The victim first entered Paris on Thursday, February 7, 1867 according to the official entry stamp. So she’d been in his city over seven years, long before the Franco Prussian War. No exit stamps; she’d remained in Paris during the Siege and the Commune, unless she fled to the country like the rest of her lot.
Why was he dredging up these details now? He was halfway home and must get the dead countess off his mind. Her pocketbook contained several large bills and some coins, over six-hundred francs, an enormous amount for a woman of any class to be carrying in Paris. In her purse were a small photograph of a man about thirty-five or forty, the approximate age of the victim, and a carte de visite of an older gentleman, an uncle or father, or rich lover. Both the photo and the cdv bore the stamp of a studio in Oltramari, Sicily. When questioned, her husband had been polite. It figured: he was the one with the title. He’d been attired like a nobleman, and his French was impressive. Valois hated to detain him, but he had to have someone to question and the cafe owner was immediate in his identification of the man as her frequent companion.
“Hello, Monsieur l’Inspecteur! Valois, isn’t it? My neighbor?”
“Oh, so sorry. Forgive me, Madame Hugo, I didn’t see you. And your little dog.”
“You were preoccupied, dear sir. Well, of course, the weight of all Paris is on your shoulders. You, a principal inspector and me, a poor little old woman, not worth your time. No, indeed.”
Not so little, that one. She looked like a stuffed goose newly arrived from Brittany. He doffed his hat and made his apologies again, complimented her on the rosiness of her complexion, and bent to pet the animal, cursing himself for dreaming again. He touched his hat to the old witch and continued on his way.
At first the death of the mysterious woman in the Rue Cassette had seemed like a suicide, the pistol, a double-barreled Derringer recently used, common enough, found in her left hand. “We get them often in this neighborhood, you’d be surprised,” the sergent de ville told him. Valois himself believed at first that the wound had been self-inflicted, the gun would have fit easily in the bag she carried. But the autopsy proved otherwise.
At approximately six in the morning on Thursday, April 16, the coroner on duty performed his examination. Unheard of so soon after the murder, but done quickly at the request of the family, milliners of high standing in the city. After all, she was a countess and a foreigner. Best to get her off his plate. There’d be more special handling of the case, delicate because of the nationality of the victim, and the sooner he had his facts, the better. So he’d prevailed upon the good doctor to make haste. “Much obliged, dear man, you see, the deceased, is foreign royalty.” Dr. Melange issued his report that afternoon, concluding that the victim sustained a fatal wound to the left side of her head. The bullet, deflected by bone and skin and blood, exited into the oral cavity where it lodged in the left side of the tongue. The doctor had extracted the metal and held it in his hand, showing it to Valois. Time of death was fixed at between one and three that morning, according to the state of rigor described by the policeman when he found the body and the contents of the victim’s stomach.
But an examination of bone spurs in the deceased’s fingers indicated that she had been right-handed. The pistol had been placed by the killer or his accomplice in the victim’s left hand in order to feign suicide. In short, Elena Loffredo had been murdered. Of that, Dr. Melange was certain. And most probably murdered by someone she knew, although it was not inconceivable that an unknown assailant could have surprised her. Because of the short barrel, the gunman had to have been standing close to the countess.
They’d canvassed the area. Two witnesses said they’d seen a man answering Loffredo’s description bending over the body. It could not have been easier. This was a crime of passion committed by a cuckolded husband. And so Valois had relaxed, forgotten the discrepancies that bothered him initially, and arrested the husband. All that remained was identification of the body by a close relative or friend. Madame de Masson, the countess’s aunt, had obliged, fussing and complaining during what was for her a distasteful ordeal. The woman made clear her antipathy for her niece, saying Elena’s wanton ways had long ago predicted her abrupt and violent demise. She’d taken one look at the face and declared the body to be that of her niece.
He stroked his mustache and continued down the street, now a few blocks from home, hoping Francoise would be pleased to see him arrive early for once. He was a dedicated servant of France, a principal inspector in the largest prefecture of all, rising up through the ranks of his colleagues these past fifteen years by diligence and thoroughness. Cleverness, too. He was assigned to the left bank in the busiest city in France, the most important city in Europe, and working for the most innovative branch of detection the world had ever known, La Surete Nationale.
But the arrival of the Sicilian detective, or sleuth, or whatever she called herself, only spelled trouble for his career, and he was not about to help her. Not now, at any rate. He knew his concern with the case was not acceptable behavior. Worse, his preoccupation with the Sicilian matter might be blinding him to the truth, although he doubted it, and yet he could not help himself. He was in its thrall, and he feared it might ruin him, especially if there was no quick confession by the husband. He would have issue orders for a more intense form of interrogation.
Valois opened his gate, loosened his cravat, and stepped inside. The Valois family lived in one of the few private homes in the area untouched by Haussmann’s design, a stone house with an attached lot that his wife had made into one of the most beautiful gardens in the arrondissement. He made his way to the back where he knew he’d find Francoise. Sure enough, she was weeding a bed of spring flowers next to the old apple tree his father had planted.
His luck had been extreme, meeting, wooing, winning this woman, his wife for close to thirteen years. They met when he was at the Sorbonne, enrolled in the Advanced Latin course and she was sent to tutor him, having been privately schooled by one of the greatest class of French scholars, a femme savante. He’d admired Francoise’s grace, her generosity, her mind, her fire. He’d never considered another woman, and after a suitable courtship, they were married.
She looked up at him and smiled. “You’re troubled, Alphonse. Don’t tell me why, I’d be bored to tears,” she said. Her face was lightly tanned, her blue-violet eyes penetrating, her forehead high and filled with wisdom, lines forged and refined by generations of Northern European waters. “I’m going to sit in the garden and admire my handiwork while you wait on me. I’ll have a tisane, please, a little sugar but no lemon, perhaps a spot of cream and a few of the madeleines my mother brought us yesterday. Let the domestic help, but do most of the work yourself to show her your true nature.”
“Where is Charlus?”
“Inside doing his homework and waiting to kiss his father. Don’t distract him for too long. And don’t touch the pate — the Clermonts are coming for dinner.”
An innovator, his Francoise, who had a fresh way of viewing life. Not that she wasn’t like him, the result of upper class coupling. Like him, born and raised in Paris, educated by the best.
As he waited for the tea steeping in a porcelain pot, the difficulties of the case seemed barely visible, like the smoke from a locomotive disappearing into the Pyrenees. But he tried to hold onto his problem so that after their refreshment, he could explain it and with his wife’s unsurpassed ability to discern, discover the proper course of action to follow.
During the Siege and the Commune, they could have fled with their son, then a toddler, to their estate in the south of France, but chose instead to remain. “Good for your career,” she’d assured him. And they had prevailed, thanks to her brains and tenacity. One picture of that hungry time remained in his mind, that of Francoise twisting the mane of a rotund neighbor, the two of them fighting for the last scrap of horse flesh while the butcher and half the neighborhood looked on. She’d returned, unaware that he’d seen the altercation. Graceful, unperturbed, not a blonde hair was out of place but coiled into a perfect bun on top of her head, she had hummed while the meat sizzled in the pan.