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Chapter 10
The Murderer’s Garden

Gardens, you are, by virtue of your curves, your abandon, your plunging gorge, and the softness of your curves, women of the mind—often stupid and wicked, but the very stuff of intoxication, of illusion.

LOUIS ARAGON,
Paris Peasant

“W
alking is an excellent idea,” Marie-Do said when I told her Odile’s advice. “You can walk in the Luxembourg.” She saw my sour look. “What’s wrong with the Luxembourg?”

It all went back to those Sunday afternoons when our parents dressed us in our best outfits and dragged us to the nearest expanse of public greenery—in our case, Sydney’s Centennial Park. As an adult, I came to appreciate, if not actively relish, this Victorian relic, its roads lined with palm trees, and the reedy ponds where indignant birds squabbled and squawked. And how symptomatic of Australian conservatism that some self-appointed censor had taken a hammer and chisel to the statues of Greek and Roman athletes, castrating every one, fig leaves and all. But even in infancy I recognized my natural habitat as urban. What I wanted under my feet was asphalt, not grass.

Nevertheless, next day found us walking in the Luxembourg.

“It’s the park of Marie de Medici!” Marie-Do spoke with the enthusiasm you would expect from a woman who wrote her master’s thesis on the Renaissance printers of Florence. She swung me around to face the block-long building of the Sénat. “This was her palace. It’s an exact copy of the Palazzo Pitti in Florence.”

“But the Pitti’s an art gallery,” I told her. “There are things to look at.”

“There are things to look at here.”

Over the next hour, we looked at them: fountains, flower beds, yacht pond, children’s playground, puppet theater, bee farm, Botanic Association pavilion, facilities for tennis, chess, and
boules
, not to mention the original model for the Statue of Liberty. I preferred the outdoor café by the bandstand where one could read a book, enjoy an aperitif, and turn one’s back on all of it
.
The Luxembourg, I decided, was just Centennial Park with a French accent.

Gretchen, the mistress of meat, the poetess of pork, changed my mind.

I
n a fit of manic hospitality, we had invited to dinner a dozen dealers in rare books visiting Paris for the annual Foire des Livres Anciens. Inspired by the season’s first succulent white asparagus, I decided to serve them as a starter, steamed, with
sauce hollandaise
.

Ten minutes after the last guest arrived, I was still in the kitchen, whisking hollandaise, when a wave of perfume wafted in. The woman behind it was startling in spike heels and a hot pink dress edged in black lace. Champagne flute in hand, she peered at the lemon yellow emulsion.

“And what is this?”

The black hair she wore pinned up, and the hot pink of her dress accentuated skin a shade too slatey and shadowed to be Anglo-Saxon. Leni Riefenstahl had that skin, and Hedy Lamarr. Her accent gave a husky cadence to her voice, like
Lieder
. “Kennst du das Land wo die Zitronen blümen?” Do you know that land where the lemon trees bloom?

It says something for the impression she made that in defiance of all wisdom I stopped whisking to explain.

“Hollandaise,” I said. “For the asparagus.” I raised the whisk and let a ribbon dribble back into the bowl. “Not thick enough yet.”

Happily, she didn’t offer to help. Instead, posing herself against the edge of the table, glass in hand, she made herself available to be admired.

“In all the confusion,” I said, getting back to whisking, “I didn’t catch your name.”

“I am Gretchen,” she said. “I am the lover of . . .”

She named our most suave guest, a U.S. dealer who’d arrived with his own champagne, of a
marque
so obscure it had to be not only the best but the most expensive.

“Are you a book dealer too?”

“I was. Now I am artist.”

“Painter? Sculptor? Filmmaker?”

“You would say . . . performance?” She refilled her glass from one of her lover’s bottles and leaned back. Dietrich could not have been more alluring. It would not have surprised me if she began to sing “Falling in Love Again.”

“My new work,” she said, “is in flesh.”

That was enough to stop me whisking again.

“Flesh?”

“Well, skin, at least. In Berlin . . .”

It was a hell of a story.

A few years before, her husband had abandoned her. Choosing to express her rage in meat, she planned a life-size effigy in raw pork. The plan was to dress it in one of his suits, take it into the country, set two pit bulls onto it, and, while filming it, watch them tear it apart.

“And you
did
this?”

“Almost. But
Schweinefleisch
, you know, begins to smell, and is . . . not nice. I completed only the head . . .” She paused, sniffing. “Something is burning?”

Something was burning. It was me. Mesmerized by her story, I’d backed into the gas flame and set my shirt on fire.

S
he rang the next day. “Hallo, hier ist Gretchen. Ist alles OK?
”

“It was only a shirt,” I said. “The flames never touched me.”

“You are me for coffee joining,
ja
?”

I found her at that same outdoor café of the Luxembourg.

“I thought you’d suggest the Flore. Or at least Deux Magots.”

“Oh, no! So . . .
gutbürgerlich . . .
how do you say—middle class?”

“And this isn’t?”

She looked around at the green-painted metal chairs clustered in the shade of the huge plane trees.

“Oh, no. You don’t feel . . . something?”

“Like what?”

