Mister Memory

by Marcus Sedgwick

  Here Boissenot paused, finger still pointing at the ceiling and Petit found unwelcome thoughts arising in his mind. He tried to count the hairs on Boissenot’s head, he tried to listen to the still air in the room. Anything rather than listen to more descriptions of horror. And yet, as a policeman, it is his job to confront such things. So he nodded to Boissenot, and forced a smile displaying an interest in the gruesome subject matter.

  Boissenot barely noticed.

  ‘It’s the end of the world. That’s what it is. At least, it’s the end of the century. Here we are, months away from a new era, and what do we find? We have been cheated. Weren’t we promised everything? That fancy exhibition ten years ago, and now they will have another one, and what do we see? The electric light, the wonders of machinery, the wonders of science, technology and medicine, where are these things for the likes of you and me? When I retire I will be lucky to make ends meet. No motor cars for me, no luxuries. And here we are, the end of the century coming, and we have been cheated. That is what underlies this angst, my boy; it is anger and fear. Anger at what we do not have and fear that when the clock strikes twelve on the 31st of December, we will find that, lo and behold, we are no better off than we were in the previous century. Anger and fear, my boy. Anger and fear.’

  Petit was careful not to dally too long in or near Boissenot’s office after the first few times he was caught, but he did often think about the old man’s theory. Sometimes, he found himself taking it rather seriously, particularly on those days when he is unable to suppress the memory of the first way that fate erupted into his life.

  Now, as he stands in the doorway to the bedroom of the man they called Marcel Mémoire, is one of those days.

  Petit backs out of the doorway and does something he often does, namely knocks something over. As soon as he feels his rear nudge something, he spins, and manages to catch the vase he’s backed into, though in doing so he puts his elbow through the flimsy glass of the door, shattering one of the six panels into a thousand crystalline pieces.

  He sighs, and looks furtively at the open door, and the stairwell beyond. He’s already had to suffer half an hour of the concierge, and only her laziness prevented her from accompanying him up to, as she put it with melodrama, the scene of the crime. What she wanted to know was how soon she could rent the place out again, assuming that Després was headed to the guillotine, and anyway, his rent was due on Friday, and who would be paying that?

  Petit eventually managed to escape her without learning anything useful. He’d already managed to interview some women from the picture card factory, as well as a Scotsman and a Marseillais, and they had all confirmed the story: Marcel had arrived home, found his wife and an American from the cabaret where they all worked hard at it, and shot Ondine there and then. The gardiens had found Marcel in the passage, kneeling on the cobbles, frozen to the spot. From the remorse, a dim-witted blanchisseuse had told him, with a knowing look. There were some discrepancies in people’s accounts of the murder, however. Some said there had only been one shot, while others said three or four, and Fraser maintained it had been five, definitely five. Petit had already learned in his short time as a detective that people’s recollection of events could often be open to question. Memories, even of something so notable as the sound of gunshots very close by, could not always be relied upon. And the interesting thing was that, very often, these people who contradicted one another did not seem to be lying. Each of them could be absolutely convinced of the truth of their own story, sometimes even when presented with facts that meant their memory had to be false. It drives him mad, this inability to be able to rely on witnesses.

  Petit looks at the broken glass and then creeps to the head of the stairwell, fearful of the sound of the concierge’s footsteps coming to see what the breakage was. Nothing.

  He sighs a second time and tells himself to examine the scene of the crime again, then curses himself for using the concierge’s expression. That is something else that drives him crazy: the way every simpleton thinks they know all about police matters. Everyone has an opinion, everyone knows the truth. He wishes very much that they would all shut up and let him do what he was employed to do.

