The Case of the Flying Donkey: A Ludovic Travers Mystery

by Christopher Bush

  So much for Gallois of the Sûreté: but there was another Gallois—the artist and poet. Travers always thought that the perfect portrait of him would have been as a virtuoso, painted by John as a pair to that great portrait of Suggia. A violin should be tucked beneath his chin, the bow superbly drawn, the long, lean fingers caught in some dexterity of double-stopping, and on his face that sad brooding smile that had in it a sympathy for all the sorrows of a world.

  That evening it was Gallois the poet who was ruminatively at work. There was an intellectual circle to which he belonged, and his turn would be coming in a month or two to contribute a paper. And as Gallois was so much of an Anglophile as to be almost an Anglomaniac, he had gone at once for a theme to some point of literary contact, and at that very moment was deciding on Molière and his debt to Shakespeare. Then the buzzer went. Gallois frowned as he picked up the receiver.

  “An anonymous caller on the line, Monsieur l’Inspecteur, who says he has information about Bariche.”

  “Bariche!” The eyes of Gallois goggled. “Put him through.”

  Charles, from the side-table, had also pricked his ears at that mention of France’s latest and most spectacular Bluebeard, and so that the sound of the keys should not disturb his own listening, was temporarily abandoning his typing.

  “The headphones—quick!” Gallois hissed agitatedly across at him. “Paper and pencil. And record in your mind, if you please, your own impressions.”

  Charles was just in time for the first sound of the voice, and an unusual voice it was—high pitched, querulous and slightly asthmatic.

  “You are Inspector Gallois who was in charge of the Bariche affair?”

  “Yes. Who is it speaking?”

  “That I am unable at present to tell you, but I am genuine—I assure you of that.”

  “Continue, I beg of you,” said Gallois suavely. “What is this information you wish to give me?”

  There was a slight clearing of the throat before the voice went on.

  “First of all, is there a reward for the capture of this Bariche?”

  “But Bariche is dead!”

  “M’sieu, I am assuring you that he is not dead.”

  Gallois grunted as if enormously surprised.

  “There will be a reward then for his arrest?” the voice was going on.

  “Undoubtedly.”

  “It will be a considerable sum?”

  Gallois smiled sadly.

  “That depends not only on the amount but on the need of monsieur, if he will allow me to say so. There are those to whom a thousand francs would be a considerable sum.”

  The listener discerned the subtle question behind the remark and he took a moment or two’s thought.

  “I would not embroil myself with the affair for a thousand francs. What is the final sum which the authorities would be prepared to pay?”

  The shoulders of Gallois drooped and a world of regret was in his voice.

  “That, monsieur, I do not know, but if you ring again in the morning I guarantee to inform you.”

  “There is no hurry,” the voice said. “There are certain inquiries which it will be necessary for me to complete.”

  “Precisely,” said Gallois, with the same suavity. “You therefore know the whereabouts of Bariche?”

  “I think so, but I am not sure. As I said, there are inquiries which I still have to make.”

  “The inquiries will take—how long?”

  “That I cannot say. A week perhaps. Also it is possible—” He broke off as if to think once more. “It is very difficult to explain, but I ask you to believe me a man of honour. I wish the revelations to be made by a third party, because there are certain confidences which I am bound not to reveal. I am obtaining the assistance of this third party.”

  “Precisely,” said Gallois again. “MayI also assure you that I desire to respect these confidences. If monsieur cares at this moment, for instance, to give me merely his name, I give my sacred word that it shall not be known outside this room.”

  “That is impossible,” the voice said with a curt finality.

  “Perhaps I could arrange a personal and private interview at any place monsieur would care to suggest. There could also be every possible safe-guard.”

  “That unfortunately is impossible,” the voice said, and with a definite regret. “You are in Paris and I am—a thousand kilometres away.”

  Gallois smiled sadly.

  “M’sieu, if you are twenty thousand kilometres away, it wouldn’t matter. Where Bariche is concerned, I should consider it no more than a step across the road.” He smiled even more sadly. “But if you wish me to come to Indo-China or Siberia, might you not at least describe this supposed Bariche to me as a proof that your information is genuine?”

  A pause. “That, monsieur, I am afraid I prefer not to do. As I told you, there are certain things to verify. Nevertheless I swear my offer is genuine.”

  “As you wish,” Gallois said. “And where and when do you want me to meet you?”

  There was a longer pause, then: “You would be prepared to come to Toulon?”

  “But certainly.”

  “I see. If you will allow me a moment then, to make arrangements in my mind, and write them down?”

  One minute and he was ready.

  “You could be in Toulon this day week? At eighteen hours, at the door of the Bureau of the Syndicat d’Initiative?”

  “I shall be there,” Gallois told him. “On Wednesday next at eighteen hours. And I shall recognize you—how?”

  “I have a photograph of yourself, and it will be I who approaches you. You can absolutely rely on me. Au revoir, monsieur.”

  “One moment,” said Gallois quickly. “This matter of the reward?”

  “We can discuss that then. But I should not be interested in a sum of less than fifty thousand francs. If my information is complete, I may desire much more.”

