The Erasers

5

Madame Jean glances cautiously toward the post office. Everything is calm along the parkway.

But everything seemed just as calm before, and yet some thing happened, here, fifty yards away, at the corner of the Rue Jonas. It had already begun in September-otherwise the commissioner would not have sent for her this afternoon. Probably she was taking part in their shady deals without even knowing it. In any case, she didn’t get anything out of it.

She certainly gave the man letters, without thinking twice about it: she had enough trouble checking the numbers on the cards, without examining the faces of the people who handed them to her. He might even have come often: the little Dexter girl obviously knew him well. He said he wasn’t the one, of course, and Madame Jean wasn’t going to say anything different! They’re big enough to get out of it by themselves. Yet she had proof of the fact that he really was the one: if he was so eager to find another post office this morning, it was because he couldn’t go back to that one, where he would have been recognized right away.

When she saw him again, after lunch, he was so tired that he had fallen asleep over his table. What had he been doing all morning long? Something else besides sending a telegram, that was sure. And why was he loitering around here again?

A doctor, Emilie said-maybe. He’s well dressed; he looks important. Madame Jean tries to imagine Wallas with the heavy glasses described by the old maid; actually it makes him into quite a likely doctor. Which obviously does not keep him from being a criminal.

“There are some funny doctors around here, you know.” That’s the truth. And who don’t know much: the epidemic proved that. But this one’s sly. He’s even managed to put the commissioner in his pocket: a little more and he’d have been running the investigation! He sounded so cocky when he answered the little Dexter girl that the poor thing didn’t dare say mother word. They don’t have much chance of finding the guilty man now.

Madame Jean thinks about this strange turn of events inwhich the guilty man himself takes charge of the investigation. Since she cannot make any headway in so confusing a supposition, she deliberately turns her eyes away-and begins thinking about something else.