by Clive Barker
"Where is he?"
"They locked him up. They say he's dangerous. They say he could kill again."
Lewis shook his head. There was a pain at his temples, which might go if he could only close his eyes.
"He needs to see you. Very badly."
But maybe sleep was just an escape. Here was something even he couldn't be a spectator to.
Phillipe Laborteaux stared at Lewis across the bare, scored table, his face weary and lost. They had greeted each other only with handshakes; all other physical contact was strictly forbidden.
"I am in despair," he said. "She's dead. My Natalie is dead."
"Tell me what happened."
"I have a little apartment in Montmartre. In the Rue des Martyrs. Just a room really, to entertain friends. Catherine always keeps number 11 so neat, you know, a man can't spread himself out. Natalie used to spend a lot of time with me there: everyone in the house knew her. She was so good natured, so beautiful. She was studying to go into Medical School. Bright. And she loved me."
Phillipe was still handsome. In fact, as the fashion in looks came full circle his elegance, his almost dashing face, his unhurried charm were the order of the day. A breath of a lost age, perhaps.
"I went out on Sunday morning: to the patisserie. And when I came back..."
The words failed him for a moment.
"Lewis..."
His eyes filled with tears of frustration. This was so difficult for him his mouth refused to make the necessary sounds.
"Don't —" Lewis began.
"I want to tell you, Lewis. I want you to know, I want you to see her as I saw her — so you know what there is... there is... what there is in the world."
The tears ran down his face in two graceful rivulets. He gripped Lewis' hand in his, so tightly it ached.
"She was covered in blood. In wounds. Skin torn off hair torn out. Her tongue was on the pillow, Lewis.
Imagine that. She'd bitten it off in her terror. It was just lying on the pillow. And her eyes, all swimming in blood, like she'd wept blood. She was the dearest thing in all creation, Lewis. She was beautiful."
"No more."
"I want to die, Lewis."
"No."
"I don't want to live now. There's no point."
"They won't find you guilty."
"I don't care, Lewis. You must look after Catherine now. I read about the exhibition —"
He almost smiled.
"— Wonderful for you. We always said, didn't we? before the war, you'd be the one to be famous, I'd be —"
The smile had gone.
"— notorious. They say terrible things about me now, in the newspapers. An old man going with young girls, you see, that doesn't make me very wholesome. They probably think I lost my temper because I couldn't perform with her. That's what they think, I'm certain." He lost his way, halted, began again. "You must look after Catherine. She's got money, but no friends. She's too cool, you see. Too hurt inside; and that makes people wary of her. You have to stay with her."
"I shall."
"I know. I know. That's why I feel happy, really, to just…"
"No, Phillipe."
"Just die. There's nothing left for us, Lewis. The world's too hard."
Lewis thought of the snow, and the ice-floes, and saw the sense in dying.
The officer in charge of the investigation was less than helpful, though Lewis introduced himself as a relative of the esteemed Detective Dupin. Lewis's contempt for the shoddily-dressed weasel, sitting in his cluttered hole of an office, made the interview crackle with suppressed anger.
"Your friend," the Inspector said, picking at the raw cuticle of his thumb, "is a murderer, Monsieur Fox. It is as simple as that. The evidence is overwhelming."
"I can't believe that."
"Believe what you like to believe, that's your prerogative. We have all the evidence we need to convict Phillipe Laborteaux of murder in the first degree. It was a cold-blooded killing and he will be punished to the full extent of the law. This is my promise."
"What evidence do you have against him?"
"Monsieur Fox; I am not beholden to you. What evidence we have is our business. Suffice it to say that no other person was seen in the house during the time that the accused claims he was at some fictional patisserie; and as access to the room in which the deceased was found is only possible by the stairs —"
"What about a window?"
"A plain wall: three flights up. Maybe an acrobat: an acrobat might do it."
"And the state of the body?"
The Inspector made a face. Disgust.
"Horrible. Skin and muscle stripped from the bone. All the spine exposed. Blood; much blood."
