Free The Devil in Montmartre by Gary Inbinder

a look at that studio. Wouldn’t you, professor?” Rousseau grinned at Achille, a gleam in his piggish eyes.
    “I would indeed, but we don’t have enough evidence for a warrant.”
    Féraud leaned further over his desk and lowered his voice. “Listen, boys, what the juge d’instruction doesn’t know won’t hurt him. This is strictly between us. Within the next day or two, I want you to have a look at Lautrec’s studio—without a warrant. Rousseau, you know who to use on that job.”
    “Right chief; just leave it to me.” He turned to Achille: “You O.K. with that, professor?”
    Achille did not like the old extrajudicial methods, but he figured in a case like this the ends justified the means. And he was not about to harm his career by crossing Féraud. “As long as the chief approves, it’s fine with me.”

    The stench of La Villette on an unseasonably warm autumn morning struck Achille like a punch to the gut. Home to the stockyards and great abattoirs that provided meat for the tables of two million Parisians, La Villette was also a hodgepodge of factories, warehouses, working class dwellings, boîtes , cafes, administrative buildings, and markets. Located in the northeastern corner of Paris, a district annexed during the reign of Napoleon III, the modern industrial site and docklands were built around a large basin and main canal that flowed into the Seine through a system of locks.
    The main canal was itself fed by a network of smaller canals polluted with industrial waste and slaughterhouse effluent criss-crossed by iron footbridges and railway bridges. The emissions from hundreds of locomotives and factory chimneys enveloped the area in a yellowish-brown haze. A steel spiders-web overspread the vast acreage, traversed day and night by smoke-belching engines pulling long trains of cars loaded with lowing cattle, bleating sheep, grunting and squealing pigs, brought by the thousands to be offloaded into the slaughterhouse pens. Trains with ice-cooled boxcars conveyed the butchered product to the Paris markets.
    La Villette was also a collection point for sewage pumped from the Paris cesspools. In the early morning hours, hundreds of wagons filled with human waste lined up on the quayside, waiting to pour out their cargo into tanker-barges bound for the suburban sewage farms. Achille supervised two workers in a dark shed near the quay as they raked and sifted through excrement removed from the cess-pit where the torso was found, looking for clues. The foul sludge had been pumped into a galvanized iron vat and sprayed with disinfectant, but the odor in the stuffy shed was still overwhelming.
    Does filth breed crime? Achille pondered this question as he anxiously awaited a discovery that might shed light on his case. He had read Zola and was familiar with the author’s literary theory of naturalism, according to which character was formed by a combination of social conditions, heredity, and environment. That might hold true for the common criminal, but would it apply to a monster that could murder and horribly mutilate a woman? Try as he might, Achille could not picture the individual who committed the crime.
    Lombroso, the celebrated Italian criminologist, believed the criminal was a definite anthropological type bearing physical and mental stigmata, the product of heredity, atavism, and degeneracy. Could you read evil in a face, a body, mannerisms, and gestures? Would the man Achille was looking for be simian and grotesque like Lautrec? Perhaps alienation from decent society had motivated him to destroy beauty in revenge for the rejection brought on by his deformity. Achille pondered another literary association, Hugo’s hideously deformed Quasimodo. According to Lombroso’s theory of criminal physiognomy, Quasimodo would have been a prime suspect in a Ripper-type murder investigation. Nevertheless, Hugo had portrayed the hunchback as a noble, self-sacrificing character who loved the beautiful Esmeralda.