Castle Rouge (63 page)

“It was cumbersome and it was expensive, but nothing was too good to inspire my Medved.”

“He is your protegé then?” Irene asked.

“
Agh!
You understand nothing! A protegé would follow in my footsteps. Medved as a dancer in the Russian ballet…how amusing. ‘Medved’ means ‘bear,’ you know, in Russian. It is my pet name for him. He will be known better by his real name, Grigorii Efimovich.”

“Gregory, son of Efim.” Irene said promptly.

“Ah, you know the Russian usage. Is he not fascinating? Not yet twenty-five and look at all he has accomplished? He has sent several great capitol cities to their knees.”

I soberly contemplated that he was barely older than Pink.

“Or perhaps he is only twenty,” she went on with a shrug. “They hardly know the year of their own birth, these incredibly hardy peasants. The year of the ice storm. Whatever sticks in human memory. I mentioned his talents, healing and also a certain clairvoyance. He recognizes character at first sight. Some call it second sight. But he is young and has other talents as interesting. By the age of fifteen, he drinks like a sperm whale. He fights like a wolf. He mates like a mink. Perhaps I should say sable.”

“If he is such a beast,” Irene said calmly, as though beastliness were a fine civilized subject for discussion, “and a foreign beast at that, who barely speaks a word of English, or French, or Bohemian, how was he able to approach the prostitutes of each city? As some have pointed out, he is drunken, dirty, crude. Even streetwalkers would be cautious of such a figure.”

Tatyana laughed. And laughed. And laughed. It was a high-pitched, hooting cackle one would expect from a witch, not a fairly young woman, but it seemed oddly natural coming from her. She threw back her supernaturally long throat (reminding me of a serpent) and indulged in laughter the way I guessed some would indulge in liquor.

“Oh, my poor, foolish, ordinary, blind women! You and your prim little secretary there! He has this last and most wondrous gift, my Medved. He is irresistible to women.”

“Not I,” I said. “I repulsed him.”

“Perhaps you did,” she said with a denigrating look I much resented, as if she eyed me up and down and inside and out and found me wanting. Me, a decent woman!

“But I tell you,” she said, stalking toward me with one foot crossed in front of the other, reminding me of the few times I had seen Sarah Bernhardt on the stage playing some
femme fatale
or other. “I tell you,
Miss
Huxleigh, that Medved, drunk as any lord in England and only half as drunk as a Siberian peasant in top form, can approach a queen or a Gypsy fortune-teller or a prostitute or a girl-child of twelve, and they will fall to him, succumb to him, like overripe fruit to a windstorm.”

She was face-to-face with me before anyone could stop her. I held my ground. “Name one,” I said.

“One what?”

“One queen he has seduced.”

“Not yet. But there will be!”

“If he lives that long,” Sherlock Holmes put in. “Step back, Madam, or I shall be forced to make you.”

She spun to face him.

“You think you can, Cobra? Or are you someone else? I am not as gifted as Medved at sensing character. I cannot quite tell. I bow to your command.”

And she fluttered back as lightly as a firefly, like a ballerina
en pointe
, a mocking, infinitely graceful figure of the gaslit stage.

“I should tell you,” Mr. Holmes continued, “that I have had some little time to investigate these brutal rituals of yours and Medved’s. Like everything evil under the sun, they are not without precedent. Nothing criminal ever is, in my experience.

“From the first I detected a similarity to the rites of the flagellants, a religious sect that crops up in many lands and that is as old as Greece. There is a thread in mankind that cannot unweave pain from pleasure, or that seeks to punish pleasure with pain. To this we owe many historic atrocities. I had never heard of the Siberian variety until your protegé’s activities drew my attention in Paris. You were discreet in London, even having Colonel Moran find and procure the ritual sites. In Paris Medved went mad. I have a theory—”

“A theory! In the face of primitive nature? That is why the weaklings of the West will never resist the power of the East. If you have researched my darling boy’s homeland, you must know that it has spawned dozens of brutal halfling children from the forcible rape of paganism by Christianity, sects, if you will, that the Orthodox church persecutes. His people retreated to caves and cellars and underground chapels in the icy climate, to fires and communal celebration…and then communal copulation and from there it was but a half-step to communal blood sacrifice. Today, in this day and age, it is still happening, this impulse that will not be quenched, that civilized men cannot explain and proper women cannot resist. It is the spirit of primitive man that will not be denied. Torture. Whipping. Slavery. Rape. Castration. Killing. It is in the blood and the blood demands to shed and be shed. The blood is the life.”

Mr. Holmes cut through her gruesome rhetoric to pluck out the fact that answered his question. “So Paris, with its subterranean catacombs and cellars and sewers, was the very evocation of Siberia. What of the religious elements, the graffiti invoking the Jews?”

“The Jews! That was my idea. They are leaving Russia like rats and no more welcome anywhere else. How easy to point the finger at them. And the Christian signs and symbols? They
are
Christian, these magnificent Siberian savages. Devoutly so, though twisted like ancient olive trees into such a divine and original obscenity of the Christian doctrine.

“Do you know, did you learn in your ‘investigations’ that a Siberian peasant, hearing of an official census, took it as the arrival of the anti-Christ. He buried mother, wife, and children alive, inspiring his village to beseech his services for their own families, killing twenty before he succumbed to suicide.

“Some men did likewise to their own families, counting on their leader to slit their throats as the
coup de grace
. Wherever there are sheep to be led, leaders will rise up to slaughter them. Religion is the distraction of the people from their poverty. Some peculiarities of faith in Siberia are less violent but no less odd. Some sects worship the sky through a hole in the roof, others a tree or a river, but most often there is a strain of such astounding excess, a combination of the licentious and the puritanical. The
Khlysty
date back at least two centuries and engendered, though that may be the wrong word in this case, the
skopstys
, who believed that the Disciples were castrated and that the Holy Spirit comes by fire, not the water of Baptism. That explains some of the self-torture and mutilation their rituals involve.”

