In Paris, although they shared a suite in the century-old Hotel d’Hallwyl, Johnny and April were kept so busy by their respective schedules they rarely saw each other except to say good night on their way to their rooms. Each missed the other’s company and perspective, and at length they decided to revive their St. Louis tradition and meet every day at a restaurant they both found pleasing, to renew their acquaintance and compare the details of their day.
Their choice was the Maison Cador, next to the church of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois and across from the east end of the Louvre, where Claude Monet had stood on a balcony to paint that Gothic pile eight years before. There in a cream-and-gold room decorated in relief and hung with crystal chandeliers, they sat in cane chairs at a pink marble table, sampling the patisserie’s sweets and omelets and correcting each other’s French.
“Another new frock?” said he one day, admiring her pearl-colored suit and gray silk shirtwaist. Her straw hat wore an abundance of intricately tied ribbons. “Shall we rob the Banque de France, or stow away in a lifeboat during the voyage home?”
“The Banque is impregnable to our method. I made a point of checking it out last week. In any case, you have our return tickets stitched inside the lining of that hideous caped overcoat. You oughtn’t to leave it lying about.”
“I don’t consider hanging it in the wardrobe in my room leaving it lying about. You sewed it back up with admirable skill. I didn’t detect it.”
“I took it to a seamstress, and supervised her work.”
He nibbled at a cream-filled pastry. “Did you think I was hoarding love letters? I’m beginning to think you’re living your role. Repertory players are especially susceptible when they don’t trade off.”
“That’s poppycock, and you know it. I wanted to make sure you weren’t selling forged American railroad stock to gullible Europeans. You might end up in the Chateau D’If for real, and then where would I be, a woman alone in wicked Paree?”
“A bit less emphasis on the second syllable. I distinctly heard the double e.”
“It’s pronunciation now, is it? Have you been taking French lessons behind my back?” She took a forkful of egg poached in white wine, made a little face, and sipped water to dilute the effect. Parisian food did not agree with her, much to her dismay; she felt it betrayed her American palate to the natives. In consequence, she ordered Parisian only, and bought peppermints by the half pound to put her stomach to rest afterward.
“Only indirectly. My fencing instructor has taken it upon himself to turn me into a boulevardier. He makes his vocabulary points quite literally.” He touched a tiny scratch on his left cheek.
“I’d wondered about that. I thought you’d run afoul of a married marquis. Precautionary measures?”
“I think and hope I’ve fought my last duel. If challenged again, I’ll choose parasols at dawn. I merely wish to improve my form the next time I cross swords with Corny onstage. He’s gotten more graceful, have you noticed? It wouldn’t do for Hamlet to lose to Laertes.”
“Your poor beautiful face. Haven’t those foils little round beads on the ends?”
“Buttons. Monsieur Anatole doesn’t believe in them, nor in protective headgear. He considers fear of serious injury a useful learning device.”
“Un gros sauvage. He’ll put your eye out, and you’ll play nothing but beggars and pirates the rest of your days.”
“Sauvage, oui. Gros, non. He’s scarcely your height, and I rather think you have the advantage of a pound or two. In all the most charming places, I hasten to add. He’s damnably fast, and I think he has it in for men of greater stature.”
“He’ll kill you. Or give you one of those horrible white scars that look like tapeworms.”
“I wonder which will distress you most,” he mused. “You needn’t be concerned about the former. I pay him only after each session, and then by cheque. He’s an officer retired on half pay, with little more coming in thanks to his temperament.” He sipped his coffee. “And what athletics have you attempted? Waltzing with counts?”
“I tired of the nobility the first week. The men all wear corsets and the women smell like mortuaries. My interests have taken a Bohemian turn. I’ve met the most interesting painter.”
“Not one of those ragged Impressionists, I hope.”
“He isn’t that kind of painter. He specializes in houses and bridges, which in this city should keep him employed for life. He has muscles in places I didn’t know they could be grown.”
“You always fascinate me when you blush,” he said. “It’s a characteristic I’ve tried to develop, but in vain.”
“For that, you have to have been raised in the Catholic faith.”
“Oh, but I was. Every Sunday my father and I shared a pew with the governor, where Father delivered his graft by way of the collection plate. So will you surrender your citizenship and rear Anglo-French bastards on the Left Bank?”
“If I made that choice, they’d not be bastards.”
There was no banter in this; her tone was cold and metallic. She attacked her eggs.
They finished the meal in silence. She was gone before he could rise, her skirts swishing over her curt good-bye.
