Beside it there is a square tin containing piles of seashells and pebbles collected by Olivier Gratiolet at Gatseau, on the Isle of Oléron, on 3 September 1934, the day his grandfather died, as well as a set of popular Epinal woodblock prints, wrapped in a rubber band, of the kind you used to get at school as a prize for a given number of merit marks: the one on top shows a meeting between the Czar of Russia and the President of France. This takes place on a ship. All about, as far as can be seen, are many other ships, the smoke from their funnels vanishing in the bright sky. Both Czar and President have rushed towards each other with long strides and are clasping one another by the hand. Behind the President stand two men. By comparison with the gay faces of the Czar and President, the faces of their attendants are very solemn, the eyes of each group focused on their master. Lower down – the scene evidently takes place on a top deck – stand long lines of saluting sailors cut off by the margin.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
On the Stairs, 4
GILBERT BERGER HOPS down the stairs. He has almost got to the first-floor landing. In his right hand he is holding an orange plastic dustbin out of which poke two out-of-date directories, an empty bottle of Arabelle maple syrup, and various vegetable peelings. He is a lad of fifteen with a mop of blond, almost white, hair. He is wearing a check linen shirt and broad black braces embroidered with a design representing sprigs of lily-of-the-valley. He has on his left ring finger a tin ring of the sort generally found as free gifts with chemical-flavoured bubble gum in those blue wrappers labelled To Give Is a Joy, To Receive a Pleasure and which have come to replace standard gift packs, and which you can get for a franc from the vending machines outside stationers’ and haberdashers’ shops. The oval inset of the ring imitates the shape of a cameo with an embossed head attempting to represent a long-haired youth distantly reminiscent of an Italian Renaissance portrait.
Gilbert Berger is called Gilbert despite the ugly sound of the reduplicated “ber” syllable because his parents were both fans of Gilbert Bécaud and met at a concert the singer gave in 1956 at The Empire, in the course of which 87 seats were smashed. The Bergers live on the fourth floor left, beside the Rorschachs, beneath the Réols, and over Bartlebooth, in a flat of two rooms and a kitchen where once lived the lady who went out on the landing in her smalls and had a little dog called Dodéca.
Gilbert is in the fourth form. In his class, the French teacher makes the pupils produce a wall-sheet newspaper. Each pupil or group of pupils is responsible for one page or column, and produces copy which the whole class, meeting each week as an editorial committee for two hours, discusses and sometimes even rejects. There are political and trade-union columns, sports pages, strip cartoons, school news, classified advertisements, local news, space fillers, advertising (usually from parents with businesses near the school), and several games and hobbies columns (tips for hanging wallpaper, making your own backgammon board, getting your picture-framing right, etc.). Together with two classmates, Claude Coutant and Philippe Hémon, Gilbert has taken on the job of writing a serial. The story is called The Prick of Mystery, and they have got to the fifth episode.
In the first episode, For the Love of Constance, a famous actor, François Gormas, asks the painter Lucero, who has just won a major Academy prize, to do a portrait of him in the scene which made him famous, where, playing d’Artagnan, he duels with Rochefort for the love of pretty young Constance Bonacieux. Though he thinks Gormas is a conceited, third-rate ham unworthy of his palette, Lucero accepts, hoping, it must be said, for a princely fee. On the appointed day, Gormas comes to Lucero’s spacious studio, dons his costume, and poses with a foil in his hand; but the model booked some days earlier to do Rochefort hasn’t come. Gormas sends for a certain Félicien Michard, the son of his concierge, working as a floor-scrubber for the count of Châteauneuf, to act as a last-minute stand-in. End of the first episode.
Second episode: Rochefort’s Lunge. So the first sitting can now begin. The two opponents take up their positions, Gormas pretending to parry in a clever delayed move Michard’s fearsome secret lunge which is supposed to pierce his jugular. That’s when a bee flies into the studio and begins to buzz around Gormas, who suddenly puts his hand to the back of his neck and collapses. Fortunately a doctor lives in the building, and Michard runs to fetch him; the doctor arrives a few minutes later, diagnoses paralytic shock from a bee-sting touching the rachidian bulb, and takes the actor into hospital as an emergency. End of the second episode.
