Murder in Montparnasse (15 page)
‘Then why is this person trying to kill you all?’ asked Phryne.
‘Well, we looked all right,’ explained Bert. ‘Apart from me, they was all standing up straight. Could have saluted, too, if an officer went past. Maccie was an expert at that. I’ve seen him stand like a flagpole when only a little breeze would have felled him like a tree . . . poor old Maccie,’ said Bert.
‘In that case,’ said Phryne, ‘I want to know everything about the man who pushed Sarcelle under the train.’
‘Who said it was a man?’ asked Cec.
All the sadness of the city came suddenly with the
cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops
to the high white houses as you walked but only
the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors
of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationery
and newspaper shops, the midwife—second
class—and the hotel where Verlaine had died . . .
Ernest Hemingway,
A Moveable Feast
‘Sorry?’ asked Phryne.
‘It was a woman,’ said Cec. ‘In one of them long coats with a fur collar. Black. And one of them little black hats that fit round the head. With a red feather in it. Lots of make-up like a . . . like one of Madame Printemps’ girls.’
‘Are you sure?’ demanded Phryne.
‘Course I’m sure. Can see her as plain as plain. And she was, too. Plain, I mean. Beaky sort of nose, thick eyebrows, as far as I could tell under the paint. Got both hands square on the poor bloke’s back and shoved hard, then vanished into the crowd. Lot of people screaming by then, pushing us, and I had all these blokes to mind.’
‘Lord,’ said Phryne. She racked her memory, trying to find anyone who resembled the woman in black. Eva, Picasso’s wife? No, too tall and statuesque. The clothes were too common. She herself had owned, at that time, a long black coat with a dyed rabbit collar and a small black cloche with a red feather. There must have been thousands of women loose in Paris wearing that combination of clothes on any November or December day in 1918. Black didn’t show the dirt as much and the red feather cheered up the sombreness of the dark garments. Who could it have been? Not Madame Sarcelle. She was short and stout and wore bright colours. Her only outer garment was a hand-woven cloak of a penetrating teal blue with green braid edgings. Not her. She was, Phryne knew, devoted to Sarcelle. In any case she had been in the railways building at the time, trying to get permission to go to the south to care for her sister and the new baby. The examining magistrate had established that.
In any case, who would have wanted to kill him? He was a harmless person, interested only in his art. Would an artistic rival, jealous of his success, really have shoved Sarcelle under an actual train? They might talk loudly of his failure of line and his feeble drawing, scoff at his cubism and call his portraits ‘pretty-pretty’, but would they really have killed him?
It sounded unlikely. Paris, however, at that time, was a strained, anxious city, and when the influenza epidemic hit, a panicky one as well. Odd things happened in times of plague. Phryne remembered that she would never see Guillaume Apollinaire again. He had died of the Spanish ’flu on November the 9th, 1918, and when Blaise Condrass had gone to his funeral on the 11th, armistice day, the crowds were rejoicing and dancing in the street, singing the anti-war song ‘You don’t have to go, Guillaume’, and Blaise had sworn that he had heard Guillaume Apollinaire’s characteristic chuckle as his cortége moved off, a perfectly absurd ending for an absurdist.
People had thrown their servants, even their relatives, out to die in the gutter. The artists’ colony had not been badly hit, possibly due to the immunity conferred by the earlier ‘la grippe’. In any case, despite rivalries, the Montparnasse crowd clung together. Fear was bourgeois, death was ever present, and what was the threat of dying of the ’flu to someone who lived on judicious doses of morphine washed down with absinthe? ‘Bah,’ they said. ‘Vive la mort!’
Some of the parties had been in the worst of all possible taste. Parties at which Influenza, the Spanish Lady, had appeared in her frilly flamenco dress, snapping her fan, flirting, her painted mask snatched away to reveal the skull underneath. The world had always been good at bad taste, ever since English ladies tied a thin red ribbon round their throats and dressed their hair à la guillotine for daring French Revolution balls. But Paris in 1918 knew that the world was absurd, dangerous and randomly fatal. Paris danced on the edge of a volcano, and she danced the tango, a dance that was modern and barbarous and scandalous.
