by Claude Izner
‘This place might be a hovel, but it’s my home, and I don’t want to share it with the likes of you, so hop it, you lot!’ the concierge was fond of saying.
And so, when somebody began pounding on his door, all he did was stifle a yawn and raise his eyes to heaven. But he put down his knife when a woman’s voice cried out, ‘Monsieur Myon, Monsieur Myon! Help! It stinks of gas!’
The word ‘gas’ had an instantaneous effect and the armchair was dragged away, allowing in the actress playing the part of Maria de Medici.
‘Calm down, Mademoiselle Eugénie. Where’s it coming from?’
‘From the first-floor staircase. It was one of the carpenters who warned me – he rushed up to Monsieur Leglantier’s room.’
‘Has Monsieur Leglantier been told?’
‘Yes, he’s shut himself in his office. He was supposed to come down for a costume fitting. We’ve been waiting for him for over an hour! The others sent me up to find out what was going on and that’s when the carpenter told me to go back down on account of the gas.’
Casimir Myon hurried to the foot of the stairs where he could tell from the overpowering stench that there was a major gas leak.
‘Whatever you do don’t light a match, anybody. I’m going to air the place.’
Clasping a handkerchief to his face, he ran up to the dimly lit first-floor landing and opened the casement window then examined the pipes, which seemed to be in order. Behind him, Maria de Medici couldn’t stop coughing.
‘What about upstairs, in Monsieur Leglantier’s office…He might have come out again and forgotten to turn off the gas,’ she suggested.
They continued mounting the stairs. The concierge went over to the door of the office. He felt faint and hung on to the doorknob.
‘Are you there, Monsieur Leglantier?’
There was no reply.
‘Where’s the fireman on duty?’
‘Alfred Truchon? He’s at his post in the auditorium.’
‘Go and fetch him as quick as you can, and tell the police! Hurry, there may be an explosion any moment.’
Tripping over her petticoats, Maria de Medici ran down to the ground floor and returned in a flash with the fireman hot on her heels. They managed to push their way past the musketeers, stagehands, gentlemen in ruffs and ladies in hooped skirts who had gathered around the concierge, getting on his nerves with all their suggestions.
The fireman wedged a chisel between the door and the doorjamb and, with a massive shove, broke the lock. Pushing the door open proved more difficult, and only when they had succeeded did it become apparent what had been blocking it: the manager of Théâtre de l’Échiquier lay slumped on the floor, his body twisted as though he were drunk. Andréa gasped in fright. The gas fumes drove back the crowd. Casimir Myon had great difficulty forcing open the window, as the handle was jammed, and left the fireman to attend to Edmond Leglantier.
Alfred Truchon knelt down beside him. ‘He’s not breathing…Fetch a doctor, quick!’ he cried out to the onlookers.
The concierge felt dizzy for a moment and held on to the back of a chair. He braced himself. His vision, which had blurred for a second, became sharp again, and he noticed a piece of paper stuck in the typewriter barrel. His duty was to read it.
‘Is he…Is he dead?’ stammered Andréa, clutching the shoulder of Maria de Medici, who remained silent.
It wasn’t Ravaillac who had slain Henry IV this time, but the city’s gas supply.
Chapter Seven
Tuesday 18 July
VICTOR was in a foul mood. He was annoyed with Joseph and with Tasha for having foisted a lovelorn, flea-ridden kitten on him. Kochka’s rasping miaows and scratchings at the door had woken him at two in the morning.
‘Why don’t you let her in?’ Tasha had suggested.
‘Why don’t I sling her in the studio!’
‘She’ll claw my canvases to shreds!’
So Kochka had nestled between their pillows and promptly expressed her euphoria by purring loudly.
Victor had tossed, turned, scratched himself and wondered how such a skinny little creature could make such a din, before finally dropping off just before dawn.
The next morning, his eyes still puffy from sleep, he pushed his bicycle along Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, even though his two visits the previous day and the day before that had provided no useful information. This time he was in luck. As he walked past a building with a flaking façade, a bare-headed woman appeared and rushed over to a small boy who was diligently stirring a pile of horse droppings in the middle of the road. There were shouts, slaps and howls, but they did not deflect Victor from asking his ritual question.
