by Michael Sims
“But what about the carpet tacks?” I asked. “The leg was full of tacks.”
“I know that, or rather my best amputating knife knows it, for some of them spoiled the edge of it,” he said with energy; “but the people would not explain, so I know nothing of them. He had been shot by mistake, they said, and carried home by my guide—probably while breaking into some house.”
“And how did you lose the letter?”
“I never knew—I had it in my overcoat pocket ready for posting, and I may have pulled it out when I took out my amputating knife—at any rate I was stopped on the street by the same villain who took me to the place, and he demanded money, saying he would give the letter to Mrs. Graham’s husband if I refused, so I caved in and gave him half a sovereign. I appealed to his sense of gratitude for all I had done for them, but it was just a waste of breath.”
“And have you never again seen your patient?”
“Oh, yes, once—I was taken to him in the same way, but by a different person, and he was progressing very well. I told him of the blackmailing, and he said he would have Pete’s life for it; but that did not bring back the letter or my half-sovereign. He got another out of me to-night, and will be at me again before long.”
“He won’t, for he’s in the lock-up now,” I promptly answered, “and I have the letter safe.”
“You have! Give me your hand! That takes a ton weight off my mind!” he joyously exclaimed. “You might hand it over and let me burn it.”
“I cannot just now, but you will get it all right later on. Now you might get on your boots and try to take me as near to your patient’s lodging as you can.”
He started up and got on his things, and we went down to the Grassmarket together, where I blindfolded him, and he led me up the West Port for some distance, and then stopped near a street lamp.
“Is there a close-mouth near here?” he asked, and there was, so he led me into that, and some distance down he felt for a stair on the left hand.
“It was a place like this, but I’m not sure that we are in the right close,” he said, but as I knew that on that stair was living a ticket-of-leave man named Ned Cooper, I decided to go up and give him a call. The keeper of the lodging declared that Cooper had not been there for weeks, but I soon proved that she was quite mistaken, for I found him—or at least a considerable part of him—in the inner room, with a basket over his left leg to keep the bedclothes off the tender stump. As the student did not appear with me, Ned rashly jumped to the conclusion that he had been betrayed by Pete Swift, and he straightway resolved to be even with the traitor.
“It’s for that crib-cracking in Lauriston, I s’pose?” he inquiringly observed; “the one that Pete Swift planned and got me to help in?”
I nodded vaguely, and Ned clenched his fists, and swore at Pete till he was black in the face.
“It’ll be seven years, I s’pose?” he gloomily added, “but seeing as I was drawed into it like a innercent lamb, and was shot by the man in the house and have lost a leg, I oughter get off easier nor Pete, eh?”
“Well, it seems fair that you should, and I daresay it may be managed,” I said, and as my word was as good as a bond, Ned gave me the whole particulars of the housebreaking. They had thought the house empty; but it was not, for the owner was asleep in a back room, and had emptied a gun into Ned’s leg before he even sighted him. There was no pursuit, and Ned was hauled out at the open window by Pete and borne off on his back. Ned knew nothing of the finding of his leg nor of the carpet tacks with which it had been filled; so I left him under guard, and next morning called at the house into which he had broken. The owner was at breakfast alone, and he started up in manifest alarm when he recognised my face.
“Is it about the man I shot?” he faintly asked, motioning me to a chair.
I nodded, and gravely said:—
“Why did you not report the matter to us?”
“Report it? I was nearly dead with remorse, and haven’t had a solid night’s rest ever since,” he hurriedly answered. “Is he dead?”
“Oh, no; but how did it happen?”
“Well, I’m a light sleeper, and woke with the opening of the front gate. Then I started up and listened, till I heard them trying the front parlour window. There’s been a lot of housebreaking about here, so I had a gun ready loaded; but I’m no great shot, and as there was only a bullet in it, I felt pretty sure I should miss the man. On the mantlepiece, however, was a paper of tacks left by the upholsterers a few weeks ago, and I groped for that in the dark, and emptied them into the gun. I would have taken out the bullet, but I had not time, for I heard the front window being shoved up. I slipped along the lobby, and saw a man with one leg just inside the window, and I let bang at that. I think the recoil knocked me over, for when I came to again there was no sign of the man, and nothing but a great pool of blood to show what had happened. I think there were two of them, but I only saw one inside.”
I laughed at the poor soul’s concern and terror, and hastened to relieve his fears by stating the facts already set down. Ned Cooper was removed as soon as possible, and was able to give such information against Pete that that worthy duly got off with the anticipated seven years, while he himself got off with one. The case of the letter and the blackmailing did not appear at the trial at all, and in due time the letter was restored to Manson, who burned it before my eyes, and declared that he would never again pen another of the same kind.
Émile Gaboriau
(1832–1873)
As mentioned in the introduction, Frenchman Émile Gaboriau was one of the many writers influenced by the “memoirs” of criminal-turned-policeman Eugène François Vidocq. Embellished or not, Vidocq’s adventures left a considerable legacy. Gaboriau, however, was too good a writer to merely imitate either Vidocq or another of his idols, Poe’s Dupin. His stylish and entertaining novels helped create the police procedural and influenced many later writers, from Anna Katharine Green to Arthur Conan Doyle. “Gaboriau had rather attracted me,” Conan Doyle reminisced, “by the neat dovetailing of his plots.”
