Lady Killers Page 16

  Cherifa was a such a talented dancer, the story goes, that she was often forced to perform an elaborate ritual for clients called the Hot Tea Dance, which was invented by Moulay herself. During this performance, Cherifa was stripped naked, and Moulay placed a tray loaded with cups of boiling mint tea on the girl’s head. Thus burdened, Cherifa was required to dance and perform acrobatic tricks without scalding herself. She managed to complete the routine about once every four times, but she was usually burned.

  One evening, Moulay was entertaining some particularly important guest who was high on hashish and feeling exceptionally cruel. The tense spectacle of the Hot Tea Dance wasn’t doing it for him that night, so he topped it off with a little entertainment of his own invention: sticking pins into Cherifa’s naked back, heating them with a cigarette lighter, and watching her squirm.

  Cherifa snapped. As the man busied himself with one of the pins, she spun around and, with an acrobat’s strength, punched him right in the stomach. When he crumpled, she kicked him so hard in the chin that she almost broke his neck. Before she could finish him off, Moulay and Mohammed sprang on the rebellious girl—and that was the beginning of the end.

  Though this story may well be fictionalized, it alludes to a surprising number of truths hidden between the accounts of mint tea and sinuous nude dancing. We know that Cherifa was brutalized, starved, and forced to sleep with horrible men. We know that Moulay was a wicked mastermind who used her creativity and intellect to please her clients. The tea tray and the cigarette lighter add color, but they’re not the real point of the story. What’s important here is that Moulay, once again, aligned herself with the victimizer, not the victim.

  Speaking of reportage, though: what of the Moroccan press? Where are the accounts written in Arabic about Cherifa’s murder, about Moulay’s ghastly brothel? As a matter of fact, there was almost no large-scale Arabic-language Moroccan press extant in Moulay’s day. Since Morocco was a French protectorate, there were French papers published in Morocco, but those mainly targeted, well, the French. Attempts by nationalists to run Arabic-language papers were frequently squelched by French colonial authorities in order to ensure that the idea of protectorate as ideal state wasn’t challenged. So what we know of Moulay, we know in French or English. Colette’s account (written in French) is the best we have, but even though her reportage is at times quite empathetic, and though she takes the devastating effects of colonialism into account, she is not Moulay’s countrywoman. What we’re left with is an imperfect portrait of a strange, cruel woman who never did manage to break free from the tentacles of the country she loved—or pretended to love, or was forced to love—not even in print.

  In the courtroom, Mohammed Ben Ali—who had tried to admit everything to the police earlier—was more than willing to keep talking. He even stood at the front of the room and acted out the murder for the benefit of his disgusted and fascinated audience. According to Ben Ali, once he and Moulay grew tired of kicking and beating Cherifa, they each picked up one end of a garrote and wrapped it around the girl’s neck. Slowly, patiently, they pulled the cord in opposite directions. Later, the two dismembered her, “boiled the remains for twenty-four hours to make them unrecognizable,” and then packed her away in the basket full of herbs. But they were remarkably careless with the body: not only did they fail at rendering the remains “unrecognizable,” but they barely bothered to hide the basket. Cherifa’s broken body could no longer bring in money, and so it meant nothing to them.

  “The Proper Fashion”

  There were plenty of witnesses against Moulay, but the most pitiful ones were the emaciated children who had been pulled from behind her wall. In court, people were astounded by their thinness, their raw animal terror—one of the girls burst out screaming when she saw Moulay in the courtroom—but what nobody expected was that these children, who had seen it all happen through a crack in the plaster, had nothing to say. They had been so starved and abused that they hardly had the capacity to form memories, much less recall and process them on command. “They barely murmur, wail quietly, prostrated,” Colette wrote. When asked why they didn’t try to run away, they responded, “We didn’t think about it,” or, “Impossible, we were too weak.” Colette rather callously saw them as “graceful cattle, but cattle whose impenetrable crushing stupidity is utterly loathsome.”

