The Curse of the Grand Guignol

by Anna Lord

  The Countess was livid, though outwardly she appeared calm.

  “After you collect the marionettes I want you to rent a small room in a boarding house and leave the trunk there. Tell the landlady you will be taking the room for four days.”

  Fedir never questioned the strange ways of his mistress. He gave a nod and turned to go.

  “One more thing,” she called. “I want to know about rag and bone men. I do not wish you to question Mahmoud on this matter. I would like you to find out as much as you can from whatever source is available. I want to know when they work, how they work, exactly what they do, and so forth. Be discrete.”

  Our two sleuths decided to pay a visit to Café Bistro before going to Salpetriere even though it was miles out of their way.

  Dr Watson was even more incensed than the Countess at the scurrilous treatment meted out to the French inspector. Satire could be a force for good when it was deployed against the shameless in society, the hypocrites, the liars, the amoral and the immoral. But when it was deployed against those who fought to uphold truth and justice it made his blood boil. He was now absolutely committed to doing all in his power in catching the killer and restoring the reputation of Inspector de Guise.

  The seedy café was ripe with man-sweat and horse-shit. It was packed to the rafters, and though most of the anarchists had been downing shots of vodka for a couple of hours they still recognized an attractive woman when they saw one, and when that woman spoke fluent Ukrainian it intrigued them enough to clear a path to the bar.

  “Samohonka,” she said loudly. “Dva stakane. My comrade will pay.” She indicated Dr Watson, who duly slapped some coins on the greasy zinc countertop.

  There is no such thing as a Ukrainian who cannot stomach vodka and Fedir had warned his mistress of the fire-power of the homemade brew.

  “Nazdorovya,” she cried as she tossed it back and threw her glass on the floor for good measure. It shattered into a dozen pieces and what was left of it she ground to smithereens using the heel of her ankle boot.

  Dr Watson decided sipping slowly was the better way to go. “I might as well be drinking sulfuric acid,” he muttered to himself as his tongue disintegrated.

  There was nothing for it, decided the Countess. Her companion would soon become the butt of cruel jibes. She feigned being jostled and knocked into him. He spilled his glass all over the man standing beside him. It turned out to be Laszlo minus the purple beret and orange pussy bow. The dirty paint-smock didn’t seem to suffer any damage from the vodka bath and Laszlo was in a fearfully good mood. He was the new Daumier, the artist of several of the masterpieces wallpapering the cafe and was being regaled with more fanfare than Michelangelo upon completion of the Sistine Chapel. He slapped Dr Watson on the back in the manner of an old comrade and offered to buy him a drink. The doctor insisted on doing the buying and made sure to get himself a glass of vinegar that was being passed off as burgundy but was a far better alternative to vitriolic acid.

  “What brings you here?” said Laszlo cheerfully. “Santé!”

  “I’m an art lover, as you know, and I heard about the excellent drawings. Santé! Which ones are yours?”

  Laszlo elbowed his way to the other side of the café, pulling the doctor by the sleeve. “This one,” he said proudly. “And that one. And the one over there.”

  Dr Watson beamed his hypocritical approval. “Marvellous!” he managed without a trace of sarcasm. “Does your friend Salvador have any drawings on display?”

  Laszlo laughed risibly. “Salvador cannot draw to save himself! He will always be a dauber!”

  “He’s not here celebrating your success?”

  “He is sleeping in a gutter somewhere. Drunk from the money he got from your rich friend. Is she here with you?”

  Dr Watson looked around the alcoholic field of dipping heads. It was like a torpid field of nodding sunflowers, turning this way to the sun, and that way to the sun – so many suns it was blinding. “Yes, she’s chatting to that big blond man wielding the hammer and sickle.”

  “That’s Klaus. He’s the owner of the café, well, him and his two brothers, Kaspar and Karl. They will lead the revolution when it comes.”

  “Vive la France!” said Dr Watson dryly, draining his vinegar and trying not to wince.

  “Vive la France!” shouted Laszlo.

  And the echo went up: “Vive la France!”

  Someone started singing The Marseillaise and that was it for the next ten minutes.

  Dr Watson decided to fight his way back to the Countess. She was drinking something that resembled sump oil from a chipped cup.

  “Have you tried the burgundy?” he said pleasantly out of the side of his mouth.

  She smiled back. “I believe it was a good year for vinegar.”

  “And cast iron stomachs. Have you noticed the trapeze above the bar?”

  “How unfortunate that there is no saltimbanque to give us a demonstration.”

  “Yes, it would be nice to finally meet the artiste.”

  “Don’t look now – but someone just came in. Pas de gaffe.”

  Casually, he looked around, pretending to be studying the caricatures. Good grief! They had both assumed Fedir would be busy collecting the marionettes. They did not expect to run into him in the café mid-morning.

  “Should we leave now?” he whispered urgently.

  “It will look suspicious. Order another drink.”

  Easy for her to say! She’d never been wounded in the Anglo-Afghan War and suffered from enteric fever. His stomach hadn’t been the same since Maiwand. He could feel a bout of dysentery coming on and decided to buy a vodka shot for Laszlo instead. He was scooping up the greasy glass when someone bumped him. He thought it might be deliberate and he knew it wasn’t the Countess.

