Castle Rouge (37 page)

“Nor do you look Romany, as you did this afternoon.” She laughed and quaffed from a metal goblet like Godfrey and I held, only I guessed it held something cold and searing, not hot like our cider.

I sipped, savoring cinnamon and other less-known spices, not sure what to say.

“We wait dinner upon one last guest,” she announced. “Mr. Norton!” Her voice rang out like a challenge. “You will sit at my right hand.”

Godfrey remained very still. I could see him debating obedience.

“And you, Miss Huxleigh, will sit opposite, to the right of the seat at the table’s other end.”

I glanced down at the other empty, high-backed chair, fit for a queen, or a head of household. Who was to occupy it? Not Godfrey. Surely not the dwarf?

I heard the crack of a door in the anterooms, almost felt the slight inrush of chill night air.

“Ah. Our party is complete.” Tatyana stood before her throne, lifted her glass. “He is here at last. My dear…guests, my loyal servants, what can I say? Enter the Tiger.”

We all turned as we had been programmed to do, like supernumeraries in the Lyceum Theater production of
Macbeth
, to welcome the leading man into our midst.

In walked another Englishman in evening dress: sturdy, bald, mustachioed, completely at home among this international circus of characters; a man I had last seen gripped in a death-lock with Quentin Stanhope above the Thames on Hammersmith Bridge. This was the heavy game hunter and spy and mortal enemy to Quentin, Godfrey, Irene and myself, and to Mr. Sherlock Holmes…Colonel Sebastian Moran.

I wondered if Godfrey would consider swooning a sufficient diversion under the circumstances.

30.

Digging Deeper

Decadent literature spread perfumes too dark and heady, its exuberant blood-flowers breathe suffocating air
.

—
FRANTI
EK XAVER
ALDA ON PRAGUE’S HAUNTING
FIN DE SIÈCLE
MYSTIQUE

FROM A JOURNAL

We gathered again that night in our hotel room: Irene and myself, Quentin Stanhope, and Bram Stoker.

We were all garbed in black, as agreed. Irene and I wore the men’s clothing we had donned during one expedition in Paris and that she had resurrected for herself during our visit to the fortune-teller. Bram’s frockcoat did not button quite high enough to obscure his white shirt front, but Irene ringed his neck with a dark muffler to finish the job.

Quentin’s clothing made him into one solid charcoal stroke on a piece of white paper. He affected the same black jersey beneath the jacket that Irene had, as well as a soft, dark cap pulled low, muffler and black leather gloves like a coachman.

He even produced a pot of bootblack in case we should wish to darken our faces, but Irene felt that hats and scarves would be sufficient.

We assembled in that humble hotel room like a slink of burglars, surrounding the table clothed in a map of the streets of Prague that would soon be our stalking ground.

“No police, no Rothschild representatives?” Bram Stoker asked, eyeing our unconventional party a bit nervously.

For all his great size, the writer of lurid tales and theatrical manager preferred a cast of dozens for the battle scenes. He hadn’t realized we were mounting a new production of
Joan of Arc
with the leading lady and her understudy playing half the invading force.

Irene produced her revolver from a pocket. “We are better armed than we look.” Quentin, nodding, allowed the butt-end of a pistol that Buffalo Bill Cody would be proud to flourish to emerge from one pocket.

Naturally Bram Stoker looked to me and my jacket pocket.

Firearms were not in my armament, so instead I hefted Godfrey’s sword-stick from its resting place against the bureau and withdrew enough of the haft to show a grin of bared steel. I felt rather like Jean LaFitte the pirate.

“I am not armed,” Mr. Stoker said regretfully. “I travel with nothing more lethal than a walking staff for the moors and mountains, and have never encountered trouble or troublemakers.”

“Your size alone is a weapon,” Irene said. “And I hope that we won’t need any of our ‘equalizers.’ At this point, I am only looking for a trail, not the ones who made it.”

“Ones,” Quentin pounced. “Then you are not trailing the Ripper. Or do you believe he has partners in crime?”

“I don’t know,” Irene admitted. “I only know that if we can find some pattern here in Prague, we will have half a chance of understanding why Nell and Godfrey are missing.”

Quentin pulled something out of his other pocket…an innocent scrap of paper.

“I’ve noted the locations of the murdered women found recently in the city, at least the ones that are made public. I find it rather interesting that the Whitechapel murders are news the world over but that these Prague killings and the more recent but no less horrific slaughters in Paris remain a well-kept official secret.”

“I’m not surprised,” Irene said. “The London panic taught the authorities discretion. Public furor only made the task of tracking the killer harder. And,” she added, “no sensible government wishes to unleash the anti-Jewish sentiment that always lurks beneath the surface of European civil unrest.”

