10

The rain stopped at 4 a.m., and a violent west wind swept through the empty streets. The inspector, sitting on Mr Hire’s bed, rubbed his eyes and reluctantly stood up.

‘Your turn!’ he said to the detective. ‘What time is it?’

He was stretching this way and that in an effort to wake up. The back of his jacket was badly creased. While his colleague took his place on the bed, he automatically opened up a cardboard box that had been found in the back of the wardrobe. It contained the murdered woman’s handbag – an ordinary handbag with a deer’s head embroidered on it, its threadbare silk lining caked with powder.

‘You’ll wake me?’

The inspector looked at the handbag with big sleepy eyes, and rifled around inside it – bank notes, lottery ticket, lipstick, a pack of cigarettes that had barely been touched.

‘This fellow is either a genuine hard case or a fool!’ he grumbled, returning the handbag to the box.

He filled his pipe and looked up at the sky, the white and grey clouds roaming beneath the moon.

Mr Hire, seated at a table behind a bottle of champagne, was repeating obstinately: ‘No, I’m telling you, no. Stop asking!’

But the woman sitting with him wasn’t ready to stop, she sat there smoking, leaning close and pressing her breast against his side.

‘Aren’t you made like any other man?’

‘I’m engaged!’

It was the first time he’d said the word aloud. He was so moved by it, he couldn’t comprehend the woman’s further insistence.

‘As if that made any difference!’

‘No!’

Finally she stood up, leery and worn out.

‘And you think your fiancée isn’t playing you for a fool?’

But he didn’t budge. Mr Hire was huddled in a corner of the almost-empty cabaret. The musicians eyed him morosely, wondering if he would ever leave.

‘Waiter!’

There was a moment of hope.

‘Bring me something to write with.’

‘I don’t know if I can …’ the waiter grumbled, walking off. He talked it over with the manager, the whole time looking over at Mr Hire. The two women who had waited up till now got dressed, shook hands with the musicians and departed. Finally, the waiter brought over a small bottle of violet ink, a pen and a sheet of lined paper, along with an envelope.

‘We close in five minutes,’ he announced.

The saxophonist looked questioningly at the manager, who shook his head no. Not worth it! The musicians may as well pack up and go.

The pen sputtered, catching on the rough paper:

Monsieur le Procureur de la République,

I have the honour of being in a position to inform you that the perpetrator of the Villejuif murder is a young man from the neighbourhood, very likely a mechanic, by the name of Émile. I am unfamiliar with his surname but I do know that every Sunday he goes to the stadium at Colombes. He is of a medium height and build, and is accustomed to wearing a tan felt cap.

I remain, dear sir, your humble servant.

He didn’t sign the letter, but wrote in the address and asked for a stamp. By the time the letter arrived at its destination, he would be long gone, and Alice would be with him.

‘One hundred and fifty francs!’ declaimed the waiter, who had reached the limits of his patience.

Outside, patches of road were already dry of rain, and the wind rustled in the trees overhead. From time to time, a market cart would rumble by, or the footsteps of a pedestrian could be heard echoing through the neighbourhood streets.

There were ten of them clustered near the door of Gare de Lyon. A few had set down their bags and were sitting on top of them, half-asleep. At the back, in the locked and empty station, an occasional train whistle could be heard.

It was very cold. The lights came on in a small bar down the street. A man was making the rounds through all the rooms of the station, carrying a lantern, opening some doors and closing others, noisily shifting things as he went.

Mr Hire was so tired he was dizzy, but it was just another moment to live through, the worst moment: the transition from night to day. He closed his eyes for a minute or two, and the burning sensation behind his eyelids gave him an intense pleasure. He smiled vaguely at his own thoughts.

The footsteps inside the station approached the door. A key creaked. The iron bars were removed, and the sleepers rose, all crumpled, and made their way into the hall, which gaped like the interior of a vast bell. There was only one ticket window lit up. Mr Hire was the first to get there, but still he had to wait while the agent changed into his blazer and filled his pen up with ink.

‘Two for Geneva, second class.’

‘Round-trip?’

‘One way.’

All of a sudden, he shuddered. His fingers trembled, fumbling in the pockets of his wallet.

