A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

When Love Turns

She was tall, for a woman, but not to the point of being an oddity or towering over those around her. There was such a perfect proportion between her height and her girth that her moderate fullness kept her from seeming lanky, and her graceful tallness kept her from seeming stout. In short, she had the classic symmetry of an antique statue, so seldom found in the living bodies of real life.

Her hair was blonde, and was worn in tight little curls clinging closely to her head, as if someone had showered her with gilt wood-shavings and they had stuck to her there.

Her mouth was charming when she smiled, but smiles are always charming on a pretty face. When it was in repose, it hinted at the major defect she might possess. There was a stubborn cast to it, an overtone of thin but unyielding determination to have her own way. As if it were saying, “When things go my way, that’s all right. But don’t cross me, or you’ll have trouble.” It was a fair-weather mouth, good only for smiles.

She had about everything a woman would want: unlimited money, a magnificent home out near the Bois de Boulogne that was a show-place, lavish good looks; and if she was no longer in the full flush of youth, neither was she yet by any means within the gray overcast of its after-years.

She had everything but one thing. The one she loved no longer loved her.

The Daimler drove up and Boniface arrived home while she was supervising the final preparations for that evening’s festivities. She caught just a glimpse of him through several successive doorway-frames as he crossed the foyer and started up the stairs. He did not seem to see her, and she did not call out to attract his attention. It might be better if they did not meet until later, when she was dressed for the evening, she decided. She wanted him to receive the full impact of her completed appearance.

In any case, she reflected philosophically, cupping her palm underneath a bronze chrysanthemum as though she were weighing it, he did not come home to see me. He came home, yes, but not to see me. The two things are not quite the same.

Boniface was that absolute rarity, a mature man without a paunch. Whether this had to do with the gymnasium he attended or with his activity in sports, or was a judicious combination of both, the fact remained that his waist was as slim as a bullfighter’s after the sash has throttled it. Another unique thing about him, he was that almost nonexistent man who not only looks good in evening clothes but even looks better in them than in a business suit. Pictorially, they had a perfect marriage.

He was her Education, advisedly spelled with a capital. True, she had attended schools and seminaries as a child and young girl, but little she had learned there had remained with her. He had taught her the two main things a woman has to know: the art of living and the art of loving. And now the teacher seemed to feel his pupil had graduated. He was out seeking new classes.

And there you have the husband. The man who must have once loved Fabienne deeply, for he had married her.

He came into her dressing-room as she was just put-ing the finishing touches to her make-up. Richard, the hair dresser, had finished and gone. She was doing one eye, and had the other one left to do.

She turned around and smiled at him, and he smiled at her. They noticeably did not kiss.

“Too soon?” he asked sociably. “Shall I go down ahead of you?”

She crinkled her forehead at him in a sort of rueful appeal. “No, tonight’s my birthday. Wait for me and let’s go down together. I have only one eye left.”

They both laughed at the funny little expression.

He sat down, balanced one leg across the top of the other, and took out a cigarette.

She had stopped, was watching him in the glass. There was character, she thought, even in the way he went about lighting a cigarette. Not fussy or elegant, nothing like that. Sort of soothing, calming: it made you feel secure, protected, under his wing. Women, it suddenly occurred to her, really shouldn’t smoke. They didn’t know how to do it right at all. It was inborn in men, coming down through the generations.

He could make a feminine room like this seem even more feminine, just by coming into it. By contrast, of course. His intrinsic maleness provided the catalyst, the counterpoint to it. He was looking out the window now. Not bored, but quite genuinely curious, the way a man would be who is rediscovering the almost-forgotten view from a room he never enters any more.

I wonder what her name is this month, she thought poignantly.

What’s the difference what her name is? she told herself. Her name is love. The thing we all live and die by. And a strange fellow-feeling for him swept over her momentarily. Not the feeling of a wife for her husband, or of a woman for a man, but the feeling of two comrades, two fellow-beings, two alikes, both going down in the same whirlpool. But going down separately, not together. Not even clasping hands to ease their drowning.

