A Silver Ring in the Ear

by Tony Duvert

  A Silver Ring in the Ear

  A novel by

  Tony Duvert

  I

  Marc hadn’t played at burials this afternoon, even though the weather was fine. He liked to be the body, because then he would be pushed around in a wheelbarrow like a slothful king, while others cried, or laughed, pulled his hair, or pinched him.

  To-day, however, he had had no wish to be a corpse. He had said he was going out to play, but he had been walking around randomly by himself. He was eight years old.

  He inspected his soup. Grandma Oriane was eating. And, when she was eating soup, she held the edge of her spoon in front of her mouth and she sucked through her front teeth, as a whale filters the waves. Beatrice, his mother, was also eating. As for Papa, he was dining far away from Paris: he was as usual at a biology conference, somewhere like Lyon, Tokyo or New York.

  Grandpa was upstairs, in his surgery: in the evenings he would think about things, and, despite his gluttony, he would often linger there going through books or old papers, before coming down to eat. Grandpa was a very famous psychiatrist.

  “What’s wrong with your ear, dear?” asked Beatrice.

  Marc fingered his right earlobe. He was not put out. He replied:

  “Nothing, mother. Oh, that? That… that was itchy. There on the ear. There, that one. Can you see it? Well, that was itchy.”

  He tasted the soup. Beatrice admired the little boy’s coolness. Grandma Oriane had put down her spoon and gave her grandson a tender look. She didn’t see anything, but said:

  “My goodness, his ear! My darling, this child is so…

  Marc repeated:

  “No, no. It was itchy.”

  “You scratch too much,” said his mother. “Too much scratching is not right.”

  “Well, was it bleeding?” asked Marc.

  “His father used to scratch his legs a lot,” said Grandma Oriane to Beatrice. “I didn’t care for that either!”

  Beatrice smiled gently. Her parents had been sleeping in separate rooms for a long time. She thought of them in their forties: her father, Professor Brisset, with bare legs, sitting on the edge of the conjugal bed, sighing, at a loss at having to sleep. He had an absent expression, the fine man, looking at his bare toes in a melancholy way and nechanically scratching his great thighs.

  Very gently, but with a calculated movement, using two fingers, Marc pushed away his plate. Beatrice knew this code, and called out:

  “Peter!”

  Marc, expressionless, waited, very satisfied. Grandma Oriane, who had finished, smiled softly and remarked:

  “He’s right. This soup is really… Peter!”

  Peter was the sole live-in servant of this private hotel. A female housekeeper came to help him in the mornings, and extra staff were taken on for receptions. He was fiftyish, a dumpy little man, bald, with a large and very prominent backside. He did the cooking, light housework, waiting on table, the shopping, and the gardening. He was unmarried. He was English, but quite unpolished: nevertheless they put up with his bad manners, his cantankerousness, and the coarseness of his language, because he was an admirable worker. He came into the dining-room.

  “What?” he said in a doleful tone. “The soup’s gone already? I haven’t done the next course yet, you eat too fast.”

  The heat of the oven, in the kitchen, had coloured his pale cheeks, which usually had the colour of distinguished old ivory, of a Chinese child, or of camel’s teeth.

  “No no, but this soup is horrid!” cried Grandma Oriane. “I swear to it, my friend.”

  Peter shrugged his shoulders and murmured, with the weariness of a tired out giant:

  “Madam, don’t be silly, I make this soup twenty times a year. You’re talking nonsense. As for me, I have work to do.”

  He made as though to leave.

  “Marc doesn’t want any,” said Beatrice calmly. “Take his plate away, would you. Darling, what would you like?”

  “An avocat!” said Marc. “There’s some in the fridge.”

  “Marc wants an avocat,” repeated Grandma Oriane. “Did you hear, Peter?”

  “Little squirt,” grumbled Peter. “They’re not aged yet. Oh well what do I care if he shits all night.”

  Peter deftly took Marc’s plate. He asked:

  “And the professor, will he have the soup or what?”

  “Yes, keep it warm, he’ll be coming down.”

