The Riddle of Monte Verita

by Jean-Paul Torok

  ‘I think,’ he replied, weighing his words carefully, ‘that Dr. Hoenig chose the bungalow simply for its view of the lake. I also think there’s a good chance that the mysterious woman was a journalist who had come to interview him or submit an article. As for the hypothesis of an idyll between his wife and his assistant, it’s too much of a literary cliché to be taken seriously.’

  ‘“Interesting, although elementary”,’ quoted Lippi, looking at him ironically. ‘But: “I am afraid, my dear Watson, that most of your conclusions were erroneous.”’

  ‘“Some people,”’ responded Pierre, ‘“without possessing genius, have a remarkable power of stimulating it.”’

  ‘Good,’ said Lippi, approvingly. ‘Very good! Baskervilles, first chapter, I think?’

  ‘Exactly,’ replied Pierre.

  And conversing thus, they took the road to the bus station.

  ***

  Lippi went up to his room and Pierre joined his wife who had been reading the evening newspaper in the hotel lounge while waiting for him.

  ‘Have you seen the news?’ she asked anxiously, frowning charmingly. ‘It looks as though there’s going to be war. I’m beginning to wonder if we wouldn’t be better off staying in Switzerland.’

  ‘And what would I do?’ he asked with nervous smile.

  ‘I don’t know. Whatever you want. You could write detective stories, for example.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t like detective stories?’

  ‘No, but it seems to be profitable,’ she replied with a knowing look. ‘Look at Arthur Carter Gilbert: he has a beautiful villa in Lausanne, a boat and a charming wife much younger than he is.’

  It was his turn to frown.

  ‘Do you know him?’

  ‘Of course. Didn’t I tell you? I knew him when I was very young. He was a great friend of my parents when my father was posted to London. He used to sit me on his knee and call me his little fairy, and I used to call him Uncle Arthur.

  Pierre was stunned. It wasn’t the first time she had unexpectedly revealed a part of her past, but he still found it hard to get used to it.

  ‘At the time, he hadn’t yet published anything. He was working in the Foreign Office, and that’s how he and Papa….’

  The sentence tailed off and she stared at him wide-eyed.

  ‘Why are you looking at me like that? What have I said?’

  ‘Nothing. I didn’t know you knew him, that’s all.’

  He had promised himself never to question her, but he couldn’t help asking her, rather too sharply:

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me when you knew we were coming to the symposium?’

  ‘You didn’t tell me he was going to be here. I found out from Freyja Hoenig this afternoon. Anyway, he’s not coming. He’s an old bear; he has a horror of appearing in public.’

  He changed the subject and adopted a lighter tone.

  ‘Listen to me, darling. It’s probably nothing, but you must have shared some confidences with that woman, and I have very good reason to believe she told everything to her husband.’ He forced a smile. ‘It’s hardly surprising, but he appears to be interested in you. He asked me certain questions and –.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ she replied angrily. ‘I chatted with Madame Hoenig, as women will do. You’re acting very strangely this evening.’ She hesitated, then burst out laughing. ‘What makes you think I shared any confidences?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he confessed, shaking his head. ‘I just have a bee in my bonnet.’

  ‘If we’re talking about confidences,’ she continued, ‘she was the one confiding in me. In any case, I can tell you two things: that woman does not love her husband, and she doesn’t share his views.’

  ‘Who doesn’t love her husband?’ whispered Lippi who had suddenly appeared in front of them. He took Solange’s hand and brought it to his lips. ‘Certainly not you, dear Madame… Sorry to interrupt, but as we’re all a little tired of the hotel cooking, I thought I would take you to a restaurant in the old town to try a genuine Swiss fondu accompanied by a delicious local wine.’

  With the Italian’s arrival, the atmosphere relaxed a little and Pierre, already won over, turned to his wife, who looked doubtful.

  ‘It wouldn’t be reasonable, darling. You have to give your paper tomorrow morning.’