Johnny finished his coffee in deep thought. He’d never known April to take serious insult to anything he’d said. He wondered if perhaps they shouldn’t leave Rome to the philosophers and return home. Britain and the Continent had begun to corrupt them with its centuries of respectability.
Gilbert Anatole was a former colonel of the Second Empire, who claimed to have lost his right hand to Prussian grapeshot at Sedan, converted to Marxism under the Commune, and dedicated himself to the overthrow of the Third Republic in favor of a government run by the proletariat, of which as a humble soldier he considered himself a member in good standing. He was an ugly little man with a dark complexion who parted his scant hair in the center and wore a singlet and old-fashioned silk breeches that accentuated his womanly hips and a set of genitals all out of proportion to his small body. Johnny could not help looking at his crotch, to his own intense shame and near disaster to his person when they fenced. Fortunately, although he was convinced Anatole was a pederast, he himself was not the man’s romantic preference. Valèry, the shaggy, paunchy gnome who showed up at the end of each session to drive him home, displayed proprietary interest, and his unwashed body left a tang in the air of the grubby little gymnasium in the Rue de la Glacière several minutes after their departure.
Preposterous as he appeared when at rest, Anatole was a demon on the mat; a whirling, lunging, unstoppable engine of destruction, lethal at every angle, as if he’d sprouted razor-sharp quills on all sides in addition to the single foil (épée, properly, since the tip was neither blunted nor rendered harmless by a button) in his remaining hand. In place of the other he wore a curious hook that ended not in a point but in an elongated loop shaped like a narrow spoon with a slot an inch and a half wide in the center. On the rare occasions Johnny defended himself sufficiently to lock blades in a tight clinch, the little colonel inserted Johnny’s nose in the slot and gave it a savage twist that brought tears to the victim’s eyes—and once a deviated septum, which Anatole later corrected by repeating the operation in the opposite direction, wrenching it back into place with a heart-stopping crack and nearly as much pain as the original injury.
“Damn your eyes!” Johnny sprang back with his hands to his face. Blood seeped between his fingers.
“Devene un homme, Americain. Be a man. I have left a piece of myself on every battlefield in Europe, and not a single tear. Did you not fight the rebel and conquer the red Indian?”
“Not personally. If Lee had armed his troops with contraptions like that, they’d be eating grits in Washington. Sometimes I think you forget we’re only practicing. You confuse me with Bismarck.”
“Ha. If you were Bismarck, they’d be eating crepes in Berlin. You poke when you should pounce. That is a sword, not a knitting needle. We go again. En garde!” He leveled his weapon, hook akimbo.
“On your own guard, you Gallic Attila. I’m through for the day.” Johnny racked his épée and fished out a handkerchief.
Still, he progressed. He lost fat, although he had little surplus at the start, gained muscle, and straightened his posture; April commented on it at the end of his first week, before she learned what he’d been about. His reflexes improved rapidly, as they had to if he were to avoid decorating his face and torso with sticking plaster after each session, as he had after the inaugural. He was sore and sprained throughout that opening week, but ten days in he’d begun to acquire the kind of agility and economy of movement he’d only been able to affect onstage, naturally and without thought. Oddly enough, he first became aware of this not while fencing with Anatole, but on the ballroom floor, where a turn with the pretty daughter of a wealthy importer led quickly to her boudoir upstairs, where he could hear the violins still simpering below, and smell the smoke from her father’s cigar in the sitting room of his chamber down the hall, where (she said) he was busy writing an eloquent letter to President Grant on the subject of tariffs. Johnny had never closed a seduction so promptly nor with so little conversation. Throughout that hour, he wondered at England’s obsession with pugilism, when fencing was so much more rewarding. Monsieur Anatole was puzzled, and awkwardly pleased, when at the end of the course his student presented him with a splendid gold Swiss watch engraved with the master’s initials; Valèry scowled.
Much later, in another hemisphere, Johnny Vermillion would ponder whether he ought to have given him much more. A watch, however beautiful and well-crafted, seemed poor payment for a life even so discreditable as his.
Allan Pinkerton loved to walk. The wiry fifty-six-year-old’s morning constitutional was the delight of those visitors to Chicago who refused to leave the city until they had caught a glimpse of the internationally famous detective, and the bane of those subordinates who preferred to meet with the chief in the library of a gentlemen’s club downtown, in leather chairs with snifters at their elbows. He conducted these conferences on the trot, swinging his stick and covering several miles of park and macadam without loss of breath. Nine years hence, that walk would end his life, when he would trip, bite through his tongue, and owing to careless treatment develop a fatal infection, making his the only documented case in history of a man having bitten himself to death.
