Cynthia Manson (ed) (8 page)

“There were five of
us,” he went on. “Five boys, that is. The winters were colder in those days.
Sometimes we had to go by sledge.”

Lecœur, on the
switchboard, had taken off his earphones to listen. “In what part of the
country was that?”

“Lorraine.”

“The winters in
Lorraine were no colder thirty or forty years ago than they are now—only, of
course, in those days the peasant had no cars. How many times did you go to
Midnight Mass by sledge?”

“Couldn’t say,
exactly.”

“Three times?
Twice? Perhaps no more than once. Only it made a great impression on you, as
you were a child.”

“Anyhow, when we
got back, we’d all have black pudding, and I’m not exaggerating when I tell you
I’ve never had anything like it since. I don’t know what my mother used to put
in them, but her
boudins
were quite different from anyone else’s. My
wife’s tried, but it wasn’t the same thing, though she had the exact recipe
from my eldest sister—at least, my sister swore it was.”

He walked over to
one of the huge, uncurtained windows, through which was nothing but blackness,
and scratched the pane with a fingernail.

“Hallo, there’s
frost forming. That again reminds me of when I was little. The water used to
freeze in our rooms and we’d have to break the ice in the morning when we
wanted to wash.”

“People didn’t have
central heating in those days.” answered Lecœur coolly.

There were three of them on night duty.
Les nuiteux
,
they were called. They had been in that vast room since eleven o’clock, and
now, at six on that Christmas morning, all three were looking a bit jaded.
Three or four empty bottles were lying about, with the remains of the
sandwiches they had brought with them.

A lamp no bigger
than an aspirin tablet lit up on one of the walls. Its position told Lecœur at
once where the call came from.

“Thirteenth
Arrondissement, Croulebarbe,” he murmured, replacing his earphones. He seized a
plug and pushed it into a hole.

“Croulebarbe? Your
car’s been called out—what for?”

“A call from the
Boulevard Masséna. Two drunks fighting.”

Lecœur carefully
made a little cross in one of the columns of his notebook.

“How are you
getting on down your way?”

“There are only
four of us here. Two are playing dominoes.”

“Had any
boudin
tonight?”

“No. Why?”

“Never mind. I must
ring off now. There’s a call from the Sixteenth.”

A gigantic map of
Paris was drawn on the wall in front of him and on it each police station was
represented by a little lamp. As soon as anything happened anywhere, a lamp
would light up and Lecœur would plug into the appropriate socket.

“Chaillot? Hallo!
Your car’s out?”

In front of each
police station throughout the twenty arrondissements of Paris, one or more cars
stood waiting, ready to dash off the moment an alarm was raised.

“What with?”

“Veronal.”

That would be a
woman. It was the third suicide that night, the second in the smart district of
Passy.

Another little
cross was entered in the appropriate column of Lecœur’s notebook. Mambret, the
third member of the watch, was sitting at a desk filling out forms.

“Hallo! Odéon?
What’s going on? Oh, a car stolen.”

That was for
Mambret, who took down the particulars, then phoned them through to Piedbœuf in
the room above. Piedbœuf, the teleprinter operator, had such a resounding voice
that the others could hear it through the ceiling. This was the forty-eighth
car whose details he had circulated that night.

An ordinary night,
in fact—for them. Not so for the world outside. For this was the great night,
la
nuit de Noël
. Not only was there the Midnight Mass, but all the theaters
and cinemas were crammed, and at the big stores, which stayed open till twelve,
a crowd of people jostled each other in a last-minute scramble to finish off
their Christmas shopping.

Indoors were family
gatherings feasting on roast turkey and perhaps also on
boudins
made,
like the ones Sommer had been talking about, from a secret recipe handed down
from mother to daughter.

There were children
sleeping restlessly while their parents crept about playing the part of Santa
Claus. arranging the presents they would find on waking.

At the restaurants
and cabarets every table had been booked at least a week in advance. In the
Salvation Army barge on the Seine, tramps and paupers queued up for an extra
special.

Sommer had a wife
and five children. Piedbœuf, the teleprinter operator upstairs, was a father of
one week’s standing. Without the frost on the window-panes, they wouldn’t have
known it was freezing outside. In that vast, dingy room they were in a world
apart, surrounded on all sides by the empty offices of the Prefecture de Police,
which stood facing the Palais de Justice. It wasn’t till the following day that
those offices would once again be teeming with people in search of passport
visas, driving licenses, and permits of every description.

In the courtyard
below, cars stood waiting for emergency calls, the men of the flying squad
dozing on the seats. Nothing, however, had happened that night of sufficient
importance to justify their being called out. You could see that from the
little crosses in Lecœur’s notebook. He didn’t bother to count them, but he
could tell at a glance that there were something like two hundred in the
drunks’ column.

No doubt there’d
have been a lot more if it hadn’t been that this was a night for indulgence. In
most cases the police were able to persuade those who had had too much to go
home and keep out of trouble. Those arrested were the ones in whom drink raised
the devil, those who smashed windows or molested other people.

Two hundred of that
sort—a handful of women among them—were now out of harm’s way, sleeping heavily
on the wooden benches in the lockups.

There’d been five
knifings. Two near the Porte d’ltalie. Three in the remoter part of Montmartre.
not in the Montmartre of the Moulin Rouge and the Lapin Agile but in the Zone,
beyond where the Fortifs used to be, whose population included over 100,000
Arabs living in huts made of old packing cases and roofing-felt.

