The Devil in Montmartre (8 page)

Following the autopsy, Achille stopped at a café, purchased a bottle of beer and a sandwich, and returned to his office. He sent a message to his wife, Adele, and told her not to wait supper for him. He then typed his report for Féraud. The old boys hated the typewriter; they refused to use it, and the chief did not insist. But Achille had mastered the new machine, and he preferred its neatness and uniformity to the typical detective’s scrawl.

As he worked he could not shake the image of the torso on the dissection table. What sort of monster could have committed such a crime? It’s as though the Devil had come to Montmartre. Might the Devil have been a deformed, aristocratic painter, or France’s greatest surgeon? Could it be Jack the Ripper, as Rodin implied in his morbid joke?
Don’t jump to conclusions.
They knew so little, but hopefully in the coming days they would learn more. Could the murderer strike again? Scotland Yard’s failure in the Ripper murders loomed large.

Shortly after ten
P.M.
, Achille finished typing his report, closed his file, rubbed his weary eyes, turned out the lights, and headed for home.

Achille, his wife Adele, their four-year-old daughter Jeanne, and Adele’s mother, Madame Berthier, lived in a spacious second-floor apartment in the 1st
arrondissement
, not far from Sûreté headquarters. The building was one of Baron Haussmann’s elegant modern creations, located on a quiet, tree-shaded avenue. The apartment belonged to Madame Berthier, widow of a much decorated cavalry colonel, a fervent Bonapartist and friend of General Boulanger.

Achille paid rent to Madame and she retained a commodious boudoir and an adjoining study. This arrangement allowed the family to live a very comfortable bourgeois life, much better than that of a typical civil servant of Achille’s rank. They could even afford a maid, a cook, and a nanny for the little girl.

Achille got along reasonably well with his mother-in-law, despite the fact that she disliked his chosen profession. She had formed an image of detectives from the first Sûreté chief, Vidocq, who employed reformed criminals like himself, on the theory that it takes a thief to catch a thief. She also railed against the government for its treatment of General Boulanger, looked forward to a war of revenge against Germany, and blamed the Germans, their Jewish bankers, Protestants, and Freemasons for all the evils of mankind. Achille found Madame’s politics and prejudices illogical and distasteful. But as a good husband and son-in-law he tried to maintain peace at home. Therefore, whenever in conversation with Madame Berthier, Achille avoided discussing his job, politics, or anything controversial; if she raised these matters he simply nodded sympathetically, tried to switch the subject, or if possible, politely excused himself.

When he arrived home that evening, his mother-in-law had already retired to her boudoir. Adele greeted him in the front hall, with a petulant frown:

“Cook made your favorite cassoulet for supper, and Jeanne wanted you to read her a story before she went to sleep. She cried when I told her you weren’t coming. Why can’t Féraud be more considerate? He works you like a slave.”

Achille’s eyes were sad and tired; the last thing he wanted was an argument. He smiled and stroked Adele’s soft cheek.
Such bright green eyes; such warm red lips. How pretty she is
, he thought. He noticed a change in her expression from mild vexation to deep concern. “Please my dear,” he whispered, “I’m dog-tired. Féraud’s assigned me to a case of the utmost importance and I must report to him at five
A.M.
”

She held his hand and kissed it softly. “I’m sorry, darling; how thoughtless of me. Go relax in the sitting-room, and I’ll join you. Would you like a cognac, or sherry?”

Achille smiled. “A cognac would be heaven.” Adele went to fetch the brandy. He wandered into the sitting room and collapsed in his favorite, well-stuffed armchair. Placing his aching feet on a footstool, he rubbed his eyes and yawned. Achille wanted to forget the case and get a good night’s sleep, but he knew he wouldn’t; it would occupy his thoughts, day and night, until the murderer was brought to justice.

Adele returned with a decanter and two glasses on a silver tray. Her husband did not seem to notice her; he was staring into the darkness like someone sleeping with his eyes open. She set down the tray on a small round table and then turned up the lamp. “It’s too dark in here.”

Achille murmured, “Huh,” as if coming out of a trance. Adele was about to sit next to him on a settee. He reached out, took her hand and pulled her onto his lap. She giggled as he nibbled her tiny earlobe and nuzzled her fragrant neck. Achille wanted her; he needed to forget his job, to erase the horror of it from his mind. His hands cupped the soft material over her breasts. She sighed, and his mouth covered hers, his tongue making a gentle entrance into her sweet mouth. He closed his eyes and started lifting her dress until the naked torso on the dissection table broke into his mind like a thief in the night. Achille shuddered, and then pulled away from her gently. Smiling nervously, he muttered, “You see how much I’ve missed you? Anyway, I’m ready for that brandy.”

Adele frowned with disappointment, but she poured the drinks without complaint.

6

OCTOBER 16, MORNING

T
he regulator clock on the wall facing Féraud’s desk registered five
A.M.
On the walls and ceiling, gas jets hissed and glowed greenish yellow. The chief sprang the guillotine; the blade clipped the tip of his cigar neatly. Féraud plucked the severed “head” from a little basket and dumped it into the ashtray. He struck a match, lit up, and took a few deep, satisfying puffs.

Fat Rousseau mopped sweat from his low forehead. The chief had an old-fashioned aversion to night vapors and kept the windows shut tightly until dawn. Achille sat next to his partner across from the chief, nervously anticipating Féraud’s response to his report. Rousseau turned to Achille and gave him a furtive wink, as if to say:
Don’t worry professor, we’ve got it covered.