“From the war, perhaps?” She nodded toward the Sénat. “This was Luftwaffe headquarters, I think.”

She was right. The Nazi high command, sons of schoolmasters and shopkeepers, greedily seized the castles of countries they conquered. As the headwaiter in
Casablanca
says of seating Conrad Veidt’s Major Strasser, “I have already given him the best, knowing he is German and would take it anyway.” In Paris, the Gestapo occupied the Lutetia, the best hotel on the Left Bank, while the army grabbed the Crillon, overlooking the Place de la Concorde. Not to be outdone, Hugo Sperrle of the Luftwaffe snagged the Luxembourg Palace, where his boss, Hermann Goering, Reichsmarschall des Grossdeutschen Reiches, visited him frequently. Of Sperrle, Albert Speer observed dryly, “the Field Marshal’s craving for luxury and public display ran a close second to that of his superior. He was also his match in corpulence.”

Gretchen was right. Thinking of these paths strolled by jackbooted men plotting conquest did cast a shadow. At the side entrance of the Sénat, a young policewoman stood guard in a Perspex sentry box, pistol holstered at her belt. Why had I never noticed her before?

“And also, there was Landru,” Gretchen said.

About Henri Désiré Landru, I knew. Between 1914 and 1918 he murdered ten women for their money. When the son of one victim became suspicious, he killed him also. And his preferred location for assignations was the Luxembourg.

An advertisement in
France Matin
baited the trap. “Widower with two children, aged 43, with comfortable income, serious and moving in good society, desires to meet widow with a view to matrimony.” The details were mostly true. Landru sold used furniture, with a little swindling on the side. In his film
Monsieur Verdoux,
Chaplin’s Landru-like killer is suave, even playful—a seducer. But no middle-aged war widow wanted that. They looked for someone solid, reliable
—
qualities writ large in Landru. He was short and billiard-ball bald, with thick eyebrows and a bushy beard of deep mahogany red that gave him a commanding air. He embodied what his victims craved: a serious man. And when he invited his prospects home, he never offered them anything more provocative than a glass of Madeira and a biscuit.
Such a gentleman. So correct.

Mass murderer Henri Désiré Landru

He dressed the part, too, down to a discreet ribbon on his lapel, supposedly a decoration from the Ministry of Education. Louis Aragon was so impressed he wrote, “What a pity that the court does not issue a programme in which one could print in italics: ‘At court and in town, Monsieur LANDRU is outfitted by THE FASHIONABLE TAILOR.’ ” Jean Cocteau found his murders almost chic. “The ordinary lover disposes of his memories by putting them on the fire: letters, flowers, gloves, locks of hair. Isn’t it simpler to set fire to the lady herself?”

“It seems so . . . ordinary,” I said, looking around at the little cluster of chairs and tables, the green-painted kiosk, the waiter lounging in the shade.

“But it is perfect!”

I began to see it with her eyes: Landru sipping an
eau à la menthe,
leafing through
Paris Matin,
patient, waiting—while his prey paused at the gate to tidy her hair or loitered at a distance among the trees, snatching a glimpse before taking the plunge.

And where better to allay suspicion than the Luxembourg? No out-of-the-way hotels or suburban cafés, but a park, with strolling couples, nurses with baby carriages, a brass band playing, and an old woman collecting payment for the use of the chairs.

His methods, too, were conventional, even boring. Always the same advertisement, the same kind of woman, the same promise of marriage. The opening of a joint bank account into which his new fiancée deposited her savings as the traditional
dot
, or dowry, that all French brides brought to a marriage. Then, an invitation to spend the weekend at his country house in Gambais, sixty miles west of Paris. On Monday, he returned alone, emptied the bank account, removed anything of value from the house, including her furniture, which he transferred to his warehouse, and reinserted his advertisement in
Paris Matin.

A suspicious friend alerted the police, but Landru denied everything. Where was the evidence? And indeed no body ever came to light. Neighbors at Gambais talked of Landru’s kitchen stove burning late some nights, and oily smoke streaming over the fields. But sieving the ashes produced no bones—only metal buttons and catches of the kind used in women’s corsets.

In the end, Landru’s frugality betrayed him. He bought return tickets to Gambais for himself, but only singles for his victims. After all, they weren’t coming back. He could bluster his way out of most accusations, but that detail damned him. In 1922, at Versailles, the guillotine clipped his ticket.

The house in Gambais still stands, respectable and discreet behind its well-clipped hedge and surrounded by the same flat fields across which black smoke once streamed all night long. As it happened, Richebourg was only a few kilometers away, so I occasionally passed it. Driving by, I wondered, what, for a man like that, would have been the most beautiful walk? Was it the stealthy strangler’s approach to the unsuspecting widow? Or did even a murderer, strolling toward the Luxembourg and his next assignation, take a moment to enjoy the day, smile at a child, and share Louis Aragon’s vision of the garden as a woman, and this garden in particular as his own, to ravish and murder?

Chapter 11
Going Walkabout

Australia is an outdoor country. People only go inside to use the toilet. And that’s only a recent development.

