Perfume. The story of a murderer - Suskind Patrick - Страница 49

• Предыдущая
• 49/56
• Следующая

The dread was more paralyzing, however, than six months earlier, for people felt helpless at the sudden return of a danger that they had thought well behind them. If even the bishop’s anathema had proved useless! If even Antoine Richis, the great Richis, the richest man in town, the second consul, a powerful, prudent man who had every kind of assistance available, if even he could not protect his child! If the murderer’s hand was not be deterred even by the hallowed beauty of Laure-for indeed she seemed a saint to everyone who had known her, especially now, afterwards, now that she was dead-what hope was there of escaping this murderer? He was more cruel than the plague, for you could flee before the plague, but not before this murderer, as the case of Richis had proved. Apparently he possessed supernatural powers. He was most certainly in league with the devil, if he was not tue devil himself. And so many people, especially the simpler souls, knew no better course than to go to church and pray, every tradesman to his patron: the locksmiths to St. Aloysius, the weavers to St. Crispin, the gardeners to St. Anthony, the perfumers to St. Joseph. And they took their wives and daughters with them, praying together, eating and sleeping in the church; they did not leave during the day themselves now, convinced that the only possible refuge from this monster-if any refuge was to be had-was under the protection of the despairing parish and the gaze of the Madonna.

Seeing that the church had failed once already, other, quicker wits banded together in occult groups. Hiring at great expense a certified witch from Gour-don, they crept into one of the many limestone grottoes of subterranean Grasse and celebrated black masses to curry the Old Gentleman’s favor. Still others, in particular members of the upper middle class and the educated nobility, put their money on the most modern scientific methods, magnetizing their houses, hypnotizing their daughters, gathering in their salons for secret fluidal meetings, and employing telepathy to drive off the murderer’s spirit with communal thought emissions. The guilds organized a penitential procession from Grasse to La Napoule and back. The monks from the town’s five monasteries established services of perpetual prayer and ceaseless chants, so that soon unbroken lamentation was heard day and night, now on one street comer, now on another. Hardly anyone worked.

Thus, with feverish passivity and something very like impatience, the people of Grasse awaited the murderer’s next blow. No one doubted that it would fall. And secretly everyone yearned to hear the horrible news, if only in the hope that it would not be about him, but someone else.

This time, however, the civil, regional, and provincial authorities did not allow themselves to be infected by the hysterical mood of the citizenry. For the first time since the murderer of maidens had appeared on the scene, well-planned and effective cooperative efforts were instituted among the prefectures of Grasse, Draguignan, and Toulon, among magistrates, police, commissaries, parliament, and the navy.

This cooperation among the powerful arose partly from fear of a general civil uprising, partly from the fact that only since Laure Richis’s murder did they have clues that made systematic pursuit of the murderer possible for the first time. The murderer had been seen. Obviously they were dealing with the ominous journeyman tanner who had spent the night of the murder in the inn stables and disappeared the next morning without a trace. According to the joint testimony of the innkeeper, the groom, and Richis, he was a nondescript, shortish fellow with a brownish coat and a coarse linen knapsack. Although in other respects the recollections of the three witnesses remained unusually vague-they had been unable to describe the man’s face, hair color, or manner of speech-the innkeeper did add that, if he was not mistaken, he had noticed something awkward or limping about the stranger’s posture and gait, as if he had a wounded leg or a crippled foot.

Armed with these clues, two mounted troops had taken up pursuit of the murderer by noon of the same day, following the Mar6chaussee in the direction of Marseille-one along the coast, the other taking the inland road. The environs of La Napoule were combed by volunteers. Two commissioners from the provincial court at Grasse traveled to Nice to make inquiries about journeyman tanners. All ships departing from the ports of Frejus, Cannes, and Antibes were checked; the roads leading across the border into Savoy were blocked and travelers required to identify themselves. For those who could read, an arrest warrant and description of the culprit appeared on all the town gates of Grasse, Vence, and Gourdon, and on village church doors. Town criers made three announcements daily. The report of a suspected club-foot, of course, merely confirmed the view that the culprit was none other than the devil himself and tended more to arouse panic among the populace than to bring in useful information.

But only after the presiding judge of the court in Grasse had, on Richis’s behalf, offered a reward of no less than two hundred livres for information leading to the apprehension of the murderer did denunciations bring about the arrest of several journeyman tanners in Grasse, Opio, and Gourdon-one of whom indeed had the rotten luck of limping. They were already considering subjecting the man to torture despite a solid alibi supported by several witnesses, when, ten days after the murder, a man from the city watch appeared at the magistrate’s office and gave the following deposition: At noon on the day in question, he, Gabriel Tagliasco, captain of the guard, while engaged in his customary duties at the Porte du Cours, had been approached by an individual, who, as he now realized, fit the description in the warrant almost exactly, and had been questioned repeatedly and insistently concerning the road by which the second consul and his caravan had departed the city that same morning. He had ascribed no importance to the incident, neither then nor later, and would most certainly have been unable to recall the individual purely on the basis of his own memory-so thoroughly unremarkable was the man-had he not seen him by chance only yesterday, right here in Grasse, in the rue de la Louve, in front of the studio of Maitre Druot and Madame Arnulfi, on which occasion he had noticed that as the man walked back into the workshop he had a definite limp.

Grenouille was arrested an hour later. The innkeeper and his groom from La Napoule, who were in Grasse to identify the other suspects, immediately recognized him as the journeyman tanner who had spent the night with them: it was he, and no other— this must be the wanted murderer.

They searched the workshop, they searched the cabin in the olive grove behind the Franciscan cloister. In one comer, hardly hidden, lay the shredded nightgown, the undershirt, and the red hair of Laure Richis. And when they dug up the floor, piece by piece the clothes and hair of the other twenty-four girls came to light. The wooden club used to kill the victims was found, and the linen knapsack. The evidence was overwhelming. The order was given to toll the church bells. The presiding judge announced by proclamation and public notice that the infamous murderer of young girls, sought now for almost one year, had finally been captured and was in custody.

AT FIRST people did not believe the report. They assumed it was a ruse by which the officials were covering up their own incompetence and attempting to calm the dangerously explosive mood of the populace. People remembered only too well when the word had been that the murderer had departed for Grenoble. This time fear had set its jaws too firmly into their souls.

Not until the next day, when the evidence was displayed on the church square in front of the provost court-and it was a ghastly sight to behold, twenty-five garments with twenty-five crops of hair, all mounted like scarecrows on poles set up across the top of the square opposite the cathedral-did public opinion change.

• Предыдущая
• 49/56
• Следующая