  Brisset, sweet as an angel, had won Peter’s heart forever. Peter served “the others” for the sake of the fine old man. He left, slamming the door.

  “Here, Beatrice, I’ll drink a little wine,” said grandma Oriane.

  “Not allowed,” said Beatrice.

  She took the bottle, an excellent bordeaux. She served her mother. Marc made a sign with his finger indicating “me too”. Beatrice poured two inches for Oriane, and less than an inch for Marc. She herself drank only aerated water.

  Some one rang the front door-bell.

  “But you have blood on your neck!” exclaimed Beatrice.

  In an exaggerated way Marc rubbed the skin under his right ear, and wrinkled his forehead as though he were about to burst into tears:

  “I told you it had been bleeding! I told you!”

  Beatrice, confused, did not fathom her son’s mischievousness. She felt as if she were being accused. She asked him whether it was painful.

  He inspected his fingers:

  “Now it’s dried up.”

  “The soup was very good!” Grandma Oriane suddenly asserted. “It’s true! At that moment the vegetables were indescribable. Peter is an extraordinary cook. And on Monday that Mr. Mortsauf adored his minted turbot, you know, with the dry chocolate sauce and that marvellous julienne with pickled angelique. But our dear little Marc wasn’t there!” she said, wrinkling up her nose laughingly at her grandson.

  The doors had slammed.

  They waited for the visitor. Who would it be? The private hotel, at Neuilly, was very simple, large and four-square, made of free-stone, and surrounded by a garden of old trees where Madame Brisset, who considered roses affected, tirelessly cultivated rare tulips and irises, among large bushes that on the lawns, towards June, burst out with scented flowers.

  Nevertheless, she complained about the moles, and poured poison into their holes.

  Professor Brisset’s patients, once they had become accustomed to the place, passed through the street-door without ringing, crossed the garden under the lindens, and then rang at the house porch. The two bells were different. After seven-thirty when the last patient had left, Peter would bolt the street-door.

  A bearded man, young and well turned out, came into the dining-room. Mrs. Brisset laughed:

  “What a rough fellow that Peter is! My poor doors! How are you, Robert?”

  She elided the “t” of comment. Dr. Rousseau kissed her hand, shook hands with Beatrice, and sent an irritated glance towards the boy.

  “A great deal of work, a great deal of work,” he sighed.

  He agreed to sit down, but refused cutlery. He simply wanted to have a word with the professor after the latter had dined.

  Robert Rousseau, thirty-eight years old, was Brisset’s favourite pupil. A man with a promising future. To earn his living he cared for lunatics; his parents were dead. But he preferred experimental medecine: and he tortured animals in a state laboratory, to study sleep. For one year he had been working on cats. He put them in the middle of a swimming-pool: the cat was on a minute platform where it could not lie down. Its fear of the water kept it awake. It was not fed. After it finally drowned, Dr. Rousseau tapped its cephalorachidic liquid. A huge number of people suffered from insomnia; a fortune lay at the end.

  On this particular day, Rouss
eau had received an extraordinary piece of news. For a long time he had been wanting to experiment on chimpanzees. That is very expensive, and requires reputation and influence. He had just learned that they had been approved. Thanks to Brisset’s support, clearly.

  He wanted to thank the professor, and give him an initial report of his experiments. To keep an ape awake until death, the cat pool would not suffice. Rousseau planned to use an electric cage that would adapt to the shape of the body: shut in there, the chimpanzee would be obliged to keep as still as a statue, otherwise it would receive a painful shock. Rousseau already saw himself as a Nobel prize winner.

  “My husband is making us wait,” said Grandma Oriane. “I wonder what he’s doing. Oh, I have my suspicions!”

  “Is the professor well?” asked Dr. Rousseau. “That gout, from last March?”

  “Have we not seen you since March?” asked Oriane with astonishment.

  “I’ve been working, madam, and the professor has been working. Hardly a phone call, alas! But still, I wouldn’t have expected it!… Springtime is a strain for alienists!”

  “The nuts wake up,” said Oriane.

  “Papa is very merry these days,” Beatrice remarked. “You know” (she hesitated, her choice of words was bad) “he is so happy to be alive! When you are really down in the dumps, and you spend five minutes with him, you get reinvigorated, you begin to have faith again.”

