Moreau, 3
AT THE BEGINNING of the nineteen fifties, in the flat that Madame Moreau was to buy later on, there lived an enigmatic American woman whose beauty and blondeness as well as the mystery surrounding her, earned her the nickname of Lorelei. She claimed to be called Joy Slowburn and lived apparently alone in the vast space of her apartment, under the silent protection of a driver-cum-bodyguard answering to the name of Carlos, a short and swarthy Filipino always spotlessly dressed in white. People sometimes ran into him in luxury stores, purchasing candied fruits, chocolates, or sweets. She, for her part, was never seen in the street. Her shutters were always shut; she received no mail and her door only ever opened to caterers delivering cooked meals or to the florists who each morning delivered great heaps of lilies, arum, and tuberoses.
Joy Slowburn only ever went out after night had fallen, to be driven in a long black Pontiac by Carlos. The inhabitants of the building would watch her pass, a dazzling figure in a black, raw-silk ball gown with a long train which left almost all her back bare, with a mink stole on her arm, a large fan made of black feathers, and her hair of an unrivalled blondeness, skilfully plaited and crowned with a diamond-incrusted diadem; and on seeing her long, perfectly oval face, her narrow, almost cruel eyes, her almost bloodless lips (whereas the fashion then was for very red lips), neighbours felt a fascination such that they were unable to say whether it was delightful or frightening.
The most fantastical stories circulated about her. People said that on some nights she held sumptuous, silent parties, that men came to see her clandestinely, shortly before midnight, clumsily carrying bulky sacks; people said that a third, unseen person also lived in the flat but was not allowed to go out or be seen, and that ghostly and abominable noises sometimes rose through the cavities of the chimneys, making children sit bolt upright in bed out of fright.
One April morning in nineteen fifty-four, it was learnt that Lorelei and the Filipino had been murdered in the night. The murderer had given himself up to the police: he was the young woman’s husband, that third tenant whose existence had been suspected by some, though none had ever seen him. He was called Blunt Stanley, and his revelations cleared up the mystery of the strange doings of Lorelei and her two companions.
Blunt Stanley was a tall man, as handsome as a Western hero, with dimples like Clark Gable’s. He was an officer in the US Army when, one evening in 1948, he met Lorelei in a music hall in Jefferson, Missouri: born Ingeborg Skrifter, the daughter of a Danish pastor who had emigrated to the United States, she performed a clairvoyant act under the pseudonym of Florence Cook, a famous medium of the last quarter of the nineteenth century whose reincarnation Ingeborg claimed to be.
It was love at first sight for both of them, but their happiness was short-lived: in July nineteen fifty, Blunt Stanley left for Korea. His passion for Ingeborg was such that scarcely had he landed when, unable to live without her, he deserted so as to try to get back to her. The mistake he made was to desert not by going AWOL – it’s true he wasn’t granted any leave – but whilst leading a patrol not far from the thirty-eighth parallel: together with his Filipino guide – who was none other than Carlos, real name Aurelio Lopez – he abandoned the eleven men in his patrol, condemning them to certain death, and after a frightful peregrination arrived at Port Arthur, whence they managed to reach Formosa.
The Americans thought the patrol had been ambushed, that the eleven soldiers had died in it, and that Lieutenant Stanley and his Filipino guide had been taken prisoner. Years later, when the whole affair was about to reach its lamentable conclusion, the chancery division of Land Army general staff was still looking for Mrs Stanley, query widow, to give her the possibly posthumous Medal of Honor awarded to her absent husband.
Blunt Stanley was at the mercy of Aurelio Lopez, and it quickly became apparent that Aurelio Lopez intended to take full advantage of the fact: as soon as they were in safety, the Filipino told the officer that all the details of his desertion had been put in writing and deposited in sealed envelopes with lawyers having instructions to act on their contents if Lopez failed to give them signs of life at regular intervals. Then he asked for ten thousand dollars.
Blunt managed to get in touch with Ingeborg. On his instructions, she sold all that she could sell – their car, their trailer, her few jewels – and got to Hong Kong, where the two men joined her. When they had paid Lopez, the couple were together again, alone, with a fortune of some sixty dollars, which nonetheless got them to Ceylon, where they managed to land a paltry engagement in a show cinema: between the shorts and the feature film, a spangled curtain would descend over the screen, and a loudspeaker would announce Joy and Hieronymus, the famous seers from the New World.
