The Devourer of Men

by Ben Stevens

  The Devourer of Men

  A story inspired by the book Papillon (Henri Charriere).

  In a small café situated along the Rue des Grands Augustins, close to the River Seine, a fat man sat at his customary table and regretted his life. Once the official prosecutor of the Palais de Justice of the Seine, he now spent his days drinking brandy and boring anyone who would talk to him (and these were few and far between) with his tales of woe.

  True, no one now had any concept of the bitch that had been her. A bitch with a God-given face and body; a bitch whose voice had been a silky, bewitching purr; a bitch who had driven Pierre Pradel almost crazy with lust and desire...

  When seeking to possess such a bitch (considered Pradel as he stared at his glass), a man can no longer be held accountable for his actions. For possession – absolute possession – becomes a must, a prerequisite for his existence...

  And the bitch had worked such feminine black magic on Pradel himself, so that from being one of the most feared court prosecutors in the country he’d fallen to become nothing more than a laughing stock.

  No longer was he able to concentrate for any significant length of time. No longer was he able to flatter and sway the twelve country-bumpkin fools on the jury into believing that they were his social and intellectual equals. All his old fire and vigour deserted him; he became utterly unable to practise his own type of black magic any longer. So men – both guilty and innocent – who previously would certainly have been sent to the guillotine or the penal colonies walked free.

  And when Pradel had one day discovered that the bitch was busy sleeping with (or so it seemed) half the population of Paris – both male and female – and that the other half of the population was aware of this while he himself had been wholly ignorant, he’d sought solace in the bottle.

  Alcohol had granted him the necessary, albeit temporary relief – but what total enslavement it had extracted in return! The years from this point to now… These had passed in a slow, murky haze, Pradel occupying a dilapidated room in the nearby rue des Beaux-Arts, spending every day from morning to late evening in this café.

  In the last month, however, something truly wonderful had entered his life. That Raymond did nothing more than offer Pradel a sympathetic ear was of absolutely no concern to the former prosecutor. At least one person did not avoid his company like the plague; at least one person seemed happy just to sit and listen as he bemoaned his useless life.

  And this, wholly in itself, was a marvellous thing.

  Pradel looked impatiently at his watch: eleven o’clock. In a few hours’ time he would feel weary with the brandy he’d drunk and he would doze in his chair, but at this particular time he was impatient for Raymond’s company. It was likely Raymond would be in soon, for during the last month or so his visits to this small, nondescript café had become increasingly more frequent.

  It seemed to Pradel that Raymond enjoyed his company – for there was no other discernible reason for the disfigured man to come to this place.

  ‘Another drink, Monsieur Pradel?’

  Pradel turned to look imperiously at the small, thin, weasel-faced man who’d asked the quiet question. As ever, the thin man avoided looking him in the eye. He seemed uncomfortable under such a stare, and it warmed Pradel’s heart to see a specimen more pathetic than himself – a man so beaten that he allowed his wife to run the café instead of himself. For it was her name above the door, not his, and it was she who gave the orders.

  ‘Yes,’ said Pradel curtly.

  As the thin man filled his glass, a woman’s voice called stridently from the counter:

  ‘Jean-Luc! Hurry up and take these two coffees to the couple seated outside!’

  ‘Yes, dear,’ said Jean-Luc wearily, and having poured Pradel his drink he walked hurriedly away.

  With a pompous grunt of amusement the former prosecutor sipped his replenished glass, and then started a few moments later as Raymond entered the café.

  ‘Dubois, get another brandy to this table!’ he bellowed, forgetting in his pleasure that Raymond never drank brandy or indeed any alcohol.

  ‘Yes, Monsieur Pradel. Good morning, Monsieur,’ said Jean-Luc. He nodded quickly at Raymond, who ignored him.

  A man who had at some point in his life suffered severe burns, Raymond shook Pradel’s proffered hand as he sat down. Only one half of his face was able to smile and thus register any pleasure at this meeting; the other half, his left, was an ugly patchwork of raw scar tissue, the muscles forever burnt frozen. Amidst this destruction there gleamed a glass eye.

