The Passing of Pascal

by Annette Moncheri

  The Passing of Pascal

  Madame’s Murder Mysteries: No. 1

  Annette Moncheri

  Contents

  A Note to the Reader

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

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  About the Author

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  A Note to the Reader

  Bonne année, dear Reader! And merci for picking up this little book!

  I wanted to let you know—at the end of this book, you’ll find an offer to receive the prequel to this series for FREE if you subscribe to my mailing list at my website. Look for the link at the back of the book!

  À bientôt!

  ~Annette

  1

  Dear delicious Reader, how shall I relate this particular histoire? It is a complicated one, true enough... but my primary concern is that it begins with murder, or at least attempted murder, and I don’t wish you to be too alarmed. You can be assured that this is, overall, a happy story that ends well.

  But don’t let me spoil the story.

  I will begin with this. It was a night like any other, right up until the unfortunate incident I alluded to a moment ago. Which is to say that it was busy—chock full of customers coming and going and meeting with their mesdames—and I was making sure that business was running as smoothly as could possibly be desired. It is a challenging thing, to run a high-class brothel such as Le Chat Rose here in the 4th Arrondissement.

  The busiest area was the vast drawing room on the ground floor, with collections of cushioned settees and armchairs set around tables, many of which were layered with thick, velvety table runners and tablecloths. Customers and mesdames occupied perhaps half the tables, with more people continually buzzing through, and the din of their conversation fought with the Chopin piece being played at the grand piano on the west side of the room.

  Young women paraded through in various states of dress and undress, some wearing enormous furs over their fashionably scanty attire as they came and went from late-night parties and other events with their customers. Colorful headdresses were all the rage at the moment, often enormous feathered ones that extended almost the width of their shoulders. The customers—wealthy men in expensive suits and bowlers or top hats—were all smiles, which was exactly what I wanted to see.

  Cigar and cigarette smoke wafted above us all but dissipated before it reached the ceiling, which rose all the way to the first floor, with a double staircase wending down and a spacious balcony at the landing. A crystal gas-light chandelier cast a warm glow over the room, along with many small lamps along the walls, which were dressed with rose-print wallpaper, a teeming assortment of gold-framed portraits, and heavy floral-print drapes that kept out prying eyes.

  Monsieur Georges, our wonderfully effective and nearly invisible night butler, was in the midst of ensuring that the household staff correctly set out the complimentary champagne and hors-d’oeuvres for our guests. The night cook, Monsieur Gachet, had spent hours in the preparation of delicate pastries and both sweet and savory tartlets. I acquired a leek and goat cheese tartlet as it passed by me—only to check its quality, of course. It tasted smoky and decadent, though its scent was in competition with the heavy, expensive parfum that hung in the air and the oak logs burning in the large fireplace on the east wall.

  I noted that Hélène Bachelet was present, as usual, although she is not one of my girls. I adore the woman. She is the sort of person who is liberated enough to spend time at a brothel while neither taking a client nor partaking of the wares herself—though I swear I’ve caught her casting a glance a time or two.

  Yes, it starts with dark-haired and mischievous Hélène, who was sitting on the stair banister with her skirt pulled up around her thighs, revealing the tops of her stockings and the clips holding them in place. I went to kiss her cheek. “Salut, Hélène.”

  She kissed me back with a “Bonsoir, Madame.” She took a drag from her strong, unfiltered Gauloise, tilted her head toward the slight young man with a cane just then entering the drawing room, and observed, “They don’t like one another a bit, do they?”

  She then inclined her head the other direction, toward the heavyset young man with a bright brow and a perennially worried look who sat like a bullfrog upon a divan. He was just then exchanging unfriendly looks with the slight man, who stepped in an affected sort of way, perhaps a limp, supported by his slender glass cane.

  “How do they even know each other? Only conversation here in the drawing room?” I asked.

  “Well, Valentin Adnet”—by which she meant the slender fellow with the cane—“once attempted to pick up the very woman whom Jean Daucourt’s father so favors. And that was, one might say, awkward, n’est-ce-pas?”

  I inclined my head in a nod and imagined what that scene might have looked like. Valentin Adnet was a regular who had settled with Anaelle de Gall, a strikingly slender woman who kept her fair hair long despite the current trends. Jean Daucourt, however, did not himself partake, but only came to collect his father from his favorite girl, Melodie Bouvier, who was the most beautiful of all the girls—and, perhaps, too aware of that fact.

  “I take it that Jean Daucourt took offense,” I observed.

  “Oh, poor Jean is always horrified and affronted by the whole thing,” Hélène declared. She swiped her fashionably short bob out of her eyes. “He’s upset because his father is still married. Jean doesn’t think married men should stray. I do keep trying to persuade him to simply join in the fun, but I suppose anything one’s old man does seems abhorrent. At any rate, that’s how their antagonism began, but I feel that one or the other of them is continually adding insult to slight and by now they fairly well despise each other.”

  “Ooh, are we talking about Jean Daucourt?” asked another voice. I turned to discover Mireille, one of our mesdames who has a tendency toward cards, setting her small, dark eyes on Jean as well. “Have you heard about the row between his father and his stepmother?”

