He had sat at the bar in the Ancre de Fortune café, beside a bakery on Rue des Vinaigriers. It was a tiny place with a provincial air and he felt as though he were back in Cherbourg. Outside, a long, drab strip of fencing partially concealed a warehouse built from tarred wood. The light of a gas lamp cast its spindly shadow across the road and into the gutter. Two stray dogs were playing in the street, and a tow-haired boy was carrying a large jug filled with cheap beer. There was no noise except the puffing of trains coming from the Gare de l’Est.
‘Do you know if there are any rooms to rent near here?’ he had asked the barman.
‘How long do you need it for?’
‘A month or two. I can pay in advance.’
‘Maman!’ the barman had called. ‘You’ve got a customer.’
An old woman had stuck her nose out of the kitchen.
‘If you’re not too fussy, I’ve got an attic. The water’s from a pump and you’d have to go down three floors to get it, and there’s no heating.’
‘That’s fine. How much?’
That evening he had stood daydreaming, gazing at the sky above the huge, dark warehouse, with no thought of what was to come. On the horizon, windows began to light up, casting a wavering glow over the tiled roofs. She was so close by, just behind one of those curtains that fluttered in the night air, his lovely siren.
Over the next few weeks, Sophie Clairsange had not left the house. Corentin Jourdan had questioned some of the neighbours and learnt that the man with a large bag who visited the house each morning was a doctor, and that the woman lodging there was ill. One evening he had caught sight of her briefly, standing at the window. She was well again! He felt relieved.
He was always on the alert, ready to intervene when the time came. He didn’t know exactly what had happened, but his imagination filled in the gaps and led him to gloss over some of the details. Who was the blonde woman? A nurse, most likely, or a friend, nothing more.
All the while that Corentin Jourdan kept watch over the lit window on the second floor, he thought about Sophie Clairsange, her body which he had glimpsed so briefly and the secrets hidden in the blue notebook.
* * *
An old drunk slumped on a stool in the Au Petit Jour bar on Rue d’Allemagne2 let out a loud hiccup, like a bottle being uncorked.
‘They serve short measures here … it’s a well-known fact!’
Martin Lorson fixed his gaze on the Views of Paris calendar that was pinned to the peeling wall, picked at a stringy ragout and did his best to block out his surroundings. But it was to no avail: to his right, an ex-clergyman with a beard sprinkled with lumps of fried egg declaimed a line from Ecclesiastes, ‘The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be’, and to his right, a scrawny girl, a mother at just sixteen, was prattling to her baby: ‘Whose are these little hands then?’
A man with a wooden leg leered toothlessly at the ruddy baby and hailed his fellow drinkers. ‘The Middle Ages, now that was a good time to be alive! On Friday, I was sitting right up against the big heater in Église Saint-Eustache, and the sexton shows up. “What’s going on here?” he says. “I’m just getting warm,” I say. “This isn’t a warming house, you know, this is God’s house, and you’d better leave.”’
‘The Middle Ages? You must be joking!’ mumbled the ex-clergyman.
‘Churches were places of sanctuary, Mr Preacher! You think you’re so clever. I might be on my uppers now, but I’m an educated man!’
In desperation, Martin Lorson craned his neck to look at a niche in the wall where, with one hand on her hip and a suggestive look on her face, an Egyptian dancing girl made of wax, rotated slowly to the strains of ‘Plaisir d’amour’. For a moment he dreamt of putting his arms round the dancer and escaping with her from all the ugliness around him. The hoarse voice of the ex-clergyman interrupted his reverie.
‘“There is nothing new under the sun!” I don’t hold it against society, but really, for someone of my background to be reduced to a career on the stage, playing bit parts at the Châtelet. Five changes of costume every performance, and I only get forty sous for it! Ecclesiastes was right, “What profit hath a man of all his labour?”’
The landlord, bilious and sharp-tongued, with a dirty cap askew above his hatchet face, a menacing mouth and hard eyes, gathered up a stack of plates. On his way past, he flicked Martin Lorson with his dishcloth and addressed the listening audience.
‘Now, take this bloke, he’s fallen off a pedestal too. Haven’t you, Swot? That’s what they used to call him when he was still a pen-pusher at the Ministry of Finance. Look where it got him!’