  So, Marcel had come in the front door, and was probably standing more or less where Petit is now when he’d seen them through in the bedroom. He’d taken up a gun (and Petit would need to find out why they had a gun and what it was doing there) and shot his wife. Then he’d run. Then almost as quickly he’d stopped running. And then he’d been arrested, and, furthermore, Petit gathered that he had not denied the murder. So much was indisputable. Petit hadn’t bothered to tell the concierge that even though all this was indisputable, one further thing was certain: Marcel would not be going to the guillotine. The very worst he might get would be transportation; very probably he would get a term of hard labour on French soil, five to ten years, depending on how the judge saw the matter. For Marcel had been lucky. Or clever. Petit was not alone in finding some aspects of the penal code outdated, but there it was: the law remained the law, even when that law stated that the murder by a husband of his wife, finding her in the adulterous act of sexual congress in the marital home, was an excusable crime. And excusable meant that the punishment for the crime was reduced from capital punishment to a lesser sentence. So Marcel would not have his head removed. There was an outside chance of transportation, which was not called the dry guillotine for nothing – twenty years of hard labour on a starvation diet on the disease-ridden islands off the coast of Cayenne saw very few prisoners return; many didn’t even survive the journey there on the prison hulk.

  Petit conjures up the moment in his mind: the jealous, angry husband; the experience of seeing his wife with another man. There would have been shouts, perhaps, a moment of unbelievable rage and frustration. Then the gunshot, or shots, depending on whose story you believed. The gun had been recovered by the gardiens and was now at the commissariat waiting to be examined.

  Petit goes to inspect the bedroom wall, looking for holes made by bullets. There are many holes in the wall, the apartment being, like much of Paris, somewhat dilapidated, and Petit cannot be certain that any of them were made by bullets. That is not necessarily a surprise; he has been told the gun was a St Etienne 8mm, the very one he carried in his time as a second lieutenant; a neat weapon but with poor striking power. Any bullets that hit Ondine very likely stayed in her body. He’d have to read the post-mortem reports.

  There’s not much more to do. Petit has a notebook full of corroboration from a variety of witnesses; the case is, as the concierge would no doubt have said, one that could be open and shut. And Petit only wants to make sure there is no way in which some shifty lawyer could find a reason for Després to be exculpated, and that he gets the justice he deserves.

  Petit is startled from his reverie by a voice from the outer door.

  ‘This the place?’

  Petit turns to see Drouot, a fellow inspector from the Quai des Orfèvres, who’d been dispatched by the examining magistrate to go and interview Marcel before the police could beat him to death.

  Petit likes Drouot well enough, but unfortunately they are not often assigned to the same cases.

  Drouot strolls into the apartment, hands in his pockets.

  ‘That concierge, eh?’ he says, shaking his head. He looks at the glass on the floor. ‘He shot her through the door?’

  ‘No,’ says Petit, without thinking.

  ‘No? So why the broken window? A struggle?’

  ‘No, no struggle.’

  Petit dies inside.

  ‘Or perhaps, yes,’ he adds hurriedly. ‘I don’t know. We need to interview the American. The lover.’

  ‘Forget it,’ says Drouot, poking the broken glass with his toe.

  ‘Forget it?’

  ‘Forget it. The whole thing’s done. They’ve said he’s crazy. Moved him to Salpêtrière.’

  ‘They did what? Who did?’

  ‘The Préfecture. They’ve declared
him to be criminally insane and now he’s in a cell in Salpêtrière.’

  ‘They can’t do that. Can they?’

  ‘They very much can. And they did. So the job’s over and because I’m so nice to you I came to tell you on my way home so you can buy me a beer instead.’

  ‘The Salpêtrière? I thought that was for women only.’

  ‘So did I. Apparently they take crazy men now too. It’s nice to see such emancipation, no? So we’re done, and you can buy me a beer.’

  Drouot is already halfway outside, but turns to find Petit still staring into the bedroom. He’s looking over at the portrait of Ondine, dressed in what was presumably her finest dress, her hair done up. Petit finds that he is provoked by this image of her; she was not the most beautiful woman ever, but maybe close. And there was clearly something indisputably sexual about her. There was also, he thinks, a hardness about her face. If one can be sure of such things from a photograph.

  ‘Coming?’

  ‘Hmm? Yes,’ says Petit, and, turning, hits his head on the lintel of the doorway to the bedroom.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Drouot asks. ‘One less problem for us to worry about, yes?’

  ‘It’s not right,’ says Petit. ‘We have a simple case of murder, an easy one to please the chef, and it’s taken out of our hands because they say he’s mental. That’s not right.’

