Beyond Rue Morgue Anthology: Further Tales of Edgar Allan Poe's 1st Detective

NEW MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE By CLIVE BARKER

Winter, Lewis decided, was no season for old men. The snow that lay five inches thick on the streets of Paris froze him to the marrow. What had been a joy to him as a child was now a curse. He hated it with all his heart; hated the snowballing children (squeals, howls, tears); hated, too, the young lovers, eager to be caught in a flurry together (squeals, kisses, tears). It was uncomfortable and tiresome, and he wished he was in Fort Lauderdale, where the sun would be shining.

But Catherine’s telegram, though not explicit, had been urgent, and the ties of friendship between them had been unbroken for the best part of fifty years. He was here for her, and for her brother Phillipe. However thin his blood felt in this ice land, it was foolish to complain. He’d come at a summons from the past, and he would have come as swiftly, and as willingly, if Paris had been burning.

Besides, it was his mother’s city. She’d been born on the Boulevard Diderot, back in a time when the city was untrammeled by free-thinking architects and social engineers. Now every time Lewis returned to Paris he steeled himself for another desecration. It was happening less of late, he’d noticed. The recession in Europe made governments less eager with their bulldozers. But still, year after year, more fine houses found themselves rubble. Whole streets sometimes, gone to ground.

Even the Rue Morgue.

There was, of course, some doubt as to whether that infamous street had ever existed in the first place, but as his years advanced Lewis had seen less and less purpose in distinguishing between fact and fiction. That great divide was for young men, who still had to deal with life. For the old (Lewis was 73), the distinction was academic. What did it matter what was true and what was false, what real and what invented? In his head all of it, the half-lies and the truths, were one continuum of personal history.

Maybe the Rue Morgue had existed, as it had been described in Edgar Allan Poe’s immortal story; maybe it was pure invention. Whichever, the notorious street was no longer to be found on a map of Paris.

Perhaps Lewis was a little disappointed not to have found the Rue Morgue. After all, it was part of his heritage. If the stories he had been told as a young boy were correct, the events described in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” had been narrated to Poe by Lewis’ grandfather. It was his mother’s pride that her father had met Poe, while traveling in America. Apparently his grandfather had been a globe-trotter, unhappy unless he visited a new town every week. And in the winter of 1835 he had been in Richmond, Virginia. It was a bitter winter, perhaps not unlike the one Lewis was presently suffering, and one night the grandfather had taken refuge in a bar in Richmond. There, with a blizzard raging outside, he had met a small, dark, melancholy young man called Eddie. He was something of a local celebrity apparently, having written a tale that had won a competition in the Baltimore Saturday Visitor. The tale was “MS. Found in a Bottle” and the haunted young man was Edgar Allan Poe.

The two had spent the evening together, drinking, and (this is how the story went, anyway) Poe had gently pumped Lewis’ grandfather for stories of the bizarre, of the occult and of the morbid. The worldly-wise traveler was glad to oblige, pouring out believe-it-or-not fragments that the writer later turned into “The Mystery of Marie Roget” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” In both those stories, peering out from between the atrocities, was the peculiar genius of C. Auguste Dupin.

C. Auguste Dupin. Poe’s vision of the perfect detective: calm, rational, and brilliantly perceptive. The narratives in which he appeared rapidly became well-known, and through them Dupin became a fictional celebrity, without anyone in America knowing that Dupin was a real person.

He was the brother of Lewis’ grandfather. Lewis’ great uncle was C. Auguste Dupin.

And his greatest case — the Murders in the Rue Morgue — they too were based on fact. The slaughters that occurred in the story had actually taken place. Two women had indeed been brutally killed in the Rue Morgue. They were, as Poe had written, Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter Mademoiselle Camille L’Espanaye. Both women of good reputation, who lived quiet and unsensational lives. So much more horrible then to find those lives so brutally cut short. The daughter’s body had been thrust up the chimney; the body of the mother was discovered in the yard at the back of the house, her throat cut with such savagery that her head was all but sawn off. No apparent motive could be found for the murders, and the mystery further deepened when all the occupants of the house claimed to have heard the voice of the murderer speaking in a different language. The Frenchman was certain the voice had spoken Spanish, the Englishman had heard German, the Dutchman thought it was French. Dupin, in his investigations, noted that none of the witnesses actually spoke the language they claimed to have heard from the lips of the unseen murderer. He concluded that the language was no language at all, but the wordless voice of a wild beast.

An ape in fact, a monstrous orang-outang from the East Indian Islands. Its tawny hairs had been found in the grip of the slain Madame L’Espanaye. Only its strength and agility made the appalling fate of Mademoiselle L’Espanaye plausible. The beast had belonged to a Maltese sailor, had escaped, and run riot in the bloody apartment on the Rue Morgue.

That was the bones of the story.

Whether true or not the tale held a great romantic appeal for Lewis. He liked to think of his great uncle logically pacing his way through the mystery, undistressed by the hysteria and horror around him. He thought of that calm as essentially European; belonging to a lost age in which the light of reason was still valued, and the worst horror that could be conceived of was a beast with a cut-throat razor.

Now, as the twentieth century ground through its last quarter, there were far greater atrocities to be accounted for, all committed by human beings. The humble orang-outang had been investigated by anthropologists and found to be a solitary herbivore; quiet and philosophical. The true monsters were far less apparent, and far more powerful. Their weapons made razors look pitiful; their crimes were vast. In some ways Lewis was almost glad to be old and close to leaving the century to its own devices. Yes, the snow froze his marrow. Yes, to see a young girl with a face of a goddess uselessly stirred his desires. Yes, he felt like an observer now instead of a participator.

But it had not always been that way.

