19

At a quarter to 9 Rydal was driven by two police officers—one the gendarme who had found him—to Les Halles. Their car was a plain black Citroën. Rydal was very nervous, and at the same time simply tired. He was actually drowsy during the ride. He had not told the police Chester had shaved off his beard and moustache. They had asked, “He has a beard and a moustache?” and Rydal had replied, “Yes,” at once, then had started to correct himself, and hadn’t. He supposed he had thought it would make himself seem uncertain about it, make his story of seeing Chester in Paris seem untrue, if he had corrected himself. But that wasn’t it, Rydal knew. Telling the police he was clean-shaven now seemed to be stacking the cards too much against Chester. This way it was more sportsmanlike. Maybe that was it. At any rate, he hadn’t corrected himself. And he had been very emphatic, too, in saying that Chamberlain was clever about spotting the police, in plain clothes or not, so they had best keep a certain distance until they were sure they had him. “Oh, yes? How did he become so clever about police?” they had asked. Rydal didn’t know, but he was. After all, Rydal thought, the police were going to keep their eye on him, mainly, and naturally they would see any person to whom he spoke, and who handed him anything—an envelope, a newspaper—that contained the ten thousand dollars. What would it matter if Chester had a beard and moustache or hadn’t?

“Not too close,” Rydal said as he saw the first flower-pots along the pavement ahead. “Let me out here. No, over there. To the left.”

The car slowed down and swung to the left in the broad street. It was raining. The lights of the market made blurred yellow paths across the shining black streets, and the occasional shimmers of red lights reflected in them suggested to Rydal spilled blood.

“Into that little alley,” Rydal said, annoyed now. “If he sees me getting out of this car, he’ll know something is up.”

“Very good, m’sieur, very good,” the driver said with mock patience.

Rydal and the gendarme in plain clothes got out at the same time, from the right side of the car. The gendarme had his hands in his overcoat pockets, where there was no doubt a gun. He looked awfully much like a gendarme in plain clothes with a gun to Rydal.

“Let me go ahead,” Rydal said to him. “Four meters—six meters ahead is not too much.”

“Ah?” The gendarme wagged his head dubiously.

The other man was getting out of the car, too.

Rydal turned and crossed the street towards the pavement that was bordered with plants and flowers. Trucks presented their open back ends to the pavement, their floors full of plants and small trees with roots tied up in burlap, and in a few trucks a man or a woman slept on sacking, tired after a long day that had begun early in the country. Rydal did not look for Chester at first. He walked along casually, hatless now, his head mostly down as he looked at the greenery.

“Hey, ivy here! Very cheap!” cried a woman’s piercing voice. “Hyacinths in bloom! Take one to your girl! Take your choice, m’sieur!”

The leaves of rubber plants were glossy and bright in the market lights, and there was a pleasant smell of rich, rain wetted earth. The ivy seemed to glory in the cool moist air, the flowers looked bursting with happiness and vitality, and Rydal was sorry to think of any of them being taken into gas-heated Paris apartments. Rydal stopped and looked back, looked first at some chrysanthemums, then for the gendarme. The gendarme was fifteen feet or more behind him, one hand in a pocket now. Frowning, Rydal passed a hand across his hair, and went on.

He saw Chester, and his scalp prickled. Chester was about to turn at the corner on the broad pavement, and he was coming towards Rydal. Chester carried a newspaper-wrapped pot at the top of which some red blossoms showed. An intelligent prop, Rydal thought. Chester was twenty feet away, looking now at the plants on either side of him, then glancing straight in front of him.

Rydal slowed, idling. He stood erect, but looked down at a banked display of cacti in small pots on his right.

“Three for five francs, m’sieur,” said the man. “This kind makes a pretty pink blossom.”

Rydal hated what he was doing. He was balking. He wanted to take one gigantic leap, leap over the cactus display and through the brick wall behind it and disappear. Remember Colette, he thought. Chester is a crook. He cheats honest men. But there wasn’t time to remember Colette, or to think about Chester’s dishonesty. Rydal turned from the cacti and drifted on. Chester saw him now. Rydal half closed his eyes and gave a shake of his head, a faint shake which he finished with a tilt of his head to the left, a rubbing of his left ear, as if he had got water into it.

Chester passed by him.