Féraud closed the file, rested his cigar in the ashtray, and leaned back in his chair. He closed his eyes as if in deep concentration and fiddled with a charm on his watch chain, a golden skull with glowing ruby eyes. After a tense moment, he leaned forward, stared at his subordinates, and cracked a smile. “Good work, men.”

Achille and Rousseau breathed sighs of relief.

Féraud continued: “Achille, you’re going directly to La Villette to sift through the muck?”

“Yes, sir. The cesspit contents are being held in a shed near the quay. When I’m finished, I’m returning to the Morgue to meet with Chief Bertillon and Dr. Péan.”

Rousseau laughed. “I pity you, professor. From the slaughterhouse and shit barges of La Villette to the putrefying stiffs. You’ll need to bathe in perfume before you go home.”

Achille tried to smile in response to his partner’s crude humor, but it came off looking like a wince of pain. He continued with his itinerary. “Following the meeting, I’ll go to Bertillon’s laboratory to pick up a copy of the pathologist’s report, a chemical analysis, and some information concerning the cloth, the footprints, and the cigarette butt. All we’ve got so far is a headless torso. Bertillon will provide an estimate of the woman’s height, weight, and physical appearance, including the distinguishing marks. From there, I’ll go to records to check the missing persons’ reports.” Achille paused a moment; then: “I assume you don’t want to put the cadaver on display?”

“Hell no!” Féraud growled. “No need to stir up a hornet’s nest, at least not yet.” Then to Rousseau: “What’s your plan for today?”

“Follow up on my leads, chief. I’ve interviewed several people on the Rue Tourlaque and Rue Caulaincourt; no eyewitnesses, so far. I heard some gossip about Toulouse-Lautrec and his
lorettes
. Drunken brawls and late night shouting matches; that sort of thing. Evidence of jealous rage—one of the oldest homicide motives in the book. But you wonder why any girl would take up with a monkey like that; money and title, I suppose. Anyway, I’ve got my snoops in Montmartre and Pigalle keeping their ears open for chatter about missing girls, especially models. Do you want me to interview Lautrec?”

Féraud frowned and shook his head. “No, not yet. He’s the son of a count, not an
apache
. But I want him tailed. Pick your two best men, and put them on twelve-hour shifts. Include their findings in your daily reports.”

“Right, chief. And I’d sure like to get a look at that studio. Wouldn’t you, professor?” Rousseau grinned at Achille, a gleam in his piggish eyes.

“I would indeed, but we don’t have enough evidence for a warrant.”

Féraud leaned further over his desk and lowered his voice. “Listen, boys, what the
juge d’instruction
doesn’t know won’t hurt him. This is strictly between us. Within the next day or two, I want you to have a look at Lautrec’s studio—without a warrant. Rousseau, you know who to use on that job.”

“Right chief; just leave it to me.” He turned to Achille: “You O.K. with that, professor?”

Achille did not like the old extrajudicial methods, but he figured in a case like this the ends justified the means. And he was not about to harm his career by crossing Féraud. “As long as the chief approves, it’s fine with me.”

The stench of La Villette on an unseasonably warm autumn morning struck Achille like a punch to the gut. Home to the stockyards and great abattoirs that provided meat for the tables of two million Parisians, La Villette was also a hodgepodge of factories, warehouses, working class dwellings,
boîtes
, cafes, administrative buildings, and markets. Located in the northeastern corner of Paris, a district annexed during the reign of Napoleon III, the modern industrial site and docklands were built around a large basin and main canal that flowed into the Seine through a system of locks.

The main canal was itself fed by a network of smaller canals polluted with industrial waste and slaughterhouse effluent criss-crossed by iron footbridges and railway bridges. The emissions from hundreds of locomotives and factory chimneys enveloped the area in a yellowish-brown haze. A steel spiders-web overspread the vast acreage, traversed day and night by smoke-belching engines pulling long trains of cars loaded with lowing cattle, bleating sheep, grunting and squealing pigs, brought by the thousands to be offloaded into the slaughterhouse pens. Trains with ice-cooled boxcars conveyed the butchered product to the Paris markets.

La Villette was also a collection point for sewage pumped from the Paris cesspools. In the early morning hours, hundreds of wagons filled with human waste lined up on the quayside, waiting to pour out their cargo into tanker-barges bound for the suburban sewage farms. Achille supervised two workers in a dark shed near the quay as they raked and sifted through excrement removed from the cess-pit where the torso was found, looking for clues. The foul sludge had been pumped into a galvanized iron vat and sprayed with disinfectant, but the odor in the stuffy shed was still overwhelming.

Does filth breed crime?
Achille pondered this question as he anxiously awaited a discovery that might shed light on his case. He had read Zola and was familiar with the author’s literary theory of naturalism, according to which character was formed by a combination of social conditions, heredity, and environment. That might hold true for the common criminal, but would it apply to a monster that could murder and horribly mutilate a woman? Try as he might, Achille could not picture the individual who committed the crime.

Lombroso, the celebrated Italian criminologist, believed the criminal was a definite anthropological type bearing physical and mental stigmata, the product of heredity, atavism, and degeneracy. Could you read evil in a face, a body, mannerisms, and gestures? Would the man Achille was looking for be simian and grotesque like Lautrec? Perhaps alienation from decent society had motivated him to destroy beauty in revenge for the rejection brought on by his deformity. Achille pondered another literary association, Hugo’s hideously deformed Quasimodo. According to Lombroso’s theory of criminal physiognomy, Quasimodo would have been a prime suspect in a Ripper-type murder investigation. Nevertheless, Hugo had portrayed the hunchback as a noble, self-sacrificing character who loved the beautiful Esmeralda. But then, Hugo was a great Romantic of the previous generation, not a modern scientist.