Then, by contrast, blissful cool air. I pushed open the doors to a grander room, in fact an atrium, a place of classical pillars and tall arches, the very center of the hammam. Immediately in front of me was a huge temptation, a pool of water that I could tell at a glance was ice-cold. Had I been totally confident of pri­vacy, I would have discarded the towel, stepped out of the san­dals, and plunged in. However, one has one’s standards of deco­rum. Through the vaporous air (it was still tropically warm in here), I had spotted two fellow creatures, and one doesn’t parade naked in front of strangers, even though these two were inert. They were lying facedown on the vast marble platform at the center of the room that is used for massage. So far as I could tell in the conditions, they were not female.

  A third figure, a boy of Eastern features in a blue loincloth, appeared from behind a column and gestured to me to join the others on the platform. One is frightfully vulnerable facedown; however, I submitted. I don’t know if the heat saps one’s resist­ance, but at that minute the prospect of being horizontal was peculiarly appealing.

  When the boy eased the towel from underneath me, I didn’t even murmur. I lay there like a beached porpoise. He commenced to massage me by pressing lightly with his finger­tips on my neck and shoulders, working downward to my feet, which he chafed assiduously to remove hard skin from the soles.

  I was lulled into a state approaching sleep when the second, more vigorous stage of the massage began. Unknown to me until this moment, a second masseur had arrived, an adult. I opened my eyes and saw him, huge, solemn and silent, in loin­cloth and turban and with a black beard, just as he grasped my wrists and jerked them suddenly from under my head to engage in what felt to me like a tug-of-war with the boy, who gripped my ankles. My spine stretched and my limbs ached. Not satis­fied with that, the man immediately tried another maneuver, pressing his knee into the small of my back and pulling hard on my shoulders until the joints cracked. I’ve had Turkish mas­sages before and I know about the joint cracking, but this was more like the Inquisition. Of course, the manipulations are well founded, subscribing to a ritual universal in the Muslim world, differing only in the degree of energy expended by the masseur. This fellow was herculean. Ignoring my groans of protest, he attacked every joint in my body from the toes to the fingertips with sudden twists and savage jerks, the sole purpose of which was to achieve the audible crack of bone and gristle that signals success. He was inexhaustible, and turned me over like an omelet several times. At one stage, he was standing on my chest, kneading my ribs with his bare feet. The next, he grabbed my arm to raise me up while he pressed his foot against the opposite thigh.

  I have no idea how long this torture persisted. He signaled the end of it, as they invariably do, with a sharp slap across my buttocks. To me at that stage of the process, any indignity was welcome if it brought respite. I felt as if my entire body had been taken apart and reassembled. I swear that no muscle, ligament, or nerve had escaped his attention.

  I flopped on the marble, panting.

  As if from another world, a voice said in French, “Your Royal Highness?”

  I remained supine.

  “Mustafa is unequaled at his trade. You will feel the bene­fits later, Your Royal Highness.”

  I wouldn’t have troubled to raise my head if the voice had not sounded familiar. I couldn’t trust my ears alone. I hauled myself onto an elbow and stared across the marble surface at the naked form of the chef de la Sûreté.

  CHAPTER 18

  My first thought was that the dreadful mauling I had just received had affected my brain. With my blood in its parboiled and turbulent state, was it any wonder that I should experience hallucinations? I blinked twice, fully expecting to remove Marie-François Goron from my field of vision. But when I looked again, he appeared more substantial than before. His cropped hair glistened with sweat and his fat face was crimson. The wax had melted from his mustache and the tufts at each end had sprouted and sagged.

  He raised himself to his hands and knees and crawled toward me across the massage dais like a large naked baby—a spectacle too ludicrous to be a figment of my imagination.

  The squelch of his potbelly coming to rest beside me on the marble removed any lingering doubt. I won’t say I was reas­sured; I preferred the illusion.

  I sat up and said, “This can’t be a coincidence.”

  He grinned sheepishly.

