talking about — has to have a creator, and the creator can be held responsible!” Gregory shouted, overcome with anger. “He’s only playing with me” suddenly flashed through his mind, and he said, “Chief Inspector, please answer one question for me.”
Sheppard looked at him.
“You don’t really think this case can be solved, do you?”
“Certainly not. I don’t want to hear that kind of talk anymore. Of course there is a possibility that the solution —” The Chief Inspector broke off in mid-sentence.
“Please, sir, tell me everything.”
“I don’t know if I have the right,” Sheppard said dryly, as if displeased by Gregory’s insistence. “You might not like the solution.”
“Why? Please, explain it to me a little more clearly.”
Sheppard shook his head.
“I can’t.”
He walked over to the desk, opened the drawer, and removed a small package.
“Let’s work on the part that pertains to us,” he said, handing it to Gregory.
The package contained photographs of three men and one woman. Commonplace, banal faces, indifferent to everything, stared at Gregory from the shiny little cardboards.
“That’s them,” he said, recognizing two of the photos.
“Yes.”
“Don’t you have any pictures taken after death?”
“I managed to get two.” Sheppard reached into the drawer. They had been taken at the hospital at the request of the families.
Both photographs were pictures of men. And it was a strange thing: death seemed to give a new dignity to their rather ordinary features, bestowing a kind of motionless gravity upon them. Dead they looked more expressive than they had while living, as if they finally had something to hide!
Gregory looked up at Sheppard. To his surprise, the Chief Inspector was hunched over, suddenly looking much older than before. He was clenching his lips as if in pain.
“Chief Inspector?” he said softly, with unexpected timidity.
“I would prefer not to give this case to you… but I have no one else,” said Sheppard in a quiet voice. He placed his hand on Gregory’s shoulder. “Please keep in touch with me. I’d like to help you, although I have no idea whether my experience will have much value in a case like this.”
Gregory drew back and the Chief Inspector’s hand dropped. Both men were now standing outside the circle of light made by the lamp, and in the darkness the faces on the wall stared down at them. The lieutenant felt more drunk than he had all evening.
“Please sir…” he said, “you know more than you’re willing to tell me, don’t you?” He was a bit breathless, as if he’d been exerting himself strenuously.
“Sir… are you unwilling to tell me, or unable?” Gregory asked. He wasn’t even shocked at his own audacity.
Sheppard shook his head in denial, watching Gregory with a look of immeasurable patience. Or was it irony?
Gregory glanced down at his hands and noticed that he was still holding the photographs, the ones of the live subjects in his left hands, the dead ones in his right. And again he was inspired by the same mysterious compulsion that had made him direct such an odd question to the Chief Inspector. It was as if an invisible hand was touching him.
“Which of these are… more important?” he asked in a barely audible voice. It was only possible to hear him because the room was absolutely still.
A tight-lipped expression on his face, Sheppard made a discouraging gesture and went over to the light switch. The room was flooded with brightness, everything became ordinary and natural. Gregory slowly hid the photographs in his pocket.
The visit was obviously coming to an end. During the remainder of their conversation, which concentrated on such concrete matters as the number and posting of the constables guarding the mortuaries, the organization of a cordon around the areas mentioned by Sciss, and the details of the lieutenant’s actual powers, there remained the shadow of something left unsaid.
Again and again the Chief Inspector would fall silent and look at Gregory anxiously, as if uncertain whether to leave these businesslike considerations and resume the previous conversation. But he left well enough alone and didn’t say anything.
Gregory was halfway down the stairs when the lights went out. He managed to feel his way to the door. Suddenly he heard his name.
“Good luck!” the Chief Inspector shouted after him.
The lieutenant walked out into the wind and closed the door.
It was terribly cold. The puddles had all solidified; frozen mud crunched underfoot; in the onrushing wind the drizzling rain was being changed into a blizzard of icy needles that pricked Gregory’s face painfully and made a sharp, paperlike rustle as they bounced off the stiff fabric of his coat.
Gregory tried to review the details of the evening, but he might just as well have tried to classify the invisible clouds that the wind was driving around over his head. Remembered snatches of this and that struggled in his mind, spilling over into images unconnected with anything except a poignant feeling of depression and being lost. The walls of the room had been covered with posthumous photographs, the desk with open books, and he vehemently regretted now that he hadn’t taken a good look at any of them, or at the papers spread out next to the books. It never even occurred to him that such actions would have been indiscreet. Gregory began to feel that he was standing on the boundary between the definite and the indefinite. Each of his thoughts seemed about to reveal one of many possible meanings, then vanished, melting away with every desperate effort he made to grasp it fully. And he, pursuing understanding, seemed about to plunge into a sea of ambiguous details in which he would drown, comprehending nothing even at the end.
Whom was he supposed to catch for Sheppard — the creator of some new religion? Although able to function smoothly and efficiently in routine cases, the machinery of investigation was now beginning to turn against itself. The more meticulously the facts were measured, photographed, recorded, and assembled, the more the whole structure seemed to be nonsensical.
If he’d been asked to track down a completely obscure and unknown murderer, Gregory wouldn’t have felt so helpless. What, he wondered, was that confused anxiety he had seen in the eyes of the old Chief Inspector, who wanted to help him but couldn’t?
Furthermore, why had the Chief, who seemed to think the case was unsolvable, picked him, a beginner, to take it over? And was that really the reason Sheppard had invited him to his house in the middle of the night?
With his fists clenched in his pockets, Gregory walked along the deserted street, not seeing anything in the darkness, not feeling the raindrops trickling down his face, not remembering where he was headed for. He gulped in some of the cold, damp air and again saw Sheppard’s face before him, the little shadows at the corner of his mouth twitching.
How long was it since he had left the Europa? He began to calculate. It was now 10:30, so nearly three hours had gone by. “I’m not drunk anymore,” he said to himself. Stopping in the circle of light around a lamp post, he read the street sign to get his bearings, figured out the location of the nearest subway station, and headed toward it.
The streets became more crowded, brightened now by neon signs and by blinking red and green traffic signals. Once inside the revolving doors at the subway entrance, Gregory was met by a blast of warm, dry air from the heating ducts. He rode downward on the escalator, slowly sinking into the noisy rumbling below.
It was even warmer on the station platform than it had been upstairs. Gregory let the Islington train pass, watching the triangular red light on the last car until it disappeared in the distance. Circling around a newsstand, he leaned against an iron support beam and lit a cigarette.
After a while his train arrived. The doors opened with a pneumatic hiss. Gregory took a corner seat. The car jerked and pulled out, the station lights flicking by more and more quickly, then disappearing; the train was soon moving so fast that the lights in the tunnel couldn’t be distinguished from each other as they shot past.