Third episode: The Poison That Kills. Gormas dies on his way to hospital. The doctor, surprised at the speed of the effect of the sting, refuses to sign the death certificate. The autopsy shows in fact that the bee had nothing to do with it: Gormas was poisoned by a microscopic quantity of topazine from the tip of Michard’s foil. This substance, a derivative of the curare used by Amerindian hunters, who call it Silent Death, has a curious property: it is effective only on individuals having recently been infected with viral hepatitis. As it happens, Gormas had indeed recently recovered from an illness of this kind. Given this new element, which seems to indicate premeditated murder, a detective, Chief Inspector Winchester, is put in charge of the investigation. End of the third episode.
Fourth episode: To Ségesvar in Confidence. Chief Inspector Winchester informs his assistant Ségesvar of the points that the case raises in his mind:
firstly, the murderer must be close to the actor since he knew that the latter had recently had viral hepatitis;
secondly, he must have been able to obtain
item one, the poison, and especially
item two, the bee, since the case occurred in December, and there are no bees in December;
thirdly, he must have had access to Michard’s foil. Now this foil, like Gormas’s, was lent to Lucero by his art dealer, Gromeck, whose wife was known to have been the actor’s mistress. That makes six suspects in all, each with a motive:
1. the painter Lucero, galled at having to do the portrait of a man he despises; moreover, the scandal which the case could not fail to arouse could be very advantageous to him commercially;
2. Michard: in days gone by Madame Gormas, the mother, used to invite young Félicien to spend holidays with her son; since then, the poor lad has been continually humiliated by the actor, who exploits him shamelessly;
3. the count of Châteauneuf, a bee-keeper, is known to harbour a mortal hatred for the Gormas family, since Gatien Gormas, president of the Beaugency Public Safety Committee, had Eudes de Châteauneuf sent to the guillotine in 1793.
4. the art dealer Gromeck, both out of jealousy and for publicity;
5. Lisa Gromeck, who never forgave Gormas his having rejected her for the Italian actress Angelina di Castelfranco;
6. and finally Gormas himself; a successful actor, but an incompetent and unlucky impresario, he is in fact completely insolvent and has been unable to get the agreement needed from his bank to finance his latest spectacular: a suicide disguised as a murder is the only way he can get out with dignity and at the same time (because of a substantial life-insurance policy) leave his children with an inheritance commensurate with their ambitions. End of the fourth episode.
This is where the serial has got to, and it’s not too difficult to identify some of its immediate sources: an article on curare in Science et Vie, another on outbreaks of hepatitis in France-Soir, the adventures of Inspector Bougret and his faithful assistant Charolles in Gotlib’s Odds and Endpiece, various news items on the regular financial scandals in the French film world, a quick reading of Le Cid, a detective story by Agatha Christie called Death in the Clouds, a Danny Kaye film called Knock on Wood in English and A Touch of Madness in France. The first four episodes were most warmly received by the whole class. But the fifth one poses awkward problems for the authors. In the sixth and last episode, it will be discovered that the culprit is in fact the doctor living in the building where Lucero has his studio. It is true that Gormas is on the verge of bankruptcy. A murder bid from whic
h he could miraculously escape unharmed would guarantee enough publicity to relaunch his latest film, on which shooting had been stopped after eight days. So with the doctor, Dr Borbeille, as an accomplice – for he is none other than Gormas’s foster brother – he had thought up this convoluted plot. But Jean-Paul Gormas, the actor’s son, loves Isabelle, the doctor’s daughter. Gormas is fiercely opposed to the marriage which the doctor, on the other hand, looks on favourably. That is why he takes advantage of the journey to the hospital, when he is alone with Gormas in the rear of the ambulance, to poison him with an injection of topazine, since he is certain that Michard’s foil will be held guilty. But Chief Inspector Winchester will learn when interrogating the model whom Félicien Michard stood in for at short notice that he had in fact been paid to call off his booking, and from this revelation he will take the entire machine to pieces. Despite a few last-minute revelations which break one of the golden rules of detective fiction, this solution and its final peripeteia constitute a perfectly acceptable denouement. But before getting there, the three young authors have to rule out all the other suspects, and they are not too sure how to go about it. Philippe Hémon has suggested that as in Murder on the Orient Express they should all be guilty, but the other two have turned the idea down vehemently.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
