Crossings

by Alex Landragin

  Finally I was ushered into a room labelled Bureau du Commissaire, a smallish office with a solitary porthole window overlooking the river and the Latin Quarter. There were shelves on three sides half-filled with folders, which two men were loading up on trolleys to transport to another location. Massu was standing, leaning over his desk. His hair was neatly combed, the homburg hanging from a stand in the corner. He didn’t look up when I came in, but gestured for me to approach while instructing the other men to leave us. Pictures of Vennet’s apartment were fanned out on the desk in front of him. It had been photographed from every possible angle. There were shots of Vennet’s body, lying fully dressed on the bed in the foetal pose in which I’d found him. There was one photograph so gruesome I had to look away: a shot of his eyeless face.

  Massu must have noticed me flinch. ‘Once seen, never forgotten,’ he said. ‘Note the minimal bleeding from the eyes. No laceration of the epidermis inside or around the sockets. Eye injuries don’t bleed much, as a rule, but there is evidence of abrasion around the neck’ – he pointed with his index finger – ‘indicating the victim’s head was immobilised. What does that tell you?’

  ‘That he was alive when his eyes were gouged?’

  ‘Precisely. The poor man was tortured.’ Massu sat down in his deskchair and began stroking his chin. ‘But why?’ I had no reply. He took a manila folder out of a drawer, opened it and began scanning its contents with a raised eyebrow, emitting a series of staccato grunts. He seemed the kind of man who was never rattled, whose mind was always turning, whose slight smile disappeared rarely. ‘Tell me, monsieur,’ he said, ‘what were you doing at the auction yesterday?’

  ‘I was interested in the Baudelaire manuscript. I’m a writer, and something of a Baudelaire scholar.’

  ‘Why did you follow Vennet afterward?’

  ‘I happened to be walking behind him after the auction and saw that he was being followed by two people, one of whom was you, of course, although I didn’t know you were a policeman. But the other one was the man he’d beaten to the prize. It seemed suspicious to me. When I saw that he was in the bookshop, I went in to warn him that he was being followed.’

  ‘After you fled the scene, Vennet took your advice and gave us the slip. So I was unable to protect him, which was why I was there in the first place. By the time I tracked him down he was already dead. So, in a way, if it wasn’t for your interference, Vennet might still be alive. Then, wonder of wonders, you turn up the following day at the scene of the crime. How does that happen?’

  ‘I didn’t murder Vennet, which is what you seem to be implying.’

  ‘I know. We checked your file. According to our records, you have lived in Paris only seven years. The origins of this crime are much older. Whether you know it or not, monsieur, you have stumbled upon one of the oldest cases of multiple homicide in the history of this marvellous city. And I believe you may be able to help us.’

  ‘I will do whatever I can.’

  Massu gave one of his little philosophical smiles. ‘Tell me, monsieur, how did you get tangled up in this mess? You shouldn’t even be in Paris.’

  ‘I’m wondering that myself.’

  ‘Have you seen the manuscript?’

  ‘Yes, yesterday at the auction.’

  ‘What did you make of it?’

  ‘Well, I only looked at it for a few minutes, but nothing I saw suggested it was a fake. The handwriting appears to be Baudelaire’s, the paper stock seems old enough.’

  ‘Have you read it?’

  ‘I didn’t get time. I skimmed over the beginning – again, nothing appeared inauthentic.’

  ‘I read it last week, at Jacquenet’s bookshop. I’d been waiting to read it for eighteen years. Let me tell you what is in it – this may interest you, not just as a scholar but as a human being. It is not a work of fiction. Baudelaire has written it as himself. It tells the story of his preparation for a transformation of the most unusual variety.’

  Just as Madeleine described, I thought to myself. Much as I wanted to hear what Massu knew, I also intuitively felt compelled to keep everything I knew about Madeleine to myself. ‘A transformation?’

  ‘Metempsychosis, monsieur – are you familiar with the term?’

  ‘Of course, the transmigration of souls after death.’

