“She knows nothing more. I was curious about the incident because of the London Ripper activities last year and I asked a number of questions. That was all she knew.”
“None of the women have complained about other strange requests, not sexual, but anything that seems odd to them?”
“Not that I’ve heard, but I haven’t been seeking out the stories either.”
“Would you mind asking the others about strange requests, any missing women?”
“The prostitutes I know are mostly house girls, but I can ask them to talk to the street girls they know.”
Never one to be left out of a conversation for too long, Oscar pipes in. “Nellie believes the man committing these atrocious acts might also be an anarchist.”
“He wears black clothes and a red anarchist scarf,” I explain.
The painter nods. “Like the followers and admirers of Louise Michel.”
“Yes, when I saw her speaking yesterday she was wearing all black, except for a red scarf. I realize it must be her trademark, but why is that?”
“She began wearing black after the murder of a young journalist, Victor Noir,” Jules explains. “Noir was sent by another journalist to deliver a challenge to a duel to Prince Pierre-Napoléon, a cousin of Napoléon III. The prince shot him. After the prince was found not guilty by a court of inquiry, Louise wore black to the funeral and has done so ever since.”*
“So the slasher must be a follower of the Red Virgin?” I ask him.
“Not necessarily. Thousands have adopted the fashion.”
“If you want to ask the Red Virgin about any suspicious anarchists,” Toulouse says, “you’ll need to ask Aristide where she’s hiding.”
“Who’s Aristide?”
“The owner of Le Mirliton, a café. It’s up the street, on Bou’ Rochechouart.”
I stand up. “We must talk with this gentleman immediately.”
“But of course!” Toulouse agrees. “I am thirsty and need a green fairy to help me find my soul.”
40
Jules and I follow Oscar and the painter. As we come up the street, they disappear into a doorway at 84 Boulevard Rochechouart. The establishment appears closed, but a man dressed as refined as a ragpicker eyes us contemptuously when we approach the door.
“You are perhaps on the wrong street, Monsieur, Madame. Possibly you are looking for a La Roquerre café.”
The reference is to an area known for its criminals. I look to Jules, expecting to see that famous temper of his flare, but his features are unreadable.
“We wish to enter,” Jules says in a flat tone.
“Enter?” He gestures disrespectfully at me. “You, and this … person? We shall see.” He beats heavily upon the door with his fist and a large judas door opens. A villainous face glares out. “What’d you want!”
“These two ask to enter.”
“And?”
The ragpicker shrugs. “They appear harmless.” He glances at us. “Perhaps a little stupid.”
The sound of a large bolt being shoved back comes from the other side and the door swings open.
A better dressed man, but just as vile in temperament, greets us. His dress and carriage is odd and flamboyant at the same time. He is not tall, but has powerful, dominating features and piercing black eyes. Long, straight, black hair falls from under a floppy purple velvet hat that has a romantic flair to it, the sort of hat one might expect Lord Byron to have worn when he fought in the Greek revolution. His hunting jacket has metal buttons. Black velvet pants billow around his boots. But his most interesting item of clothing is the blood-red scarf of revolutionaries—his is wrapped around his neck and falls down his back in cape-like fashion. Like Jules, he’s clean shaven.
“Welcome to Montmerde, Monsieur, Madame. How many children of the poor did you crush under your carriage wheels on your way here?”
I realize the creature had just welcomed us to a mountain of … excrement and he’s being facetiously rude, but I still don’t like it and have to bite my tongue.
“We’re with Toulouse,” Jules says matter-of-factly.
“Toulouse? You mean that pig of a count who paints dirty pictures of poor prostitutes while he lives off the francs his family has stolen from the poor for five hundred years?”
“That very person.”
“Then come in, see your friend before he loses his head in the next revolution!”
The salon is dark and crowded. Haze from cigarettes, cigars, and pipes have assembled among the dust and cobwebs in the heavy beams of the ceiling. It’s a wonder anyone can breathe in the place.
