and the Souvenirs of a Numismatist by M. Florent Baillerger, formerly Chief Clerk to the Department of Haute-Marne, Chalindrey, Le Sommelier Booksellers, n.d.
Hélène Brodin died in this room, in nineteen forty-seven. She had lived here, fearful and discreet, for nearly twelve years. After her death her nephew François Gratiolet found a letter in which she told how her stay in America had ended.
In the afternoon of 11 September 1935, the police came to fetch her and drove her to Jemima Creek to identify her husband’s corpse. Antoine Brodin’s skull was smashed, and he lay on his back with outstretched arms at the bottom of a muddy, waterlogged quarry. The police had put a green handkerchief over his face. His trousers and boots had been stolen but he was still wearing the grey pinstriped shirt Hélène had bought him a few days earlier at St Petersburg.
Hélène had never seen Antoine’s murderers; she had only heard their voices, two days before, when they had calmly told her husband they would be back for his scalp. But she had no trouble identifying them: it was the two Ashby brothers, Jeremiah and Ruben, accompanied as ever by Nick Pertusano, a cruel and vicious dwarf who had an indelible ash-coloured mark in the shape of a cross on his forehead, who was their sidekick, butt, and scapegoat. Despite their gentle biblical forenames, the Ashbys were little bastards feared throughout the county who extorted protection money from saloons and from diners, those rail-cars equipped as restaurants where you could eat for a few nickels; and unfortunately for Hélène, the sheriff of the county was their uncle. Not only did this sheriff fail to arrest the murderers, he also had two of his men escort Hélène to Mobile and advised her against ever setting foot in the county again. Hélène managed to give her guards the slip, got to Tallahassee, the state capital, and filed a complaint with the Governor. That same evening a stone smashed one of the windowpanes of her hotel room. Tied to it was a message threatening death.
On the Governor’s orders the sheriff was nonetheless obliged to conduct a phony investigation; he advised his nephews to keep clear of the place, for safety. The two hoodlums and the dwarf split up. Hélène learnt of this and realised she now had her only chance of revenge: she had to act fast and kill them one after the other before they even knew what was happening to them.
The first one she killed was the dwarf. He was the easiest. She learnt he had taken a job as kitchen lad on a steamboat travelling upriver on the Mississippi, a boat worked all year round by professional hucksters. One of them agreed to help Hélène: she disguised herself as a boy, and he got her on board as his groom.
During the night, when everyone not asleep was hellbent on endless games of craps and faro, Hélène had no trouble finding her way to the galley; the dwarf, half-drunk, was drowsing in a hammock beside a stove on which a huge mutton stew was simmering. She came up close and before he could react seized him by the neck and suspenders and dumped him into the gigantic cauldron.
She left the boat next morning, at Baton Rouge, before the crime had been discovered. Still dressed as a boy, she went back downriver, travelling this time on a floating timber raft, which was a veritable little town on water where several dozen men lived in comfort. To one of them, a gypsy of French extraction called Paul Marchal, she told her story, and he offered to help her. At New Orleans they rented a truck and began to crisscross Louisiana and Florida. They stopped at gas stations, railroad stations, roadside bars. They humped around a kind of one-man-band outfit, consisting of a sound box, a bandoneon, a harmonica, a triangle, cymbals, and bells; she dressed as a women from the East with a chador, did a vague belly dance before offering to tell fortunes by cutting cards: she would spread three rows out in front of her audience, cover two cards adding up to eleven as well as the three court cards: it was a type of patience she had learnt as a little girl, the only one she knew, and she used it to predict the most improbable things in an inextricable mixture of languages.
It took them only ten days to find a trail. A Seminole family living on a raft moored on the banks of Lake Apopka told them of a man who had been living for the last few days in a huge disused well, near a place called Stone’s Hill, about fifteen miles from Tampa.
It was Ruben. They found him sitting on a wooden box trying to open a tin of food with his teeth. He was so desperate with hunger that he didn’t even hear them coming. Before killing him with a bullet in the back of his neck, Hélène forced him to give away Jeremiah’s hide-out. All Ruben knew was that before splitting up, the three of them had vaguely discussed the places they would go to: the dwarf said he wanted to travel around, Ruben wanted a cosy hole, and Jeremiah claimed there was no better place to lay up than in a big city.