Everybody turned to stare at the object of his disdain, a bloated, balding man in his forties, whose fraying suit was shiny with grease and dirt.
‘And d’you know why?’ continued the landlord. ‘Debts! Oh, the little Swot wasn’t lazy, and if he’d hung on for another eighteen years he could have worked his way up to being the office boss, which is more or less a rest cure! Oh yes, only going to work three days a week, to read the paper and stamp a few documents. But he hadn’t counted on his dear lady wife!’
A crumpled-up dishcloth landed on the bar. Martin Lorson hurriedly paid the bill, jammed an old top hat onto his balding head and grabbed a coat that had seen better days. He tried to hurry, but his ample stomach and equally impressive posterior impeded his progress. He thus had the pleasure of hearing all the landlord’s venomous comments, like an animal caught in a trap.
‘Her ladyship wanted a posh house and all the trimmings. She wanted to be kept in the style to which she was accustomed, didn’t she? A new dress here, a pair of shoes there, not to mention the servants and the private box at the theatre. Was he rich, though, the Swot? No! So he had to borrow, left, right and centre. And then boom! Creditors rolling up at the Ministry on pay day – it looks bad, doesn’t it? Once, twice, ten times, the cashier agrees to give him an advance, but the eleventh time, he gets fired!’
Martin Lorson had finally reached the door when he realised that he had forgotten his scarf. With burning cheeks, he laboriously made his way back across the room. Suddenly cheering up, the ex-clergyman didn’t feel as bad about himself as usual and the young girl caressed her baby, sure that he would never end up in such a terrible state.
‘“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,”’ brayed the ex-clergyman.
‘Someone get me a drink!’ roared the old drunk.
‘As soon as Madame Lorson got wind of her penpusher of a husband’s disgrace, she chucked him out. It’s just a blessing they never had any children!’ the landlord concluded, eyeing the girl and her offspring.
‘And now?’ asked the ex-clergyman.
‘Now? He’s a pauper dressed as a gent!’
‘“All is vanity and vexation of spirit!” says Ecclesiastes. “That which is crooked cannot be made straight.”’
* * *
Suddenly aware of noise outside, Corentin Jourdan got up quietly from his chair. Down below, a streak of orange light fell across the pavement, spilling from the open door of the basement of the bakery. Within, a group of young men, bare to the waist, stood with their arms thrust into the dough, seizing it and kneading it as they chanted rhythmically, like natives around a campfire. Corentin looked at his watch: eight o’clock. The baker’s boys had already begun their night’s labour. Sitting down close to the window, he picked up his book, Treasure Island.
This here is a sweet spot, this island – a sweet spot for a lad to get ashore on. You’ll bathe, and you’ll climb trees, and you’ll hunt goats, you will; and you’ll get aloft on them hills like a goat yourself …
He had read and reread Stevenson’s novel, and each time this paragraph brought tears to his eyes. ‘Bathe … climb trees … hunt…’; for him, all these things were impossible now. But then it occurred to him that the situation in which he now found himself was rather like having a map of a desert island in the South Seas, but not knowing where the buried treasure was hidden. He was Jim Hawk
ins, sailing alongside Long John Silver aboard the Hispaniola.
A creaking interrupted his reverie. He pulled back the curtain and saw that the metal gate of the house on the corner had just opened. A woman in a gold-sequined cloak, her hair coiled into a chignon and covered with a velvet cap, was hurrying towards Rue Lancry. He jumped up, pulled on his coat and hat and, despite the pain in his injured leg, ran down the three flights of stairs and raced to the courtyard where his horse, already saddled, greeted him with a stamp of its foot.
He caught up with the woman on Boulevard Magenta just as she disappeared into a carriage, which turned round and drove up Quai de Valmy. Corentin followed on his horse, keeping his distance. At the far end of the canal, in the dim light of the lanterns illuminating the locks, a large cylindrical building loomed, like an ancient monument.
* * *
Night was closing in on the La Villette meat market, headquarters of butchery and metropolis of steak, mutton and offal, through which Martin Lorson wandered, his spirit wounded by the landlord’s biting remarks. He would have to get a grip of himself.
