A Silver Ring in the Ear

by Tony Duvert

  Marc frowned furiously and turned his head away. He was crying.

  Sorel missed that, and attributed the movement to the pride of the beautiful little boy-actor.

  “Look, madam, you yourself appeared convinced that your grand-son had spoken seriously! I no longer understand.”

  He received no response.

  “Marc, I’ll ask you just one question,” he said. “Did you see your dead grandfather, yes or no?”

  “You’re bothering me, I didn’t see him,” growled the boy. “I didn’t see him!”

  Oriane Brisset saw Marc’s tears and rushed over to him, crying out:

  “Inspector! I was assured that the police would be courteous. This scene… your insistence… shocks me deeply. I implore you to stop torturing this boy! I am really…”

  Julien Sorel beat a retreat towards Peter and his kitchen.

  VI

  A gigantic silhouette emerged from the shade. The man was dressed in black trousers and a black vest that showed the shape of his powerful muscles. He wore a hood that revealed two burning eyes and an imperious mouth.

  “Go down in front of me. Not a word.”

  Julien Sorel obeyed the stranger.

  They went down the stairs that led to the cellars of the flats.

  “Keep going. Hurry up.”

  The man in black hit Sorel in the kidneys, and the inspector groaned. They reached a cul-de-sac illuminated by an inspection lamp hanging from a nail. The giant turned Sorel’s face to the wall, and attached him crosswise to the pipes of the central heating.

  Then in a bestial way he tore off the young inspector’s clothing and brutally sodomised him. His cock was enormous, hard as a bludgeon, and as long as a bicycle-pump.

  “Insult me,” the inspector suddenly muttered.

  “Dash it, I forgot!” said Gabriel. “Excuse me!… Heap of shit! Excrement! Dirty fuckable cop! I’m going to have your guts for dinner.”

  He was not lying. He fucked so violently that his victim, tossed against the wall, became semiconscious and had a face covered with blood.

  “Is your ear better?” he asked Julien gayly after they had gone up to their flat again.

  “I don’t know,” said Sorel. “I’m bleeding from the nose now, aren’t I?”

  “Wait a bit, let’s see. No, it’s not a nostril. It’s the end that’s scratched.”

  “I did tell you to use the cement wall!” Julien complained. “Not that one! It’s bad, with all those old stones.”

  “All right, but it has no pipes to tie you to. Did I go in too hard?”

  “You always go in too hard. That’s why I’m so keen on you, my own tough guy!” said the inspector. “You’re in a good mood to-day, aren’t you?”

  “Well yes, get changed and I’ll tell you later.”

  “Shit, the right eyebrow’s deep. Completely shattered! It’s going to swell up, eh?”

  “You’ll look your usual self. I’ve made a semolina cake, are you pleased?”

  “… with caramel?”

  “Certainly, yes.”

  “How you pamper your big old ducky,” sighed Inspector Sorel as he wiped the spattered blood from the basin.

  He dressed the wounds on his face, combed his hair, applied a little scent, slipped into a dressing gown in pink silk, cyclist style (tour of Italy), and rejoined Gabriel in the living room. They drank an Alexandra made with bourbon: Julien loved chocolate.

  “I’ve been offered a job as a killer,” Gabriel de Lorsange said suddenly,” modest but radiant.

  Sorel shrugged his shoulders gently.

  “Big as you are, it’s dangerous. You’d be spotted at once. A real suicide, Gaby.”

  Gabriel didn’t reply. He had thought about it, but didn’t care.

  “How much are you being paid?” Julien continued.

  “Not a lot,” confessed Gabriel.

  “Less than five thousand?…”

  “No. I’m a beginner. Three thousand.”

  “Three thousand per hit?” asked Sorel.

  “Ah! No, nothing like that. For a cop, you’re really ignorant, Juju. No! Three thousand per month. And… four… four operations.”

  “Seven hundred and fifty francs per hit,” calculated Sorel, concerned. “You’re nuts, Gaby.”

  “They’re using me, I know. But it’ll be regular. It will come in every month, you understand.”