In 1937, in the very room at number eleven, Quai de Bourbon, where he now sat, there had been experience enough. Paris was still a pleasure-dome in those days, studiously ignoring rumors of war, and preserving, though at times the strain told, an air of sweet naiveté. They had been careless then; in both senses of the word, living endless lives of perfect leisure.

It wasn’t so of course. The lives had not been perfect, or endless. But for a time — a summer, a month, a day — it had seemed nothing in the world would change.

In half a decade Paris would burn, and its playful guilt, which was true innocence, would be soiled permanently. They had spent many days (and nights) in the apartment Lewis now occupied, wonderful times; when he thought of them his stomach seemed to ache with the loss.

His thoughts turned to more recent events. To his New York exhibition, in which his series of paintings chronicling the damnation of Europe had been a brilliant critical success. At the age of seventy-three Lewis Fox was a feted man. Articles were being written in every art periodical. Admirers and buyers had sprung up like mushrooms overnight, eager to purchase his work, to talk with him, to touch his hand. All too late, of course. The agonies of creation were long over, and he’d put down his brushes for the last time five years ago. Now, when he was merely a spectator, his critical triumph seemed like a parody: he viewed the circus from a distance with something approaching distaste.

When the telegram had come from Paris, begging for his assistance, he had been more than pleased to slip away from the ring of imbeciles mouthing his praise.

Now he waited in the darkening apartment, watching the steady flow of cars across the Pont Louis-Philippe, as tired Parisians began the trek home through the snow. Their horns blared; their engines coughed and growled; their yellow foglamps made a ribbon of light across the bridge.

Still Catherine didn’t come.

The snow, which had held off for most of the day, was beginning to fall again, whispering against the window. The traffic flowed across the Seine, the Seine flowed under the traffic. Night fell. At last, he heard footsteps in the hall; exchanged whispers with the housekeeper.

It was Catherine. At last, it was Catherine.

He stood up and stared at the door, imagining it opening before it opened, imagining her in the doorway.

“Lewis, my darling—”

She smiled at him; a pale smile on a paler face. She looked older than he’d expected. How long was it since he’d seen her? Four years or five? Her fragrance was the same as she always wore: and it reassured Lewis with its permanence. He kissed her cold cheeks lightly.

“You look well,” he lied.

“No I don’t,” she said. “If I look well it’s an insult to Phillipe. How can I be well when he’s in such trouble?”

Her manner was brisk, and forbidding, as always.

She was three years his senior, but she treated him as a teacher would a recalcitrant child. She always had: it was her way of being fond.

Greetings over, she sat down beside the window, staring out over the Seine. Small gray ice-floes floated under the bridge, rocking and revolving in the current. The water looked deadly, as though its bitterness could crush the breath out of you.

“What trouble is Phillipe in?”

“He’s accused of—”

A tiny hesitation. A flicker of an eyelid.

“—murder.”

Lewis wanted to laugh; the very thought was preposterous. Phillipe was sixty-nine years old, and as mild-mannered as a lamb.

“It’s true, Lewis. I couldn’t tell you by telegram, you understand. I had to say it myself. Murder. He’s accused of murder.”

“Who?”

“A girl, of course. One of his fancy women.”

“He still gets around, does he?”

“We used to joke he’d die on a woman, remember?”

Lewis half-nodded.

“She was nineteen. Natalie Perec. Quite an educated girl, apparently. And lovely. Long red hair. You remember how Phillipe loved redheads?”

“Nineteen? She was nineteen years old?”

She didn’t reply. Lewis sat down, knowing his pacing of the room irritated her. In profile she was still beautiful, and the wash of yellow-blue through the window softened the lines on her face, magically erasing fifty years of living.

“Where is he?”

“They locked him up. They say he’s dangerous. They say he could kill again.”

Lewis shook his head. There was a pain at his temples, which might go if he could only close his eyes.

“He needs to see you. Very badly.”

But maybe sleep was just an escape. Here was something even he couldn’t be a spectator to.

Phillipe Laborteaux stared at Lewis across the bare, scored table, his face weary and lost. They had greeted each other only with handshakes; all other physical contact was strictly forbidden.

“I am in despair,” he said. “She’s dead. My Natalie is dead.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“I have a little apartment in Montmartre. In the Rue des Martyrs. Just a room really, to entertain friends. Catherine always keeps number 11 so neat, you know, a man can’t spread himself out. Natalie used to spend a lot of time with me there: everyone in the house knew her. She was so good natured, so beautiful. She was studying to go into Medical School. Bright. And she loved me.”

Phillipe was still handsome. In fact, as the fashion in looks came full circle, his elegance, his almost dashing face, his unhurried charm were the order of the day. A breath of a lost age, perhaps.

“I went out on Sunday morning: to the patisserie. And when I came back…”

The words failed him for a moment.

“Lewis…”

His eyes filled with tears of frustration. This was so difficult for him his mouth refused to make the necessary sounds.

“Don’t—” Lewis began.

“I want to tell you, Lewis. I want you to know, I want you to see her as I saw her — so you know what there is… there is… what there is in the world.”

The tears ran down his face in two graceful rivulets. He gripped Lewis’ hand in his, so tightly it ached.

“She was covered in blood. In wounds. Skin torn off… hair torn out. Her tongue was on the pillow, Lewis. Imagine that. She’d bitten it off in her terror. It was just lying on the pillow. And her eyes, all swimming in blood, like she’d wept blood. She was the dearest thing in all creation, Lewis. She was beautiful.”

“No more.”

“I want to die, Lewis.”

“No.”

“I don’t want to live now. There’s no point.”

“They won’t find you guilty.”

“I don’t care, Lewis. You must look after Catherine now. I read about the exhibition—”

He almost smiled.

“—Wonderful for you. We always said, didn’t we? before the war, you’d be the one to be famous, I’d be—”

The smile had gone.

