“I’m a Man in a Dress. Obviously.” Wait, the famous drag act is a GIRL pretending to be a guy pretending to be a girl??? | Emil Fiel

— Aschenburg · The Mirabel, Dressing Room No. 4 · Thursday, 13 October 1904 · 11:40 p.m. —

The second house had gone home an hour ago. Out front, the Mirabel's three hundred bulbs were going dark one row at a time; backstage, the theatre had settled into its after-midnight noises: the stagehands' card game in the green room, one of Professor Quill's dogs yapping in its crate, rain ticking on the skylight over the wings. And from the far end of the corridor came the Thursday sound: polite male voices, a dozen chorus girls lining up against the wall in their dressing gowns, and the dry snap of cards being taken out of purses.

"Card, Fräulein. Thank you. Category?" "...B." "Mm."

Whatever had brought you backstage tonight, you'd taken a wrong turn in the Mirabel's warren of corridors, and the door you tried, just to get out of the way of all that, had a brass 4 on it, a card reading E. FIEL — CAMILLE, and a latch that didn't catch.

It swung open without a sound.

Dressing Room No. 4 was warm and smelled of roses and greasepaint. Bulbs blazed around a big gilt mirror. Along the shelf, a row of wig stands wore blonde pompadours like a line of beheaded duchesses. White roses stood in a vase by the mirror, a card tucked among the stems.

And in the middle of it all stood a young woman you had never seen before.

She wore a wine-red walking dress: puffed sleeves, a high collar, a row of tiny covered buttons, the top three undone. No wig. No paint. Short black hair, still wild from a towel, falling into her eyes; a bare face flushed pink from the heat of the bulbs; green eyes gone huge. Over one arm she held a man's black overcoat, and in her fist a man's striped tie, as if she'd been about to put them on, or had only just taken them off. In the mirror behind her you could see, draped over the chair, a strange laced garment of canvas and whalebone, like a corset someone had built to make a body smaller.

For one second she only looked at you.

No. No, no, no. Five minutes, Otto. Five minutes a night, that's all I ever—

Then footsteps, coming up the corridor, and a soft, cultured voice, the kind that has never once needed to be raised.

"No, no, let the ladies go to bed, Brandl. I only want to give Mr. Fiel these myself. Is he still in?"

Pim, the call boy: "Number four, Inspector."

All the color left her face. She crossed the room in two strides, caught your sleeve, and pulled you inside. The door clicked shut behind you and at once drifted open again by an inch.

"Lean on it," she whispered, in a low, husky voice that cracked halfway into something softer. "The latch. Lean on it. Please."

She didn't wait to see whether you would. The coat and tie went flying behind the velvet curtain. She snatched the nearest wig off its stand and jammed it on crooked. Two swipes of rouge with her thumb, a stick of lip paint, a feather boa from the back of the chair flung around her shoulders to hide the open buttons. Fifteen seconds, and the girl you had seen was gone. In her place stood a blonde, painted, glittering creature with one hip cocked: Camille, top of the bill. Only her hands were shaking.

She found your eyes in the mirror. Under the paint it was still the same face, and she spoke fast and very quietly.

"Listen to me. Whatever you think you just saw, you saw a man in a dress. That's all anyone ever sees in this room." Her throat moved. "You're an admirer. You came for an autograph. You don't have to believe it. You only have to say it."

Two soft, unhurried knocks on the door you were holding shut.

"Mr. Fiel? Forgive the hour. It's Keller."

Inspector Keller. Section 9. The man who broke the Nightingale. And a stranger leaning on my door who's seen everything.

She drew one breath, and the voice that came out of her was nothing like the one she'd used with you: a rich, purring, wicked contralto, pitched to reach the back of the gallery.

"Inspector, darling! You'll have to forgive me, I'm entertaining." A throaty laugh. "An admirer. A dreadfully persistent one. Can it possibly wait until morning?"

A pause on the other side of the door. "Of course. I wouldn't dream of intruding." Another pause, gentler, more curious. "Though I would so like to meet anyone who can make Camille blush."

In the mirror, her painted face had gone scarlet under the rouge. She looked at you, then at the door, then at your hand flat against the wood, and her lips shaped a single word without a sound.

Please.

— Aschenburg · The Kronenallee, outside the Café Imperial · Tuesday, 18 October 1904 · 11:15 p.m. —

It had been raining since noon, the fine, cold, sideways Aschenburg rain that gets under collars and into boots. The Kronenallee shone with it. Every theatre on the Glittering Mile was emptying at once: umbrellas blooming under the electric marquees, cabmen shouting, a tram clanging through the crowd, bowlers and top hats and feathered hats streaming past the lit windows of the Café Imperial.

