Paris Requiem (7 page)

‘They’ll release her after the cure,’ Raf said softly.

‘Will they? Will they?’ Her voice rose. ‘Don’t believe it. There’s no justice for us. None. And she’s so ashamed.’

She wiped her eyes fiercely with the back of her hand, then unfolded a cloth that was on the table. There was a slab of cheese in it. She cut it in half, wrapped the larger section and
handed it to James. ‘Yes, go and see her. Give her this from me. And tell Rachel. Please. I couldn’t get to her. Rachel will help her. Please.’

Raf’s face was a mask. He didn’t gainsay the woman. There was already too much misery here. Instead he offered words of comfort and politely refused the cheese, saying they would bring Louise a treat of their own. Meanwhile, James looked at the child. Surreptitiously he took a note from his wallet and with a pretence of bending to touch its small hand, he placed the money in the fold of the blanket.

Dusk had fallen on the lampless streets. Only their driver, in an attempt to ward off the grimness of the area, had lit his lanterns. He took off impatiently, whipping his horse into action. When they reached the glittering streets of a more familiar Paris, with its bustle of top-hatted men and silk-clad women, James felt they had entered a fairy tale. But these streets, he now knew, led to ones of which he had never been properly aware.

‘What is this infirmary Louise’s sister was referring to?’

‘When the police pick up their suspected streetwalkers, the women are subjected to a medical examination.’ Raf’s voice was terse. ‘A rather brutal one, I suspect. No bedside
manners
. If they have any kind of venereal disease they’re taken straight to the infirmary for treatment. It’s the Saint-Lazare prison infirmary. They never, of course, pick up the men. It’s as if men were too pure to spread anything. You can come there tomorrow with me, if you like. It’s too late now.’

He put up a staying hand to James’s next question. ‘Just read those articles, Jim. And think. Think about Olympe.’

‘When did you first meet her?’

Raf didn’t answer immediately. His face took on a dreamy look. ‘Just after Christmas. On stage. At the Minema. She danced … She stole the show.’

James’s mind sped, counting months, thinking of Raf’s
near acquaintance with a world he had barely imagined. He had always been so hungry for life in all its beauty and all its sordidness. His next words came haltingly. ‘And the woman in your apartment … the woman with the infant?’

‘What woman?’ Raf stared at him, then burst into raucous laughter. ‘Jim, you didn’t … You didn’t really think that Arlette and I … No, no. You’re too eager to add to the quantity of my sins. I’ve just been helping Arlette out. I’ve given her my
chambre de bonne
at the top of the house. She’s a friend of Touquet’s. He’s saved her, so to speak. And she does for me. But only in the housekeeping way. Jim, you’re as bad as the neighbours.’

They had reached his hotel and James stepped out with an audible sigh.

‘I won’t join you for dinner, Jim. Sorry. I’ve got a piece to catch up on.’ Raf held his eyes for a moment, then stretched out an awkward hand. ‘But I’m glad you’re here. Glad of your help,’ he mumbled.

James held on to his hand. ‘You’ll see Ellie, won’t you? She wants to see you. You’ll give her the gloves.’

‘Yes. Yes, of course.’

As the cab moved away, James saw him rubbing his
temples
again as if the weight of the world pressed on them and Olympe’s dead body had once more usurped his entire field of vision. It came to him that he, too, must once have looked like that, felt like that. This was hardly the fraternal common ground for which he might have wished.

T
he satchel Raf had left for his brother contained a welter of newspaper articles. There were clippings, whole pages or entire issues of a paper. They seemed to be in no particular order and after a quick rummage, James grew impatient and determined that he had to classify the material in some way if he was to begin to make sense of its content, let alone sniff out any clues to Olympe Fabre’s death.

He cleared the top of the hotel desk of any extraneous matter, turned on all the lights and with his spectacles on his nose and a sheet of writing paper in hand, he proceeded to
organise
the articles into rough piles, guided in the first instance by headlines. The piles spilled over onto the floor. Wishing for a dictionary, he began to read with a laborious slowness, which only gradually acquired momentum. He took meticulous notes. If nothing else this was the French refresher course he needed.

He started with the scattering of reviews which
mentioned
Olympe Fabre. She was variously characterised as the most talented dancer to burst on the Parisian stage in recent months or as a dramatic actress of great promise. Epithets
such as ‘mesmerising’, ‘beautiful, ‘of astonishing grace’ were in plentiful supply. There was a drawing showing her in the midst of a leap, some gauzy stream of fabric flowing with her, her arms raised, her hands buried in a welter of hair above her clear profile. James stared at this for a moment and tried to imagine the living woman. She was all of twenty-three he learned, far too young to die.

Three of the articles mentioned her Israelite origins. One of them spoke of the artistic heights we have come to expect from this talented race. Another talked of the plight of the Parisian theatre, when the highlights of an evening have to depend on the seductive skills of an upstart foreigner.

James made a note of these. He rued the fact that Raf had too often clipped away the names of papers and more
importantly
, the dates of the articles.

