Tales of the Shadowmen 2: Gentlemen of the Night

by Jean-Marc Lofficier

  The Phantom pointed his gun directly between the speaker’s eyes. “But I’m an ace, boy, and that trumps everything.”

  Behind the Phantom one of the urchins, a girl, said, “Sigono, enough with the taunting. Let’s just do him and get the stone.”

  Before the Phantom could respond, a huge gout of viscous, black liquid spurted into the cavern from one of the pipes. It splashed many of the urchins, and the force and weight of the discharge was enough to knock the Phantom over–and spare some sympathy for the Phantom, if you will: there does not exist enough cologne or perfume on Earth to conceal the stench of the Paris sewers.

  But the Apaches did not leap upon the prostrate and flailing Phantom.

  Sigono wrinkled his nose and hesitantly said, “Is that... oil?”

  In answer came, from one of the tunnels, a gleeful, evil laughter. Panicked looks crossed the urchins’ faces, and Sigono swore, “Merde! Le génie!” The children fled into the closest tunnels, and the Phantom forced his way to his feet and tried to follow them.

  From the tunnel nearest the Phantom, a lit match pinwheeled through the air. When the match touched the surface of the liquid, it ignited, and flames and smoke instantly filled the cavern. The Phantom threw himself into the nearest tunnel, out of the flaming liquid, and hurriedly threw off his burning robes. Unclothed, but still wearing the mask, the Phantom could be seen to be a slim, athletic woman.

  She was checking herself to make sure no burning oil clung to her body when a man quietly stepped out of the darkness behind her and struck her on the back of the head with a cosh. She dropped without a sound, and the man stepped over her, stamped out the flames from her robes, and withdrew the Moonstone from them. He tossed the diamond in the air and chuckled. He moved to leave, then stopped and covered the Phantom with his cloak. He tipped his hat to her, and returned to the Louvre via the sewage pipes and tunnels.

  Before entering the Louvre, he paused to adjust his hat and cravat and then smoothed down his tuxedo. He placed a domino mask on his face–it is not that he particularly desired anonymity, you understand, but he is sufficiently well-known and recognizable, wearing the mask, that his vanity demanded that he appear in public wearing it.

  He entered the museum through a concealed doorway in the Entresol and ignored the noise of the crowds piled up at the museum exit and enduring the indignities of a body search by the Louvre guards–so efficient now that the theft had already taken place! He climbed the Escalier Colbert to the Second Floor and into the museum’s attic, where the curators store material not ready for display.

  At this time, most of the material in the attic was South American, the results of the Forrestal-Littlejohn expedition down the Bermejo River, so the visitor to the attic was greeted by the grisly display of several dozen shrunken heads accompanying crude clay figures and two large, inexpertly-carved gold statues. (Hardly worth the effort to steal, which is why no one had bothered.)

  The man in the domino mask paused on seeing the rows of shrunken heads, all placed on display sticks and arranged by some waggish student assistant to face the entrance to the attic. The effect was to put the visitor in mind of a macabre, expectant audience at some valse funèbre. I am told the man in the domino mask removed his hat, bowed, said, “Ladies and gentlemen, good evening,” and continued onward to the roof.

  Ahead of him lay the bodies of the Policemen he had killed and the small balloon which his men had constructed there earlier in the evening. But between the roof exit and the balloon stood another man, also in tails, insouciantly leaning on an ivory cane.

  The interloper’s skin and hair were snow-white, and his crimson-irised eyes glittered as they reflected the lights of Paris. The albino briefly inclined his head toward the man in the domino mask. “Monsieur Fantômas, I presume.”

  Fantômas smiled and bowed theatrically to the albino. “The Romanian Prince.”

  The albino smiled coldly. “Indeed.”

  Fantômas withdrew a long knife from an interior pocket of his jacket and held it ready behind him in a pose known and feared across Paris.

  The albino’s smile widened, although there was little humor in it. “Ah. You have spared yourself the farce of negotiation and have decided on a more basic language.” He pointed his heavy ivory cane at his opponent, although he did not withdraw the sword from it. “It is a tongue I speak fluently.”

