De Villiers immersed himself in the demimonde of Paris night life. He needed a honey-pot trap, but with a difference. Davies meanwhile watched the judge, sought out his “pattern,” meticulously logged his every move. It was early October 1976. In two or three weeks the pair would meet and put together a schedule for the judge’s death. The lady client had specifically ordered that the target’s posthumous reputation be disgraced. So de Villiers concentrated on the sordid. He ignored the obvious tourist traps of Pigalle, Montparnasse, St. Germain des Pres and the Champs-Elysees. All expensive froth and no action; or, as Davies put it, “All mouth and no trousers.”
The hostess masseuses offering gentlemen “the ultimate body massage,” the pseudo-Thai girls with their body-body bathrooms and the quick hand- or blowjobs of the parks-all these lacked the extreme denigration de Villiers sought. Zoophilia was available; indeed the Paris milieu interfered only “if the animals suffer.” The most commonplace were canine seances but there were also studios with donkeys, horses, pigs and monkeys. Most of these dens of iniquity made their profit through selling videos of the action.
De Villiers considered the possibilities of pedophilia, rampant in Paris with pedophiliac rings and films featuring two- to twelve-year-olds of both sexes, but decided against it. Not with a member of the judiciary. It lacked the ring of truth, and he was a perfectionist. In his experience most pedophiles had one thing in common: they were men whose careers put them in close contact with children. Social workers, vicars, schoolteachers, but not judges.
He looked into the closed world of sadomasochism. There were only four women in Paris who specialized in flagellation and “tortures.” Their clients, who averaged one or two visits per month, were forbidden to touch them and yet paid 1,000 francs per hour. Not the sort of scene de Villiers was seeking. Too parochial; a strange face would stand out a mile.
By the end of his first week in Paris, having made short work of the private-subscription orgy clubs and the exhibitionists of the rue de Roland-Garros, de Villiers was concentrating on the gay scene and in particular the graveyard where his old favorite, Edith Piaf, resided. In the late seventeenth century a Jesuit named Pere Lachaise was confessor to Louis XIV. The graveyard that is named after him is a dismal, rambling place with many dingy corners, gothic tombs and derelict chapels. After the war the cemetery served as a perfect spot for DIY prostitutes with no rooms of their own. Homosexuals took over in the sixties. De Villiers counted seventy-nine young men, between eighteen and twenty-five years of age, who operated in the graveyard between 1 p.m. and 6 p.m. Their customers, numbering hundreds at certain times of the week, were usually middle-aged or elderly pederasts. Uniformed inspectors of the Brigade des Parcs et Jardins patrolled between the rows of chrysanthemums but had little authority and seldom intervened. On the approach of an inspector, or one of the mainly Soviet tourists who came to see Piaf’s tomb, the young man and his client, sitting on a gravestone, would simply cover their laps with a tourist map or a copy of Le Figaro.
De Villiers decided the Pere Lachaise Cemetery was a distinct possibility but, wishing to explore every lead, he took a cab to the frenetic roundabout of the Porte Dauphine, on the edge of the city near the Bois de Boulogne. Every evening of the week, their work done, a host of Parisians descend by car on the Porte. Each driver circles until he or she makes eye contact with a fellow joy-seeker. Hand signals are exchanged and the two parties leave the concourse to seek intimacy elsewhere. This custom, de Villiers discovered, was a favorite with wife-swapping couples, and so again lacked sufficient degradation for his purposes. His dilemma was resolved by good fortune. Davies confirmed on the twelfth day of his judge-watching that on two Tuesday evenings in succession the judge had driven his Citroen ID19 to the Bois de Boulogne. Davies called de Villiers at his hotel and the method was agreed upon.
To Parisians the Bois has always meant romance, the mythical forest of the fairy temptress Melusine, a place of moonlit fauns and summer idyll.
In 1970 a handful of the entrepreneurial freelance prostitutes known as tapineuses tried their luck with motorists either in the backseat of the car or in the bushes. Harmless fun that bothers nobody, the chief of the brigade decided. Then, in 1973, the travelos came.
Veroushka was the first. In Sao Paulo, where she learned to “faire la nuit,” she met a madame who sold her a package deal for 12,000 francs including air tickets, identity papers and a three-month tourist visa for France. At first, tolerated by the established Bois whores as an oddity, Veroushka made up to 2,000 francs a night. But by 1976 a further two hundred Brazilian transvestites had followed her route to the forest and thrown out all but half a dozen of the “genuine” prostitutes. Competition was fierce.
