The Officer's Prey

by Armand Cabasson

  ‘What are we to think of a confused mind that carries out a consistent plan in masterly fashion? Did he even understand what he had been made to confess to? I don’t doubt that he admitted to doing it. What’s surprising is that he didn’t also admit to being responsible for the double murder on the Lyons mail-coach, Marat’s assassination, the booby trap that almost blew up the Emperor in Rue Nicaise, and to being the man in the iron mask.’

  ‘Don’t overdo it. I don’t need you for that. At least I asked that, in view of his mental disorder, he should not be sentenced to death. That’s something.’

  So they even wanted to execute him, did they? Margont felt nauseated.

  ‘I’m going to order a new inquiry,’ continued the prince. ‘I admit that your argument does trouble me. However, I’ve often had positive reports about the efficiency of the Polish authorities.’

  Margont did not doubt that. He sensed a presence behind those who had conducted this mockery of an investigation. Countess Nergiss. The prince was so eager for this case to be solved … Bribing one of her servants and one or two Polish notables was neither here nor there in terms of expense as far as she was concerned. Margont had mixed feelings about this woman. Either she had been seduced by power or else she had acted out of love, to fulfil her husband’s dream. If that was the case, her ambition was rather moving and Margont could not bring himself to dislike her.

  ‘Nevertheless, it has to be him,’ muttered Eugène.

  ‘How did events that evening unfold?’

  ‘The murderer mingled with the guests. That must have been the case because there were sentries all around the castle and such a large number of people present …’

  Of course he mingled with the guests because he was one of them! Margont exclaimed to himself. Still, at least the prince was co-operating now.

  ‘He went into the dressing room …’

  ‘How did he find it?’

  ‘Just after the performance a crowd of spectators hurried into the dressing rooms to congratulate the actors as they were removing their make-up. I went in myself. It was easy therefore to locate the place. The actors then went back out into the grounds. Mademoiselle Lasquenet returned to her dressing room later so her murderer then took an enormous risk in following her there because an admirer might have tried his luck with her, or a servant might have encountered him or heard him. He acted very swiftly, otherwise someone would certainly have caught him in the act. He entered the room. Mademoiselle Lasquenet was not worried. All she needed to do was to shout and a servant would hear her. Besides, either the murderer was disguised as a valet and she thought he had been sent by the countess, or he introduced himself as one of the guests. If that were the case, actresses are used to this sort of situation and know how to deal with people tactfully. The man took her by surprise and stabbed her twice. She died before she even had time to scream. So, as you can see, this crime is different from the one involving the Polish woman.’

  ‘But it’s very similar to the one involving the sentry – killing someone outright by stabbing them only twice. Besides, we can’t say whether the murderer would have mutilated his victim or not if he’d had time.’

  ‘On that subject, there is one detail. The murderer cut out her tongue.’

  Margont shuddered. He could never get used to horror. ‘The tongue …’ Now it was his turn to feel unsettled. Fortunately, he had shaken the prince sufficiently to persuade him to provide all the details.

  ‘I’ve thought about it long and hard. An anecdote can perhaps explain such a cruel act. By the end of the performance, the audience was completely enthralled. Seeing this, Countess Nergiss suggested that the actors should give a repeat performance of certain scenes according to public request. Everyone joined in the spirit. They were even asked to recite speeches from other plays and were then applauded enthusiastically. From time to time someone asked a question. How could such and such an actor play such an odious character? Did they themselves feel anger when their character was angry? Opinions differed. Some of the actors maintained that you had to use your sensitivity and your emotions to “become” your character in order to perform the role properly. Hence a considerable limitation of roles because any given person could not “become” just anyone. Others thought that the actor remained an actor pretending to be the character. Therefore he had to use first and foremost his intelligence. Hence the possibility for a gifted actor to take on any role. In a word it was the insoluble debate begun by Monsieur Diderot.