And Phryne had danced the Auvergne waltz to the tune of cabrette and button accordion in the Rue des Trois Colonnes among the smell of varnish and wood-shavings from the vernissagiers upstairs. The room was so small that one had to invent steps which did not take one careering into a wall or the small tables; one, two-three and round in a tight circle, to the heavily accented, ornamented music, a sprinkle, a twinkle of shrill grace notes embroidering ‘Rue de Fauborg’ or ‘Wood Carver’s Lament’ and round and round again, until the room swung round too. In René’s arms, one could dance forever . . .
Back to the real world, she ordered herself. What woman hated Sarcelle enough to kill him, or what man? One who had a female accomplice ready to kill for him? That would have to be uncommon. She might have died for René, but she would not have killed for him.
Bert set down his glass. ‘Now we’ve told you all we can,’ he said, ‘what do you think?’
‘The situation is very confused,’ said Phryne. ‘Unless there’s something you’ve all forgotten about completely, in which case I can’t imagine why someone is pursuing you, then it has to be the death of Sarcelle, and I’ll have to think about it and ask around. Meanwhile, my dears, keep up your hearts, stay on guard, and I’ll find something, even if I have to go to France. I could get there in a plane in a week, allowing for emergencies. But with any luck I won’t have to do that. The murderer is here.’
‘And if I get my hands on the bastard,’ growled Johnnie Bedlow, ‘he won’t be here much longer.’
‘Quite,’ said Phryne.
Mr Butler saw them out. Ember strolled in, followed by Molly. In defiance of all biology, Ember appeared to consider that Molly was his kitten, and Molly had enthusiastically adopted this identification, having been separated from her own mother very young in life. This meant that until Ember lost patience with his maternal role and sprang up the curtains, Molly tagged along behind him, nipping at his tail and trying to play. When he turned to box the importunate puppy’s ears, she would fling herself onto her back, exhibiting the bare tummy of childhood. Ember would then flip her playfully around the ears instead of disembowelling her, and the dance would begin again. A bourrée de deux, with a little more physical contact than that dance of unresolved sexual tension which could set a whole bal musette alight and drive the couples closer together as the two danced, never touching after the first handclasp, shooting glances of dark Auvergnat passion through the smoky air . . .
Paris again. Phryne realised that she would not be able to suppress it now. Paris was returning, flooding back, and she had to go along with the waves or excise a part of her life forever.
And what was René, anyway? Just the man who broke her heart. As Lin Chung had said, that was what young love was
for
. And ever since then, no one had been in a position to do it again. She had seen to that, choosing her lovers carefully, paying attention to her own emotional well-being. She chuckled. She owed her astoundingly successful amatory career to René. And one day she might even be able to thank him fittingly.
With, as it might be, a handy piece of four-by-two across the ear.
Consoled by this thought, Phryne sat down by the window and picked up a book. The bookshop sent five new detective stories a week. She sipped at her last glass of wine and was halfway down the page before she realised that something was wrong.
‘She half-fell, half-slid into his strong arms. She felt his heart beating wildly against her cheek. He stroked the silky hair back from her burning cheek. “There, there, little girl,” he murmured.’
Unless someone got killed in the next paragraph, Phryne thought, she was going to strike this author from her list of writers. No one did. She closed the book and read the dust jacket.
Midnight of the Sheik
. Phryne refrained from throwing the book against the wall, because it was obviously Ruth’s. The idea of the girl devoting herself to such drivel was uncomfortable, especially if she came to believe it. There was more to midnight with a sheik than someone murmuring ‘There, there, little girl’, Phryne was sure. Raining kisses on one’s burning cheek was one thing. No one in a romance novel discussed the difficulty of, for instance, getting gracefully out of a pair of knickers which you have just realised are torn across the crotch, or stockings which have potato sack holes in them. Or how to deal with the unexpected arrival of a menstrual period. Not to mention the surprise of all but the country-bred when the young woman discovers what is contained in the male underwear.
That led her to wonder about Lin Chung’s fiancée, Camellia. What did well-brought-up Chinese girls know about men? Were they closeted away from anything with a penis?
Phryne put the book carefully back on the table, finished her wine in a gulp, and climbed the stairs to her own apartments. Tonight was dinner, and she would contrive to find out whether this alliance had the full consent of the girl who had braved such dangers to get here.
