by Alan Hynd
Fiery mad, the pimp accosted the doctor one night under a street light. Marius opened the meeting by slowly running his right forefinger across his throat. Then he started to snarl. The doctor, he said, had spoiled a good piece of merchandise, and he demanded reimbursement for the loss.
Bougrat, cheerfully admitting the facts, asked Marius how much he wanted for Andrea. Marius wanted 9,000 francs, equivalent to maybe $5000 at the time or $100,000 today. That was a sizeable sum, far more than Bougrat had. He tried to beat down the price. But the pimp stood firm.
“All right,” said Bougrat, “I’ll raise the money somehow.”
In the late afternoon of the next day, a Friday, Doctor Bougrat was sitting in his office wondering how he would meet the Apache’s terms, when Luck walked in. It planted itself before his desk in the form of a self-effacing little man with a pinched face, buck teeth and a glazed black suit. His name was Jacques Rumèbe, and he was the paymaster of the St. Henri steel pipe mills in Aix. He was also an old patient of Bougrat. The men had been great friends and companions in the army.
The relationship between the doctor and the paymaster had begun years before on the battlefields of Bulgaria, when Bougrat, a medical officer, had treated Private Rumèbe for syphilis. The affliction did not heal, and after the war it began to sap Rumèbe’s strength. The little paymaster feared that if he revealed the seriousness of his condition to his employers that they might replace him. So Rumèbe followed the habit of sneaking into the doctor’s office every Friday afternoon after work to get an injection that would keep him on his feet for another week. Not even Rumèbe’s wife knew he was receiving the treatments. And Bougrat had promised never to mention it to anyone.
Bougrat had come to take the visits of the paymaster for granted until this particular Friday, when Rumèbe had suddenly assumed a new importance. After giving the patient his injection, Bougrat invited him to sit down for a chat.
“Your employers must have great trust in you,” the doctor said, letting you carry all that money from the bank every Saturday.”
“Oh, yes,” said Rumèbe, “they have perfect faith in me.”
“How much money do you really handle? Is it so great an amount?” Bougrat asked.
“Sometimes more than 100,000 francs.”
The doctor gulped.
The following Friday afternoon, when the pipe mills were releasing their workmen for the day, Doctor Bougrat just happened to be passing the main gate in his little blue car. When he saw the paymaster coming out he hailed him.
“I’m glad I ran into you, Rumèbe,” said the doctor. “I won’t be able to take care of you today. But I can see you tomorrow.” Rumèbe, badly in need of the shot, asked eagerly what time. Since the doctor’s office was midway between the bank where Rumèbe picked up the payroll and the factory, Bougrat casually suggested that he drop in on his way back from the bank. The little paymaster couldn’t have been less suspicious.
That evening, according to testimony that was later heard in court, the doctor sat down and, disguising his handwriting, composed a letter to the St. Henri mills. The letter stated that the company’s paymaster was carrying on a secret love affair with a prostitute in Marseilles and should no longer be trusted with money. When the letter was written, the doctor stuck it in his pocket. He was not quite ready to mail it.
A little after 10 the next morning Rumèbe appeared at Bougrat’s office. “How are you feeling?” the doctor asked solicitously. “I need the treatment bad,” the paymaster said. “I don’t know what I’d do if you didn’t give me an injection every week.”
Bougrat smiled understandingly and glanced at the satchel the man was carrying. He prepared a hypodermic needle and told Rumèbe to roll up his sleeve.
“This will take care of you,” the doctor said gently, and rammed the needle in.
When, by noon, Rumèbe had not turned up at the St. Henri mills, the police were summoned. Within an hour the whole town knew the paymaster had disappeared with the payroll.
Doctor Bougrat did not budge from his house until nearly dusk, when he took the short walk to the post office. He had just reached the outside mail slot when the local gendarme came by on his beat. They exchanged greetings and the doctor asked what was new. The cop was surprised that the doctor hadn’t heard, Rumèbe the paymaster had disappeared with more than 100,000 francs of his employer’s money.