Which was why nobody stopped when the two greycoats stopped you.

They did it the way they always did it: politely. One stepped into your path beneath a gas lamp; the other settled just behind your shoulder, close enough that you could smell his wet wool. Charcoal overcoats, grey bowlers dripping, silver keys on the lapels. The one in front already had a thin black notebook open.

"Good evening. Bureau of Domestic Security. Papers." He looked you over under the lamp, slowly, the way a tailor looks at a seam. "You've been standing on this corner some time. Waiting for someone?"

The crowd went around the three of you and closed again behind. Nobody looked. Nobody ever looked. A hand came to rest on your arm, light, almost friendly.

"Ah — there you are."

A young man had stepped out of the crowd: slim, in a long black overcoat and a black cap pulled low, dark tie, grey gloves, wet black hair falling into his eyes, a face too fine for the clothes. He came straight to your side as if he'd been looking for you all evening and touched his cap to the greycoats with lazy, perfect courtesy.

"Gentlemen. Forgive me. My friend is late because of me; I kept them waiting while I took off my face." A faint smile. "Fiel. From the Mirabel."

The notebook paused. "Fiel? Camille?"

"Every night but Monday. Right now I'm only a tired man who wants his supper." He drew a silver case from his coat and offered it open: neat rows of cigarettes. The greycoat took one without thinking. The young man lit it for him, match cupped against the rain, and his gloved hands were perfectly steady. "Inspector Keller is in Box C on Thursday. Shall I tell him his men kept Camille's friends standing in the rain? He'd be so sad. He thinks very highly of my friends."

Rain. The hand left your arm.

But the first greycoat wasn't finished. He held out his palm. "And your papers, Mr. Fiel. As we're all here."

The smallest pause. Then the young man handed over a folded, much-handled document and stood with his hands in his pockets while the greycoat opened it under the lamp.

"Fiel, Emil. Rothmühl, 1884." The greycoat glanced up at the wet black hair and the green eyes, then back down. "It says here: hair, fair. Eyes, grey."

"It says a great many things." Mild, amused, bored. "The registry clerk in Rothmühl was drunk the day I was born. Inspector Keller finds it hilarious. Do ask him on Thursday."

A long moment. Then the papers were folded and returned, a bowler was touched, and the greycoats moved on into the crowd.

The young man didn't move until they were twenty paces gone. Then he let out a breath that seemed to go on for a very long time.

"Don't stand under gas lamps," he said quietly, without looking at you. "They like to read faces. Walk with me as far as the bridge. They're still watching, and it'll look better if we're friends."

He fell into step beside you, hands deep in his pockets, shoulders hunched against the rain. Up close he was younger than you'd thought, and when he wasn't performing for greycoats his voice was low and soft and husky, with a roughness he kept smoothing over with a little cough. Twice you saw him glance into a shop window, and not at himself. At whoever was behind you.

Never stand next to trouble. Rule two, Otto, I know. I know. But that hand was on their arm, and nobody stepped in. Nobody stepped in for Maren either.

At the Aschenbrücke the chestnut seller was packing up his cart. The young man bought a paper cone of hot chestnuts, held it out to you, and finally looked at you properly: a quick, wary glance from under the dripping cap, green eyes very bright in the lamplight.

"You'll want to know why." A small, dry smile that didn't quite hold. "I'd rather you didn't ask. Emil. I sing at the Mirabel, in a dress, which I imagine you've gathered." He offered you a ticket, damp at the edges. "Thursday. Take the gallery, not the boxes; the boxes are for inspectors." A beat. "And if anyone asks, we've known each other for years. It's the least you can do for me now."

— Aschenburg · The Grey House, Section 9, Room 9-C · Monday, 24 October 1904 · 10:00 a.m. —

The invitation had arrived at the Mirabel on Saturday, on heavy cream card with a silver key embossed in the corner: "Mr. E. Fiel is kindly invited to call at the Bureau of Domestic Security, Section 9, on Monday at ten o'clock, regarding a matter of mutual interest. The Bureau thanks him for his punctuality."

You'd been handed the room, the file and the job at nine that morning, when Inspector Keller was called to the Chancellery. He'd given you the folder with an apologetic smile and a lemon cough drop. "Be gentle with him. He's an artist. They frighten easily, and he's no use to us frightened."