Black wrought-iron gas lanterns cast pale and gloomy light upon the time-stained, brown shade of the walls and floor. Paintings and sketches hug the walls. I recognize the hand of Toulouse in two paintings I pass.
Everywhere, on the walls, overhead beams, fireplace mantle, are odds and ends of the queerest sort—snarling grotesque heads, leering gargoyles, twisted figures of man and beast, Turkish swords and other strange bric-a-brac. The place had been decorated by a drunken satyr. Surprisingly, the tables are plain bare wood, not at all cleverly finished, and the seating mostly hard benches.
The host, if that is what he is, marches us to Toulouse’s table. A piano player springs into life and the crowd sings.
“Sit!” the host commands, slamming his walking stick on the table.
Toulouse grabs his drink and greets us with a friendly smile. He and Jules immediately huddle in conversation while I examine my surroundings. I hear the name “Aristide” called by a patron and the unpleasant man who seated us responds. So, this is the man we came to talk with—a strange name for a strange man. Abruptly, Aristide leaps upon a table and points his stick in our direction.
“Did you see what entered?!” He proceeds to bang the table with his stick. “Quiet! Quiet, you swine!”
When the noise subsides, he again points at our table. “Did you see what kind of fish just entered?” He didn’t wait for his trained minions to answer. “A sturgeon. A big, old sturgeon, full of bourgeois pomp.”
Jules and Toulouse are deep in conversation, totally oblivious to what is going on. I tap Jules’ arm. “He called you a bourgeois sturgeon.”
“Yes, fine.”
This Aristide creature then points directly at me. “And look, look my friends at what swims behind him. A little minnow. Un fleu du feu, young enough to be his daughter. I take my hat off to the man. He may be beardless on his chin, but he obviously has plenty of beard where it counts.”
The audience roars and my face grows hot. Oh, if I was in New York with a couple of my buddy boys from the Bowery detail … I know the whole thing is a joke, that people pay to come to this cabaret to be insulted by this crude man, but I personally don’t like to be the butt of jokes by a bully.
ARISTIDE BRUANT RECITING ONE OF HIS VERSES
“I wonder where the big fish got the little minnow? Could it be at Saint-Lazare? Is she one of these nuns who are not married to God but to any man who could buy her time for a few sous?”
That does it! Saint-Lazare is a woman’s prison. As the audience shrieks with laughter, I get up and march across the room. Jules calls after me, but I do not falter from my path. The audience grows quiet with anticipation as I approach Aristide. He stands still atop the table. Arms are akimbo, grinning evilly. These are the moments he lives for—another fish has been hooked and will be humiliated. I stop in front of the table and look up at him.
“Monsieur Aristide, my father has brought me here to discover what you will do about the baby.”
“The baby?”
“Yes, the baby, Aristide. Little Pierre who you gave me as a present when you stayed at our inn when I was twelve years old and lured me into your room under the pretense—”
Jules pulls me away, but I have the pleasure of hearing Aristide’s habitués laugh at him for once and they applaud. I’m tempted to turn around and bow, but Jules is pulling too hard.
As we go back to
the table, our host belts out a song about a street apache and the working-class girl who was sentenced to Saint-Lazare because of him, while Oscar floats around the room like a colorful butterfly, distributing his verbal favors.
“Aristide considers himself a champion of the poor,” Jules tells me, “but he’s the most bourgeois of any of us. He hurts the poor with his songs of thieves and prostitutes, instructing us that poverty and moral corruption are two sides of the same coin.”
“Well done, Mademoiselle, few people win a round with Bruant,” Toulouse says, after we are seated. “His humor’s crude, his songs cruder. I’m sure they’re sung even in the cafés of New York.”
I nod. I’ve never heard of Mr. Bruant or his songs, but I don’t want Toulouse to think I’m ignorant of such things, or that New Yorkers are not aware of what goes on in Paris. One is expected to be aware of what is happening in Paris, no matter where one lives.
Toulouse is already drawing, making a pencil sketch of Bruant that will no doubt someday appear on his easel. I feel like grabbing the little man, shaking him and telling him that he’s wasting his time with these scenes from the seedier side of life. What possible value could a painting of Aristide Bruant ever be?
