CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
On the Stairs, 4
GILBERT BERGER hops down the stairs. He has almost got to the first-floor landing. In his right hand he is holding an orange plastic dustbin out of which poke two out-of-date directories, an empty bottle of Arabelle maple syrup, and various vegetable peelings. He is a lad of fifteen with a mop of blond, almost white, hair. He is wearing a check linen shirt and broad black braces embroidered with a design representing sprigs of lily-of-the-valley. He has on his left ring finger a tin ring of the sort generally found as free gifts with chemical-flavoured bubble gum in those blue wrappers labelled To Give Is a Joy, To Receive a Pleasure and which have come to replace standard gift packs, and which you can get for a franc from the vending machines outside stationers’ and haberdashers’ shops. The oval inset of the ring imitates the shape of a cameo with an embossed head attempting to represent a longhaired youth distantly reminiscent of an Italian Renaissance portrait.
Gilbert Berger is called Gilbert despite the ugly sound of the reduplicated “ber” syllable because his parents were both fans of Gilbert Bécaud and met at a concert the singer gave in 1956 at The Empire, in the course of which 87 seats were smashed. The Bergers live on the fourth floor left, beside the Rorschachs, beneath the Réols, and over Bartlebooth, in a flat of two rooms and a kitchen where once lived the lady who went out on the landing in her underwear and had a little dog called Dodéca.
Gilbert is in the fourth form. In his class, the French teacher makes the pupils produce a wall-sheet newspaper. Each pupil or group of pupils is responsible for one page or column, and produces copy which the whole class, meeting each week as an editorial committee for two hours, discusses and sometimes even rejects. There are political and trade-union columns, sports pages, strip cartoons, school news, classified advertisements, local news, space fillers, advertising (usually from parents with businesses near the school), and several games and hobbies columns (tips for hanging wallpaper, making your own backgammon board, getting your picture-framing right, etc.). Together with two classmates, Claude Coutant and Philippe Hémon, Gilbert has taken on the job of writing a serial. The story is called The Prick of Mystery, and they have got to the fifth episode.
In the first episode, For the Love of Constance, a famous actor, François Gormas, asks the painter Lucero, who has just won a major Academy prize, to do a portrait of him in the scene which made him famous, where, playing d’Artagnan, he duels with Rochefort for the love of pretty young Constance Bonacieux. Though he thinks Gormas is a conceited, third-rate ham unworthy of his palette, Lucero accepts, hoping, it must be said, for a princely fee. On the appointed day, Gormas comes to Lucero’s spacious studio, dons his costume, and poses with a foil in his hand; but the model booked some days earlier to do Rochefort hasn’t come. Gormas sends for a certain Félicien Michard, the son of his concierge, working as a floor-scrubber for the count of Châteauneuf, to act as a last-minute stand-in. End of the first episode.
Second episode: Rochefort’s Lunge. So the first sitting can now begin. The two opponents take up their positions, Gormas pretending to parry in a clever delayed move Michard’s fearsome secret lunge which is supposed to pierce his jugular. That’s when a bee flies into the studio and begins to buzz around Gormas, who suddenly puts his hand to the back of his neck and collapses. Fortunately a doctor lives in the building, and Michard runs to fetch him; the doctor arrives a few minutes later, diagnoses paralytic shock from a bee-sting touching the rachidian bulb, and takes the actor into hospital as an emergency. End of the second episode.
Third episode: The Poison That Kills. Gormas dies on his way to hospital. The doctor, surprised at the speed of the effect of the sting, refuses to sign the death certificate. The autopsy shows in fact that the bee had nothing to do with it: Gormas was poisoned by a microscopic quantity of topazine from the tip of Michard’s foil. This substance, a derivative of the curare used by Amerindian hunters, who call it Silent Death, has a curious property: it is effective only on individuals having recently been infected with viral hepatitis. As it happens, Gormas had indeed recently recovered from an illness of this kind. Given this new element, which seems to indicate premeditated murder, a detective, Chief Inspector Winchester, is put in charge of the investigation. End of the third episode.
Fourth episode: To Ségesvar in Confidence. Chief Inspector Winchester informs his assistant Ségesvar of the points that the case raises in his mind:
firstly, the murderer must be close to the actor since he knew that the latter had recently had viral hepatitis;
secondly, he must have been able to obtain
item one, the poison, and especially
item two, the bee, since the case occurred in December, and there are no bees in December;
thirdly, he must have had access to Michard’s foil. Now this foil, like Gormas’s, was lent to Lucero by his art dealer, Gromeck, whose wife was known to have been the actor’s mistress. That makes six suspects in all, each with a motive:
1. the painter Lucero, galled at having to do the portrait of a man he despises; moreover, the scandal which the case could not fail to arouse could be very advantageous to him commercially;
2. Michard: in days gone by Madame Gormas, the mother, used to invite young Félicien to spend holidays with her son; since then, the poor lad has been continually humiliated by the actor, who exploits him shamelessly;
3. the count of Châteauneuf, a bee-keeper, is known to harbour a mortal hatred for the Gormas family, since Gatien Gormas, president of the Beaugency Public Safety Committee, had Eudes de Châteauneuf sent to the guillotine in 1793.
4. the art dealer Gromeck, both out of jealousy and for publicity;
5. Lisa Gromeck, who never forgave Gormas his having rejected her for the Italian actress Angelina di Castelfranco;
6. and finally Gormas himself; a successful actor, but an incompetent and unlucky impresario, he is in fact completely insolvent and has been unable to get the agreement needed from his bank to finance his latest spectacular: a suicide disguised as a murder is the only way he can get out with dignity and at the same time (because of a substantial life insurance policy) leave his children with an inheritance commensurate with their ambitions. End of the fourth episode.
This is where the serial has got to, and it’s not too difficult to identify some of its immediate sources: an article on curare in Science et Vie, another on outbreaks of hepatitis in France-Soir, the adventures of Inspector Bougret and his faithful assistant Charolles in Gotlib’s Odds and Endpiece, various news items on the regular financial scandals in the French film world, a quick reading of Le Cid, a detective story by Agatha Christie called Death in the Clouds, a Danny Kaye film called Knock on Wood in English and A Touch of Madness in France. The first four episodes were most warmly received by the whole class. But the fifth one poses awkward problems for the authors. In the sixth and last episode, it will be discovered that the culprit is in fact the doctor living in the building where Lucero has his studio. It is true that Gormas is on the verge of bankruptcy. A murder bid from which he could miraculously escape unharmed would guarantee enough publicity to relaunch his latest film, on which shooting had been stopped after eight days. So with the doctor, Dr Borbeille, as an accomplice – for he is none other than Gormas’s foster brother – he had thought up this convoluted plot. But Jean-Paul Gormas, the actor’s son, loves Isabelle, the doctor’s daughter. Gormas is fiercely opposed to the marriage which the doctor, on the other hand, looks on favourably. That is why he takes advantage of the journey to the hospital, when he is alone with Gormas in the rear of the ambulance, to poison him with an injection of topazine, since he is certain that Michard’s foil will be held guilty. But Chief Inspector Winchester will learn when interrogating the model whom Félicien Michard stood in for at short notice that he had in fact been paid to call off his booking, and from this revelation he will take the entire machine to pieces. Despite a few last-minute revelations which break one of the golden rules of detective fiction, this solution and its final peripeteia constitute a perfectly acceptable denouement. But before getting there, the three young authors have to rule out all the other suspects, and they are not too sure how to go about it. Philippe Hémon has suggested that as in Murder on the Orient Express they should all be guilty, but the other two have turned the idea down vehemently.