“—notorious. They say terrible things about me now, in the newspapers. An old man going with young girls, you see, that doesn’t make me very wholesome. They probably think I lost my temper because I couldn’t perform with her. That’s what they think, I’m certain.” He lost his way, halted, began again. “You must look after Catherine. She’s got money, but no friends. She’s too cool, you see. Too hurt inside; and that makes people wary of her. You have to stay with her.”

“I shall.”

“I know. I know. That’s why I feel happy, really, to just…” “No, Phillipe.”

“Just die. There’s nothing left for us, Lewis. The world’s too hard.”

Lewis thought of the snow, and the ice-floes, and saw the sense in dying.

The officer in charge of the investigation was less than helpful, though Lewis introduced himself as a relative of the esteemed Detective Dupin. Lewis’ contempt for the shoddily-dressed weasel, sitting in his cluttered hole of an office, made the interview crackle with suppressed anger.

“Your friend,” the Inspector said, picking at the raw cuticle of his thumb, “is a murderer, Monsieur Fox. It is as simple as that. The evidence is overwhelming.”

“I can’t believe that.”

“Believe what you like to believe, that’s your prerogative. We have all the evidence we need to convict Phillipe Laborteaux of murder in the first degree. It was a cold-blooded killing and he will be punished to the full extent of the law. This is my promise.”

“What evidence do you have against him?”

“Monsieur Fox; I am not beholden to you. What evidence we have is our business. Suffice it to say that no other person was seen in the house during the time that the accused claims he was at some fictional patisserie; and as access to the room in which the deceased was found is only possible by the stairs—”

“What about a window?”

“A plain wall: three flights up. Maybe an acrobat: an acrobat might do it.”

“And the state of the body?”

The Inspector made a face. Disgust.

“Horrible. Skin and muscle stripped from the bone. All the spine exposed. Blood; much blood.”

“Phillipe is seventy.”

“So?”

“An old man would not be capable—”

“In other respects,” the Inspector interrupted, “he seems to have been quite capable, oui? The lover, yes? The passionate lover: he was capable of that.”

“And what motive would you claim he had?”

His mouth scalloped, his eyes rolled, and he tapped his chest.

“Le coeur humain,” he said, as if despairing of reason in affairs of the heart. “Le coeur humain, quel mystère, n’est-ce pas?” and exhaling the stench of his ulcer at Lewis, he proffered the open door.

“Merci, Monsieur Fox. I understand your confusion, oui? But you are wasting your time. A crime is a crime. It is real; not like your paintings.”

He saw the surprise on Lewis’ face.

“Oh, I am not so uncivilized as not to know your reputation, Monsieur Fox. But I ask you, make your fictions as best you can; that is your genius, oui? Mine; to investigate the truth.”

Lewis couldn’t bear the weasel’s cant any longer.

“Truth?” he snapped back at the Inspector. “You wouldn’t know the truth if you tripped over it.”

The weasel looked as though he’d been slapped with a wet fish.

It was precious little satisfaction; but it made Lewis feel better for at least five minutes.

The house on the Rue des Martyrs was not in good condition, and Lewis could smell the damp as he climbed to the little room on the third floor. Doors opened as he passed, and inquiring whispers ushered him up the stairs, but nobody tried to stop him. The room where the atrocity had happened was locked. Frustrated, but not knowing how or why it would help Phillipe’s case to see the interior of the room, he made his way back down the stairs and into the bitter air.

Catherine was back at the Quai de Bourbon. As soon as Lewis saw her he knew there was something new to hear. Her gray hair was loosed from the bun she favored wearing, and hung unbraided at her shoulders. Her face was a sickly yellow-gray by the lamplight. She shivered, even in the clogged air of the centrally-heated apartment.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“I went to Phillipe’s apartment.”

“So did I. It was locked.”

“I have the key: Phillipe’s spare key. I just wanted to pick up a few clothes for him.”

Lewis nodded.

“And?”

“Somebody else was there.”

“Police?”

“No.”

“Who?”

“I couldn’t see. I don’t know exactly. He was dressed in a big coat, scarf over his face. Hat. Gloves.” She paused. Then, “He had a razor, Lewis.”

“A razor?”

“An open razor, like a barber.”

Something jangled in the back of Lewis Fox’s mind. An open razor; a man dressed so well he couldn’t be recognized.

“I was terrified.”

“Did he hurt you?”

She shook her head.

“I screamed and he ran away.”

“Didn’t say anything to you?”

“No.”

“Maybe a friend of Phillipe’s?”

“I know Phillipe’s friends.”

“Then of the girl. A brother.”

“Perhaps. But—”

“What?”

“There was something odd about him. He smelt of perfume, stank of it, and he walked with such mincing little steps, even though he was huge.”

Lewis put his arm around her.

“Whoever it was, you scared them off. You just mustn’t go back there. If we have to fetch clothes for Phillipe, I’ll gladly go.”

“Thank you. I feel a fool: he may have just stumbled in. Come to look at the murder-chamber. People do that, don’t they? Out of some morbid fascination…”

“Tomorrow I’ll speak to the Weasel.”

“Weasel?”

“Inspector Marais. Have him search the place.”

“Did you see Phillipe?”

“Yes.”

“Is he well?”

Lewis said nothing for a long moment.

“He wants to die, Catherine. He’s given up fighting already, before he goes to trial.”

“But he didn’t do anything.”

“We can’t prove that.”

“You’re always boasting about your ancestors. Your blessed Dupin. You prove it…”

“Where do I start?”

“Speak to some of his friends, Lewis. Please. Maybe the woman had enemies.”

Jacques Solal stared at Lewis through his round-bellied spectacles, his irises huge and distorted through the glass. He was the worse for too much cognac.

“She hadn’t got any enemies,” he said, “not her. Oh maybe a few women jealous of her beauty…”

Lewis toyed with the wrapped cubes of sugar that had come with his coffee. Solal was as uninformative as he was drunk; but unlikely as it seemed Catherine had described the runt across the table as Phillipe’s closest friend.

