by Alex Capus
They padded around quietly and talked in low voices, and if some clumsy junior should happen to clatter two Erlenmeyer flasks or test tubes together, his colleagues merely raised their eyebrows in annoyance. Here superiors addressed their subordinates formally as ‘vous’ and politely couched their orders in the interrogative form. Everyone made his own coffee at break time, and no one would have dreamed of even noticing a colleague’s belated arrival.
It was ten years since Léon had presented himself at the Police Judiciaire’s communications centre, which was situated two floors below the laboratory and one floor above the commissariat. In the early weeks he had found it hard to do justice to his function as a Morse expert, because all that counted there was efficiency and he couldn’t disguise his incompetence by falling back on a railwayman’s smart uniform and a red flag. It had clearly emerged after only one hour’s work that Léon hadn’t a clue about Morse telegraphy. This he had with difficulty justified to his superiors by vaguely alluding to years off work owing to war service and convalescence after being wounded in action; once he had even pulled his shirt out of his trousers to show off his cicatrized bullet wounds.
But because he proved to be extremely hard-working and pored over the official manuals of the French and international telegraph companies until long after midnight in his attic room in the Batignolles, he quickly overcame his handicap and was accounted a fully qualified telegraphist after only a few months.
However, it was soon borne in on him that Morse telegraphy, once you got the hang of it, was an extremely monotonous occupation with little prospect of variety. As luck would have it, he was rescued from the telegraph office after three years by the deputy director of the Scientific Service, with whom he occasionally had lunch and who offered him an assistant’s post in the newly established forensic laboratory.
Léon’s change of job did, admittedly, mean a return to a state of utter incompetence, because his total lack of interest in chemistry had consigned him to the bottom of the class at school, and he had completely forgotten the little rudimentary knowledge that had, despite himself, lodged in his brain.
By employing his tried and tested method of imposture, however, he again succeeded in remedying his ignorance in a short space of time. His colleagues forgave his initial clumsiness partly because he was friendly to them all and did not contest anyone’s position in the hierarchy. By the autumn of 1928, when his second child was on the way, Léon was among the most senior members of the laboratory staff and accountable to no one. There was a good chance that he would be appointed deputy departmental director in a few years’ time.
That morning he had to check a potato gratin sample for traces of arsenic, a procedure he must have carried out a hundred times before. He took the dish containing the supposedly poisoned gratin from the refrigerator, dissolved a knife point of it in hydrogen and poured the solution over a piece of filter paper to which he had previously applied a solution of auric sodium chloride. Although constant repetition had rendered every move he made second nature to him, he exercised due care when handling the samples, every second or third of which actually proved to contain enough poison to be hazardous to health. This time the result was negative. Instead of turning violet under the influence of the potato solution, the auric sodium chloride retained its brown coloration. Léon went to the sink and washed his utensils, then sat down at the black and gold Remington on his desk and typed out a report plus three copies for the investigating magistrate.
In the early years he had taken an interest in the broken vows of fidelity and cooling passions that gave rise to the poisoned potato gratins and pork chops, likewise the stories of avarice, betrayal and revenge. He had tried to imagine the desperation of the poisoners – it was nearly always women who resorted to rat poison, men having other weapons at their disposal in the fight for survival. He had also tried to empathize with the feelings of relief and disappointment entertained by those husbands who had misinterpreted their stomach-aches, giddy spells and fits of sweating as symptoms of poisoning. He used to seek out the detective inspectors on the ground floor and chat with them in order to learn something of the fate of those persons whom he, Léon Le Gall, with his pipettes and stirrers, had either set at liberty or consigned to prison or the scaffold. He had sometimes – unofficially and against his colleagues’ advice – visited crime scenes or viewed the homes of female poisoners, paid his respects to their victims in the morgue, and looked into the murderesses’ eyes when they were convicted and sentenced.
As time went by, however, he discovered that most of these dramas bore a terribly banal resemblance to each other, and that the same stories of rapacity, brutality and stupidity recurred again and again with only minor variations. After three years in the department at latest, therefore, he confined himself to looking for arsenic, rat poison or cyanide on behalf of the law and left any questions of guilt, motive and fate, as well as punishment, atonement and forgiveness, to others: to the judges in their august robes, or Almighty God in heaven, or the man in the street, or the beer drinkers around their favourite table. This was the attitude of professional detachment which his more experienced colleagues had advised him to adopt from the outset.
For all that, he could nearly always arrive at a clear-cut, definitive and exhaustive answer to the simple questions – Arsenic, yes or no? Cyanide, yes or no? – he had to deal with in the laboratory. This he found extremely pleasant, and after years of handling countless cases he could still subscribe without reservation to the moral principle underlying his work: that it wasn’t a good thing to dispatch people from life to death by means of poison.
From that point of view, Léon still found the purpose of his job – demonstrating to potential poisoners that they might not get away with it – moral and important and right. As for the repetitive nature of his daily work, which didn’t often get him down, he consoled himself with the generous salary that had enabled him to afford the move from the Batignolles to the Rue des Écoles when he married, and with the hope that if all went reasonably well he would sometime be promoted to a more interesting position.
