In the Shadows of Paris (The Predator Of Batignolles) (6 page)

He had left his print works in Petit-Montrouge in the late afternoon in order to arrive at this fellow’s place by seven o’clock, leaving himself plenty of time to pop in and warn Marthe. The thing was not to change his habits under any circumstances. He’d walked up Passage des Thermopyles and into the haberdasher’s. It was empty. He could hear Marthe stirring her pots in the adjoining kitchen.

‘Is that you, Paul?’

‘I’m just going to meet a client who has ordered some posters. Mmm, that smells delicious! What are you cooking?’

‘Jugged hare.’

Paul Theneuil had taken a swig of Sancerre, changed his jacket and grabbed an umbrella.

‘Put a plate aside for me, dear.’

His ‘dear’ had blown him a kiss and gone on adding white wine to her roux.

The heavens had decided to open just as Paul Theneuil stepped onto an omnibus. He was a stocky, coarse-looking man of about sixty. His broad face gave the impression of being covered in stubble even when it was clean-shaven. His thin, straight hair was greying at the temples and he wore a pince-nez on his red, bulbous nose. The typesetters and apprentices called him ‘Ugly mug’ behind his back.

The rain had eased off. The courtyard and the street beyond were empty. Paul Theneuil realised that the man had not specified whether to meet him indoors or out. After that downpour he was most likely inside. All the better, it would make his job easier. He reached for the latch. The door opened onto a stack of empty boxes. Light filtered dimly through the grimy windows. He glanced around the room, taking in its contents: a desk covered in papers, two chairs, shelves lined with files and a workbench running along one wall.

‘Hello! Is anybody there?’

He heard the sound of breathing.

Something moved to his left.

Paul Theneuil swung round.

Wednesday 5 July

As he left Professor Mortier’s house, Joseph aimed a kick at a dustbin. He was livid. They’d sent him halfway across Paris to deliver a dictionary of Ancient Greek with only sixty centimes in his pocket! Before Iris’s betrayal, he would have been allowed to take a cab, but nowadays Monsieur Mori treated him as though he had fallen from grace. He walked up to the first in a row of omnibuses. A puckish-looking conductor was sitting on the platform puffing on a cigarette while he stared at his shoes.

‘Have I time to buy a newspaper?’ Joseph enquired.

The man spat without letting go of his fag end.

‘We’re leaving in two minutes, lad.’

In his hurry, Joseph bumped into an old man buying a copy of
Le Figaro
from the news vendor.

‘You oaf!’

Joseph muttered an apology and, his
Passe-partout
under his arm, ran back to the omnibus, which was just moving off. His only thought was to find a seat, open his newspaper and make the journey in comfort. He knew the route off by heart: the boulevards and then, as they neared the centre, the more fashionable streets.

‘Hot, isn’t it?’ a man remarked.

‘Dreadful time of year.’

‘The newspapers forecast rain.’

‘Well, you can’t always believe what you read…’

Some bored-looking firemen on duty were leaning out of the mezzanine at the Bibliothèque Nationale, watching the traffic below. Through half-open windows, public servants could be seen busily idling. One, however, was sharpening a pencil.

The clippety-clop of the horses’ hooves echoed as they passed under the archway leading to Cour du Carrousel. Two men alighted.

Leaden clouds presaged a dull day. A passing dray poked its nose in above the platform. The conductor cried out, ‘Two-legged animals only, my beauty! Room for two more downstairs, numbers seven and eight!’

Ding a ling a ling.

With a deafening clatter, the yellow omnibus turned the corner into a wide avenue. At every stop, people clamoured and waved their numbered tickets at the driver. The ‘full’ sign was put up. The conductor, who’d seen it all before, said in a jaded voice, ‘With omnibuses as with books – you never know what you’ll find inside.’

Then he pulled the cord to alert the driver, who reined in his horses to allow another faster omnibus to overtake.

‘It’s going to bucket down!’ the driver called out.

‘It’ll make the grass grow!’ the conductor cried back. ‘Louvre, Châtelet, Odéon, room for one more upstairs. Number six!’

On the pavement, a score of disappointed faces looked up at the sky and decided it was perhaps a good thing there was no room for them on the upper deck. At last number six came forward.

Ding a ling a ling.

‘Get your
Figaro, Intransigeant, Petit Journal
!’