“Do you think Phillipe murdered her?”

Solal pursed his lips.

“Who knows?”

“What’s your instinct?”

“Ah; he was my friend. If I knew who had killed her I would say so.”

It seemed to be the truth. Maybe the little man was simply drowning his sorrows in cognac.

“He was a gentleman,” Solal said, his eyes drifting towards the street. Through the steamed glass of the Brasserie window brave Parisians were struggling through the fury of another blizzard, vainly attempting to keep their dignity and their posture in the teeth of a gale.

“A gentleman,” he said again.

“And the girl?”

“She was beautiful, and he was in love with her. She had other admirers, of course. A woman like her—”

“Jealous admirers?”

“Who knows?”

Again: who knows? The inquiry hung on the air like a shrug. Who knows? Who knows? Lewis began to understand the Inspector’s passion for truth. For the first time in ten years perhaps a goal appeared in his life; an ambition to shoot this indifferent “who knows?” out of the air. To discover what had happened in that room on the Rue des Martyrs. Not an approximation, not a fictionalized account, but the truth, the absolute, unquestionable truth.

“Do you remember if there were any particular men who fancied her?” he asked.

Solal grinned. He only had two teeth in his lower jaw.

“Oh yes. There was one.”

“Who?”

“I never knew his name. A big man: I saw him outside the house three or four times. Though to smell him you’d have thought—”

He made an unmistakable face that implied he thought the man was homosexual. The arched eyebrows and the pursed lips made him look doubly ridiculous behind the thick spectacles.

“He smelt?”

“Oh yes.”

“Of what?”

“Perfume, Lewis. Perfume.”

Somewhere in Paris there was a man who had known the girl Phillipe loved. Jealous rage had overcome him. In a fit of uncontrollable anger he had broken into Phillipe’s apartment and slaughtered the girl. It was as clear as that.

Somewhere in Paris.

“Another cognac?”

Solal shook his head.

“Already I’m sick,” he said.

Lewis called the waiter across, and as he did so his eye alighted on a cluster of newspaper clippings pinned behind the bar.

Solal followed his gaze.

“Phillipe: he liked the pictures,” he said.

Lewis stood up.

“He came here, sometimes, to see them.”

The cuttings were old, stained and fading. Some were presumably of purely local interest. Accounts of a fireball seen in a nearby street. Another about a boy of two burned to death in his cot. One concerned an escaped puma; one, an unpublished manuscript by Rimbaud; a third (accompanied by a photograph) detailed casualties in a plane crash at Orleans airport. But there were other cuttings too; some far older than others. Atrocities, bizarre murders, ritual rapes, an advertisement for Fantômas, another for Cocteau’s La Belle et La Bete. And almost buried under this embarrassment of bizarreries, was a sepia photograph so absurd it could have come from the hand of Max Ernst. A half-ring of well-dressed gentlemen, many sporting the thick mustaches popular in the eighteen-nineties, were grouped around the vast, bleeding bulk of an ape, which was suspended by its feet from a lamppost. The faces in the picture bore expressions of mute pride; of absolute authority over the dead beast, which Lewis clearly recognized as a gorilla. Its inverted head had an almost noble tilt in death. Its brow was deep and furrowed, its jaw, though shattered by a fearsome wound, was thinly bearded like that of a patrician, and its eyes, rolled back in its head, seemed full of concern for this merciless world. They reminded Lewis, those rolling eyes, of the Weasel in his hole, tapping his chest.

“Le coeur humain.”

Pitiful.

“What is that?” he asked the acne-ridden barman, pointing at the picture of the dead gorilla.

A shrug was the reply: indifferent to the fate of men and apes.

“Who knows?” said Solal at his back. “Who knows?”

It was not the ape of Poe’s story, that was certain. That tale had been told in 1835, and the photograph was far more recent. Besides, the ape in the picture was a gorilla: clearly a gorilla.

Had history repeated itself? Had another ape, a different species but an ape nevertheless, been loosed on the streets of Paris at the turn of the century?

And if so, if the story of the ape could repeat itself once… why not twice?

As Lewis walked through the freezing night back to the apartment at the Quai de Bourbon, the imagined repetition of events became more attractive; and now further symmetry presented itself to him. Was it possible that he, the great nephew of C. Auguste Dupin, might become involved in another pursuit, not entirely dissimilar from the first?

The key to Phillipe’s room at the Rue des Martyrs was icy in Lewis’ hand, and though it was now well past midnight he couldn’t help but turn off at the bridge and make his way up the Boulevard de Sebastopol, west on to Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle, then north again towards the Place Pigalle. It was a long, exhausting trudge, but he felt in need of the cold air, to keep his head clear of emotionalism. It took him an hour and a half to reach the Rue des Martyrs.

It was Saturday night, and there was still a lot of noise in a number of the rooms. Lewis made his way up the two flights as quietly as he could, his presence masked by the din. The key turned easily, and the door swung open.

Street lights illuminated the room. The bed, which dominated the space, was bare. Presumably sheets and blankets had been taken away for forensic tests. The eruption of blood onto the mattress was a mulberry color in the gloom. Otherwise, there was no sign of the violence the room had witnessed.

Lewis reached for the light switch, and snapped it on. Nothing happened. He stepped deeply into the room and stared up at the light fixture. The bulb was shattered.

He half thought of retreating, of leaving the room to darkness, and returning in the morning when there were fewer shadows. But as he stood under the broken bulb his eyes began to pierce the gloom a little better, and he began to make out the shape of a large teak chest of drawers along the far wall. Surely it was a matter of a few minutes work to find a change of clothes for Phillipe. Otherwise he would have to return the next day; another long journey through the snow. Better to do it now, and save his bones.

