Castle Rouge (5 page)

“Nell would have been incensed if I’d given you preference. It was bad enough you went to the morgue along with me.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake! This petty rivalry has cost us all a pretty penny. You would be only half so distracted if only one of your…associates were missing.”

“You are saying that I would not take your abduction as seriously as Nell’s?”

“You know that I can take care of myself.”

“Nell may do better than you think.”

“If she is alive.” I had not meant to be brutal, but Irene had pointed out the reality first, after all. Apparently reality was harder to face when it was turned back on one.

“You’re right. We can’t know that,” she said through tight lips. “Yet I cannot help but suspect that Nell was apprehended in much the same manner and for the same purpose that Godfrey was abducted at about the same time on the opposite side of Europe. What that purpose is, I don’t know, but I intend to find out. And since it is a purpose, I am hopeful that their lives, rather than their deaths, are the key to it.”

After that, talk seemed as dangerous as dueling. Mutually silent, we made our way to the huge arena prepared for the Wild West Show.

En route I found myself thinking of Sherlock Holmes again. He already had some repute as a wonder of deduction. Now I wondered where he wandered. In Whitechapel, obviously, returning to the scene of the Ripper crimes with fresh insight into which of dozens of suspects might be the actual killer. Did he track a rogue Red Indian from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show? The great scout and showman had admitted that some of his native warriors had parted company with the cast to remain in London. Long Wolf was the most famous instance, but another man had also jumped ship, so to speak, there.

Irene, to give her credit, had first brought up the possibility that a Red Man, encountering European society and the thousands of women and girls who plied the prostitute’s trade in such great capitals as London and Paris, might succumb to a barbaric slaughtering. It was not so long ago that those of their tribe, or neighboring ones, had raped, burned, and mutilated settlers of the West. What would such a savage soul make of the poor white women who solicited pennies on the streets of Whitechapel in such numbers?

Sherlock Holmes was the quintessential Englishman in my view: superior, opinionated, and desperately in need of showing up. It was rather amusing to watch his vaunted logic dither in the presence of the beauteous and bright Irene. He had even admitted within my hearing that she was the only woman ever to have outwitted him.

I truly did not see what he saw in her, for she seemed sadly disorganized and dependent now, relying upon the kindness of friends, trusting to Indian scouts instead of her own pluck. And the men all kowtowed to her great losses like courtiers to a widowed Queen Victoria!

This was not where the mystery would unwind. At least Sherlock Holmes had hied to London to reinvestigate the Ripper’s Reign of Terror there. Oh, to be in England now!

I would so dearly love to beat him to the identity of the Ripper.
AMERICAN GIRL BESTS EUROPE’S GREATEST SLEUTH
. What headlines that would make on my side of the Atlantic!

A plain lantern sat on the huge table in Buffalo Bill Cody’s tent, its vivid light painting his long wavy yellow locks into tongues of flame.

He stood hunched over a map of England, not of the Wild West.

Hunched beside him was the thrillingly authentic figure of Red Tomahawk, whose nose was as aquiline as any Spanish aristocrat’s, whose earth-colored skin shone like tanned leather, whose figure radiated the sheen of bone and feather and deerskin.

The scene resembled a lithograph of the Indian Wars, save that we were plunked in the middle of a great fairgrounds in the world’s most civilized city. Once I was done with Paris, France, and London, England, and other points east of the great U.S. of A., I determined to go West some day soon to record the doings there, though the exciting conflicts of yesteryear were over and done with in this advanced year of 1889.

So I envisioned again the savage scene that we four violently different people gathered here had witnessed on these very holiday grounds: the gathered madmen—and women—leaping and screaming and slinging weapons as if partaking in an Indian war dance, though they were surely the debased product of a half dozen European countries. No doubt the Europeans prided themselves at having evolved beyond savagery, but these demented Gypsies and lowlifes gave such snobbery the lie.

And the three other witnesses to this murderous scene were an odd blend of New World and Old: the courtly Wild West scout better known by the colorful name of Buffalo Bill instead of William F. Cody. The colorfully garbed Red Man, a sharp shadow of the fierce plains warriors his dead brothers had been, his name and tracking abilities testifying to his proud and violent heritage, Red Tomahawk. The American-born dethroned European diva turned very private detective, Irene Adler.

They consulted like old warriors, despite their disparity, despite my presence, which they ignored. I began to see that “taking notes,” as Nell had so often done, effectively rendered one invisible.

I didn’t mind. I was most effective when invisible. Until I chose to be very visible indeed.

“So you found the horse with the misshapen shoe?” Irene asked Red Tomahawk.

Her tone was no different than if she had addressed the Baron de Rothschild. Indeed, it was perhaps more respectful, for Red Tomahawk’s native abilities bordered on the magical in the eyes of whites and Europeans, much as did Sherlock Holmes’s vaunted reading of the smallest signs of evidence.

He grunted, displaying the admirable taciturn nature of his race. His finger stabbed the map. “From here. To here. To here. The horse with the damaged shoe only took them to the edge of the settlement. Then the wagon went on.”

“The Gypsy wagon you followed through the exposition grounds earlier?” Buffalo Bill asked.

Red Tomahawk nodded, setting his feathers atremble. “I followed the trail, east where the sun awakens, to a city they call Verdun.”

“Verdun! On foot all that way?”

Red Tomahawk eyed Irene. “All our horses were shot out from under the Red Man. So we walk.”

She understood that he spoke of not-so-ancient wrongs. “Did no one comment on your appearance?”

