Paris Requiem

by Lisa Appignanesi

  ‘She was found in the river.’

  ‘The river?’

  Tears quivered on Elinor’s cheeks. She didn’t bother to wipe them. Her eyes were fixed unblinkingly on some invisible point.

  She was utterly still. It was as if her body had been robbed of sensation, as if the paralysis had spread upwards.

  When her lips moved, at last, he shivered.

  ‘He must be devastated. Tell him to come to me. No one knows how to comfort him as I do. You remember that, Jimmy. It’s always been thus. Always. Tell him. I’ll be gentle with him. Go now. I need to rest.’

  Her unblinking eyes followed him from the room. They unnerved him, so that he hesitated when he reached the landing, his hat in his hand, uncertain of whether he ought to do what he had thought to do next. It was as if she might be able to see through walls.

  After another moment’s pause, he knocked softly on the door opposite, then more loudly to reassure himself.

  The door opened before he had finished.

  A woman confronted him. Her hair tumbled in stray curls round her face. Her wide lips were painted scarlet, her blouse a striking fuschia pink. It dipped at the bosom, revealing an acreage of rosy flesh from which he averted his eyes. ‘Oui?’ The word interrogated him as boldly as her stance, one hand on hip.

  James stepped backward. Had he misunderstood Ellie and come to the wrong place. ‘Mon frère, Monsieur Norton, est-il là?’

  ‘Non, Monsieur.’ The woman studied him shrewdly, as if she were sizing him up for potential custom.

  ‘When do you expect him?’

  He only half listened to her reply. He had just noticed that the bundle she held over one hip was a swaddled babe. His mind reeled. He felt an uncomfortable urge to rush into the bedrooms and explore the lay of the land. Is this what Ellie was pointing to when she said Raf was guilty of Olympe’s suicide? Another woman? A child?

  He grunted something and raced downstairs.

  The streets gave James no repose. They were as noisy and unsettling as his reflections which pursued Raf into unseemly corners. He had an hour before he was due to meet his brother and he needed to order his thoughts.

  He crossed a wide avenue swarming with traffic and almost collided with an omnibus. Its driver screeched what he imagined must be a series of expletives. As he made his escape, he narrowly missed being hit by a cyclist, only to find himself the subject of a threatening lecture by a caped gendarme. The man spouted statistics at him, one of which he instantly grasped. Twelve thousand citizens had been injured by vehicles in this last year, one hundred and fifty killed. Did he want to be one of them?

  James doffed his hat, apologised in English and tried his best to induce a state of calm as he kept to the sidewalk.

  From the corner of the street, a newsboy shouted his papers. James stopped to purchase one and after a quick glance at a headline blaring a crime, he thought again of his brother.

  When Raf had last been in Boston, they had spent a single evening alone, talking mostly about France and the Dreyfus Affair and what appeared to be the trumped-up charge for spying which had sent the poor captain to Devil’s Island way back at the beginning of ’95. But there had been other things too.

  He tried now to piece together what had been a fragmentary conversation, inspecting it for clues to Raf’s state of mind. He recalled that Raf had talked about a strange syndrome, a series of railroad-linked illnesses which brought patients complaining of dizziness, sight disorders, neck and back pains to bemused doctors who named the condition ‘railway spine’. The railways might bring fresh fruit and vegetables speeding to the city. They also disgorged a daily load of provincials in search of work or pleasure, who inflated the city’s population, not to mention its horde of prostitutes together with its crime rate. The latter fed the penny press as efficiently as the food fed its hungry readers. No day passed without the latest instalment in a series of scandals and murders, including railway murders.

  It came back to him that in the same context Raf had also talked about nerves, how they were affected by speed and mobility – social and class mobility, as well as the physical kind. Nerves frayed, like train tracks, from too much stimulation. Collisions and disasters could ensue. Had he been thinking about himself? About Olympe? If he had known all that, why had he plunged Ellie into the midst of it all? Ellie who had always been his confidante, his principal friend within the family. Ellie who had bandaged his knees and spoken soothing words.

