The Curse of the Grand Guignol (30 page)

The warehouse provided the
perfect cover. It was close to the rue des Abbesses where the first
victim was found, and again the fourth victim in the Cimetiere du
Calvaire, and again the fifth outside Café Bistro. The murderer was
familiar with the area around Montmartre and would have known the
furniture would be left outside on the pavement.

The murderer did not use his
hand-cart for victim number three, Madame Hertzinger. It would have
been too far to go from Montmartre to the Marais pushing a cart.
But he didn’t need to. He did not need to transport her body. He
killed her on the spot and strung her up from her own balcony.
Whether he intended her to fall is a matter for conjecture. He
probably arrived at her door dressed as someone respectable,
perhaps even himself.

No hand-cart would have been
used for murder number two either. It was in the Bois de Vincennes.
The murderer would have killed his victim in the park and then
dragged it to where he wanted to string it up.

On that logic, the Trocadero was
likewise too far from Montmartre. But how else would the murderer
get his victim across the construction site to the windmill?

“I hope you’re right about
this?” said Inspector de Guise. “We’re on the trail of Crespigny
but I don’t think he’s our murderer.”

She was beginning to doubt
herself. “Tell me again what Pascal saw at the theatre.”

“He stepped out to the foyer for
a cigarette. He recognized the man he bumped into on the night of
the fifth murder.”

“This is the first I have heard
of Pascal,” she said with more than a trace of exasperation. “You
will need to elaborate, inspector.”

He explained about the event,
including the bloody hand print on the lamp-post, the red-tinged
water trough, and the conversation between the policeman and the
‘decent’ man he had met. “I believe Pascal bumped into the
murderer. The man was coming out of rue de Brouillard, a short-cut
no decent man would take at night, not even if her was running
late. I believe he had changed out of his rag-grubber’s clothes
after dumping the body of victim number five outside Café Bistro.
He was on his way home. He had possibly vomited just before bumping
into Pascal. Either he was sick from the stench in the alley
because he is not used to it or he was physically sick from
mutilating the corpse.”

“Yes,” she agreed, recalling the
rotten smell of the rag-grubber’s yard. “He is not a maniac who
kills for the thrill of it.”

“Pascal said something
interesting when he finished recounting the tale. He said his
wife’s opinion cannot be trusted because she imagines the rag and
bone man is Napoleon. Now, Madame Leveret strikes me as an
intelligent woman not prone to fantasy. I think it is possible she
has seen this man in both guises – as the rag-grubber and as
himself.”

“I agree with your deduction,
inspector, now tell me exactly what Pascal said to you at the
theatre when he recognized this man.”

“He stepped out to the foyer. He
saw a man on the stairs. The man seemed to start at the sight of
him. That’s when Pascal recognized him. He ran to summon me.”

“And yet the man waited. Why
didn’t he bolt immediately?”

“Well, Pascal looks vacant at
the best of times. The man may have felt perfectly safe. Or else he
was waiting for someone to join him for a cigarette. That sort of
thing. When I entered the foyer the man spotted me and bolted down
the stairs. I didn’t get a good look, as I said, but I swear it
wasn’t Crespigny. That’s when I bumped into you.”

“Pascal said he saw the man come
out from one of the booths?”

“I questioned him on that point
as we were speaking to the cab drivers. He didn’t actually see the
man emerge from a booth but where else could the man have come
from?”

“I emerged from the top of the
stairs and I did not come out of a booth,” she reminded. “There is
a door that leads back-stage down some stairs.”

“It could have been anyone from
the theatre then.”

“Not Laszlo and Salvador. I saw
them as I was leaving. They could not have run ahead of me. Not
Hilaire or Vincent either. They were on stage.”

“What about the third
circassien?”

“Felix.”

“Is he the one who did the show
with you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it could have been him.
What about the director? Did you see Serge Davidov as you were
leaving?”

She shook her head.

“What about Monsignor Delgardo?
Dr Watson told me he keeps a private booth next to la
marquise.”

“Yes, I suppose it could have
been him. But he’s not tall.”

