He found Pierrot-le-Fût quite quickly, at the third of the addresses he had jotted down, an unattractive bistro off the Boulevard Clichy, and without evident nausea he sipped some extraordinarily foul and bitter coffee while he browsed slowly and exhaustively through the same edition of Match that he had mauled through each of the other stops he had made.
His purpose at that time was no more vital than to satisfy a student’s curiosity to observe this excrescence with his own eyes, to verify certain aspects which Yvonne Norval’s prejudice might have distorted, and to make a few observations of his own, in much the same way as a professional executioner discreetly assesses the weight and musculature of the man he is to hang.
Pierrot-le-Fût was a big man, built somewhat along the lines of the barrel which was only one of the possible meanings of his sobriquet, but in spite of his tubby shape he also looked hard as a cask is hard. He had small piggy eyes and a sadistic mouth from which a loud voice blustered mechanical obscenities. He had a flushed face and an equally ruddy nose which bespoke other habitual intemperances. He drank cognac from a large glass which was frequently refilled, and although it did not seem to be having any devastating effect on him at the time, this was still early in the night’s probable span for him.
From what he saw and overheard, Simon Templar decided that the picture that had been drawn for him was not exaggerated, and he paid for his noxious coffee and folded his magazine and went out. The entire excursion would hardly have been worth mentioning in this anecdote at all, if it had not been for the totally unexpected complication which it unluckily led to.
The Saint had only walked a block or so along the Boulevard Clichy, and caught the attention of a prowling taxi, and discussed his destination with the chauffeur according to the protocol established by modern Paris taxi drivers (who must first be assured that the travel plans of a potential passenger fit in with their own, which they almost never do, which calls for a special bonus above the metered fare to be agreed on to compensate the driver for the inconvenience), when there was a nudge at his elbow and he turned, with a standard formula of polite but firm rebuff ready on the tip of his tongue. But instead of the painted or the pandering nonentity that he expected, he looked into a mournful emaciated-spaniel face that he knew only too well, for it belonged to Inspector Archimède Quercy of the Police Judiciaire.
“You will permit me to ride with you?” said the Inspector, making the question mark barely perceptible. “The George Cinq is not far out of my way, and it would be agreeable to rest my feet.”
“But of course,” said the Saint, with a delighted geniality which he did not feel. “After all the jokes I’ve made about that occupational malady of policemen, it’s about time I did something to alleviate it.”
In the cab, he closed the glass partition that separated them from the driver.
“And which of the nude spectacles have you been checking on?” he continued quizzically. “I had no idea it was one of the duties of the Police Judiciaire to go around making surprise examinations of show girls’ costumes, to catch anyone trying to chisel a millimeter off the legal minimum of eight centimeters tapering to four.”
“And I,” said Quercy, with the utmost composure, “had no idea that the Saint was interested in such canaille as Pierrot-le-Fût.”
Simon’s bantering gaze did not waver, in spite of the leaden feeling that sagged within him as his premonition was so bluntly confirmed.
“Then how did you acquire this extraordinary notion?”
“Purely by observation. I give you my word, I have not been having you watched. By accident, I happened to see you in a café as I passed. I was about to cross the street to speak to you, when I noticed that in certain small ways you were not comporting yourself as I am used to seeing you. These were not things that would have caught the eye of anyone else—indeed, they were things that would help you to escape attention. It was clear, then, that you did not want to be seen.”
“Which naturally made you want to see.”
“It is a professional instinct,” said the other calmly. “You soon left this first café and went to another, which was equally unlike the kind of place where one is accustomed to find the elegant Simon Templar. But again, you were trying not to appear elegant. And since you did not trail anyone there, it became evident that you were looking for someone. This was substantiated when, after a while, you walked to the third bistro, again not following anyone, again trying to efface yourself, and again devoting yourself to a magazine which I had already seen you read twice.”
“It’s a pity it was so absorbing, or I might have felt you breathing down my neck.”
“Obviously it had not occurred to you that anyone might be following you: therefore you must believe that in this affair, whatever it is, you have all the initiative.”
“Did Emile Gaboriau get any of his inspiration from you?”
“He could have, but I was not so old then…Eh bien at last you discover Pierrot-le-Fût. He does not recognize you, and you are not wearing a false beard, so one deduces easily that he is not aware of your interest in him. But although you hardly exist for anyone else, you can be so skilful at submerging yourself on the rare occasions when you choose to, it is you I am watching from my concealment outside. I suspect you identify him from a picture or a description that has been given you, since it is manifest that you have never met, and the identification is ratified for you when his friends call him Pierrot. I see you studying him closely from behind your magazine, for a long time, until you seem to be satisfied and you leave.”
“And what makes you think I was looking for this Pierrot character, out of all the others I must have looked at while you were spying on me?”
