The Death of Achilles

THREE

Etienne Licolle ‘s only regret was that his mother had not lived to see this day. How she had dreamed of the time when her boy would qualify as an advocate and array himself in the black robe with the rectangular white tie! But paying for his studies at the university had consumed all of her widow’s pension and skimping on doctors and medicine had shortened her life — she had died the previous spring. Etienne had gritted his teeth and refused to be defeated. Dashing from one lesson to another in the afternoon and poring over his textbooks at night, he had completed his studies after all — and the coveted diploma with the royal seal had been duly awarded. His mother could be proud of her son.

His fellow graduates and newly fledged advocates had invited him to go to a restaurant in the country — to ‘christen the gown’ — but Etienne had refused. He had no money for revels, but more important than that, on a day like this he wanted to be alone. He walked slowly down the broad marble staircase of the Palais de Justice, where the solemn ceremony had taken place. The entire city, with its spires, towers, and statues on rooftops, lay spread out below him, at the foot of the hill. Etienne stopped and admired the view, which seemed to be offering him a hospitable welcome. As if Brussels had opened its arms wide to embrace the new Maitre Licolle, enticing him with the prospect of every possible kind of surprise — for the most part, of course, pleasant ones.

Of course, who could dispute the fact that a diploma was only the beginning? Without useful connections and acquaintances he would not be able to find good clients. And in any case he lacked the means required to establish his own firm. He would have to work as an assistant to Maitre Wiener or Maitre Van Gelen. But that was not so bad — at least they would pay him some kind of salary.

Etienne Licolle pressed the folder containing the diploma with the red seal against his chest, turned his face toward the warm September sunshine, and squeezed his eyes tightly shut in an excess of emotion.

He was surprised in this absurd position by Achimas Welde.

Achimas had picked the young lad out while the hall was echoing to the boring, pompous speeches of the award ceremony. The youth’s appearance was ideally suited to requirements: pleasant-looking, but no Adonis. Slim, with narrow shoulders. Wide, honest eyes. When he stepped up to pronounce the words of the oath, his voice had proved ideally suited, too — clear, boyish, trembling with excitement. But best of all, it was immediately obvious that he was no rich gentleman’s son, but genuine plebeian stock and a hard worker.

While the interminable ceremony continued, Achimas had been able to make inquiries. His final doubts had been laid to rest; this was indeed ideal material. The rest could not have been simpler.

He walked up to the thin youth without making a sound and then cleared his throat.

Etienne started, opened his eyes, and turned around to find himself facing a gentleman in a traveling coat with a walking cane who had appeared out of nowhere. The stranger’s eyes were regarding him with keen seriousness. They were a rather unusual color, too, very pale. “Maitre Licolle?” the man inquired with a slight accent. It was the first time Etienne had been addressed as ‘Maitre’ and he liked the feeling.

As was only to be expected, the boy was at first exultant to learn that he was being offered a case, but when the client’s name was mentioned he was horrified. Achimas remained silent while he indignantly objected, gesticulating wildly and declaring that he would never defend that villain, that monster, for anything. He only spoke after Licolle, having exhausted his reserves of indignation, muttered: “Anyway, I couldn’t cope with a case like that. You see, monsieur, I am still very inexperienced. I have only just received my diploma.”

Now it was Achimas’s turn. He said: “Do you wish to work for a pittance for twenty or even thirty years, earning money and glory for other lawyers? Yes, sometime about 1900 you may manage to scrape together enough centimes to set up in practice for yourself, but by that time you will be a bald, toothless failure with a sick liver and life will already have squeezed you dry. Your vital juices will have oozed out through your fingers drop by drop, maitre, in exchange for those hard-earned centimes. But I am offering you far more than that right here and now. Now, while you are still twenty-three, you can earn good money and make a big name for yourself — even if you should happen to lose the case. In your profession, a name is even more important than money. Certainly your reputation will be tinged with scandal, but that is better than wasting your entire life as someone else’s errand boy. You will receive enough money to open your own firm. Many people will hate you, but there will be others who will appreciate the courage of a young lawyer who was not afraid to stand up against the whole of society.”

