Emperor Norton's Ghost Read online

  Oh really! I swear it makes my teeth curl.

  Generally speaking, even leaving aside the more outrageous of my ideas, I believe it is a good thing for a couple not to become entirely dependent on one another’s company. So it was that this particular night I told Michael I preferred to be alone. I fixed myself a simple supper of omelet, bread, and fruit in the office kitchen and took it upstairs to my apartment. When I was done eating I called Wish Stephenson on the telephone, praying that he—not his mother—would answer. His mother loves to talk on the telephone above all things, and she will keep you at it for so long you’ll forget why you called him in the first place.

  The instrument rang hollowly, over and over, in my ear. “Oh, botheration!” I said. No one was home. And I had so wanted to find out more about those empty graves!

  I felt all at loose ends. I sucked on a lemon pastille. I walked from room to room, looking out the windows but paying no attention to the view. I tried calling again, and still there was no answer. Good son that he was, Wish had probably taken his mother out for the evening. If they’d merely gone out for supper, I fancied they would have returned by now. If they did not come home soon, it would be too late to call, for politeness’ sake. And what I was really doing with all this aimless activity was trying to push Frances McFadden out of my mind.

  I leaned against the window frame and looked east toward Russian Hill, where I used to live in Mrs. O’Leary’s house. She has a fine, wealthy husband now and lives in Los Angeles. She has not seen the new houses that are springing up like mushrooms there, where we used to live—in that part of the City where everything burned after the earthquake not so long ago. I watched the contours of houses and buildings go fuzzy and gray with twilight, no fog tonight; watched the gray grow a blue tinge, like spreading ink; and then the electric lights started to come on. Pop! pop! pop! they came on one by one, or a whole handful at a time, like diamonds scattered over a dark counterpane by the Hand of Night. I shoved the window open an inch, drew in a deep breath of air that tasted of evening, and was suddenly seized by a fit of melancholy without cause.

  Divisadero Street was empty, uphill and down, everyone tucked up safely at home. By listening hard I was able to discern the whine of an electric trolley on Van Ness Avenue, and somewhere someone tootled a car horn, but on the whole, all was still. Too still.

  It was a strange moment. I should not have been surprised to see a spectre materialize in a blank window of the house across the street, whose inhabitants appeared to be perpetually away. Surely in this sad, foreboding stillness something would happen?

  But nothing did. I tried calling Wish one last time, and he was still not at home.

  At last, knowing it was a mistake, I called Frances McFadden—even though I was well aware her husband kept their one and only telephone in his study, practically under lock and key. I had the oddest feeling Frances had been thinking of me all this time, trying to communicate with me somehow, and perhaps if I telephoned she might answer. She did not, but Jeremy McFadden did, and I broke the connection without saying a word. My cheeks burned as if he could see me, in my cowardly silence, through the wires.

  ———

  After a perfectly horrid, restless night, I got up early. Dressed in a dark green skirt, a wide brown leather belt, and a lace-trimmed ecru blouse, I had already made the coffee when I sensed Michael’s presence in the office kitchen. I turned around and there he was, though he hadn’t made a sound.

  I frowned. “I don’t know how you do that,” I said.

  “Good morning to you, too. Do what?” He reached around me to remove the coffeepot from the burner, but stopped short of kissing my cheek.

  “Sneak up on me sometimes.” I frowned harder. “Generally, I know when you are there; and besides, I should have heard the door.”

  “Poor Fremont.” Now he kissed my cheek. His eyes twinkled with mischief. “Even those famous ears cannot be expected to hear everything.”

  “So far as I know, my ears are not in the least famous.”

  “They are with me.”

  “I shall not make such a good detective after all,” I groused, pouring coffee for myself and plopping down into a chair at the table, “if I can’t even hear my own front door open—and with a bell on it, at that!”

  Michael chuckled. “If you were more yourself, you would realize I came in the back.”