But in the late spring of 1875, the rugged Scot was in the glory of good health, and Philip Rittenhouse, who had balked at neither the misery of three days aboard the stage aptly christened the Bozeman Bonebreaker nor a week of dysentery brought on by the chicken and dumplings served at Ma Smalley’s boardinghouse in Omaha, found himself hard-pressed to keep up with his superior. The trek lacked the adventure of life on the border, with a subtext of sadism on the part of its instigator; for the man who coined the phrase “We never sleep” secretly loved to torture those in his employ, including the two who shared his blood. His sons, William and Robert, longed for his decline and their opportunity to remake the agency in their image, with due public obeisance to the old-world individualism of its illustrious founder.
Rittenhouse lifted his bowler to mop his bald head with a scarlet handkerchief, his only ostentation, and new since his Western sojourn—a sort of personal Order of the Garter for services rendered unto the goddess Justice. Those who called him the Reptile would gawk at the spectacle of his perspiring under any circumstances, including the old man’s dreaded constitutional.
“I fail to see why you called me out of the office,” said he, “unless the prospect of deadly apoplexy looks better to you than paying my pension.”
“I ought to dismiss you for that. No one speaks to me so, including my sons. I sometimes wish they would.”
“They’re in a precarious position. You might decide to leave the agency to the boy who cleans the water closets, and they’ll have to go to work.”
“That is unjust. William at least is a top-notch detective. I know you’ve had your problems with him, but for my sake you might try to be insincere. I called you out here because I don’t want to embarr-rass you in the hearing of your colleagues. Jim Hume has been after me over Sioux Falls. That was your assignment.”
“It still is, unless you’ve decided to take it out of my hands. Some cases take time to resolve, in spite of the lesson of those dime novels you write.”
“Those are case histories. There is a great deal more to the detective business than apprehending criminals. The good will of the public is an invaluable source of unpaid information, and fear of retribution is a deter-r-rent to crime.”
“Forgive me if I speak outside my station, but if we deter crime, do we not risk putting ourselves out to pasture?”
“I’m not hosting a debate,” Pinkerton snarled. “Where does the investigation stand at present?”
“All over. I know from newspaper advertisements that Evelyn and Elizabeth Mort-Davies are performing in California, but if they’re breaking the law, it’s in too small a way to appear in the news columns. Cornelius Ragland seems to have fallen off the face of the earth, but then he was barely here to begin with. John Vermillion and April Clay have vanished also. I suspect they’re in South America, or abroad. They attract attention wherever they go, but the effect is delayed here by the separation of culture and distance. It’s possible the Prairie Rose has disbanded permanently.”
“If that’s the case, I advise you to swear out a complaint with the authorities in California against the Davieses and have them taken into custody. A rigid fare of bread and water ought to loosen the Major’s tongue at least, if he’s as fat as you say.”
“He may know nothing of the others’ whereabouts; in which case the publicity of the arrest will drive the rest deeper underground. I said it’s possible they’ve split up for good. Such a move upon our part would make it a certainty.”
“Suggest an alternative.”
“The theatrical season begins again in the fall. We have crimes enough to occupy us until then. Ace-in-the-Hole and Turkey Creek struck within a few miles of each other in Wyoming Territory just last month.”
“Each sustained a casualty, our confidential informants told me. Their luck has turned.”
Rittenhouse was surprised. “I wasn’t aware we had informants there.”
“If I reported them to everyone in the agency, they wouldn’t be confidential for long. We’ll have ever-ry last man rounded up in a matter of weeks. Meanwhile the Davieses may slip through our fingers. Swear out that complaint.”
They’d stopped to let a streetcar pass. Rittenhouse wiped off his scalp again and used the handkerchief on the sweatband inside the crown of his hat. Then he put it back on, reveling in the cool touch of the leather against his skin.
“Suppose we leave the authorities out of it for now and I investigate them in person,” he said.
“Your last foray into the field was not a resounding success.”
“I disagree. Before I made it, we thought a lone bandit had stuck up the Wells, Fargo office in Sioux Falls. Now we know the names of all the accomplices and have connected them with at least five other robberies, including one we didn’t know about in St. Louis, which I suspect was their first. Thanks to reviews and advertising and my interviews, we know a good deal more about them than we do about Ace and Turkey Creek, not counting what you’ve heard from your phantom informants. Theirs may be the first criminal enterprise in history to employ the techniques of a press agent.”