Achimas waited for a minute, to give the lad time to grasp what he had said. Then he moved on to the second stage of his argument, which, as he understood matters, ought to prove more decisive.

“Or could it be that you are simply afraid? Have I not just heard you swear ‘to uphold justice and a man’s right to legal representation regardless of all obstacles and pressures’? Do you know why I chose you out of all the graduates? Because you are the only one who pronounced those words with genuine feeling. Or at least, so it seemed to me.”

Etienne said nothing, horrified as he felt himself being swept away by a raging torrent that was quite impossible to resist. “And most important of all,” said the stranger, lowering his voice suggestively, “Pierre Fechtel is innocent. He is no Pied Piper; he is the victim of a confluence of circumstances and the zealous determination of the police. If you do not intervene, an innocent man will go to the scaffold. Yes, it will be very difficult for you. You will be overwhelmed with insults; no one will want to testify in defense of a monster. But you will not be alone. I shall be helping you. I shall remain in the shadows, your eyes and ears. I am already in possession of certain items of evidence which, while they do not entirely confirm Pierre Fechtel’s innocence, do at least cast doubt on the prosecution’s case. And I shall obtain more.”

“What items of evidence?” Etienne asked in a weak voice.

At least three hundred people were crammed into the little hall of the Merlain Municipal Court, which was designed to hold only a hundred, and there were even more people thronging the corridor, standing under the windows, and waiting on the square outside.

The appearance of public prosecutor Renan was greeted with a thunderous ovation. But when they brought in the felon, a pale, thin-lipped man with close- set black eyes and sideburns that had once been well-groomed but had now grown ragged and uneven, a deadly silence fell in the hall, followed by such a thunderous uproar that the judge, Maitre Viksen, broke his bell trying to call the assembly to order.

The judge called out the counsel for the defense and for the first time everyone noticed the puny young man whose advocate’s robes were clearly too large for him. First turning pale, then bright red, Maitre Li-colle babbled a few barely audible words and then, in reply to the judge’s impatient question as to whether the accused admitted his guilt, he suddenly squeaked quite clearly: “No, Your Honor!” The hall erupted indignantly once again. “And such a decent-looking young man, too,” shouted one of the women.

The trial went on for three days.

On the first day the witnesses for the prosecution testified. First came the policemen who had found the terrible room and then interrogated the accused. According to the commissioner of police, Pierre Fechtel had trembled and given contradictory answers to questions, been quite unable to explain anything, and offered the police huge sums of money if they would leave him alone.

The gardener who had reported suspicious screams to the police did not appear in court, but his presence was not necessary. The public prosecutor summoned witnesses who provided vivid descriptions of Fechtel’s debauchery and depravity and his constant demands for the youngest and slenderest girls in brothels. The madam of one of these bawdy houses told the court how the accused had tortured her ‘little daughters’ with red-hot curling tongs, but the poor darlings had put up with it because the villain paid them a gold coin for every burn.

The hall burst into applause when a man who had seen the flower girl Lucille Lanoux ride away in the carriage (her head was later found in a barrel with the eyes gouged out and the nose cut off) identified Fechtel as the very same man who had described the miraculous abilities of his mechanical piano in such glowing terms.

The jurors were presented with items of evidence: implements of torture, a photographic camera and photographic plates discovered in the concealed room. There was also testimony from Monsieur Briihl, who had taught Pierre Fechtel the art of taking photographs three years previously.

In conclusion the jurors were shown an album of photographic cards found in the ghastly basement. These photographs were not shown to the public and the journalists, but one of the jurors fainted and another vomited.

The advocate Licolle sat there with his head bowed like a student at a lecture, assiduously taking down all the testimony in a notebook. When he was shown the photographs he turned as white as chalk and swayed on his feet. “That’s right, take a good look, you puny weakling!” someone shouted from the hall.

That evening there was an unpleasant incident at the end of the session: As Licolle was leaving the hall, the mother of one of the murdered girls came up to him and spat in his face.