  One of his hands on the same side was similarly burnt – still functional but now more like a claw than a hand – and he walked with a limp, as though his foot or his leg pained him.

  His greying hair was brushed back in oiled waves from his forehead. He looked to be somewhere in his late forties or early fifties, while his remaining eye somehow displayed with its gimlet stare unusual strength of will and above average intelligence. His skin was browned, suggesting that he’d spent considerable time in a tropical clime. Like Pradel, he was casually dressed in shirt and trousers.

  ‘Pierre, how are you today?’ asked Raymond warmly, as Jean-Luc scurried across with the (already greatly depleted) brandy bottle and a glass.

  Signifying with a shake of his head that he wanted nothing to drink, Raymond rudely dismissed Jean-Luc. Instead, he listened with curious intensity to Pradel’s answer:

  ‘I find myself bored, Raymond – bored and disillusioned with Paris. That’s how I am, if I’m to be succinct.’

  By now aware that there would be no return inquiry concerning his wellbeing, Raymond said with a sympathetic half-smile, ‘They say that if you’re tired of Paris then you’re tired of life. But they don’t say anything about being bored or disillusioned.’

  ‘If only I had family, friends – but I have none of these, excluding, if I may be so bold, your good self. No, Raymond, I have no one to help relieve the tedium of my days, to distract me from remembering just how cruelly I was treated in the past.’

  Having by now been completely acquainted with Pradel’s history, Raymond nodded his ascent.

  Then he started, and gripped the former prosecutor’s arm.

  ‘Pierre, I might just have a solution to your problem!’

  Pradel looked keenly at him.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I have not mentioned this before... I have recently returned from a long period spent abroad, and have purchased a house.’

  ‘In Paris?’

  ‘No, I could not live in such a place. It is too noisy, too busy... No – my house is situated on the outskirts of Hesdin, a tiny village in Pas de Calais. It is surrounded by fields and little woods, and there are no other properties close by. As a lover of solitude, it is perfect for me.’

  ‘And?’ said Pradel testily. He considered that this conversation was fast moving away from the subject of himself.

  ‘What I mean is this: why don’t you come and stay? I had been meaning to ask you before, but there were… There were a few alterations I had to make.’

  ‘Alterations?’

  Dismissing the subject with a wave of his claw-like hand, Raymond said vaguely, ‘It is an old building... Anyway, why don’t you come and spend a weekend there? A change of scenery will do you the world of good, of that I’m certain.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘No time like the present, I always say. Today is Friday, and I’m driving to my house this very evening.’

  ‘So soon, so soon,’ gasped Pradel, surprised by this possible disruption to his invariable routine. ‘There are things I must do, preparations I must make…’

  ‘Come now,’ laughed Raymond good-naturedly. ‘You can afford to ne
glect your duties just for the weekend, can’t you? Treat yourself for once.’

  With a shrug of his wide shoulders Pradel signalled his cautious agreement... Then his fleshy face suddenly brightened as he gave the suggestion further thought, and he said, ‘I can hardly wait, you know! What a fantastic idea!’

  ‘I’ve got to get going, attend to a few matters. Shall I pick you up from this café at about six?’

  ‘I’ll be here,’ said Pradel with certainty.

  Outside the large old house the wind howled and the rain crashed against the leaded glass windows. It was hard to believe that earlier, in Paris, it had been a bright and warm summer’s day.

  Stoking the fire into a roaring blaze, Raymond then replaced the poker by the hearth.

  ‘A nasty night,’ he said.

  Nodding, Pradel sunk further into the comfy leather chair that was placed close to the flames. He wondered if he’d made the right decision in accompanying Raymond to this house after all. It had been years since he’d left Paris – years since his routine of leaving his room for the café each and every day had been any different.

  And away from familiar surroundings, he’d become steadily more aware that he really knew nothing much at all about this man called Raymond.

