The Assassin in the Marais Read online

  ‘You’re better than Baedeker! Last one to the Archway tavern pays a forfeit!’ she cried, speeding off, holding her hat on with one hand.

  ‘No! Iris, wait!’

  He joined her, out of breath and fractious, as she hailed an omnibus.

  ‘I want to take the tube … Let’s go to Islington!’

  It was a command.

  Resignedly Kenji slumped against the window of the onmibus, trying to forget his age and his fatigue.

  They took a lift down to the platform, in which Iris imagined herself plunging to the bottom of a mine. Pink with pleasure she all but burst out laughing in the coach of the City and South London Railway, where she attracted the admiring glances of the male passengers. Kenji’s pride in his daughter was mixed with tenderness – she was full of youthful exuberance.

  I’m in love, Iris thought as the carriage rumbled along. I’m a woman now. He kissed me four times the day I left. By now he will have received the letter I posted at Victoria station. I wonder if he blushed. When I told him I found him attractive, he turned bright red!

  ‘Let’s get out at London Bridge – we can catch a cab from there.’

  She hailed one of the new hansom cabs, with its carriage suspended between two huge wheels and the driver seated at the back. Aghast at this new caprice, Kenji shouted, ‘Sloane Square!’ through the opening in the hood.

  As they strolled round Sloane Square, the sight of the bookshop stirred up painful memories. An image rose up before him: the extremely corpulent Monsieur Legris, stick in hand, threatening Victor as he hid behind his mother. What minor misdemeanour had the boy committed? Only Kenji had not feared the bookseller. He knew how to calm him by coolly reeling off one of his made-up proverbs; he had probably declared something like, ‘Of the Great Fire of London not a single cinder remains,’ and Monsieur Legris would have retreated from the charge and lowered his stick.

  ‘Has the shop changed?’ asked Iris.

  ‘It’s been repainted and the windows …’

  He stopped to listen to a newspaper seller yelling out the headlines:

  ‘Scotland Yard still questioning staff of the murdered Lady Frances …’

  The surname was drowned by the noise of a passing carriage.

  ‘ … in her home, Brougham House. Police seek identity of visitor on the evening of her murder!’

  ‘The windows have smaller panes now,’ finished Kenji.

  ‘Shall we go in?’

  ‘No need to stir up ghosts.’

  ‘I like Chelsea. If I had to live in London, it would be here … Or else Westminster or Regent’s Park.’

  ‘Your mother and I liked to meet under the cedar tree in the Chelsea Physic Garden. We also liked the Reading Room in Cromwell Road. Shall we go there?’

  ‘I would rather finish my purchases. I promised Tasha I’d go to Twinings on the Strand to get her some tea. And Victor would like catalogues from Quaritch the bookseller and Eastman the photographic shop. That will take me as far as Oxford Street and I’d like to see the ladies’ rooms at DH Evans. Father, could I have some money?’

  Kenji sighed. Iris would be the ruin of him. And if she were not, Eudoxie Allard, alias Fifi Bas-Rhin, would be. Eudoxie had tired of her Russian Archduke and had taken up with Kenji again the month before. He was planning to buy her something in one of the jewellers in New Bond Street.

  Kenji enjoyed his encounters with Eudoxie, which provided agreeable interludes and satisfied his virile needs. They were careful not to introduce any elements of their day-to-day lives into their relationship, offering each other only the best of themselves. Their relationship, limited to eroticism, remained casual, because Kenji’s heart would always belong to Daphné.

  ‘We’re dining at seven thirty in the hotel restaurant and I’ve reserved a box at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. I think I’ll stay here for a while. Don’t be late now!’

  Iris nodded politely, although she detested opera and knew she would be bored to tears. I’ll think about Joseph, she decided, climbing up to the upper deck of a brown omnibus. In the meantime I’ll buy him a tiepin.

