by Tony Duvert
“Yes. I have. I’ve withdrawn whatever had to be withdrawn. Perhaps I’ll talk to you about that later. On the other hand, Mr. Sorel, you have permission to examine the entire appointment book. Not a page is missing, not a name. Here it is. And here are his files expurgated by me. Don’t thank me.”
“But if the appointment book is complete,” Sorel asked laboriously, “why did you…”
“Look, Sorel! Do you think the professor would write the true name of some of his patients in this book? It’s your job to decrypt it, to recover the names etc.”
“Impossible,” remarked Sorel. “Since the keys are missing.”
“You are clever, you are a minouche, you have the snout!” mocked the superintendent. “Always quick witted, Sorel… Ah, and sniff around in Neuilly a bit. Enquire politely, be a cop who knows how to behave, don’t be too curious. Mr. Sorel, this case can do a lot for your future. Understand that, no more than that. And don’t get involved with the rest.”
“Yes, madam. Thank you madam,” Sorel said as he stood up.
III
Gabriel de Lorsange turned twenty this evening. But no one thought of celebrating his birthday.
He wrote:
Sir, And I believe that every mother will understand me, I am deeply indignant that
A dirty job. He had got it thanks to Julien. A shady little arrangement working as a writing pad for the government: its business was sending letters from readers, listeners and viewers to the authorities at the papers or television stations which had expressed ideas that shocked public opinion, and printed or transmitted images that offended decency.
A model for each indignant letter was supplied by a team of maoist but penniless journalists. A high official retouched and evaluated it. Then it was photocopied and sent out to the manual copyists. That is how the prudish, pro-family and moralising mail is fabricated that throughout the year floods into the editorial rooms and director’s offices of the mass media.
…at half past nine in the evening and my son who is ten and a half years old which allows him, at least I venture to expect that you would not deny him that freedom, to watch the television until nine fifty, a man and a woman, in a film moreover profoundly vulgar, believed it necessary to
Gabriel de Lorsange was six feet three inches tall. Slender, supple, athletic, a jumble of hard worker and lovely boy, he suffered solely from being young and poor. His hand-writing was seductive, and he even had several styles if required.
I dare to hope that … besides, for a long time I have been obliged to slap my boy to prevent him from watching scenes of violence … and every mother will understand me … and with the exorbitant sum asked for the rental TV is it normal that
Gabriel had aching fingers, and an aching heart. He needed to change the writing each time he copied the model letter, sign and date the various envelopes, and then take them all to the ministry. Payment was made at piece rates: if the indignant mother was done twenty times a day, that gave you hardly enough for a sandwich and a beer. But Gabriel had his pride; he was reluctant to live wholly at the expense of his friend.
Lorsange stood up and shook his swollen arm. He saw his pretty face reflected from the window: night had fallen. He sighed. It was such a bore, the world would never begin to exist.
He heard a suspicious noise from behind the door.
Barefoot, he crossed the linoleum with rapid, silent paces. He turned everything off. He listened.
Someone was fumbling with the lock on the front door, a bunch of keys rattled, someone was trying to get into the flat. Gabriel took cover two steps from the door, ready to jump.
A key turned. Slowly, the door was half-opened. The unknown man slipped through and closed the door gently. Gabriel jumped on him from behind, grabbed him by the neck and dragged him into the centre of the living room. A pale, white light coming from the night and the street fell upon the two men. They fought. A low table was knocked over, a vase fell without breaking. Gasping, the men rolled on the floor. Gabriel was on top. He turned the intruder round, belly down, ripped off his breeches and brutally sodomised him. Gabriel’s prick was enormous, the length of a forearm, and hard as an iron bar. As he came he bit his victim’s ear: the lobe, half torn off, began bleeding.
“I’m going to look wonderful with that in the office to-morrow,” said an annoyed voice. “You overdo it, Gabriel. It’ll need stitches! What’s got into you to munch me like that. So you really really love me, my big rabbit?”
Gabriel didn’t hear: he had run off to the bathroom and was washing himself.