  It was not as though anything in the man’s manner caused him alarm – Raymond made polite small talk and ensured that Pradel was comfortable and had a drink in his hand. The three hour drive to Hesdin had passed by agreeably enough, with a break for a drink and something to eat at a cafe halfway. But now that he’d time to think, all of Pradel’s old distrust – indeed dislike – of mankind came bubbling back to the surface of his mind.

  As a prosecutor he’d quickly conditioned himself to never feel any compassion for a defendant, to never question or indeed care whether the man on trial might be innocent of the crime of which he was accused. To never wonder whether the notoriously corrupt methods of the Parisian police, or the perjured evidence of a witness, had resulted in a man being falsely charged.

  As hard as he’d stared at the man in the dock, while holding the court spellbound with the power of his oratory, Pradel had seen nothing. His mind had instead created a piggish mask of filth and degradation that he used to mask the features of the defendant, so that he saw only an enemy of society who needed to be wiped from the face of the Earth.

  If the man had not actually been this enemy (sometimes, in his heart of hearts, Pradel had been certain that a defendant was innocent) then he’d still done everything in his power to make it appear that he was. And before the bitch had entered his life and destroyed his career, he’d almost always been successful.

  Having worked himself into a state of suspicion, Pradel now set his mind to determining exactly what it was that Raymond wanted.

  Money? Was Raymond’s motive to ultimately swindle or rob him in some way? Hardly: he’d already made it perfectly obvious that he’d barely a centime to his name. Could it be, after all, that it was actually just company that Raymond sought? Pradel had never heard him talk of friends or seen him in the company of another man or woman. So it was indeed quite possible that this disfigured man was as lonely as he.

  Pradel realised that this suggestion soothed his strangely troubled mind.

  As the former prosecutor thought about such things, Raymond sat in the chair opposite and with his single eye stared happily at his captive. The flames of ecstatic joy burnt in his heart as fiercely as those flames in the hearth, so that he placed his hands hard on his thighs to stop his legs from shaking.

  Now, after so many years spent dreaming about this moment, he could allow himself a little time to toy with this bastard...

  ‘What are you thinking about, Pierre? What question grips your soul?’

  Pradel looked slowly up at him, thoughtfully sipping his brandy. The fire gave a sudden, fierce crackle, jagged yellow flames shooting angrily up into the chimney. The cracked marble mantelpiece above the hearth was bare except for an old wooden clock whose hands had long since stopped at ten to three. The smell of damp that had greeted the two men’s entry half an hour earlier had begun to diminish with the warmth of the fire; but the brown paper on the unadorned walls had peeled in places, exposing old and fragile plaster.

  ‘You must forgive my rude silence, Raymond,’ Pradel said slowly, with uncharacteristic humility. ‘For some years now I have been used to my lodgings and the café. This change in scene bewilders me, to a certain extent. I feel the remoteness of this house contrasting strongly with the liveliness of Paris.’

  ‘Are you sorry that you came, sorry that you’re experiencing this solitude?’

  ‘Hardly solitude, Raymond, for I’m not alone. I am adapting to a change in scenery, that is all. Familiarity is something that’s not easily relinquished, you know.’

  ‘But Pierre – earlier in the café you informed me that you were bored of Paris! So much for familiarity!’ Raymond exclaimed, his solitary eye now shining with some strange kind of mischievous pleasure.

  Suddenly feeling deeply uneasy, Pradel murmured, ‘Well, all the same…’

  ‘Do you like familiarity? Do you need familiarity? Do you need to know exactly where you are each day every day, year in, year out? Is that what satisfies your soul?’

  Flushing red, Pradel said angrily, ‘I think, Raymond, that you are assuming a touch too much familiarity on too short an acquaintance. I think what satisfies a man’s soul is best known only to himself, wouldn’t you agree?’

  He took a gulp from his glass; then he flushed even redder, and held a hand to his forehead.

  Closing his eyes, he heard Raymond say, ‘Pierre, what is the matter?’