  James slowed his steps. The vista of the Place de la Concorde had opened before him with its nymph-clad fountains, its lustrous obelisk and ranked statuary. It was one of those spots that brought dusty memories in its train. He didn’t want to be deflected by them now, yet a walk through the park would do him good.

  Squaring his shoulders, he crossed the first arc of the square and headed quickly into the Tuileries Gardens.

  Children’s voices reverberated through the park. A hoop passed him, closely followed by a skipping boy. Nurses chatted as they pushed large prams lazily before them. A dog leapt up onto one of the scattered benches and was promptly chastised by a small girl in a chequered pinafore.

  Ellie had once been like that small girl, all unrestrained activity and certainty of opinion. Brimming with good health. Both the brothers had doted on her. Their father, too. She was the only one who could sway him from his occasional black moods.

  Then everything had changed, not irreparably, no. Not even all at once, except when one examined it with hindsight – like one of his cases. He could date it precisely now. It was the summer they had all gathered in Provincetown to breathe the tangy air of the Cape. He had just graduated from Harvard and was preparing to join a firm in Philadelphia. To broaden his experience, his father had said. It was that summer, too, that he had first met Maisie. Maisie who had looked up at him from beneath the wide brim of her sun hat with innocent eyes that singled him out from the crowd and declared, ‘you’.

  James walked more quickly. The gravel crackled beneath his feet, coating his shoes with a grey film.

  It was in the middle of that hot summer that Ellie had suffered her first episode. She had developed a blinding migraine, so intense and debilitating that their mother had her confined to the coolest room of the house. The shutters there were kept permanently closed. The boys were prohibited from visiting. Their parents took turns sitting by her side. The only outsider who was permitted to enter was Dr Field, who maintained a stubborn silence about any prognosis. ‘Patience,’ was the only word James ever heard him utter to their mother.

  The large, bustling, clapboard house developed a troubled hush. There were fewer and fewer visits from his parent’s large circle, the politicians and writers, artists and advocates whose company he had begun increasingly to enjoy that summer. There were no more parties in the spacious living room which spilled over onto the wraparound terrace, where his friends and Raf’s mingled with Ellie’s, and his father, revelling in the young, engaged all and sundry in whiplash political debate. Nor were there any more of those lazy gatherings on the lawn after a day’s boating or on the surf-lapped beach where cool lemonade flowed in time to conversation. Now everyone tiptoed. Speech was confined to whispers. The piano was kept permanently shut.

  Only the cries which sometimes emanated from the sick room ruptured the stillness. A cascade of strange, piercing monologues, more sound than sense. Once he had heard Maisie’s name in the midst of one, coupled with an epithet he didn’t like to repeat and was astonished to find on Ellie’s lips. He was glad then to be ousted from the house – as the boys always were when what their mother euphemistically called ‘Ellie’s growing pains’ and their father ‘passing fits’ came on. On their way out, they would see Maria, the plump Irish housekeeper rushing towards Ellie’s room with a bowl of cold water and an assortment of cloths.

  After some three weeks, Ellie emerged from her sickbed to take up a position on a chair by the window of the sitting room. It gave her a view of the activity on th
e street and, in the distance, the ocean. She looked very pale, but rather more beautiful than when she had first been taken ill. Her smile was radiant, her wit more agile than ever as she entertained them with snippets from her reading. She never once mentioned her illness. It was almost as if she had forgotten it. And soon, she was up and about, once more party at least to their less exuberant pleasures.

  That summer had marked a turning point in more ways than one. From then on, Ellie’s condition, the possibility of what was always an erratic recurrence, had played an unuttered, but shaping part in family life.

  Poor, dear Ellie.

  He had never seen her as poorly as today. He must buy her a present to cheer her. She had been so well when she left Boston with Raf late in September. And her letters to him throughout the winter had been studded with lively vignettes from what seemed an ever-amusing Paris life. True, these had been sparse of late. But he had hardly expected her health to have reached such an impasse. Raf had been seriously remiss. He would take matters in hand now. The visit to the doctor would be only the first step. Yes, only the first step.