Smiling, she held out her scarf to him.

Smiling, he put it around her shoulders.

Smiling, they went toward the door together; he opened it and saw her through.

Smiling, they started down the graceful, slow-curving staircase side by side. The smiles of compatibility: cordial, comfortable, companionable — even loyal to a point. But the smiles of friendship only.

Not the smiles of love.

It seemed as though half of Paris had stopped in to offer their congratulations. Or at least half of the Paris that she and Boniface knew, which of course condensed it a lot, but heightened it in quality. At eleven and even after, people were still arriving, and very few had left yet — always a sure sign of a successful party. But Fabienne had never given an unsuccessful party in her life.

And yet, as the evening advanced, a disturbed expression began to appear more and more often on her face. A sort of strained expectancy. It was too ephemeral to be noticed by others, or if they did notice it, to be accurately interpreted. Boniface however seemed able to do both. He disengaged himself and went over to her.

He put his hand on her arm as he joined her, in a touch intended to convey encouragement or reassurance, a lending of moral support.

“He didn’t come yet?” he murmured, with that unspoken understanding that, when it is shared by two people, requires no further clarification.

“As you can well see,” she answered sullenly.

“Perhaps he was delayed.”

“Yes,” she said, in a tone of cynical disbelief. “Oh, any time at all will do!” she went on resentfully. And as she turned away to join some of the others, she added over her shoulder: “To come here.”

He watched her go across the room with a compassionate look in his eyes. The look of one who sympathizes but is unable to help because it is not his problem and he is not permitted to interfere. He went back to his own business of being a congenial host.

A moment afterward a liveried manservant showed up in the doorway and announced: “Monsieur Gilles Jacquard.”

A number of heads turned. Not Fabienne’s, though. A snub of about forty-five seconds followed, but so adroitly delivered that only the recipient was aware of it, before she turned and went over to him.

He was a younger man than Boniface, and startlingly handsome, almost too much so. He had the dark eyes and hair of the Mediterranean peoples, but with that admixture of Celt and Teuton that is basic in most of the French to lighten the over-all effect, to keep him from being swarthy. When he smiled it was not a smile only, it didn’t stop there, it was a wide grin, wholehearted, a little too impudent, but boyish enough to be forgiven for it.

Her hand went out in greeting and he shook it.

“Many happy returns, Fab,” he said. He had a voice of magnificent resonance, which he still had to grow up to.

She smiled and inclined her head without answering. The smile was not the warmest one she was capable of giving.

“I’m a little late, I know.”

“Agreed,” she said.

“You have no idea what the traffic is.”

“The traffic,” she said. “That will do as well as anything else.”

“My word of honor. Some car or other broke down and created a bottleneck right in the middle of—”

She turned her head aside as if to point up the fact that it wasn’t even worth listening to. Then turned back to him again. “There was no traffic once,” she said drily. “It is only now that there is traffic.”

They blended into the party together.

Presently they got together again, in a small lobby or lounge linking two of the larger rooms. He had seen her enter it, and, detaching himself, went in there after her.

“Aren’t you going to let me show you the little gift I brought you?” he asked as he joined her.

She unwrapped the tissue-paper, opened a small oblong box.

He had very good taste, she reflected, that was one thing about him. Taste; you either had it or you didn’t have it, it came with you, it couldn’t be acquired. And by the time he was Boniface’s age, he was going to be a vastly cultivated man.

And I too have good taste, her thoughts went on. I picked well. The one time there was to pick. She put it that way because she knew there would never be another choice made the rest of her life. This once and never again.

He was watching her. She was being purposely casual about it.

“It doesn’t please you,” he said quizzically.

“It pleases me—”

“But the donor doesn’t,” he finished for her.

She raised her brows at him coolly, as if to say: Should he? What does he expect?

“And how was Lyon?” she asked.

He gave a slight hitch to one shoulder. “It was a business-trip. You know how those things are.” He stopped very briefly, almost unnoticeably. Then he said, “It was Toulouse, not Lyon.”