  Peter pushed open the door and curtly plonked the roast down on the table: a little turkey.

  “Professor Brisset has great dynamism, that’s true,” Rousseau remarked discreetly.

  Marc, who had forgotten his avocat, lifted his eyes abruptly:

  “No,”, he said, “now grandpa is dead.”

  II

  Inspector Sorel, all fresh in a new rain-coat, smiled at his colleagues as he entered.

  He loved this barracks atmosphere, the smell of feet, the hairy arms.

  “Who are we going to arrest to-day?” he joked in a refractory way. He hung up his rain-coat. He was wearing a spring suit of sky-blue shantung, the shirt lie-de-vin, and a black tie with white spots.

  “We’re arresting the queers, watch your bums,” said Foyer. “No, seriously, go and see Rênal, my dear. She’s been waiting for you for an hour.”

  “For me? But I’m not late,” said Sorel.

  “Go and tell her that yourself, ducky,” said Foyer. “Oh, I’m warning you, this morning she’s forgotten her make-up.”

  They laughed. Sorel, touched that he was needed, went along the dirty corridor and knocked on the big chief’s door.

  A harsh voice ordered him to come in.

  “Mr. Sorel. Good, good. Sit down and be quiet. It’s going to be a long one.”

  Sorel obeyed, and took one of the black plastic arm-chairs, facing the desk.

  The superintendent was a woman of around fifty-eight, weighing 13 stone and exactly 5 feet tall. She did not care for walking: her legs were too heavy to support her.

  With shiny grey hair, cut high and square over a great bulging yellow forehead, intelligent and unlined, a powerful nose, a strong mouth, Madam Rênal was Paris’s sole superintendent of the female sex. That did not make her vain. She treated her male subordinates like the mistress of a boarding-school whom the little boys simultaneously softened and exasperated. Unmarried, she lived in a two-room flat furnished in the best Louis XVI style, where she spoiled herself.

  “You are well educated, so I thought the case would suit you,” she told Sorel.

  He nodded politely.

  “It’s very disturbing,” said the superintendent. “The victim knew some very very important people. He was a psychiatrist.”

  She smiled.

  “Sorel, you will understand! When a politician consults an astrologer to find out if he will be elected, he doesn’t cry that from the roof-tops. When he gets treatment because he can no longer get an erection, he likewise would not announce that to the council of ministers. It’s really disturbing that Professor Brisset should have been killed. People will talk about his clientele. People will talk about the government. People will talk about… well, the papers will jump on it. You know what the press can do, in this day and age.”

  Inspector Sorel carefully examined a corner of the desk:

  “It’s a case, er…” he said.

  “I’m not asking for your advice,” said Superintendent Rênal. “I cannot get about easily. You are going to investigate on my behalf. On my behalf, not on yours. Also these are distinguished, refined, elegant people: you can talk so well, that will please them.”

  The inspector gave a sickly smile.

  “Whoever the culprit may have been,” continued Madam Rênal, “they would have had to be discreet. In high places, Mr. Sorel, it would have been preferable for Professor Brisset to die of old age. If really necessary, his wife could have killed him accidentally.”

  “Pardon?” said Sorel, rather puzzled.

  “Yes, his wife,” repeated the superintendent. “I know that Oriane Brisset, a woman of my generation, you may imagine, grows marvellous flowers. She could have prepared poison for the moles or slugs, and then made an infusion for her husband, forgetting to wash her hands.”

  “The poison dose would have been minute,” the inspector objected.

  “Certainly, but Brisset was very old, sedentary, a great eater, and a great drinker. Anything could have finished him off. When people ruin themselves!… Well, I’m telling you this because I’ve had the case since six o’clock this morning. I’ve thought about it. I couldn’t sleep. I’ve never been able to sleep. Oh, I can’t complain. No, I keep quiet. I keep quiet. I keep quiet, you understand!”