"Phillipe is seventy."
"So?"
"An old man would not be capable —"
"In other respects," the Inspector interrupted, "he seems to have been quite capable, oui? The lover, yes? The passionate lover: he was capable of that."
"And what motive would you claim he had?"
His mouth scalloped, his eyes rolled and he tapped his chest.
"Le coeur humain," he said, as if despairing of reason in affairs of the heart. "Le coeur humain, quel mystère, n'est-ce pas?" and exhaling the stench of his ulcer at Lewis, he proffered the open door.
"Merci, Monsieur Fox. I understand your confusion, oui? But you are wasting your time. A crime is a crime. It is real; not like your paintings."
He saw the surprise on Lewis's face.
"Oh, I am not so uncivilized as not to know your reputation, Monsieur Fox. But I ask you, make your fictions as best you can; that is your genius, oui? Mine; to investigate the truth."
Lewis couldn't bear the weasel's cant any longer.
"Truth?" he snapped back at the Inspector. "You wouldn't know the truth if you tripped over it."
The weasel looked as though he'd been slapped with a wet fish.
It was precious little satisfaction; but it made Lewis feel better for at least five minutes.
The house on the Rue des Martyrs was not in good condition, and Lewis could smell the damp as he climbed to the little room on the third floor. Doors opened as he passed, and inquiring whispers ushered him up the stairs, but nobody tried to stop him. The room where the atrocity had happened was locked. Frustrated, but not knowing how or why it would help Phillipe's case to see the interior of the room, he made his way back down the stairs and into the bitter air.
Catherine was back at the Quai de Bourbon. As soon as Lewis saw her he knew there was something new to hear. Her grey hair was loosed from the bun she favoured wearing, and hung unbraided at her shoulders. Her face was a sickly yellow-grey by the lamplight. She shivered, even in the clogged air of the centrally-heated apartment.
"What's wrong?" he asked.
"I went to Phillipe's apartment."
"So did I. It was locked."
"I have the key: Phillipe's spare key. I just wanted to pick up a few clothes for him."
Lewis nodded.
"And?"
"Somebody else was there."
"Police?"
"No."
"Who?"
"I couldn't see. I don't know exactly. He was dressed in a big coat, scarf over his face. Hat. Gloves." She paused. Then, "he had a razor, Lewis."
"A razor?"
"An open razor, like a barber."
Something jangled in the back of Lewis Fox's mind.
An open razor; a man dressed so well he couldn't be recognized.
"I was terrified."
"Did he hurt you?" She shook her head. "I screamed and he ran away."
"Didn't say anything to you?"
"No."
"Maybe a friend of Phillipe's?"
"I know Phillipe's friends."
"Then of the girl. A brother."
"Perhaps. But —"
"What?"
"There was something odd about him. He smelt of perfume, stank of it, and he walked with such mincing little steps, even though he wa
s huge."
Lewis put his arm around her.
"Whoever it was, you scared them off. You just mustn't go back there. If we have to fetch clothes for Phillipe, I'll gladly go."
"Thank you. I feel a fool: he may have just stumbled in. Come to look at the murder-chamber. People do that, don't they? Out of some morbid fascination..."
"Tomorrow I'll speak to the Weasel."
"Weasel?"
"Inspector Marais. Have him search the place."
"Did you see Phillipe?"
"Yes."
"Is he well?"
Lewis said nothing for a long moment.
"He wants to die, Catherine. He's given up fighting already, before he goes to trial."
"But he didn't do anything."
"We can't prove that."
"You're always boasting about your ancestors. Your blessed Dupin. You prove it..."
"Where do I start?"
"Speak to some of his friends, Lewis. Please. Maybe the woman had enemies."
Jacques Solal stared at Lewis through his round-bellied spectacles, his irises huge and distorted through the glass. He was the worse for too much cognac.
"She hadn't got any enemies," he said, "not her. Oh maybe a few women jealous of her beauty..."
