All Pure Souls

by John Brooke

  Monsieur le Juge lets the prisoner talk, thinking he would let him dig himself a deep hole where he could spend the rest of his life.

  “All you need,” says Herméné, now gazing out the window, remembering less complicated times, “if you have a good group, and by that I mean a happy group, a creative group!...all you need is a subscription to Paris-Match.”

  “Paris-Match?” Gérard’s wife subscribes.

  “...or Life magazine, monsieur. America! Not long after the Queen of England left the scene we created an exquisite copy of Elizabeth Taylor, about thirteen years old, with that lovely white skin. Some of my more sentimental clients brought their sons in for their first experiences. Those were happy boys, if ever I saw any.”

  “What happened to the Queen?”

  “Oh...well, she was killed, as a matter of fact. In the street, after she’d left us. Strangled... Girls are a lot safer when they have each other and a solid roof over their heads.”

  Life magazine: now it wasn’t such a force in pricking the public’s imagination. But Grace Kelly, or “...the wife of the American president! When she was in mourning? The sunglasses? The kerchief? Many men were touched. They wanted to hold her and make it better. We provided that opportunity. Oh yes, for a while there, we always kept a copy of Life magazine close at hand...” But Herméné is fretful. “It all seems like so long ago, especially after something so tragic as my poor Manon.”

  “Monsieur Dupras,” advises Gérard after a respectful moment, “there are at least ten excellent motives for murder in your statement to me. It would make everything so much simpler, and less costly to the state, if you would specify the one which actually impelled you.”

  “Monsieur,” replies Herméné, “I am not cynical, so please don’t you be. Until you and your colleagues believe that I love those girls, that I loved Manon especially and that there is no reason on this earth why I would do such a thing as was done to her...that they are my bread and butter...that I was drugged and I have been framed in the most vicious way!...well, you and I will not make any progress at all.”

  “More’s the pity for you.” Gérard’s fascination has come full circle and is now arriving back at a deep sense of revulsion. “How can you speak of love?” he demands. “It’s disgusting!”

  Herméné has to pause. Is love really such an incongruous element? He spreads his arms, shrugging as largely as he’s able. “Monsieur, we live in the same house...are involved in the same business; we share many things. One becomes attached. I insist again: Manon was a wonderful girl! Full of joy... You know, she could make me come while laughing heartily at the same moment.”

  “What?” A lob shot; the judge is taken by surprise. No context he can apply in returning...

  “I told you: she was a very talented woman. Why would I kill such a one as her?”

  “Mon Dieu...” sighs Chief J.of I. Gérard Richand, turning to a fresh page (in much the same manner as Commissaire Néon had done). “Explain, monsieur...please explain that!”

  Of course Herméné would explain. But why did they get so angry?

  5

  The Goddess

  Aliette sleeps late, awakes refreshed. Bearing flowers from Herménégilde Dupras, she jumps another puddle and lands at the brothel door. Lynda’s at the front desk. They’ve set up a small memorial: flowers in a vase with Manon’s room key attached to a black ribbon slung around its neck. Leaning against the vase is that same photo depicting their late colleague in her lamé dress, platinum hair swept up to the right, eyes merry, scarlet mouth stretched wide in laughter.

  “Flossie?”

  “Upstairs...”

  In Manon’s room a woman is sitting at the desk, hunched over a book, nursing a glass of milk. A woman? She’s probably about seventeen. Her unpacked bag is open on the bed. Since Flossie Orain’s door is shut this morning, Aliette taps on hers instead. “Bonjour...”

  “Bonjour. I...I, uh, don’t think we’re open quite yet.”

  “It’s all right...” presenting her ID card as she enters; “my name is Inspector Nouvelle.”

  “Oh... My name is Vivienne.” She stands and extends her hand. “...Vivi. I’m new.”

  “But you know why I’m here?”

  She nods. Lush eyebrows and extravagant sienna eyes add gravity to a sallow and delicate heart-shaped face. “It’s very sad... She was the best... It’s an art, you know. And he just killed her.”

  “And you’re her replacement?”

  “Yes.”

  “But aren’t you afraid?...I mean, isn’t it a bit strange sitting here in her room?”

  “No... They’ve got him. Why would I be afraid?”

  Facing this Vivi’s expression, the inspector has to suppress a blush; yes, it was a stupid thing to ask. But the next logical question is still more gauche. “How old are you, Vivi?”

  “Old enough,” is the easy reply.

  Alors...another awkward pause. Aliette sighs. “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand.”

  “Understand?”

  “Why you would come here.”

  “Something to do. Nothing much happening in my life... I can make good money.”

  “So I’m told.”

  “And maybe I’ll have some family.”

  “Family? Don’t you have anyone?”

  “Only my mother.” This with a blasé shrug.

  “Does your mother know you’re here?”

  “Mais oui... She sent me.”

  The girl’s not lying. The inspector gapes as the weight of this settles, not sure whom she should hate. Vivi, clearly a veteran at meeting distraught stares, sips her milk and turns back to her book.

  “What are you reading?”

  “It’s a verse.”

  “May I look?” Yes... Aliette bends and reads the lines.

