AHMM, October 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  McReary said, “Don't that put money in Frankie's pocket?"

  "It's a screwy war,” Zagreb said. “We'll get all the bugs worked out in time for the next."

  They found Bernice Hooper packing a lunchpail in the kitchen of a small house on Joseph Campau. She was a thick-waisted woman with gray in her hair who said she was working the swing shift at Dodge Main.

  "I'm sick of having coppers in my house,” she said. “I had ‘em in every house I ever lived in. My father and uncle were cops, I married a cop, I got a brother who's a cop. I'm glad now I never had a kid. I'd be pinning his diapers on with a shield."

  "Tough break.” Canal sounded sincere.

  McReary had his hat off, baring his bald head. “We're sorry for your loss."

  "Every copper says that. It must be in the department manual."

  Zagreb said, “Eddie Karpalov's dead, if it helps."

  "Gee, let me check. Jim!” she called over her shoulder. She waited, shrugged, threw a box of raisins in the pail. “Nope. Still in the ground."

  "Can you tell us where you were at seven this morning?” Zagreb asked.

  "Welding tanks, midnight till eight."

  "You pulled a double shift?"

  "I don't have a husband to come back to, mister. My mother talks about Jesus all the time, so I don't figure I'm missing much in the way of conversation."

  Burke said, “We'll check with your foreman."

  "Check or not, I don't care. I'm glad he's dead, but my life's the same either way."

  Zagreb paused in the midst of lighting a cigarette. “Mind telling us your maiden name?"

  * * * *

  That night they reconvened in Room 1102 of the California and wolfed down kielbasa sausage and cabbage cooked by Canal on the hot plate, chasing it with beer. The big sergeant was a lifelong bachelor and the only one of the Horsemen who could apply heat to a meal without needing a fire extinguisher or a stomach pump. They were sitting around burping when the candlestick phone rang. Zagreb said “Okay” three times and pegged the receiver.

  "Washington P.D. picked up Deputy Marshal Cash an hour ago,” he said. “He rolled over on his partner, but he says all he did was drive the getaway car, a rental. He never heard of anybody named Smallwood. Deputy Marshal Rudnicki lives on the Virginia side. They're rounding up the locals to help snag him. We'll know in a little."

  "Bernice Rudnicki.” McReary shook his head. “How'd you guess, Zag?"

  "I didn't. When she said she has a brother who's a cop, I got a hunch, but I didn't figure Rudnicki. The Justice Department checked with his bank. He cashed in all his war bonds last month. That's how he paid Smallwood to arrange to spring Karpalov."

  "Burke picked his teeth with a thumbnail. “It don't make sense. They could've taken a crack at him on the train all the time he was in their custody."

  "And explain it how?” Zagreb said. “Rudnicki called in some markers to get the assignment. The shooting team would start with that, and when it came out he was Hooper's brother-in-law, he'd be hotter than Canal's hot plate. This way he had a legitimate reason for being in town and a hundred other guys to take the fall, including us and everybody who ever knew Eddie."

  "Even so, I hope he gets the same break in court Eddie got.” Canal fired up a cigar.

  Zagreb got up and opened a window to let out the stench. “Not till he rolls over on Smallwood. Otherwise we can't tie Smallwood to that phony affidavit that kept Eddie in the country. Winston Sweet's dumb enough or scared enough to take that ride alone, and the law can't make him give up his client under oath."

  McReary said, “What makes you think Rudnicki will?"

  "Just the difference between time off for good behavior and life without parole. If he don't make a fight of it tonight. Those capital cops cut their teeth on spies and saboteurs. He makes a fight of it, all we got's another dead cop and a live fixer who makes Frankie Orr's operation look like the Lollipop Guild."

  The telephone rang again. Zagreb answered, listened, said, “Thanks,” hung up. He dug a Chesterfield out of his pack. “He made a fight of it."

  After a little while McReary took out the deck of cards.