  ‘Mademoiselle Lasquenet favoured the second point of view and proclaimed that she could play absolutely any role. Another actress, whose only fault was to be less beautiful and less talented than her stage partner, jealous of being eclipsed, challenged her to play a whore. How childish it was! They were no longer two young women but two adolescent girls ready to pull each other’s hair out. Mademoiselle Lasquenet gave a very convincing demonstration and even went as far as to caress her breasts. At that moment, the real spectacle was not what was happening on stage but on Countess Nergiss’s face. Mademoiselle Lasquenet continued in her role, this time using her tongue. She ran it over her lips quite indecently … The countess suddenly rose to her feet to applaud and the audience did likewise whilst Mademoiselle Lasquenet, whose cheeks were bright red, bowed politely, still surprised by her own boldness. That was what must have infuriated the murderer and driven him to take such risks. That’s why he cut out her tongue. Such cruelty unleashed by the shamelessness of a susceptible adolescent girl!’

  The silence that ensued made the two men ill at ease.

  ‘Your Highness, General Triaire must provide me with an exact list of guests.’

  ‘Exact, exact … He’ll note down the names of those he saw.’

  ‘Can he try to establish who was absent at the time of the murder?’

  ‘That’s impossible. More than an hour elapsed between the moment Mademoiselle Lasquenet went to change and when the housekeeper knocked on the door. We do not know at what precise time the murderer stabbed her and it took only a few moments. His absence was probably not even noticed and, even if it had been, so many people were coming and going to the buffets, flitting from group to group or goodness knows what. In any case, who would care about someone’s absence in such a crush?’

  ‘Could General Triaire also do a sketch of the state of the bedroom: the position of the body, the—’

  The prince gave a nervous laugh. ‘Are you mad? In any case, nobody entered the bedroom except the countess and the investigators.’

  ‘Do we know how the murderer got rid of any bloodstains that might have—’

  ‘I don’t know if any attention was given to those details. There was only one thing that struck the investigators. At one point they thought that the murderer had stolen the tongue because it was nowhere to be found but it had in fact been hidden in one of the pockets of the victim’s cloak.’

  The prince’s furrowed brow and his tightly folded arms betrayed his tension. If he had hoped that Margont would dispel his doubts, he really did have cause for annoyance.

  ‘I think I’ve told you everything about this sad event,’ he concluded. His sentence had the ring of a funeral oration.

  ‘I am indebted to you, Your Highness. May I leave?’

  ‘Keep me regularly informed by sealed letter addressed to General Triaire. Ask to see me only if you have something new to tell me.’

  Eugène then dived into the mass of messengers whilst Margont lingered in the grove. His thoughts were jumbled and incoherent. Could this affair be linked to his investigation or not? He was not at all convinced of the deranged man’s guilt but nor was he convinced of his innocence. On what basis could he assume that the person he was tracking had also killed the actress? What was the significance – if any – of cutting out her tongue? Unable to make up his mind and torn between various suppositions, Margont was struggling to find a connection between these disparate elements.

  That same evening, as he was recounting hi
s conversation with the prince to Lefine, he received the list of guests. Almost two hundred officers from IV Corps. And Triaire pointed out that this list was almost certainly incomplete. Predictably, the names of the four suspects were among them.

  CHAPTER 17

  THE march resumed its tedious course. The road to Moscow, attractively lined with birch trees, was so dusty that every breath was agony for the lungs. Sometimes they advanced laboriously in the unbearable heat, making a rush for any stagnant water hole, even if it meant suffering diarrhoea. Sometimes they were soaked to the skin by rain or bombarded by hailstones. At night they shivered with cold and got very little sleep. Everything in this country seemed to be on an excessive, inhuman scale. There was also the constant smell of putrefaction coming from the thousands of dead horses, a smell that was all the more abominable as it presaged the slaughter to come. More than a third of the army was sick or off foraging for food and three-quarters of the eighty thousand horses that had set off on the campaign had perished. But the French continued to move forward in the sweltering heat through a countryside that consisted of plains, hills, marshes, forests and charred remains.

