NOTHING in the ante-chamber indicated that a tragedy had taken place
there. There were pictures on the walls, pieces of faience, some arms of
rare kinds, Japanese swords and a Malay creese. Bernardet glanced at
them as he passed by.
"He is in the salon," said the concierge, in a low tone.
One of the folding doors stood open, and, stopping on the threshold, in
order to take in the entire aspect of the place, Bernardet saw in the
centre of the room, lying on the floor in a pool of blood, the body of
M. Rovere, clothed in a long, blue dressing gown, bound at the waist
with a heavy cord, which lay in coils on the floor, like a serpent. The
corpse was extended between the two windows, which opened on the
Boulevard de Clichy, and Bernardet's first thought was that it was a
miracle that the victim could have met his death in such a horrible
manner, two steps from the passers-by on the street.
"Whoever struck the blow did it quickly," thought the police officer. He
advanced softly toward the body, casting his eye upon the inert mass and
taking in at a glance the smallest objects near it and the most minute
details. He bent over and studied it thoroughly.
M. Rovere seemed living in his tragic pose. The pale face, with its
pointed and well-trimmed gray beard, expressed in its fierce immobility
a sort of menacing anger. This man of about fifty years had evidently
died cursing some one in his supreme agony. The frightful wound seemed
like a large red cravat, which harmonized strangely with the
half-whitened beard, the end of which was wet with blood.
But what struck Bernardet above everything else, arrested his attention,
and glued him to the spot, was the look, the extraordinary expression in
the eyes. The mouth was open, as if to cry out, the eyes seemed to
menace some one, and the lips about to speak.
They were frightful. Those tragic eyes were wide open, as if transfixed
by fear or fury.
They seemed fathomless, staring, ready to start from their sockets. The
eyebrows above them were black and bristling. They seemed living eyes in
that dead face. They told of a final struggle, of some atrocious duel of
looks and of words. They appeared, in their ferocious immobility, as
when they gazed upon the murderer, eye to eye, face to face.
Bernardet looked at the hands.
They were contracted and seemed, in some obstinate resistance, to have
clung to the neck or the clothing of the assassin.
"There ought to be blood under the nails, since he made a struggle,"
said Bernardet, thinking aloud.
And Paul Rodier, the reporter, hurriedly wrote, "There was blood under
the nails."
Bernardet returned again and again to the eyes--those wide-open eyes,
frightful, terrible eyes, which, in their fierce depths, retained
without doubt the image or phantom of some nightmare of death.
He touched the dead man's hand. The flesh had become cold and _rigor
mortis_ was beginning to set in.
The reporter saw the little man take from his pocket a sort of rusty
silver ribbon and unroll it, and heard him ask Moniche to take hold of
one end of it; this ribbon or thread looked to Paul Rodier like brass
wire. Bernardet prepared his kodak.
"Above everything else," murmured Bernardet, "let us preserve the
expression of those eyes."
"Close the shutters. The darkness will be more complete."
The reporter assisted Moniche in order to hasten the work. The shutters
closed, the room was quite dark, and Bernardet began his task. Counting
off a few steps, he selected the best place from which to take the
picture.
"Be kind enough to light the end of the magnesium wire," he said to the
concierge. "Have you any matches?"
"No, M. Bernardet."
The police office indicated by a sign of the head, a match safe which he
had noticed on entering the room.
"There are some there."
Bernardet had with one sweeping glance of the eye taken in everything in
the room; the fauteuils, scarcely moved from their places; the pictures
hanging on the walls; the mirrors; the bookcases; the cabinets, etc.
Moniche went to the mantelpiece and took a match from the box. It was M.
Rovere himself who furnished the light by which a picture of his own
body was taken.
"We could obtain no picture in this room without the magnesium wire,"
said the agent, as calm while taking a photograph of the murdered man,
as he had been a short time ago in his garden. "The light is
insufficient. When I say: 'Go!' Moniche you must light the wire, and I
will take three or four negatives. Do you understand? Stand there to my
left. Now! Attention!"