Lewis toyed with the wrapped cubes of sugar that had come with his coffee. Solal was as uninformative as he was drunk; but unlikely as it seemed Catherine had described the runt across the table as Phillipe's closest friend.
"Do you think Phillipe murdered her?"
Solal pursed his lips.
"Who knows?"
"What's your instinct?"
"Ah; he was my friend. If I knew who had killed her I would say so."
It seemed to be the truth. Maybe the little man was simply drowning his sorrows in cognac.
"He was a gentlemen," Solal said, his eyes drifting towards the street. Through the steamed glass of the Brasserie window brave Parisians were struggling through the fury of another blizzard, vainly attempting to keep their dignity and their posture in the teeth of a gale.
"A gentleman," he said again.
"And the girl?"
"She was beautiful, and he was in love with her. She had other admirers, of course. A woman like her —"
"Jealous admirers?"
"Who knows?"
Again: who knows? The inquiry hung on the air like a shrug. Who knows? Who knows? Lewis began to understand the Inspector's passion for truth. For the first time in ten years perhaps a goal appeared in his life; an ambition to shoot this indifferent ‘who knows?' out of the air. To discover what had happened in that room on the Rue des Martyrs. Not an approximation, not a fictionalized account, but the truth, the absolute, unquestionable truth.
"Do you remember if there were any particular men who fancied her?" he asked.
Solal grinned. He only had two teeth in his lower jaw.
"Oh yes. There was one."
"Who?"
"I never knew his name. A big man: I saw him outside the house three or four times. Though to smell him you'd have thought —"
He made an unmistakable face that implied he thought the man was homosexual. The arched eyebrows and the pursed lips made him look doubly ridiculous behind the thick spectacles.
"He smelt?"
"Oh yes."
"Of what?"
"Perfume, Lewis. Perfume."
Somewhere in Paris there was a man who had known the girl Phillipe loved. Jealous rage had overcome him. In a fit of uncontrollable anger he had broken into Phillipe's apartment and slaughtered the girl. It was as clear as that.
Somewhere in Paris.
"Another cognac?"
Solal shook his head.
"Already I'm sick," he said.
Lewis called the waiter across, and as he did so his eye alighted on a cluster of newspaper clippings pinned behind the bar.
Solal followed his gaze.
"Phillipe: he liked the pictures," he said.
Lewis stood up.
"He came here, sometimes, to see them."
The cuttings were old, stained and fading. Some were presumably of purely local interest. Accounts of a fireball seen in a nearby street. Another about a boy of two burned to death in his cot. One concerned an escaped puma; one, an unpublished manuscript by Rimbaud; a third (accompanied by a photograph) detailed casualties in a plane crash at Orleans airport. But there were other cuttings too; some far older than others. Atrocities, bizarre murders, ritual rapes, an advertisement for ‘Fantomas', another for Cocteau's ‘La Belle et La Bete'. And almost buried under this embarrassment of bizarreries, was a sepia photograph so absurd it could have come from the hand of Max Ernst. A half-ring of well-dressed gentlemen, many sporting the thick moustaches popular in the eighteen-nineties, were grouped around the vast, bleeding bulk of an ape, which was suspended by its feet from a lamppost. The faces in the picture bore expressions of mute pride; of absolute authority over the dead beast, which Lewis clearly recognized as a gorilla. Its inverted head had an almost noble tilt in death. Its brow was deep and furrowed, its jaw, though shattered by a fearsome wound, was thinly bearded like that of a patrician, and its eyes, rolled back in its head, seemed full of concern for this merciless world. They reminded Lewis, those rolling eyes, of the Weasel in his hole, tapping his chest.
"Le coeur humain."
Pitiful.
"What is that?" he asked the acne-ridden barman, pointing at the picture of the dead gorilla.
A shrug was the reply: indifferent to the fate of men and apes.
"Who knows?" said Solal at his back. "Who knows?"
