Mister Memory

‘Fossard?’

  ‘Our neighbour. He’s an art student. He’s from Marseille and—’

  ‘Thanks, yes, Fossard. I remember now. Shares rooms with the Scottish man.’

  Petit is determined to keep Marcel on the right track now. He’s let him have his head, and maybe it did do him some good after all, because now that the catatonia has gone, he is as lucid as he has ever been in Petit’s presence.

  ‘So where does this zonier work?’

  ‘He’s in the slums by the fortifications. By the Porte de Sèvres.’

  Petit knows this place. South, out towards the old Champs des Manoeuvres, the army drill fields, where they’re knocking down the ancient city walls, is one of the most notorious of zonier slums. He had no idea arms dealing was going on out there however; the zoniers’ usual business was rag-and-bone stuff and maybe a little prostitution for the girls.

  ‘You bought the gun with how much ammunition?’

  ‘I didn’t want to buy the gun at all. It was Ondine. She was attacked one night and—’

  ‘You bought the gun. How much ammunition did you buy with it? How many rounds?’

  ‘Just the six in the chambers.’

  ‘Just six?’

  ‘Just six. No more. I—’

  ‘Yes, you didn’t want it. I know. Now, Marcel, I have a very important question for you. Did you ever use the gun? Before that night, I mean, did you ever use the gun?’

  ‘No. Never.’

  ‘Did you keep it loaded?’

  ‘We did. Ondine said we had to in case we needed it in a hurry.’

  ‘And did anyone else know about it?’

  ‘No, no one. Although I suppose Bishop must have because it was out on the table, right there, when I came in.’

  ‘Yes, I meant to ask you about that. Where did you keep the gun? Did you always keep it in the same place?’

  ‘Yes,’ Marcel says. ‘We kept it in a drawer in the kitchen, under a towel. A drawer we didn’t use for anything else. But Ondine always took it when she went out. Because of those men who attacked—’

  ‘So why do you think the gun was out on the table?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ Marcel says. He thinks about it for a while. ‘Ondine was showing it to Bishop?’

  ‘I think we can assume that since you didn’t take it out and that no one else knew about it, your wife had taken it out and had showed it to Bishop.’

  ‘Why did she do that?’ asks Marcel, but Petit ignores him.

  ‘You state that you only shot Ondine once?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘And yet you also state that you pulled the trigger five times.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘How can those two statements be true? You mean you missed her with four of the shots?’

  ‘No,’ says Marcel. ‘I mean the gun didn’t fire after the first shot. I pulled the trigger and I hit Ondine in the stomach and then I fired four more times but the gun didn’t fire and then Bishop shouted at me and said if I knew what was good for me I would run. So I ran, and—’

  ‘Yes. You told us that part. Marcel. Please think as hard as you can. You have this amazing skill, this incredible memory. I want you to use it now. Please take yourself back there again, and look. Look around the room. Is there anything else strange? Is there anything that isn’t right, or that strikes you as odd?’

  Morel makes to intercede. He worries that Petit will send Marcel back into the semi-conscious state that he’s just spent several days freeing him from. But Petit is feeling in charge for this brief time, and relishes it. He gives a gentle but powerful nod to the doctor.

  Sit, it means. Say nothing. Let me do my job now.

  ‘Well,’ says Marcel. ‘There are a few things that are confusing.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Well, for one thing, there were the clothes that Ondine was wearing.’

  ‘She had changed since you saw her at the club?’

  ‘Yes, and no. To most people, well, most people would say she was wearing the same clothes. To me, she was wearing different clothes. She was wearing a black skirt and a white blouse, just as she had at the club, but they weren’t the same ones. I suppose to most people they would look the same, but there was a small rip in the hem of the skirt that she wore at the club, and when I got home she was wearing another one like it. She has three just the same.’

  ‘Just the same apart from the rip in the hem?’

  ‘Exactly. Do you know that—’

  Petit holds up his hand again. ‘Marcel, what else was odd?’