  “As you will,” said Gallois calmly. “That, as you say, is a something which also can be discussed later. Until Wednesday then.”

  “Until Wednesday,” repeated the voice, and at once the line was dead.

  Gallois frowned for a moment, then was pressing the buzzer.

  “You have traced that call?”

  “Yes, It was from Toulon.”

  “Then take these instructions. Request Toulon to discover the place of origin of the call, and request also that the greatest circumspection should be employed. I’d like the information before my departure to-morrow afternoon.”

  He sat frowning for a minute before he turned to Charles.

  “You think he is genuine, this informer?”

  Charles smiled, and one saw at once an extraordinary likeness to Gallois himself, though the snub nose gave the face a difference as well as a curious attractiveness. The scandalous would hint that Charles was more than the great man’s protégé and that his adoption by Gallois had had in it more than benevolence, but few could deny the young agent’s merits or maintain a jealousy in the face of his personal charm.

  “Is it not the rule,” Charles said, “that an anonymous communication should never be disregarded? Besides, you yourself never believed that it was Bariche who died in that fire.”

  “And you?” countered Gallois.

  Charles shrugged his shoulders.

  “Your own conclusions were overwhelming. If our superiors thought differently . . .”

  He shrugged his shoulders again. Gallois was walking slowly round the room, his lean fingers feeling, as it were, the air, as if to pluck from it the confirmation he needed. Then at last he halted, and faced Charles again.

  “The difficulty was that nobody was ever very closely acquainted with Bariche—”

  “Except his victims.”

  “Precisely,” said Gallois imperturbably. “And the dead unhappily leave little evidence. But in that fire a man and a woman died, and the man wore the clothes which Bariche had been seen wearing, and Bariche’s ring was on his finger. Both had
been shot and it was impossible to say who had died first. If the man was not Bariche, then who was he?”

  “But, if you will pardon the liberty, why repeat the conclusions of those who disagreed with us?” Charles asked dryly.

  “Because after all they may be right,” Gallois told him.

  “But there was always the fire. I admit again that there were those who disagreed with you, but—you will pardon the impertinence?—I myself believed your theories implicitly. ‘Bariche,’ I said to myself, ‘pretends to be dead and gets rid of another victim at the same time. Sooner or later he will reappear, and the trouble is that till perhaps many more women are dead we shall not be aware that we were right.’”

  Gallois was nodding to himself as he resumed his walk around the room. It was the fire at the Auteuil villa of which they had been talking, with its revelations, through the supposed discovery of the man’s identity, of the trail of victims that Bariche had left through France. The career of Landru had been far less horrifying than that of Bariche, and even then the police were of the opinion that many of his victims were still unknown. And another tragedy of the Auteuil fire had been that Bariche—dead or alive—had left behind him never a fingerprint. His methods, too, had been far more subtle than those of Landru. The women he had married were never young and callow, but of an age and kind to manage their own affairs, and he had always succeeded in avoiding personal contact with relatives. Later there would be a letter from the wife announcing a sudden business trip abroad, after which—nothing. And since the various disappearances were not focused about the one man, Bariche, till after the Auteuil fire, it had been extremely difficult for the police to hark back and compile a description of Bariche from the recollections of tradesmen and such others as had seen him or come into some brief impersonal contacts.

  Gallois halted again, nodded to himself, and then came back to his seat at the desk.

  “Let us leave all that,” he said. “This conversation which you have written down—what were your impressions?”

  “You assume that Bariche is alive?”

  Gallois made a gesture of impatience.

  “But certainly.”

  Charles nodded in satisfied acceptance.

  “Then I would say that Toulon is an admirable place for him to make a reappearance. The Riviera is one of the districts from which we had no information about him at all. Also he was not of the crude type who inveigled servants and typists. His women had money and were superior—the kind he would find at this moment, for instance, on the Riviera, during the spring.”

  The face of Gallois lighted for a moment.

  “Admirable,” he said. “As you say, this Bariche is the plausible, handsome type, and he has made money.”

  “It is also well over six months since the fire,” Charles said, “and he knows the public has accepted for a fact that he is dead. He would have waited that long to make sure.”

  “Yes,” said Gallois reflectively. “But the informer. What is his relationship with Bariche?”

  “There was a mention of secrecy,” Charles reminded him, if somewhat tentatively. “He said he had scruples and he wished the vital information to come through a third party.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, there is the possibility, for instance, that this informer may be a priest.”

  Gallois looked as if the idea had not occurred to him.

  “A priest,” he said, and frowned. “Then he obtained the information at the confessional, through some new victim whom Bariche has in mind. But how could that woman possibly suspect that her lover or fiancé was Bariche? The papers announced that Bariche was dead, and only you and I thought otherwise.”

  Charles shrugged his shoulders again.

  “A description was circulated, when we were hunting for information. Every paper published it.”

  “But a description is not a photograph. Besides this Bariche was a chameleon. The only thing of which we are certain is his height and build, and possibly the colour of his eyes.”