  You get the sense, reading over the trial, that these children were something like blank slates, wiped bare by months of torture. When they were rescued, the heaviest of them weighed no more than seventy pounds. “Victim? Certainly,” wrote Colette of the only boy, a thirteen-year-old named Driss, who tottered and gasped at the witness stand. “But a victim without memory; he has forgotten the dungeon, the lice, the itching, the hunger, the torture.”

  Moulay was visibly disdainful of these child witnesses, her old employees. Watching her, Colette noted that Moulay had no sense of guilt about the way she’d treated them. For Moulay, abuse was simply a natural part of the world she knew. It was the way one ran a brothel. “What words or images can we use to make Oum-El-Hassen understand what we mean by cruelty, and how could the accused murderer and torturer communicate to us her conviction that she is innocent?” asked Colette. Moulay seemed to believe that prostitutes should know their place in public, and she was appalled by the trembling and wailing of her former boarders. “Let them entrust this shrieking girl to Oum-El-Hassen and they’ll see how to educate them in the proper fashion,” wrote Colette, speculating about Moulay’s thought process. “A touch of torture, starvation, some shutting away.”

  Moulay’s actions imply that she cared desperately about following the rules—and not just any rules, but the French rules. She informed on the uprising, as dutiful as a telltale child. She eavesdropped on her girls to make sure they followed her instructions, which were simple: pleasure the clients and don’t try to escape. But her reliance on the rules was a doomed one, for the game she was playing was rigged. The scholar Marnia Lazreg writes that “the colonial view of prostitution was marked not only by a deliberate neglect of the ways in which colonialism contributes to a flourishing, if not encouraging, of this activity, but also by a constant desire to define prostitution as a sign of deficient moral standards among native people.” French soldiers may have paid her rent for a while, but they would never truly claim her as one of their own. She was too contaminated.

  Was Moulay so careful about rules because she genuinely bought into this system of colonialism? Or was her loyalty given coldly and calculatingly—you know, betting on the side of the victor? It seems she chose the side of the French as a careful gamble: she would be good to them now, and they would be good to her later. But what a gamble to make, counting on the loyalty of a colonizing nation.

  For her entire life, Moulay’s position was marked by abuse from above and below. She was colonized; she was colonizer. In 1933, a few years after Moulay warned her Frenchmen about the religious uprising, one journalist lamented over the state of the average Moroccan woman, who was “stuck in a medieval routine” and could “neither read nor write, stays imprisoned in her house.” Contrast this with Moulay, who was not the imprisoned woman, but the jail keeper herself. She was liberated from the home, but bought—too fully—into another system of oppression. Though she avoided being one of that “uncertain and miserable number” of dead girls, she contributed to the miserable number. In these economies of flesh, where everyone is feeding off everyone else, a dreadful question starts to emerge: is a life of comparative freedom (Moulay) only able to be purchased with the life of another (Cherifa)? The violence begins to feel inevitable, even mathematical—a horrible equation of power.

  In court, a few folks testified about Moulay’s character—or rather, her properness, which was her real defense. If she was a proper woman and ran a proper house, how could she be criticized? Proper women can’t be executed, can they? But the searing disappointment of the trial, for Moulay, was the fact that none of her beloved officers showed up to defend
her. Several of them were summoned, but not one of her clients or lovers appeared in court to explain how valuable she was to them, and how good. It was quite possibly the great betrayal of her life, and when she realized it, she wept into her white silk handkerchief.

  White Silks

  Moulay was skewered in the press throughout the trial. Everyone focused on the cruel corrosion of her looks, emphasizing that she used to be beautiful and talented and popular but that now she was evil both inside and out: the “once-glamorous” courtesan gone really, really bad. People even linked the loss of her looks to the increase in her cruelty. “After she lost her beauty she opened a house of prostitution,” ran the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, a bit smugly.

