The Song Peddler of the Pont Neuf Read online

DIPLOMAT ATTACKS YOUNG GIRL

  An Austrian diplomat, here in Paris working with colleagues on a scurrilous mission to tear France away from her faithful ally, the Ottoman Empire, raped and beat a fourteen-year old girl in a mansion in the rue de Grenelle on Sunday night.

  “What will you have, monsieur?” I looked up to see the waiter, a boy no more than ten years old.

  “Coffee and bread,” I said. He hurried away. I returned to my reading.

  The young girl, named Juliette Lesage, appeared before this reporter and told a tale that will shock and anger every Parisian. She was introduced to the diplomat, Anton Cobenzl, at a party at the mansion. Despite her budding age and obvious naïveté, Herr Cobenzl made advances toward her. Although Mademoiselle Lesage begged him to let her alone, he continued to harass her throughout the evening. Finally, when she was preparing to leave the mansion, he dragged her to a small cloakroom, where he savagely raped and beat her, and then left her there, bleeding from her wounds.

  “Here you are, monsieur.” The boy placed my breakfast on the table. I gulped the coffee, took a bite of bread, and returned my attention to the pamphlet.

  This reporter has interviewed Mademoiselle Lesage, and I have found her to be an honest, upstanding young woman from the provinces, who came to Paris to practice her talents as a seamstress. I was shocked by the evidence of Cobenzl’s attack on her. She must have formerly been a beauty, but her face will be permanently scarred by his beating. She is dazed and shocked by the rape.

  All good men and women of the city should beseech the king and his government to investigate this vicious crime and bring the Austrian to justice. Furthermore, Parisians of good will must demand that the king’s ministers investigate the circle of advisors surrounding the queen, who support her brother the Emperor of Austria’s attempts to meddle with France’s affairs. We must also insist that the emperor’s entire diplomatic corps be expelled from Paris immediately.

  Mademoiselle Lesage, though reluctant to relive her experience, recognizes her duty to France, and is available to give testimony to the king’s ministers about this matter.

  I chewed on my breakfast and reread the article. Sunday night in the rue de Grenelle, it said. But I had seen Juliette leave the Hôtel d’Estrées with the other girls. Her lovely face had been unmarked. I had followed Cobenzl back to his hotel. He had seemed the same as ever.

  I pulled some coins out of my pocket to pay my bill, shoved the pamphlet into my cloak, and left the café. In the street, a large group of eager customers surrounded the colporteur, who was selling the pamphlet as quickly as he could scoop money from people’s hands. He was probably just one of many who were hawking the pamphlet. This story would be all over the city before noon.

  I hurried across the Petit Pont and onto the Île de la Cité, headed for the rue des Bons Enfants. I wanted to know what had really happened.

  A middle-aged clerk with a pasty complexion and an impassive expression on his face sat behind a desk in the spartan lobby of Cobenzl’s hotel. There were no guests milling about—the only other person I could see was a stocky man in a porter’s uniform stacking trunks in the corner near the door.

  The clerk examined me and sniffed, apparently not pleased by what he saw. “May I help you?” he asked.

  “Yes, I’m looking for a guest of yours, an Austrian, Anton Cobenzl,” I said.

  He pursed his lips. “I am sorry. We don’t give information about our guests to strangers,” he said. “If you wish to leave Herr Cobenzl a message, I will have it delivered.”

  In my haste to find out what had happened between Cobenzl and Juliette, I had neglected to think of an effective way to approach the hotel clerk. He didn’t seem to be the type who would tell all in exchange for a few coins or a plug of tobacco. I sighed. I might as well try to get what I needed from the man. I blundered on.

  “I don’t wish to speak to him,” I said. “I just need to know if he went out late last Sunday night.”

  The clerk’s mouth tightened. “As I told you, we don’t give out that sort of information. Herr Cobenzl’s affairs are his own business. Now, if you do not wish to leave a message for him, I must ask you to leave.”