BARRY HUMPHRIES

A
s if living in Los Angeles was not enough to turn me against walking, I’d been raised in rural Australia, where distances discourage the man on foot.

Well, they discouraged
me
.

Distance was only one reason to stay off the ground. Australia harbors the world’s largest population of lethal animals, insects, and plants. Tiger sharks, bull ants, saltwater crocodiles, venomous snakes, jellyfish, killer wasps, vampire bats, fruits that poison, thorns that spike, vines that trip, flowers that give a rash . . . everything, it seems, is out to get you. As kids, we were warned to avoid long grass, where snakes slithered, so poisonous that one bite killed not only you, your dog, and the little sister whose hand you held but probably also the woman driving the school bus.

Lurking in slanting earth tunnels disguised with a cunning lid, trapdoor or funnel web spiders waited to launch themselves up the leg of your trousers. Old bush hands wore “bowyangs”—loops of string, just below the knee. But bowyangs wouldn’t help with the redback spider,
Latrodectus hasselti
: a deadly pea-sized spider with a dashing red flash across its mostly black back. Our house, being on the outskirts of town, had only recently acquired a sewer. The lavatory was still entered from outside, a vestige of the old days when the “dunny man” visited a couple of times a week to collect the can. Redbacks often make their homes under the wooden seats of such outdoor facilities. As Clive James remarked, anyone bitten in those circumstances had only five minutes to live and an urgent problem about where to tie the tourniquet.

Not every Australian shared my prejudice against the outdoors. The aboriginal people who still live in tribal conditions, away from big cities, routinely “go walkabout,” setting off into the desert, living off what they can harvest or hunt, and communing in some little-understood way with the land, which for them is the basis of their religion. Among white men, hobos, called “swagmen,” trudged all over the outback, carrying their belongings in a blanket roll, or “bluey.” (In local slang, this way of life was known as “humping the bluey,” which caused some hilarity among Americans.) The hero of Australia’s national song, “Waltzing Matilda,” is a “jolly swagman” who camps where he pleases, in his case by a small lake, or billabong. He dines off “a jolly jumbuck” (a stolen sheep), is caught by the police, and drowns himself. Not everyone’s concept of a cultural ideal, perhaps, but Australians love an outlaw.

Australian swagman “humping the bluey”

Occasionally a swaggie stopped by our back door for a handout. Since we lived on the edge of town, with a rutted red clay stock trail running past our back gate, we saw more of them than other householders. Stepping off the track, they’d remove their battered felt hats, and ask politely, “Missus, could you let us have a bit of flour?”

While my mother filled a paper bag, we kids stared with fascination through the screen door.

Once, there were two men, one an aboriginal—the first I’d met. The aboriginal wore a faded blue shirt, corduroy trousers worn smooth at the knees, and nothing on his feet. Even then he looked overdressed. His friend’s once-smart tweed suit was worn and patched, his cotton vest stained under the arms with concentric rings of sweat. Above all, his boots, dusty and so scuffed and scratched that one could no longer tell the leather’s original color, spoke of hundreds, even thousands, of miles on the track.

Even as a child, the mechanisms of cooking interested me. “What do you make with the flour?” I asked.

The white man looked down without expression.

“Damper,” he said at last.

He had an accent—guttural, European. Was he one of the emigrants forced out of Europe by the war? The group dismissed by my father as “reffos,” but later rebranded by the government as “New Australians”?

I knew damper; a kind of bread, like a scone, made with flour, salt, water, and a pinch of baking soda.

“How?” By way of explaining my inquisitiveness, I added, “My dad’s a pastry cook.”

“We mix it up,” he said after a long pause, “and bake it in the ashes.”

Speaking took effort. In the isolation of the track, language shrivels for lack of use. This was probably as long a conversation as he’d had in weeks.

My mother returned. She lifted the latch and, maintaining a firm grip on the handle inside the door, passed out the paper bags of flour and salt.

“I put a bit of baking powder in, too. It’s in with the flour.”

“Thanks, missus.” He slipped the bags into pockets stretched out of shape with long use to carry things for which they’d never been intended.

“But
how
?” I pressed. My eyes, sweeping over the things they carried—the rolled bluey and a battered billy can with a wire handle, blackened from boiling tea over an open fire—I saw no pots, no pans for mixing or baking. How did they combine the ingredients and knead them into dough, as I’d watched my father do a thousand times in the bake house?

“Don’t bother the gentlemen,” my mother said.

“No, it’s all right, missus,” said the man. “Clever kid.”

He squatted so that our eyes were level. I smelled the not unpleasant odor of tobacco on his breath. Talking through the metal mesh recalled the confessional, the sense of privileged communication.

“How we make it, son,” he said. “Jacky here . . .” He tilted his head toward his friend. “ . . . takes off his shirt and lies down, and I mix the damper on his back.” Then he winked.

Standing up, he tipped his hat. “Thanks again, missus. God bless.”

They walked down the path to the back gate and stepped out onto the red dust track leading out of town. In all this time, the black man hadn’t said a word or even acknowledged our existence. As they closed the back gate, I expected them to laugh, but if they did, I never heard it. I hope he knew I got the joke.