“The doll. We left it up there, near the bridge.”
With his hand, Fabio Canti indicated to the children the debris caught between two rocks.
“Baby Tony!” cried Ulette. “My child! Help. We need to rescue him.”
“In the state in which the torrent’s left him, it’s hardly worth the trouble. I’ll buy you another one, my little Ulette.”
“I forbid you to do that,” Madame Aubert interjected. “This disobedience deserves to be punished. What would your brother Etienne say if he knew how you treated his gifts?”
Ulette burst into tears.
“Don’t cry, darling,” said the painter, picking her up. In a whisper, he added: “Tomorrow, Maman won’t be angry any more; she’ll let me do it and I’ll buy you a doll even more beautiful.”
“It won’t be Baby Tony.”
“But I don’t understand how the pram could fall into the stream,” said Robert. “We left it far enough away from the bridge that it couldn’t have rolled there.”
“Besides which,” observed Madame Ossola, “the bridge has a trellised parapet. Someone must have thrown it over.”
Madame Aubert went pale. In her mind, a connection was made between the mesh of the bridge and the factory wheel.”
“If I’d seen that…!” said Robert, brandishing his rifle.
“That astonishes me,” said Madame Desambez. “There are no nasty people around here.”
“Did you meet any strangers?” Madame Aubert asked the children.
“Yes,” said Robert. “A man who isn’t local. He asked me if he was far from the Villa Bellarosa, and he swore when I told him that we were the grandchildren of Madame Desambez, the owner of the villa, and that Ulette and Antoine were Madame Aubert’s.”
The three women exchanged a glance full of anxiety. While consoling Ulette, the painter had not missed a word. He put his equipment back in the auto.
“Climb in everyone, mothers and children. Madame Ossola, whom I know to be a very good driver, will kindly take the wheel. Go back to the house. I’ll climb up to the wood and see how the pram could have rolled into the torrent. Perhaps—for I can read a dread in Madame Aubert’s face—I can find an explanation.”
He helped everyone to climb aboard.
“By squeezing up a little, there’s room for everyone. See you in a little while, Mesdames. It will do me good to come back on foot, and I’ll reflect.”
With that, the auto pulled away, and the painter, heading in the opposite direction, scaled the sheer hillside down which the children had come.
A few minutes later he was near the bridge. The road was covered with a fine white dust, the dust of the Midi. Very clearly, beside the spot where the children had left the pram, he saw the scuff-marks and footprints that had been made around it when Robert, Simone and Ulette had kissed Baby Tony. Over those light imprints, Fabio distinctly saw the marks of solid shoes heading, with the pram, toward the bridge. There was no doubt that the owner of those heavy shoes had lifted up the pram and thrown it into the Luron.
Having done that, the man had run for some time: that was written in the dust of the road. But why had he done it? Some maniac, fond of destruction.
Then the painter went down the path that led to the main road. In certain places the dust was so thick that the malefactor’s tracks were imprinted as clearly as in clay.
Why would a stranger to the region have had the stupid idea of playing a dirty trick on the children? Fabio Canti resumed walking. The individual had stopped there, behind that bush. Evidently, he had been following the children. Why? It was the individual encountered by Robert, Ulette, Simone and Baby Tony, in the pram, who had asked them the way to the Bellarosa.
Uh oh! he thought. The clown mistook the doll for little Antoine. That would be serious. After the father, the new-born. Who do those two crimes profit? Etienne Aubert. No! That’s too horrible! But the more I think about it, the more certain I am that he thought he was throwing Madame Aubert’s baby son into the torrent. When he finds out that he’s made a mistake, he’ll look for another means…but I’m forewarned. I’ll watch out. As for Etienne, I’m going to write to my friend Raynaud, in order that he can keep an eye on the boss of the factory on the Quai de Javel...
No longer having anything to study, he took the road to the Bellarosa at a rapid stride. He arrived an hour after the auto carrying the three women and the three children.
“Well?” asked the grandmother and the mothers.
