Murder in Montparnasse (9 page)

‘Never mind,’ said Phryne, patting his hand.

‘True, it is of no importance. Ma soeur, will that suffice?’ he asked. The elder lady nodded and got to her feet.

‘No soufflés?’ she asked delicately.

‘Non,’ said M’sieur Anatole. ‘One needs a light heart for soufflés and my heart is not light.’

He poured another cup of the fine, fragrant coffee and sighed. He looked at Phryne.

‘Have you found my Elizabeth? No, don’t tell me, I can see that you have not.’

‘No, but I have been investigating,’ said Phryne. ‘I met her father today. He drew a gun on me.’

‘Ah, that Hector, what a quick temper he has! Truly, it will get him into trouble one of these weeks.’

‘Truly,’ agreed Phryne. ‘I convinced him not to shoot me, which is always an advantage. And I am working on the matter and I will find Elizabeth, I assure you. Also, I have mentioned to a little bird that this end of Fitzroy Street might bear a little more policing. Now I need to know more about you and yours. Would you show me your establishment, m’sieur? I have not even met all your people.’

‘There are few outside the family,’ said M’sieur Anatole. ‘But come in. The kitchen is quiet now, just between lunch being cleared away and dinner preparations starting.’

He led the way through a swinging shutter beside the zinc counter into a large room which seemed to be entirely full of white coats, tall hats, steam and a reek of boiling washing-up water and soap; sour as old milk. Phryne’s nose wrinkled involuntarily.

‘This is Jean-Paul,’ said M’sieur Anatole.

‘Madame,’ Jean-Paul bent and kissed her hand, holding it a little too long. He had clearly also graduated from Charming Rich Ladies School.

‘This is Henri, my cousin.’

Stocky, dark Henri took her hand in a grasp greased lightly with chicken fat and kissed it.

‘And this?’

‘Oh, that is just Sam. He is our washer-up.’

A straw-polled boy ducked his head and grunted something. He was dressed in a flannel shirt which had evidently belonged to an older relative, and a pair of washed-white moleskins. When Phryne bent to look into his face he turned away. Not before she had seen a livid scar puckering his face, as though someone had tried to gouge out his eye with something curved—say, a bottle. The face was young but mutilated, the lip drawn up into a permanent sneer.

Not by one word or surprised declaration did Phryne let it be known that she was fairly sure that Billy the Match was working in the kitchen at Café Anatole.

Still, he was doing a good job with the washing up. Those plates were being scoured to within an inch of their patterns under the steel wool held in goose-skin wrinkled hands, red with heat and suds.

‘Sam doesn’t talk much, does he?’ she asked.

‘Il est un sourd-muet,’ explained Henri. ‘Deaf-mute. But a good industrious boy, nonetheless. Works hard. And sometimes you’d swear he could understand every word. But he can’t, of course.’

‘Of course,’ echoed Phryne. ‘How long have you had him?’

‘He came here looking for work a few days ago. He had a little sign, all written out. And we shall keep him—eh, my brave boy?’ Henri patted the shoulder under the checked shirt.

‘Hello,’ Phryne signed, holding her hands under the boy’s downcast face. He lifted his hands out of the water long enough to return the greeting, clumsily. Billy had picked up some skills in prison, then.

She followed the chef back into the shiny bright bistro and allowed him to pour her more coffee.

‘I want to ask your advice, now,’ she said. ‘I want you to remember Paris for me, at the end of the Great War.’

‘That is a sad place to send me,’ he objected.

‘But it is where I must go,’ she answered.

‘What I really remember,’ he said slowly, ‘is the funerals. I was living in Montparnasse in the Avenue du Maine and they went past all day, a dark parade, a sad procession, and the bell tolled—oh, all the day.’

‘The influenza epidemic,’ agreed Phryne. ‘When they were still having funerals, in November, I walked after the coffin of my dear friend Adelie, out from the Rue de Gaîté and into the Avenue, so slowly, so sad. And the cemetery like a city of the dead, all those little stone houses for the families. I had not thought that death had undone so many . . .’

It was very cold. The wind cut through Phryne’s new leather coat and did not bother slowing in its course through her for minor matters like bones. Rain dripped off her only hat and ran down her face, colder than tears. Just near Professeur Larousse they were burying Adelie, who had survived the Great War, ambulance crashes, a near-direct hit with a shell and the armistice celebrations in Brussels, where the triumphant soldiery had brewed a victory cocktail made of rubbing alcohol and absinthe. But the ’flu had made an end of her.