Rydal walked on to the corner where he had first seen Chester. He was strangely relieved, as if he had successfully hurdled a dangerous crevasse that he had had to cross. But he listened tensely for a sound of commotion behind him. He yearned for the darkness around the corner. It was a darker street, a back street. At the corner, Rydal quickened his step slightly. For a few seconds, very few, he would be out of the sight of the gendarme. At the same time, he did not want to rouse the attention of anyone on this side of the block by running. Rydal gave himself about twelve steps, about five seconds, and then he dove, headfirst and horizontal, into the back of a truck. He held his breath, his eyes shut, expecting a voice. Nothing happened. He opened his eyes. The truck was empty and black, except for the little window in the back through which a driver could look when he drove. Rydal’s hands felt dirt crumbs, moist newspapers, some small flower pots.

Just then a hurdy-gurdy started playing, very near. It played “La Vie en Rose”.

. . . il me parle tout bas

je vois la vie en rose. . . .

Rydal crawled on his belly farther into the truck. Now his hands struck cloth, and he paused, afraid he had touched the cover of someone sleeping. It was just a pile of dark cloth for shading plants, perhaps, at the back of the truck on the floor. Rydal crawled into the corner and pulled it over him, over his head and feet. He lay still. He was just in time, for a flashlight shone then into the truck. He could see its glow through the cloth.

. . . ça dura pour la vie-e-e. . . .

Rydal almost smiled. He hoped not!

“Non,” grunted a voice, and feet hurried off.

Rydal listened. Then he looked. There was only a dark wall across the pavement behind the truck. The only light came from the right, making a triangle at the left on the truck’s floor.

Then suddenly a man’s figure appeared, a man in a cap who shoved the dropped flap of the truck shut with a crashing, proprietary impact, and Rydal heard a bolt slide. Whistling, the man approached the front of the truck, his shoes clanked on the truck’s metal steps, the engine started.

What luck! Rydal smiled and sighed.

The man drove like a demon. Rydal was tossed entirely into the air every few seconds. It crossed his mind that this man was running away from something, too. But Rydal could hear his whistling and singing over the noise of the motor. Rydal made his way to the rear of the truck and crouched behind the three-feet-high door. They were still in traffic, so that when the truck paused for a light, the head lights of a car behind glared against the back of the truck. Once at a stop, a street-lamp illuminated a street name brilliantly: rue de Belleville. Rydal couldn’t have cared less.

The driver made a left turn that rolled Rydal against the truck’s right wall. Rydal huddled behind the short door again. They were now in a district with less lights. The truck stopped for a red. Rydal jumped out. His rubber soles made a slapping noise on the street, but he doubted if the driver heard. Also, a man and woman walking under an umbrella saw him, but so what, Rydal thought. People rode trucks sometimes, drivers let off their workers here and there, and his clothing was not so good that he couldn’t be taken for a truck-driver’s assistant. Besides, it was dark. Besides, the man and woman walked on. Besides, he was free!

Rydal smiled into the rain as he walked down a street. It was just a street, in Paris. He didn’t know its name. It was a medium-sized street, and a sens unique, he saw. A bar-tabac’s slanting red cylinder glowed a hundred yards ahead. Rydal whistled “La Vie en Rose”. He went into the bar-tabac, his coat collar up, his hair wet and purposely mussed, and such a cheerful expression on his face, he felt, that it would not be easy for people to see any resemblance to the earnest young man called Rydal Keener in the newspaper photograph. But it was unfortunate, he thought, that the police, due to wanting to capture Chester tonight, had not announced to the public that Rydal Keener had been apprehended. That would have given him the best protection of all. He bought a slug for the telephone.

Then he called the Hôtel Élysée-Madison, whose number he remembered.

M. Wedekind was not in.

“He has not checked out, has he?” Rydal asked.

“No, m’sieur.”

“Thank you.” No, of course he hadn’t checked out. Not enough time had passed. Hardly fifteen minutes had passed since he had seen Chester. Yet hours ago, Rydal had thought Chester might have decided to check out just after his telephone call this afternoon. He wondered if Chester would be afraid to go back to his hotel for his possessions, thinking that he, Rydal, had told the police where he was staying? That was possible.

Rydal wondered, in fact, just what Chester would make of his giving him the warning at the flower market? Wouldn’t Chester assume that the police had found Rydal Keener and were using him to catch Philip Wedekind? Or at very least that the police were watching him? Of course Chester would.

He walked on at a moderate pace, getting soaked and not caring at all. He walked in the general direction of the center of the city, which he knew by instinct. Now he recognized a couple of street names, Faubourg du Temple and then the avenue Parmentier, not because he had been here before, but because he had used to pore over maps of Paris and Rome and London as an adolescent. He knew vaguely he was in the north-east of Paris, because old “potatoes Parmentier” had been in the upper right of his folding plan de Paris. He grew bored with walking, and took a taxi to the Seine.

The driver asked him where on the Seine.

“Vicinity of Notre Dame,” Rydal said in a careless tone.