  ‘I feel touched by fever. My head aches…’

  ‘You have had three glasses of brandy…’ Raymond tentatively suggested. He, of course, hadn’t touched a drop.

  ‘Perhaps… Perhaps… You mentioned dinner…?’

  ‘Yes, yes, in a while,’ Raymond said brusquely, so that Pradel opened his eyes and looked hard at him. Now seated on the edge of his seat, the man with the glass eye was clearly in a state of excitement.

  He said, ‘Please, Pierre, I must return to the matter of our short acquaintance. Or rather, what you believe to be our short acquaintance. For you see, this was actually made nearly twenty years before I walked into that drab café a month or so ago, and sat down at your table for the first time.’

  Wondering just what on Earth this madman was talking about, Pradel said slowly, ‘I don’t understand.’

  Leaping up from his chair and limping rapidly around the moderately sized, almost empty room, Raymond then cried, ‘My real name is Henri Grandet! There!’

  Pradel’s fat face was entirely blank. ‘Is this… Is this supposed to mean something to me?’ he asked quietly. Considering that he was effectively the prisoner of a madman, he wondered if he ought to try and grab the poker, so to use it as a weapon...

  Henri’s reaction surprised him: he sagged back into his seat and covered his ruined face with one hand. He appeared utterly crushed.

  Seizing the opportunity, Pradel leant slowly out from his seat, his hand stealthily reaching for the poker.

  He froze when – still covering his face – Henri said, ‘You do that and I’ll kill you now.’

  For a short while Henri remained silent; then he removed his hand from his face, and looking at Pradel said mournfully, ‘I should have known, of course. One of just how many men was I? Of course you don’t remember me. Had I not been so badly burned you would still not have recognised me...

  ‘But still and all – when I think of the furore surrounding my case, the newspaper reports…! Think, man – think! Henri Grandet: Henri Grandet.’

  ‘The name means nothing to me,’ Pradel said obstinately.

  With a curt nod of his head, Henri stopped looking so sorrowful.

  He said brusquely, ‘My story should be heard in two parts, with the latter half first, and the former last. Do you think that after all the time I have
spent listening to your ceaseless babblings about yourself, that you can hear my story?’

  Again Pradel put a hand to his forehead and closed his eyes.

  ‘I do not understand… I do not…’ he breathed; then, ‘No – of course I do. It is this wretched brandy that bewilders me. At some point in the past you faced me as a defendant. Correct?’

  Henri felt entirely perplexed. There was none of the fear evident in either Pradel’s voice or face that he’d assumed this realisation would have prompted.

  ‘Correct.’

  There was indeed no fear at all. Instead there was a look almost of relief as Pradel said firmly, ‘Then kill me, as is doubtless your intention. And do not assume that you will have the satisfaction of hearing me beg for my life, of seeing tears course down my cheeks. If my life is indeed worth nothing then I at least have my pride, and so I will go to meet my maker armed with the knowledge that I died bravely.’

  Henri leaned towards him, and there was no mistaking the vengeance that shone in his remaining eye. He fought valiantly against the overwhelming urge to wrap his hands round Pradel’s fleshy neck.

  No, no – he had his plan – he had to stick to it.

  ‘Do not assume that your death will be quick,’ he said tightly, and at length.

  Only for a moment did Pradel’s composure waver. His bravery was proving of great surprise to Henri.

  ‘So it is torture, is it? What – Dumas’ recipe? Do you intend to place me in some dark room and let me die of hunger? Of course, I should expect nothing less from a man of your ilk. Men of my own station – they would oblige their enemy with a quick death. Such is our type of honour.’

  The pallor of the good half of his face ashen, Henri slumped back shocked in his chair.

  ‘You speak of honour? You, who had me buried alive for a murder I did not commit?’

  With another curt shake of his head his composure returned; he said, ‘Enough – you will sit and listen to me talk: you have no other choice. If you interrupt or attempt to flee, I will hold your head in that fire until your face looks worse than my own.’