‘It’s at 5.54, right?’

‘Forty-three.’

And the ticket agent gave him a sharp look. He stared at his moustache, his hands, his wallet. He was still leaning forwards as Mr Hire bounced into the snack bar. The station was filing up. One waiter was arranging croissants in little baskets while another drew semicircles in the sawdust on the floor.

At 5.10, two men were sitting in a corner of the buffet. One of them looked down at a sheet he had in his hand and murmured, ‘That’s him.’

Mr Hire looked at the clock, at the door, at the clock again, at his watch.

‘How much?’

He spoke in a dry, matter-of-fact tone.

‘I assume the Geneva train is already here?’

‘Platform 3.’

But first he went to look out at the street. The day hadn’t yet begun, wasn’t even on the verge of beginning, and yet the sky was getting lighter – maybe from the moon – and the first trams and taxis that were converging on the station, along with the growing number of open cafés, made it clear that it was no longer night, either.

In every station in town, there were men holding a description of Mr Hire in their hands as they scrutinized the passengers’ faces.

It was a long train. Part of it extended past the glass canopy of the station, to the far end of the platform, where the air was colder. Mr Hire had chosen his carriage, his two seats. Now he stood on the platform, annihilated by the solemnity of the occasion.

The hand of the big clock stuttered forwards, minute by minute, triggering a mechanical noise with each jerk. The platform filled with people. The railway workers were walking around, and so were the newspaper vendors, and the little cart with chocolate and lemonade.

At 5.40, when the train jolted forward as if testing its engine before departure, Mr Hire felt his knees start to wobble and rose up on to the balls of his feet to look over people’s heads. He bolted forwards suddenly, gasping, mouthing words to himself, filled with joy because he had seen a green hat. But from ten metres off, he saw that it was a short, dumpy woman with a child in her arms, who was being hoisted into a third-class carriage.

The two detectives were prepared to prevent him from leaving. Like Mr Hire, they practically dislocated their necks as they strained to see the length of the platform, wondering who would appear.

Nobody. The train whistled. A railway worker ran down the train, closing doors. Mr Hire still had hope. He was so tense his entire body ached. But wasn’t this exactly as he’d imagined their departure? He had always thought that Alice would rush up at the last second, and that he would have to help her leap up on to the running board as the train rattled away. He stomped his feet on the ground. He was grimacing and smiling at the same time, and there were tears of impatience in his eyes.

And then he had the impression that the platform was moving. It wasn’t the platform. It was the train that was pulling out, speeding up little by little. The doors flashed by, along with the faces, the fluttering handkerchiefs.

Hands in his pockets, he began to walk away, swaying his shoulders as if to unburden himself of despair.

‘Ticket!’

Mr Hire took his out, and was called back.

‘This isn’t a ticket for the platform. It’s …’

‘Never mind!’

And the employee looked curiously at the back of the black overcoat, the velvet collar, the short, trembling legs walking away from him.

Mr Hire felt very much like crying. He remained standing on top of the stairs to the main entrance, staring at the square and its cobbles, which were imperceptibly absorbing the light of the day.

He didn’t know what he felt. It was complicated. He was cold – a strange, subtle kind of cold that pierced his still-warm flesh like needles. He was afraid. He thought about the letter he had tossed into the postbox; about Émile; about the policemen who would start following him again; about the commissioner who had taken him on with words as hard as fists. He was hungry. Hungry, or thirsty: he couldn’t tell. Hot, too. He didn’t feel steady on his legs, but he didn’t have the heart to sit down in the snack bar.

Maybe Alice was late? Maybe Émile had prevented her from leaving? Maybe she would show up any second now?

He watched as people got out of the taxis that were pulling up in front of him. They all looked his way – he really did have the air of a policeman on surveillance.

Six o’clock. The sky continued to brighten. Buses were surging down the streets, and he still didn’t have the strength to leave. He took a few steps, walked down the stairs a way, then climbed back up.

‘Maybe she couldn’t find a taxi!’

And he calculated the time that it would take to come by tram from Villejuif.

The restless impatience had drained from his heart to his bladder; he had to step away from his post. Now he no longer felt the need to keep the station under surveillance: after all, Alice could have come and gone while he was away.