  ‘Precisely,’ said Massu. ‘Except that what Baudelaire seems to allude to in this story is a transference of souls that occurs before death.’

  ‘I see.’ Massu was studying me closely. ‘Sounds like fiction to me.’

  ‘Normally, I would tend to agree with you. But this case, which incidentally dates back at least eighteen years, blurs the lines between the real and the fictional. What do you know of the Baudelaire Society, or of its president, Madame Gabrielle Chanel?’

  I’d been rather hoping he wouldn’t mention Chanel. By doing so, he’d made it impossible to keep pretending that Madeleine’s stories were delusions. Still, I thought, better to keep all this to myself. ‘Until recently, I’d never heard of the Society,’ I replied. ‘The woman’s name rings a bell.’

  ‘Let me fill you in. The Baudelaire Society is a relic of a bygone era, when literary associations were fashionable. At its height in the 1900s, it was considered the most prestigious such association in Paris, and therefore the world. In 1923, its presidency passed to Gabrielle Chanel, a young high-society seamstress. She is now the wealthiest woman in France, and is better known as Coco. Surely you’ve heard the name?’ I nodded. Massu paused, as if weighing up what to say next. ‘Do you know what that smell is, monsieur? It is the smell of burning paper. You will have noticed, upon your arrival, a fire in the courtyard below. Currently, in the courtyards of government buildings all over Paris, paperwork is being burned. Entire archives are going up in flames. This is all the information anyone needs to gauge how the defence of the republic is proceeding. And knowing this would naturally lead you to wonder why, at a time like this, an overworked police commissioner should take such a personal interest in a case about a murdered bouquiniste. But this is no ordinary case. Vennet is the third victim I know of to have had their eyes removed when they were killed, and each time the Baudelaire manuscript was involved. The first was in 1922. I was a neighbourhood policeman assigned to assist the investigation. The victim was an antiquarian bookseller. His eye sockets were empty, his eyeballs never found. When I interviewed the widow, she mentioned that her husband had been commissioned by a new client to sell a manuscript on consignment: a previously unknown story by Baudelaire. The manuscript had vanished. The client turned out to have been the Baudelaire Society. I went to pay the Society a visit – it is headquartered in a hôtel particulier on the Île Saint-Louis. The president at the time was Aristide Artopoulos. Strange fellow – he claimed to have no recollection of the book, or of the bookseller. Eventually the suspicion of guilt fell on the bookseller’s brother-in-law, a brutal alcoholic who owed the victim some money. He was charged, found guilty and guillotined. I attended the execution – it was in the early morning, outside the prison on Boulevard Arago, and I remember thinking that the wrong man was being executed. But such is police life, and I put the matter out of my mind.

  ‘A decade passed, during which time I rose through the ranks to deputy commissioner. Shortly after New Year in 1931, a suburban policeman called in a murdered body one morning, adding that the corpse was missing its eyeballs. When I heard this, my thoughts immediately returned to the bookseller, all those years previously. The victim’s papers were still on him – he was a Belgian industrialist and notorious playboy. He owned a superb library on the subject of his beloved Belgium. He’d told his friends at the Jockey Club the evening before his death that he was in Paris to purchase, for a handsome sum, a story written in Baudelaire’s own hand during his exile in Brussels. After dinner, he’d gone to the Chabanais, a high-class brothel in the second arrondissement where he was a regular. He left the Chabanais at four in the morning but never made it back to the Hôtel George V,
where he was staying. His body was found in the Bois de Vincennes by two kids the following morning.

  ‘The story made a bit of a splash in the papers before it was hushed up. Suspicions fell on a taxi driver with a gambling problem who’d picked up our Belgian outside the brothel. But I wasn’t satisfied. I sifted through the evidence and recognised an address scribbled in his notebook – 17 Quai d’Anjou. The address of the Baudelaire Society. So I paid it another visit. By this time, Artopoulos was gone. Instead, it was presided over by a woman, one whose name was familiar to me: Coco Chanel. She’d known the man socially, she said, but knew nothing of his death other than what had been printed in the dailies.