  She finally gave in and the evening turned out perfectly. The light from the candles on the table brought out the smoothness of Solange’s skin and accentuated the silky highlights in the chestnut hair curling around the nape of her neck. The décolleté of her green dress displayed the graceful line of her throat and shoulders to perfection. She had never looked more beautiful. Lippi put himself out for her and was at his scintillating best with a stream of sparkling witticisms. But, although she laughed heartily at his jokes, Pierre noticed that she chain-smoked nervously and the only time her innocent grey-green eyes met his, he believed he could detect a secret anxiety.

  IV

  Saturday 24 September

  Pierre, on the podium, was in a lively debate with an admirer of the hammer and sickle and follower of a doctrine that professed internationalism but was nonetheless driven by an inflexible chauvinism. He railed against “Anglo-Saxon imperialism” and the idea that an American had invented detective fiction seemed to him to be yet another impudent reactionary lie. As far as he was concerned, the genre had been created by the French, along with the Rights of Man and the guillotine, and had been inspired by the activities of the secret police under Fouché – Napoleon’s partner in crime; Balzac’s novel Une Tenebreuse Affaire (A Murky Business); and Gaboriau’s serialised tales.

  Pierre replied courteously that the conjecture, while not exactly erroneous, was – and here he deliberately used English words – unconvincing and irrelevant ; for, while it was clear that each moment in history had inevitably followed all the preceding ones and so – put that way – nobody could deny a connection between Fouché’s snitches, the gigantic ape of the Rue Morgue, and the phosphorescent mastiff of the Baskerville family, he himself, not being a specialist in dialectic materialism, was unable to see it. Particularly since Une Tenebreuse Affaire was written in 1841, the same year as The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and the first novel of the so-called precursor Gaboriau, L’Affaire Lerouge, didn’t appear until 1863.

  This brilliant rejoinder ended his session with a flourish and earned him hearty applause from everywhere but the ranks of the speaker’s colleagues. ‘“To win without risk is to triumph without glory”,’ Lippi whispered in his ear, his appreciative smile belying his words. Pierre, momentarily dizzy with his success, did not consider the effect the incident might have on his cursus honorum – his academic future. For now, he was just deeply happy to have been a success in front of his wife and couldn’t wait to be alone with her to listen to her congratulations.

  From his position on the platform where he was holding forth on the enigma of The Scarlet Letter, he had finally dared to glance in her direction. She was sitting modestly to one side at the end of the third row, dressed for the occasion in a dark brown suit with a matching beret, which gave her the air of a student. She listened with that innocent, almost too innocent, expression she wore when she was bothered: her eyes, under their long lashes, held that look of rapture which subtly hinted at sexual arousal. When she had realised he was looking at her, she blushed and lowered her eyelids.

  She left the auditorium at the end of the debate and went to wait for him on the terrace. He caught sight of her standing not far from the door, in the full sunlight that was beating down on the flagstones. Trying to make his way towards her while avoiding the attendees wishing to ask him questions, he bumped into Albert Mestre who insisted on congratulating him and wanted to ask permission to publish his talk in the review he edited.

  He answered him distractedly, keeping his eye steadfastly on his wife and waving to her discreetly. At that very moment his feeling of euphoria vanished. In the middle of the terrace, among the groups
of chattering attendees, he could see Dr. Hoenig walking towards Solange, with his heavy tread, jutting jaw and disdainful mouth, and the air of someone who knew exactly how to get what he wanted. Pierre saw him speak to her. She, initially startled, smiled with a forced ease that fooled no-one: the smile was like a mask. She fiddled nervously with the clasp of her handbag and, when the doctor leaned towards her to emphasise his words, recoiled instinctively and looked around for help.

  It seemed to last an eternity. Mestre had been replaced by a cackling swarm of Swiss students who bombarded him with compliments and trivial questions. He tried to push them away but they kept returning and he felt paralysed and impotent, as if trapped in a bad dream.

  In fact, the whole scene lasted only a few minutes. He managed to free himself and stepped forward with clenched fists. ‘If that repugnant thug speaks to her for one second more,’ he said to himself, ‘I’ll punch him in the nose.’ As if he had heard the threat, Hoening bowed curtly and turned on his heels. Suddenly, Pierre found a radiant Solange in front of him, throwing herself into his arms. And he suddenly felt so good that he wondered, laughing at himself, whether his imagination had once again played tricks on him.

