The Montmartre Investigation

by Claude Izner

  ‘For God’s sake!’ he complained, fiddling with the spout.

  ‘Looks like the frogs have got into your barrel,’ bawled a crone with flaxen hair.

  The bar owners laughed amongst themselves as they watched Polyte trying to extract a few drops from the tap.

  ‘Confound it! What’s going on here! It can’t have emptied itself all on its own. Unless some joker siphoned it out in the night!’

  He struck the side of the barrel violently.

  ‘It sounds full. We’ll have to find out what it’s got in its belly!’

  He bent down, seized an iron lever and prepared to prise open the lid, expecting to have to use considerable force. But the lid came off easily, and Polyte toppled backwards against the ample bosom of the crone.

  ‘Watch out there, love! Are you trying to have your wicked way with me? Cos I warn you, I’m spoken for.’

  Sniggering, Polyte leant into the barrel then hastily turned away, nauseated. The others looked in.

  ‘Good God Almighty,’ exclaimed a large fellow in a grey smock.

  He made way for Basile Popêche, who had forgotten his glasses, and had to squint in an effort to see exactly what was in the barrel. An icy terror gripped him by the throat as he made out the horrifying sight. It was like something floating in a specimen jar at a museum: hair undulating on the surface of the vermilion liquid, mottled yellow in the light of the street lamp, staring eyes with dilated pupils, mouth twisted in a mute cry. Transfixed, he leant further over. He recognised the drowned man. Although he had only passed him twice, he was sure it was the ground floor tenant from his building.

  ‘We’ll have to tell the coppers,’ murmured the giant.

  Everyone recoiled. No one wanted to get involved in this sordid affair. Embarrassed, they avoided looking at each other. As if with one mind, they scattered to the four corners of the market.

  ‘Oy! Wait for me!’ yelped Polyte. ‘Basile, where are you going?’

  Basile Popêche, sweating profusely, was walking fast up Rue de Champagne towards the Seine. That man from his building, he had seen him the other evening, when he was taking a breath of fresh air at his window; it must have been about midnight. And there had been another man, a strapping fellow in a grey overcoat who had appeared from Rue Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire. He had glimpsed Monsieur Grey Overcoat for long enough to remember his face, and to notice that he seemed to be following the fellow from the ground floor.

  ‘But it’s nothing to do with me. I’ve got enough of my own worries; best to leave them to sort it out without me. I know nothing; I saw nothing!’

  A ray of sunlight pierced the milky daylight that filtered through the window and found its way into the alcove, dragging Victor from sleep. He was astonished to find himself lying on his stomach. He sat up so quickly he felt slightly dizzy. Tasha was painting. Apart from her bare feet and her tousled chignon, she was entirely hidden behind her easel. The stove was purring like a contented cat. Victor leaned back against the pillows, yawning, and flattened his rumpled hair.

  ‘Can’t you stop doing that?’ he complained. ‘It’s Sunday – come back to bed!’

  ‘No, I’m determined to finish this sketch while it’s fresh in my memory. You go back to sleep.’

  Annoyed, he threw back the eiderdown. Go back to sleep! What he wanted was to laze in bed with her, nibbling the lobes of her ears and her breasts, caressing her body tenderly and yielding slowly to his desire.

  But she wants to finish her drawing! Why did I have to fall in love with an artist?

  Just for a moment, he wished she was one of those women obsessed with nothing but her appearance and attire.

  ‘Are you sulking?’ she teased him. ‘Victor, this picture is important to me, and you know how obsessive I am.’

  He knew it well. He watched her as he dressed. What he saw was familiar, soothing. She seemed to him extremely vulnerable, and yet he knew she was possessed of a stronger character than his.

  ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘I’ll leave you to concentrate.’

  His words were totally insincere; he felt ashamed.

  ‘Shall we have dinner together? Oh bother, I have to go and see someone. I’ll be home late.’

  ‘I have to see someone too,’ he replied, quick as a flash.

  She tossed a cotton sheet over her canvas, and ran over to him, putting her arms round his neck.

  ‘A woman?’

  ‘And you, a man?’

  ‘Of course not, idiot!’

  They kissed lingeringly. By the time she pulled away he felt reassured. Those beautiful green eyes – surely they would not lie to him? But then even if she were lying he would still be besotted with her.