A news vendor made a few speedy sales.

Joseph opened his
Passe-partout
, handily just as number six, an enormous woman laden with shopping baskets, stepped on board. Nobody offered her their seat.

‘It’s no good, Madame,’ the conductor observed. ‘You’ll have to go upstairs. Here, I’ll give you a shove. Heave-ho!’

Joseph shrank into his corner, feeling deliciously guilty, and skimmed the headlines.

Guy De La Brosse’s Body Found

The remains of Guy de la Brosse, founder of our Natural History Museum, have been discovered in an abandoned cellar – formerly the museum’s zoological gallery…

‘Tickets please. What the blazes is going on here?’

The Plaisance–Hôtel de Ville omnibus was struggling up Boulevard Saint-Germain, blocked by a noisy crowd. Stuck at the back of the vehicle, Joseph was thinking that he must go back to writing his novel,
Thule’s Golden Chalice,
when his attention was suddenly drawn to page two:

Enamellist Murdered

There are still no clues in the case of the murder victim, Léopold Grandjean, stabbed by an unknown assailant in Rue Chevreul on 21 June. The sole witness is unable to describe the killer, having only seen him…

The large woman with the shopping baskets had come back downstairs and was complaining loudly about young people today. Joseph stood up reluctantly, and with a polite gesture offered her his seat.

‘Madame, allow me…’

He pushed his way over to the platform and listened idly to a couple of servant girls chatting.

‘Why have we slowed down?’ the plumper of the two asked the other.

‘I haven’t a clue. I expect it’s those good-for-nothing students demonstrating again. It’s all very well railing against society, but who does all the work? Us, that’s who!’ exclaimed her companion, a pretty brunette, who winked brazenly at Joseph.

‘Are they still warring at your house, then?’ she asked her friend.

‘I’ll say. Madame’s husband has a mistress who wants him to leave her and understandably Madame’s afraid she’ll be out on her ear.’

The demonstrators’ angry shouts began to crescendo.

‘Sparks will fly,’ the plump one said.

‘And at my place, too,’ retorted the brunette. ‘What with Monsieur’s saucy remarks and his straying hands…’

A sudden jolt ended the young women’s intimate exchange. A group of students had stopped the team of three horses, and, despite the stream of invective from the driver, was now leading them into Rue de l’Échaudé. The passengers downstairs panicked and tried to leave but were blocked by a flood of people descending from the upper deck.

‘What’s all the fuss about?’ the brunette shouted.

‘It’s that cold fish Senator René Bérenger.
¹⁴
He’s got them all up in arms by denouncing their costumes at the “Quat’zarts Ball”.
¹⁵
Licentious he said they were,’ a lanky fellow announced placidly from behind his newspaper.

‘What’s licentious?’

‘Pornographic, Mademoiselle. The Guardian of Public Virtue would have done better to cover his eyes. Nothing annoys the electorate more than encroachments on its freedom to go about in a state of undress,’ he added, giving Joseph a knowing wink.

Joseph blushed and made his way to the edge of the platform. Next to a kiosk in flames, a tram had been derailed and turned into a barricade. The boulevard was a battlefield. On one side demonstrators were sacking shops and shouting, ‘Down with Bérenger! To hell with Bérenger!’ and, on the other, the police were rolling up their capes ready to use as batons.

With the conductor’s help, the driver fought off the assailants and regained control of his horses. The omnibus took off with a loud clatter down Rue de l’Ancienne-Comédie, only to be surrounded once more when it reached the Faculty of Medicine.

‘Off you get, you sightseers!’ yelled a scruffy-looking individual.

The alarmed passengers scattered, regrouping around the statue of Paul Broca. The driver managed to unharness his horses and led them off at a trot to Carrefour de l’Odéon. Flattened against a Wallace fountain, Joseph looked on as the omnibus was pushed onto its side. Flames instantly began devouring the inside to loud cheers. A police charge dispersed the arsonists.

Without knowing quite how he had got there, Joseph found himself hurrying along the pavement of Rue Dupuytren, muttering abuse at the blasted students, the forces of order, his bosses and the world in general. Rue Monsieur-le-Prince was still peaceful. He leant against a lamp-post to collect himself.

‘Is it revolution?’ he asked a carter delivering vegetables in crates.