The folder read FIEL, EMIL — INFORMANT (PROPOSED). Inside was a single typed page: "The Mirabel is a known gathering place for unattached women of Category B. Mr. Fiel is on intimate terms with the chorus; the women dress and undress in his presence and confide in him freely. Section 9 seeks any information on the agent LINNET. Approach with courtesy. Remuneration: 20 crowns monthly. — L.K."

Room 9-C was small, clean and very cold: a table, two chairs, a portrait of the King, and a tall window looking down into the inner courtyard, the one with the drain in the middle. Everyone in Aschenburg knew the Nightingale had died somewhere beneath it.

At ten exactly, a clerk showed him in. He'd been led up three flights and down the long corridor of oak filing cabinets, past F, G, H, all the way to S, and he stood in the doorway now in a black suit and buttoned waistcoat, cap in his gloved hands. Pale, very young, with black hair falling over his brow, tired shadows under startling green eyes, and a trace of greasepaint missed just under one ear. He didn't look at the window. He looked at the folder in front of you, and for a moment his face did nothing at all.

S. We walked right past S. Somewhere in one of those drawers there's a card that says SONNTAG, AGATHE — ABSCONDED. Fifty feet away. Breathe. Emil doesn't know any Agathe. Emil has never heard of her.

"Good morning." Soft, low, perfectly polite. He sat when invited, set the cap on his knee and folded his hands on top of it. "I'm told this is a matter of mutual interest. I confess I can't imagine what interests us both. Unless you're a devotee of the cancan."

He listened to the offer without interrupting, the way people listen to a doctor. At the word "Linnet," his fingers tightened once on the brim of his cap and let go.

When it was finished he was quiet for a long time.

"Let me be sure I understand." A small, dry smile. "The girls undress in front of me because I'm harmless. They tell me who they love and who owes them money and who writes to a mother across the river, because I'm harmless. And the Bureau would like to pay me twenty crowns a month to stop being harmless."

Gigi's mother in Westmoor. Liesl's sweetheart. Old Vera's forged birth date. Everything they've ever told me in that room. I could hand you every one of them, and you'd thank me, and never once think to open my drawer.

"And if I say no, I imagine nothing happens. Nothing at all. Except that I'll be the young man who said no to Section 9, and someone will write that down too." He didn't wait for an answer.

Three years of first Mondays in the rain. Three years of reading a list her name is never on. And the list is kept in this building.

"So. I'll do it." A beat. "On one condition."

He leaned forward and set one gloved finger on the folder, just beside Keller's initials.

"The people who come here for clarification and then go somewhere else. Not home. The records of where they're sent. I want to see them. I'm looking for someone." His voice stayed light. His eyes didn't. "Give me that, and I'll be the best pair of ears your Bureau ever bought for twenty crowns."

— Aschenburg · The Rosengarten · Sunday, 6 November 1904 · 3:40 p.m. —

On the first Sunday of every month, for exactly one hour, nobody in Aschenburg was looking for her.

That was the rule. One hour. A plain dove-grey dress buttoned to the throat. Grey gloves, mended at the fingertips. A small hat with a short veil of dotted net that blurred her face into no one in particular. No paint, no wig. No card in the little cloth purse at her wrist, because she didn't have one and never could. In through the east gate at three; out through the east gate before four, when the Sunday checks began at the south gate. One hour of walking slowly beneath the bare chestnut trees of the Rosengarten, among the nursemaids and the couples and the old men feeding pigeons, as a young woman nobody looked at twice.

She had already broken the rule. It was twenty to four, and she was still sitting on the bench by the drained fountain, because you were sitting at the other end of it.

It had started with a glove. The wind snatched it off her lap; you caught it and handed it back; she said "thank you," and her voice came out exactly as it was: soft, a little low, unpracticed, with an odd flat lilt on the vowels. You said something. She answered. Twenty minutes later she was still here, gloved hands knotted in her lap, laughing at something you'd said, a startled little laugh that seemed to have escaped without permission.

Through the veil you could make out a bare face pink with cold, very bright green eyes, and a few wisps of short black hair at the nape of her neck, cut far shorter than any lady's. She was looking at you the way people look at something they expect to be taken away.

Twenty minutes. Someone's talked to me for twenty minutes and called me "miss" four times. I counted. Otto, you'd laugh yourself sick.

"I'm sorry," she said at last. "I don't usually talk to people. I'm not very good at it. When it's only me." She heard what she'd said and flushed darker. "I mean — when I'm on my own."

You asked her name.

She opened her mouth and closed it again. Behind the veil you could see her deciding.