  The most compelling insight into Moulay’s interiority comes from Colette’s cold but beautifully written reportage—and even though Colette sat next to the murderess for hours, watching the intricate play of emotions in her eyes, it’s still only speculation. In her coverage of the case, Colette puts forth a sort of theory of Moulay’s cruelty, saying that Moulay considered brutality to be a rite of passage for young, beautiful women who put themselves in the way of men. “What we call cruelty was the ordinary, bloody, and joyous currency of her life from infancy: the blows, the cord tying the slender limbs, the harsh male embrace, the passion she had for following . . . our first French contingents,” wrote Colette. “All that kills, wounds, withers was her first lot as an adventurous girl.” Moulay’s world taught her that women were “creatures who strictly speaking have no value,” and she internalized this message and passed it on to her boarders. “Where could she have learned that punishment exercised on women . . . has any limits?” Colette wondered. What she learned of violence, she probably learned from the French contingents, who were marching through her streets and paying her to spend the night with her North African girls.

  Her devotion to the French was finally rewarded, however: she escaped the guillotine and was only sentenced to fifteen years in prison. (Mohammed got away with ten years.) Once her story reached the United States, it ballooned to mythical proportions: the number of victims attributed to her hovered around one hundred, and at least one paper ran a piece claiming that she had been guillotined. The same article reported that, at her execution, her beloved colonel was “seen to dabble his eyes.”

  The misinformation about Moulay only contributed to the sense of enigma and exoticism that hovered around her. Even Colette couldn’t help comparing the trial to something out of the Thousand and One Nights. To this day, Morocco still appears sinuous and strange in the Western imagination; descriptions of Fez have hardly changed since Colette wandered, a wide-eyed product of her colonizing motherland, through its streets. (In 2007, the New York Times described Fez with breathless amazement, writing that the city’s “shrouded figures and forgotten passages can seem impossible to decipher—yet tinged with a deep enchantment.”) When Western sources retold Moulay’s story, the details about smoky hashish, supple dancing girls, and scalding mint tea all fit nicely into the perennially popular fetish of the exotic woman, playing out against the backdrop of a very strong, very manly, very European army. At the end of the day, what was Moulay to the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern but a “shrouded figure” from a fairy tale?

  But the true mystery of Moulay isn’t her exoticism. It’s her motives, which will always be closed to us. Who did she kill to please? Her clients? Her own dark urges? The French? And why? We can only guess at the forces that made her so willing to take a bullet in the hand for the officers of an invading army. We don’t know what happened between Moulay and her love, the colonel. We can speculate that she felt broken, abandoned, and haunted by the memories of her glory days, when she was beautiful and when all the soldiers wanted her. But all we can really rely on is the image of her in the courtroom, surrounded by her own instruments of torture, weeping into her white silks.

  So Moulay went to prison, and the world wondered why she didn’t get the death penalty. Some suspected that she knew more than she was letting on—perhaps she was privy to some “political dynamite”?—or that she still had friends in high places who would have retaliated if the French executed her. But no one reached down from on high to hand Moulay a pardon, so off to jail she went, and she was never heard from again, at least not in “proper” society.

  Perhaps her colonel finally appeared to her, tore down the walls of her prison, and stole her away into the warm night air. But if not, Moulay stumbled out of her cell at the end of her sentence and vanished, a second time, into the underbelly of the world that raised and destroyed her.

  HIGH PRIESTESS OF THE BLUEBEARD CLIQUE

  Tillie Klimek

  If you were a woman who wanted to kill her husband, Chicago in the 1920s was the place to be. All you had to do was shoot the cheating bastard in the back of the head and then show up in court, fragrant with perfume and biting your lip in remorse. Your lawyers might ask you to marcel your hair, taking inspiration from the lovely murderesses that walked free before you, like “Stylish Belva” Gaertner and “Beautiful Beulah” Annan—the women who inspired the play Chicago. The all-male jury would glance approvingly at your silken ankles as you crossed them, visibly trembling. Go on, let a single tear roll down the side of your perfect nose. You’ll go free—but only if you are very, very beautiful.

