“She hadn’t got any enemies,” he said, “not her. Oh maybe a few women jealous of her beauty. . .”
Lewis toyed with the wrapped cubes of sugar that had come with his coffee. Solal was as uninformative as he was drunk; but unlikely as it seemed Catherine had described the runt across the table as Phillipe’s closest friend.
“Do you think Phillipe murdered her?”
Solal pursed his lips.
“Who knows?”
“What’s your instinct?”
“Ah; he was my friend. If I knew who had killed her I would say so.”
It seemed to be the truth. Maybe the little man was simply drowning his sorrows in cognac.
“He was a gentlemen,” Solal said, his eyes drifting towards the street. Through the steamed glass of the Brasserie window brave Parisians were struggling through the fury of another blizzard, vainly attempting to keep their dignity and their posture in the teeth of a gale.
“A gentleman,” he said again.
“And the girl?”
“She was beautiful, and he was in love with her. She had other admirers, of course. A woman like her —”
“Jealous admirers?”
“Who knows?”
Again: who knows? The inquiry hung on the air like a shrug. Who knows? Who knows? Lewis began to understand the Inspector’s passion for truth. For the first time in ten years perhaps a goal appeared in his life; an ambition to shoot this indifferent ‘who knows?’ out of the air. To discover what had happened in that room on the Rue des Martyrs. Not an approximation, not a fictionalized account, but the truth, the absolute, unquestionable truth.
“Do you remember if there were any particular men who fancied her?” he asked.
Solal grinned. He only had two teeth in his lower jaw.
“Oh yes. There was one.”
“Who?”
“I never knew his name. A big man: I saw him outside the house three or four times. Though to smell him you’d have thought —”
He made an unmistakable face that implied he thought the man was homosexual. The arched eyebrows and the pursed lips made him look doubly ridiculous behind the thick spectacles.
“He smelt?”
“Oh yes.”
“Of what?”
“Perfume, Lewis. Perfume.”
Somewhere in Paris there was a man who had known the girl Phillipe loved. Jealous rage had overcome him. In a fit of uncontrollable anger he had broken into Phillipe’s apartment and slaughtered the girl. It was as clear as that.
Somewhere in Paris.
“Another cognac?”
Solal shook his head.
“Already I’m sick,” he said.
Lewis called the waiter across, and as he did so his eye alighted on a cluster of newspaper clippings pinned behind the bar.
Solal followed his gaze.
“Phillipe: he liked the pictures,” he said.
Lewis stood up.
“He came here, sometimes, to see them.”
The cuttings were old, stained and fading. Some were presumably of purely local interest. Accounts of a fireball seen in a nearby street. Another about a boy of two burned to death in his cot. One concerned an escaped puma; one, an unpublished manuscript by Rimbaud; a third (accompanied by a photograph) detailed casualties in a plane crash at Orleans airport. But there were other cuttings too; some far older than others. Atrocities, bizarre murders, ritual rapes, an advertisement for ‘Fantomas’, another for Cocteau’s ‘La Belle et La Bete’. And almost buried under this embarrassment of bizarreries, was a sepia photograph so absurd it could have come from the hand of Max Ernst. A half-ring of well-dressed gentlemen, many sporting the thick moustaches popular in the eighteen-nineties, were grouped around the vast, bleeding bulk of an ape, which was suspended by its feet from a lamppost. The faces in the picture bore expressions of mute pride; of absolute authority over the dead beast, which Lewis clearly recognized as a gorilla. Its inverted head had an almost noble tilt in death. Its brow was deep and furrowed, its jaw, though shattered by a fearsome wound, was thinly bearded like that of a patrician, and its eyes, rolled back in its head, seemed full of concern for this merciless world. They reminded Lewis, those rolling eyes, of the Weasel in his hole, tapping his chest.
“Le coeur humain.”
Pitiful.
“What is that?” he asked the acne-ridden barman, pointing at the picture of the dead gorilla.