Cinoc, 2
CINOC’S BEDROOM: a rather dirty room, which feels musty, with stains on the woodblock floor and peeling paint on the walls. On the doorjamb is nailed a mezuzah, a domestic talisman adorned with the three letters
as well as bearing a few verses from the Torah. Against the rear wall, over the divan-bed draped in a printed material with a triangular leaf motif, books and pamphlets lean against each other on a little hanging shelf, and at the open window stands a high-legged, flimsy folding desk, with a small, thick felt mat on the floor beneath it, just large enough to afford standing room. To the right of the shelves, hanging on the wall, is a completely foxed engraving entitled The Somersault: it portrays five naked babes frolicking, over the following sestet:
A voir leurs soubresauts bouffons
Qui ne diroit que ces Poupons
Auroient bon besoin d’Ellebore;
Leur corps est pourtant bien dressé
Si, selon que dit Pythagore,
L’homme est un arbre renversé.
Beneath the engraving a low table with a green cloth cover holds a water-jug with a glass on top of it and various loose volumes amongst which some titles can be made out:
From Avvakum’s Raskolniki to the Insurrection of Stenka Razin. Bibliographic Notes to Studies of the Reign of Alexy I, by Hubert Corneylius, Lille, Lime Press, 1954;
La storia dei Romani, by G. de Sanctis (vol. III);
Travels in Baltistan, by P. O. Box, Bombay, 1894;
When I Was a Little Ballerina. Memoirs of Childhood and Youth, by Maria Feodorovna Vyshiskava, Paris, 1948;
“The Miner” and the Origins of the Labour Party, by Irwin Wall (offprint from the journal Annales);
Beiträge zur feineren Anatomie des menschlichen Rückenmarks, by Goll, Ghent, 1860;
three issues of Rustica magazine;
Sur le clivage pyramidal des albâtres et des gypses, by Mr Otto Lidenbrock, Professor at the Hamburg Johanneum and Curator of the Mineralogical Museum of Mr Struve, Russian Ambassador, an offprint from the Zeitschrift für Mineralogie und Kristallographie, vol. XII, Suppl. 147;
and the Souvenirs of a Numismatist by M. Florent Baillerger, formerly Chief Clerk to the Department of Haute-Marne, Chalindrey, Le Sommelier Booksellers, n.d.
Hélène Brodin died in this room, in nineteen forty-seven. She had lived here, fearful and discreet, for nearly twelve years. After her death her nephew François Gratiolet found a letter in which she told how her stay in America had ended.
In the afternoon of 11 September 1935, the police came to fetch her and drove her to Jemima Creek to identify her husband’s corpse. Antoine Brodin’s skull was smashed, and he lay on his back with outstretched arms at the bottom of a muddy, waterlogged quarry. The police had put a green handkerchief over his face. His trousers and boots had been stolen but he was still wearing the grey pinstriped shirt Hélène had bought him a few days earlier at St Petersburg.
Hélène had never seen Antoine’s murderers; she had only heard their voices, two days before, when they had calmly told her husband they would be back for his scalp. But she had no trouble identifying them: it was the two Ashby brothers, Jeremiah and Ruben, accompanied as ever by Nick Pertusano, a cruel and vicious dwarf who had an indelible ash-coloured mark in the shape of a cross on his forehead, who was their sidekick, butt, and scapegoat. Despite their gentle biblical forenames, the Ashbys were little bastards feared throughout the county who extorted protection money from saloons and from diners, those rail-cars equipped as restaurants where you could eat for a few nickels: and unfortunately for Hélène, the sheriff of the county was their uncle. Not only did this sheriff fail to arrest the murderers, he also had two of his men escort Hélène to Mobile and advised her against ever setting foot in the county again. Hélène managed to give her guards the slip, got to Tallahassee, the state capital, and filed a complaint with the governor. That same evening a stone smashed one of the windowpanes of her hotel room. Tied to it was a message threatening death.
On the governor’s orders the sheriff was nonetheless obliged to conduct a phony investigation; he advised his nephews to keep clear of the place, for safety. The two hoodlums and the dwarf split up. Hélène learnt of this and realised she now had her only chance of revenge: she had to act fast and kill them one after the other before they even knew what was happening to them.
The first one she killed was the dwarf. He was the easiest. She learnt he had taken a job as kitchen lad on a steamboat travelling upriver on the Mississippi, a boat worked all year round by professional hucksters. One of them agreed to help Hélène: she disguised herself as a boy, and he got her on board as his groom.
During the night, when everyone not asleep was hellbent on endless games of craps and faro, Hélène had no trouble finding her way to the galley; the dwarf, half-drunk, was drowsing in a hammock beside a stove on which a huge mutton stew was simmering. She came up close and before he could react seized him by the neck and suspenders and dumped him into the gigantic cauldron.
