As Lebæuf approached the open hole with his lantern, Jacques warned:
“Hey, Papa, stand back with that lantern. There might be a gas leak.”
“I know, dammit. I’ve been cleaning out shit-holes since before you were born.” He handed the pole to Jacques and stood back, shining the light into the cesspool.
Jacques grabbed the implement and poked round the masonry-lined receptacle. “God, what a stink,” he muttered. Then: “Hey, Papa, I’ve got something. It looks like some bastard dumped a hunk of meat wrapped in a cloth.”
Lebæuf snorted in disgust. “I’d like to make the damned fool clean out every shit-hole on this hill. Well, no use bitching about it. Go ahead and fish it out.”
Jacques hauled up the smelly object and flung it onto the pavement where it landed with a thud. Papa turned the light on it. When they saw what it was their eyes widened. The younger man looked away, gagged, and retched.
Papa Lebæuf was proud of his strong stomach, but the bloody thing they fished out of a Montmartre cesspool that morning would haunt his dreams for the remainder of his life.
5
OCTOBER 15
THE INVESTIGATION
Dawn crept over Paris. The Île de la Cité emerged from the shadows; the sun, an orange disc in a slate sky, shone its pale rays through a cloud bar onto the grimy gothic towers of Notre Dame. Nearby, on the south bank of the Seine, in an office building on the Quai des Orfèvres, Paul Féraud, Chief Inspector of the Sûreté, began his day with coffee, bread, and a mysterious police report.
Mote-sprinkled light streamed through half-opened blinds; an oil lamp burned feebly on Féraud’s cluttered mahogany desk. The streets below were quiet; a good time for the chief to work and to think through a problem. He took advantage of this early hour to review new reports of unusual suspected homicides, his specialty. A thirty-year veteran, Féraud had risen through the ranks, learning his profession in the hard school of experience.
The office was a study in organized confusion: files, dossiers, reference books, photographs, strewn about in an order known only to the chief. Among the papers littering his desktop stood a gleaming brass telephone, the aforementioned green-shaded lamp, a photograph of Féraud’s late wife in a black-crepe-decorated silver frame, and photographs of the Chief’s four adult children: three married daughters and a son in the military. In addition, there was a cigar box, a copper ashtray with an engraving of the Eiffel Tower, and a curiosity, a guillotine cigar cutter, a gift from the “old boys” on the force in recognition of their chief’s thirty years of public service.
The drab gray-green painted walls were lined with dusty bookshelves and cabinets overflowing with paperwork, curios, and memorabilia. On the wall opposite the chief’s desk hung the Rogue’s Gallery, a grouping of photographic portraits of criminals brought to justice by Féraud, many mounted side by side with photographs of their guillotined heads posed on slabs in the Morgue.
One particular file had just arrived and it occupied the chief that morning. It had, pursuant to his instructions, been marked “Urgent” and rushed to him by special courier. The file contained a police report concerning a female torso discovered in a Montmartre cesspit by a pair of night soil collectors. The sergeant on duty had immediately notified Féraud; that was at five A.M. (the time the chief arrived at his office each morning) and this too was according to instructions. Moreover, the police had erected a rope-line barricade and assigned a gendarme to guard the area, preventing the curious from contaminating the scene with their footprints, cigar and cigarette butts, and so forth.
Paris was full of tourists, the closing ceremony of the Universal Exposition was only two weeks away, and the Whitechapel Murders of 1888 were fresh on everyone’s mind. Scotland Yard’s widely publicized failure in that case had placed all detectives and their methods under a dark cloud of popular mistrust. Any hint in the press that Jack the Ripper had crossed the channel could cause panic, not to mention embarrassment to the police and the government. Therefore, as a precautionary measure, a preliminary report of any suspected homicide resembling the Ripper’s modus operandi went directly to the Chief Inspector as a matter of the highest priority.
The detailed description of the body disgusted Féraud and, as always, filled him with a sense of outrage. Though he had seen many horrific things in his years on the force, he always wondered what drove people to commit such crimes. Gruesome photographs would be taken at the scene and at the Morgue later that morning, before and after the autopsy. He scratched his short, graying beard. It could be a prank. He hoped that was the case, that some medical students or drunken riffraff had gotten hold of a cadaver and dumped it into the cesspit as a hoax. Paris was a world-renowned medical center, after all, and cadavers quite easy to come by. Stupid bastards, he muttered. But then, what if it wasn’t a hoax? He could not afford to take chances, to make a mistake that might cost other women their lives. A knock on the door interrupted the chief’s train of thought. It must be Achille. “Enter,” he growled.
A tall, slender man of thirty entered the office and stood at attention before his chief. Inspector Achille Lefebvre was a new breed of detective, a graduate of the prestigious École Polytechnique, a fervent advocate for scientific methods of detection. Achille’s pale, clean-shaven face, near-sighted blue eyes aided by a gold-rimmed pince-nez, and stiff, soft-spoken manner made him seem an “odd fish” to the veterans. The old boys had nicknamed him the professor, but after five years on the force Achille had gained their grudging respect, not to mention what mattered most—the confidence of their chief.
The chief smiled at the young man’s soldierly stiffness. “Relax, Achille; take a load off your feet. You’ve got plenty of legwork ahead of you, my boy.” Achille sat in a small armchair on the other side of the desk; Féraud handed over the file. After giving him a minute to scan the report, the chief continued: “You’re going up to Montmartre on the Morgue meat wagon. Take Rousseau and a good photographer. Do you know the neighborhood?”
“Yes, sir, it’s a quiet area near the summit of the hill.”
Féraud nodded. “Yes, it was quiet and I want to keep it that way. I’ve already given a release to the newspapers: Body of unknown female discovered in Montmartre. And that’s all they’ll get until we make a positive identification. Give them any more and the reporters and morbid curiosity-seekers will be swarming Montmartre hill like flies on a turd. Anyway, let’s hope this is all a stupid prank, but for now we’ll proceed as though it’s a homicide. To begin, we know from the report that the night soil collectors had last pumped the cesspool the morning of the 13th. So the body must have been dumped between then and this morning’s collection.
“Start gathering evidence and question the residents at that address. We’re a long way from going to the juge d’instruction for a warrant. There’s a gendarme guarding the scene and they’ve set up a barricade. You’ve worked with Rousseau before; he’s a good man and you both know the drill. When you’ve got what you want, you and the photographer can take the body to the Morgue on the meat wagon. Rousseau will stay in Montmartre to interview the neighbors.
“I’ll contact Bertillon. He owes me a favor or two, and I’m going to ask him to supervise the autopsy and work directly with you. Telephone the Morgue from the Montmartre station to confirm the appointment. When you’ve finished at the Morgue you may go home, but I want you and Rousseau in my office with a written report first thing tomorrow morning. Any questions?”