Then he walked along the Quai Henri IV towards the Île Saint-Louis. He had walked along here more than a year ago, and he remembered being aware of the formal and cold atmosphere of the straight-fronted houses that faced the river. Formal, elegant, cold, unfriendly, he had thought. And neither they nor he had changed, really, but now the neighborhood seemed happy to him, even in the rain and in the dark. He was free. He could not go back to his hotel for the rest of his clothes or his notebook of poems or his few books, and he was being sought by the police at this minute, and he was without a passport or identification. But he had thirteen thousand dollars in his pocket, and he was free, as only a nameless person of his time could be free. It would not last long, he knew. But for these few hours, he would have it—freedom—he would savor it, he would rejoice in it, and he would never forget it. It was like being suspended in some element that did not really exist on earth, like the element in which angels flew, or spirits communicated with one another.

He looked at his watch. It was 10:15. He had been free for about an hour.

No, Chester would probably not go back to his hotel, he thought. Chester carried his passport at all times, and he probably carried all his money on him now. It would be typical of Chester to hazard taking a plane to the States using his Wedekind passport. In fact, what else could he do? Was he possibly at Orly or Le Bourget this minute? A passenger without luggage? Rydal rested his forearms on the parapet beside the Seine and looked at the illuminated façade of Notre Dame. Its design was complex, heavy, immobile, yet somehow floating, a work of art that seemed to him perfect, and it occurred to Rydal that it ought to be one of the Seven Wonders of the World, instead, perhaps, of the ponderous Pyramid at Gizeh. He was smiling, his eyes half closed as he looked at the cathedral’s mysteriously weightless mass, and then a frown tightened his brows. Why had he let Chester go? Chester wasn’t gone, of course, wasn’t free, because Rydal knew his alias, and all he had to do was tell it to the police. He pushed himself away from the embankment and walked on. At the Pont Neuf, he crossed to the Left Bank, and walked through the rue Dauphine to the boulevard Saint-Germain. He passed a gendarme as he crossed a street, and Rydal simply glanced at him, as any person might have, without a change in his speed of walking. But by now, Rydal thought, every gendarme on street patrol must have been notified of the “escape” of Rydal Keener. Rydal went into the first café he saw on Saint-Germain. He called Chester’s hotel. It was a compulsion. He knew as he waited for the hotel to answer that if Chester was not in, he would go to the hotel and wait for him. He would wait indefinitely in the lobby, he knew. He would take a taxi directly there. And if he waited mysteriously in the lobby for an hour or two, Rydal had no doubt that the hotel personnel would notice him, would see that he was or looked like Rydal Keener, would call the police to come and take a look at him—and he would be back where he was before, only without the appointment with Chester.

“I should like to speak to M. Wedekind, if you please.”

“Oui, m’sieur.”

Rydal waited a whole minute. Longer, he thought. “He’s out?” Rydal asked.

No one answered him.

Then Chester’s voice said hoarsely, “Hello?” He sounded breathless.

“Hello,” Rydal said. “Hello, Phil.”

“Where are you?” coldly.

“Well, I’d say—somewhere near l’Abbaye on Saint Germain —Why?”

Chester did not speak immediately. “Are you with the police or what?”

Rydal smiled. “I’m not with the police. I’m absolutely free. And you? You sound distrait.”

Only Chester’s irregular breathing came over the telephone.

“Are you with the police?” Rydal asked. “Are they letting you pack up?”

“What kind of a trick is this?” Chester said in an angry tone that was familiar to Rydal.

“No trick, Chester. I was with the police and now I’m not. Suppose I come to see you?” He hung up before Chester could answer.

Rydal ran to a tête de taxis near the Brasserie Lipp.

The taxi-driver didn’t know the hotel or the street.

“Near the Opéra!” Rydal said. “Drive to the Opéra and I’ll direct you when we get there.”