“And accident, quite simply. Those blockheads had left the pram on the slope; it rolled to the one place where it was possible for it to fall into the Luron—a gap made recently on the edge of the balustrade. I’ll have to notify the watchman. There’s no reason to be anxious.”
“I told you so, my dear Aline,” said Madame Desambez. “You forge romantic ideas too quickly. We’re no longer in an era when such crimes can be committed.”
“That’s true—but since my husband’s death, I’ve thought of nothing but all kinds of machinations against me and my son Antoine.”
“That will pass, with time, my dear Madame,” said Fabio Canti. “Your nerves are in a bad way, but the sun of these blessed shores will soon dissipate your dark imaginings.”
XVIII. Baudard’s Triumph and Defeat
While Fabio Canti was trying to restore calm to Madame Aubert’s mind, Armand Baudard had taken the train back to Nice.
When they knew the result that same evening after midnight—for their accomplice had telephoned the villa on Mont Boron to advise them of his prompt and fortunate return, during the party that Josette Coutan was living—Thomas Keysar and Berthe Jafaux looked at one another.
“Well,” said Thomas, “that’s much better than one would have dared to hope. That’s work well done.”
“Let’s wait for tomorrow morning’s papers,” said Berthe. “The Petit Var, the Eclaireur and the Petit Niçois. It will be sufficient to send them to the boss, underlining the information in red pencil. Etienne will have nothing more to do than pay up.”
In spite of the inertia of their conscience, the two associates had a rather agitated night. Waiting for the news, the night seemed interminable. When they were served chocolate in their rooms, they sent the valet to buy the Nice papers.
There was no mention of an accident on the Pont de Tournant or of the Villa Bellarosa.
“It’s nerve-racking to wait. What if we were to hire an auto and go to have lunch in Théoule?”
And that was what they did.
“What a splendid view!” said Thomas to the pretty waitress—her name was Rose—who served them lunch on the terrace of the hotel, with the intention of making her chat. “It’s a paradise.”
“Oh, we’re used to it, we don’t pay any attention to it. Personally, I’d prefer the inferno of Paris. One gets bored in paradise. Nothing ever happens here…well, yes…yesterday, Monsieur Fabio Canti, a great painter, so they say, who’s a guest at the Villa Bellarosa, the roof of which you can see through the trees, was making a study of the Luron, the local torrent, when a bad lot threw a baby’s pram from the Pont du Tournant. Fortunately, there was only a doll in it.” She started to laugh, showing youthful teeth. “It wasn’t anyone from Théoule, for sure, who did that—doubtless a vagrant.”
Thomas struck the table with his fist. Berthe bit her handkerchief angrily, and Rose the waitress, nonplussed, looked at them fearfully. Then they paid the bill, adding a good tip, without taking coffee, and set off back to Nice.
As soon as the auto started moving, Berthe said in a low voice, so that the driver could not hear: “That idiot Armand! To mistake a doll for a kid! That’s a bit too much. I’ll give him what for, the imbecile! And to think that my sister supports such a numbskull! No, I can’t believe it!”
“Calm down.”
“All the same, he’d have done better to look at what he was chucking in the water.”
“Damn! He was in a hurry. Perhaps you’d have done the same in his place.�
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“Never in this life! He didn’t even think to poke it in the belly to make it say Papa, Mama.”
“I’ll go to see Baudard this evening at his hotel, to get things going again and give him orders to follow: how to get into the villa and a means of killing the baby.”
“Prussic acid.”
“No. That’s an old game and its effect leaves traces. I have a mate at the hospital in Nice, who can filch me a test tube of typhoid fever microbes. Only it’s necessary that Baudard changes his face and treads warily, now that Fabio Canti, who’s a smart fellow, is at the Villa Bellarosa.”
“All the same, it will be hard.”
“A million; that’s the price. Shut up—we’re going through Cannes. What if we were to go take coffee at Cornichet’s, near the Casino. We’ll find friends and chic people there.”
