In the Shadows of Paris (The Predator Of Batignolles) (31 page)

‘Could it be Theneuil, Boss? His wife made a point of saying how youthful he looked. We have his photograph – all we have to do is show it to Mariette Trinquet and—’

‘If you weren’t a man, Joseph, I’d kiss you! Hurry over to Rue Guisarde and find out. I’ll go back to Rue Fontaine and telephone our friend Raoul Pérot.’

Josette Fatou walked back to her house, hugging the walls, clutching the bag of potatoes she’d gone to buy after parking her cart. These past few days, her anxiety had swelled up inside her like a balloon until she felt she was suffocating. Powerless to resist the pressure, she waited meekly for the worst to happen.

She did not have to wait long.

Just as she reached the gate, a gloved hand closed round her wrist and a voice breathed, ‘Make up a bundle of clothes and follow me, quickly!’

The balloon burst, deflated in one go. What was the point of struggling? He would find her wherever she went. She might as well give in.

‘Why?’ she had the strength to ask.

‘Because it’s the only solution. I’ll stay here. Hurry.’

‘Where are we going?’

For a moment she felt as if it wasn’t she who had spoken.

She stared up at him, open-mouthed. His words had frightened her and yet she could scarcely feel his presence.

She walked cautiously down the corridor, the ground swaying beneath her feet. She felt terribly afraid and yet strangely removed.

As she climbed the stairs, she understood that death had been moving towards her since the day she was born. Sometimes slowly, sometimes fast, always unpredictable. It was up to each of us to make friends with death. And if hers took on the appearance of desire would that not give it a certain beauty? Weren’t love and death related?
Love.
She wondered why he’d behaved so tenderly towards her after he broke into her lodgings. In her semi-conscious state she had yielded not to the demands of the stranger, but to an instinct deep in her own body whose impulses she had always suppressed. She was sure of one thing: this man provided the answer to all her questions. Very well, she would go with him, and if death conquered love then so be it. She had waited years for this meeting, for this awakening of her senses, cursing men and dreaming of a gentle lover. What a shame that her Prince Charming should also turn out to be her killer.

Wrapped in his greatcoat, his hat pulled down over his brow, Frédéric Daglan stared into the darkness of the doorway. There was a scrunch of gravel; a harridan in clogs crossed the courtyard. A chicken clucked and a dog chained beside a hut whined expectantly.

‘Shut your trap!’ the harridan cried as she walked away, but not before shooting a malevolent glance at the man standing under the lamppost.

Suddenly, Frédéric Daglan began to feel flustered. His plan was an absurd fantasy; the flower girl would barricade herself in her apartment and rouse the neighbours. He’d been afraid she might cry out and put up a struggle. He’d been prepared to use all his powers of persuasion to convince her to go with him. Her submissiveness had thrown him – she was like a person who suffered from vertigo and was fatally attracted to heights. Had it been a ruse? Had she already escaped through a back door? No, she was back, carrying a carpet bag on her arm. She’d combed her hair and changed into a cheap dress that showed off her figure.

He remembered her small hard breasts cupped in his hand the night she’d fainted in fright when she saw him. He had seldom desired a woman so intensely. But he was suspicious of the fact that she’d gone along with his decision so easily. He must tread carefully.

He led her in silence to Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Antoine, where a cab was waiting beside the pavement. Josette drank in the sunny façades of the buildings, forcing herself to hold on to the image before the cab door clicked shut.

A man slipped nervously into the bookshop. Kenji, who was busy selling an illustrated edition of
Orlando Furioso
⁶⁷
in three volumes, noticed the visitor’s unassuming manner out of the corner of his eye.

‘How may I help you?’

‘Are you Monsieur Legris’s associate? We’ve met before. I’m a watchmaker on Rue Monsieur-le-Prince. I’m here on a rather delicate matter. About ten days ago, I entrusted Monsieur Legris with a fob watch belonging to Monsieur Andrésy. He was to give it to you. Only, this morning a man claiming to be his cousin came in asking for it. Without thinking, I told him I no longer had it. I hope I haven’t made a mistake.’