  Copyright © 2010 Loren D. Estleman

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Fiction: MONSIEUR ALICE IS ABSENT by Stephen Ross

  * * * *

  Art By Ron Chironna

  * * * *

  I had my first drink at age seven, a mouthful of Cabernet Sauvignon from my father's glass. I liked it. Not a day now passes without a mouthful of red. In vino veritas, as my father used to say. In wine is truth, if you don't know Latin.

  This is the picture in my head of my father: He sits in his big chair in his room full of books on the top floor of our house in Paris, a glass in his hand, one of those stinky cigarettes in the corner of his mouth, and ever ready with a quote in Latin, or German, or in English. He spoke and read all three.

  My father was an author, celebrated, feted. Le grand Parisian. I am a primary school teacher, and I am hardly that. I am a student completing my training and I live 280 kilometers from the magnificent City of Light. Smell the irony on my breath.

  When I was seven, I wanted to be like my father: ebullient, creative, full of ideas and argument. But I am not my father and I have consigned myself to being commonplace. I am twenty-one and I am a member of the Everyone Else class. La classe stupide, as my father used to describe them. Us. Me.

  I rent a room in Metz—a town in the northeast of the country. My room is unheated, and I share the latrine at the end of the hall with the four other rooms on my floor. My electricity is to be disconnected tomorrow, and I will not be able to pay again until two weeks. I am of ordinary appearance and intellect. I cannot sing and I cannot dance.

  * * * *

  It is morning and raining. I am walking to the école de Bouchard, a primary school on the edge of town. An aspect of my teacher training requires me to observe and analyze the work of experienced teachers. I sit in their classes and make notes. I hope to become a good teacher, so I appreciate the opportunity to learn from those who are.

  Today I will be observing Monsieur Alice. I have never met Monsieur Alice and I know nothing about him. I have been told he has been employed at Bouchard for sixteen years.

  "Mademoiselle Laugier?” the stern woman asks. The stern woman has horn-rimmed glasses. She stands behind the counter in the school office and drinks from a cup of coffee with her little finger pointing.

  "Yes,” I answer.

  "There is no class for you. Monsieur Alice is absent from school today."

  The stern woman slides the school daybook across the counter toward me and turns it about. Dated today, and written in red ink, it reads:

  MONSIEUR ALICE IS ABSENT

  The stern woman arranges for me to sit in class tomorrow, assuming Monsieur Alice's return. She then scolds me for wearing blue denim jeans.

  "I know it is now 1970 and it has become fashionable for young women teachers of Paris to wear long pants, but in this school, women wear skirts. When you return tomorrow, you will be attired in such fashion, or you will not proceed beyond this office."

  I break an egg on a plate, and I swirl the yoke and the white with a fork. I drop a piece of bread facedown into the egg mix and let it soak. I cut pieces of cheese and slice a small tomato.

  I turn on the radio. It fades into life and I hear an American band. There are jangling guitars and a woman singing. I don't understand English, but I like her melody. It is mournful.

  I wonder what I will do when my electricity is disconnected?

  I slide the bread and egg mix from the plate and into the frying pan. As the egg starts to fry, I drop the pieces of cheese onto the bread. I watch them melt. I then drop the tomato pieces onto the top, adding a finger squeeze of pepper.

  The song stops. The radio announcer apologizes for his interruption. He tells me about a murder in Paris. A man's body was found in Saint-Cloud today. According to bystanders who observed t
he body as it was taken away, the dead man was another victim of the Duchamp Killer. The jangling guitars return.

  I turn off the radio.

  * * * *

  I sit in the hot water of my bathtub, and I eat my dinner with a fork. A glass of wine stands next to the soap in the soap rack on the wall.

  I wonder if Monsieur Alice was in Paris today? I wonder at the odds that in all the millions who live in that city, that Monsieur Alice should have been in Saint-Cloud, and that he should have been murdered by the Duchamp Killer?

  Marcel Duchamp had been a famous artist. Years ago, he drew a mustache and goatee onto a print of the Mona Lisa. The Duchamp Killer draws that same mustache and goatee onto the faces of his victims, and then cuts their throats.

  I wake up in my bed with a dry mouth and heavy pulse. It is four in the morning. I have just dreamt of a man who had no face. His head was that of a large egg. He had no eyes or nose or mouth.