Gaboriau was definitely good at plotting a mystery—he could plant clues and strew red herrings with the best of them—but he was just as interested in the investigative routine employed by his police detectives, the patient legwork and careful interrogation. He also spent more time than many of his colleagues in bringing characters to life, fleshing them out as individuals and conjuring the boulevards and countryside of France through which they make their cautious way. His dialogue is lively and his descriptions sparkle. In the story below, a snuffbox is “as large as that of a vaudeville capitalist.” A candle at a crime scene “had burned down to the end, blackening the alabaster save-all in which it was placed.” A prisoner in a cell “was ugly; smallpox had disfigured him, and his long straight nose and receding forehead gave him somewhat the stupid look of a sheep.”
After years in the French cavalry, Gaboriau began the best possible training for a thriller writer. He served as secretary to the dramatist and novelist Paul Féval père, who wrote everything from swashbucklers to vampire stories. Gaboriau spent his time researching in police stations and morgues. A villain in one Féval novel was named Lecoq (the Rooster), and after he began writing on his own, Gaboriau resurrected the name for his protagonist. The French policeman called Monsieur Lecoq, whose surname would seem to also conjure the former head of the Sûreté (and whose given name is never revealed), appeared first as a relatively minor character in L’Affaire Lerouge (The Widow Lerouge or The Lerouge Case) and only rose to the marquee position in 1868 with a novel named after him and famously promoted all over Paris with mysterious posters bearing only the words Monsieur Lecoq! to build up advance interest.
Like many other writers at the time, Gaboriau tended to bifurcate his novels into detective story and Gothic family drama. In the first part a crime is discovered, an investigation carried out, and a culprit revealed; in the second part, he reveals the tangled history of mistakes and c
ruelties that led to the murder. They read like two related books joined together, not always the most compelling of structures. Anna Katharine Green, whose books clearly show Gaboriau’s influence, sometimes used this approach. Three of Conan Doyle’s four Sherlock Holmes novels are detective stories wrapping such flashback histories; only The Hound of the Baskervilles stays with Watson throughout, and even in it Holmes is offstage much of the time.
Gaboriau’s most acclaimed shorter work, “The Little Old Man of Batignolles,” which appears here in an anonymous nineteenth-century translation, was first published in 1868. It features not Lecoq but a tough and compassionate policeman named Mechinet.
The Little Old Man of Batignolles
I.
When I had finished my studies in order to become a health officer, a happy time it was, I was twenty-three years of age. I lived in the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, almost at the corner of the Rue Racine.
There I had for thirty francs a month, service included, a furnished room, which to-day would certainly be worth a hundred francs; it was so spacious that I could easily put my arms in the sleeves of my overcoat without opening the window.
Since I left early in the morning to make the calls for my hospital, and since I returned very late, because the Café Leroy had irresistible attractions for me, I scarcely knew by sight the tenants in my house, peaceable people all; some living on their incomes, and some small merchants.
There was one, however, to whom, little by little, I became attached.
He was a man of average size, insignificant, always scrupulously shaved, who was pompously called “Monsieur Mechinet.”
The doorkeeper treated him with a most particular regard, and never omitted quickly to lift his cap as he passed the lodge.
As M. Mechinet’s apartment opened on my landing, directly opposite the door of my room, we repeatedly met face to face. On such occasions we saluted one another.
One evening he came to ask me for some matches; another night I borrowed tobacco of him; one morning it happened that we both left at the same time, and walked side by side for a little stretch, talking.
Such were our first relations.
Without being curious or mistrusting—one is neither at the age I was then—we like to know what to think about people to whom we become attached.
Thus I naturally came to observe my neighbor’s way of living, and became interested in his actions and gestures.
He was married. Madame Caroline Mechinet, blonde and fair, small, gay and plump, seemed to adore her husband.
But the husband’s conduct was none too regular for that. Frequently he decamped before daylight, and often the sun had set before I heard him return to his domicile. At times he disappeared for whole weeks.
That the pretty little Madame Mechinet should tolerate this is what I could not understand.
Puzzled, I thought that our concierge, ordinarily as much a babbler as a magpie, would give me some explanation.
Not so! Hardly had I pronounced Mechinet’s name than, without ceremony, he sent me about my business, telling me, as he rolled his eyes, that he was not in the habit of “spying” upon his tenants.
This reception doubled my curiosity to such an extent that, banishing all shame, I began to watch my neighbor.
I discovered things.
Once I saw him coming home dressed in the latest fashion, his buttonhole ornamented with five or six decorations; the next day I noticed him on the stairway dressed in a sordid blouse, on his head a cloth rag, which gave him a sinister air.