  Song of Amergin:

  I am a roebuck displaying seven tines

  I am a floodwater covering the fields

  I am a wind over a deep lake

  I am the tears of the Sun.

  I am a falcon circling the ledge

  I am a bramble hooked in the skin

  I am the perfection in every garden

  I am an enchanter — who else

  will set the whispering voice to song?

  I am a battle-waging spear

  I am a fish turning ‘neath the surface

  I am a call beckoning from paradise

  I am a path where poets wander.

  I am a charging boar

  I am a gathering wave

  I am the current inside the tide

  I am a child — who else

  sees through the unshaped sacred stone?

  I am the knot in every weave.

  I am the glow on every ridge.

  I am the queen of every hive.

  I am armour for every heart.

  I am the tomb of every hope.

  Repeating the last line aloud. “I am the tomb of every hope...”

  “I have to study it,” says Vivi. “It’s part of my apprenticeship.”

  “But what does it mean?”

  “Flossie says it’s about love.”

  “Flossie says that?”

  But the apprentice pute is looking at her, telling her to please leave her alone. Same eyes Aliette uses when she too wants some privacy. “Sorry,” Vivi adds, gently — a nice girl; “it’s my first day, you see...”

  2.

  The bar is sombre on a quiet Saturday morning. Aliette Nouvelle faces Flossie Orain and Louise Lebraz, still in their nightgowns. “What is that girl doing here?”

  “She’s going to work,” replies Louise with cool disdain, not happy at having been yanked from her bed by an agitated cop. Flossie gives Louise’s arm a calming rub and speaks to the inspector’s righteous implications. “Vivi came of her own free will and with her mother’s blessing. She’s free to leave whenever she wants.”

  “With a decent bank account and a hell of a lot more sense about the world than when she arrive
d,” adds the prickly redhead.

  “I’ll show you the letters if you like,” offers Flossie.

  Like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, but harder to enjoy.

  The inspector asks, “What letters?”

  “From her mother, practically begging me to take her Vivi in with us.”

  “You know her mother?”

  Flossie shrugs. “I used to. She’s had a lousy life. Met the wrong people.”

  “Was she...did she work here?”

  “No.”

  “Then how could she possibly want her daughter to —”

  “Because,” says Louise, “it will be better here than anything she could ever give her out there.”

  “Ah, voyons madame!” Are you serious?

  Yes, Louise is. “Vivi gives her body. Vivi gets a life.” Simple.

  “I won’t let you.”

  “It’s her choice.”

  “And you know how impossible it is,” adds Flossie, not without some apology in her voice.

  She’s right. Mari Morgan’s is registered as an apartment-hotel, essentially a private dwelling. In accordance with the French obsession with privacy, the law forbids the authorities from bursting in anywhere private from between nine in the evening and six in the morning without due cause. Which makes it difficult, and usually more trouble than it’s worth.

  Louise Lebraz smiles — with no apology at all. “It’s a business like any other.”

  “Yes? And what if she ends up like you?” Trying to hit something...somewhere.

  Louise feels nothing. “...a business in an industry. The sex industry. What are you going to do about it?”

  What am I going to do about it? Give it some integrity? Some rights and meaning? Ondine Duguay’s bleak notions are echoing in this still room. But Aliette, who’s a cop and not a politician, much less a stony old seamstress, has no ready answer. She can only move forward, into the case. She asks, “Is this some kind of cult?”

  Flossie Orain’s perpetually interested eyes register laughter. “Where did you get that idea?”

  “Ondine Duguay.”

  “This is a house,” states Louise. “We have some ideas we share that make it a home.”

  “What are you — witches?”

  “We’re prostitutes, Inspector. Whores. We don’t make soup with toads and snakes. We fuck, and otherwise offer and perform a wide range of sexual services. Please try to keep that straight in your mind.”

  Yin to Louise’s yang, Flossie remains conciliatory. “Ondine hasn’t been in our house for several years now, and we’ll do our best to protect her from this thing. She’s not exactly young any more. We’re not going to let her connection to Herménégilde Dupras mean the wrong thing.”

  Aliette sneers. “I’m sure she appreciates it.” Flossie’s niceness is wearing thin.

  “What about Manon!” demands Louise, disengaging from Flossie’s arm, sitting forward to meet the police head on. “You don’t like what we do so you spend the taxpayer’s money digging up an old woman who makes underwear, and getting on your moral high horse over another new girl in the business. Why don’t you leave us alone and do your job?”

  “Louise, two days ago everyone here including you was telling me this case was about love! Fine. I can go along with that — love is always a good reason for murder. Much better than money. But if it’s about love, then it’s a two-way street: the victim’s love, and the suspect’s. Ondine Duguay was in love with the suspect and she lived in this house. These things all relate... No?”

  No answer. They only watch her. Two whores sitting in judgement. This is disconcerting.

  “You say I’m being moralistic. Well, no offence to the sex industry — heaven forbid that we should offend the sex industry — but if it’s about love, it’s about self-respect and when I meet a girl like that one studying to be a prostitute, I have to wonder what kind of love you’re talking about! Sorry — I wasn’t raised to be in the sex industry. I don’t know anyone who was!”