“It is just as well to remember where one has said one was going in the first place,” she concurred. “Even if it takes a minute or two longer.”

He clapped himself dismayedly in the center of the forehead with the heel of his hand. “Oh, my God, Fab! Now you don’t even believe that.”

“Boniface and I were coming back from dinner at the Duprez’, one night well over a week ago, and we drove past your house.”

“And?” was all he said to that.

“The windows of your flat were lighted up.”

“Since when does my street lie along the shortest way home between the Duprez’ and your place?” he came back at her.

“It was I who suggested to Boniface we make a detour and go through there,” she admitted imperturbably.

“There it is,” was his comment to that. The almost-untranslatable “voilà.”

“Boniface saw me looking up and said, ‘Gilles must have come back sooner than you expected him to.’ ” And she reproached him, with that complete objectivity only the French can bring to bear on matters of love, “Imagine how I felt, to be humiliated like that in front of my own husband! What must he have thought? ‘She can’t even hold on to her chosen friend.’ ”

“The concierge must have gone up there to clean. Or maybe to repair something.”

“At that hour of the night?” She uttered a laugh as cutting as a broken sliver of glass. “You’re not even plausible.”

The small but expert group of musicians she had engaged struck up an American dance-tune (but almost all dance-tunes were American, anyway) called “It’s All in the Game.” Like two people who in the middle of a dispute obey their motor-reflexes without realizing what they are doing, they fell into dance position and automatically moved out into the dancing-space.

A vocalist, obviously non-American, began to sing in suicidal English:

“Every time we meet now, it turns into one of these discussions,” he said aggrievedly.

“It’s a pity, is it not?” she retorted brittly.

“Yes, it’s a pity,” he said with a certain amount of heat.

And that ended the contention for the time being. A moment later they had stopped dancing as unpredictably as they had begun.

The party had ended now. There remained only Gilles and a very old but brilliant man with whom Boniface was having an interminable philosophical discussion over in a corner.

She and Gilles were in the entrance-hall near the front door, where the departure of the last guests had brought her, and where he had followed her, evidently with some idea in mind of going himself.

“They will go on for half the night yet, those two,” she said indulgently. “I think I’ve had enough. I’m going up now. Will you join me in a bénédictine? I still have some of that up there that you enjoyed so the last time.”

“I should leave now, Fab,” he said, ridging his forehead discontentedly.

She stopped short and turned around again; they stood looking at each other.

“The last to arrive and the first to go,” she said accusingly.

“Hardly,” he tried to point out. “There’s no one left any more but old Bertrand inside there.”

“Well, and is this a sacrifice?”

“I feel—” He gestured helplessly. “I don’t know how to say it, awkward about it.”

She almost laughed outright as his meaning, or what she took his meaning to be, struck her. “Surely you don’t mean because of Boniface? Don’t tell me that. Boniface has always known. And you yourself have always known he has. This is no betrayal, no cheap affair behind his back, no jealous husband sort of thing. Boniface and I have our own code for living, our entente; for me, he wants only what brings me the greatest happiness, he is still my husband by that much. He thinks and rightfully so that that designates you; therefore he approves of you, and that is all that matters. Don’t you remember the night he even came in and joined us for a while, and we had such an enjoyable time talking about love and life and sipping little liqueurs, the three of us?”

“What’s the good?” he said grimly. “Everything has to stop sooner or later, doesn’t it?”

“You wish it to, is that what you’re trying to say? Only because you wish it to, that is why it has to stop, not otherwise.”

He pointed to a clock standing behind them in the foyer. “Doesn’t this run down? Isn’t it natural for it to do so? Well—”

“I don’t care for such an illustration,” she said irritably. “A clock is mechanical, love isn’t.”

“A beautiful woman like you, you could have half of Paris. Why me?”

“That’s not the point. I made my choice when I first grew to know you, and my choice remains.”

He said something she didn’t quite hear.

“What?”

