The Curse of the Grand Guignol (7 page)

“Yes?” encouraged the inspector
as he took his seat and glanced ruefully at the mountain of papers
piling up on his desk. He wished the young man would get on with
it. He was probably after a bit of praise – If you could put in a
good for me, inspector…He forced himself to focus on the young
patrolman. “Pascal, isn’t it?”

“Pascal Leveret, sir.”

The inspector nodded
meaningfully. “I recall we met briefly at the murder scene last
night? Good work spotting the body, Pascal.” His eyes drifted to
the report from the police surgeon; it was sitting on top of the
tallest pile. “The body was still warm when you found it, no?” A
word or two of praise and he would send the policeman on his way
with the promise to mention him by name in his report.

“Yes, sir, and that’s what made
me think about the man I bumped into.”

The inspector looked up. “What
man?”

“I bumped into a man on the
corner of rue de Brouillard shortly before I discovered the body,
sir. I did not think anything of it at the time, and not afterwards
either, but, well, my wife said I should mention it. I don’t know
if it is important, sir, and I do not wish to waste the time
of...”

“Pascal,” interjected the
inspector stridently, “every happenstance is important in a murder
investigation. We do not know what is vital and what is not until
the end. Now, take a seat and think back. What man? Do not omit any
detail.”

The young policeman pulled up a
chair. “I was making my patrol and was approaching rue de
Brouillard, more of an alley than a rue really, lined with small
warehouses used by rag-grubbers because they can dry their rags and
sort their rubbish, anyway, there is always thick fog in the Street
of Fog because of the charcoal burners for drying out the rags, you
see, so I didn’t see him at first, but he tripped on the
cobblestones. They were wet. That’s how I noticed him. And so were
his cuffs.”

“The man you bumped into had
wet cuffs?”

“Yes, but I did not think
anything of it at the time, only later when I was telling my
wife.”

The inspector gave an
encouraging smile. “Go on.”

“Well, the man was
well-dressed, not a rag and bone man, and it surprised me to see
him there. He had been drinking champagne with his mistress, that’s
why he tripped on the wet cobbles, but he wasn’t wearing
gloves.”

“The man was with his
mistress?”

“No, he was on his own. I think
he might have been taking a short-cut. He was going home to his
wife after
being
with his mistress, but he wasn’t wearing
gloves.”

“I see.”

“Anyway, there is a horse
trough around the corner and this morning when my wife was going to
the boulangère she stopped to have a look – and the water was
reddish.”

“The water in the horse
trough?”

“Yes – like blood had been
washed through it. Women have an appreciation for such things
because of, well -” The young man broke eye contact and
blushed.

The inspector sat forward,
leaning on his elbows. “Your wife thinks the man may have washed
his hands in the horse trough, is that it?”

“Yes, that’s it, inspector. His
cuffs were wet and he had no gloves on and the water was reddish. I
checked on my way here and she was right, my wife, that is, and
there’s more.”

“Please go on.”

“There was a bloody hand print
on a lamp-post.”

“Where?”

“Next to the horse trough.”

“You spotted it while you were
checking the horse trough?”

The patrolman shook his head.
“My wife spotted it when she was coming back from the
boulangère.”

“You took a measurement of
it?”

“No, it rained heavily as she
hurried home so there was nothing for me to measure by the time I
got there, but my wife is good at guessing the size of things
because she takes in extra work as a seamstress between doing
laundry and ironing for the Moulin Rouge. She can tell a six
centimetre handkerchief from an eight centimetre and so on.”

The inspector hid his
disappointment and smiled indulgently. “I see – was it a six
centimetre or an eight centimetre hand print?”

“Hard to tell – the bloody
fingers were wrapped around half the post but not all the way
round, but my wife says it was bigger than mine.” He lifted up his
hand to show the inspector.

The inspector bit his tongue
and tempered his response. “Go on.”

“Well, here’s the thing,”
continued the other, gaining confidence, “my wife said the man must
have been fairly tall. The print was too high for being that of a
woman unless the woman was a gigantesse. My wife guessed the man
who made the print to be over five feet and ten inches tall,
probably closer to six feet. Taller than me.” He stood up to show
the inspector.