  “No, do tell us,” Hélène said, her eyes brightening.

  “It was at L’arbre a Cannelle”—a popular and opulent restaurant—“where they had a tremendous fight. Madame Daucourt was loudly saying she couldn’t bear to hear the name Melodie Bouvier another time, and Monsieur Daucourt was telling her to hold her tongue. It was a scene.”

  Hélène looked most pleased by the bit of gossip. “Madame Daucourt must be green with envy.”

  “Oh, there’s Pascal coming in now,” said Mireille. “I’ll go tell Inés here in a moment.”

  Pascal Lemare, the steady customer for Inés Dujardin, was the sort of sturdy young man who looked more American than French, with an affable demeanor and a milk-fed complexion and a strong inclination toward rugby. He was a gentleman, however, in all the best senses, and seemed to be treating Inés the right way.

  “You know, in that jacket, I’ve just noticed he’s quite fit,” Anaelle said approvingly.

  About that time, a familiar wail sounded out from one of the bedrooms above and behind us, and I set out at once to discover what the matter was—although I suspected from the beginning what I would find.

  And indeed, sweet, pale Inés Dujardin was standing in her bedroom wailing and holding up her favorite red dress, which was fairly slashed to ribbons. And not too far down the hallway was Melodie Bouvier, the one I mentioned who is perhaps too aware of her own beauty, but with her regal
good looks currently marred by a slight smirk.

  Since no one else was yet in the hallway, I took advantage of my charme to fly silently to the side of Melodie Bouvier, where I took her arm firmly in mine.

  She did not hear me coming, of course, and she gave a most satisfactory squeak when she found me holding her arm.

  “Dear Melodie, I don’t suppose it was you who did such harm to Inés’s dress?” I asked dryly.

  Melodie recovered quickly and answered with a smug, “Dear me, did something happen to Inés’s dress? Which one?”

  I gave her a solid glare, one that had a trace of my enchantement in it. “Be kind to Inés,” I ordered, and Melodie’s face fell.

  I turned back and pressed through the crowd of girls who by then had come to discover what was the matter. At Inés’s side, I took her hand. “Dearest, don’t worry. I will buy you another exactly the same. Pay it no mind.”

  Inés sniffled, but managed a watery smile and allowed me to hug her. Then her face contorted, and she announced, “I hate that awful cow. I wish she would go... far away.”

  I raised an eyebrow, amused. Inés Dujardin was our newest fille de joie, and one so innocent that I was still not convinced that she understood what her job actually entailed, but then again, if she could earn her keep by holding hands with young men, it was so much the better. And for delicate, sweet, innocent Inés to wish for her tormentor to “go far away” was a severe curse.

  I rang the bell, and when Monsieur Georges came, I gave him the strictest instructions to find the same tailor who had made the original and to remake it all over again as quickly as possible.

  The difficulty with running a brothel, I am convinced, is that it is full of women. Take no offense, delicious Reader, for you know exactly what I mean. Hardly a day can pass without jealousy or spite of some sort. Half my job is maintaining a smoothly running business, and the other half is keeping the peace. It’s a good thing that I have an immortal sense of patience and my otherworldly charme.

  Ah. Of course, I have not yet told you about myself. But I don’t wish to go on at great length about it. I will only let you in on my greatest secret: I do require a certain source of sustenance which most people hold dear, but with my powers, they will turn it over to me gladly and then go on their way with a smile and a quickly vanishing memory of the event.

  It is true also that I have certain other strengths, such as the ability to shapechange and to hear, see, and pick up scents at a distance. But of course I also have certain weaknesses. I opened a brothel in part because it allows me to work through the night and sleep during the day, for my susceptibility to sunlight is exactly what you might expect.

  Curiously, I find no prohibition on crossing the threshold of another’s home, though I have heard of such supposed limitations. Perhaps it is an accident of my time and place—high-society people allow any visitor entrance to their drawing rooms and often entertain from their beds, and so the boundary between private and public may be blurred.

  That aside, my greatest weakness, my greatest difficulty, is that I cannot cross running water. In and of itself, perhaps this would be not so great a difficulty, but whoever made me what I am—and I have no memory of that event nor of anything that came before it—made me while we were on the Île Saint-Louis, which, as you may know, is a tiny island at the very center of Paris. Because it is surrounded by the moving waters of the Seine, the Île Saint-Louis must remain my exclusive home for all of time to come.

  It does raise the question of whence my forebear came or went after that—as I have never seen or heard of him again, and presuming he possesses my same weaknesses, one would think that he is also a prisoner here. But that is a question for another day.

  The Île is bisected by only one major street and composes perhaps twelve city blocks in its entirety, and only a few thousand people live and work here. Many others, of course, pass through on a regular basis, as we are at the city’s center, but I shall never go beyond it.

  But I must say that so far I have not much minded. As a young one, I did. I used to dip my toes in the Seine of a summer night and look wistfully to the other shore—to the entire rest of the world—so tantalizingly close and yet forever so far away. But I have made my peace with it now.