The Concierge’s Office
UNTIL NINETEEN FIFTY-six the concierge of the building was Madame Claveau. She was a woman of middle height, with grey hair and a narrow mouth, and always wore a tobacco-coloured headscarf and (except on evenings when there was a reception and she was in charge of the cloakroom) a black pinafore with small blue flowers. She watched over the cleanliness of her building with as much care as if she had owned it. She had married a delivery man working for the Nicolas Wine Co. who travelled Paris from end to end on his tricycle, his cap slanted jauntily over one ear, a fag-end stuck out of the side of his mouth, and who was sometimes to be seen, at the close of his day, swapping his beige leather jerkin, all crisscrossed with cracks, for a quilted jacket left him by Danglars, and lending his wife a hand with polishing the brass on the lift cage or doing the big mirror in the entrance hall with whiting whilst whistling the latest hit all the while: Paris Romance, Ramona, or First Meeting. They had a son, named Michel, and it was for him that Madame Claveau asked Winckler for the stamps from the parcels that Smautf sent him twice a month. Michel killed himself in a motorbike accident at the age of nineteen, in 1955, and no doubt his premature death had something to do with his parents’ departure the following year. They retired to the Jura. Morellet claimed for a long while that they had opened a cafe which ran down straight away because old man Claveau drank his stock in trade instead of selling it, but no news ever came to confirm or deny this rumour.
Their place was taken by Madame Nochère. She was then twenty-five. She had just lost her husband, a regular staff sergeant, fifteen years her elder. He died in Algiers, not in a bomb outrage, but from gastroenteritis induced by an excessive consumption of little bits of gum, not chewing gum, which could not have had such grave consequences, but India-rubber gum. Henri Nochère was in fact assistant to the deputy director of 95 Section, that is to say the “Statistics” office of the Projections and Planning Division of the Personnel Service attached to the General Headquarters of the Xth Military District. His work had been quite quiet up to 1954–1955, but from the first call-ups of conscript soldiers it worried him increasingly and Henri Nochère, in order to calm his nerves and to cope with his heavy workload, began to suck his pencils and chew his erasers as he started over for the nth time his endless adding up. Such nutritional practices, harmless when kept within reasonable bounds, can be dangerous if abused, for the minute fragments of involuntarily ingested rubber may cause ulceration and lesions of the intestinal membrane which are all the more serious for remaining imperceptible for a considerable period of time, for which reason it is not possible to make a correct diagnosis sufficiently early on. Sent to hospital for “digestive disorders”, Nochère died before the doctors really had any idea what he was ill with. In fact, his case would probably have remained a medical mystery if, in the same quarter and probably for the same reasons, Warrant Officer Olivetti, at the Oran inducting centre, and Lance Sergeant Dasiweel, at the Constantine Transit Centre, had not died in almost identical circumstances. That is where the term “The Three Sergeants’ Syndrome” comes from, an utter misnomer with respect to military hierarchy, but with enough appeal to the imagination to carry on being used for this type of affliction.
Today Madame Nochère is forty-four. She is a tiny, rather plump, voluble, and obliging woman. She doesn’t correspond in the slightest to the usual image of a concierge: she neither yells nor mumbles, does not deliver hoarse-throated harangues against house pets, does not shoo off doorstep salesmen (which is, moreover, something that several co-owners and tenants might well reproach her for), she is neither servile nor money-grubbing, does not leave her television set switched on all day, and does not rage against people emptying dustbins in the morning or on Sundays or growing flowers in pots on their balconies. She is not mean or petty in any sense, and the only thing that could be held against her is that she is a little too much of a gossip, even a little overbearing, always wanting to know the story of this one and that, always ready to feel sorry for someone, to help, to find a way out. Everyone in the building has had occasion to appreciate her kindness and at one time or another has set off with a mind at rest knowing that the goldfish would be properly fed, the dogs walked, the flowers watered, the meters read.