  ***

  Solange stayed for lunch at the Albergo and the conversation, with Pierre, Mestre, Prokosch, and Professors Harvey and Lippi at the table, was very lively. There was no discussion of detective fiction, locked room mysteries, dark sorcery, or even politics. Instead they talked about trivial yet essential things such as gastronomy, wine, the new painters in vogue, the latest Paris craze, the recent Paul Morand novel and the annual Giraudoux play. Amid a general feeling of well-being, Lippi raised his glass and cited the prophetic phrase from La Guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu: ‘A minute of peace is always worth seizing,’ and Solange captivated Prokosch by telling him about Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, a full-length cartoon that she had just seen on the Champs-Élysées. All present went out of their way to be witty and frivolous, helped greatly by the charming local Tessin wine. The young woman was amazed that so many serious and erudite people could behave like tipsy students.

  As soon as they left the Albergo by the door to the parking space where the Delahaye was parked, Pierre gathered her to him and kissed her at length and lovingly. It reminded him of the first time he had held her in his arms, on the quay at Le Havre just after she had disembarked from the ocean liner; they had held each other as if the world was about to end, completely oblivious to the crowd milling around them. ‘You won’t be back too late, darling?’ she asked imploringly as she slid behind the wheel and looked up at him with eyes welling with tears. And, as he stood there alone, he felt the trees and the landscape spin around him.

  ‘I’ve had too much wine,’ he thought. He steadied himself and walked resolutely back down the steps leading to the Albergo. Just as he was about to step onto the terrace, he froze. A valet was opening one of the great French windows and Dr. Hoenig appeared. He was wearing his customary thick woollen suit, out of the top pocket of which he produced a cigar, which he stopped to light with an almost maniacal attention. Once again Pierre felt extreme unease. He saw in a flash the incident earlier that day, and felt the same surge of anger. But instead of stopping to think, as he would have done in his normal state, he marched straight towards the fat man and stood defiantly in front of him.

  ‘What did you say to my wife?’ he said, almost spluttering. His mouth was dry and his throat was tight and he didn’t know why.

  Hoening looked him up and down.

  ‘What do you want, Monsieur Garnier?’

  ‘I demand to know,’ he repeated, ‘what you said to my wife.’

  Hoenig raised his eyebrows to show astonishment.

  ‘What I said to your wife? Nothing important, I can assure you. I just reminded her of two or three episodes in her past. Murky businesses she was mixed up in, which had sparked the interest of my country’s police force.’ He paused and took a long and exasperatingly slow pull on the cigar. ‘Listen to me carefully. I couldn’t care less about justice as you understand it, which is a pathetic invention of decadent democracies. Whatever you may think, I have great admiration for her; I mean for her intelligence, obviously, for she is a woman of superior intelligence, which of course you already knew. No, no, rest assured I have no intention of reopening the files.’

  Pierre stood thunderstruck. Hoenig looked at him with a scornful pity. He removed the cigar from his mouth, considered the tip thoughtfully, and started to leave. Mechanically, Pierre followed him as if under the pull of an invisible magnet.

  ‘Look at it this way,’ continued Hoenig, descending the stairs towards the park with a measured step. ‘Intellectually, I’m very curious. I wouldn’t want to leave this world without discovering the solution to one of the rare criminal problems that has defeated me.’ He stopped to look patronisingly at Pierre. ‘I like you, Garnier. If you agreed to help me, I could help you in return. Otherwise….’

  Pierre found his voice, but he was so confused that his anger had subsided.

  ‘I don’t know if you realise it or not,’ he replied dully, ‘but I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘That doesn’t surprise me, Monsieur Garnier. To borrow the illuminating distinction that your friend Professor Lippi makes between the story and the account, you find yourself in the position of the hero of the novel, to whom all kinds of things happen without him having the faintest idea of the story he’s living. At least until the dénouement, which generally occurs right at the end. But neither you nor I have the patience to wait until then, no?’ It was a rhetorical question and he continued: ‘However, as it’s a long story, I suggest you come with me to my bungalow where we can take all the time we need and sample an excellent cognac to boot. Oh, yes,’ he sighed, ‘I have been known occasionally to break the strict rules I impose on myself. Don’t worry, it will be our secret. My wife and my assistant have gone to do a little shopping in Milan where, incidentally, cigars cost less than half of what they do here in Switzerland. By the way, your charming wife has asked mine to bring back some cigarettes.’

