She Was Evil

Chapter One Corliss The question when it came was not entirely unexpected: “When did you last hear from Estephe Bernard?” I paused, reflecting for a moment, as I added ice to the Pastis favoured by my visitor. “Going on three months now,” I told her, saying it aloud bringing all my worries for my old friend to the fore, even as I tried to make light of it. “He’s not a recluse exactly but he is a tardy correspondent, be it by mail or telephone.” “Have you fallen out?” I placed the aniseed before Madame Elise Danton and gave her a slight scowl for her impertinence, knowing even as I did that it would have little if no effect upon her. “Bernard and myself,” I responded, fighting back irritation, “are on the very best of terms. Though I must confess to a little concern of my own that I have yet to hear from him.” Not for the first time, it struck me that the strongly defined features of my guest in no way belied the strength of her somewhat overpowering character; while her womanly curves were rendered more forbidding than enticing by the sharp cut of her somewhat mannish apparel. Lustrous black hair, cut short in the way of a choir boy, and when taken with the features below it, gave off the impression of a particularly no-nonsense educator. And as ever, despite the face I made of it, made me nervous in her presence. Having only returned from China two years before, tis for a stint as a missionary during which she had met and become friendly with Bernard, I was only too willing to accept my friend’s description of her as a woman who could find an argument in an empty room. And now she was about to add to my knowledge of her in a way my straitlaced English background could not fail to find shocking. “It will be a woman keeping him from you, no doubt,” she offered, her eyes not leaving mine and showing an unabashed interest that made me colour - despite my own forty-one years that exceeded her thirty-seven. “Meaning?” I asked, feeling a little hot at the neck as she continued to eye me in a way I could only describe as… predatory. Her mocking smile did nothing to cool my Turnbull & Asser collar or ease my discomfort in her presence. In fact, as she raised the Pastis to full painted lips and allowed them to satin the rim of the glass, I felt like nothing else but a small rodent before one of the more predatory and merciless of reptiles. “You English are so amusing,” she told me. “How you once managed to subdue three-quarters of our planet when the merest reference to s*x has you scurrying behind a defence of bemused ignorance is quite beyond my reasoning.” “I see no connection between wise and beneficent government and… and…” Again she laughed, “s*x, Corliss. Do you run so scared of the subject it is impossible for even the word itself to pass your lips? And you a doctor, too.” Her laughter became even more pronounced, more… mocking. “Madame,” I protested. “You are in my rooms and where I come from it is not the done thing to insult one’s host.” The look this fetched me was not what I would describe as contrite. “As for the subject of s*x,” I forced the word out, even if doing so discomfited me in just the way she described. “In my country it is not considered a suitable subject between a man and a woman who remain, to all intents and purposes, relative strangers.” If I thought my rebuke would shame her then it soon became obvious a rethink was required: “And what if I were to tell you that I do not intend for us to remain ‘relative strangers’? What if I were to tell you that I find you… interesting. The kind of man, in fact, suited to be in a relationship with a woman strong enough to accept his weakness and give him disciplined guidance.” I was aware of my cheeks colouring and, to my own amazement and embarrassment, a stirring at my groin at her preposterous suggestion. “But that is a matter we can return to at a later date,” she saved me a problematical and infuriated reply. “For now I wish to discuss our mutual friend.” I allowed her a curt nod, suddenly finding myself picturing her minus the mannish two-piece suit and steepling my hands over the disturbance at my waist that she not spot it and multiply the levels of my current discomfort. Had she been able to divine the image playing itself out upon the back of my eyes she might well have given her observation some more thought. Especially when she noticed my head between her legs and my tongue working busily at her… “Do you ever wonder if that abominable excuse for a human being could have survived the fire in your home city?” she interrupted my lustful imaginings. My skin instantly chilled at mention of the nightmare that was Dr Fu-Manchu, depraved interior interlude fading rapidly as the goose-bumps making residence upon the back of my neck at least took my mind from the embarrassment at my lower extremities. “In truth, Madame Danton, I…” “Call me, Elise,” she interrupted with a look of intent. “I will tell you when you have earned the right to address me as ‘Madame’.” Bernard had warned me that his friend had… “Eccentricities”… though he had not been specific in regard of their nature and I had not gotten to know her well enough during the troubles in London to ascertain just what they might be, but this latest piece of nonsense at least confirmed such a description as true. Deciding to ignore her, and having no idea as to what she was blathering about, I decided to humour my guest: “As I was about to say… Elise…” I continued. “It would be inconceivable had that accursed c******n managed to escape the cellar in that burnt-out cottage in Dulwich Village. And even if he had, I find it somehow difficult to imagine how he could have managed to spirit himself away from under our very noses.” Goose-bumps were fast becoming duck-eggs