The Kingdom of Bones

“But you knew I was there all along.”

“Nevertheless. You intended I would not. To me, that makes it a strange business.”

“Some people thrive on strange business. What was that about a horse?”

Louise finished gathering up her books, then held them to her in a stack like a schoolmistress. She said, “I think I can guess it from her mother’s reaction. The child probably overheard her father say that actresses are no better than whores.”

The young man mused on this, not at all shocked by her forthrightness. “Do you know her father?” he said innocently.

She gave him a sideways look.

“You speak very boldly,” she said. “For one whose preference is to hide and observe.”

“Yet when I speak boldly, you do not take offense.”

She turned square on to him. “What would you have from me?” she said. “A lock of my hair? A button from my coat? My signature on your program?”

“I’d settle for a kiss,” he said.

“For fifty cents?” she said. “Now I take offense. Good day to you.”

He watched her walk across the stage, away from him and into the wings. When she got there, he called out, “When do I get to collect?”

She stopped and looked back. “Collect what?”

Again, he made a show of his innocence. “My change,” he said. “If I don’t get the kiss, I want my money.”

“Where can you usually be found, Jules Patenotre?”

“I have rooms at Murphy’s Hotel.”

“Then that is where I will find you,” she said, and left him standing on the stage.

TWENTY-NINE

Each Pinkerton office had a criminal department. They had card files and a rogues’ gallery and the resources to track certain kinds of criminal activity. The information held by the Philadelphia office didn’t compare with the criminal departments in New York and Chicago, but it gave a good account of all the local activity. The room was stuffy and high-ceilinged, and there was a fly somewhere loose in it.

“This one may fit,” said Sebastian, pulling out one of the cards to read it more closely.

“How so?” Sayers was in one of the office’s captain’s-style swiveling chairs, hands on his knees, looking ill at ease. He was out of place in here, and he knew it.

Sebastian read for a few moments and then said, “It’s one of our closed cases. A woman engaged us to look for her husband. Forty-two years old. He owned a company making optical and scientific instruments. Happily married, five children, and he disappeared without any reason or warning.”

“People disappear all the time. That’s not enough.”

“Wait. We closed the case after a farmer found his body. At first, it was assumed that he’d fallen from a train. He lay by the tracks for a month until the farmer came along. After all the animals and insects had been at him, it was impossible to be sure of the cause of death. But in the space of that month, our agent found out a few things about him that his family would have preferred not to know.”

Sayers had been swinging the chair from side to side. He stopped.

“Don’t tell me,” he said. “He led a double life.”

“He liked the vaudeville. The chorus girls best of all.”

“Louise Porter is no chorus girl,” the prizefighter said.

“I use the term loosely.”

“As does everyone.”

“I mean young actresses of any kind. He’d take a box at Keith’s theater or the old Trocadero and send notes to the stage door. Once in a while, he’d get lucky.”

“Louise has a particular method,” Sayers said. “I’ve seen it develop over the years. She arrives in a new city, sometimes with a letter of introduction to someone in society. That gets her an invitation to one salon or another, where she sings and recites and always causes a stir among the men. She might hire a hall to give a reading, but never a theater. She keeps the title of an actress, but she is never part of any cast or company. She dare not be.”

Sebastian held the card up, as if it might offer the proof of something.

“This man’s wife was on the committee of the Philomusian Club,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a women’s club. Arts, music, poetry. For all we know, some of their events could even have been hosted at his mansion.”

Sayers thought about that one. It did, indeed, seem to put a different light on matters.

He said, “Is there anything there to say how he died?”

Sebastian had to go deeper into the file for an answer. He read for a while and then, with his eyes still on the paper, said, “Our police contacts say they found needles in his body. A dozen of them. All in a cluster. Pushed in where no needle ought to go. All else might decay, but the needles did not. The family were never told.”

Sayers asked to see the paper. Sebastian checked for anyone passing the room before he handed it over, but no one was there. Bearce wouldn’t like it if he saw an outsider reading a confidential file, potential client or not.

Sayers read for a while and then said, “I believe this may be evidence of her work.”

“Her work?”

“I have learned so much about my own sex in these past fourteen years, Becker. There are men who hold that they worship innocence while they seek to consume it like dogs. And there are upright, respectable citizens whose secret dream is of pain and humiliation at the hands of another. Of a mistress, or a lover. To undergo such is an almost unbearable ecstasy for them. Most stay well within the safety of the dream. Some would go to its limit. And at that limit, there is always the possibility of something going wrong.”

“These are the men she seeks out?”

“She does not need to seek them out. Whatever signal they are looking for, they seem to find. They pursue her. Most of what I know came from the case of a man in San Francisco. He had survived her attentions, but was left damaged. His consent to what had happened meant nothing in law. There was a scandal. After that, she had to stop using her own name.”

“Good God,” said Sebastian, who until this moment was certain that he’d pretty much seen everything there was to see of human nature.

Sayers said, “Don’t you see what she’s doing, Sebastian? She’s fulfilling the letter of the Wanderer’s contract without being entirely true to its spirit. She dispenses suffering, all right, but only to those who actively seek it. If a death occurs, it’s more by their misadventure than by her intent.”

“A nice distinction,” Sebastian said drily. “As I’m sure the widows would agree.”

Alongside the post office building stood the square-towered headquarters of the Philadelphia Record. They waited in the foyer as Sebastian had a message sent upstairs, and within a few minutes one of the regular staff came down, greeted him as an old friend, and led them through to the archive rooms.

Here, recent copies of the newspaper were piled flat on shelves. Older editions could be consulted in huge bound volumes that needed a rolling ladder to get them down and specially built lecterns to hold them open.

They were interested in those issues that covered the weeks before the dead man’s disappearance. Sebastian wasn’t entirely sure of what they were searching for, but Sayers seemed to have more of an idea.

“Here’s one,” Sebastian suggested, and read aloud from the classifieds. “Miss M. S. Lyons. Private instruction in all the latest and most fashionable dances. Classes taught out of town. Private lessons any hour.”

Sayers glanced up from his own pages. “A dance instructor?” he said. He didn’t seem persuaded.

“You said she tried something like it before,” Sebastian suggested.

“I don’t think so,” Sayers said. “I’m in the society pages, here…” He ran his finger down an entire column in a second or two. Sebastian realized that he wasn’t so much reading it as taking in the text as a block of print and