On the second day the witnesses were questioned by the counsel for the defense. He asked the police if they had shouted at the accused. “No, we gave him a hug and a kiss,” the commissioner replied sarcastically to approving laughter from the hall.

The advocate asked the witness to the abduction of Lucille Lanoux if he had seen the full face of the man with whom the flower girl had driven away. No, he had not, the witness replied, but he did remember the sideburns very clearly.

After that Maitre Licolle wanted to know what kind of photographs Pierre Fechtel had taken in the course of his amateur studies. It turned out that he used to take photographs of still lifes, landscapes, and newborn kittens. (This announcement was greeted with whistling and jeering, after which the judge ordered half of the spectators to be removed from the courtroom.) In conclusion the counsel for the defense demanded that the main witness, the gardener, must be brought into court and the session was adjourned for an hour.

During the break in proceedings the local cure approached Licolle and asked if he believed in our Lord Jesus Christ. Licolle replied that he did, and that Jesus had taught charity to sinners.

When the proceedings continued, an inspector declared that the gardener could not be found and no one had seen him for the last three days. The counsel thanked him politely and said that he had no more questions for the witnesses.

Then came the public prosecutor’s opportunity to shine. He conducted his interrogation of the accused brilliantly and Pierre Fechtel was unable to give a satisfactory answer to a single question. When he was shown the photographic cards he stared at them for a long time, swallowing hard. Then he said that he had never seen them before. When he was asked if the Weber and Sons camera belonged to him, after whispered consultation with his counsel, he said, yes, it did, but he had lost interest in photography a year ago, put the camera away in the attic, and not laid eyes on it since then. When the question was asked whether the accused could look the parents of the little girls in the eye, it evoked thunderous applause, but it was withdrawn on the insistence of the defense.

When Etienne got back to his hotel that evening, he saw that his things had been thrown out into the street and were lying in the mud. Blushing painfully, he crawled around on all fours, gathering up his long drawers with darned patches and soiled shirtfronts with paper collars.

A large crowd gathered to enjoy this spectacle and shower the ‘mercenary swine’ with abuse. When Etienne had finally packed his things into his new travel bag, purchased especially for this trip, the local tavern-keeper came up to him, slapped him resoundingly across both cheeks, and declared in a voice of thunder: “You can add that to your fee!”

Since none of the other hotels in Merlain would take Licolle in, the mayor’s office provided him with lodgings in a little house used by the guard at the railway station. The old guard had retired a month before and had not yet been replaced.

In the morning there were several words scrawled in charcoal on the white painted wall of the little house: “You will die like a dog!”

On the third day public prosecutor Renan surpassed himself. He delivered a magnificent denunciatory speech that lasted from ten in the morning until three in the afternoon. People in the hall sobbed and cursed freely. The members of the jury, all of them respectable men who paid at least five hundred francs in taxes each year, sat with their faces set in sullen scowls.

The counsel for the defense was pale and they noticed in the hall that several times he seemed to glance inquiringly at his client, but the latter was sitting with his shoulders hunched up, his head lowered, and his face in his hands. When the public prosecutor demanded a death sentence, the public sprang to its feet as one man and began chanting ‘String him up, string him up!’ Fechtel’s shoulders began twitching spasmodically and he had to be given smelling salts.

The defense was given the floor after the break, at four o’clock in the afternoon.

For a long time Licolle was not even allowed to speak — people deliberately scraped their feet, creaked their chairs, and blew their noses loudly. The lawyer waited, bright crimson in his trepidation, clutching a crumpled sheet of paper covered with the neat handwriting of a star pupil.