“You did not look at any others in the same way. And after you had finished studying him, you left, and you did not try any more bars. You hailed this taxi and asked to be taken to your hotel. When I heard that, I knew that you had accomplished your object, at least for the present, and I allowed myself to intrude on you.”
Simon threw back his head and laughed almost inaudibly.
“If you don’t qualify for some sort of award, I’ll have to institute one for you,” he said. “What would you think of calling it the Prix Poulet?…Now, let me tell you. I’ve had such a bellyful of some of these elegant places where one is accustomed to find me, as you put it, that I had an overwhelming urge tonight to go slumming. I wanted to sit in some dull dives and look at some drab characters of the type that I sometimes ran into in the bad old days. Obviously I had to try to make myself inconspicuous, or at least not too much like an American tourist. But things don’t seem the same as they used to seem. Or maybe it’s me who is getting old. But I sat in a couple of joints without finding anything to be nostalgic about, and then in the last one there was this Pierrot, a survival from what seems like another era. I watched him for a while, and concluded that he was no longer amusing, only a gross bullying pig. I decided to stop trying to recapture the past and return to the soporific civilization of the Champs Élysées.”
Quercy nodded sympathetically.
“I understand you perfectly,” he said. “And therefore I have to warn you that although Pierrot-le-Fût is without doubt a pig of outstanding swinishness, the responsibility for slaughtering him must be left to a French court and the authorized machinery of the State.”
“When do you think they will get around to it?”
“That is not for me to predict, Monsieur Templar. But after this, if anything violent should happen to Pierre Norval that cannot instantly be attributed to his equally abominable associates, I predict that I shall be obliged to investigate every possibility that it was an act of the Saint.”
“Do you mean,” asked the Saint incredulously, “that you don’t believe me?”
The Inspector rubbed his sad sunken jowls forbearingly.
“We have been through more than one case together, and I have learned a great respect and fondness for you, mon cher ami. But I do not f
orget the record which was the first thing I had to study about you, and I do not think you have quite overcome all your bad habits—especially when you mock a serious policier.”
They had arrived at the hotel. Simon got out, and said with unabated impudence, “Must we make it such an early night? How about bringing your tape measure and we’ll walk over and process the G-strings at the Crazy Horse Saloon?”
But Quercy shook his head and remained in the cab.
“Merci. I am too comfortable now, so I shall ride the rest of the way home. But I beg you, do not forget what I have said. For I shall not forget.”
“Everyone should have his beautiful memories, Archimède,” said the Saint.
But upstairs in his suite, he paced the floor for half an hour before he could relax enough even to lie down on the bed.
The wild coincidence that Quercy had chanced to spot him in the first café, and had deployed such unexpected talents for analytical observation, had transformed with one malign stroke what should have been a virtually kindergarten exercise in meritorious homicide into a disconcertingly serious hazard.
The Saint was even less inclined to allow Pierrot-le-Fût to continue to pollute the universe than he had been when he set out for Montmartre that night, but he had no intention of losing his head over the project, figuratively or literally—and Inspector Quercy had made the latter possibility much too explicit for complacency.
The mopping-up of Pierre Norval would have to be as clean a job as the Saint had ever engineered.
It was not until he was horizontal, but still tussling frustratedly with the problem, that he had a sudden dazzling recollection of a certain cocktail party and the pompously infuriating Dr Wilmot Javers.
There was a BEA flight to London at eleven o’clock in the morning which he was able to catch with no indecent scrambling, and thanks to the anomaly of daylight-saving time he arrived in England a little earlier than he had left France. He called Dr Javers from the first telephone he could reach at the airport, and was fortunate to catch him at his office.
“You remember, you warned me your puzzle would haunt me,” he said, with shamelessly hypocritical humility. “I didn’t believe you at the time, but eventually it did. But I simply don’t have the technical knowledge to solve it. Anyway, this being the first time I’ve been back here since you gave me that headache, the top-priority item on my list is to get you to put me out of my misery.”
He could hear the man’s jocund gurgle of self-satisfaction. “I remember our little talk perfectly. And I think you’ve suffered enough. Can you dine with me tonight at my club? It just happens to be the evening I keep free for my scientific reading, but for an occasion like this the Medical Journal can wait!”
Dr Javers was just as unctuously patronizing when they met, and maliciously refused to be the first to bring up the reason for their meeting. Simon out-waited him through two Dry Sacks and a lot of small talk, and finally had the minor satisfaction of forcing the other to advert to the topic after they had sat down to dinner.
“So you couldn’t stand it any longer, eh? You admit that was one mystery that stumped you?”
“You can have it in writing if you like. But don’t make me rack my feeble brain any longer.”
Dr Javers took his time, sipping a spoonful of soup and savouring it deliberately along with his moment of triumph.
“The subject was poisoned by carbon tetrachloride—otherwise, the commonest kind of cleaning fluid.” Simon stared at him, blinking.
“I thought that was supposed to be harmless. Unless he drank it. But I’m positive you never gave me any hint that he might have done that.”