Minister Poniatowski tried that year to oust the travelos. He failed and the police continued to turn a blind eye. Every three months each of these androgynous workers took a day-trip to Belgium to receive a passport stamp enabling him/her to apply for a further three-month visa. This was no great trouble in return for a job paying an untaxed fortune, compared with likely takings back in Rio or Bahia.
Pia was twenty-four and about as sexy a travelo as the Bois regulars could remember. She was blond, tall and sad: exactly what de Villiers was after except that her specific beat was in the wrong part of the forest. The best spots, on the roads most used by motorists, were jealously guarded by the older and richer bisexuals. Davies, given the job of changing Pia’s beat, drove out to the Bois around midnight. Most of the “girls” worked between 11 p.m. and dawn, for daylight was their enemy, revealing hair growth and highlighting other remnants of masculinity.
The travelos were heavily outnumbered, Davies discovered, by voyeurs who parked their cars, left the headlights on and mooched around the business sites staring at the weirdos and their customers. Vendors of hamburgers and beer did good business in the most popular areas. Their trade, Davies noticed, was with the girls and the voyeurs, never with the clients, many of whom slunk away when sated, their eyes averted from the light-a fact that pleased Davies. The travelos mostly displayed their breasts, and those with more feminine thighs wore miniskirts or just a G-string. In winter, Davies mused, this sort of business conducted al fresco must leave a lot to be desired. What clothes the girls did wear were gaudy in the extreme: leopardskin leotards, polka-dot T-shirts, plumes reminiscent of Rio samba queens, and glittering sequins tacked on everything from high-heeled shoes to hair bands. Davies cruised the roads of the Bois for an hour or more until he was satisfied he knew its layout and the location of all the girls.
Pia was indeed a good looker. Davies warmed to the idea of his job. Initially he had felt disgusted. As he watched the voyeurs he realized many were affluent. They had only to visit riverbanks or sandy beaches anywhere in summertime France to enjoy the sight of countless real breasts and bare bodies. Davies shrugged. It takes all types, he thought, unaware of any irony, since he saw himself and his work as perfectly mundane.
Studies of the travelos’ clients say that over half go only once in their lives to “see what it is like” and are put off for good. The majority of the rest are “normal” citizens-plumbers, professors and office workers-happily married with happy children. They appear merely to be pursuing their hidden fantasies despite the knowledge that they are entering the body of a man who, high on drugs and unwashed, has just received many other clients among the discarded condoms and beer cans of the same copse. Why they thrill to the false, pumped-up breasts, the body odor and the baritone voice with its heavily accented Portuguese, remains a mystery to the milieu. How to explain the nonstop supply of clients and the ever-increasing attractions of this outside theater of sodomy is not the job of the local police, the Brigade Mondaine.
Davies parked at the curb behind two other cars and right beside the waste bin that marked Pia’s habitual site. He had not long to wait. A small man-a town clerk, Davies decided-in a rumpled brown suit and thick spectacles, emerged from the bushes and made for his car, fumbling with the key. Pia followed, wearing a black mini-petticoat that concealed little. Her blond hair was cropped urchin-style, and Davies felt himself roused despite the dictates of common sense.
Pia leaned against the waste bin. Davies’s window was down. He could clearly see Pia’s maleness and smell the mix of sweat, cheap aftershave and the afterodor of previous clients. She had a pretty smile.
“How much?” Davies asked.
“It’s one hundred francs.”
“But if I-”
She cut him off. “Anything extra is fifty more francs.” Davies nodded. He locked the car and followed her into the bushes.
Afterward he told her, truthfully, it was the first time for him. Her French was only a little better than his, so he kept his sentences short and spoke slowly.
“You are very beautiful,” he said.
She seemed to like his flattery, but already she was showing signs of impatience. Perhaps she was losing a customer. He took the plunge. “Here is an extra two thousand francs, Pia. You’re unlikely to have another twenty clients tonight, so let’s go to a nightclub of your choice for an hour or two. I have a special proposition to make you. Good money is possible.”
Pia was of course interested. She fetched a chic mackintosh and calf boots from a carry-all in the shrubbery.
“Where are you living?” she asked.
“In a motel in town,” Davies told her.
“We go there. I do not like nightclubs.”
This suited Davies. He stopped off at a bar to buy whiskey and cheese biscuits.
