Game of Patience (7 page)

She stared at him, speechless. “Gossip must have been his food and drink,” he continued. “If you say you’d known him—”

“We had met a few times, at the theater, and at the homes of friends.”

“Then he would have had his suspicions. He needed only the proof. No doubt he knew all the places where women think their secrets will be safe. He stole your letters and promptly deserted Victoire, having no further use for her.”

“Oh, the beast,” she whispered. “Poor stupid Victoire.”

“So he demanded money in exchange for the letters?”

“Yes. He asked for far more than I had. My husband is wealthy—he owns two foundries and they make cannon for the army—but he rarely gives me money. Saint-Ange wanted fifty louis in gold. I told him I would bring him what I could. Today … today was the fourth time I’d come. I thought I should never be free of him.” She broke off, eyes pleading. “Have you found the letters?”

Aristide shook his head. “Not yet. If the police find them, I assure you the commissaire or I will take great pleasure in handing them back to you ourselves.”

“And now we can guess why the dead girl was there,” said Dautry, after Madame Beaumontel had left them, discreetly veiled once more.

“Well, he couldn’t have secured such a comfortable income from a few rents.” Aristide grimaced. “Go on back to headquarters. I’ll come by shortly, after I lambaste Didier for overstepping his authority.”

“He won’t take kindly to you telling him off.”

“I really don’t care. When will that man remember it’s no longer 1793?”

#

Aristide returned to the commissariat and elbowed his way to Brasseur’s office through the midmorning crush of inspectors, clerks, complainants, and the inevitable half-dozen men and women of all sorts and conditions who were presumably spies with information to sell, waiting furtively or patiently on benches in the outer chamber. He found Brasseur looking much more pleased with himself than before.

“Here’s another stroke of luck. The girl from Rue du Hasard’s been identified.” He waved a creased form at Aristide. “Just as you suggested; she’s no cheap slut. Her father visited the morgue at the Basse-Geôle yesterday and identified her; her name is Célie Montereau.”

“Montereau?” Aristide echoed him. “Wasn’t there a member of the National Convention named Montereau, an ex-aristocrat, quite wealthy …”

“The same. Honoré-Charles-Éléonor Montereau, formerly the Comte de Soyecourt. We’re to question him this afternoon, after a visit to the morgue to see what they have to say there. In Montereau’s mansion in the faubourg Germain if you please. You’ll have to show me how to mind my manners in a house like that.”

“My uncle was a lawyer, not a duke,” Aristide said absently as he followed Brasseur through the clamor of the antechamber. Brasseur grunted.

#

It was market day outside the Châtelet and their hired fiacre rolled slowly through the disorderly cluster of farm-carts and stalls, where leather-throated vendors hawked their wares. Cabbages, turnips, onions, and apples lay stacked in careful pyramids beside cheeses, sausages, and jumbled heaps of old clothes and shoes, the tattered castoffs of the prosperous. Amid the bustle, the beggars shuffled or crouched in corners, mutely stretching out grimy hands.

The fiacre left the marketplace behind and approached the looming walls of the Châtelet to halt in a gloomy, vaulted passage of sooty masonry that provided a public way through the center of the old fortress. To their left, a small door led to the Basse-Geôle de la Seine, the morgue where unidentified corpses and victims of violent death were sent. Leaving Dautry, who refused to accompany them inside, behind in the cab, Brasseur exchanged a few words with the dour clerk on duty. They passed through a grille that the clerk unlocked for them, and the faint odor of spoiled meat drifted to their nostrils as they descended a short staircase.

The stagnant smell was far stronger in the chill, lamplit cellar below, hanging like fog over the half-dozen shrouded figures lying on their stone tables. A second clerk, a pop-eyed man with a long, mournful face like a bloodhound, straightened as they approached, tugged a sheet back over a corpse, and plunged his hands into a basin of dirty water.

“Morning, Bouille,” said Brasseur. “Do you have anything more for us about the Rue du Hasard murders?”