Their first act was based on two classical tricks used by village-fair magicians: Blunt, dressed up as a fakir, would guess various things from numbers chosen apparently at random by Ingeborg; as for Ingeborg, dressed as a clairvoyant, she would take a steel nib and scratch the gelatin of a photographic plate representing Blunt, and a bleeding scar would appear on her partner’s body at exactly the same place. The Singhalese public usually loves this sort of show, but it cold-shouldered this one: Ingeborg soon realised that, although her husband undeniably possessed stage presence, it was imperative that he keep his mouth shut, except to utter two or three inarticulate sounds.
The basic idea for their subsequent offerings grew out of this constraint and was soon perfected: after various divining exercises, Ingeborg would go into a trance and, communicating with the beyond, call forth the Illumined himself, Swedenborg, the “Buddha of the North”, dressed in a long white tunic, his chest spangled with Rosicrucian emblems, a luminous, flickering, smoky, flashing, frightening apparition, accompanied by crackling, lightning, sparks, discharges, exhalations, and emanations of every kind. Swedenborg was content to utter a few indistinct grunts, or incantations such as “Acha Botacha Sab Acha”, which Ingeborg would translate into sibylline sentences said in a screeching, strangulated voice:
“I have crossed the seas. I am in a central city, beneath a volcano. I see the man in his bedroom; he is writing, he is wearing a loose-fitting shirt, black with white and yellow trim; he puts the letter in a collection of Thomas Dekker’s poetry. He stands; it is one o’clock by the clock on his mantelpiece, etc.”
Their act, which relied on the usual sensorial and psychological preparations of this kind of attraction – mirror tricks, smoke tricks based on various combinations of carbon, sulphur, and saltpetre, optical illusions, sound effects – was a success from the start, and a few weeks later an impresario offered them a lucrative contract for Bombay, Iraq, and Turkey. It was there, during an evening at an Ankara nightclub called The Gardens of Heian-Kyô, that the meeting took place which would determine their careers: at the end of their show, a man called on Ingeborg in her dressing room and offered five thousand pounds sterling if she would agree to bring him into the presence of the Devil, and more precisely Mephistopheles, with whom he wished to make the usual pact: his eternal salvation against twenty years of omnipotence.
Ingeborg accepted. Making Mephistopheles appear was not intrinsically more complicated than making Swedenborg appear, even if this apparition had to happen in front of a single spectator rather than several dozen or several hundred indifferent, amused, or bemused onlookers who were all, in any case, seated much too far away from the thing to come and check any details if the whim so took them. For if this privileged spectator had believed in the appearance of the “Buddha of the North” to the extent of risking five thousand pounds to see the Devil, then there was no reason why his request should not be fulfilled.
Blunt and Ingeborg thus settled into a villa rented for the occasion and modified their act to fit the required apparition. On the appointed day, at the stated hour, the man turned up at the villa door. For three weeks, obeying Ingeborg’s strict orders, he had tried never to go out before nightfall, to eat only boiled green vegetables and fruit peeled with non-metallic instruments, to drink only orange-flower water and fresh mint, basil, and oregano tea.
A native servant led the applicant into an almost unfurnished room, painted matt black throughout, barely lit by torches set in inverted conical holders giving off greenish-yellow flames. In the centre of the room hung a cut-glass globe, revolving slowly on its axis, whose thousand minute faces projected twinkling flashes in apparently unpredictable directions. Ingeborg sat beneath it, in a high-backed armchair painted dark red. About a yard away from her, a little to her right, a fire burned on flat stones set directly on the floor, giving off copious, acrid smoke.
According to custom, the man had brought a black hen in a brown canvas bag; he blindfolded it, then cut its throat over the fire whilst looking to the east. The hen’s blood did not put out the fire; on the contrary, it seemed to make it burn more fiercely: tall blue flames shot up, and for a few moments the young woman observed them attentively, taking no notice of her client’s presence. Finally she rose, took some cinders in a shovel, and spread them on the floor just in front of her chair, where, instantaneously, they formed a pentangle. Taking the man by his arm, she made him sit in the armchair, with his back straight, quite still, with his hands flat down on the armrests. For her part, she kneeled in the centre of the pentangle and began to declaim an incantation as long as it was incomprehensible, in an impossibly high-pitched screech:
Al barildim gotfano dech min brin alabo dordin falbroth ringuam albaras. Nin porth zadikim almucathin milko prin al elmin enthoth dal heben ensouim: kuthim al dum alkatim nim broth dechoth porth min michais im endoth, pruch dal maisoulum hol moth dansrilim lupaldas im voldemoth. Nin hur diavosth mnarbotim dal goush palfrapin duch im scoth pruch galeth dal chinon min foulchrich al conin butathen doth dal prim.
