler, one might miss Impasse Chaplet. In such a gaudy district, it would be easy to walk past the ill-lit cul-de-sac, even with footprints stencilled on the pavement. Once, the red trail was enough to lead those 'in the know' to the Théâtre des Horreurs. Now, a less exclusive audience required more obvious signposts.
When lone tourists wandered into this quartier, basking crocodiles slid off mudbanks to slither after them, smiling with too many teeth. Kate Reed knew better than to stroll along Rue Saint-Vincent after dark, peering through her thick spectacles at grimy signs obscured by layers of pasted-up advertising posters. Holding a Baedeker's Guide open was like asking for directions to the city morgue in schoolgirl French.
She walked briskly, as if she knew exactly where she was going – a habit learned as a crime reporter. Montmartre struck her as less vile than the Monto in Dublin or Whitechapel in London. Les Apaches had a swaggering, romantic streak. It was put about that the crooks of Paris tipped chapeaux and kissed hands when robbing or assaulting you, seldom stooping to the mean, superfluous twist of the blade or kick in the ribs you could expect from an Irish lout or an English ruffian…
…though, of course, she was here because of a string of unromantic disappearances and ungallant murders. The 'superfluity of horrors' promised by the playbills was spilling off the stage into the streets. On the map, red 'last seen in the vicinity of' and 'partial remains found' dots clustered suspiciously around Impasse Chaplet. The Sûreté shrugged at a slight rise in unsolved cases, so a local tradesmen's association – which, at a guess, meant an organised criminal enterprise ticked off by poaching on their preserve – placed the matter in the hands of the Opera Ghost Agency.
Looking around for suspicious characters, she was spoiled for choice.
Strumpets and beggars importuned from doorways and windows. Barkers and panderers even stuck their heads out of gutter-grates, talking up attractions below street level. Here were cafés and cabarets, bistros and brothels, poets and painters, cutpurses and courtesans. Drinking, dining, dancing and damnation available in cosy nooks and on the pavement. Competing musicians raised a racket. Vices for all tastes were on offer, and could be had more cheaply if the mademoiselle would only step into this darkened side-street…
Montmartre, 'mountain of the martyr', was named after a murder victim. In 250 AD, Saint Denis, Bishop of Paris, was decapitated by Druids. He picked up his head and climbed the hill, preaching a sermon all the way, converting many heathens before laying down dead. Local churches and shrines sported images of sacred severed heads as if in gruesome competition with the Théâtre des Horreurs.
A troupe of nuns sang a psalm, while a superior sister fulminated against sin. As Kate got closer, she saw the nuns' habits were abbreviated to display legs more suited to the can-can than kneeling in penitence. Their order required fishnet stockings and patent leather boots. The sermon was illustrated with lashes from a riding crop – a chastisement eagerly sought by gentlemen for whom the punishment was more delightful than the sin.
A solemn gorilla turned the hand-crank of a barrel organ. A monkey in a sailor suit performed a jerky hornpipe. The ape-man's chest-board proffered an art nouveau invitation to the Théâtre des Horreurs. His partner – face shaved and powdered so that at first you might take it for a human child – wasn't happy. The monkey's arms were folded like a jolly tar's, sewn together at the elbows and wrists. The stitches were fresh. Tiny spots of blood fell. The creature's tail was docked too. It wasn't dancing, but throwing a screaming fit to music.
A busker who so mistreated a dumb animal in London would be frogmarched by an angry crowd to a police station, though he could do worse to a real child and have it taken all in good fun.
She slipped a small blade out of her cuff – she had come prepared for this expedition – and surreptitiously sawed through the string which tethered the monkey to a colonne Morris. The creature shot off between the legs of the crowd, ripping its arms free, shedding clothes. The ape-man gave chase, clumsy in his baggy costume, and tripped over a carefully extended parasol.
Kate looked up from the parasol to its owner, who wore a kimono decorated with golden butterflies and a headdress dripping with flowers. Her sister Angel of Music had abetted her intervention. They weren't supposed to acknowledge each other in the field, but exchanged a tiny nod. As ever, Yuki presented a pretty, stone face. Kate would not have suspected softness in the woman, but remembered monkeys were worshipped in Japan.
As Yuki walked on, Kate instinctively looked for her other shadow – and saw Clara frowning disapproval from across the road. The third Angel was strange, even by the standards of the English. Yuki's background was outside Kate's experience or imagining, but she was easier to warm to than Mrs Clara Watson. The beautiful widow might be the worst person in this affair, yet she was also in the employ of an agency devoted – in a manner Kate had yet to determine – to the cause of justice.
Kate and Clara both had red hair. She guessed her colleague was seldom bothered by lads cat-calling 'carrot-top' or 'match-head' at her. Kate kept her ginger mop short and tidied away under caps and bands. Clara let her luxurious, flaming mane fall loose. Kate had the plague of freckles which often came with her colouring. Clara's skin was milk with rose highlights, flawless as the powder mask Yuki wore on formal occasions. Six inches taller than her sister Angels, Mrs Watson gave the impression of looking down on them from a far greater height.
