Read Online Cynthia Manson (ed) by Merry Murder - Free Book Online Page A

where the call came from.
    “Thirteenth
Arrondissement, Croulebarbe,” he murmured, replacing his earphones. He seized a
plug and pushed it into a hole.
    “Croulebarbe? Your
car’s been called out—what for?”
    “A call from the
Boulevard Masséna. Two drunks fighting.”
    Lecœur carefully
made a little cross in one of the columns of his notebook.
    “How are you
getting on down your way?”
    “There are only
four of us here. Two are playing dominoes.”
    “Had any boudin tonight?”
    “No. Why?”
    “Never mind. I must
ring off now. There’s a call from the Sixteenth.”
    A gigantic map of
Paris was drawn on the wall in front of him and on it each police station was
represented by a little lamp. As soon as anything happened anywhere, a lamp
would light up and Lecœur would plug into the appropriate socket.
    “Chaillot? Hallo!
Your car’s out?”
    In front of each
police station throughout the twenty arrondissements of Paris, one or more cars
stood waiting, ready to dash off the moment an alarm was raised.
    “What with?”
    “Veronal.”
    That would be a
woman. It was the third suicide that night, the second in the smart district of
Passy.
    Another little
cross was entered in the appropriate column of Lecœur’s notebook. Mambret, the
third member of the watch, was sitting at a desk filling out forms.
    “Hallo! Odéon?
What’s going on? Oh, a car stolen.”
    That was for
Mambret, who took down the particulars, then phoned them through to Piedbœuf in
the room above. Piedbœuf, the teleprinter operator, had such a resounding voice
that the others could hear it through the ceiling. This was the forty-eighth
car whose details he had circulated that night.
    An ordinary night,
in fact—for them. Not so for the world outside. For this was the great night, la
nuit de Noël . Not only was there the Midnight Mass, but all the theaters
and cinemas were crammed, and at the big stores, which stayed open till twelve,
a crowd of people jostled each other in a last-minute scramble to finish off
their Christmas shopping.
    Indoors were family
gatherings feasting on roast turkey and perhaps also on boudins made,
like the ones Sommer had been talking about, from a secret recipe handed down
from mother to daughter.
    There were children
sleeping restlessly while their parents crept about playing the part of Santa
Claus. arranging the presents they would find on waking.
    At the restaurants
and cabarets every table had been booked at least a week in advance. In the
Salvation Army barge on the Seine, tramps and paupers queued up for an extra
special.
    Sommer had a wife
and five children. Piedbœuf, the teleprinter operator upstairs, was a father of
one week’s standing. Without the frost on the window-panes, they wouldn’t have
known it was freezing outside. In that vast, dingy room they were in a world
apart, surrounded on all sides by the empty offices of the Prefecture de Police,
which stood facing the Palais de Justice. It wasn’t till the following day that
those offices would once again be teeming with people in search of passport
visas, driving licenses, and permits of every description.
    In the courtyard
below, cars stood waiting for emergency calls, the men of the flying squad
dozing on the seats. Nothing, however, had happened that night of sufficient
importance to justify their being called out. You could see that from the
little crosses in Lecœur’s notebook. He didn’t bother to count them, but he
could tell at a glance that there were something like two hundred in the
drunks’ column.
    No doubt there’d
have been a lot more if it hadn’t been that this was a night for indulgence. In
most cases the police were able to persuade those who had had too much to go
home and keep out of trouble. Those arrested were the ones in whom drink raised
the devil, those who smashed windows or molested other people.
    Two hundred of that
sort—a handful of women among them—were now out of harm’s way, sleeping heavily
on