  As he walked, James had a sense that he had distanced himself from his siblings, as indeed from so much else, for perhaps too long.

  FOUR

  ‘Sorry I’m late, Jim. Couldn’t be helped.’ Raf raced into the lobby of the Grand and stopped short in front of him. He looked haggard, his eyes red-rimmed from lack of sleep. James’s inclination to reprimand evaporated.

  ‘I’ve brought you this.’ He waved a black leather satchel in the air. ‘We can leave it at the desk until later. I want your opinion, once you’ve read the contents.’

  Without waiting for James to reply, he had a quick word with the clerk.

  Moments later their carriage had merged with the traffic on the boulevard. Raf was rubbing his forehead with his hand, like a man trying to efface an indelible image.

  ‘What have you been up to?’ James asked gently.

  ‘The morgue. I’ve been to the morgue.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Do you? I wish I did.’ Raf rubbed his brow again. ‘They haven’t examined the blood for poisons yet.’ His voice grew cold, detached. ‘Her left arm was broken. There was some bruising. Across the thighs. Across the shoulders and chest. Two bands. Both could have occurred either before or after she was in the water. There are conflicting opinions on the timing. It could have happened over a week ago. It could be far less.’

  The horse had taken on a brisk pace. The sound of iron on cobbles reverberated in the carriage.

  ‘So it could have been …’ James didn’t quite know how to put the question. ‘She might have done it …’

  ‘Herself. No.’ Raf’s fingers were clenched into tight bloodless fists. ‘No. Not Olympe. Not now.’

  ‘Why are you so certain? Ellie says …’

  ‘Ellie is full of fantasies.’ His voice was harsh. He modulated it. ‘This last while, since she’s been so weak, her imagination has grown even more florid than usual. You saw her then. You told her?’

  James nodded.

  Raf was staring out the window. There seemed to be little to look at except a row of uniform grey façades.

  James waited, then took a deep breath and put the matter that had been troubling him. ‘Her father, no, no, it was Madame de Landois, said that Olympe had once suffered from a condition which I think William James describes as ambulatory automatism. Did you know that about her?’

  Raf didn’t respond.

  James pressed on. ‘I attended a series of lectures he gave some years back. On exceptional mental states. He talked about physical or mental activity performed without the awareness of the conscious self. It happens that a hidden or secondary self can take over from the person and spontaneously perform various acts – including walking. So it’s possible that if Olympe was prone to such trances that …’

  ‘No. That kind of automatism is epileptic in origin. Often hereditary. Or it’s brought on by some kind of trauma. A shock to the whole system. That’s what the best of the French neurologists say. I’ve learned something over the years, too. There’s no history of epilepsy in Olympe’s family.’ He paused, his face a battleground of conflicting feelings. ‘And at the time of the incidents Marguerite was referring to, there was … well, let’s call it a shock. Olympe’s mother died. In terrible circumstances. But all that’s in the past. I’m certain of it. Absolutely certain.’

  ‘How can you be?’

  ‘She was happy,’ he said simply, then rushed on to override James’s doubts. ‘All right, more important than that, she was earning her keep. She was helping to support her little brother and sister. She was devoted to them. Utterly devoted. She would never have …’ He let the sentence hang. ‘If you’d met her, you’d understand.’

  James didn’t pursue it. He considered what Raf had revealed. From his practice, he knew that the instincts of near ones were worth trusting. Though he also knew that they were often neither as near, nor as infallible as they surmised.

  ‘How … how did you come to meet her father?’

  ‘I insisted. It was only recently that she allowed it.’ He paused. ‘I guess there was an element of curiosity, too, on my part. Here I am writing about all this Dreyfus stuff, all the hatred the affair has unleashed, and … well, you understand. Olympe watched me like a hawk that first time – to see what prejudices I’d let slip.’

  ‘What’s the father’s story?’

  ‘Common enough. The family comes from Russia. They left in the early eighties, fleeing the pogroms, myths of ritual slaughter, poverty. Only to find it in a new guise.’ His tone was bitter, angry.