  Paris, Friday 8 April, five o’clock in the morning

  It had become a routine. He would get up quietly, listening for Gabrielle’s regular breathing, grab the clothes discarded the night before from the chair and dress in the adjoining bathroom. He would light an oil lamp so that he could see his way down the hall, at the end of which he would quickly duck into the pantry, just long enough to drink a glass of water and cut himself a slice of bread. He would creep down the stairs, grateful that the old man’s ancient dog had finally kicked the bucket and would not give him away by barking. Then he would go carefully down the stone steps, snuff out the lamp and leave it outside the concierge’s lodge.

  He opened the door slowly so that it would not creak and crossed the courtyard, taking care that his boots did not clatter on the cobblestones. With four strides he was out in the street, filled with the intoxicating sense of freedom he felt each time he escaped the family circle.

  At first he had disliked his bouts of insomnia, but he had cultivated the affliction until gradually it became chronic. Night was his kingdom. When he could not sleep, he had the time to write up notes on his conferences and plan the quest that would culminate in his magnum opus. But normally what happened, as this morning, was that after three or four hours of restless sleep, he would awake at dawn and take advantage of the early hour to wander along the slumbering narrow streets, before joining Boulevard de Sébastopol, where he would sip coffee at the counter of a bar, among the market gardeners who brought their produce to Les Halles. Then he would head for the museum.

  The inhabitants of the Enfants-Rouges quarter were sleeping, shut away from the biting cold. His breath turned to vapour in the dim light of the street-lamps. He made his way into the gloom, along the wet pavements of the narrow Rue Pastourelle, then through the milky gap of Rue du Temple, which he left reluctantly, slipping quietly long Rue des Gravilliers. The game of hide-and-seek between shadow and light reminded him of his escapades in the equatorial rainforest long ago, where sun and stars were hidden by the thick mass of vegetation. The river of Rue de Turbigo flowed peacefully; the door of the Église Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs was like a rock stemming the tide. In the square, workmen in blue smocks and cotton caps accompanied by their wives in knotted headscarves were returning from Les Halles, where they had delivered their vegetables. Once the horses were unhitched they went off to put their carts back in Rue Greneta, where glorious chaos reigned under the flickering light of the street-lamps.

  As the man walked past the vast hangar of a toy factory, the entrance to which was blocked off by carts, he heard someone call his name. He stopped, trying to make out where the voice had come from – it seemed to reverberate from beyond the greyish mass of a dray. A sharp crack rang out. The man made a vague gesture towards his chest, a fleeting expression of bemusement crossed his face, his legs gave way and he toppled over some bundles of wadding.

  By the time he had been dragged behind a pile of crates and a hand had patted his frock coat in search of his wallet, he was dead.

  Paris, same day, seven o’clock in the morning.

  A pale light filtered between the curtains and the murmurings of the city could be heard in the distance. The fingers holding the pen moved rapidly across the paper:

  The seven thunders have made their voices heard. I am the emissary. I have eliminated the two witnesses. Now I must destroy the abomination before false prophets get hold of it and seduce those who bear the mark of the beast and worship his image.

  The emissary put down his pen, closed his notebook and went to bury it in the depths of his wardrobe. The carafe of water on the desk acted like a prism, multiplying the pinkish light of the lamp many times over in miniature.

  CHAPTER 2

  Friday, 8 April, nine o’clock in the morning

  WHEN Tasha was asleep, the pillow squashed beneath her cheek, Victor was fre
e from anxiety. Even though her dreams carried her out of reach, she was his. No matter how much he reproached himself for and tried to suppress his possessiveness, it always crept insidiously back. For several months he had believed that he had conquered it, but recently it had reappeared. Tasha seemed to be hiding something from him and was often preoccupied. Moreover, he had caught her one evening reading a letter that she had hastily whisked out of sight when she saw him. Since then he had been eaten up by doubt.

  He snuggled up against her, fitting himself to the outline of her naked form, but still he could not relax. His mind was like an attic in which a jumble of experiences, anxieties and hopes was piled high. It was impossible to get a wink of sleep. One thought led to another … He was obsessed with the temptation of finding that letter; he had to know what was in it. Unable to bear it any more, he got up and began methodically going through her drawing boxes, drawers and pockets. Finally, finding nothing, he went back to bed and lay still, eyes open, staring at the window.

