Murder in Monte Carlo Read online

  The Roman philosopher Boethius was a major source for the medieval view of the Wheel of Fortune. Writing about it in his Consolation of Philosophy, while in prison and his own doom looming, he said:

  I know how Fortune is ever more friendly and alluring to those she strives to deceive, until she overwhelms them with grief beyond bearing, by deserting them when least expected. Are you trying to stay the force of her turning wheel? Ah, dull-witted mortal, if Fortune begin to stay still, she is no longer Fortune.

  He had good reason to analyse the Wheel of Fortune.

  Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (ca. 480–524 AD) belonged to an ancient family which included emperors Petronius Maximus and Olybrius and many consuls. His father, Flavius Manlius Boethius, was a consul in 487 after Odoacer deposed the last Western Roman Emperor and became the first “barbarian” King of Italy. Boethius was growing to manhood when Theodoric, the famous Ostrogoth, crossed the Alps and, in the name of the emperor of the Byzantine or Eastern Roman Empire, Anastasius, defeated Odoacer. Theodoric ruled Italy essentially as an independent monarch although he was the nominal representative of Anastasius.

  Boethius’ parents died early and he was brought up by Symmachus, a good and saintly man, and later became his son-in-law. Highly educated and talented, he excelled in a variety of disciplines – as an orator, musician and philosopher. He valued his integrity and his honesty shone like a beacon in the murky world of politics. He entered the service of Theodoric and was raised by him to the head position in the civil administration (magister officiorum). Not only successful, he also had a very happy family life with his wife Rusticana and sons Symmachus and Boethius. He could have been forgiven for assuming that Fortune would be his lifelong ally. This seemed to be confirmed in 522 AD when by special favour his two young sons were appointed joint consuls and rode to the senate accompanied by senators and with the approval of the public. Boethius delivered a speech in honour of King Theodoric. It appeared that his future was assured.

  But within a year he was a solitary prisoner exiled to Pavia, 500 miles from Rome, stripped of his honours and wealth, facing death. He had been falsely accused of treason with evidence of forged letters composed by his enemies.

  The Emperor Anastasius had died. His successor was Justin, who was also advanced in years, but who had a forceful young nephew Justinian. Theodoric himself, now in his seventies, had only Athalaric, his infant grandson, as an heir. Theodoric suspected that some within his own court were conspiring against him in favour of a return to direct imperial rule. Several leading senators were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy, including Boethius.

  Boethius was distraught with grief, outraged at the injustice of his misfortune and sought relief from his depression by writing The Consolation of Philosophy. The result is one of the greatest examples in the history of the incarcerated of, for want of another term, the ‘prison diary’. He spares little of his suffering in the account. Using a combination of verse and prose he constructed a scenario in which the Divine Figure of Philosophy appears to him in the guise of a woman of supreme dignity and beauty and during a series of conversations convinces him of the vanity of regret for the lost gifts of his fortune, raises his mind to the contemplation of true good and makes clear to him the mystery of the world’s moral government.

  She consoles him by discussing the transitory nature of fame and wealth (no man can ever be truly secure until he has been forsaken by fortune) and the ultimate superiority of things of the mind, which she calls the “one true good”. She contends that happiness comes from within. One’s virtue is all because it cannot be affected by the vicissitudes of fortune.

  Boethius considers such questions as the idea of free will versus predestination and determinism. He discusses the nature of virtue, happiness, human nature and justice. Humans are essentially good, he concludes.

  Significantly, he believes that criminals are not to be abused, but rather treated with sympathy and respect, using the analogy of the doctor and patient as the ideal relationship between prosecutor and criminal.

  The book became one of the most popular works of secular literature in Europe, read by statesmen, philosophers and theologians. The Middle Ages, with its vivid sense of an overruling fate, found in Boethius an interpretation of life closely akin to the spirit of Christianity, at a time of great political and economic upheaval. Its themes echoed throughout the Western canon: the female figure of Wisdom that informs Dante’s ascent through the layered universe in The Divine Comedy, Milton’s Paradise Lost, the reconciliation of opposing forces that find their way into Chaucer’s tales and the Wheel of Fortune so apt and revealing in all generations from the apogee achieved in the Middle Ages.

  The opening verses of The Consolation of Philosophy encapsulate Boethius’ feelings of despair at his predicament:

  They were the pride of my earlier bright-lived days: in my latter gloomy days they are the comfort of my fate; for hastened by unhappiness has age come upon me without warning, and grief hath set within me the old age of her gloom. White hairs are scattered untimely on my head and the skin hangs loosely from my worn-out limbs.

  Happy is that death that thrusts not itself upon men in their pleasant years, yet comes to them at the oft-repeated cry of their sorrow. Sad is it how death turns away from the unhappy with so deaf an ear and will not close, cruel, the eyes that weep. Ill is it to trust to Fortune’s bounty, and while yet she smiled upon me, the hour of gloom had well-nigh overwhelmed my head. Now has the cloud put off its alluring face wherefore without scruple my life drags out its wearying delays.

  Why, O my friends, did ye so often puff me up, telling me that I was fortunate? For he that has fallen low did never firmly stand.