Phryne sniffed. Standing at her elbow a young man with a clever, brown, shrewd face groped in his pocket and gave her a handkerchief. She mopped and blew. Poor Adelie. Phryne had caught la grippe early in May and thought herself immune to this ’flu. She was not feeling endangered, just hollow and sad, although so many had died in her sight, even under her hands, that she had thought that she had no feeling left.

‘She gave me her last piece of chocolate once,’ she sobbed.

‘She was a generous person,’ he agreed.

‘You don’t understand. She gave me her last piece of chocolate when we were starving hungry, filthy, trying to dig out a bogged ambulance full of shell-shocked men under fire. The stretcher cases were all screaming. I couldn’t stand it any longer. And she gave me her last piece of chocolate.’

‘Not just generous, then,’ murmured the man. ‘Heroic generosity.’

If there had been any trace of irony in his voice, Phryne would never have spoken to him again. There was not. The priest concluded his address. Earth landed on Adelie’s coffin not with a rustle but a terribly final, soggy thud.

‘Come,’ he said to her, laying one hand on her shoulder. ‘The friends of Adelie are going to drink to her. Will you come?’

‘Where are you going?’

‘La Closerie de Lilas. It is quiet. Also the girls from Au Chien Qui Fume will cross the road for this once.’

‘What is your name?’ she asked, slipping an ungloved hand into the crook of his arm. He smelt of Gauloises and cognac, a male scent.

‘You are Lady Phryne Fisher,’ he said in his almost comic sibilant Auvergne accent. ‘And I am René Dubois. A musician.’

Phryne blew her nose again and looked into his brown eyes and fell desperately, completely and all at once in love.

‘I fell in love at a funeral in that cemetery,’ she said to M’sieur Anatole.

‘They say it is Life, struggling against death. I myself was once violently seduced by a widow when her husband’s grave was just covered. I was strangely surprised, but what would you? A grieving woman should not be refused. But it was grey, my Paris, in 1918. That was a long winter, colder than the grave.’

Not cold in René’s bed, where he had taught her many new and interesting skills, huddled under all of their combined blankets and her leather coat. Not cold, though frost caked the panes of the tall wood-framed windows of the atelier in Impasse d’Enfer. Not cold even though milk froze in bowls and water in taps and even the goatherd’s pipe, as he led his nannies up the cobbled streets, sounded wavery and distant in the icy air.

She recalled the taste of goat’s milk, drunk blood-warm from the bowl, when the street was so cold that the milk appeared to be smoking. Cold? No. The only cold thing in Paris that year had been René Dubois’ heart, and it took her a long time to find that out.

‘And nothing to eat,’ the chef went on. ‘Turnips, potatoes. Some dry legumes, haricots, lentilles. Nothing to cook but a pot-au-feu with whatever ingredients we could find. No sugar, no cream, no honey, no game, no chickens. Not even mushrooms. It was when I had to pay five francs—five francs!—for a piece of pig which would have been thrown out in disgust at a beggars’ banquet that I decided to leave. Challenges, yes, a good cook needs challenges, but one must have ingredients.’

‘Eels,’ said Phryne. ‘I remember eels, mussels, once even a turbot. Bread made out of pease flour. But there was a lot of army surplus tinned food. We used to feast on sardines and sop up the oil with that crumbly bread. We even made rissoles out of bully beef.’

M’sieur Anatole shuddered. ‘Madame was very young.’ He strove to find an excuse for Phryne. ‘And madame was in love.’

‘Yes, I was. But there was a scandal late that year,’ she said, trying to jog the old man’s memory. ‘Something—I can’t recall—was it about a train?’

‘But of course,’ he said. ‘Jean-Jacques! Bring me the cognac! I cannot remember the sorrows of the past on coffee! The train, yes, you were there, madame, you must remember.’

Jean-Jacques plunked down the bottle and two glasses.

‘Why do you need cognac to bear the past?’ he demanded, filling two grudging measures of fine golden spirit.

‘You wait until you have some sorrows of your own, my boy,’ M’sieur Anatole chided him. ‘You’ll start getting them just after the little mouse has taken your last baby tooth.’

Jean-Jacques demonstrated Sulky French Waiter and flounced away. The swinging doors banged behind him. Phryne smiled. There was somehow no real malice in the young man. His uncle clearly felt the same.

‘He will be a good restaurateur, that one,’ he said comfortably. ‘He has the élan. And his twin brother Jean-Paul. Some have it and some don’t. You were asking me about the scandal. It was a year of scandals, indeed. Food riots. Women were shot outside the Presidential Palace, demanding bread for their children. But the one you are thinking of was the scandale fou about the painter, Sarcelle.’