He sat up on the edge of the seat during the drive, feeling very happy, as if he were on a lark of some kind. He felt also as if he had surrendered to the totally irrational, as much as if he were blind drunk and embarking on a most unwise action, such as driving a car fast on the unprotected hairpin turns of the Saint Gotthard pass on a dark night. There were many factors in his visiting Chester now, Rydal thought. Chester was terrified, first of all, and Rydal was looking forward to seeing him with his own eyes in that condition. No more, perhaps, would Rydal ever see Chester with that paternal sternness—Rydal had, for obvious reasons, to call it paternal—on his face that he had seen the moment just before he gave Chester the no in the flower market of Les Halles. At Rydal’s shake of the head, he supposed, Chester’s courage had collapsed. He had probably fled back to his hotel, at any rate fled from Les Halles. And there was just the possibility that tonight he would beat Chester up. Say, no more than two good blows to the jaw. That would satisfy Rydal. Straightforward blows, none of the knee or the fist in the stomach stuff that Chester had tried with him on the boat from Crete. One paste in the mouth, on the mouth that had so often kissed Colette’s. No, that was a bit primitive, Rydal thought. None of that, he warned himself. No fisticuffs, just a few words. He glanced out at the lights of the Tuileries—it was like a glimpse into the seventeenth ­century—and Rydal suddenly saw a scene of mercy between himself and Chester, saw himself touching a shaking shoulder and saying to Chester—What? Some brilliant idea that would come to him, of course, in regard to Chester’s escaping from the police. Rydal was smiling slightly. He did not want to help Chester at all. Not at all. In reality, quite consciously and definitely, Rydal detested him.

“Make a right at the next corner, please,” Rydal said to the driver. “Two streets up and it’s on the left.” He had the money ready.

Rydal got out of the taxi in front of the hotel and walked in. It was a small, ornate lobby. Rydal went to the desk and asked the man to tell M. Wedekind that M. Stengel was on his way up. The name popped into his head. It didn’t matter. The man spoke to Chester, then said he could go up.

Chester opened the door, pale and visibly shaking—or perhaps it was a shudder that Rydal saw. His shirt collar was unbuttoned, his tie slid down.

“I’m alone,” Rydal said. He went into the room. The room was in disorder, even the bed rumpled, as if Chester might have tried to hide in it after he came back from Les Halles tonight.

“I suppose you’ve come for the money,” Chester said.

“Oh—Well, as I’ve said before, I’m not averse.”

“This time you’re not getting it.”

“Oh,” Rydal said in a polite tone, and with an absence of interest that was genuine. He looked at Chester.

The only color in Chester’s face was around his eyes, and it was pink. He had picked up a nearly finished glass of Scotch from somewhere. The inevitable bottle was on the inevitable bureau.

“What happened to your police friends?” asked Chester.

“I gave them the slip.”

Chester sipped his drink. “They picked you up?”

Then Rydal was suddenly angry, felt a fury that was like a brush of flame. He waited until it had passed. “No. I dropped by and talked to them.”

“What?” Chester said, frowning. “Don’t give me that crap.—What’re they waiting for?”

Rydal looked at him, and he didn’t need Chester to tell him that all his money, his “assets” in the States were gone now, seized by the American police or perhaps absconded with by Chester’s scared pals. Only a loss of money could have broken Chester down so. Losing Colette hadn’t had this much effect on him.

“What kind of game are you playing, Rydal?” Chester asked.

Rydal shrugged. “It must have dawned on you I haven’t told the police your name or the name of this hotel, or they’d be here.”

“All right, you’re asking me to pay for that. Is that right?”

Rydal had an unpleasant reply in mind, but the bickering irked him. Chester would have paid now for his not telling the police his alias, or would pay if Rydal promised not to tell it for twenty-four hours, or something like that, so Chester would have time to get to America. “Why don’t you get out of the country?”

Chester looked at him suspiciously. “You came here to tell me that?”

“Certainly not. I could have told you that on the telephone. I came here to see you.” Rydal smiled, and lit a cigarette.

Chester’s pink-rimmed eyes stared at him. “What did you tell the police?”

“I told them what happened at Knossos. What happened in Crete. I said that’s where I’d met you. Mr. and Mrs. Chamberlain. And then I told them you’d vanished in Athens. The Athens part didn’t hold water very well, but when I told them I had a date with you tonight, they weren’t too fussy about the rest of it. They wanted to get you.”

“And? Why didn’t you let them?” Chester’s voice was hoarse again, and there was a note of self-pity in it, which probably alcohol had brought. “Rydal, I’m a ruined man. Look at that! At that letter!” He gestured towards the papers on the night table, which in the general disorder of the room, Rydal had not noticed before. “I haven’t a cent in the States! I’m MacFarland—in that letter. I’m wanted for murder—” His voice stopped, the tone dangling.

“I can imagine. I’m not interested,” Rydal said.

“Tell me what you want. Let’s have it. If you told the police to come here—”

“If I’d told the police to come here, they’d have been here sooner than I. Do you know what I want, Chester?” Rydal asked, walking towards him. He said slowly, “I’d like a photograph of Colette. Have you got one?”

Chester had taken a step back. He frowned. “Yes. Yes, I’ve got one,” he answered, angry but reconciled, stunned, hopeless. He went as if in a daze to his jacket that was thrown over a chair and groped in the inside pocket of it. He pulled out a mass of papers and money. A small card fell to the floor.