  ‘They had made coffee.’

  ‘What? Why is that odd?’

  ‘It isn’t. But Ondine had made coffee and not put the pot back where it goes on the shelf and also she had changed the sheets on the bed.’

  Petit resists the urge to scream. He is struck by the idea that this is all a total waste of time. Coffee pots, changed sheets. What does any of it matter? How will any of it come to be useful? He takes a deep breath and is about to ask a further question, when Marcel adds something else.

  ‘Bishop,’ he says. His face darkens as he speaks of something he clearly finds painful to remember, but then so much of what Marcel remembers causes him pain.

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘I don’t think they were actually having sex.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘When Bishop pulled away, his . . . He was soft. It can’t have been doing it. They were pretending.’

  Petit thinks about that, and has absolutely nothing to say.

  ‘And there’s something else,’ says Marcel, his voice low and trembling. ‘I don’t understand this at all. I shot Ondine and she fell on the floor by the bed, and her blood ran out from under her.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes, but at the same time as I saw her blood, well, I can see it still now: there was blood coming from under the bed.’

  ‘From Ondine?’

  ‘No, it couldn’t have been. There was blood already there before she fell. What does that mean?’

  Petit thinks he has a pretty good idea what it means, but he’s not about to say.

  ‘I think that’s enough for tonight,’ he says instead, and bids Marcel good night. ‘Doctor, perhaps you would walk me to the gate?’

  Morel keeps any sign of surprise to himself, and does as the young inspector has asked him to.

  ‘Well?’ he says, as soon as they are sure they are alone.

  Petit doesn’t answer at once. He wonders how much he should tell Morel. Does he need to know about Delorme and his grubby secret? No, Petit thinks, he doesn’t, and yet it would be so very nice, he would feel so very relieved, if he could tell someone about it, just for the sake of doing so. But he forces himself to be professional.

  ‘Doctor, I have a theory about what happened that night. It is extraordinary and in order to prove it I will have to make one or two enquiries. I don’t want to make these enquiries, because, as you know, I am not supposed to be coming here, and I am not supposed to be speaking to Marcel. But I have to know.’

  ‘What is it you need to know?’

  ‘I have to see the post-mortem report on Ondine Després.’

  ‘So why don’t you?’

  ‘Because I am very truly worried that if the wrong people know I have asked for that report I will wind up in the Seine with a knife in my back.’

  The doctor stops walking.

  ‘Why?’ is all he can say.

  ‘I can’t tell you why.’

  There is a long silence. They are close to the walls of the hospital; the giant gates loom out of the darkness of the November night, and they both shiver.

  ‘And if I were to take a look at it for you?’

  ‘You?’

  ‘As a senior physician at one of Paris’s most important institutions I can make a direct request to see the reports of police surgeons. I could say it is for the well-being of my patient. That he wishes to confront what he has done and I have concluded that he should read t
he report.’

  ‘I don’t like it. It sounds too suspicious to me. They’ll guess someone is still looking into the matter.’

  ‘Who, exactly, are they?’

  ‘I don’t want to tell you that,’ says Petit, and then, he thinks, I don’t actually know. ‘But Doctor, I can’t drag you into this. I’ll find another way to get the report.’

  ‘Well, if you’re sure. But let me know. And Inspector, it might do you good to tell me what you know, or what you think you know, at least.’

  They part.

  Petit goes home and broods on how to get hold of the post-mortem report.

  Two days pass.

  On the third day, he leaves for work, and finds a large envelope crammed into his postbox in the ground-floor hallway.

  There is a note that can only be from Morel.

  ‘I decided to take the risk. M’

  The note is pinned to a thick card folder, containing two sheets of paper: the post-mortem report of Ondine Després.

  BERTILLONAGE

  Petit makes a snap decision. Part of him thinks it would be best to run straight back upstairs and hide the report somewhere better than under a towel in a drawer. Another part of him thinks it would be best to keep it next to him at all times, and when he says next to him, he means under his shirt, by his skin. It’s this latter course of action that he takes.

