The Disappearance at Père-Lachaise

by Claude Izner

  He lifted the tarpaulin and seized the two carcasses lying on the frock coat, two black cats he’d found behind Parmentier’s tomb, already dead. Père Moscou was too fond of animals ever to kill them. He stuffed them in a box, which he covered with a piece of sacking.

  ‘I’ll offer Marcelin the skins on Sunday and then sell the rest to Cabirol as hare’s meat. But first I’ll have to get hold of some rabbit heads at Les Halles. I’ve got a lot on my plate!’

  Père Moscou lay down. He was exhausted, but pleased with what he’d achieved. He snuggled under the quilts and smiled at a plaster bust sitting on a chair.

  ‘Goodnight, my Emperor,’ he mumbled, ‘and death to Grouchy!’

  He put out the lamp and was soon snoring.

  Although her brother Erwan had been dead for three years, Denise found herself walking with him beside the sea, and was surprised to see him looking so well. A sudden crash woke her from her dream and she curled up in bed, terrified.

  What had roused her was only a creaking sound magnified by the silence. She heard it again, and then again. It was too evenly spaced to be the furniture shifting, she decided. It was coming from the corridor, muffled and menacing.

  Mastering her emotions, she got out of bed and dragged her washstand against the door after first removing the jug and basin. She listened. Silence. Trembling with fear and cold – her room faced north and was not heated – she curled up on the narrow iron bed. A pale light shone through the window. Denise fixed her eyes on the door handle and saw it move slowly downwards. Someone was trying to get in. A chink appeared as the door opened slightly and was blocked by the washstand, which stood firm. The intruder gave a slight push, to no avail. The door closed and the handle went back to its original position. The unseen visitor moved stealthily away.

  Denise relaxed her jaw and lowered her hand, which had been pressed against her mouth. She made herself count up to two hundred. Vaguely reassured, she got up and hurriedly straightened her clothes and hair. The large purple cotton shawl that had carried her meagre belongings from Quimper three years earlier was spread out on the bed. Behind a worn curtain, two patched dresses and the velvet skirt that Madame de Valois had given her hung on a clothes rail. She placed them on the shawl with some stockings, a petticoat and two carefully folded white blouses and, before tying the four corners of the shawl together, she added a tarnished silver crucifix, a mirror and an embroidered tucker – objects that had once belonged to her mother and which constituted her entire inheritance.

  On her guard, Denise listened carefully and, hearing nothing, decided to slip on her coat and put back the washstand. She was just about to leave the room when she realised she had forgotten something. She lifted the mattress and pulled out a chromolithograph fixed to a thin piece of wood, which depicted the Virgin Mary, dressed in a blue robe, standing in front of some yellow rocks. She wrapped it quickly in a pillowcase, wedged it under her arm and, picking up her bundle, opened the door.

  The grey dawn hadn’t dispelled the menacing gloom of the apartment. Denise held her breath as she had before plunging into the River Odet as a child, and raced down the corridor. She had to get out of that haunted place as fast as possible. When she reached the landing she hesitated. The keys! What had she done with the keys? Had she put them above the fireplace in the sitting room before lighting the candles or mislaid them in her room? It was too late! She slammed the door impulsively, tore down a flight of stairs, then stopped dead in her tracks. Where would she go? The only money she had was the change from the grocery money. She ought to have left it on the hall table, or she might be accused of stealing. But then again Madame de Valois owed her some wages. The money could be considered an advance payment. In any case she did not have the courage to go back up there.

  She carried on down the stairs. Where would she go? She didn’t know a soul in Paris. Was there a place that took in homeless young women? Then she remembered Madame’s former lover, Monsieur Victor Legris, the attractive gentleman with dark eyes who always had a kind word for her and occasionally slipped her a coin. She remembered having accompanied Madame de Valois to his bookshop on the Rive Gauche, near the Seine. What was the name of that street? It began with Saint…and there was a hospital nearby.

  As she crossed the entrance hall Monsieur Hyacinthe called out to her.

  ‘You’re abroad early this morning, Mademoiselle Le Louarn. Is anything the matter?’

  She shook her head and walked out into the deserted boulevard, unaware that the door to the building had opened behind her and a young boy wearing a gilt-buttoned tunic and a peaked cap had slipped out.