  Fantômas abruptly leapt forward, his knife swinging around to slash at the albino’s throat. The albino leaned back slightly and deflected the blow with his cane. He elbowed Fantômas in the jaw and followed through with a stiff, powerful left.

  The albino retrieved the Moonstone from Fantômas’ unconscious body and was walking toward the exit when he heard whistles from below and the scuffling of boots on the stairs. He walked to the balloon, untethered it, shoved it off the roof, and hopped into its undercarriage as it took to the air.

  The Police found the deflated balloon in the Gare d’Austerlitz several hours later.

  The sequence of events which followed was not discovered by the Police. It is only by piecing together several different accounts that a clear picture can be drawn of the movements of the Moonstone over the next week.

  Blanchard, in Le Petit Vingtième, described an event which provoked some mild, brief outrage among the reading public. An albino gentleman–foreign royalty, though Blanchard declined to identify which nationality–was walking toward the hotels along the Boulevard St. Marcel when he saw, limping in his direction, a veteran of the War.

  He was horribly scarred–one eye covered by a patch, and a formerly handsome face permanently disfigured–and he was missing an arm. But the man was tall, broad, and seemed to have a great vitality, and on his chest he wore the Légion d’Honneur. He had clearly been reduced to penury–his uniform, seemingly his last piece of clothing, was soiled and had many rents–but he carried himself with pride and did not lower himself to ask the handsomely accoutered albino (returning, Blanchard said, from the previous night’s entertainment at the Louvre) for any money.

  It was perhaps this pride which caught the albino’s attention and drew him to offer the maimed veteran first a cigarette and then the contents of his billfold–for, the albino Prince said, “the sadness of survival.” It was this pride which kept the Prince still as he listened to an account of heroism at the Somme and then at the infamous “Loki” prisoner of war camp. And it was this pride, and the eloquence of the veteran, which–according to the albino Prince–distracted him and prevented him from noticing what the veteran was doing as he described the torments of the camp and emphasized his story with gestures from his remaining arm.

  The albino Prince admitted–“in a face curiously rueful and almost admiring,” or so Blanchard says–that after bidding the veteran farewell and wishing him “the honor of a dignified death,” the Prince walked for several hundred yards before thinking to check his pockets. They were quite empty, of course, and the veteran had, by that time, vanished. Carlier, the officer handling the case, had no leads but shared the anger of many that a scoundrel should use the guise of a veteran to commit a crime.

  The stories in the Parisian newspapers about Ténèbras, the infamous “Ghost Bandit,” are almost as numerous as those about Fantômas, the “Lord of Terror,” himself. One story, written by M. Courville in L’Année 2000, has received surprisingly little attention from those who track Ténèbras. The afternoon following the disappearance of the Moonstone from the Louvre, a body was found in the Jardins du Trocadero. An autopsy, performed by Dr. Cordat of the Sûreté, revealed that the man had been gassed, and a cab ticket found in the man’s vest pocket led Inspector Walter, one of the Sûreté officers pursuing Ténèbras, to claim that the victim had been poisoned in a cab rigged to flood its compartment with poison gas–one of the trademark murder methods of Ténèbras.

  Experienced observers of Ténèbras have seen this as but one more murder to his name and, truly, there are so many that, as with Fantômas, Zigomar, Satanas,
Dr. Tornada and the many other madmen who have plagued our society, one gets the feeling that more men have died of crime in Paris than perished from German lead during the War. But these observers have slighted this particular murder victim. Among his possessions was a monogrammed handkerchief with the initials, “G.D.,” a ticket to the Moulin Rouge, a yellowed newsclipping about the famous American Carter’s defeat of a “School of Crime,” and a small case, which might once have contained theatrical makeup. On the man’s face were substantial traces of makeup, and beneath his coat was a rig which actors and beggars use to conceal a limb. (It involves a harness, a generously cut coat, and the willingness to put up with the discomfort of having one’s arm twisted behind the body for hours at a time. It is most uncomfortable).