“What is it, Julien? What have I forgotten?” he asked calmly when he reappeared in the living room.
“Turn the light on, please,” said Julien. “I’m knackered. I can’t believe the job the boss has given me, and I don’t know how I’m going to get out of it. What a fool’s profession. Ah! look, that’s just fine, it’s pissing on the lino, see that!…”
“The blood?”
“Yes, the blood! You like that, don’t you?”
“It’s not bad. But you haven’t got it on your clothes.”
“I was careful. I don’t tell the cleaner about my life. But anyway, you’re a brute some days. I don’t ask very much of you.”
Thus spake Inspector Sorel, flat on his belly, pants torn, his vest dotted with blood, his backside smashed in and sticky, to his young lover Gabriel de Lorsange.
Gabriel, unreceptive to these particular compliments, had sat down at the end of the living room and, with big eyes and a sad expession, was looking for a radio station on a defective transistor.
“You piss me off, Juju,” he said. “You have to know what you want. As for me, when I fuck, I fuck.”
“This job is confusing me,” Sorel apologized. “Don’t take any notice.”
Gabriel shrugged his shoulders. He said:
“There are two religieuses in the fridge. I’ve chopped the noodles. I copied eleven mother’s letters. And I’m twenty to-day. And you’re lucky to be you. Otherwise I would have murdered you.”
IV
“A religieuse!” exclaimed Marc.
“Coffee or chocolate?” asked the sales-woman.
“Coffee, no, chocolate!” said Marc. “They’re bigger!” he added for the man with him.
The man paid and left the cake-shop with the little boy.
Marc beheaded the religieuse and nibbled at the cabbage. When his lips were really mucky, he elucidated:
“You were better as a kind lady, the other day.”
“I know,” said the man, “but to-day I can’t.”
“I like you better as a kind lady,” Marc said again.
“Next time, I promise. So, your grandpa is dead?”
“Yes, yes. Yes. Yes he is. Just as you wanted.”
“I didn’t want anything!” protested the man. “I just said it in passing.”
“Well yes, as you see, that’s what happened.”
“It’s truly a chance thing. It’s annoying.”
Marc sucked the cream off his big cabbage. He lifted his eyes towards the man.
“What is it, a chance?”
“I can’t explain it to you. So, tell me, did you try your ring?”
“Yes, come on, I’ll show you!”
He laughed and pulled the man under a porch. He searched in a fob of his short pants, and drew out a ring, the size of an engagement ring, very elaborate, 1925 style, in solid silver. He handed the remains of his cake to the man, who took it and waited. Marc felt around his right ear with his two hands gracefully joined, found the hole, slid in the ring and set everything free:
“Is it beautiful?” he asked, delighted.
The man did not reply.
Marc felt himself, to understand. It was very beautiful! He took his cake back.
V
Inspector Sorel closed his little notebook. He defiantly observed, on the Chinese lacquer table, the beer he had requested when Madam Oriane Brisset had offered him a drink. They heated this house
far too much, and he was dying of thirst. But he had a horror of foreign beers. To make up for it, he envied the lacquer a panel put on a discreet server and then covered with a`thin sheet of glass – to protect it from the clods but to show it to them nevertheless.
“But drink up, inspector!” said Oriane Brisset. “Your beer will go flat. My husband adored it.”
Sorel obeyed. It was less bad than expected.
“The detail that intrigues me, madam,” said Sorel, “is that… Well, according to you, it was your grandson who announced the professor’s death?”
“But I’ve told you that a hundred times, dear sir!” cried Madam Brisset. “It’s so odd, is it not.”
“That worries me a lot, but I will be obliged to interview him. He was probably the first to see the body: and the time of your husband’s death is very important.”
“Inspector! The time of his death!” protested Oriane. “He was as fat as thirty-six thousand pigs!”
“What does that mean, if you please?…”
“The fat, it retains the heat! Even if Marc had touched his grand-father, how could you expect him to give you any useful information?”