How typical of Victor to be so secretive, thought Kenji.

‘No matter,’ he replied, ‘I’ll bring you the watch as soon as we close for lunch. Just now I’m alone and…’

He gestured discreetly towards a customer at the back of the shop.

‘Oh, there’s no hurry. The cousin said he’d return late afternoon.’

‘I believe I’ve met this cousin,’ Kenji went on, ‘a tall, slender young man with a beard. Somewhat eccentric.’

‘It’s difficult to say exactly,’ replied the watchmaker. ‘He was bundled up in a greatcoat. Can you imagine, in this heat! He wore a hat pulled down over his eyes, dark glasses and a beard à la Victor Hugo…A real eccentric. Well, I must be going, until later, then, and my apologies for any inconvenience.’

Kenji saw the watchmaker out. They were saying goodbye when the man snapped his fingers.

‘I’ve just remembered something. While he was browsing through various trinkets I noticed a long scar on the palm of his left hand, does that mean anything to you?’

‘No.’

Puzzled, Kenji walked upstairs to his apartment.

‘Iris, dear, are you busy? I have to go out, and those rogues Victor and Joseph are playing truant. Could you…Would you…’

‘Play shopkeeper? Yes, Papa. Honestly, for somebody who hasn’t much interest in books, I’m practically a prisoner in a reading room!’

‘My omnibus is rather good, don’t you think, Kochka?’

In the background of the painting, the yellow vehicle belonging to the General Transport Company stood at the foot of a hill while an old man hitched a spare horse to a team of two bays. Perched on his seat in a coachman’s uniform and a silver-ribboned stovepipe hat made of boiled leather, the driver surveyed the same scene as the viewer of the painting. Still in sketch form, a family of acrobats stood in a line waiting to perform a series of daredevil feats. The couple and their six children were all in tights, side by side with their hands on their hips, poised for Tasha to bring them to life.

Kochka mewed and rubbed a paw behind her ear.

‘Bad cat, you’ll make it rain! That’s an idea, what if I make it rain on my acrobats? No, too depressing.’

She began whistling the third movement of Vincent d’Indy’s
Symphonie Cévenole
,
⁶⁸
which she’d heard at a concert Victor had taken her to recently. She reflected which colours to use. Black was forbidden except for the coachman’s hat. She recalled what Odilon Redon had said: ‘You must respect black; use it sparingly.’ Others’ words came back to her, above all those of Degas: ‘Light has an orange tint; the shadows of flesh are red; half-tones are green, and beware of white!’ She chewed her thumbnail while Kochka rubbed against her ankles, then suddenly she decided to follow her intuition, to be her own mistress as Victor had always advocated. She set down her palette, prey to one of those fits of restlessness that frequently upset her concentration.

Flitting from one end of the studio to the other, she replaced the top on a flask of oil she used to dilute her colours and put it next to a bottle of siccative oil and a tube of cadmium lemon.

‘When I paint I am like Poussin, who fled chaos, except I’m stuck with a cat that keeps chasing after a piece of string,’ she reflected as she tickled Kochka’s whiskers with a piece of frayed cord. As the animal leapt about excitedly, it knocked over a boot and a pile of books lying on the floor, and began chewing a slipper. Tasha grabbed an apple in passing, and paused at the table where she’d spread out a few sketches for a chapter of the
Odyssey
. Circe was watching with glee as Ulysses’ crew was transformed before her eyes into a herd of pigs. Tasha still hadn’t resolved the problems posed by the composition and she felt guilty. She was behind, and the publisher was getting impatient. Even so, she turned away from the sorceress, tossed the uneaten apple onto the bed and returned to her painting, her thoughts refreshed.

Just then, Kochka miaowed to be let out.

‘Do you need to do your business, darling? Follow me.’

