The Phantom of the Rue Royale: Nicolas Le Floch Investigation #3. Jean-Francois Parot

Nicolas said, ‘I’ll follow you on that path. I’ve had nothing in my belly since midday yesterday except a brioche. I’m all ears. What do you propose?’

      ‘The usual place we go when we’re hungry and we don’t have much time, in Rue du Pied-de-Boeuf. I think that’s the perfect choice.’

      ‘I’m hungry, therefore I follow you. That’s my cogito for this morning.’

      ‘Especially as I’ve been to see Sanson,’ Bourdeau went on. ‘He’ll join us in the Basse-Geôle on the stroke of noon for the opening of the corpse. Not something to watch on an empty stomach – it might give us the hiccups …’

      He laughed, and Nicolas shuddered at the thought of this grim prospect. He agreed, though: opening a corpse was like a journey by sea – both required a full stomach.

      Their usual tavern was only a short distance from the Châtelet. The proximity of the Grande Boucherie, although a source of sanies and foul odours, also offered the advantage of fresh products. As soon as they entered the low, smoky room, Bourdeau called to his old friend – they were both natives of a village near Chinon, in the Touraine – and asked him what the kitchen could offer them at that hour of the morning. The fat, ruddy-faced man smiled.

      ‘What can I possibly serve you?’ he said, giving Bourdeau a dig in the ribs that would have knocked over anyone less steady on his feet. ‘Hmm … What do you say to a calf’s breast pie? I just made one for a neighbour of mine who’s christening his baby. I’ll go and heat it up for you. With two pitchers of red wine from our region, as usual.’

      Nicolas, who loved inside information, asked him the recipe for this promising-sounding dish.

      ‘Only because it’s you, Commissioner. Otherwise, I wouldn’t say a word, even under torture. Here goes. You cut a decent piece of calf’s breast – choose it well: it has to be plump and pearly. Then you cut it up into slices, which you lard with one or two pieces of fat. Make a crust pastry out of lard and lower it into the pie dish. Put in the slices of veal, after seasoning them with bacon, salt, pepper, cloves, nutmeg, herbs, bay, mushrooms and artichoke ends, and cover the whole thing with pastry. Two good hours in the oven. You take it out and, just before serving, you cut a little hole in the top and carefully pour in a white sauce made with lemon juice and egg yolks.’

      ‘That seems to me perfectly adapted to the emptiness of our bellies,’ said Bourdeau with a gleam in his eye and his lips all aquiver with anticipation.

      ‘And, to whet your appetite, I’ll serve cherries, the first of the year, cooked in cinnamon wine.’

      ‘Ideal for a little eleven o’clock meal,’ Nicolas said ingratiatingly.

      A pitcher of purple wine was quickly brought. They drank many glasses, calming their raging hunger with a salad of beans mixed with slices of lard. Nicolas informed Bourdeau of the night’s events as he and Semacgus had experienced them, as well as the gist of his interview with Monsieur de Sartine, emphasising the fact that it was their chief who had appointed the inspector to assist him in this delicate case.

      ‘Let me see if I’ve got this right,’ said Bourdeau, turning red with pleasure. ‘We’re going to concentrate on the case of the strangled girl in order to divert attention from what we’re really up to.’

      ‘Exactly. But the credibility of our alibi will depend on the result of the autopsy. The marks on her neck could have been caused by attempts to free the body from where it lay with the others.’

      ‘I don’t think so. Nothing in the state of her clothes or her appearance indicated that there had been any kind of struggle to free her.’

      Nicolas was convinced that it was a good policeman’s duty to obey his instincts. From snippets of information, sometimes unformulated impressions, clues, coincidences and assumptions, a policeman used his common sense to organise all the elements of a case. He needed an open mind, a good memory for precedents and the barely conscious ability to refer to a whole collection of human types and situations. Beneath his good-natured appearance, Bourdeau had all these qualities, as well as a remarkable sensitivity. How many times had one of his apparently innocuous remarks sent an investigation along a new line of inquiry which had not previously been explored in depth?

      The smell of veal simmered in its spices drew Nicolas from his reflections. Carefully, their host placed his golden pie on the uneven wooden table. He disappeared, only to reappear immediately with a small pan that had seen better days, having been seasoned by hours of exposure in the oven. From it he took a sharp knife and nimbly cut a small hole in the pastry. Steam rose through it, enveloping them in its aroma. The innkeeper gently drizzled white sauce into this opening, so that it soon reached the smallest crannies of the pie. He put down his pan, picked up the dish, moved it from side to side, and set it down again. Nicolas and Bourdeau were already leaning forward when he stopped them.

      ‘Go gently, my lambs, let the sauce do its work. It has to imbue the meat with its aroma and make it tender. The thing to remember is that I call it calf’s breast pie, but to make it particularly mellow and plump I add a little cartilage. And the sauce! It’ll make your mouth water! It’s not like that miserable stuff that tastes like plaster, put together in a hurry by kitchen boys. It takes hours, gentlemen, for the flour to rise. I may be an insignificant little innkeeper, but I put my heart into my work, just like my great-grandfather, who was sauce chef to Gaston d’Orléans under the great Cardinal.’

      Inspired no doubt by this glorious memory, he served them ceremoniously. The dish and its flavours lived up to his introduction. The hot crust, crisp with caramelised meat juices at the edges, enclosed meat perfectly tender from the sauce melted over it. They spent a long time savouring this piece of work so simply and eloquently presented. The cooked cherries were refreshing, acid and sweet at the same time. The two men were overcome with a pleasant drowsiness, made all the stronger by brandy served in porcelain bowls as a precautionary measure. They blissfully let this infringement of the regulations pass without comment. Their host had no licence to serve spirits, the sale of which was reserved for another guild. His modest business allowed him only to supply wines from the cask, not from sealed bottles. Bourdeau, always alert to detail, suddenly realised that they did not have any snuff. It was an old joke between them. They always resorted to snuff when attending autopsies, in order to blot out the musty smell of decomposition pervading the Basse-Geôle. The host obligingly lent them two earthen pipes reserved for his customers, and a pro portionate amount of snuff.

      Back at the Grand Châtelet, they went straight to the torture chamber adjoining the office of the clerk of the criminal court. It was in this sombre Gothic room, on one of its oak tables, that bodies were opened up. The operation was still fairly uncommon: the regular doctors attached to the court refused to perform it unless specifically ordered to do so and, even when that was the case, they did not follow the rules, thus rendering the examination imperfect and completely useless from the point of view of an investigation.

      A man of Nicolas’s age, dressed in a puce-coloured coat, breeches and black stockings, was laying surgical instruments out on a bench. They glittered in the torchlight. Daylight never entered this room: the casement windows were fitted with metal hoods to prevent screams being heard beyond the walls of the fortress. Charles Henri Sanson was an old acquaintance of Nicolas from his earliest days in Paris. They had begun their careers at about the same time, and both served the King’s justice. An unexpected sympathy – one quite unhoped-for by Sanson – had drawn the young commissioner to this shy, temperate, highly cultured man. Nicolas always found it hard to imagine him as an executioner. He thought of him more as a doctor of crime. He knew that Sanson had been given no choice, but had been forced to take over the family profession. Nevertheless, he accomplished his terrible task with all the care of a compassionate man. Sanson turned, and his grave face lit up when he recognised Nicolas and Bourdeau.

      ‘Greetings, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘I am at your disposal. My one regret is that the pleasure of seeing you again has only been afforded me by last night’s tragedy.’

      They shook hands, a custom on which Sanson always