The Case of the Flying Donkey: A Ludovic Travers Mystery

by Christopher Bush

  “The valet!”

  Bernice explained with a patience that only too obviously shielded a grievance.

  “The young man you thought might suit you as a valet.”

  “What on earth is this? Why should I want a valet?”

  “That’s just what I wondered,” Bernice said.

  Then Travers was staring again.

  “Where is he?”

  “In the anteroom,” Bernice said, with something of the same faint frigidity. “He said he was to wait.”

  Travers, with visions of thieves and false pretences, was already across the room and opening the door.

  “Charles! What the devil are you doing here?”

  “I came to offer my services as valet,” Charles said in the most careful and laborious English.

  “Come in here,” Travers told him. “Bernice, this is Charles, whom you’ve heard me mention. This is some joke or other—”

  “You permit,” broke in Charles, in the same careful English. “It is not a joke, but it is serious. I come actually to demand if monsieur wishes a valet. I am a good valet and I conduct also a car.”

  Travers chuckled. The eyes of Charles caught those of Bernice and she had to smile too.

  “I’ll leave you to get out of the muddle for yourselves,” she said.

  Charles was across the room in a flash and opening the door for her. Then Travers had him by the arm and was leading him to a chair.

  “Now let’s hear what all this is about. What the devil do you mean by coming here and posing to my wife as a valet?”

  Charles shrugged his shoulders and appeared not to be amused.

  “I assure you, monsieur, that it is serious. What actually happens is this.”

  As Charles related those experiences of the last few hours the most strange of illusions began to take possession of the mind of Travers. There was the slow, pleasant voice of the young agent, his friendly face, and his smile that had much of the sad, brooding quality of Gallois. So simply and so convincingly did he describe things, that it was as if he really had become that wholly new person in whose guise he had made the acquaintance of Elise. She too became something intensely personal, so that Travers had the queer feeling of listening to some intimate and indeed moving tragedy, that belonged to no tinselled, artificial Bohemia of the stage. It was the story of flesh and blood; of two human beings, drawn together by loneliness and misfortune, and finding suddenly a need of each other, and a consolation in misfortune itself.

  Charles had waited some time at the rendezvous the previous night, for Elise was late. When she arrived she was still very distressed. At the morning’s chance meeting she had given a version of her relations with Braque, and now she confided that the police had taken her to the Morgue to identify the body, and had also questioned her, though she knew nothing.

  The two went to a little restaurant for a meal, and Charles too was indignant against the police. There was a false charge which had been brought against him by a former employer, and yet the police would still not leave him alone. And, of course, there was that business of the previous night, though he doubted if he’d be recognized again after the darkness of the rue de Jourdoise.

  The intimacy of that meal, and even their own whispered voices, brought a sympathy, and soon she was telling him how she had met Braque. She had been hard-up at the time and it was he who had proposed things. She was desperate and accepted his arrangements, but when she saw the apartment he was providing, she had a sudden revulsion of feeling and refused to have anything to do with the affair.

  “You were lucky,” Charles said, indicating the headline in the paper he had just bought. “One does not deal sympathetically with the friends of swine like this Braque.”

  That was what was frightening her, she said. The police would not believe her, and if anything got out about herself, her livelihood might be affected. Charles asked why she did not seek the aid of relations or friends, and then she was telling him more about herself: the terrifying crazy existence with her father and brother, with squalor and rows and embroilments with the police. There was one fight between the pair, when the brother was slashed across the mouth with a knife, and when he came out of hospital, he was away for some time, no one knew where. Then the father died, and the brother went on with his career as an artist. Then he began to show signs of the same madness and ultimately he disappeared. All this, as she related it, was against the background of Paris during the war, and an atmosphere that in itself was crazy and unreal.

  Then she changed her name and found work as a model, and from then—mere child though she was—she had managed to support herself in that precarious profession. Then, only five years ago, she had received through an old friend, now dead, a letter from a priest in Algiers, telling her of the death of her brother there.

  It was a tragic history, and yet the history of Charles—and it was a true history, as he assured Travers—had something in common. He also was an orphan, and had been brought up by a grand-mother, and ultimately a patron had interested himself and found him work. Now he was seeking a new job and finding it heart-breaking. But one always had hopes and one continued to exist in spite of everything.

  The couple read that evening paper together, with its news of the affaire Braque, and lingered out their time till the opening of the cinema. There they sat close in the warm dark, and soon were once more whispering together about themselves. Charles was finding it inexplicable that the police had not accepted her statements. Had she by any chance become involved, without then being aware of it, in those schemes the paper had mentioned? Or with any of the friends of Braque? But she knew no friends of Braque, she said. She even knew nothing in reality about Braque himself, except that at first he had been kind, and had spent his money.

  They walked by dark deserted side-streets to the rue Vagnolles, where Charles said good night. She asked where he was going, and he said to Belleville, where he had a room. She insisted that he should come in first and drink something warm, for he was shivering after the warmth of the cinema and he had no overcoat.