A few children had
been lost in the exodus from the churches, but they were soon returned to their
anxious parents.

“Hallo! Chaillot?
How’s your veronal case getting on?”

She wasn’t dead. Of
course not! Few went as far as that. Suicide is all very well as a
gesture—indeed, it can be a very effective one. But there’s no need to go and
kill yourself!

“Talking of
boudin
,”
said Mambret, who was smoking an enormous meerschaum pipe, “that reminds me
of—”

They were never to
know what he was reminded of. There were steps in the corridor, then the handle
of the door was turned. All three looked round at once, wondering who could be
coming to see them at ten past six in the morning.

“
Salut!
”
said the man who entered, throwing his hat down on a chair.

“Whatever brings
you here, Janvier?”

It was a detective
of the Brigade des Homicides, who walked straight to the stove to warm his
hands.

“I got pretty bored
sitting all by myself and I thought I might as well come over here. After all,
if the killer’s going to do his stuff I’d hear about it quicker here than
anywhere.”

He, too, had been
on duty all night, but round the corner, in the Police Judiciaire.

“You don’t mind, do
you?” he asked, picking up the coffeepot. “There’s a bitter wind blowing.”

It had made his
ears red.

“I don’t suppose
we’ll hear till eight, probably later,” said Lecœur.

For the last
fifteen years, he had spent his nights in that room, sitting at the
switchboard, keeping an eye on the big map with the little lamps. He knew half
the police in Paris by name, or, at any rate, those who did night duty. Of many
he knew even their private affairs, as, when things were quiet, he would have
long chats with them over the telephone to pass the time away. “Oh. it’s you,
Dumas. How are things at home?”

But though there
were many whose voices were familiar, there were hardly any of them he knew by
sight.

Nor was his
acquaintance confined to the police. He was on equally familiar terms with many
of the hospitals.

“Hallo! Bichat?
What about the chap who was brought in half an hour ago? Is he dead yet?”

He was dead, and
another little cross went into the notebook. The latter was, in its
unpretentious way, quite a mine of information. If you asked Lecœur how many
murders in the last twelve months had been done for the sake of money, he’d
give the answer in a moment—sixty-seven.

“How many murders
committed by foreigners?”

“Forty-two.”

You could go on
like that for hours without being able to trip him up. And yet he trotted out
his figures without a trace of swank. It was his hobby, that was all.

For he wasn’t
obliged to make those crosses. It was his own idea. Like the chats over the
telephone lines, they helped to pass the time away, and the result gave him
much the same satisfaction that others derive from a collection of stamps.

He was unmarried.
Few knew where he lived or what sort of a life he led outside that room. It was
difficult to picture him anywhere else, even to think of him walking along the
street like an ordinary person. He turned to Janvier to say: “For your cases,
we generally have to wait till people are up and about. It’s when a concierge
goes up with the post or when a maid takes her mistress’s breakfast into the
bedroom that things like that come to light.”

He claimed no
special merit in knowing a thing like that. It was just a fact. A bit earlier
in summer, of course, and later in winter. On Christmas Day probably later
still, as a considerable part of the population hadn’t gotten to bed until two
or even later, to say nothing of their having to sleep off a good many glasses
of champagne.

Before then, still
more water would have gone under the bridge—a few more stolen cars, a few
belated drunks.

“Hallo!
Saint-Gervais?”

His Paris was not
the one known to the rest of us—the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Opéra—but one
of somber, massive buildings with a police car waiting under the blue lamp and
the bicycles of the
agents cyclistes
leaning against the wall.

“The chief is
convinced the chap’ll have another go tonight,” said Janvier. “It’s just the
night for people of that sort. Seems to excite them.”

No name was
mentioned, for none was known. Nor could he be described as the man in the fawn
raincoat or the man in the grey hat, since no one had ever seen him. For a
while the papers had referred to him as Monsieur Dimanche, as his first three
murders had been on Sunday, but since then five others had been on weekdays, at
the rate of about one a week, though not quite regularly.

“It’s because of
him you’ve been on all night, is it?” asked Mambret.

Janvier wasn’t the
only one. All over Paris extra men were on duty, watching or waiting.

“You’ll see,” put
in Sommer. “when you do get him you’ll find he’s only a loony.”

“Loony or not, he’s
killed eight people,” sighed Janvier, sipping his coffee. “Look. Lecœur—there’s
one of your lamps burning.”

“Hallo! Your car’s
out? What’s that? Just a moment.”

They could see Lecœur
hesitate, not knowing in which column to put a cross. There was one for
hangings, one for those who jumped out of the window, another for—

“Here, listen to
this. On the Pont d’Austerlitz, a chap climbed up onto the parapet. He had his
legs tied together and a cord round his neck with the end made fast to a
lamppost, and as he threw himself over he fired a shot into his head!”

“Taking no risks,
what? And which column does that one go into?”

“There’s one for
neurasthenics. We may as well call it that.”

Those who hadn’t
been to Midnight Mass were now on their way to early service. With hands thrust
deep in their pockets and drops on the ends of their noses, they walked bent
forward into the cutting wind, which seemed to blow up a fine, icy dust from
the pavements. It would soon be time for the children to be waking up, jumping
out of bed, and gathering barefoot around lighted Christmas trees.

“But it’s not at
all sure the fellow’s mad. In fact, the experts say that if he was he’d always
do it the same way. If it was a knife, then it would always be a knife.”

“What did he use
this time?”

“A hammer.”

“And the time
before?”

“A dagger.”

“What makes you
think it’s the same chap?”