‘Forgive me for bothering you. You didn’t happen to hear an explosion the day Monsieur Andrésy’s shop burnt down?’
The woman froze, clutching the child who struggled to get free.
‘How did you know? Yes, there was a blast – bang, bang. It gave me such a fright I dropped my saucepan of milk; luckily it was only lukewarm. Poor Monsieur Andrésy, such an obliging man, always willing to look after this scamp for me.’
She was suddenly aware of the danger her child had escaped, and clasped him to her skirts.
‘Did he have friends?’ Victor pursued.
‘He wasn’t very sociable, but I sometimes saw him with a large, cheerful-looking bloke. They would lunch together at Chez Fulbert on the corner.’
Her son wriggled free and made a dash for it. She ran after him, caught him and, forgetting her recent surge of affection, promised him another slap if he was naughty again.
On a trestle table outside the Chez Fulbert tavern stood a row of glasses and some carafes filled with pink liquid. A slate advertised:
Grenadine – ten centimes a glass
A flabby girl offered feebly, ‘Refreshments? With free ice.’
‘Put a bit more energy into it, Marie-Louise, you sound like you’re selling a sleeping draught,’ a voice shouted from inside.
There was laughter. Victor joined a group of regulars at the bar.
‘That lass is no bright spark, but she’s easy on the eye,’ a road worker remarked.
‘Hey, Arsène, you keep your hands to yourself or you’ll feel my boot on your backside.’
The landlord, a rotund little man, sliced the head off a glass of beer with a violent gesture and slapped it down in front of one of his customers.
‘For you?’ he barked at Victor.
‘A vermouth cassis, please. I’m trying to track down anyone who knew Monsieur Andrésy. Somebody just told me that he used to have lunch here with a friend.’
‘Somebody told you right. First Sunday of every month, regular as clockwork, at that table over by the window. They were old comrades – fought together in that filthy war. Talk about a tragedy!’
A customer hidden behind a newspaper raised his head.
‘Do you happen to know the friend’s name?’ Victor asked.
‘Monsieur Andrésy always called him Gustave. He lives near La Chapelle, Rue…Rue…My errand boy would know, only he’s away at a wedding until the 24th. He delivered a case of table wine to Monsieur Gustave last year – a gift from Monsieur Andrésy, the real stuff, mind, straight from the vine. My brother’s a winegrower in La Gironde. Here, try some – it’ll tickle your taste buds more than that cassis of yours!’
He poured a slug of red wine into a glass. The regulars pricked up their ears at the sound of the pleasant glug-glug. The man reading lowered his newspaper to take a closer look at the lucky recipient of such largesse. Victor tasted the wine and clicked his tongue.
‘Full-bodied, fruity with a good bouquet, my compliments to your brother.’
‘It’s a shame! They were here just a couple of weeks ago. I can still see Marie-Louise bringing them a cassoulet and almost tipping it over them because she tripped over her own feet.’
‘Like I said, not the brightest of lasses…’
‘I won’t tell you again, Arsène, belt up or get out,’
growled Fulbert. ‘It’s impossible to have a private conversation around here. Where was I? Oh yes, we get used to having people around and when they kick the bucket we realise that time is marching on and we’re all on the same slippery slope.’
‘You’re getting very philosophical in your old age, Fulbert,’ said the man with the newspaper.
‘So I am…They were bachelors so they appreciated a slap-up meal occasionally. But I mustn’t talk about Monsieur Gustave in the past tense – he isn’t dead!’
‘Have you seen him since the accident?’
‘He was very upset. He wanted us to tell him exactly what happened then he drowned his sorrows with three glasses of gut-rot,’ said Fulbert, wiping the counter.
Victor left, followed by the man with the newspaper, who asked him, ‘Were you one of Monsieur Andrésy’s customers by any chance?’
‘Yes, I’m a bookseller. I used to send him books to bind.’
‘That’s what I thought. And if I’m not mistaken you have a Chinese colleague?’
‘Japanese.’
