The Curse of the Grand Guignol Read online

  Countess Zoya kept Des Ballerines as a private retreat, a secret bolt-hole away from prying Parisian eyes, and did her partying elsewhere, staying at one hotel particulier or another with one of her many aristocratic friends. It suited him not to have crowds through the place. That’s why he took the job of maître de maison. That’s how he came to be the guardian of the house…what was that?

  A string of carriages, three in all, cutting a merciless swathe through rue Bonaparte like Napoleon on his way to war, mowing down that which stood in his way. If it was war they wanted, it was war they would get. He would not surrender. This was his last stand. He was a descendent of the noble rural caste of Jat, a living embodiment of the five K’s: Kesh, Kirpan, Kara, Kachera, Kanga – uncut hair, sword, bracelet, cotton undergarment and wooden comb.

  He opened the door and the enemy advanced.

  “Bonjour, Mahmoud.” As soon as the large black door swung back and the Countess took one look at the intimidating orientalist, she remembered the name. Memory was a funny thing, like a house full of unfurnished rooms and a dark cellar, the doors all locked, the key out of sight, and then, voila! The key is found, one door opens, and then all the other doors swing open up one after another in swift succession. Memories rush out. Thinking is replaced by remembering. The past becomes the present. Throughout the northward bound train journey, from Biarritz to Paris, she had strained to remember the name and then it came just like that. The revelation took her by surprise and her voice came out sounding shrill and sharp, like a battle cry.

  The fierce Sikh with one hand on the door knob and the other on his dagger appeared to bristle. His fingers twitched; his dusky knuckles showed white.

  The Countess had the strangest sensation he was about to strike, but was it she who was the intended target or was it Dr Watson? Many Sikhs regarded British born citizens as natural born enemies because of the atrocities committed during the Anglo-Afghan war. She vaguely recalled her aunt telling her Mahmoud was a descendent of some fierce caste from a small tribe in Kabul or Kandahar. She made a mental note to speak to Dr Watson regarding discretion and his military service in Afghanistan at the first opportunity.

  “Bienvenue, la comtesse.”

  Mahmoud had a deep, grainy, manly voice, as if he had swallowed too much desert dust as a child and the harshness had permanently affected his vocal chords. It was not unattractive, though the dry gnarly notes could be a little disturbing, conjuring images of being buried alive under mountains of sand, gagging and suffocating in the struggle to breathe. The thick wiry beard didn’t help. Perhaps that’s why he had intimidated her all those years ago when she was a mere child. That, plus the lethal looking dagger strapped to his side. She understood now that it was a religious symbol.

  Sikhs wore a small curved sword the way Christians wore a cross, except in the case of male Sikhs it was mandatory. The turban was likewise a mandatory religious male accoutrement. Where it had once made him seem taller and more frightening like a mystical Arabian Nights djinn; it now appeared merely exotic.

  Surprisingly, his tawny skin seemed lighter than she remembered, not at all dark and menacing, merely sun-tinted. His flashing eyes, however, were the same, like obsidian gems, they gleamed – she remembered - in the dark, like the all-seeing eyes of an ancient desert idol with supernatural power. He never smiled. He was not smiling now. Not even as he greeted her, welcoming her home after years of absence.

  “Merci, Mahmoud, vous parlez l’anglais?”

  “Oui, la comtesse - English, French, Pashto, Dari, and Hindi.”

  “Bravo, Mahmoud,” she praised, genuinely impressed by his mastery of so many tongues. “May I introduce my travelling companion, Dr Watson. He speaks English.”

  Dr Watson’s eyes fell at once on the sheathed dagger. He got the distinct impression the Sikh would like to slit his throat given half a chance. He made a mental note to sleep with his door locked, in fact, to keep his bedroom door locked at all times, whether he was in or out. Memories of Pashtun tribesmen slipping death adders into empty beds made him break out in a cold sweat. Major Rawlins had endured a horrific death.

  In fact, the doctor decided then and there to keep his Webley in his pocket from this moment forth. The Sikh might recognize it as a service revolver, which it rightly was, and think he was back in the Hindu Kush. Sikhs were born warriors; killing was in their blood; they made the deadliest assassins.

