The Alchemy of Murder (29 page)

ARISTIDE BRUANT RECITING ONE OF HIS VERSES

“I wonder where the big fish got the little minnow? Could it be at Saint-Lazare? Is she one of these nuns who are not married to God but to any man who could buy her time for a few sous?”

That does it! Saint-Lazare is a woman’s prison. As the audience shrieks with laughter, I get up and march across the room. Jules calls after me, but I do not falter from my path. The audience grows quiet with anticipation as I approach Aristide. He stands still atop the table. Arms are akimbo, grinning evilly. These are the moments he lives for—another fish has been hooked and will be humiliated. I stop in front of the table and look up at him.

“Monsieur Aristide, my father has brought me here to discover what you will do about the baby.”

“The baby?”

“Yes, the baby, Aristide. Little Pierre who you gave me as a present when you stayed at our inn when I was twelve years old and lured me into your room under the pretense—”

Jules pulls me away, but I have the pleasure of hearing Aristide’s habitués laugh at him for once and they applaud. I’m tempted to turn around and bow, but Jules is pulling too hard.

As we go back to the table, our host belts out a song about a street apache and the working-class girl who was sentenced to Saint-Lazare because of him, while Oscar floats around the room like a colorful butterfly, distributing his verbal favors.

“Aristide considers himself a champion of the poor,” Jules tells me, “but he’s the most bourgeois of any of us. He hurts the poor with his songs of thieves and prostitutes, instructing us that poverty and moral corruption are two sides of the same coin.”

“Well done, Mademoiselle, few people win a round with Bruant,” Toulouse says, after we are seated. “His humor’s crude, his songs cruder. I’m sure they’re sung even in the cafés of New York.”

I nod. I’ve never heard of Mr. Bruant or his songs, but I don’t want Toulouse to think I’m ignorant of such things, or that New Yorkers are not aware of what goes on in Paris. One is expected to be aware of what is happening in Paris, no matter where one lives.

Toulouse is already drawing, making a pencil sketch of Bruant that will no doubt someday appear on his easel. I feel like grabbing the little man, shaking him and telling him that he’s wasting his time with these scenes from the seedier side of life. What possible value could a painting of Aristide Bruant ever be?

A poet, one of the hanger-ons guarding the piano, gets up and spiels some verse, more street talk by bourgeois revolutionaries. Everyone in France seems to be a revolutionary. At least in cafés.

“I spoke briefly to Aristide,” Toulouse speaks as he continues drawing. “He won’t disclose the Red Virgin’s location to you because he’s worried you are police spies, but he told me to ask at a café called Le Couteau.”

Le Couteau—The Knife, a proper name for an anarchist café.

“It’s under the rubble of an old mill near Moulin de la Galette that got knocked down from the shelling during the Commune. Legay, the owner, got out of prison with the amnesty of the Commune fighters and opened a café in the basement—a seedy place that serves apaches and anarchists. He provides them a place to plot assassinations over cheap beer and build bombs in the backroom. Even Aristide hesitates to go there unless Louise Michel is there. I went there once, but feared for my wallet and my throat. Legay got half his face shot off and the other half is even uglier.”

The poet by the piano starts circulating around the room with a tin cup to collect money for his presentation. Anyone who refuses is cursed. I excuse myself to go to the convenience room. I’ve been bad-mouthed enough for the night.

The wall on the way to the toilets is filled with paintings from Montmartre artists who, like Toulouse, will never gain fame because they refuse to paint pleasing scenes. A country scene is deliberately made
blurry
. What is it with these Montmartre painters? Why would this artist, one Vincent van Gogh, imagine that he could actually sell this type of work?
*

As I turn the corner to the hallway that leads down to the convenience room, I recognize another painting with Toulouse’s style. The scene is of two women doing the cancan in a crowded café, not professional dancers but of women who do an impromptu dance, to the cheers of a roomful of men. I don’t believe it. I grab the painting off the wall and take it back to our table.

“
Look!
”

Toulouse is instantly excited. “You like it? One hundred francs. But for you, Mademoiselle, fifty.”

“It’s him,” I tell them.

Three men are in the painting, at a table, watching women dance. The two men in the center face forward. One of them has a heavy beard, rose-tinted glasses, and a box hat. He wears a red scarf and a black suit.

“A coincidence perhaps,” Jules states in a “calm down” tone.

“No,
it’s him
. There’s no mistake. Who’s this man, Toulouse?”

Toulouse, showing his disgust that I am not interested in buying his painting, has buried his face in a tall glass of absinthe. He daintily wipes his forehead with his handkerchief before looking back at the picture. He’s a real gentleman, even if he paints tawdry pictures.

“An anarchist.”

“How do you know he’s a real anarchist?”

He shrugs. “He has the clothes, scarf.”

“What’s his name?”

“He’s a face in a painting. Give him whatever name his features conjure up for you. Perhaps he’s a Jean … or a Pierre.”

“How long ago did you do this painting?” Jules is now interested.

Toulouse examines it. “Two, three years ago.”

“It fits. That’s when the killings began in Paris.”

“Do you recognize the other two men?” Jules asks Toulouse.

He shakes his head. “Just café patrons. They have a reason to be together at the same table, but they are not friends.”

“How do you know that?” I ask.

Toulouse gestures at the picture. “Look at their clothes. Two are conservatively dressed, not expensively, or fashionably, but as professional men dress—perhaps even less fashionably than that, more like college professors or mid-level government officials. They’re not bohemian, not men of the arts or literature, and definitely not anarchists, completely unlike him. His companions have a drink after work and go home to their families. He lingers at underground cafés until late at night and argues with comrades whether the French government will fall if the President is killed.”

I’m impressed. “Toulouse, you should have been a detective. This café scene, is it another salon here at Le Mirliton?”