Rydal moved to pick the card up, and caught also a five-hundred dollar bill that was fluttering down.

“It’s the only one I’ve got left,” Chester said in a maudlin voice. “The others—are in the States.”

“Pity.” Rydal snatched the photograph from his fingers and looked at it. He smiled. It was in color. Colette looked straight at him in a full-face view, her reddish hair fluffy, her mouth smiling. Looking at her lavender eyes, Rydal could hear her voice speaking to him: I do love you, Rydal. I do. Had she ever said it in those words? No matter, she was saying it now. Rydal put it into his jacket pocket, the left breast pocket, the handkerchief pocket. “A pity you had to kill her,” he said to Chester.

Chester put his hands over his face and wept. He sat down on the bed, his face sunk in his hands.

Rydal had had enough. “Pull yourself together. Either go to the police or pack up and fly to the States.” Chester looked as if he hadn’t the energy to do anything but give himself up to the police, if that. Then Rydal realized there was a small matter he might bargain about. It concerned the Greek agent’s body in the Hotel King’s Palace in Athens. In return for Chester’s not mentioning his services there—No, Rydal shied away from it. It was dishonest, cowardly. And he had to smile at his own resurgent sense of honor, risen again like a phoenix, out of where, out of what? “Which do you choose to do?” Rydal asked.

Chester was now staring into space, his shoulders hunched. “It’s best if I get to the States. Get back home. Got to start over again.” Chester hauled himself up and went to the bureau for the bottle. Then, with the bottle, he looked around the room, like someone half blind, for his glass.

Rydal saw it first and handed it to him. “Your fortitude is admirable,” Rydal said in a tone his father might have used in one of his devastating speeches, “but just how long do you think you can keep it up in the States? What’s Philip Wedekind going to do first? Start selling phony stock to gullible old ladies or—”

“Ah, Philip Wedekind can disappear as soon as I hit home ground,” Chester said.

The drink in his hand had raised his confidence, for the moment. Rydal felt the warm anger in his face again. “And then—then, when you’re caught as Mr. X, and they find out you’re also Chamberlain and MacFarland and so forth, you’ll give out with the old story again? Rydal Keener killed my wife, Keener blackmailed me, and, way back, Keener killed the agent in the hotel in Athens. Is that it, Chester?”

Chester did not answer, did not even look at him. He didn’t have to. Rydal knew that was it. What else could it be, from a man like Chester? Chester dragged himself across the room to the closet.

“I’m wasting my time here and yours, too,” Rydal said. “We could put everything off a little while longer, maybe I could buy a French identity card, maybe you could get to the States. But what’s the use? Why don’t you get on the tele­phone, Chester? I know the French police would like to—”

Chester was facing him with a gun in his hand.

Rydal was surprised, but not frightened. “What’s the use of that? It’ll just make a noise and you’ll have the whole hotel up here.”

Chester came closer, his face and his hand with the gun very steady now.

Chester had nothing to lose, Rydal realized. Chester wouldn’t mind at all killing him. Rydal grabbed for Chester’s wrist, struck it but failed to get a grip, as Chester fired. In sudden anger, Rydal hit him hard on the jaw with his fist. Chester fell. Rydal went to the door and out. He took the stairs down to the floor below, saw by the indicator that the elevator was on its way up, and he pressed the down button. The elevator went on up, past his floor.

“What was that?” asked a woman’s voice in French in the hall above.

“A gunshot?” said a man’s voice.

The elevator stopped on the way down, and Rydal got in. He was so tense, his tension seemed to hold his brain immobile. He thought only: don’t hurry.

His objective was merely the dark street outside, and he felt a kind of triumph and relief when he got there. The man who had ridden down in the elevator with him walked quietly away in the opposite direction on the pavement. Rydal walked one street, then two. He felt confused, shocked—as if what had just happened was complicated and inexplicable.

Rydal felt suddenly very sad and old. He raised his head, took stock of where he was—at the corner of the boulevard Haussmann and chaussée d’Antin—then proceeded purposefully to find a telephone.

He called from a brasserie. He did not know the location of the police station the operator had connected him with, but the man he spoke to knew the name William Chamberlain, and Rydal told him Chamberlain could be found at the Hôtel Élysée-Madison under the name Philip Wedekind.

“Very good! May I ask your name, sir?”

“Rydal Keener,” Rydal said.

“Rydal Keener! Where are you? If you do not tell us, this call can be traced, anyway.”

“Save yourself the trouble. I’m in the Café Normandie, boulevard Haussmann and—near the Opéra. I shall wait for you.”

So ended his freedom.