After the potato gratin he tested a glass of white Bordeaux for cyanide, got another negative result, and took the Roquefort he was to test for rat poison from the refrigerator. A glance at the clock on the wall told him it was already eleven. He decided to save the Roquefort for the afternoon and have lunch at home for once. Being so early, he would take advantage of the spare time and make two or three Métro trips back and forth between Saint-Michel and Saint-Sulpice.
When Léon left the Boulevard Saint-Michel and turned off down the Rue des Écoles, the clouds parted. Ahead of him, the Sorbonne emitted a pale radiance such as only exists in the streets of Paris and the sky suddenly gleamed as if impregnated with gold dust. From one moment to the next the blackbirds in the trees began to sing, the hum of the traffic sounded more cheerful, the tap-tap of ladies’ heels crisper, the gendarmes’ whistles less peremptory.
After a few steps Léon seemed to hear, above the noises of the street, the delighted squeals of his son Michel. As he drew nearer, he saw he hadn’t been mistaken: the little boy really was on the little stretch of turf beside the Collège de France which municipal gardeners had laid right below his living-room windows a few weeks ago. Cheeks flushed and eyes shining with all the joie de vivre of which a four-year-old is capable, Michel was riding round and round the centrepiece of the miniature park, a stone bust of the deaf poet Pierre de Ronsard, in a bright red pedal car in the form of a fire engine complete with turntable ladder, bell and spotlight.
Seated on a stone park bench, in a pose of utter relaxation, was Léon’s wife. Yvonne’s left arm was draped over the back of the seat, her right forearm rested horizontally against her forehead. She had stretched out her legs and was as engrossed in the sight of her blissful child as a mother cat that has just given her litter an ample feed. She was wearing a long white linen dress that was new to Léon – her self-confidently swelling
little tummy could be glimpsed beneath it – together with a pretty little straw hat and some pink-lensed sunglasses that lent her summery get-up a rather jaunty appearance.
Léon was taken aback. This wasn’t the blithely singing girl he’d left at home that morning, nor the tormented domestic prisoner who had kept him company in recent months, but a woman he’d never seen before. She might have been one of those Russian aristos who strolled for hours in the Luxembourg Gardens, or an American film star on her third highball.
When Yvonne spotted him, she waved each of the fingers on her right hand in turn. He waved back, then crouched down beside his little son and got him to show off his fire engine’s bell and ladder.
‘Léon, how nice that you’re home for lunch for once!’ Yvonne said as he sat down beside her. When he kissed her, he felt her nestle against him in a way she hadn’t for a long time.
‘Forgive me for asking,’ he said, ‘but did you go mad this morning?’
She laughed. ‘Because of these new acquisitions, you mean? Little Michel and I went on a shopping spree at Galeries Lafayette.’
‘You bought all this stuff brand-new?’
‘As you can see. Look how happy the boy is. The bell’s solid brass, you know. Michel, sweetheart, ring the bell again for your Papa.’
The little boy tugged at the bell rope so hard, passers-by on the other side of the street glanced across in surprise. Léon did his best to smile at this display of childish happiness, then readdressed himself to his wife. ‘Care to tell me how much that fire engine – ’
‘Do you like it?’
‘How much did that fire engine cost?’
‘No idea. It’s down on the bill. Probably a bit more than you earn in a month. How much do you earn, actually?’
‘Yvonne...’
‘It’s made by Renault, you know.’
‘You’re out of your mind!’
‘A genuine little Renault, manufactured in their workshops at Boulogne-Billancourt. The salesman explained it to me. The power is transmitted from the pedals to the rear axle by a Cardan drive, just like a real Renault. You must take a look.’
‘Yvonne...’
‘Do you know what a Cardan drive is?’
‘Yes.’
‘What?’
‘A drive shaft with a universal joint.’
‘Correct. How do you like my dress?’
‘Listen to me.’
‘The sunglasses look a bit silly, I admit.’
‘Kindly listen!’
‘No, you listen to me now, Léon. Will you?’
‘Of course.’
‘What are you trying to tell me – that I’ve done something silly?’
‘You can say that again!’
‘You see? We’re in agreement there. I have done something silly, but so have you.’
‘You’ll bankrupt us, you and your Cardan drive.’
‘And you did a fair bit of travelling on the Métro today, didn’t you?’
Léon didn’t answer.
‘I know you too well – I knew you would before you knew it yourself. I watched you from behind when you left the building this morning. I could tell you’d go on the Métro today from the guilty way your neat little boyish buttocks waggled to and fro.’
‘And that’s why you took our son to Galeries Lafayette?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Forgive me if I fail to see the connection.’
‘Léon, your Métro rides are a disgrace and an insult – an insult to you and me and us both. I don’t want you committing such pathetic little stupidities. You’re making a fool of yourself, and you’re making me look a laughing stock to myself. It’s got to stop. Either you go looking for that dead girl, or you don’t.’
‘You’re right.’