Bernardet took his position and the porter stood ready, match and wire
in hand, like a gunner who awaits the order to fire.
"Go!" said the agent.
A rapid, clear flame shot up; and suddenly lighted the room.
The pale face seemed livid, the various objects in the room
took on a fantastic appearance, in this sort of tempestuous
apotheosis, and Paul Rodier hastily inscribed on his writing pad:
"Picturesque--bizarre--marvelous--devilish--suggestive."
"Let us try it again," said M. Bernardet.
For the third time in this weird light the visage of the dead man
appeared, whiter, more sinister, frightful; the wound deeper, the gash
redder; and the eyes, those wide-open, fixed, tragic, menacing, speaking
eyes--eyes filled with scorn, with hate, with terror, with the ferocious
resistance of a last struggle for life; immovable, eloquent--seemed
under the fantastic light to glitter, to be alive, to menace some one.
"That is all," said Bernardet, very softly. "If with these three
negatives"----
He stopped to look around toward the door, which was closed. Someone was
raining ringing blows on the door, loud and imperative.
"It is the Commissary; open the door, Moniche."
The reporter was busy taking notes, describing the salon, sketching it,
drawing a plan for his journal.
It was, in fact, the Commissary, who was followed by Mme. Moniche and a
number of curious persons who had forced their way in when the front
door was opened.
The Commissary, before entering, took a comprehensive survey of the
room, and said in a short tone: "Every one must go out. Madame, make all
these people go out. No one must enter."
There arose an uproar--each one tried to explain his right to be there.
They were all possessed with an irresistible desire to assist at this
sinister investigation.
"But we belong to the press!"
"The reporters may enter when they have showed their cards," the
Commissary replied. "The others--no!" There was a murmur from the crowd.
"The others--no!" repeated the Commissary. He made a sign to two
officers who accompanied him, and they demanded the reporters' cards of
identification. The concourse of curious ones rebelled, protested,
growled and declaimed against the representatives of the press, who took
precedence everywhere.
"The Fourth Power!" shouted an old man from the foot of the staircase.
He lived in the house and passed for a correspondent of the Institute.
He shouted furiously: "When a crime is committed under my very roof, I
am not even allowed to write an account of it, and strangers, because
they are reporters, can have the exclusive privilege of writing it up!"
The Commissary did not listen to him, but those who were his
fellow-sufferers applauded him to the echo. The Commissary shrugged his
shoulders at the hand-clappings.
"It is but right," he said to the reporter, "that the agents of the
press should be admitted in preference to any one else. Do you think
that it is easy to discover a criminal? I have been a journalist, too.
Yes, at times. In the Quartier, occasionally. I have even written a
piece for the theatre. But we will not talk of that. Enter! Enter, I beg
of you--and we shall see"--and elegant, amiable, polished, smiling, he
looked toward M. Bernardet, and his eyes asked the question: "Where is
it?"
"Here! M. le Commissaire."
Bernardet stood respectfully in front of his superior officer, as a
soldier carrying arms, and the Commissary, in his turn, approached the
body, while the curious ones, quietly kept back by Moniche, formed a
half circle around the pale and bloody corpse. The Commissary, like
Bernardet, was struck by the haughty expression of that livid face.
"Poor man!" he said, shaking his head. "He is superb! superb! He reminds
me of the dead Duke de Guise, in Paul Delaroche's picture. I have seen
it also at Chantilly, in Gerome's celebrated picture of _Le Duel de
Pierrot_."
Possibly in speaking aloud his thoughts, the Commissary was talking so
that the reporters might hear him. They stood, notebooks in hand,
taking notes, and Paul Rodier, catching the names, wrote rapidly in his
book: "M. Desbriere, the learned Commissary, so artistic, so well
disposed toward the press, was at one time a journalist. He noticed that
the victim's pale face, with its strong personal characteristics,
resembled the dead Duke de Guise, in Gerome's celebrated picture, which
hangs in the galleries at Chantilly."