  ‘What’s right got to do with it?’ asks Drouot, who finally manages to get Petit to leave the studio, and also gets him to buy beer for the two of them. Drouot’s beer lowers rapidly, while Petit’s grows warm in the glass, until his friend offers to drink it for him.

  The next day, however, Petit finds himself determined to act. He goes to complain to Boissenot, who looks extremely troubled at having to think about something other than the end of the world. He passes Petit up the line to the Chef de la Sûreté himself, Cavard.

  Cavard is no fool. At forty-eight he is one of the youngest chefs in the history of the Sûreté. He takes one look at Petit and though they have not met before, decides he seems ready to learn a lesson. So he listens to the young inspector’s complaint, and promises he will take it up with the examining magistrate at their next meeting. Which he duly does, summoning Petit back to his office two days later.

  Petit arrives without great expectation, but nevertheless with at least a little hope of success.

  Cavard waves him in.

  ‘I spoke with Peletier, the examining magistrate in this case. I put to him your request that the matter be reconsidered, and he put to me a very pertinent question, which is why you think you have any right to question the decisions of your superiors, and to which he added another question, namely why I thought I should waste his time in bringing your request to him. So, does that give you all you need to know? It does, I think.’

  Petit swallows hard and nods, and is about to leave when Cavard calls him back.

  ‘I need keen inspectors like you, however,’ he says. ‘So I have some work for you. How does that sound?’

  Petit nods and says it sounds good, and that is how he finds himself dispatched to the archives department for four weeks, in a mostly fruitless attempt to restore the material that was lost to fire of the days of the Commune. In that time he develops a particular skill in dropping box files so that their contents scatter and shuffle across the parquet of the Sûreté library.

  And yet, despite this deliberate humiliation, Petit finds that he has not entirely lost his will to question his superiors, nor has he entirely lost his interest in the case of the murderer Marcel Després, the man they called Monsieur Mémoire. Something in him will not let it drop. Or rather, someone in him, someone still living in him, insists that he sees it through.

  MONSIEUR MÉMOIRE

  In his cell-cum-room at the Salpêtrière, Marcel has fallen back into a near catatonic state. After the breakthrough, and Morel’s discovery of Marcel’s incredible memory, it appears that the patient has had some kind of relapse, and now will not speak, will not move unless forced to, will barely eat or drink. The situation becomes so bad that one day Morel orders the warders to bring the force-feeding equipment. The process is so unpleasant that it alone is often enough to bring the indolent out of their torpor and remind them that eating is no bad thing. Yet as the tube is passed down Marcel’s gullet, and the funnel held high and the little brass handle wound and wound, Marcel barely reacts, never mind struggles. When it’s done, he collapses on his thin pallet and sleeps, his eyes staring into nothingness.

  The food does seem to do him some good, however, for the next day, when Morel probes around, there is a little more life on Marcel’s face. What Morel would like to do is continue the investigation into the limits of Marcel’s mnemonic powers. He curses himself that he wasted so much time on those numbers, but then again, he did not expect Marcel to relapse so soon and so profoundly. He knows that he is hoarding Marcel, and that, in time, he will have to share the case with Dr Raymond, the Chief Physician of the hospital. And he wants to do that; it’s the right thing to do. It’s just that Raymond has swept aside much of Charcot’s work since he replaced the great master, something that irritates Morel. So that’s one thing. And then there’s the fact that if Morel is ever to make a name for himself, he must produce a masterpiece in his own right.

  Over the last few years, the hospital has moved rapidly to shift its position on matters such as hysteria, for example, something that old Morel finds troubling. Just because the new regime chooses not to recognise something, does that mean that it stops existing? Is all Charcot’s work now to be ignored or refuted? And the assistance that he, Morel, gave to Charcot? Morel knows that Marcel’s is a most interesting case, one perhaps without precedent in the literature, and therefore he wants to be absolutely sure that he knows what he is dealing with before he consults Raymond.

  So Morel tries speaking directly to Marcel again, and he tries speaking obliquely, looking for a key to unlock the door, as he found previously when he got Marcel to tell him how he’d killed his wife. Morel cannot help but think about his memory; this unbelievable memory. The doctor finds himself frustrated, like a child given a new toy but forbidden from playing with it. He wants to explore, he wants to test and challenge, he wants to set Marcel impossible tasks but be beaten, and yet all the while Marcel sits staring through the grey walls of his cell, Morel is thwarted.