  “Herméné,” notes Flossie.

  “Right,” sighs Aliette.

  “You don’t know anything about us,” sniffs Louise.

  Aliette massages the slight pulsing in her temple. Her mouth is dry. “When does the bar open, by the way?” She chews on her thumbnail, looking from one pair of pute-eyes to the other. “It would be nice if we could work together on this.”

  “Only on the case, Inspector...not our lives.” Louise again.

  Flossie gets up and goes around behind the bar. “What would you like?”

  “Beer.”

  Louise heckles: “It’s not even noon...you have a problem?” Aliette just nods: Yes, Louise — guess who? Flossie brings a bottle and glass and places them on the table; makes a be-right-back sign as she walks out of the room, across the foyer and up the stairs. The inspector pours her beer slowly, watching it rise, hoping Louise will go away as well. She takes a sip...wipes the foam from her upper lip. It tastes good, it calms her down. She drinks. Louise continues to sit there.

  Flossie returns bearing the old book Vivi was reading, and a bundle of stationary wrapped in an elastic band.

  A red book — no title is inscribed in the faded morocco binding. Nor overleaf. And no author’s name is ascribed. Only “Ondine Duguay,” written in fountain pen, clearly many years before. Aliette turns a page. The yellowed paper is thick between her fingers. She reads aloud. “Must all things swing round and round forever? Or how can man escape from the wheel?“ After another sip of her beer she comments, “That’s a pretty big question for a little girl.”

  “A basic problem,” corrects Flossie, leaning across the table and opening the book to a page in the middle. “It’s Druidic...” There’s Vivi’s verse: Song of Amergin.

  “Who is Amergin?”

  “We don’t know. It’s a collection of Celtic poems and stories, but they could have come from anywhere. Amergin?...maybe he was Syrian or Greek or Welsh or Egyptian; it doesn’t really matter. This is a calendar.”

  “A calendar? Vivi said it’s about love.”

  “It is about love,” says Flossie; “love between light and dark, weak and strong, masculine and feminine...love between the elements, the love of life that accepts death, and the aspects of death that give back again to life...and love. A year is a cycle, a wheel. The verse ties all these things together.” Flossie smiles. “Vivi will have to know these things... We all have to. It’s how you get off the wheel.”

  The inspector sits back, sips a little more beer, absorbing. Her eye finds the motto carved along the top of the mirror: I am the hostess of the irreproachable Ferry Tavern, a white gowned moon welcoming any man who comes to me with silver. Gesturing at it: “Is that Mari Morgan talking?”

  “No, that’s the goddess.”

  “And the goddess is not Mari Morgan?”

  “Mari Morgan is fate...she’s the one who takes us off the wheel and delivers us to the goddess. There’s a difference.”

  “Will Vivi understand that?”

  “I hope so. It’s why we have to teach her.”

  “And Herméné Dupras knows nothing about it.”

  “If he does, he doesn’t care... Never much for the spiritual side, our Herméné.”

  “Do you hide it?”

  “Not at all. But we don’t shove it down anyone’s throat, either. It’s only for us.”

  “Why?”

  Louise rises from her chair. She looks down at Aliette with a kind of pity — just a hint. “Because everything we do here, from our milk in the morning till the last happy little businessman is put out the door, is for something better. That’s why.” With that, she leaves the room.

  Flossie watches after Louise, wistful, maybe sympathetic too, then expands on the notion of improvement. “When men get jealous. When they get sentimental and weak. When all they care about is the shape of your ass. When they try to control what they worship and then worship what they control. There’s the wheel, Aliette...Manon and that one who killed he
r were spinning around on it, full tilt! The goddess gives us strength to cope.”

  “Do you hate men?”

  “No...although when you scrape the surface, most of them aren’t worth much more than the money in their pockets. I like them...I like sex. But I thank my stars I’m not in thrall to any of them.”

  “In thrall?”

  “Married to, in love with, working for, dependent on...I’ve had every man I’ve ever wanted.” Flossie is blank for a moment. She asks, “Do you like men?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I like. What about Louise...does she like men...does she like anything?”

  “There are men in this city who have given up sex forever after going up with Louise...I almost gave up sex after going up with Louise.” Again that gauzy mix of sly and shy.

  Aliette wrinkles her brow, not amused. What was worse: Louise’s bite or Flossie’s solicitude?

  “Louise is right,” continues Flossie. “You seem more worried about us and what we do than about the murder of our friend. Louise was expecting that you would be more — ”

  “More automatic in my response to Herméné and the murder?”

  “More open minded about us... We read about you. We thought you would be a different kind of woman.” Shaking her head, acknowledging an apparent mistake; and the inspector is shaking hers: sorry to be so normal... Flossie reaches over and pats the inspector’s hand. “Only you know what you need. As long as you’re happy. You seem happy. That’s what’s interesting about you.”

  “Stop it, Flossie.”

  “I’m attracted to you.”

  “Well, don’t be. Please.” A professional smile, totally neutral. Another sip of beer. “Who brought your goddess...and Mari Morgan?”