“Someone slipped this under the door of the concierge’s lodge. It’s marked ‘Urgent’ and ‘Personal.’ ”
Laurent takes the yellow envelope the man hands him. The address, written in pencil, is scarcely legible: “Personal. Chief Commissioner. Urgent.”
“The concierge didn’t see who brought this letter?”
“He couldn’t; he found it under his door. It may have already been there a quarter of a hour, or even more.”
“All right. Thanks.”
When the officer has left the room, Laurent feels the envelope. It seems to contain a rather stiff card. He holds it up to the electric light, but sees nothing abnormal about it. He decides to open it with his paper knife.
It is a picture post card showing a little house in a bad imitation Louis XIII style, at the corner of a long, gloomy suburban street and a wide avenue, probably at the edge of a canal. On the back is written, also in pencil, this one phrase: “Meeting tonight at seven-thirty.” In a woman’s handwriting. There is no signature.
The police receive messages like this every day-anonymous letters, insults, threats, denunciations-most often very involved, usually sent by illiterates or lunatics. The text of this post card is distinguished by its brevity and its precision. The meeting place is not indicated; it must be the street corner shown on the photograph-at least so one might suppose. Ii Laurent recognized the place, he might send one or two men there at the hour arranged; but it isn’t worth the bother of doing a lot of research to end up-at best-laying hands on some fishing boat that is smuggling in five pounds of snuff.
It would be better to be sure that this minor infraction would be effectively punished by the inspector who discovered it. The chief commissioner knows that a good deal of minor smuggling occurs with the complicity of the police who merely take a modest share for themselves. It is only for serious misdemeanors that they are required to be completely uncompromising. it the other end of the scale of crimes, one wonders what their behavior might be… if, for instance, a political organization f the type described by Wallas were to appeal to their…luckily, the question does not come up.
The commissioner picks up his phone and asks for the capital. He wants to have a clear conscience. Only the central services can inform him-if they have had time to perform the autopsy.
He gets his line soon enough, but he is transferred from office to office several times without managing to get in touch with the proper branch. The head of the department that signed the letter ordering the release of the body told him to speak to the medico-legal service; here, no one seems to know anything. Transferred from one to the other in succession, he finally reaches the prefect’s office, where someone-he doesn’t know precisely who-agrees to listen to his question: “From that distance was the bullet that killed Daniel Dupont fired?”
“Just one minute, please, hold on.”
It is only after a rather long interval, interspersed with various noises, that the answer reaches him:
“A 7.65 bullet, fired from a distance of about four yards.”
An answer which proves absolutely nothing, save that the lesson has been well learned.
Laurent then receives another visit from Wallas.
The special agent seems to have nothing to say to him. He has come back here as if he no longer knew where to go. He describes the escape of the businessman Marchat, the meeting with Juard, the visit to the former Madame Dupont. The commissioner, as on each occasion he himself has had dealings with the doctor, finds the latter’s conduct rather suspect. As for the divorced wife, it was obvious to everyone that she knew nothing. Wallas describes the strange shopwindow the station saleswoman has made, and to Laurent’s great surprise, take out of his pocket the same post card the officer has just brought in.
The commissioner goes to his desk and picks up the card sent by the unknown woman. It is the same card. He read Wallas the phrase written on the back.
3
The scene takes place in a Pompeian-style city-and, most particularly, in a rectangular forum one end of which is occupied by a temple (or a theater, or something of the same kind the other sides by various smaller monuments divided by wide paved roadways. Wallas has no idea where this image comes from. He is talking- sometimes in the middle of the square-sometimes on stairs, long flights of stairs-to people he can’t distinguish from one another but who were at the start clearly characterized and individual. He himself has a distinct role, probably a major one, perhaps official. The memory suddenly becomes quite piercing; for a fraction of a second, the entire scene assumes an extraordinary density. But what scene? He has just time to hear himself say:
“And did that happen a long time ago?”
Immediately everything has vanished, the people, the stair the temple, the rectangular forum and its monuments. He has never seen anything of the kind.
It is the agreeable face of a dark young woman which appears in its place-the stationery saleswoman from the Rue Victor-Hugo and the echo of her little throaty laugh. Yet her face is serious.
Wallas and his mother had finally reached the dead end of a anal; in the sunlight, the low houses reflected their old facades i the green water. It was not an aunt they were looking for: it as a male relative, someone he had never really known. He did not see him that day either. It was his father. How could he have forgotten it?
Wallas wanders through the city at random. The night is amp and cold. All day long, the sky has remained yellow, low, overcast-promising snow-but it has not snowed, and it is now the November mists that have gathered. Winter is coming early this year.
The lights at the street corners cast reddish circles just strong enough to keep the pedestrian from losing his way. It takes a good deal of care, crossing the street, not to stumble against the curbstones.
In the neighborhoods where the shops are more numerous, le stranger is surprised to find so few shopwindows lighted. Probably there is no need to attract customers in order to sell ice and brown soap. There are few notion stores in this province.
Wallas steps into a crowded, dusty shop that seems intended for the storage of merchandise rather than its retail sale. At the rear, a man in an apron is nailing shut a crate. He stops pounding to try to understand what kind of eraser Wallas wants. He nods several times during the course of the explanation as if he knew what Wallas meant. Then, without saying a word, he walks toward the other side of the shop; he is obliged to shift a large number of objects on his way in order to reach his go; He opens and closes several drawers, one after the other, thin for a minute, climbs up a ladder, begins searching again, wit out any more success.
He comes back toward his client: he no longer has the item. He still had some not long ago-a lot left over from before the war; they must have sold the last one-unless it’s been put away somewhere else: “There are so many things here that you can never find anything.”
Wallas dives back into the night.
Why not go back to the solitary house as well as anywhere else?
As the chief commissioner pointed out to him, Doctor Juard behavior is not absolutely clear-though it is hard to see what his secret role could be. When he walked through the parlor library, the little doctor glanced at Wallas out of the corner of his eye while pretending not to see him through his heavy glasses: yet he had walked through the room on purpose to have a look at him. And several times during their conversation half an hour later, Wallas was amazed at the strange way which Juard expressed himself: he seemed to be thinking of something else and occasionally even to be talking about something else. “He has a bad conscience,” Laurent declares.
Perhaps, too, the businessman Marchat is not so crazy as it seems. After all, to go into hiding was the better part of vale It is strange that the doctor’s account does not make the least allusion to Marchat’s presence in the Rue de Corinthe at the time of the wounded man’s arrival; he has always claimed, to the contrary, that he did not need anyone’s help; yet according to the commissioner, Marchat cannot have invented all the details he reports concerning the professor’s demise. If Juard knew, one way or another, that Marchat was to be murdered tonight in his turn, it would certainly be to his advantage to conceal the businessman’s presence in his clinic last evening He does not know that the latter has already mentioned it to the police.