  In the international edition of The Daily Star, an Italian reporter named Ruder Ox wrote a piece on the Café Noir de Lune. In this piece he–

  What? You do not know of the famous Café Noir de Lune? I had thought every last Englishman and woman acquainted with it by now, and spending so many hours there that–you will forgive me saying so–the Café’s former patrons, good Frenchmen and women all, are prevented from taking any tables. The Café is located along the Rue de Nevers, named for the Duke of honored memory. Of late the Café has become renowned as the personal salon of France’s wittiest raconteur, Emil Lupin (no relation to the infamous Arsène, you may be assured).

  It is a café first, of course, and formerly it was famous for the quality of its food, but since the War, Lupin has, every night, taken a center table and entertained the guests of the Café, and now the Café is better known for Lupin’s stories than for its food. I myself have spent several nights there, and Lupin’s reputation is well-deserved. He is a master of both dramatic timing and the bon mot, and it is understandable that he and the Café would become so popular with tourists.

  Lupin’s stories are marvels of humor and irony, and his “Rupert of Graustark” is a favorite of tourists, not least because of its delightfully slanderous subject matter. Popular rumor has it that those described in the story actually brought suit against Lupin–but I am assured they did not, for fear of having Lupin’s tale proven to be true. Among the locals, Lupin’s “Fifi’s Flight to Eucrasia” remains his most-requested tale. And quite amusing it is–but then, Parisians tend to have a dark and even savage sense of humor. To a more select clientele, Lupin is known for more mature material, including “The Last Draw on the Cigarette.”

  Alone among the cafés of the Rue de Nevers, the Noir de Lune is open all night. Should you care to visit it sometime, Lupin usually appears around 10 p.m. and leaves at 4 a.m. precisely. So it should be no surprise that someone in the mood to celebrate–say, the acquisition of a valuable gem, or perhaps a triumph over one’s peers–would go to the Café for breakfast. Few tourists frequent the Café in the early morning, and it remains a popular spot with the locals for coffee and oeufs Lyonnaise or saucisson à l’Anatole.

  Ruder-Ox describes how, on the morning after the Louvre contretemps, Emil Lupin himself made an appearance at the Café, much to the surprise of the regulars. He insisted on seeing that the customers were enjoying themselves, and was seen to pay particular attention to one man, a muscular tough in workingman’s clothes. Ruder-Ox made much of the man’s appearance by way of illustrating how popular the Café was with the locals; Ruder-Ox wrote, “This man seemed more appropriately the inmate of a hard labor camp at Toulon rather than the famous Noir de Lune, but Lupin himself treated him as family.” Lupin even deigned to share a pot of tea with him–no small honor from the famous Lupin, whose distaste for dining with others was well-known.

  The customer was flattered by the attention and delighted with the food, and it was only after leaving the Café that he thought to inspect his belongings. In place of his billfold, and what he claimed was a fake diamond of purely sentimental value, was the calling card of one “Professor Pelotard,” on which was written one of Villiod’s mottos: “One finds that the most suspicious of criminals are always the easiest gulled.” The real Emil Lupin, naturally, denied most vehemently ever having been at the Café that morning.

  A short time after the incident at the Café, a guard at the Place St.-Michel train station noticed a weathered Breton businessman being approached for directions by an English tourist, a handsome black-haired woman of indeterminate years and very determinate dimensions. Ordinarily, the Breton’s reaction would have gone unremarked upon, for he would have taken her by the arm, spoken with her at length, urbanely flattered her dress and appearance, and then invited her to share breakfast with him in his cabin–English women are so enthusiastic in their consumption of café au lait, they are really quite inspiring.

  But the Breton’s reaction to the English tourist was peculiar, and so drew the guard’s attention: he bowed politely to the woman and then backed away from her, never allowing her to come with an arm’s length of him. The guard’s assumption was that the businessman was a Gideist, but the man wore a wedding ring. Recently married, surely, to pass up the opportunity to flirt with a desirable woman. The Breton was similarly wary of a porter on the train and refused to leave his cabin until the train was well underway to Monte Carlo. Only then did he emerge, obviously well-satisfied with something, and venture to the dining car.

  Subsequent approaches to the man by a female server–this one sharing the ample proportions of the English tourist, but blonde and speaking French like a Marseillaise–in the dining car were met with aplomb and invitations to dine with the man–perhaps not so recently married after all?–and a later attempt to burgle the man’s cabin was laughingly dismissed. That, of course, is the sign of a burglary done quite incompetently.

