Death on the Cards

by Richard Grindal

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

When a homemade bomb explodes on a houseboat moored on the Seine, following two brutal stabbings in Pigalle, the Paris police receive a list of targets for assassination that includes the President of the Republic himself. Each murder will be announced beforehand by the arrival of a playing card. Inspector Jean-Paul Gautier believes the choice of cards, their suit and value, are significant in some way, and must follow the threads of a riddle that unfolds against the colourful backdrop of life in Belle Époque Paris and climaxes in a spectacular bal masqué.

Release date: December 14, 2015

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 200

Sample

As the first light picked out its spires and towers, Gautier, standing on Pont Neuf, was astonished, as he had often been before, by the transformation in Paris. It was as
though each new dawn brought a rebirth, leaving the city free of the violence and vice and corruption which disfigured it by night. Even the Seine flowed soundlessly beneath its silent bridges, as
though reluctant to disturb a sleep of innocence.

The smell of violence and fear still hung on him, for he had spent most of the night in Pigalle, lying in wait for a man who was suspected of murder, following a tip-off which, like so many
others, had proved false. The murder was the second in Pigalle within four nights. In a quartier where stabbings and brutal assaults were a nocturnal commonplace, that statistic might not
be thought unusual, but the two killings had certain features in common: the manner of their execution was identical, a single upward thrust with a broad-bladed knife, expertly placed; and both
seemed to be without motive. Afraid that the two might be forerunners of a string of gruesome murders like those committed in London by the maniac whom the English had christened Jack the Ripper,
the Sûreté had started an investigation. Gautier had been sent to Pigalle and had so far learnt nothing of any significance.

An excellent breakfast in one of the cafés around Les Halles, which catered for porters from the markets nearby, had helped him to forget the frustration of the night, and now, after
reporting back at Sûreté headquarters which overlooked the Seine on Quai des Orfèvres, he was on his way to his apartment on the Left Bank. And as he so often did, he had
stopped as he was crossing the river to lean on the parapet of the bridge and look at the water.

Before long Paris would begin to stir itself. The streets would gradually fill; with workmen whose métier demanded an early start, with priests hurrying to prepare their churches
for the first Mass of the day, with tradesmen selling provisions from their horse-drawn vans, each shouting his distinctive cry and bringing out servants from the houses around to buy milk, bread
and vegetables for the day. But now both the city and the river were still silent and deserted.

Then Gautier saw a rowing boat pull out into the middle of the river. It appeared to have come from around the stern of a houseboat which was moored some two or three hundred metres down along
the Left Bank, almost opposite Sûreté headquarters. The houseboat, Gautier knew, was owned by a wealthy Greek businessman and it was large enough to require a crew of a captain and
five sailors. The man in the rowing boat, though, was not wearing a sailor’s uniform but a brown suit and brown derby hat, a form of dress common enough in the boulevards, but one seldom
favoured by those who went boating, whether as their livelihood or for pleasure.

With accomplished, economical strokes the man in the brown suit crossed the river diagonally and rowed along beside Quai des Orfèvres until he disappeared from view beyond Pont St Michel.
Gautier looked at the houseboat and noticed that since the last time he had seen it, several months previously, the hull had been repainted and the awning over the deck, under which passengers
could recline in sunny weather, had been changed. The former awning of red and white striped canvas had been replaced by one in gold and white and all the brass fittings of the boat seemed freshly
burnished. That probably meant that the houseboat was about to leave on another cruise, down the Seine and along the coast to Normandy or Brittany, stopping at any harbour which the owner felt
might offer a good dinner, a casino or some other distraction for his guests.

Suddenly, as he was looking at the houseboat, its whole stern appeared to disintegrate, fragments of wood, metal and canvas flying upwards and outwards, each tracing its own trajectory. Only as
they began to fall, seconds later it seemed, did the roar of the explosion carry across the water.

