«And what happened?»
«I won. All but two newspapers were convicted.»
«So what’s still troubling you?»
«Everything. The opposing lawyer, though praising my work, said I’d ruined my future through my passionate intemperance. He told me that relentless failure would dog my every step as punishment for my pride; that by attacking this and that I had become neither parliamentary deputy nor minister; that perhaps I’d been more successful as a writer than as a politician. But that’s not true either, because what I have written has been forgotten, and after winning these cases I’ve been banished from any salons of importance. I have won so many battles and yet I am a failure. A time comes when something breaks inside, and there is no more energy or will. They say you must live, but life becomes a burden that inevitably ends in suicide.»
«A time comes when something breaks inside, and there is no more energy or will. They say you must live, but life becomes a burden that inevitably ends in suicide.»
Simonini believed what he was about to do was entirely justified. He would be saving that unfortunate soul from an extreme and humiliating gesture, the ultimate act of failure. He was about to commit an act of charity…and would be rid of a dangerous witness.
He asked Joly if he would take a quick look at some papers on which he wanted his opinion. He handed him a large file containing old newspapers. It would take him some time to absorb their contents, and Joly was sitting in an armchair, carefully gathering up pieces of paper that were slipping out of the bundle.
He began to read, unaware of what was going on, while Simonini moved quietly behind him, put the muzzle of the pistol to his head and pulled the trigger.
Joly slumped forward, with a trickle of blood flowing from a hole in his temple and his arms dangling. It wasn’t hard to put the pistol in Joly’s hand. Fortunately, this occurred six or seven years before the discovery of a miraculous powder that allowed the fingerprints on a weapon to be clearly detected. At the time Simonini had settled his score with Joly, the methods of identification devised by Bertillon were still followed, based on the measurements of the skeleton and particular bones of the suspect. No one would have suspected that Joly’s death was anything but a suicide.
Simonini retrieved the bundle of newspapers, washed the two coffee cups and left the apartment in good order. Two days afterward, as he later discovered, the doorkeeper, noticing the tenant’s absence, went to the police station for the Saint-Thomas-d’Aquin district. Officers broke down the apartment door and found the body. According to a short newspaper report, the pistol was apparently on the ground. Simonini had obviously failed to fix it properly in Joly’s hand, but it made no difference. By extraordinary good fortune there were letters on the table addressed to Joly’s mother, sister and brother. None of them spoke specifically about suicide, but they were all tinged with deep and noble pessimism and seemed to have been written for that very purpose. And who knew whether the poor fellow hadn’t actually meant to kill himself, in which case Simonini had gone to a great deal of trouble for nothing.
This was not the first time Dalla Piccola had revealed matters to his fellow occupant that he might perhaps have learned only in confession and that Simonini himself did not wish to recall. Simonini was somewhat offended and had written several angry comments beneath Dalla Piccola’s account.
Certainly, the papers your Narrator is browsing are full of surprises, and might be worth using one day as the basis for a novel.
19. Osman Bey
11th April 1897, evening
Dear Abbé, I’m striving as hard as I can to reconstruct my past and you continually interrupt like a pedantic tutor, correcting me every time I make a spelling mistake…You are distracting me. And you’re upsetting me. Very well, perhaps I did kill Joly, but I was intent on achieving an end that justified the small means I was forced to use. You should follow the example of Father Bergamaschi, with his political acumen and sang-froid, and control your own morbid petulance…
Now that I was no longer beholden to Joly or Goedsche, I could work on my Prague Protocols (as I called them). I had to devise something new, since the old setting of the Prague cemetery had become a commonplace almost worthy of a novel. A few years after my grandfather’s letter, Le Contemporain had published «The Rabbi’s Speech,» purporting to be a factual report by an English diplomat named Sir John Readcliff.
Since the pseudonym used by Goedsche as the author of his novel was Sir John Retcliffe, it was clear where the text had come from. I lost count of the number of times the scene in the cemetery was reused by other authors—as I write, I seem to recall that a certain Bournand recently published Les Juifs et nos contemporains, where «The Rabbi’s Speech» appears once again, except that John Readcliff had become the name of the rabbi himself. My God, how is life possible in a world of counterfeiters?
I was therefore looking for new material to add to my Protocols, and I was not averse to taking it from published works, well aware that—save for the unfortunate case of Abbé Dalla Piccola—my potential clients didn’t seem the sort of people who spent their time in libraries.
Father Bergamaschi said to me one day: «Someone called Lutostansky has published a book in Russian on the Talmud and the Jews. I’ll try to get a copy and have it translated by my brethren. But more importantly, there’s another person who may be useful. Have you ever heard of Osman Bey?»
«A Turk?»
«He might be Serbian, but he writes in German. His book on the Jewish conquest of the world has been translated into several languages, but I think he may be in need of more information, since his campaigns against the Jews are what he lives by. It is said that the Russian political police have given him four hundred rubles to come to Paris and investigate the Alliance Israélite Universelle. If I remember correctly, you had information about it from your friend Brafmann.»
«Very little, to be honest.»
«Then make it up. Offer something to this Osman Bey and he’ll give you something in return.»
«How do I find him?»
«He’ll find you.»
I worked very little now for Hébuterne, but made contact with him every so often. We met at the central doorway of Notre Dame, and I asked for information about Osman Bey. It seems he was known to the police halfway around the world.
«He may be Jewish by origin, like Brafmann and other fanatical enemies of their race. He has a long history: he used to call himself Millinger or Millingen, then Kibridli-Zade, and some time ago claimed to be Albanian. He’s been deported from many countries for shady dealings, generally fraud; in others he has spent several months in prison. He’s interested in the Jews because he sensed it would be profitable. In Milan, on some occasion or other, he publicly retracted everything he’d written on the Jews, then had new anti-Jewish pamphlets printed in Switzerland and went selling them door-to-door in Egypt. But his real success was in Russia, where he began writing stories about the murder of Christian children. Now he’s interested in the Alliance Israélite. That’s why we want to keep him out of France—as I’ve mentioned before, we don’t want to start any dispute with these people. It’s not in our interest, at least not for the moment.»
«But he’s on his way to Paris, or may already be here.»
«I see you’re better informed than I am. Well, if you’d like to keep an eye on him, we’d be much obliged, as always.»
And so I had two good reasons for meeting Osman Bey: first, to sell him whatever I could on the Jews, and second, to keep Hébuterne informed of his movements. And a week later Osman Bey got in touch with me, leaving a note under my shop door with the address of a boarding house in the Marais.
I had imagined he might enjoy his food, and wanted to invite him to Le Grand Véfour to let him taste fricassée de poulet Marengo and les mayonnaises de volaille. But in an exchange of messages he refused any form of invitation and told me to meet him that evening at the corner of place Maubert and rue Maître-Albert. I would see a fiacre draw up, and I should approach it and make myself known.
When the vehicle stopped at the corner of the square, the face that appeared was of someone I wouldn’t wish to meet on a dark night in the streets of my area: long, disheveled hair, hooked nose, pasty complexion, hawk-eyed, with a nervous tic in the left eye, and as spindly as a contortionist.
«Good evening, Captain Simonini,» he said immediately. «In Paris the walls have ears, as they say. The only way to have a quiet chat is by taking a drive around the city. Here the coachman can’t hear us, and even if he could, he’s as deaf