“But does your choice necessarily cover the two of us?”

“Ah, now it comes out!”

“You back me into a corner,” he gritted, shoving his hands deep down into his pockets as forcefully as if he were trying to dig up a garden-patch with them through his clothing and all. “You practically drag out of me the very thing you do not wish to hear and that I do not wish to say. And then you’re wounded, angry. Why not leave things unspoken? My esteem for you has not changed since the day we first met.”

“Esteem,” she said scornfully. She began to walk slowly back and forth, holding her hands clasped just below her chin. “What have I done? What is it you don’t like? Tell me and I’ll correct it.”

He shook his head hopelessly. “It isn’t a question of ‘What have I done?’ The thing is over, finished. Let’s just let it go, and not try to hold onto it, drag it out.”

She laughed bleakly. “For you that’s easy, yes. Because evidently you never did love me from the start. But with me it’s different. It’s a part of me, I can’t let it go.”

“I loved you very deeply and very sincerely, Fab. As much as any man ever loved a woman, never doubt that.”

“The past tense,” she whispered, stricken. “He gives it the past tense, as if it were completely gone, as if it were dead.”

“It is, Fab,” he said stonily. “It is.”

She gripped the lapels of his coat with her hands. Then she held his face pressed between her hands gripping that, in an intensity of supplication. “Make believe, then. Pretend. Just lie close, without saying anything. Even that is better than nothing. Just so I know you’re near.”

“Some women can fake love even when they don’t feel it. An honest man can’t. I’m not a gigolo.” He lowered his head, so that his face became an ellipse instead of an oval. “It wouldn’t work. The very muscles that should serve to love you... They don’t know you any more, Fabienne. They don’t want you. They wouldn’t respond.”

She stared at him white with mortal insult. Then she began to slap him back and forth across the mouth, repeatedly, swinging her open hand to and fro in an agony of frustration and hatred, over and over until it seemed she would never stop.

He played his part well, played it just as it should have been played. For he neither flinched nor averted his face nor drew back, nor did he try to trap and control her punishing hand. He stood his ground, utterly motionless, a faint smile of distant pity for futile feminine rage half-forming on his lips. He just played the man’s part, unreachable in his own fastnesses once the door of volition was closed.

She turned aside at last, and with broken breaths that were like sobs, covered her face with both her hands and crept forlornly into some private hiding-place of cosmic loneliness that no one could enter but her. For loneliness is single, cannot be shared by two.

Suddenly, with what one might call neat despatch, he had turned, opened the door, and gone, leaving it unclosed behind him.

She looked around, stunned. The unbelievable had happened. He was finished with her, he had left her. All through the open doorway, like someone pursued by outcome, had never doubted she would win him back in the end; anything else had seemed an impossibility, and now — she had lost him, he wasn’t here any more.

All at once she came to life and ran after him, out through the open doorway, like someone pursued by demons. And she was: the most frightful demons there are, the demons of not being loved when you love. Crying out, careless whether the whole house heard her: “Gilles, I love you! I love you! I love you!”

His little Dauphine, as small as a youngster’s play-automobile, had been facing the wrong way, just as he had left it when he arrived. She heard the door slap after him as he got in, and then it came backwards toward her a little, then shifted and gushed forward into a sweeping street-wide turn, and lurched away in the opposite direction. She just stood rooted there at the bottom of the apron-like entrance-steps, under the glass-and-iron door-canopy, staring into the empty space it had left behind it. Around her in the stillness a disembodied cry still seemed to linger, like an echo, like the ghost of dead love, faint and far-away. “I love you—” Above her, facile and fickle and having no heart, the glitter of stars that had seen too many loves die in this town to care about one more.

Boniface was putting on his things to go out, when she turned and went back inside again.

“It didn’t go well?” was all he said to her, in an understanding undertone.

Her face gave the answer.

“There is always the next time,” he tried to console her.

She answered dully, more to herself than to him: “There will be no next. This was the first time. This is the last.”