Oriane Brisset’s thought processes escaped poor Sorel. He did not press the point. Oriane seemed quite unaffected by her bereavement. With her shining cheeks, her fresh teeth, and bright eyes, she was excited and gay. She was wearing a Spring dress with Pompadour patterns, long and pleated. Madam Brisset was tall, elegant, and slender; the gardening had already lightly tanned her forearms. At sixty she discovered with surprise, because of her widowhood, that she had been married. This peculiar idea inspired her.
“You are right,” replied Sorel. “But I must, despite all that, speak with your grandson. Oh, very briefly, certainly.”
“Very briefly!” repeated Oriane. “You’re the one who is saying it! With a talker like Marc! I hope you’ll finish your interview before Christmas!… Oh, he’s a little mule! If he doesn’t want to, you won’t get him to say a word.”
Inspector Sorel gave a rather obliging smile. He finished his beer.
“Marc isn’t here?” he asked.
“I’m alone in the house. Except Peter, of course. My daughter is working, and Marc is at school. My son-in-law will soon be back from that congress, he’s been telegraphed. My other grandson, Philippe, will be in Paris to-morrow afternoon, I think. He’s a boarder at the Christ-roi of St-Martien-des-Eaux. His father was a priest! Well, I’m joking, but you will understand my meaning.”
“His father?”
“My daughter was married, dear sir, for the first time, and she had one son, Philippe. He is fifteen. Then she got divorced, and married a second time, and she had a second son, Marc.”
“She is your only daughter?”
“The only one,” said Madam Brisset.
“You don’t seem to like her very much, madam,” remarked Sorel.
“Like! Like! One always likes one’s children, inspector. Let us talk about something else, I beg you.”
“I’m sorry. I think that’s all, and I thank you profoundly, madam,” said Sorel.
He stood up.
“May I visit the professor’s study? It’s on the first floor, isn’t it?”
“Of course! His floor!” said Oriane. “I don’t know what to do with it now. Would you go with a lodger, in my place?”
“Er,” said Sorel, disconcerted, “really I don’t…”
“No. You wouldn’t do that. Right. That would be grotesque!” admitted Oriane Brisset. “We are so disorganised, with all the patients my husband saw. A little calm, isn’t that the thing?”
She accompanied Sorel to the antechamber.
“Take the lift,” she said. “Perhaps there will be some exciting clues. Because as I see it the criminal was a lunatic.”
Sorel looked at the little private lift: a kind of narrow goods-hoist, with bench, in a Louis XV cupboard.
“All the old nut-cases that my husband treated had bad legs!” explained Oriane. “That craze for chasing doctors.”
Sorel got in and pressed the button. The machine took him gently to the first floor. Sumptuous furnishings.
Professor Brisset’s study was a long rectangle with mahogany panelling and padded door, a thick velvet dark blue moquette carpet, arm-chairs and desk Louis-Philippe. No books were visible: the panelling hid numerous shelves upon which Professor Brisset had arranged his library. There were no further trinkets, and no pictures: the desk, save for a lamp and a writing-pad, was empty. Brisset was afraid he would influence his patients. He had already been forced to impose upon them his private hotel, his famous name, his servant, and his garden: all that was too much. Discreet and spotless, his study would restore equilibrium, he had hoped.
Sorel was disappointed. He investigated the moquette methodically: but he did not discover the murder weapon, that famous shoe-lace. All he found was a pair of worn-out slippers, behind one of the mouse-grey plush curtains that adorned the windows.
He opened every cupboard, every drawer. Professor Brisset had kept mountains of manuscript archives, illegible and discouraging.
The inspector decided to stop searching. He was anxious to meet the boy, that funny little Marc. While waiting, he would interview Peter.
Oriane Brisset came to meet Sorel in the vestibule when she heard the lift door. She seemed to be relieved that his hands were empty.
“Your husband didn’t have a secretary, I suppose?”
“No, inspector. Not here. At the hospital he did. At the hospital. Here he took care of his appointment book himself, and also his card-index, of course. Your colleagues took everything away this morning.”