In the car Pia unwound a bit. She was, Davies soon realized, a desperately unhappy person. Every Sunday she prayed at the church in Pigalle dedicated to Saint Rita, who, in Brazil, is the Patron Saint of the Hopeless. She was homesick for her parents in a shantytown in Sao Paulo. Much of her savings was spent each winter on a two-month trip back to Brazil.
“I like to buy myself pretty clothes,” she laughed; a quick, masculine noise.
Vice in the Bois, thought Davies, must be a hideous, tortured misery for these people. Why do they do it? he wondered. It can’t be for money. To alleviate her black moods Pia took alcohol, cocaine and marijuana. She craved the love of a real relationship, but she knew men never fall in love with travelos. Some of her Bois friends had committed suicide from despair. All professional travelos have the regular hormone treatment, silicone operations and expensive weekly hair removal necessary to prevent reversion to visible masculinity. Life consists of the taunts of voyeurs, the fear of murder by weirdos or mugging by one of the many Bois predators, the dubious pleasure of twenty or more possibly diseased clients per night in all weather, and the never-ending cost of unnatural medical inputs. Since there is no way of saving money the only apparent gain is the ability to remain a transsexual.
They chatted together in the tiny motel room for three hours. Pia understood that Davies wanted her to entertain an important customer in the Bois the following Tuesday night. If the man failed to turn up, she would still be paid by Davies and they would try again on successive Tuesdays. She looked at a photograph of the judge until she was certain she would recognize him. She also memorized the details of his Citroen. She accepted Davies’s assurances that she would be able to ply her trade on the agreed-upon night or nights at the prime Bois site that he had described to her, for the normal occupants would be well paid to accept her temporary presence there.
Davies took Pia back to her lodgings not long before dawn, but first he drove her to the chosen site and together they walked into the forest to a section of loose undergrowth unlittered by the ubiquitous condoms of the well-used patches.
Excited at the prospect of major earnings in the near future and grasping the half-empty whiskey bottle, Pia waved fondly at the departing Davies.
The judge slipped into his astrakhan overcoat and looked about his office close to the Ile de la Cite. He was a careful man and cheated on his wife with the same attention to detail as he handled his cases. Nothing was left to chance. From time to time he did work for the security service and not all of it was savory. For many reasons it was wise to be circumspect.
In the underground car park he selected the keys to the old Citroen ID19. Only the attendant knew about the Citroen and he was tipped to the eyebrows. The world in general, and certainly his family, associated the judge only with his black Alfa-Romeo. But he still felt a sliver of unease. Despite the many threats he had received over the years he was never able to ignore open hostility and the woman last month had been especially venomous. He had put the three brothers from Marseilles away for life for murder and conspiracy to blackmail. Quite which one the woman belonged to was uncertain, but he remembered her beetle-black eyes above the mink coat and the intensity of her brittle scream: “You bastard. You destroy his life. Now I destroy yours.” He made an effort to forget her, to concentrate on the sharp pleasures of the immediate future.
Two years ago, driving home through the Bois de Boulogne in the early morning, the judge had chanced to pass a teenage transvestite named Zita. Whether it was his mood at the time, the flux of the moon, or merely the effect of his headlights on her cheekbones and thighs, he did not bother to ponder. She possessed a magnificent body, pert little breasts and ash-blond, shoulder-length hair. He later discovered that Zita alternated a wardrobe of ten wigs, but by then he was hooked.
His table of Rotarian colleagues met on Tuesday evenings for nine months of the year, and since the judge had never looked at another woman, his wife in their well-appointed flat in La Muette, was not suspicious. He developed a routine. Once away from the office he exchanged his astrakhan for the scruffy flasher’s mac and cloth cap that lived in the Citroen. Thus transformed, he felt safe from recognition in the Bois and titillated by the touch of the bizarre, the forbidden, that enhanced the whole procedure.
He ceased to be bothered by middle-age feelings of rusting away. Life was no longer a mundane groove. Should he be discovered in pursuit of his perversion, his career and his marriage would not survive the shock. He savored, indeed nurtured, the risk in much the same way as a climber relishes a dizzy void.
Fearing the darker, less accessible parts of the Bois, the judge habitually cruised the main thoroughfares, especially the northern end of the Avenue du Mahatma Gandhi. He invariably chose tall, fair transvestites, a hangover perhaps from Zita, who had killed herself in a public lavatory not long after introducing him to the dubious pleasures of the Bois. He grew to love the alien smell of the earth and the sounds of the forest as he pounded away in the scrub. To the judge, sex without the Bois soon became like strawberries without cream.
