Murder in Montparnasse Read online

  Across the boulevard, I thought I glimpsed a familiar figure just as the view was cut off by a streetcar. After the cream-and-green tram had moved, I could see Laure Duclos just entering the Café du Dôme on the corner opposite. Quickly I paid my bill and crossed the road to join her, hoping that she might have forgotten our last meeting. Perhaps I should have questioned my precipitousness, especially when I saw Laure speak to the waiter, who then consulted his pocket-watch. But the sight of the woman who had been on my mind did away with good sense.

  Laure gave me a wary smile as I came towards her through the nests of tables and chairs. It was caution bordering on alarm, but she gave me her hand. “I hope you’re not expecting anybody?” I asked, hoping to be asked to sit down. Laure was looking wonderfully well. She was wearing a dark coat with a white fur collar and cuffs. Her lips and eyes had been made up as carefully as her fingernails, which glistened as she drew back her hand. Her navy-blue frock, with a small white tie at her throat, reached down to her knees. There were silver buckles on her high-heeled shoes.

  “It’s very boring, Mike, but the bald fact is that I am meeting someone. But why don’t you buy us a quick drink, poor lamb, after the way I’ve treated you. I’m a quarter of an hour early. I need a witness. It’s never been said that I’m the promptest woman in the Quarter.”

  I sat down and pulled the chair close. Our knees were almost touching under the table. Laure flagged down the waiter and we both ordered: she a vin blanc and I a local beer. Considering Laure across from me now, indifferent, smiling, but, within reason, friendly, it was easier to see her as the femme fatale of the stories I’d been hearing. At that moment, she’d decided to be irrelevant and teasing, but impersonal. I wished she would stop moving her finger from the tip of her chin to the top of the tie. I wanted to tell her to stop, but even in my state I recognized that the problem was mine and not hers.

  Laure talked about a book-signing she had just come from. Cocteau had been there with his following from the Boeuf sur le Toit, his regular place of permanent exhibition. She was quite wickedly delightful in her descriptions of the fuss they had made. “He’s quite out of mourning for Radiguet now. He has even shed his black armband. Until recently, he dressed like a mortician. Cocteau in mourning could out-Hamlet Hamlet.”

  She listened to what I told her about my life, which I tried to dramatize with what cunning I possessed, but her eyes made a regular survey of the passing throng on the sidewalk. She asked me about Waddington and the rest of that flock, none of whom I’d seen. “Everybody is reading Wilson O’Donnell’s new book,” she said. For a few minutes we discussed O’Donnell and his work. Luckily, I’d been given a copy of the novel by a colleague from the Star to read on the boat. O’Donnell was one of my favourite writers. In the papers they called him “the Father of the Jazz Age,” as though he had discovered a way of burning his candle even faster than Miss Millay. Of all the writers I knew, his seemed to be the most accurate voice of a generation that had come home from the battlefields, damaged and exhausted.

  Laure had that French intensity when she spoke. O’Donnell seemed very real as she discussed him. She had read the novel with an eye far more acute than my own, but I could imagine her discussing the proper tearing of lettuce with the same grave face. The French people I’d met treated all subjects with an equal seriousness. The location of a street not found on my map occupied an interrupted pedestrian as fully as a discussion of the sinking value of the franc or the talk of German rearmament schemes. I didn’t think that Laure was an intellectual, by any means, but she had acquired the intellectual method.

  It was starting to rain again, not heavily, but what in England would be called a Scotch mist. Out of it came four or five art students in bright costumes. They were in high spirits as they began to bedeck the customers with a fine gold confetti while they passed out leaflets. They missed me but caught Laure with a near-direct hit. She looked like a statue cast in gold. It was quite a wonderful moment. The gold clung to her forehead and clothes in an extraordinary way, as though Zeus himself had taken a sudden interest in Laure and had cleverly beaten my time with her in yet another of his ingenious ways. Laure touched the gold on her arm. It was a powder rather than paper, as I first had thought: gold-dust or the dry making of gold paint. Perhaps it had come from a picture-framer’s supply of gilt. The gold came off in her fingers and she touched my forehead with it.

