Baudelaire's Revenge Read online

  Lefèvre raised an eyebrow.

  “And if I’m right, she practised her profession not so long ago,” the concierge concluded with a vague expression on her face, as if she were reminded of something in her own past she would have preferred to forget.

  5

  THE COMMISSIONER’S OFFICIAL PLACE OF work at the prefecture had heavy curtains, a desk, a pipe stand, and two woollen carpets he had brought back from his military service in Algeria. A portrait of Napoleon III, which made l’empereur look like an escapee from a lunatic asylum, graced one of the walls, while his desk, which connoisseurs would describe as Classicist, was a little out of the ordinary with its countless drawers and extraordinary ornamentation. Most of the drawers contained weapons. Lefèvre had a predilection for heavy-gauge pistols. His collection included a Basque front-loader and a Richards–Mason .357. Lefèvre considered the Mason more reliable than the Colt of the same calibre Bouveroux used.

  The commissioner blew his nose and browsed through his notebook. He had spent a restless night in his apartment on the Rue de Nesle. After organizing the removal of the corpse to the morgue, where a police doctor could examine it, he had considered continuing on his way to Claire de la Lune after all, but a curious listlessness had prevented him. The demon on the wrist of the murdered young man, which had changed colour while he was looking at it, continued to preoccupy him.

  He put the optical illusion down to the Algerian love potion he had downed before getting dressed. The commissioner was aware that drinking the watery solution of Scilla Autumnalis was not without its risks. The Berber from Sidi Bel Abbès, who taught him to make the potion long ago, had told him about the Roman legend of the beautiful nymph Scilla who had begged Circe for a love potion. Instead of drinking it, she had bathed in it to be sure her satyr lover Glaucus would remain faithful.

  “Too much passion, sidi, can turn a person into a monster. Scilla was transformed into a woman with two serpent’s tails and six barking dog heads. She threw herself into the sea, and since then she has murdered every unfortunate soul who comes near her.” The Berber produced the sinister, piercing smile of someone you would prefer not to meet in a dark alley. But his potion worked and Lefèvre had come to trust its properties down through the years.

  He had noticed the need to increase the dose every now and then to maintain the effect. The love potion produced a burning sensation like hot fiery coals in his lower belly, running from his navel to his testicles. But Scilla Autumnalis sometimes made him see things that were not there. Did he really see the khout change colour? The commissioner decided to reduce the dose next time.

  Bouveroux entered the office without knocking. “You look as if you did more last night than interrogate the demoiselles,” he said in good spirits.

  Lefèvre could smell wine on his old army comrade’s breath. He had stopped reprimanding Bouveroux for his alcohol consumption years ago. The commissioner accepted that everyone needed their own secret poison to make life liveable. He had advised his assistant to rinse his mouth with a digestif made from crushed mint, to freshen his breath after drinking serious amounts of alcohol. The inspector had answered that his memory was like a sieve. By the time he had downed his first glass, the thought of mint-flavoured concoctions had vanished.

  When they were alone, they treated each other as friends. In 1842, twenty-eight years earlier, they had spent three years in Louis Napoleon’s Algerian army. The man insisted on being referred to as Emperor Napoleon III, in spite of the fact that Otto von Bismarck—the “Iron Chancellor”—had sworn he would humiliate the “puppet emperor” if he continued to resist the presence of a German Hohenzollern prince on the Spanish throne. Twenty-four-year-old Lefèvre and twenty-one-year-old Bouveroux had fought in Algeria against Sufi who were convinced that death in the name of Allah was a man’s proper and only destiny. They had reclined in the arms of houri, highly skilled at satisfying a man’s needs yet dangerous nonetheless. Esoteric contacts with djinns sometimes drove these veiled creatures to relieve the Frenchman they had just fondled at their welcoming breasts of his testicles, hacking and cursing like women possessed.

  Nostalgic by nature, Bouveroux had gradually drowned the realization that he would never be the great historian he had dreamed of becoming in gallons of wine. His syntax may have been pedantic at times, but it concealed an industrious and analytical intellect. The inspector was a fervent library visitor with an encyclopaedic disposition. While Lefèvre was interested in the subterranean twists and turns of the criminal mind and often followed his instincts, Bouveroux was a gatherer of facts. In contrast to the commissioner, whose bulbous cheeks were reminiscent of an English bulldog, Bouveroux had an elongated ascetic look, in spite of his alcohol consumption.

  “We have the victim’s identity,” he said triumphantly, as if it was the result of peerless detective work. “His name is Albert Dacaret. An artist.” Bouveroux placed a wickedly large pile of snuff on his thumb, snorted it deep into his nostrils, and grinned blissfully. “The motive was probably money. Artists are always short of cash and end up borrowing from the wrong kind.”

  “Dacaret?” said Lefèvre. “Interesting. A promising young poet, the papers say.”

  Bouveroux’s grin turned to a frown. The commissioner maintained an interest in the press, in spite of his well-publicized conviction that it was full of lies and foolishness, but the inspector preferred not to make a point of it. “Your knowledge of French literature continues to amaze me, Paul.”

  Lefèvre looked at him with a smile. He knew his friend better than he was willing to admit. “I presume you also know the cause of death. Otherwise you wouldn’t look so self-satisfied.”

  Bouveroux took a seat and placed his hat on the chair next to him. “That’s what makes the case so remarkable,” he said. “The painting on the man’s wrist contains an exotic poison. The natives of French Guiana use it to kill giant lizards.” Bouveroux appeared to be hungry. In spite of his thin frame, he could eat as if there was no tomorrow. “The deadly tincture needs time to take effect. Once the colossal reptiles are dead, they cut them up and cook them. They say their flesh is as tender as a baby’s.”

  He started to pat his jacket and trousers and after some searching produced a crumpled piece of paper from his inside pocket. Bouveroux was in the habit of scribbling down the things his investigative mind was likely to forget and ferreting them out later from various openings in his clothing. “Albert Dacaret. Caused a furor six months ago with the collection Le Fièvre du Diable. Was hailed by newspaper critics as ‘the new Baudelaire.’ Became seriously angry at this response and wrote a letter to the editor of a newspaper in which he annihilated his deceased predecessor. Just three weeks ago, the Spanish poet Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer predicted that Dacaret would ‘tear the staggeringly conceited romanticism of French letters to pieces’.”

  Bouveroux started to pat his pockets again, this time in search of his tobacco box, which turned out to be empty. Lefèvre tossed his own tobacco at Bouveroux, who caught it with gratitude. “Where do you get all this information?”

  “You know me, Paul,” said Bouveroux. “I have plenty of journalist friends. Let me tell you something. In less than a century, the journalists will be bigger stars than the sopranos at the opera!”

  Lefèvre, who was standing at the window with his back to Bouveroux, could see the church of Saint-Germain-L’Auxerrois a couple of blocks up the street. The gothic edifice was constructed on the site of an ancient Merovingian sanctuary. Simpler souls believed that light could be seen inside in misty weather, giving the deep-blue stained glass windows an unearthly glow.

  Once again he felt a stabbing pain in his left eye and imagined, for a split second, that he was leaning against a curtain that had once concealed a wall, but not anymore. He glanced over his shoulder. It was a grey morning. The gaslight in his office made Bouveroux’s cheeks appear pallid and the sockets of his puny eyes black. The sky above Paris was restless and darker than the cloak of a s
ervant girl waiting in a doorway for her lover. It was the end of August and the summer had been a disappointment. Rain, thunderstorms, a plague of mosquitoes, howling dogs and agitated cats.

  The commissioner’s broad face, which betrayed his roots among the fishermen of Brittany, was grim and dour. Bouveroux was convinced that an air of melancholy had been hanging ’round his old friend of late. Perhaps the commissioner was worried about approaching old age. It was better to drown such worries in wine than to face them eye to eye, the inspector thought.

  “Artists have explosive temperaments,” said the commissioner pensively. “They hate one another with a vengeance.”

  Bouveroux fluttered his eyelids. “I’m no great follower of art, Paul. Overstated trickery, if you ask me. I prefer to stick to the facts in the newspapers and in books. Art is the same as spiritualism. Did you know that there are more than six hundred soothsayers and mediums in Paris at the moment, all of them earning huge sums of money from people who believe that their futures can be read in a crystal ball?”

  Bouveroux produced a neighing sound, interrupting the commissioner’s concentration. He hadn’t been paying his assistant much attention. The prickly atmosphere of the previous night and the apprehension in his stomach left the commissioner with the impression that he had missed something important.

  Lefèvre tried to sort out the evidence thus far: an exotic poison introduced into the body of the deceased via a painted tattoo. What did this have to say about the murderer’s methodology? Had he learned the technique during a visit to Indochina? Or had he picked it up from an island dweller living in Paris? Dark-skinned foreigners had been popular in the city of late. It was hard to avoid hearing about the furor caused by Creoles, Indians, Patagonians, and Spice Islanders at the salons held daily in the capital, as if the danger posed by the advancing Prussians was a mere fantasy.

  “How long does the poison take to work, exactly?”

  Bouveroux looked contritely at his boss. “I’ll have to check that with Doctor Lepage. You won’t get an answer right away, I’m afraid. Lepage will have to track down a colleague who served in French Guiana.”

  “Fine. And check whether Dacaret ever visited any exotic destinations, although the man’s simple background doesn’t point in that direction. If he’s never been abroad, then we should concentrate our inquiries on tattooists in Paris …”

  “It’s not a real tattoo, commissioner.”

  “Perhaps some tattooists are familiar with the technique you were talking about.”

  “Rakshasa tattoos?”

  “Precisely, that demon of yours. Which of them is talented enough to paint such creatures on the skin? Try to find out as quickly as possible.”

  The commissioner’s demeanour told the inspector that his boss wanted to be alone. Bouveroux made a couple of trivial remarks and left the office.

  The corridors of the prefecture were old, winding, and poorly lit, reminiscent of the wine-coloured light illuminating the bazaars in Algeria. The memory sharpened Bouveroux’s senses. As he headed mechanically toward the stairs, he muttered under his breath about the séances that were all the rage. An Enlightened Empire? Not a bit of it! The French were either stupid, frightened, or unfortunate—mostly a combination of the three. Bouveroux counted himself among the unfortunate. The rooms he rented in the Rue du Jardinet were poorly maintained, had curtains the color of rotting gums, and were furnished with junk delivered by cart sometime in the distant past.

  But his apartment provided the anonymity he needed when he was away from the prefecture. He liked to compare it with the lair of a wounded animal. Since his Marthe’s death, the only thing that could relieve his melancholy was a visit to the public library. While his wife was alive, Bouveroux had only succumbed to the distraction of cheap women when the need was greatest, when certain memories of Algeria returned to haunt him—memories he had to expel. He had never told his colleagues that he had remained monogamous in his heart, not even Paul Lefèvre. If he had confessed that he was attached to his wife like a homing pigeon, they would have accused him of betraying the true Frenchman’s pride in his national flag, flown by preference “in his trousers.”

  His name resounded against the walls. Bouveroux looked back to find the commissioner standing in the doorway of his office. A different image took its place. Lefèvre at an outstation in the Sahara, covered in blood, standing in the doorway of the brightly-lit waiting room of a whitewashed fort, illuminated by the frosty stars of the desert night. Bouveroux remembered the excitement on his friend’s face.

  Almost thirty years later, he saw the same expression. The commissioner had been on the prowl for a long time, and he wallowed in the confusion and hunger in his soul. Lefèvre was waving the piece of paper that had been found on the corpse. “The same handwriting,” he said. “Identical! I knew I had seem it somewhere before. Take a look.”

  In his other hand the commissioner was holding a book, which he held out to Bouveroux. As a fervent library visitor, the inspector registered both title and author in an instant: Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne by Charles Baudelaire. He took hold of the book and followed Lefèvre’s index finger. The volume contained a dedication: For a man of the law who obeys the laws of poetry above all else. Charles Baudelaire, 1857.

  A single glance at the scrap of paper in the commissioner’s right hand was sufficient.

  The handwriting was indeed identical.

  6

  GRANIER DE CASSAGNAC WAS SO excited about his recent trip to Nouméa, and the impeccable travelogue he planned to write about it, that he didn’t pay the slightest attention to the picturesque cloudscape hanging over Paris. He turned into the Rue Saint-André-des-Arts and strutted boldly past the estaminet run by the moustachioed Jean-Claude, who almost certainly had a good bottle of wine at the ready to kindle his ardour. But not today! His writing desk was waiting, polished and fragrant with beeswax.

  He passed a newspaper kiosk on the Rue Dauphine where they sold La Patrie and Paris Journal. It wouldn’t be long now before Paris Journal was begging for the right to publish his story about the French penal colony on New Caledonia. Gautier, a literary jester who imagined himself to be the French Thackeray but was little more than a small-minded nobody who constantly grumbled about money, was going to vomit with jealousy. The last time de Cassagnac had seen the parvenu, Gautier was in the company of the de Goncourt brothers, perfumed vampires and the bane of every promising young artist. With enough pathos to make a third-rate Greek theatre jealous, Gautier had thrown himself on the sofa and announced that as far as he was concerned he was dead, and that everyone should rejoice in the fact. Death, after all, was the highest form of existence. A poet capable of producing such nonsense deserved nothing better than to have to make his living as a vulgar journalist. Gautier considered the latter a plague to which he frequently dedicated lengthy and whining laments.

  De Cassagnac chased the conceited dandy from his thoughts and replaced him with sonorous sentences that drifted through his mind as coaches clattered past on the rutted cobblestones. He stopped to admire the gloomy side wall of Jean Mangin’s restaurant, which was decorated with fashionable paintings advertising his wares. He paid no attention to the conspicuous cluster of clouds above the pointed edifice, but saw in his mind’s eye the crude huts of New Caledonia, populated by young men caught stealing or committing some other crime and shipped to the colony to serve as cheap labour. The miserable brutality he had witnessed on New Caledonia had given his writing an exceptional élan.

  One of the rascals was a particularly effeminate individual, referred to by the others as the White Bitch. He would put on a turban, make up his eyes with black powdered kohl, and parade himself among the workers until the bidding started. The colony’s guards took their cut of his profits and provided him with henna to color his hair, and natural oils used by Polynesian women to keep their skin smooth.

  De Cassagnac had never encountered the kind of moral depravity he had witnessed in the Mal
aysian, Chinese, and Polynesian quarters of Nouméa. He suspected that the task of describing the natives, who were prone to humping one another at every opportunity, day and night, would likely stretch his syntax beyond its usual elegance. Many an author would be unable to rise to the occasion. The brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, for example, would turn such an immense subject into gutter prose and emboss every disgusting detail onto pretentious medallions with fancy writing. De Cassagnac had decided to use a naturalistic style, which he was sure would cause the book-loving ladies in the most infamous salons to faint. He couldn’t imagine a better expression of appreciation. He had even taken note of a couple of sayings in Ajië, the local dialect of the Polynesian tribes. Their opulent resonance would grant an extra dimension to the innovative literature that was lingering in his mind.

  As he turned right at Petin’s Bronzes d’Art et Pendules on the way to his rented study, a coach with drawn curtains stopped immediately in front of him. De Cassagnac saw its occupant step out onto the street and automatically stood aside. He was surprised when the person spoke to him, but he responded nevertheless with a gallant bow. He suddenly felt a hefty stabbing pain in his neck.

  7

  GRANIER DE CASSAGNAC RECOVERED CONSCIOUSNESS when someone held a cloth soaked in ammonia under his nose. The penetrating odor confused his senses. The feeling that he was having a nightmare was reinforced by the lack of light. De Cassagnac hoped this was a dream, like the horror stories of that hysterical American Edgar Allan Poe. But the cold, hard floor beneath his body and the stench of brackish water that had gradually replaced the smell of ammonia were all too real.

  His body stiffened involuntarily when he realised he was in a cave, a feeble smoking torch in a corner its only illumination. The light flickered against the walls, revealing stacks of human skulls and other bones, black with age. De Cassagnac instinctively looked away. A figure dressed in a hooded cloak crouched to his left, silent, motionless.