  There and then, he opens his shirt, folds the sheets of paper in half, and tucks them next to his hip, above his waistband. The envelope he tears steadily into four pieces, then eight, holding them in his hand, tucked into his pocket, until halfway down the Rue des Carmes he takes a quick look around and quickly drops the pieces into a hole in the gutter that leads to the underworld. Let the sewers have them.

  For some reason he has a sudden vision of returning home that evening to find his apartment burgled and wrecked, much like . . . much like Baraduc’s studio. That’s when he knows he’s right. There are greater powers at play than his own, than the police force of Paris. Who those forces are is unclear. Delorme, yes, of course. But who else?

  Out of nowhere his mind makes the connection he failed to make a few days before. Those men following him at the café. If they were speaking Russian, if they were following him, that would probably mean they were Tsarist agents. It’s an open secret, at least to those who work in the police department, that the Okhrana have a station house in Paris, that their presence is tolerated in certain quarters, even welcomed by some. There are forces among the police who share the same sentiments as the Okhrana: anti-communist sentiments.

  When Petit makes this connection, his heart starts to pound so hard that he’s amazed that Drouot can’t hear it across the desk they share. He can’t think for one moment what the Okhrana might have to do with the case of Marcel Després, but that doesn’t make him any less worried.

  He knows he has to act normally, as if nothing is wrong, but he fails. All week he has been dropping even more things than usual, and now when he tries to stand, he sends his chair spinning backwards, causing Drouot and half the room to look up at him.

  ‘Anything wrong, old man?’ Drouot asks, for once not immediately taking the chance to tease Petit. That in itself worries him. If Drouot, who is about as insensitive as it gets, has realised that something is genuinely amiss with his colleague, then he must be showing it pretty obviously.

  Petit does something he finds unforgivable.

  ‘Marie,’ he says, and pulls a face. ‘The anniversary.’

  It isn’t, in fact, but it’s close enough for no one to question Petit’s connection to that time, and therefore his emotional response.

  This mention of his dead fiancée is enough to make Drouot nod and apply his gaze firmly and immediately to his paperwork once more. Petit hates himself for using his beautiful Marie as the cover for his discomfort, but it works. Everyone knows what happened to him, to Marie. Everyone in fact wonders how it was that Petit still decided to become a police inspector even though the very Sûreté for which he works had absolutely zero success in finding the murderer. Petit knows why. It was because, in those days, he didn’t think very deeply about things. Such a short time ago, and how much has changed. Why? he thinks. Why have I changed? When did I start thinking? And would I rather not have done; would I rather not be able to remember all this suffering, this trauma?

  Petit sits in the stall in the bathroom as he did once before, shaking. He checks that the report is still folded up by his skin, but he refuses to allow himself to read it until he is far away from police headquarters. He is already drawing far too much attention to himself; he doesn’t need anything else to make matters worse.

  The rest of the day crawls by. Drouot looks up at him across the desk from time to time and pulls a half-grimace, half-smile, a look that Petit finds utterly disconcerting. He waves a hand airily back, meaning I’m fine, it’s nothing, but knows he isn’t doing a very good job of convincing anyone of anything. His eyes glaze over at the papers on his desk. Every time he catches himself, he tries to concentrate and get working again, but every time he does it is at most five minutes before he is visualising Baraduc’s studio, and wondering whereabouts the photographer has got to. Maybe he’s in the bottom of the Seine, put there by . . . who knows?

  Finally the time comes when he can leave and still make it look respectable. Drouot leaves him be, lets him go with barely a goodbye. He heads for home through the dark evening in the most circular route he can devise. He takes a bus in completely the wrong direction, gets off on a whim just as it is about to move on, checking carefully that no one gets off after him. He ducks into the Metro and doubles back, once again stepping out of the carriage just at the last moment. He finds a quiet café in an unfamiliar neighbourhood and forces himself to wait for half an hour, all the time watching the streets outside, then slips the waiter five francs to allow him to leave through the kitchens. In the street, he hails a cab and has it take him nearly all the way home, the jolting of the horse snapping into his head like hammer blows, every one. Finally, in a deserted street, he steps from the cab and briskly walks the final few hundred metres back to the Rue Laplace, knowing all the while that this entire charade of his will have been pointless if someone is waiting for him outside his apartment.

