Paris Requiem (11 page)

His thoughts faltered, dispersed by an uncanny sensation of eyes on his back. He turned, half expecting to see the sullen face that had peered out at him on his way down from
Olympe’s
apartment. Under less tense circumstances, he would have stopped to interview the neighbour. But the policeman had been there. He was here again now.

James clutched the satchel in his hand more tightly. With a show of casualness, he stepped past a braying donkey. The open door of a tavern beckoned. The large painted sign above it showed a hare leaping out of a casserole and James leapt across the threshold with the same alacrity, half turning to see if the policeman would pass him by or follow him. The man paused to give him a steely glance, but then walked on. James calmed himself. His own guilt at pinching Olympe’s letters was affecting his nerves.

The stares of the motley crew assembled in the tavern didn’t help. They eyed him with the morose curiosity of regulars. He hastened to a table in a dim corner of the ramshackle room. As his eyes grew accustomed to the smoky half-light, he was struck by the oddity of his surroundings. At a long wooden refectory table at the centre of the room, a hirsute man with the look of an ancient mariner picked a desolate tune from his guitar and sang a plaintive ballad. Around him sat a heterogeneous assortment of men and women.
Bohemians
, James thought, and then taking in the wild assortment of paintings and sculptures which hung from the dark walls or were poised on tables and chairs, altered his thought to conclude that he was in some kind of artists’ den. On the bench not far from him, one man was stretched in sleep or perhaps drunken stupor. A couple looked dreamily into each other’s eyes over glasses of absinthe.

James ordered one for himself and examined the art more closely. There was a strange, gnarled Christ half reclining against the wall, a view of jagged roofs from a disorienting perspective, a series of circus performers. An odd prickling started at the base of his spine. The tightrope walker with her striated skirt and bodice, her direct, musing gaze looked remarkably like the Olympe Fabre he had seen in the photograph so short a time ago.

‘Ça vous plaît, Monsieur?
’ The young, raven-haired waiter deposited James’s drink on the table and followed his gaze.

James nodded his approval of the picture and then asked if he knew the model.

‘Oh yes, Monsieur. She lives nearby. She comes in often.’ His face took on a grimness and he lowered his voice. ‘Used to come in, I mean. She’s dead now.’

He was about to move away, but James held him back. ‘And the artist. Do you know the artist?’

‘Max Henry.’ He looked swiftly round the room. ‘No, he’s not here today. You’re interested in buying the picture?’

‘Yes,’ James said with sudden decision. ‘And in meeting Monsieur Henry.’

The youth gestured to the guitarist who strummed a few more chords and lumbered over. ‘This is my father. He can advise you.’

Some half-hour later James left the cabaret with the picture under his arm. He had paid too much, he reckoned, but the bearded owner had turned out to have more than a talent for the guitar and mournful ballads of the city streets. He was a fine salesman. He had told him that Max Henry might be a mere stripling now, but would go far. He had also told him all about the talented Olympe Fabre and her tragic demise. Why, he could see her clearly sitting right there in the far corner of the room nursing a drink with her friends and yes, sometimes entertaining them with a ditty of her own in the late hours,
after the theatre was closed. Her beauty pierced, almost like a pain. He brought a gnarled fist to his heart.

With a new-found directness, James had asked him whether she was more than a model to Max Henry and the man had winked and draped an arm across his shoulder and murmured, ‘Ah, these young ones. They have hot blood, Monsieur. But I couldn’t say for certain. No, not for certain.’ Perhaps he had taken in the inadvertent look of disapproval on James’s face, for he had then added, ‘But it is some time back now. Max painted this series last year, maybe eighteen months ago. You must come back one night and ask him yourself. He is often here, later on though. After ten.’ No, the man didn’t have a recent address for Max.

James pondered all this as he followed the downhill course of the winding streets. Should he question Raf about Max Henry? He would have to test the temperature of his brother’s emotions carefully. On the other hand, Raf must be far more aware than he was of Olympe’s bohemian connections.

He clutched the small canvas to his chest and felt oddly happy with his purchase, as if he had brought a little of the dead girl to life. These were her streets he reminded himself and looked around him carefully, as if each cobble, each street vendor or brightly dressed juggler might give up a clue to her untimely death.