The inspector thought that if
Pascal Leveret ever gained a promotion it would be thanks to his
wife – perhaps the Sûreté should employ women instead of men. “I
see. You can sit down now. Does that height fit with the man you
bumped into?”

“Yes, yes it does, inspector,
now I think back, though the fog was thick and he was hunched
over.”

“A hunchback?”

“No, no, as if he was unwell.
He was clutching his stomach when I first saw him as if he had just
vomited. Too much champagne, I think.”

“Did he speak?”

“Yes, I asked if he was all
right – he’d tripped on the cobbles, you see – and he replied that
he’d had too much champagne with his mistress. It made me
smile.”

“He did not appear nervous,
agitated, threatening?”

“No, no, he seemed a decent
sort.”

“How was his voice?”

“His voice?”

“Educated? Uneducated? Foreign?
Did he have an accent?”

The young policeman scratched
his head and bit his lip. “Educated; no accent.”

“A Frenchman?”

“Yes, no, I cannot say.”

“Think, Pascal. It is
important.”

A moment of heavy silence
ensued. “I don’t think French was his mother-tongue.”

“Take your time, Pascal, why do
you think that?”

The young brow puckered under
the weight of pensive responsibility. “He did not have an accent,
not like the Jews and Ruskis and Germans coming here ahead of the
Paris Fair, but there was something about the way he rolled his R’s
or maybe it was because he’d had too much champagne and was
slurring his words a little or maybe he was from the countryside.
My wife’s cousin is from Alsace and he has a different way with
some of his sounds.”

The inspector back-tracked.
“You did not think his manner nervous or threatening?”

The policeman shook his head
firmly. “He seemed light-hearted.”

“Not worried or defensive?”

“Not unless you count him being
worried about what his wife might say when he got home after
midnight. Oh, and he may have been worried about there being
another murder.”

“Why do you say that?”

“He asked me straight out?”

“He asked you straight out if
there had been another murder?”

“Yes, that’s why I know he
cannot be the killer. If he had committed the crime he would not
need to ask. He was relieved when I told him no and he praised the
police for keeping the city safe. He was a decent sort. My wife is
over-imaginative. She may have just imagined she saw a bloody hand
print. She imagines the rag and bone man is Napoleon. I humour her
because she lost a babe last year - stillborn. She urged me to come
here and I promised I would but I fear I have wasted your time,
inspector.”

“Not at all, Pascal. If you saw
this man again would you recognize him?”

Pascal bit his lip. “I’m not
sure. It was foggy.”

Paris was the new Babylon. At
the cusp of the fin de siècle it was like all European cities
ushering in a New World Order, but more decadently, colourfully and
outrageously than most. It was setting itself up early as the new
crossroad of civilization, and thanks to the soon-to-be Paris Fair
it was clearly the place where people from different walks of life
rubbed shoulders for the first time in a long time, where hordes of
foreign labourers toiled alongside French ouvriers, where filthy
rich revolutionaries rubbed up against dirt poor French
aristocrats, where classically educated men-of-letters denounced
the stuffy institutions that had made them world famous, where
bohemian artists challenged the old school guard and sold their
paintings to a hungry public direct from the pavements, and where
from inside the thousands of cafes that had sprung up in the city
intellectuals mingled with illiterates and found them not so
ignorant after all.

Throughout Paris, theatrical
entrepreneurs were turning traditional entertainment on its head
and staging circuses not in hippodromes or under big-tops but
inside ordinary buildings topped with extraordinary red windmills,
featuring not clowns and performing dogs but dancehall belles who
performed scandalous dances.

Traditional theatres which once
staged classical Greek plays and Italian operettas now accommodated
peepshows and magic lantern shows. One theatre was screening the
astonishing moving images or cinématographes of the Lumière
brothers. The shock of the new was everywhere. Theatre-goers
fainted with fear, took fright and vomited, attended in droves and
applauded as never before.

