police station and were now being called upon to explain things they couldn’t remember doing.
What had his brother Olivier been doing all through the night? An old woman had been found dead. A boy had started before dawn on a breathless race through the streets, breaking the glass of the telephone pillars as he passed them, having wrapped his handkerchief round his fist.
And what was Olivier waiting for at the Gare d’Austerlitz. sometimes in the overheated waiting rooms, sometimes on the windswept platforms, too nervous to settle down in any one place for long?
Less than ten minutes elapsed, just time enough for Godin, whose nose really was running, to make himself another glass of hot grog.
“Can I offer you one, Monsieur le Commissaire?”
“No, thanks.”
Looking more embarrassed than ever, Saillard leaned over towards Lec?ur to say in an undertone, “Would you like us to question him in another room?”
No. Lec?ur wasn’t going to leave his post for anything. He wanted to stay there, with his little lamps and his switchboard. Was it that he was thinking more of the boy than of his brother?
Olivier came in with a detective on either side, but they had spared him the handcuffs. He looked dreadful, like a bad photograph faded with age. At once he turned to Andre. “Where’s Francois?”
“We don’t know. We’re hunting for him.”
“Where?”
Andre Lec?ur pointed to his plan of Paris and his switchboard of a thousand lines. “Everywhere.”
The two detectives had already been sent away.
“Sit down,” said the Inspector. “I believe you’ve been told of Madame Fayet’s death.”
Olivier didn’t wear spectacles, but he had the same pale and rather fugitive eyes as his brother had when he took his glasses off. He glanced at the Inspector, by whom he didn’t seem the least overawed, then turned back to Andre. “He left a note for me,” he said, delving into one of the pockets of his grubby mackintosh. “Here. See if you can understand.”
He held out a bit of paper torn out of a schoolboy’s exercise book. The writing wasn’t any too good. It didn’t look as though Francois was the best of pupils. He had used an indelible pencil, wetting the end in his mouth, so that his lips were very likely stained with it.
“Uncle Gedeon arrives this morning Gare d’Austerlitz. Come as soon as you can and meet us there. Love. Bib.”
Without a word, Andre Lec?ur passed it on to the Inspector, who turned it over and over with his thick fingers. “What’s Bib stand for?”
“It’s his nickname. A baby name. I never use it when other people are about. It comes from
“Who’s Uncle Gedeon?”
“There isn’t any such person.”
Did he realize he was talking to the head of the Brigade des Homicides, who was at the moment investigating a murder?
It was his brother who came to the rescue, explaining. “As a matter of fact, we had an Uncle Gedeon but he’s been dead for some years. He was one of my mother’s brothers who emigrated to America as a young man.”
Olivier looked at his brother as much as to say: What’s the point of going into that?
“We got into the habit, in the family, of speaking—jocularly, of course— of our rich American uncle and of the fortune he’d leave us one day.”
“Was he rich?”
“We didn’t know. We never heard from him except for a postcard once a year, signed Gedeon. Wishing us a happy New Year.”
“He died?”
“When Francois was four.”
“Really. Andre, do you think it’s any use—”
“Let me go on. The Inspector wants to know everything. My brother carried on the family tradition, talking to his son about our Uncle Gedeon, who had become by now quite a legendary figure. He provided a theme for bedtime stories, and all sorts of adventures were attributed to him. Naturally he was fabulously rich, and when one day he came back to France—”
“I understand. He died out there?”
“In a hospital in Cleveland. It was then we found out he had been really a porter in a restaurant. It would have been too cruel to tell the boy that, so the legend went on.”
“Did he believe in it?”
It was Olivier who answered. “My brother thought he didn’t, that he’d guessed the truth but wasn’t going to spoil the game. But I always maintained the contrary and I’m still practically certain he took it all in. He was like that. Long after his schoolfellows had stopped believing in Father Christmas, he still went on.”
Talking about his son brought him back to life, transfigured him.
“But as for this note he left, I don’t know what to make of it. I asked the concierge if a telegram had come. For a moment I thought Andre might have played us a practical joke, but I soon dismissed the idea. It isn’t much of a joke to get a boy dashing off to a station on a freezing night. Naturally I dashed off to the Gare d’Austerlitz as fast as I could. There I hunted high and low, then wandered about, waiting anxiously for him to turn up. Andre, you’re sure he hasn’t been—”
He looked at the street plan on the wall and at the switchboard. He knew very well that every accident was reported.
“He hasn’t been run over,” said Andre. “At about eight o’clock he was near the Etoile, but we’ve completely lost track of him since then.”
“Near the Etoile? How do you know?”
“It’s rather a long story, but it boils down to this—that a whole series of alarms were set off by someone smashing the glass. They followed a circuitous route from your place to the Arc de Triomphe. At the foot of the last one, they found a blue-check handkerchief, a boy’s handkerchief, among the broken glass.”
“He has handkerchiefs like that.”
“From eight o’clock onward, not a sign of him.”
“Then I’d better get back to the station. He’s certain to go there, if he told me to meet him there.”
He was surprised at the sudden silence with which his last words were greeted. He looked from one to the other, perplexed, then anxious.
“What is it?”
His brother looked down at the floor. Inspector Saillard cleared his throat, hesitated, then asked, “Did you go to see your mother-in-law last night?”
Perhaps, as his brother had suggested, Olivier was rather lacking in intelligence. It took a long time for the words to sink in. You could follow their progress in his features.
He had been gazing rather blankly at the Inspector. Suddenly he swung around on his brother, his cheeks red, his eyes flashing. “Andre, you dare to suggest that I—”
Without the slightest transition, his indignation faded away. He leaned forward in his chair, took his head in his two hands, and burst into a fit of raucous weeping.
Ill at ease, Inspector Saillard looked at Andre Lec?ur, surprised at the latter’s calmness, and a little shocked, perhaps, by what he may well have taken for heartlessness. Perhaps Saillard had never had a brother of his own. Andre had known his since childhood. It wasn’t the first time he had seen Olivier break down. Not by any means. And this time he was almost pleased, as it might have been a great deal worse. What he had dreaded was the moment of indignation, and he was relieved that it had passed so quickly. Had he continued on that tack, he’d have ended by putting everyone’s back up, which would have done him no good at all.
Wasn’t that how he’d lost one job after another? For weeks, for months, he would go meekly about his work, toeing the line and swallowing what he felt to be humiliations, till all at once he could hold no more, and for some trifle—a chance word, a smile, a harmless contradiction—he would flare up unexpectedly and make a nuisance of