He had almost reached the bottom of the Butte now. The clatter of coaches and hoofs rose from the busy
intersection
. A policeman stood at its edge, and for a moment, James froze, as if the man were lying in wait for the stolen letters in his satchel. He squared his shoulders and put on his most authoritative mien, the one he wore for judge and jury.

But it was a different officer and the man’s attention was elsewhere. Parked in front of him stood one of those
gleaming
new motor cars with large spoked tires and headlamps as brazen as a lighthouse beam. A tall, weedy man in tattered
clothes, cap askew over a lank abundance of hair, was running his hand over the car’s shining surface as he might over a prize-winning thoroughbred. He had a rapt look on his bony face.

In the blink of an eye, the officer stayed the man’s arm. ‘
Papiers
,’ he demanded in a bellowing voice. Passers-by scurried quickly away. Others stopped to watch, James amongst them.

The man looked dazed, as if he couldn’t quite emerge from his dream. Then fear contorted his features. He tried to shake off the staying hand. ‘Your papers,’ the officer repeated.

The man made a run for it. But the policeman was quicker and stronger. He caught up to him, and grabbing him by the collar of his shapeless jacket, shook him severely. ‘Your name?’ he said in the loud voice of one speaking to an imbecile. ‘Your address?’

‘A vagabond,’ the man who was standing next to James muttered with distaste. ‘A degenerate. Off to the Dépot with him.’

‘Send him back where he came from,’ another man shouted, cursing beneath his breath. ‘Too many of his kind here. Dirt.’

The officer seemed altogether prepared to follow the popular will. He was propelling his captive forward in a frogmarch.

Suddenly a woman appeared in front of them. She clutched at the policeman’s arm. ‘That’s my brother. Leave him alone.’

The officer sized her up. She had a frowsy, painted face and an expanse of cleavage that didn’t bode well. ‘Prove it,’ he sniggered. ‘Or join him at the Dépot.’

The woman’s face fell. With a single backward glance, she vanished into the crowd.

James moved on. Had he read it in one of those newspaper clippings or was it Raf who had told him about the stringent vagrancy laws which prevailed in the city? Tramps, vagabonds, wanderers, whose numbers had proliferated ever since the war with Germany, were seen to be a noxious social
problem. They swelled the size of unruly mobs, could be used by any faction in need of numbers. Mad, alcoholic or simply travellers without the necessary identity cards, they were deemed also to be racial degenerates – dangerous microbes to be eliminated from the social stew lest they spawn and
poison
it utterly. Repeat offenders were bundled off to asylums or in the worst cases transported to penal colonies.

James hoped that the man he had seen transfixed by the motor car would be treated leniently and pardoned. He had probably only been dreaming about escape, a speedy escape, the kind that James could afford by simply raising an arm and hailing a carriage. A rigorous solution to social problems always seemed more attractive in the abstract, than when one saw its wounded, living face. Yet the problem remained.

A nearer problem hadn’t disappeared either, he reminded himself. He would go back to the hotel now and study the bag’s contents. After he had written to his mother, he
promised
himself.

He looked up to see if a cab was in sight and noticed a cluster of people on the opposite pavement. It took him a moment to realise that they were standing at the entrance of a theatre. The Vaudeville, curving letters on the iron-columned portico announced. It was the theatre at which Olympe had last played.

Without pausing to think, he quickened his step and joined the queue. Fifteen minutes later he watched the curtain rise on a play that bordered on melodrama. It told the risqué story of a triangle – a respectable older man married to a young woman who falls in love with the equally young man who comes to paint their portrait. Enraptured by the artist, their joint passion fed by romantic poetry, the two sin against her bonds and engage in an adulterous love which ends in a joint suicide pact. Only the woman dies. At the play’s end, the husband stands alone on stage, stroking his small son’s head
and decrying the manipulability of women, the bitter tragedy of crimes of passion.

James watched on tenterhooks and tried to imagine Olympe in the role of the young woman, Olympe as he had seen her in the photograph, a haunting sadness accentuating the charm of her features. With an aching sense, it came to him that Olympe had been rehearsing death before meeting a real one.