‘And your assistant is Joseph Pignot who published a serialised novel in Le Passe-partout. I couldn’t put it down, it was so true to life. Someone said it was based on a real crime you helped solve. It was in the papers and nearly cost you your life…’
‘You’ve certainly done your homework.’
‘Monsieur Andrésy and I discussed it at length. It’s rare to come across somebody who pursues their own line of enquiry right under the noses of the police. Speaking of which, I need some advice. Monsieur Andrésy has no living relatives and I’m wondering what I should do with his watch. I’m a watchmaker, you see, and I do repairs. Monsieur Andrésy asked me to try to fix his fob watch – it gave up the ghost this winter. He was very attached to it. Should I keep it or give it to the police? I’d appreciate your opinion. Look, it’s going to pelt down. Why don’t you come into my shop. It’s very near.’
When Victor first entered the gloomy premises, set back from the road, he had the impression that a colony of bugs was busily gnawing away at the walls at varying speeds. Then in the half-light he made out the assortment of pendulum clocks, cuckoo clocks and carriage clocks filling every available space. The saraband of the moving hands made his head spin.
‘Quite a racket, eh? A constant reminder that my hourglass is emptying. Père Lamartine was right: “It flows, and we pass.”35 Now, where did I put it? Ah, here it is. Go over to the light and have a look at the inscription on the back.’
Victor held the watch up to one of the little windows and managed to make out the words:
Sacrovir. Long live the C—
‘Long live what?’
‘The corps. Well, what do you think? If I take it to the police they’ll only make me fill in a lot of tedious forms.’
‘I’ll sign to say that I’ve taken it, and pay for the repair. I feel sure that Monsieur Andrésy would be happy to know that Monsieur Mori, who was one of his closest friends, had inherited his watch.’
‘Ah, Monsieur, you’ve taken a great weight off my mind. I just can’t take it in, that he died so suddenly.’
Before getting back on his bicycle, which he’d fastened to a lamp-post, Victor jotted down:
Bookbinder’s friend Gustave, La Chapelle. Talk to the errand boy at Fulbert’s on 24th to find out his exact address.
He pedalled off towards the Luxembourg Gardens. It was so hot that his shirt was damp with sweat. He remembered the half-melted fob watch on Inspector Lecacheur’s desk. An inscription in the middle of an ornate daisy design left no doubt as to the owner’s identity:
To P—from his—e
‘P was for Pierre. As for his—e…’
Puzzled, Victor freewheeled down Rue de Médicis, invigorated by the wind on his face. On the other side of the railings, some tramps were sleeping on park benches. Two watches? There was nothing strange about that. While the watchmaker was repairing one, he carried the other.
He braked and turned into Rue Soufflot. He saw a dog, its tongue hanging out, on the edge of the pavement. A group of children lying on their fronts next to an air vent were fiercely contesting a game of marbles. Victor grabbed hold of the Courcelles–Panthéon omnibus. Its horses, in a lather, flared their clammy nostrils as they struggled to the end of their ordeal. Their hooves occasionally slipped on the cobblestones that had just been hosed down, and Victor himself narrowly avoided coming a cropper. He overtook the exhausted animals, hungry for oats and water, who were making one last effort, in a hurry to be free of the wretched harness.
Sacrovir…Was it a name? A place?
As he raced down Rue Sainte-Geneviève, the intoxication of his own speed drove all speculation from his mind.
Victor braked sharply in front of the bookshop, and narrowly avoided knocking over an imposing-looking woman wielding a large flowery umbrella, who looked daggers at him through her lorgnette. She was about to tick him off soundly for having such an infernal machine when Joseph appeared.
‘I’ll park your mustang at the back of the shop, Boss. Oh, good morning, Madame la Comtesse, look at those clouds! It’ll soon be raining cats and dogs.’
The Comtesse de Salignac pursed her lips, pushed him smartly aside and swept into the shop like a ship in full sail, making for Kenji, who was talking on the telephone.
‘Any news?’ Joseph whispered to Victor.
‘Go down to the stockroom and look up the word Sacrovir in the dictionary,’ Victor replied softly.
‘What about my deliveries? Monsieur Mori will be furious. Sacro what?’
‘Vir, the name probably comes from the Latin vir meaning “man”, like in triumvir.’