‘Of course,’ said Phryne. ‘He was just beginning to sell . . .’

‘And he ended his days under a train at the Gare du Nord,’ said M’sieur Anatole. ‘The picture dealer Dupont was arrested, you recall?’

‘And freed for want of evidence.’ It was coming back to Phryne. ‘And there was something about his wife . . .’

‘Could not have been in the Gare du Nord,’ said M’sieur Anatole. ‘Was in a Paris office, trying to get a travel exemption to visit her sister in Toulouse before her baby was born. Went there, I believe, in the end. Did you know her?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Phryne, as it all came flooding back. ‘I knew her. Véronique, that was her name. She was very fond of Pierre Sarcelle. I never believed that she had anything to do with his death.’

‘But several persons suggested that he might have been pushed,’ M’sieur Anatole said, relishing this safely dead scandal. ‘Sarcelle owed the picture dealer Dupont un mille. Dupont had been heard to say that Sarcelle would only be able to pay him back if he had the good taste to be deceased—thus his pictures would be more valuable.’

‘A pleasantry, perhaps,’ said Phryne.

‘The examining magistrate was not convinced, but he had no proof. A good artist, that Sarcelle. Something of the school of Cézanne, but his colour—I thought his colour was better.’

‘So did I,’ said Phryne. ‘I have some paintings of his. Nudes and landscapes. I sat for him. You must come and see them. Now I must be getting along. Thank you for your coffee and your company,’ she said, and Jean-Jacques bowed her out.

‘That one—she has some sorrow on her mind,’ he commented, watching her start the great car and pull out into the traffic.

‘Ask me again,’ said M’sieur Anatole, ‘when la petite souris has called for the last time.’

Annoyed at this reference to his baby teeth, Jean-Jacques didn’t reply.

Phryne rang her own front door bell, wondering if anyone would answer. Her house was destabilised and she did not like the feeling. However, she had the address of the sacked Chambers butler and she would call him and arrange an appointment. She was not going to give way on this point. Lin Chung stayed.

Mr Butler admitted her without a flicker of an I-have-just-given-notice eyelash.

‘Miss Fisher,’ he said. ‘The post is on your desk, the young ladies have arrived home from school and are in the kitchen, Miss Dot is in the smaller parlour and Detective Inspector Robinson has called and says he will call again tonight. There are, otherwise, several messages.’

‘Yes?’

‘The Mayor was so good as to return your telephone call and assures you that you should find all the invitations you requested in your hands tomorrow,’ he told her.

‘Good,’ said Phryne, not to be drawn. She shrugged off her coat and Mr Butler took it carefully.

‘Mr Lin left a message that he would bring his . . . young lady to dinner tomorrow night, if you please.’

‘I please,’ said Phryne stonily. ‘Please call him and tell him so.’

‘And Mrs Butler and I are wondering if you might have . . . softened your firm line in this matter.’

‘No,’ responded Phryne. ‘Is that all?’

‘Yes, Miss Fisher,’ Mr Butler said, with just the suspicion of a sigh.

Phryne went to find Dot, who was sitting in front of a small bright fire, knitting. The thread looked like fine silk and the small needles were moving with unthinking efficiency.

‘Miss Phryne! You look cold! Come and sit down here. Can I get you some tea?’

‘No thanks, Dot. I’m full of coffee. It’s been a busy day. I’ve been threatened by a racing identity with a gun at least ten times the calibre of his brain and then I was reminiscing about Paris with M’sieur Anatole.’

‘That would have been nice,’ said Dot.

‘No, no it wasn’t. Dot, do the Butlers really mean to leave?’

‘Yes, miss. Mr Butler’s got a real bee in his bonnet about appearing in a divorce case. Mrs Butler’s very upset. It doesn’t worry her, and she keeps telling him he’s a fool. They’ve been quarrelling all day, the milk’s curdled, and the hens have stopped laying. It’s been murder in the chookhouse all day. I’ve been hiding in here. They only stopped fighting when the girls came home, and I don’t know how long that’s going to last.’

‘Are you worried about a divorce case, Dot?’ asked Phryne, staring into the fire.

‘Don’t you think it, miss,’ said Dot stoutly. ‘I’m staying with you. I never heard such nonsense. But that’s men for you.’

‘Yes,’ said Phryne, suddenly feeling much more comfortable. ‘So it is.’