As they made their way to Lam’s apartment, Breton explained that his job as a broadcaster for the Voice of America’s European service had kept him late at the radio studio on West Fifty-Seventh Street. In those days of military stalemate for the Allies on the Western front and the Nazis’ increasing stranglehold on occupied France, his famous voice helped reassure his countrymen that they had not been abandoned in favor of the liberation of North Africa and Italy.
The work was simple—he didn’t have to write the morale-boosting propaganda he read—but he did have the option to revise and approve it and to contribute his own scripts if he wished. The whole process was emotionally exhausting. Even though his words were addressed to nameless, invisible listeners, they brought back memories from twenty-five years earlier, when war was not a distant abstraction but a minute-by-minute struggle for survival.
At around ten o’clock, he told Duchamp, he left the VOA studio, took the subway to Christopher Street, and walked along Tenth Street toward Matta’s apartment. On the way, he passed Lam’s and noticed that the light was on, so he supposed the artist must still be at home. It was unlike the frugal Lam to leave a light burning when he was out. Perhaps he had forgotten about the party or was as involved in his work as Breton had been.
He climbed the stoop, intending to ring Lam’s bell. Just then someone came out of the building and held the door for him, so he didn’t bother to ring. He walked up the three flights and knocked on Lam’s door. When he got no response he tried the knob and found the door open. He called out, but there was no answer.
The apartment, one of several in the five-story building, had its entrance door opening into the kitchen. To the right, the large front parlor with a north-facing window served as Lam’s studio. To the left, a door led to a small windowless bedroom. The toilet was outside on the landing. Hearing no movement in the studio, Breton had glanced into the bedroom, thinking that Lam might be asleep, but the room was empty. Then he entered the studio and found the artist dead on the floor.
“My God!” exclaimed Duchamp, shaken out of his habitual detachment—like Breton, he seldom lost his composure. “What happened to him?”
“I cannot say,” Breton confessed. “There is no evidence of violence, no bleeding or wounds that I could see. I did not examine the body.”
“A heart attack, perhaps,” suggested Duchamp.
“No, I am certain the cause of death was not natural.”
“How do you know?”
“You will see for yourself,” Breton told him.