‘Ah! And sacrolumbar is the lower back. I get it! It’s a man suffering from backache.’
‘I’m not interested in your half-baked theories; this isn’t a guessing game. Go and look it up before you start blathering,’ Victor ordered, putting on a charming smile as he rejoined the Comtesse de Salignac.
She was beating the air stoically with her fan, put out at having to wait for Kenji to be free.
‘Would you care to sit down, dear Madame?’
‘I’m quite capable of standing, I just don’t want to have to stand here all day,’ she retorted.
‘May I be of some assistance?’
‘No, it’s your colleague I must see.’
Adopting what she considered a suitably dignified pose, she turned her head away, fanning herself furiously. Victor withdrew, intrigued by the in-quarto volume in yellow morocco-leather, which the battle-axe was clutching to her bosom. It looked familiar.
Joseph stumbled over something and banged his knee violently. Cursing, he finally managed to find the light switch. Since Monsieur Legris had moved to Rue Fontaine, the darkroom in the basement he had used for his photography had been turned back into a reading room and electric lights installed. Its shelves were lined with bibliographies, collector’s items, catalogues and encyclopedias, which could be taken out and consulted at a table.
‘These tomes weigh a ton! They’ll be calling me Sacrovir when my back breaks from lugging them about.’
He leafed absent-mindedly through several volumes. What a pity his meeting with the girl in the classified ads at Le Figaro the evening before had ended in failure!
Regretful at having resisted the advances of the employee in the satin bonnet, he’d used the pretext of a delivery in order to enjoy Monday afternoon off. He’d gone to wait for the girl at the entrance to the newspaper’s offices and had asked her politely to take a drink with him at Café Napolitain, where he hoped to catch a glimpse of Georges Courteline36 and Catulle Mendès.37 Emboldened by the effect of the sherry, she had told him that her name was Francine. She realised from Joseph’s indifferent expression that he’d been hoping for some interesting revelation.
‘You know, I’ve racked my brains about that death notice and it’s come back to me. He was well-to-do. Middle-aged, and podgy,’ she added.
‘You mean
fat?’
‘Well, there’s fat and there’s fat! Let’s say he was…well padded. And he had a squint. Yes, he had a squint.’
As she spoke, she gently pressed Joseph’s foot under the table with hers. Nonchalant, she drained her glass, moistened her lips and resumed, ‘He had a scar on his chin, too, and a thick Alsace accent.’
Joseph prudently crossed his legs. The wealth of detail together with the attack on his shoe had aroused his suspicions. She was leading him on. Much to Francine’s dismay, he suddenly remembered a courtesy call he had to pay to his first cousin who’d suffered a fit of catalepsy recently, and left in a hurry after paying the bill, which he considered a little steep.
‘A fat bloke from Alsace with a squint and a scar my eye! She must think I was born yesterday! I swear women are a mystery to me. First they say no, then they say yes, next they’re nudging you with their foot under the table while you’re having a drink, and by the time the dessert comes they’ve shown you their stocking tops…A pity, though, she was rather fetching…’
Francine’s face was replaced by Iris’s in his mind.
‘I must be on my guard!’ he concluded.
His finger stopped at a paragraph on the history of Gaul.
‘By Jove! I think I’ve found it! Sacrovir!’
The Comtesse de Salignac studied Kenji in sullen, reproachful silence. She’d given up fanning herself and her cheeks had turned bright red. She was visibly at the end of her tether. At last, Kenji replaced the receiver. Eudoxie Allard, alias Fifi Bas-Rhin, former cancan dancer at the Moulin-Rouge, had clearly lost none of her volubility during her stay in the north. Having no doubt grown tired of her Russian archduke, the insatiable woman was back in town and eager to renew her intimate relations with her men friends.
As Kenji hung up, he looked like the cat that had got the cream but hastily composed his expression and calmly enquired of the Comtesse to what he owed the pleasure of her visit.
‘Pleasure! Ah, Monsieur Mori, it is not pleasure but disgrace that brings me here. Will you buy back this edition of Michel de Montaigne, which Monsieur de Pont-Joubert’s uncle purchased from you?’