‘Could be. Someone died yesterday. The mounted guards of the 4th Central Brigade killed a shop worker having a drink outside Brasserie d’Harcourt. There’s going to be trouble all right. Gee-up, off we go!’ he cried, clambering back onto his cart.

Joseph made his way along the street to the bookbinder Pierre Andrésy’s shop. Monsieur Mori had asked him to stop off there and pick up a Persian manuscript.

‘Talk about a constitutional! I deserve a bonus!’ he grumbled.

He was very surprised to find the door locked; the shop was usually open at this time of the morning. He stepped away from the door and peered through the narrow shop window with its samples of morocco, vellum and shagreen, then pressed his face up to the window of the storerooms next door. He could dimly make out the percussion presses and an assortment of other tools, but there was no sign of Pierre Andrésy.

‘This really is the limit!’ he muttered to himself, irate at being forced to come back later.

Was there no end to the humiliations he must suffer? He felt like the victim of some monstrous plot. Sulking, he walked back up Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, turned into Rue de Vaugirard and entered the Luxembourg Gardens.

Who would have believed that such violent clashes were taking place only a stone’s throw from these peaceful avenues. The month of July was sweltering that year, and ladies everywhere carried silk and gauze parasols with mother-of-pearl knob handles, resembling tiny iridescent suns twirling beneath a blue sky.

By the Medici fountain, Joseph passed two young women in foulard dresses out for a stroll. The prettier of the two was slender, olive-skinned and wore a large red hat with ribbon spilling down the back. She was the spitting image of Iris! He gazed at her figure. A silent grief overwhelmed him. All was lost. He wished he were dead! He smiled bitterly, like a character in a melodrama. Slumped on a bench, he watched the ballet of the goldfish in the water. He singled out one with a purple spot between its gills, and called it Ajax.

‘I’ll never marry, Ajax. I’ll have mistresses, but I won’t become attached to any of them; they’ll suffer. Oh, roll your eyes all you like – you’re not the marrying kind either! It’s just not worth it. What’s that? Be magnanimous? Forgive and forget? That’s what she wants! Never, do you hear! I’ll never join the ranks of the cuckolds. If you read more you’d know that
woman is fickle, men must beware.
¹⁶
This affair has already caused me to neglect my second novel and leave Frida von Glockenspiel in the lurch…
¹⁷
I refuse to give up literature! Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die,’ he concluded in a mournful voice as Ajax descended to explore the depths of the pond.

He rose to his feet, dejected, and continued his soliloquy, hoping to blot out the pain of his broken heart.

‘And to think that palm reader told me I was blessed by Venus. What twaddle! Anyway, I prefer it this way. I value my independence.’

His heart was pounding and his eyes were moist with tears. He dried them furiously. Between him and his resolve stood the shadow of a young woman with almond eyes who filled him with a passionate longing.

A woman cyclist in a hazel-coloured homemade outfit of shorts gathered just below the knee and a waisted bodice that highlighted her plump figure rode into Quai Malaquais. She slowed to a halt outside 18, Rue des Saints-Pères. She was preparing to dismount when she noticed a row of faces peering out at her from the Elzévir bookshop. There was a slight kerfuffle before the cyclist was dragged inside.

‘How can you be so reckless, Fräulein Becker?’ cried Victor.

‘Have you suddenly become just like all those male misogynists, Monsieur Legris? A bicycle means freedom for a woman. It is a legitimate way of escaping the supervision of her family. It also gives her an opportunity to modify her dress, which is why men like you frown on women cyclists. You’re afraid we’ll wear the trousers. Will you please let go of my bicycle!’

‘You’ve got it all wrong, Mademoiselle Becker,’ Victor assured her, grasping her bicycle with both hands and wheeling it to the back of the shop. ‘It’s nothing to do with that.’

‘What is it to do with then? Monsieur Mori?’

Kenji Mori took refuge next to the fireplace.

‘The body of a man killed during the clashes in the Latin Quarter yesterday has just been taken to Hôpital de la Charité,’ he replied, placing a hand on the bust of Molière.

‘I was there, I walked slap bang into a squad of municipal guards coming out of Rue Jacob,’ bleated Euphrosine Pignot. ‘I said to myself: “The Uhlans are coming. It’s the Siege all over again!”’