Soma Blues (2 page)

The Métro stop at Sainte-Gabrielle was deserted. Hob left his second-class car and walked down the long tiled corridor with the wall ads for Gauloises and Printemps and vacations in “Sunny Martinique.” A bum was sleeping on one of the long wooden benches that lined the corridor. He was ragged in a comic way, with a bristly red stubble over his wine-reddened face. He mumbled something as Hob passed, but Hob couldn’t quite catch it and probably couldn’t have translated it if he had. Does a mumble in an incomprehensible language count as an omen? Hob went through the pneumatic doors and up the long, grimy stairs to the street.

He had never been in this part of Paris before. The buildings were shabby and rundown. There was a low moon, partially veiled by a thin fog through which the streetlamps shown with diffused amber brilliance. The streets were wide, and the few men who passed looked North African—small men in shapeless gray and brown clothing. The streets were arranged in the familiar French
étoile
fashion: four or five roads spoking around a central hub. Across the street and a few doors up was a police van. Two police motorcycles, their red and blue lights still flashing, were parked beside it. Fauchon would be over there, no doubt. Hob started across, then stopped to let an ambulance slide in beside the motorcycles.

A policeman came up, and Hob told him that Fauchon had sent for him.

“Wait just a moment,” the policeman said. “He is just finishing an interrogation.”

“What’s it about?” Hob asked.

“The Inspector will tell you what he wishes.”

Fauchon was lucky enough to have an eyewitness account of the murder at Métro Sainte-Gabrielle. Two witnesses, in fact: old Benet, the retired ringmaster from the Lémieux Circus, and Fabiola, the India Rubber girl. Not actually a girl, of course; Fabiola was in her forties. But her long, pale face was unwrinkled, and her hair was tied back in a long braided pigtail. In repose, she gave an appearance of boneless and oddly inhuman grace. She was extremely thin, probably no more than a hundred pounds, yet her movements were so supple that even in so simple a thing as lighting a cigarette she reminded Fauchon of a snake. Her straight black hair had an oily sheen to it and was tied with a bit of colored wool. She was blue eyed, with a tiny rosebud mouth and a pointed chin. She wore a small diamond on the third finger of her right hand—Benet’s gift, no doubt, though where the old man had found the money for it was beyond conjecture. The Lémieux Circus wasn’t noted for largesse toward its retired members. Benet was a big man, getting on toward his seventies. His thin gray hair showed traces of former dyeing. It was combed in streaks that showed his freckled pink skull. He wore a black-and-white check suit, one step above a circus clown’s, a little tight on him now that he was growing a paunch. He had fierce, hooded eyes and a small gray mustache that he brushed with the back of his hand.

Benet had come out of the Métro Sainte-Gabrielle at approximately nine-thirty that evening. Fabiola had been with him. It was a Thursday, the day he went to Samaritaine to take part with the other circus old-timers in their circus festivity for the children of Paris in honor of Saint Edouard, the patron saint of circuses. It had been a chilly day for June, quite unseasonable, and he had worn his English tweed overcoat and Fabiola was wearing her sealskin jacket, the sole possession she had brought from Riga with her in 1957, when she made her escape to Stavanger in Sweden.

“I didn’t notice anything wrong at first, Inspector,” Benet said. “You don’t expect to run across a murder at Sainte-Gabrielle. It is a poor district, but quite a safe one. Good working-class people. Some retirees, like ourselves. Did you ever see us perform, Inspector?”

“I did not have that pleasure,” Fauchon said.

“Well, never mind. I was good enough, if I say so myself. But Fabiola, she was sensational. The grace of a temple odalisque.”

“What was the first thing you noticed?” Fauchon asked.

“Well, the first thing was people shouting. They didn’t sound frightened, not particularly. You know how quickly an argument can boil up in the streets. That’s what I thought it was.”

“Tell him about the horse,” Fabiola said. Her voice was light, soft, breathy.