The streetcar had moved on, but the strollers had not. Pinkerton turned to study him. “What could you learn from the Davieses that sworn law enforcement could not?”
“Nothing, perhaps. Everything, possibly; but only if I went inside.”
“Undercover?” The old man made an explosive noise, which for him was laughter. “Will you juggle, or sing opera, or teach a bear to dance?”
“Now would be an opportune time to inform you that my father was a theatrical booking agent on the vaudeville circuit. He represented people who did all those things and more, and I ran his errands until age fifteen. If you’ll stake me to an office in Portsmouth Square and a couple of hundred for advertising and promotion, I’ll manage the rest.”
The voyage home was gentler than the one out. The sun was strong on the top deck, the motion of the waves soporific. In adjoining deck chairs, April half dozed over a book while Johnny sipped gin and bitters, a taste he’d acquired in London. A gull perched on the railing looking for crumbs and, detecting none, took its leave, flapping indignantly. The sound awakened April, who sighed and found her place on the page. Johnny peeped at the title stamped in gold leaf on the spine: La Vie de Jeanne D’Arc. “Research?”
She started a little and looked at him as if she’d forgotten he was aboard. “Mm-hm.” She resumed reading.
“If the ship’s library has Shakespeare, you might want to give Anne Page a look. Remember, we’re opening with The Merry Wives.”
“Mm-hm.” She turned a page.
“The Major will quite enjoy playing Falstaff, don’t you agree?”
“Mm-hm.”
He drained his glass and caught the eye of a steward, who came over for it. Johnny ordered another. The steward asked Mrs. Mc-Near if she cared for anything.
“No, thank you.”
When they were alone again, Johnny turned onto his hip. “If you’re disappointed about Rome, I’ll make it up to you in New York: a suite at the Astor, dinner at Delmonico’s. I understand Verdi has a new opera opening on Broadway. That’s at least a taste of Italy.”
She said nothing, reading.
He reached over and tipped her book forward. “Your French isn’t that good, dear. You’ve said more to the steward than you have to me. Is it Rome?”
She placed the attached ribbon between the pages and closed the book. “I don’t give two snaps for Rome. That was your idea. Johnny, have you never thought of retiring?”
“From the theater? I’m only thirty-one.”
“You’re barely in the theater, but you could be in it a great deal more. Denver is not so snobbish as St. Louis. If we played there three weeks, we could make as much as we took from any safe, and we’d not have to worry about arrest, or such horrible creatures as that fellow who assaulted Lizzie and ran us out of the country.”
“Perhaps. And where then? Someplace like Tannery, at fifty cents a head and all the hump steak we can stomach? You’re letting a few complimentary notices turn your head. We’re far more successful desperadoes than thespians.”
“We could be better if we kept to it. If we spent as much time rehearsing Corny’s plays as we do preparing to commit felonies, we could put the Booths to shame. As it is we have some talent and only adequate skill.”
“Bravado, certainly, and most of that onstage. You mustn’t be discouraged by a couple of minor setbacks. Look at those guerrillas the Jameses and Youngers, hunted in every corner of the land. The Pinkertons and the railroad detectives don’t even know we exist. Anyway, you knew the risks when you threw in with me.”
She turned upon him the full force of her eyes. “We could be Mr. and Mrs. John McNear in truth. That’s your real name, after all. You must have realized by now how fond I am of you.”
“My father had a buggy horse he was fond of. That didn’t stop him from having it shot when it broke a leg.”
“Why must you bring your father into every serious conversation? He’s dead, dead, dead!”
It was only the second time in their acquaintance he’d known her to display so much emotion without an audience looking on.
“Well?” she demanded.
“I wish—” He broke off.
“What do you wish?” she whispered, touching his arm. He felt an electric crackle: St. Elmo’s Fire, not uncommon in open seas.
“I wish I were actor enough to know when you were performing.”
Her expression did not change so much as congeal into something he could not hope to penetrate. She withdrew her hand.
“Well, we don’t dock for a week. We’ll discuss this again.” She opened her book and returned to Joan of Arc.
The steward cleared his throat. It was Johnny’s first intimation he’d returned from the bar. He turned back and accepted his drink.
“Lifeboat drill in fifteen minutes, sir. Will you be participating?”
Johnny squinted up at him. The sun was at his back. “Do they actually lower the boats into the water during the drill?”
“No, sir.”
“In that case, the answer is no.”