The Assassin in the Marais

by Claude Izner

  There’s no point in speculating. I am too good at analysing things. It’s a weakness. I scrutinise, interpret and weigh things up according to my own reasoning, and in doing so lose sight of reality. We’ll both lay our cards on the table, he said to himself, and if any questions need answering we’ll answer them.

  He marched to and fro in his apartment, his waistcoat in his hand. Finally, he crossed the courtyard into the studio, which was filled with shadows cast by the fading light. He lit a tiny lamp that gave off a feeble bluish glow. Standing next to the window he watched the carpenter’s children. They were playing offground tag, their shrieks of laughter echoing back off the walls. He didn’t feel hungry. At nine o’clock he removed his bow tie and lay down on the bed in the alcove. At the sight of the pillow, a lump rose in his throat and he sent it flying. Suddenly he was furious with Tasha for making him so unhappy.

  What should I say to her? ‘I read it, I know, but don’t worry, dear, you are free to go and see your ex-lover. I understand perfectly …’ What drivel! He forced himself to think about the goblet, the monkey’s skullcap decorated with the face of a cat. What made it worth killing for?

  Sitting nonchalantly, cross-legged with a book in his hand and a faint smile on his lips, Kenji Mori looked as if he were about to utter one of his pet proverbs. Victor turned away from the portrait Tasha had painted two years before. What a mad idea to have hung it opposite their bed! Exasperated, he stood up, grabbed a smock and covered the painting.

  At nine thirty, Tasha opened the door. The lamp was still burning, a tiny flicker in the vastness of the darkened room. She walked over to the bed. Victor lay on his back, asleep, his shoes still on. She stood looking at him lovingly and touched his shoulder. He groaned, opened his eyes and sat up.

  ‘It’s you … Is it late?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Barbizon, your exhibition?’

  She so longed to tell him, but she couldn’t — she had promised.

  ‘I didn’t sell anything.’

  As he watched her undress, he knew he wouldn’t ask for an explanation. He loved her too much. He took her in his arms and held her tight.

  ‘I missed you,’ he murmured.

  ‘I have to go,’ Eudoxie said, straightening a hat adorned with huge bows. ‘Fifi Bas-Rhin waits for no man. Take your places for the quadrille!’

  She winked fondly at Kenji. ‘Until Thursday morning?’

  He looked at her blankly and smiled. ‘I’ll phone you, sweetheart.’

  She longed to snuggle up in his arms, but she stopped herself — he wasn’t keen on displays of affection. She blew him a kiss and left.

  As soon as the door was closed, he leapt off the bed, pulled on a dressing gown and sank into an armchair. Kenji had been brought up in a family that had converted to Christianity, but he had always distanced himself from dogma and ritual. Over the years he had formed his own philosophy, effortlessly combining experience and imagination to the point where at times he could no longer tell the difference between the two states. He enjoyed spending long moments contemplating the mirages of his own imagination, without ever really allowing them to dictate his behaviour. It had become second nature to him, carefully to manipulate his emotions and intuitions, while accepting their capriciousness, and in doing so perceive what lay beyond words.

  He dressed unhurriedly, feeling in his pocket for the notebook in which he jotted down his proverbs and aphorisms. The thing that had struck him about John Cavendish’s letter when he reread it echoed in his head like a binary measure: Trinil, Tri-nil … His intuition was to stay with that name, to drift back in time to a distant landscape buried deep in his memory.

  He closed his eyes and remembered. An expedition in a covered cart during a monsoon; a Chinese burial ground where they had got stuck in the mud; the welcome they received in a kampong, where the villagers, after eating ampo,3 had danced the tandak; Pati, the beautiful Javanese girl who had initiated him into the art of love. Her slender shoulders and breasts and her curved hips enveloped in a sarong, her long hair garlanded with flowers. The stories she had told him in whispers of the kriss — the long Malay dagger that could supposedly tell good from evil and mete out justice itself. The bubbling sound of the mounting waters mixed with the girl’s hushed tones.

  ‘The River Solo,’ he murmured.

  He reread the notes he had written that morning as he leafed through Unknown Countries and their Peoples by Victor Tissot.

