The Alchemy of Murder (3 page)

With an unkind hand, my assailant pushes her aside and steps closer to me.

“I’ll give you ten francs for the four of us.”

His friends howl with laugher.

I stand rooted in place, confused. I’ve been in many terrible situations, fought off drunks and turned the tables on pimps, but I’ve never been touched offensively before.

Swaying drunkenly like a ship at sea, he moves so close I can smell curdled whiskey on his breath. For a second I see the cruel man my widowed mother married, a drunken scoundrel who beat her and dealt lewdly with personal matters before us children.

“Did you hear me? Ten francs for the four of us.”

His friends double over with laughter.

The devil grips my heart and I edge closer to him, the fan still in front of my face. With trembling lips, I ask, “Do you want to get hot, Monsieur?”

“Yes, yes.” He moans and smacks his lips.

I squeeze the rubber flask of acid onto his bulging male parts.

Wide-eyed, he stares down at the wet stain between his legs.

“
Bitch
!” He reaches for me and I quickly step away as he bounces off Attila the Hun. I dodge and dart through the crowd with his wails of agony erupting behind me—the acid has seeped into his private parts. The hotel maid assured me that the acid is painful but not permanently disfiguring, but at this point I hope his private parts are fried.

Damn him. I fear I’ve lost my man in black.

Then I spot him moving through the mass of people. He stops and looks to three prostitutes standing next to the wall of a cabaret and gestures to the woman in the middle. As she hurries toward him, it’s easy to see she’s a real streetwalker—she has that tart’s swish that only a true prostitute possesses. The poor woman has not a clue that the price will include her life.

Wondering what I should do, I watch them walk away. If I had evidence that a policeman would accept, I’d have him arrested on the spot.

Cleopatra with a live snake around her neck steps in front of me, blocking my path. Nubian slaves, looking suspiciously like Frenchmen with bootblack, follow behind her. Hopping up and down to keep my quarry in sight, I struggle through the throng, wishing I am six feet tall instead of five-foot-one.

They move toward the Moulin Rouge. He turns and looks in my direction and I feel that goose walk over my grave again.

Slipping into a group of men watching two women doing the cancan to music provided by street musicians, I pretend to watch, but keep an eye on the man and the prostitute, who have stopped to watch tumblers perform.

The dancers lift their legs high with a froth of petticoats and swirling lace as the men cheer. It quickly becomes clear to me that not only are the women showing bare legs, but they are completely naked under their petticoats.

Really!
Women showing their private parts when a man is only privileged to see a little lace above the ankle. And men! It always amazes me how grown men transform into young boys experiencing the rush of puberty when they see a bit of flesh on women
other
than their wives.

The man and the prostitute enter the Bal du Moulin Rouge and I shoot across the circle, breaking through the other side and hurrying toward the dance hall, puzzled by their destination. Why would he want to take her into the busiest cabaret in Montmartre? The establishment has only been open a few weeks, but the daring cancan show put on by Monsieur Zidler is already the talk of Paris. Hardly the place for a murderous rendezvous with a prostitute.

As I quicken my pace toward the Moulin Rouge, I let the rubber flask slip to the ground. The flask is empty and I don’t want it on me if the police start rounding up street girls to find out who burned a tourist with acid.

Music, shouting, and a blast of body heat assault me as I enter the cavernous ballroom. Good Lord, it’s the size of a railroad station, perhaps two hundred feet long and half that in width. In the center is a dance floor, flanked by two stories of alcoves with tables.

Off to the right an orchestra plays frantically, filling the vast hall with pounding music. Thor couldn’t make more noise with his thunderous hammer than the orchestra performing a Jacques Offenbach tune played with the ferocity of a Dakota war dance. Slide trombones, brass drums, cymbals—what bedlam!

Out on the dance floor, two women and a tall, thin man are doing the cancan with rubber legs, performing splits and kicks that defy gravity and anatomy.

From a hanging banner I quickly grasp that the music hall has been taken over by art students from the Latin Quarter for a ball celebrating the autumn harvest. “Harvest” of what, I don’t know, but the decadent art students of Paris don’t need much of an excuse to drink and have fun. With their long scraggly hair, silly hats, pointed beards, three-foot-long tobacco pipes, the students give the city character. Debating Life, Love, and Liberty and plotting revolutions while sipping
café noir
in boulevard cafés, students are the pets of the city, tolerated as long as the revolutions they plan never progress further than a café table.

The man in black moves toward the end of the hall with the prostitute behind him. I’m still baffled … why would he come into this huge dance hall? Certainly he doesn’t plan to murder the woman to the tune of the cancan. And the red scarf still bothers me. Am I pursuing the wrong man? Is he just a café radical planning to have pleasure with a tart? I never got a good look at the man’s face when he tried to kill me in New York.

As I follow, barnyard doors to the right suddenly fly open and cheers fill the hall as a stunning parade enters. Leading the procession is Montezuma, followed by Aztec warriors, a dozen strong, dressed in the bright feathered capes and headdresses in brilliant greens and reds and yellows. The warriors are carrying a platform on which four buxom women, scantily clad, lie on their backs with their feet holding up a small round table top. Standing on the table top is a well-proportioned woman who is stark naked except for a turquoise band around her forehead.