  “All the same, it is something,” Charles insisted. “But if you will pardon me, what good is it to speculate?” He smiled. “I remember an argument with M. Travers, who is what you called the grand théoriste—”

  Gallois had smiled at the first mention of Travers’s name, and at once he was seeing him in his mind’s eye. Travers, like himself tall and lean, and in other innumerable ways an affinity. Yet of a type that was essentially English: reticent and with easy optimisms; the perfect listener and the most loyal of colleagues; gravely courteous but with a mind so agile that to propound a problem was indeed to hear some theory of his arrive like an echo.

  “In our profession there are all types,” he said reprovingly. “When one indulges in theories like our good friend M. Travers, naturally one makes mistakes. But it is the genius of M. Travers that he himself sifts and discards the theories that are wrong, and sooner or later he arrives at the only one that is right. There was a certain mot of his—”

  “’It is only the fools who are never wrong.’” quoted Charles.

  “Precisely. And you yourself, my dear Charles, while remembering the argument, have forgotten the fact that on that same occasion it was M. Travers who again was right and whom I recommended to you as a model.”

  He smiled dryly as the face of Charles fell.

  “You would now tell me perhaps that this Bariche talks in his sleep, or that the woman is suspicious because he is already making preparations to secure her money.” He shrugged his shoulders. “But there are a hundred theories, as you say. Let us return then to the informer. If he is a priest, why should he be so anxious about the amount of the reward?”

  “You still desire me to theorize?” Charles asked, not without a certain pique.

  “But why not?”

  “Then if he is a priest, he will consider he is not breaking the seal of the confessional provided he can induce the third party to give information. As for the money, did you ever know a priest who had no use for money? Not for himself, necessarily. For some charity, perhaps, or a religious foundation.”

  Gallois nodded.

  “And his voice? It was that of a priest?”

  Charles gave a sly look. Gallois smiled sadly.

  “You think you discern a trap. You say to yourself that if he disguises his voice then he will speak unlike a priest. But was the voice disguised?”

  “In my opinion—not. And I still think it may have been the conversational voice of a priest.”

  The only comment of Gallois was to press the buzzer and lift the receiver.

  “It is you, Lucien? Then take this down as urgent, and particularly confidential. Ask Toulon to discover for us, if possible, the name of any father concerned with confessionals who has a voice that is high pitched and inclined to break. A tendency to being asthmatical, if they prefer. If there is time they should inquire in the neighbourhood as well as in the town itself. The information to be sent to me personally, at Nîmes, before Sunday next. Repeat, if you please.”

  He nodded as if satisfied as he hung up the receiver.

  “If this priest exists and there is any information,” he said to Charles, “it is you I shall send from Nîmes to obtain further information in advance. As apparently he knows me, I must not be seen in Toulon myself before the interview, or he may be alarmed. But one question that occurs to me. You are acquainted with Toulon even better than myself. Why the choice of the Syndicat d’Initiative for the rendezvous? Isn’t it near the Place de la Liberté where every one promenades at six o’clock? It is among crowds that one can always be unobserved.”

  “But the Syndicat building faces the Place,” Charles said. “Also it is not central. It is on one side, and you can have every one beneath your eye without being observed yourself.” His face lighted. “There is a lounge with a large expanse of glass that faces the Place and I seem to remember maps hung on it and notices of information. Any one could pretend to be looking at those and at the same time be really
looking out at the promenaders in the Place de la Liberté. What I imply is that the priest could be out of sight himself and nevertheless be watching for you to approach.”

  “Excellent,” Gallois said. “Make arrangements, please, for us to have a meal here in this room, then bring all the papers relating to the affaire Bariche.”

  The papers came, but before he re-examined them he read again and again that description which had been carefully put together of Bariche as he had been known at Auteuil.

  ARMAND BARICHE, alias Bernard Aiglon, alias Hippolyte Defrère, alias Guillaume Tréfort, etc., etc, Height 1.57 metres approx., clean-shaven but may now be wearing a moustache and/or beard; colour of hair flaxen, but may have been dyed. Eyes blue-grey. Well built and carriage upright. Voice baritone and slight tendency to lisp. Lips full. Complexion pale. Chin pointed, and with dimple.

  As Gallois laid that description aside, he was clicking his tongue with a justifiable exasperation. There on the table before him was the only Bariche he had ever known—a Bariche of shreds and patches and mere words. And then suddenly he was nodding to himself with something of a grim resolve. If the informer were right—and in his heart and soul he believed that he was right—then in another week there should be another Bariche, and already his long fingers were crooking themselves and lifting as if to close tenaciously upon the shoulder of a real and living man.

  The following evening Gallois left for Nîmes where he was due at a conference. Charles accompanied him—though, when the conference was over, he was hoping to take a short holiday.

  It was on the Thursday—eight days before Good Friday, which fell late that year—that the two reached Nîmes. There Gallois learned that the person who had made the long-distance call from Toulon to the Sûreté could not be traced.

  The conference itself ended on the Saturday night, but there were various points to clear up and one rather boring function still to attend. Gallois dexterously pleaded urgency of work, and delegated the boredoms to Charles. As a set-off, Charles was definitely given his holiday. On the Wednesday, however, he was to be in Toulon at six o’clock, and on one of the seats of the Place de la Liberté nearest to the Syndicat building. What he did with himself in the meantime was his own affair.