Nick was a dwarf and Ruben an idiot, but Jeremiah frightened Hélène. She found him almost easily, two days later: standing at the bar of a boozer near Hialeah, the Miami racecourse, he was leafing through a racing paper whilst at the same time mechanically masticating a fifteen-cent portion of breaded veal cutlets.
She trailed him for three days. He lived off mean tricks, picking bookies’ pockets and raising customers for the boss of a greasy gaming den proudly named The Oriental Saloon and Gambling House, after the famous joint which Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday used to run at Tombstone, Arizona. It was a barn with walls made of planks literally nailed together from top to bottom with enamelled metal panels bearing electoral, advertising, or business announcements:
QUALITY ECONOMY AMOCO MOTOR OIL, GROVE’S BROMOQUININE STOPS COLDS, ZENO CHEWING-GUM, ARMOUR’S CLOVERBLOOM BUTTER, RINSO SOAKS CLOTHES WHITER, THALCO PINE DEODORANT, CLABBERGIRL BAKING POWDER, TOWER’S FISH BRAND, ARCADIA, GOODYEAR TIRES, QUAKER STATE, PENNZOIL SAFE LUBRICATION, 100% PURE PENNSYLVANIA, BASEBALL TOURNAMENT, SELMA AMERICAN LEGION JRS vs. MOBILE, PETER’S SHOE’S, CHEW MAIL POUCH TOBACCO, BROTHER-IN-LAW BARBER SHOP, HAIRCUT 25c, SILAS GREEN SHOW FROM NEW ORLEANS, DRINK COCA-COLA DELICIOUS REFRESHING, POSTAL TELEGRAPH HERE, DID YOU KNOW? J. W. McDONALD FURN’CO CAN FURNISH YOUR HOME COMPLETE, CONGOLEUM RUGS, GRUNO REFRIGERATORS, PETE JARMAN FOR CONGRESS, CAPUDINE LIQUID AND TABLETS, AMERICAN ETHYL GASOLINE, GRANGER ROUGH CUT MADE FOR PIPES, JOHN DEERE FARM IMPLEMENTS, FINDLAY’S, ETC.
On the morning of the fourth day, Hélène sent an envelope to Jeremiah. It contained a photograph of the two brothers – found in Ruben’s billfold – and a brief note in which she informed him of what she had done to the dwarf and to Ruben and of the fate awaiting this son of a bitch if he had enough balls to find her in chalet 31 at Burbank’s Motel.
Hélène hid all day in the shower of an adjacent chalet. She knew that Jeremiah had received her letter and that he would not be able to bear the idea of being outfaced by a woman. But that wouldn’t be enough to make him respond to the provocation; he had to be sure, in addition, of being stronger than she was.
Around seven in the evening she knew her instinct had not deceived her: accompanied by four armed toughs, Jeremiah turned up in a steaming, dented, bucket-seated Model T. Taking all the customary precautions, they cased the joint and surrounded chalet 31.
The room was not well lit, just enough for Jeremiah to see through the crochet curtains his brother Ruben lying quietly on one of the twin beds with his arms folded and his eyes wide open. With a ferocious roar, Jeremiah Ashby stormed into the room, thereby setting off the bomb Hélène had planted in it.
The same evening Hélène embarked on a schooner sailing to Cuba, whence a regular packet took her back to France. Until her death she awaited the day when the police would come to arrest her, but the American Law never dared to imagine that this mere slip of a woman could have killed in cold blood three hoods, for whose murders they had no trouble in finding much more plausible culprits.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-FIVE
Berger, 2
THE BERGER PARENTS’ bedroom: an almost square, not very large room with a woodblock floor and walls hung with a light-blue paper with narrow yellow stripes; a map of the 1975 Tour de France, full size, presented by Vitamix, the tonic of sportsmen and champions, is pinned on the rear wall to the
left of the door; beside each staging post there are black-lined boxes to be filled in by race followers as the Tour proceeds with the timings of the first six riders in each stage and of the three overall leaders in each of the classes (Yellow Jersey, Green Jersey, King of the Mountains).
