Spider Dance (40 page)

“She left California,” Irene summed up over the oysters. “She divested herself of her investments, her goods, her admirers, and her friends, her young protégée, and made arrangements for the care of her animals and her latest bear.”

We nodded.

“She embarked from San Francisco to tour Australia. The return voyage saw the tragic overboard loss of another of her ‘true loves.’”

I nodded. Quentin could say nothing. He had not steeped himself in the irregular lives and loves of Lola Montez for three days straight.

He could, however, put his ungloved hand over mine on the tabletop, as if he understood we were on a sick watch over Irene.

I thought of my dead-at-childbirth mother, an utter cipher. Was she good? Bad? Neither? I knew not. She had died before I could form any opinion of her.

For the first time I saw that as a deprivation.

Irene went on. “She lectured, with perhaps the greatest success at anything she had done in her life. Then, suddenly, on December twelfth she sailed for England, to wed yet again, this time a member of minor European royalty, although her first husband had never been officially declared her ex-husband. This Germanic princeling proved to be a—what is the word from the last century?—a poltroon. A fraud with five children and a wife, here in America, no less. But then Lola was a fraud with no children and possibly four ‘husbands.’”

Irene put her hands to her head, while Quentin ordered tutti fruttis all round.

“It seems,” Irene said when she had recovered from her amazement at Lola’s amatory adventures, “that Lola recognized she had lost her last cast of the dice. She came back to New York, resumed her lecture tour in the New Year, and was . . . a triumph. The question is, was this last, sudden whimsy to wed in England real, or was it because of me?”

For a moment I sat dazed, so caught up in the drama of Irene’s account that I could not see where it was leading.

Quentin could, however. “You mean she left New York long enough to give birth to you, then returned and resumed her usual life?”

Irene shrugged expressively, a gesture she had probably learned at La Scala in Milan. The Italians are even more accomplished shruggers than the French.

“What would she have done with the, er, child?” I asked.

“A nursemaid brought it back on the steamer and it was given to Madame Restell to place.”

“With itinerant performers, not a respectable family? I find that hard to believe, Irene.”

“Lola had been an itinerant performer. Perhaps she
wanted the child where she could be easily seen, without a frowning respectable family wanting to know what lady desired to see the child.”

“But—” I was seeking any objection that would bury this fancy once and for all. “She left you nothing. In her will. She had some means, and she left you nothing.”

Quentin chose to intervene, and to contradict me. “She could have left funds for the child with the theatrical people, before she died, before she was even ill.”

“And,” Irene said mysteriously, lighting the petite cigarette she had installed in her mother-of-pearl holder, “she may indeed have left me something. We just don’t know what, or where, it is at the moment.”

“Ah!” I was in fine fettle myself. “Now we chase the Lost Treasure of Lola Montez! We are all to be headlines in an illustrated tabloid paper!”

Irene shrugged ever so slightly. “She had collected fabulous jewels and trophies and treasures during her travels. You read of them yourself, Nell. Such things don’t vanish into London fogs. Such things are difficult to sell in the wilds of California or even in New York. That she left the last of her bank account to the Magdalen Asylum, a home for fallen women, says a great deal. But where are the ruby parure, and the gold and diamonds from the Indian prince, and the twenty-thousand-dollar diamond necklace and other jewels from Ludwig the First?”

“Pawned, sold, stolen, or lost,” Quentin suggested, earning my rigorous and approving nod.

“Perhaps.” Irene smiled and blew smoke toward the lighting fixture high above, another of those annoyingly steady electric lights. “Or perhaps they were hidden for just the right person to find.”

Oh, Lola is an untamed woman a lion would be afraid to pet
.
—A PARIS WIT ABOUT LOLA MONTEZ STOPPING TO PET
A TAME LION IN THE STREET

F
ROM THE
C
ASE
N
OTES OF
S
HERLOCK
H
OLMES

The dark-clothed man who had watched the rear of the Vanderbilt residence could have been some holy mendicant, I suppose.

I don’t know much about holy mendicants, but the manner of the dead man’s death had put me in mind of religious matters despite myself.

