This was declared as a challenge.

"With whom do you stay in Paris?" Irene went on.

"No one. I am on my own." Her youthful indignation collapsed. "I stay here."

"And what is this place?"

That question engaged our young miss's full attention. She eyed the Old World richness, plucked at the bejeweled tissue of her skirt as if surprised that she was wearing it, and took another breath.

"It is a maison de tolerance."

Those words struck a chill into my soul. I knew enough French to recognize the oft-employed word for "house" that is as familiar as the word "chez" for the same meaning in English. And I understood the word tolerance in either English or French. Indeed, it was likely spelled the same in both languages and thus spelled out the odious situation for me. We were in what the French call a brothel. Oh, a very elegant brothel for the use of only the most blue-blooded, wealthy, and well-known roues, but a brothel nevertheless.

Irene did not blink at this revelation. "Have you had some of the brandy yet?" She nodded at the libation.

The girl shook her head.

"It was meant medicinally. I think you should sip it. Nell, can you-?"

By now I had realized that the young woman was in shock, as who would not be to find oneself unexpectedly in a brothel, however opulent?

I slipped quietly to the sofa and sat beside her. Lifting the delicate gla.s.s like a medicine vial, I brought it to her lips.

"You must try some. I know it will taste strong and nasty, but you will feel better for it."

The girl glanced at me, then obeyed. After a tiny sip, her hand reached up to take the gla.s.s stem. I felt the tremor as its custody transferred from my hand to her own, but at least she had released a measure of that paralytic grip she kept upon herself.

As I returned to my chair I noticed that Irene was nodding approvingly at me.

"Not too much," she advised the girl. "You want to clear your head, not cloud your memory. Now. We have been told nothing of what is wrong here. We rely on you."

The brandy appeared to have been a hair too effective. "Pink" shook her charming head as if awakening from a bad dream. "Why are you here?" she demanded. "You cannot be from the police. They do not let women do that sort of thing on the Continent."

"And they do in the United States?" I demanded myself, surprised.

"Of course they do, Nell." Irene did not glance at me. She was still concentrating on the girl. "I was an agent for the Pinkertons when I lived in America, and also in England, for a time."

The girl clutched at the familiar word. "A Pinkerton. They have sent a Pinkerton to a Pink? How crazy, but then this whole place is crazy . . . of course, it doesn't help that I am just learning the language."

Pink laughed so hard she sputtered into the brandy gla.s.s, then coughed violently, until her eyes watered and she hiccoughed.

I recognize incipient hysterics when I see them and rose to go to her, but Irene shook her head at me.

"Is that why you're wearing man's dress?" Pink asked Irene through her tears and hiccoughs. "I feel like Alice in Wonderland. If you were a White Rabbit instead of a lady Pinkerton in man's dress . . . I'm sorry. I'm not usually such a fool. But it was pretty dreadful. The most awful thing a body could ever see. Quite retchingly dreadful."

By now I was not anxious to know the details Irene had been sent to ferret out.

"Tell me," Irene said, sitting back in the chair to draw her elegant cigarette case from one pocket and a matchbox from another.

The letter I worked large in diamonds shone like a heavenly constellation against the glorious blue-enamel case as Irene removed a thin brown cigar. The case was a priceless Faberge creation, but seeing it always made me shudder. It reminded me of the two people I most detested in the world: Sable, the Russian spy who had given this poison-armed trinket to Irene, and Sherlock Holmes, who had discerned and disarmed the lethal gift while we had watched. That Irene should use this object, and even treasure it, struck me as foolhardy beyond belief.

Pink watched her light the slender cigar in one hand by a lucifer from the other with wide eyes. "Does that taste good, really? I would like to try."

"So you shall." Irene leaned forward to extend the small dark cylinder to her. "Just . . . sip."

That poor young thing put the smoking thing between her dainty lips and drew a shallow breath. Soon she was coughing again, while I cast Irene a disapproving look.

"It takes practice," Irene said, retrieving the tiny cigar and drawing thoughtfully on it until she was able to exhale a thin stream of smoke. "Now that your mind has contemplated other matters, perhaps it can return to the dreadful recent past with an objective eye."

Pink, clutching my handkerchief to her mouth, nodded. "I pride myself on an objective eye, Mrs. Norton, is it?" She straightened on her sofa cushion, posture alone drawing her spine taut as a bowstring.

Her hands no longer trembled.

"I have found murdered women in this house, two stories below. I was the first to find them, and to alert the inhabitants. I'm afraid I screamed."

"You are sure they were murdered?" Irene asked.

Pink regarded her blankly, then spoke.

"They were more than murdered." Pink tossed back a great swallow of the brandy. Her voice came clear and sharp, precise yet angry. "They were butchered like carca.s.ses one sees hanging in Les Halles, the great open marketplace of Paris. I only recognized them for women from the shreds of clothing clinging to . . . what was left."

As suddenly as this, I knew. I had solved a petty mystery that had been niggling at me all night: the French phrase "Abbot Noir." The Black Abbot in English.

I had felt foolishly rea.s.sured that a churchman was involved in the matter, even though he be Roman Catholic and the hue of his habit be black. But the inspector and Irene had not been speaking of my mythical head monk at all. Not "Abbot Noir," but "abattoir," a word I did know even if I did not expect to hear it spoken in polite society.

Abattoir.

The French word for slaughterhouse.

