The King of Fools

by Frédéric Dard

  21

  In my student days, a classmate who was well connected in the world of cinema arranged for me to be an extra in a film. The scene in which I “featured” was a trial scene. I was a member of the public. The director asked us all to look engrossed by staring at a small light bulb above the camera. I found it very hard not to stare into the camera; I feared my mental effort would be obvious on the screen. But when the film was finished, I appeared for a just a few fractions of a second, and my face attracted no more attention than a cobble on a cobbled street.

  The next day, when I was taken before the jury, I remembered the set of the old film. It seemed to me that with the exception of Brett, every other protagonist in the scene had come straight from central casting, and a voice in the blackness beyond would shout out, “Cut!”

  I watched the curious ritual with supreme detachment; as if I were not the hero of the piece, but a mere extra, as anonymous as a speck of caviar in its tin. The judge, a big, rotund man with yellowing sideburns, explained the circumstances of the drama to an abashed-looking group of upstanding citizens.

  Marjorie was called. When she entered the room, I felt such acute emotion I thought I would faint. She was more beautiful than ever. I admired her modest demeanour and tact. She did not play the grief-stricken widow, was not dressed in premature mourning and wore her usual make-up. A young Englishwoman whose dignity commanded respect! Her reddened cheeks were the only hint that she might have been crying a great deal. She had mastered great sorrow, with tremendous courage, and I read the admiration that little bitch inspired in the tense faces all around.

  In a neutral voice, devoid of passion or hatred, she explained how we had met in France, and how I had harassed her from that moment on. Listening to her, so calm and self-assured, I began to doubt my own story. Marjorie looked me in the eye, and I read nothing in her tranquil gaze but sorrow and pity. She gave the court to understand that I was an obsessive sex maniac. She had told me she was leaving for Scotland in an effort to shake me off, and she regretted it bitterly now that I had killed her husband and shattered her life! She had been dumbstruck at the sight of me when I appeared at Mrs Morton’s bed and breakfast.

  “At that moment,” the dear soul declared, “I felt a dark premonition. I told my husband about the situation so that he wouldn’t be surprised by the actions of Mr, er, I’m so sorry, but I don’t remember his name.”

  Next, in her small but firm voice, she explained that on the day of the murder, I had followed her to the open-air theatre. I had sat next to her, assailing her with more passionate declarations. She had been forced to move away. The old, kilted gentleman who had sat beside me in the row of seats came to testify.

  At 10 p.m., still according to Marjorie, I had called her husband at Mrs Morton’s. I said I wanted to see him urgently. He had been reluctant to agree to a nocturnal meeting, and I had told him to think about it and call me back, at my hotel. This was what Nevil Faulks had decided to do, after half an hour’s thought, despite the pleadings of his wife, who was terrified at the prospect of such a meeting. The whole story was a masterly construction. I listened, knowing full well that it was completely false, and marvelling at her skill in piecing it all together. Mrs Morton duly appeared, in a fine red coat with a fur collar, to confirm everything her lodger had said. She was plastered in war paint, and looked for all the world like the elderly, eccentric heroine of Giraudoux’s play The Madwoman of Chaillot. After her, Inspector Brett took his place at the witness stand. He gave a thorough, succinct summary of his investigations, supported by readings from my statements. After that, the judge asked if I had anything to say.

  And so I repeated my version of events, because it was the truth and I could say nothing but the truth as I knew it. But I could see that no one believed me. I adopted a measured tone, and strove to convince, but the looks I encountered registered nothing but incredulity or suspicion. As expected, the jury declared me guilty of the murder of Nevil Faulks, with malice aforethought, and I was informed that I would be brought before the next session of the Court of Justice in Edinburgh, for trial and sentencing.

  With malice aforethought. That meant I would hang. My trial would serve only to confirm my sentence.

