Strangled in Paris: A Victor Legris Mystery (Victor Legris Mysteries)

by Izner, Claude

  A few names had been scribbled in the margin; Joseph recognised Victor’s handwriting.

  Maurice Laumier. Mireille Lestocart. Louise Fontane, her cousin, blonde hair dyed black. Alfred Gamache. Martin Lorson at the abattoirs or at the Érard piano factory.

  I bet the sly old dog’s started on a new investigation! This time, he’s going to collaborate with me whether he likes it or not, right from the beginning! I’m sick of always being ten steps behind him.

  He checked the date on the newspaper: Saturday 10 February 1894. The scent was still fresh! Feeling buoyed up, he went upstairs and into the kitchen. Sitting opposite each other at the table, Iris and Kenji were nibbling at a dandelion salad. He kissed his wife chastely on the forehead.

  ‘You should go to bed, my sweet. I’ll do the washing up and then I’ll come and join you.’

  When they were alone, Kenji and Joseph pushed the salad away and polished off the blancmange that had not been eaten at lunch time.

  CHAPTER 5

  Friday 16 February

  Victor’s bicycle drew up outside the bookshop just as Joseph was opening up.

  ‘Did Tasha chase you out early this morning? There’s no point hurrying anyway – I’ve still got to sweep the floor and dust everything. Maman usually does it, but she’s shut herself away in her apartment after that row yesterday. She’s lucky she can cut herself off like that.’

  ‘Nothing’s stopping you getting your own place!’ retorted Victor, who had put his bike away and was now rummaging around under piles of papers.

  ‘Thanks for the advice. I’d never have thought of that without you. What are you looking for?’

  ‘A piece of paper. I must have dropped it when I wrote down the addresses of those bookshops you told me about.’

  ‘Is it a page of L’Intransigeant that you’re after? It’s under Volume Four of Anquetil’s History of France.’18

  ‘How the devil … So it was you…?’

  ‘Yes. And you may as well know that I read it. So, dear brother-in-law, are we wallowing in sordid crimes again? Unless…’

  Joseph trailed off and contemplated his feather duster in silence.

  ‘Unless what?’ snapped Victor, pocketing the scrap of newspaper.

  ‘Unless you’re already well into the investigation, and are just trying to convince me there’s nothing going on?’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘I wasn’t born yesterday. Those names you’ve scribbled in the margin—’

  ‘Friends I’m planning to visit.’

  ‘Maurice Laumier, a friend of yours? Now that I can’t believe! You’re telling me—’

  Joseph didn’t finish his sentence. The telephone rang and Kenji shouted, ‘It’s for me!’

  He bounded down the stairs in his dressing gown, grabbed the receiver and smiled when he heard the voice at the other end.

  ‘Perfect, my dear lady. I look forward to seeing you this evening,’ he said.

  He hung up and, without noticing the knowing looks exchanged by the two younger men, went back upstairs, whistling. Halfway up, he remarked, ‘I’ve rented an office in town so that I can work in peace when I need to. Oh, it’s nothing really, just a bolthole, only big enough for a chair, a table and a little bed. When I go there, one of you two will have to cover for me, naturally.’

  With a spring in his step, he disappeared into the bathroom, murmuring an old Japanese proverb to himself: ‘The bitterest tea is sweet when it is made with fresh leaves.’

  Flabbergasted, Joseph and Victor stood stock-still for a moment, then Victor burst out laughing.

  ‘Good old Kenji! “Perfect, my dear lady. I look forward to seeing you this evening”! His cancan dancer must have surfaced again.’

  ‘An office, honestly! An office, my foot! A bachelor flat, more like, with a double bed and the whole caboodle!’

  ‘Our friend has had the same idea as you, Jojo, except he got there first.’

  ‘You shouldn’t use that nickname any more. It’s disrespectful,’ interrupted a surly voice.

  They stepped aside to let Euphrosine past. Her rabbitskin coat and feathered hat gave her more than a passing resemblance to a Mohican on the warpath. She was struggling with two huge bags full to the brim with cabbages, pumpkins, squashes and Jerusalem artichokes.

  ‘On the contrary, Madame Pignot,’ Victor replied; ‘he’s part of the family now. And so are you, of course,’ he added hurriedly. ‘And may I say that you’re looking extremely elegant today.’

