The Kill - Emile Zola [91]
Saccard had momentarily left the tongs lying between his legs. Now he grabbed them energetically, leaned forward, and practically disappeared into the fireplace, from which the young woman heard a muffled voice murmur, “Yes, yes, Larsonneau might perhaps—”
She thus arrived of her own accord at the point toward which he had been gently leading her since the beginning of the conversation. His masterstroke in Charonne had already been in preparation for two years. His wife had always been unwilling to sell Aunt Elisabeth’s land. She had sworn to her aunt that she would keep the property intact as a bequest for her child, should she become a mother. Faced with such stubbornness, the speculator’s imagination had gone to work and concocted a poem of epic proportions. It was a work of exquisite perfidy, a colossal fraud of which the city, the state, his wife, and even Larsonneau were to be the victims. He no longer spoke of selling the land, though he moaned every day about how foolish it was to leave it unproductive, to settle for a return of two percent. Renée, always hard up for cash, eventually agreed to some sort of speculative venture. He based his plan on the certainty of an imminent expropriation to make way for the boulevard du Prince-Eugène, whose route had not yet been finally decided. At this point he had brought in as a partner his old accomplice Larsonneau, who struck a bargain with his wife on the following terms. She was to contribute the land, representing a value of 500,000 francs. Larsonneau, for his part, promised to invest an equal amount to build on that land a music hall connected to a large park featuring amusements such as swings, skittles, bowling, and the like. Naturally the profits were to be shared, and by the same token any losses were to be borne fifty-fifty. If either partner wished to withdraw from the agreement, he could demand his share based on an estimate of the current value. Renée looked surprised at the figure of 500,000 francs, which seemed high since the land was worth 300,000 at most. But Saccard gave her to understand that this was a clever way of tying Larsonneau’s hands later on, since what he planned to build on the property would never be worth that much.
Larsonneau had become an elegant man about town, who wore fine gloves, dazzling linen, and astonishing ties. To run his errands he had a tilbury as finely tuned as a piece of clockwork, with a high seat on which he sat and drove himself around town. His offices on the rue de Rivoli comprised a suite of sumptuous rooms in which not a single file folder or scrap of paper was to be seen. His clerks wrote on tables of stained pear-wood, inlaid with marquetry and trimmed with chased brass. He had assumed the title of “expropriation agent,” a new profession that the public works of the city of Paris had called into being. His city hall connections yielded him advance information about the routing of new thoroughfares. When he learned the route of a proposed boulevard from one of the surveyors, he offered his services to the threatened landowners. Before the eminent domain decree was issued, he persuaded them to take certain steps to increase their indemnities. When a landowner accepted his proposal, he assumed all the costs himself, had a plan of the property drawn up, shepherded the case through the courts, and paid a lawyer in exchange for a percentage of the difference between the city’s initial offer and the indemnity finally awarded by the jury. In addition to this almost respectable activity, however, he was involved in several other lines of work. In particular, he lent money at usurious rates of interest. He was not a usurer of the old school—shabbily dressed, dirty, with blank eyes as expressionless as a five-franc piece and pale lips drawn as tightly as the strings of a purse. He smiled and darted charming glances here and there, had his suits made by Dusautoy, and lunched at Brébant’s with his victim, whom he called “my good fellow” and plied with Havana cigars over dessert. In fact, despite his penchant