“It plays no part,” Benet said, patting her hand. “You see, Inspector, there were the people shouting, and then some people were running, and then a horse came running down the street. Naturally we thought the horse was somehow a part of whatever was going on. It was only later we learned that Scharnapp, the old-clothes dealer who lives in the rue Sainte-Gabrielle and stables his horse in the little cul-de-sac just behind—Fourgerelles, it is called—well, sir, Scharnapp had unhitched his horse and was preparing to lead it into the stables to rub it down, give it food, water, talk to it—I used to come with him sometimes, because there’s something comforting about a horse, especially for a man like myself who has been a ringmaster and lived around animals all his life. But now the horse was running, you see, wild-eyed with fear because the car had grazed its side when it came around the corner on two wheels, tossing poor Scharnapp against the stone-fronted house when its right-side fender caught him in the middle of his back. But before that, although I didn’t see it, the car had cut through the crowd, knocking down Mme. Sauvier who owns the dress shop down the block and two other people I didn’t know. I am glad to hear they will live, Inspector. It was a classical nightmare—the people shouting, three of them down when the car smashed through them in pursuit of the man with the straw hat. The hat had a shiny green band. Funny what the eye sees, even at a moment like that. I saw his face clearly enough, and I had seen him once or twice before. But I didn’t know his name. He was a stranger to the district, probably a foreigner.”

Fabiola said, “The car was after him, you see. First the one car, the Peugeot, and then the other, the little German one. What was it, André?”

“A Porsche,” Benet said. “A nine-eleven. They are not difficult to spot. And they corner like the devil, eh? I suppose it adds a certain frisson, to be killed by a car like that.”

“The Porsche didn’t kill him,” Fabiola said.

“Not for lack of trying. But you’re right, it didn’t kill him. The man had been leaving the Café Argent in the Square Sainte-Gabrielle when the cars came for him. He dived for the gutter. He must have hurt his shoulder, landing like that on the cobble-stones, but at least he saved his life. For the moment, anyway. I don’t suppose he’d had time to think about the other car.”

“It came from the other direction,” Fabiola said. “It was a big car”.

“A Mercedes three-fifty, I believe,” Benet said. The driver must have seen him go under the car. So he put the Mercedes right into the parked car. He must have been going forty kilometers an hour and he went into it head on. I don’t remember what make the parked car was—perhaps an Opel. The collision rocked it right up onto the curb. It uncovered the man in the straw hat like taking off a turtle’s carapace. Only he didn’t have on his straw hat any longer. It had come off when he dived under the car.”

“He had blond hair,” Fabiola said. “He wore a leather jacket. It looked expensive.”

“And he lay there for a moment, blinking. Then he must have seen the first car, the Porsche, come around, because he scrambled to his feet and began to run, like the other people. I suppose there were a dozen out there. Some had come out of the café to see what the trouble was. They found themselves being chased by these two cars. Then, I don’t remember how, the cars were in the Square Sainte-Gabrielle.”

“They had mounted the curb following the blond man,” Fabiola said.

“You know the square, Inspector? The café in the middle with the newspaper kiosk beside it? Cars circle around it, and in the square itself there are a few plane trees and some benches. There’s also a bus shelter. The man had run there. And there were other people in the square, too, but the cars ignored them, if not deliberately hitting them can be said to be ignoring them, because they were determined to get the blond man. They were like cowboys, Inspector, trying to cut one longhorn out of the herd. One has seen the movies, one knows. And so they chased him, and he ran from them, dodging around benches. They smashed right through, damaging their cars most horribly. The blond man had not lost his courage. He dodged around, and, when the time seemed right, tried to cut back across the boulevard. And that is when they got him.”

Just then a gendarme came over, saluted the inspector and said, “I found this, sir. It was in the man’s jacket pocket.”

He handed Fauchon a small address book with a sealskin cover.

“That should help,” Fauchon said, putting it in his pocket.

“And there’s also this,” the gendarme said. “The deceased was holding it in his hand.”

He handed Fauchon a small green bottle made of what looked like jade.

4

“Ah, Hob, good to see you.” Fauchon was conservatively dressed as always. His round face expressed gravity. The high eyebrows indicated irony. The narrow upper lip showed reserve; the full lower one, passion, or perhaps gluttony. The small brown eyes were shrewd, and they seemed to glow with a light of their own. He said, “I wonder if you can identify a person for me?”