  As I was leaving the courtroom, crossing a dark, panelled antechamber between my two guards, I saw Brett framed in a window. He was smoking his black pipe, and sniffing. His face was pale, and his cherry-red nose twitched like a rabbit’s. I saw no one with him, and felt he was waiting for me. And indeed, he turned as I passed. I stopped abruptly, like a rearing horse. My guards were surprised, and hurried to clutch my arms.

  “I have something to say to you, Inspector.”

  A flicker of interest lit his eyes, and he approached our group.

  “Mr Brett,” I said, “I suppose your work is finished. But I beg you to continue your investigation. I’m ready to sign a statement declaring myself guilty of murder with malice aforethought, if that will put your mind at ease, but before I pay the price, I want to know how Faulks’s wife went about proving that I killed him at eleven o’clock at night, when I killed him at five o’clock in the afternoon! You’re an honest police officer, Mr Brett, I’m sure of it. I’m counting on you!”

  We stared at one another for a moment. He went on smoking his pipe, saying nothing. I felt an immense sorrow welling in my eyes. Tears poured down my cheeks; I couldn’t wipe them away because my guards were still holding my arms.

  “I killed him at five o’clock, Inspector. Five o’clock! You have to believe me!”

  A man weeping is always a discomfiting sight, especially for a British gentleman like Brett. He wrinkled his small, pink rabbit’s nose and turned his back on me, without a word.

  I was no longer in police headquarters, but a proper prison, and my cell was a proper cell, as tradition dictated.

  When a dog is about to die, he curls into a ball at the back of his kennel and rests his head on his paws, to await his end. I lay flat out on my bed, face downwards, and waited for mine. A strange calm came over me. Marjorie and her evil plans, the Scottish judges and their sentences faded into the background. I was alone with my conscience, with my crime. I had acted with malice aforethought all right. Oh! not days in advance, of course, but a good few seconds beforehand. And surely that came to the same thing? I could still feel the revolver in my hand. I saw Faulks’s vile grin. I had killed him out of hatred. And Marjorie’s scream of distress had done nothing to dissuade me.

  I had always been a murderer. Because the thing we are driven to become in the space of three seconds is surely the thing we have always been, our innermost nature since birth.

  “Well, then,” I sighed, “let them hang me and be done!”

  The following morning, I was in a deep sleep when a guard came to fetch me. He advised me to clean myself up, which surprised me somewhat. I entered the prison governor’s office freshly shaven. Brett was there, flanked by two of his men. At the sight of him, I was unable to suppress a cheery wave of the hand.

  “Something new, is there, Inspector?”

  He looked surlier than ever. His forehead was marked with a purplish halo left by the leather lining in the rim of his felt hat. He wore a light-coloured suit. Instinctively, I turned to look out of the window. It was a fine day.

  “You’re going to come with us, to check a small detail,” was his only response.

  One of the men approached me with a set of handcuffs, but Brett stopped him with a raised arm. Hastily, I slipped my hands into my pockets.

  In the prison yard, we climbed into an old black taxi. One of the inspectors took the wheel. Brett sat next to me, while his second colleague took one of the extra folding seats. As he did so, I noticed for the first time that he was wearing a white coat under his jacket.

  “Where are we going?”

  “You’ll see!”

  He sniffed harder than before. He must have shaved in a hurry: tufts of hair remained here and there on his chin. The taxi drove sw
iftly. There were few people about as yet. I recognized the crossroads and monuments. Edinburgh had imprinted itself on my mind, and I felt I had been living there for years. We drove down a steep street, bordered on one side by the rolling contours of Princes Street Gardens. “There’ll be a reconstruction,” I told myself. And the prospect alarmed me, because I felt unable to act out such an appalling scene. The more so because it would have no value as evidence, in the absence of Marjorie.

  Quite unexpectedly, we did not stop in front of the gardens, but continued along the road. The taxi drove along Princes Street for a moment, then turned sharp right to follow the complicated twists and turns of a square marked out with bollards to direct the traffic. Finally, we pulled into a broad, short, quiet street lined with grey houses. The driver stopped between two front doors, beside a set of black railings. The behaviour of the police officers was impossible to fathom. The man sitting on the folding seat got out first and disappeared into the nearest house. We waited. The cop at the wheel lit a cigarette. Brett toyed with the big, velvet-covered armrest.