  I obeyed, scolding myself for making sad work of the encounter. As I emerged from the hotel onto the street, I almost knocked over an old monk in a hooded cloak. “I’m sorry, Father,” I said. He mumbled a few words and limped away. I headed in the other direction, toward the rue Saint-Honoré.

  “Monsieur!” I heard a call behind me. I turned to see the porter from the hotel hurrying toward me.

  “You were just in the hotel inquiring about that young Austrian gentleman?” he asked.

  “Yes. Do you know him?”

  He looked at me slyly. “I just might know something that would interest you—”

  I handed over a few coins. He stuffed them in his uniform pocket. He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “I am usually on the desk on Sunday nights. I saw him come in that night. I like to have a bit of conversation with the guests when I hand over their keys. You get better tips when you offer personalized service, I believe. So I asked him if he had had an enjoyable evening. He said yes, he had been to a very fine party.”

  “Did he say anything else?” I asked.

  “No, that was all.”

  “What did he do then?”

  “He went up to his room.”

  “Did he come back down and go out again?”

  “No. No, I am sure of it. I was at the desk all night. He never came down.”

  “Did anyone come into the hotel and ask for him?”

  “Let me think about that.” He furrowed his brow and waited.

  I handed over another coin.

  “No, no one came in.”

  “Are you sure? There wasn’t a young woman who asked for him, and went up to his room, perhaps?”

  “A young woman? No—Oh! No. Oh, no, monsieur. We are under strict orders not to allow that type of woman into the hotel. If the manager ever heard that I had allowed one upstairs, I would be out on the street.”

  Somehow I expected that if a hotel guest paid him enough, the porter would have taken the risk.

  “I know what you are thinking, monsieur. No, you are wrong about me. I’ve never taken any money to let a prostitute go up to a room. But even if I had, I didn’t do it on Sunday night. No, there was no woman in the hotel that night. I’d swear to it before the king himself.”

  I handed him a last coin and thanked him. If the story in the pamphlet was true, someone other than Cobenzl had attacked Juliette after she left the party on Sunday. Aimée had been right all along—her friend was in trouble. I needed to find Juliette and help her in any way I could, or else face my sister’s wrath.

  I stopped by Houssemaine’s bookstore on my way home. The shop was empty of customers. My neighbor sat behind the counter, his nose in a book. He looked up as I entered.

  “Paul! What brings you here?”

  “I’m looking for a copy of Hamlet,” I said. “Do you have it?”

  Houssemaine raised a brow. “Have you read any Shakespeare before?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “In that case, I would recommend that you begin with an easier play,” he said. “Hamlet is Shakespeare’s masterpiece, of course. It’s a brilliant character study, full of observations about the human condition. But the language can be too complex for a novice. How about A Midsummer Night’s Dream or one of the histories?”

  “I’ll take Hamlet,” I replied. “A friend recommended it to me.” I didn’t mention that my friend was ten years old, and that I was interested in the tale of the ghost, and in discovering whether the young prince avenged the murder of his father.

  Houssemaine climbed off his stool, went over to a shelf in the back corner of the shop, and returned with a slim volume. “This is a decent translation,” he said. “Some of the translators take liberties with the plot, but this one is faithful to the original English.”

  “I’ll t
ake it,” I said.

  “How are you?” he asked as he wrapped the book for me and deposited my payment in a box on the counter. “I haven’t seen you at Lacombe’s in a while. Talbot and Simard are terrible at trictrac. It is tedious just listening to them argue over how to count up the points.”

  I laughed. “The case I’m working on is taking a lot of time,” I said.

  “This is the murder of the old man, the one possibly involving that pamphlet?”

  “Yes. It’s become much more complicated since then.”

  “If you ever need someone to listen while you think aloud, I’d be happy to help,” Houssemaine said.

  I hesitated and then thought, why not? The bookseller was a sensible man, with keen intelligence, just the type of person I needed to help me sort out my questions about the case. “How about now?” I asked. “I’ll buy you dinner.”

  “Now?” He looked around the shop and shrugged. “All right. I seldom see a customer this time of day, anyway.”