BOOK THREE: ZIGZAGGING TOWARD PUNISHMENT
I. Resumption of Work
On the terrace of the Villa Bellarosa, under the wisteria pergola, Fabio Canti was daydreaming, contemplating the blue sky, so pure, where he had just seen a flock of swallows fly by.
What was he thinking about? Nothing. All the springs of his mind had relaxed under the hot sun of the magnificent morning. He gazed at the progressing and impressive spring, the eternal god in the process of giving the trees a new verve and teasing the buds, the ascending sun and the errant violet shadows. Devoid of reflection and thought, he perceived as an artistic animal the images of the end of March, which already had the visage of April, the perfumes, the bird calls, the colors, the slight movements of the leaves and branches in the breeze from the deep blue sea. The Painter of the Sun was bathing, so to speak, in the sun, both of them insouciant, in the waves of the ocean of light, when he heard Madame Aubert calling to him.
“Fabio! Fabio! Come quickly!”
In a few bounds he rejoined the young woman, who was running from the far end of the garden.
“What is it? The children?”
“No, it’s outside. An unfortunate cyclist has just had a fall out there. He isn’t moving! He must have been killed!”
He’s doubtless only unconscious. Would you like to prepare a cordial, water and a cloth?”
While Madame Aubert ran inside, Fabio Canti hastened toward the sunken fence, climbed over the balustrade and jumped into the ditch.
The cyclist, still unmoving, was lying in the road. His head had struck the edge of a buried rock hidden by the grass, and blood was flowing abundantly from a cut on his forehead.
He raised the man up, bracing him against his knee, and dabbed the wound with his handkerchief. A few minutes later Madame Aubert arrived, with Madame Desambez and the old maidservant Madeleine, with everything he needed. Soon, the wounded man, bandaged and reanimated, opened his yes and stammered a few incoherent words.
“We must carry the poor man into the house,” said Madame Desambez, always excellent and charitable. “Madelon, go tell the gardener what has happened. Tell him to come and help us move the injured man.”
Madeleine set off immediately. The man had closed his eyes again, and was visibly making an effort to pull himself together.
“Well?” asked the painter. “Do you feel better now?”
“It hurts, and I still feel very dazed. It was an accursed dog. I tried to stop to avoid it and my wheel stuck in a rut. I made a mess of my dismount and fell into the grass.”
“Where you nearly split your skull on that stone. You might have been killed.”
Baudard shivered.
Baudard had been transformed; with his hair newly cut and his russet moustache shaved off, he looked like a valet in some respectable house. He had not anticipated the sharp stone; the fall, which was only intended to be a simulated accident, had nearly cost him his life.
“Don’t worry,” said Madame Desambez. “Head wounds heal quickly. We’ll telephone Dr. Gayraud in Cannes. He’ll be here within an hour. You can stay here until you’re better.”
“Do you have anyone to inform?”
“No, thank you. I’m an electrician, and I was on my way to Saint-Raphaël, where I was told there was a job going.”
“Well, you’re hired,” said Madame Desambez. “When you’re on your feet again, I’ll have some jobs for you to do. I have repairs to be done, and some electrical adaptations to make.”
“That will be a means for me to repay your kindness.”
“I didn’t mean it like that, my friend. But here’s the gardener with Madelon. He’s bringing a ladder to use as a stretcher. It’s a little primitive, but there isn’t anything better.”
The wounded man was laid on the rungs, and the gardener and Fabio Canti lifted him up. Everyone followed. Madeleine brought the bike, whose front wheel, out of kilter, was atrociously twisted.
II. Information from Dr. Gayraud
The plan improvised by Thomas Keysar and Berthe Jafaux had, therefore—with the assistance of chance—succeeded better than the three rogues had dared to hope. Baudard had counted on faking a sprain rather than cutting his face. Now that it was done, he congratulated himself.
The doctor would not arrive until the afternoon; he was on his round when the telephone call came in, and he was so desirous of satisfying his clientele that he would have had lunch before coming in his automobile, which he drove himself.