  Tillie Klimek was not beautiful. At forty-five, she was worn down by childbearing, housekeeping, and four suspiciously troubled marriages. She was cursed with a “lumpy figure” and a “greasy complexion.” She held petty grudges. She seemed like someone who knew a thing or two about the occult. And she had the audacity to play the husband-killing game without knowing the rules.

  Coffin, For Sale, $30

  Tillie came to the United States when she was about a year old as part of the first wave of Polish immigration to Chicago. This initial movement, which occurred from the 1850s to the early 1920s, was known as za chlebem—“for bread”—and it was largely an immigration of the lower classes. Tillie never learned to speak English perfectly, and later in life, people would accuse her and her family of having the “air of peasants.”

  As an adult, Tillie’s life seemed unremarkable, especially against the breakneck backdrop of Chicago. Bootlegging raged, Al Capone ruled, rival newspapermen shot each other on the bus, and murders by women jumped four hundred percent in forty years. So when Tillie’s first husband died in 1914, nobody panicked. When she remarried in a month and lost her second husband ninety days later, nobody said a thing. Violence ran like an artery through the city; there was nothing terribly shocking about the Polish woman who’d just pocketed about three thousand dollars in insurance money and dead men’s savings.

  Tillie didn’t mind flying under the radar, especially since she never had trouble attracting the people she was most interested in: unmarried men. Even though people would later tear into her looks, she certainly possessed her own brand of allure, as she was never lacking for husbands and lovers. Her eyes, especially, were hauntingly pretty (though that might be simple hindsight bias—or, to use an even better term, “creeping determinism”—since now, when we stare into her eyes, we recognize her as a killer). She took her widow’s money and spent some of it on a romantic trip to Milwaukee with her latest lover, Joseph Guskowski, hoping he’d soon become husband number three.

  Alas, the charms of Milwaukee failed to work their magic on Guskowski, because he didn’t propose, and didn’t propose, and didn’t propose. Tillie started to get irritated. She’d spent all this money on a vacation, and no ring? So as they made their way back to Chicago, she tried to terrify Guskowski into submission by informing him that her first two husbands hadn’t died naturally. They’d been poisoned, she told him. Repeatedly. By her.

  Guskowski panicked. If he was reluctant about proposing earlier, he was certainly not going to marry her now. When Tillie realized her mistake, she threatened him with prosecution under the Mann Act, which was supposed to save women from prostitution but was actually used
to prosecute many forms of “immorality,” including consensual adult sexual behavior. Oh yeah? Guskowski replied. If she dared to prosecute him, he’d take her straight to the police and expose her for the murderess that she wa—

  Apparently Guskowski never stopped to think that angering Tillie might be a horrible idea, because a few days later, their argument ended for good when he dropped dead.

  By 1919, Tillie was a newlywed again. She and her third husband, Frank Kupezyk, moved to Chicago’s 924 North Winchester Avenue, a building known to this day as Old Lady Tillie Klimek’s Haunted House. Their marriage wasn’t altogether happy, and Tillie soon took a lover named John, who would stop by to smooch Tillie on the porch after Kupezyk had gone to work. (Neighbors noticed.) Life went on—normally, if not ideally—until two years into their marriage, when Kupezyk fell desperately ill.

  One afternoon, as her husband lay sick in bed, Tillie came bounding out of her apartment, waving the newspaper. She showed it to her landlady, who was shocked to see Tillie pointing to an ad for a thirty-dollar coffin. The coffin was a steal, and Tillie declared that she was going to buy it. “My man, he’s got only two inches to live,” she informed the horrified woman. She also bought a few yards of expensive black fabric and sat by Kupezyk’s sickbed, humming as she sewed herself a lovely funeral hat.

  Kupezyk died on April 25, 1921, and while he lay stiffly in the living room, dressed in his funereal finest, Tillie blasted dance music from her Victrola. At one point, she even reached into her husband’s coffin, grabbed his ear, and shouted, “You devil, you won’t get up anymore!” As soon as he was in the ground, she collected $675 in life insurance and went searching for her next man.