Mister Memory Read online

  Petit ignores them both, striding into the area where the bed sits. Without pausing, he drags it away from the wall, and as he sees what he knew he would find, his heart starts pounding. There, on the floor, are the obvious stains of blood, murky brown on the wooden boards.

  The concierge bustles into the room.

  ‘I will call the police!’ she announces as the tenants begin to yell at her for not stopping this madman.

  ‘I am the police,’ Petit says, but not loud enough for the shouting trio to take any notice. He turns to the concierge, pointing backwards at the bloodstain as he does so.

  ‘Did you know about this?’ he demands.

  Her face pales.

  ‘I . . . No. I . . .’ she stammers. ‘No, I have no idea. I had no idea at all. What is it? What?’

  Petit doesn’t wait to hear more.

  He is out of the door and away, just as the concierge remembers who he is, and begins to hurl abuse at him down the stairwell.

  He leaves by the Rue Saint-André-des-Arts, and storms up the Rue Dauphine, looking for a horse and driver. He hails one by the river and asks for the Place de Clichy. Best not to go too close to start with, he wants to make his way on foot, not draw attention to himself by cruising through Pigalle in a cab. There are gentlemen who do such things of course, and they attract bees as to a honey jar.

  On the way, he has time to stop and piece everything together again. He has guessed what has happened, but he has little proof. Marcel, from his prison, gave him one piece of evidence hitherto unknown: there was a bleeding body underneath the bed. He knows that if Marcel says it happened, then it did; he does not forget, he does not lie. There was blood coming from under the bed before he pulled the trigger for the first time.

  Yes, Petit has only been making guesses, but each guess seems to have been accurate so far. The inevitability of each correct assumption feels like a wall of water, that spring water maybe, pushing at his back, pushing him on to the next guess, yet threatening him somehow too. His next guess is the identity of the body under the bed, and he has come to Pigalle to find that out.

  He steps down from the cab and immediately wishes that he had taken the Metro, for even here in the Place de Clichy, with its relative lack of degeneracy, he is immediately assailed by three prostitutes at once, all eager for his business. He manages to get rid of them only when he asserts that he has not come looking for women, and at that they bridle and misconstrue, and one remarks that in that case, he should be down at the Hôtel Marigny.

  He thanks the lady for her concern and pushes himself along the Boulevard de Clichy, towards Pigalle itself. Pigalle, home of the lowest strata of Parisian society, barring the zoniers, who could barely be called part of society at all. And yet also here are the haunts of free-thinkers and radicals, of the avant-garde of both art and politics. Petit walks steadily, not too fast, not too slow, trying to look as if he has somewhere to go and someone to be with. He tries to present an air of a complicated nature; that he would accept one of the many offers he receives as he makes his way, indeed, that he often does accept such invitations, but not tonight, tonight he has something special in mind that these half-dressed beauties are not able to fulfil. If he manages to pull off that image, it’s because there is some truth to it. He finds that he is stirred by the voluptuousness around him, in all its seedy horror, and despite the fact that these filles publiques are almost certainly riddled with disease. Maybe that’s part of why he finds himself titillated: the frisson of danger they exude. But that is not a way to die, with the syphilitic pox. That is a way to torture yourself.

  A girl steps right in front of him, a young girl, forcing him to break stride for a second. Before he can sidestep her, she pulls up her long skirts and shows herself to him, naked underneath her dress.

  ‘Want it?’ she coos and then laughs, causing a gaggle of her friends to cackle from the street door to their rooms.

  Petit tries to keep his cool, tipping his hat and winking at her as if he’s also amused. But he isn’t. The reality of where he is and who these women are strikes him hard, and at the next corner he turns down the Rue Blanche, walking a little faster. There seems, he discovers, to be an optimum speed to this. Too slow or, weirdly, too fast, and it appears to make the street girls and the pimps call out. Somewhere in the middle is the speed that the locals walk at, those who everyone knows aren’t interested, and he soon learns that’s all he needs to do to avoid attention. This in turn allows him to look a little bit more at the life around him. It is not his first time here, not by a long way, but now that he has woken from his sleep, now that his mind has decided to start thinking, he sees everything with new eyes. He sees the palls of smoke that drift up from every knot of people, on every corner, huddling into their little groups despite the cold winter air. Candles flicker and gas lamps glow through every window, catching faces in the act of laughter, or passion or rage, whatever it might be. Petit sees whole lives, whole worlds frozen in a momentary glance at someone through glass.

  The brothels, the bars, the roughnecks. A gang of Apaches bowls down the street on the other side, knocking a couple of young adventure-seekers into the gutter as they go. One of the young men squares up as if to fight, but his friend pulls him away. In his mind, Petit finishes the story the other way, and sees both men bleeding in the gutter with their throats slit and their money in the Apaches’ pockets.

  Things are a little quieter in the Rue Chaptal, but there is a greater air of menace. Darkness, only a couple of widely spaced street lamps, and silence – this is a sad, dying street in some ways, just a few steps from the hubbub of the Places Blanche and Pigalle.

  The sound of his footsteps rings down the street, and then he arrives at the impasse he has been looking for. He must have passed it a dozen times in his career as a policeman, and never before noticed it.