“Why me?”

“Because he is a foreigner, and we believe he lives in Ibiza.”

“What made you think that?”

“That he is a foreigner? Because we have his passport. He is English. As for the Ibiza connection, he was carrying a straw basket with ibiza embroidered on it. And I believe he is wearing a Spanish kerchief knotted around his neck. Also a Spanish shirt.”

“Only about a million people pass through Ibiza a year,” Hob said.

“Perhaps he is a resident, like you.”

“There must be thousands of year-round residents, most of whom I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting. Still, I’ll take a look if you want me to.”

“I would be much obliged.”

“What is it, a traffic accident?” Hob had just caught sight of the hastily erected police barricade. “Unless you have some important reason, I don’t think I want to see this. I’m supposed to cook chili tonight, and if I’m right about what’s in that car, it’s going to kill my appetite.”

“Really, Hob,” Fauchon said in his precise, idiomatic, and utterly foreign English, “for a private detective you have little taste for blood.”

“It may seem strange to you,” Hob said, “but even an American private detective doesn’t go out of his way to wade in gore.”

“Gore,” Fauchon said. “Good word. Dickensian? Never mind. Come with me, Hob. This is necessary.”

The body had been carried to the sidewalk and a big piece of green canvas thrown over it. Two policemen were standing nearby, their truncheons tucked into side pouches. It had just begun to rain. Drops of moisture beaded the canvas. There was a smell of diesel and gasoline in the air. The mist and light rain were growing heavier. Fauchon rocked back on his heels. He bent down over the tarp and with an economical gesture pulled the tarp halfway down.

The body was that of a blond-haired man in his late thirties or early forties. He wore a white shirt, tieless, the front heavily coated in blood and grime. His slacks were fawn, and he had on white moccasins. He wore a heavy gold chain around his neck. Hob bent to look at the chain. It terminated in a gold coin, its top pierced to allow the chain to pass through. On the coin was a bas relief of two crouched leopards. At last he looked at the face. It had been battered but was still recognizable.

5

Fauchon’s small cramped office was in a stone-fronted building that looked like a bank, occupying most of the block between rue d’Anfer and avenue Kléber. Within its tall bronze-fitted glass doors, protected from the rain, a few policemen were standing around smoking. Most of the Paris night patrols worked out of the old station near the Chambre des Députés. Fauchon’s section wasn’t interested in the nightly toll of street crimes—the muggings, beatings, wife and husband slayings; all these they left to the gendarmes. Their section was after bigger game. Anything that might have international implications found its way to the Sûreté. A lot of the cases were then reassigned to the appropriate departments. Fauchon and his people did not ordinarily respond to traffic accidents, especially traffic accidents in a far-out sector like Sainte-Gabrielle.

Hob slouched along beside and slightly behind the inspector, a head taller—or half a head because he stooped. They went down the wide central corridor, past offices on either side, only a few of which were lighted. An occasional shirtsleeved figure in an office looked up and waved. Fauchon didn’t wave back; his acknowledgment was a grunt. They reached the elevator, a small affair like a closet, to one side of the splendid marble double stairway. Fauchon had long complained about that elevator, which was much too small and much too slow. The Works Ministry claimed they could not install a larger elevator without removing two, perhaps three of the marble pillars that adorned the ground floor. Since the building had been declared a National Treasure, the pillars had to stay exactly where they were.

Fauchon didn’t say anything on the ride to the third floor. He was humming and rocking on his heels, his gaze fixed on an upper corner of the elevator as if he expected to see a malefactor appear there—ectoplasmically, as it were. They got out of the elevator on the third floor and turned left, Hob leading now because he had been here before and knew the way. Only a single light glowed at the end of the hall. Fauchon’s office was at the end of the hall on the left. He hadn’t bothered to lock it. A green-shaded lamp shone over his desk. Fauchon dropped his hat on a hatrack beside his umbrella, sat down behind his desk, and motioned Hob to take a seat.