The Death of Achilles (32 page)

On the second day the witnesses were questioned by the counsel for the defense. He asked the police if they had shouted at the accused. “No, we gave him a hug and a kiss,” the commissioner replied sarcastically to approving laughter from the hall.

The advocate asked the witness to the abduction of Lucille Lanoux if he had seen the full face of the man with whom the flower girl had driven away. No, he had not, the witness replied, but he did remember the sideburns very clearly.

After that Maitre Licolle wanted to know what kind of photographs Pierre Fechtel had taken in the course of his amateur studies. It turned out that he used to take photographs of still lifes, landscapes, and newborn kittens. (This announcement was greeted with whistling and jeering, after which the judge ordered half of the spectators to be removed from the courtroom.) In conclusion the counsel for the defense demanded that the main witness, the gardener, must be brought into court and the session was adjourned for an hour.

During the break in proceedings the local cure approached Licolle and asked if he believed in our Lord Jesus Christ. Licolle replied that he did, and that Jesus had taught charity to sinners.

When the proceedings continued, an inspector declared that the gardener could not be found and no one had seen him for the last three days. The counsel thanked him politely and said that he had no more questions for the witnesses.

Then came the public prosecutor’s opportunity to shine. He conducted his interrogation of the accused brilliantly and Pierre Fechtel was unable to give a satisfactory answer to a single question. When he was shown the photographic cards he stared at them for a long time, swallowing hard. Then he said that he had never seen them before. When he was asked if the Weber and Sons camera belonged to him, after whispered consultation with his counsel, he said, yes, it did, but he had lost interest in photography a year ago, put the camera away in the attic, and not laid eyes on it since then. When the question was asked whether the accused could look the parents of the little girls in the eye, it evoked thunderous applause, but it was withdrawn on the insistence of the defense.

When Etienne got back to his hotel that evening, he saw that his things had been thrown out into the street and were lying in the mud. Blushing painfully, he crawled around on all fours, gathering up his long drawers with darned patches and soiled shirtfronts with paper collars.

A large crowd gathered to enjoy this spectacle and shower the ‘mercenary swine’ with abuse. When Etienne had finally packed his things into his new travel bag, purchased especially for this trip, the local tavern-keeper came up to him, slapped him resoundingly across both cheeks, and declared in a voice of thunder: “You can add that to your fee!”

Since none of the other hotels in Merlain would take Licolle in, the mayor’s office provided him with lodgings in a little house used by the guard at the railway station. The old guard had retired a month before and had not yet been replaced.

In the morning there were several words scrawled in charcoal on the white painted wall of the little house: “You will die like a dog!”

On the third day public prosecutor Renan surpassed himself. He delivered a magnificent denunciatory speech that lasted from ten in the morning until three in the afternoon. People in the hall sobbed and cursed freely. The members of the jury, all of them respectable men who paid at least five hundred francs in taxes each year, sat with their faces set in sullen scowls.

The counsel for the defense was pale and they noticed in the hall that several times he seemed to glance inquiringly at his client, but the latter was sitting with his shoulders hunched up, his head lowered, and his face in his hands. When the public prosecutor demanded a death sentence, the public sprang to its feet as one man and began chanting ‘String him up, string him up!’ Fechtel’s shoulders began twitching spasmodically and he had to be given smelling salts.

The defense was given the floor after the break, at four o’clock in the afternoon.

For a long time Licolle was not even allowed to speak — people deliberately scraped their feet, creaked their chairs, and blew their noses loudly. The lawyer waited, bright crimson in his trepidation, clutching a crumpled sheet of paper covered with the neat handwriting of a star pupil.