“I didn’t, and he didn’t. The clue I gave you was the lipstick stain on his coat. Although it was comparatively innocent, he probably thought it would be better to get rid of it than have to explain it to his wife. He got out a bottle of this cleaner and started to work on it. But, being in the condition he was, he knocked the bottle over and spilt what there was in it. After that, he gave up and went to bed.”
“But if a few fumes like that can kill someone, from something that everybody uses, why aren’t people dropping dead all the time?”
“It’s a wonder it doesn’t happen more often. Everyone thinks carbon tet is harmless, but that’s because it doesn’t catch fire or explode. The fumes are quite poisonous—a concentration of five thousand parts per million, with an exposure of only five minutes, can cause damage that may be fatal after a week’s illness. That is, about a quart of fluid vaporized in a small space like the dressing-room where the subject slept.”
“Do you mean he was using a whole quart bottle of cleaning fluid?”
“Certainly not. But neither was he exposed for only five minutes. That’s why the average user gets away with it—even if they’re leaning over the thing they’re cleaning and inhaling lots of fumes, they don’t do it for long. The subject slept in this small room for more than four hours. In that length of time, a few ounces could have fatal results. And on top of this, there was one other factor which I was careful to emphasize.”
Simon figured that he had eaten his humble pie, so he was no longer obligated to play guessing games.
“Which was that?”
“Now, really, I should have thought any detective would have spotted that one. I refer to the fact that the subject had been drinking heavily. For some reason which is not yet fully understood, alcohol sharply reduces the ability of the liver and kidneys to detoxify carbon tetrachloride. So that for a person who is under the influence, the probably lethal dose can be cut by about thirty per cent. Put these factors together, and you can calculate that it didn’t take any extraordinary amount of fluid to kill the subject I told you about, in the circumstances I described.”
The Saint thoughtfully finished his soup, enjoying it every bit as much as the doctor had enjoyed his, and considered various angles while the traditionally venerable club waiter was replacing it with a plate of delicately browned sole meunière.
Then he said, “Perhaps it’s just as well more people don’t know all that, or there might be a whole rash of mysterious murders.”
“Don’t you believe it,” Javers said scornfully. “Carbon tet evaporates, yes, but it isn’t undetectable. Any good pathologist would recognize the effects at once, from the way it dissolves the fat in the body organs—just as it dissolves grease spots from your clothes. So any murderer who was planning to use it would have to be damn sure it could be taken for an accident. And that’s the problem with practically any other poison, as you must know.”
Simon nodded respectfully. He could see no flaw that would be a handicap to him.
He knew that his subject slept in a small room and went to bed well marinated in alcohol every night, and he could safely assume that Pierrot-le-Fût slept with the shutters tightly closed, like the average Frenchman of his class, in defense against the deleterious miasmas of the night. He also knew the hours during which Yvonne Norval would be scouring and vacuuming the corridors of the George V, consolidating any alibi she might ever need.
Dr Wilmot Javers, flicking bright gloating glances at him between dissecting operations on his sole, thought he could read the Saint’s mind like a book.
“Of course, you might have been able to get away with it, for one of those so-called ‘justice’ killings they say you did in your young days, where there was no obvious motive to connect you with the victim. It’s too bad you couldn’t think of it for yourself then. It’s too late now, because if I read in the paper about anything that sounded as if you’d made use of it, I’d feel morally bound to go to the police and tell them how I might have given you the idea. I don’t approve of people taking the law into their own hands.”
Simon Templar was able to smile beatifically. Fate, true to its kindly form, had finally paid its indemnity for the time and irritation that this odious coxcomb had cost him.
To make one more flying visit to Paris under another name, avoiding all places in the categor
y of the George V, and wearing some simple disguise that this time would obviate the risk of accidental recognition by Archimède Quercy or any of his ilk, would present no great difficulty to the Saint. And he felt reasonably confident that the unspectacular demise of a low-echelon Parisian hood like Pierrot-le-Fût would not rate any space in the English press.
“Good heavens, chum,” he protested. “Everyone knows I gave that up years ago.”
THE INTEMPERATE REFORMER
PREFACE
Somewhere around 1933 or 1934, in a collection of short stories, I had one about a self-righteous teetotaller whom the Saint dealt with by treacherously getting him drunk and causing him to make a public spectacle of himself. On this story, the Hodders of that era lowered the boom: it was too much of an affront to a bogey known in those days as “the Non-conformist Conscience.” So out it came, and somehow or other the manuscript was actually destroyed.
But I sometimes have a long and relentless memory, and I always did like the story. So with malice aforethought, in about 1961, I re-wrote it from memory—and I think even better than the original—and another generation at Hodders, quite unaware of its tainted past, swallowed it without a peep of protest. This story is “The Intemperate Reformer” (the same original title) which can be found in Trust the Saint.
Trust the Saint (The Saint Series) Page 9