  ‘Hmm. Don’t try to sweeten me up. I’m going to cart so many vegetables into this house that you’ll be able to convert your bookshop into a grocer’s! Get out of my way!’

  Kenji reappeared, impeccably dressed and trailing a cloud of lavender perfume.

  ‘Even monks need their little bit of privacy,’ he said, seating himself at his desk.

  ‘Who knows what schemes this monk’s got hidden under his cowl,’ muttered Joseph. Then, in a louder voice, ‘Monsieur Mori, Monsieur Legris wants me to go with him to value a collection of books in Vaugirard. It’s terribly inconvenient because I’ve got so much work to do, but we’ll be gone until about three or four o’clock. Could you let Iris know?’

  Kenji nodded.

  ‘Yes, go on then. It’s a good thing we’ve hardly got any customers at the moment. Don’t be late back – I’ve got to go out myself.’

  Joseph put on a hat and a checked jacket.

  ‘Come on, Victor, it’s on the other side of Paris!’

  Victor did as he was told, sighing irritably.

  ‘You’re completely out of your mind!’

  ‘Far from it! You’re on an interesting case, I can tell, and I insist on being part of it. Listen, just to show you that I’m a good egg really, I’ll buy you a coffee at the Temps Perdu, and you can put me in the picture. Don’t forget that you’re the future uncle of my child. That means we have to get on.’

  Victor looked at him out of the corner of his eye. Joseph was becoming an adult, an equal, and henceforth a force to be reckoned with. He tried one last counterattack.

  ‘Iris Pignot won’t be very pleased…’

  ‘My sister-in-law, Tasha Legris, won’t either. But we don’t have to spill the beans to them. We should just swear not to tell, like the knights of old, cross our hearts and hope to die.’

  After Victor had told Joseph everything he knew, they decided to go first to Rue d’Aboukir, because it was closer to Rue des Saints-Pères than Rue des Chaufourniers.

  * * *

  The cab dropped them at Place des Victoires, near the imposing statue of Louis XIV on his horse. Dozens of signs with large gold lettering disturbed the harmony of the façades, whose ornate arcades were surmounted by Ionic columns. At the corner of Rue Étienne-Marcel, Victor grimaced at the sight of two buildings that had recently been built right next to a very old one. Modern nineteenth-century Paris was worming its way in amongst the historic city, and there was no doubt that each year it encroached a little more on the old buildings so beloved of the illustrator Albert Robida. Eventually, these soulless new constructions would stifle the entire city.

  They turned onto Rue d’Aboukir, which was almost entirely given over to shops selling cloth, silk, lace and tulle, but also contained several workshops producing the very cheapest kind of clothes. Sandwiched between an artificial-flower factory and a milliner’s premises was a five-storey building that housed a dimly lit shop on its ground floor, which they now entered.

  Rows of tables buckling under the weight of piles of clothes stretched into the dark recesses of the shop. From floor to ceiling, the walls seemed to be clothed in stacks of greyish material, which gave off a sickly smell. Here and there, buyers were deep in discussion with shop assistants while their impatient fingers, like burrowing insects, tested remnants and offcuts.

  Victor introduced himself to the manager, a man wider than he was tall, whose cheeks were sprinkled with moles.

  ‘My friend and I are
writing an article about the fashion industry. We’ve been astonished by some of the clothes prices in the shops: two francs fifty for a pair of trousers, a suit for nine francs. How do you manage to sell your wares so cheaply when they’re often made of good, durable material?’

  The manager was flattered and offered to show them around.

  ‘All five floors are full, so full that we constantly have to shift the bundles around in case one of them falls on our heads. That’s the major drawback of our Parisian premises. We often have to store things vertically when actually we’d rather have them out on display.’

  They walked through a series of corridors and up staircases worn away by the steps of countless shop assistants weighed down with stacks of pattern pieces. In the midst of this hive of activity, they reached the sewing and finishing workshops, where thirty or so women worked in cramped conditions, some on sewing machines, some making buttonholes, some working on oversewing. Others did nothing but stitch hems.

  ‘These women seem to be treated as no more than needle-pushers or factory workers,’ remarked Victor. ‘What do they earn for doing these repetitive jobs?’