  Jérôme Bonaparte, the Emperor’s brother, King of Westphalia and a poor tactician who was well out of his depth as commander of VIII Corps, manoeuvred particularly badly. He let slip the opportunity of attacking Bagration’s army. Napoleon, furious that this mistake had allowed the Russian army to escape destruction, relieved him of his command. Out of pique, Jérôme left the army and returned home, taking with him his Royal Guard. The consequences of this error were very serious: the two Russian armies had almost linked up with each other and Barclay de Tolly and Bagration were able to meet up at Smolensk, one of the most important and beautiful cities in Russia. The Russians were determined to defend it, at whatever cost. ‘At last I’ve got them!’ exclaimed Napoleon. On 16 and 17 August the battle raged. The French had already seized a large part of the town when, during the night of 17 to 18 August, Barclay de Tolly once more ordered a retreat.

  Bagration was appalled. The two generals were proving to be exact opposites. Barclay de Tolly had a cold disposition. A man of unfailing composure, he was polite, patient and methodical. He never got tired and frequently went without a meal. He was a very competent general and continued to implement a scorched-earth policy even though his general staff, his soldiers and the Russian people were unanimously against it. His unpopularity was growing as the French army progressed. Bagration seemed to have an aura of heroism about him and was fêted all the way from St Petersburg to Siberia. He was combative, courageous to the point of foolhardiness, and each step backwards by the Russian army mortified him. But Barclay de Tolly’s main objective was to protect his troops, and to continue fighting in Smolensk would have prejudiced any attempted retreat. The Russians would have been hindered by the congested streets and would probably have ended their withdrawal at the very bottom of the Dnieper, the river that ran through the city. So the Russian army abandoned its positions under cover of darkness, taking with it the icon of Our Lady of Smolensk and setting fire to the city.

  IV Corps did not reach Smolensk until 19 August, too late to take part in the confrontation but early enough to witness the consequences.

  Working separately, Lefine and Margont had each been gathering information about their suspects. Three days earlier they had decided they would pool the results of their investigations the moment they arrived in Smolensk. Since then Lefine had disappeared. Margont had organised a search for him but to no avail and he was becoming increasingly worried.

  Three-quarters of Smolensk had been burnt but it was still a superb and fascinating city. It stretched out along the sides of a valley at the bottom of which flowed a river, the Borysthen. On the left bank stood the old town, surrounded by a red-brick wall with whitewashed battlements. These fortifications were twenty-four feet high, eighteen feet wide and included twenty-nine towers. On the other bank the dwellings were more recent and unfortified.

  When the 84th entered the city, a deathly silence hung over it. Whole areas had been reduced to ashes. The column progressed through the smoking rubble among which lay bodies that were charred, shrunken and twisted like vines. In the streets strewn with wreckage and corpses, blood was mingled with mud. Here, a shell had torn a dozen or so Russian grenadiers to shreds. Death had taken them by surprise: they still had their muskets slung across their chests. There, a large shack had been the scene of fighting before collapsing in flames, killing the combatants on each side indiscriminately. No sooner had a fire been put out than fighting flared up again amongst the rubble. The fires had been so extensive that they had covered everything with a fine layer of dust, a sort of grey, warm shroud that disintegrated when touched.

  Most of the inhabitants had fled with the Russian troops, but some had remained or were coming back. They were looking for relatives, begging for help in removing huge piles of wreckage, recovering anything that had escaped destruction. Although the dead were being tossed into carts and mass graves were being dug everywhere, some of the bodies had begun to decay and the air was contaminated by a vile, clinging odour. You had to press your sleeve against your nostrils to block out the smell of death. Hunger and confusion had unhinged the minds of most of the soldiers who were indulging in a frenzy of looting. They were storming grocers’ and butchers’ shops – or at least what was left of them – and smashing in the doors of houses that had withstood the flames with the aid of charred timbers.