Still, they were required to perform as a trio. In the circumstances, Kate could put up with the worrying wench. One did not become an Angel of Music unless one had a past… usually an immediate past fraught with scandal, peril and narrow escape. They had all quit countries where they were settled and fetched up in Paris. Clara, an Englishwoman who'd never set foot in England, was long resident in China, but had fallen foul of some mad mandarin and the colonial authorities. Her field of interest was prison reform … not in alleviating the sufferings of unfortunate convicts, but in heightening and aestheticising their torments. Yuki had come from her native Japan, where there was a price on her head. Of her crimes, she merely said she had 'settled some family debts'. Kate was on the wrong side of the financier Henry Wilcox. She had written in the Pall Mall Gazette about his penchant for purchasing children as 'maiden tributes of modern Babylon'. He was no longer welcome in his clubs – justice of a sort, though she'd rather he serve a long sentence in a jail designed by Clara Watson. Wilcox's writ-serving lawyers and hired bully-boys made London unhealthy for her this season.
Before quitting London, Kate secured a letter of introduction from the Ruling Cabal of the Diogenes Club to the Director of the Opera Ghost Agency. What the Club was for Britain, the Agency was to France: an institution, itself mysterious, dedicated to mysteries beyond the remit (or abilities) of conventional police and intelligence services. Status as a (temporary) Angel of Music afforded a degree of protection. She was grateful to be in the employ of an individual more terrifying than any colossus of capital. Those who'd happily see impertinent females skinned alive, beheaded by a Lord High Executioner or bankrupted by a libel suit thought twice about crossing Monsieur Erik.
Yuki casually tapped the pavement with her parasol – a fetish object she clung to after nightfall, though a stout British brolly would be more practical in this drizzle-prone city – and drew Kate's attention to the red paint footprints. The gorilla was the first living signpost on the route to the Théâtre des Horreurs. The prints – spaced to suggest a wounded, staggering man – led to the juggler, who kept apple-size skulls in the air.
The shill wore a papier-mâché mask. She had seen the face often the past few days – on posters, in the illustrated press, on children scampering in the parks, on imitators begging for a sou in the streets.
Guignol.
All Paris, it seemed, talked of the capering mountebank. Mention was made of his padded paunch, his camel's hump, his gross red nose, his too-wide grin, his terrible teeth, his rouged cheeks, his white gloves with long sharp nails bursting the fingertip seams, his red-and-white striped tights, his jerkin embroidered with skulls and snakes and bats, his shock of white hair, his curly-toed boots, his quick mind, his cruel quips, his shrill songs…
Kate understood Guignol to be the French equivalent of Mr Punch. Both were based on Pulcinella, the sly brute of Neapolitan commedia dell'arte, changed in translation. This incarnation should not be mistaken for any of his like-named or similar-looking ancestors. This Guignol was new-minted, essentially a fresh creation, a sensation of the day.
The juggler was not the real Guignol – if there even was a 'real' Guignol. He was skilled, though, keeping five skulls in the air.
He stood aside, not dropping a skull, to let Kate into Impasse Chaplet.
The racket of Rue Saint-Vincent dimmed in the cobblestoned alley. She heard dripping water and her own footsteps. What she first took for low-lying mist was smoke, generated by a theatrical device.
At the end of the cul-de-sac was a drab three-storey frontage. It could have been an abandoned warehouse, though gas-jets burned over the ill-fitting doors and firelight flickered inside.
Originally, the building was a convent school. The mob who attacked it in 1791, during the anti-clerical excesses of the Reign of Terror, were sobered to find nuns and pupils freshly dead amid spilled glasses of poison. The headmistress, intent on sparing them the guillotine, had ordered arsenic added to their morning milk. Since then, the address had been a smithy, a coiners' den, a lecture-hall and a sculptor's studio. Doubtless, the management of the Théâtre des Horreurs exaggerated, but the site's history was said to be steeped in blood: a duel between rival blacksmiths fought with sledgehammers; a police raid that left many innocents dead; a series of public vivisections ended by the assassination of an unpopular animal anatomist whose lights were drawn out on his own table; and three models strangled by a demented artist's assistant, then preserved in wax for unutterable purposes.
A dozen years ago, the impresario Jacques Hulot bought the place cheaply and converted it into a theatre at great expense. The bill offered clowns, comic songs and actors in purportedly amusing animal costumes. Patrons found it hard to laugh within walls stained with horrors. After a loss-making final performance, Monsieur Hulot slapped on white make-up and hanged himself in the empty auditorium. Cruel wags commented that if he had taken this last pratfall in front of paying customers, the fortunes of his company might have been reversed. The showman's adage is that the public will always turn out for what they want to see – a lesson not lost on the heirs of Monsieur Hulot, who transformed the Théâtre des Plaisantins into the Théâtre des Horreurs. A space unsuited to laughter would echo with screams.
Kate was not alone in the alley. Yuki had strolled past the juggler, but doubled back as if seized by idle curiosity. She joined a press of patrons who needed no bloody footprints to mark the way. Kate noticed their pale, dry-mouthed, excited air. These must be habitués. Clara should be along shortly. Kate let others surge ahead, towards doors which creaked open, apparently of their own accord.
A crone in a booth doled out blue billets. Admission to this back-street dive was as costly as a ticket for the Opéra. Freshly painted-over figures on an otherwise faded board indicated the price had risen several times as the craze took fire. Erik, a partisan of the higher arts, might bristle at such impertinent competition. Another reason the Opera Ghost Agency had taken an interest in l'affaire Guignol?
