The Curse of the Grand Guignol (11 page)

“Since when did the Sûreté
employ women?”

“I am a consulting
detective.”

“Like Vidocq?”

“More like Sherlock Holmes but
prettier.”

Despite his anxiety, he burst
out laughing and it lightened the tension. “Very well, in answer to
your question – yes.”

“You wrote all three
plays?”

Not entirely sure if he should
answer or not, he nodded as he inhaled and continued nodding until
he exhaled; he looked like an automaton; his head attached to a
spring.

“And the comedy sketches?”

Again like an automaton, he
shook his head. “They are done by Felix, Hilaire and Vincent. I
don’t have anything to do with those.”

“On your opening night there
was a murder in Montmartre. Are you aware of that?”

“I wasn’t aware at the time but
I have since learned of it.”

“Who told you?”

“I read it in
Le Libre
Parole.
”

“Did the murder strike you as
unusual in any way?”

“If you mean by that did I
notice it was similar to my play the answer is yes. In my play an
abbess who is a nymphomaniac is gloriously violated by a group of
bishops and then strung up on a lamp-post with a tag around her
neck saying ‘rape me’. A rag and bone man obliges and then chops
off her hands as she clasps them in prayer. The real murder took
place on rue des Abbesses and though it was man who was strung up
the matching details made me wonder.”

“Wonder?”

“I thought someone had been to
the show and then committed the crime but that particular play was
the last one for the night. It finished around midnight. The murder
was committed earlier, sometime during the early part of the
show.”

“How do you know?”

“I read it in
Le Temps.
They were asking for witnesses and listed the approximate time of
the murder.”

“Are you anti-Semite?”

“What?”

“You read
Le Libre
Parole
.”

He gave a careless dismissive
shrug as he flicked ash into the ashtray. “Everyone reads that rag.
It doesn’t mean anything. The caricatures are cruel but funny,
though not as cruel or funny as the ones drawn by the Brotherhood
of the Boldt.”

“They publish a newspaper?”

“Pamphlet - weekly.”

“Have you ever been to Café
Bistro?”

“Of course I have been! The
coffee is shit and the homemade vodka is like piss-on-fire but the
conversation is grist to the mill for an avant-garde auteur.”

“Tell me about your second show
on the tenth of November.”

“If you mean did I notice there
was another murder that night the answer is yes, but again not
straight away. I only realized it today when I read the newspaper
this morning and then checked back copies of
Le Temps
. It
didn’t take much to realize there was a murder each time we staged
a new show. The tenth, seventeenth, twenty-fourth, and the premier
day of December - last night.” He ignored the ashtray and flicked
ash into the paper bin.

“You realized each murder was
similar to one of your plays?”

“Yes, of course, a man strung
up on a tree – ears hacked off, a woman dangling over her balcony -
scalped, a man with his eyes gouged out and left on a grave, and
last night a corpse sitting outside a café with his tongue cut out.
That’s why you asked me if I had been to Café Bistro.”

“Yes.”

“Everyone in the show goes
there. Kiki practically lives there. The Humboldts are in love with
her.”

“Is she in love with them?”

“The cocotte is in love with
love. She enjoys adulation and applause and all the attention.”

The Countess paused to draw
breath, extinguishing her cigarette slowly, painstakingly, though
it was only half burnt down. “Now, this is important. Who reads the
scripts before the play is staged?”

He hesitated a moment. “Serge
Davidov.”

“Anyone else?”

“No,” he said without
hesitation. “I keep my room at the theatre locked. I had an ivory
dip pen stolen when we first set up in rue Ballu. Since that time I
have always locked my door.”

“And Monsieur Davidov?”

“He keeps the door to his
little sitting room locked too. Plus he keeps the scripts in a
locked chest. He doesn’t want anyone to see them or know what we
will be performing until the night. We rehearse on what is called a
closed set. Anticipation builds because of the secrecy. It is all
part of the mystique and horror of
le Cirque du Grand
Guignol
. Not knowing what will be performed is more shocking
than knowing in advance and bracing for it.”

“What about costumes and
props?”