  As thus she turns her wheel of chance with haughty hand, and presses on like surge of Euripus’s tides, Fortune now tramples fiercely on a fearsome king, and now deceives no less a conquered man by raising from the ground his humbled face. She hears no wretches cry, she heeds no tears, but wantonly she mocks the sorrow which her cruelty has made. This is her sport; thus she proves her power; if in the selfsame hour one man is raised to happiness, and cast down in despair. ’Tis thus she shows her might.

  Fortune addresses him and says:

  “I turn my wheel that spins its circle fairly; I delight to make the lowest turn to the top, the highest to the bottom. Come you to the top if you will, but on this condition, that you think it no unfairness to sink when the rule of my game demands it . . . In any way, let not your spirit eat itself away: you are set in the sphere that is common to all, let your desire therefore be to live with your own lot of life, a subject of the kingdom of the world . . .

  “Wild greed swallows what it has sought and still gapes wide for more. What bit or bridle will hold within its course this headlong lust, when, whetted by abundance of rich gifts, the thirst for possession burns? Never call we that man rich who is ever trembling in haste and groaning for that he thinks he lacks . . .

  “One man’s wealth is abundant but his birth and breeding put him to shame. Another is famous for his noble birth but would rather be unknown because he is hampered by his narrow means. With how much bitterness is the sweetness of man’s life mingled!”

  Boethius was executed at the age of 44 on October 23rd, 524, either killed with an axe or sword or clubbed to death. His remains were entombed in the church of San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro in Pavia. In his Paradiso Dante refers to him as “the soul who pointed out the world’s dark ways”.

  This profound book was the spiritual treasure offered him by the chaplain in Marseilles prison who tried to impress upon him the idea that if he could preserve his mind and spirit then he could withstand the terrible physical rigors that awaited him. If mind and spirit should collapse, everything else would follow. How was the holy and venerable chaplain to know that the administration was equally aware of that fact and had it factored into the regime of the bagne (penal labour camp)? The very basis of the modus operandi of the camp authorities wa
s slow death by a thousand whips. In France such a policy, such ghastly conditions and terrible punishments, would have created a scandal. Indeed, no man with a vestige of reason or logic could have grasped the rationale of such gross, fetid and merciless inhumanity.

  But because of the fact that the colony was thousands of miles away and a light was thrown but briefly in its direction by the brutal 1894 slaughter of the anarchists and the infamous incarceration of Dreyfus, the plight of the large population of inmates was ignored, the methods of the administration never questioned and the concept and conduct of the death camps allowed to operate with impunity.

  Not alone a machine for producing well-defined, well-regulated uniform punishment, it was a factory churning out misery without rhyme or reason – the purpose of it all to crush the prisoners, and the pieces could fall where they might. Hardly anyone survived, even in the mid-term, the ravages of the system.

  Dreyfus had been constantly tempted to commit suicide and he was totally innocent of the crime that brought him to the colony. He had been sustained only somewhat by that fact in his four-year incarceration but also by the love of his wife and his children and few close friends who believed in him. It could be said that he did not suffer the worst excesses of the prison regime, not being thrown into the suffering, desperate and dangerous communal pit but locked up in a tiny cottage built for purpose. But he was exposed to the same crushing of the body and the spirit at the heart of the administration and, in common with the inmates that he was kept separated from, descended into regular states of deep depression and despair. And he felt another common sensation, one of being nailed to the rack, and another that his brain was melting and that he was going mad.

  Unlike Dreyfus, he was guilty; his wife was in prison and his niece cast to the winds as a result of his weakness and his crime. There was nothing left but to survive until his body was thrown to the sharks.

  However dreadful the prospect, he had to face it. He had read of the shame and punishment of Dreyfus when he himself was in a seemingly much better place. He was not, as he realised, so bitter now. He was consigned to utter shame, without possibility of redemption, but the fate of the Jewish military man, just in the past year restored by official pardon, curiously had inspired him to accept his own, last torturous descent into this hellish world.

  He had read of the journey of Dreyfus at the time it had happened; it had but fleetingly caught his attention then, but now he was absorbed by it. It was an object lesson that he could take in the midst of his suffering. A lesson that the administration had ignored, but not he. The condemning of the innocent, the obliterating of the innocent, was an age-old phenomenon. His reading of the Bible and Boethius in prison in France had told him that among other things. For France now, Dreyfus was almost a Jesus figure, and in that there was consolation to be taken in some small fashion from despair.

  “The mind is its own place,” Milton observed, “and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” This was indeed what the chaplain had asserted but had he considered the other side of the coin? The camp was the prison but its horrors could never eliminate that other place of incarceration – the mind – and worst of all the rattling shackles of memory and the hauntings that would never be erased. There were some recollections of the fleeting glory of his youth that pierced the dark clouds momentarily, but they were sadly outnumbered by the vast legions of dreary sorrow.

  The vanity of the human and therefore the criminal mind dictates that we can learn by the mistakes of others, and that there is such a thing as escape from the consequences of any action. And so there is a constant cycle of human experience. Murder is no exception to the rule. What has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun. Fools can be separated from evil no more easily than a good man from God.