Only one person in the building really hates Madame Nochère: and that is Madame Altamont, because of something that happened one summer. Madame Altamont was leaving for a holiday. With her characteristic concern for propriety and orderliness, she emptied her refrigerator and gave the left-overs to the concierge: two ounces of butter, a pound of fresh green beans, two lemons, half a pot of redcurrant jam, a dab of fresh cream, a few cherries, a spot of milk, a few bits of cheese, various herbs, and three Bulgarian-flavour yoghurts. For reasons that were never entirely clear, but were probably connected with her husband’s long absences, Madame Altamont was unable to leave at the planned time, and had to stay on twenty-four hours longer at home; so she went back to see Madame Nochère and explained in an admittedly rather embarrassed tone of voice that she had nothing to eat in the flat and that she’d like to take back the fresh green beans she had given her earlier that day. “Well, it’s just that I’ve topped them already,” Madame Nochère said, “and they’re cooking now.” “I can’t help that!” Madame Altamont replied. Madame Nochère herself took up the cooked beans to Madame Altamont, as well as the other foodstuffs she had left. Next morning, Madame Altamont, leaving properly this time, again took her left-overs down to Madame Nochère. But the concierge refused them politely.
The story – told here for once without any exaggeration – rapidly spread around the building and the quartier. Since then Madame Altamont hasn’t missed a single co-owners’ meeting, and each time, on one pretext or another, she asks for Madame Nochère to be replaced by a new concierge. She is supported by the manager and Plassaert, the printed-cotton trader, who haven’t forgiven Madame Nochère for taking Morellet’s side, but the majority regularly refuses to put the item on the agenda.
Madame Nochère is in her office; she is getting off a stool after changing the fuses controlling one of the entrance-hall lamps. The office is a room about twelve square yards in area, painted light green, floored in red hexagonal tiles. It is divided into two by a louvred wooden partition. On the other side of the partition, the barely visible “living” side includes a bed with a lace bedspread, a sink with a small wall-mounted water-heater, a marble-topped washstand, a two-ring cooker on a tiny rustic sideboard, and several shelves full of boxes and suitcases. On this side of the screen, in the office proper, there is a table with three green plants on it – the puny and discoloured bougainvillea is the concierge’s, the two others are
much more flourishing rubber plants belonging to the owners of the first floor right, the Louvets, who are away and have left them to be looked after – and the afternoon mail, in the midst of which Madame Moreau’s magazine, Jours de France, is particularly noticeable, its cover showing Gina Lollobrigida, Gérard Philipe, and René Clair arm in arm on the Croisette with the caption “Twenty years ago Belles de Nuit triumphed at Cannes”. Madame Nochère’s dog, a fat, sly little ratter answering to the name of Rolypoly, is lying under another small kidney-shaped table on which the concierge has set her place for lunch: one flat plate, one soup plate, a knife, spoon, and fork, and a stem glass, next to a dozen eggs in their corrugated cardboard eggbox and three mint and verbena tea sachets decorated with a picture of girls from Nice in straw hats. Against the partition there stands an upright piano, the piano on which Madame Nochère’s daughter Martine, nowadays finishing medical school, hammered out for ten years The Turkish March, Für Elise, Children’s Corner, and Le Petit Ane by Paul Dukas; it’s now been shut up for good at last and supports a potted geranium, a sky-blue cloche hat, a TV set, and a Moses basket in which Geneviève Foulerot’s baby soundly sleeps: Geneviève is the tenant of the fifth floor right and hands her baby over to the concierge every day at seven a.m., collecting it only at eight p.m. after she’s got home, had a bath, and changed.
Life: A User's Manual Page 20