  The sun’s early rays shone through a grove of plane trees on to a ruined ivy-covered baluster and lit up a copper brazier that suddenly glinted, startling a small, slender animal with a pointed nose.

  ‘Come back here, Madame Stone Marten, you coward. Come back, my pretty one, and I’ll give you a big chunk of this crispy pork rind! An offering from Mother Valladier, that paragon among women who still has a fine bosom despite her age…You refuse? You’re a fool. Victory is ours, boom, bang, boom!’

  Père Moscou combed his fingers through his hair as he waited for his coffee to boil. He had slept soundly and was fully sober. He wished he had a drop of something with which to toast the beautiful dawn, but it was his principle never to drink anywhere but leaning against the bar of a tavern or, if pressed, at a friend’s house.

  ‘Being drunk on one’s own patch is unworthy of Antoine Jean Anicet Ménager, otherwise known as Moscou the Brave, grandson of the Emperor of the grognards3 and of the grognard of the Emperor. Remember, I am accountable to the nation for the lives of my men. If the enemy attacks, we’ll run him through, we’ll slit his throat!’

  This speech was directed at a few pigeons and a crow attracted by the breakfast scraps. Père Moscou rubbed his neck.

  ‘Speaking of throats, mine’s a little rough this morning. I must have had a bit of a tipple last night. Moscou, you’re an old lush and for your trouble not a drop of plonk before midday! Come along, it’s time you got to work.’

  He poured the remains of his coffee on to the brazier, which billowed with smoke, and made his way through the undergrowth and wild lilies, disturbing a flock of sparrows as he went. He tripped over a pile of plaster debris, bounced off a fig tree and landed in a tangle of clematis.

  ‘Prepare to die!’ he cried, rushing at the invisible enemy.

  He charged across his bivouac, sabre to the fore, then stopped in his tracks and walked nonchalantly over to his cart, which was standing by the wall. He lifted the tarpaulin, and glanced at the contents for a moment.

  ‘What a load of old rubbish!’

  Seizing the parasol, the ankle boot and the top hat, he went to deposit them in their appropriate boxes.

  ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if people left their underwear behind in that cemetery.’

  He returned to the cart.

  ‘Not to mention their children. First they dump the pram,’ he said, dropping the hood of the perambulator on the floor, ‘and then they toss the brat in the nettles!’

  He was anxious to try on the coachman’s frock coat and grabbed it, twirling it around as he threw it over his shoulders.

  ‘I should dye it green or red or the second coachman will jeer at me. It’s not bad, it’ll make a nice coa–’

  He stood rooted to the spot with his mouth wide open. A woman dressed in black was lying on the cart, her head resting on a piece of tombstone and a closed umbrella on her chest. Her eyes were shut and her cheeks deathly pale.

  ‘Well, I’ll be damned! A stowaway!’ He brushed the anonymous woman’s forehead with his hand and cried out as though he’d been stung. There was no doubt about it, she was quite dead. He noticed a brownish stain on her coat collar and pulled it back to reveal a patch of dried blood on the nape of her neck. He lifted her fur cap and pushed her head to one side. The back of her skull had been smashed in. A murder. He let go of the woman’s head in ala
rm.

  ‘That’s a serious corpse. I’ve seen enough to know and never balked at burying them. But…a murdered woman on my cart! That’s going too far! I know I didn’t do it, that’s for sure. I’ll fight anything that moves, like a lion I am when I’ve had a few and I’m fired up for battle. But never a woman. Never! Who’s trying to lay the blame for this wickedness on Père Moscou?’

  With trembling hands he replaced the tarpaulin and harnessed himself to the cart, which he dragged to the far side of the courtyard and left in a tangle of elder and viburnum bushes while he ran to fetch a spade from his bivouac.

  ‘Lucky it rained last night so the ground’s soft…’

  Removing the tarpaulin again he examined the corpse carefully. He decided he would take the hat but not the coat – too much blood. There was a chain round the woman’s neck with a silver locket on it. I’ll sell that to the jeweller on Rue de Pernelle together with this diamond ring, he thought, as he slipped it off the third finger of her left hand. The wedding ring proved more stubborn and he gave up, considering it improper to deprive a dead person of such a sacred ornament.