“Parbleu!” the doctor swore. “What a terrible thing to do.”
“Is he a patient of yours, Doctor?”
“No, I don’t recall ever having seen the man.”
“No matter,” the policeman said. “He will not get far. The Sûreté has an alert out, and every train, every bus, even every car around here is being watched.” The cop looked thoughtful. “One could almost wish he had a chance: it is a lot of money. Au revoir, monsieur.”
The gendarme walked away, and Doctor Bougrat looked after him pensively. He dropped the letter to the mill in the slot and returned home.
A little later Doctor Bougrat got into his car. He had intended to head for the Rhone to dispose of a recent but decidedly embarrassing acquisition. In the light of what the gendarme had said, however, that errand was out of the question for the time being. He would simply have to leave the thing in the closet locked up.
So, instead of the Rhone, Bougrat lit out for Marseilles. He found Marius and said he had come with the money for Andrea. The Apache counted his 9,000 francs, stuck the money in his pocket, and told the doctor where he could find Andrea. As an afterthought he added a suggestion where they could both go.
Bougrat picked up the girl and drove her to Aix to assume the role of housekeeper. Andrea wondered whether the scheme would work. The doctor was sure it would if, instead of being rouged to the ears, she wore no make-up and dressed conservatively.
On Sunday morning Andrea got up ahead of the doctor to make an omelet for breakfast. Looking around for a skillet, she found she couldn’t open the door of one of the kitchen closets. Going to the foot of the stairs, she relayed word of her plight to the doctor.
“We don’t use that closet anymore,” Bougrat called down. “And never mind about the skillet. I’ll just take some fruit for breakfast.”
All week end the hunt went on through the countryside for the missing paymaster. Official and unofficial opinion had become divided as to whether Rumèbe was an absconder or a murder victim. But on Monday morning when the doctor’s anonymous letter arrived at the St. Henri mills, the answer seemed certain. Rumèbe, the timid little man, leading a double life, had obviously taken French leave with the payroll.
While the whole town of Aix was talking about Rumèbe, a couple of paperhangers, hurriedly summoned by the doctor, were busy in the kitchen of the big stone house. When they came to the door that Andrea hadn’t been able to open, one of them noticed it had been nailed up. Sticking his head into the adjoining office, he asked Bougrat what he wanted done about it.
“Tear off the outside frame,” said the doctor, “and paper over it. There are so many wires and heating pipes inside that it is useless.”
Late that afternoon, who should pop up in Aix but Commissioner Robert of the Sûreté? After buzzing around town trying to extract some clue that might lead him to Rumèbe, Robert went up to the door of Doctor Bougrat’s house and pulled the bell. Andrea, dressed in a demure black frock, answered. Robert gave the girl a puzzled double-take.
“Haven’t I seen you someplace before?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t know, monsieur,” answered Andrea politely.
Robert cocked his head and eyed her steadily for a moment, as policemen have a habit of doing. She looked slightly uncomfortable, but it was a little late for Andrea to start blushing, so she didn’t.
“Is the Doctor in?” the commissioner finally asked.
“Oui, monsieur,” said Andrea. “But he is busy just now. Will you wait?”
Robert nodded, his eyes still on her, and she showed him to a seat.
When the d
octor had dismissed his patient, he came into the waiting room with his usual sad smile
“I’ll bet I know why you’re down here, Commissioner,” he said. “Isn’t it terrible about that paymaster?”
“Did you know him?” asked Robert. “Did you ever have occasion to treat him for anything?”
Bougrat looked off into space. “That’s the strange thing,” he mused. “This is not a large town, yet I can’t recall ever having laid eyes on the man.”
“Or hear any stories about him?”
Bougrat shook his head, and Robert got up to go.
“Don’t be in a rush, Commissioner,” said the doctor. “Stay and have a drink with me.”
He led the commissioner to the dining room, next to the kitchen where the paperhangers were at work. Robert, hearing them, peered in curiously. Bougrat explained,
“I’m having the kitchen done over. How do you like the paper?”