  ‘What are you hiding under there?’ he asked, indicating the easel.

  ‘I’ll show you when it’s finished,’

  ‘One of your rooftops? A nude? A still life?’

  ‘It’s a secret.’

  As soon as he was outside, his obsessive jealousy came flooding back. He imagined lifting the cotton cover to discover a drawing of another man, of having his suspicions confirmed with his own eyes. To take his mind off his anguish, he forced himself to think about Élisa Fourchon. Had she left the Bontemps Boarding School dressed in red, like the girl found murdered at Killer’s Crossing? He would have to find out. He reflected, not without bitterness, that he would rather frolic in the woods with Tasha; they could have picnicked on the banks of the Saint-Mandé lake.

  ‘In this weather, you imbecile? That would be a sure way to contract pneumonia. You’ll see her this evening, and then you will hold her in your arms and tell her that it can’t go on like this. Until then, concentrate on this new mystery. Go to Chaussée de l’Étang and see what you can discover. Take your photographic equipment; Mademoiselle Corymbe Bontemps will surely be delighted to have her photograph taken…’

  ‘Monsieur Legris, what a wonderful surprise! The young ladies and I were about to set off on our walk. Oh, you’re a photographer!’

  Caught in the middle of the pavement of Chaussée de l’Étang, encumbered with his concertina camera and the satchel containing his plates, Victor recoiled in the face of Mademoiselle Bontemps’s ebullience.

  ‘Would it be taking advantage if I were to ask you to take a group picture of us?’ she cried excitedly.

  ‘Well, I had in fact come to ask your help. You see I’m looking for models.’

  Victor felt perfectly ridiculous, standing there surrounded by a knot of girls decked out in their Sunday best. As for Mademoiselle Bontemps, she resembled an enormous, belligerent parakeet under the green feathers of her huge hat.

  ‘I’m not sure I’m looking my best,’ she cooed, fidgeting.

  ‘Yes, yes, you are ravishing; people will think you’re one of the girls. Let’s go down to the lake.’

  Iris, very chic in a grey coat with a fur collar, slipped over to him and whispered, ‘That’s going a bit far! She looks hideous. Did Godfather send you?’

  ‘Come along, girls, behave nicely. It’s not every day that an artist takes an interest in us! Berthe, Aspasie, you tall girls stand behind. Iris, stand here in the front beside Henriette and Aglaé. The others…’

  ‘That’s not fair; I’m an inch shorter than them,’ muttered Aspasie.

  ‘It’s a pity Élisa’s not here!’ said Berthe.

  ‘She’s gone home to her mother,’ said Mademoiselle Bontemps, who added in an aggrieved tone to Victor: ‘That mother, she has no idea how to behave. She hasn’t paid me for this term; if she thinks I’m just going to overlook it…’

  ‘The Fourchon girl? Noémi Gerfleur’s daughter?’ asked Victor innocently.

  ‘So you solved the enigma of the flowery name; what perspicacity, Monsieur Legris! Girls, girls, calm down, stay in your places. I’ll leave you to your work, Monsieur Legris.’

  Victor set up his camera, adjusted the pose of the girls and disappeared under a black cloth. There were suppressed giggles, elbowing and mutterings of, ‘How lo
ng must we stand like statues?’

  When he’d finished, the girls scattered, chased by a furious Mademoiselle Bontemps, clutching her plumed hat with one hand. Iris came over to Victor.

  ‘You didn’t say anything to Godfather?’

  ‘Not a word…How was Élisa dressed when she went to meet her lover; what colour were her clothes?’

  ‘Why?…Oh, I see, my godfather has asked you to keep an eye on the people I associate with and…’

  ‘You’re on the wrong track, Mademoiselle Iris; be kind – enlighten me.’

  She looked at him quizzically.

  ‘You’re hiding something, but I’ll find out what it is eventually,’ she murmured. ‘Élisa was wearing a red dress and coat, that’s why I lent her my red shoes. It was a joke – her good friend Gaston was taking her dancing at Le Moulin-Rouge; it’s easy for him to get in – he works there. Is it true, what they say about the naturalist quadrille?’

  ‘What do they say?’

  ‘That the dancers show their petticoats and their drawers.’

  ‘If the posters are to be believed, yes it’s true.’

  ‘I would give anything to see that!’

  ‘I very much doubt that your…ah…godfather would agree to that.’

