| Seats: | 75 centimes | |
| 1 franc | ||
| Boxes: | 2.50 francs | |
| Introducing: | ||
| Messieurs | Kam-Hill | |
| Vanel | ||
| Plébins | ||
| Mesdames | Bonnaire | |
| Duffay | ||
| Holda |
NOÉMI GERFLEUR
The name certainly was eye-catching, and flowery! Satisfied, he decided to return later that evening.
Jojo was leaning on the counter, taking advantage of a quiet moment to fill a page of his notebook with a hasty scrawl. He’d had one of those ideas, those flashes of genius he must put into writing immediately for fear they might be quickly forgotten. He was planning to write a serial entitled Blood and Treason, which began with the discovery of a woman in red, found strangled on the Boulevards, her face disfigured by acid. However, no sooner had he outlined the atmosphere of the story than his inspiration dried up – no matter how much he wet his pencil lead.
Kenji looked up from his papers when he heard the doorbell, muttering, ‘About time!’ as Victor walked in.
‘Forgive the delay, I had lunch out.’
‘Did you get it?’
Victor handed him the package. Kenji opened it and took out The Essays of Michel, Seigneur de Montaigne, a 1588 in-quarto fifth edition, bound in yellow morocco-leather.
‘How much?’
‘Four thousand, nine hundred francs.’
‘A little pricey, although the Duc de Frioul is not known for his thriftiness. What about the Clément Marot?’
‘It’s coming up this afternoon. With any luck I might get it for three thousand francs. Is that all right?’
‘You have a free hand.’
Kenji’s relaxed face and the hint of a smile on his lips conveyed a cheerfulness that had been markedly absent in the past few weeks.
‘Are you pleased with your associate?’ enquired Victor.
‘Quite pleased.’
‘Only quite!’
‘A single nod of approval is better than a thousand words of flattery. Joseph, serve us some sake.’
The sky was like a liquid veil shrouding the city. The room was like a cave, its barely perceptible shadows obscuring the furniture and blurring the lined wallpaper. The man lay on the bed listening to the murmur of voices half-drowned out by the rattle of omnibuses and carriages. He lit the petrol lamp. Prompted by a baby’s cry coming through the partition wall, he went into the bathroom and emerged carrying a bottle of rum and a tumbler. This was what he needed to steady his nerves, to enable him to separate the real from the imagined. The first slug burnt in his throat; the second warmed his insides and invigorated him. The alcohol calmed his rage, allowing him to see exactly what must happen next. He found it so hard to control himself, to rein in his hatred, his impatience! But he had finally succeeded, and soon he would reap the rewards. He was nearing his goal and he would not stop before he attained it. He emptied the glass and stared for a long time at the bottle. No, he must keep a clear head.
He went to rinse his mouth out with a menthol solution, trimmed his moustache and smoothed down his greying sideburns. He felt as if he were about to emerge from a long sleep. To the devil with inertia! He sat down at the table. Soon it would all be over; she would have paid for the five years of pain and loneliness she had inflicted on him. He had taken great care not to incriminate himself; no one would ever suspect him. The sole witness was pickling in a vat of cheap wine, the alcoholic content of which he would never know.
‘My life is beginning anew,’ he murmured.
He looked at the box of cards and the envelopes and smiled.
‘I must follow my plan to the letter. I’m a lucky devil; everything has gone smoothly. If the police have an ounce of intuition and common sense, they’ll follow the clues I’ve left for them.’
Spurred on by these words, he opened a map of Paris, smoothing out the fifth, ninth and thirteenth arrondissements, all marked with crosses denoting the various florists’ shops from which he had ordered eight roses to be sent each day for the last eight days. 16 November 1886 was the day she had betrayed, dismissed and humiliated him – the bitch! The day after tomorrow, he would wish her a happy anniversary. He had placed each order with a different florist before losing himself in the crowd of a thousand nameless faces. Who would remember him? Today he would send the flowers from Rue Auber. She would receive them as she made her exit from the stage and, flattered, would lift them to her nose to smell their scent. Then she would see the note.
He dressed and picked up the cards and envelopes. He was not sure exactly what to write, but it would come to him on his way there. He looked at his watch; it was a quarter past six. He glanced about the street. A couple of servants were chattering beside a carriage entrance, and a little girl hopped along the gutter clutching a small loaf of bread to her chest. It was drizzling. He pulled his hat down over his forehead, and turned up the collar of his grey overcoat. He must remember to remove the stains from the sleeve. He walked down the street, unaware of a chubby little man with a bushy beard, in a threadbare frock coat and shabby bowler hat who was standing on the corner next to the dairy.
The city’s cosmopolitan neighbourhood around Rue Auber, with its English tailor, American optician, telegraph and cable office and travel agent, was alive and bustling. Shop girls, purveyors of the latest fashions, and accountants were all racing for a seat on the omnibus. The man in the grey overcoat strode through the revolving door of the travel agent. Inside, well-dressed customers sat at green-topped desks in leather chairs writing letters to loved ones abroad under a bluish lamplight. At the far end of the room the model of an ocean liner was an invitation to travel. The man went over to a display counter and flicked through one of the shipping company’s catalogues until a chair became free. Then he sat down at a desk with a metal inkpot, put down the cards and envelopes, nibbled the end of his pen and proceeded to dash off the following message:
To the Jewel Queen, Baroness of Saint-Meslin, a gift of ruby red roses in fond memory of Lyon – from an old friend.
He signed himself in careful, rounded letters: A. Prévost, slipped the card into an envelope and addressed it to the recipient:
Madame Noémi Gerfleur
Théâtre L’Eldorado
Boulevard de Strasbourg
Indifferent to the rain, the chubby little man stood pressed up against the window of the travel agent’s, pretending to peruse the price lists of the brightly coloured brochures. His dull protruding eyes gave an impression of blindness, and yet they were fixed on the back of the man in the grey overcoat as he sealed the envelope. The man rose and headed towards Rue Caumartin, followed at a distance by the little man who