Beyond Rue Morgue Anthology (35 page)

Catherine was back at the Quai de Bourbon. As soon as Lewis saw her he knew there was something new to hear. Her gray hair was loosed from the bun she favored wearing, and hung unbraided at her shoulders. Her face was a sickly yellow-gray by the lamplight. She shivered, even in the clogged air of the centrally-heated apartment.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“I went to Phillipe’s apartment.”

“So did I. It was locked.”

“I have the key: Phillipe’s spare key. I just wanted to pick up a few clothes for him.”

Lewis nodded.

“And?”

“Somebody else was there.”

“Police?”

“No.”

“Who?”

“I couldn’t see. I don’t know exactly. He was dressed in a big coat, scarf over his face. Hat. Gloves.” She paused. Then, “He had a razor, Lewis.”

“A razor?”

“An open razor, like a barber.”

Something jangled in the back of Lewis Fox’s mind. An open razor; a man dressed so well he couldn’t be recognized.

“I was terrified.”

“Did he hurt you?”

She shook her head.

“I screamed and he ran away.”

“Didn’t say anything to you?”

“No.”

“Maybe a friend of Phillipe’s?”

“I know Phillipe’s friends.”

“Then of the girl. A brother.”

“Perhaps. But—”

“What?”

“There was something odd about him. He smelt of perfume, stank of it, and he walked with such mincing little steps, even though he was huge.”

Lewis put his arm around her.

“Whoever it was, you scared them off. You just mustn’t go back there. If we have to fetch clothes for Phillipe, I’ll gladly go.”

“Thank you. I feel a fool: he may have just stumbled in. Come to look at the murder-chamber. People do that, don’t they? Out of some morbid fascination...”

“Tomorrow I’ll speak to the Weasel.”

“Weasel?”

“Inspector Marais. Have him search the place.”

“Did you see Phillipe?”

“Yes.”

“Is he well?”

Lewis said nothing for a long moment.

“He wants to die, Catherine. He’s given up fighting already, before he goes to trial.”

“But he didn’t do anything.”

“We can’t prove that.”

“You’re always boasting about your ancestors. Your blessed Dupin. You prove it...”

“Where do I start?”

“Speak to some of his friends, Lewis.
Please.
Maybe the woman had enemies.”

* * *

Jacques Solal stared at Lewis through his round-bellied spectacles, his irises huge and distorted through the glass. He was the worse for too much cognac.

“She hadn’t got any enemies,” he said, “not her. Oh maybe a few women jealous of her beauty...”

Lewis toyed with the wrapped cubes of sugar that had come with his coffee. Solal was as uninformative as he was drunk; but unlikely as it seemed Catherine had described the runt across the table as Phillipe’s closest friend.

“Do you think Phillipe murdered her?”

Solal pursed his lips.

“Who knows?”

“What’s your instinct?”

“Ah; he was my friend. If I knew who had killed her I would say so.”

It seemed to be the truth. Maybe the little man was simply drowning his sorrows in cognac.

“He was a gentleman,” Solal said, his eyes drifting towards the street. Through the steamed glass of the Brasserie window brave Parisians were struggling through the fury of another blizzard, vainly attempting to keep their dignity and their posture in the teeth of a gale.

“A gentleman,” he said again.

“And the girl?”

“She was beautiful, and he was in love with her. She had other admirers, of course. A woman like her—”

“Jealous admirers?”

“Who knows?”

Again: who knows? The inquiry hung on the air like a shrug. Who knows? Who knows? Lewis began to understand the Inspector’s passion for truth. For the first time in ten years perhaps a goal appeared in his life; an ambition to shoot this indifferent “who knows?” out of the air. To discover what had happened in that room on the Rue des Martyrs. Not an approximation, not a fictionalized account, but the truth, the absolute, unquestionable truth.

“Do you remember if there were any particular men who fancied her?” he asked.

Solal grinned. He only had two teeth in his lower jaw.

“Oh yes. There was one.”

“Who?”

“I never knew his name. A big man: I saw him outside the house three or four times. Though to smell him you’d have thought—”

He made an unmistakable face that implied he thought the man was homosexual. The arched eyebrows and the pursed lips made him look doubly ridiculous behind the thick spectacles.

“He smelt?”