  He had a pen. He drew a mustache above my lip and a goatee on my chin. The nib of his pen hurt. It scratched. He then sliced open my neck with his knife.

  * * * *

  This morning I wear a skirt. The stern woman in the school office scolds me for my lateness. She confirms Monsieur Alice is present today, and I am instructed to knock on the door of classroom H on the second floor.

  I climb the staircase. Bouchard is an old school. It is a building of wooden floors and creaky doors. The interiors had last been painted during the war—the Germans used the building as a hospital.

  I knock at the door of classroom H. Monsieur Alice opens it.

  Monsieur Alice is a slight man of forty or fifty years, clean shaven with wire-rim spectacles. He wears a plain brown suit and tangerine tie. He bids me to enter and directs me to a chair at the rear.

  The classroom has one window. It looks out to the country and sunlight pours through it. There are twenty children in the class, six or seven years of age, sitting in rows. One side of the room are boys, the other side are girls.

  Monsieur Alice instructs the class to read the story that begins on page twenty-seven, and there is a flourish of page turning. Monsieur Alice, who has remained on his feet since I entered, walks unhurriedly about the desks, ensuring each child has turned to the correct page of their reader.

  Monsieur Alice seems indifferent. When he speaks to a child he doesn't look at the child, and he speaks with a slow, quiet, uninterested voice. He tells a slouching boy to sit up straight. The boy complies.

  I write in my journal:

  —Students quiet and behaved

  —Teacher in authority

  —Students read silently

  —Teacher sits at his desk at front

  —Teacher stares out of window

  Monsieur Alice smells of soap. When he opened the door for me to enter, I had smelt the kind of soap you buy for your clothes.

  Monsieur Alice sits at his desk and rests his head in his hand. His fingernails are neatly clipped. His skin is smooth. I wonder what he is thinking as he stares outside. I wonder if he is thinking of anything.

  "Who is Marcel Duchamp?” It is a girl in the front row of desks. Her dark hair is tied in two crooked tails.

  Monsieur Alice glances at her. “Have you been reading your father's newspaper?"

  She nods.

  "Marcel Duchamp was an artist."

  "Did he paint pictures?"

  "He painted and he created sculptures, but the most important thing he did was to ask a very big question."

  All of the children are now looking up and listening.

  "Duchamp asked, What is art?"

  Monsieur Alice sees the nature of the question is beyond the children's grasp. He shakes his head. “You are very small and young. You should not concern yourselves with what you see in your fathers’ newspapers."

  He returns his gaze to the window. “Continue reading."

  * * * *

  At the end of the lesson, Monsieur Alice walks me back to the school office. It is lunchtime and children crowd us on the stairs.

  "You are from Paris, yes?” Monsieur Alice asks.

  "Yes.” My accent will forever stain me.

  "I was born in Montmartre,” Monsieur Alice explains. “I dislike Paris, but sometimes I have need to return to it. My mother remains there. She is eighty-seven and lives in a hospital. Yesterday, she asked her doctor to summon me, and I went."

  "Is she dying?"

  "No, she is old and I am all she has left."

  We arrive at the school office. The stern woman makes a note in the school daybook.

  Monsieur Alice removes his glasses. He wipes them with a clean white handkerchief he takes from his pocket. “Your name is Denise Laugier, yes?"

  I nod.

  "Are you a relation of the writer J. G. Laugier?"

  "He was my father."

  Monsieur Alice nods. He seems impressed. “You hail from a distinguished family.” He puts his glasses back on and for the first time looks at me directly. He has pale blue eyes. “Why do you want to be a teacher, Mademoiselle Laugier?"

  "I think I can be a very good teacher,” I answer.

  He nods, then bids me good day.

  * * * *

  I sit on a bench by the river. I eat an egg and work on my assignment: an essay on lesson planning, two thousand words. I write sentences and I complete paragraphs, but I only think of Monsieur Alice and his smell of soap.

  My father used to reek of cigarettes. My father was loud and kinetic; he was a body always in motion. Monsieur Alice does not smoke. He is quite unlike my father. He is quietness personified.