  Having pocketed the jewellery, he spat on his hands, rubbed them together, picked up the spade and began digging, whistling a marching tune to give him courage. He tried to convince himself the dead woman was a soldier killed in battle and that he, the man’s general, was burying him on the battlefield. It took him a good hour to dig a deep enough hole, and when he stood up straight he was dripping with sweat despite the chill in the air. He pulled the dead woman by the feet. As she slid off the cart her coat and dress became hitched up, exposing her silk-stockinged legs. Père Moscou turned away in embarrassment. The body fell to the ground with a thud. He rolled it into the pit with his umbrella, hurriedly shovelling back the loose earth. When he’d finished, he flattened the grave and scattered it with stones, bits of rubble and grass. He cast a critical eye over his work and found it wanting. The most important thing was missing. He went off, inventing another story to reassure himself.

  ‘I’m certain it was he, Emperor. Emmanuel Grouchy’s behind this. Remember Waterloo? If he’d stopped Blücher from joining forces with Wellington, victory would have been yours. I reported it to you. He found out, and has hated me ever since. This is his revenge.’

  Père Moscou returned carrying two uprooted lilac bushes, which he very carefully replanted. After he’d finished, he thrust his fists in his pockets and stepped back to consider his work.

  ‘No one, not even Grouchy, would say a woman’s buried there, God rest her soul. I’m not done yet; I need a pick-me-up after that, a drop of hussar’s elixir.

  The overgrown garden was so serene he might almost have imagined the strange ceremony. But the jewellery he was rolling between his fingers was real enough.

  Chapter Two

  It was almost nine o’clock when Denise reached Pont des Arts. The crisp, clear morning set off to perfection one of the most beautiful views in Paris. She stopped halfway across the bridge, mesmerised by the sights around her. To her left lay the towers of the Palais de Justice, the spire of Saint-Chapelle and the imposing bulk of Notre-Dame with the point of the Île de la Cité and the Vert-Galant garden glinting behind them in the sunshine. To her right, far in the distance, the Eiffel Tower soared into the sky. The Seine seemed to arch its back as it curved under Pont Neuf, its current breaking against the hulls of the laundry boats before settling into a smooth yellowish flow, dotted with ducks.

  She walked past the L’Institut and the École des Beaux-Arts, watching the second-hand booksellers and the medal traders setting up their stalls on the other side of Quai Malaquais. She had to pluck up courage to ask a portly man the way, but he smiled at her from behind an enormous moustache and pointed out Rue des Saints-Pères.

  The houses here were less ostentatiously grand than those on Boulevard Haussman, but Denise found them much more beautiful, perhaps because their weather-beaten façades had stood the test of time. There was a calm, provincial air to the street that she found reassuring. There were several bookshops, but she couldn’t see Monsieur Legris’s. It was only when she spotted the sign saying ‘Elzévir’ above the number 18 that she was certain that she had come to the right place. Behind the shop windows, which were set in wood panelling of a greeny-bronze colour, large red-bound gilt-edged volumes were lined up next to more recent works. Amongst the latter, the latest book by Émile Zola, The Beast in Man, the extremely controversial Noncoms by Lucien Descaves and a Shakespeare play, left open at a lurid illustration of witches, took pride of place. One corner of the window display was dedicated to some novels whose titles Denise read out haltingly in a low voice: The Lerouge Affair by Émile Gaboriau, The Exploits of Rocambole by Ponson du Terrail, The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens, Fifi Vollard’s Gang by Constant Guéroult and The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. A small notice in red ink read:

  If you like murder mysteries and thrillers, do not hesitate to ask for advice. It will be our pleasure to assist you.

  A little alarmed by these words, Denise pressed her face against the window and saw a blond young man inside the shop, engrossed in a newspaper. She was startled by the sound of whistling. A schoolboy, his cap pulled down over his eyes, was standing beside her, so close that he nudged her arm. She moved away slightly and then took refuge under the awning of a packaging shop on the other side of the street, hoping that Madame’s ex-lover would soon appear. The schoolboy positioned himself a little further off, in front of Debauve & Gallais, makers of fine chocolates.