“Oh yes.”

“Of what?”

“Perfume, Lewis. Perfume.”

Somewhere in Paris there was a man who had known the girl Phillipe loved. Jealous rage had overcome him. In a fit of uncontrollable anger he had broken into Phillipe’s apartment and slaughtered the girl. It was as clear as that.

Somewhere in Paris.

“Another cognac?”

Solal shook his head.

“Already I’m sick,” he said.

Lewis called the waiter across, and as he did so his eye alighted on a cluster of newspaper clippings pinned behind the bar.

Solal followed his gaze.

“Phillipe: he liked the pictures,” he said.

Lewis stood up.

“He came here, sometimes, to see them.”

The cuttings were old, stained and fading. Some were presumably of purely local interest. Accounts of a fireball seen in a nearby street. Another about a boy of two burned to death in his cot. One concerned an escaped puma; one, an unpublished manuscript by Rimbaud; a third (accompanied by a photograph) detailed casualties in a plane crash at Orleans airport. But there were other cuttings too; some far older than others. Atrocities, bizarre murders, ritual rapes, an advertisement for
Fantômas,
another for Cocteau’s
La Belle et La Bete.
And almost buried under this embarrassment of bizarreries, was a sepia photograph so absurd it could have come from the hand of Max Ernst. A half-ring of well-dressed gentlemen, many sporting the thick mustaches popular in the eighteen-nineties, were grouped around the vast, bleeding bulk of an ape, which was suspended by its feet from a lamppost. The faces in the picture bore expressions of mute pride; of absolute authority over the dead beast, which Lewis clearly recognized as a gorilla. Its inverted head had an almost noble tilt in death. Its brow was deep and furrowed, its jaw, though shattered by a fearsome wound, was thinly bearded like that of a patrician, and its eyes, rolled back in its head, seemed full of concern for this merciless world. They reminded Lewis, those rolling eyes, of the Weasel in his hole, tapping his chest.

“Le coeur humain.”

Pitiful.

“What is that?” he asked the acne-ridden barman, pointing at the picture of the dead gorilla.

A shrug was the reply: indifferent to the fate of men and apes.

“Who knows?” said Solal at his back. “Who knows?”

* * *

It was not the ape of Poe’s story, that was certain. That tale had been told in 1835, and the photograph was far more recent. Besides, the ape in the picture was a gorilla: clearly a gorilla.

Had history repeated itself? Had another ape, a different species but an ape nevertheless, been loosed on the streets of Paris at the turn of the century?

And if so, if the story of the ape could repeat itself once... why not twice?

As Lewis walked through the freezing night back to the apartment at the Quai de Bourbon, the imagined repetition of events became more attractive; and now further symmetry presented itself to him. Was it possible that he, the great nephew of C. Auguste Dupin, might become involved in another pursuit, not entirely dissimilar from the first?

The key to Phillipe’s room at the Rue des Martyrs was icy in Lewis’ hand, and though it was now well past midnight he couldn’t help but turn off at the bridge and make his way up the Boulevard de Sebastopol, west on to Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle, then north again towards the Place Pigalle. It was a long, exhausting trudge, but he felt in need of the cold air, to keep his head clear of emotionalism. It took him an hour and a half to reach the Rue des Martyrs.

It was Saturday night, and there was still a lot of noise in a number of the rooms. Lewis made his way up the two flights as quietly as he could, his presence masked by the din. The key turned easily, and the door swung open.

Street lights illuminated the room. The bed, which dominated the space, was bare. Presumably sheets and blankets had been taken away for forensic tests. The eruption of blood onto the mattress was a mulberry color in the gloom. Otherwise, there was no sign of the violence the room had witnessed.

Lewis reached for the light switch, and snapped it on. Nothing happened. He stepped deeply into the room and stared up at the light fixture. The bulb was shattered.

He half thought of retreating, of leaving the room to darkness, and returning in the morning when there were fewer shadows. But as he stood under the broken bulb his eyes began to pierce the gloom a little better, and he began to make out the shape of a large teak chest of drawers along the far wall. Surely it was a matter of a few minutes work to find a change of clothes for Phillipe. Otherwise he would have to return the next day; another long journey through the snow. Better to do it now, and save his bones.