“I’ll probably go directly to the office in the morning,” he told her. He probably had a complete wardrobe of clothes — wherever love was. And why not? she asked herself. It made more sense than to have it here. “See you at dinner tomorrow night.” And he chucked her under the chin, much as one would a little girl who one suspects will be up to all kinds of mischief the minute one’s back is turned. “Bonne chance.” Good luck.

Boniface had a gun. He’d gone and she was in his room now. She looked at it as she took it out of the desk-drawer. He’d had it ever since the Liberation, that was when she first had seen it. The counter-breakthrough in the Ardennes had just taken place, and for a few breathless weeks it seemed likely that Paris might be occupied all over again. Which would have brought on a panic-exodus even worse than the one in 1940. Because now people knew what to expect. And in 1940 she had been robbed of all her jewels on the clogged, impassable roads, literally had had them taken from her at gun-point by her absconding chauffeur in full view of scores of people, too indifferent to care about this trifling personal misfortune in the midst of the whole world’s collapse.

“In case those gentlemen should come back, I want to show you how to use this,” he’d said. And he had shown her. During the Occupation, in conversations among themselves the French had a habit of referring to the enemy as “ces messieurs,” those gentlemen, in order to keep the topic more or less under wraps.

Boniface, then, had a gun. She stood looking at it now as she held it in her hand. So this was the thing you killed a man with.

She turned and left the room, and went down the stairs and outside to the street, swaying as if she were intoxicated. And she was intoxicated, but not with alcohol, with being rejected and jealousy and the will to revenge. Not crying out “I love you!” this time.

When the complex of emotions that make up the nerve-center known as love are inflamed adversely beyond a certain point, there is only one release, one outlet, one cure for them: anything else would fall short. And this is: the killing of the culpable loved one. In other words, love turns into death.

And in every case where the woman is the avenger, bringing this retribution, it is always the man she directs it against, never the other woman. There are valid psychological reasons for this. He was the one she loved, not the woman. He had the power of choice, of decision, not the woman. (The wish must come from him, or else there is nothing. Unless he wishes her to have him, she cannot have him.) And finally, the other woman is herself, acting as she herself might very well do, barring a few minor variations in ethics or in circumstances. What one woman does in love, all other women are capable of doing as well; all that prevents them is the lack of necessity for it.

So the death-wish and the death-act go out to him, and him alone. And rightly so, justly so, according to all the statutes of love. The injury has come from him, not the other woman. She merely has profited by it. She has simply stepped into the vacuum that his defection left there.

She went along the street until she reached a lamppost, and stopped by it and stood waiting there in its light (in order to make herself more easily distinguishable) for a taxi to come along. Like a loitering vendeuse, only not one selling love.

When one finally stopped for her, a few yards along, she ran down to where it was standing and got in. breathing fast with the effort, and gave him Gilles’ address, on Boulevard Suchet.

“Yes, madame,” he said tractably, and started off with her.

Paris in the small hours went by, in little scraps and montages that stood out for a moment like color-snap-shots and then flickered on past.

A man waiting for his dog to pick out an acceptable tree, with that selfless patience that only a true dog-lover has, trailing along as though he were the appendage and the dog were the master.

A pair of lovers stepping down off a sidewalk arm in arm, and nearly being grazed by her cab as it went past, so taken up were they in each other, with eyes for nothing else around them. There, she thought wistfully, could go Gilles and I, if only my luck had been different. I hope their story turns out better than ours. (But the girl was somewhat younger than she, a fact that she failed to point out to herself.)

Two men arguing heatedly on a street-corner, their arms almost resembling slowed-down propeller-blades, they spun around so. A fragment of an angry shout reached her cars. “We built Algeria from the ground up, I tell you!”

A panorama of a lighted café streamed by, all out of perspective, somehow, like a child’s crude crayon drawing of a string of railway-carriages. Nothing but large yellow window-squares, with no space left over for anything else. On the outside the tables had already been stacked up for the night, but inside there were still a few heads dotted about here and there, weaving slowly like black flies caught on yellow fly-paper.