A family like the Vanderbilts would be subject to many calls upon its charity. It’s possible the churchly beggars wished to study the habits of the household to determine whether they could ask aid—approaching disgraced maids, for instance, or unemployed stablemen, if the Vanderbilts had recently turned out any servants.

Such a surreptitious act doesn’t speak well of the holiness of the mendicants, but I suppose holiness is not what it used to be nowadays.

I decided to watch the Episcopal Club of New York and moved my cart to the street across from it.

Hacks came and went, and the occasional carriage. The churchmen who went in and out were indeed a dark-clad lot, mostly clean-shaven, somewhat portly, and none reminded
me of the lean, cloaked figure that had glided into the club in the wee hours of last night.

My presence attracted other local loungers and peddlers, and we engaged in a lively conversation on whether churchmen were more or less free with a coin to the working poor.

It soon became clear that the Episcopal Club of New York was a favored daytime refuge of the local clergy, but also functioned, as some London clubs did, as a convenient place for out-of-town members to bunk overnight on occasion.

So some members were resident, some transient, and all appeared to be respectable to the point of inspiring total despair that my watch duty would be anything but stuporous.

I missed London’s concealing fogs. I was forever having to hide my presence or produce some make-work reason for it after dark, such as repairing a broken wheel on my cart.

At least I was off the overlit thoroughfares blazing with that accursed innovation of Edison’s, electric lamps. Both the criminal and the detective have reason to abhor this latest invention.

The street had emptied by midnight. I had lit my pipe and was wistfully regarding its thin blue haze in the light of a distant gas lamp as some wisp of fog when three men on foot came hastily down the street.

The pipe was smoldering in my pocket, and I was enfolded against the inset doorway in an instant.

Like my thin cloaked man, these fellows were overdressed for a summer night. They wore long ulsters and wide-brimmed soft felt hats.

And they avoided the club’s front entrance for a side approach. All sight and sound of them melted inside before I could ascertain their exact means of entry.

I had hardly bestirred myself to find out when I heard the soft twitch of a hinge, and the muffled noises of many men.

My doorway remained my bulwark as I saw four men exit the building for the street. My hand went to the pocket sheltering not a warm pipe bowl but cold steel with a checkered walnut butt: my Webley Metropolitan Police pistol.

Watson knew I seldom carried this weapon. Indeed, I find
weapons a bother, so Watson is only too happy to unearth in my service the Adams six-shot revolver, a souvenir of his time in the Second Afghan War. Here, abroad, I must equip myself for all eventualities. This was indeed one, for the fourth figure in the men’s midst was hooded and bound and being rushed from the sedate environs of the Episcopal Club of New York to God only knew where.

I followed, my shoes soled with silence, my pipe growing as cold as my pistol, and my will hardening as well. At last I was on the trail of the villains who had slaughtered the old man. I am never surprised by the monstrosity of man, but now I was eager to know how and why these particular men had come across Europe, apparently, to invade the castle of an American millionaire.

I had, of course, studied a map of Manhattan Island. On foreign ground, I was as obligated as an invading general to know the lay of the land. Call me Cornwallis.

Here, in New York, I followed a fretwork of streets. We headed south, toward the tangled area comprising Greenwich Village (amazing how these Yanks memorialized British place names right and left).

Beyond this lay the industrial areas reaching toward the docks and all the warehouses, gin mills and doss joints that plague every port city throughout the world.

I must tread as close on my prey’s toes as possible without alerting them to my presence. The thrill of the hunt is like none other I have known. While I would never slay a dumb brute in its tracks, be it bird or beast, I find man the most subtle and rewarding game. One can never underestimate the prey’s ability to turn and fight, to defeat my simple object of finding where he goes to ground.

My every sense and all the faculties I had spent a lifetime honing were at fever pitch. I sensed each sound and smell in front of and behind this party. I was Toby, the tracking hound, only I had a secondary charge: to remain invisible
and undetected, even as I hunted the unseen spoor of unknown men abroad for an undisclosed purpose.