The Curse of the Grand Guignol (14 page)

Renaissance palaces that
resembled miniature versions of Versailles had sprung up
everywhere: Hotel de Sully, de Beauvais, de Soubise, de Guenegaud
and Carnavalet gave the marsh panache. The odd one out was Hotel de
Sens which stayed true to the medieval castle vernacular. It was
from this latter
particulier
that Hotel de Merimont took its
cue. It was built like an urban fortress situated within its own
stone walls, centred in its own country garden, clos de
Millefleurs. Enclosure of a thousand flowers.

After the landau had deposited
Monsieur Radzival back at Hotel de Merimont, the Countess and Dr
Watson were at last free to talk. She began by recounting Raoul
Crespigny’s story about the anonymous envelopes and finished with
the marionette in the travel trunk.

“Whose room was it?” quizzed the
doctor, alert to the coincidence of such a find.

“Hilaire Dupont’s.”

“Not Felix Frey’s?”

“No, I thought the same thing
myself. I thought it might belong to the clown. I double-checked to
make sure.”

“You didn’t give the game
away?”

“
Mais non
,
mon
ami
, I was careful not to show interest in the marionette in
front of Monsieur Crespigny.”

“Which reminds me, did we
mention anything about marionettes whilst having that discussion in
the cloak room, the one
he
was privy to without our
knowledge?”

“I wondered about that too. The
thought of it kept me awake for several hours. I don’t believe we
let anything slip. We discussed clowns and red lipstick but I do
not recall that we used the word marionette or puppet.”

“That’s a relief. Describe the
marionette you found in the trunk.”

She closed her eyes to better
visualize it. “It was made of wood with movable parts. It looked
not just old but a genuine antique. The paint on the face was
chipped and the vestments were faded and worn. Each item of
clothing was well made yet appeared not to belong to any period of
history. It was as if the maker had borrowed something from each
period. Did I mention it was male? Well, it was. It was scary but
not in the same way that Punch is scary. It made my blood run cold
to look at it, but I did not feel afraid. I felt a bit sorry for it
actually. It was quite ugly yet I couldn’t look at it without
feeling pity, the way you do for someone who is appallingly ugly or
badly disfigured. The physical proportions were out of kilter. Big
head, long arms, short legs. There was a bell on his velvet hat and
a bow on each of his wooden clogs. The bell recalled jesters and
troubadours but not in a good way. The bell on his hat made him
look silly. I remembered a circus freak I’d seen once, a dwarf, who
had been dressed in a silly costume with bells. Everyone laughed at
him but not in a good way. Most of all, probably because of his
huge size, he reminded me not of a marionette but a ventriloquist’s
doll.”

“You went from saying ‘it’ to
‘him’ when describing the marionette as if you started off
picturing a puppet and ended up picturing a real person.”

She opened her eyes with a
start. “Did I?”

A pitter-patter noise forced him
to look out of the window of the landau. “Oh, bother! It’s just
started raining and I left my bedroom window open.”

“Mahmoud will close it.”

He shook his head as he studied
the gouache of thick clouds. “He won’t be able to. I keep my door
locked.”

“Oh, don’t worry. He will have a
master key.”

The doctor tried not to squirm.
Just thinking about snakes had him picturing a venomous adder in
the landau curling around his ankles. He checked the floor then
immediately castigated himself. “I say, isn’t that the Pont Neuf we
just passed. This coachman is hopeless!”

“We’re not returning to rue
Bonaparte just yet. While you were busy staring after Monsieur
Radzival I directed the coachman to take us to Montmartre.”

“I was not
staring
after
him,” he denied indignantly. “I was trying to figure out where the
man in the black cloak was standing last night.”

“What man?”

“While I was conversing with
Monsieur Crespigny on the balcony last night I noticed a man
wearing a black cloak looking up at us from the courtyard. I think
he was standing in the shadow of the arched gate. I don’t think he
was one of the guests.”

“Why didn’t you mention this
earlier?”

“I didn’t think it was
important. Why?”