In the course of this incantation the smoke grew more and more opaque. Soon there were reddish plumes of smoke accompanied by crackling and sparks. Suddenly the bluish flames grew unnaturally tall, then died away almost at once: just behind the fire, baring all his teeth in a broad grin, with his arms folded, stood Mephistopheles.
It was a fairly traditional Mephisto, almost a conventional one. He didn’t have horns, or a long cloven tail, or goat’s hooves, but a greenish face, dark eyes set deep in their sockets, bushy, very black eyebrows, a thin moustache, and a Napoleon III goatee. He was wearing a somewhat indeterminate costume: what could mainly be seen was an immaculate lace ruff and a dark-red waistcoat, the remainder being masked by a big black cape whose flame-red silk lining gleamed in the firelight.
Mephistopheles didn’t say a word. All he did was bow his head very slowly whilst placing his right hand on his left shoulder. Then he put his hand out over the hearth, now burning with flames that seemed almost unearthly and giving off strongly scented smoke, and signalled the applicant to come forward. The man rose and went to stand next to Mephistopheles, on the other side of the fire. The Devil handed him a parchment folded in four, bearing a dozen or so incomprehensible signs; then he grasped the man’s left hand and pricked his thumb with a steel needle, bringing forth a bead of blood which he placed onto the pact; on the opposite corner he swiftly signed his own mark with his left index finger, apparently covered with greasy soot, a signature resembling a large, three-fingered hand. Then he tore the sheet in two, put one half in his waistcoat pocket, and handed the other to the man with a low bow.
Ingeborg gave a strident scream. There was a noise of paper being crumpled, and the blinding glare of lightning flashed through the room, accompanied by a roll of thunder and an intense smell of sulphur. Thick, acrid smoke formed all around the fireplace. Mephistopheles had disappeared, and on turning round the man once again saw Ingeborg sitting in her armchair; in front of her there was no trace of the pentangle.
Despite the exaggerated precautions she took, and in spite of the rigid, somewhat overstylised aspect of the performance, it does indeed seem that this apparition matched what the man had expected, for not only did he pay up the promised sum without a grumble, but a month later, still without revealing his identity, he let Ingeborg know that one of his friends, living in France, had a keen wish to partake of a ceremony identical to the one he had been honoured to witness, and that the friend was disposed to give her five million French francs and in addition to meet her travelling costs and her expenses in Paris.
That is how Ingeborg and Blunt came to France. But unfortunately for them they did not come alone. Three days before they were to leave, Aurelio Lopez, whose affairs had taken a turn for the worse, joined them in Ankara and demanded to go with them. They were unable to refuse. All three settled in the big flat on the first floor. It had been agreed already that Blunt would never show himself. As for Aurelio, they decided that, rather than their taking on a maid and a butler, he would serve, under the name of Carlos, as chauffeur, bodyguard, and groom.
In the space of a little over two years, Ingeborg had the Devil appear 82 times for fees eventually rising to twenty, twenty-five, and once even thirty million (old) francs. The list of her customers included six members of parliament (of whom three in fact became ministers, and only one an Under-Secretary of State), seven top civil servants, eleven company directors, six officers of the rank of general or above, two professors at the Medical Faculty, various sportsmen, several top clothes designers, restaurant owners, a newspaper editor, and even a cardinal, the other applicants coming from the worlds of the arts, literature, and especially show business. All were men, with the exception of one black operatic singer whose ambition was to play the role of Desdemona: shortly after signing her pact with the Devil, she brought her dreams to reality thanks to a “negative” production which caused a scandal but ensured notoriety for the singer and the director: Otello’s role was played by a white man, all the other parts were played by black artists (or whites in black makeup), with costumes and sets similarly “inverted”, where everything light or white (the handkerchief and the pillow, for instance, to quote just those two indispensable props) became dark or black, and vice versa.
