Gustave Pujol was a French police inspector who served in the "Tiger Brigades" flying squad in Paris during the 1910s.
Biography[]
Gustave Pujol was born in Paris, France, and he became a policeman and rose to the rank of inspector in the mobile state security brigades established by Georges Clemenceau in 1907, nicknamed the "Tiger Brigades". Pujol was controversially in a public relationship with the prostitute Lea Dupuy, and he also bullied his colleague Achille Bianchi for being an Italian immigrant. However, he was an efficient investigator and a loyal subordinate to Chief Inspector Paul Valentin. In 1912, he and the Tiger Brigades were assigned to crack down on the Bonnot Gang, and Pujol investigated the gang's theft of a ledger belonging to the banker Casimir Cagne in December 1911. After Valentin discovered that the ledger contained information on embezzled Russian bonds, Pujol recruited Lea to sleep with Cagne and secretly return the recovered ledger to his office, which would give the police an excuse to arrest him and obtain the ledger legally. The plot initially seemed to work, and Lea worked on a testimony which falsely claimed that Cagne had bragged about his embezzlements while sleeping with Lea. However, Bianchi reluctantly leaked the Tiger Brigades' conspiracy to the corrupt Paris Police Prefecture, and Prefect Louis Lepine obtained Cagne's release from jail and had Lea tortured with acid to force her to withdraw her testimony. A humiliated Superintendent Claude Faivre was forced to scapegoat Pujol for the fiasco and fire him, and Valentin voluntarily resigned, as he took responsibility for ordering Pujol to set up the conspiracy.
Pujol privately harbored a desire for revenge against Cagne after the police harmed Lea, and Pujol traveled to Cagne's mansion with the intention of interrogating him and finding the codes to his ledger. However, Cagne was dead by the time Pujol arrived, and Valentin soon caught up with Pujol and learned of Cagne's demise. The two men deduced that the last remaining member of the Bonnot Gang must have forced Cagne to decode the ledger before killing him, and they decided to continue their quest to uncover the embezzlement conspiracy whilst also thwarting a likely anarchist terror plot which could destabilize the talks towards forming the Triple Entente alliance between France, Britain, and Russia.
Pujol and Valentin interviewed Constance Bolkonsky and the imprisoned Raymond Callemin in order to identify the last at-large anarchist as Piotr Hernienko, whom they discovered worked as an electrician at the opera house where the Entente ambassadors would attend a performance of Ivan the Terrible. Before Pujol and Valentin could intervene, they were ambushed, beaten down, and kidnapped by Duke Aleksandr Bolkonsky's Russian guards, as the Duke was involved in the embezzlement scheme and sought to prevent his guilt from being established. The two policemen were able to escape the Duke's captivity during the performance, and, while Pujol went to stop Hernienko from assassinating the Duke, Valentin went to warn Constance. Pujol succeeded in shooting Hernienko several times in the power room, but a mortally wounded Hernienko shoved Pujol against a lever which detonated the lightbulb bomb above the Duke's box, killing Duke Aleksandr. Thanks to Inspector Marcel Terrasson, however, much of the audience and the actors were warned to clear out due to the bomb, minimizing the loss of life.
With Hernienko dead and Constance deported for her role in the plot, Valentin resolved the ledger conspiracy by persuading Celestin Hennion to fire Prefect Lepine, among other concessions, in exchange for preventing the ledger's contents from being publicized. Pujol and Valentin were reinstated as policemen in gratitude for their services.