‘The fish rots from the head first, after all. I should despise these fools. I’m head and shoulders above all of them.’
For a moment, he thought he could hear the piteous cacophony of terrified beasts, brought by blue-overalled drovers to the entrance of the biggest abattoir in Paris, but it was only the roaring of blood in his head. In this strange landscape, where the capital’s lunches and dinners were prepared, the atmosphere was permeated with the fear of the animals about to be sacrificed. Fear was a constant companion to him now. Had it not been at his side ever since his dismissal from the Ministry? Fear and resentment, fear and loneliness, which lasted far longer than the sudden fright caused by the clatter of a passing cart laden with coke or animal fodder. The weight of his fear would sometimes lift for a while, only to return with renewed force. He hoped that he would eventually escape from it by dint of sheer stubbornness.
A lamplighter was making his way down the street, repeating the same series of movements again and again: lifting the lever on the gas tap and squeezing the rubber air pump at the bottom of his pole. The glass mantles lit up one by one, and the neighbourhood echoed with the sound of the rubbish carts doing their rounds. Martin Lorson knotted his scarf more tightly round his neck; the air was unpleasantly damp despite the mildness of the winter.
As he walked on, he planned his movements for the next twenty-four hours. Stand in for Gamache. Then to bed, with a lie-in the next morning. Sprint over to the piano maker’s and stand in for Jaquemin. Lunch at the cheap canteen in Rue de Nantes. Stand in for Berthier, Norpois and Collin at the abattoir. Dinner at Au Petit Jour. Go back and meet Gamache again.
The career he had invented for himself as a stand-in provided regular work and he was rather proud of it. The people whose jobs he took over could go and have a drink or a bite to eat, and in return they gave him a few centimes, enough for him never to be short of food or tobacco. And, thanks to Gamache, he even had somewhere to sleep. Had he not, all things considered, found a jolly good solution to his problems? No senior clerk breathing down his neck, no promotion, no wife, no rent and no furniture or possessions except the few odd things he kept stored in the shack where he slept. This was true independence. So what did he care about the base insults of a common waiter? Now that he had had a taste of this life, no amount of money would have persuaded him to change it. His colleagues at the Ministry were welcome to their struggles to make ends meet before payday, moonlighters taking their jobs, and the treacherous attentions of women!
No sooner had these thoughts run through his mind than a wave of vague anxiety broke over him and his breath seemed to catch in his throat. Stopping in front of the public wash-house (only twenty centimes for a bath), he lit a cigarette. Smoking calmed his nerves. He set off again, his protuberant stomach leading the way.
In the centre of the La Villette roundabout, the impressive rotunda that marked the toll barrier at the old city gates loomed up like a huge fortified tomb, with its circular gallery and arcade supported by forty columns. The mausoleum of a building had been built by Claude Nicolas Ledoux,3 and now contained offices and stocks of goods held as surety. A general air of dirt and decrepitude added to its funereal aspect. Below a triangular pediment were some rusty railings with a sign attached:
NO ENTRY
By the light of a streetlamp, Martin Lorson could just make out a figure in a kepi armed with a bayonet, on guard near one of the large colonnaded porches of the rotunda. He was twirling the ends of his enormous moustache and pacing up and down. As soon as he caught sight of his stand-in, he pulled on his cape and handed over his bayonet and kepi, which was embroidered with the emblem of a red hunting horn on a dark background.
‘I was starting to wonder where you’d got to – I haven’t got time to stand around kicking my heels, you know!’
‘I came as fast as I could!’
‘Well, ’scuse me! I might stay away for longer than usual tonight. I’ve got an assignation with a nice little bit-part actress from La Villette Theatre. I’ve promised her a slap-up meal and I’m hoping for a bit of slap and tickle in return. Ah, that Pauline, she’s perfect!’
He joined his thumb, forefinger and middle finger and kissed them, but his friend merely grunted disapprovingly. Martin Lorson had no interest in Alfred Gamache’s little intrigues, and besides he was anxious to get rid of the man and settle down to drink the rum he had bought earlier in the day at La Comète des Abattoirs.