He sat reflecting on this in his corner box until almost everyone had left the theatre and then, with sudden decision and a glance at the actress’s name on his programme, rushed to find the stage door.

A uniformed man barred his entrance. James reached for his wallet, all the time explaining that he was a friend of Oriane Martine, of Olympe Fabre, too, and needed to speak to Mademoiselle Martine. The size of the bill earned a nod and a grunt of ‘First door on your right on the second floor.’

The back-stage area was an airless warren of dusky
corridors
. A smell of must and tired heat rose from the walls. The floorboards creaked. A man ran past him as he climbed the stairs. With a start James recognised the handsome actor who had played the young lover, but he looked faceless now, tired. When he reached the second floor, the sound of
laughing
voices dispelled the gloom. Two women walked down the hall, arm in arm. They pointed him to Mlle Martine’s door, then giggled, as if sharing a secret.

James hesitated before the door. There were raised voices coming from the room, arguing over something. At last he knocked.

‘Who is it?’ A ringing voice called out.

Not knowing quite how to answer, James identified himself as a friend of Olympe Fabre. It took a moment, but the door opened a fraction to reveal the disgruntled face of a young woman, not, he was almost certain, Oriane Martine.
‘Vous êtes qui?
’ she demanded in a surly tone.

James identified himself and heard another voice. ‘Oh let him in, Marianne. What does it matter!’

He walked into the small, cluttered dressing room. Clothes hung from a rack. Bouquets of flowers gave off a dense, sultry scent. A woman sat in front of a large, yellowing mirror. Her hair was tied back and she was rubbing paint from her face with some white cream. Her features were pointed in a foxy prettiness. Beside her stood a portly man in a frock coat.

‘Leave us,
mon ami
. Wait for me downstairs.’ Oriane Martine smiled into the mirror, her cheek dimpling.

The man seemed about to argue, then giving James a slightly sullen look, left with a bow.

Dark-lashed blue eyes studied James from the mirror and measured his worth. He seemed to have passed some test, for the hair was quickly released and shaken out and Oriane turned to give him her non-reflected face. ‘So you were a friend of Olympe’s?’

James shifted his weight. ‘Not exactly. My brother Rafael Norton …’

‘Oh, of course, Monsieur Norton,’ Oriane laughed
infectiously
, then put a staying hand over her mouth. In a moment, the face had grown into a tragic mask. ‘How heartless of me. I really was very very sorry to hear of Olympe’s death. I don’t know what kind of black mood could have gripped her.’

‘Do you think playing the part – your part – might have affected her, influenced her in some way?’

Oriane looked at him with visible incomprehension, then as it dawned crossed herself swiftly. ‘You mean the nightly dying? No, no. We’re professionals. And Olympe was well. Seemed to me to be very well. We used to be good friends, you know. Years back. It’s dismal that … how shall I put it, her terrible misfortune was my gain.’ She pouted sweetly. ‘Yes, I suddenly found myself in a lead part. We didn’t know, of course, last week, when she disappeared that she was …’ She
stood up and paced the tiny room for a moment, picking a shawl off the floor, admonishing the girl who had opened the door to him.

James found himself liking her directness. ‘Of course not,’ he murmured.

‘I’m very sad for her. Can I offer you a glass of wine, Monsieur.’

James nodded and accepted an inch of red in a glass which wasn’t altogether clean.

‘Yes, three years back, maybe four, when we were both mere girls, Olympe and I travelled together. There’s nothing quite like it for making or breaking a friendship. Twenty-five towns in thirty days. Tours, Nantes, Nîmes, I can’ t even name them all. You can imagine. It produces railway fever. Sometimes you don’t even remember what town you’re playing in. Olympe and I, we enjoyed the movement. We shared our centimes. Often, even our beds. You save money that way.’ She shook her head in fleeting nostalgia, then met his eyes. ‘She was a real trouper.’

James cleared his throat. ‘And you were still friends. In Paris?’

‘Oh yes. A little less, though, with the years. Olympe’s star was rising. She was very busy. Mine wasn’t … well, all that’s changing.’ She gave him a radiant smile, which crinkled her eyes in wry intelligence, so different from the demented passion of her role that he began to wonder at her
performing
power.