“Looks fine,” said Robert. He glanced at the old paper still exposed, and noted that it seemed hardly faded at all.
The commissioner left shortly, and as he was returning to Marseilles through the thickening dusk, he couldn’t get the girl at the doctor’s house out of his mind. He was sure that he had seen her someplace before.
On an impulse he returned to his office. There he began to flip through the picture files of girls who had come under the scrutiny of the police for anything from prostitution to murder. Hours passed. Along toward midnight, when Robert was fortifying himself with glass after glass of black coffee, he came to the picture he was looking for.
Andrea Audibert, it seemed, had been brought to Marseilles from Paris not long before to appear in third-rate music halls and double as a prostitute. And the man who had brought her was Marius.
Now Robert went to another file. Presently he was scanning all the cops knew about the pimp. One opinion stuck out: Marius was perhaps the hardest man in the Marseilles underworld with a franc. Going back to his desk, Commissioner Robert sat sipping hot black coffee, lost in thought. If Andrea had been one of the stable of girls maintained by Marius, how come she had made the jump from Marseilles to the doctor’s home? Had she just been up in Aix temporarily when Robert called? He thought not. There had been something about the way she had stood in the doorway that led him to believe she was in permanent residence. Perhaps it was her very lack of make-up, most unusual in a femme de joie.
Robert started sniffing around the waterfront dives of Marseilles. Among a host of minor items, he learned that Marius, unlike most Apaches, believed in banks. At the bank where the pimp kept his money, Robert found out that he had made a deposit of 9,000 francs, on the Monday after the paymaster dropped from sight.
The commissioner wondered if there was a connection between the bank deposit and the appearance of the prostitute in the doctor’s house. He also wondered if there was a connection with the disappearance of the paymaster. Had that anonymous letter to the mill been a fake, a red herring to throw the police off?
He had to get some answers. Sneaking into Aix at night, Robert watched the stone house where the doctor lived. He could see, moving on the window shades, two shadows, obviously those of Bougrat and the Audibert doll. When the lights went out, Robert let himself into the garage.
He didn’t know exactly what he was looking for, but after a little poking around he lifted up the rumble seat. Thus he came upon that Apache attire of the doctor’s. Why, Robert asked himself, would the doctor have been driving around with that rig in the rumble seat? Inevitably it was a disguise. And it must have been used where such clothes were common, in the dives of Marseilles. The commissioner’s mind clicked on. There the doctor must have met, and purchased, the girl who was now living in the big stone house.
But the whole story, the whole series of suppositions, pushed credibility past reasonable limits. Robert just couldn’t fathom it.
In the days and nights that followed, however, Robert poked into the known past of the doctor. He thus put together the story of the defection of Bougrat’s patients. This buttressed the suspicion in Robert’s mind that Bougrat had suffered from a shortage of funds with which to finance the revels.
Now, suddenly, Robert began to think about two paperhangers he had seen in Bougrat’s kitchen on the Monday following the paymaster’s disappearance. Had Bougrat murdered Rumèbe and, not being able to dispose of the body elsewhere before the hue and cry went up, stuffed it in a kitchen closet? Then, to cover things up, had he had the kitchen papered and the closet sealed?
One night, some three weeks after Rumèbe had dropped from sight, Robert, nostrils flaring, hung around Bougrat’s house until the lights went out. Then he jimmied his way into the kitchen and played a flashlight on the walls, looking for a sign of unevenness to indicate a closet that had been papered over.
Robert found something even more interesting. In one area of the wall, his flashlight picked out several worms busily engaged in boring their way through the wall. Those worms told the detective that he had come to the end of the trail. Worms, he knew, were attracted to the decomposition of flesh and were able to figure out, even though a layer of wood, what human nostrils couldn’t detect.
When Robert tapped the wall and heard a hollow sound, he knew he was rapping on a closet door. Jimmying the door, the Sûreté man found the decomposing body of Jacques Rumèbe.
