What guest list at fete Grand Palais could boast such celebrated names? This is the Felon’s Salon. So haut monde as to be the living end in fatal snubs, people are just dying to get in. Definitive (with an emphasis on fin) its terminal disdain.

Fan in claw the courtesan Madame Woo brews her evaporating poisons. Funereal. Venereal. No man knows what hit him, or where she’s gone in air. She could uncoil upon the parquet floor beneath her empire chair. Snakes and ladders, cloak and dagger; seated to her left is the “Razor” Lacenaire.

The museum on rue Rouchefoucauld is closed for the evening. How did they get inside? By magic, it appears. Like Fantomas, do they exist? Is this why no gendarme can apprehend them? Damask. Cut glass flasks. Dizzying tisanes. Midnights the Musée Moreau plays ghostly hollow host to this most ghastly clan. That Symbolist himself devised the racks, which showcase here his eerie works on paper. No less bizarre et Byzantine are these complex wooden spines, an integument of unfolding wings, tricked hinge, and cobweb vanes that display his occult aquarelles, watercolors and designs.

Signature killers, each club member keeps a calling card with its distinctive flair. Cooney, the garrulous Australian, favors the garrotte. He’ll throttle any man who interrupts him when he’s talking. In the end, he may well catch his death. The Aussie just might snuff himself when he stops to take a breath! Cram a man between his vise-like hands; he’s canned Spam. The author withholds details, though what a tale to tell. Gory stories unfold in a style that will not sell.

Cooney has no imitators. He choked one cuckold fool to death with a bell-pull from Notre Dame. His discourteous parting gesture. So he leaves his name. “If overnight is not alright, a café is OK.” Loose as a noose, he is every lady’s swain. It’s not an instance of the opposite of the same.

“Rehearse outbursts first.” we hear in our weary ears. “Want good, fast, cheap? Pick two.” The mangler strangler claims. He gagged a convicting magistrate with scarlet velvet ropes that cordon off the foyer of Leroux’s famous phantom’s opera. Thus he made his mark or sign. His favorite film stars Fu Manchu in The League of the Nine.

Pale candles burn and curl down like viburnum. “Look ma, no hands!” jokes Saint Peaux-Rouge, a cruel conceptual killer. He may grow as old as the superannuated alchemist the Comte de Saint Germain, for he knows time’s in the mind.

Most criminals get caught because they’re high. They pull brainless heists mainly when they are in a real big hurry to get high. Ordinarily, such chumps are picked up lickety split in the crackhouse right next door, where they are looking in the wrong hand for their lighter. A typical sober success story in A.A. in New York City, anyway, drones on in this manner. “Hello, my name is Norm. I got sober 5 years ago, met a nice girl in the program. Today I work for an insurance company.” His tale unfolds in Manhattan’s church sub-basements like a Möbius strip, Mies van der Rohe’s “less is more” paradox, or the Eternal Return of the Same. How differently then did Ravaillac, at our table’s head, quit dope to become a super duper knife fighter . . .

“No guns, no bombs, no knives! That’s too far out.” the sobriquet checkout line tabloids term the “Red Skin” begins. “Mental violence: that is in! This nickname works for me. Do not we French call thugs Apaches?” Saint Peaux-Rouge is a dandy. Just as Leonardo scorned the sculptor, in Michelangelo, for his muck and mire, so he revered the painter more in Buonarotti. Specters spectate and lift little. By the power of suggestion the Red Skin can think a man to death. “Too much die in that diet platter?” Clad in black alpaca, he dawdles at his langoustine. Lixiviate. Elutriate. “You cannot be caught red handed if you keep immaculately clean.”

Impassively, Saint Peaux-Rouge trails one fair hand in air, slender fingers plinking as if coaxing ivory keys. Spell caster, hypnotist to high society’s surprise suicides, he consults your horoscope in constellated skies. Perhaps a banker wanders in a daze over the cliffs. His sole beneficiary? Saint Peaux-Rouge’s Svengali’s sway cannot be denied. Signed, dated, pushing the documents toward you. “Tomorrow I had to go crazy.” “Just now my photograph died.”

Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle’s work appeared in literary magazines including Fence, Verse, Purple, Lit, among others and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2004. This story was excerpted from his unpublished novel, Kook!
Everywitchway9@aol.com