“They are not devil worshipers?” I couldn’t help asking.

“Not at all. Like so many Christians, they claim their rituals offer the one and only true path. They seek spiritual purity. However, such acts of devotion as their religion demands requires the celebrants to be dulled by drink to their own pain. So they commit drunkenness in the search for holiness. They also manage, by a convoluted form of thinking that would do a politician proud, to conclude that the path to abstinence is overindulgence. To be pure one must first be impure. Especially their leaders are allowed every imaginable excess.

“My dear Medved calls it using sin to drive out sin.”

Irene stared at her. “You have no religion but yourself. You thrive on chaos. International. Political. Religious. Personal. Why?”

“The blood is the life,” she answered coldly. “People who make history are not afraid to shed it.”

“She is right in this much,” Sherlock Holmes commented when we stood outside the chamber that held Tatyana and far down the hall from the guards. “It would be better if the authorities executed her and this young Russian at once.”

“Without trial?” Irene did not so much ask, as express disgust.

“I suppose that my observation is a heresy the
Khlystys
with their illogical goal of finding purity by committing sin would endorse: sometimes justice is best served by circumventing justice. But never fear, this region boasts enough obscure but impregnable fortresses to contain and hide Napoleon and his legions for decades. These two misbegotten souls will disappear into the bowels of such a place, never to be heard from again.”

“And you are convinced that Medved—Grigorii—is Jack the Ripper?”

“He is by far the most likely candidate. I found sites in Whitechapel where cult members had met, littered with the same wax from the vodka bottles and cork from ordinary wine bottles, which the non-Russian of the cultists drank instead. Your companions have witnessed his incredible capacity for drink. In such a state, a man like him could do anything.”

“I now believe,” I put in, “that the crazed figure who came rushing toward me in the Paris panorama building just before I succumbed to the chloroform was not Kelly, but Medved. He was…pawing at the buttons on my bodice,” I admitted with both shame and disgust.

“That is indeed a damning link,” Irene said. “What of James Kelly?” she asked Mr. Holmes.

“It’s possible he committed a murder or two along the way in imitation of his Master, but not in London. His swift departure after Mary Jane Kelly’s slaughter was no doubt a vain attempt to catch up with the absconding Tatyana and Medved. Even she must have realized after that atrocity that things had gone too far. Certainly they could not count on the cover provided by the tangled byways of Whitechapel any longer.”

“It does make sense,” I said, speaking mostly to Irene. “When you consider the Chi-Rhos scratched into the meeting sites and the fact that all the murders we know of form a Chi-Rho upon the map of each particular city.”

“Chi-Rho?” Mr. Holmes echoed me, sounding alarmed. “What nonsense is this?”

“Mere speculation,” Irene answered quite disingenuously. “The Chi-Rho is the Greek symbol for Christ: an ‘X’ intersected by a figure that resembles the English letter ‘P.’ We noticed a certain pattern to the killings that duplicated the extreme points of the Chi-Rho on the maps of Whitechapel, Paris, and Prague.”

“I must have copies of those maps…and Madam Tatyana’s yellow book that she was writing in when we confronted her.”

“Oh, that. I gave it to Quentin, since he will be reaching civilization before us.”

“Gave it to Stanhope! I must read it.”

“It is written in Russian.”

“I will have it translated.”

“I was planning on doing that. It does, after all, document matters that intimately affect me and mine.”

“We will certainly get no more out of Madam Tatyana than she chooses to tell us, and Medved is too uneducated to provide any enlightenment except on the nature of his delusions. I must see that diary.”

“Perhaps I can provide you with a copy of the translation.”

A Gypsy scowl is fearsome to see when it is powered by an irritated Englishman. “You had better do so. And I will not leave without copies of the maps Miss Huxleigh mentioned. This theory of yours sounds far-fetched, but I am willing to review it and give my opinion of its relevance.”

Irene laughed. “A fair exchange. Your professional opinion of a series of maps that are moot now, as they too must be buried to history forever, and a translation of Sable’s record of Grigorii’s religious mania. I suspect the maps will be much easier reading than the contents of that yellow book.” Irene glanced at me. “And the mouse-size scribblings in Nell’s miniature chatelaine notebook. You shall have to copy it all out in normal size.”

“I will,” I said, rather glumly.

Not only was Quentin galloping away from me, but I did not know when, or if, I would ever see him again, or dare to.

Meanwhile, from the discussion here, it was all too obvious that we three would meet again in not too long a time to exchange artifacts and opinions on a case of such excess and cruelty that I could wish to fall asleep and awake having forgotten every speck of it.

It was indeed a cruel world when Quentin was a mystery I might never see again or solve, and Mr. Sherlock Holmes had become a reluctant associate we would have occasion to see again all too soon.

And then I recalled the most vivid memory among all the mayhem I had so reluctantly witnessed, events that had changed me forever.

It was Irene’s marvelous voice lifted a capella in that murderous cavern singing the simple old hymn of conversion written by a former slave trader, “Amazing Grace.”

I could only hope that some amazing grace would shed its light on me as time led us all far from our descent into the hell to be found in twisted hearts and minds.

Afterword

In this drink-sodden, low-class intrique there were reefs that Rasputin did not see…. For Europe. Rasputin was an anecdote, not a fact. For us, however, he was not only a fact. He was an epoch
.

—
ALEXANDER YABLONSKY IN ONE OF RASPUTIN’S 1916
OBITUARIES