Ticket in hand, Kate stepped under a curtain held up by a lithe woman in a black bodystocking and Guignol mask. She joined an oddly solemn procession, down a rickety stairway to an underlit passage. One or two of her fellows – other first-timers, she guessed – made jokes which sounded hollow in this confined space. The smoke-mist pooled over threadbare patches in the carpet. She couldn't distinguish genuine dilapidation from artful effect.
Notices – not well-designed posters, but blunt, official-seeming warnings – were headed ATTENTION: THOSE OF A NERVOUS OR FEMININE DISPOSITION. Kate looked closer. THE MANAGEMENT TAKES NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR MEDICAL CONDITIONS SUSTAINED DURING PERFORMANCES AT THIS THEATRE… INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO FAINTING, NAUSEA, DISCOLORATION OR LOSS OF HAIR, HYSTERICAL BLINDNESS OR DEAFNESS, LOSS OF BOWEL CONTROL, MIGRAINES, CATALEPTIC FITS, BRAIN FEVER AND/OR DEATH BY SHEER FRIGHT AND SHOCK. Every poster promised NIGHTMARES GUARANTEED.
Two women in nurses' uniforms required that everyone sign (in duplicate) a form absolving the management of 'responsibility for distress, discomfort, or medical condition', etc. Uncertain of the document's legality, Kate folded her copy into her programme. Only after the paperwork was taken care of was the audience admitted into the auditorium.
It was about the size of a provincial lecture-hall or meeting-place. The chairs were wooden and unpadded. No one was paying for comfort. Unlike the grand theatres of London and Paris, this playhouse was not illuminated by electric light. The Théâtre des Horreurs was still on the gas. Sculpted saints and angels swarmed around the eaves. A relic of the convent school, the holy company was – after a century of alternating abuse and neglect – broken-winged, noseless, obscenely augmented or crack-faced. The house barely seated 300 patrons, in circle, stalls and curtained boxes.
Kate took her seat in the middle of the stalls, between an elderly fellow who might be a retired clerk and a healthy family of five – a plump burgher, his round wife and three children who were their parents in miniature. After the warnings and waivers, it surprised her that minors were allowed into the performance.
The elderly fellow was obviously highly respectable. He was tutting approval over an editorial in La Vie Française, a conservative Catholic publication, which breathed fire on all traitors to France. Treason was defined as saying out loud or in print that Captain Alfred Dreyfus, currently stuck in a shack on Île du Diable, was not guilty of espionage. To Kate, the oddest thing about the affair was that everyone seemed to know Dreyfus was innocent and that another officer named Esterhazy was the actual traitor. Papers like La Vie, published and edited by the powerful Georges Du Roy, still ruled it an insult to France to question even a manifestly wrong-headed decision of a military court. Dreyfus was a Jew, and the line the Anti-Dreyfusards took on the issue was virulently anti-Semitic. A military doctor pledging to a fund established to benefit the family of Captain Henry, who had committed suicide when it came out that he had patriotically forged evidence against Dreyfus, stated a wish that 'vivisection were practised on Jews rather than harmless rabbits'. Dreyfus, his novelist supporter Émile Zola and caricature rabbis were burned in effigy on street corners by the sorts of patriotic moralists who would denounce the Théâtre des Horreurs as sickening and degrading. The gentleman reader of La Vie Française could evidently summon enthusiasm for both forms of spectacle – unless he had come to lodge a protest against Guignol by throwing acid at the company.
She looked about, discreetly. Yuki was seated in the back row, presumably so her headdress wouldn't obstruct anyone's view of the stage. In England – or, she admitted, Ireland – a Japanese woman in traditional dress would be treated like an escaped wild animal. The French were more tolerant – or less willing to turn away customers. After all, Yuki was plainly not Jewish. Clara had wangled a box. Kate caught the glint of opera-glasses. It was only fair she get the best view: she was the devotee of contes cruels.
A small orchestra played sepulchral music. Refreshments included measures of wine served in black goblets marked poison and sweetmeats in the forms of skulls, eyeballs and creepy-crawlies. Kate bought a sugar cane shaped like a cobra and licked its candied snout. She was used to keeping an itemised list of out-of-pocket expenses. She trusted the Persian, Erik's representative above ground, was less of a fussbudget about petty cash than the editors with whom she was used to dealing.
A lifelong theatregoer, Kate had filed notices on the stuffiest patriotic pageants and the liveliest music-hall turns. She'd been at the opening night of Gilbert and Sullivan's hit The Mikado – which Yuki professed never to have heard of, though everyone asked her about it – and the closing night of Gilbert's disastrous 'serious drama' Brantinghame Hall. She knew Oscar Wilde, though she'd not yet found the heart to seek him out in his exile here in Paris. She'd laughed at the patter of Dan Leno and the songs of Marie Lloyd, stopped her ears to Caruso's high notes and Buffalo Bill's Indian whoops, gasped at the illusions of Maskelyne and fallen asleep during Irving's Macbeth. She'd seen a train arrive in puffs of steam and the Devil disappear in clouds of smoke at the Salon du Cinématographe. She did not expect to be much impressed by a French spook show.