  She had two small rooms above a derelict garage. The kitchen was also the living-room, and there was a tiny bedroom. She heated coffee for them both and they sat talking once more about themselves. Soon she was remembering something. There was a friend of Braque whom she had seen. Twice she had seen him. Once, about a fortnight ago, she was with Braque at a restaurant and this Pierre appeared. She did not know his other name, but the description she gave was Pierre Larne to the life. At the sight of him Braque had abruptly paid the bill and had left her, and joined him. Later that week she had seen the two in the same restaurant, their heads together in talk.

  Charles said something would have to be done. If one knew more, one could understand the persecution of the police, and one could make one’s plans. But it was late, and he rose to go. But there was no need for him to go all that way to a cold room, she said. He could occupy the kitchen, and she would find him clothes. He would not hear of it, but she insisted, and he finally agreed.

  So he slept that night on the kitchen floor, and she occupied the bedroom. He slept soundly, he said, and it was not till dawn that he woke. Then the door opened and she appeared, already dressed. “Now you take the bed.” she said, “and rest there till I am ready. I have affairs to see to.”

  From the warm bed he could hear her washing at the kitchen tap, and then she went out. In half an hour she was back, and soon there was the smell of coffee. She brought the little breakfast to his room, and he asked where he could wash and shave.

  “There is time for that,” she said. “This morning I do not work, and you also have no need of hurry.”

  “You are good,” he said. “When I obtain this work, there are perhaps things I shall do for you.”

  “It is you who are good,” she said. “When one is a model, one meets all types, and one learns. Me, I am nothing but what I am, but you are different.”

  Once more they were talking about the
mselves. What he would like, he said, was to get into the employment of some Englishman. They paid well and were good masters.

  There was an Englishman, she said. He was a friend of the great painter Larne, and she told him all the story of how he had returned to the villa, and how later he had either gone or been taken to the rue Jourdoise with herself.

  “He is rich, this Englishman?” Charles asked her.

  She did not know, she said, but he had that air.

  “Then he has already a valet-chauffeur,” he said. “Perhaps he has both.”

  Then he also remembered something. If the Englishman had been with Gallois and at Braque’s flat, then doubtless he knew many things about the police. If one could enter his service, one also could doubtless learn many things. But where did this Englishman live?

  But that, unhappily, she did not know, and Charles himself could only shrug his shoulders helplessly. Then he remembered something. One had only to make enquiries among the taxi-drivers, and many were his friends, and he would discover where the Englishman had been driven. All that was needed was a description.

  Almost at once he was shaving, and Elise herself brushed his clothes and cleaned his boots.

  Abruptly, and yet aptly, the story ended. Something of the illusion had already gone, and yet Travers hardly knew.

  “And you return this evening to her apartment?” he said.

  “Yes,” said Charles quietly, “I return.”

  Travers shook his head. “While you were telling me what you’d been doing, I could almost believe you were what you said you were.”

  Charles looked astonished.

  “But, monsieur, I am what I say I am. In order to convince others, it is necessary at first to convince one’s self. And my story was true. I am an orphan who never knew father or mother. For the rest—” and he shrugged his shoulders.

  “And you have changed your mind about this Elise?”

  “But, how?”

  Travers explained somewhat diffidently. His own idea had been that she was no better than a considerable number of her kind.

  “But one knows all that,” Charles said. “If monsieur permits me to recall the fact, she explains that herself. When one is a model, one must prepare to meet all the types. It is necessary to arm one’s self with a certain knowledge of affairs, and even a pretended vulgarity. But at heart she is also different.”

  Travers shrugged his shoulders.

  “So long as this comedy that you play remains a comedy, everything will be well. This evening you may announce that you have seen the Englishman, who has given you employment while he remains here in Paris. This evening, perhaps, you celebrate. And now let’s forget romance and come back to hard facts. Do you know what M. Gallois is doing about the information you were able to give him—that Pierre Larne was a friend of Braque?”

  Charles said he was once more making enquiries at the bureau of the models. It was absolutely necessary to know how it was that Elise had been the model to be sent to the Villa Claire. If it was she herself who had contrived it, then things would have to be looked at from a different angle, especially in view of the information that Pierre Larne and Braque had been associates.

  “Then you do not believe her?” asked the astonished Travers.

  “It is necessary to make sure,” Charles said. “Also it is not what I believe. It is what M. Gallois believes.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Where women are concerned, he is not sympathetic, that one.”

  Then he remembered that he had a note from his chief. It merely told Travers that Gallois was making enquiries in certain directions, and meanwhile would Travers go to a Fontainebleau address which Charles knew, and interview M. le Professeur Frigot, and obtain any information about Braque as the Professor knew him.

  “Then we go to Fontainebleau,” Travers said to Charles. “But there is no mention of hurry.”

  “You permit that I say something?” Charles said. “Since I am now in the service of monsieur, to-night or to-morrow it will be necessary to hire an auto. I also must procure myself some clothes.”

  “No time like the present,” Travers told him dryly. “You obtain your clothes and I obtain the auto. At fourteen hours we start, which allows time for lunch. Then in half an hour we should be at Fontainebleau.”