They crossed the courtyard to the locked apartment. Kochka had her little ways and ran straight over to her box filled with old newspapers in the kitchen where she began scrabbling furiously. Tasha went back to the studio, leaving the door ajar. After reflecting for a moment, she thinned a mixture of cobalt and Indian yellow on her palette as she hummed Vincent d’Indy’s air. She was about to add a drop of oil when Kochka reappeared, tail puffed out, hackles up, ears flattened.

‘What is it, little one? A nasty old tom? The butcher’s moggy or the Marquis de Carabas?’

Kochka hissed and scurried to the back of the alcove. Curious, Tasha went outside. All she saw were some flies performing their aerial ballet above the fountain. She narrowed her eyes and watched them dart back and forth in the sun’s last rays, caressing the acacia leaves as she entered the apartment. Since the theft of one of his cameras, Victor had been scrupulous about closing the shutters in order to avoid another break-in. Without bothering to light the lamp, Tasha walked around the room, cursing Euphrosine’s mania for leaving the bedside table next to the water-closet door after she’d finished dusting.

The pale refection of her face rippled in the mirror. A strange mysterious girl with flowing red hair, like the creatures in Gustave Moreau’s paintings. She moistened her forefinger and tamed an unruly lock. Mysterious, her? Nonsense. She was a woman who aspired to independence, creativity and love; she was neither the sphinx nor the succubus so dear to male artists, whether symbolists or realists.

A muffled sound like the rustle of fabric drew her towards the darkened bedroom. A dancing candle flame traced eerie shapes in the gloom.

‘Victor? Is that you?’

She bumped into someone. She choked back a scream. An icy cold spread through her stomach, gripping her heart, a hand closed over her mouth.

‘Be quiet,’ a man’s voice ordered.

He had one arm round her shoulders and with his full weight was trying to force her to the ground. She felt herself fall, and fought back, lashing out with her fists. She managed to escape his clutches and almost reached the door, but he caught her, twisted her wrist and, despite her resistance, dragged her back to the bedroom. A sharp pain ripped through her skull; the blow to her temple sent her plummeting to the bottom of a black pit.

Just as he entered the courtyard, Victor heard what sounded like a woman’s scream coming from the apartment. Imagining Tasha in distress, he broke into a run.

‘Tasha! Tasha, where are you?’

A click. Followed by a command: ‘Don’t move, Legris. Walk over here slowly, your hands above your head.’

Victor moved forward. The stranger tripped him up and he fell onto the bed, where Tasha lay motionless. Her torn blouse revealed the silky roundness of her breast. His head was spinning, his limbs felt heavy.

‘Damn you!’

‘Calm down, Monsieur Legris, you’re not in any danger. Get up slowly.’

Victor could see the gun pointing at him. The man was enveloped in a greatcoat. A top hat and dark glasses made it impossible to identify him.

‘She only has a small bump, Legris. I didn’t come here looking for a fight. I need that watch. Do you know why?’

Victor shook his head.

‘We’re wasting time, Legris, I know you’ve got it.’

That voice, those clothes…

‘You had me fooled, Daglan.’

‘Give me the watch, quickly! Don’t try anything, my gun is pointing at her.’

Victor walked over to the wardrobe.

‘No tricks, Legris, put your left hand behind your back.’

‘I need both hands to open the lid.’

‘The box of photographs! I should have known. Turn round. One false move and I’ll shoot her.’

‘Put your gun down on the pillow or I’ll shoot you,’ said a deep voice.

The stranger moved towards Victor, urged on by the pistol Kenji was pressing between his shoulder blades. Suddenly he swung round.

‘Kenji! You?…Perhaps it’s just as well. I’ve done what I had to do, I leave in peace.’

Everything happened with the strange unreality of a dream. The man placed the barrel of his gun against his chest and pulled the trigger. Victor had the impression of being suspended in mid-air for what seemed like an unbelievably long time, and then the man fell to the floor.

Kenji dropped his gun; he was shaking.

‘I didn’t mean that to happen,’ he said to Victor. ‘Go and see to Tasha.’

He went to open the shutters then knelt down beside the dying man, gently removing his top hat and glasses.