  What on earth had possessed the Countess’s aunt to hire an assassin as a major-domo? It defied belief. Actually, come to think of it – it was par for the course. Ukrainians were all mad. The Countess was a case in point. How had he ever been talked into detouring to Paris? Oh, hang on! It had been his idea. Perhaps certain forms of madness were contagious.

  “Hello, Mahmoud, no need to stand on formality.”

  He tried to sound relaxed when the major-domo bowed stiffly but a slight tremor in his voice betrayed him. Still, he didn’t think the Sikh noticed. Not with all that wadding around his head.

  Café Bistro was a seedy little establishment near the Moulin Rouge. It was frequented by down-at-heel artists, muses, writers, pamphleteers, dancers, anarchists and anti-Dreyfusards. The regulars took their coffee bitter and black with a dash of homemade vodka to dilute the sludge. Everyone chain-smoked cheap Russian cigarettes that were really dried horse shit. The place smelled like a barn full of animals at the end of winter. The ceiling was black, the floor was blacker, the glasses were grimy, the cups were greasy, the windowsill was a graveyard for dead flies and the people who worked there were surly, belligerent and dangerous.

  Arguments erupted over every little thing: the colour of Clemenceau’s cravat, the name of Voltaire’s cat, Marx and Lenin, the existence of the devil, the Third Republic, the Panama Canal, the Dreyfus Affair, the Paris Fair, the price of bananas in Venezuela, and who was paying for the next round of drinks.

  Café Bistro was owned by three German brothers (Kaspar, Karl and Klaus) who were known affectionately as The Brothers K - a nod to Dostoyevsky, brotherly madness and the Russian babushka who had raised them; and sometimes less affectionately as Die Troika - a wink to their subversive politics.

  The brothers lived upstairs and kept a printing press in the cellar along with the still for making samohonka. Most nights would find them running off seditious articles concerning bankers, financiers, politicians, policemen, judges and Jews. They signed their work KKK. Their surname was Humboldt and the masthead at the top of their pamphlets proudly proclaimed: The Brotherhood of the Boldt.

  Inspector de Guise had already viewed the mutilated corpse outside Café Bistro soon after midnight when he first received word that another murder victim had been found by a policeman near the Moulin Rouge. Corpse number five. It had been carefully crafted after death, same as the other four, to resemble a puppet. The wrists were tied with string which was then attached to a rudimentary wooden crossbar, the sort of thing used to manipulate a marionette out of view of the audience. The mutilation this time was to the tongue – it had been cut out after death and was nowhere to be found. At least the luggage tag was loosely draped around the neck and he didn’t have to hunt for it in the dark. Just one word; same yet different: didi.

  He read it and felt vindicated that he had not summoned the Countess in vain.

  The corpse had been taken to the morgue, where he had again viewed it at nine o’clock in the morning, confirmed that it was not a homeless beggar or penniless drunkard, but a respected citizen of France, same as the previous four corpses that had been mutilated after death and set up to look like puppets. Now it was ten o’clock and he had returned to the café to speak to the Humboldts.

  “The pool of blood in the alleyway did not surprise you when you opened up this morning?” He addressed the one called Klaus whose turn it was to dispense sludge to the handful of bleary-eyed comrades who’d managed to drag themselves out of bed before midday.

  The Teutonic giant recognized a policeman when he met one, shrugged
his shoulders and blew a plume of shit-smelling smoke the inspector’s way. “Fights break out all the time. One day a pool of blood, the next day a puddle of puke, the next day dog turd or cat piss – it’s Karl’s job to sluice it. What’s the big deal?”

  As if to prove his point, a brawl broke out between two men slumped at a table by the window when one told the other to tais-toi. Cups were upended and thick black viscous sludge pooled on the table top before dribbling onto the floor. It looked more like oil than coffee. Klaus grunted something vicious and stomped over, knocked the offending patrons out of their chairs with a swift slap left and right, then proceeded to wipe up the sludge with a filthy tea towel which he then draped casually over his shoulder.

  “Beat it! Both of you! And don’t come back till you’re sober!”