  “And now?” I asked, pleadingly.

  My companion shrugged his shoulders.

  “Why won’t you speak to me, Inspector? Don’t you think my nerves have suffered enough?”

  “I have nothing to say to you, Mr Valaise.”

  He stared insistently at the steps up which his white-coated colleague had climbed. I did the same, and a full fifteen minutes went by. Would I never stop waiting in this godforsaken city! With the noose around my neck, would they make me wait before the trapdoor fell away beneath my feet?

  The second cop appeared at the top of the steps. But he was not alone. He was accompanied by a man. A tall, brown-haired man with a pale complexion. When I saw him, the world stopped turning for what seemed an eternity. My mouth had fallen wide open, but I was incapable of speech. I tried to stretch out a hand, but my arm felt like lead.

  “Something the matter, Mr Valaise?” asked Brett, in that calm voice of his, shot through now with a hint of irony.

  “That man! The man!” I croaked.

  “What of him?”

  “That’s Nevil Faulks!”

  22

  My feelings were beyond comprehension. There were no words to express my incredulity, my state of shock, and my hopefulness. I feared I was mistaken, and wondered again if I had gone mad. I was desperate to get a closer look. Brett held me back as I made to dive out of the car door.

  “Calm yourself.”

  His gruff voice held a note of unaccustomed warmth.

  “Your reaction is not entirely unexpected,” he added.

  In a flash, I saw again the scene of the murder. Faulks’s fierce, ironic sneer as he brandished the revolver. Our brief struggle, and Marjorie choking. And then the bullet I had fired quite deliberately into his head. Immediately, his skull had become a monstrous, blood-soaked thing. He had fallen face down in the grass, dead! Utterly dead! And the next morning, he was stiff in the falling rain and the dried blood covered his neck like a hideous coating of purplish-red plaster. No, the man walking slowly down the street with his back to me now couldn’t be Nevil Faulks. This might be his twin brother, or his ghost… But it could not be the man I had killed and buried in the dark soil in the middle of the lawn.

  “Let’s go after them,” I pleaded, “I want to get a closer look.”

  “You’ll see him soon enough, Mr Valaise. My deputy is escorting him to my office. You’ll get a good, long look at him there. But I’ll have had a word with him beforehand….”

  “That’s not Nevil Faulks, is it?”

  “Indeed. That man is not Nevil Faulks.”

  “His brother?”

  “Nor his brother. That man’s name is William Brent.”

  “The resemblance is astonishing.”

  “I think not.”

  “I swear, they’re utterly alike!”

  “And I swear that they are not. Both are tall and thin, but that’s all. Brent doesn’t even have brown hair, as Faulks did.”

  I stared at the two men walking away.

  “On the contrary, just look! That man has brown hair!”

  “His hair is dyed.”

  Brett pulled out a wad of papers he had been keeping stuffed inside his jacket, distorting its shape. There were newspaper cuttings, typed circulars, letters and photographs. Brett took one of the photographs and handed it to me. A portrait of an ascetic-looking man with charcoal eyebrows and a huge, prominent Adam’s apple.

  “Allow me to introduce you to Nevil Faulks, Mr Valaise.”

  I shook my head.

  “No, Inspector, you’re mistaken. I’ve never seen that man before.”

  “Oh, but you have! On that morning, when, looking out for Marjorie Faulks, you saw her on her husband’s arm, on the other side of the street. You told me she had crossed the road to get close to you. You had eyes for her alone. Her companion was a mere silhouette. You didn’t want to attract his attention. We never look too closely at a person we do not wish to look closely at us.”

  “But I saw him again that afternoon at the open-air theatre. And we stared straight at one another!”

  “That was not Nevil Faulks, but the other man, Mr Valaise.”