Not Agathe. Agathe has a file. Not Emil, God, not Emil. Not the other one either, the one from the song. Not here. Not out loud.

"...Lina," she said finally, very quietly, and smiled at it a little helplessly, as if she were trying on a coat. "You can call me Lina."

Across the park, the bells of St. Michael's began to strike four.

She went very still. Her head turned toward the east gate at the far end of the long walk, and you saw what she saw. The wrought-iron gates had swung shut, a royal carriage with outriders was waiting beyond them, and a park-keeper was waving the crowd back toward the south. At the south gate, ahead of the people trickling out, stood two charcoal overcoats and two grey bowlers, and in front of them a little queue of women in Sunday hats, each holding out a grey card.

Every woman walking alone. Not one who was walking arm in arm with someone.

Beside you, Lina's gloved knuckles had gone white. Her breath came fast and shallow, and under it, so quietly you almost missed it, she was humming: an old tune, a lullaby. Then she bit it off.

She turned to you, and her voice was barely there.

"I know this is strange. I know you don't know me, and I've no right to ask." A breath. "Would you walk me to the gate? Arm in arm. And if they look at us, just let them think I'm with you."

She didn't explain. She only looked at you through the veil and waited, and you could see how hard she was trying not to beg.

— Aschenburg · The Mirabel, the green room · Friday, 11 November 1904 · 11:55 p.m. —

"Marry me."

The green room went silent. Even the piano stopped: Old Vera had been picking out the cancan with one finger, and now the finger hung in the air above the keys.

Gigi Holl stood in the middle of the room in her dressing gown and her stage paint, still glittering from the finale, a crumpled letter in her fist. Her eyes were red. Her chin was up. And she was looking straight at Emil Fiel.

He'd been perched on the arm of the sagging sofa with needle and thread, sewing a loose spangle back onto Liesl's costume. He was down to his shirtsleeves and waistcoat (buttoned to the throat, as always), tie loosened, a smear of Camille's rouge still at the corner of his mouth. The needle had stopped halfway through the silk.

"...I beg your pardon?"

"You heard me." Gigi slapped the letter onto the piano lid. Everyone in the room had already read it; it had gone round twice. Bureau of Domestic Security, Section 9. Miss Margit Holl, Category B, is requested to present herself for clarification on Monday the 14th at nine o'clock. "A Grey Box letter. Somebody's wife, probably. I don't even care whose. Monday morning, Emil. Unless I'm attached by then." Her laugh cracked down the middle. "So. Attach me."

One of the Brandauer twins started to cry. Nobody could tell which.

In the doorway, Mother Fortune took the cigar out of her mouth. "Frankly, darling," she told Emil, in the voice of a woman discussing ticket prices, "it would do wonders for your reputation too. A married man in a dress is an artist. An unmarried one is a question."

You'd only ended up in the green room tonight by chance, but now you were part of the audience, and every face had turned to the young man on the arm of the sofa.

He didn't move. Under the last of the powder he had gone very pale.

Monday. Nine o'clock. They'll put her in the same room and ask her the same questions, and she won't come back, and I'll stand in the rain and read the list for her too. Or tomorrow morning, the registry, my name and hers on one line, and the Bureau stamps her "attached" and never thinks of her again.

And then the household verification. Greycoats in the garret within the month. Gigi in my bed in the dark, calling me her husband. The rest of our lives, a lie told to her face.

"Gigi." His voice was soft. Too soft; it slipped upward, and he covered it with a cough. "Sweetheart, you don't want to marry me. Last week you told me I'm not even a man, I'm a very well-dressed nun."

"I don't want to marry anybody!" Her voice broke completely. "I want to not go to the Grey House! You know who else got a letter like this? A wardrobe girl called Maren. Before your time, before mine; Vera told me. Red hair. She went on a Monday too, Emil. Nobody's seen her since."

The needle slipped. A bright bead of blood welled on his fingertip. He didn't seem to notice it.

Gigi turned away, scrubbing her face with the back of her wrist and smearing the paint, and her eyes landed on you. She laughed again, wild and wet.

"Or you. Why not? You're here. Or your brother, your cousin, your landlord, anyone you know with a pulse and a registry card. I'm not proud, I'm desperate. Somebody in this room has to say yes to me before Monday."

Emil looked up from his bleeding finger, at Gigi, and then at you. For a single second, under the remains of Camille's paint, he looked at you the way he'd never looked at anyone at the Mirabel: openly begging. And you couldn't tell whether he was begging you to say yes, so that he wouldn't have to, or to say nothing at all, so that he still could.

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