And in all this shocking newness
nothing was more shocking than the theatre of naturalistic horror
known as Le Grand Guignol. It took tales of human madness, added a
liberal dose of rampant violence, spiced it up with lashings of
uninhibited lust, and churned out mentally depraved imaginings that
the public couldn’t get enough of. Rich and poor, male and female,
educated and uneducated, flocked to number 20 rue Chaptal.

It had proved so spectacularly
popular that a rival theatre had recently opened up to accommodate
the desperate crowds, for if Paris was the new Babylon then the
foothills of Montmartre, north of the city, known as the
Jardin
de Paris
because of the vegetable gardens, cow paddocks, and
terraced wine slopes that could be found there, were the new
mythical Hanging Gardens to which everyone flocked in search of
amusement.

Unable to obtain tickets for the
madly popular theatre on rue Chaptal, neither for love nor money,
Fedir had settled for purchasing two tickets for the rival
le
Cirque du Grand Guignol
on nearby rue Ballu.

Like the theatre on rue Chaptal,
this theatre had once been a chapel. It had a stage surmounted with
cherubic angels and the upper tiers were filled with private
booths, similar to private boxes in an opera house. They had
originally been the preserve of nuns who could listen to sermons
without upsetting priestly male sensibilities. Today the private
booths were booked out months in advance. Unable to secure a booth,
they had to settle for seats in the tenth row. The view was not
brilliant but the Countess had remembered to bring her opera
glasses.

There were three short plays,
each one more horrific than the last, featuring madness, murder,
rape and every conceivable outrage common to the lives of the lower
classes. Brief comedy sketches were staged between the lurid plays,
providing respite for jangled nerves, however, they seemed to
increase rather than decrease the sense of heightened anticipation
for the final brutal performance.

“What on earth is happening in
the booths?” asked Dr Watson when the upper gallery began
shaking.

The Countess rolled her eyes.
“Need you ask?”

Dr Watson turned bright red and
was about to step outside for a cigarette when his eyes became
riveted to the stage. The curtain lifted and the scene opened with
a customer sitting outside a café. It was closing time but the
customer had passed out from drink. The café owner left him where
he was, slumped over the table, and locked up the café as usual. As
darkness fell and the limelights dimmed, along came a mad woman
carrying a large kitchen knife. She cut out the man’s tongue, took
it home, cooked it and fed it to her husband.

The realism was staggering.
Blood had fountained from the man’s mouth and covered most of the
stage. A dog had appeared and lapped it up. Someone in the fifth
row vomited on the person in front and a brawl broke out. The
violent melee soon spread. By the time the curtain fell pandemonium
had erupted. The Countess and Dr Watson dodged the worst of the
punches being thrown by mounting the stairs and escaping to the
first floor.

“Did you see that final
sketch?” Dr Watson gurgled as they slipped into an empty booth to
catch their breaths.

“Yes, yes,” she responded
breathlessly, heart pounding as if she had just made passionate
love to her late husband, “and there simply must be a connection
between what we just witnessed on stage and the latest murder.”

“I think we should report what
we’ve seen to Inspector de Guise first thing tomorrow.”

“We can do better than that,”
she said, hooking her arm through his and steering him back out of
the booth and along a tight corridor toward a black door marked: No
Entrance Beyond This Point.

“You cannot go through there,”
he protested.

“We need to meet the
playwright. This door might lead backstage. We need to find out
when the play was written and when it was first performed.”

“Wait up,” he warned sternly as
someone stepped out suddenly from an adjacent booth and banged
straight into him. He apologized out of habit though it had
not
been his fault.

The theatre-goer, head cast
down, did not acknowledge the courtesy or even offer an apology of
his own as he passed swiftly through the prohibited door.

Then, with equal suddenness, a
second figure emerged from the next booth and did the same thing,
almost knocking the doctor off his feet. It was not surprising the
two figures had crashed into him. The first was clad in a long
black cloak with a voluminous hood that was pulled down to disguise
the face, presumably to avoid being recognised. The second figure
was also clad in black, though the disguise was not as successful.
The former could have been a monk. The latter was definitely a
religious cleric.