Nor was that all. One beautiful afternoon, as he was going out, I saw his wife accompany him to the threshold of their apartment and there kiss him passionately, saying:
“I beg you, Mechinet, be prudent; think of your little wife.”
Be prudent! Why? For what purpose? What did that mean? The wife must then be an accomplice.
It was not long before my astonishment was doubled.
One night, as I was sleeping soundly, some one knocked suddenly and rapidly at my door.
I arose and opened.
M. Mechinet entered, or rather rushed in, his clothing in disorder and torn, his necktie and the front of his shirt torn off, bareheaded, his face covered with blood.
“What has happened?” I exclaimed, frightened.
“Not so loud,” said he; “you might be heard. Perhaps it is nothing, although I suffer devilishly. I said to myself that you, being a medical student would doubtless know how to help me.”
Without saying a word, I made him sit down, and hastened to examine him and to do for him what was necessary.
Although he bled freely, the wound was a slight one—to tell the truth, it was only a superficial scratch, starting from the left ear and reaching to the corner of his mouth.
The dressing of the wound finished, “Well, here I am again healthy and safe for this time,” M. Mechinet said to me. “Thousand thanks, dear Monsieur Godeuil. Above all, as a favor, do not speak to any one of this little accident, and—good night.”
“Good night!” I had little thought of sleeping. When I remember all the absurd hypotheses and the romantic imaginations which passed through my brain, I can not help laughing.
In my mind, M. Mechinet took on fantastic proportions.
The next day he came to thank me again, and invited me to dinner.
That I was all eyes and ears when I entered my neighbor’s home may be rightly guessed.
In vain did I concentrate my whole attention. I could not find out anything of a nature to dissipate the mystery which puzzled me so much.
However, from this dinner on, our relations became closer. M. Mechinet decidedly favored me with his friendship. Rarely a week passed without his taking me along, as he expressed it, to eat soup with him, and almost daily, at the time for absinthe, he came to meet me at the Café Leroy, where we played a game of dominoes.
Thus it was that on a certain evening in the month of July, on a Friday, at about five o’clock, when he was just about to beat me at “full double-six,” an ugly-looking bully abruptly entered, and, approaching him, murmured in his ears some words I could not hear.
M. Mechinet rose suddenly, looking troubled.
“I am coming,” said he; “run and say that I am coming.”
The man ran off as fast as his legs could carry him, and then M. Mechinet offered me his hand.
“Excuse me,” added my old neighbor, “duty before everything; we shall continue our game to-morrow.”
Consumed with curiosity, I showed great vexation, saying that I regretted very much not accompanying him.
“Well,” grumbled he, “why not? Do you want to come? Perhaps it will be interesting.”
For all answer, I took my hat and we left.
II.
I was certainly far from thinking that I was then venturing on one of those apparently insignificant steps which, nevertheless, have a deciding influence on one’s whole life.
For once, I thought to myself, I am holding the solution of the enigma!
And full of a silly and childish satisfaction, I trotted, like a lean cat, at the side of M. Mechinet.
I say “trotted,” because I had all I could do not to be left behind.
He rushed along, down the Rue Racine, running against the passers-by, as if his fortune depended on his legs.
Luckily, on the Place de l’Odéon a cab came in our way.
M. Mechinet stopped it, and, opening the door, “Get in, Monsieur Godeuil,” said he to me.
I obeyed, and he seated himself at my side, after having called to the coachman in a commanding voice: “39 Rue Lecluse, at Batignolles, and drive fast!”
The distance drew from the coachman a string of oaths. Nevertheless he whipped up his broken-down horses and the carriage rolled off.
“Oh! it is to Batignolles we are going?” I asked with a courtier’s smile.
But M. Mechinet did not answer me; I even doubt that he heard me.
A complete change took place in
him. He did not seem exactly agitated but his set lips and the contraction of his heavy, brushwood-like eyebrows betrayed a keen preoccupation. His look, lost in space, seemed to be studying there the meaning of some insolvable problem.
He had pulled out his snuffbox and continually took from it enormous pinches of snuff, which he kneaded between the index and thumb, rolled into a ball, and raised it to his nose; but he did not actually snuff.
It was a habit which I had observed, and it amused me very much.
This worthy man, who abhorred tobacco, always carried a snuffbox as large as that of a vaudeville capitalist.
If anything unforeseen happened to him, either agreeable or vexatious, in a trice he had it out, and seemed to snuff furiously.
Often the snuffbox was empty, but his gestures remained the same.
I learned later that this was a system with him for the purpose of concealing his impressions and of diverting the attention of his questioners.
In the mean time we rolled on. The cab easily passed up the Rue de Clichy; it crossed the exterior boulevard, entered the Rue de Lecluse, and soon stopped at some distance from the address given.
It was materially impossible to go farther, as the street was obstructed by a compact crowd.
In front of No. 39, two or three hundred persons were standing, their necks craned, eyes gleaming breathless with curiosity, and with difficulty kept in bounds by half a dozen sergents de ville, who were everywhere repeating in vain and in their roughest voices: “Move on, gentlemen, move on!”