  Trinil is a village situated in central northern Java, at the foot of the Lawu-Kukusan volcano on the banks of the River Solo. Flooding is frequent during the rainy season in the last few months of the year.

  He sighed. He had only spent one night with his first lover. And yet he had never been able to forget her face. He had left at dawn, promising to return. He had no idea then that he would soon set off for an island shrouded by the mists of the North Sea.

  He caught hold of himself and picked up the receiver of the telephone he’d had Eudoxie install. He asked for a London number then went and sat down again. His thoughts turned to Iris and Joseph. Why did his daughter’s fondness for his assistant bother him so? Was it because he was afraid that she was reproducing the situation he had created with Daphné? Did not his irritation prove that he was projecting his own past suffering on to these young people?

  The telephone rang. He explained the reason for his call to the English person at the other end and gave him the address of the Elzévir bookshop. He was disappointed — he would have to wait two more days for the answers to his questions.

  CHAPTER 14

  Sunday, 17 April

  JOSEPH whistled as he crossed Le Marché des Enfants-Rouges. Housewives laden with bulging string bags rummaged suspiciously through the merchandise set out on rows of stalls. A vendor cried out the benefits of a lotion for insect bites in a mournful voice. The sun had come out and Joseph’s spirits were soaring, for Iris had sworn her undying love for him, and he felt free of all earthly cares. He couldn’t resist the desire to buy a couple of cured sausages from an obese, moustachioed woman who insisted on pouring him a snifter of absinthe, which he politely refused. He needed to keep a clear head. Sated from his snack, he fingered the envelope the Boss had entrusted to him.

  His sleuthing instinct told him he should open it and he obeyed. It contained a catalogue of photographic studies for painters and sculptors of nude women in varying poses: from the front, the rear, side on, vertical and horizontal.

  ‘They’re a sight for sore eyes,’ he said to himself.

  No point in wasting ammunition. He may as well eke out the rewards if he was going to quiz the old goat: one picture for every correct answer. That seemed fair enough. He tore out half a dozen prints and continued on his way.

  ‘Hey! You! The fellow in the cap!’

  Joseph smiled broadly at the ill-tempered little runt in a stove-pipe hat who was standing guard beside the entrance to the town house.

  ‘Maman sent me. “Tell Madame Bertille that the Jerusalem artichokes will be delivered tonight.”’

  The password did the trick, and Michel Crevoux, ex-colonial infantryman, wounded at the battle of Lang Son in the service of France, allowed him through.

  Heavens! Joseph thought. I have to find my way back through that maze of corridors.

  He walked up to the first floor and promptly got lost. After turning in circles, he opened a door and found himself in an anteroom, the walls of which were covered in grotesque masks that looked like the Oriental cousins of the ones on the Pont Neuf. Hearing voices in the hall, he looked around for an exit and saw another door hidden by a curtain. He opened it a crack. A man and a woman were standing in the middle of a drawing room.

  ‘My dear Gaby,’ said a tall, languorous-looking individual with a jaded expression, ‘you must admit it is rather incongruous.’

  ‘What is?’ asked the woman as she sat down at a piano.

  ‘The show of devastated grief you put on for the servants’
benefit … Oh no! Not Chopin’s “Funeral March”. I can’t abide Chopin!’

  The woman closed the piano lid and looked at him, amused.

  ‘Where is your sense of humour, Alexis? You are so dreadfully serious!’

  ‘I won’t deny it. But I can’t say the same for you. You seem to revel in making a chaste man out of me. This sinister farce is starting to get on my nerves.’

  ‘Have you no sense of propriety, my poor dear? Antoine is barely in the ground and all you can think of is …’

  ‘Since when have you been such a prude? Why not be open about what everybody suspects we have been doing for so long in secret?’

  ‘I … Yes?’

  A man walked into the room, his back to Joseph.

  ‘What did you want, my dear Dorsel?’ the woman asked.

  ‘I have to go out this afternoon …’

  Joseph missed the rest of the conversation. He heard footsteps approaching. He moved away from the door and plonked himself in front of a Noh mask. The footsteps died away. Joseph glanced out into the corridor. It was empty. He set off, determined to find Fortunat de Vigneules’s chamber. In the end he had no difficulty locating it, guided by the sound of raised voices.

