The house on the Avenue Foch quivered in the heat of the morning. The trees before it moved sensuously as though anxious to savour the hot sun. The door was opened by a butler; we stepped inside the entrance hall. The marble was cold and the curve of the staircase twinkled where sunbeams prodded the rich colours of the carpeting. High above us the chandeliers clinked with the draught from the open door.
The only sound was a girl’s scream. I recognized it as the tape-recording that Datt mentioned. The screams were momentarily louder as a door opened and closed again somewhere on the first floor beyond the top of the staircase.
‘Who is up there?’ said Datt as he handed his umbrella and hat to the butler.
‘Monsieur Kuang-t’ien,’ said the butler.
‘A charming fellow,’ said Datt. ‘Major-domo of the Chinese Embassy here in Paris.’
Somewhere in the house a piano played Liszt, or perhaps it was a recording.
I looked towards the first floor. The screams continued, muffled by the door that had now closed again. Suddenly, moving noiselessly like a figure in a fantasy, a young girl ran along the first-floor balcony and came down the stairs, stumbling and clinging to the banister rail. She half-fell and half-ran, her mouth open in that sort of soundless scream that only nightmares produce. The girl was naked but her body was speckled with patches of bright wet blood. She must have been stabbed twenty, perhaps thirty times, and the blood had produced an intricate pattern of rivulets like a tight bodice of fine red lace. I remembered M. Kuang-t’ien’s poem: ‘If she is not a rose all white, then she must be redder than the red of blood.’
No one moved until Datt made a half-hearted attempt to grab her, but he was so slow that she avoided him effortlessly and ran through the door. I recognized her face now; it was the model that Byrd had painted, Annie.
‘Get after her.’ Datt called his staff into action with the calm precision of a liner captain pulling into a pier. ‘Go upstairs, grab Kuang-t’ien, disarm him, clean the knife and hide it. Put him under guard, then phone the Press Officer at the Chinese Embassy. Don’t tell him anything, but he must stay in his office until I call him to arrange a meeting. Albert, get on my personal phone and call the Ministry of the Interior. Tell them we’ll need some CRS policemen here. I don’t want the Police Municipale poking around too long. Jules, get my case and the drug box and have the transfusion apparatus ready; I’ll take a look at the girl.’ Datt turned, but stopped and said softly, ‘And Byrd, get Byrd here immediately; send a car for him.’
He hurried after the footmen and butler who were running across the lawn after the bleeding girl. She glanced over her shoulder and gained fresh energy from the closeness of the pursuit. She grabbed at the gatepost and swung out on to the hot dusty pavement of the Avenue Foch, her heart pumping the blood patches into shiny bulbous swellings that burst and dribbled into vertical stripes.
‘Look!’ I heard the voices of passers-by calling.
Someone else called ‘Hello darling’, and there was a laugh and a lot of wolf-whistles. They must have been the last thing the girl heard as she collapsed and died on the hot, dusty Parisian pavement under the trees in the Avenue Foch. A bewhiskered old crone carrying two baguettes came shuffling in her threadbare carpet-slippers. She pushed through the onlookers and leaned down close to the girl’s head. ‘Don’t worry chérie, I’m a nurse,’ she croaked. ‘All your injuries are small and superficial.’ She pushed the loaves of bread tighter under her armpit and tugged at her corset bottom. ‘Just superficial,’ she said again, ‘so don’t make so much fuss.’ She turned very slowly and went shuffling off down the street muttering to herself.
There were ten or twelve people around her by the time I reached the body. The butler arrived and threw a car blanket over her. One of the bystanders said ‘Tant pis’, and another said that the jolie pépée was well barricaded. His friend laughed.
A policeman is never far away in Paris and they came quickly, the blue-and-white corrugated van disgorging cops like a gambler fanning a deck of cards. Even before the van came to a halt the police were sorting through the bystanders, asking for papers, detaining some, prodding others away. The footmen had wrapped the girl’s body in the blanket and began to heave the sagging bundle towards the gates of the house.
‘Put it in the van,’ said Datt. One of the policemen said, ‘Take the body to the house.’ The two men carrying the dead girl stood undecided.
‘In the van,’ said Datt.
‘I get my orders from the Commissaire de Police,’ said the cop. ‘We are on the radio now.’ He nodded towards the van.
Datt was furious. He struck the policeman a blow on the arm. His voice was sibilant and salivatory. ‘Can’t you see that you are attracting attention, you fool? This is a political matter. The Ministry of the Interior are concerned. Put the body in the van. The radio will confirm my ruling.’ The policeman was impressed by Datt’s anger. Datt pointed at me. ‘This is one of the officers working with Chief Inspector Loiseau of the Sûreté. Is that good enough for you?’
‘Very well,’ said the policeman. He nodded to the two men, who pushed the body on to the floor of the police van. They closed the door.
‘Journalists may arrive,’ said Datt to the policeman. ‘Leave two of your men on guard here and make sure they know about article ten.’
‘Yes,’ said the policeman docilely.
‘Which way are you going?’ I asked the driver.
‘The meat goes to the Medico-Legal,’ he said.
‘Ride me to the Avenue de Marigny,’ I said. ‘I’m going back to my office.’
By now the policeman in charge of the vehicle was browbeaten by Datt’s fierce orders. He agreed to my riding in the van without a word of argument. At the corner of the Avenue de Marigny I stopped the van and got out. I needed a large brandy.
15
I expected the courier from the Embassy to contact me again that same day but he didn’t return until the next morning. He put his document case on top of the wardrobe and sank into my best armchair.
He answered an unasked question. ‘It’s a whorehouse,’ he pronounced. ‘He calls it a clinic but it’s more like a whorehouse.’
‘Thanks for your help,’ I said.
‘Don’t get snotty – you wouldn’t want me telling you what to say in your reports.’
‘That’s true,’ I admitted.
‘Certainly it’s true. It’s a whorehouse that a lot of the Embassy people use. Not just our people – the Americans, etc., use it.’
I said, ‘Straighten me up. Is this just a case of one of our Embassy people getting some dirty pictures back from Datt? Or something like that?’
The courier stared at me. ‘I’m not allowed to talk about anything like that,’ he said.
‘Don’t give me that stuff,’ I said. ‘They killed that girl yesterday.’
‘In passion,’ explained the courier. ‘It was part of a kinky sex act.’
‘I don’t care if it was done as a publicity stunt,’ I said. ‘She’s dead and I want as much information as I can get to avoid trouble. It’s not just for my own skin; it’s in the interests of the department that I avoid trouble.’
The courier said nothing, but I could see he was weakening.
I said, ‘If I’m heading into that house again just to recover some pictures of a secretary on the job, I’ll come back and haunt you.’
‘Give me some coffee,’ said the courier, and I knew he had decided to tell me whatever he knew. I boiled the kettle and brewed up a pint of strong black