  “Here’s something for you, Mike. Let me share my sudden wealth.”

  “Allez-vous-en! Allez-vous-en!” It was Père Chambon, the proprietor of the café, shouting to the young people at the top of his guttural voice. He came after them, his moustaches terrible, his bald pate shining under the electric light. Two waiters gathered up the students at the other end of the enclosed terrasse and ejected them into the night and the fine rain. As they passed our window, we could see that their spirits weren’t in the least dampened, either by their reception in the café or by the weather.

  “Poor dears,” said Laure, watching them cross the boulevard to the Rotonde. “They’ll get a worse reception there.”

  Paul Chambon hurried over to our table and to those of others who had been dusted by the students. He picked up fallen leaflets advertising the sale of students’ works at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, panting as he got to his feet and holding his back. “Last year a woman got some of that in her eyes!” he said trying to catch his breath. “And who do you think had to pay the hospital bills, eh?”

  Laure wiped the gold flecks from her face with a handkerchief. As she looked at the metallic stain, she saw that I was watching her and for a moment returned my look.

  “Poor lamb, you’ve got it bad, haven’t you?” She took my hand in one of her gilded hands. “I’m sorry I’m such a raffish bitch. Really, I am. You’re far better off to be shut of me.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” I said, looking her in the eye. It took all my strength, but I even smiled.

  At the end of ten minutes, I paid for the drinks and took my leave. She bussed me on both cheeks in the French manner and we parted. I concentrated on what I had heard about her from the others. I was going to take her advice and get myself a girl of my own. But in the meantime, I was still curious about the identity of the lucky dog who was meeting her. After walking along the boulevard for a few hundred yards, I crossed over to the other side and found another table under the marquee of the Rotonde. This time I ordered whisky with a siphon. But the thought of discovering who it was that Laure had planned to meet proved to be more warming than the drink.

  After about ten minutes, Jason Waddington crossed Montparnasse, coming from the direction of the gare. He had started crossing before he’d reached the terrasse of Le Select. A number 91 tram coming from Port Royal, marked “Montparnasse-Bastille,” interrupted his crossing. Wad stood back from the tracks, letting the car nearly touch him. It was an imitation of a bullfighter allowing the horns to get as close to him as his suit of lights. The arc lamps picked out the pass and the streetcar continued out of sight down the boulevard. Wad went by the Dôme without going in. He crossed to the display of fruits de mer, sitting on a bed of kelp, outside a restaurant on the far corner, then retraced his steps, this time going up to Laure’s table and joining her.

  There was something rather formal about their greeting, as far as I could judge. There was certainly no bussing, just a conventional shaking of hands. The waiter brought them something to drink and they talked, leaning towards one another for five minutes. Laure brought a piece of paper from her purse and showed it to Wad, who half stood up when he saw it. He took it in both hands and read it. In a moment, he let his hand drop. Laure reached for the paper, with Wad for a moment unwilling to return it. In the end he held it out to her, and Laure returned it to her bag. They talked for another ten minutes, then Laure got up and left the café, walking off in the direction of the Dingo, up the rue Delambre and out of sight.

  Wad sat for another minute, then reached into his pocket to pull
out enough money to cover their drinks and the service non compris. He looked as if he were trying to catch up with Laure as he rounded the wedge-shaped end of the Dôme and headed up Delambre. Something was going on, and my curiosity was such that I redeemed my saucers immediately and crossed the street.

  The usual haunts along the rue Delambre were crowded and smoky. The din and subdued lighting made a sharp contrast to what was going on out of doors. I saw Arlette and Anson in the Dingo and Biz and George in the place around the corner. They tried to get me to join them, but I hurried on as soon as it was clear that neither Laure nor Wad was present. When I came out again into the night air, I was out of breath. Why was I running after them? What did I hope to discover?

  After another short block, I slowed down. The silliness of my chase had become evident. I turned around and cut across the street. I had never liked the back streets behind Montparnasse. The cemetery along boulevard Edgar Quinet bothered me. Above the high walls, leafless black branches clawed at the sky. I thought of Baudelaire buried on the other side of the wall and hurried on. Rounding a corner that I hoped would return me to the boulevard, I passed a rundown café with tables full of scruffy artists, one of whom was in the act of pocketing sugar as I moved beyond the yellow light and tobacco smoke.