  ‘We wouldn’t have to tell him if you agreed to chaperone me. You can keep a secret can’t you, Monsieur Legris?’ she said in an icy tone.

  Victor was saved by the return of Mademoiselle Bontemps, who had gathered her lost flock. It was a struggle to extricate himself; the young ladies, egged on by their headmistress, insisted on his trying a sensational blend of tea accompanied by apple strudel. As he left, he could not help glancing at Iris anxiously. Was Kenji taking his responsibilities towards the young girl seriously?

  *

  Victor collapsed exhausted in a bistro on Avenue Victor-Hugo. Restored by a glass of vermouth, he laughed at his propensity to turn events into the plot of a novel. But it was impossible to deny that there were similarities between the circumstances of the murder and Iris’s account. The red dress, the bare feet, the slipper found by Grégoire Mercier. Now that he was on the trail it was out of the question that he should abandon it.

  ‘Le Moulin-Rouge…Gaston…Is he a musician? Dancer? Stagehand? I’ll go there this evening. That way I won’t have provoked Tasha for nothing, and I’ll get to see the ladies show off their underwear.’

  He laughed to himself. The ardent eyes, shiny black hair and sensual mouth of Eudoxie appeared before him: the beautiful Eudoxie Allard, languorous succubus who had tried to seduce him in the offices of Le Passe-partout, where she worked as a typist. Hadn’t she given up journalism to become a dancer? He vaguely recalled Isidore Gouvier saying of her: ‘She’s been taken on by Zidler at Le Moulin-Rouge to kick up her pins.’

  ‘Let’s see, what did he say her stage name was? PhiPhi?…No…Fifi…Fifi…Fifi Bas-Rhin!’

  Victor climbed out of the cab and stood still for a moment, mesmerised by the incessant movement of the red sails. Drawn to this flame of variegated colour, a crowd of revellers filled Boulevard de Clichy, where two years previously a Catalan named Joseph Oller and a former butcher, Charles Zidler, had built a sumptuous music hall on Place Blanche, aimed at dethroning the Élysée-Montmartre. It was an instant success, thanks to its principal attraction, the cancan, revived from its heyday in the 1830s. Now the lewd dance, which had been only accessible to habitués of the clubs and dives of Pigalle, was available to the bourgeoisie and aristocracy of Paris.

  Beautiful women escorted by men in evening dress, errand girls flanked by lovers, their caps pushed back on their heads; all had come to bask in the glow of the tawdry windmill that ground out nothing but jigs, polkas and waltzes at a time when the real mills on the heights were in their death throes.

  Victor paid his two francs. Passing through a lobby decorated with paintings, posters and photographs, he was surprised by the size of the interior; it resembled a station concourse furnished with tables and chairs surrounding a dance floor occupied until the start of the show by couples whirling around to the syncopated music. Charles Zidler, a shrewd innovator, had taken care to provide his clientele with an extravagant experience, a temple of pleasure designed by the illustrator Adolphe Willette. High up on a wooden balcony, supported on pillars ornamented with banners, was an orchestra of forty musicians. The vibrantly coloured décor was starkly lit by gas footlights, chandeliers and electric globes and was reflected in a wall covered with mirrors; the effect was oriental in flavour.

  Victor tried to reach the bar, knocking into Englishmen in knickerbockers and tweed deerstalkers, and making way for demi-mondaines, genteel in their pallor and their slenderness, and showing off the latest dresses from Worth.

  ‘Hello, handsome, what will you drink?’ asked the waitress, a comely girl with a mane of red hair.

  ‘Nothing, I’m looking…’

  ‘Yes, look, look, and when you’ve found what you need, let me know. Just shout out: “Sarah!”’

  He studied two enormous canvases hung behind the bar, evidently by the same artist. One showed a dancer doing the chahut before a man with a hooked nose in the midst of a crowd of people. He immediately recognised the man and woman from the poster he had spotted the night before on Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle. The second was of a woman on a horse, prancing before a circus audience.

  ‘You there, you’re in love but you can’t say so because you’re too lily-livered! Suppose I serve you a cocktail?’ proposed Sarah, sticking her bosom out. ‘With cassis, would you like that?’

  ‘All right then. Who’s the painter?’

  ‘A nobleman no bigger than a dwarf, but with a name to make up for it. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, that boozer watering himself at a table over there.’