She left the boat next morning, at Baton Rouge, before the crime had been discovered. Still dressed as a boy, she went back downriver, travelling this time on a floating timber raft, which was a veritable little town on water where several dozen men lived in comfort. To one of them, a gypsy of French extraction called Paul Marchal, she told her story, and he offered to help her. At New Orleans they rented a truck and began to crisscross Louisiana and Florida. They stopped at gas stations, railroad stations, roadside bars. They humped around a kind of one-man-band outfit, consisting of a sound box, a bandoneon, a harmonica, a triangle, cymbals, and bells; she dressed as a woman from the East with a chador, did a vague belly dance before offering to tell fortunes by cutting cards: she would spread three rows out in front of her audience, cover two cards adding up to eleven as well as the three court cards: it was a type of patience she had learnt as a little girl, the only one she knew, and she used it to predict the most improbable things in an inextricable mixture of languages.
It took them only ten days to find a trail. A Seminole family living on a raft moored on the banks of Lake Apopka told them of a man who had been living for the last few days in a huge disused well, near a place called Stone’s Hill, about fifteen miles from Tampa.
It was Ruben. They found him sitting on a wooden box trying to open a tin of food with his teeth. He was so desperate with hunger that he didn’t even hear them coming. Before killing him with a bullet in the back of his neck, Hélène forced him to give away Jeremiah’s hideout. All Ruben knew was that, before splitting up, the three of them had vaguely discussed the places they would go to: the dwarf said he wanted to travel around, Ruben wanted a cosy hole, and Jeremiah claimed there was no better place to lay up than in a big city.
Nick was a dwarf and Ruben an idiot, but Jeremiah frightened Hélène. She found him almost easily, two days later: standing at the bar of a boozer near Hialeah, the Miami racecourse, he was leafing through a racing paper whilst at the same time mechanically masticating a fifteen-cent portion of breaded veal cutlets.
She trailed him for three days. He lived off mean tricks, picking bookies’ pockets and raising customers for the boss of a greasy gaming den proudly named The Oriental Saloon and Gambling House, after the famous joint which Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday used to run at Tombstone, Arizona. It was a barn with walls made of planks literally nailed together from top to bottom with enamelled metal panels bearing electoral, advertising, or business announcements:
QUALITY ECONOMY AMOCO MOTOR OIL, GROVE’S BROMOQUININE STOPS COLDS, ZENO CHEWING GUM, ARMOUR’S CLOVERBLOOM BUTTER, RINSO SOAKS CLOTHES WHITER, THALCO PINE DEODORANT, CLABBERGIRL BAKING POWDER, TOWER’S FISH BRAND, ARCADIA, GOODYEAR TIRES, QUAKER STATE, PENNZOIL SAFE LUBRICATION, 100% PURE PENNSYLVANIA, BASEBALL TOURNAMENT, SELMA AMERICAN LEGION JRS VS. MOBILE, PETER’S SHOE’S, CHEW MAIL POUCH TOBACCO, BROTHER-IN-LAW BARBER SHOP, HAIRCUT 25¢, SILAS GREEN SHOW FROM NEW ORLEANS, DRINK COCA-COLA DELICIOUS REFRESHING, POSTAL TELEGRAPH HERE, DID YOU KNOW? J.W.MCDONALD FURN’ CO CAN FURNISH YOUR HOME COMPLETE, CONGOLEUM RUGS, GRUNO REFRIGERATORS, PETE JARMAN FOR CONGRESS, CAPUDINE LIQUID AND TABLETS, AMERICAN ETHYL GASOLINE, GRANGER ROUGH CUT MADE FOR PIPES, JOHN DEERE FARM IMPLEMENTS, FINDLAY’S, ETC.
On the morning of the fourth day, Hélène sent an envelope to Jeremiah. It contained a photograph of the two brothers – found in Ruben’s billfold – and a brief note in which she informed him of what she had done to the dwarf and to Ruben and of the fate awaiting this son of a bitch if he had enough balls to find her in chalet 31 at Burbank’s Motel.
Hélène hid all day in the shower of an adjacent chalet. She knew that Jeremiah had received her letter and that he would not be able to bear the idea of being outfaced by a woman. But that wouldn’t be enough to make him respond to the provocation; he had to be sure, in addition, of being stronger than she was.
Around seven in the evening she knew her instinct had not deceived her: accompanied by four armed toughs, Jeremiah turned up in a steaming, dented, bucket-seated Model T. Taking all the customary precautions, they cased the joint and surrounded chalet 31.
The room was not well lit, just enough for Jeremiah to see through the crochet curtains his brother Ruben lying quietly on one of the twin beds with his arms folded and his eyes wide open. With a ferocious roar, Jeremiah Ashby stormed into the room, thereby setting off the bomb Hélène had planted in it.
The same evening Hélène embarked on a schooner sailing to Cuba, whence a regular packet took her back to France. Until her death she awaited the day when the police would come to arrest her, but the American Law never dared to imagine that this mere slip of a woman could have killed in cold blood three hoods, for whose murders they had no trouble in finding much more plausible culprits.