By then it was dawn and Robert was jolted by a banging on Dr. Bougrat’s front door. He concealed himself as he heard Bougrat crash down the steps to open the door. Thereupon several other law enforcement types confronted Bougrat over a series of bad checks that he had passed to cover some of his debts. Robert listened to this commotion for several minutes before stepping out of the kitchen and interrupting the financial haggling. He went then to arrest Doctor Bougrat for murder.
Bougrat admitted everything but the murder. But the detective had the vital organs of the corpse analyzed and found that death had been caused by an overdose of the drug arsenobenzol. The motive, insisted Robert: murder for profit.
At his trial, Bougrat admitted that he had administered the drug, secretly, so that he could keep Rumèbe on his feet and save the man’s job for him. But, since the administration of the drug was an inexact science, he had given the paymaster an overdose by mistake. Feeling the effects of the overdose, Rumèbe, had come staggering back to the doctor’s office that Saturday a few hours after having received his treatment from Bougrat. Not only was he sick, but he was in a panic, Bougrat said. He had paid a drunken visit to a brothel claiming and had lost his satchel, which was full of money. Feeling too sick to function on his own, he asked Bougrat to go back to where he had been and try to find the money. Bougrat did as asked but when he returned empty-handed he found his friend dead on the floor. He then panicked, he said, and, his better judgment suspended, he had sealed Rumèbe up in the closet.
And where did the money come from for Bougrat to purchase Andrea from Marius, the cops asked next. That was from all those bounced checks, Bougrat said: he was desperate to get the woman he loved away from the gangster, so he hung bad paper all over the south of France. What about those wealthy old folks who had disappeared, Robert also inquired. An unhappy coincidence, Bougrat said, and only two had been his patients.
On the surface, the doctor’s alibi held together. But the police and prosecutors, recalling that body stuffed into a closet, just weren’t buying it.
The trial, of course, was a regional sensation and even made international news, with most observers feeling that Bougrat just plain seemed like a guilty man, what with that ex-hooker for a playmate, the Apache clothing, the love of money and nightlife and the dead war buddy with syphilis.
So Bougrat was found guilty of the murder by a vote of six to five under the French jury system of the time. He faced the guillotine, and the majority of the jury, working up a real bourgeois dislike for the man recommended it.
But under French law, no man could be put to death who was in a certain category of war hero. Bougra
t - remember those medals? - was so classified. So he was sentenced to twenty-five years on Devil’s Island with no possibility for parole. He was sent there immediately by boat, leaving a heartbroken Andrea behind, and still maintaining his innocence.
End of story? Far from it!
Devil’s Island is located approximately nine miles off the coast of French Guiana, near South America. The island was a part of the controversial French penal colony of French Guiana from 1852 to 1953. In its time, it was the most famous for its use for internal exile of political prisoners. The island, a tourist attraction today, albeit a bizarre one, is surrounded by rocky promontories and shoals, vicious ocean cross-currents and shark-infested waters. Landing on the island by boat in the day of Dr. Bougrat (mid-1927 when he arrived) remained so treacherous that prison officials had constructed a cable car system to connect the island to the nearby Île Royale, and used it for years to travel the two hundred yard wide channel between the two islands.
The most famous political prisoner on Devil’s Island, as is well known, was Captain Alfred Dreyfus, and while political prisoners were common in the penal colony, it was a destination mostly for the most hardened, violent and unsavory of the French criminal class. Conditions were brutal and prisoner-on-prisoner violence was common. Tropical diseases were rife and mosquitos - big blood-thirsty fat ones - were everywhere. To say the least, the place was appropriately named.
The penal colony had been functioning with the flotsam of the French underworld for more than a century. Very few men who were sentenced there were ever seen again in Europe. But Dr. Bougrat, reluctantly pushing Andrea out of his mind now, had plans other than dying in one of the most miserable places on the planet.
On Devil’s Island, Doctor Bougrat quickly became a model prisoner. And almost as quickly, he became the prison doctor.
Bougrat studied his predicament and put on his thinking cap. Here he was surrounded by water on one side with squalor, disease and violence all around him on the other sides. His only real asset was his medical degree. He went to work on a plan to get out of there.