The Abbot Noir

The disorders of the room had, as usual, been suffered

to exist

-EDGAR ALLAN POE, "THE MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE"

Not very much later, the girl's brandy gla.s.s was empty, and Irene's slender cigar had shriveled into a pyramid of silver ashes impaled by a dark dead stub in one of the empty crystal goblets.

Much as I deplore the stench and the mess of the smoking ritual and much as I abhor spiritous liquors, I had to admit that these masculine vices had put raw emotion at a distance.

"Stay here," Irene told Miss Pink, who was much calmed for having unburdened herself of her dread cargo of horror. As for me, had someone offered, I would have indulged in a gla.s.s of the contents of the decanter, and I only drink spirits under severe duress.

We left the room. The men guarding either side of the door leaped to confront us, their Gallic faces so eager for news they resembled agitated poodles.

It would have been laughable had not we heard such grim tidings.

Irene wasted no time on preliminaries. "This was her first day . . . night at the house. She did not know, or even recognize, the dead women. I understand that is quite understandable." Both men nodded, dropping their eyes. "Apparently there has been an atrocity on a scale of The Murders in the Rue Morgue.' You know the story?"

Inspector le Villard nodded. "I am a student of the methods of foreign detectives, as you know, especially Miss Huxleigh's countryman."

I shuddered for the first time that evening to hear a reference to the man, that all-too-ubiquitous consulting detective, Holmes.

"Even fictional detectives?" Irene asked.

"Mr. Poe's setting was Parisian, and the investigator was French. C. Auguste Dupin," he said as if savoring Napoleonic brandy. "You are right to invoke that long-ago tale. It is the closest thing to what has happened here, except for-"

"Yes," Irene said. "I must see the murder scene. Miss Huxleigh can remain here with Mademoiselle Rose."

"No!" For once the inspector objected before I could. "The scene is not fit for female sensibilities. You cannot see it."

"If you wish me to elicit every shred of testimony from her, I must see what she saw. I must know what questions to ask. In such cases, with the shock, she may have seen more than she realizes."

"That is true, but now that you have heard of the grotesquerie of it . . . I would not ask even my gendarmes to face such a scene, were it not necessary."

"Commendable, but I am not one of your gendarmes."

"You were not brought here for such viewing."

"I was brought here, and now I ask what will help me perform the service you requested. Nay, demanded. You and your anonymous Great One."

The inspector sighed and slapped the damp felt hat in his hands against his leg.

The shadowy superior murmured a torrent of French.

After some discussion between them, le Villard turned back to Irene. "You may go, but only because we must answer to your . . . sponsor. I will not be responsible for any hysteria."

"There will be no hysteria."

"Indeed not," I interjected. "For I will go along."

The Frenchmen began blathering again, hysterically.

Even Irene turned to me in disbelief.

I explained myself to Irene. "I have seen the body on Bram Stoker's dining-room table, I have been to the chamber of the Paris Morgue with you, remember? I cannot allow you to confront such perfidy alone, or not alone, I should say. I owe it to G.o.dfrey that you do not go off unsuitably chaperoned."

She was not fooled by my invoking the proprieties, eternal pretext in my limited a.r.s.enal of argument. She laid a hand on my arm.

"I will be all right, Nell."

"I know you will, for I will be there with you." Then I added, "It would be cruel to keep me in the dark, when even that child has seen the truth, and survived."

"Not without brandy afterward."

"I will have brandy afterward if necessary."

Irene's further arguments never pa.s.sed her lips. She knew that if I was willing to take spirits, I was serious indeed.

The inspector's lively features had frozen into disapproving resignation. "Your presence was requested by an Eminent Personage. We must allow you to pursue actions you will deeply regret. I hope you will not try to misplace the blame."

Irene glanced at me. "I never misplace blame."

I inhaled as deeply as Miss Pink had a few minutes earlier. I must be prepared to face what I had demanded to see. I had no doubts it would be a vision of h.e.l.l.

The Frenchmen, stiff with disapproval and with funereal step, led us down the back stairs to the first floor. Their dark figures, etched into murky relief against the rays of the lamp they carried, looked as misshapen as latter-day Quasimodos. I began to wonder if they had changed into monsters once their backs were turned upon us. The narrow stair, the sound of our footsteps as regular as the pounding of coffin nails . . . in truth, the mention of the American fantasist Edgar Allan Poe, whose horrific stories I had read during my Shropshire days when ghost stories were my only entertainment, all combined to heighten my natural dread at facing death, and death in a particularly revolting form.

Still. I was a country parson's daughter, and had seen much in my tending of the ill young and old in the parish that would surprise a dweller in large cities, where much ugliness is swept away into inst.i.tutions.

On the first story we were led again to the wide pa.s.sage. A rich flocked wallpaper of oriental design glinted gold back from the walls as our guiding lamp pa.s.sed. Dragons writhed in the flickering twilight, and roofs like piled hats seem to shimmer with worms instead of tiles.

By the time we came to the painted and gilded door where two gendarmes stood at attention, my hands were cold and clasped before me. Just like . . . Pink's, I realized, and I had seen nothing yet.

"The first to see has the least to fear," Irene whispered in my ear.

I noticed that her face was pale, her features drawn into the same falsely serene control I had seen on Pink's young face.

The man who had never identified himself nodded to the guards. One swept open a door with military precision, never glancing inside.

The stench that rushed out to greet us was unfortunately familiar, though stronger than any I had encountered before. A charnel-house reek of unfettered blood and bowel.

All six of us recoiled involuntarily from that awful odor.

Grim-faced, Inspector le Villard held up the lamp. "It is not too late to retreat."