An appreciative titter from the group.
To Toussaint, the building resembled an old theater slightly gone to seed. There was no one waiting to enter. This must be a slow time at Madame Tussaud’s, he thought.
As he entered the museum, Toussaint became conscious that, even though he was a member of a tour group, he was quite alone; now that Koesler was no longer with him, he was with no one. The only person with whom he might have conversed was Irene Casey. And she was busy talking with Joan Blackford Hayes. Just as well, he concluded; his mind was busy with what they had just found in Westminster Abbey.
Thus distracted, Toussaint found himself staring at a pale, unblinking head. It was the wax image of Admiral Nelson as he lay dying aboard his ship at the climax of the Battle of Trafalgar. Toussaint read the description posted nearby. It stated that Nelson had signaled the beginning of that mighty sea battle by announcing, “England expects that every man will do his duty.” And as he lay dying, he uttered the immortal words, “Thank God I have done my duty.”
A smile crossed Toussaint’s face as he contrasted the related statement of the late General George Patton: “Don’t be a fool and die for your country. Let the other sonofabitch die for his.”
Time certainly seemed to change the philosophy of war; Toussaint agreed wholeheartedly with Patton.
He climbed one flight and found himself among the kings and queens of history. Henry VIII and his wives! The last one, Catherine Parr—the only one of his wives with any luck at all—had been lucky enough to outlive Henry. Toussaint moved on and found himself passing American presidents, French, Russian, and Chinese leaders. Even a lifesize figure of Pope Leo XIV. Very realistically, the Pope looked tired. So tired he appeared ready to fall down and die.
Toussaint continued to stroll by the exhibits, but his final thought about the Pope triggered musings over the recent assaults against probable papal candidates. What a wild, rash plot! But a plot that had already produced two murders and one attempted murder. And, in all likelihood, another attempt at murder this evening.
Even with all their preparations, the police would have to be on their toes tonight. They simply couldn’t disrupt a public religious service by detaining and interrogating each seemingly suspicious-looking person who entered the abbey. Besides, if they were to be totally and ultimately successful, it would be counterproductive to frighten away the perpetrators or alert them to the fact that they were walking into a trap.
No; tonight’s operation must appear to be an ordinary ecumenical service. And this would immediately put the police at a disadvantage. It takes only a second for an assassin to strike. The police had only a fraction of a second to counterattack.
The police would need a lot of luck this evening.
No, not just luck; God’s providential care.
Without quite being conscious of it, Toussaint had climbed another flight. He was now on the top floor amid the tableaux, the conservatory, and the heroes. Apparently, even with all his distractions, he was making better time than the others. He could, faintly, hear some of their voices from the floor below, but none of them was in sight.
In front of him was a mean-looking little wax man holding a sword and standing near a barrel of what appeared to be a keg of gunpowder. Toussaint checked the descriptive note. His guess was correct: it was Guy Fawkes, one of the leaders of the unsuccessful plot by a group of Catholics to blow up the Houses of Parliament.
How history might have been altered had Fawkes and his coconspirators succeeded, Toussaint thought. Then again, how history, in all probability, had already been altered by this weird plot of the Rastafarians. What if the aged and fragile Leo XIV were to die now? Two very promising candidates for the office had already been murdered. What would the Papacy have been under the reign of Cardinal Claret? Or Cardinal Gattari? The world would never know.
Toussaint strolled through the conservatory. The figures were so lifelike. Alfred Hitchcock, Agatha Christie, Jean Paul Getty; Telly Savalas in sunglasses, holding a cherry sucker in his role as Kojak; Larry Hagman in ten- gallon hat as JR in
Now he was among the heroes. As he walked among the wax figures, Toussaint reflected that the choosing of a hero depended a great deal on who was doing the selecting. He, for one, would never have looked upon tennis player John McEnroe as a hero. More a very spoiled but very wealthy brat.
Toussaint was quite sure—and his hunch was confirmed— that he would not find the Rastafarians’ hero-god here. There was, however, one black man: Muhammad Ali. Strange that with all the achievements of blacks—Paul Robeson, Jackie Robinson, George Washington Carver, Ralph Bunche, Martin Luther King, Jr.—the only black hero was a prizefighter. Well, Ali had claimed to be the greatest. Perhaps he was right.
He had seen it all now except what many considered Madame Tussaud’s piece de resistance, the Chamber of Horrors. Appropriately, this was in the basement.
As Toussaint descended the stairs, he was unaware of the man who furtively removed a sign blocking the ground floor entrance to the chamber stairway. Nor, after Toussaint disappeared into the basement, did he see the man replace the sign in front of the stairway.
The sign read: Temporarily Closed.
The Chamber of Horrors was, quite deliberately, very dimly lit—one of those places wherein it requires several minutes for one’s eyes to adjust to the near-darkness. Toussaint stood motionless at the landing until he could see more clearly. He was then able to discern the general design of the chamber.
It was laid out in a serpentine manner occasionally opening into larger compartments. Many of the exhibits had been set in large alcoves in the walls, the twisting nature of which tended to shield the displays, thus intensifying the viewer’s shock.
He was greeted by the wax image of five human heads that had been severed by the guillotine during the French Revolution: Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Hebert, Carrier, and Fouquier-Tinville.
The heads were spattered with varying amounts of blood. Toussaint recalled the custom of the executioner’s holding up a freshly severed head and exhibiting it to the crowd. There was no questioning this exhibit’s stark realism.
Toussaint moved along the corridor. There was the infamous Marat, murdered in his bath in 1793. And John Christie, his shirtsleeves rolled up as he busied himself in the kitchen of the house wherein he had concealed the bodies of his wife and five other women he had murdered. And there was Dr. Crippen in the dock with his paramour beside him. He had murdered his wife and attempted to flee England with his mistress disguised as a boy.
As he continued down the corridor, Toussaint heard noises intended to evoke a London street of the previous century. There was the sound of a horse-drawn carriage and the muffled speech of passersby. This was punctuated by the muted echo of a woman’s scream. There was even a bit of fog. Toussaint peered into the exhibit. It was one of Jack the Ripper’s disemboweled victims. Gruesomely graphic. He wondered if such depictions might not be nightmarish for impressionable children as well as for normally squeamish adults.
The thought of children and adults made him aware that he had seen no other living person in the Chamber of Horrors since he had entered. True, he had not encountered that many people on any of the floors above. But there had been some. And the chamber was supposed to be the most popular section in the museum. He thought it odd, but no more than odd, that he had encountered no one else down here. He shrugged; he would undoubtedly find someone else at the turn of one of these bends.
He recalled the story of the next exhibit clearly. It conjured up the interesting case of one George Joseph Smith. In 1915, Smith was arrested on a “holding charge” of suspected insurance fraud. The police strongly suspected he had murdered his wife, whose insurance he was trying to collect. One Inspector Neil was convinced that Smith, under three different aliases, had murdered three of his wives for their insurance.
Each woman had died in the same manner: by drowning in her bath. And in each case there were no marks of violence. Local doctors had listed the cause of death in each case as heart failure—in one case possibly due to epilepsy. One curious circumstance—again common to all—was that each was found lying with her head under the water at the sloping end of the tub with her legs sticking out the other end.
A pathologist later testified that an epileptic attack causes the body to first contract and then stretch out— which would have pushed the head out of the water. An ordinary faint would have allowed water to enter the mouth and nose and would have had a reviving effect. If the women had fallen forward and drowned, their bodies would have been found face downward, the pathologist concluded.
This same pathologist reexamined the bodies after evidence proved they were all connected to Smith. Still he