  Sorel understood, more than anything, that his police salary was too small to keep a childless couple. Gabriel was getting bored in the house: the housekeeping, the cooking, Julien’s clothing that he had to repair in the daytime and rip apart in the evening, the letters from indignant mothers, a tiny amount of pocket-money – at twenty, that was not a life.

  Three thousand francs more, for four working appearances per month. A passionate sort of work, creative, rich with the unexpected, such as youths love. Gabriel was right.

  “You know people, you’ll help me,” added Lorsange.

  “The criminal classes? No, that’s not my field,” said Sorel. “I get sent to see the bourgeois. Never in my life have I seen a professional criminal. Gaby, I swear to you that it’s too dangerous.”

  “What should I do then? I’m tired of copying letters. Look at me: twelve and a half stone, six feet three plus twelve and a half inches! And how do I pass my time? Dear chief editor. All mothers will understand me…”

  Sorel burst out laughing: one bandage came unstuck, and the wound on his eye-brow started bleeding again.

  “Go on the game,” he said. “You will get your three thousand francs. But per day. Per day, Gaby.”

  “It’s already been discussed,” said Gabriel, annoyed. “You’re well aware that I don’t like men.”

  “And American women?…”

  “I don’t like women either. Nor even old crooks. The people I like… the people I like, Juju, don’t have a penny.”

  “Yes. Necessarily,” said Sorel, crestfallen. “Necessarily they don’t have a penny.”

  Police Superintendent Rênal, dressed in a white night-shirt and a chestnut-coloured angora bed-jacket, was wedged among her hefty pillows.

  She contemplated her room, papered with blue velvet layette, meticulously arranged. Her need of order and her mistrust of logic were expressed in one single mania: authority. She imposed it on her furniture as she did on her fellow workers. Everything at her place seemed pinned down: even her bed-linen.

  In these conditions she passionately enjoyed comfort and softness, and she was charming towards others. Others who were pinned down.

  Her Regency bed-side table provided her, in the golden light of a parchment lamp mounted on a large Chinese vase, with her habitual insomniac delights: first-class little chocolates, a tiny silver plate holding a small carafe of cognac and a doll’s glass, cotton-sticks for the ears, and volume XVII of a bound series devoted to the concentration camps.

  She had received it by post to-day. The volume was entitled The Little Jewess and the Doctor. The dust-jacket depicted a little girl, only just become woman, whose very short skirt had been ripped. Behind her, a nazi with a riding-whip, without a cap. He was blond, in a passion, buckled up, young, frightening and handsome. His dark designs were evident, and a bright yellow band, printed over the image, announced their success: 300,000 copies, it affirmed.

  This historical document, the chocolates, and the cognac, did not help Madam Rênal to sleep. The Brisset affair was pre-occupying her. For her own private reasons, which were not those of a Sorel.

  Point one. The higher-ups had decided against influencing the juristic doctors. They had found no poison. They had concluded upon criminal strangulation.

  So Brisset was not important enough for faking: the compromising documents had been recovered, traces had been covered, the press had been misled or gagged, that was enough. Justice could take its course. With circumspection, certainly: but freely. This added responsability gave rise to much anguish and pride within Madam Rênal.

  Point two. She
should have received directives, explanations, confidences. Nothing had come. This freedom which delighted her, had on the whole been thrown to her like a broom to a slattern. Go on, my girl, rub, scrub, clean.

  Or was it only an impression, dictated to her by an over-sensitive self-love? The continuation of the investigation would clarify at least that, even if it were to obscure all the rest.

  A comforting view, all things considered. And Superintendent Rênal smiled in satisfaction. She didn’t smoke in bed. She ate a golden lozenge. She thought that a mouthful of cognac would be delicious to follow. She drank gently, mixing in her mouth the chocolate and the alcohol, then put down her tiny glass and took a breath through her nostrils. She fell back against her pillows with such force that the floor groaned. Her mouth full of sugar, she opened The Little Jewess and the Doctor.