Detective Constable Hugh Collins left the train at Mildura and hefted his bag. He supposed that he should go, first of all, to the police station. He knew that he was supposed to stay there in a dormitory set up for firefighters, which he knew would be the height of discomfort. The more dedicated the officers, the worse the accommodation, hours, pay and food, he knew. Better to be on the spot.
He walked into the main street and headed for the Mildura Hotel. It was a large, imposing brick building, constructed when river boats brought hundreds of travelling salesmen, wanderers and workers along the Murray. It had elaborate iron lace on its balconies, a verandah deep in solid shade, and the sort of front door one expects in a castle. It was propped open.
He went in. A bosomy girl looked up from her contemplation of a yellow-covered novel. She was sitting in a highly polished wooden cubicle, and he was sure that he could smell a faint, attractive perfume. She had tightly curled blonde hair and heavily kohled eyes.
‘Hello,’ she said throatily. Must have been practising, Collins thought. That was just like Theda Bara would sound if she had sound.
‘Room for the night?’ asked Hugh.
‘Staying long?’ she drawled, fluttering her lashes.
‘I don’t know,’ said Hugh, truthfully.
‘Room 12,’ she said, unhooking a ring with two brass keys. ‘Dinner from six to eight. Breakfast . . .’ the eyelashes swept down ‘. . . six to seven in the breakfast room. The door’s closed at midnight. After that, ring the night bell and the porter will let you in.’
‘Thanks,’ he said. She shoved the large, blue-backed ledger across the polished counter.
‘Sign the register, please,’ she requested.
He signed and she read the information. ‘Hugh Collins, commercial. You don’t look like a commercial. My name’s Ella,’ she added, drawing out the syllables.
‘Nice to meet you, Ella,’ he said. He shook the pale hand heartily and mounted the stairs. It was his first solo investigation and he was determined not to make a single error. He wanted Dot to be proud of him.
And he could start investigating at dinner. Time for a wash and brush-up and then he could begin his very own investigation.
He tingled with pride as he bounced up the steps.
At seven p.m. Hugh Collins came down to dinner at the Mildura Hotel. The room was large and heavily decorated, but already the agricultural depression which the papers had been talking about for ages had set in. The dining room’s red plush was shabby. Cigarette holes had been burned in the arms of red-velvet chairs. Spider webs hung from the portraits of past presidents of the shire and unpolished wood gleamed fitfully in the setting sunlight.
Dinner promised to be something of a trial. The only vacant space in the room was between a very large farmer and an equally large river-boat captain. Hugh sat down squarely on his bit of bench and wriggled, managing to push them aside enough to be sitting on both buttocks and with a reasonable chance at the edibles.
The Mildura Hotel was used to dealing with men who knew what they liked, and it happened to be just what Hugh Collins liked, too. A large plate laden with a very large steak, nicely burned on the outside and cooked to the consistency of wood, a heap of thoroughly boiled vegetables and four roasted potatoes, crowned with lashings of butter and gravy. He shook salt and pepper and Worcestershire sauce liberally over everything and began to eat, constrained only by the squared elbows of his co-diners in really getting down to absorbing the whole meal.
After ten minutes of hard going, the farmer wiped his mouth and said, ‘Now that was a good meal to give a man.’
‘Too right,’ said the river-boat captain. ‘My missus believes in all this Food Reform. Food Fad, I call it. Nothing but poached chicken and steamed vegetables. Won’t even fry my Murray cod, and there’s good eating on a Murray cod, just out of the river, fried in butter in a hot pan. Man needs food that’ll stick to his ribs. But I got away from her tonight. She’s at the Country Women’s Association, probably learning about new ways to grate carrot.’
Hugh grunted an agreement. His own mother had flirted with Food Reform, until his father had threatened to walk out if he ever saw another pumpkin that wasn’t roasted or seethed in butter. No jam, no pickles, no vinegar, no fried food, no alcohol, no sauces, no gravy, only a lot of oatmeal and chicken cooked in water. No wonder the old man had gone crook. Hugh said so. His companions laughed.
‘Leaves! Bran! Rabbit food is for rabbits, and horse food is for horses, that’s what I told her,’ said the captain, introducing himself as Captain Max. ‘If I wanted to eat grass I’d go out and graze! But she’s a headstrong woman and there’s nothing to be done on a river boat with a headstrong woman but to keep the peace.’