Three weeks passed before the judge spotted Pia. He parked the Citroen and listened to her argue with a pock-faced Moroccan.
“You are not busy,” he whined. “Three times I come by here and always you are free. Maybe you don’t like Arabs. Huh? Come on, I pay you double.” Pia’s response was negative.
“Va te faire sauter ailleurs, conasse,” shouted the frustrated Arab, moving on to a buxom brunette.
The judge edged the car forward as soon as Pia was alone on the verge.
He spoke gently. “A hundred and fifty for an hour?”
She responded at once. She was not absolutely sure about him because the cap shadowed his features. But the car was enough.
“I’m all yours, darling… let’s go.”
She led him by the hand to a tiny clearing in a thicket.
“How do you like it, m’sieu?”
He explained and was quoted an extra fifty francs. This was normal and he agreed. When both were naked but for the judge’s black socks, Pia lay on her back on a prepositioned tartan rug. She spread her legs and smiled up at her client.
Davies rehoused the CB radio. “De Villiers says the judge has taken the bait.” He closed the trunk quietly and handed Meier one of two iron bars. These he had purchased together with other farm implements from a hardware store in Dieppe a week previously.
Both men, clad in baggy, gray cotton track suits over slacks and shirts, entered the forest. Davies led without a flashlight: he knew the path well. Only that afternoon he had walked along its winding length and removed twigs for the last hundred yards and right up to the thicket. Twice he hissed at his companion. He never liked this sort of work with Meier.
De Villiers himself was quiet as a cat and quick as an adder, but Meier, short-sighted and unfit, verged on being a liability. He was, however, undeniably brilliant with technical matters: no electronic or mechanical challenge was too great. Davies had often wondered why Meier had left the Mercedes factory in Wolfsburg where he had worked as a senior research scientist for nine years. Meier had, over the years, refined various electronic and mechanical methods of untraceable murder. He was an invaluable asset to the team and could be forgiven his nocturnal clumsiness.
After five minutes Davies stopped by a solitary birch tree and raised his hand in the gloom of the forest. Both men could hear clearly the low grunts of pleasure and the ritual endearments of the travelo. Meier followed Davies closely. As always they had rehearsed the kill.
The first blow of Davies’s iron bar split open the judge’s skull. Pia’s legs were clasped together around the judge’s back and the sudden shock of her terror seemed to lock them there. Davies dragged the corpse sideways so that Meier had access to Pia’s head and chest. She recognized Davies. Her voice rasped with fear.
“Do not hurt me. Please. I have done exactly what you asked. You wanted a photograph. So take as many as you like, but I beg you, do not hit me.” Her long, white arms, already wet with the judge’s blood, stretched out in supplication.
Meier brought his iron bar straight down on Pia’s temple. She relaxed. The rest was for show: a dozen wicked blows to her silicone-filled breasts and finally-the Manson touch as stipulated by de Villiers-the writing in blood across the judge’s back.
They stood back and surveyed the scene. The corpses were still entwined. “We have done the poor girl a favor,” Davies muttered. “She had a miserable life and no future.”
He removed the judge’s wallet, keys and credit-card holder. These and the iron bars he threw into the scrub after pocketing the banknotes and credit cards. A few minutes later they were driving back to Paris to rejoin de Villiers.
The bodies were found by a lorry driver, or, more precisely, by his traveling companion, a wire-haired terrier, the following afternoon.
Patrol cars from the police districts of the eighth, sixteenth, and seventeenth arrondissements converged on the scene within minutes. The crime was classified as murder by youths in search of money for cocaine or, because of the word COCHONS crudely etched into the skin of the judge, the random work of crazed moralists. Either way an unhappy epitaph for the deceased. A government department blocked all media inquiries, perhaps because of past activities by the judge on their behalf. This was a move welcomed by the police, for the crime coincided with a good deal of criticism of moral laxity. It was yet another disgrace to the good name of France.
Some months later Minister Poniatowski launched a “clean up the Bois” operation, the effects of which lasted for a few months, and in August 1983 the head of the Paris police, Monsieur Fougere, conducted Operation Salubrite with great elan and amid much publicity. Its effects were initially severe on the travelos, but in 1991 their business was still going strong and, like royalty in London, or the girls in Bangkok, was considered no bad thing by the relevant French authorities.