He turned next to a series of notices reporting on
mysterious
deaths. He sniffed Touquet’s hand in the first of these, though the article was unsigned. Highly rhetorical, it evoked the death by murder or suicide of the woman who had plunged to her end in the underground, the first death in the great transport system which would transform Parisian life. What was it in the tumultuous hub of modernity that Paris was which drove hapless young women to confront their maker in such violent ways? Was the life of these women worth so little that they could fling it away? Or were there foul forces at play which condemned them to a terrible end? It was the duty of the police to answer these all-important questions, before life for any and all women grew even more treacherous.

Other articles on the same case took up different positions. One contended that the death pointed a moral for all women: to fall into the morass of prostitution was to invite a violent end. Girls beware. Their proper place in life was in the safety of the family. Another chastised the police for failing to clear the vice-infested streets in preparation for the centennial year.

Wishing for more fact and less rhetoric, James took notes.

Three other deaths were the subject of the clippings. All were reported in the same vein of moralising hyperbole. But the deaths were terrible enough. One young woman, the daughter of a reputable Jewish shopkeeper, had been found in the Seine near Passy. She had been missing for ten days and her disappearance had been reported by her parents. The neighbours talked of elopement. They had seen her in the streets with a young man in military uniform. Police experts debated whether the marks and bruises on her neck were signs of strangling or the effects of clothes and jewellery. Despite the number of column inches devoted to speculation, no suspects had been found. Nor had the man in military uniform been located. The right-wing press characterised him as a fabrication by socialist neighbours, invented to cast aspersion on a sacred French institution.

Another woman had been found in the canal north of the République. Eventually discovered to be a listed prostitute, her death was quickly attributed to suicide and seemed to have generated little coverage.

Finally, a woman’s body had been found hidden in
shrubbery
not far from a waterside inn on the banks of the Seine in one of those outlying areas of Paris frequented by weekend countryside seekers. The woman had either fallen on a rock or been hit on the head with a heavy object. She was
unidentified
and there were no witnesses to her death. Because of the lack of identification, the police claimed she was one of the thousands of vagabonds who flocked to the city in search of work. Inquiries were still in progress.

James sighed. The cases seemed to him to be random. Apart from the fact that they were young and female, no thread tied the women together – not even the one of abject poverty. He put the clippings aside and turned to the next pile.

It was large and seemed mostly to contain articles from
two papers,
La Libre Parole
and
l’Intransigeant
. Their content consisted of fanatical diatribes against the Jews. The words spewed venom, characterising the Jews in one long, foul breath as traitors without national allegiance, rich, powerful and secret enemies of the state who despoiled it of its wealth, who were an ugly canker within, draining the blood of the nation, filling the streets with their dangerous, degenerate spawn, fomenting unrest and rebellion.

Feeling sullied, James shuffled the sheets to one side and pulled out his pipe. He didn’t altogether understand why Raf had given him all this – except perhaps to emphasise the sheer scale of irrational hatred which attended Olympe’s
people
. But he knew that already.

He suddenly thought of his mother and the telegram that had gone unanswered. He paced for a moment, then opened the window to take a breath of the cool evening air. The square was crowded with revelers. Massenet’s
La Navarraise
was playing at the opera. Not for him this world of pleasure. He returned to his desk and started on the next pile of clippings.

At its top lay a long article signed by Touquet. The piece and its fellows told the complicated story of a Republican deputy who had been involved in a heated scandal. The man had been arrested in the Palais Royal for making advances to a child. He had vigorously denied the charges. Asking to be freed from his parliamentary immunity, he had sued to clear his name, attesting that he was the victim of a police frame-up. Their one witness, it transpired, was a paid
homosexual
informer for the vice squad, which had fabricated the whole scheme because the deputy was a staunch Republican, a spokesman for reform – and a pro-Dreyfusard. The scandal, first surrounding the calumnied member of parliament, then the police, had enmeshed the country for months.

There followed a swathe of articles about the workings of the police force.

Two upper-class women had been picked up around
midnight
by a drunken police officer and charged with
clandestine
prostitution. They had been kept overnight in a squalid cell and subjected to a shaming medical examination the next day. Both were virgins. The brother of one of the women, a journalist, had launched a furious campaign against the excessive powers of the morality police which allowed them arbitrarily to victimise innocent women. The Chief of Police defended his officers. No apology was given.

In another case, a working woman had gone out in the middle of the night to try and find medication for her sick child. She too had been picked up and despite her protests,
incarcerated
. During the night, her child had died alone in bed. Threatened by police should she make the unjust arrest public, the woman had succumbed to delirium and been packed off to the Salpêtrière asylum where she died six months later.

In yet another story which covered hundreds of column inches and sparked contending editorials, a girl of thirteen and a slightly older woman were picked up late at night on the Champs Elysées and arrested by the vice squad for unlicensed prostitution. The girl, it transpired, was the granddaughter of the Head of the League for Human Rights. The older woman, her governess. The two had been to the theatre, and unable to find a carriage to take them home, had decided to walk. The Head of the League lodged a complaint, but withdrew it after a personal apology from the Chief of Police.