  The two men staggered out, leaning against each other, tails between their legs.

  The inspector waited until the German returned to the zinc serving counter and began to dry some coffee cups with the same tea towel. “You didn’t bring your furniture in last night?”

  “What is this! Is there a law against leaving the furniture out on the street?”

  “Yes,” said the inspector calmly, “actually there is.”

  Klaus tossed his cigarette into a glass of red wine that still had some dregs in it from the night before and trumpeted, “Hey! This flic is here to arrest me because we left our furniture outside last night!”

  A racking chorus of emphysemic guffaws rumbled through the shitty haze.

  “I’m not here to arrest you. I just want to know what you know about the blood in the alleyway.”

  Looking bored, Klaus began to light up another cigarette. “Ask Karl – that’s his job.”

  “Where will I find Karl?”

  Klaus moved to a trapdoor and bellowed, “Karl!”

  The inspector got the impression Klaus did not want the inspector to go down into the cellar. The German stood between the inspector and the black maw until a blond head popped up. It could have been a demigod rising from the dead.

  “What’s up with you? You know I’m busy with – ”

  Karl could spot a policeman at a glance, same as his burly brother. And make no mistake the two men could not be mistaken for anything but brothers. They were both built like Minotaurs minus the mythic horns. Aryan good-looks had endowed them with blue eyes, blond hair, and chiselled features. If they had bothered to bathe, use a razor or get decent haircuts they would have passed for handsome.

  “This flic wants to interrogate you about the blood this morning,” said Klaus in a mocking tone, fresh cigarette hanging off the side of a thick lip.

  Karl emerged into the dirty light and dropped the trapdoor behind him. It banged into place and several of the patrons reacted as if a gun had been fired.

  “What blood?”

  “You cleaned some blood off the alleyway this morning?” reminded the inspector, wondering why he was bothering with this line of enquiry. The Humboldts had a reputation as anarchists, not melodramatic killers. If they had wanted to kill someone they would have done it fearlessly. They would not have left behind a puppet-like corpse and an artistic trail of blood. They would have made a bomb and thrown it through a window.

  Karl had the same mannerisms as his brother – he gave a surly shrug. “So what?”

  “Do you know how the blood got there?”

  “This isn’t the Café des Flore,” he amplified with a sneer, earning an accolade from his appreciative audience. “Fights break out all the time.”

  “You live above the café, how come you didn’t hear anything?”

  “We were in the cellar.”

  “We?”

  “Klaus and Kasper and me.”

  “In the cellar?”

  “Sorting out a delivery of wine,” he said a little too quickly. “We were checking the crates to make sure we hadn’t been short-changed. Can’t trust anyone these days.”

  Another appreciative snigger rumbled around the squalid café.

  “Can I take a look in the cellar?” The inspector went to step around the German when the third brother appeared suddenly from a back room. He was holding a meat cleaver, or rather wielding it, and had probably been listening to the entire exchange.

  “What for?” The third lookalike had even more attitude than the first two.

  “It will corroborate that you were busy uncrating bottles of wine.”

  “Since the wine has been uncrated there is nothing to corroborate,” he declared with surly emphasis, forming a solid wall with the other two chips-off-the-block.

  Relying on brains rather than brawn, Inspector de Guise was not built like a Minotaur and he didn’t really believe he would find anything in the cellar apart from an illegal still for vodka and pamphlets denouncing rich Jews, and he had a chilling premonition that checking the cellar might end in a nasty accident, perhaps even a fatal fall down a ladder. Not having any back-up made him reluctant to go it alone into the underground. Jules was busy scouting for possible witnesses and Marcel was busy speaking to the dead man’s widow, trying to establish a link with the other murder victims – five in all now.

  He bid the Brotherhood of the Boldt an ironic bonne journee and headed toward rue Bonaparte.

  “The staging of the murder scenes to make the victims look like marionettes has to be an allusion to the theatre, moreover,” asserted the Countess confidently, eyes alarmingly bright as myriad theories germinated inside her head one after another until she settled on her favourite, “the theatre of naturalistic horror known as le theatre du Grand Guignol.”