It was not the ape of Poe's story, that was certain. That tale had been told in 1835, and the photograph was far more recent. Besides, the ape in the picture was a gorilla: clearly a gorilla.
Had history repeated itself? Had another ape, a different species but an ape nevertheless, been loosed on the streets of Paris at the turn of the century?
And if so, if the story of the ape could repeat itself once why not twice?
As Lewis walked through the freezing night back to the apartment at the Quai de Bourbon, the imagined repetition of events became more attractive; and now further symmetry presented itself to him. Was it possible that he, the great nephew of C. Auguste Dupin, might become involved in another pursuit, not entirely dissimilar from the first?
The key to Phillipe's room at the Rue des Martyrs was icy in Lewis's hand, and though it was now well past midnight he couldn't help but turn off at the bridge and make his way up the Boulevard de Sebastopol, west on to Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle, then north again towards the Place Pigalle. It was a long, exhausting trudge, but he felt in need of the cold air, to keep his head clear of emotionalism. It took him an hour and a half to reach the Rue des Martyrs.
It was Saturday night, and there was still a lot of noise in a number of the rooms. Lewis made his way up the two flights as quietly as he could, his presence masked by the din. The key turned easily, and the door swung open.
Street lights illuminated the room. The bed, which dominated the space, was bare. Presumably sheets and blankets had been taken away for forensic tests. The eruption of blood onto the mattress was a mulberry colour in the gloom. Otherwise, there was no sign of the violence the room had witnessed.
Lewis reached for the light switch, and snapped it on. Nothing happened. He stepped deeply into the room and stared up at the light fixture. The bulb was shattered.
He half thought of retreating, of leaving the room to darkness, and returning in the morning when there were fewer shadows. But as he stood under the broken bulb his eyes began to pierce the gloom a little better, and he began to make out the shape of a large teak chest of drawers along the far wall. Surely it was a matter of a few minutes work to find a change of clothes for Phillipe. Otherwise he would have to return the next day; another long journey through the snow. Better to do it now, and save his bones.
The room was large, and had been left in chaos by the police. Lewis stumbled and
cursed as he crossed to the chest of drawers, tripping over a fallen lamp, and a shattered vase. Downstairs the howls and shrieks of a well-advanced party drowned any noise he made. Was it an orgy or a fight? The noise could have been either.
He struggled with the top drawer of the teak chest, and eventually wrenched it open, ferreting in the depths for the bare essentials of Phillipe's comfort: a clean undershirt, a pair of socks, initialed handkerchiefs, beautifully pressed.
He sneezed. The chilly weather had thickened the catarrh on his chest and the mucus in his sinuses. A handkerchief was to hand, and he blew his nose, clearing his blocked nostrils. For the first time the smell of the room came to him.
One odour predominated, above the damp, and the stale vegetables. Perfume, the lingering scent of perfume.
He turned into the darkened room, hearing his bones creak, and his eyes fell on the shadow behind the bed. A huge shadow, a bulk that swelled as it rose into view.
It was, he saw at once, the razor-wielding stranger. He was here: in waiting.
Curiously, Lewis wasn't frightened.
"What are you doing?" he demanded, in a loud, strong voice.
As he emerged from his hiding place the face of the stranger came into the watery light from the street; a broad, flat-featured, flayed face. His eyes were deep-set, but without malice; and he was smiling, smiling generously, at Lewis.
"Who are you?" Lewis asked again.
The man shook his head; shook his body, in fact, his gloved hands gesturing around his mouth. Was he dumb? The shaking of the head was more violent now, as though he was about to have a fit.
"Are you all right?"
Suddenly, the shaking stopped, and to his surprise Lewis saw tears, large, syrupy tears well up in the stranger's eyes and roll down his rough cheeks and into the bush of his beard.
As if ashamed of his display of feelings, the man turned away from the light, making a thick noise of sobbing in his throat, and exited. Lewis followed, more curious about this stranger than nervous of his intentions.
"Wait!"
The man was already half-way down the first flight of stairs, nimble despite his build.