But once he began speaking, Etienne didn’t glance at the sheet of paper even once. This is his speech, word for word, as it was printed in the evening editions of the newspapers with the most disparaging of commentaries:

“Your Honor, gentlemen of the jury. My client is a weak, spoiled, and even depraved man. But that is not what you are judging him for. One thing is clear: In the home of my client, or rather in a secret room in the basement, the existence of which
might or might not
have been known to Pierre Fechtel, a terrible crime was committed. A whole series of crimes. The question is: Who committed them? (A loud voice: “Yes, that’s a real riddle.” Laughter in the hall.) The defense has its own explanation of events. I surmise that the murders were committed by the gardener Jean Voiture, who reported the mysterious screams to the police. This man hated his master because he had reduced his salary for drunkenness. There are witnesses who can be called if necessary — they will confirm this fact. The gardener has an awkward, quarrelsome character. Five years ago his wife left him, taking the children with her. It is well known that people of the same type as Voiture often become morbidly sensitive and develop aggressive tendencies. He knew the layout of the house intimately and could easily have installed a secret room without his master’s knowledge. He could also have taken the camera with which Monsieur Fechtel had become bored down from the attic and learned how to use it. He could have taken his master’s clothes during his frequent absences. He could have glued on false sideburns, providing easy identification. You must surely agree that if Pierre Fechtel had committed these heinous crimes, he would long ago have rid himself of such a distinctive feature. Please understand me correctly, gentlemen of the jury. I am not stating that the gardener did all of this — only that he
could
have done it all. But the main question is — why has the gardener, who set the entire investigation in motion, disappeared so suddenly? There can be only one explanation — he was scared that in court his true involvement in the affair would be revealed, and then he would suffer the punishment that he deserves.” Up to this point Maitre Licolle had spoken smoothly and rather impressively, but now he suddenly began stammering out his words. “And what I would like to say to you is this. There is a great deal that is unclear about this story. To be quite honest, I myself do not know if my client is guilty. But while there remains even the shadow of a doubt — and, as I have just demonstrated to you, there are indeed many doubts concerning this whole business — it is absolutely impermissible to send a man for execution. In the faculty of law I was taught that it is better to acquit a guilty man than to condemn an innocent one. That is all that I wished to say, gentlemen.”

The speech was over at ten minutes past six. The lawyer resumed his seat, wiping the sweat from his brow.

There were jeers here and there in the hall, but all in all the speech received a mixed reception. The correspondent from
Le Soir
heard (as he later reported in his newspaper) the famous advocate Jan Van Brevern say to his neighbor, also a lawyer: “In essence the boy is right. From the higher perspective of fundamental jurisprudence. But in this particular case that changes nothing.”

The judge rang his bell and shook his head reproachfully, with a glance at the lamentable counsel for the defense: “I had assumed that Maitre Licolle’s address would continue until the end of today’s session and then all of tomorrow morning. But now I find myself in some difficulty. I therefore declare today’s session at an end. I shall sum up for the jury tomorrow morning, following which you, gentlemen, will withdraw to consider your verdict.”

But the next morning there was no session of the court.

During the night there was a fire. The railway guard’s hut was torched and Maitre Licolle was burned alive, because the door had been locked from the outside. The inscription ‘You will die like a dog’ was left on the smoked- blackened wall — no one took the trouble to remove it. No witnesses to this act of arson were found.

The trial was interrupted for several days. Certain intangible but quite definite shifts in public opinion took place. The newspapers reprinted Maitre Licolle’s final address to the court, this time without any scoffing remarks, accompanied by sympathetic commentaries from respected lawyers. Touching reports appeared concerning the short and difficult life of a young man from a poor family, who had studied at university for five years in order to be an advocate for just over a week. His portrait gazed out at readers from the front pages: a boyish face with large, honest eyes.

The lawyers’ guild published a declaration in defense of free and objective jurisprudence, which should not be held to ransom by an emotionally imbalanced public baying for vengeance.

The concluding session was held on the day after the funeral.