Editorials fulminated. This case was simply the tip of an iceberg. If women of this class could be arrested and subjected to such scabrous treatment, what about the
thousands
of unreported cases of poor, working women? Their treatment at the hands of the police was scandalous, yet no scandal made the headlines. Harassed, humiliated, subject to arbitrary arrest by men who handed out sentences without investigation or a call for witnesses, placed on the register of
prostitutes against their will, these women had been robbed of their rights as citizens. It was as if, for a whole sector of society, the
ancien régime
with its secret powers of arrest had never been transformed into a free Republic. Police powers had to be curbed. Such discrimination was scandalous.

‘The mark of the civilisation of a people lies in the
guarantees
it gives to each individual’s liberty and the respect it accords to women,’ one writer stated, in the crisp, clear prose James approved. Maybe this particular article was by Raf. He had no way of determining anything by style in French.

Other editorials exonerated the police and put forward public health and order arguments. Prostitution might be legal, but it had to be kept severely in check. Crime always came in its train. Syphilis was rampant, corrupting the blood of the nation, robbing it of manliness, so that the French would never be able to stand up to their long-term German enemy. A few random instances of police misconduct were worth the price of safe and decent streets and the health of the populace.

The police themselves defended their role as guardians of public order. The challenge they were set was a
monumental
one. They might make the occasional mistake, but if their powers were curbed, no citizen would be safe from assaults on their person or dignity in the streets of Paris.

James rubbed his eyes and leaned back in his chair. He was tired. The effort of reading in a foreign language didn’t help. Arguments which pitted the demands of public order against individual rights and liberties may not have been new to him, but the particular French situation, which brought them into play over the question of prostitution, was.

Why had Raf given him this particular set of clippings? Was he simply trying to fill James in on a set of concerns which had preoccupied him in this last while? Or did he think that the whole prostitution question really was somehow linked
to Olympe’s death. He tried to ease himself into his brother’s mind. He had to acknowledge it was now quite foreign to him.

The most obvious relation between Olympe’s death and these articles was that she had been picked up by the police and following the shame of the event had taken her own life. But even with his small knowledge, he didn’t think Olympe was a character to be so easily cowed.

Perhaps Raf suspected, without quite admitting it to
himself
, that Olympe had – when she was still Rachel – been somehow linked to the prostitute’s underworld, that some figure from the past had come back to haunt her, even perhaps some crooked policeman who threatened her with exposure in her new-found fame. A struggle had ensued and Olympe had met her death. To build up such a case, to locate a possible suspect, would mean tracking back through Olympe’s life. The girl, Louise Boussel, would be a help in that, which was probably why Raf was so keen to interview her.

James returned to his reading. There were more stories of police harassment. Beside one which detailed an actress’s complaint about summary arrest by the vice squad while returning late one night from the theatre, he found a row of asterisks, so savagely scratched into the page, that the paper had been torn. In that tear, he felt Raf’s emotion, as surely as if the marks had been ripped into his skin.

The ache still with him, he leafed through more pages,
hurriedly
now, stopping only when a headline about a shop girl caught his eye. As he read the poignant story of this young woman, she took on the form and face of the shy little milliner they had interviewed that afternoon. He could see her walking home in the rain after a long day’s work, could feel the edge of tiredness which made her slow her steps, pause, only to find herself approached by an ordinary man, suited, soft-spoken, who offered to accompany her in the darkness. In her sweet, naïve way, the girl accepted. Better the
protection of company, than this solitary trek through the night streets.

Some ten minutes along the way, she finds herself charged with soliciting out of bounds and without the necessary licence by this policeman in plainclothes. She protests her innocence, but is nonetheless manhandled and arrested, subjected to some thirty-six hours in the company of lewd women who rail against her for taking away their legitimate trade, who tell her she is worse than a whore. The next day, she suffers the mortification of a sanitary examination which she experiences as tantamount to rape. She cannot forget the indignity of this even when she is released with a clean bill of health. When she tells her boyfriend the story, he flays her with suspicion, takes on all the punishing ferocity of the police. Two days later, her body is fished out of the canal.

His mind reeling, James went to lie on the bed. His hands were clammy. His thoughts moved into prohibited realms of their own volition. He didn’t want to remember that shameful episode, nor its dire aftermath. But the scenes burst upon him with all their original force, like storm clouds that had hovered too long.

He was on his honeymoon. So long ago. Over a decade. Had been on his honeymoon for some two weeks already. With Maisie. Maisie with her blonde delicacy and those
long-lashed
gentle eyes which looked up at him with innocent admiration. Fourteen days, the last four of which had been here in Paris. He had so wanted to introduce Maisie to the city he remembered so fondly. The family had spent part of his sixteenth year here, a protracted holiday his father had long promised himself and them. James had adored the city, had woken to manhood amidst its sights and smells, its dense history and bizarre particularities. His French had been laid down in those months, together with a host of impressions he now wanted to share with Maisie.