  The door of the building beside the bookshop opened and out came a woman as round as a ball, enveloped in an apron and armed with a broom. As she scanned the street, looking from right to left, she caught sight of Denise and stared at her suspiciously. Then she disappeared into the hall, reappearing a moment later with a bucket, which she emptied on to the pavement just as a costermonger’s cart appeared beside her. The water narrowly missed the woman pulling the cart.

  ‘Watch out, Madame Ballu. You almost drowned me!’

  ‘I’m sorry, Madame Pignot, my mind was elsewhere. I was thinking about my cousin Alphonse, the one who went to Senegal. He’s caught it!’

  ‘Caught what?’

  ‘Influenza. They’ve given him syrup of snails, but he’s still coughing and coughing.’

  ‘Not to worry, Madame Ballu, I’m sure he’ll get better. Good day!’

  ‘And good day to you, Madame Pignot.’

  Madame Pignot waved in the direction of the bookshop and set off again pulling her cart. The young blond man rushed out of the shop. ‘Maman, wait!’ he cried.

  He caught up with the costermonger, grabbed a couple of large apples from the top of her fruit and vegetable basket, planted a kiss on her cheek and went back into the bookshop.

  Denise did not budge from her spot. She saw the blond boy reappear on the pavement and call to a man leaning out of a first-floor window, ‘Give me ten minutes, boss!’

  The man nodded his assent, then closed the window. Denise had time to notice his slanting eyes. She remembered her mistress mentioning Monsieur Legris’s Chinese valet disapprovingly.

  The Oriental man was dressed in the English style in a fully buttoned tweed jacket with narrow lapels and flap pockets, a white shirt, grey trousers with an impeccable crease and brown leather shoes. He went over to a table with a row of inkwells on it, and picked up some rail tickets, which he slipped into his wallet. He gazed for a moment at the two new prints recently hung on the wall to brighten the room. One, Boat ride under the Azuma Bridge, was by Kiyonga1 and the other, entitled Lake Biwa, was by Hiroshige.2 He pushed open the door of the bathroom, which was equipped with a copper bath. Leaning towards the mirror over the basin, he straightened the knot of his green silk tie, put on a checked worsted bowler hat and, apparently satisfied, smiled at the photograph on a marble shelf in front of him. Gazing out of the image was a young woman with brown hair who was tenderly holding a boy of about twelve. At the bottom was
the inscription, Daphne and Victor, London 1872.

  The man went back into the spacious sitting room, which was furnished in the style of Louis XIII, slid back a slatted paper partition, and entered a Japanese-style bedroom. A recess housed a thick cotton blanket and a wooden pillow, a Japanese trunk with ornamental hinges, Noh theatre masks, sheathed swords and a lacquer writing desk. He closed a suitcase, covered in multicoloured labels, and attached a rectangular tag to the handle bearing the following identification: Monsieur Kenji Mori, 18 Rue des Saints-Pères, Paris, France.

  As he prepared for his departure, Kenji was reflecting on how, finally, Iris was going to be living near him. In her last letter she had expressed her joy at the thought of living in France, no longer having to wait weeks for him to find time to leave his business associate and cross the Channel to be with her. Saint-Mandé was very close to Paris and he would be able to visit her every Sunday. She would enjoy living comfortably in the heart of the countryside. Mademoiselle Bontemps’s boarding house, an agreeable dwelling on Chausée de l’Étang, was opposite the Bois de Vincennes. He would, however, have to use all his wiles to keep her away from the bookshop. It was out of the question that she should meet Victor! He would find a way. His thoughts were interrupted by the noise of wheels in the street. He went over to the window: a carriage was drawing up in front of the bookshop. The blond young man got out and shouted triumphantly, ‘Your cab awaits, M’sieu Mori!’

  ‘Coming!’

  Denise watched the blond boy come out of the bookshop weighed down by a suitcase dotted with labels. He was followed by two men: the Oriental, and a good-looking man of medium height aged about thirty. He had brown hair and a moustache. She stiffened – it was Madame de Valois’s old lover! She heard him cry, ‘Have a good journey, Kenji, be good!’ as the Oriental took his seat in the cab, which set off.