“To Pascal, anyone over five
foot is tall. And black always makes a person look taller and
leaner than they really are. Wasn’t the librarian, Monsieur
Radzival, at the theatre tonight?”

“Yes, he is sharing the booth of
la marquise.”

He expelled a weighty breath.
“It could have been any one of them and hopefully we are about to
find out. A murderer under pressure will slip up and leave a clue.
We know a lot about him. We know almost everything except his name.
Here we are at the Trocadero. I can see the windmill from here. I
know there’s no point telling you to wait in the cab. Stay close,
that’s all I can say.”

Fedir got the fright of his life
when he decided to check on Xenia to see if she was still sleeping
and spotted what he thought was a burglar creeping through the
French window that beamed moonlight onto the landing of the
stairwell. He was even more surprised when it turned out to be
Kiki.

“What…?” was all he managed to
get out, stupefied.

She recognized the bulky blond
Ukrainian from his visits to Café Bistro, of course, but the shock
of meeting him in the house of the Countess came like a slap to the
face.

For a full half hour she had
stood in the shadow of the opposite doorway across the road and
watched Des Ballerines. All the rooms at the front of the
pied-a-terre were in darkness. There was just one candle burning in
a dormer window poking out of the mansard roof. She knew enough
about grand houses to know that’s where the servants slept.

Shimmying up the drain pipe was
child’s play. The little wrought iron balconies provided convenient
staging posts. The architectural pediments could have been designed
specifically for acrobats. Balancing on the edge of a roof four
stories above the ground caused no alarm to a
saltimbanque
accustomed to heights.

Without difficulty, she had
scaled the high walls and the tiled roof and dropped down
soundlessly into the courtyard garden on the other side to scan for
an open window. There was a French door, wide open, curtains
wafting in the breeze, two stories up. More child’s play.

“What are you doing here?” she
said, straightening her skirt and smoothing back her hair now that
she had recovered from the terrible shock.

“I live here. What are
you
doing here?”

Kiki was a born actress. She had
been playing a role of one sort or another for most of her life.
She went straight into acting mode. “The Countess sent me.”

“Countess Volodymyrovna?”

“Yes.”

“Why? What for?”

“She’s in danger. She needs you
to come right away.”

“Come where?”

“The theatre on rue Ballu.”

Torn between his duty to his
mistress and his duty to his sister, he began shaking his head. “I
cannot leave Xenia.”

“Xenia?”

“My sister?”

Oh, so that was the situation.
She understood better. She had already noted that he was dressed
differently, not in the shabby garments of the oppressed worker ,
the heavy coat and grubby boots he had worn to Café Bistro, and not
in the formal vestments of la marquise’s servants, but not a
gentleman either, not like Davidov or even the raffish Crespigny.
If his sister was the Countess’s maid it was highly likely he was
her manservant. Clothes were costumes too. She understood that
better than anyone.

“There is no time to lose,” she
said urgently.

Agitated, confused, he glanced
back at the French window and his brow creased. “I don’t
understand.”

But she understood perfectly. “I
knocked on the door and no one answered.”

“I didn’t hear anyone knocking.”
He wasn’t questioning her so much as questioning himself. Why
didn’t he hear the door? Worry for his sister had made him dull.
His hearing was dull. His thinking was dull. He secured the French
window.

Her brain was not at all dull.
“I didn’t want to disturb the Arab?”

“Arab?”

“The one with the dagger.”

“Mahmoud.”

“Yes, him.”

“Is he the danger? Is that why
the Countess sent you?”

She nodded quickly. “You must go
to the theatre at once. I can sit with your sister.”

“This way,” he said gratefully,
leading her up the last flight of stairs and into a small room
where a single candle burned on the window sill and a woman with a
thick golden plait lay sleeping peacefully in a box bed. “If she
wakes,” he began, but she cut him off.

“Don’t worry. I will know what
to do. You must hurry. The Countess needs you.”