“Here’s my report,” said the concierge with a quick swallow from his pocket flask. Aristide glanced over Brasseur’s shoulder. Deceased, female, had been identified by her father as Marie-Célie-Josèphe-Élisabeth Montereau, age twenty-two years and five months, in good health and well-nourished, bearing no scars or highly individual features. Examination of the corpse had revealed a wound consistent with a single shot to the heart from a small firearm, as stated in the police surgeon’s report. Deceased had worn one chemise of good linen, one gown of white muslin bearing no marks or repairs (other than such damage caused by the shot that had killed deceased), one rose-pink carmagnole jacket of lightweight wool showing little wear (other than the aforementioned damage), one pair red leather shoes without high heels and showing little wear, one pair thread stockings showing little wear, one scarf of pink cashmere… .

Brasseur glanced quickly over the second sheet, the report on Louis Saint-Ange, rolled the papers into a tube, and tapped it against his lips. “Nothing much new here.”

“Might I see the girl?” Aristide said.

Bouille shuffled to one of the draped forms and folded back the sheet. Aristide gazed at the pallid, pretty young face, calm and inscrutable in death, and raised a hand to brush away a stray thread that had fallen across her cheek.

Bouille glanced at his notes. “Do you want to see the other one? We’re done with them, and the identification’s in order. The relatives can claim them whenever they like.”

“Who formally identified Saint-Ange?” Brasseur asked. “His servant?”

“Hmmm … Barthélemy Thibault, domestic official, identified him; and the girl’s father, Citizen Montereau, confirmed it.”

“Montereau!”

Bouille nodded. “We showed him the second corpse, just as a matter of form, and Montereau recognized him. Seemed very surprised. Claimed he was a relation.”

“Well, well.” Brasseur wrote a few lines in his notebook. “Nothing else?”

“Sorry. Be sure to tell the relatives they can claim the bodies,” Bouille reminded them as they retreated. “Daude’s done with the inventory of the clothing and effects. He’s very efficient that way.”

Very efficient, Aristide thought, as they climbed the steps out of the corpse-stink.

After a quarter-hour at the Basse-Geôle, neither Aristide nor Brasseur felt inclined toward more luncheon than a roll and a stiff two-sou glass of cheap brandy, commonly known as eau-de-vie or “water of life,” from a street hawker. They continued to the faubourg Germain and, telling the cabman to wait, alighted from their fiacre in a spacious, cobbled courtyard. A groom hurried forward to lead the horse to a marble watering-trough.

The manservant who led them inside wore no aristocratic livery, but the republican austerity of 1793 and 1794 seemed to have made little other impression on the ex-Comte de Soyecourt’s manner of living. A chilly, elegant marble foyer led upstairs to a series of richly furnished antechambers and salons, hung with satin curtains and decorated with delicate carved and painted paneling, where silent servants were hanging black draperies over windows, mirrors, chandeliers, and clocks. Montereau rose from a writing-desk to meet them as they entered the library.

“Citizen Commissaire? They told me at—at the Basse-Geôle that someone would call. Coffee for the citizens, Michel,” he added, to the lackey.

Aristide took stock of Montereau as Brasseur introduced himself and Dautry pulled out his notebook. The dead girl’s father was thickset and dark, lines of grief marking what would have been in better times a good-natured, though harassed, countenance beneath an untidy powdered wig.

“This is all so terribly sudden,” he said, hastily thrusting away a handkerchief. “To be occupying myself with offers for her hand one day, and then to order her coffin the next; but this … she was in excellent health, I never suspected …”

He absently scratched his head, pushing his wig askew, and rubbed his eyes. An amiable untidiness seemed to be the essence of Montereau’s temperament, Aristide thought. Though his black silk frock coat was finely tailored, its cut was some years out of fashion and it hung on his sturdy shoulders as if he had been wearing a peasant’s smock.

Aristide seated himself on the nearest chair. Brasseur gingerly lowered his large frame onto a graceful Louis XV sofa and perched on the edge. Across the ceiling above them, simpering cherubs surrounded a pair of nude pagan gods who reclined among rosy clouds. Brasseur glanced upward, blushed, and tried to look as if he saw such suggestive opulence every day.