At 6.30, the lights of Paris went out all at once. It was day. The wind blew bits of paper along the deserted pavements, which were still stained from the rain.

Mr Hire walked. He entered a bar with tiled walls. He had chosen the smallest, seediest place he could find. With an elbow on the counter he drank a cup of coffee and tried to eat a croissant, but pushed it away, barely touched. When he turned around to go back out on to the street, he saw two men stationed at the corner. He walked briskly for about one 100 metres and, making an abrupt about-face, found the two men right behind him.

He walked so fast – without even knowing why – that people turned around to look. It was a kind of vertigo, a panic. He plunged into the first Métro entrance he saw, and the two men followed him on to the platform.

The letter had been sent. At noon, it would arrive at its destination. Because she hadn’t come, Alice must be busy delivering bottles of milk to people’s doors. She wore her clogs in the morning but, in order not to make noise, she always left them at the bottom of the stairs and put on her slippers with the green trim. Around eight o’clock, after having served breakfast to her employers, she went back up to her apartment to clean up. But during the daytime, you could barely see her through the dirty glass, because for a few hours there was actually light in the courtyard.

The train stopped and started again. Mr Hire forgot to look at the names of the stations. But still, when they arrived at Porte d’Italie, from sheer force of habit, he got off.

Paris had had time to wake up while he was underground. Lorries and cars streamed into the city one after another, lining up to infinity; and the trams emptied out their full loads of blue- and white-collar workers – blue-collar, mostly, since the white-collar workers got off to a later start.

What was he going to do? Alice hadn’t come! He didn’t even ask himself whether she loved him or didn’t love him. He had never asked himself that. The only question was whether or not she was his. He had shown her the 8,000 francs.

It wasn’t cynicism. It was humility. Now, she hadn’t come, despite the Treasury bonds, and he didn’t understand; he was out of his depth. Without knowing why, he found himself thinking of the girl in the red-and-blue-striped sweater, who had looked at him with such distrust, then with a kind of anger. Why?

He waited for a Villejuif tram. He could still see his two followers. He was sad again, no longer impatient, but sad – a hot, private sadness, like tears. It was the hour when, during his days on Rue Saint-Antoine, he would have already been putting clothes out on hangers and accosting the passers-by. In prison, where everyone rises early, it was the hour for walking in the yard, single file, in silence, ears straining to hear the rumblings of the waking city on the other side of the walls.

The shoulders of his overcoat were still sopping wet; they were beginning to freeze. A tram arrived. It was empty, like all the early-morning trams bound for the suburbs. The conductor recognized Mr Hire, then looked at the two men who sat down a little way behind him.

The scenery paraded by, the same as always: the pharmacy on the left; then the gigantic billboard advertisement for soap; the hill where construction was always going on.

Mr Hire could tell that he was pale. His eyelids were starting to droop, but he didn’t dare shut them for fear of dropping off to sleep. He felt like he might vomit, though he hadn’t eaten a bite.

He saw the street that he used to take to get to the bathhouse – that big tiled house where the steam filled entire corridors. He felt no desire. He felt something like disgust.

‘Ticket, please.’

He still had a carnet of them in his pocket, as well as a Métro ticket. He knew the price of every ride.

‘Thank you.’

Something was missing. He looked at his knees and realized that it was the black leather briefcase. This threw him off course. What really got to him was that he was incapable of remembering – with his prodigious memory! – where he could have left it.

It didn’t matter. There was nothing of interest in his briefcase. But now that his thoughts had switched on to that track, he couldn’t stop them.

Where had he left it? Why wasn’t it sitting flat on his lap, like always?

At first, it was a struggle to think about it, but soon he had worked up into a fever! He needed to know! He furrowed his brow! He frowned! He pursed his lips and stared straight ahead with a ferocious expression.

Alice came down first, and helped her boss empty the contents of three big jugs of milk into bottles, stopping the tops with blue paper circles. At that hour, the shop was still closed, the shutters shut. It was half flooded with rainwater.

‘Hurry up so you can get everything clean before seven.’