“Everyone in the show decides
for him or herself. They are all old hands. They have all been
performing since they were children. They don’t have costumiers and
such. They can order what they like as far as costumes and wigs go.
Davidov doesn’t quibble about expenses. He wants to be more famous
than the rue Chaptal gang. That’s another reason he is fanatical
about secrecy. If our rivals got hold of a script and staged one of
our plays before us there would be all hell to pay.”

“Our plays?”

“What?”

“You said
our
plays – as
if it is a collective effort.”

He shifted uncomfortably and
stared at his cigarette. “Well, it
is
collective. We all
have a stake in the success of it. The scripts are just an outline.
Davidov encourages everyone to ad lib. It makes it more real.
That’s why the shows are so successful and audiences can come again
and again to see the same show. No two shows are ever word for word
identical. Just the general plot is followed.”

“I see. But do you see?”

“What?”

“If no one sees the script but
Davidov, the five cast members and you, then one of you must be
passing the information to the murderer.”

He leapt out of the chair,
aghast; ash fell on the Turkey rug. “No! No!” he denied
strenuously, using his shoe to obliterate the ash out of
existence.

“You cannot destroy a fact
simply by denying it.”

Weakly, he fell back into the
chair and ground the butt of his cigarette into the ashtray before
letting his head fall into his hands. “Do you think someone is
passing the scripts onto our rivals so that they can ruin us?”

Again, she noticed he didn’t
refer to the scripts as:
my
scripts. “To implicate you in
murder?”

“Yes - oh, my God!”

He sounded like a man who had
just experienced a shocking epiphany.

“What is it?” she pressed
before he had time to collect himself.

He looked up slowly. The blood
had drained from his face. The eyes seemed magnified behind the
round glasses. “Our rivals are famous for staging crimes taken from
police files, actual crimes that have happened. It just occurred to
me, we are staging plays that will become crimes. Don’t you see,”
he cried, horrified, “they are staging crimes; we are creating
them! Don’t you see?” he implored desperately.

Struck by his damning
summation, she began nodding in earnest. “It is the difference
between Art imitating Life and Life imitating Art.”

“Yes, yes,” he groaned
unhappily. “That’s it exactly.”

With her brain whirring, she
began to pace the little room. “If what you have told me is true
then it is unlikely to be Serge Davidov passing on the scripts. He
would not wish to destroy his own theatre company. He would not
wish to bring ruin upon himself. He has too much at stake. And I no
longer suspect you, Monsieur Crespigny.”

“Oh, thank you very much,” he
managed to croak miserably.

“That leaves the five cast
members. It must be one of them, or perhaps several of them acting
in concert.”

She caught his wretched
reflection in the mirror of the desk door as she reached the end of
the room and whirled round. He was raking his hands through his
unkempt hair and his face looked even more bloodless than before,
like a ghoul or vampire, one of the living dead. Rather than having
more sympathy for him, however, it made her think he was hiding
something.

“Is there something else you
are not telling me? Whatever you are holding back will eventually
come out and I guarantee Inspector de Guise will be merciless.
These murders are heinous and the Sûreté will not rest until the
killer is caught. If you attempt to withhold evidence things may go
badly for you.”

Nervously, he glanced toward
the door and swallowed hard. “Lock the door.”

She did as instructed and
waited patiently for him to muster the courage to speak.

“I don’t write the scripts,” he
said in a low dry voice.

She thought she might have
misheard him. “Say that again.”

“I don’t actually write the
scripts.”

“Who, then? Serge Davidov?”

The playwright shook his head,
slowly at first and then emphatically. “No, no, at least I don’t
think so. He thinks I write them because he is always on at me to
make changes here and there. If he wrote them he would not be
demanding alterations all the time. So it cannot be him. It is
someone, well, someone anonymous.”

“Anonymous!”

She almost laughed out loud at
the stunning revelation. Inspector de Guise was never going to
believe this. The killer was writing his own script and handing it
to
le Cirque du Grand Guignol
to be performed at exactly the
same time as the crime was being committed. This was not merely a
case of Art imitating Life or Life imitating Art. This was theatre
dictating reality; the artist as master manipulator.

“Tell me what you know,” she
said urgently, checking the small carriage clock on the desk. It
was getting on for two o’clock in the morning. Voices and footsteps
could be heard in the corridor. Guests were gathering their cloaks
and saying their goodbyes. Dr Watson would be looking for her. He
would soon grow worried.