  Victor took a mouthful of his red drink and put his glass down with a grimace.

  ‘What on earth’s in there?’

  ‘Dry white wine, cassis and a drop of vodka. It was a Rusky, Prince Troubetzkoï, who gave me the recipe.’

  ‘That man with the beaked nose, who’s that?’ he asked, pointing to one of the paintings.

  ‘The man with the big hooter? Where have you been, lovey? Don’t you know Valentin le Désossé? I can point him out in the flesh. Let’s see, where’s he hiding, that demon of the quadrille? Got him – just to the left of La Môme Fromage and La Goulue; the beanpole there, see? I’m assuming you at least recognise the girls?’

  He nodded, not wanting to appear like an idiot. So this is what it was like, the famous Moulin-Rouge! There had been strings of articles about it. Unlike Iris, he had never felt the slightest interest in the subject. He disliked large crowds and the lifting of petticoats left him cold. Tasha’s gentle curves aroused him more than the black-clad calves of the girls practising in front of the mirrors.

  ‘I’m looking for a young man called Gaston…’

  Sarah guffawed.

  ‘There are about twenty Gastons round here! Gaston who?’

  ‘I don’t know. And Fifi Bas-Rhin, where is she?’

  ‘Well, I must say you’ve an awful lot of questions about our little world. I haven’t seen Fifi yet. If I were you, I would wander over to the galleries. She likes to sup from the tankard before she goes on.’

  ‘Sup from…?’

  ‘She likes a tipple! Strange creature, that one!’

  The orchestra had just launched into a waltz. Buffeted between couples, Victor breathed in the scent of ylang-ylang, or Cuir de Russie, mixed with sweat and tobacco. In spite of the enthusiastic brass band and the stamping of feet, he caught snippets of conversation.

  ‘Look at them all at the mirror this evening!’

  ‘She’s a looker, that little one.’

  ‘If she comes over here, I’ll tell her what I think!’

  He passed Valentin le Désossé who, impassive and rigid, was dancing with the voluptuous La Goulue. Part-laundress, part-bourgeoise, her red hair with its square-cut fringe was piled on top of her head and she wore
a ribbon of watered silk around her neck. Aware that Victor was looking at her curvaceous figure and plunging neckline, she stopped, stared at him, hands on hips, and bellowed:

  ‘These fops, don’t they have birds at home?’

  Mortified not so much by the vulgarity of her words as by the harshness of her tone, Victor hurried towards the gallery, desperate to find Eudoxie Allard amidst the forest of penguins in stovepipe hats and courtesans sprouting plumes, among whom the waiters scurried.

  ‘A bowl of mulled wine!’ called a man in a crooked boater flanked by two adoring young girls; Victor recognised him as Alfred Stevens the society painter.

  Then he spotted her, tightly laced into a red and white striped dress and weighed down by a hat made all the taller by its giant bows. He made to retreat, suddenly reluctant to suffer her advances. Too late!

  ‘Look, it’s Monsieur Legris! Over here! Come and join us!

  She was seated at a table with three drinkers, a swarthy lothario, his sombrero tilted over one ear, an elegant bon-viveur with a long face and a morose expression, and a blond young man sporting a monocle and chewing on a cigar. She made the introductions.

  ‘Monsieur Legris, an old friend. He’s a bookseller. We became friendly at Le Passe-partout.14 Louis Dolbreuse, poet and songwriter, based at the moment at Le Chat-Noir.’ She indicated the lothario who smiled, dreamily stroking his goatee beard. ‘And Alphonse Allais, writer and entertainer, he’s just published…’

  ‘Yes, I know, with Ollendorff, Stories to Make you Laugh: Tales of Le Chat-Noir. I adored that book,’ said Victor to the morose bon-viveur.

  ‘And this is Alcide Bonvoisin, Paris’s future best chronicler, after his friend Aurélian Scholl,’15 concluded Eudoxie Allard, tapping the shoulder of the blond young man. ‘Sit there, Monsieur Legris.’

  Victor shook everyone’s hands and settled himself between Eudoxie and Louis Dolbreuse who was pouring champagne, and offered him a glass.

  ‘Are you still writing? Alcide, you have a rival here. I forgot to mention that Victor – may I call you Victor? – pens highly regarded articles.’