  I was incensed. “I came here in the expectation of meeting someone else. Instead, I am the victim of an ambush. I have been forced to strip, then pummeled, mauled, and beaten. Every joint in my body has been tugged out of its socket—and now I know exactly whom to blame.”

  He raised his shaggy eyebrows in pretense of innocence and two beads of moisture rolled down his cheeks. “May I respectfully suggest that you lie still and relax, Your Royal Highness? Mustafa would like to complete the shampoo.”

  “Shampoo?”

  He nodded.

  The effrontery of this charmless clown took my breath away. Nobody on this earth, not even my mother, the Queen, refers to my receding hair, however obliquely. When I managed to find words, I told him, “This is beyond belief! Who do you think you are to make offensive remarks about my appearance?”

  “Sir, I think you misunderstand me. Shampoo as the Turks understand it is a massage of the entire body, not merely the head. You have just had the manipulation and it can be rather nerve-racking to hear one’s joints cracking, but that is the way they do it. The embrocation is the next stage. I think you will find it more agreeable. While Mustafa does his work, we can talk.”

  “Never mind Mustafa. I demand to know why I was lured here.”

  “Understandably,” said Goron. “It was a necessary strata­gem and I apologize for it. I needed as a matter of urgency to speak to you in private, without Madame Bernhardt in atten­dance.”

  “Bernhardt? All this because of Bernhardt? It’s preposter­ous. If you wanted a word in private, you should have asked.”

  “Ah, but she would have taken it as a challenge,” said he. “She hates being excluded from anything. This is one place where I can be assured of meeting you alone. At this time of the day, the bath is hardly used. Actually, I come here several times a week. It is the most discreet location for a meeting between gentlemen.”

  “Discreet is hardly the word I would use,” I commented. “Parading in the buff is not my idea of discretion. Couldn’t we have met in a club?” By declining to answer this, except with a sigh and a shake of the head, he intimated that his reason for bringing me here was too compelling to delay any longer. Making it plain that I was seething over what had happened, I resumed the prone position beside him—only because I was immensely curious to learn why he had tricked me into coming here. “Well, if this is the way the Sûreté conducts itself, I’m glad your methods haven’t crossed the Channel. I take it that the message I was handed in the café was from you?”

  “That is so. The man distributing the notes was one of my officers.”

  “How did he find me?”

  “Another of my men has been following you for the past two days.”

  “I was not unaware of him,” said I smoothly, quick to remember the fellow in the brown bowler hat. The fact that I had taken him for a newspaper reporter was of no importance. “You should teach him to be less obvious.”

  Goron sidestepped the criticism. “I became concerned about your activities. There was serious danger that you would undermine my investigation.”

  “By finding out the truth, do you mean?”

  “No, sir. If I thought you were likely to find out the truth, I would have no cause for concern.”

  “Except the trifling inconvenience that you arrested the wrong man,” said I with a shaft of irony that was deflected by Mustafa planting a blob of cold cream between my shoulder blades. “Jerusalem!”

  Goron said, “Morgan is guilty.”

  To which I retorted, “That’s the fallacy of French justice. You presume a man is guilty when he’s innocent and has no chance of proving it. Is he still rotting in your prison?”

  “He is still being questioned, yes.”

  “Hasn’t he confessed yet? He must have a will of iron.”

  “I can vouch for that,” he said with feeling.

  Mustafa had smeared the cream liberally across my shoul­ders and was kneading my flesh with his fingertips, and I have to say that he was producing quite tolerable sensations.

  I told Goron, “You are completely wrong about Morgan. The murder was committed by a woman.”

  His response was to yawn without even covering his mouth. “You mean Claudine Jaume? That is impossible.”

  “It most certainly is not. She was Letissier’s lover before he met the Agincourt family. She bore his child and when he rejected her, she understandably became incensed. She visited him on the Sunday before the murder to beg him not to marry Rosine. All this is indisputable.”

  “I don’t dispute it,” said Goron, yawning again.

  I would not allow his want of manners to deter me. “It was a classic French crime, the rejected mistress driven to a desper­ate act, a crime passionnel. I would have told you everything in time to arrest her, but I was hot in pursuit. If you had not invei­gled me here under false pretenses, I would certainly have caught her. She must be up and away by now.”