  Where was the fulfilment and harmony he had assumed would characterise living as a couple? Could they be called a couple? Two apartments on either side of a courtyard, two careers …

  ‘We’ve loved each other for almost three years, and we’ve hardly progressed … And you’ve hardly progressed …’ he said to himself, flattening a tuft of hair.

  He sat up and kissed her on the forehead, neck and throat. Languorously she touched his chest and her leg slid between his. They let themselves go until they had passed the point of no return.

  ‘Young man, you have an annoying habit of procrastinating!’ barked the Comtesse de Salignac.

  ‘What on earth? Why is the battleaxe talking to me about procreation?’ wondered Joseph, engaged in tying up the parcel for the Comtesse, his first customer of the morning.

  ‘You’ve been promising me George de Peyrebrune’s1 Dairy of a Blue-stocking from Ollendorf for an eternity. Some hope! How much do I owe you?’

  The Comtesse de Salignac glared at Joseph from behind her lorgnette. She leant forward a little to study the book that he was trying to hide under his newspaper.

  ‘Fenimore Cooper … The young today simply revel in violence! And people wonder at the rising tide of crime!’ she exclaimed, her mouth formed in the disapproving shape of a parrot’s beak.

  She paid for the Jules Mary,2 with which she had had to make do, as furious as a victim of the rabies that the newspapers indicated had returned to Paris.

  ‘Good riddance,’ snarled Joseph, unfolding Iris’s letter again.

  My dearest Joseph,

  Dare I say ‘my beloved’? Yes, your kisses permit me to. Consider this letter a pledge by which I promise myself to you. I will be yours when you have succeeded in convincing my father and in demonstrating the brilliance of your talent. Until then I swear fidelity to you …

  ‘Fidelity,’ he murmured. ‘That’s beautiful. A little chaste, but beautiful. She’s shy … As for convincing her father …’

  Kenji’s stern face superimposed itself on the figure of the Red Indian brandishing a tomahawk on the colourful jacket of The Last of the Mohicans.

  Surprised by the jangling of the door bell, Joseph tucked the letter in his pocket and donned his bookseller’s smile.

  ‘I’d like to see the bookshop owner, Monsieur Kenji Mori.’

  The man, who had tinted glasses and wore a black wool double-breasted overcoat and a dented bowler hat, made his request calmly yet forcefully. Alarmed, Joseph imagined that the man was an officer of the moral police, come to warn Kenji that his assistant was compromising the virtue of his daughter.

  ‘One of the owners,’ he corrected. ‘His associate, Monsieur Legris, won’t be long. He’ll be here at about ten o’clock. I’m the one who …’

  ‘In that case, I’ll go and see Monsieur Mori at home – where does he live?’

  ‘He lives in the adjoining building, number 18, but he’s travelling at the moment. Can I take a message?’

  The man adjusted his bowler hat with a nonchalant gesture that was belied by his frown.

  ‘That’s most unfortunate. Here’s my address. Please give it to him and ask him to contact me. When will he be back?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  The man scribbled rapidly on the back of his visiting card, put it on the counter and made for the door without saying goodbye.

  ‘What does he think I am, that fellow?’ muttered Joseph. ‘Part of the furniture? I’ll show them all, when I’m as famous as Émile Gaboriau!’

  He had been disappointed that the publication of his serial ‘The Strange Affair at Colombines’3 had brought him neither fame nor fortune, although thanks to him the circulation of Le Passe-partout had increased. According to Antonin Clusel, the editor of the newspaper, he would have to publish one or two more novels of the same sort before he could expect any recognition. ‘So better get writing, old chap, and make it good!’

  ‘I’d like to see him at it. I’m as dry of ideas as a squeezed lemon!’

  Frozen in the middle of the courtyard of 18 Rue des Saints-Pères, the man with the tinted glasses stared first at the concierge, who was wielding her broom, then up at the closed shutters of the first floor of the four-storey building, before turning on his heel and leaving. He strode off down Rue des Saints-Pères.