  “Oh. That explains it, then.” But it didn’t, not entirely. Michael is very, very good at sneaking around. Or at surveillance. I shall most likely never be as good at all these clandestine activities as he is. It rankles that I have never yet followed him on one of our training exercises without his knowing I am there. He has doubled around and come up behind me more than once, and it makes me furious—with myself, of course, not him. Well, maybe just a little bit with him.

  I sat glowering over my coffee and worrying about Frances, which did make me cross with Michael, because I couldn’t very well turn to him for support. Not after he’d practically forbidden me to pursue a friendship with her. Indeed! Well, he knew that wouldn’t work, but I still could not expect him to allay my anxieties, which had no foundation in any case. None that I knew of.

  My partner, wisely leaving me alone in my grumpiness, had begun to fry bacon and was beating up some eggs in a bowl. Michael is a more passable cook than I, if the truth be told. “No eggs for me,” I said, as I realized what he was doing.

  “You have to eat, Fremont. A good breakfast might even make you less disagreeable in the mornings.”

  It stung. I protested: “That wasn’t very nice.”

  “But true.” He picked up another egg.

  “Really,” I said sharply, before he could break the shell, “I had eggs for supper last night. Toast and bacon will do me quite well, thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  After a few moments, out of the corner of my eye I saw one of Michael’s black eyebrows arch up as he flashed a look at me over his shoulder. I knew what he was thinking: Is she approachable yet?

  I should be ashamed of myself, but I wasn’t. I was still irritated with him for bossing me around about Frances. More than that, I wanted and needed to talk with him about my concerns for her, which for no reason at all had intensified overnight. Perhaps, indirectly, there was a way …

  I joined Michael at the chopping block, next to the stove, and busied myself with cutting bread for toast. “Michael,” I said casually as I fastened the slices into the rack, “do you believe in mental telepathy?”

  Both black brows shot up. “I beg your pardon?”

  “You know, the ability some people claim to have, to be able to communicate across a distance, without spoken words.”

  “Mind to mind,” he said gravely.

  “Yes.”

  “Why do you ask?” Suddenly my partner was as tense as a bow, before the arrow is let fly.

  “It’s no big thing,” I said, bending down and shoving the racked toast into the oven, “just that I’ve had the oddest feeling someone may be trying to communicate with me in that manner.”

  I could not fail to notice that Michael’s tension immediately lessened. “Oh,” he said, sounding amused, “and what is this someone saying? Are the two of you engaged in a dialogue?”

  “Not exactly. I do not seem to be very good at it, but the feeling is certainly very strong. So what do you think, is it possible?” I retrieved the toast from the oven just in time to prevent its burning, observing in passing that the two of us had become rather good at this business of preparing meals together. So long as the meals were simple enough.

  “There is a great deal of interest in such matters right now in the land of my ancestors,” Michael acknowledged—reluctantly, I thought.

  “Russia, you mean.”

  “Yes, because of this man Grigori Efimovich, whom most are calling by the disgusting name Rasputin.”

  “I’ve heard of him,” I said. “He is a mesmerist, is he not? And why is the name so disgusting
?”

  “I don’t know what he is, Fremont, and neither do some people who happen to be among the few in Russia I still care about. I only know he is already close to the heart of the Tsarina, and I cannot believe that a person of such low birth and no education as this Grigori—”

  “Whoa, Misha! And I thought you such an egalitarian.”

  “Let me finish, if you please.” Michael’s eyes were flashing. He looked like a candidate for tsarhood himself, or at least a prince; a leader, a ruler, and an angry one at that. “The name Rasputin means ‘debaucher,’ and he is debauched, though he presents himself as a holy man. Like Jesus Christ, may the saints forgive the comparison—”

  “I didn’t know you were religious.” I popped a piece of toast in my mouth. I was enjoying this; it was highly interesting, even if it wasn’t helping me much with my own problem.