The trees of the thoroughfare they were following were like massed black plumes, dipping almost to the ground along its sides, and the boulevard lights, peering down through them from above, seemed to cast shafts or rods of yellowish vapor, like sodium pentathol, swirling and fuming with living motes just as if they were contained inside glass test-tubes. The cab, crashing through them, shattered them noiselessly one after the other, but they re-formed behind it each time intact, like luminous magic wands.

Paris in the small hours...

The cab stopped suddenly, and they were there.

She opened her bag and thrust her hand down into it, alongside the cold heel of the gun. She made a discovery that at any other time would have been a hindrance, now was inconsequential.

She raised her head. “I have no money,” she told the driver. “I forgot to bring any along.”

He sized her up, not eye to eye but by way of the glass. He must have rated her for what she was: high class, and not the kind that would be likely to try to bilk him out of a fare. His manner noticeably didn’t change: he didn’t get excited, raise his voice, become abusive.

“What do you want to do?” he asked even-temperedly.

“I don’t know what to do,” she said.

“Shall I wait here until you come out again?” he suggested.

“Don’t do that,” she said with enigmatic brevity.

“Well then—?” He gestured helplessly.

“Here, hold this,” she said abruptly, and twisted a sizable diamond solitaire Boniface had once given her off her finger, and held it out to him. “Keep it as a pledge, until you get your fare back. I’ll give you my address: come around in a day or two, there will almost certainly be someone there to see that you get your money.”

He looked at it big-eyed, but with considerable trepidation. “I’m not sure I ought to do it,” he said dubiously. “The regulations are very severe about some things.”

“I’ll take the responsibility, you won’t get in any trouble.” She put it in the center of his hand, and took hold of his fingers and pressed them closed over it on all sides. “Now don’t detain me any longer, I have to get

He drove off at a crawl, still shaking his head to himself, and jumping it up and down undecidedly in the same hand into which she’d put it, only one hand to his wheel.

Gilles’ concierge answered her ring at the street-doorbell, and the cloudy look with which she’d been about to greet this late night-visit turned into a sunny one when she saw who the visitor was.

“Mademoiselle!” she gushed cordially. “You don’t get around to see us much any more.”

No, I don’t, thought Fabienne wryly. But whose fault is it? She said: “Don’t announce me, I’ll go right up.”

She was afraid he might bar his apartment-door to her if he were tipped-off that she was on her way up.

“Of course not,” the concierge agreed. “Anything mademoiselle wishes.”

She didn’t call Fabienne “madame” because that would have been taking too much for granted. Besides, it was none of her business.

“I won’t forget to show my appreciation,” Fabienne promised. “I’ll take care of you — later.”

The concierge protested insincerely with two back-turned palms, as though the very idea filled her with horror.

Fabienne went to the stairs at the back, and passed by the waiting birdcage elevator. For the same precautionary reason: because she did not want him to hear it bring her up. It always stopped with considerable jangling and bickering of its parts.

“Until later then,” she said over her shoulder to the concierge.

“Enjoy yourself,” the latter called after her amiably, no irony dreamed of.

After a brief interval, the lower-hall lights went out. But there were lights at each floor-level along the stairs. It was only two flights; he lived on the third.

She took out the key he had once given her and put it in, and the door opened before her no more dramatically than it had at any other time. For instance, when she would let herself in to fix tea for him before he came home from work.

She stepped past the threshold. The light was on at the back of the bachelor-apartment, in the end-room, which was the bedroom. She could see it from where she was. The intervening room was dark.

As matter-of-factly as though this were any ordinary visit, she put her hand to the wall and turned on the light-switch, and then went on by.

“Who’s out there?” his voice called out.

“Fabienne,” she said with deathly intensity. “Tu te souviens de moi?” Remember me?

His voice said again, but to somebody else in the room with him, “I told you! I told you this would happen!”

She appeared in the bedroom-entrance, looking in at him. “Yes, you told!” she cried out shrilly as they came face to face. “You told well! You told right!”