  The Breton was not so sanguine after awakening the following morning and realizing that the wine he had brought onboard the train–an exquisite Tokay Imperial–had been tampered with, and that he had been rendered unconscious for over 24 hours and his person thoroughly searched. The Breton lodged a futile complaint with the authorities and exited at Dijon in no good mood, though perhaps wiser in the ways of beautiful women, if not his own vanity. Of course, his ire might have been the result of the ruination of the Tokay rather than his scheme to gain the Moonstone.

  Some hours later, outside Lausanne, the train made an unexpected stop and was boarded by the Police. A woman was taken from train and her cabin searched. The woman claimed to be a Spaniard by the name of Elena Acevedo; she had red hair the shade of a Sorraia colt, and it took five Policemen to restrain her.

  The leader of the investigation, a fascinatingly ugly man–imagine a Shar Pei wearing glasses and a trenchcoat–whose papers identified him as “Bertrand Charon” of the Deuxième Bureau, claimed that the woman was a Catalan separatist and that she had a bomb in her cabin, so that he and he alone could search her cabin. The search took 90 minutes, although no bomb was found. Charon then took the woman to the Lausanne prison and left her in the care of the prison guards.

  An hour later, in Chamonix, a man who called himself “Prosper Bondonnat” and who did not resemble Charon in the slightest boarded the train and stayed in his cabin until it reached Monte Carlo, at which time he headed for the Casino.

  I am friends with one of the chemin-de-fer dealers at the Casino, and he told me of a game played there that evening. Five players took part: our friend Bondonnat, three English lords and one Russian woman. Véra Roudine is an adventuress infamous among the habitués of the Casino, not least for her intimacy with members of Cheka, who have often–quite forcefully–collected her debts for her, and only brave men dare to gamble with her. One of the Englishmen, Maxim de Winter, is almost as well known for his skill at chemin as for his magnificently sprawling mansion. I have myself visited it, and it is quite impressive. The second Englishman, Lord Lister–ah, you recognize the name. Yes, the same one who relieved the Duke of Norfolk of the burden of his diamonds. Needless to say, Lister is a master at cards, and those who know him do not risk their money by gambling with him. The
third Englishman identified himself as “Lord Stuart.” He was not known to the others at the table, and had the air of a none-too-bright member of the nobility who overestimates himself in every way. Such men, you may be sure, are frightfully common–it seems that one of the requirements for a title in England is an intelligence below the average Seine mudlark’s–and are quite welcome at the tables of the Casino. They are better company than bank clerks, and are easier to get money from.

  Imagine it: an empty-headed English lord gaming with Bondonnat, Roudine, de Winter and Lister. Heady company for a vain English lord, and surely Stuart kept both eyes on his own wallet far more than on his cards. Yet when the evening was over, Stuart emerged with the valuables of Lister and de Winter, the guarantee of one night’s pleasure with Roudine–for, like her compatriot Mlle. Lazarre, whose company I myself have enjoyed on more than one occasion, the sultry Roudine was far more willing to gamble herself than to risk her money–and Bondonnat’s chips, his cash, his watch, his silver cigarette case, and a particularly valuable yellow diamond which Bondonnat was forced to risk when the cards seemed to have turned against him.

  Such events do not go unnoticed, of course, especially among the criminal fraternity, what my friend Yvonne Cartier calls “the Light-fingered League”–perhaps it does not translate into English? Many sets of eyes tracked Lord Stuart’s movements around the Casino, and more than eyes followed Stuart on to the express to Calais.

  But he survived the trip unscathed and was whistling as he entered his West End mansion, the so-called “House that 1000 Diamonds Built”–I have seen it from the inside, and the more apposite gem is the rhinestone. It is a typical nouveau riche monstrosity, all faux-silk chinoiserie and cheap copies of Japanese art. It was only while he was visiting his famous cousin Percy at Percy’s club that Lord Stuart was reminded that a man’s home may be his castle, but that all castles have cracks in their mortar. (You remember Percy Stuart–the “Savior of the Sunken City,” the beau ideal of the foolish rich and the brainless press).