  “You might say Russian Orthodoxy is in my blood, or call it superstition. As I was saying: Like Jesus Christ, this Grigori Efimovich claims that physical contact with him can heal. Jesus healed with a touch of his hand. Rasputin takes it rather further than that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Michael ran his hand through his hair, messing it up, which he does only when he’s deeply distressed. “I should never have gotten into this with you. I’d managed to put it out of my own mind until you became involved with that damn woman!”

  I felt the blood flash into my cheeks. “Really, Michael, you had better explain yourself, because I cannot for the life of me imagine what connection there can be between my friend Frances and this—this debauched Russian!”

  “All right!” he said hotly, then quickly calmed. “But you must bear with me because it won’t be easy. I have heard on good authority that before he went to St. Petersburg, which by the way was only a year or so before I met you, Grigori Efimovich was healing people, especially females, through having carnal knowledge of them.”

  “You mean intercourse,” I said, my cheeks doubly hot now, “on the theory, no doubt, that if a mere touch is healing …”

  “Precisely,” said Michael. “Now that he’s at the imperial court, there are those who say he has cast his spell on the Tsarina in the same way, that this is what binds her to him, not just his ability to calm the Tsarevich.”

  “Begging your pardon, but you’ve lost me. What or who is a Tsarevich?”

  “The boy, the heir, Alexei, whose health is so frail. That is not general knowledge, by the way.”

  I frowned, perplexed. “But I still don’t see what any of this has to do with Frances. And you certainly should not have called my friend ‘that damned woman.’ Really, Michael!”

  “All right. I apologize, I was angry. You see, Fremont, mysticism is still all the rage in Russia, though the craze has passed its peak here in the United States and in England. The Russians are a sort of brooding, mysterious people by nature anyhow—mysticism, mentalism, mesmerism, all those things naturally appeal to them. I think Rasputin is dangerous, and the last thing in the world I want right now is to have to go back to Russia and be part of some plot to expose him.”

  I reached out and put my hand over Michael’s. “Is there such a plot?”

  “Not yet. But there are rumblings.”

  I thought about what I’d seen—and heard—at the séance. “Could he be legitimate, this Rasputin? Could he really have some otherworldly power?”

  Michael searched me, through my eyes. He said, “I’m beginning to understand. You think that medium at the séance the other night was the real thing. Don’t you?”

  “I don’t know. But I do know Frances, and something strange—and I believe otherworldly—happened to her, Michael. Something that has no logical explanation.”

  Michael inhaled deeply, and his love for me, mingled with a fierce caring, poured from his eyes into mine. “One thing I can tell you for certain, Fremont. Power is only power, but people can be good or evil. Rasputin is evil. Now I have to ask you: How much do you really know about your new friend?”

  5

  ———

  Threshold

  I told Michael I knew her well enough, and I would be careful. When he looked at me like that, how could I argue, or any longer be cross? It is not as if I’ve been the world’s best judge of people in the past. So I smiled and caressed his cheek and went on with my day, but all the while I felt as if I were waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  I have observed that oftentimes when things are not going very well to begin with, as the day goes on they only get worse. One wishes one had stayed in bed with the covers over one’s head; or at most, one might feel safe curled up in a chair with a book. But for those of us who must earn a living, such luxuries are not possible, and so I blundered on, with the kind of results one might expect on such a day. I dropped a whole box of paper clips all over my desk, including into the typewriter; forgot that I was supposed to be interested in Wish’s cemeteries until after he’d gone off alone, shaking his head; and I’d been writing and rewriting the same letter to my father for more than an hour when suddenly it happened. The other shoe dropped: Frances McFadden came to my door.

  The little bell jingled, a somewhat tousled head and narrow shoulders leaned in, and a tremulous voice inquired, “Fremont? Is this the right place?”