No one ever expressed a doubt about the “reality” of the apparition or the authenticity of the pact. Once only, one of their customers was amazed to have kept his shadow and to be able still to see his reflection in mirrors, and Ingeborg had to persuade him that this was a privilege Mephistopheles had granted to avoid his being “recognised and burnt alive in foro publico”.
As far as Ingeborg and Blunt could tell, the effect of the pact was almost always beneficial: the certain belief in omnipotence was usually enough to make those who had sold their souls to the Devil accomplish what they expected of themselves. In any case, the couple had no problem in recruiting applicants. Barely three months after their arrival in Paris, Ingeborg had to start turning down the offers that were flooding in, charging applicants higher and higher rates, setting longer and longer waiting lists and more and more rigorous preparatory tasks. At her death, her “order book” was full for more than a year ahead, there were over thirty applicants on her waiting list, and four of them committed suicide when they learnt of her death.
The apparition scenario never differed very much from what it had been in Ankara, except that, from quite early on, the seances no longer started in darkness. The cone-shaped torches were replaced by heavy-looking floor-standing black cylinders surmounted by large spherical glass bulbs giving off a bright blue light which dimmed imperceptibly, allowing the applicant time to see for himself that the room was empty apart from the young woman and himself and that all exits were hermetically sealed. The couple brought their existing trick techniques to perfection – lighting adjustment and flame control, the sound-proofing required for thunder effects, remote ignition of the ferrocerium tablets which produced sparks, the manipulation of iron filings and magnets – and introduced some others, in particular the use of certain siphenapteroid insects endowed with a phosphorescent power giving them a glowing green hue, and the use of special perfumes and incenses which, mixed with the smell of the lilies and tuberoses which permanently impregnated the place, created sensations favourable to manifestations of the supernatural. These ingredients would never have been adequate to persuade anyone ever so slightly sceptical, but people who had accepted Ingeborg’s terms and endured the preliminary ordeals came, on the evening of their pact, ready to be convinced.
Unfortunately, their professional success did not free Ingeborg and Blunt from Carlos’s continuing blackmail. Ingeborg was supposed to speak only Danish and some Upper Friesian dialect by means of which she conversed with Mephistopheles, and so it was the Filipino who negotiated with applicants, and he kept for himself the entirety of the colossal sums they paid him. His surveillance never ceased, and when he went out to buy things he forced the former officer and his wife to strip and put their clothes under lock and key, having no intention of letting go of this veritable goose with the golden eggs.
In 1953, the Armistice of Panmunjon raised their hopes of an imminent amnesty which would allow them to be free of this unbearable servitude. But a few weeks later, Carlos, with a triumphant smile on his face, handed them an already long-published issue of the Louisville Courier and Journal (Kentucky): the mother of one of the soldiers Lieutenant Stanley had had under his command had expressed surprise at the absence of Blunt Stanley’s name from the list of prisoners released by the North Koreans. The Army had been alerted to this and had decided to reopen the case. Although not yet giving a final verdict, the investigators were at that point prepared to hint that they could no longer exclude the possibility that Lieutenant Stanley might have been a deserter and a traitor.
Several months later, Ingeborg succeeded in persuading her husband that he had to kill Carlos, so that they might flee. One evening in April 1954, Blunt managed to evade the Filipino’s vigilance and throttled him with a pair of braces.
They searched the flat and found the hiding hole where Carlos kept more than seven hundred million old francs, in banknotes of every denomination and in jewels. They hurriedly filled two suitcases and prepared to leave: they were planning to go to Hamburg, where several people had already suggested Ingeborg should set up her diabolical business. But, just before going out, Blunt automatically looked out of the window and through the shutters saw two men apparently watching the building; and he panicked. It was obviously not possible for Carlos’s threats to have been carried out already, only a few seconds after his murder, but Blunt, who had not left the flat even once ever since he had moved in, imagined that the Filipino had been having them watched for ages and violently reproached his wife for not having noticed.
It was during this altercation, Stanley claimed, that Ingeborg, who was holding a small pistol in her hand, had been killed accidentally.