But once he began speaking, Etienne didn’t glance at the sheet of paper even once. This is his speech, word for word, as it was printed in the evening editions of the newspapers with the most disparaging of commentaries:

“Your Honor, gentlemen of the jury. My client is a weak, spoiled, and even depraved man. But that is not what you are judging him for. One thing is clear: In the home of my client, or rather in a secret room in the basement, the existence of which might or might not have been known to Pierre Fechtel, a terrible crime was committed. A whole series of crimes. The question is: Who committed them? (A loud voice: “Yes, that’s a real riddle.” Laughter in the hall.) The defense has its own explanation of events. I surmise that the murders were committed by the gardener Jean Voiture, who reported the mysterious screams to the police. This man hated his master because he had reduced his salary for drunkenness. There are witnesses who can be called if necessary — they will confirm this fact. The gardener has an awkward, quarrelsome character. Five years ago his wife left him, taking the children with her. It is well known that people of the same type as Voiture often become morbidly sensitive and develop aggressive tendencies. He knew the layout of the house intimately and could easily have installed a secret room without his master’s knowledge. He could also have taken the camera with which Monsieur Fechtel had become bored down from the attic and learned how to use it. He could have taken his master’s clothes during his frequent absences. He could have glued on false sideburns, providing easy identification. You must surely agree that if Pierre Fechtel had committed these heinous crimes, he would long ago have rid himself of such a distinctive feature. Please understand me correctly, gentlemen of the jury. I am not stating that the gardener did all of this — only that he could have done it all. But the main question is — why has the gardener, who set the entire investigation in motion, disappeared so suddenly? There can be only one explanation — he was scared that in court his true involvement in the affair would be revealed, and then he would suffer the punishment that he deserves.” Up to this point Maitre Licolle had spoken smoothly and rather impressively, but now he suddenly began stammering out his words. “And what I would like to say to you is this. There is a great deal that is unclear about this story. To be quite honest, I myself do not know if my client is guilty. But while there remains even the shadow of a doubt — and, as I have just demonstrated to you, there are indeed many doubts concerning this whole business — it is absolutely impermissible to send a man for execution. In the faculty of law I was taught that it is better to acquit a guilty man than to condemn an innocent one. That is all that I wished to say, gentlemen.”

The speech was over at ten minutes past six. The lawyer resumed his seat, wiping the sweat from his brow.

There were jeers here and there in the hall, but all in all the speech received a mixed reception. The correspondent from Le Soir heard (as he later reported in his newspaper) the famous advocate Jan Van Brevern say to his neighbor, also a lawyer: “In essence the boy is right. From the higher perspective of fundamental jurisprudence. But in this particular case that changes nothing.”

The judge rang his bell and shook his head reproachfully, with a glance at the lamentable counsel for the defense: “I had assumed that Maitre Licolle’s address would continue until the end of today’s session and then all of tomorrow morning. But now I find myself in some difficulty. I therefore declare today’s session at an end. I shall sum up for the jury tomorrow morning, following which you, gentlemen, will withdraw to consider your verdict.”

But the next morning there was no session of the court.

During the night there was a fire. The railway guard’s hut was torched and Maitre Licolle was burned alive, because the door had been locked from the outside. The inscription ‘You will die like a dog’ was left on the smoked- blackened wall — no one took the trouble to remove it. No witnesses to this act of arson were found.

The trial was interrupted for several days. Certain intangible but quite definite shifts in public opinion took place. The newspapers reprinted Maitre Licolle’s final address to the court, this time without any scoffing remarks, accompanied by sympathetic commentaries from respected lawyers. Touching reports appeared concerning the short and difficult life of a young man from a poor family, who had studied at university for five years in order to be an advocate for just over a week. His portrait gazed out at readers from the front pages: a boyish face with large, honest eyes.

The lawyers’ guild published a declaration in defense of free and objective jurisprudence, which should not be held to ransom by an emotionally imbalanced public baying for vengeance.

The concluding session was held on the day after the funeral.

To begin with, at the judge’s suggestion everyone present honored the memory of Etienne Licolle with a minute’s silence. They all stood, even the parents of the dead girls. In his summing-up, Judge Viksen recommended the jurors not to bow to external pressure and reminded them that in capital cases a majority of two thirds of the jurors was required for a guilty verdict to be carried.

The gentlemen of the jury consulted for four and a half hours. Seven of the twelve said ‘not guilty’ and demanded that the judge release Pierre Fechtel for lack of evidence.

A difficult task had been carried off very neatly. The gardener’s body was lying in a pit of quicklime, and as for the boy lawyer, he had died without any suffering or fear — Achimas had killed him in his sleep before he set fire to the watchman’s hut.