Several rows of seats in the Stalls had been removed to make way for gilded armchairs sent from the Palace. Ferdinand and a large retinue made an entrance. The Prince bowed to the invited audience, turning his head upwards to nod in friendly fashion at Sir Penderel, with a further, more solemn nod to us. The theatre hushed. A short delay ensued while the soldiers came down from the proscenium stage to probe the padding of the armchairs for bombs or other murderous engines. The Knyaz took his seat.
At the faint sound of flute and zither rising up from the pit, the curtain rose on an exotic scene outside Herod’s palace. Copper bowls and ewers and enormous silver cups lay scattered around the stage. Salomé appeared, pale-faced, almost immaterial, with appealing, wild black eyes and scarlet lips. She stood as though frozen in ice, an iridescent mass of silks and ostrich feathers. Her train gleamed like stained glass in the moonlight, adorned with countless blue foil and velvet butterflies. Now with the slow, formal gestures of a sorceress, now with the cuffing movement of a cat playing with a doomed mouse, Salomé began to taunt a roped John The Baptist, her eyes fixed on the lower half of his agonised face.
‘Iokanaan, it is thy mouth that I desire. Thy mouth is like a band of scarlet on a tower of ivory. It is like a pomegranate cut in twain with a knife of ivory. The pomegranate flowers that blossom in the gardens of Tyre, and are redder than roses, are not so red. The red blasts of trumpets that herald the approach of kings, and make afraid the enemy, are not so red - ’
Her head leaned forward towards him like a heron about to strike. ‘There is nothing in the world so red as thy mouth. Suffer me to kiss thy mouth.’ She reared back. ‘What! You have nothing to say! You reject me! Yet I say, I will kiss thy mouth, Iokanaan. I - will - kiss - thy - mouth.’
The curtain fell.
When it rose, the shockingly young Salomé stood alone on the stage. A servant came in, bearing the Baptist’s head on a silver platter. Blood dripped profusely from it. Salomé seized the severed head by the black matted hair and dangled it in front of her, addressing the sightless eyes.
‘Ah! Thou wouldst not suffer me to kiss thy mouth. Well! I will kiss it now. I will bite it with my teeth as one bites a ripe fruit. Yes, I will kiss thy mouth.’
As she uttered the words a spurt of blood burst from the severed neck and spattered down to the floorboards. She twisted and turned, kneading the blood into the stage as though pressing grapes. The crimson smeared into a circle hardly wider than her small feet.
‘I said it; did I not say it?’ Salomé remonstrated. ‘I said it. Ah! I will kiss it now. But wherefore dost thou not look at me? Thine eyes that were so terrible, so full of rage and scorn are shut now. Wherefore are they shut? Open thine eyes! Lift up thine eyelids!’
I began to feel in need of air, overcome by the same nausea I experienced on the choppy sea-crossing to France. I started to rise, whispering an apology to an entranced Sir Penderel. Holmes’s hand restrained me.
‘Hold hard, Watson, there is something here - ’ he cautioned in an urgent whisper.
I returned my eyes to the stage. The slight, beautiful Salomé with her tea-rose skin stood there motionless. She brought the still-bleeding head closer and closer to her face, the gap narrowing inch by inch until suddenly, unbelievably, the two mouths met. A shocked silence engulfed the theatre. Seconds passed while she held the Baptist’s mouth hard against hers as though her young lips were wrestling a spirit from it. After an age, the pairs of lips pulled slowly apart.
‘Ah!’ she called out wildly to the severed head. ‘John, I have kissed thy mouth, I have kissed thy mouth. There was a bitter taste on thy lips. Was it the taste of blood? Nay; but perchance it was the taste of love. They say that love hath a bitter taste. But what matter? What matter? I have kissed thy mouth.’
The curtain fell. Applause led by the Prince began. Holmes grabbed my arm, his voice cutting through the sound.
‘Watson! Now we must go - and faster than the wind. Sir Penderel, forgive us, for we must leave you.’
I caught a glimpse of Colonel Kalchoff leaning forward, his expression startled as he observed our precipitate exit. We rattled down the long flight of stairs, my comrade’s eyes shining, his cheeks tinged with colour. Only at a crisis have I seen those battle-signals flying.
‘What is it, Holmes?’ I called out as I puffed after him in great confusion.
He called back, ‘I deserve to be kicked from here to Charing Cross. Salomé has given us the very answer we have been seeking!
Chapter XVIII
SALOMÉ GIVES HOLMES THE CLUE
OUTSIDE the theatre, we searched for a public conveyance. Almost invisible in the confusion of ostlers rubbing down matched carriage-horses were two conveyances on offer, the one a jolting Droshky, the other a tall chaise à porteurs, two tunnels of yellow light spilling out from its side lanterns. Holmes led me into the chaise, drew up the windows against the cold night air, tapped on the wood-work, and with a flick of their heels, the porters whirled us away through the darkness. Soon we were trotting into an endless succession of covered bridges and melancholy, deserted streets, silent and lifeless as some city in a dream. Not even the clatter of a piano resounded through the night.
‘Holmes,’ I begged. ‘Please let me know what we are up to!’
‘We are going to Vasil Levski Boulevard.’
His hand shot up. ‘Before you ask the inevitable, my dear Watson, we must keep Mycroft’s words in mind.’
‘Which in particular?’ I asked.
‘“Nothing you take for granted in England will offer you any sort of blueprint for your stay”.’
My companion gave a short laugh. ‘He might well have quoted Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland - “But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked. “Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad”.’
I took up the familiar refrain. ‘“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice’.’
To which Holmes ad-libbed, ‘We must all be, or we wouldn’t be here.’
I stared out at the dark streets. ‘Why are we heading for Vasil Levski Boulevard?’ I demanded at last.
‘That’s where the body of the murdered woman lies, at the Coburg Mortuary Chapel.’
‘Why would you want to examine her again?’ I asked, unsettled by this development.
‘Other than a pair of reading-glasses, nothing affords a finer field for inference than a cadaver.’
‘You say Salomé has supplied the answer we’ve been seeking? How so?’
‘Do you remember when she drew the severed head of John the Baptist to her own?’
‘Shall I ever forget it!’ I exclaimed. ‘Why, nothing among the Timurids - ’
‘And when the Baptist’s grisly black hair pressed against her young face?’
‘Indeed. The blood trickling through the beard! I nearly retched.’
‘That triggered nothing in your mind, Watson? Come, think hard! When Salomé tore the head away and we could see her bare face again - ?’
I shook my head. ‘I’m sorry, Holmes, I am at a complete loss.’
After my reply, despite my importunate enquiry, he would only say, ‘We need to glance a little more closely into details. It is imperative to examine the body one last time,’ adding quietly, ‘There lacks one final proof before we confront the killer and reveal the solution to the world.’