  ‘The taxi driver was found guilty and he, too, was guillotined at dawn on Boulevard Arago, and once again I attended the execution. I was convinced that another miscarriage of justice had occurred – only I had no evidence. I decided to delve into the archives, looking for murders that had involved the gouging out of the victims’ eyes. I found several. Hippolyte Balthazar, a psychologist who worked in the military asylum at the Salpêtrière hospital, was murdered in 1917. Balthazar, it turned out, had been a prominent member of the Baudelaire Society for seventeen years. Encouraged, I looked even further back. In 1900, on a train from Nantes to Paris, Édmonde de Bressy, founder of the Baudelaire Society, and Lucien Roeg, its secretary, were both found dead in their cabins, their eyes gouged out. In the same year, Gaspard Leducq, a captain in the merchant navy, was murdered in Le Havre, eyes also removed. He had been an employee of a shipping company owned by the Artopoulos dynasty. All of these homicides remain unsolved.

  ‘Vennet’s death confirms my intuition: someone out there is killing people associated with the Baudelaire manuscript, and by removing the victims’ eyes they are doing it conspicuously, as if they want the murders to be noticed, to be connected. The common thread that links them is the Baudelaire Society. Which poses an interesting question: can a literary institution be guilty of the crime of murder?’ Massu rose from his seat and walked over to the window. The water in the river below continued its dark, restless flow. ‘That is why, monsieur, we are not holding you here as a suspect: you’ve only lived in Paris since 1933. But you may be able to help us find the culprit. Perhaps it is the other man who was tailing Vennet yesterday.’

  ‘The one in the tailored suit?’

  ‘Precisely. I’d like you to find out his connection to the Baudelaire Society. Perhaps you could pay Madame Chanel a visit.’

  ‘How do you suggest I do that?’

  ‘That is up to you. But you would be appropriately rewarded.’

  ‘I see. You want me to become an indicateur.’

  ‘A time-honoured tradition. You are at last becoming a true Parisian.’

  ‘Just as I was thinking of leaving. What’s in it for me?’

  ‘Name your price,’ said Massu.

  ‘An exit visa.’

  ‘For the right information, it can be arranged.’ His smile disappeared for an instant. ‘But the information would have to be very useful indeed.’ He went to the door and opened it, signalling it was time for me to leave. ‘You would basically have to solve the mystery on our behalf. We are very stretched, as you can see.’

  The interview was at an end. I stood and we shook hands. I was almost out the door when I remembered my notebook. It contained all the notes I’d made of Madeleine’s stories. ‘And my notebook? May I have it back?’

  ‘Ah, the notebook. For now, we shall keep it – as a security deposit, if you like. Good day, monsieur.’

  {225}

  The Baudelaire Society

  I WANDERED HOME slowly in the afternoon sun. Commissaire Massu’s story had left me in a daze. Even without referring to my notebook, it was clear that somehow his story and Madeleine’s dovetailed almost exactly – to such a degree, in fact, that they’d both asked me to run the same errand on their behalf. It seemed there would be no avoiding a rendezvous with Madame Chanel.

  In the lobby of my apartment building I ran into the concierge, Madame Barbier, shuffling envelopes.

  ‘The Germans may be coming but the bills must be paid all the same,’ she said, speaking in the old country way, rolling her r’s. She approached me with a worried look. ‘What are you still doing here? Don’t you know it’s all over?’

  I held up the copy of Le Temps I’d just bought. ‘The English are sending more troops, apparently, and the Americans may enter the war at any moment.’

  ‘Well,’ she huffed, ‘you’re quite the optimist. I don’t believe a word of it. It’s a veritable nightmare. When I think of my poor Jeannot . . .’ Her son was a conscript. She lifted a crate by her feet and carried it to the building’s entranceway, where her husband was packing their belongings onto an old Peugeot. ‘We’re going to my aunt’s place in Vichy. There’ll be no trouble there. You should leave too, if you know what’s good for you.’