The room was large, and had been left in chaos by the police. Lewis stumbled and cursed as he crossed to the chest of drawers, tripping over a fallen lamp, and a shattered vase. Downstairs the howls and shrieks of a well-advanced party drowned any noise he made. Was it an orgy or a fight? The noise could have been either.

He struggled with the top drawer of the teak chest, and eventually wrenched it open, ferreting in the depths for the bare essentials of Phillipe’s comfort: a clean undershirt, a pair of socks, initialed handkerchiefs, beautifully pressed.

He sneezed. The chilly weather had thickened the catarrh on his chest and the mucus in his sinuses. A handkerchief was to hand, and he blew his nose, clearing his blocked nostrils. For the first time the smell of the room came to him.

One odor predominated, above the damp, and the stale vegetables. Perfume, the lingering scent of perfume.

He turned into the darkened room, hearing his bones creak, and his eyes fell on the shadow behind the bed. A huge shadow, a bulk that swelled as it rose into view.

It was, he saw at once, the razor-wielding stranger. He was here: in waiting.

Curiously, Lewis wasn’t frightened.

“What are you doing?” he demanded, in a loud, strong voice.

As he emerged from his hiding place the face of the stranger came into the watery light from the street; a broad, flat-featured, flayed face. His eyes were deep-set, but without malice; and he was smiling, smiling generously, at Lewis.

“Who are you?” Lewis asked again.

The man shook his head; shook his body, in fact, his gloved hands gesturing around his mouth. Was he dumb? The shaking of the head was more violent now, as though he was about to have a fit.

“Are you all right?”

Suddenly, the shaking stopped, and to his surprise Lewis saw tears, large, syrupy tears well up in the stranger’s eyes and roll down his rough cheeks and into the bush of his beard.

As if ashamed of his display of feelings, the man turned away from the light, making a thick noise of sobbing in his throat, and exited. Lewis followed, more curious about this stranger than nervous of his intentions.

“Wait!”

The man was already half-way down the first flight of stairs, nimble despite his build.

“Please wait, I want to talk to you.” Lewis began down the stairs after him, but the pursuit was lost before it was started. Lewis’ joints were stiff with age and the cold, and it was late. No time to be running after a much younger man, along a pavement made lethal with ice and snow. He chased the stranger as far as the door and then watched him run off down the street; his gait was mincing as Catherine had said. Almost a waddle, ridiculous in a man so big.

The smell of his perfume was already snatched away by the north-east wind. Breathless, Lewis climbed the stairs again, past the din of the party, to claim a set of clothes for Phillipe.

* * *

The next day Paris woke to a blizzard of unprecedented ferocity. The calls to Mass went unrequited, the hot Sunday croissants went unbought, the newspapers lay unread on the vendor’s stalls. Few people had either the nerve or the motive to step outside into the howling gale. They sat by their fires, hugging their knees, and dreamt of spring.

Catherine wanted to go to the prison to visit Phillipe, but Lewis insisted that he go alone. It was not simply the cold weather that made him cautious on her behalf; he had difficult words to say to Phillipe, delicate questions to ask him. After the previous night’s encounter in his room, he had no doubt that Phillipe had a rival, probably a murderous rival. The only way to save Phillipe’s life, it seemed, was to trace the man. And if that meant delving into Phillipe’s sexual arrangements, then so be it. But it wasn’t a conversation he, or Phillipe, would have wanted to conduct in Catherine’s presence.

The fresh clothes Lewis had brought were searched, then given to Phillipe, who took them with a nod of thanks.

“I went to the house last night to fetch these for you.”

“Oh.”

“There was somebody in the room already.”

Phillipe’s jaw muscle began to churn, as he ground his teeth together. He was avoiding Lewis’ eyes.

“A big man, with a beard. Do you know him, or of him?”

“No.”

“Phillipe—”

“No!”

“The same man attacked Catherine,” Lewis said.

“What?” Phillipe had begun to tremble.

“With a razor.”

“Attacked her?” Phillipe said. “Are you sure?”

“Or was going to.”

“No! He would never have touched her. Never!”

“Who is it Phillipe? Do you know?”

“Tell her not to go there again; please, Lewis—” His eyes implored. “Please, for God’s sake tell her never to go there again. Will you do that? Or you. Not you either.”