  Running north back up from the Rue Chaptal, a short, dead-end street, with the light from two gas lamps making the cobbles shine and, at the far end, the place he has come to visit. It is not the Cabaret des Insultes, because Petit doesn’t want to draw attention to himself by asking questions there. Once again, he is working from details supplied by Marcel’s memory: that Ondine used to work in other places before she came to Chardon’s. He recalled, and Petit recorded, that she worked in this place, at the end of the alley, the small, new but undeniably notorious Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, the theatre of horror, the theatre of fear.

  Everyone has heard of it, everyone knows the stories of the shows they perform, yet very few Parisians have actually witnessed matters for themselves. The theatre is tiny, but in its short lifetime has developed such a reputation for horror, for unbridled violence, for sexual daring, that it is talked about across the capital, discussed in the boardrooms of businesses and commented upon in the gazettes and papers. Its themes are of the lowest of the lowlife of Paris: of working girls, of bordellos. Corruption and decay. Murder. Incest. Drugs and drink. Sadism and torture. Such things are its nightly fare and a whole new genre of play has had to be created to fulfil the urges generated within the building, a new play every few weeks, each more depraved than the last.

  Petit decides to act as a punter, and pauses for a moment outside to peruse the playbill, a gaudy depiction of a woman with one breast exposed and a man looming over her with a long sharp metal spike of some kind in his hand, held at such a height and in such a way as to suggest that it is his phallus. The play is called Elle! and, just inside the door, Petit pays for a ticket at a small kiosk.

  There is not long to wait until the curtain rises on the drama. Petit takes the little time he has to hang around in the foyer, trying to take stock of the staff of the place, which seems minimal. There is the girl who sold him a ticket, and a man, for some reason in an antique soldier’s uniform, standing by the door into the theatre. He sees a man who might or might not be the director; he comes and goes from a small office, smiling and greeting some of the playgoers, then retreating to his lair.


  The play is about to start. Petit heads into the auditorium itself, having his ticket torn in half by the soldier. He finds a spot as near to the back as he can, on the end of a row.

  It is half full, with the air of a small chapel, seating perhaps only a hundred. People drift in, milling about, laughing uproariously, and sometimes perhaps nervously, for the theatre’s reputation is that its mission is to shock, and does not consider a night to be a success unless at least one paying customer has fainted or been sick.

  Then a trumpet sounds from somewhere behind the curtain, the lights are dimmed, and the curtain lifts.

  Almost as soon as it begins, Petit regrets his decision. The play concerns the fortunes of a young woman of rich society, orphaned as she has barely reached womanhood. Desperate, innocent, she eagerly accepts the help of her mysterious uncle, who has designs upon the pretty young thing. He rapes her.

  The whole thing is as sick as can be devised, and yet the mood is strange: overly theatrical, deliberately pantomime in places. The rape scene depicts the uncle in a melodramatic long black cape, which swirls around him as he pushes the girl back on to an ornate table, thus obscuring whatever it is he is doing to her, though all in the room know full well. Not wishing to disappoint those who have heard that nudity is frequent at the Grand-Guignol, the evil uncle rips the girl’s blouse open to display her ample right breast to the crowd. Petit can almost hear them drool, moving towards the edge of their seats. There is a tremendous eager silence in the room as the girl screams, her breast wobbling lasciviously with every thrust from the caped villain.

  It is inevitable that Petit’s thoughts turn to his beautiful Marie. He shuts his eyes but the damage is done. The scene is soon over, culminating in an all-too-real stage effect in which the uncle throws vitriol at the girl’s face, disfiguring her. Her skin, her actual skin appears to blister and peel and bleed, right before the eyes of the crowd, who gasp in horror and delight combined. Despite himself, Petit opens his eyes for a second, unable to ignore the cries of the crowd; in the row in front of him a woman does indeed retch, and staggers out of the theatre, her husband at her side.

  Petit shuts his eyes again, but it really is too late. All his suppressed imaginings of Marie’s final moments erupt in him at once, so powerfully and with such terrible images, that it is all he can do to prevent himself from screaming out, there and then. So many times these images have haunted him, things he does not even know for sure occurred, but which he can imagine, and has done so a thousand times. The murderer sitting on her stomach, or spreading her legs. His hands on her throat with such strength that he can take one hand off and rub her wherever he wishes. Poor Marie. Poor, poor Marie. In the darkness of the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, tears run down the inspector’s face, and he makes the final decision to see this whole strange affair to the end, no matter what, or who, that takes down in the process.

  The interval arrives, during which Petit stares into nothingness, suppressing his anger, his grief and, most of all, the disgust he feels. He detests the crowd around him, he detests the people who put this thing on the stage. But above that, he detests himself, because he too felt something watching the girl being exposed and taken, something he does not like to believe exists.

  The second half commences, which follows the decline of the young girl, tricked out of her fortune, her face an ugly mess on one side, as she falls into the life of a girl on the streets. The end concerns her revenge on her uncle, but by the time that scene arrives, and she pierces his eyes with a red-hot poker, Petit has left the theatre.

