Bibi—His Mark

By Achmed Abdullah

Bibi is young and French. For as long as he can remember he has only ever had one name: the second part he has earned. The second part is le Tuer - the Killer. He lives in Paris and has been in trouble many times.

• Language: English
• Publisher: DigiCat
• Release date: Jul 21, 2022
• ISBN: 8596547086062

Achmed Abdullah

Achmed Abdullah (1881-1945) was the pseudonym of an American writer who specialized in pulp stories and screenplays. His Siamese drama Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness was nominated for an Academy Award in 1927.

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Achmed Abdullah

Bibi—His Mark

EAN 8596547086062

DigiCat, 2022

Contact: [e-mail]

Table of Contents

CHAPTER I. BIBI L'TEUR.

CHAPTER II. IN AGAIN, OUT AGAIN.

CHAPTER III. AVEC INFÂMIE.

CHAPTER IV. THE MILK OF HUMAN KINDNESS.

CHAPTER V. CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS.

CHAPTER VI. CAPTAIN DANIÉLOU.

CHAPTER VII. GRAF VON BASCHWITZ.

CHAPTER VIII. TWO GRAVES.

CHAPTER I.

BIBI L'TEUR.

Table of Contents

IT will always remain a moot point if the inner, driving power which gave the final impetus to the man's deed was his animal instinct, his congenital desire to take life, or a result, brutal and crafty, yet eminently great, of that complicated emotion called patriotism.

Certain pompous, pursy, bearded French gentlemen who, robed in the gorgeous crimson silk of the highest judiciary, met one drowsy, zummy spring afternoon in the Palais de Justice, and went there over the man's record—it was entirely black, except where it was tainted with the viscous, fetid red of human blood—decided to credit the score to patriotism; decided, furthermore, to forget the record which had been taken from the files of the secret archives of the Paris police, to blue-pencil it clear across its regrettable length, and, by the same token, to give the man a fresh chance.

He himself, on the other hand, shrugged his feline shoulders in a ribald and very Latin manner, threw his flat palms with the broad, stumpy fingers outward so that the tips curled like ironic question-marks, and said something in metallic Paris slang which, translated into a semblance of civilized speech, meant that he had been bored for a long time with killing citizens and policemen—"d'saigner les pant' et les sergots," to give the exquisite original; that it had always been his ambition to croak one of these here (deleted) aristocrats, for after all, dis donc, mon p'tit boug,' one is a Frenchman, a republican, hein? and—the rest entirely suppressed for reasons of decency, purity, and editorial policy.

Bibi I'Tueur was his name—Bibi the Killer.

As far back as he could remember—and his memory started with a day thirty years earlier when, at the advanced age of seven, a capped, velvet-trousered gentleman called Toto Laripette, who in moments of maudlin drunkenness acknowledged himself as his father, to disclaim the imputation with ferocious oaths in moments of retrospective, alcoholic jealousy, kicked him out into the street and told him to sink or swim on his own hook, he personally didn't give a damn which—as far back as he could remember he had had no other name: Bibi—though the latter half of his name, the Killer, pronounced as the case may be with love, fear, envy, respect, admiration, or hatred, came later on—deservedly.

Bibi the Killer he was, at the heyday of his career, to his girl, his pals, his gang, his enemies, the police, certain inquisitive and fearless newspaper reporters, the wine merchants and restaurant keepers of the neighborhood, and the white-haired, absinth-sodden, bleary-eyed, old harridan who sold fried potatoes in a postern of the Rue de Turbigo, and who every night gave him a generous twisted paper full of her deliciously crisp, golden-brown, salty wares, free of charge, because he reminded her of a lover guillotined forty years earlier.

Given his sobriquet, given the fact that he lived up to it less ostentatiously than conscientiously, given furthermore his physical characteristics—the closely cropped, bullet-shaped head crowned by a peaked, jeering cap that was worn at a rakish angle; the arrogant, beady black eyes on either side of a prying, angular beak with nervous, flaring nostrils; the mouth, cruelly thin yet scarlet with sensuousness; the loose, floppy ears with the lobes extending down the sides of his neck; and the receding chin—it was fitting that, in the cramped old streets in back of the Central Market Halls of Paris, he should be an unchallenged leader among men.

For, more than all the rest of Paris, not excepting even the Bastile, are these alleys and culs-de-sac