“But you are convinced, chief, that the murderer is French?”
“If not French, then they have lived in France for many years.”
Used not to questioning his superior’s instinctive judgements, Le Bec accepted this.
As their electromobile sped them back to the Quai d’Orsay, Lapointe mused on the problem. “I need to find someone who has an idea of all the metatemporals who come and go in Paris. Only one springs to mind and that is Monsieur Zenith, the albino. You’ll recall we have worked together once or twice before. As soon as I get back to the office, I will put through a call to Whitehall. If anyone knows where Zenith is, then it will be Sexton Blake.”
Sexton Blake was the real name of the detective famously fictionalised as Sir Seaton Begg and Lapointe’s opposite number in London.
“I did not know Monsieur Zenith was any longer amongst us,” declared LeBec.
“There is no guarantee that he is. I can only hope. I understood that he had made his home in Paris. Blake will confirm where I can find him.”
“I understand, chief, that he was in earlier days wanted by the police of several countries.”
“Quite so. His last encounter with Blake, as a criminal, was during the London Blitz. He and his old antagonist fought it out on a cliff house whose foundations were weak. The fictional version of the case has been recorded as The Affair of the Bronze Basilisk. Zenith’s body was lost in the ruins of the house and never recovered, but we now know that he returned to Jugo-Slavia where he fought with Tito’s guerillas against the Nazis, was captured by the Gestapo before he could smoke the famous cyanide cigarette he always kept in his case and was found half-dead by the British when they liberated the infamous Milosevic Fortress in Belgrade, HQ of the Gestapo in the region. For his various efforts on behalf of the allied war-effort, Zenith was given a full pardon by the authorities and in his final meeting with his old adversary Sexton Blake, both men made a bargain-Blake would allow no more stories of Zenith to be published as part of his own memoirs and Zenith would not publish his memoirs until fifty years after that meeting which was in August 26, 1946. Both men have been exposed to the same effects which conferred longevity upon them, almost by accident. That fifty years has now, of course, passed.”
“And Monsieur Zenith?” asked Le Bec as the car hummed smoothly under the arches into the square leading to their offices. “What has happened to him?”
“He has become a kind of gentleman adventurer, working as often with the authorities as against them and spending much of his time in tracking down ex-Nazis, especially those with stolen wealth, which he either returns in whole to their owners or, if it so pleases him, pays himself a ten percent ‘commission’. He will now sometimes work with my old friend Blake. His adventures will take him across parallel universes where he assumes the name of ‘Zodiac’. But he still keeps up with his old acquaintances from the criminal underworld, mostly through a famous London thieves’ warren known as ‘Smith’s Kitchen’ which now has concessions in Paris, Rome and New York. If anyone has heard a hint of the business here, it will be Zenith.”
“How will you contact him, chief?”
Lapointe smiled almost to himself. “Oh, I think Blake will confirm I know where he will be later this morning.”
III
A broken rosary, a silver crucifix bearing the initials j.c., a few coarse, brown fibres, some photographs of the corpse seen earlier at Les Hivers… One by one, Commissaire Lapointe laid the things before him on the bright, white table-cloth. He was sitting in a fashionable cafe, L’Albertine, situated in the Arcades de l’Opera whose windows looked into a square in which a beautiful fountain played. Outside, Paris’s haut-monde strolled back and forth, conversing, inspecting the windows of the expensive shops, occasionally entering to make purchases. Across from him, sipping alternately from a small coffee cup or a glass of yellow-green absinthe, sat a most extraordinary individual. His skin was pale as alabaster. His hair, including his eyebrows, was the colour of milk, and his gleaming, sardonic eyes resembled the finest rubies. Dressed unusually for the age, the albino wore perfectly cut morning dress. A grey silk hat, evidently his, shared a shelf near the cash-register with Lapointe’s wide-brimmed straw.
“I am grateful, Monsieur, that you found time to see me,” murmured Lapointe, understanding the value the albino placed on good manners. “I was hoping these objects would mean more to you than they do to me.
Evidently belonging to a priest or a nun-”
“Of high rank,” agreed Zenith continuing to look at the photographs of the victim.
“We also found several long black hairs, traces of heavy red lipstick of fairly recent manufacture.”
“No nun wore that,” mused Zenith. “Which suggests her murderess was disguised as a nun. In which case, of course, she is still unlikely to have worn lip-rouge. It was not the young woman’s?”
“Hers was from an earlier age altogether.” Lapointe had already explained the circumstances in which the corpse had been discovered, as well as his guess at the time and date when she was murdered.
“So we can assume there were at least two people involved in killing her, one of whom at least had knowledge of the multiverse and how to gain access to other worlds.”
“And at least one of them can be assumed still to be here. Those footprints told us that part of the story. And some effort had been made to wrest the rosary from her fingers after she had arrived in Les Hivers.”
“The man-shall we assume him to be a priest?” Monsieur Zenith raised the rosary as if to kiss it, but then sniffed it instead. “J.C.? Some reference perhaps to the Society of Jesus?”
“Possibly. Which could lead us to assume that the Inquisition could have been at work?”
“I will see what I can discover for you, Monsieur Lapointe. As for the poor victim…” Zenith offered his old acquaintance a slight shrug.
“I believe I have a way of discovering her identity also, assuming she was not what we used to call a ‘virtuous’ girl,” said Lapointe. “I have already checked the police records for that period and no mention is made of a society disappearance that was not subsequently solved. Therefore, by the quality of her clothes, the fairness of her skin, condition of her hair, not to mention her extraordinary beauty, we must assume her to be either of foreign birth or some kind of courtesan. The cut of her clothes suggests the latter to me. There is, in that case, only one place to look for her. I must inspect our copy of De Buzet.”
Zenith raised an alabaster eyebrow. “You have a copy of the legendary Carte Bleue?”
“One of the two known to exist. The property of the Quai d’Orsay for almost two hundred years. Of little value, of course, in the general way. But now-it might just lead us to our victim, if not to her murderers.”
Monsieur Zenith extinguished his Turkish cigarette and rose to leave.
“I will do what I can to trace this assumed cleric and if you can discover a reasonable likeness in La Carte Bleue, we shall perhaps meet here again tomorrow morning?”
“Until then,” declared Lapointe, standing to shake hands. He watched with mixed feelings as the albino collected his hat and stick at the door and strolled into the sunlit square, for all the world a flaneur from a previous century.
Later that same day, wearing impeccable evening dress as was his unvarying habit, Monsieur Zenith made his way to a certain unprepossessing address in the Marais where he admitted himself with a key, entering through a door of peeling green paint into a foyer whose interior window slid open and a pair of yellow, bloodshot eyes regarded him suspiciously. Zenith gave a name and a number and, as he passed through the second door, pulled on a black domino which, of course, did nothing to disguise his appearance but was a convention of the establishment. Once within, he gave his hat and cloak to a bowing receptionist and found himself in those parts of the catacombs made into a great dining room known to the aristocrats of the criminal underworld as La Cuisine de Smith. Here, that fraternity could exist unhindered and, while eating a passable dinner, could listen to an orchestra consisting of a violinist, a guitarist, double-bassist, an accordionist and a pianist. If they so wished they could also dance the exotic tango of Argentina or the Apache of Paris herself.