  He’s noted that the man who he takes to be the director of the theatre is watching from a small gallery to one side, with glee, too, Petit sees. Feigning the need to be sick, the inspector staggers from the auditorium and out into the foyer, which attracts no attention at all since he is far from the first to leave. The foyer is dark, the door to the street is closed, the girl is missing from her kiosk.

  Petit tries the handle of the little office, and expecting to find it locked almost falls through it when it opens easily under his hands.

  He steps inside, closing the door behind him gently, and by the half-light from the window finds a lamp on the desk, and matches. Once he has the lamp going he sees some drawers and cabinets, and he sets to work immediately. He very soon finds what he is looking for: a pay book, with lists of all the staff of the theatre, the details of payments made to them, and their addresses.

  He flicks back through the months and there, in 1897, he sees Ondine’s name, and right underneath it, that of Lucie Rey. It is for Lucie that he came here, for her address.

  He tears the page from the book, and is gone.

  Back out in Pigalle, little has changed. But once again Petit is very strongly aware of how every move and every action that he makes feels as if it has been laid down for him, with utter inevitability. He knew who he was looking for, where he would find what he needed. That it would all work out, that the door to the office would be unlocked thanks to the carelessness of the director of the gruesome theatre. Lucie’s address is also in Montmartre, not far, but a steep climb up the hill, that leaves him panting as he makes the Rue Gabrielle.

  It is there that he learns from Lucie’s old landlady that she did indeed leave for Lyon.

  The old lady is kind and immediately trusting, and Petit wonders how she survives in Montmartre as he asks if she can tell him when exactly it was that Lucie left.

  ‘Yes, why, yes, I can,’ she says, ‘but you’ll have to wait a moment. It’s in my book. I’ll have to check. Why don’t you come inside?’

  Petit does, again asking himself how the old lady has not been murdered in her bed for being so naïve as to let a total stranger into her house. He hasn’t even told her he is a policeman. He stands for a moment in a small hallway and then she returns with a ledger open in her hands.

  She shows it to Petit.

  ‘There; the last week was the 26th June. She left on the Saturday, I remember.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘I’m sure. She’d paid for the whole week and I offered to refund her a day’s rent, but she refused.’

  Petit’s eyebrows rise. A second angel in Montmartre! What is the world coming to?

  ‘There is one thing, though,’ the lady says.

  Petit knows this is the next moment of his journey.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes. She left some things. Lots of things, in fact. In a trunk. She said she wanted to get along to Lyon and settle herself and would have the trunk sent for when she was ready and able.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Well, she still hasn’t sent for it. That was five months ago, wasn’t it? I haven’t heard a thing. It’s still in my basement, the trunk, I mean.’

  This news does not surprise Petit one bit.

  ‘Did she say anything else? Did she mention anyone that day? Please try to remember, it’s very important.’

  ‘It is?’ asks the old lady, who is so sweet that Petit finds he is suppressing the urge to weep. ‘Well, yes. She said she was heading down on the night train, but was going to see an old friend first. Though, you know, I thought there was something funny about the way she said that. I couldn’t work out why, but it stuck with me because there was something else to it. If you know what I mean.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Petit. ‘I know what you mean.’

  Petit thanks the woman and heads out into the night again, back downhill, as fast as his legs will go. Every cab in Paris seems to have vanished, and so he walks as briskly as he can back towards the river. He has one more call to make on this most active of nights, but as he reaches the bottom of the Rue des Martyrs, he is taken with the sensation that he is being followed again, as so often over the last weeks. He tries to shake the feeling: it would not be the first time that a group of Apaches have spotted a solo gentleman on the streets of Montmartre and decided to make easy pickings. But as Petit turns at the sound of footsteps behind him, there is nothing.

  Apache
s would not be so subtle. Perhaps it was just the echo of his own boots in the deserted street.

  He presses on, and finally finds a cab on the Boulevard des Italiens to take him to the hospital, passing police headquarters as he does so – but who in that building, he thinks, can he trust?

  It takes him a while to convince the night porter at the Salpêtrière that he must speak to Morel, that it is an urgent matter, but after some wrangling and the intimation of the crime of obstructing a policeman in the course of his investigation, the porter calls directly to Morel’s rooms.

  The two men confer, briefly, for two or three minutes, and then Petit sees the time. If he is not careful he will miss the last train at the Gare de Lyon, and that’s back across the river from the hospital.

  He bids the doctor good evening and sets out, but has only gone a short way along the avenue when he finally knows he was right. He feels a hand on his shoulder before he even hears anyone. The hand tries to pull him round and instinctively he turns rapidly with it, sinking his fist into the man’s throat with a hard jab. Even as the first man collapses, choking, he realises another assailant has stepped out of the shadows under the lime trees and he feels two arms grab him. The man says nothing. Petit feels his breath on his neck and the heat of his body against his in the cold night, he feels bristles against his cheek and then jerks his whole body forward, lifting the man off his feet.

  Petit takes a half turn and then straightens, stepping back as hard as he can, hoping he has judged where the tree is. He does it perfectly, and winds the man so badly that he too falls to the ground, gasping horrid short little breaths that will not fill up his lungs.