  He tapped the window with his ring finger. It was the first time I had noticed his wedding ring. Until then, it hadn’t once occurred to me that Brett might be married. The man was a machine sent to confuse me, a functionary charged with dispatching me to the scaffold as quickly as possible. The gold ring conjured a domestic existence in my imagination: an apartment, a wife, children, objects, smells… He lived somewhere in this city of blackened stone. Perhaps we had passed in front of his house?

  The fake taxi was moving again. We sped past Brett’s deputy and the man Brent, just as they were preparing to cross the road. The two men were talking, and Brent didn’t see my astonished face pressed to the back window of the car.

  “Where are they going?” I stuttered.

  I feared the man would disappear into thin air, like the witches of ancient legend. Scotland is a land of ghosts, a place for magic of every kind.

  “They’re going to the police, but Brent thinks he’s going to hospital.”

  “How so?”

  “My deputy is posing as a nurse. He’s telling Brent that Mrs Faulks has been the victim of a traffic accident, and is asking for him.”

  “But why the lie?”

  “So that we can be sure this man knows Mrs Faulks. Clearly, he does know her, because he has gone along with Lawrence. I’m rather pleased with my little ruse.”

  Brett allowed himself a moment of self-congratulation. He stretched his legs on the folded-down seat opposite, crossed his hands on his stomach and breathed a long sigh through his sniffling nose.

  “Lovely day, wouldn’t you agree, Mr Valaise? Oh! While I think of it, I’ve a letter for you. Hmmm… let me see.”

  He gave a high-pitched whine as he searched through his poor, overstuffed pockets.

  He pulled out a letter, folded in half. It came from France and I recognized the elegant hand immediately. It was from Denise.

  “This came for you yesterday evening, at the Learmonth Hotel, and I took the liberty of opening it. You may not like its contents, Mr Valaise, but it has very probably saved your life.”

  I read:

  My poor, dear chump,

  Was Ivanhoe the First a cuckold? We shall never know. But Ivanhoe the Second certainly is. It happened the day after you left. Who? Narcissus, the blond beauty from the beach. His skin is like silk and he plays volleyball like a champion, but in bed, as elsewhere, he thinks only of himself. No, the only satisfaction I obtained from this magnificent numbskull was moral, not physical. He actually asked after you (not out of concern, but for fear you might return at any moment). I told him about your romantic idyll in the arms of Albion, and can you imagine the words that came of this angel’s mouth? “I hope it wasn’t the same one who tried to pull the car trick on me.” I question
ed him. No mistake, it was your own dearly beloved! To get into conversation with her chosen man without losing face she pretends to get into the wrong car! It’s really quite clever! But it didn’t work on Narcissus – she wasn’t his type. She left her beach bag in his car too, but Narcissus spotted it in time. Unlike you. In short, if you’ve been taken for the king of fools, I shouldn’t be even half surprised.

  You may think I’m being thoroughly nasty. It’s true, I am. But there it is, there’s only one thing more fragile than a woman’s virtue, and that’s her pride.

  A loving word to end, all the same: missing you.

  Je te…

  Denise

  I folded the letter. I felt bitter, and half dead with shame.

  “This letter has proved the keystone of my investigation, Mr Valaise. When I read it, I suddenly understood that you were not lying, and that you were more victim than murderer. Nothing like a revelation of that order to set a policeman’s mind ablaze!”

  I said nothing, and he turned to look at me. I must have been wearing a curious expression indeed, because he began sniffing again in his corner of the car, staring out at the great herd of buses.

  “If you’ve been taken for the king of fools, I shouldn’t be even half surprised.”

  What was better? To be a murderer or a gullible fool? Perhaps I felt the loss of my status as a twisted murderer as failure of a kind? Brett would despise me more as a victim than as the guilty party. The king of fools! Was Ivanhoe the First a cuckold? I felt like a bystander on the margins of society, in the fog-bound limbo reserved for the shivering herd of my pathetic kind. Disaffected idealists! Ridiculed heroes! Scorned lovers!