That was all she said to him, nothing more, not another word.

He was completely dressed, save for his jacket and his tie, and the top button at the collar of his shirt. Her eye, glancing quickly over him, took in the detail of the finely pleated shirt he had worn at her party, without really seeing it at all.

But the girl behind him, sitting up in the bed, was just as completely not dressed. There was nothing to her at all, nothing to her from head to foot. A mop of scrambled black hair, large frightened eyes like those of a calf, a thin pipe-stem of a neck, bony shoulders the shape of a coat-hanger, a scrawny parody of breasts like an adolescent’s. She had nothing, nothing at all but one thing. But the one thing she had gave her the victory. She had: youth.

“You want him?” Fabienne cried out to her bitterly. “Take him! I give him to you! I give him to you like this, with my compliments!”

She pried open her handbag, scooped the gun out, and stood pointing it at him. The handbag fell with a discarded flutter, its lining coming up out of it like an air-blister.

His fate didn’t even have time to get white, just incredulous.

Instead of holding it close in to her own body and firing it from there as a man would have, she thrust it out toward him, as if it were a weapon with a cutting or stabbing point. Thus it was the easiest thing in the world for him to grasp her forearm and up-end it, backing the gun away from himself.

It clicked sterilely, once, midway between them.

But she was pulling, straining, in reverse impetus now, to get her arm away from him. And in his reflex of self-defense, he had caught it in an awkward place, midway to the elbow. Now, trying to shift his grasp to her wrist, the more natural place to hold her by, his grip slackened for an involuntary instant. Her arm, freed with all the straining effort she was putting into it, sprang back like a suddenly released mainspring, and the gun imbedded itself into her own breast. The impact itself must have detonated it.

There was a hollow, reverberating thud, like the sound an empty flower-pot might make if it were dropped many stories down an air-shaft. A minimal amount of smoke came up between their faces, not much more than if one of them had just released the vestiges of some long-pent-up cigarette-inhalation.

The gun, its treachery accomplished, fell inert to the floor.

The gap between them closed, as if they were in a final parting embrace. Her hand even crept up his shoulder toward the turn at the top of it, but whether in last conscious longing or whether in blind instinctive seeking of support, there was no way to know. And his arm went around her waist, to try to keep her upright.

So that at the very last moment, death had turned back to love again. Or at least the postures of it.

Then she tumbled downward in a straight line, slipping through the half-circle of his arm, which was only meant to keep her from falling outward and back. And rolled over once at his feet, with the ricochet of the fall, and then a second time, with the final galvanic death-spasm itself. And then didn’t move any more.

The girl gave a whinny like that of a frightened little foal. There was a blurred kaleidoscopic impression, swirling like a spinning pin-wheel, of clothes being snatched at from every direction and all being whisked inward toward a common center, too quickly for the eye to follow. Then, still only half-clad, she scissored her long legs to clear the form on the floor and scampered toward the outside door and the public stairway beyond, two shoes held in her hand by their straps knocking together clackingly all the way.

He, meanwhile, was chopping the edge of his hand down on the telephone-brackets, trying to get a connection, and then shouting hoarsely when he had: “Get the police! Tell them to send someone up here quick! There’s been a fatal accident! My name’s Jacquard, I’m on the third floor, Boulevard Suchet, number—”

And on the floor lay the gown that had caught every eye at the party only a little while before, a shroud now, with a little red-rimmed hole in it like a pair of puckered lips parted in astonishment at what had happened.

The girl came out of the prefecture of police with the bedraggled air of a kitten that has been soaked in the rain. A moment later, after he had shaken hands with the lawyers (it had taken three of them to obtain her temporary release from custody), Boniface came out after her.

“So this is how you played around with me,” he said through grimly clenched teeth as he hustled her over to his waiting car. “Behind my back the whole time, with this young sprout— If poor Fab hadn’t thrown a monkey-wrench into the whole thing by showing up there tonight, you would have gone on fooling me like this indefinitely, I suppose—”