  “I have to look in on my bird. Why don’t we meet at Lacombe’s in a half hour? I’ll ask Charlotte to fetch dinner for us.”

  “All right.”

  I took my package and went to the wineshop. As I walked in the door, my landlord came over and handed me a message. “A boy brought this for you about an hour ago,” he said.

  I broke the seal, unfolded the paper, and recognized my brother’s familiar scrawl.

  I have information that concerns your case. Come tomorrow at midday.

  B.

  I stood puzzled for a moment, wondering how Bernard would have obtained information about the murder, and then remembered that I had told the secretive bouquiniste, Janaret, who lived in Saint-Antoine, that he could contact me through my brother at Sainte-Marguerite Church.

  I asked Charlotte to fetch two dinners from the caterer down the street and then save me a table in the corner of the wineshop. I hurried upstairs with my brother’s note, excited about the possibility of making some progress on my investigation. Yesterday I’d seen Janaret cower under Duval’s angry fist. Perhaps the nervous bouquiniste had had enough of the police inspector’s threats and was willing to tell me where he obtained the illegal pamphlets and how Duval was involved. If I was lucky, he’d even tell me something I could use to prove that Duval murdered the two old men.

  After Houssemaine and I had eaten half our dinners and had both noted that the portion was substantially smaller and the meat tougher, I told him the details of the case from the beginning: how I had been hired by Hubert Montigny to find his friend Bricon, and how I had found the blackmail note and article about Duval in the old song peddler’s lodgings. My neighbor listened patiently as I described my meeting with Vincent Chéron, who had given me the illegal pamphlets Bricon had been selling.

  “After that, my client came to the wineshop and told me that Bricon had been murdered. He had heard that the body of an old man had been found on a quai, and fearing the worst, had gone to the morgue, where he identified the body as Bricon. He told me that his friend had been beaten to death, his face bruised and cut by what appeared to be a large ring.”

  Houssemaine scratched his left ear.

  “Then I found Montigny murdered in his lodgings. Someone had cut his throat.”

  “The poor old soul,” Houssemaine murmured.

  “I went to the morgue to pay to give him a decent burial,” I continued. “The attendant mentioned something odd to me. He recognized Montigny as the man who had come in to identify another old man’s body. But when I pressed him for details, he told me that the man Montigny claimed was Bricon had not been murdered at all. There had been no marks on his body. He was probably just a vagrant who had died from the elements or from natural causes.”

  “How strange,” Houssemaine said. He sipped his wine.

  “The attendant’s description of the body did not match what people have told me Bricon looked like,” I said. I took a bite of stew and chewed.

  “Meanwhile, I rode out to meet your friend, Eugèn Viot,” I said.

  Houssemaine sighed. “He’s an intelligent young man,” he said. “Every time I see him, I tell him that he should write something serious, not the malicious drivel he puts out. But who am I to judge him? I don’t have a dying father and a brood of youngsters to support.”

  I watched my neighbor carefully as I continued. “Viot told me that he had heard that Duval was corrupt—that he seized illegal pamphlets and instead of burning them, resold them. Apparently he has built himself a large network of sellers and is making good profits.”

  Houssemaine’s cheeks reddened as he studied his plate.

  “I wonder if Bricon had learned of these activities and was blackmailing Duval about them,” I said.

  My neighbor cleared his throat and looked up at me. Ah, here comes the truth that he had withheld from me the last time we spoke, I thought.

  “I should tell you—I’ve written some pamphlets myself.” His ears flushed red. “No, not those scurrilous ones about the queen’s sexual proclivities or the debauchery at court. Mine were about the commoners, about the need for us to have vote by head in the Estates General, so that we will be as powerful as the two privileged orders. But I’ll admit, I did not soften my words when the subject of the aristocracy or the king’s ministers came up.”