The nurses took up a station at one side of the stage, joined by a tall man in a white coat. He had a stethoscope around his neck. Kate wondered if this 'doctor' ever had to do more than administer smelling salts or loosen tight collars. The warnings and the medical staff were part of the show, putting the audience on edge before the curtain went up. Not immune, she admitted a certain frisson. The smoke-mist was thinner in the auditorium, but her head was fuzzy. Opiates mixed with the glycol might account for 'nightmares guaranteed'.
The music stopped. The house gas-jets hissed out.
In the darkness… a chuckle. A low, slow, rough laugh. It scraped nerves like a torturer's scalpel.
Rushing velvet, as the heavy stage curtains parted. A drum beat began, not in the orchestra pit. With each beat, there was a squelch…
A series of flashes burned across the stage. Limelights flaring. Sulphur wafted into the stalls.
The scene was set: a bare room, whitewashed walls, a table, a boarded-up window.
The beat continued. A drum wasn't being struck.
A middle-aged woman lay face-down. A grotesque imp squatted on her back, pounding her head with a fire-poker. With each blow, her head reddened. Spatters of blood arced across the white wall…
Was this a dummy, or an actress wearing a trick wig?
The imp put his whole weight into his blows, springing up and down, deliberately splashing that wall. Kate even smelled blood – coppery, sharp, foul.
The imp flailed. Blood – or whatever red stain was used – rained on patrons in the first two rows. Kate had wondered why so many kept hats and coats on. A few were shocked, but the
habitués knew what to expect. They exulted in this shower of gore.
Murder accomplished, the imp tossed away the now-bent poker.
The orchestra played a sinister little playroom march. The imp went into a puppet-like caper, as if twitching on invisible strings. He took a bow. Applause.
Guignol, in all his mad glory. Eyes alive in his stiff mask.
'A disagreement with the concierge has been settled,' he squawked.
His harsh fly-buzz voice was produced by the distortion gadget Punch and Judy men called a swazzle. It was rumoured that Guignol, whoever he was behind the mask, had his swazzle surgically installed. When he laughed, it was like Hell clearing its throat.
Already, before the show had really started, Guignol's costume was blood-speckled.
'Welcome, pals, to the Théâtre des Horreurs. We've much to show you. We are an educational attraction, after all. For the world is wild and cruel. If you are alarmed, upset or terrified by what you see, tell yourself it is fakery and sham. If you are bored or jaded, tell yourself it's all real. Many have said they would die for a chance to go on the stage – how heartless would we be not to grant such wishes?'
It was only a mask. If its expression seemed to change, it was down to shadows etched into the face by limelight. But the illusion of life was uncanny.
Guignol was the theatre's third mask, rudely pushing between the Tearful Face of Tragedy and the Laughing Face of Comedy.
The Gloating Face of Horror.
Erik, who spoke with musical perfection from behind a dark mirror, was also masked. Could this whole affair be down to a squabble between false faces? The monsters of Paris contesting the title of King of the Masquerade?
Stage-hands carried off the limp, dripping concierge– who bent in the middle like a real woman, rather than a dummy.
The list of the disappeared contained several women who might have been cast as a concierge. However, it would take a degree of insanity compounded by sheer cheek for a murderer to commit his crimes before paying witnesses. There must be a trick she wasn't seeing.
Now, Guignol sat on the edge of the stage and chatted with the front row, advising patrons on how to get stains out, admiring hats and throats and eyes. He slowly turned his head, an unnerving effect inside his mask, and looked up at Clara Watson's box, blowing her a kiss. He leaped to his feet, did a little graceful pirouette, and flourished a bloody rag in an elaborate bow.
Was the clown on to the Angels? Kate couldn't see how. He was probably just playing up to whoever had bought the most expensive seats in the house.
'Now, heh heh heh, to the meat of the matter… the redmeat.'
Iron latticework cages lowered from the proscenium, each containing a wretched specimen of humanity. The cages were lined with spikes. Chains rattled, groans sounded, blood dripped.
Guignol set the scene with, 'Once upon a time, in the dungeons of Cadiz…'
Tall figures in black robes and steeple-pointed hoods dragged in a young man, stripped to the waist and glistening, and a fair-haired girl, in a bright white shift…By now, Kate understood the Théâtre des Horreurs well enough. Whenever she saw white on stage it would soon be stained red.
'There was a plot, once,' Guignol continued. 'A wealthy young orphan, a devoted lover, a cruel uncle who held high office, a false accusation, a fortune for the coffers of the church if a confession could be extracted. Scenes dramatised all this. Lots of chitter-chatter. But we have learned it is wasteful of our energies to go into that. Really, what do you care whether an innocent's gold coins be diverted to dry sticks of priests? The preamble is stripped away here, for we understand you want to reach this scene, this climax, as soon as possible. And so our piece begins with its climax, and then…
The youth and the girl were clamped into cages and hauled aloft. The girl uttered piteous cries. The youth showed manly defiance. A canvas sheet was unrolled beneath the hanging cages.
Braziers of burning coals were wheeled on stage. A burly, shaven-headed brute in a long apron entered. An eye-patch didn't completely cover the ridged scarring which took up a third of his face. Shouts of 'Morpho bravo' rose from all corners of the house. A popular figure, evidently. Morpho grinned to accept applause. He unrolled an oilskin bundle on the table, proudly displaying an array of sharp, hooked, twisted, tapered implements. Picking up Guignol's cast-off poker, he straightened it with a twist – exciting more cries of approval – then thrust it into a handy fire.