Suddenly the door handle
rattled.

“Who’s in there? Open up!”

The Countess lowered her voice
to an imperative whisper. “We will have to continue this
conversation tomorrow. Come to Des Ballerines on rue Bonaparte.
Midday. Don’t be late.”

Fists pounded on the door. “Open
up I say!”

Raoul Crespigny stood up, swayed
lightly then fell back into the chair. He looked scared and sickly.
The Countess unlocked the door and in burst Monsieur Radzival.

“What’s going on? This is my
private study. You have no right to be in here. What are you
doing?”

The Countess, thinking on her
feet as usual, schooled her face into an image of grave concern.
She glanced worriedly from the red-faced librarian to the
white-faced playwright and back again. “I came across Monsieur
Crespigny outside the cloak room. He was looking pale and unwell. I
thought he might faint at any moment. Without ado, I naturally
ushered him in here and was about to summon Dr Watson when you
banged on the door.”

Monsieur Radzival studied the
young man slumped in the chair. There was no denying he looked ill.
“But, but,” he remembered, sounding unconvinced, “the door was
locked.”

“It was probably just jammed. I
brushed past it in my desperation to get Monsieur Crespigny into a
chair and the whoosh of my skirts may have caused it to close. But
locked? No, you are mistaken.” She turned back to the playwright
and spoke with urgency. “Put your head between your legs until the
blood rushes back to your brain, Monsieur Crespigny.”

“What’s going on?” It was Dr
Watson.

“Oh, there you are,” she said,
sounding immensely relieved. “I was just coming to fetch you. Help
Monsieur Crespigny into our landau. He was feeling faint. We can
give him a lift home.”

“Nonsense,” intervened the
mature voice of their hostess. “He can spend the night here. I will
have the guest room made ready at once. What sort of hostess allows
a guest to go home feeling unwell?” She turned to the librarian.
“Casimir, help Monsieur Crespigny upstairs.”

The Countess glanced
surreptitiously at her counterpart in crime-solving. He’d seen the
look before and knew what was expected.

“Let me help him upstairs. I’m a
doctor. I can give him a quick examination when I get him into
bed.”

As soon as the Countess was
alone with the librarian she put a question to him in the hope of
shedding light on a point that had been bothering her for several
hours. The murders involved respectable, elderly men and one
elderly, respectable lady. These were not random acts of violence
staged by a madman with a hatred of families or a dangerous lunatic
with a lipstick fetish entertaining theatrical fantasies. The
killer was choosing his victims with care. He was preparing name
tags in advance. He was thinking ahead. He was planning ahead. He
was rational. And hand-in-hand with pre-meditation and method came
motive. It had something to do with the theatre, of that she was in
no doubt, but it was more than theatrical rivalry, more than
success and failure on stage, more than the thwarting of the
marriage of a talented
saltimbanque
.

What topic, the Countess asked
herself, had dominated French hearts and minds for the last few
years? What topic had polarized public opinion, setting neighbour
against neighbour, father against son, copain against comrade,
intellectuals against each other, turning friend into foe and
everyone into an enemy of the State? And the answer came
suddenly.

Nothing had fomented French
passion more than the Dreyfus affair.

“Can you explain to me the
difference between Dreyfusards, Dreyfusiens and Dreyfusists,
s’il vous plait
?”

The librarian, healthy colour
restored, regarded her oddly from beneath neatly arched brown brows
before bowing to her request just as he would were she his
patroness.

“Certainly, la comtesse.
Dreyfusards are the original and staunchest defenders of Alfred
Dreyfus, the most famous being Emile Zola who wrote
J’accuse
to bring world attention to the affair and to rally others to his
way of thinking. Dreyfusiens, on the other hand, also have sympathy
for Alfred Dreyfus but they wish to preserve the status quo of the
republic, ergo to preserve the peace of the city. They would like
the affair to go away as quickly as possible. National stability is
more important to them than individual justice. Dreyfusists,
however, are more philosophical in their outlook. They view the
affair in broader social and political terms. They also have
sympathy for Alfred Dreyfus but are more concerned with a wider
world view. Intellectual implications interest them the most.”