  “Yes!” I rushed into the foyer to assist her. “Come in, by all means, Frances. I’m so glad to see you. I’ve been quite concerned.” She was rather oddly dressed, in a black rain slicker several sizes too large for her. Beneath the gaping neck of the garment her throat was bare, with delicate collarbones protruding. Below the slicker’s hem I could see an inch or so of thick, smoky blue satin. Need I add that it was not raining?

  “Oh dear,” I said softly, “you look as if you’ve run away from home.”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes, I have.” She hunched her shoulders and cocked her head to one side. She appeared neither frightened nor repentant, so I relaxed a bit.

  “Come back to the kitchen,” I said, leading the way, “where it’s a bit warmer, and we’ll have more privacy to talk.”

  Frances was looking around with interest. “This is where you work? Cora—she’s the maid who answered the door to you yesterday—gave me your card, but she could not do so until this morning.”

  “I wasn’t sure she would do it at all.” We were passing through the dining room so I said, “This is our conference room.” I resisted the impulse to tiptoe as we passed the closed door to Michael’s study; he was certain to hear us talking in the kitchen anyway, it could not be helped.

  “She’s not so bad, really,” Frances said. “It’s just that Jeremy is not the sort of man one can disobey. Not without consequences. And he’d said I should not be disturbed, you see.” She shot a keen glance at the closed door, but said nothing about it.

  I put on a fresh pot of coffee to perk, then excused myself, explaining: “I’m going to run upstairs and get a warm shawl for you to wear, at least for now. As for later—well, we’ll take that as it comes.”

  “Oh, that’s not necessary, really!”

  “Yes, it is. Don’t argue.”

  “Fremont, wait. Stop. I can’t stay long. I have to go back.”

  “Go back? But you said you’d run away!”

  “Only because I needed to see you. I’ll be perfectly fine for some time yet, because I overheard my husband making an appointment for lunch at his club. He can’t possibly return before midafternoon at the earliest.”

  “Nevertheless, I’m going to get you a shawl so that you can take off that dreadful garment. You’re wearing your nightclothes under it, aren’t you? And you expect me not to be concerned?”

  Frances sighed, and made a wave of her hand with a shapely, graceful wrist. “Oh, all right, thank you. I’ll explain everything when you return.”

  “Good. And, Frances, do keep an eye on the coffee while I run upstairs. If a man comes out of that closed door we passed, don’t be alarmed. It will be Michael Kossoff, my partner, and he�
��s harmless.” Ha! That was a lie if ever I told one—Michael, harmless. But to Frances he would be, as long as I was here … or he’d have me to answer to.

  I was back in a trice, with my largest shawl. Crocheted of soft wool in an amethyst shade, it was given to me by Maureen O’Leary (as was—her new married name is Sullivan) last Christmas. The color is divine, but it has a deep fringe that can be annoying for things catching in it. I love it anyway, because it reminds me of her: Mrs. O. was always fond of fringes.

  “Here you are,” I said, placing the shawl on the table in front of Frances. “If you will allow me to help you out of that thing, I’m sure you’ll be both warmer and more comfortable.”

  “Thank you, Fremont.” The slicker fastened with toggles, which she fumbled a bit as she undid them. I went around behind her chair, ready to take the stiff coat from her shoulders. Her red-gold hair had been haphazardly pinned up, and as she shrugged out of the slicker, a curling strand of it came tumbling down. Frances automatically reached up to tuck it back in, and, as she did so, the satin sleeve of her dressing gown slipped above her elbow.

  I drew in my breath sharply, audibly, and almost dropped the slicker: Her upper arm bore one of the most dreadful bruises I had ever seen.

  Frances looked at me over her shoulder. “Well, now you know,” she said.

  The stiff slicker crackled in my hands. It gave off a damp, fetid smell like an old drain. For distraction I said, wrinkling my nose, “Wherever did you get this thing? It’s worse than old fish!” And then I briskly carried it right out to the enclosed back porch, where such a smelly thing rightfully belonged.