  Montparnasse was looking friendly and bright from the glimpse I had of it half-way up rue Campagne-Première. A streetcar silently crossed the top of the street. When I reached the corner, I turned back in the direction of the Dôme. There was a dark stretch to cross before I would come into the full illumination of the carrefour. Perhaps my eyes were already adapting to the stronger light, because they spotted something bright in the gutter. For a moment my feet failed to stop, and I nearly fell. Catching my balance, I went back to see what could have had such power over my progress. It was a woman’s handbag, made of soft leather and held together by a bright metal rim with fasteners at the top. I picked it up and brushed away the rain and dirt from the underside. I felt like an imbecile holding onto a woman’s handbag, but then, I was on Montparnasse, where these things are not perhaps as strange as elsewhere. I moved back in the direction from which I’d come, stopping under the street lamp. My fingers clicked the bag open; I began to rummage through it to see if there was a name and address to help the police find the owner. I found a rather good fountain pen and a lace handkerchief. Under a silver cigarette case, I discovered a postcard with the following name and address:

  Mlle. Laure Duclos

  14, rue de Tilsitt

  Paris, 17e

  The message from the Côte d’Azur was friendly, with some Mack Sennett bathing beauties on the other side. It was signed Françoise. I decided that I had better find a place to sit down. My eyes stayed in the gutter as I moved towards the light. There lay cigarette ends, a twisted bicycle spoke and hub, a familiar broadsheet advertising a forthcoming Beaux-Arts sale of art and a discarded, broken umbrella.

  CHAPTER 10

  Mike, what the hell’s the matter with you?”

  “What?”

  “I’m talking to you, that’s what!”

  “Sorry, Quent, I was wool-gathering.”

  I was having lunch at our usual little restaurant a few streets from the agency. Quentin Bryson, who worked with me, was staring at me from across the table. He’d been in Paris a year longer than I had and was drawing a larger salary. A serious fellow from Montreal, with an early bald spot growing through his fair hair, Quent could talk about nothing but the office until he had had three demis. Then the intimacies came in a torrent: his father, the brute; his mother, the brow-beaten victim; his wife, who did not understand him; his daughter, who had suddenly and suspiciously stopped hating this posting. He had a motor-car and, when he was not taking it apart and putting it together again, he motored up to Senlis with his wife and daughter. He had vaguely suggested on several occasions that an invitation to dinner was on its way, but it never arrived.

  Wool-gathering, I had said. It was not strictly true. I had withstood a few shocks since I’d discovered Laure’s purse in the gutter the night before. First and foremost, when I reached the office the next morning, I learned that Jack de Paris had been busy again overnight. His seventh victim had been discovered not far from the place where I’d found Laure’s handbag. It was with more than routine interest, then, that I’d pursued my inquiries at the commissariat about the identity of the murdered woman.

  “Mike! Damn it, there you go again!”

  “Sorry, Quent,” I said, digging into the last of my leek-and-potato soup. “I was thinking about the murders.”

  Quent was cleaning up the last traces of soup from the sides of his bowl. He was clean-shaven, tall and round-shouldered. He was stooping now over his soup, as a mediaeval monk might have over an illuminated manuscript or as he did at the office, over his Royal typewriter. He finally put down his spoon with a clatter.

  “You sent off all we know about the seventh killing this morning. What’s bothering you about it?”

  “She was found in my own backyard, Quent. All of them were. I use those streets every day. It’s all right for you out in St-Mandé.”

  “Charenton,” he corrected. “Where was this one?”

  “Rue Léopold Robert, a block away from the Dôme.”

  “Yeah, I see what you mean. They don’t know her name?”

  “They may, but they wouldn’t tell me. All I got from the commissariat was this: ‘When there is a statement to be made, it will be made by Monsieur le Préfet.’”

  “Wonderful!”