  I waited as he pushed the remnants of his dinner around his plate. “I had them printed by a man down by the Sorbonne who produces religious tracts by day and political pamphlets by night. I was selling them in my shop, only to my most trusted customers. But someone must have told Duval about me, because a few weeks after he became inspector, he came into my shop and demanded that I sell some pamphlets he had with him. They were the typical scandalous stuff, not as sophisticated as Madame Désirée, but along the same idea.” He pulled at his collar. “I was stupid. I refused.”

  I swallowed some wine and waited.

  “A few weeks after that, there was a pounding on my door in the middle of the night. Duval and two men dragged me out of bed. They searched the shop and my private quarters. They found the pamphlets I had written and took them away. About two months later, one of my customers told me that he had seen my work for sale by a bouquiniste on the quai Malaquais.” Houssemaine shivered. “I suppose I was lucky that he did not arrest me and throw me in the Châtelet,” he said.

  We sat for a few minutes and finished our wine.

  “So now you know, the rumors are true,” Houssemaine said. “Duval is a corrupt police official. But that doesn’t make him a murderer.”

  I nodded. “Yes. I have no proof that he murdered Bricon. I don’t even know if the old man is dead. But I spoke with a young man who lived upstairs from my client. On the night Montigny was murdered, this man heard two men arguing. Later, when he was going out to a tavern, he saw a man leave the building—a man with a large ring on his finger. I’ve met Duval. He wears such a ring.”

  “Yes, I remember it,” Houssemaine said. “So as I see it, your case comes down to this: it is possible that Bricon sold pamphlets for Duval and foolishly attempted to blackmail the police inspector, who killed him. And it is also possible that Duval argued with your client for some reason and murdered him. But how will you find proof?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll just have to keep looking.”

  • •

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The night brought a light dusting of snow, which gleamed in the brilliant sunshine and cold of Thursday morning. I left my lodgings just before noon, having spent the morning cleaning the bird cage and then chatting with my landlord and Charlotte over a small breakfast. On the rue Saint-Honoré the idlers of Parisian society, who had just risen from their beds, straggled toward the Palais Royal, determined to spend the day shopping and gawking at one another despite the cold.

  The police log had listed an address in the rue de Richelieu for Juliette Lesage. I easily located the house, a modest, elegantly appointed four-story building of white stone. A se
rvant was sweeping snow off the pavement with a large broom.

  “May I help you, monsieur?” he asked when he saw me eying the house.

  “Yes, thank you,” I said. “I’m looking for a young lady who lives at this address.”

  He looked me over carefully, noting my simple cloak and scuffed boots.

  “The young ladies do not receive guests this early in the day, monsieur,” he said.

  “I am not here as a client,” I said, concocting another story. I’ve found lying to be necessary in my profession. “I was told my cousin lives here. I’m just in the city for a few days and haven’t seen her since she moved to Paris. I promised her mother I would look in on her.”

  “What is her name?” he asked.

  “Juliette. Juliette Lesage.”

  He frowned and set the broom by the door. “Wait here,” he said. “I will ask if Madame Rolle will speak to you.” He opened the door and slipped inside.

  I paced up and down on the newly cleaned walk for several minutes. When my toes felt like blocks of ice, the door finally opened and the servant beckoned me inside. He ushered me into a parlor directly off the foyer. “You can wait here, monsieur. Madame will be down shortly.” He left, closing the door behind him.

  I seldom visit the houses of the wealthy, and do not know much about furniture and the trappings of interior decoration. But this room was among the most charming I’d ever seen, far nicer than those I remembered from my father’s house. The paneled walls were painted white and decorated with carved medallions. Above the marble mantel of the fireplace hung a wide gilt-framed mirror. Drapes of bright pink satin patterned with white and gold leaves hung at the tall windows. Armchairs in the same fabric and small marble-topped tables were scattered over an Ottoman rug. A long sofa stretched along the back wall. Knowing that the sight of me on the furniture would ruin the designer’s intent, I remained standing.

  After a few minutes the door opened and a woman entered. She wore a brilliant blue negligée with a short white lace peignoir thrown over her shoulders. Her eyes were as black as coal; her hair, which was pinned up under a net, was the same hue. Only the scowl on her face ruined her appearance.