I put in my professional opinion. “Certainly the repetition of the Goulston Street graffito in Paris would have raised a few international eyebrows, discretion or not. I wonder if you and Godfrey have been used throughout this latest outbreak to obscure the truth, rather than seek it out.”

I had expected to unleash operatic fireworks of denial at my implication that the Rothschild motives might be self-seeking. Instead Irene merely nodded.

“There is always that danger in accepting work from people with power, Pink. Isn’t that true, Quentin?”

“The trick is to be of use in a good cause without being used to advance a bad one,” he agreed. “I take nothing for granted. It is even possible that Godfrey was abducted by the Rothschilds for some larger purpose of their own that he had ceased to serve, especially if his investigations into the Prague murders led in the wrong direction.”

“It is also possible,” Irene added, “that the Paris murders were orchestrated to divert attention from the Whitechapel killings. If so, some faction may be angry that the officials have so successfully kept them out of the public press.”

“Then maybe,” I said quickly, “the public press is exactly where they should be.”

Again Irene surprised me by nodding agreement. “Such a sensational revelation would best be made public in an uninvolved country.”

I admit my heart began beating with a vision of what might very soon be. I had known, and resented, that I was accompanying Irene because she wanted to control me and perhaps to somewhat replace Nell. Now I saw that she might at any moment find it useful for me to wire the whole sordid Paris episode to my newspaper, just to keep the powerful people for whom she sometimes worked from totally obscuring the truth for their own safety.

My initial admiration for her, dampened by recent uncertainties, came roaring back. Like myself, she ultimately served what some might call the public interest. Of course, it was necessary to see somewhat to one’s own interest so as to be properly positioned to rise in defense of the public good at the exactly right time….

“Anyway,” Quentin went on, “I can’t offer the tidy illustrations you…and Nell have marshaled for London and Paris.” He waved a gloved hand over the map of Prague. “Like London and Paris and most great cities of the world, Prague is bisected by a river. Unlike the much larger capitals, Prague is lopsided, with only the smaller Mala Strana and Prague Castle districts sitting across the river from the sprawling districts of the city’s western and southern sections.”

We stared at the areas he indicated, and nodded sagely at the obvious.

“The Whitechapel murders,” Irene said, “were confined to a very small area of a notorious but quite small site within the equally notorious East End of London. In Paris, the murders kept to the right bank, but involved the entire city on that side.”

“Here they do not cross the river either,” Quentin said, “only here the river is not the Seine, but the Vltava. And they have so far been confined to the crowded section in the crook of the river, northeast from the Joseph Quarter in the Old Town to the New Town Hall district, and southwest from the Old New Synagogue to the museum. These streets are dense and old, narrow and dirty, easy to disappear into…and out of.”

“Like Whitechapel,” I said.

“Were any of the bodies moved from the place of death to be displayed elsewhere?” Irene wondered.

“Nobody’s considered that,” Quentin said. “Certainly they were readily found, openly left on the street as in London. Why? Was it different in Paris?”

“Some of the bodies were moved to the Paris Morgue for identification. Although the Whitechapel bodies also swiftly found their way to city morgues, the Paris Morgue is a showplace as well as an official mortuary. So by the very fact of being killed in Paris, the victims were on display, if anonymously. While one body was held back even from that public acknowledgment, another was deliberately brought into a famous Paris wax museum and substituted for a corpse on display.”

“Nervy!” Quentin said, almost admiringly. “But you know, perhaps the Whitechapel bodies were also put on display, just less obviously so. Civil murder isn’t my bailiwick, but weren’t the bodies found quite soon after the killings, in the open, stumbled over, in fact, by the usual Whitechapel residents whose jobs start in the wee hours or go past midnight?”

“Yes,” I said, eager to join the discussion. “Everyone assumed the victims had been dropped in their tracks, but they could have been dragged around a corner into a more public view, at the least. Often a bobby was due to pass by the sites within minutes, or no more than half an hour.”

Bram Stoker spoke again, as our speculation finally touched on his area of expertise. “You’re saying the Ripper always set the scene, whether on Hanbury Street or under the shadow of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, much as a stage direction might call for a body to lie by the footlights at the beginning of an act.”

There was a silence. No one had quite conceived of the Ripper as a stage manager.

“Quentin,” Irene asked, “where were the bodies found here?”

His forefinger danced over five points on the east side of the Vltava: “Here, by the New Town Hall and diagonally opposite at the far northeast corner of the
Staré M
sto
district.”

Irene seized the pen and the ink-stained edge of the cablegram from Mycroft Holmes and drew a line.

“And here,” he went on, “at the Old Town Square, and diagonally down near the museum.”

“And that was the order of the crimes?”

“Yes.” Quentin watched the dark slash of another line intersect the first, forming the telltale “X.”

As he had said earlier, drawing “X”s on maps was arbitrary child’s play. Finding a Chi-Rho at the heart of them was harder.