  The 84th reached the area allotted to it and was given permission to seek out supplies. Colonel Pégot reminded everyone that ill treatment of civilians or prisoners, theft, rape or the refusal to obey gendarmes would result in severe punishment, which often meant death. No sooner had he finished speaking than his regiment vanished about their business.

  Margont was marching in the company of Saber and Piquebois.

  ‘Why did our corps arrive after the battle?’ asked an outraged Saber. ‘We are incredibly badly led! What can Prince Eugène have been thinking of? There’s more of the Eugène than the Prince about that one!’

  Neither Margont nor Piquebois replied. It was quite impossible to discuss this subject with Saber. Saber detested Prince Eugène, who, in his opinion, was the Viceroy not of Italy but of upstarts. The son of Alexandre and Joséphine de Beauharnais, he found his life transformed when his mother had taken as her second husband a certain up-and-coming Bonaparte who quickly became known simply as Napoleon. Thus, in 1805, at the age of twenty-four he had been promoted Viceroy of Italy by his stepfather. Saber had already taken his revenge mentally many times on what he considered to be the ultimate betrayal. He frequently imagined himself – albeit in a few years’ time – receiving his marshal’s baton from the Emperor’s own hands and declaring loudly enough for Prince Eugène to hear: ‘I thank Your Majesty with all my heart. My mother will be overjoyed to learn of this appointment to which she has contributed so much … by educating me and helping to make me the man I am.’

  The prince was not totally devoid of qualities as a military leader. Everyone acknowledged his courage at least. Or rather, almost everyone, because Saber could not be made to accept this indisputable fact. ‘Of course it’s disputable, because I dispute it! He’s just the stepson of the right person!’ he would say angrily. And he would draw an unfortunate parallel with the prince’s opera dancer, asserting that it was natural that someone who was so good at mimicking a real general should have fallen in love with a ‘stage Cleopatra’.

  Two dogs suddenly leapt out of a narrow street and barked at the three officers.

  ‘Look – even the curs hate us now!’ fumed Piquebois.

  Saber reached for his sword. ‘They’re as hungry as we are. It can’t be nice to be seriously wounded and have to contend with the likes of them.’

  A little further on he picked up a Russian shako decorated with a brass grenade with three flames shooting up from it, symbolising an explosion. He prised the metal plaque off with the p
oint of his knife and stuffed it into his pocket.

  ‘A souvenir. I have an infantryman’s grenade with one flame, a grenadier’s grenade with three flames, and the double-headed eagle of the soldiers of the Guard. A complete set.’

  Piquebois merely shook his head, whereas a few years earlier he would have rolled up his sleeves for fisticuffs over this trophy.

  ‘You’re missing the cross of the national guards, which has the engraved inscription, “For Faith and the Tsar”.’

  ‘I don’t take account of the militiamen,’ Saber retorted contemptuously.

  ‘Well, you’ll see when you come across them whether they take account of you.’

  Margont’s horse whinnied frequently. Swarms of insects were swirling around the carrion-choked city and clusters of flies were massing on the animal’s eyes as if they were lumps of caviar. The three Frenchmen went past an Orthodox church. The walls had been blackened by smoke but the gilded cupolas of the bell towers sparkled in the sun. It looked like a palace out of the Arabian nights. Families in tears crowded around the altars. A few heaps of rubble further on, they joined a handful of inhabitants in clearing away wreckage as they’d been told it was an inn famous for its larder. When they eventually cleared the trapdoor to the cellar it opened to reveal not smoked hams but a pale-eyed, terror-stricken young girl and her mother. The woman was clutching the child in her arms and could not be persuaded to let go of her. The man who had spoken of the larder explained in halting French that he had ‘lied a bit’ to save his wife and daughter.

  ‘But why lie like that?’ exploded Saber. ‘We are French officers. Had you told us the truth we would have worked twice as fast.’

  All the Russian understood of course was the word ‘lie’ and he quickly handed over a bag to Saber. It contained slices of meat. The French were reluctant to deprive this family but the man rubbed his stomach and smiled. Piquebois, whey-faced, looked closely at the food.