“They told me my daughter had been murdered,” Montereau said. “Who—who could have done such a thing?”

“We hope to find that out, Citizen Montereau,” Brasseur told him, “but it looks as if she was just the victim of bad luck, in the wrong place at the wrong time. When was the last time you saw your daughter?”

“
Décadi,
in the morning. The day she disappeared. We—we breakfasted together as we usually did. Then I went to the Tuileries to meet—pardon me, the National Palace—to meet some friends; I joined them for dinner at Méot’s, and didn’t return home until nearly eleven o’clock that evening.”

Aristide nodded. Méot was a fashionable and expensive
restaurateur
near the Palais-Égalité and Montereau’s presence there could be easily verified.

“Célie wasn’t here when I returned. Her maid told me she had gone out on an errand.”

“What sort of errand?” said Aristide.

“I don’t know. Pierrette didn’t know. Célie left at about five o’clock, after she’d dined, and said she would be gone only an hour or two. She said she was only going on an errand …”

“Did your daughter often go out alone?” Brasseur inquired.

“Usually she took Pierrette with her—her maid—but now and then she insisted she could go alone. She could—she could take care of herself, she claimed, and after all she was twenty-two. She was so delicate and gentle, but though she didn’t look it she had a mind of her own.” A maid arrived with the coffee tray and Aristide accepted a cup, balancing it in his hands as Montereau continued. “There was no danger in going out alone, she said, not in going abroad in a respectable neighborhood in full daylight.”

The coffee was strong and bitter. Out of the corner of his eye Aristide saw Brasseur, who preferred his coffee well sugared, grimacing at the peculiar tastes of the well-to-do.

“Citizen, they told us you identified the body of Louis Saint-Ange.”

“He is—was—a distant cousin of my first wife’s. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I recognized him. Why was my daughter’s body found in his lodgings? What has he to do with this? We’ve not seen him for years … since ’eighty-nine. He emigrated to Saint-Domingue. Of course, we were not close; his reputation was a trifle unsavory.”

“Well,” Brasseur said, “it seems that Saint-Ange might have had some kind of hold over your daughter.”

“Hold?”

“He might have possessed some secret of hers that she wouldn’t have wanted spread about. He seems to have made a living from extortion.”

“Extortion?” Montereau echoed him. “That scarcely surprises me, from what I remember of him, but what possible hold could he have had over Célie?”

“No doubt it was something quite trivial,” Aristide said. “Can you think of any other reason why Citizeness Montereau should have been calling upon Saint-Ange?”

Montereau slowly shook his head. “None. She would never—I would have sworn an oath that she would never have gone alone and called on a young man, even a distant relative. She would never have risked her reputation in such a fashion. Dear God—what secret would she have feared to reveal to me?”

Brasseur set his cup and saucer aside on a pearl-inlaid table and began to scribble his own notes in addition to the transcript Dautry was meticulously recording. “No chance there might have been a … a clandestine affair of the heart—maybe with somebody unsuitable?”

“Citizen! My daughter was not that sort of woman!” Montereau exclaimed. “If I’d ever supposed otherwise, I’d—I’d—” He stopped abruptly and clamped his lips shut. “I was about to say,” he continued, more calmly, after a pause to collect himself, “that I would have killed the man who dared to take advantage of her. But those would seem to be injudicious words at such an occasion …” His voice trailed off and he blew his nose loudly.

“Who lives here with you, citizen, besides the domestics?” Brasseur inquired, glancing up from his notebook.

“Only my children—” Montereau checked himself and drew a deep breath. “Only my son and I, now… .”

An image flashed across Aristide’s mind, that of an aristocratic, quick-tempered youth disposing of an enemy as he might shoot a marauding wolf, and then killing his own sister for the sake of outraged family honor. “We shall have to question your son.”

“Théodore?” said Montereau, bewildered. “My son is barely six years old.”

Relieved, Aristide raised an inquisitive eyebrow. Many years lay between a daughter of twenty-two and a son of six.