as I pondered the unthinkable under the eye of my, unsettling guest. “Yet… I cannot help but wonder…” A sense of dread made me leap to my feet and move to the window of my Bois de Vincennes apartment to take in the normality of the human traffic traversing the gaily lit street running the length of its western edge. “I feel as you,” her voice carried across to me as I stood with my back to her and thought the unthinkable, her earlier… eccentricity… completely absent from her voice now. “With such a creature and his offspring one can never be entirely sure.” I felt myself nodding, totally attuned to her misgivings as she enlarged upon her own fears. “If I thought, Edgar… You do not mind me addressing you with such familiarity, I take it?” After having taken me to task for addressing her as “Madame” and telling me I needed to “earn” such a right, it struck me that Elise Bernard was one of those women who needed to draw attention to herself by behaving… differently. I had met enough such egotists in my time to recognise the phenomena, after all. Even if, in this case, there would be an altogether more startling explanation for taking such an approach with me. But we will come to that later. “Anyway, Edgar,” she continued, taking my silence as agreement. “If I thought for one moment that Dr. Chao-Zhang lived still… If I seriously suspected that stupendous intellect and despicably evil genius survived, I would be afraid our civilised world might be threatened anew at any moment.” To anyone without experience of the c******n in question, her words would have been regarded as the most outlandish hyperbole. But we, Madame Elise Danton, and I, Dr. Edgar Corliss, knew as fact that there was no exaggeration whatsoever in either her words or her fears. She was becoming agitated now, shooting out her jaw in the truculent manner of a person not afraid to face a challenge, yet terrified of the challenge she described at the same time. A person, I was more and more certain, composed of some of the oddest complexities ever to be found beneath a female’s stockings and basque. “He may have got back to China, doctor!” she cried, eyes fairly sparkling with a fighting glint in them. “Have you thought of that? Could you rest in peace if you believed that he lived? Should you not fear for your life every time that a night-call took you out alone?” It was something I considered on a regular basis but saw nought to be gained from confiding the fact to her. Quite the opposite, if you must know. In point of fact, her earlier description of me as a man weak enough to require the guiding hand of a strong woman made me chary of saying anything that might cement her in this illogical and delusory perception of hers on my behalf. Or so did I consider it delusory at the time. I was becoming agitated myself now as the subject of the man who had near destroyed us all again came to the fore. It was, after all, only two years since he was here amongst us; since we were searching every shadow for those awful, soul piercing green eyes! What became of his band of assassins? His stranglers and dacoits? The damnable poisons and insects and command of hypnotic mind-control that made him such an utterly dangerous and implacable enemy when taken with utter and complete lack of any conscience or moral compass? A shiver of Arctic coldness flashed the length of my body as I recalled the days when this monster was amongst them. It was not until her voice broke into my pained reminiscence that I was forced back to the present: “You searched in Egypt with Estephe, did you not?” I nodded. “Correct me if I am wrong,” she continued; “but my impression is that you were searching for the girl – Guan-yin - I think she was called?” “We found no trace of her,” I answered, sadness as profound as it was unmistakable. “You were interested?” “More than I knew,” I replied, the pain of loss fetching truth instantly to the fore, “until I realized that I had lost her.” “I never met Guan-yin, but from your account, and from others, she was quite unusually…” “She was very beautiful,” I said, turning back to the view from my window and anxious to terminate this phase of our conversation. Elise Danton’s reflection regarded me sympathetically; she knew something of my search with Estephe Bernard for the dark-eyed Eastern girl who had brought romance into my drab life and I was sure she would have heard from Bernard just how much I treasured my memories of her – just as I loathed and abhorred those of the fiendish and brilliant Chinese doctor who had been her master. It was her turn to stand now and begin to pace up and down upon the fireplace rug, deep in thought as I took in her form from the view afforded me by her reflection in the window and wondered how two women so different could react upon me in such a similar way. As I watched her, you see, and despite the seriousness of our discussion, my erection had returned with a vengeance. Forgive my vulgarity, but there it is. She was a remarkable and utterly independent woman, that was for sure, but there was also something similar in her psychological make-up – at least the analytical side – that fetched my friend Bernard, the Burmese emissary, to mind. After all, had not Bernard paced our rooms in London in just such a way as Elise Danton paced my Paris rooms now. This before he had rung up the curtain upon the savage drama in which, though I little suspected it then, Fate had cast me for a leading role. My thoughts – other than, I confess, less than gentlemanly lustful asides – were centred upon the unforgettable figure of the murderous and sadistic c******n and I felt certain hers would be no more and no less than a mirror image of the same as I brought to mind Bernard’s description of the threat facing us: