The Cavalier of the Apocalypse Read online

5

  Aristide met Derville in the afternoon for a few hours of dining and sightseeing at the Palais-Royal. He returned to his room late in the evening and, with a sigh, dropped onto his bed. He had had more wine than he knew was sensible, and wanted only to lie back in the darkness and settle his stomach after an overrich supper. His faintly rancorous musings about Derville's patronizing generosity were abruptly cut short, however, when someone rapped on the door.

  His first thought was to ignore the caller, for it was past eleven o'clock. Few people had unexpected callers after ten o'clock, for by law the street doors were locked every night at that hour, to keep fleeing criminals from bolting into the nearest house, and so late a visitor was probably his landlord with some demand or other. But the rapping sounded again, rattling his aching head, and he dragged himself to his feet and unlatched the door.

  Brasseur stood on the landing, large, solid, and apparently immovable.

  "Could we have a talk?"

  Aristide stared. "What?"

  "I'd like to talk."

  Brasseur, he supposed, must have used his authority as a police inspector to get himself admitted at such an hour, and to demand and receive a candle to light himself up the stairs, too. "Look, this isn't the best time," he began, but Brasseur strolled in past him, set the candlestick down amid the litter of papers on the writing table, pulled out the chair, and seated himself.

  "You're a clever fellow, Ravel."

  "So you said." Aristide eyed him, wary. What on earth did the man want from him?

  "As I said, we could use a man like you in the police."

  "And I said I had other plans. I've no interest in a career of patrolling the streets and reminding tradesmen to sweep in front of their shops. Monsieur Brasseur, is this really necessary? It's late, and I'm a little unwell-"

  "There are other ways of working for the police besides strutting about giving orders," Brasseur said. "Have you thought about that?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "A police force lives on information. Two-thirds of the people who work for the police never put on a black suit or fill out an official report."

  Aristide knew immediately what he meant. Covert informers, often nicknamed mouches-flies-were the backbone of the Paris police; they supplied everything from court gossip to intelligence about the sordid doings of the pickpockets, housebreakers, confidence artists, quacks, and pimps who swarmed from the filthy and teeming warrens of central Paris to profit from the weaknesses of their more prosperous neighbors.

  "Monsieur Brasseur, are you suggesting I should become a police spy?"

  He smiled slightly. "What would you say if I did suggest it?"

  "I'd tell you to go to the devil, of course." The average Parisian grudgingly tolerated the police, who kept the city running more or less smoothly, but detested their spies.

  "Oh, I've no doubt you would. But you know what they say, that the police know everything about everybody. Why, they even know a bit about you. How do you think I got your address?"

  "Me?" Aristide echoed him, the queasy feeling in his belly abruptly swelling. "What are you talking about?"

  "I went and looked you up at the office of Control of the Book Trade, Monsieur Ravel. They keep dossiers on men like you, the hungry young literary fellows, once you've attracted a little attention." He extracted his notebook from a pocket and glanced through it. "Nothing much here?they seem to think you're pretty harmless. Though I copied this bit down: 'Ravel, Aristide-Chr?tien-Marie, native of Bordeaux, son of a felon broken on the wheel for murdering his adulterous wife and her lover. Physiognomy: tall, thin; hair and eyes dark brown; aspect not unhandsome, though habitually with a dour and sarcastic demeanor. Most recent known address a shoddy sixth-floor attic on Rue de la Muette, near La Salp?tri?re. Reported to be a malicious and mediocre hack writer-' "

  " 'Malicious and mediocre hack'?" Aristide repeated indignantly.

  " '-suspected of producing various indecent and seditious writings for known publishers and disseminators of illegal works.' " Brasseur closed the notebook and beamed at Aristide. "What do you think?"

  Suddenly the full import of what Brasseur had recited to him sank in, and Aristide abruptly sat down on the bed. "Are you arresting me?"

  "Good Lord, no. Just making a little proposition. You see," Brasseur continued when Aristide said nothing, "I really do want a fellow like you on my side. Our conversation this morning proved to me that you've a talent for investigation. Now investigating crimes is only a portion of what the police do, of course, and sometimes it gets short shrift. My superior, that's Monsieur Le Roux, the commissaire, he's a good honest gentleman and all, but he's getting along-he's been commissaire for twenty years-and his talents run more in the administrative line. He doesn't like criminal matters, unless they're the easy ones like a vagrant stealing sheets off the washlines, or a drunk beating up his girlfriend in the wineshop, in front of half a dozen witnesses. A thorny problem like this morning's murder, with peculiar evidence and no eyewitnesses, is going to put him completely out of countenance, and I'd like to make it nice and clear for him when I finally put the case in front of him."

  He paused and Aristide gathered his wits sufficiently to ask a question. "You want me to become a spy-"

  "Not a spy, monsieur. A subinspector, say. Working openly with me."

  "-to help you investigate this murder?"

  "That's it, Monsieur Ravel. I knew you were quick on the uptake. I thought I'd seize my opportunity before Delahaye, that's the inspector in charge of the book trade, saw you were an educated fellow who'd be useful to him, and nabbed you for himself."

  "And what if I refuse?"

  "Well," Brasseur said placidly, "in that case, I'm afraid I might feel it was my duty to alert Delahaye that this particular 'malicious and mediocre hack writer' was continuing to produce seditious writings. Which you are, of course, aren't you? A bit of filth about Antoinette and the cardinal in bed together pays a whole lot better than getting an ode respectably published in the Mercure."

  What choice do I have? Aristide thought. Loathsome as his present room was, he had no desire to find himself in new lodgings in the Bastille. He nodded and Brasseur grinned.

  "Splendid. We start tomorrow morning. You know where I live."

  Wednesday, 11 January

  The house where Brasseur lived, and where Aristide had lived until some months before, was notable chiefly for the sign in the shape of an enormous boot that hung out over the street; a cobbler's shop occupied the rear of the building, behind the two small ground-floor rooms that served as the inspector's headquarters. Aristide arrived at Brasseur's apartment at half past seven and soon learned that the inspector, while he might be a redoubtable enemy, was a congenial enough ally. After a quick breakfast of bread, butter, and strong coffee that he insisted Aristide share, devoured under the suspicious eye of his plump wife, he led the way downstairs to his office. Aristide waited while he glanced over a few reports, briefly conferred with a subinspector and a seedy-looking individual who had "spy" written all over him, and at last led him out toward Rue St. Jacques, where he flagged down a fiacre.

  "The Ch?telet," he told the driver, and gestured Aristide inside. Aristide found a spot on the grimy leather seat that was not too lumpy and looked at Brasseur, opposite him.

  "What's at the Ch?telet? That's where the police courts are, isn't it?"

  "Yes, but we don't want those. We're going to the Basse-Ge?le de la Seine."

  "The what?"

  "The morgue, Ravel. The attendants might be able to tell us a bit more about our corpse. The first thing you need to know in a case of murder is, of course, the victim's identity."

  Aristide did not fancy reexamining the body from the churchyard, but knew he had no choice and said nothing.

  "Then you need to learn who benefits from his death," Brasseur went on as the cab got underway. "People kill other people for just a few essential reasons. Gain-that's the most common. Gain covers everything fro
m a bandit who shoots a traveler to rob him, to some young wastrel poisoning his father for the inheritance because the old man's taking too long to die. Then there's jealousy-" He stopped short and glanced at Aristide, not without sympathy. "I expect you know all about that."

  Aristide did not reply and Brasseur continued. "Also revenge, self-preservation?those are pretty simple to understand?and love."

  "Love?"

  "Oh, yes."

  "Wouldn't that fall under 'jealousy'?" Aristide said, resolutely thrusting away the sudden sharp memory of the smell of gunpowder, and his mother's body, and blood.

  "No, I mean love. Jealousy is just a form of selfishness; it's somebody who can't bear the knowledge that he's lost something he thought was his. But murder for love?that's a person acting completely against his usual nature because he has such an intense love for somebody, or something. If what he loves is an idea, then you call it a murder for principles, but it's all the same in the end. Gain, jealousy, revenge, self-preservation, love," he repeated, ticking them off on his fingers. "Remember that."

  The cab made its way down the long, congested stretch of Rue St. Jacques, and across the Seine directly to the forbidding gray bulk of the Ch?telet.

  Brasseur paid off the cabman and strode down a dim, chilly public footpath, past a few laborers trudging with handcarts, to the magistrates' stairway, which led up to the judicial chambers at the heart of the medieval castle. Opposite the foot of the staircase, he paused at an inconspicuous door and gestured Aristide inside. "You might want a handkerchief handy."

  The sickly, butcher-shop odor of slowly decaying flesh rose to Aristide's nostrils as they entered the Basse-Ge?le and a taciturn clerk admitted them past an iron grille. He fumbled for a handkerchief and pressed it to his nose. Brasseur, he noticed, seemed unaffected. He guessed the other man had visited the place in far warmer weather and thus was inured to what must have been, for him, only a mild stink.

  Aristide followed him down a flight of stairs to a frigid, dank cellar with a single small window. Somewhere in a corner, beyond a dozen stone slabs where a few sheeted figures lay, he thought he saw a rat scuttle past.

  "You're here for yesterday's murder, I suppose?" the attendant inquired, appearing from the shadows. Aristide tried not to stare, for the man was all one might expect the concierge of a morgue to be, pale and hollow-cheeked, with the long, doleful face of a bloodhound, made yet more bizarre by a gloomy, pop-eyed gaze.

  "Morning, Bouille," said Brasseur. "Yes, that's the one. What can you tell us?"

  "He had a contusion on his head but died of the throat wound, bled to death, probably within a few seconds of the attack. No surprises there. Let me see, he was found at half past five yesterday morning, and was already quite cold?though that's nothing astonishing, in this brutal weather we're having?I'd say he was killed between, oh, some time after sunset the night before, say eight o'clock, and the small hours of the morning, judging from the rigor mortis, just as your police surgeon said. Have you found the weapon?"

  "No."

  "It was an ordinary sharp blade of some kind that made a clean cut, a kitchen knife or a hunting knife, or even a razor?nothing you couldn't find in half the households in Paris, I fear. Angle of the cut indicates a right-handed murderer standing behind him, which isn't of much help to you."

  "A man, of course," Brasseur muttered.

  "Oh, yes, absolutely. With this knock on the head, the victim was probably on the ground or on his knees, and the murderer had to pull him partially upright to reach his throat, and I doubt a woman would have had the strength for that; or else he was standing or staggering, dazed, and in that case the murderer must have been at least the same height as his victim, or ideally a little taller. Definitely a man's crime."

  "He'd have gotten blood on his clothes, wouldn't he?"

  "Undoubtedly; the great vessels would-"

  "But not very much," Aristide said, "if he was standing behind his victim. Wouldn't the victim's body itself have shielded him from most of it?"

  Brasseur abruptly strode to Bouille and, to the attendant's surprised indignation, seized him from behind and mimed cutting his throat. "Yes, I see what you mean. A bit of blood spraying on your cuffs and sleeves, maybe, but not much more than that. Strip off your coat, toss it in an alley where some beggar will find it and disappear with it, and there goes any evidence."

  "So, a man who can afford to throw away an otherwise wearable coat."

  "I wasn't done," Bouille said, with a cough and a glare at Brasseur. He reached beneath the long apron he wore, brought out a pocket flask and took a swallow from it, then gestured them to one of the tables and drew back the sheet covering the nude corpse. "First, have a look at that."

  Aristide reluctantly peered over Brasseur's shoulder, trying to avoid looking at the broad bandage loosely wrapped about the man's throat. Brasseur whistled.

  "Now how did we miss that?"

  A compass and square, crude but unmistakable, had been slashed into the man's chest. Aristide winced but forced himself to take a closer look. The cuts were not deep, though they looked as raw as meat on a butcher's counter.

  "I don't imagine anybody looked beyond the slit throat when they examined him," Bouille said. "You know Dr. Touret never takes more than five minutes when it's outside and the weather's bad. These cuts were undoubtedly done after he was dead. The murderer pulled open his shirt-which was already soaked with blood, of course-slashed him, and laced him up again."

  Brasseur glanced at Aristide. "Freemasons again. And it looks like the matter's getting very, very personal. Would you slash something like this into a dead man's flesh?"

  "God, no."

  "Well, then. Something nasty's going on here."

  "There's something else," said the concierge. The pocket flask reappeared and he took another generous swallow. "Dr. Touret didn't put this down in his report, either."

  He unknotted the linen bandage tied about the corpse's head to keep the mouth from falling open, and gently pried the jaws apart. "I didn't find this until the rigor mortis began to pass off. Look."

  Gingerly they peered into the dead man's mouth. Aristide saw, at first, nothing but a set of good white teeth, missing one toward the side, until he realized he was looking at only a stump of raw flesh where the tongue ought to have been. He jerked backward and quickly pressed his handkerchief once again over his mouth and nose, praying he would not be sick.

  "His tongue's been cut out?" Brasseur said incredulously. "What sort of madman would do that?"

  "Lord knows," said Bouille. "Though that, also, was done after he was dead. I don't suppose you found it?"

  "The rats probably got it." Shaking his head, he turned to Aristide. "Are you all right there, Ravel?" Aristide nodded and Brasseur turned once again to Bouille. "Got a report on the clothing and effects? Any clue at all to who he is?"

  The attendant took another swallow from his flask and dolefully shook his head as he handed Brasseur a sheet of paper covered with tiny, precise handwriting. "Only the obvious. He's a well-nourished man of about forty to forty-five, average height and build, hair medium brown turning to gray, slightly receding hairline, eyes brown, no significant identifying marks or scars aside from one missing tooth in the left side of the upper jaw. His remaining clothes and the state of his apparent health would suggest he's a well-off bourgeois: a merchant or manufacturer or a professional man. Not the sort that usually ends up here."

  "Corpses from the river, mostly," Brasseur said, in response to Aristide's curious glance. "Accidents with the dock workers, the boatmen and bargemen, people watering horses that get out of control?and suicides. Some in better condition than others."

  "We had just a single leg in, a few days ago," Bouille announced, to no one in particular, with a glance toward the far side of the cellar. "From upriver, apparently. No one's claimed it yet."

  Brasseur ignored him and glanced through the report, abruptly pausing to tap a finger on the paper. "Let's see hi
s things."

  Bouille vanished into an adjoining room and returned, clothing draped over one arm. "Clothes, what was left of them, of good quality. Under-linen, new thread stockings, shirt, waistcoat, cravat. Whoever stole his outer garments must have left the rest because they were worthless; of course the shirt and waistcoat, and especially the cravat, received the full flow of blood from the throat?"

  Aristide made himself look more closely at the dead man's hands. They were clean and well kept. A pale band, slightly chafed, around the little finger of his right hand indicated that he had habitually worn a ring.

  "Well," he said at last, "I don't know who or what he was, but I can guess what he wasn't. He wasn't a writer, a lawyer, a clerk?a man who used a pen for a living, the sort of man who regularly spent a long time writing manuscripts, or letters, or working in ledgers or anything of that sort."

  "Not a writer?" Brasseur echoed him. "Why not?"

  For answer Aristide held out his own right hand. "See the ink stains? He has scarcely any. If you spend your time holding a quill for hours, day after day, you're going to get stains on your fingertips that never go away. And that little callus on his middle finger, where the pen rests, is no more pronounced than anyone else's, while mine is obvious."

  "Not bad," Brasseur said, with a slow smile. "What else can we learn about him? What about the clothes?"

  Bouille handed them over to Aristide. He shook out the shirt, relieved to find that the blood had been washed out of it, save for some lingering reddish-brown stains. "Good quality linen, well made. Same for the cravat: fine muslin, tiny stitches."

  The striped silk waistcoat was a sad sight; the washing had removed the worst of the blood but ruined the cloth, although it had obviously been of fine quality before the dyes had bled and the blood and water had stained and puckered it. Aristide looked it over and turned to Brasseur. "I'm no judge of fashion, as you know. But he dressed well, and he liked the English style." English men's fashions, with their plainer, slimmer silhouette, had eclipsed the fussier French style of the 1770s for the past several years, and had grown so popular that the trend was known as "Anglomania."

  "Think you could name the tailor?"

  "From one waistcoat? Not in a hundred years. But," Aristide said suddenly, "I know someone who might be able to. Could we take these with us for a few hours?"

  Brasseur and Bouille exchanged glances. The attendant shrugged. "It's your business, monsieur."

  "I don't imagine your friend would be willing to come here to look at the clothes?" Brasseur inquired. "No, I didn't think so. All right, I'll take responsibility for them. Wrap them up well, would you, Bouille?"

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~