“I wore hat and coat, like Long Wolf in London. Most strange garb. When tracking bear it is well to wear bear hide.”

“Why only as far as Verdun?” Buffalo Bill asked. He not only had no trouble believing in Red Tomahawk’s startlingly long foot journey; he wondered why it was not wholly epic! Why not Frankfurt or Prague or Vienna or any of the great cities beyond Verdun?

Red Tomahawk tapped the point on the map again. “No more wagon. Iron Horse.”

I loved that expression. So apt. The railway engine had indeed been a Trojan horse, an Iron Horse snorting and steaming its way across Indian lands like a giant plow, domesticating the land, making the flesh-and-blood horse obsolete. And the buffalo. And the Red Man.

“They drove the wagon to a railway station?” Irene asked.

“Hoofprints lost in boot tracks, in Iron Horse tracks.”

“Have you no idea where they went from there, Red Tomahawk?” she asked, her voice throbbing with naked hope as only a performer’s can.

“East, where White Man come from. Everywhere I go east, there are more and more White Men. No Red Men.”

“Ah, but go far enough east,” Buffalo Bill put in, “and there are Yellow Men, millions of them.”

“I have gone far enough east to know that I will not like the end of it.” Red Tomahawk’s forefinger stabbed the map again. “That is where wagon went, and all who were on it. The horse came back the same way Red Tomahawk did. I crossed its path more than once, but when I found the wagon it pulled, there were only these dark tribes you call Gypsies aboard. They may know something of these war dances in the caves, but I was not one they would answer to.”

“They answered to you in the cavern, when you threw your war tomahawk,” Irene pointed out.

The Indian said nothing.

“It was bravely done,” Buffalo Bill noted. “Only a war whoop would stop those Devil’s imps from their obscene business. Pistol shots were like snapping lapdogs in that hellish scene.”

“It’s true,” Irene said, “that the Rothschild agents were horrified into inaction. It took us Americans to stop the butchery.”

Buffalo Bill nodded, grinning. “No fiercer warriors, on horseback or on foot, than the American Indian. That’s why I delight in bringing their cavalry prowess to the attention of the crowned heads of Europe. Those princes and kings are pretty proud of their mounted forces in their fancy helmets and uniforms on their warm-blooded patrician horseflesh, but a bareback Cheyenne on a rangy paint pony can ride rings around them. Rode rings around me.”

“White Brother ride all right,” Red Tomahawk conceded. “Ride our buffalo to death.”

Buffalo Bill cleared his throat. “We had settlers to feed.”

“Iron Horse to feed.”

Buffalo Bill nodded. “But now we can afford to celebrate the Indian and the pony of the plains, and the horsemen who ride them. Now we can corral the buffalo like cows, those that remain, and build up the herds.”

“Corral the Indians, too?”

I had expected Red Tomahawk to answer his boss and fellow American, but it was Irene who had spoken.

“Listen,” said Buffalo Bill. “If these Indians weren’t on the reservations, they’d be dead. Many of the Indians in my show would be imprisoned at home. I maintain their freedom.”

“Freedom of movement,” she said, running her finger along the red veins of roads upon the map. “Where could our mysterious party go from Verdun? And does not their hasty escape imply that they are heading somewhere specific, and possibly conveying a prisoner with them?”

“Could be,” Buffalo Bill admitted. “And where to go? I don’t know. South to Italy. North to Germany, perhaps Berlin. Or east as Red Tomahawk thinks. There’s the most land that way, if distance is what they crave.”

“We know they crave blood,” Irene said. “Why they want Nell…oh, it is a mystery meant to madden! We cannot afford to dally with insanity when we are chasing it.”

“You think this is related to those women murdered here in Paris?” the scout asked. As he respected Red Tomahawk in matters of tracking, he bowed to Irene Adler in matters of murder.

“And London,” she answered.

Buffalo Bill whistled his surprise. “Those are mad acts, all. Do you really believe a madman—madmen, as we have seen here in Paris—is so methodical as that? What do you opine, Red Tomahawk?”

The Indian thought first, as was his wont, before delivering himself of a diagnosis. “These are crazy men. They are not at war. They do not fight for their tribe. There is firewater in their blood. They kill their own squaws? No sense in that. Squaws too valuable workers. They wound, they kill for no good reason. Not for land. Not to turn back White Man, who is like the waves of grass and springs up ten-thousands full under the very hooves of our horses and our buffalo. They are crazy-drunk.”

“It’s true,” Irene observed, “that liquor plays a part in their debauchery.”

I could tell that the word “debauchery” meant nothing to Red Tomahawk.

“What do you think, Pink?” she asked, turning to me at last.

Nell had been right: she had a most annoying habit of rhyming a person’s name with the word before it.

I was struck by how swiftly I, Nellie Bly, had been subsumed into the role of Irene’s quiet companion and amanuensis, Nell Huxleigh. As long as it suited my purpose, I would serve. When it didn’t, I would prove myself a very different sort of Nell indeed!

“I think,” said I, “that we need to better understand exactly what happened in the cavern on these grounds the other night.”

I won support from an unexpected quarter.

“No one can track,” said Red Tomahawk, “without knowing the ways of the prey.” He looked at Irene, a regard as steady as his ax hand. “She will scout for you when you go east.” It was a question presented as a certainty.

“With me,” Irene corrected. “And the red-bearded man as well.”

The Indian nodded. “He walks the lone ways, like a scout. He is a man of the city, but there is prairie in his soul.”