The room was large, and had been left in chaos by the police. Lewis stumbled and cursed as he crossed to the chest of drawers, tripping over a fallen lamp, and a shattered vase. Downstairs the howls and shrieks of a well-advanced party drowned any noise he made. Was it an orgy or a fight? The noise could have been either.

He struggled with the top drawer of the teak chest, and eventually wrenched it open, ferreting in the depths for the bare essentials of Phillipe’s comfort: a clean undershirt, a pair of socks, initialed handkerchiefs, beautifully pressed.

He sneezed. The chilly weather had thickened the catarrh on his chest and the mucus in his sinuses. A handkerchief was to hand, and he blew his nose, clearing his blocked nostrils. For the first time the smell of the room came to him.

One odor predominated, above the damp, and the stale vegetables. Perfume, the lingering scent of perfume.

He turned into the darkened room, hearing his bones creak, and his eyes fell on the shadow behind the bed. A huge shadow, a bulk that swelled as it rose into view.

It was, he saw at once, the razor-wielding stranger. He was here: in waiting.

Curiously, Lewis wasn’t frightened.

“What are you doing?” he demanded, in a loud, strong voice.

As he emerged from his hiding place the face of the stranger came into the watery light from the street; a broad, flat-featured, flayed face. His eyes were deep-set, but without malice; and he was smiling, smiling generously, at Lewis.

“Who are you?” Lewis asked again.

The man shook his head; shook his body, in fact, his gloved hands gesturing around his mouth. Was he dumb? The shaking of the head was more violent now, as though he was about to have a fit.

“Are you all right?”

Suddenly, the shaking stopped, and to his surprise Lewis saw tears, large, syrupy tears well up in the stranger’s eyes and roll down his rough cheeks and into the bush of his beard.

As if ashamed of his display of feelings, the man turned away from the light, making a thick noise of sobbing in his throat, and exited. Lewis followed, more curious about this stranger than nervous of his intentions.

“Wait!”

The man was already half-way down the first flight of stairs, nimble despite his build.

“Please wait, I want to talk to you.” Lewis began down the stairs after him, but the pursuit was lost before it was started. Lewis’ joints were stiff with age and the cold, and it was late. No time to be running after a much younger man, along a pavement made lethal with ice and snow. He chased the stranger as far as the door and then watched him run off down the street; his gait was mincing as Catherine had said. Almost a waddle, ridiculous in a man so big.

The smell of his perfume was already snatched away by the north-east wind. Breathless, Lewis climbed the stairs again, past the din of the party, to claim a set of clothes for Phillipe.

The next day Paris woke to a blizzard of unprecedented ferocity. The calls to Mass went unrequited, the hot Sunday croissants went unbought, the newspapers lay unread on the vendor’s stalls. Few people had either the nerve or the motive to step outside into the howling gale. They sat by their fires, hugging their knees, and dreamt of spring.

Catherine wanted to go to the prison to visit Phillipe, but Lewis insisted that he go alone. It was not simply the cold weather that made him cautious on her behalf; he had difficult words to say to Phillipe, delicate questions to ask him. After the previous night’s encounter in his room, he had no doubt that Phillipe had a rival, probably a murderous rival. The only way to save Phillipe’s life, it seemed, was to trace the man. And if that meant delving into Phillipe’s sexual arrangements, then so be it. But it wasn’t a conversation he, or Phillipe, would have wanted to conduct in Catherine’s presence.

The fresh clothes Lewis had brought were searched, then given to Phillipe, who took them with a nod of thanks.

“I went to the house last night to fetch these for you.”

“Oh.”

“There was somebody in the room already.”

Phillipe’s jaw muscle began to churn, as he ground his teeth together. He was avoiding Lewis’ eyes.

“A big man, with a beard. Do you know him, or of him?”

“No.”

“Phillipe—”

“No!”

“The same man attacked Catherine,” Lewis said.

“What?” Phillipe had begun to tremble.

“With a razor.”

“Attacked her?” Phillipe said. “Are you sure?”

“Or was going to.”

“No! He would never have touched her. Never!”

“Who is it Phillipe? Do you know?”

“Tell her not to go there again; please, Lewis—” His eyes implored. “Please, for God’s sake tell her never to go there again. Will you do that? Or you. Not you either.”

“Who is it?”

“Tell her.” “I will. But you must tell me who this man is, Phillipe.”

He shook his head, grinding his teeth together audibly now.

“You wouldn’t understand, Lewis. I couldn’t expect you to understand.”

“Tell me; I want to help.”

“Just let me die.”

“Who is he?”

“Just let me die… I want to forget, why do you try to make me remember? I want to—”

He looked up again: his eyes were bloodshot, and red-rimmed from nights of tears. But now it seemed there were no more tears left in him; just an arid place where there had been an honest fear of death, a love of love, and an appetite for life. What met Lewis’ eyes was a universal indifference: to continuation, to self-preservation, to feeling.

“She was a whore,” he suddenly exclaimed. His hands were fists. Lewis had never seen Phillipe make a fist in his life. Now his nails bit into the soft flesh of his palm until blood began to flow.

“Whore,” he said again, his voice too loud in the little cell.

“Keep your row down,” snapped the guard.

“A whore!” This time Phillipe hissed the accusation through teeth exposed like those of an angry baboon.

Lewis could make no sense of the transformation.

“You began all this—” Phillipe said, looking straight at Lewis, meeting his eyes fully for the first time. It was a bitter accusation, though Lewis didn’t understand its significance.

“Me?”

“With your stories. With your damn Dupin.”

“Dupin?”

“It was all a lie: all stupid lies. Women, murder—”

“You mean the Rue Morgue story?”

“You were so proud of that, weren’t you? All those silly lies. None of it was true.”

“Yes it was.”

“No. It never was, Lewis: it was a story, that’s all. Dupin, the Rue Morgue, the murders…”

His voice trailed away, as though the next words were unsayable.