  And that is quite enough about me!

  On my way out of Inés’s room, I found Anaelle lingering at the large landing at the end of the hallway that looked out over the vast drawing room. Her fair hair was like a sun’s rays coming down along her bare shoulders. To my dismay, I heard her calling down into the drawing room, “Monsieur Ludovic Daucourt! Your lady is a horrible chienne!” To which, even more to my dismay, I heard scattered applause from the guests gathered below.

  I quickly drew up to her and gave her a pointed look.

  “Well, she is,” Anaelle insisted. “Although I don’t actually see Monsieur Daucourt down there. Has he not come yet?”

  “I won’t have you upsetting the customers,” I said gently, smoothing her hair behind her ears. “You know it’s bad for business.”

  “I don’t see why you don’t do something about that Melodie Bouvier,” Anaelle said. “No one can stand her. Why don’t you get rid of her?”

  “The customers like her just fine,” I said.

  “And that’s all that matters to you? Profit?”

  “If that were so, I wouldn’t keep Safia around, now would I?” I asked reprovingly.

  Safia was mad, the poor dear, though in a sweet and harmless sort of way.

  “Yes, you couldn’t bear to turn her out into the streets, could you?” Anaelle asked, with a hint of mocking in her tone.

  “Never,” I said. “We will go on taking care of her and promising her she’ll have a customer any moment. It gives her hope and a reason to get up and make herself beautiful every day.” In reality, of course, our customers knew Safia was not suitable to keep company these days. Someday, when she is too far gone, I shall give her my warm embrace and usher her painlessly into that long sleep. I mean it to be a kindness, dear Reader, and I do hope you understand.

  “Shouldn’t Monsieur Adnet be on his way up to you?” I asked Anaelle. “I saw him coming in even before Melodie had her little prank, so I thought he would have found you by now.”

  “Yes, I don’t know what he’s doing,” Anaelle answered crossly. She was often cross—I believe because she was always hungry. The girl was so thin it hurt to look at, at least to my eyes, but Valentin Adnet saw what he wanted in her and that was enough.

  Monsieur Georges found me at the landing to inform me that a new guest visiting from Brussels wanted a champagne bath with two girls in the copper bathtub, for which I granted permission, and to report that the stereoscope set which guests could use to view photos of the mesdames on offer seemed to have gone missing again, which I acknowledged with a sigh, and I gave him permission to request the manufacture of another set.

  On my way down the stairs, Hélène waved to me from her perch where she still sat on the banister, now eating an apple she had procured from someone. She motioned me close, her eyes sparkling, and I leaned close to her red-painted lips.

  “Look, l’ancienne has an admirer,” she whispered, and she gestured across the way.

  Indeed, I was delighted to see that our septuagenarian “girl,” Dorothée, was luxuriating in the attentions of a gentleman who was likely two decades older even than her. When Dorothée first came to apply at Le Chat Rose, I thought to myself that she had kept herself up nicely and one is always a younger woman than someone if you look hard enough, and indeed, the number of elderly gentlemen who dropped by had gone up dramatically after l’ancienne took up residence.

  The old man gave Dorothée a broad smile and kissed her hand. Then he helped her up, and they tottered off together toward one of the rooms on the ground floor.

  “That’s darling,” I commented.

  “What in the world are they going to do between bedsheets?” asked another voice. It was Inés Dujardi
n again. She was adorably wide-eyed. “I mean, surely they don’t actually….”

  The way she trailed off uncertainly, I still wondered whether she knew what “actually” she was referring to. “But isn’t it lovely to know we’ll still be having fun at that age?” I asked wickedly.

  Inés’s eyes couldn’t have been any wider, and I stifled a laugh and took pity on the poor dear. “Or perhaps they only cuddle.”

  “Ah.” Inés looked immensely relieved at the suggestion.

  “Melodie shouldn’t have done that to you, with your dress,” the slender Anaelle declared to Inés.

  The young waif shrugged lightly. “Oh, I know. She’s rotten.”

  “Are you in love with Pascal?” Anaelle asked. “It looks that way.”

  “Oh!” Inés said, and she laughed, blushing prettily. “I don’t know even what being in love is, really.” But her eyes shone, and I smiled indulgently at her.

  “Where is Pascal, anyway?” Anaelle mused as she looked out over the drawing room. “He came in a few moments ago. We all commented on it.”

  Hélène passed out cigarettes and nodded to Anaelle as she did so. “How in the world do you stay so thin?” she asked admiringly. “You must have a twenty-inch waist.”

  “Twenty-two inches,” Anaelle declared morosely. “I only wish it were twenty.”

  And it was then that we all heard the full-throated scream of terror coming from the courtyard outside.

  2

  It took all my self-control not to run with my superhuman speed or to shift into a bat and fly down to the source of the scream. I knew it was one of my girls, and I must admit to being a bit too overprotective of them, but I also must hide my… eccentricities. Instead, just like all the rest, I had to carefully descend the staircase in high heels.