Gideon Smith and the Mask of the Ripper (11 page)

Close by, a voice cut through the chatter, as though for his ears only. “Lost, handsome.”

He hadn’t noticed the woman sitting with her back to the wall, a small folding table covered by a silk scarf in front of her. At first he thought she was old, due to the gray rat-tailed, dreadlocked hair tied with bright scraps of rag. But the eyes in her coal-black face were shining and bright, the shoulders exposed to the biting cold smooth and thin.

“No, I am not lost, thank you for asking.”

She smiled, a gold incisor flashing among her gleaming white teeth. “It wasn’t a question, handsome. It was a tell.”

She indicated the bones—rat, perhaps, or bird—scattered on the silk scarf covering the table. Gideon nodded. “You’re a fortune-teller.”

She shrugged those immaculate shoulders, her breasts rising from the patchwork dress she wore. “Fortunes, futures. Fates.” She locked her white eyes with Gideon’s. “Possibilities. All for a farthing.”

Gideon sat down on the crate before the folding table, handing over the coin. The woman spirited it away and snatched up the white bones, shaking them in her cupped hands and whispering into them before casting them on the faded silk. She studied the pattern of their falling.

“A lost father dies,” she announced.

Gideon smiled sadly. Too late. Arthur Smith was dead these five months, lost beneath the claws and teeth of the rampaging Children of Heqet, his bones picked clean in the caves beneath the Lythe Bank promontory near Sandsend, where Gideon and his father had lived.

“That’s the past,” he told the woman. “I thought you told the future.”

She heaved those shoulders, that chest. “Possibilities, I said.”

“Who are you?” asked Gideon.

She looked from beneath plucked brows, her eyes cold as diamonds. “Names, or at least the knowing of them, are powerful things, not to be traded lightly.” He stood to go, and she said, “Be careful, Gideon Smith. Don’t get lost.”

Gideon was looking to the lines now heading into the theater when he wondered how she knew his name. But when he turned back she had gone, crates and table and all, disappeared into the crowd.

Gideon joined the flow into the theater and purchased a ticket for the stalls at the box office, ignoring the woman with a basket of rotten fruit for sale, three items for a ha’penny to throw at acts that didn’t come up to scratch. The performance was due to finish at nine thirty; plenty of time for him to get back to Grosvenor Square and …

And what? His approach to Maria after her return from Bodmin Moor had been clumsy and awkward, and had Bent witnessed it he would have put his head in his hands. Eventually, Gideon had managed to stammer that he wished Maria and himself to have a
closer
relationship, and that although he had to go out on business he would not be
averse
to returning to find her in his bed, should she think such a thing was
appropriate
or indeed
desirable,
the latter being something that he himself considered her to be. Eventually he had brought his anguish to an end and fled to his room to prepare for the evening, being careful to clear away any errant clothing, tidy the bedside cabinet, and put on the gas lamps at their lowest setting.

He filed into the theater, pushing through the throng to get as close to the front of the stalls as he could manage. The crowd was noisy and restless, and the heavy stage curtains were still drawn, with an easel in front bearing the same playbill as was displayed outside the building. Gideon intended only to get a look at Mesmer, at his methods, and then decide what course of action to take regarding Charlotte Elmwood. Her disappearance, of course, was a source of concern to her parents, but it was in her eerie likeness to Maria that the real mystery lay.

The lights dimmed as Gideon found a seat and the curtains swung back, a stagehand removing the easel. The stage was bare, and a voice boomed, “Ladies and gentlemen, please allow yourselves to be amazed at the neurological gymnastics of the legendary master of mental manipulation, Markus Mesmer.…”

There were a few whistles and catcalls, and then the crowd quieted as a figure walked stiffly from the wings to the center of the stage. He was tall and thin, clothed in a gray serge suit and a waistcoat buttoned up to a silk cravat. His hair was parted down the middle and greased flat, his cheekbones sharp enough to catch the lights above as dazzlingly as his well-polished shoes, his eyes as steely and gray as his clothes. He carried a cloth bag that bulged with something the shape of a decent-sized cabbage.

At the center of the stage Mesmer stopped and turned sharply to face the audience, his heels clicking. One eyebrow raised, he surveyed them, the working classes of East London, then began to speak in clipped, modulated English.