“…the ape.”

Those were the words: the apparently unspeakable was spoken as though each syllable had been cut from his throat.

“…the ape.”

“What about the ape?”

“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.”

Lewis wiped his lip as the warders escorted the prisoner out of the room and back to his happy drugged oblivion. All he could think of now, left alone in the cold interview room, was that Phillipe had it easy. He’d taken refuge in pretended guilt, and locked himself away where memory, and revenge, and the truth, the wild, marauding truth, could never touch him again. He hated Phillipe at that moment, with all his heart. Hated him for the dilettante and the coward he’d always known him to be. It wasn’t a more gentle world Phillipe had created around him; it was a hiding place, as much a lie as that summer of 1937 had been. No life could be lived the way he’d lived it without a reckoning coming sooner or later; and here it was.

That night, in the safety of his cell, Phillipe woke. It was warm, but he was cold. In the utter dark he chewed at his wrists until a pulse of blood bubbled into his mouth. He lay back on his bed, and quietly splashed and fountained away to death, out of sight and out of mind.

The suicide was reported in a small article on the second page of Le Monde. The big news of the following day however was the sensational murder of a redheaded prostitute in a little house off the Rue de Rochechquant. Monique Zevaco had been found at three o’clock in the morning by her flatmate, her body in a state so horrible as to “defy description.”

Despite the alleged impossibility of the task, the media set about describing the indescribable with a morbid will. Every last scratch, tear and gouging on Monique’s partially nude body — tattooed, drooled Le Monde, with a map of France— was chronicled in detail. As indeed was the appearance of her well-dressed, over-perfumed murderer, who had apparently watched her at her toilet through a small back window, then broken in and attacked Mademoiselle Zevaco in her bathroom. The murderer had then fled down the stairs, bumping into the flatmate who would minutes after discover Mademoiselle Zevaco’s mutilated corpse. Only one commentator made any connection between the murder at the Rue des Martyrs and the slaughter of Mme Zevaco; and he failed to pick up on the curious coincidence that the accused Phillipe Laborteaux had that same night taken his own life.

The funeral took place in a storm, the cortege edging its pitiful way through the abandoned streets towards Montparnasse with the lashing snow entirely blotting out the road ahead. Lewis sat with Catherine and Jacques Solal as they laid Phillipe to rest. Every one of his circle had deserted him, unwilling to attend the funeral of a suicide and of a suspected murderer. His wit, his good looks, his infinite capacity to charm went for nothing at the end.

He was not, as it turned out, entirely unmourned by strangers. As they stood at the graveside, the cold cutting into them, Solal sidled up to Lewis and nudged him.

“What?”

“Over there. Under the tree.” Solal nodded beyond the praying priest.

The stranger was standing at a distance, almost hidden by the marble mausoleums. A heavy black scarf was wrapped across his face, and a wide-brimmed hat pulled down over his brow, but his bulk was unmistakable. Catherine had seen him too. She was shaking as she stood, wrapped round by Lewis’ embrace, not just with cold, but with fear. It was as though the creature was some morbid angel, come to hover a while, and enjoy the grief. It was grotesque, and eerie, that this thing should come to see Phillipe consigned to the frozen earth. What did it feel? Anguish? Guilt?

Yes, did it feel guilt?

It knew it had been seen, and it turned its back, shambling away. Without a word to Lewis, Jacques Solal slipped away from the grave in pursuit. In a short while both the stranger and his pursuer were erased by the snow.

Back at the Quai de Bourbon Catherine and Lewis said nothing of the incident. A kind of barrier had appeared between them, forbidding contact on any level but the most trivial. There was no purpose in analysis, and none in regrets. Phillipe was dead. The past, their past together, was dead. This final chapter in their joint lives soured utterly everything that preceded it, so that no shared memory could be enjoyed without the pleasure being spoilt. Phillipe had died horribly, devouring his own flesh and blood, perhaps driven mad by a knowledge he possessed of his own guilt and depravity. No innocence, no history of joy could remain unstained by that fact. Silently they mourned the loss, not only of Phillipe, but of their own past. Lewis understood now Phillipe’s reluctance to live when there was such loss in the world.

Solal rang. Breathless after his chase, but elated, he spoke in whispers to Lewis, clearly enjoying the excitement.

“I’m at the Gare du Nord, and I’ve found out where our friend lives. I’ve found him Lewis!”

“Excellent. I’ll come straight away. I’ll meet you on the steps of the Gare du Nord. I’ll take a cab: ten minutes.”

“It’s in the basement of number sixteen, Rue des Fleurs. I’ll see you there—”

“Don’t go in, Jacques. Wait for me. Don’t—”

The telephone clicked and Solal was gone. Lewis reached for his coat.

“Who was that?”

She asked, but she didn’t want to know. Lewis shrugged on his overcoat and said: “Nobody at all. Don’t worry. I won’t be long.”

“Take your scarf,” she said, not glancing over her shoulder.

“Yes. Thank you.”

“You’ll catch a chill.”

He left her gazing over the night-clad Seine, watching the ice-floes dance together on the black water.