Shouting threatens to blow off the roof. I gather that the naked woman has been elected queen of artists’ models for the carnival. She should get an award just for keeping her balance.

To these students who paint nudes as part of their learning, I’m sure flesh is not equated with sin, but I find it a little disconcerting to be in the midst of hundreds of drunken students shouting about a naked woman.

A student paws me and I knock away his hands.

The killer and his chosen lamb reach the rear door and I hurry to intercept with no thought as to what I will do or say after stopping them. Running is impossible in the crowded dance hall and they vanish through a door before I reach them.

Undecided as to what my next move must be, I stare at the closed door as if it will give me an answer. What danger might I find behind it? Is he waiting for me with knife in hand?

I can forget about getting the attention of anyone in the music hall. The men are completely out of their minds in crazed delight, hailing their new queen. The puny police whistle around my neck wouldn’t be heard five feet. And if I did manage to gain their attention, what am I to tell them? Exclaim in my poor French I’m an American detective reporter who, after encountering a maniac while I was a patient in a New York insane asylum, followed him to Paris?

I grab a champagne bottle from a table where men are on their feet yelling toasts to the naked queen and her ladies—I could have cut off their beards and they wouldn’t have noticed.

Opening the door, I peer out to a patio with tables and an enormous replica of an elephant that appears big enough to hold a small orchestra. The patio is dark, cold, and deserted. Beyond is an alley shrouded by fog and darkness.

I can’t shake my heart’s conviction that I’m following the right man and that the poor woman is in mortal danger. Summoning my courage, I prop open the door with the bottle and hurry across the patio.

As I stare at the alley, trying to make out whether I see two people or figments of my overworked imagination, I hear something behind me and spin around to see a waiter holding my champagne bottle as he shuts my door to safety.

Running back, I try the handle. Locked! Banging on it does no good, it remains closed.

Staring at the fog-shrouded alley, I pull my shawl tighter to keep out the chill but in truth it’s not the night air that’s making my blood run cold.

THE GRAND CAVALCADE

Too much of a coincidence.

I should have known. It’s too convenient that the man I am searching for suddenly appears purely by chance. I’d be a fool to think otherwise. Obviously he’s found out that I’ve been in Paris hunting for him.

It’s no accident that I find myself alone in a dark place.

The hunter has become the hunted.

It’s a long way from Cochran Mills
, I think as I step into the lonely night. That’s my home town, Cochran Mills, Pennsylvania, population exactly 534. The little town was given my father’s name after he built a mill on the river nearby, turning the sleepy town into a thriving community.

Elizabeth Cochran is my birth name, though my family calls me Pink because of my mother’s preference for dressing me in that color when I was little. My father passed away when I was six, leaving our family in a bad state of finances. Unable to afford finishing high school, I lived with my mother and worked as a factory girl, making half the wage of the men working beside me.

Defending working women is how it all started. It began with a newspaper article that criticized women who earned their daily bread.

After that I was committed to a madhouse in New York …

I’ve always

had the belief that

nothing is impossible

if one applies a certain

amount of energy

in the right direction.

If you want to do it,

you can do it.

—NELLIE BLY

3

Nellie, 1885

On January 15, 1885, I read an article entitled “What Woman Was Made For” in the Quiet Observations column of the
Pittsburgh Dispatch
. The writer, Erasmus Wilson, had the cheek to say:

Man was made the highest of God’s creation and given dominion over all. Woman retains the same relation to man that Eve did to Adam—a helpmate, a partner, an assistant, a wife.

Whenever woman is found outside her sphere, whenever she assumes the place of man and makes him her complement, then she is abnormal. A man-woman—that is a woman who ignores her mission, denies her station and usurps the place of man—is a monstrosity, an abnormal creature, a lusus naturae.

Can you believe such utter nonsense!

This was an attack upon women, not a brutish one by a masher, but done with pen and paper. Mr. Wilson had no understanding of the plight of women who either refused to give up their freedom and legally prostitute themselves in marriage—sex for board and room and a twenty-four hour workday—or for those who were turned out onto the streets to sell their bodies for their daily bread. Had this foolish reporter but opened his eyes, he would have seen that there are thousands of women working in factories and shops, doing just as good a job, if not better, as their male coworkers—
for half the pay
.

This man was repeating the conventional wisdom that a woman should stay away from the rigors of employment and devote her life to husband and home. The fact that many women had neither husband nor home and had to subsist minimally on beans and bread at a workers’ boarding house from the pennies earned in a factory or retail shop, had been completely ignored by the columnist.

I, for one, was brimming with ideas and ambitions, but because of men like him I was unable to express myself. Mind you, I know what I speak of, for I was a factory girl grinding out a meager subsistence in a Pittsburgh sweatshop working ten and a half hours a day, six days a week, and living in a boarding house with my mother. What held me back was not my poverty, but this conventional wisdom about the “weaker sex.”