'Which to torture first?' Guignol asked the audience. 'Don Bartolome or Fair Isabella?'
'Maim the whore,' shouted someone from the circle. 'Maim all whores!'
'No, open up the lad, the beautiful lad,' responded a refined female voice – not Clara, but someone of similar tastes. 'Let us see his beautiful insides.'
'What the hell, do the both of 'em!'
This audience participation was like a Punch and Judy show, only with adult voices. The caged actors looked uncomfortable and alarmed. No stretch, that. According to the programme, the roles of Isabella and Don Bartolome were taken by performers called Berma and Phroso. Few in the company cared to give their full names.
Morpho took out his now red-hot poker and applied the tip to the callused foot of one of the background victims, who yelped. Claqueurs mocked him with mimicked, exaggerated howls of sympathy pain.
No one on stage in the Théâtre des Horreurs could frighten Kate as much as their audience.
'You, Madame,' said Guignol – tiny bright human eyes fixing on her from deep in his mask – 'of the brick-red hair and thick shiny spectacles… which is your preference?'
Kate froze, and said nothing.
'Bartolome, Isabella, the both… neither?'
She nodded, almost involuntarily.
'A humanitarian, ladies and gentlemen. A rare species in this quarter. Madame… no, mademoiselle… you are too tender-hearted to wish tortures cruel on these innocents, yes? Would you care to offer yourself as substitute? Your own pretty flesh for theirs? We have cages to fit all sizes of songbird. Morpho could make of you a fine canary. You would sing so sweetly at the touch of his hot hot iron and sharp sharp blades. Does that not appeal?'
Kate blushed. Her face felt as if it were burning already. The elderly gent beside her breathed heavily. He looked sidewise at her as if she were a Sunday joint fresh from the oven. His pale, long-fingered hands twitched in his lap. Kate wished she could change places so as not to be next to him. She looked to the plump family on her other side – Morpho supporters, to the smallest, roundest child – and was perturbed by their serene happiness.
'So, mademoiselle, would you care to join our merry parade?'
Kate shrank, shaking her head. Morpho frowned exaggeratedly, sticking out his lower lip like a thwarted child.
'I thought not,' snapped Guignol. 'There are limits to humanitarianism, even for the best of us.'
Guignol stood between the hanging lovers, hands out as if he were a living scales.
'Confession is required from Isabella, before she can be burned as a witch and her properties seized by the church,' he explained. 'I think the most ingenious means of eliciting such a statement will be… to push in her beloved's eyes with hot sticks!'
Morpho jabbed his poker up into Don Bartolome's cage… twice.
The stink of sizzling flesh stung Kate's nose. The young man's cries set off screams from Isabella and quite a few members of the audience.
Red, smoking holes were burned in the young man's face.
…or seemed to be. It must be a trick.
Isabella sobbed and collapsed in her cage, then rent her hair and shift in shrill agony. She was too horror-struck to sign a confession – a flaw in the wicked uncle's plan. Though, as Guignol had said, the audience didn't really care.
They were all just here for the horror.
Morpho considered a medium-size set of tongs, then shook his head and selected the largest pincers. Cheers and hoots rose from his partisans.
Kate couldn't look away but didn't want to watch. She took her glasses off, and the spectacle became a merciful blur… but she could still hear what was happening.
Putting her glasses back on, her vision came into focus just as a long string of entrails and organs tumbled out of Don Bartolome's opened belly, then dripped and dribbled and dangled…
Just sausages in sauce, she told herself. The Théâtre des Horreurs bought pigs' blood and horses' offal in bulk from the local slaughterhouses.
And so it went on. The scene changed, and other 'plays' were presented. Simple situations which allowed for atrocities. In a gloss on Edgar Allan Poe's 'The System of Dr Tarr and Professor Fether', Morpho returned as a maniac who takes charge of a madhouse and trephines his own head-doctor. Isabella and Don Bartolome were done with, but Berma and Phroso came back with other names to be violated and abused all over again: as harem captives of a cruel Eastern potentate; passengers sharing a lifeboat with hungry sailors, drawing lots as to who would be eaten when the rations ran out; a brother and sister sewn together by gypsies who needed a new star attraction for their failing freak show. Kate fancied that Berma, though luminous in suffering, was a little bored with it all, but handsome, wild-eyed Phroso was eager for each new indignity. He all but begged for the knife, the flail and the cudgel.
Early in the evening, Morpho did the heavy lifting, but his energies flagged as Guignol became more animated, more active. The maestro personally wrestled a bear, throttled a baby, killed the King of Poland…
Saint Denis interrupted the proceedings, his disembodied head preaching against the immoral spectacle. Guignol snatched the head and booted it into the wings, blowing a spectacular, swazzle-assisted raspberry. What was it about Paris and severed heads? From Saint Denis to Dr Guillotine, the city had decapitation on the brain.
The saint's headless body blundered comically and was hauled off by a music-hall hook. Since the usual neck-yank was out of the question, the hook had to snag him by the midriff.
Kate checked her programme. No interval was promised.
Kate got her fill of horrors. The elderly gent in the next seat kept his eyes on the stage, but – under cover of his folded Vie Française– let his hand wander to her knee. She touched the back of his hand with the point of her tiny blade, prompting a swift withdrawal. The roué didn't take rejection in bad humour. He licked a blood trickle – a darker shade than the stuff spilled on stage – from the shallow cut. He was lucky not to have been seated next to Yuki. She'd have cut off his hand and dropped it in his lap.