When he arrived at the house on the Rue des Fleurs, Solal was not to be seen, but fresh footprints in the powdery snow led to the front door of number sixteen and then, foiled, went around the back of the house. Lewis followed them. As he stepped into the yard behind the house, through a rotted gate that had been crudely forced by Solal, he realized he had come without a weapon. Best to go back, perhaps, find a crowbar, a knife; something. Even as he was debating with himself, the back door opened, and the stranger appeared, dressed in his now familiar overcoat. Lewis flattened himself against the wall of the yard, where the shadows were deepest, certain that he would be seen. But the beast was about other business. He stood in the doorway with his face fully exposed, and for the first time, in the reflected moonlight off the snow, Lewis could see the creature’s physiognomy plainly. Its face was freshly shaved; and the scent of cologne was strong, even in the open air. Its skin was pink as a peach, though nicked in one or two places by a careless blade. Lewis thought of the open-razor it had apparently threatened Catherine with. Was that what its business had been in Phillipe’s room, the purloining of a good razor? It was pulling its leather gloves on over its wide, shaved hands, making small coughing noises in its throat that sounded almost like grunts of satisfaction. Lewis had the impression that it was preparing itself for the outside world; and the sight was touching as much as intimidating. All this thing wanted was to be human. It was aspiring, in its way, to the model Phillipe had given it, had nurtured in it. Now, deprived of its mentor, confused and unhappy, it was attempting to face the world as it had been taught to do. There was no way back for it. Its days of innocence had gone: it could never be an unambitious beast again. Trapped in its new persona, it had no choice but to continue in the life its master had awoken its taste for. Without glancing in Lewis’ direction, it gently closed the door behind it and crossed the yard, its walk transforming in those few steps from a simian roll to the mincing waddle that it used to simulate humanity.

Then it was gone.

Lewis waited a moment in the shadows, breathing shallowly. Every bone in his body ached with cold now, and his feet were numb. The beast showed no sign of returning; so he ventured out of his hiding place and tried the door. It was not locked. As he stepped inside a stench struck him: the sickly sweet smell of rotten fruit mingled with the cloying cologne: the zoo and the boudoir.

He edged down a flight of slimy stone steps, and along a short, tiled corridor towards a door. It too was unlocked; and the bare bulb inside illuminated a bizarre scene.

On the floor, a large, somewhat thread-bare Persian carpet; sparse furnishings; a bed, roughly covered with blankets and stained hessian; a wardrobe, bulging with oversize clothes; discarded fruit in abundance, some trodden into the floor; a bucket, filled with straw and stinking of droppings. On the wall, a large crucifix. On the mantelpiece a photograph of Catherine, Lewis, and Phillipe together in a sunlit past, smiling. At the sink, the creature’s shaving kit. Soap, brush, razor. Fresh suds. On the dresser a pile of money, left in careless abundance beside a pile of hypodermics and a collection of small bottles. It was warm in the beast’s garret; perhaps the furnace for the house roared in an adjacent cellar. Solal was not there.

Suddenly, a noise.

Lewis turned to the door, expecting the ape to be filling it, teeth bared, eyes demonic. But he had lost all orientation; the noise was not from the door but from the wardrobe. Behind the pile of clothes there was a movement.

“Solal?”

Jacques Solal half fell out of the wardrobe, and sprawled across the Persian carpet. His face was disfigured by one foul wound, so that it was all but impossible to find any part of his features that was still Jacques.

The creature had taken hold of his lip and pulled his muscle off his bone, as though removing a balaclava. His exposed teeth chattered away in nervous response to oncoming death; his limbs jangled and shook. But Jacques was already gone. These shudders and jerks were not signs of thought or personality, just the din of passing. Lewis knelt at Solal’s side; his stomach was strong. During the war, being a conscientious objector, he had volunteered to serve in the Military Hospital, and there were few transformations of the human body he had not seen in one combination or another. Tenderly, he cradled the body, not noticing the blood. He hadn’t loved this man, scarcely cared for him at all, but now all he wanted was to take him away, out of the ape’s cage, and find him a human grave. He’d take the photograph too. That was too much, giving the beast a photograph of the three friends together. It made him hate Phillipe more than ever.

He hauled the body off the carpet. It required a gargantuan effort, and the sultry heat in the room, after the chill of the outside world, made him dizzy. He could feel a jittering nervousness in his limbs. His body was close to betraying him, he knew it; close to failing, to losing its coherence and collapsing.

Not here. In God’s name, not here.

Maybe he should go now, and find a phone. That would be wise. Call the police, yes… call Catherine, yes… even find somebody in the house to help him. But that would mean leaving Jacques in the lair, for the beast to assault again, and he had become strangely protective of the corpse; he was unwilling to leave it alone. In an anguish of confused feelings, unable to leave Jacques yet unable to move him far, he stood in the middle of the room and did nothing at all. That was best; yes. Nothing at all. Too tired, too weak. Nothing at all was best.

The reverie went on interminably; the old man fixed beyond movement at the crux of his feelings, unable to go forward into the future, or back into the soiled past. Unable to remember. Unable to forget.

Waiting, in a dreamy half-life, for the end of the world.

It came home noisily like a drunken man, and the sound of its opening the outer door stirred Lewis into a slow response. With some difficulty he hauled Jacques into the wardrobe, and hid there himself, with the faceless head in his lap.

There was a voice in the room, a woman’s voice. Maybe it wasn’t the beast, after all. But no: through the crack of the wardrobe door Lewis could see the beast, and a red-haired young woman with him. She was talking incessantly, the perpetual trivia of a spaced-out mind.

“You’ve got more; oh you sweetie, oh you dear man, that’s wonderful. Look at all this stuff.”

She had pills in her hands and was swallowing them like sweets, gleeful as a child at Christmas.

“Where did you get all this? OK, if you don’t want to tell me, it’s fine by me.”

Was this Phillipe’s doing too, or had the ape stolen the stuff for his own purposes? Did he regularly seduce redheaded prostitutes with drugs?

The girl’s grating babble was calming now, as the pills took effect, sedating her, transporting her to a private world. Lewis watched, entranced, as she began to undress.

“It’s so… hot… in here.”

The ape watched, his back to Lewis. What expression did that shaved face wear? Was there lust in its eyes, or doubt?

The girl’s breasts were beautiful, though her body was rather too thin. The young skin was white, the nipples flower-pink. She raised her arms over her head and as she stretched the perfect globes rose and flattened slightly. The ape reached a wide hand to her body and tenderly plucked at one of her nipples, rolling it between dark-meat fingers. The girl sighed.