Behind it followed a long moment’s hushed silence. Then debris began to clatter on to the embankment beside the boat and to flop into the water. From the eaves and ledges of the buildings
across Quai des Grands-Augustins birds flew up in fright, filling the air with the agitated thrashing of their wings.

Running across the bridge and along beside the river, Gautier reached the houseboat at the same time as a caretaker who came out of a building opposite it pulling his trousers on over his
nightshirt. His wife, a shawl around her shoulders and paper curlers in her hair, stood frightened, watching from the doorway. The stern of the houseboat was badly damaged, with a jagged hole in
the hull, which fortunately seemed to be above the water-line, and another in the deck, through which smoke was billowing.

‘Was there anyone on board?’ Gautier asked the caretaker.

‘Two sailors, I suppose. The crew take it in turn to sleep on board and guard the boat while it’s moored here.’

‘Ask your wife to telephone the local police commissariat.’ Gautier knew that the building from which the man had come housed a government department and would therefore have a
telephone. ‘Tell them an ambulance is needed and the fire brigade, quickly.’

‘I’ll have to do it myself. My wife doesn’t understand the telephone.’

The man hurried away and Gautier swiftly crossed the small gangplank which led from the quayside on to the houseboat. He remembered something of the layout of the vessel from his previous visits
to it and knew that the saloon, the dining saloon, the owner’s study and passenger cabins were all to be found in the middle and the bows, while the engine room and crew’s quarters were
in the stern. Below decks the passageway leading to the crew’s quarters was full of smoke. Holding a handkerchief over his nose and mouth he tried to find his way along it but was forced
back, choking and with streaming eyes.

The fire which, he suspected, was in the engine room of the boat would have to be extinguished before anyone who might have been injured in the explosion could be reached. There would be a hose
on board, used for washing down the decks, but Gautier had no idea where it would be stowed nor how it could be connected to the boat’s pumps. In any event the pumps themselves might well
have been damaged by the explosion. Going back on deck, he found that a score of people had gathered on the quay, all of them from buildings nearby and most of them straight out of their beds. He
sent some of them for pails and others for lengths of rope with which to lower the pails over the side of the houseboat. Presently he had a squad working, filling their pails from the river and
tossing the water into the hole in the deck.

Their efforts did not even contain the fire. The smoke grew denser as it billowed out, with tongues of flame shooting upwards through it, and Gautier was relieved when a clanging of bells and
the sound of hooves on the cobbles told him that a fire engine, drawn by a team of horses, was arriving. The firemen took charge and, as soon as the fire was under control, two of them went below
with axes to cut a passage through the wreckage which the explosion had created in the stern of the boat below deck. After a time one of them returned.

‘Has the ambulance arrived?’ he asked Gautier. ‘We’ve found the two sailors.’

‘How are they?’

‘Both dead. The place is a mangled wreck down there.’

‘Have you any idea of what might have caused the explosion?’

The fireman shrugged his shoulders. ‘We’ll have to wait for the experts to examine the damage, but there’s no doubt in my mind. It can only have been a bomb.’

The Café Corneille was beginning to fill up when Gautier arrived there later that morning. Of the small circle of friends who met regularly in the café only
Froissart, a bookseller from the Left Bank, was already there and Gautier joined him at his table. The Café Corneille did not draw its clientele from any one profession or
métier. One could find cafés in Paris for bankers and diamond merchants and journalists and even circus performers, but the only attributes which habitués of the
Café Corneille seemed to have in common were lively minds and a respect for the views of other people. When Gautier reached Froissart he saw that he was reading a copy of Le
Monde.

‘You had better hide that paper when Duthrey arrives,’ Gautier told him. Duthrey was one of their friends, a journalist who worked for Figaro. ‘Or he’ll accuse
you of disloyalty.’

‘I’ve already read Figaro,’ Froissart replied. ‘I only bought Le Monde to read what that charlatan Astrux has to say. Le Monde is carrying a
long interview with him today.’

‘Astrux? What is his latest prophecy? That we are to be invaded by men from Mars?’

‘Nothing so precise as that; the collapse of the Entente Cordiale, an assassination and a major political scandal which will bring the Government down.’