  Charles smiled like his old happy-go-lucky self for the first time since entering that room.

  “That, monsieur, depends on the auto.”

  Travers drove the hired car—an English limousine which its former owner had exchanged for a French car—and Charles told him what was known about the Académie Poussin. It had been nothing of the size or importance of the famous Julien, not had it been situated in the neighbourhood of the Sorbonne, and yet in its own way it had had a considerable vogue before the War, chiefly owing to the reputation of its visiting professors.

  Frigot, now a very old man, was apparently one of the last of these, and with a garrulity of age he insisted on recounting to Travers his own contacts with the great figures of the end of the century. Then at last Travers got him pinned down to the defunct Académie Poussin, already in decay when Frigot first knew it. All he would talk about then was Henri Larne, a student of curious temper, as he described him, but misplaced as a portrait painter, as time had shown. Frigot professed to have foreseen that Larne would one day be a somebody. There was a portrait of his, he said, which had been exhibited at one of the minor galleries, and which gave the critics a chance too good to be missed, and he remembered how for the first time there was that obvious and nevertheless insulting play upon his name, and a recommendation to the donkey to confine itself to its thistles.

  “And now the donkey flies,” smiled Travers.

  The old man chuckled delightedly.

  “Monsieur knows, I see. The donkey indeed flies, and it is the critics who remain on the ground with their thistles.”

  Braque he also remembered. He was heavy and stodgy in his work, but inclined to give himself airs. Frigot had informed him that he would never earn a flea’s keep with his brush.

  And so to the other students, and it was Travers who had to recall a certain Moulins.

  “Ah!” said the old man excitedly. “There indeed was a curiosity.”

  He elaborated with much gesture. A painter of extreme brilliance who could accomplish with a turn of the brush what the idiots failed to do in hours. But a madman undoubtedly. Ditty, unkempt, and one who already consumed too many glasses. There was drink and madness in the family. Frigot had slightly known the father, who might also have become a somebody but for himself.

  “Wasn’t there a daughter?” asked Travers.

  That he did not remember, but there was much more he had to tell of Moulins.

  “You know, perhaps, L’Homme Qui Rit of Victor Hugo? The jester whose mouth was cut so that he appeared always to smile? That was this Moulins. In an accident his face was cut, and he had an air so comical that he was the butt of the students. It. was that which doubtless embittered him.” He shook his head. “Then I cease to go to the Academic, and later I enquire for this one and that, and I am told of him that he has left and where he is no one knows. Until you speak of him to-day, I do not hear his name.”

  “He’s dead now,” Travers said. “He died in Algiers five years ago.”

  The old man nodded to himself at the news, and was silent for a moment or two. Then he said that Moulins had doubtless become a species of Gauguin and had been living a hand-to-mouth existence in the colonies. He had known several like that, he said, and then was at once away on a dissertation on the perils of the artistic temperament.

  It was almost dusk when Travers arrived back at the hotel. Arrangements had already been made to park the car at the garage where it had been hired. Travers wrote a note for Gallois, saying that no new information had emerged, and he was proposing to remain at the hotel and at the Inspector’s disposal.

  “You’re going afterwards to the apartment of Elise?” Travers asked Charles, who was to deliver t
he note.

  “First, with the permission of monsieur, I will change my clothes here,” Charles said.

  “You’re not going to display yourself?”

  Charles shook his head.

  “In these affairs, monsieur, it is necessary that one should move slowly. To-night I announce merely that I am under consideration by monsieur, and it will be to-morrow that he engages me and I obtain the clothes.”

  “Perhaps you’re right,” said Travers, and smiled. “It is not only M. Gallois who is an artist.”

  “When one is chez les artistes, it is necessary that one becomes an artist one’s self,” said the enigmatic Charles, and disappeared into the cloakroom to effect his changing.

  As Travers watched the door close on him, he had once again that queer feeling of being on the outside of things. For the young agent he was beginning to have something like affection, and yet with him, as with Gallois, there was a queer something somewhere, like a door that is opened to reveal a view that one admires and likes, and then without reason is closed again.

  Then Bernice arrived home, and was told all the news. Travers forgot all about the affaire Braque for at least an hour. It was, in fact, at six o’clock that the hotel phone informed him that a M. Gallois desired most urgently to see him at the bureau. Travers grabbed hat and coat and fairly sprinted down the stairs.

  “Ah, my friend,” said Gallois, and shook him warmly by the hand.

  Then he was leading him off to a deserted corner of the lounge, and he refused Travers’s offer of a drink.

  “There isn’t even a minute that we can spare,” he said. “But it is at the Hôtel Coutance, is it not, that M. Lame has removed to-day?”

  Once more it was as if the door had closed. For the life of him Travers could not help but know that Gallois was only too well aware of the name of Larne’s hotel.

  “That was the name,” he said. “But I don’t know if he’s actually moved in there yet.”

  “It is not M. Larne himself that I wish,” Gallois said, “except that he gives information perhaps about this brother who is an associate of Braque. At that bureau of the models, I expect to find news of the brother, but there was none. To them he is unknown.”