A poet, one of the hanger-ons guarding the piano, gets up and spiels some verse, more street talk by bourgeois revolutionaries. Everyone in France seems to be a revolutionary. At least in cafés.
“I spoke briefly to Aristide,” Toulouse speaks as he continues drawing. “He won’t disclose the Red Virgin’s location to you because he’s worried you are police spies, but he told me to ask at a café called Le Couteau.”
Le Couteau—The Knife, a proper name for an anarchist café.
“It’s under the rubble of an old mill near Moulin de la Galette that got knocked down from the shelling during the Commune. Legay, the owner, got out of prison with the amnesty of the Commune fighters and opened a café in the basement—a seedy place that serves apaches and anarchists. He provides them a place to plot assassinations over cheap beer and build bombs in the backroom. Even Aristide hesitates to go there unless Louise Michel is there. I went there once, but feared for my wallet and my throat. Legay got half his face shot off and the other half is even uglier.”
The poet by the piano starts circulating around the room with a tin cup to collect money for his presentation. Anyone who refuses is cursed. I excuse myself to go to the convenience room. I’ve been bad-mouthed enough for the night.
The wall on the way to the toilets is filled with paintings from Montmartre artists who, like Toulouse, will never gain fame because they refuse to paint pleasing scenes. A country scene is deliberately made blurry. What is it with these Montmartre painters? Why would this artist, one Vincent van Gogh, imagine that he could actually sell this type of work?*
As I turn the corner to the hallway that leads down to the convenience room, I recognize another painting with Toulouse’s style. The scene is of two women doing the cancan in a crowded café, not professional dancers but of women who do an impromptu dance, to the cheers of a roomful of men. I don’t believe it. I grab the painting off the wall and take it back to our table.
“Look!”
Toulouse is instantly excited. “You like it? One hundred francs. But for you, Mademoiselle, fifty.”
“It’s him,” I tell them.
Three men are in the painting, at a table, watching women dance. The two men in the center face forward. One of them has a heavy beard, rose-tinted glasses, and a box hat. He wears a red scarf and a black suit.
“A coincidence perhaps,” Jules states in a “calm down” tone.
“No, it’s him. There’s no mistake. Who’s this man, Toulouse?”
Toulouse, showing his disgust that I am not interested in buying his painting, has buried his face in a tall glass of absinthe. He daintily wipes his forehead with his handkerchief before looking back at the picture. He’s a real gentleman, even if he paints tawdry pictures.
“An anarchist.”
“How do you know he’s a real anarchist?”
He shrugs. “He has the clothes, scarf.”
“What’s his name?”
“He’s a face in a painting. Give him whatever name his features conjure up for you. Perhaps he’s a Jean … or a Pierre.”
“How long ago did you do this painting?” Jules is now interested.
Toulouse examines it. “Two, three years ago.”
“It fits. That’s when the killings began in Paris.”
“Do you recognize the other two men?” Jules asks Toulouse.
He shakes his head. “Just café patrons. They have a reason to be together at the same table, but they are not friends.”
“How do you know that?” I ask.
Toulouse gestures at the picture. “Look at their clothes. Two are conservatively dressed, not expensively, or fashionably, but as professional men dress—perhaps even less fashionably than that, more like college professors or mid-level government officials. They’re not bohemian, not men of the arts or literature, and definitely not anarchists, completely unlike him. His companions have a drink after work and go home to their families. He lingers at underground cafés until late at night and argues with comrades whether the French government will fall if the President is killed.”
I’m impressed. “Toulouse, you should have been a detective. This café scene, is it another salon here at Le Mirliton?”
“No, I did this at the Le Chat Noir. You should ask Salis, the owner, about the men. They might be regulars.”
“May we borrow the picture?”
“I would prefer you buy it, but it seems to be my lot in life to paint what people shun like the pox.”