The room is empty except for a fat alley cat – Poker Dice – curled up drowsing on the fluffy sky-blue quilt draped over a divan-bed flanked by two matching bedside tables. On the right-hand one stands an old valve-radio set (the one whose operation at what Madame Réol considers to be unreasonably early hours puts in jeopardy the otherwise friendly relations the two couples enjoy): its lid, which can be raised to reveal a primitive pickup, bears a bedside lamp with a conical shade decorated with the symbols of the four suits of playing cards, and a few 45 rpm record sleeves: the one on top illustrates Boyer and Valbonne’s famous ditty, Boire un petit coup c’est agréable, sung by Viviane Malehaut with Luca Dracena on the accordion and tympani; it depicts a roughly sixteen-year-old girl clinking a glass with a group of fat, guffawing sausage-makers who, against a background of split pigs on butcher hooks, raise their glasses of sparkling wine in one hand and in the other proffer great white china trays spilling over with various pork delicacies: ham dotted with fat, saveloy, muzzle, andouille sausages from Vire, red tongue, pigs’ trotters, brawn, and sweetbreads.
On the left-hand bedside table, a lamp made from an Italian wine flask (Valpolicella) and a Série noire detective thriller, Raymond Chandler’s Lady in the Lake.
* * *
It was in this flat that the lady with the little dog lived until 1965, with her son who aimed to take the cloth. Before her, for many years, the flat’s tenant had been an old gentleman everyone called The Russian because he wore a fur cap all year round. The rest of his dress was markedly more Western: black trousers with a seat reaching up to his sternum held up both by braces and an underbelly belt, a white but rarely pristine shirt, a broad black tie, almost a cravat, and a walking stick with a top made from a billiard ball.
The Russian was actually called Abel Speiss. He was a soft-hearted man from Alsace, a former army veterinarian, who spent his spare time sending in solutions to all the little competitions published in newspapers. He solved riddles with disconcerting ease:
Three Russians have a brother. The brother dies leaving no brothers. How can this be?
history catch-questions
Who was John Leland’s friend?
Who was threatened by a Railway share?
Who was Sheraton?
Who shaved the old man’s beard?
“word-chain” puzzles:
HIM LOVE ONE
HEM HOVE ORE
HER HAVE ARE
HATE ALE
ALL
arithmetical puzzles:
Prudence is 24 years of age. She is twice as old as her husband was when she was as old as her husband is. How old is her husband?
Write the number “120” using four eights.
anagrams:
STREET = TESTER
ATHENS = HASTEN
ABSOLUTE = OUSTABLE
and logic problems:
What comes after O T T F F S S E?
Which is the odd item in the following list:
French, short, polysyllabic, written, visible, printed, masculine,
word, singular, American, odd?
boxwords, crosswords, three-corner words, two-dimensional “ghosts” words (a, at, ate, rate, grate, gyrate), block-words, etc., and even “hidden questions”, the nightmares of all puzzle-solvers.
His great specialism was cryptograms. But although he victoriously carried off the Grand National Contest, with a prize worth THREE THOUSAND FRANCS, run by the Vienne and Romans Reveille, by discovering that the message
aeeeil ihnalz ruiopn
toeedt zaemen eeuart
odxhnp trvree noupvg
eedgnc estlev artuee
arnuro ennios ouitse
spesdr erssur mtqssl
encrypted the first two lines of La Marseillaise, he never managed to decipher the puzzle set by Dogs of France:
t’ cea uc tsel rs
n neo rt aluot
ia ouna s ilel-
-rc oal ei ntoi
and his only consolation was that no other contestant had managed it either, and the magazine decided to withhold the first prize.
Apart from riddles and logogriphs, The Russian had one other passion in life: he was madly in love with Madame Hardy, the wife of the olive-oil trader from Marseilles. She was a motherly, middle-aged woman with a sweet face and a faint moustache on her upper lip. He took advice from everyone in the building, but despite the encouragement he got from all, he never dared – in his own words – to “speak his flame”.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-SIX
Rorschach, 5
IN ITS HEYDAY Rorschach’s bathroom was a thing of luxury. Along the whole of the rear wall, connecting all the sanitary fixtures to each other, was a complex arrangement of lead and copper piping graced with lavishly convoluted bifurcations, as well as a probably superfluous plethora of manometers, temperature gauges, flow-meters, hygrometers, clappers, cocks, taps, control levers, handles, valves, and stoppers, providing a machine-room backdrop which made a striking contrast to the refinement of the remainder of the decor: a veined marble bath; a medieval font for a washbasin, a fin-de-siècle towel rail; bronze taps carved in the shapes of radiant suns, lions’ heads, swans’ necks; and a few curios and objets d’art: a crystal ball, of the kind you used to see in dance halls, was hung from the ceiling, refracting the light in its myriad cat’s-eye mirrors; and there was also a Japanese ceremonial sabre, a screen made of two panes of glass trapping a host of dried hydrangea flowers, and a painted wooden Louis XV low table, holding three crudely moulded tall jars for bath salts, perfume, and bath oil which represented three maybe ancient statuettes: a very youthful Atlas carrying a scale world globe on his left shoulder, an ithyphallic Pan, and a frightened Syrinx already half-transformed into a reed.