  ‘Oh, they get by. It’s three francs a day. They just need to know how to be thrifty.’

  ‘And how to tighten their belts, and go without new clothes or any little luxuries,’ murmured Joseph, who was standing a little way off.

  ‘How many hours a day do they work?’ asked Victor.

  ‘Fourteen. The people to blame for this state of affairs aren’t the producers or the wholesalers; it’s the customers in the department stores. We constantly have to cut our prices, so salaries suffer. And now it’s the summer off-season.’

  A bell rang: it was time for the lunch break.

  The women scattered. Victor and Joseph took their leave of the manager and followed a group of young women to another building on the same road, where they flocked into a cheap canteen run by Protestant women. For ninety centimes they could buy a meat dish with vegetables and a dessert, served with a glass of wine, beer or milk. The majority of the girls, seamstresses, cutters, trimmers, finishers or embroiderers, made do with a bowl of soup for fifteen centimes or with a stew for thirty.

  Joseph noticed a bench where a freckled redhead was chattering cheerfully to a stuck-up-looking girl with blonde hair, who kept adjusting her ringlets in the mirror that ran along the wall. He dragged Victor over and they sat down opposite the pair.

  ‘May we join you, ladies?’

  The redhead giggled.

  ‘You’re not shy, are you?’ the blonde exclaimed.

  ‘We’d love to buy lunch for you, if you don’t have any objections,’ suggested Victor.

  They consulted one another, with a good deal of whispering.

  ‘There’s no harm in a bit of lunch, is there, Pétronille?’ the redhead concluded raucously.

  ‘Pétronille – what a lovely name! Mine is Joseph and this is Victor.’

  ‘And mine’s Florine. Waiter, four menus, please, and some bread and wine! What’s for afters?’

  ‘Îles flottantes!’ barked the waiter on his way past.

  ‘We’ll have coffee too. If that’s all right with you two, that is?’

  ‘Of course,’ replied Joseph. ‘We’re friends of Louise Fontane. Do you know her?’

  ‘Loulou? She’s gone – threw in the towel three weeks ago. She just dropped everything. Really excited, she was. Told us she’d had enough of this slave labour and that she was sick of ruining her eyes sewing seams. I don’t blame her.’

  ‘She must have found herself a rich bloke!’ said Florine, getting ready to devour her tomato and parsley salad.

  ‘It’s better than that. An old childhood friend of hers just back from America has given her a job. Apparently it’s easy and she gets paid a fortune. A load of money without all the trouble of having to have an affair with someone. Oh, this salad’s lovely. I could eat it all day!’

  Pétronille devoured her tomatoes, and Victor and Joseph followed suit. Between two mouthfuls, Victor asked, ‘What’s this rich friend’s name?’

  ‘No idea. But Loulou sent Lionel packing. He’s our foreman and he’s a dirty old so-and-so with wandering hands. She grabbed her chance, our Loulou! If an opportunity like that ever came my way, I’d make the most of it too.’

  ‘Where does she live?’

  ‘The friend from America? I don’t know – do you, Florine?’

  Florine shook her head.

  ‘She never told me anything.’

  ‘And Loulou? Do you know her address?’

  Victor tried to nudge Joseph’s foot under the table to remind him that Laumier had already given them Loulou’s address, but his foot slipped and collided with Florine’s shoe instead. She burst out laughing.

  ‘Wait a minute, I thought you were friends of hers. You’re not pimps, are you? What are you up to?’

  The arrival of a lentil hotpot mollified her, and while she gobbled it down, Joseph tried to reassure them.

  ‘I’m practically her brother – we were brought up together by the same nurse, in Charente.’

  ‘That’s funny, she told me she grew up around Flanders,’ remarked Pétronille, who, having cleaned her plate, was eyeing Victor’s with envy.

  ‘That was later, when her mother moved to Paris,’ said Joseph.

  ‘Are you going to eat all of that, Monsieur Victor?’

  ‘I’m not really very hungry. If you’d like it…’

  Pétronille didn’t wait to be asked twice. Her excessive appetite betrayed a life of daily deprivation and chronic hunger.

  Joseph’s winning smile combined with Victor’s generosity overcame the redhead’s reticence.