  He nods to the concierge and wonders about asking him to keep an eye out, but decides against it; the old boy is unreliable at the best of times; any fuss might only make anyone else more suspicious.

  Heart in mouth, he climbs to his rooms, half expecting to be jumped on at each turn. But there is no one there.

  He fumbles his key from his pocket, drops it on the landing, just as the middle-aged lady who lives opposite him emerges from her rooms.

  ‘Monsieur Petit?’

  ‘Good evening, Madame Faralicq,’ he mutters. He manages to get the key into the hole, enters, locks himself in, and places a chair against the door, resting its back under the door handle, and its two back feet in a gap between the floorboards. He kneels down and peers through the keyhole. He sees Madame Faralicq standing looking towards his door for more time than she has a right to, then she totters away down the stairs.

  No, he tells himself. She’s just an old lady and she lived here long before I started getting mixed up in this business. It’s just the fear.

  He rushes to the table and pulls the papers from inside his shirt.

  And reads.

  The body of Ondine Després, he learns, was penetrated five times by bullets that matched those of an Etienne 8mm. One of these bullets entered her stomach, just above the navel, rupturing several organs and lodging in her spine. The other four bullets entered her face, completely disfiguring her. However, positive identification of the victim was made by several witnesses to the event: the American, Bishop; the concierge; Monsieur Jean Bertand, the barber; as well as a general crowd of onlookers who knew Ondine well.

  Petit pauses to consider this. Her face was unrecognisable, yet everyone knew it was her. He reads on.

&
nbsp; It is fortunate, in this case, he is told, that the exacting system of Monsieur Alphonse Bertillon has once again proved invaluable in identifying a person connected to a crime. The attached sheet of paper is a copy of that earlier report. It is very helpful, the report notes, that Ondine, when she was still Badiou, committed a minor indiscretion some dark evening a few years before. She was involved in a squabble with a girl who she worked with, resulting in a breach of the peace for which each girl was imprisoned for the night. It being the new practice then to apply Monsieur Bertillon’s system of measurements to everyone who passed through police custody, the record of Ondine’s visit was readily found in Bertillon’s filing system, proving beyond all doubt that the corpse before the police surgeon was indeed Madame Badiou or Després.

  The report ends.

  Petit is cold. And suddenly he notices how hungry he is. He rummages in his cupboards and finds a piece of cheese that he wolfs down without pausing, walking all the while around his room, thinking. He pours himself a glass of wine, and he doesn’t taste that either. There are other things to think about.

  He does not trust this system of Bertillonage. He knows it has been proved effective in the ten or so years it has been used by the Sûreté, but still Petit finds it somewhat medieval. It cannot be that simple to take a series of bodily measurements and prove that there is a unique combination for each individual. Height, arm length, leg length; finger ratios, facial proportions . . . Surely, thinks Petit, these would be the same for a great number of people. He’s heard that in Argentina or somewhere equally unlikely they have developed a system based on the pattern of lines found on the pads of everyone’s fingers. Apparently, being unique to each person, they can identify anyone with one hundred per cent accuracy, and can be detected from the prints left behind on the most unlikely of surfaces. This system came before the powers that be here in Paris, Petit knows, and was rejected. A powerful lobby from Monsieur Bertillon himself, combined with the argument that it’s one thing to know that fingerprints are different, but quite another to catalogue them so that they can be searched. Monsieur Bertillon had just made a name for himself again, staking his reputation on the retrial in the Dreyfus business, the treason trial of that Jewish officer. He’s not someone to be easily overruled. So for the time being, these measurements and their results are what Petit has to work with.