  Dr Watson recognized the passionate and breathless tone. Like father, like daughter. Sherlock was always unnaturally aroused by the prospect of a new case, a fresh adventure, an element of danger. “What makes you so sure it has something to do with the Grand Guignol?”

  “Grand Guignol means Big Puppet. It is named after a giant puppet from Lyonnaise similar to Punch.”

  “As in Punch and Judy?” clarified the doctor.

  “Yes, that Punch - there simply must be a connection.” Another frisson of excitement caused her neck hairs to stand on end.

  “The five murder victims,” said the incorruptible inspector, drawing an unsentimental breath and wondering if he had done the right thing after all in dispatching that telegram, “had no connection to any theatre whatsoever. They had no family members or close friends who worked in the theatre and no dealings with the theatre in a professional capacity. As far as we know they had never even attended a performance of the Grand Guignol.”

  Undeterred, the Countess rang the bell for Mahmoud. What they needed was more coffee and some patisseries. Men were always more agreeable when their stomachs were full. They had reached a stalemate early and needed to go back to the beginning. Inspector de Guise was looking pale and tired; no doubt the murders were keeping him up at night. What little sleep he was snatching was probably being circumvented by the next murder and the one after that. Dark circles underscoring the nut-brown eyes were making the hazelnuts look like something even the squirrels would reject. His unhealthy skin tone had all the warmth of bowl of yesterday’s kasha. She wondered if he’d been skipping meals and if he’d had any breakfast.

  She subpoena’ed him with a winning smile. “If you wouldn’t mind indulging me, Inspector,” she said when the coffee had been dispensed and he had consumed three freshly baked croissants and two brioches, “I would like you to describe all four murders in detail starting with the first.”

  Carefully, he replaced his delicate demitasse cup on the tray table, wiped the corners of his mouth with a linen napkin and made himself comfortable for the first time since being ushered into the salon that overlooked busy rue Bonaparte.

  It was not a grand room, stiff with French formality; more like a Byzantine closet full of exotic little treasures. The step-aunt had clearly possessed eclectic taste and had created an orientalist trompe l’oeil from her many travels to far-flung destinations.
There was a collection of jewelled scarabs from Egypt on a round table by the window, a bust of Herodotus in the corner, another of Caligula with his face to the wall like a naughty boy in disgrace, a row of phallic ornaments on the carved mantelpiece surmounted by an octagonal Venetian mirror, and myriad Eastern Orthodox ikons depicting various saints and several versions of the Virgin Mary – oddly, the saints all looked alike and the Virgins all looked different; the many looked like one and the One looked like many.

  They covered the wall behind him and he had the uneasy feeling they were looking over his shoulder. He could see them reflected in the Venetian glass and was tempted to throw some salt over his shoulder. But should he throw it over his left or his right? Was it a wall of evil eyes or an army of guardian angels?

  Chapter 3 - Kisses in the Night

  “The first murder occurred almost a month ago – the third day of November. A body was found hanging from a lamp-post in the rue des Abbesses. Not hanging by the neck, but strung up as if it was a marionette, the underarms bound with string, the sort of string used for binding large packages that one wishes to send through the post, quite common, able to be purchased almost everywhere. The corpse looked bizarre because the lips had been smeared with red lipstick and there were red dots on the cheeks, the sort that clowns paint on their faces, achieved using the same red lipstick. It was doubly bizarre because the victim was an elderly man.”

  “That comical contrivance appears to be related to a circus rather than a theatre of horror,” commented Dr Watson.

  “Yes,” agreed the inspector, “except the victim’s hands had been cut off.”

  “Oh,” muttered the doctor. “Nothing comedic about that, then.”

  “No,” agreed the inspector blandly, affecting an immobile expression to counter the melodramatic fact. “The hands had been chopped off most likely using a small hatchet after the victim had been stabbed through the heart with a round spike of some sort. There was a pool of blood in a nearby alleyway but hardly any under the lamp-post. The missing hands were never found though we searched high and low. The dead body did not immediately strike us as looking like a marionette – merely a bizarre method of displaying a corpse.”