  That same evening, Marc was languishing in his room. He had been sent there to sleep; people had come to tuck him in and kiss him. Nice enough, but he wasn’t sleepy. After the women had left, he got up.

  The room, conceived and decorated by his filthy-rich grandmother Oriane Brisset, was much more luxurious than that of Superintendent Rênal: but he was not old enough to take pleasure in that, and he thought it not colourful enough.

  In front of a great round mirror, with a frame in white lacquered crackled wood, he observed his figure. He had attached his silver ring to his ear and combed his hair again. He liked the way it shone.

  There were not many boys as beautiful as him! Not many girls either, which went without saying. Even so, Marc was vexed that the man had not complimented him. Must be a thoroughly odd fellow. Men’s clothing didn’t suit him.

  Suddenly Marc pulled down his pyjama pants. The mirror was too high, and he saw nothing new. Then he took off his vest as well. But there was nothing interesting under that. He pulled a chair in front of the mirror and stood up on the seat.

  There, he saw the interesting parts. Everything! Except his head and his feet. He lowered his head: his face came forward, like that of a giraffe quenching its thirst, leaning over in the mirror image. The silver ring moved gently on the giraffe’s ear, and gave flashes of gold, due to a lamp. Marc smiled at himself, and then his body abruptly drew back and he straightened up.

  “Dirty boy!” he shouted.

  VII

  “Mr. Sorel, how do you assess the initial results of your investigation?” asked Superintendent Rênal.

  This morning she had in her eyes two corners of yellow matter, dried and angular. Her eyelids were pinched from bad sleep: but she seemed to be in a friendly mood.

  “The results of my investigation?” asked Sorel, ironically. “Blanks, to be precise. Or rather, there was one. Just one.”

  “Yes?…”

  “I discovered that I was making an investigation that is just worthless. It’s a conclusion that has some value, does it not.”

  “You exaggerate, Sorel,” said the superintendent. “Or rather you are not really aware of the situation. Your situation, my boy. At your age, at your grade, one already has many opportunities to… play a role, even if a modest one, in a serious case. What more could you hope for?”

  “Madam!” protested Sorel. “I’m not complaining about not being the boss! I’m subservient, and I’m not ashamed of that. But those people don’t even submit to being interrogated! They laugh in my face! They treat me like a child! They tell me one thing, and then the opposite. They are aware that the investigation is of no importance, they make fun of my job. Including the servant.”

  “Ah! yes, that Englishman, that… Peter, am I right?” said Madam Rênal.

  Her eye-problem was starting to irritate her, and she decided to use a discrete fingernail to scratch those things.

  “Peter, yes. And finally, madam, do you want a killer, yes or no?”

  “There I will be explicit, inspector: I do need one.”

  “In the Brisset family?”

  Relieved, the superintendent raised her eye-brows.

  “Not necessarily! Don’t talk as though we’re the ones doing the choosing!… I have my preferences, it’s true. But don’t take that as an order. Remember that you have to find a culprit, Sorel.”

  The inspector pulled a funny face:

  “That won’t be easy, if you don’t tell me who.”

  Madam Rênal smiled guardedly:

  “Look, my boy, I mean well, and I only want to help you. Do you have an idea?…”

  “Frankly,” said Sorel, “I plump for the little kid. Some kind of accident with the shoe-lace. A game that went bad because the grandfather was cardiac, to be exact. Don’t you think that that would be an elegant kind of solution?”

  The superintendent looked at Sorel fondly: that is to say with a furious contempt that would have struck down three thousand million flies in the wink of an eye, and made of them a great flabby black paste.

  “I’ve already told you that I don’t like that, my boy. Leave that child in peace. Besides, that gives a fabricated impression. The theory of an accident within the family, the two innocent little hands… We wouldn’t be believed. No, no, Sorel: find me a decent culprit. An adult.”

  “But… the real one, then?”

  “From bad to worse, Mr. Sorel!” sneered the superintendent. “I’m telling you, a plausible culprit. It will be for a court to decide whether he really killed or not. That’s not your job. You will propose; and the jury will dispose.”