“Today, there was a man in a
black cloak watching us from the opposite bank of the Canal
Saint-Martin. I asked Monsieur Crespigny if he had ever seen him
before and he replied in the negative. I wondered if it might be
Anonymous. Later, I discounted that theory because Monsieur
Crespigny had already received the plays for next week. They were
delivered early this morning while he was at the Hotel de Merimont.
That’s what caused him to forget his midday appointment at rue
Bonaparte. He was busy copying the plays out in his own hand and
destroying the originals.”

Dr Watson stroked his moustache
thoughtfully. “Do you think the man was watching the peniche or
watching you?”

“Monsieur Crespigny was of the
opinion the man was watching
me
. I didn’t say anything but I
agreed with him because this morning Xenia informed me that she
overheard our coachman recounting to the servants that a hansom cab
without a passenger had followed him all the way from Hotel de
Merimont to rue Bonaparte and then turned into a mews.”

“I’ll question the coachman
later. The man I saw was above average height and build.”

“Same today – tall and broad of
shoulder.”

They were rattling past the
Musée du Louvre, heading toward the Tuileries. She appeared to be
gazing idly at the contemporary frontispieces of the city but the
careful tone belied the careless eye.

“Where did you disappear to with
Monsieur Radzival?”

“We went to check out the corpse
on the quai. Fortunately, it didn’t look like a marionette. It was
a badly bruised, painfully thin, young woman called Lulu; most
likely a wretched streetwalker who met a violent end thanks to an
ungrateful customer. I was fleetingly concerned it might be victim
number six but the next murder probably won’t occur until the
eighth of December. That gives us five more days.”

“Yes, time is of the essence.
Where did you go after you looked at the body? I didn’t see you on
either bank.”

“I thought you might require
some time alone with the playwright so I pretended to be interested
in the Hospital Saint-Louis. Monsieur Radzival offered to act as a
guide.”

“What opinion did you form of
him?”

“Well, he’s highly intelligent.
He seems to know a lot about a lot. I’m not surprised he spends
most of his time in a library. I found him very easy to talk to; a
font of knowledge.”

“What sorts of things did you
talk about?”

“Oh, just about everything. He
recounted the history of the Hospital Saint-Louis and then we
talked about Salpetriere. The book he gave Monsignor Delgardo last
night was a transcript of the lectures delivered by Dr Charcot, the
doctor who revolutionized the ways in which maladies and madness
were treated. I wouldn’t mind paying the Salpetriere a visit while
I’m in Paris.”

“We can go tomorrow,” she
suggested.

“We?”

“Everything is grist to the mill
for a consulting detective.”

Never a truer word said.
Sherlock was living proof of that. “Since you put it that way, I
wouldn’t mind paying a visit to the gallery that was staging the
exhibition in the memory of corpse number three.”

“Galerie soixante-six.”

“Yes, Gallery sixty-six,” he
paraphrased, no longer astounded at her instant recall – it
reminded him of Sherlock most of all, that, and the way she
steepled her fingers. She’d been steepling them since they left
Hotel de Merimont. It told him she was thinking deeply about
something that had happened since this morning, something she was
keeping to herself. “It was somewhere in the Marais, wasn’t
it?”

She turned suddenly to look at
him and beamed one of her benign smiles. “Place de Puces. I didn’t
realize you were interested in ‘daubings’?”

He smiled back; the quip was
playful rather than facetious. “My taste runs to the English school
and no further. Constable. Stubbs. Landseer. Gainsborough. But last
night while I was trying my best
not
to mingle, I overheard
two men discussing the latest murder. They knew where it had taken
place and that the victim had been mutilated. They immediately
rushed off to Café Bistro to find out more. I followed them out to
the stairwell and noted they were part of that group known as the
Splattereurs. That’s when I bumped into you.”

“Hmm, grist to the mill. We can
detour there right now. It cannot be far from here.”

She banged on the roof of the
landau with her umbrella and stuck her head out of the window when
the carriage stopped. “Place de Puces,” she directed. “
Vite
!
Vite
!”

The coachman cracked the whip
and did an about face.

“By the way,” the doctor said,
handing her his pocket handkerchief, “why were we going to
Montmartre? And please don’t tell me we were going to investigate
the cemetery for clues, not in this downpour.”