He set the bayonet down as far away as possible, and began swigging the rum, which quickly lulled him into a state of exquisite bliss. From Boulevard de la Chapelle, the faint strains of a barrel organ could be heard, droning out La Fille de Madame Angot.4 Curled up against the railings, he soon dozed off. There was silence all around him, broken only occasionally by the click-clack of heels tapping along the tarmac. Even the canal seemed to slumber, tired after the incessant to-and-fro of barges loaded with goods destined for the factories in the port or for delivery to one of the nearby warehouses.
In his drunken haze, Martin Lorson didn’t notice a carriage draw up on the pathway separating the rotunda from the canal. A woman in a ball gown and wrapped in a gold-sequined cloak got out and the carriage drove away. She considered her surroundings, her face hidden behind a black velvet mask. A second carriage clattered down Rue de Flandre and stopped just out of sight, and this time the commotion woke Martin Lorson from his trance. The passenger, a man wearing a soft felt hat, hesitated for a moment under the pale glow of a gaslight, a cigarette in his mouth. He watched the woman skipping down the pathway and avoiding the cracks between the paving stones. Eventually, he accosted her.
‘If this is where the toffs meet up for their smutty shenanigans, I’m in for a long night,’ Martin Lorson muttered.
But he soon realised that these two weren’t a pair of lovebirds. Otherwise, why would they be so offhand with one another? There was no embrace, no tender caress; they only talked, in voices too low to be overheard. Now the woman was waving an envelope she had produced from her bag. The man tried to take it from her, but she whisked it away, laughing, and made off towards Rue de Flandre. It was four or five seconds before the man reacted, and then everything happened so quickly that Martin Lorson didn’t even have time to brandish his bayonet. The man leapt towards the woman, grabbed her by the neck and squeezed and squeezed. His victim’s body jerked like a puppet and then sank down lifeless into his arms. He let her slide to the ground, looked at her stiffened body for a moment and then bent down, rifled through her bag and ran off. Then a horse could be heard trotting away.
On Boulevard de la Chapelle, the barrel organ was still playing, but La Fille de Madame Angot had given way to La Fille du Tambour-Major.5
Suddenly a man appeared from behind the rotunda.
I must’ve had one too many, Martin Lorson thought to himself, his heart beating wildly. I’m seeing visions … It’s all over, is
n’t it?
It wasn’t all over. The killer had returned. Bending over the woman, he lifted her mask. Kneeling over her, transfixed, the man studied her face minutely before replacing the mask and melting into the shadows.
Martin Lorson was too terrified to utter a sound. He dared not move or even swallow, sure that the man must be watching him as a cat watches a sparrow, delighting in its fear. Would he jump out from one side, or from directly opposite him? Panic kept Martin Lorson curled up in a ball, shrinking against the railings. Was that creak the muffled sound of a knife being drawn? Was that shadow the fist of an assassin about to attack?
Panting, he screwed his eyes shut and clenched his jaw. After what seemed like an hour but was only a few minutes, he managed to convince himself that there was nobody around. He tiptoed over to the woman, freezing at the slightest sound. He nudged her body with his foot. A corpse. As he greedily gulped down air, a medallion stuck between two paving stones caught his eye. Crouching down, he slipped it into his pocket, and noticed the remains of the cigarette that had fallen from the man’s mouth as he’d committed his crime. Lorson lit it and filled his lungs with smoke. The rotunda gazed at him hollow-eyed, daring him to carry on keeping watch. Why should he hang around here while Gamache was off carousing? A draught of rum revived him, and he decided to hide the kepi and bayonet behind a column as a sign that his departure had been carefully considered. Alfred was wily enough and would realise that his friend had judged it best, for whatever reason, to slip off quietly. He would see the dead woman, alert the police and, with any luck, omit to mention the name of the only witness to the crime.
Martin Lorson made his stumbling way back to the wooden shed on the quayside that was currently his home. Here, he jostled for a little space to sleep among piles of goods confiscated at the toll barrier. In the midst of the jumble of boxes and crates, a simple mattress, a horsehair pillow and two eiderdowns, along with a sawdust stove, a pitcher and a basin, constituted the sum of his worldly possessions. He sank down on the mattress, still fully dressed and, huddled under his double layer of feathers, soon began to snore sonorously.
Strangled in Paris: A Victor Legris Mystery (Victor Legris Mysteries) Page 3