The last act was more like conventional drama than the succession of gory spectacles which made up the bulk of the evening's entertainment. Someone must actually have written it.
Members of the company posed as statues vives, on display in a waxworks. Guignol acted as guide, recounting crimes which earned respectable-seeming gentlemen and ladies sobriquets like Ripper, Razor, Poison Marie, Black Widow or Werewolf. This scene transformed as the figure of murderer and corpse-molester Bertrand Caillet came to life and crept into a graveyard to clutch the throat of a lingering mourner.
In a change of pace, Caillet was played by Phroso, given the chance to slaughter instead of being slaughtered. Memory of the actor's earlier sufferings lingered, making his monster pathetic if not sympathetic. The date was 1871. The arrest and trial of the madman was black farce, carried on during the fall of the Paris Commune. So many committees and sub-committees were in session, debating the aims and achievements of the Commune and its increasingly desperate defence, that no official courtroom could be found. Caillet's case was heard in a disused horse-butcher's shop. Witnesses, lawyers, policemen and victims' relatives were called or dragged to the barricades as the Army of Versailles retook the city. Offstage fusillades rattled those giving testimony. Caillet's confession was interrupted as pitched battle spilled into the makeshift courtroom, leaving the shop floor splashed with human blood. The skirmish done, Caillet resumed a stuttering account of his crimes and compulsions.
Guignol cavorted and chortled through la Semaine Sanglante, the bloodiest week in the bloody history of Paris. Caillet's homicidal mania was a trifle amongst greater, more cynical horrors. Most of his 'victims' were dead when he got to them. He strangled two or three, but found the results unsatisfactory. Fresh-killed was too dry for his tastes. To prick his amatory interest, a corpse had to have the sheen of rot. Meanwhile, one hundred hostages, including priests and nuns, were executed on the orders of the Committee of Public Safety. In reprisal, the victorious army murdered thirty thousand – the innocent, the guilty, the uninvolved, anyone who was passing.
To Kate, it seemed every one of the deaths was enacted on the tiny stage. Berma appeared as the Spirit of Liberty, tricolour sash barely wound across half her torso, and was shot down. She danced at half-speed to the drum-rattle of rifle discharges. Ribbons of thin, scarlet stage blood splashed around. The orchestra played 'La Marseillaise' out of tune. The prima diva of horror – who had been earlier tortured, violated, shocked, throttled, mutilated, dismembered, disfigured and degraded – received wild applause for her last death scene of the evening. Even Morpho's claque joined in. Funeral garlands were thrown on the stage. Without breaking character, Berma died under a pile of black and red flowers.
This piece was closer to home than mediaeval dungeons or exotic locales of Guignol's other horror tableaux. 1871 was within the memory of much of this audience. They'd lived through the Commune, lost friends and relatives, suffered wounds. In all likelihood, some of the moneyed, middle-aged folk up in the circle had taken part in the slaughter. A pack of bourgeois women had poked a dead Communard general's brains with their umbrellas, while regular army officers arranged the efficient execution of whole districts.
As the barricades fell, the bickering Committee of Enquiry into the lunacy of Bertrand Caillet remained in session. Proceedings were disrupted by fist-fights, a duel, assassination and the purge. Through an error of transcription, a Monsieur Dupond was thrown before a firing squad convened for a Monsieur Dupont. Enfin, the senior judge – who'd absent-mindedly signed the death warrant of the Archbishop of Paris while listening to Caillet's confession – proclaimed himself insane in a vain attempt to evade his own executioners. When Guignol took the judge's head, no one was left to rule in the case of the sad, forgotten prisoner. A venal turnkey (Morpho) let Caillet go free.
The dazed maniac was drawn by his lusts to his old stamping grounds. Caillet arrived at Père Lachaise Cemetery as the last of the Commune's National Guard were put against its wall and shot. No one paid the amateur of murder any attention, except a guard dog which bit him as he was rooting in a grave for a sufficiently putrid corpse. The ragged ghoul succumbed to this festering, untreated wound and joined the pile of corpses.
At last, Guignol – who played the guard dog himself – was making a point; albeit while dancing in entrails and tearing the eyes out of dwarves, nuns and a disapproving censor. If Bertrand Caillet was a monster on the strength of his crimes, what was to be said of the politicians and generals who could have a hundred people – a thousand, thirty thousand, a million, ten million! – eradicated at the stroke of a pen? The tableau vivant returned, but poisoners, stabbers and stranglers were replaced by politicians, judges, officers, priests and newspaper editors. Their hands were red with stage blood.
The human waxworks went unnamed, but Kate recognised many. The Minister Eugène Mortain, famous for surviving corruption scandals and maintaining a dozen mistresses at the public expense; the examining magistrate Charles Pradier, who vowed to restock Île du Diable with journalists who argued the innocence of Dreyfus or the guilt of Esterhazy; General Assolant, recalled from Algeria after a run of harsh police actions and put in charge of the Paris garrison to maintain public order; Père de Kern, confessor to government and society figures, and reputedly the most depraved man in France, though always humble in public; and Georges Du Roy, publisher of La Vie Française, L'Anti-Juif and the children's story paper Arizona Jim.