  ‘No,’ said Pierre, and stopped dead.

  Hoenig turned round.

  ‘No, what, Monsieur Garnier?’

  ‘I’m not going a step further. I’ve already heard enough of your rant.’

  The doctor opened his hands palms up in a conciliatory gesture.

  ‘Just as you wish,’ he replied calmly. ‘I expected as much. But, if I may be permitted an indiscreet question, what do you earn outside of your university salary?’

  The question was so incongruous that Pierre burst out laughing. He told himself his first hypothesis was correct: the eminent Herr Doktor was completely off his rocker. It felt as if a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders. Hoenig, however, observed him with a clinical eye and repeated imperturbably:

  ‘Let me put it another way: are you rich?’

  ‘Of course not! How can you possibly think – .’

  ‘So, consequently, she is the one with the money. Obviously. In that case….’ He frowned and nodded his head as if the revelation had opened new avenues of thought.

  ‘In that case, it isn’t altogether out of the question that she’s in love with you. It’s true that it’s fairly frequent with this kind of pathology….’

  In his mind’s eye, Pierre could see Solange’s imploring look as she took leave of him; Solange who couldn’t bear for him to be away, even for a few hours; Solange who professed not to be very intelligent and who admired him so much; Solange and her lack of common sense; Solange who spent hours making up and dressing up to please him; Solange so gentle and so innocent. That innocence shone out of her as rays from her sensual nature, and when Solange was in love she had absolutely no idea what she was doing or saying.

  He smiled and became so absorbed in his reminiscences that it took him a moment to realise they were walking past the rocky face at the foot of which lay the sinister crevasse. The
interplay of light and shadow in the sunlit undergrowth intensified the dark places. He was vaguely conscious, as if in a fog, of Hoening’s impersonal and interminable droning.

  ‘… for that reason, Monsieur Garnier, I don’t think you are in any danger, at least for now. But be very vigilant, your wife –.’

  ‘Leave my wife alone! If I see you near her once more, I’ll kill you!’ He breathed in deeply to try and calm himself. ‘That’s enough. I’m going.’

  ‘Go in peace, Monsieur Garnier,’ replied Hoenig with a beatific smile. ‘Your wife’s real name is Simone Lantier. And she’s a murderess.’

  ***

  ‘Her parents were both from the French working class. The father, Maurice Lantier, was a carpenter who married a domestic servant, Marthe Vatard, in 1907, and a year later she bore him a daughter they named Simone. Two or three years before the war, Lantier, who was involved with a number of anarchist groups – you’ve heard of the Bonnot gang, no doubt – participated in an attack on an armed security guard. Things went wrong and the guard was killed in a fusillade of gunfire. In 1913 several of the gang members were caught and four of them, including Lantier, were sentenced to death and guillotined shortly thereafter. All of that is historical fact and can be easily verified.

  ‘At the time of her husband’s death, the mother was working for the Duvernois, a wealthy childless couple of rather liberal leanings, who showed great affection for the little girl. When Marthe died in 1919, a victim of the Spanish flu, the Duvernois adopted the orphan and changed her name to Solange, which they presumably found more distinguished. They took her to London, where the husband had been made an attaché in the French embassy. She was already exceptionally pretty and they raised her as their own child. However, she was also rather a handful and she ran away at the age of sixteen with a small sum of money. By that time the Duvernois were in Berlin, where the husband had been posted. She got into trouble again two years later when she pilfered a diamond brooch from a jeweller’s in Potsdamer Platz. The Duvernais used their connections and the jeweller dropped his complaint, but the Stadtpolizei referred her to me for a psychological examination. Hers seemed to me to be run-of-the-mill case and I recommended she be placed in a specialised institution where, according to her teachers, she turned out to be a brilliant and hardworking student.’