“My great-grandfather Franz Mesmer postulated that there was an invisible yet irresistible force, an energy transference that occurred between all objects. This he termed animal magnetism. Since his theories were published there have been many who have followed in the study of hypnosis and the suggestion and control of the human mind.”

He paused, casting his arched gaze around the hushed auditorium. “But only I, Markus Mesmer, have perfected my great-grandfather’s early hypothesis and experimentation.”

Mesmer dug into the bag and emerged with what appeared to be a complicated skeletal structure with a series of lenses, magnifying glasses, and colored glass circles held tightly within moveable brass orbits arranged at one side. He held it up, casting the cloth bag away.

“Behold, the Hypno-Array! The ultimate marriage of animal magnetism and man’s technological ingenuity!”

Mesmer held the device reverently up for the audience to consider, then placed it on his head, the cage fitting snugly to his skull, the lenses arranged around his eyes. “Now,” he said. “A volunteer, if you please.”

There was a reticent murmuring at first, then a rangy youth stood up to applause and whistles. He gave a gap-toothed grin to the crowd and bowed to laughter. Gideon recognized him as the young man who had shouted at the girls outside. Fixing his derby on his head, he shuffled out of his row and sauntered down the aisle to where Mesmer’s aides, hidden in the darkness of the orchestra pit, helped him up onto the stage.

“A brave volunteer,” said Mesmer, lightly putting his hands together to encourage more applause. “What is your name, sir?”

“Walter Longridge,” he said, grinning again and waving at his mates in the crowd. “I work down at the docks.”

“At the docks,” mused Mesmer, steepling his fingers. “And you will work with fish at the docks, yes?”

“Crates of ’em!” Longridge laughed, then frowned. “’Ere, you’re not saying I stink of fish, are you?”

The crowd roared with laughter again, and Longridge smiled broadly, waving at them. Mesmer said, “How would you like to
be
a fish, Herr Longridge?”

The young man sniffed. “Not so much. Why?”

Gideon leaned forward as Mesmer manipulated a switch or mechanism on his Hypno-Array, and the wheels began to turn, the lenses rotated, and a sharp light from what Gideon surmised must be tiny electrical bulbs implanted in the array shone through the colored glass circles as they moved in an elliptical orbit around the structure, casting multi-hued lights on the surprised face of Walter Longridge.

Mesmer was murmuring something, but Gideon couldn’t make out what. Longridge seemed to relax and stared into the Hypno-Array, his shoulders slumping, his jaw slackening. The crowd remained silent, then Longridge crouched down and began to make exaggerated swimming motions with his long arms, his eyes bulging out and his cheeks puffed with air as he opened and closed his mouth, moving slowly as though through rushing water around Mesmer.

“Behold!” said the German with a tight smile. “The man is now the fish!”

When the uproarious applause and laughter had died down, Mesmer switched off his Hypno-Array, clapped his hands, and sent the befuddled Longridge back to his seat on a wave of applause. Over the next two hours, Gideon watched members of the audience fall over themselves to allow Mesmer to humiliate them by making them think they were chickens, horses, and ballerinas. To the delight of the audience he hypnotized two burly bricklayers into behaving like a coquettish courting young couple.

When the curtain finally fell, Gideon stayed in his seat for a moment, considering. From what he had seen it was quite plausible that Mesmer had hypnotized Charlotte Elmwood into behaving in quite an unbecoming manner, and it did seem that Mesmer had to deliberately end the mind control before the subject returned to normal. But what to do about it? As he moved to join the lines of the crowd filing out of the auditorium, he was before he realized it sliding away from the flow and making toward the stairs that led backstage, where a uniformed theater employee stood guard by a velvet rope.

“Mr. Mesmer don’t want no autograph hunters,” said the man.

Gideon showed him the card that identified him and his affiliation with the Crown. “He’ll see me.”

“Mr. Smith. Very good, sir,” said the man, unhooking the rope and ushering Gideon through.

Gideon tapped his nose. “Not a word, though.”

The man winked. “Of course. Top secret, sir.”

The staircase led to a corridor at the end of which was a door marked A
RTISTES
. Gideon paused outside it for a moment, glancing back along the deserted corridor. He could hear voices from within—including Mesmer’s Teutonic accent, raised in controlled anger.