“Quite so,” replied Sorel, to whom Superintendent Renal had said nothing about this matutinal visit by the police.
“But my husband, inspector, did not have the kind of patients who assassinate their psychiatrists!” said Nadan Brisset. “No! I’m convinced that it was a lunatic. A real one! A lunatic who disguised himself as someone with a mental illness like the others, do you understand? And my husband was completely hoodwinked!…”
“What you say is very interesting, madam. From what you say, we will discover the culprit if we go through the professor’s private clientele?”
Oriane shook her head:
“Not at all! I said the exact opposite! Besides, I would never have authorised Raymond to admit lunatics under my roof! Old nut-cases, yes. But lunatics, killers! Never!”
“The… the private hotel belongs to you, madam?”
“Yes, inspector.”
Sorel took a few notes, and then turned towards the kitchen.
“No! out!” shouted Peter when he heard some one opening the door.
“Sorry, it’s the police,” said Inspector Sorel.
“I don’t care, I haven’t killed any one, and I’m not dead! Let me do my work.”
Sorel just twitched a little, and looked more closely at the plump little Englishman. He had the impression of having often seen and heard this type of man: but in certain places to which respectable bachelors do not venture. Suddenly sorel asked himself whether Professor Brisset… an idyll with the big-bummed cook? Odder loves exist.
“You’re the one who admitted the professor’s patients,” said Sorel. “Your testimony is essential.”
Peter violently threw his table-spoon into a copper pan where some veal was sizzling:
“Are you deaf or something?” he shouted slowly. “I’m working! Either stick me in prison or leave me in peace!”
Disconcerted, Sorel resolved not to bother. The occupants of the house enjoyed protection from the highest level, and Peter, just as much as the others, was aware of that.
“Surely you can give me the names of the last patients you admitted,” he suggested. “The times of their arrival, and the times of their departure. Easy, what? … I’m listening.”
This calmness seemed to surprise the plump Englisman. He covered the veal, came up to Sorel and finally grunted:
“Could you give me that notebook? I can write it down. Yes? Come back soon, and it will be done.”
“Impossible, I need it. Here, take one page. That’ll be enough, won’t it?”
“And the pencil,” Peter growled.
Sorel obeyed, and left the kitchen.
“Inspector! Quickly, come into my boudoir!” exclaimed Oriane, who had put her head around a door at the end of the vestibule. “Marc has just come back!”
Sorel hurried in.
The boudoir was quite a large square room, mauve and white, with furniture displaying silk buttercups. He smelt tobacco: Madam Brisset was in fact in the habit of smoking exquisite little Havana cigars there.
A little boy, thighs spread in a sloppy pose, seemed to be sulking on a Directoire chaise-longue. Sorel had the impression that he was dressed like a pauper. Only, the visible skin (face, hands, legs) exuded the richness, the refinement, the corporeal opulence of a high-class boy stuffed with good food, bursting with beauty like a god.
“You don’t mind my staying with you, since it’s not a confession?” asked Oriane. She sat down without waiting for Sorel’s reply.
“Would you like some port, inspector? I shouldn’t be asking you that, after a beer, but you’re so timid! I’m sure you’ll feel uneasy interrogating Marc!”
She was right. Sorel accepted, resigned to the tone of the house. The boy, who had large eyes, swollen but very beautiful, gave him a gleaming and mischievous look. A quick-tempered or scoffing tom-cat, a touchy domestic divinity. Sorel took the glass of port and tossed it off in one movement. He pretended to look through his note-book, so as to give himself a countenance, and he said:
“You, I think, were the first to see Professor Brisset, your grandfather, after his death.”
“Me? … I don’t know who told you that,” muttered Marc contemptuously.
He gave a dry smile and withdrew it immediately into his beautiful cheeks.
“But, young man, your grandmother has said that…”
“His grandmother!” interrupted Oriane. “Let’s not exaggerate, inspector! You take that too seriously, we find. Marc was without a doubt playing with words. He’s a boy… a very caustic boy. And he so loved to play with his grand-father! You know that the two of them adored each other.”