  ‘Describe your act for me,’ he says.

  Nothing.

  ‘Would you always perform the same routine?’

  Nothing.

  ‘Did you use members of the audience as part of the act?’

  Nothing. Or perhaps there is something, but it does not emerge for Morel to witness. Yet in Marcel’s mind’s eye, the memories come thick and fast.

  The night that Marcel is thinking about is no different from many of the others, yet to Marcel there is always something different about each night. The one he has in mind is about six months ago, or, as Marcel knows, five months, three weeks and two nights ago. It was a Thursday evening, and the club was not quite as full as it was on weekends. As Marcel took the stage he noted that there were fifty-one people in the crowd, watching him; thirty-eight men and thirteen women. There were eight waiting staff working, in addition to the two barmen, and Chardon himself, of course.

  His routine had gone well for some weeks, very well. But things had started to sour. Many of the cabaret’s customers were regulars, who came a couple of times a month, and they had seen enough of Monsieur Mémoire. Now they could remember his act almost as well as he could, it had diminishing charms for them. Ondine had told him he needed to add variety, try new things, become more daring, and he was trying to do just that on that particular Thursday night. He had invited a lady on to the stage, a lady who seemed unable to prevent herself from giggling continuously, but who had managed to play along with Marcel’s directions. He’d instructed the room to attain perfect stillness, so that no one got up, or sat down, or moved, and then he’d asked her to blindfold him.
Checking that he could not see, she’d then pointed to an object in the room; any object. It might be someone’s hat, or a cane. Or it might be a bottle on a table, or a picture on the wall, or even an old gentleman’s bow tie. When she’d pointed to it, and while Marcel was still blindfolded, someone in the crowd was silently to hide the indicated object, removing it from view.

  He would then, as he’d done on the preceding eight nights of this new trick, announce which of the thousand possible objects in the room had vanished, to rapturous applause. If the applause did not come with the first object, he would proceed to the fifth, eighth, eleventh object, until the applause did come.

  But that night, Marcel remembers that it went differently. Deep in his mind he searches for the cause; he knows the cause is there, he only has to find it, the thing among the thousand things that happen every second, the one that started him thinking. He was on. Halfway through his routine. The lady he selected made her way to the front, and up the two little steps on to what was charitably called the stage at the Cabaret of Insults. He produced a blindfold from his pocket, and then the lady announced that she would prefer to use a handkerchief of her own, so there could be no thought of deception, no danger that Marcel’s blindfold was in some way compromised, and perhaps allowed some vision. Laughing, Marcel took up the challenge, and he declared in return that, if the lady so liked, she could place both his blindfold and her own handkerchief on top of it, so that he was doubly blind.

  That was what she did, tying her own handkerchief across his eyes first, before placing Marcel’s black blindfold on top. Even as he gave his final instructions, the touch of the fine cotton on his eyes began a chain of associations in his thoughts. The cotton felt exactly like a scarf that his mother wore tightly around her neck on evenings when summer was starting to fail but before autumn had properly come. That scarf had been black, but with his eyes shut, he could only feel the cloth, rather different from the cotton of the shirt he wore constantly as a boy, day after day without change unless it was in the wash, until finally Celeste had torn it into strips to use as rags, and bought him a new one. That new one had never felt the same, not even when it too was showing signs of wear, and Marcel supposed that each and every thing in the world had its own nature; that no two shirts were the same, just as no two trees were the same, as no two stones were exactly the same, as no two faces were the same, not even from moment to moment. Then he thinks that this lady’s handkerchief is closest to the feel of Celeste’s scarf, and he remembers that Celeste’s scarf got lost one day after church, but it was he, Marcel, who found it; he was nine years and fourteen days old at the time and the church was colder than usual and he found the scarf between the pews and there was dust there, because the woman who swept the church was ill with a fever; the doctor had said it was one hundred and four and that she might not survive, but she did survive, well, for another four nights at least when finally God released her, and she was buried next to her husband, who’d lived from 1804 to 1873, or so it said on his grave, but . . .