  He said indifferently, “Up and away? Yes.”

  I hesitated. “Do you know this for a fact?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then in the name of justice, why didn’t you detain her?”

  He said flatly, “Because she is dead.”

  “Dead?” I stared at him, aghast. “How do you know?”

  “I have seen the body. When you remarked that she is up and away, I could not disagree. It is true in a metaphysical sense. Whether she is up or down, it is difficult to say, but she is cer­tainly away.”

  Only a French detective could have talked metaphysics at a moment like this. “How did she die?” I asked, still unwilling to believe him.

  “Suicide, we believe. Her body was recovered from the Seine, near the Pont des Arts. A child’s body was also found. Both have been identified.”

  “Already?”

  “Already.”

  He gave the information in such a colorless way that I was beginning, after all, to accept it as fact.

  “If this is true,” I commented, “it’s dreadful. She took the child’s life as well as her own?”

  “No, sir. The evidence suggests that the child was dead before entering the water. The most likely explanation is that Claudine killed herself from grief and had the dead baby in her arms when she jumped from the bridge.”

  “Grief, you say. Let’s not exclude guilt.”

  “I’m not excluding it, sir. She was a tormented young woman.”

  As if by mutual consent, a silence descended. We respected the gravity of death, regardless that the deceased had sinned more than most. For an interval, the only sound was the rubbing of Mustafa’s hands across my back.

  I was dumbfounded by Goron’s statement and, if the truth be told, crushingly disappointed. After so much diligent detec­tive work, I had looked forward to unmasking the murderer myself. Was that too much to have hoped?

  “I suppose she didn’t leave a note, a confession?”

  “No note,” said Goron.

  “It’s so unsatisfactory this way.”

  “Yes.”

  Mustafa grasped me firmly by the hip and shoulder and turned me to face upward, this time dropping the towel strategi­cally over what an intimate friend of mine once called the crown jewels.

  “Anyway, her suicide is tantamount to a confession of mur­der,” said I.

  “No, sir,” said he flatly.

  I gasped at his obtuseness. “You’re not still insisting that Morgan did it, not after this?”

  “I am more certain than ever,” he insisted. “Claudine couldn’t have murdered Letissier.”

  “Why ever not?”

  “Because her body was found six hours before he was shot.”

  I sat bolt upright and pushed Mustafa away. “That’s impossible.”

  Goron also heaved himself up. “I don’t tell lies, sir.”

  “That’s rich! What do you call it when you inveigle me here with a note supposedly from a woman who turns out to be dead?”

  “I’d call it deception—in the interest of justice.”

  “Don’t talk to me about justice, Monsieur Goron. You’ve deceived me from the outset,” said I. “This is the first I’ve heard of her death. You didn’t mention it when I came to see you at the Sûreté headquarters.”

  “I was unaware of it then. The bodies lay in the morgue unidentified for a fortnight. The girl’s father, Felix Jaume, an hotelier, came up from Nantes yesterday because she hadn’t written. She always wrote two letters a week to her family. After he’d described her to me, he was shown the body. He recog­nized his daughter at once, her face, her clothes, her crucifix, the comb she wore in her hair.”

  I shook my head. It is painful to reject an explanation one has firmly believed to be the truth. I would have staked my rep­utation on Claudine. Yet now that I cast my thoughts back to the conversation I’d had with the old woman who was her neighbor in the house in the rue du Chemin-Vert, she had told me that Claudine had done a moonlight flit with the baby two weeks previously. Two weeks—the interval matched Goron’s infor­mation.

  I said, “It would appear that I may be in error.”

  Goron gave a magnanimous shrug (which looks odd when given by a naked man).

  I said, “I suppose I should thank you for mentioning it in private.”

  “You need not,” said he, adding, after a significant pause, “All I would ask, sir, is that you now leave the Sûreté to com­plete its work.”

  This I did not particularly care for. I said, “I see no reason to abandon the case, if that is what you mean.”

  He frowned.