  All these and many other thoughts flooded his brain, and those of his fellow inmates. Together they were condemned to a constant examination of the errors of their ways, painful contemplation of their crimes and a never-ending search for an explanation of the blight on their short life on earth. What had led them, and not the rest of humanity, to end their existence in the colony of the damned? It was beyond any man’s imagination that such a hell could have been invented on earth. And the why of it all.

  Dreyfus captured in his journal the deadly depression induced by the constant conflict of the mind when exposed to an experience of such monumental cruelty:

  The sea beneath my window has always for me to be a strange fascination. I have a violent sensation which I felt on the boat, of being drawn irresistibly towards the sea whose numerous waters seem to call me with the voice of a comforter. Another tyranny. Where are the beautiful dreams of my youth and aspirations of my manhood? My brain reels with the turmoil of my thoughts. What is the mystery underlining this tragedy? Even now I understand nothing of what has passed.

  Not one disagreed that the guillotine would have been a mercy compared to what they had to endure before they were thrown to the sharks. The history and methods of punishment were known to all, through an oral telegraph as swift in communication as its mechanical counterpart. The past and present up-to-the-minute history breathed from the walls of the labour camps, transmitted from the mainland through the three islands, from the cages of the solitary-confined to the sanguinary halls of the dreaded Crimson Barracks (so called because of the killings committed among its prisoners, the most violent inmates, murders that were rarely punished because of the refusal of even friends of the victims to speak under torture – murders that would be avenged in a continual loop of bloodshed).

  One night in a state of fitful sleep the symbol of his terrible crime returned in a mixture of confused and haunting images. He was on a train, but not the train. There was a woman sitting opposite him, but not the woman. She was younger, beautiful, but mocking him, targeting his weakness which he had attempted to disguise for so long. But there was something else far more distracting. He could not dismiss it from his mind and every nerve in his body was jangling at the thought. He heard the next stop being called. He was on the wrong train and in rising panic realised he was going to Lyons. He was in possession of the trunk which contained . . . the trunk, the provenance of it all and the memory that seeped into the darkest hall of his diseased brain.

  3

  L’AFFAIRE GOUFFÉ

  A merchant in Baghdad sent his servant to the marketplace for provisions. The servant returned quickly, pale-faced and trembling, and told his master that whilst in the marketplace he was jostled by a woman who he recognised as Death and she made a threatening gesture to him. The servant begged his master for a horse and fled at great speed to Samarra, a town about 75 miles north of Baghdad, where he believed that the woman would not find him. The merchant went to the marketplace, found the woman and asked her why she had made the threatening gesture to his servant. She replied: “That was not a threatening gesture, it was only a jolt of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”

  An old Arab tale from

  the Babylonian Talmud

  In mid-November 1889, Dr Alexandre Lacassagne, head of the Department of Legal Medicine at Lyons University, received a request for his assistance in a bizarre and mysterious case. Four months earlier a body of an adult male had been found in a duck-cloth sack on a steep incline leading down to the River Rhône about ten miles south of Lyons. A post mortem had been carried out by a Dr Bernard, a previous student in the university. A cause of death had been established but there had been no positive identification made of the decomposed remains.

  Dr Lacassagne had a considerable reputation in the matter of solving difficult murder cases and was regularly consulted when those cases seemed to be defying a resolution. He was not only an expert in legal medicine but a crime-scene expert and skilled pathologist. The body was believed to be that of a missing man from Paris by the name of Toussaint Augustin Gouffé. He was a court bailiff by profession, a wi
dower with two children and worked from an office in Montmartre.

  He was financially well off with a reputation as a bon viveur and with a vigorous interest in the opposite sex. Clearly his status as a widower allowed him indulge his taste for fine wine and women. Mature wine and unripe women, it was said. On July 27th of that year his brother-in-law, a man by the name of Landry, had reported him missing to the district police in Montmartre. It was a busy time for the force as it coincided with the Paris World Exposition and the report did not receive priority.

  The report was brought to the attention of Marie-François Goron, chief of the investigative unit at the Sûreté. He was a man with a reputation for punctiliousness and doggedness in his methods of investigation and never gave up until a crime had been solved and the perpetrator brought to justice. He set his mind to finding the explanation for the disappearance of a man of some status who, as he had established from his initial enquiries, had no financial problems and had given no indication to anyone of plans to leave the capital in a hurry. He also learnt that a stranger had entered the bailiff’s office on the evening of July 26th and had left in a hurry without stating his business.

  Goron began, as was usual in such cases, to find out as much as he could about the missing man. He had last been seen by two friends on the Boulevard Montmartre at about ten minutes past seven on the evening prior to the report of his disappearance. Since then nothing had been heard from or about him, either in his office on the Rue Montmartre or in his house on the Rue Rougement. He was a man of regular habits in his working routine and even in the somewhat darker shades of his private life.

  He was apparently in good health and spirits, so no reason why he should through melancholy go somewhere to take his own life. As a widower he lived with his three daughters, happily by all accounts. He did a good trade as a bailiff and process-server, a position in France that was more important and lucrative than in other countries and involved a lot of legal work.