  ‘She lives at number 8, Rue des Chaufourniers, in a furnished room. I went there once and I can tell you I’d never set foot there again! What a neighbourhood! An awful place.’

  Guessing that he would probably get no more out of these two, Victor pushed back his chair.

  ‘It’s time to go, Joseph.’

  ‘What, already?’ cried Florine. ‘What about our afters? And our coffee?’

  ‘I’ll pay the bill and ask them to give you our desserts as well as yours.’

  ‘Oh, go on, stay a bit longer; we’re having a good time. You’re not like the usual idiots and gropers, you two.’

  Florine twisted her napkin in her hands, still thinking about Victor’s accidental foot signals. Joseph got up to follow Victor to the tills.

  ‘Come back tomorrow!’ called Pétronille.

  Out on the street again, where errand girls, seamstresses and telephone operators hurried back to their servitude, Victor decided on the next plan of action.

  ‘Joseph, you go back to the bookshop, and I’ll go and find Loulou’s old room. I’ll join you later.’

  ‘Why not the other way round?’

  ‘Tasha’s at La Revue Blanche all day today, but Iris is at home waiting for you,’ replied Victor, hailing a cab.

  * * *

  Rue des Chaufourniers branched off Rue Bolivar and ran all the way up to the scrubby, terraced hillocks of Buttes-Chaumont park, where it ended in a semicircular cul-de-sac. At the top of the road an open sewer spewed out its foul water. The place reeked: sour, sickly and vinous odours blended in the heavy atmosphere. An air of desolation had settled over the whole area. Children riding in broken prams tore down the street at high speed between peeling façades, screeching to a halt in front of Monsieur Smith’s bar and then climbing back up the hill, dragging their vehicles along behind them.

  In this neighbourhood, the arrival of a cab caused quite a stir. A mob of curious onlookers wandered out of the bar, the headquarters of a pawnbroker where the poor could get a couple of sous in return for their cast-offs. The baker, the laundry woman, the rag and bone man, their clientele and their assorted offspring crowded around Victor.

  At number 8, a furnished lodging house claiming to offer ‘all mod cons’, an imposing woman with the suspicion of a beard replied to Vict
or’s enquiry.

  ‘Loulou? She paid her last rent on the dot three weeks ago. She wasn’t the sort to flit without paying. I usually won’t rent rooms to single people, but she was different, a lovely girl and, anyway, Father Boniface said he’d answer for her honesty, so we weren’t worried!’

  ‘Where does she live now?’

  ‘She kept herself to herself in that way, and I didn’t ask her to tell me.’

  ‘This Father Boniface, might he know?’

  ‘He might do – Loulou was a favourite of his. Before she moved in here, she lived in a hostel for seamstresses that was run by nuns, on Rue de Maubeuge. She was sick of sleeping in a dormitory and just wanted to find a little place of her own, not too expensive, ten francs a month maximum. She talked to Father Boniface about it. He’s a real guardian angel for the poor folks around here – always does what he can for people.’

  ‘Where can I find him?’

  ‘It’s easy. From here you can see the coach-hire company. On the other side of that, you go down Rue Asselin,19 and don’t dawdle because it’s full of shady characters, then go down Rue Burnouf. The clinic is near Boulevard de la Villette.’

  Victor set off down a slimy passageway no more than a few feet wide. On the right-hand side was a palisade of rotting boards, and on the left, a row of sordid hovels with holes where the doors and windows should have been, surrounded by mounds of detritus.

  At the intersection of Rue Asselin and Rue Monjol the Hôtel du Bel Air, painted a garish red, seemed to invite those unlucky in love to set off on a new amorous journey, judging by the scantily clad women who were hanging around on the pavement outside.

  Two identical buildings, the Hôtel Bucarest and, at the top of the steps at the end of Rue Asselin, one called 56 Marches, formed the outer edge of a large area in which some crazed architect had piled up flimsy shacks, mouldy sheds and a heap of worm-eaten buildings whose windows were gaping holes open to the elements and whose roofs were worn away by wind and rain. The unpaved streets were gradually disintegrating, leaving large craters filled with mud and rubbish. This cramped and dirty cesspit was home to gaggles of pale children, mangy dogs, prostitutes, pimps, the unemployed, old men and tramps.