  ‘Monsieur Fortunat, your daughter gave me strict instructions not to let you take snuff or smoke. She’ll make you pay a penalty.’

  ‘Silence, sloven! I’ll die before I give her a penny!’

  ‘I don’t care what you get up to!’ Bertille Piot cried, turning on her heel. ‘But the day you set this place on fire …’

  Joseph waited until she had gone before knocking on the door.

  ‘By the Devil! Vade retro, slattern! Go and stir your pots! How dare you call me an arsonist!’

  ‘Monsieur de Vigneules, I work for the photographer. I’ve brought you a small gift.’

  ‘Oh, it’s you, the messenger — delighted you could come! Enter, servant boy, and inform me of your knight’s reply. I see that the slattern delivered my letter.’

  ‘I confess that my knight could make neither head nor tail of it.’

  Joseph handed Fortunat one of the prints from the catalogue. The old man eyed it, his eyes sparkling.

  ‘Oh, curvaceous creatures! Alas, I am feeble with age and can no longer hold my trusty sword aloft! Stay there, servant boy,’ Fortunat ordered, ‘I need a moment to reflect.’

  He knelt at the foot of Louis XVI’s portrait, uttered a quick prayer then rose to his feet again, frowning.

  ‘I am extremely busy, servant boy. Do I have your word that you will leave nothing out when you relay to your knight what I am about to tell you?’

  ‘You have my word.’

  ‘Well then, I am penniless and haven’t an ounce of tobacco left. I am being fed on scraps and held prisoner. I need rescuing! But there’s worse …’

  Fortunat rummaged through a pile of clothes and pulled out a garment that resembled an instrument of torture.

  ‘Look, servant boy. What do you think this is?’

  ‘Er … a corset?’

  ‘Quite right. Pretty, isn’t it? And very slimming. Why, I could have joined my hands round the waist of the woman who wore it.’

  ‘What are you getting at?’

  ‘Patience, servant boy — every detail counts. This contraption shows off the hips to great advantage. Feel it. It is rigid, yet it fits the contours of the belly, bringing out its rotundity and at the same time pushes up the breasts, and … You’re not listening!’

  ‘I am, I assure you.’

  ‘As I said, servant boy, every detail counts. The material, for instance, is mauve silk brocade: her colour. Oh! How often I watched her undressing in the evening through a crack in the wall! She knew I was spying on her, the temptress, and snuffed out her candle before taking off her underwear. Then a man would join her, and I plugged my ears to block out the sound of their breathless fornication! Look,’ Fortunat cried, thrusting the corset under Joseph’s nose.

  ‘I can’t see anything remarkable.’

  ‘There! The embroidered ladybird with its seven black spots! She has an identical one tattooed on her shoulder. The corset is hers, I am sure. Moreover, she’s from Sète.’

  ‘The town of Sète?’

  ‘Yes, not far from the land of the Cathars, that heretical sect!’

  ‘But who are you talking about?’

  ‘Delilah, the wicked woman who cut off poor Samson’s hair. Ah, servant boy, the dance of the veils!’

  ‘A thousand pardons, but …’

  ‘I digress. How do you account for this petticoat, this garter, this corset, this Book of Hours initialled L. R., all of which I discovered at the back of a cellar on Rue du Poitou, during one of my underground forays?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘I am glad to hear you say so, for neither have I. And she disappeared five days ago.’

  ‘Who did?’ bellowed Joseph.

  ‘Lucie Robin, my daughter’s maid. Ah! It’s too much! Tell me, swineherd, by what infernal magic did this garter and these petticoats turn up at the exact spot where the remains of one of the order’s masters were discovered?’

  Joseph felt like saying that he preferred to be called servant boy. The conversation was taking a worrying turn. Was the old eccentric telling him the truth or simply pulling the wool over his eyes? He remained silent, staring at the pear-shaped face of the late Louis-Philippe hanging over the hearth and thinking, I must get out of here.

  ‘I can find no logical explanation,’ he replied. ‘This Lucie Robin must be dotty to have left her clothes strewn about in a place like that.’

