Free Angels of Music by Kim Newman Page A

her reputation and her thousand names and faces to become one person… Mrs Calhoun. The man for whom she had made such sacrifice served her so brutally she needed to fetch her abandoned make-up kit to cover the bruises.
    Like Erik, she finally had no face. Only masks – masks of paper, masks of paint, masks of skin.
    She remembered Mr Calhoun’s final face – staring furious eyes and open screaming mouth as the waters closed over him, the anchor tied to his ankles pulling him down into the dark.
    Standing by the Seine, she at last became the Woman Who Was No One.
    Mrs Calhoun drowned with her husband. La Marmoset’s agency was wound up, her ties with the Sûreté and the Deuxième Bureau sundered. The earnings of her successful career were in her husband’s name, and she had contrived it so he was officially missing, not dead. Lawyers in America controlled his estate and would have no sympathy for her… Tampa Morel, the name signed to the marriage register, wasn’t an identity which would hold up in court, so legal access to her own fortune or her husband’s was impossible.
    She thought of joining Mr Calhoun eternally, swimming down to cling to his corpse.
    If The Woman Who Was No One dies, who would care?
    She thought of
L’Inconnue de la Seine
… a case known to all detectives.
    Some twenty-five years earlier, a young woman – believed to be not French – was fished out of the river, stuck like a specimen bug on a spar of driftwood. A presumed suicide by drowning. Her cold face smiled like the Mona Lisa, and her wax death mask became the template for replicas sold all over the city. That unnamed face was everywhere, even after all this time: in posters, bas-reliefs, prints sold to tourists and popular masks.
    L’Inconnue de la Seine
, by virtue of an obscure and pathetic death, became a heroine of France. Even with all the publicity, no one came forward to identify her. La Marmoset thought that highly suspicious. Were
l’Inconnue
her case, she would not have so readily written it up as a suicide.
    Having rid herself of Mr Calhoun, she was on the point of becoming the unknown’s sister – famous for being no one, for being dead, for losing all which could be lost.
    Then, alone, she heard music from beneath the city – an impassioned solo organ recital, distorted eerily by echoes, broadcast by sewer outlets. Later, she would learn that the piece was ‘Don Juan Triumphant’, from Erik’s perpetually reworked, never-finished opera.
    She knew of the Opera Ghost Agency and realised now that there was a place for her on its lists. The next day, she approached the Persian at the Café de la Paix. She wore one of her favourite disguises, though it was in truth a disguise no longer – a black veil and widow’s weeds. In introducing herself, she hesitated only when it came to giving her name.
    ‘I am… La Marmoset,’ she said. ‘Yes, that will do.’
    The Persian didn’t press her. He had also misplaced any real name he might once have had.
    She was first called La Marmoset by men – gendarmes, detectives, criminals, magistrates – who resented her involvement in what they took to be their business. To them, she was an interfering monkey. Nothing but a nuisance in skirts – clingy, chattering, agile and facetious. Each and every one of those men had come to speak the name with respect and even fear.
    ‘You were expected, Madame,’ said the Persian. ‘It is Erik’s pleasure to accept you as an Angel of Music.’
    At that time, the Opera Ghost Agency was assembling a new trio.
    In Dressing Room 313, La Marmoset was introduced to Sophy Kratides, whom she had once glimpsed from afar…
    That had been a memorable morning. Frederick Hohner, condemned wife-murderer, was to be executed in rue de la Roquette, just outside La Grande Roquette Prison. As he climbed the steps to the guillotine, he was felled by a rifle-shot from across the prison yard. With his first conviction secure, the state had not troubled