  Inside my front door, the black suitcase was waiting for me like a faithful hound. But instead of picking it up and leaving, as I ought to have done, I lay down on my bed and started reading the newspaper. The headlines were upbeat, it was true, but reading in between the lines there was no denying Madame Barbier was right. The situation was worsening: Belgium routed, the French army outmanoeuvred and the British evacuating at Dunkirk. The government itself was leaving Paris for the relative safety of Tours. By concentrating on a total military victory in the north, I calculated, the Germans had delayed their arrival in Paris by a few more days. That, I figured, gave me just enough time. I wanted to get to the bottom of this affair – if there was indeed a bottom to get to. And if my plans went awry, there was always the morphine.

  The next day, I sent a letter by pneumatic tube to the Baudelaire Society on the Quai d’Anjou, signing it with Arthur’s name and apartment number.

  Paris, Wednesday, 5 June 1940

  Dear Madame Chanel,

  I recently acquired a previously unpublished work by Charles Baudelaire, a story entitled ‘The Education of a Monster’. The work is of enormous literary significance and prestige. I cannot guarantee its safekeeping in these troubled times. Given that the libraries are all closed, I would be grateful if the Baudelaire Society would consider accepting it with a view to assuring its preservation. As for obvious reasons I do not wish to send you the manuscript in the post, I am happy to bring it to the Society and give it to you in person at your earliest convenience.

  Yours, etc.

  I had no idea if Chanel had already recovered the manuscript from Vennet. Either way, I was betting she would take the bait. It wasn’t much of a plan, hardly better than a derringer without bullets, but it was all I had. I was racked by anxiety and doubt, excoriating myself for my foolishness, but once the letter was sent there was no going back. My motivations were several, each of them slight when considered alone but constituting an irrefutable argument when combined. First of all, I coveted the Baudelaire manuscript, and I figured I still had a chance of acquiring it. As a reader of crime novels, I had an interest in solving Vennet’s murder. I figured that if there was half a chance of acquiring the exit visa Massu had dangled before me, I might as well take it. But above all I wanted to verify Madeleine’s story, and visiting the Baudelaire Society was my best chance at certainty.

  The reply finally arrived Friday around noon. When I heard the familiar tinkle of the postman’s bell, I raced downstairs, found the blue envelope and tore it open: I was invited to meet Chanel at the Society headquarters the following Monday afternoon. I would have to wait another three whole days! What if the Germans were to arrive before then?

  The weekend weather was summery and joyous. I continued to head out for walks at daybreak, wisps of mist drifting through the streets and across the river. Paris, in its state of suspended animation, was lovelier than ever. On Saturday, couples ambled arm in arm along the quays, here and there fishermen cast their rods into the river, and the bouquinistes tended to their stalls. All of these scenes were tinged with nostalgia, a
s if they already belonged to the past, while I began to seriously consider, for the first time, a future beyond the here and now: leaving Paris, making my way somehow to America or Argentina, starting again, making a new life. In every such snapshot of the life to come I was not alone – Madeleine was there by my side.

  On Sunday, I woke to the sound of distant artillery fire coming from the east. All at once, the previous day’s idyll was forgotten and in the streets Parisians hauled suitcases to the nearest Métro station. I too ventured out, lumbered with notebooks and papers wrapped in string, to visit my librarian friend Georges. Weeks earlier he’d agreed to hide the book I’d been writing for so many years, a book that would now have to remain unfinished, at least for as long as the war continued. But it would survive in its hiding place, the archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale. It gives me a shiver of pleasure to know a piece of me is still there.

  On my way home, I dropped in at the Café de Flore, which was full of writers and artists who’d gathered to speculate on the latest developments, as the radio wasn’t to be trusted. I ran into Tristan Tzara, who advised me to go straight to the nearest train station. Of course, I had no intention of following his advice. Passing the Montparnasse station on the way home, I noticed Republican Guards separating men fighting for train tickets in the forecourt.