“Shall I… take everything off?”

The monkey grunted.

“You don’t say much, do you?”

She shimmied out of her red skirt. Now she was naked but for a pair of knickers. She lay on the bed stretching again, luxuriating in her body and the welcome heat of the room, not even bothering to look at her admirer.

Wedged underneath Solal’s body, Lewis began to feel dizzy again. His lower limbs were now completely numb, and he had no feeling in his right arm, which was pressed against the back of the wardrobe, yet he didn’t dare move. The ape was capable of anything, he knew that. If he was discovered what might it not choose to do, to him and to the girl?

Every part of his body was now either nerveless, or wracked with pain. In his lap Solal’s seeping body seemed to become heavier with every moment. His spine was screaming, and the back of his neck pained him as though pierced with hot knitting-needles. The agony was becoming unbearable; he began to think he would die in this pathetic hiding place, while the ape made love.

The girl sighed, and Lewis looked again at the bed. The ape had its hand between her legs, and she squirmed beneath its ministrations.

“Yes, oh yes,” she said again and again, as her lover stripped her completely.

It was too much. The dizziness throbbed through Lewis’ cortex. Was this death? The lights in the head, and the whine in the ears?

He closed his eyes, blotting out the sight of the lovers, but unable to shut out the noise. It seemed to go on forever, invading his head. Sighs, laughter, little shrieks.

At last, darkness.

Lewis woke on an invisible rack; his body had been wrenched out of shape by the limitations of his hiding-place. He looked up. The door of the wardrobe was open, and the ape was staring down at him, its mouth attempting a grin. It was naked; and its body was almost entirely shaved. In the cleft of its immense chest a small gold crucifix glinted. Lewis recognized the jewelry immediately. He had bought it for Phillipe in the Champs-Élysées just before the war. Now it nestled in a tuft of reddish-orange hair. The beast proffered a hand to Lewis, and he automatically took it. The coarse-palmed grip hauled him from under Solal’s body. He couldn’t stand straight. His legs were rubbery, his ankles wouldn’t support him. The beast took hold of him, and steadied him. His head spinning, Lewis looked down into the wardrobe, where Solal was lying, tucked up like a baby in its womb, face to the wall.

The beast closed the door on the corpse, and helped Lewis to the sink, where he was sick.

“Phillipe?” He dimly realized that the woman was still here: in the bed: just woken after a night of love.

“Phillipe: who’s this?” She was scrabbling for pills on the table beside the bed. The beast sauntered across and snatched them from her hands.

“Ah… Phillipe… please. Do you want me to go with this one as well? I will if you want. Just give me back the pills.”

She gestured towards Lewis.

“I don’t usually go with old men.”

The ape growled at her. The expression on her face changed, as though for the first time she had an inkling of what this John was. But the thought was too difficult for her drugged mind, and she let it go.

“Please, Phillipe…” she whimpered.

Lewis was looking at the ape. It had taken the photograph from the mantelpiece. Its dark nail was on Lewis’ picture. It was smiling. It recognized him, even though forty-odd years had drained so much life from him.

“Lewis,” it said, finding the word quite easy to say.

The old man had nothing in his stomach to vomit, and no harm left to feel. This was the end of the century, he should be ready for anything. Even to be greeted as a friend of a friend by the shaved beast that loomed in front of him. It would not harm him, he knew that. Probably Phillipe had told the ape about their lives together; made the creature love Catherine and himself as much as it had adored Phillipe.

“Lewis,” it said again, and gestured to the woman (now sitting open-legged on the bed), offering her for his pleasure.

Lewis shook his head.

In and out, in and out, part fiction, part fact.

It had come to this; offered a human woman by this naked ape. It was the last, God help him, the very last chapter in the fiction his great uncle had begun. From love to murder back to love. Again. The love of an ape for a man. He had caused it, with his dreams of fictional heroes, steeped in absolute reason. He had coaxed Phillipe into making real the stories of a lost youth. He was to blame. Not this poor strutting ape, lost between the jungle and the Stock Exchange; not Phillipe, wanting to be young forever; certainly not cold Catherine, who after tonight would be completely alone. It was him. His the crime, his the guilt, his the punishment.

His legs had regained a little feeling, and he began to stagger to the door.

“Aren’t you staying?” said the red-haired woman.

“This thing…” he couldn’t bring himself to name the animal.

“You mean Phillipe?”

“He isn’t called Phillipe,” Lewis said. “He’s not even human.”

“Please yourself,” she said, and shrugged.

To his back, the ape spoke, saying his name. But this time, instead of it coming out as a sort of grunt-word, its simian palate caught Phillipe’s inflexion with unnerving accuracy, better than the most skillful of parrots. It was Phillipe’s voice, perfectly.

“Lewis,” it said.

Not pleading. Not demanding. Simply naming, for the pleasure of naming, an equal.

The passers-by who saw the old man clamber on to the parapet of the Pont du Carrousel stared, but made no attempt to stop him jumping. He teetered a moment as he stood up straight, then pitched over into the threshing, churning ice-water.

One or two people wandered to the other side of the bridge to see if the current had caught him: it had. He rose to the surface, his face blue-white and blank as a baby’s, then some intricate eddy snatched at his feet and pulled him under. The thick water closed over his head and churned on.

“Who was that?” somebody asked.

“Who knows?”

It was a clear-heaven day; the last of the winter’s snow had fallen, and the thaw would begin by noon. Birds, exulting in the sudden sun, swooped over the Sacré Coeur. Paris began to undress for spring, its virgin white too spoiled to be worn for long.

In mid-morning, a young woman with red hair, her arm linked in that of a large ugly man, took a leisurely stroll to the steps of the Sacré Coeur. The sun blessed them. Bells rang.

It was a new day.