  ‘Are you suggesting that I’m senile? Oh no, swineherd, I am in possession of all my faculties. I cannot trust a single member of that tribe. I demand to be rescued. Confound you, slave! I’ll end up losing my temper with you. How would you like a rump full of buckshot?’

  If this goes on much longer, I’ll have to make my escape through the window, thought Joseph. No. I must remain steadfast and accomplish my mission!

  ‘Let’s not get heated, Monsieur le Baron. Let’s make a trade and then we can drink to it,’ he suggested.

  ‘What do you want from me?’

  ‘An answer for each of these,’ Joseph said, holding up a second print with pictures of naked nymphs on both sides.

  ‘Agreed, servant boy. I am all ears.’

  ‘Which members of your family have been to Java recently?’

  ‘All of them, by Jove! They left me at the mercy of the servants for four months to go off and live with the apes. Gibbons and orang-utans are more important in their view than their own progenitor!’

  ‘I want their names.’

  ‘My daughter Gabrielle; her husband Antoine — the devil take him!; cousin Maxime, a spineless creature; their secretary Charles, a good sort; and the whore of Babylon!’

  Joseph handed Fortunat a third print.

  ‘Have any of them ever been to Great Britain?’

  ‘Ah! Bounder! Let us take that drink. We’ll drink to the health of the French King. Don’t mention the name of perfidious Albion in my presence — my grandfather was cut in two at Trafalgar! A pox on England! … Antoine used to go there every so often to give conferences on monkeys. Monkeys, monkeys, that’s all he was interested in! Ah, servant boy! Without tobacco I am incapable of stringing two thoughts together. Gabrielle, my daughter, has been bewitched. Commoner that you are, I shall let you into a secret. I am plotting a rebellion, armed with rapiers and pistols!’

  ‘Do you know how to use a gun?’

  ‘What an amusing fellow! Why I was taking pot shots at the insurgents back in 1830. Quack, quack! And I taught my daughter to shoot too. Quick, where’s my blunderbuss? … Run along now, servant boy, I must join the pack; the mort has sounded. Tallyho!’

  ‘One last thing. Besides your daughter, which of the others in the house knows how to use a gun?’

  ‘I understand that in Java their favourite pastime was sniping at melons on sticks, yes, even th
e whore of Babylon! They think they’re the cat’s whiskers, but they’re beneath my contempt. Melons …’

  Joseph fled without waiting for him to finish.

  The emissary saw the assistant appear at twelve o’clock on the dot and make a beeline for the butcher’s shop, the window of which the emissary was using as a mirror. No doubt the fair-haired youth had come to relieve his associate, who had been standing there since the crack of dawn.

  A crowd of passers-by had gathered in front of the butcher’s block, where the first apprentice, his sleeves rolled up, was sculpting a piglet out of a block of lard using a scraper. From his observation post, the emissary kept a sharp eye on the two accomplices whose reflection mingled with a row of lambs’ legs decked in frilly paper crowns. He was well out of earshot, but judging from his emphatic gestures the fair-haired boy was on to something. What were they talking about? The emissary trembled with rage.

  For pity’s sake, Lord, put an end to my ordeal! Let those scoundrels lead me to the abomination. Amen!

  ‘So, Boss, did you see the Italian girl?’

  ‘No. I’ve been mooching around here since six o’clock this morning. I’ve seen several women come out of number 3, but none of them looked remotely like a barrel organ player. I assume she must begin her rounds in the afternoon. And what of your visit to Monsieur de Vigneules, Joseph?’

  ‘Wait for it, Boss. I overheard a conversation that left me in no doubt that Antoine du Houssoye was a cuckold. His wife’s lover is a man named Alexis. Why such a long face?’

  ‘That’s hardly news! Anything else?’

  ‘No. Only that the old goat drove me half crazy,’ Joseph added bitterly. ‘You can go and pay your respects in person next time. I’ve had enough!’

  Joseph began to tell him a confused story about every member of the household on Rue Charlot having a skeleton in their cupboard. Victor wondered if the discovery of women’s underwear in the cellar of a house on Rue du Poitou was significant.