There were two men stationed outside, and the bistro on the corner – the one on the right – was already lit up. From far away Alice noticed Émile sitting at the counter; he hadn’t been able to sleep, and there was a glass of rum next to his coffee.

Her dress was still damp from the previous night, and it hung limply around her calves. Empty lorries were coming back from the market. The ground would still be wet in the countryside, where it can take hours for the rainwater to drain out of the trees.

A door opened on the first floor while Alice was setting down a bottle of milk. A man with a razor in his hand asked: ‘Did they arrest him?’

‘Not yet.’

The concierge called to her as she was coming back down. She had had an atrocious night; at every moment it had seemed to her that her daughter had stopped breathing. She would turn on the light, look at the girl’s congested face and dilated nostrils, then turn the light off. She’d listen to the child breathing for a moment, then, a little later, wake with a start, her ears straining desperately in the dark.

She was pale. Her hair was all over the place.

‘They’re still there?’ she asked, pointing to the upper floors.

‘I saw a light on.’

‘It’s still raining?’

‘No, but it’s windy.’

And Alice did the rounds of the neighbouring buildings, bringing the empty bottles back to the dairy, where the shutters had now been opened.

The detective had just come down and was looking at her through the window with an expectant air.

‘They’re still there!’ said the proprietor, much like the concierge.

The detective smiled, making signs that Alice didn’t understand. He wanted to explain that he hadn’t been able to come to see her in her bedroom, but that it was only put off till another day. He had a day’s growth of beard which turned his cheeks grey. Suddenly, the proprietor of the bistro arrived, wearing a sky-blue apron, and led him away towards that establishment.

‘You can put out the lamp now!’ yelled Alice’s boss from the back of the shop.

It was basically light outside. Only the bistro and the trams remained lit. From a distance, Émile must have been able to see Alice behind the window; from where she was, she could watch him ordering his second coffee and shot.

Then the detective came back, running, found Alice on the doorstep. Without stopping, he said, ‘He’s coming!’

‘What’s happening?’ snapped her boss.

‘Mr Hire is coming!’

The concierge was on her doorstep, her eyes worried, jumping to her feet, looking for Alice.

‘It seems they’re going to arrest him! And here I am, waiting for the doctor!’

Doors were slamming and opening in the building. The tenant from the first floor looked out into the street, glancing in both directions.

‘Is he really coming?’

‘Wait for me, Georges!’ a voice cried out from above.

And the butcher left the bistro, talking to someone who offered him a cigarette. He walked with him towards the building, stopping a few feet away from the door. The concierge gave him a suspicious look.

‘What is it?’

‘They’re going to arrest him!’

And he stopped a small lorry which was making its way down the pavement, driven by one of his pals.

‘Come look over here!’

A woman got out, then another.

‘Is it true?’

‘What?’

‘They have the proof. They found the handbag. They’re going to arrest him!’

From the door they could see a policeman at the tram stop, and another one who seemed to be trying to stop traffic on the cross street.

‘Alice! I need you to mop up the water!’

‘I’m coming!’

She went back inside, reluctantly, grabbed a floor cloth from behind the back door, and plunged her hands into the cold water, where they turned red. The detective, who had gone to see the inspector upstairs, came back down as quickly as he’d gone up.

‘Don’t loiter, please! There’s nothing to see! Nothing at all!’

Now there were ten of them, then twelve; and more and more kept showing up from the bistro and elsewhere. Émile came closer, smoking a cigarette, but he stayed behind one of the groups, as if he didn’t want to be seen.

People driving by turned their heads and wondered what could be causing such a crowd, since they could see no trace of an accident. The traffic policeman couldn’t take his eyes off the building as he went about his job.

‘I’m begging you!’ cried the detective, who couldn’t seem to make himself heard. ‘You’ll ruin everything!’

The inspector was alone in Mr Hire’s room.

The handbag was on the table. From there, all that could be heard was the noise of the cars on the road, and a woman yelling insults at her children because they weren’t putting on their clothes fast enough.

‘Stop standing so close together! You’re compromising a police operation!’

A tram arrived. The undercover officer made a gesture with his hand. Instantly the detective – and everyone else – understood.

‘He’s here!’

Alice, washing the floor in the doorway, continued to drag her floor cloth over the blue stone.