‘One does not have to be clairvoyant to predict the fall of a French government.’

‘No,’ Froissart agreed. ‘They succumb as easily as the virginity of a convent educated girl.’

Astrux was the professional name of a self-professed astrologer and clairvoyant who was very much in vogue at that time. Wealthy Parisians would pay handsome fees for consultations with him,
bankers and stockbrokers were supposed to be guided by his predictions when making their business decisions and ladies slavishly followed his advice on any matter from the colour of their dresses
to the choice of names for their pet dogs. Astrux was a name he had devised from the initials of his real name, Achille de Saint-Trucheron.

‘At least he is now being circumspect in what he says about the President,’ Gautier remarked.

‘For the time being perhaps, but he’ll never forgive Loubet. He took it as a personal insult and an affront to his dignity that anyone should take him to court.’

‘Even the President?’

‘Especially the President.’

About two years previously Astrux had published a prediction which might have been considered to imply that the President of the Republic had been taking bribes. He was immediately charged with
criminal libel, found guilty and sentenced to a year in prison and a heavy fine. However, the President had exercised clemency: the prison sentence had been lifted but the fine doubled. The
sensation of the trial had not damaged Astrux’s reputation; rather the reverse, and the number of Parisians pressing for consultations and horoscopes and mystic seances had doubled
overnight.

Gautier and Froissart were still talking about Astrux when two more of their circle arrived. One was an elderly judge, a man whose crusty manner and astringent comments on the manners of the day
concealed a shrewd brain and an inherent kindness. The other was the deputy for Val-de-Marne. They joined in the discussion. No one seriously believed that Astrux was able to foretell the future,
but they conceded that he was remarkably skilful in turning notoriety to his advantage. His name had been linked with many scandals: stories of black masses and satanism and of young girl disciples
with whom his relationship was a good deal less than supernatural. Each scandal, reported in obsessive detail by the press, only appeared to add to Astrux’s lustre. He was invited to the
salons of the most fashionable hostesses in Paris and it was hinted that he was consulted by members of the royal houses of Europe whenever they visited the city.

From the notoriety of Astrux their conversation broadened inevitably into a discussion of French society and the future of France – inevitably, because many thinking Frenchmen saw in the
behaviour of men like Astrux a symptom of the decline in morality which they believed was undermining the country.

‘We are living in the twentieth century,’ Froissart remarked. ‘How can people believe in fortune-tellers?’

‘Don’t talk to me about the twentieth century!’ the judge exclaimed. ‘What has it brought us? A collapse in morality, a slide towards anarchy.’

‘The century is still young. It will bring progress, one can be sure of that. We will have new inventions to make life more comfortable for us.’

‘Like the automobiles which fill our streets with noise and our lungs with their loathsome fumes?’

‘What I deplore,’ Froissart said, ‘is that elegance is vanishing from life. In the nineties France led the world in fashion, style and taste as well as in art and
culture.’

‘She still does. France is the centre of the civilised world. Everyone comes to Paris – English milords, American millionaires, German composers, Swedish philosophers.’

‘And what have they brought us? Homosexuality.’

They began to talk about the homosexuality of both sexes which was being reported in the press, and that led to a discussion of free thinking and the growing agitation for women’s rights.
Gautier listened, making no more than an occasional comment, not because he did not have opinions of his own to contribute, but because the conversation seemed to be veering towards politics. Men
went to cafés to exchange opinions on the matters of the day, very often passionately and heatedly. Some cafés had been breeding grounds for discontent and subversion and the
Government had been known to send in spies and agents provocateurs to identify trouble-makers. Gautier was secretly proud that the habitués of the Café Corneille trusted him enough to
accept him as an equal, talking freely in front of him, but he considered it prudent to avoid becoming involved in political arguments.

‘A pity our friend Duthrey is not here,’ he remarked. ‘He has strong views on the decline in morality in our country.’