  I have read of Buddhist monks in the East and how they meditate. They remain perfectly still and seek mental solitude, a type of nothingness. There is an observable nothingness about Monsieur Alice.

  * * * *

  I buy a newspaper, and I take a seat and table in front of the café near the Cathedral. I order coffee. It is the late afternoon and the sun is leaving. I open the paper, and I read about the Duchamp Killer.

  The dead man found yesterday in Saint-Cloud had been thirty-seven. He had been a cinema projectionist. He was the sixteenth victim of the Duchamp Killer, and the first since the January 31 murder of last year, where a woman's body had been found under a bridge.

  Sixteen Duchamp Killer murders over nine years, always in Paris, always the black ink from a fountain pen, and always the cut of a knife to the throat.

  Marcel Duchamp gave me an apple once, when I was a child. It was a shiny red apple, and when I had tried to bite into it, he and my father had burst into laughter. The apple was made of rubber and painted to look real.

  Were he still alive, I imagine Monsieur Duchamp would have hated the way the Paris press had taken his name and his art and associated it with a murderer.

  "May I join you?” It is Monsieur Alice. He hugs a parcel of groceries with one arm. He takes off his hat.

  "Yes.” I fold up the newspaper.

  Monsieur Alice sits opposite. He stands his parcel on the chair next to him. He calls for a glass of water and one is brought.

  "If you want to be a good teacher,” Monsieur Alice instructs me, “let them be who they are. Stop them if they do wrong, but let them be when they do not."

  I nod appreciatively.

  "And always remember the three P's."

  "Present, practice, and produce?"

  Monsieur Alice nods. “It is the method of all good teachers.” He drinks from his glass of water. He spies the headline of my newspaper. “Murder fascinates people, yes?"

  "Yes,” I answer him. “And I am proof. I make no habit of buying newspapers."

  Monsieur Alice smiles at me. It is the first time I have seen emotion in him. His eyes stare into me. I wish I knew what to say. I want to say something to Monsieur Alice.

  "What is art, Mademoiselle Laugier?"

  I don't know how to answer. I have no words. I am like a child in his classroom.

  Monsieur Alice knows that. He finishes his water
. “Good evening.” He rises and puts his hat back on. He takes his parcel and leaves.

  * * * *

  It is three in the morning. I have woken. I am wet from perspiring. I have again dreamt of the egg man. He violated me. He then again drew a mustache above my lip and a goatee on my chin, and then he killed me. He smelt of soap.

  * * * *

  The stern woman lights a cigarette. Holding a folder of papers under her arm, she leaves the school office. She walks with military precision down the hall and then climbs the stairs. I hear her heels ascend.

  It is eleven in the morning and classes are in progress. I have come back to Bouchard. I have remained out of sight. There is now no one in, or about, the school office. I have come to resolve a conflict between my intuition and my belief.

  The school daybook lies open on the counter. I slide it across to me. I turn back the pages from today, turning back until I find January 31 of last year. It was a Friday and the date of the previous Duchamp Killer murder.

  Next to the date, among other notes of the day's activities in the school, I read in red:

  MONSIEUR ALICE IS ABSENT

  I have stolen the school daybook. It lies unopened at my feet. I am sitting at a carrel in the newspaper room in the public library and my fingers are stained black with ink. I have turned the pages of countless newspapers and my arms ache.

  I have ventured back nine years and have found newspaper reports for every one of Duchamp Killer murders. In my journal, I have written down the date of every death.

  I have become an authority.

  The killer has murdered both men and women, both young and old. Scientific tests have determined that the knife used is always the same, and that the fountain pen and brand of ink are also always the same.

  All sixteen murders have taken place outdoors, always in secluded locations, and the killer has left no clue nor been observed by any witness.

  The killer has three times sent communiqués to the Préfecture de Police. He has sent postcards of the Mona Lisa, and writing on the back of these, he has stated he would never be caught. And on the last, he has stated he would never be caught because it is impossible to imprison the imagination. There had since been lengthy public debate as to what the killer had meant by that.