Short, very dark, with a deep red complexion, a moustache and beard like a horseshoe on his jutting chin, Dr. Gayraud, a general councilor of the Alpes-Maritimes, and also an alert and cheerful bon viveur, inspired confidence with his perpetual cicada song to the most obstinate invalid: “Illness,” he said “only exists because one allows oneself to fall under the suggestion of some indisposition. Get it into your head that there’s nothing wrong, and you’ll be cured.”
Departing from that principle, he used fewer pharmaceutical products than cordials. When he had to care for an injury, however, his skill was incontestable; no one could count the number of fractures he had repaired and dislocations that he had undone instantaneously. He was, in consequence, known and esteemed throughout the region.
“So,” he said when he came in, “What’s wrong, clumsy?”
Baudard only replied with a groan. The doctor unwrapped the improvised bandage in order to examine the wound.
“Damn! Fortunately, my lad, you’ve bled abundantly—which doesn’t mean there’s no internal hemorrhage. In five or six days you’ll be able to get up, and in a fortnight you’ll be as good as new.”
He turned to Madame Desambez and Madame Aubert. “Absolutely no food today. Tomorrow, light nourishment and a glass of Mariani wine. After that, whatever he wants. I’ll make him a dressing that won’t need to be renewed, unless there are improbable complications—in which case, call me. So, everyone’s in good health here. Terrible clientele! And the children?”
They went back down to the drawing room, where Madame Ossola had taken the three heroes of the escapade of the Pont du Tournant. Madeleine was holding little Antoine in her arms. Dr. Gayraud examined all the children carefully.
“Go on, it’s not this time that you’ll go to bed without supper. But keep an eye on the baby. I’ve heard it said, Madame Aubert, that you have the intention of staying with us. In that case, you and your children will become future clients.”
“Indeed, Doctor, if my godmother wants to keep us.”
“Don’t say such silly things, Aline. Well, Gayraud, how is the little one?”
“I’m aware of your misfortune, Madame Aubert. I feared that the child might be feeling the repercussion of your emotion, but there’s nothing there. He’s solid. By the way, where did you pick up that parasite?”
“He fell in front of the sunken fence. He’s an electrician who was going to Saint-Raphaël to look for work.”
“Ah! That’s odd...”
“Why?” said Fabio Canti.
“Nothing. An idea...”
The painter accompanied the physician, who had taken his leave of the ladies. When they were alone under
the wisteria pergola, the doctor, with his Provencal accent adding a hint of garlic to his confidence, said:
“Your wounded man surely hasn’t contrived his injury deliberately? The day before yesterday, in Cannes, I was at Césaire the barber’s, in the process of being shaved, with my chin covered in soap, when the individual you’re hospitalizing—whom I definitely recognize, even if he didn’t pay any attention to me—came in, but not with the face he has now. No, with a curly shock of hair and a russet moustache. He came in saying: ‘Cut my hair and get rid of the moustache. I’m going to be a valet. Give me the head of a flunkey in a big house...’ That’s why, turning my face toward him, half-hidden by the white foam, I noticed the fellow, who scarcely had the appearance of that employment. As he’s given himself here as an electrician, I’m advising you, illustrissimo signor Fabio Canti...”
“Yes, that seems bizarre to me, all the more so as…one confidence for another...”
The great painter told the physician the story of the death of the doll, Baby Tony, thrown with the pram into the Luron from the Pont du Tournant, and concluded: “Perhaps there’s no correlation, but thank you for your information, which seems to me to be of great importance. I suspect the man of having believed, when he threw the pram into the torrent, that he was drowning little Antoine Aubert. And if that were the same criminal who caused the accident that crushed his father, it wouldn’t surprise me.”
“You’re an artist, with a rapid imagination. All the same, you’re going a bit far, it seems to me, in the association of ideas. Who would profit from all these murders worthy of the Atreides?”
“The son of the first marriage, Etienne Aubert, now the master of the factory. I’ll write to a friend in Paris, the Commissaire of Police at Grenelle. He was the one who made the report concluding an accident, without conviction but without immediate evidence to the contrary.”
“What? The son of the victim! That’s monstrous! He had his father murdered by this clumsy cyclist?”
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