To begin with, at the judge’s suggestion everyone present honored the memory of Etienne Licolle with a minute’s silence. They all stood, even the parents of the dead girls. In his summing-up, Judge Viksen recommended the jurors not to bow to external pressure and reminded them that in capital cases a majority of two thirds of the jurors was required for a guilty verdict to be carried.

The gentlemen of the jury consulted for four and a half hours. Seven of the twelve said ‘not guilty’ and demanded that the judge release Pierre Fechtel for lack of evidence.

A difficult task had been carried off very neatly. The gardener’s body was lying in a pit of quicklime, and as for the boy lawyer, he had died without any suffering or fear — Achimas had killed him in his sleep before he set fire to the watchman’s hut.

In the year of his fortieth birthday, Achimas Welde began wondering whether it was time for him to retire.

No, he had not become blase about his work — it still gave him the same satisfaction as ever and set his impassive heart beating slightly faster. Nor had he lost his touch — on the contrary, he was now at the very peak of his maturity and prowess.

The reason lay elsewhere — there was no longer any point to his work.

In itself, the process of killing had never given Achimas any pleasure, apart from those very rare occasions when personal scores were involved.

The situation with the killings was simple. Achimas existed alone in the universe, surrounded on all sides by the most varied forms of alien life — plants, animals, and people. This life was in constant motion: It came into existence, changed, and was broken off. It was interesting to observe its metamorphoses, and even more interesting to influence this process through his own actions. But trample down life in one sector of the universe, and it changed the overall picture very little — life filled in the breach that had been formed with quite wonderful tenacity. Sometimes life seemed to Achimas like a tangled, overgrown lawn through which he was trimming the line of his fate. Precision and careful deliberation were required in order not to leave any blades of grass sticking up in the wrong place, while not touching any more blades than were necessary in order to maintain the smoothness and evenness of the line. Glancing back at the path he had traveled, what Achimas saw was not trimmed grass, but the ideal trajectory of his own movement.

Until now there had been two stimuli for his work: finding solutions and earning money.

However, Achimas no longer found the first of these as fascinating as he once had — for him there remained few truly difficult problems that were genuinely interesting to solve.

The second stimulus had also begun to make less and less sense.

A numbered account in a Zurich bank contained very nearly seven million Swiss francs. A safe in Barings bank in London held securities and gold ingots worth seventy-five thousand pounds sterling.

How much money did a man need, if he didn’t collect works of art or diamonds, if he wasn’t building a financial empire or consumed by political ambition?

Achimas’s outlays had stabilized: two or three hundred thousand francs a year went on ordinary expenses and the upkeep of his villa cost another hundred thousand. The price of the villa had been paid in full the year before last, all two and half million francs of it. It was expensive, of course, but a man who was almost forty had to have a house of his own. A man of a certain psychological constitution might not require a family, but he had to have a house.

Achimas was satisfied with his residence, a house that suited the character of its owner perfectly. The small villa of white marble stood on the very edge of a narrow outcrop of rock overlooking Lake Geneva. On one side there was free, open space, and on the other cypress trees. Beyond the cypress trees there was a high stone wall, and beyond that a sheer descent into a valley.

Achimas could sit for hours on his veranda overhanging the smooth surface of the water, looking at the lake and the distant mountains. The lake and the mountains were also forms of life, but without the constant agitation intrinsic to fauna and flora. It was hard to affect this form of life in any way; Achimas had no control over it and therefore it commanded his respect.

In the garden, among the cypresses, stood a secluded retreat, a white house with small round towers at its corners, in which the Circassian woman Leila lived. Achimas had brought her here from Constantinople the previous autumn. He had long ago abandoned the Parisian agencies and the monthly rotation of professional women — the moment had arrived when they no longer seemed so very different to Achimas. He had developed his own taste.

This taste required that a woman should possess a beauty and natural grace that were not cloying and not be too talkative. She should be passionate without being forward, not too inquisitive, and, above all, she should possess a female instinct that made her unerringly sensitive to a man’s mood and desires.