There are four works of art which draw the eye especially. The first is a painting on wood, dating certainly from the first half of the nineteenth century. It is entitled Robinson Making Himself as Comfortable as He Can on His Desert Island. Above this title, written in two lines of white-on-black capital letters, can be seen a fairly naïve depiction of Robinson Crusoe in a pointed bonnet and a goatskin waistcoat, sitting on a stone; on the tree used to mark the passing of time he is making a notch for Sunday.
* * *
The second and third items are prints dealing differently with similar subjects: one, mysteriously called The Purloined Letter, portrays an elegant drawing room – herringbone woodblock floor, Jouy cretonne wallpaper – in which a young woman, seated by a window looking out onto a great park, is edging a piece of fine linen with bourdon lace; not far from her, an ageing, exaggeratedly English-looking man is playing the virginals. The second engraving, of surrealist inspiration, depicts a girl of maybe fourteen or fifteen wearing a short lace slip. The open-work clocks on her stockings end in arrowheads, and the little cross she wears on her neck has branches made of fingers, with slightly bleeding nails. She is sitting at a sewing machine, near an open window through which can be seen the mountainous boulders of a Rhineland landscape, and on the lingerie she is sewing can be seen this motto, embroidered in black-letter Gothic script.
The fourth work of art is a cast standing on the rim of the bath. It is a full-length model of a woman walking, about one third life-size. She is a Roman virgin of twenty or so. Her body is long and supple, her hair is gently waved and almost entirely veiled. Her head is tipped slightly to one side, and in her left hand she holds a gather of the extraordinarily pleated robe which falls straight from her neck to her ankles, thus revealing her sandalled feet. She has her left foot forward, and her right foot, about to step on, touches the ground only by the tip of its toes, with its heel and sole almost vertical. This movement, expressing both the easy agility of a young woman and her self-c
onfident calm, gives the statue its particular charm, a firm stride held steady, as it were, in mid-air.
A canny woman, Olivia Rorschach has rented out her flat for the months she will be away. The rental – which includes Jane Sutton’s daily services – was arranged through a bureau specialising in temporary accommodation for very rich foreigners. This time the tenant is someone called Giovanni Pizzicagnoli, an international administrator normally resident in Geneva but spending six weeks in Paris to chair one of the budgetary commissions of the Unesco special assembly on the energy problem. This diplomat made his choice in a few minutes on the specifications provided by the bureau’s Swiss agent. He won’t arrive in France until the day after next, but his wife and young son are here already because, believing all Frenchmen to be thieves, he has given his wife – a sturdy Bernese of about forty – the job of checking, on the premises, that everything is as promised in the specification.
Olivia Rorschach thought her presence at this visitation pointless, and she withdrew at the start with a charming smile, using her imminent departure as an excuse; she did no more than to urge Madame Pizzicagnoli to watch that her little boy didn’t break the decorated plates in the dining room or the blown-glass grapes in the entrance hall.
The girl from the bureau took her client over the rest of the flat, listing the fittings and fixtures and ticking them off on her list as they proceeded. But it quickly turned out that the visit, originally envisaged as a routine formality, was running into a serious difficulty: the Swissess, clearly obsessed to the highest degree by domestic safety problems, has demanded to have the workings of every household appliance explained to her, and to be shown the location of every circuit-breaker, fuse, and disjunctor. The inspection of the kitchen was manageable, but in the bathroom things quickly went critical: overwhelmed by events, the girl from the bureau called her boss to the rescue, and, given the size of the deal – the rental charge for the six weeks is twenty thousand francs – he could not but come over, but since he had obviously not had time to look up the file properly, he in turn had to call for help from various people: from Madame Rorschach, in the first place, but she declined, claiming it was her husband who had dealt with the installation; then from Olivier Gratiolet, the former landlord, who replied that it had ceased to be any business of his nearly fifteen years ago; from Romanet, the manager, who suggested asking the interior designer, who did no more than give the name of the plumber, who, given the time of day, could be materialised only in the form of a recorded message on his telephone answering service.
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