  Madam Rênal was not joking. She shrugged her great old shoulders. She looked at the cask of wine that she hid behind a filing-cabinet. She looked at her short finger-nails. She looked at Sorel. A pretty boy, a pink baby, a very clean look, exactly the kind of lover one wants when one is not looking for anything. It was sickening, and superintendent Rênal pouted.

  “Do we simply wait for the autopsy report, then?” Sorel suggested.

  “No. Or rather, yes. Listen to me!… My problem is that Brisset was strangled. That’s the trap. The body was discovered by a physician, a certain Dr. Rousseau. A friend of Brisset. He noticed at once the signs of strangulation, and he called the police. Without him, Mr. Sorel, the family would certainly have concluded that it was a natural death, a heart attack for example. But now we have have to remedy the gaffe of that cretin Rousseau.”

  “Remedy the…” Sorel murmured, frankly in ecstasies.

  “Figure of speech,” said Madam Rênal. “If it were up to me alone…”

  “But how would your slug-poison help there?”

  “It wouldn’t. Wouldn’t help at all. Just something for a rainy day! Just suppose, Sorel, that the autopsy were not to confirm Dr. Rousseau’s initial conclusions, and that instead a hint of poison were discovered?”

  “You seriously think that…”

  “Why not. The telephone is working, isn’t it? For scientific men, it is useful if it is told whatever people are anxious to learn from them. And nothing more. Otherwise, I’m scared of little crooks. Who’s paying them, Sorel? Who’s paying them? Unfortunately, I say again that I’m not sure that any one will telephone.

  “It’s very disagreeable, this uncertainty!” exclaimed Sorel.

  “Very disagreeable! That’s the word.”

  “…and, er, do you think that this Dr. Rousseau could, for his part, admit that he had mistaken the…”

  “A red mark, fine,” said the superintendent. “A shirt collar too tight over a plump neck. That would be so simple!”

  Sorel sighed:

  “I hope he’ll agree.”

  “The state has just given him some fine rewards for his research,” explained Madam Rênal, beaming. “We can relax.”

  “Ah, what a piece of luck!”

  “Yes, yes, yes. A piece of luck. A piece of luck if the legal physician
…”

  The inspector’s face clouded over.

  “I’ll be frank,” said the superintendent. “In principle, Professor Brisset was strangled with a shoe-lace: and the trace is truly all too clear. An extraordinarily good will would be needed not to see that!”

  “With a shoe-lace, eh,” said the inspector.

  “But read Stendhal, Mr. Sorel!” barked Madam Rênal with jubilation, “A shoe-lace! In times gone by, in Venice, that is how the rich were executed. At home, gently. In their bedroom. In their favourite arm-chair.”

  “It would have to be a hefty fellow, no?”

  “Hefty! Not at all!” protested the superintendent. “A child could do it! Sorel, if you are six, or eight, and playing with grandpa, he’s joking, you take a lace out of your tennis shoe, you tell grandpa to close his eyes, you wind the lace around his neck, he’s joking, he’s joking, you pull, you pull: bang, no more grandpa.”

  “On that point…”

  “Yes. And Brisset had just such an eight-year-old grandson, Marc. They got on very well,”

  “But that’s perfect!” said Sorel, delightedly. “If there’s no poison in this psychiatrist’s organs… the shoe-lace… the grandson who played at…”

  Madam Rênal dropped her fists onto the desk, and cackled with laughter.

  “My dear boy! My dear boy! Leave the little ones alone! I’m not asking that of you!”

  “Nevertheless it would make a good murder,” insisted Sorel, a little vexed. “The case would be closed. Eight years old, rich family, what would he risk?”

  “No! I say again that I don’t like it,” said the superintendent, who was starting to unscrew her meerschaum. She did not actually smoke in the presence of the personnel.

  “We should… we should accuse Madam Brisset, then?”

  “We should! Pooh!” growled Madam Rênal. “We’ll decide after we have the support of the autopsy. Look, Sorel, while we’re waiting, amuse yourself by going through Professor Brisset’s files. Find an assassin for me among his clientele, a suitable nut-case! That should keep you busy.”

  The inspector flushed.

  “What, his files, madam? Do you mean that he’s… that no one has touched them?”