  On Quai Malaquais, a woman seated on the terrace of the Temps Perdu café lowered the menu she had been pretending to study and joined him near the cab rank.

  Resisting the urge to re-read Iris’s letter, Joseph picked up the notebook in which he stuck newspaper articles about crimes or unusual occurrences. He did not notice the visiting card left by the man in the bowler hat flutter down to the bottom of the umbrella stand. The last pages of his notebook were exclusively devoted to the anarchist bombings the previous month and the arrest on the 30 March, at the Restaurant Véry,4 of their perpetrator, one Ravachol.

  ‘Illustrious dynamiter, furtive and calamitous …’5 Joseph started to sing, but he broke off at the sight of his mother, laden with provisions.

  Too late, she had heard, and she went upstairs grumbling, ‘There he goes again with his flights of fancy. Those thugs are threatening to blow up the capital. They wouldn’t care if we all went up in smoke.’

  Joseph let out a weary sigh. ‘Maman, I’ve told you a hundred times. Monsieur Legris would prefer you not to traipse through the bookshop with the groceries. You can easily go through the courtyard – it’s not that much of a detour!’

  ‘But the concierge will hold me up! That Madame Ballu, she could talk the hind leg off a donkey. She gets on my nerves!’

  ‘That’s not a good enough reason. We’re working here and the customers …’

  ‘Oh, the customers? I see. Monsieur is ashamed of his mother; Monsieur would like to see the back of her! Well, don’t worry, I’ll soon be joining your poor father, and then you’ll be happy.’

  ‘I didn’t say that! Do you want me to help you?’

  ‘Don’t trouble yourself. You obviously have much more important things to see to. Oh the cross I have to bear!’ she groaned, climbing the stairs.

  Since Christmas Day 1891, when Germaine had solemnly hung up her apron because Mademoiselle Iris balked at eating the turkey, Euphrosine had been preparing meals for Kenji and his daughter, cleaning their apartment and then going each afternoon to Rue Fontaine to cook and dust for Victor and Tasha. For the first few weeks, overjoyed at no longer having to pull her costermonger’s cart, she had found her duties light, especially since she went to and fro on the omnibus. But, in spite of these benefits, she had started to complain about her rheumatism, about the demands of Iris’s vegetarianism and the weight of her domestic responsibilities, even though she skimped on the housework.

  For his part, Joseph, while taking advantage of his mother’s absence to meet Iris secretly at their apartment, found it hard to bear being under her eye all morning in the Elzévir bookshop.

  He unfolded La Vie Populaire and continued to read ou
t loud to himself from Émile Zola’s latest novel, The Debacle.6

  ‘Those white sheets! How he had longed for sheets! Jean could not take his eyes off them. He had not undressed, had not slept in a bed for six weeks …’

  ‘Of course, it would be paradise after the butchery of the battlefields,’ Joseph murmured.

  Tasha woke Victor gently by hugging him tenderly, then bounded out of bed, ran to set the water to boil and snatched up a coffee grinder that she placed between his thighs.

  ‘Get up and start cranking. I could eat a horse! Shall I make you some bread and butter?’

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Eleven o’clock. Joseph is going to grumble.’

  Barefoot and munching, her slice of bread in hand, she went to study the canvas she was working on, a modern version of Poussin’s Eliezer and Rebecca. A group of women, seated in a cabaret, were laughingly observing a rather self-conscious young man as he offered one of them some flowers, while a waitress filled an overflowing glass.

  In the version of Moses Saved from the Waters she had just finished, and in which she had represented a mother bathing her baby in a basin in a wash-house, she had striven to mix realism and symbolism. She had been satisfied with Moses, but she could not stop retouching this second composition. In order to be less financially dependant upon Victor, she had undertaken to illustrate an edition of Edgar Alan Poe’s Extraordinary Stories, and as a result she was suffering from having less time to devote to her painting.