Femme Fatale Read Online Free PDF

instrument. Those strings are my vocal cords. That wooden frame is my sounding board of bone and blood. I maintain myself. I had forgotten the maestro’s long-ago gift. Can you play it?”
    “I can, but I doubt that I should.”
    “Just a few passages, perhaps. I should like to hear it again. It had such a sweetness of tone, I remember.”
    “Madam, really—”
    But Irene had dashed around the front of the piano, drawing out the stool and lifting the key cover.
    “It is yours, Mr. Holmes, if it is worth having. I will never play the violin, nor anyone else here. I am so glad I remembered it. The maestro would be happy.”
    “I am an amateur, madam.”
    “You play. Nell particularly remarked upon it.”
    He sent me a look sharp enough to debone a trout. I thanked Irene’s tact that she did not mention my opinion of the violin-sawing that I had heard emerging from his hotel room on one occasion.
    A glissando of notes rippled off of Irene’s supple fingers. “Beethoven’s ‘Für Elise’? Everyone knows that.”
    “I must tune it.” He turned the violin into the crook of a suddenly elegant wrist and then stroked the accompanying bow over the strings.
    Lucifer flattened his ears, fluffed his tail, and scampered out of the parlor at the first violently off-tune screech. I had heard that violin strings were fashioned from cat gut, which might account for the wily Lucifer’s sudden exit. Then again, the unholy wailing sound the strings emitted under Mr. Holmes’s attentions might have accomplished it.
    Strangely, the dreadful sound seemed to encourage rather than discourage him. He pressed the instrument to his ear and cheek, his eyes only upon it, turned the tuning pegs, then struck a chord again. And again. Turning and striking and listening withan intensity I have seen in no other living creature than a cat, or a mongoose, waiting to strike prey.
    The parlor was forgotten. The piano was forgotten. Irene was, perhaps for the first time in her life . . . forgotten.
    She grinned at me in admission of her insignificance compared to a dusty old violin. I realized of a sudden that she had meant to distract him from the issue of how complete the translation of the Yellow Book was, that she had never answered him on that account.
    I also recalled Dr. Watson’s describing his former living partner’s retreat to the seven percent solution of cocaine, and suspected that Mr. Holmes’s face and attention must be just so lost and concentrated when he was needling the drug into his hollow veins as when he was drawing sound from the hollow body of a violin.
    The process, the intense . . . pitch of it unnerved me. It reminded me of something far closer to home, but I could not quite name it.
    Irene ran another introductory glissando up the keys of her piano. Gradually, the tones of the two instruments were growing together, and the teeth-jarring dissonance was muting into melody.
    Finally, Mr. Holmes nodded without taking his eyes from the violin, and her hands moved into the familiar lilting notes of “Für Elise.”
    The violin entered after the first few bars, a sudden low moan of almost-unwanted harmony. And then the two very different instruments rang through their melodic pattern, both in tune and in conflict still, so different and yet so paired. The piano’s smooth, bell-like trickling sound ran like clear water. The violin sounded raw, as if each note were wrung from a dry throat. Yet it throbbed with muted feeling, as the veriest beast will whimper for some unknown boon.
    I cannot say I have an ear for music. Casanova tilted his headfrom side to side, yet remained silent. Perhaps if Irene had sung . . . but there were no words to “Für Elise” and the violin was voice enough, the croakings of some abandoned Caliban as it was.
    I have always preferred more sprightly instruments like piccolos and flutes to lugubrious bagpipes and the violin.
    Yet there is a power in the strings’ unspoken longings, in their hoarse