Solemnly, Guignol passed amongst the wax monsters, awarding each a rosette and ribbon, inducting these worthies into the Légion d'Horreur!
Kate hadn't expected the detour into political agitation, if indeed this was that. How was Guignol getting away with it? Newspaper offices were burned to the ground and journalists submitted to the system of Dr Tarr and Professor Fether for less. For an institution eager to make powerful enemies, the Théâtre des Horreurs was surprisingly un-persecuted.
Even before the attack on the people best placed to have the place shut down, the programme seemed calculated to offend everyone– Catholics (especially Jesuits), Protestants (especially Freemasons), Jews (no surprises there), atheists and free-thinkers, conservatives, moderates, radicals, anyone not French enough, anyone not French at all, the medical profession, the police, the law, criminals, cannibals, the military, colonialists, anti-colonialists, the halt and lame, circus folk, animal lovers, people who lived through the Paris Commune, the friends and relatives of people who failed to live through the Paris Commune, women of all classes, drama critics.
In a city where a poetry recital or a symphony concert could set off a riot, this house was tolerated so completely that she sensed an invisible shield of protection. Was the Théâtre des Horreurs so profitable it could afford to bribe everyone? Including the Paris mob, who were notoriously easier to stir up than buy off.
In parting, Guignol sang a song whose last refrain was – loosely translated – 'If these shadows have offended, you can all go stuff yourselves!'
The curtain came down. Thunderous applause.
'I didn't like it at the end, Papa,' said one of the fat round children. 'When it made my head hurt from thinking.'
The fat round father fondly cuffed the lad around the ear.
'There, that'll take the ache away.'
Guignol poked his head out of the curtain to take a last bow.
After some minutes of capering and farewell, Guignol departed and the house lights came up.
The Show Let out after eleven o'clock. Kate kept her head down and made for the Sortie.
To escape the theatre, she had to run a gauntlet of minions in Guignol masks hawking souvenirs: Toby jugs with Guignol features; phials of authentic Théâtre des Horreurs blood; postcards of the stars in sealed packets so you didn't know what you were getting (how many leering Morphos did a collector have to buy to secure that elusive bare-breasted Berma?); tin swazzles seemingly designed to drive parents to acts of infanticide suitable for dramatising next season; and enamel pins with Guignol faces or bloody pulled-out eyes.
Succumbing, she purchased a profusely illustrated pamphlet featuring photographed scenes, with diagrams showing how effects were done. It might come in handy in the investigation. She was convinced a connection existed between the crimes in the streets and the crimes on the stage. It was as if the real horrors extended the argument of the Ballade de Bertrand Caillet. Doubtless, victims didn't care much whether they were killed to make a philosophical point or just plain ordinarily murdered.
Leaving by a side door, she saw a cluster of devotees around the artists' entrance. Some wore amateur horror make-up as if hoping to audition: dangling eyeballs, running sores, vampire fangs. A mec in a short-sleeved sailor shirt showed off a raw tattoo of Guignol's grin. Others wore cheap masks and competed – despite their lack of swazzle – to imitate Guignol's voice. A tipsy toff in evening dress struggled with a huge bouquet of black roses. Kate suspected Stage Door Jeannot was an admirer of the much-abused Berma. He looked more like the recipient than the disher-out of consensual floggings.
Back on Rue Saint-Vincent, she clocked Yuki's headdress bobbing in the distance. She paused a moment to consider her options. They were supposed to make their separate ways back to the pied-à-terre the Persian had rented for the purposes of the investigation. Kate had memorised a few routes.
Ideally, she'd have liked a stroll by the Seine to clear her head.
The Théâtre des Horreurs was overwhelming. An evening with the smell of offal, that funny smoke and packed-in patrons would make anyone light-headed, even without the parade of tortures.
She passed gay cafés and cabarets, but horrors had soured her outlook. Her glasses weren't rose-coloured, but blood-smeared. Music and laughter sounded shrill and cruel. Pretty faces seemed cracked and duplicitous.
Guignol peeped from posters. She thought she saw him in the crowd. It wasn't unlikely. Many cardboard masks were sold in Impasse Chaplet.
She took precautions against being followed, as much for practice as genuine caution. In the front door of a restaurant and out through the kitchens – even a glimpse was enough to dissuade her from going back for a meal – and a quick change on the hoof. She reversed her distinctive check jacket to show anonymous green.
She found a table in the corner of a busy courtyard and ordered anisette.
No one tried to pick her up, which was obscurely depressing. If she could sit by herself in a French café and not be bothered, she must be a fright indeed.
She was thirty-two. No age at all… though her soonest-married school friends had nearly grown-up daughters and sons. As an unmarried, 'unconventional' woman, she was accustomed to importunage on a daily basis – in England, let alone Paris. Being Kate Reed was like being a coconut in a shy. Every other chap thought it worth a throw. If the shot went wide, no harm done, old girl. The 'respectable' gents were bad enough – the husbands of her school friends, or even their fathers – but the men who made her skin crawl were the firebrand stalwarts of causes she supported – Irish home rule or women's suffrage – who felt she owed them a tumble because they said the right things on platforms. From now on, she would recommend that these pouncing comrades take a run at Clara Watson, connoisseur of exquisite tortures.