  “Yes, I see,” murmured Sorel, to whom his profession seemed more complicated than ever.

  “So, with all these suspects, you haven’t yet found one whom the court could easily acquit?” Madam Rênal continued, with false astonishment and jovially.

  “No. I tell you again that apart from Marc… His manner made a big impression on me. He’s a misfit. A spoiled child. He’s sick. A mental case, a neurotic capable of anything!… And he has an air of intelligence that is very disagreeable.”

  “There’s a shortcoming that nobody would take exception to in you,” said the superintendent. “You seem to hate him, the poor little mite!”

  “I… I don’t like boys who indulge in… Well, Madam, if you knew that house…”

  “But I do know it a little, imagine that! I can even spare you fifty years of investigation. Oriane and I were school friends.”

  “Madam Brisset and you?” repeated Inspector Sorel, surprised.

  “Yes indeed. Later I was also a patient of her husband. I had a cold.”

  “Ah! He treated colds at that period.”

  “Period yourself, dear boy, I’m not a hundred! No, Professor Brisset didn’t treat colds. It’s a fashion of speaking. You yourself have never consulted a psychiatrist, Sorel?”

  The inspector was silent.

  “A bad cold too, probably,” commented Madam Rênal.

  “But,” the inspector went on, “your treatment, was that a long time ago?”

  “Are you interrogating me? Me?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “Look in the professor’s appointment books, Sorel. You need practice, don’t lose this chance.”

  “That won’t tell me whether you were recently at the Brisset’s house,” Sorel remarked. “As a friend, of course.”

  “More or less, more or less,” sang the superintendent softly. “You’re a shrewd one, I’m giving you a supplementary suspect! All things considered, I could indeed be the one who killed Professor Brisset, with the lace of my tennis shoe. At his age, men are satyrs, they cling with podgy fingers: and I, I, Sorel, I’m as frigid as a box of Ronron.”

  The inspector smiled awkwardly. These bizarre confidences of Madam Rênal disturbed him. And what new familiarity! The big boss must have some ulterior motive: but what?

  “You’re very kind, madam,” said the inspector in the end. “I don’t know how to thank you for having responded. If I am not wrong, I can now really look for the culprit. Really. Even if it is you.”

  Superintendent Rênal smiled mysteriously. She fiddled with
her meerschaum behind her filing-cabinet: and, with a rather disdainful movement of her chin, indicated to Sorel that he should leave.

  VIII

  “I thank you for seeing me, Doctor,” said Sorel humbly.

  “Oh not at all,” said Dr. Rousseau, “this is a terrible story. The foremost among French neuropsychiatrists murdered! Murdered. Inspector, for me it is as though some one had killed my father.”

  “I understand,” said Sorel. “I would like to reconstitute with you the evening when you discovered… Professor Brisset’s body.”

  “Of course,” said Rousseau.

  He took Sorel’s elbow:

  “Follow me! My office is down here, right at the end. We’ll have to walk a little way.”

  They went along a long corridor lined with white tiles, and without doors or windows.

  “I’ll have the monkeys soon!” exclaimed Rousseau, who continued to guide the inspector by the elbow.

  “Monkeys?”

  “Chimpanzees! Seven or eight, perhaps. Can you imagine that?”

  Doctor Rousseau expressed himself greedily, and smiled, with shining eyes. Julien Sorel wondered whether chimpanzees had big cocks: he didn’t dare ask.

  “… Females, I hope!” added Rousseau. “They are much better subjects for experimentation than males.”

  “Will you keep them here?” asked Sorel, disappointed.

  “No, on the ground floor. There will be air-conditioned cages, games, qualified female keepers, television, in fact everything that could please monkeys. You cannot imagine what is at stake in my work! When I think that, just yesterday, I had the stupid idea of killing my contingent of chimpanzees in a few days! What rubbish! There are a million more things to take from them before they die! Ah! I assure you that I’ve thought about it a lot since Professor Brisset left us!”

  Rousseau took Sorel cordially into a little office with blueish-grey metal furniture, which appeared never to have been used.