“No, I did this at the Le Chat Noir. You should ask Salis, the owner, about the men. They might be regulars.”

“May we borrow the picture?”

“I would prefer you buy it, but it seems to be my lot in life to paint what people shun like the pox.”

As Jules and I leave, I spot a bouquet of flowers in a vase at a nearby table. I grab them and place them before Toulouse. “Paint flowers instead of cancan girls,” I advise him, “and you will find the world at your door.”

I hurry to catch up with Jules, leaving Toulouse staring dumfounded at the vase of flowers.

While I’m not ordinarily free with my advice, believing that self-improvement comes from within, I’m very grateful to the odd little man for capturing the slasher on canvas and feel I should give him the benefit of my artistic knowledge. It’s the least I can do.

Dear Oscar is too busy playing the social butterfly to notice our exit, but Aristide Bruant stands on top a table and queries his corps of waiters, “What do we think of the customers?”

“The customers are pigs!” the waiters chorus in unison.

I can’t help but turn around and bow before exiting.

41

“I hope this next cabaret is more pleasant than Le Mirliton.”

Jules chuckles at my statement. “You will be more charmed by Rodolphe Salis. He’s Bruant’s father—professionally speaking. Le Mirliton occupies the quarters abandoned by Le Chat Noir a few years ago. Most of the bizarre odds and ends scattered around Le Mirliton were abandoned by Salis in the move. There is even one famous chair, forgotten during the move. When Salis came back to get it, Bruant refused to turn it over. He hung it on a wall and points it out to customers when he roasts Salis in his monologues.”

“Bruant worked for Salis?”

“Yes, when Le Chat Noir was at the Rochechouart location. He wrote the Chat Noir theme song that Salis still uses. Salis has something of the same approach toward customers.”

“Oh, this should be a wonderful visit.”

“No, it won’t be as bad. He’s not as vulgar and considers himself more of a friend of the arts than a revolutionary.”

At the entrance to Le Chat Noir a man in the uniform of a Swiss Guard asks our names. Swiss Guards were the palace guards massacred by a mob when they tried to protect their king and queen during the French Revolution.

He tells Jules that Salis is handling a mutiny of galley slaves and will not be available for a few minutes and then proceeds to pound three times on the floor to announce our entrance, “Monsieur Morant and Mademoiselle Brown.”

As Le Mirliton tried to capture the spirit of the streets, Le Chat Noir is a fantasy world decorated in a mixture of ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and the Louies of France. Added all around are bits of the macabre and bizarre—Oriental fire masks, cups said to have graced the lips of Voltaire and Charlemagne, the skull and shin bones of the fifteenth-century vagabond poet François Villon, a clock telling time with two tails of a cat, and a menagerie of art and junk, though most of the outrageous pieces appear to have been left behind at Le Mirliton.

As we walk through a dining room called Salle du Conseil, the Council Room, there are people drinking beer and eating French fries with their fingers while they listen to a winsome young woman with a sad face accompanied by a piano singing:

I seek my fortune at the Black Cat in the moonlight of Montmartre.

I seek my fortune at the Black Cat of Montmartre, in the evening.

“Have you seen a shadow play?” Jules asks me.

“Yes. A puppet show when I was a child.”

“Le Chat Noir’s shadow theater isn’t child’s play. It’s the state of the art in mechanical moving pictures, presented by Rivière and Robida. Let’s take a look at it while we wait for Salis. I’ve heard it’s a good one.”

Jules leads me to a dark, crowded room called Salles des Fêtes on the next floor. A strange creature hangs from the ceiling, perhaps a large fish with the head of a snarling dog. On the far wall is a peculiar oval-shaped mantel framing a large, bright, “white screen” composed of fine cloth back lit by bright lanterns. A courtly piece above it displays a fierce cat-like griffin, winged and snarling, held up by roles of dramatic heads, laughing, crying, frightened—all the emotions of the theater. Naturally, there’s a stalking cat or two.

On the screen enemy airships, great balloon-like flying machines rigged with cannons and machine guns, drop bombs on Paris while French aeronauts battle them from their own balloons. The airships move across the sky, bombs fall, explosives rip the city’s silhouetted skyline, flames shoot up from burning buildings, screams and shouts cry out along with the sound of fierce wind and destruction.

I wish I could go backstage and see how the stage crew is creating the realistic atmosphere; it’s far beyond the typical washtub “thunder” of stage plays. I turn to Jules to ask if it would be possible, but he is completely engrossed in the play. To my surprise, he appears tense, even angered at the war scenes.

“Monsieur, Mademoiselle.”

A waiter dressed as a university don snaps us to attention.

“Monsieur Salis will see you now.”

On our way back downstairs, Jules says, “It’ll come.”

“What?”

“Airships battling over great cities.”

Fortunately for the world, Jules’ imagination is far-fetched. If everything he imagined came true, we’d live in a world in which people fly between cities in airships, are carried up very tall buildings by moving stairs, rockets will race to the moon, moving pictures will be mechanical rather than done as shadow plays, and in everyone’s homes there will be telephones and electric lights.
What a crazy world that would be.

“Welcome to Le Chat Noir.”

Monsieur Salis is a well-nourished man with red hair and beard. He’s dressed in a brocade waistcoat that would have looked appropriate at a king’s coronation … when worn by the king. He stares a little quizzically at Jules, as if he should recognize him. Jules ignores his look and instead diverts Monsieur Salis’s attention to the painting we brought.

“We have this painting by Toulouse-Lautrec.”

Salis leans the painting against the back of a chair. “Yes … I’ve seen this one before. Toulouse offered it to me and hung it at Bruant’s when I rejected it. Someone saw it in a toilet, I believe. Of course, the whole place is a toilet.”

“We’re interested in the identity of these men.”