‘It isn’t too late,’ the judge said. ‘Unless my eyes deceive me he is just arriving.’

The judge was not mistaken, for at that moment Duthrey came into the café. The journalist from Figaro was a small man, inclined to stoutness, but the tailor who made his frock
coats cut them in a way which concealed his embonpoint and enhanced his air of quiet dignity. His friends in the Café Corneille often teased him, though never unkindly, for his unshakeable
belief in the sanctity of marriage and family life and for his insistence on following the same precise and unchanging daily routine. That morning the pattern had been broken and Duthrey was not
pleased.

‘It really is too bad!’ he complained, looking at his pocket-watch as he came up to their table. ‘I’m more than twenty minutes late!’

‘What cataclysmic piece of news was it that kept you at your desk?’ the deputy for Val-de-Marne teased him. ‘Has the Pope caught a cold in the head?’

Duthrey snorted. ‘One of my colleagues was sent out to cover some trifling incident on the river and I’ve been doing his work. It’s scandalous that we do not have enough staff
to run the paper properly.’

‘What was the incident?’

‘An explosion on a houseboat. You will have seen the one. It’s tied up alongside Quai des Grands-Augustins.’

‘It was more than a trifling incident,’ Gautier told him quietly. ‘Two sailors were killed in that explosion.’

‘I had no idea! What a terrible thing.’

‘You were not to know.’ Gautier could see that Duthrey was upset and ashamed at his thoughtless remark. ‘I only know about the explosion because I saw it happen.’

The other men around the table looked at Gautier enquiringly, wishing to know how he had come to witness the explosion but not wanting to question him. Normally he never mentioned any police
investigations on which he was working to his friends at the Café Corneille, and neither did they. This time he could see no harm in telling them about the explosion, for what little he knew
would soon be public knowledge when it was reported in the newspapers. So he told the others how he had come to be on Pont Neuf that morning and what he had seen.

‘I was passing the houseboat on my way to the Assemblée Nationale this morning,’ the deputy said, ‘and I stopped for a moment to watch the firemen who were still trying
to clear the debris. Many of the windows in buildings nearby had been shattered.’

‘Was anyone injured besides the two sailors?’

‘It appears not.’

‘One of them was truly a victim of fate,’ the deputy remarked. ‘They say it was not his turn to sleep on board the houseboat, but he had agreed to so that another of the crew
could attend a wedding of a relative in Calais.’

‘To whom does the boat belong?’ Froissart asked.

‘The Greek armament salesman, Paul Valanis.’

‘To have a boat like that built for one is just vulgar ostentation,’ Duthrey said indignantly. ‘They tell me there is every conceivable luxury on board, even a grand piano.
It’s a miniature floating palace in execrable taste.’

‘What must the poor in Paris think when they see it tied up in the Seine?’ the judge commented.

Paul Valanis had arrived in Paris four or five years previously as the accredited representative of Lydon-Walters, the British armaments firm. Selling field-guns and rifles and machine-guns was
a lucrative business, particularly in France where the Government was determined to build up the country’s military strength and so avoid any repetition of the humiliation which Bismarck and
the Prussians had inflicted on the French only three decades previously. Valanis, backed with the resources of his company, had built a huge house in Avenue du Bois where he entertained Government
ministers and leading figures in Paris society. He was reputed to be as rich as the Rothschilds and a good deal more generous, especially to ladies.

Gautier did not tell the others that he knew something of Valanis’s past, most of it discreditable, for only two years previously he had been in charge of an investigation into the murder
of an art dealer from Montmartre which had involved one of the leading hostesses of Paris, the Princesse de Caramond, at that time Valanis’s mistress. The origins of Valanis were obscure but
he had faced criminal prosecutions in both Greece and Turkey on charges which ranged from living on the immoral earnings of women to smuggling and the misappropriation of rifles from the Turkish
army. On every occasion he had contrived to avoid prison, even though in Turkey the Minister of War and two of his subordinates had been executed for their part in the affair of the rifles. Gautier
had found it hard to understand how a. . .