'There are beasts, Lewis. Some of them are pitiful; circus animals. They have no brains; they are born victims. Then there are others.'
'What others?'
'Natalie was a whore!' he screamed again, his eyes big as saucers. He took hold of Lewis' lapels, and began to shake him. Everybody else in the little room turned to look at the two old men as they wrestled over the table. Convicts and their sweethearts grinned as Phillipe was dragged off his friend, his words descending into incoherence and obscenity as he thrashed in the warder's grip.
'Whore! Whore! Whore!' was all he could say as they hauled him back to his cell.
Catherine met Lewis at the door of her apartment. She was shaking and tearful. Beyond her, the room was wrecked.
She sobbed against his chest as he comforted her, but she was inconsolable. It was many years since he'd comforted a woman, and he'd lost the knack of it. He was embarrassed instead of soothing, and she knew it. She broke away from his embrace, happier untouched.
'He was here,' she said.
He didn't need to ask who. The stranger, the tearful, razor-wielding stranger.
'What did he want?'
'He kept saying ‘Phillipe' to me. Almost saying it; grunting it more than saying it: and when I didn't answer he just destroyed the furniture, the vases. He wasn't even looking for anything: he just wanted to make a mess.'
It made her furious: the uselessness of the attack.
The apartment was in ruins. Lewis wandered through the fragments of porcelain and shredded fabric, shaking his head. In his mind a confusion of tearful faces: Catherine, Phillipe, the stranger. Everyone in his narrow world, it seemed, was hurt and broken. Everyone was suffering; and yet the source, the heart of the suffering, was nowhere to be found.
Only Phillipe had pointed an accusing finger: at Lewis himself.
'You began all this.' Weren't those his words? 'you began all this.'
But how?
Lewis stood at the window. Three of the small panes had been cracked by flying debris, and a wind was insinuating itself into the apartment, with frost in its teeth. He looked across at the ice-thickened waters of the Seine; then a movement caught his eye. His stomach turned.
The full face of the stranger was turned up to the window, his expression wild. The clothes he had always worn so impeccably were in disarray, and the look on his face was of utter, utter despair, so pitiful as to be almost tragic. Or rather, a performance of tragedy: an actor's pain. Even as Lewis stared down at him the stranger raised his arms to the window in a gesture that seemed to beg either forgiveness or understanding, or both.
Lewis backed away from the appeal. It was too much; all too much. The next moment the stranger was walking across the courtyard away from the apartment. The mincing walk had deteriorated into a rolling lope. Lewis uttered a long, low moan of recognition as the ill-dressed bulk disappeared from view.
'Lewis?'
It wasn't a man's walk, that roll, that swagger. It was the gait of an upright beast who'd been taught to walk, and now, without its master, was losing the trick of it.
It was an ape.
Oh God, oh God, it was an ape.
'I have to see Phillipe Laborteaux.'
'I'm sorry, Monsieur; but prison visitors —'
'This is a matter of life and death, officer.'
'Easily said, Monsieur.'
Lewis risked a lie.
'His sister is dying. I beg you to have some compassion.'
'Oh...well...'
A little doubt. Lewis levered a little further. 'A few minutes only; to settle arrangements.'
'Can't it wait until tomorrow?'
'She'll be dead by morning.'
Lewis hated talking about Catherine in such a way, even for the purpose of this deception, but it was necessary; he had to see Phillipe. If his theory was correct, history might repeat itself before the night was out.
Phillipe had been woken from a sedated sleep. His eyes were circled with darkness.
'What do you want?'
Lewis didn't even attempt to proceed any further with his lie; Phillipe was drugged as it was, and probably confused. Best to confront him with the truth, and see what came of it.
'You kept an ape, didn't you?'
A look of terror crossed Phillipe's face, slowed by the drugs in his blood, but plain enough.
'Didn't you?'
'Lewis...' Phillipe looked so very old.
'Answer me, Phillipe, I beg you: before it's too late. Did you keep an ape?'
'It was an experiment, that's all it was. An experiment.'
'Why?'
'Your stories. Your damn stories: I wanted to see if it was true that they were wild. I wanted to make a man of it.'
'Make a man of it.'
'And that whore...'
'Natalie.'
'She seduced it.'
Lewis felt sick. This was a convolution he hadn't anticipated.
'Seduced it?'
'Whore,' Phillipe said, with infinite regret.
'Where is this ape of yours?'
'You'll kill it.'
'It broke into the apartment, while Catherine was there. Destroyed everything, Phillipe. It's dangerous now that it has no master. Don't you understand?'
'Catherine?'
'No, She's all right.'
'It's trained: it wouldn't harm her. It's watched her, in hiding. Come and gone. Quiet as a mouse.'
'And the girl?'
'It was jealous.'
'So it murdered her?'
'Perhaps. I don't know. I don't want to think about it.'
'Why haven't you told them; had the thing destroyed?'
'I don't know if it's true. It's probably all a fiction, one of your damn fictions, just another story.'
A sour, wily smile crossed his exhausted face.
'You must know what I mean, Lewis. It could be a story, couldn't it? Like your tales of Dupin. Except that maybe I made it true for a while; did you ever think of that? Maybe I made it true.'
Lewis stood up. It was a tired debate: reality and illusion. Either a thing was, or was not. Life was not a dream.
'Where is the ape?' he demanded.
Phillipe pointed to his temple.
'Here; where you can never find him,' he said, and spat in Lewis' face. The spittle hit his lip, like a kiss.
'You don't know what you did. You'll never know.'