  ‘Hardly the same.’

  ‘Easy for you to say that. You and me. What do we know about it? Take just the getting here. You and I, we travel, we board a luxury liner, land in first class hotels, get by in one language or another. And have the security of a home to go back to. They … Olympe’s family, they walk, beg rides in carts, scramble into crowded third class compartments when they can raise the fare. When they arrive, there’s no welcoming committee. They …’

  ‘That’s enough, Raf. I get the picture. What does Olympe’s father do?’

  ‘He works for a tailoring establishment.’

  ‘I see.’

  They lapsed into silence. Raf broke it after a few minutes had passed. ‘We’re not far now.’

  ‘Are we going to the theatre where Olympe was working?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But surely that should be our first point of call.’

  Raf gave him a scathing look. ‘Trust me, Jim. Don’t you think I’ve already interrogated everyone at the theatre? I talked to them before … before Olympe was found. They were as mystified by her disappearance as I was. In any case, that will be Durand’s first point of call. You think like a policeman, Jim.’

  ‘I’ll take that as a compliment in the present circumstances,’ James muttered. ‘So where are we going?’

  ‘You’ll see. My friend the journalist, Touquet, is joining us. And I’ve asked Antoine to come along. He can be useful.’

  ‘The boy you sent for me?’

  Raf nodded.

  ‘Good. I didn’t get a chance to thank him. You should get him some cleaner clothes.’

  Raf grinned his old grin for the first time. ‘He refuses. Says he’s got better things to do with his money.’

  ‘And Touquet?’

  ‘I didn’t altogether explain, did I, about the work we’ve been doing together? There’s been a series of strange deaths here over the last months. We’re not altogether sure how many, four certainly. Maybe five or six. Young women. Two of them identified as prostitutes. ‘The others … Well, they might have been. They weren’t on the official police lists. They could have been what they call ‘insoumises’ – clandestines. So many of the women lose their identity cards just to get off the lists. And to get the police off their backs. Harassment is prevalent to put it mildly. There are some hundred thousand whores
in this city, Jim, servicing a population of only three million.’

  ‘Really!’

  ‘Takes one aback, doesn’t it. Tells you about levels of poverty. And the good citizens of Paris simultaneously want their streets orderly and clean and want their vice squad to behave like gentlemen to the whores they both loathe and desire. Publicly, they want the first a little more, of course. Anyhow, Touquet started off with a press campaign against the behavior of the vice squads – harassment, arbitrary arrests, but also of course, profiteering. A poor cop’s gotta earn a buck, let alone enjoy the more fleshly pleasures. The way Touquet puts it is that any given policeman acts not only as judge and executioner, but also as pimp and sometimes drug dealer.’

  ‘Hold it.’ James cut off the lecture. ‘Let’s go back a bit. You think there’s a Jack the Ripper on the loose?’

  ‘If only it were that clear.’

  The cab had stopped and they both leapt out. They were on a broad street which abutted on a square in a part of the city James didn’t recognise. From the dilapidated exterior of the buildings, it looked working class. A market seemed just to have run to its closing time. The stalls were empty, the ground covered with broken crates, bits of greens and squashed fruit. Hunched, grizzled men and ragamuffins sifted the remains, while flies buzzed, gorged on entrails. Here and there, sturdier figures with muscled arms heaved panniers onto wagons.

  ‘No,’ Raf was still immersed in his train of thought. ‘The difficulty here is that the girls aren’t mangled in any way. Their Paris deaths could just as easily have been self-willed. All neat and tidy, mimicking suicide.’

  He waved suddenly. ‘Touquet’s already there. Let’s go. He’s pursuing all this because he has a real passion for justice … and the police don’t conform to it. I’ve put some of his articles into the satchel I left for you. They’ll add some colour to your French.’

  By the time they had reached the sallow journalist, Antoine had appeared from another side of the square. He nodded at James who returned his greeting. The youth was still in his grubby clothes, his face even dirtier than the last time he had seen him. Perhaps he had been working in the market.