Blunt Stanley was tried in France on charges of premeditated murder, homicide by inadvertence, public exploitation of occult powers (articles 405 and 479 of the Penal Code), and fraud. He was then extradited, taken back to the United States, tried by court martial on a charge of high treason, and sentenced to death. But he was granted presidential clemency, and his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
The rumour spread rapidly that he possessed supernatural powers and that he was able to communicate – and to commune – with infernal forces. Almost all the warders and prisoners at Abigoz penitentiary (Iowa), as well as numerous policemen and several judges and politicians, asked him to intercede on their behalf with one devil or another on some particular problem or another. They had to install a special visiting booth so he could receive wealthy individuals from every corner of the United States who requested an audience with him. The less wealthy, instead of consulting him, and for a fee of fifty dollars, could touch his prison number, 1758064176, which is also the number of Devils in Hell, since there are 6 demoniacal legions each of 66 cohorts each of 666 companies each comprising 6,666 Devils. For a mere ten dollars, you could buy one of his fluidic needles (old steel pick-up needles). For numerous communities, congregations, and faiths, Blunt Stanley has become today the reincarnation of the Evil One, and several fanatics have come to Iowa to commit indictable offences with the sole purpose of being imprisoned at Abigoz so as to attempt to murder him; but, with the complicity of the warders, he has managed to set up a bodyguard consisting of other prisoners, who have, up to now, protected him effectively. According to the satirical journal Nationwide Bilge, he must be one of the ten richest lifers in the world.
It was only in May nineteen sixty, when the mystery of Chaumont-Porcien was clarified, that it was realised that the two men who were in fact watching the building were the two detectives Sven Ericsson had hired to tail Véra de Beaumont.
Madame Moreau decided to turn this room, where Lorelei made Mephisto appear and where the twin murder occurred, into her kitchen. The designer Henry Fleury devised an avant-garde outfit which he loudly proclaimed would be the prototype for the kitchens of the twenty-first century: a culinary laboratory a generation ahead of its time, equipped with the most sophisticated technology, fitted with microwave ovens, invisible automatic hotplates, remote-controlled domestic robots capable of carrying out complex food preparation and cooking programmes. All these ultramodern devices were cleverly integrated into antique-style cupboards, Second Empire ranges in enamelled cast iron, and antique bread bins. Behind brass-hinged polished oak doors hid electric slicers, electronic grinders, ultrasound chip-pans, infrared toasters, totally transistorised electro-mechanical blenders, regulators, mixers, and peelers; but on coming in all you could see were walls tiled in Old Delft style, unbleached cotton tea towels, old Roberval weighing scales, pitchers with little pink flowers on them, pharmacy jars, big check tablecloths, rustic dressers with Mayenne linen fringes, bearing little pastry moulds, pewter measuring cups, brass pots, and cast-iron cocottes, and, on the floor, a spectacular pattern of tiles, an alternation of white, grey, and ochre rectangles, some decorated with lozenge motifs, a faithful reproduction of the floor of the chapel in a monastery at Bethlehem.
Madame Moreau’s cook, a sturdy Burgundian hailing from Paray-le-Monial and answering to the first name of Gertrude, was not going to be taken in by such gross trickery, and informed her mistress immediately that she would not ever cook anything in a kitchen like that, where nothing was in its proper place and nothing worked the way she knew. She insisted on having a window, a stone sink, a real gas cooker with rings, a deep frying pan, a chopping block, and especially a scullery to put her empty bottles in, for her cheese wickers, crates, potato bags, her buckets for washing vegetables, and her salad bowl.
Madame Moreau sided with her cook. Fleury, smarting, had to have his experimental equipment removed, break up the floor, dismantle the plumbing and electrical circuitry, and move the partitions.
Of the weathered old junk from French kitchens of times gone by, Gertrude has kept the pieces she might use – a rolling pin, the scales, the salt box, the kettles, cocottes, fish poachers, pot ladles, and butchering knives – and has had the rest put down in the cellar. She brought up from her homeland some of the utensils and accessories she could not have done without: her coffee grinder and her tea-egg, a flat strainer, a conical strainer, a potato masher, a bain-marie, and the box in which she has always kept her vanilla pods, her cinnamon sticks, her cloves, her saffron, her silver balls, and her angelica, an old biscuit box made of tin, square in shape, on the lid of which you can see a little girl munching the corner of her petit-beurre.