“Where is he? How is it that we cannot find the swordsman? Am I surrounded by assholes?”

Another voice answered, “
Je suis désolé, l’ homme
à épée n’ habite pas où
je le croyais.”

“In English, you cretin!” yelled Mesmer. “It is the one bloody language we are all supposed to share!”

“I am sorry,” said the voice again, more haltingly. “The swordsman is not living where we thought.”

“God,” said Mesmer. “You do not think he has found out about the outbreak of typhus in New Orleans that has claimed his wife and daughters? That he has gone rogue, abandoned his mission?” There were some noncommittal murmurs and Mesmer sighed raggedly. “It was a rhetorical question, you buffoons. You, Alfonso. What news of the whore?”

A deeper voice came. “It is difficult, Señor Mesmer.
Las putas,
they are … how they say? On strike. Finding this girl on the streets … it is like a needle in a haystack.”

Gideon frowned. Mesmer had Spaniards and Frenchmen working for him? It was normally the case that they were at each other’s throats if in the same room for more than five minutes. And what were they talking about? Swordsman? And whores? He pulled back from the door thoughtfully. There was certainly something—

Too late he heard the padding of footsteps on the carpet, and he had barely turned to see the grim faces of two unshaven men in big coats before something hard hit him at the back of the head, and he slumped to the floor.

*   *   *

When Gideon awoke he was bound with thin rope to a high-backed chair, his head throbbing. Markus Mesmer was in front of him, perched on the edge of a dressing table, smoking a cigarette and coolly regarding him. Gideon’s wallet was on the dressing table, and Mesmer held his card in his hand.

“So you are Gideon Smith,” he said. “I must say, I was quite saddened to hear of the deaths of Reed and his catamite Trigger.” He smirked unpleasantly. “They were a great source of income for me with their slanderous lies.”

Mesmer flicked the card over his shoulder and stood. “You do not look much like your likeness in
World Marvels & Wonders,
Herr Smith.”

“They take some measure of artistic license with the illustrations,” said Gideon, his mouth dry. “So as not to impede my passage and my work.”

“Ah yes, your work,” said Mesmer. “The Hero of the Empire! How very grand. And you imagine I am up to villainy, Herr Smith?”

Gideon met his stare. “I have been knocked unconscious and tied to a chair. So yes, I fear some villainy at work.”

Mesmer spread his hands, his face a picture of innocence. “You were eavesdropping at my door, Herr Smith. My employees quite naturally suspected
you
of villainy.”

“Why are you blackmailing the Elmwoods, Mesmer?” asked Gideon.

Mesmer smiled. “Ah. Direct. I like that, Herr Smith. But … blackmail? Libel, Herr Smith. Defamation. You seek to continue the good work of Lucian Trigger and fill my pockets with settlements from your employers?”

Gideon narrowed his eyes. “What are you up to? Who is the
swordsman
?”

Mesmer nodded. “I see you heard much at our door. Perhaps this is the moment when I lay bare all my plans, safe in the knowledge that you are my prisoner. But then you escape, Herr Smith! You foil my dastardly machinations! I am undone! You see, I am very much familiar with the formulaic plots of your cretinous story papers.”

Gideon glanced around the room. There were five other men apart from Mesmer, rough looking and muscular. At least two of them were Spanish in appearance. He said, “A rather …
international
team you have. You are to be commended for bringing old enemies together.”

Mesmer smiled. “They serve neither the Emperor of France nor the Queen of Spain. Like me, they have other loyalties, Herr Smith. We have pledged fealty to an older king.”

Gideon tugged at his bonds and asked, “What are you doing here, Mesmer? Surely you are not just in London to perform for East End crowds.”

Mesmer sat on the dressing table again and lit another cigarette. “What are
you
doing here, Herr Smith? Playing the hero?” He paused for a moment. “But what is a hero? A man who does as he is told, or who finds his own way? And are heroes born or made, Herr Smith? Shall we find out?”

One of the Frenchmen handed the Hypno-Array to Mesmer, and he fitted it to his head. Gideon closed his eyes tightly but felt his head gripped by strong hands that pried his eyelids open. The light from the contraption blinded him momentarily, colored shapes swimming in front of his eyes, as Mesmer began to murmur.