  “I’m damned if I’ll give up,” said I. “The tragic death of this young woman must have a bearing. It can’t be coincidence.”

  “She killed herself because her baby died,” said Goron.

  “It was also Letissier’s baby, remember.”

  He pressed his hand to his head and gave a sigh like the ebb tide. “Sir, I wouldn’t have brought you here—wouldn’t have gone to such lengths—unless there were overriding rea­sons to ask for your cooperation. This unhappy episode can only inflict more grief and distress on those already mourning the death of young Letissier. I am thinking of his parents in particular, decent elderly people who have not the slightest idea that their son fathered an illegitimate child. If you had met them and seen their suffering already, as I have, you would not wish them to be dealt this additional blow. Without wanting to be overdramatic, I fear that a further tragedy might be the result.”

  I said, “I shan’t trouble the Letissiers unless it becomes absolutely necessary. My suspicions point me in another direc­tion.”

  “And which is that?”

  “Back to the Agincourts, I’m afraid. I say that with a heavy heart, Monsieur Goron. I am a family friend.”

  A look sprang into his eyes that I had not seen before, and it was akin to the look of a child caught raiding the pantry. “The Agincourts? They are just as vulnerable,” he said quickly. “Surely you can see that? The daughter, Rosine, was engaged to Letissier. The parents welcomed him as a future son-in-law. In recent days, they have had to endure repeated interrogation by the police and the press, not to mention you. They have seen their name bandied in the cheapest newspapers and they have borne it all with dignity. To heap this fresh infliction on them would be to invite more press sensations, more wagging tongues in the cafés and on the boulevards. We can spare them that, Your Royal Highness.”

  “Spare the Agincourts—or spare the Sûreté?” said I. “You nailed your colors to the mast when you took in Morgan as your prime suspect, didn’t you?”

  He said, “That is immaterial.”

  “On the contrary, it’s so material, you could make a convict suit out of it, my friend, and it might not fit Mr. Morgan. If the news of this tragedy gets to the ears of the examining magistrate, he may not be so impressed by a forced confession.”

  He said with vitriol, “You exceed yourself, sir.”

  “We shall see. I have not the slightest intention of surren­dering the case to you. I may have been mistaken over Mademoiselle Jaume, but no more mistaken than you are over Morgan. I shall persist in pursuing the truth, Goron, whatever the cost to peoples sensibilities. If necessary—who’s that?”

  My attention was distracted by a movement at the other end of the massage dais. Someone had stood up and was creep­ing away. I couldn’t see him clearly through the vaporous atmosphere and he was swallowed altogether by steam bil­lowing from a door he went through, but I can tell when a man’s movements are furtive.

  “Just another bather,” said Goron.

  “That’s the steam room,” I pointed out. “He’s gone the wrong way.”

  “That’s his choice,” said he.

  But I wasn’t satisfied. I remembered taking note of two recumbent figures when I had entered this place. The shock of meeting Goron had dismissed the second from my mind. That mysterious person, whoever he was, had been well placed to eavesdrop on our conversation.

  “I’m going after him.”

  Goron said, “Don’t.”

  That galvanized me.

  I swung my legs off the dais and dashed across the atrium, past the cold pool, skidding dangerously on the wet tiles and just staying upright. When I tugged open the door, steam fairly rushed out and hit me like a solid mass. It was a lunatic act to subject oneself to the experience without first becoming inured to heat in the purgatory of the other heat chambers. But if the man I was following was so keen to escape, then I was keener still to follow. Inside, the shock of the heat made me stagger. With eyeballs popping, heart thumping, and my entire body streaming, I groped toward a stone bench supposedly provided for the patrons to disport themselves upon—if their physiques could endure the experience. No one was there, so I shuffled to the other side. There I found a set of steps. The ventilators belching out the heat were high above me, near the ceiling, and it was a test of bulldog courage to mount the steps, increasing the agony. The only reason I submitted to it was that I had glimpsed through the billowing steam a pair of legs about four steps above me. Whoever was up there, he would be blistered all over if he stayed for long.

 

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