  “Sorry, comrade,” said a voice he recognized without even looking.

  “No harm done, old chap.”

  He’d handled that well, he thought, as he presented Laszlo with the vodka and congratulated the new Daumier yet again on his marvellous creations. Laszlo’s crowd were decrying the Paris Fair, likening it to the financial disaster of the Panama Affair orchestrated by the filthy rich Jews. Someone mentioned the word Potemkin and that sent everyone into a fresh lather of violent condemnation.

  Dr Watson had stomached enough. He was on his way back to the Countess when he saw that Fedir had been shirt-fronted by one of the Blonds behind the bar. There was the glint of a sickle and you could have scythed the shitty air with it.

  “Keep your beady eyes and hands off Kiki or you’ll end up like one of those puppets!”

  “Vive la France!” shouted the Countess, slapping a ten franc note on the counter. “The vodka is on me, comrades!”

  Everyone rushed for the bar as they rushed for the exit.

  Threat averted, Fedir stayed to drink to the success of the revolution.

  “Do you think it was safe to leave him there?”

  Dr Watson and the Countess were hurrying to the end of the rue where their landau was waiting; painted canvas strapped to the roof with no threat of rain.

  “Fedir can take care of himself,” she replied confidently.

  “Those caricatures were obscene and deplorable.”

  “They reminded me of the posters for the Grand Guignol.”

  “Mmm, I wonder if my friend Laszlo did those too. It might be worth checking. What do you think of the theory that Kiki is the one who passes the scripts to the Humboldts who then commit the murders? The brother who issued that threat against Fedir didn’t mince words. Which brother was it?”

  “The one called Kaspar. But what is Kiki’s motive?”

  “Hmm, that hoary old chestnut.”

  They took the corner and stopped in their tracks.

  “Where’s our carriage?” he said, looking vacant. “It was this corner was it not? Corner of rue des Trois-Frères and rue Chappe?”

  “Yes,” she agreed, equally perplexed. “I distinctly remember the laundry ha
nging out of the windows but I don’t recall this pile of broken furniture in the middle of the street.”

  Paris had been completely rebuilt in the last few decades by Haussmann, who had been granted authority to purchase entire streets, demolish the buildings and erect grand new boulevards. Gone were the ramshackle medieval slums, the narrow crooked streets and the dark, sunless alleys that were a gift to thieves and murderers and revolutionaries. Rue Bonaparte had been an early beneficiary of his enterprise.

  But Montmartre had been excluded from the glorious reconstruction, and now that construction had turned to the Champs de Mars and the Trocadero in preparation for the Paris Fair it was even less likely to experience a renaissance, so what was all this discarded furniture doing in the street?

  “Let’s walk back to Boulevard de Clichy,” she suggested.

  They began to retrace their steps and had not gone far when the landau came into view. The carriage had been forced to move on when angry residents began building a barricade. It signalled a possible battle with the army or the police – a common tactic of communards during the revolution. And so inflamed were feelings against the army following the gross miscarriage of justice orchestrated against Dreyfus there was talk of an uprising.

  Anti-Dreyfusards, not to be outdone, had started building their own barricade at the opposite end of the street. The incompetence of the police following the Marionette Murders, as the five murders were now known, only added fuel to the fire. Effigies of Inspector de Guise and the Director General of the Sûreté National were being strung up on lamp-posts at every street corner.

  It was not until they had crossed the Seine that Dr Watson returned to the subject at hand. “What if Kiki wants to revenge herself on Monsieur Davidov? That would be motive enough to ruin him, and the three brothers would be happy to oblige.”

  The Countess nodded. “Yes, they would do anything for her, but why those particular victims?”

  “The four respectable men may have wronged her in some way. She would not be the first pretty circus performer who granted sexual favours to older men. They may have been lured by her charm for the purpose of blackmail and then refused to pay up.”

  “And Madame Hertzinger?”

  “She may have wronged the pretty performer in some way that we are unaware.”

  “You’re theory makes sense, mon ami, but we must tread carefully. Kiki managed to avoid the Marquise de Merimont’s salonniere the other night so we haven’t really spoken to her. I wonder if we shouldn’t pay the theatre another visit.”

  “I couldn’t stomach another show.”

  “If you feel that way I could go alone. I want to speak to the others too. I hardly spoke to Davidov at the party. He couldn’t focus on anything except the playwright. Which reminds me – we simply must go to a daytime rehearsal. We have to discover what the next murder will involve.”

  “There are three short plays,” he reminded. “How do we know which one the murderer will choose to replicate?”

  “Some advance notice is better than none.”

  “Very well,” he conceded.

  He was both surprised and pleased he didn’t have to argue his case regarding Mademoiselle Kiki. He was loath to condemn the talented young actress but she did live with Raoul Crespigny on the peniche so she had advance notice about the scripts, she was in on all the rehearsals, and she had those three blond thugs wrapped around her little finger.

  “Potemkin?” he said quizzically, moving on to something that had been puzzling him since their recent visit to the cafe. “What is it?”