An accordion played. The performer was the image of a music hall Frenchman, down to the beret and waxed moustache – though he'd left his string of onions at home. He was wringing out the 'Valse des Rayons' from Offenbach's Le Papillon. Space in the courtyard was cleared for a couple to enact the famous apache dance. A slouch-hatted, stripy-shirted rough slung his long-legged partner about in a simulation of violent love-making, in time to repetitive, sinuous music. The fille alternately resisted the crude advances of her garçon and abased herself in front of him. Throughout, a lit cigarette dangled from the corner of the man's mouth. He puffed smoke rings between cruel kisses. Even dances in Montmartre involved punches, slaps, knees to the groin and neck-breaking holds. The girl pulled a stiletto from her garter, but the mec snatched it away and tossed it at a wall. It embedded in a poster of Guignol.
Kate sipped her anisette, which stung her nose and eyes as well as her tongue. It was but a step from this anise-flavoured, watered cordial to absinthe. Which led, popularly, to syphilis, consumption and death.
The dancers finished, and were clapped. They collected coins. Kate gave the girl a sou and hoped the bruises under her powder were from overenthusiastic rehearsal.
The point of Guignol's Caillet play was that horror was unconfined. Not limited to one madman, not on one small stage. It was all about, all-pervasive, in the statues of Saint Denis toting his raggedly severed head and the ritualised domestic abuse of the apache dance. The Reign of Terror and the Commune were done, but Guignol's Chevalier de la Légion d'Horreur were ensconced in positions of power. Georges Du Roy could throw honest ministers to les loups but maintain Eugène Mortain in office. Riots erupted whenever the Dreyfus case was argued. War with Germany was inevitable one week, then alliance with Germany against Great Britain was equally inevitable the week after. Père de Kern was appointed Inspector of Orphanages. Horrible whispers spread about his night-time surprise visits to his little charges, though even Zola didn't dare accuse him in print. A military coup which would have installed General Assolant as a new Napoléon had recently collapsed at the last minute. Kate liked to think herself a reasonable person, but she was working for a faceless creature who supposedly dropped a chandelier on an opera audience because he didn't like the casting of Marguerite in
Faust.
Was it all in fun?
The horrors were certainly not confined to Paris. The British Mr Punch, Guignol's cousin, knocked his Judy about as much as any apache panderer did his tart… and killed policemen, judges and crocodiles. In the East End, Kate spent too much time with women nursing black eyes after trying to stop their old men blowing the rent money going on beer to find Punch and Judy shows very amusing. At least, the apachette fought back.
She looked about the courtyard. People were having a good time, even if their pockets were being picked. Despite the horrors, life went on, mostly merrily. Dance done, the performers were drinking together, the girl flirting with her partner and the musician. Kate's jangled nerves calmed, and she tried to shrug it all off.
The stiletto had been reclaimed from the wall. A tear-like triangular divot showed brick under Guignol's eye.
Kate thought about the eyes of Guignol, the living eyes in the papier-mâché face. She thought she'd know those eyes again. But would she, really? Guignol was in disguise when he took his mask off. He might be anyone.
The programme and pamphlet were no help. There were notes about Berma, Phroso, Morpho (a veteran disfigured by Riffs, apparently) and others. Even Dr Orloff, the resident physician, had a write-up. Guignol's biography was of the character not the performer. Guignol was himself, not who he had been… Jean-François Someone or Félix-Frédéric Whoever. Under Berma's photograph was a paragraph about her early life and career. She'd played in other companies, rising from Cleopatra's asp-delivering handmaiden to Juliet and Desdemona, before her engagement at the Théâtre des Horreurs. Under Guignol's picture was a list of crimes. Credited as writer and producer of the show as well as its proprietary spirit, he had sprung from nowhere to take over the remains of the late Monsieur Hulot's company.
The craze burned throughout Paris, exciting much commentary. W.B. Yeats, Gustav von Aschenbach and Odilon Redon hailed Guignol as a genius, though Kate would have laid money they wouldn't have him round for dinner. Paul Verlaine and André Gide lampooned Guignol as a fraud, though the inconsistent Gide also said he loved the imp like a brother. Léo Taxil had boosted the Mad Mountebank of the Théâtre des Horreurs in his periodical La France Chrétienne Anti-Maçonnique, then claimed to have invented Guignol… only to discover his creation had 'escaped into the wild'.
She was no wiser about the masked man.
Thinking about Guignol made her jittery. It was too easy to imagine that face – those eyes– looking at her from a dark corner or between a press of people. Kate still felt he, or someone wearing his face, was nearby… and could lay a hand on her at any moment.
Was that why she wasn't being preyed on? A greater predator had marked her as his own.
She poured the last of the water into the last of the anisette
and drank up. Then she left, hurrying towards the rendezvous of the Angels.
Was she being followed still? Had she ever?
It was as if Guignol were waiting wherever she turned. In the limelight, up on a stage, his atrocities were often absurd. In spite of herself, she had laughed. In the dark, a step or two off the main street, the clown would not seem funny.
Kate felt a chill up one arm. She looked down and saw the sleeve of her jacket – and the sleeve of her blouse – had three long slits, as if claws of supreme sharpness had brushed her when she was distracted, cleaving cloth but not skin.
She heard the laughter of Guignol, but could not be sure it was in her head.