She heard him thumping rapidly
down the stairs, taking them by twos, and removed the vial from her
pocket. A few more minutes. She would give him time to hail a
passing hansom. There was no rush. She had waited years to get rid
of Coco. Darling Coco! How everyone adored Coco! It was so easy to
loosen the string on the trapeze when no one was looking, and even
easier to cast Laszlo as the guilty party, especially when he
blamed himself. Giving her sister white absinthe mixed with opium
was easy too. Here, have some more to ease the pain. Poor
darling!

It should have been Kiki et
Coco! Not the other way around. Coco was never as pretty, never
ethereal, not like a butterfly.

And then that stupid woman had
walked into the cell just as she was tipping a bit of laudanum down
Coco’s throat to finally put an end to it. She couldn’t go to
America if Coco was still alive. What sort of sister would she be
if she left Coco in France? No, she had to end it.

That stupid woman knew at once
what she was up to but she didn’t say so directly. People are so
stupid. Especially the stupid ones. But how was
she
to know
that the stupid woman was the maid of the Countess? She had to get
rid of her. Fast. She pretended to be making a cup of tea for
Monsignor Delgardo in the kitchen the doctors used and convinced
Little Marianne to give it to the stupid woman when she was having
a slice of bread for her lunch in the garden. But she didn’t have
enough laudanum left for the job. Still, it would have been enough
if the Countess hadn’t turned up...

It was exactly as they feared.
A body was strung up like a marionette, dangling from the wooden
sail of the half-finished windmill, the weight of it forcing the
sail to tilt drunkenly away from its pin. Scaffolding had provided
a platform to work from. The murderer had chosen his sixth setting
with the well-practised eye of a true master, though it was
difficult to appreciate the finer points of the artistry from
ground level without the aid of daylight.

The night sky was swirling with
swift-moving clouds and shifting stars, a tipsy blur of dusky blues
speckled with flecks of gold. The depressing light cast the corpse
in bluish hues, cold and distant, as far-seeming as a dead planet
hanging in space. The wind was stronger coming off the Seine. It
picked up middens of soil and whipped up eddies of dust that
whirled around their feet as they dodged piles of tools and shallow
pools of mud.

Inspector de Guise scaled the
scaffolding to take a closer look. There was the same red lipstick
smeared clumsily across the lips and the same comedic rouging of
the cheeks.

But that wasn’t the worst of it.
He recognized the victim and it gave him a sharp shock. He caught
back a gasp. It was Père Denys from the little church in Montmartre
that adjoined the Cimetiere du Calvaire. The priest was not wearing
his black robe. It wasn’t until he looked closer that he recognized
the face. Père Denys was wearing long-johns and it was clear he had
been crudely dismembered.

A night-watchman came around the
corner. He was carrying a heavy truncheon, wielding it as if he
meant to use it. “Hoy! Climb down! You can’t go up there!”

“I’m a policeman,” called the
inspector. “There’s dead body up here. I’m checking it.”

The night-watchman looked up at
the dangling grotesquerie but remained rightly skeptical. “How do I
know you’re a policeman? You could be the killer!”

The Countess stepped out of the
shelter of the windmill where she had been huddling to stay warm.
“He’s with me,” she said. “I am Countess Volodymyrovna and the man
on the scaffolding is Inspector de Guise. You need to run for
help.”

“I’m not running anywhere. Not
till I am satisfied you aren’t the killers.”

“Do I look like a killer?” she
challenged.

“You might still be,” he
responded dubiously, checking the quality of her garments as the
inspector clambered down to join them.

“It’s Père Denys,” he said, and
she gasped.

“Who?” said the night-watchman -
a man who did not appreciate being left out of the loop, treated as
if he didn’t exist by two trespassers who had no right to ignore
him.

“Never mind,” said the inspector
peremptorily before adopting an air of authority. “You need to
summon help. This is the sixth victim of the Marionette Murderer.
How many night-watchmen are here with you on this site?”

“Six this side of the river and
ten the other side.”

“Do you have a whistle?”

“Yes.”

“Then for God’s sake use
it.”

Fedir was sprinting toward rue
Visconti when he passed a landau going in the opposite direction.
The Z crest on the door looked familiar but it wasn’t until the
carriage pulled up suddenly and a voice called out, “Where are you
going?” that he stopped dead.