As Jules and I leave, I spot a bouquet of flowers in a vase at a nearby table. I grab them and place them before Toulouse. “Paint flowers instead of cancan girls,” I advise him, “and you will find the world at your door.”
I hurry to catch up with Jules, leaving Toulouse staring dumfounded at the vase of flowers.
While I’m not ordinarily free with my advice, believing that self-improvement comes from within, I’m very grateful to the odd little man for capturing the slasher on canvas and feel I should give him the benefit of my artistic knowledge. It’s the least I can do.
Dear Oscar is too busy playing the social butterfly to notice our exit, but Aristide Bruant stands on top a table and queries his corps of waiters, “What do we think of the customers?”
“The customers are pigs!” the waiters chorus in unison.
I can’t help but turn around and bow before exiting.
41
“I hope this next cabaret is more pleasant than Le Mirliton.”
Jules chuckles at my statement. “You will be more charmed by Rodolphe Salis. He’s Bruant’s father—professionally speaking. Le Mirliton occupies the quarters abandoned by Le Chat Noir a few years ago. Most of the bizarre odds and ends scattered around Le Mirliton were abandoned by Salis in the move. There is even one famous chair, forgotten during the move. When Salis came back to get it, Bruant refused to turn it over. He hung it on a wall and points it out to customers when he roasts Salis in his monologues.”
“Bruant worked for Salis?”
“Yes, when Le Chat Noir was at the Rochechouart location. He wrote the Chat Noir theme song that Salis still uses. Salis has something of the same approach toward customers.”
“Oh, this should be a wonderful visit.”
“No, it won’t be as bad. He’s not as vulgar and considers himself more of a friend of the arts than a revolutionary.”
At the entrance to Le Chat Noir a man in the uniform of a Swiss Guard asks our names. Swiss Guards were the palace guards massacred by a mob when they tried to protect their king and queen during the French Revolution.
He tells Jules that Salis is handling a mutiny of galley slaves and will not be available for a few minutes and then proceeds to pound three times on the floor to announce our entrance, “Monsieur Morant and Mademoiselle Br
own.”
As Le Mirliton tried to capture the spirit of the streets, Le Chat Noir is a fantasy world decorated in a mixture of ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and the Louies of France. Added all around are bits of the macabre and bizarre—Oriental fire masks, cups said to have graced the lips of Voltaire and Charlemagne, the skull and shin bones of the fifteenth-century vagabond poet François Villon, a clock telling time with two tails of a cat, and a menagerie of art and junk, though most of the outrageous pieces appear to have been left behind at Le Mirliton.
As we walk through a dining room called Salle du Conseil, the Council Room, there are people drinking beer and eating French fries with their fingers while they listen to a winsome young woman with a sad face accompanied by a piano singing:
I seek my fortune at the Black Cat in the moonlight of Montmartre.
I seek my fortune at the Black Cat of Montmartre, in the evening.
“Have you seen a shadow play?” Jules asks me.
“Yes. A puppet show when I was a child.”
“Le Chat Noir’s shadow theater isn’t child’s play. It’s the state of the art in mechanical moving pictures, presented by Rivière and Robida. Let’s take a look at it while we wait for Salis. I’ve heard it’s a good one.”
Jules leads me to a dark, crowded room called Salles des Fêtes on the next floor. A strange creature hangs from the ceiling, perhaps a large fish with the head of a snarling dog. On the far wall is a peculiar oval-shaped mantel framing a large, bright, “white screen” composed of fine cloth back lit by bright lanterns. A courtly piece above it displays a fierce cat-like griffin, winged and snarling, held up by roles of dramatic heads, laughing, crying, frightened—all the emotions of the theater. Naturally, there’s a stalking cat or two.
On the screen enemy airships, great balloon-like flying machines rigged with cannons and machine guns, drop bombs on Paris while French aeronauts battle them from their own balloons. The airships move across the sky, bombs fall, explosives rip the city’s silhouetted skyline, flames shoot up from burning buildings, screams and shouts cry out along with the sound of fierce wind and destruction.
The Alchemy of Murder Page 20