  “Prince Potemkin was the name of one of Catherine the Great’s lovers, some say her actual husband. When she travelled to Ukraine to see how he had improved the region he was governing, he erected false facades of houses to give the impression of numerous dwellings and great prosperity. A Potemkin village is one that is merely for show.”

  “Do you think the Paris Fair is a Potemkin village?”

  “It is being built for show but at least the buildings are real. It is being built to bring nations together, not simply to impress one person. There are more differences than similarities.”

  “Do you think it will bankrupt France?”

  “Nations are financing their own displays but there is always the possibility of over-reaching oneself.”

  “There was a lot of violent debate going on at the café about the cost to the nation. A lot of the anger seemed justified.”

  “The poor and oppressed have always had a valid grievance. But when the lunatics take over, the madness begins, and the suffering is universal.”

  “So we limit the suffering to the poor and oppressed? Is that the best we can do? ”

  “If I give all my wealth away, if all the wealth in the world is shared equally among everyone, what sort of world will we have after ten or twenty or thirty years? Will we have equality and harmony and universal happiness, or will we back to where we are now? I don’t have an answer.”

  “We work to change laws. We work towards better education, jobs, housing, fair wages, and we do it without violent revolution.”

  “I know you’re right, but a part of me believes that sometimes violent revolution is the only way to bring about change.”

  Chapter 10 - Salpetriere

  Gunpowder. Salt-peter. Salpetre. Salpetriere.

  Who could have imagined that a gunpowder factory would one day become a hospital? The inmates did. They imagined it self-destructing inside their heads every night. They pictured it blowing sky-high, raining fire and brimstone on the heads of the doctors and nurses, the sick and the mad, the doomed and the damned. They pictured it burning hotter than the fires of Hades. They pictured it destroying Pain. And that bane of all existence - Hope.

  They danced on its grave. And they sang.

  “It has colour and movement,” pronounced Monsignor Delgardo when the Countess presented him with the painting. “Where did you say you purchased it?”

  “Galerie soixante-six.”

  He recognized the name. “Ah, the Splattereurs.”

  “I thought you might find a home for it in the hospital to cheer the patients up.”

  “I thought the asylum might be the best place for it,” said Dr Watson dryly.

  Monsignor Delgardo placed the large canvas vertically on a table where it leaned against the wall of his office. He stood back to study it in more detail. “I detect a sardonic note, doctor?”

  “I cannot pretend to like it.”

  “The formless splatters are not too unpleasing,” offered the Countess, trying to say something positive. “You can make of them whatever you want.”

  “Now! There you have it!” said the Monsignor enthusiastically. “I have been thinking of using splatters in my assessment of megalomania. Da Vinci and Botticelli thought that ink blots spoke volumes about creativity and imagination. Dr Binet has been experimenting with ink blots for some time, using them to assess thought disorder and mental illness. Some people who find it difficult to express how they are feeling will reveal a lot about their innermost emotions when describing ink blots because they regard them as removed from themselves. It is a fascinating area of study. Dr Kerner even published a book of poems related to ink blots which stirred quite a lot of interest among doctors of psychology. It reminded me of that party game Gobolinks.”

  “Gobolinks?” said Dr Watson dubiously, wondering if these so-called psychologists weren’t madder than the patients they professed to treat. “Never heard of it.”

  “It was popular in my country when I was a young man. Everyone was mad for it. A month would not pass that I did not receive an invitation to a Gobolinks party. Eventually, like all those things, it fell victim to its own popularity.”

  “Oh, yes, I remember it now,” said the Countess. “We played it at finishing school in Switzerland. We had a Gobolinks Day where everyone dressed up in symmetrical costumes which they cobbled together on the day from a costume box. We all made symmetrical ink blot patterns o
n paper and had to write a short poem about one of our creations. Prizes were awarded for best blot, best poem, best costume, and there was a booby prize that made everyone laugh.”

  “Yes, that’s it,” smiled Monsignor Delgardo. “The costumes had to be symmetrical and the more macabre the better. That was another reason Gobolinks parties eventually lost favour. It became too hard to think up new costumes all the time. I might hang the painting in my office, exactly where it is now, just above that table. Yes, I will use it in my research.” He turned to the doctor. “What do you think your colleague, Sherlock Holmes, would have made of it?”

  “A crime against art,” the doctor replied, tongue-in-cheek.

  “Ah, see, now, that off-hand response speaks volumes about Mr Holmes’s megalomania.”

  “Megalomania?” said the Countess. “Sherlock Holmes?”

  “Yes,” said the doctor, shifting his gaze from the ridiculous canvas to his sometimes megalomaniac but never ridiculous female counterpart. “Monsignor Delgardo believes my old colleague, Sherlock Holmes, may suffer from megalomania.”

  “Well, I have never met the man,” she said truthfully, “but if by megalomania you mean an unnatural passion for dominance driven by an inflated sense of self-esteem then quite so, quite so, and quite rightly we could add any great man. History honours the megalomaniacs. What do you see in the splatter, Monsignor Delgardo?”