‘But if you go looking for her, you must do it properly. Otherwise, I’ll show you how to commit some really big stupidities, not pathetic little ones. If you continue to go on your pathetic little Métro rides, I’ll commit some stupidities that’ll make your hair stand on end.’ She took his right hand and clamped it between her knees, then rested her head on his shoulder.
‘Am I going to lose you, Léon?’ Her voice had gone suddenly reedy and her expression was as pained as if she were plucking her eyebrows or ripping a depilatory off her leg. ‘Are you going to leave me? Am I losing you?’
‘How can you even ask such a thing? I certainly won’t leave you, it’s out of the question.’
‘Nice of you to say so, but we know better, don’t we? You probably won’t leave me, that’s true, but either I’ve already lost you or I never had you. That’s the way it is. From now on, things can get either worse or a little bit better. It’s entirely up to us.’
‘I’m sitting here beside you, Yvonne, surely you can see that? I’m here because I want to be. I won’t leave you, I promise.’
‘And you always keep your promises, I know.’ She sighed and patted his flank like a dog. ‘For all that, Léon, you mustn’t waste any time. Go looking while the trail is fresh.’
‘There’s no point.’
‘I order you to. Think of some way of finding the woman. After all, you’re with the police.’
They sat there in silence for a while, watching little Michel circling the gravel path in his fire engine. When the pressure of her knees relaxed he took her right hand and pressed it firmly to his lips. Having released her, he nodded as if in confirmation of some decision he’d come to. Then, without another word, he rose and walked swiftly, resolutely off. It felt as if the Rue des Écoles were leaving him behind, not the other way round.
10
The express to Boulogne was heading out into Picardy. Seated on his own in an overheated second-class compartment, Léon was trying to read the afternoon edition of Aurore but looking out at the autumnally brown countryside every few moments. After leaving his wife in the park and returning to the Boulevard Saint-Michel, he had only briefly contemplated calling in at headquarters and enlisting police assistance in his search for Louise. Then he realized that nothing good could come of it. For one thing, he would make himself look a fool in front of his colleagues; for another, if the police actually launched a search contrary to all expectations, it would very probably yield no result. Thirdly, if Louise were actually run to earth, she wouldn’t find it very romantic if the first sign of life made by the long-lost friend of her youth was to send a posse of uniformed gendarmes chasing after her.
So Léon had decided to look for Louise by himself. Although the detective methods employed by the Police Judiciaire were known only in broad outline to him, who spent his days in the seclusion of the laboratory, he was familiar with one basic rule of criminology: that a perpetrator often returned to the scene of the crime. And since he and Louise were both, in a sense, perpetrators and accomplices as well as victims and investigators, he took the Métro to the Gare du Nord and bought a ticket to Le Tréport. The direct route via Épinay was closed for construction work in September 1928, so he had to make a detour by way of Amiens and Abbeville.
Like most townsmen, Léon seldom left the city. Like all Parisians, he always swore that he would, if only it were possible, gladly exchange the noise, dirt and bustle of the City of Light for a quiet, peaceful life somewhere in the provinces, and that he would happily exchange the Opéra, the Bibliothèque Nationale and all the theatres in Paris for a glass of burgundy in the southern sun, a game of pétanque with friends, and a long walk through the woods and vineyards with the dog he would then acquire – possibly a black and white cocker spaniel by the name of Casimir or Patapouf.
But because there were no jobs for Léon in the vineyards of the South and he secretly realized, like all Parisians, that he would very soon get bored to death in the provinces, he stuck it out in the unloved city. Once or twice, at the best time of year, he would take a bateau mouche trip down the Seine with his wife and child or picnic in the woods at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and at Christmas and the New Year he took the train to Cherbou
rg to visit his father and mother. The other three hundred and fifty days he spent within the city limits, and on three hundred of them he saw little more of the city itself than the handful of streets between the Rue des Écoles and the Quai des Orfèvres.
Not for the first time, Léon was surprised at how abruptly the sea of buildings petered out and the green and brown undulations of field, meadow and ploughland began. At Porte de la Chapelle the railway line was still flanked by factories and warehouses and the banks of the Seine by sheds and barns; but immediately beyond the gasometer at Saint-Denis, where dense smoke billowed from tall chimneys, a farmer’s boy could be seen herding some cows across a meadow, a dead straight avenue of poplars stretched away to the horizon, and golden yellow willows were bending before the keen north-east wind.
Léon experienced an almost irresistible urge to get out at the next station, buy a bicycle – or, better still, steal one – and ride to the sea beneath the open sky, in the fresh air and rain and against the wind. His buttocks would hurt as they had then, his muscles would ache as they had then, and he would collect some strange odds and ends on the way and keep an eye on the horizon in the insane hope that a girl with a red and white polka-dot blouse and a squeaking bicycle would appear. He would buy some bread and ham and drink water from a fountain, relieve himself behind a hedge like a farmer’s boy, and seek shelter from storms in empty barns like a tramp. And it would all be pointless and nonsensical – a pathetic little stupidity unworthy of his Yvonne, unworthy of his Louise, and unworthy of himself.