  Our main courses had arrived and for awhile talking was unnecessary. I couldn’t share my anxiety over Laure with Quentin. I’d been nearly incapable of doing my job all morning. As soon as I read the report on my desk, I went to the finger-marked wall map to check the location of the street. It was the very intersection where I’d stumbled on Laure’s purse. Could her body have been there all the time? Had it been lying in the deep shadows of the buildings along that dark stretch of Montparnasse?

  But it was more than I knew to say that the body belonged to Laure Duclos. There was even some question about whether the handbag I had found belonged to her. The name was right but the address was wrong. I looked up the rue de Tilsitt on the wall map. It was in the Étoile district, close to the Arc de Triomphe, a solidly middle-class area. It couldn’t be Laure. For all I knew, Laure had finished her evening in her own bed in the passage de Dantzig. Or in another. But certainly not in the gutters of rue Léopold Robert.

  One thing was sure, I had to find out quickly or there would be no sleep for me tonight. The quicker I could deliver the handbag over to its owner the better. And if, stretching the probabilities, just supposing, the murdered woman was Laure, then the sooner I sent the bag around to the authorities the better it would be for all concerned. I had been with Laure last night. Had I been seen? Was I now a suspect? All of this was premature. I should keep my speculations confined to the cheese tray which would follow my main course.

  “What do you know about Jack the Ripper, Quent?”

  “Not a great deal. He murdered prostitutes in London’s East End in the late 1880s. He was said to be a surgeon gone wrong and at least as crazy as this killer here in Paris. But our man isn’t trying to rid the world of whores; he’s content to prey on artists’ models for the most part. Both of them kept to a single district in their cities. Jack never struck outside Whitechapel, and our man is happy in Montparnasse.

  “There have been all sorts of theories about Jack’s identity. Some of them come close to the British royal family, and others are just as far-fetched. Someone named General Booth of the Salvation Army, if you can believe it! One murderer admitted to being Jack, but he didn’t elaborate.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He was standing on the gallows at the time, and the hangman dropped him through before he could enlarge upon his theme.”

  “Not very helpful to the investigation. Do you think our Jack is mad?”

  �
��As a hatter. Our man is closer to Jack than he is to another French killer, like Landru. Ah, that was before you arrived, Mike. He went to the national barber three years ago. They called him Bluebeard. He killed women all right, but all his cases involved some aspect of fraud. The murders were secondary. At his trial, Landru had everybody laughing, even while he refused to admit a single fact presented against him. You know how formal a French court of law is? Well, one day a woman came into the courtroom and couldn’t find a seat. Landru got up politely and offered to let her have his seat in the prisoner’s dock.”

  “Our man kills these women without having known them at all. The flics won’t say whether or not they have been interfered with.”

  “Glad to see you’ve read the style book on reporting rape.”

  Mme. Bonnet came to our table with her inevitable tray of cheeses. As usual, the coffee filter on my cup refused to function until the water was so cold I had no further interest in it. Quentin watched me peeling an elderly piece of Camembert, which Madame explained had “abandoned itself.” I was acquiring a taste for it, but I confess it still reminded me of the odour that lingers at the ends of third-class coaches on French trains.

  We went back to the office for another three hours. I was working on several stories and wasn’t happy with any of them. I couldn’t concentrate. How should I have been able to do so, with Laure’s leather bag lying where I had carelessly flung it on coming back to my room the night before?

  Before leaving the office at the end of the day, I hefted the heavy Paris directory, the Bottin, to my desk. I checked 14, rue de Tilsitt. There was no one named Duclos listed. I telephoned one of Quentin’s friends at the commissariat in the Étoile neighbourhood and asked if he had more recent information about the tenants at number 14 than was printed in the Bottin. This brought the second big surprise of the day. One of the apartments had been let to the American writer and novelist Wilson O’Donnell and his wife. Laure and I had just been talking about his new book! What would the King of the Jazz Age want with Laure Duclos? Was there a connection? If Laure knew O’Donnell personally, why hadn’t she mentioned it? There were too many absurdities here to reflect upon. What on earth would a famous writer like O’Donnell have in common with Laure, or any of our friends on this side of the river? O’Donnell had made himself wealthy with his novels. We were all struggling around the bottom of the ladder he had climbed so easily.