Belle - Lesley Pearse [192]
Fritz frowned. ‘Can’t say it’s a place I frequent. What’s he done to you?’
‘Nothing. But he’s been arranging clients for a friend of mine who has now gone missing.’
‘Fille de joie?’
Etienne nodded. He was glad Fritz had used that expression, it was kinder.
‘But it’s the client you should be looking for surely? Do you know his name?’
‘Le Brun, that’s all, there must be hundreds in Paris. But he’d be rich. And she was excited about seeing him again, so she liked him.’
‘So we’re looking for a Monsieur Le Brun, rich, charming. Any idea how old?’
‘No. But I can’t imagine he’d be much more than forty. She’s only eighteen, girls of that age wouldn’t be excited by someone very old. But could you get any information on this man Pascal? I may be forced to lean on him and I need to know what I’m dealing with.’
‘See that man there?’ Fritz pointed out a burly man in his thirties with a very big nose who was sitting a few tables away. ‘He was a doorman at the Ritz a while back. Got the push for insulting someone. He’d know about the concierge.’
Etienne hesitated. ‘But what’s he like? I don’t want it getting back to Pascal that anyone’s been asking about him. Nor do I want anyone else knowing about this business. You know what I mean.’
Fritz nodded. He realized Etienne was concerned that the organization he used to work for might try to force him back to work for them if they heard he was active again. ‘He owes me a couple of favours. I can make up some reason for asking about Pascal. I won’t tell him you want to know.’
‘Fair enough. Ask him when I’ve gone and we could meet up tomorrow. Can you think about the name Le Brun too, and see if you can come up with something?’
‘I will. I’ll meet you at Gustave’s at ten in the morning.’
After leaving Le Chat Noir, Etienne hailed a fiacre to take him to the Marais. It was an area that had fallen on hard times, but he was fond of it for he’d lived there during a period when he had had to leave London in a hurry but couldn’t go home to Marseille. It was well past midnight, but the place was buzzing with life, including dozens of prostitutes strutting up and down looking for business, and their maquereaux leaning on lamp-posts smoking and looking menacing.
Music wafted out of the many cafés and bars, above many of which were brothels. Etienne had worked in one briefly as a doorman, and he’d been shocked by the perversions the place offered. One room was like a torture chamber with manacles on the walls where the clients could be secured to be whipped. He’d seen men stagger out of there with their flesh so badly lacerated it was a miracle they were still conscious. He still couldn’t understand how anyone would find that pleasurable.
It was here that he first learned that some men like sex with children, and it was hearing a girl of twelve screaming as she was raped that broke the spell of Paris and sent him back to Marseille. Again and again over the years he’d come up against men who abducted children and young girls to force them into prostitution, a practice he found despicable. The saddest thing was that there was no way out for these girls; once sucked into the trade, there they stayed until they were too old or too diseased for any man to pay them.
Because of his strong feelings about this trade, he felt deeply ashamed that he’d given in to pressure from Jacques and escorted Belle to New Orleans. While it was true he had no choice, not if he wanted Elena and the boys to remain safe, he had come to justify himself because Belle wasn’t a child and he also believed that Martha’s was a far better place to be than any brothel in Paris.
But after he left her there, thoughts of what he’d been a party to were like having a thorn in his foot that he was unable to get out. He had nightmares of Belle being ill treated, imagining brutish men forcing themselves into her. He hated himself for not being clever enough to find some way of getting her back safely to England, while