She used his handkerchief to mop
raindrops off her face then refolded it according to the existing
creases and handed it back. “We were going to visit the little
church next door to the Cimetiere du Calvaire. We can still go
after the gallery. Churches are never locked. I want to speak to
the priest. He might be able to recall something from the night of
the fourth murder.”

Dr Watson and the Countess
stepped blithely through the door of Galerie soixante-six and
stopped dead. It wasn’t just the surreal sight that confronted them
head on, but the assault on their sense of expectation.

Marionettes were dangling from
the ceiling, strung up on wires, hundreds of them - Italian,
Indian, African and Oriental. There were jesters and clowns, happy
and sad; there were devils, black and red, horned and hooded;
witches and wizards, white and black; kings and queens, knights and
damsels, princes and princesses, ogres, giants, dwarfs, and
fantastic characters that were an amalgamation of all of the
above.

Disturbing, jarring, chaotic,
there was Mr Punch with his sugarloaf hat, and Judy with her
mob-cap. There was every version of Pulchinello since the comedia
dell’arte started in the year dot. There was Tatterdemalion,
Truffa, and Pierrot, some with diamonds, some with triangles, some
with moons and stars and suns on their clothes, tasselled and
ruffed, belted and cuffed.

Weird and wonderful, was
Pantalone the pants man, Bagatino the juggler, Cucurucu the
trickster brother of tricky Harlequin, Colombina the cockteaser,
and Dante’s Alichino, the Devil who had invaded every circle of
hell since paradise was lost.

“Art should always shock.”

The voice that addressed them
sounded like a high-pitched squawk. It took a moment to realize the
man was not gargling quicksilver, but speaking through a swazzle, a
sort of kazoo for the mouth, essential to Mr Punch. Without it the
puppet was not really Punch at all but a poor imitation.

Stunned by the sight of so many
dangling puppets, they lacked the wherewithal to speak. Their
brains were spinning out of control. What did it mean? Did it mean
anything? Was it art? Was it truth? Or was it a monstrous joke?
Parody? Mockery? Insanity? A celebration of life? Or the
celebration of death?

The man removed the swazzle from
his mouth and his voice sounded strangely human. “Art is nothing if
it does not make you catch your breath.”

The Countess found her voice
before the doctor did. The fact the man addressing them was the one
with the absurd handlebar moustache only added to the doctor’s
consternation.

“Your exposition is celebrating
the life and death of Madame Hertzinger,
n’est-ce pas
?”

“Yes,” replied the man with an
exaggerated sigh, “a great lady, a patroness of the arts, one who
was not afraid of the New.” He pronounced the last as if it should
have a capital N.

“I believe she fell from her
balcony?” The Countess feigned ignorance as she whirled elegantly
past the artist and began to inspect the works of art. The exercise
actually helped the blood return to her dizzily spinning head.

The artist followed in her wake
like a flâneur on the Champs Elysses trailing after a beautiful
woman, twirling his magnificent moustache out of habit. “I have
depicted the death scene here in this painting.” He led her to a
large canvas where some pink, orange and purple splotches had been
flicked ad hoc onto a blank canvas. “You can see the agony she
suffered as she lay there on the pavement.”

“Indeed,” said the Countess in a
level tone. “The aesthetic agony is striking.”

Dr Watson looked at the price
tag; his voice came back to him in one outraged breath. “The only
agony is that ridiculous sum!”

“I will take it,” said the
Countess, ignoring her companion.

“A discerning choice, madame,”
praised the moustachioed one, with an obsequious bow. “I will
deliver it personally if you will be so good as to supply your name
and address.”

“Countess Volodymyrovna, Des
Ballerines, rue Bonaparte.”

He rushed away to write it down
before his memory failed him.

“Is that one of the men from
last night?” she said, sotto voce.

“Yes – have you gone mad? That
work is rubbish! It isn’t worth a bean!”

“No, but a private conversation
with the artist is worth something.”

“Not that much!”

The artist returned moments
later with a rectangle of card attached to some string. The card
had the word SOLD written on it. Proudly, he hung it over a corner
of the canvas and a buzz immediately bestirred the sleepy little
gallery.