The German’s words had cast a sudden revelatory light on things and I needed to ponder its implications.
What was happening to me, the mystery surrounding me, the corpse I had seen, the tentative assumption that one or more of my friends was embroiled in the affair, all of this was so grave and so extraordinary that I did not dare mention it to the stranger whom chance had given me as my neighbour.
It was now clear to me that I was in Lisbon. Naturally, I was eager to know the street and the number of the house, but I could find no plausible way of getting the German to tell me, other than by questioning him in a roundabout fashion which, given my situation, could have aroused suspicions that might endanger the safety of the other people involved. So I contented myself with saying that I was becoming uncomfortable in the awkward posture I was obliged to adopt and would, therefore, bid him goodnight. My neighbour took his leave by giving three evenly spaced knocks on the wall, just as I had done initially in order to catch his attention. It occurred to me that Friedlann might be a freemason, and would, therefore, in my current circumstances and in the name of reciprocal oaths and mutual obligations, provide me with the protection I was asking him for. So I gave him a single letter, he responded with another, and thus we created a password.
‘Salut, mon frère!’ he exclaimed.
‘Remember, not a word to anyone!’ I replied in a low voice, responding to his signal by rapping on the wall.
Then I closed the cupboard door, returned the bed to its original position, and lay down fully clothed.
I could not sleep. I began to think and grew sad with thinking.
In this house, under this same roof, I thought, lies a dead man, a young, elegant, handsome man, who entered this house filled perhaps with hope and happiness and plans for the future, only to have his life cut short, poisoned by a mysterious hand, and now, ignored, unknown and alone, far from the beloved woman who may, at this very moment, be waiting for him, far from the family who loved him as a child, far from the place of his birth, from the weeping mother who might have closed his eyes, from the anguished father who, in the name of humanity, might have bestowed on him a final blessing.
Hapless boy! Who knows what mental torments you must have suffered on being torn so violently from the world, leaving to society your inert, impassive body, as mute as an enigma placed anonymously in the middle of a blank page. Who knows what thoughts death stopped in their tracks? Who knows what affections it froze in your heart, through which, not long since, the vital sap of youth flowed so abundantly, a youth now for ever sterile and dead.
Poor lad! Worthy as you are, deserving perhaps to be sadly missed, you sleep your eternal sleep, still dressed for the ball, covered by a travelling rug, stretched out on a sofa, immune for ever to the joys and sorrows of this wretched life; and, in the brief history of your passage through the world, possibly not a single tear will be shed to commemorate this poignant moment, when the dead expect of the living the final, supreme favour that mankind can offer to those they most prize and love – the gift of a grave wherein dwells oblivion.
The eyes of those who love you do not yet weep. They are closed perhaps in sweet tranquil sleep, haunted in dreams by your dear countenance, or else fixed on the usual road along which they expect you to appear, ready to recognise your tardy step, to hear you humming the last waltz you heard as you left the party, to see you arrive home, carefree, smiling and happy.
Poor things! The footsteps of the lad who, possibly only today, said goodbye to you, thinking to greet you once more a few hours later, they will never again take the road to the house where he is expected; his voice will never again answer the voice that calls to him; his eyes will never again gaze enraptured at the eyes that once returned his gaze; his lips will never again brush the lips that once kissed his!
I shed no tears for you because I never knew you, we never met, and I do not even know who you are. But I do not wish to insult the grief that hovers over your death by allowing myself to fall asleep in the same house where you lie unburied, while there is still someone who assumes that you are still alive and in the world.
It was driven by these feelings, my dear friend, that I rose from the bed where I lay and returned to the table where I had eaten my supper to write these long pages, pages we will surely enjoy reading some day, in a frame of mind quite different to that in which we find ourselves tonight.
I had completed a little more than half of this account when the surrounding silence – broken only by the scratching of my pen on paper – was interrupted by the voices of the masked men talking quietly in the room I had walked through in order to reach this one. I had just finished the paragraph previous to this one when I heard the voices again, and this time I felt curious to know what was being said. I went over to the door and, unable to see anything through the keyhole, I pressed my ear to it. Since it was unlikely that our jailers would be sitting in the dark, I surmised that there must be a corridor between this room and the one in which they were talking. I could not make out what they were saying. Only now and then did the odd word reach my ear. I was thinking of returning to my writing or finishing this letter, when one of the men raised his voice and I clearly heard him say:
‘But the banknotes, the £2,300! Didn’t he have them with him?’
‘I’m sure he did,’ said another voice.
‘Then this is monstrous!’
You can imagine the impression made on me by these words, the only ones I managed to hear!
It proved to me that the house to which we were brought is not the romantic hideaway I had first supposed. We must now accept one of the Prussian’s hypotheses: this is either a gaming house or a masonic lodge. The noises heard by people in the adjoining house provide convincing proof. In a love-nest, one does not hear gales of laughter at dead of night or the sound of coins jingling on tables. Given the neighbours’ reports of mysterious comings and goings, one cannot help but suspect clandestine meetings. The chink of gold, the laughter, the luxurious appearance of the boudoir we were shown into, leaves me in no doubt that this place is a den of gambling and revelry.
The words I heard a short time ago aroused my worst suspicions.
The unfortunate man who lies therein could have been the victim of a premeditated murder, committed in order to rob him of the money he brought with him.
But why then did the masked men go in search of a doctor? The words I overheard may explain this. The criminals who administered the opium to their victim with the intention of robbing him, found their plan frustrated by the absence of the English money they had believed to be in his pocket. At this juncture, they decided to resort to extreme measures and bring in a doctor whom they could easily prevent from reporting the crime; they would show him the opium and trust that this display of solicitous concern and confidence in their own innocence would deflect from them any suggestion of involvement in a crime and shroud the whole affair in mystery. This may not be exactly what happened. What remains indisputable, however, is that the disappearance of the money the victim brought with him does not fit with the idea that this is a house of probity and honesty.
I need hardly tell you what I have made up my mind to do. My Prussian neighbour is a somewhat fanciful man, but he seems sincere and trustworthy. I’m going to close now, address this letter and ask him to post it. I shall easily find a way of passing it to him in his room. Should I succeed in breaking right through the partition at the back of the cupboard, without anyone noticing, I’ll go myself instead of sending the letter. Alternatively, as soon as the door to this room is opened, I will hurl myself at the person or persons blocking my path and fight my way past them as would any decent man determined to stand up to a handful of blackguards.
If, like me, you are incarcerated here, I swear to God that we will see each other tomorrow. If you have been freed and you receive this letter, but have no further word from me during the subsequent twenty-four hours, write to ‘Friedrich Friedlann, Poste restante, Lisbon’. He will meet you at a place of your choosing and will tell you where I am.
Farewell,
F.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The following unsigned pages – written in the same hand as the letters from the doctor previously published in this newspaper – were found together with the letter we printed yesterday.
F. has not appeared. That same day, two days and three nights after receiving the long letter he had addressed to me – the first part of which I immediately sent to your paper, followed later by the second – I tried by every means possible to get word of him. All my efforts were in vain. I wrote to Friedrich Friedlann and received no reply. I sent someone to enquire at the post office and found that the letter I had written to him, suggesting that we meet, had not been collected.
I feel deeply worried, nervous and uneasy.
F. is an impetuous man, easily angered and almost insanely jealous of his honour. Given his temperament and the violence of his reactions, I fear that an outburst on his part might have had fatal consequences for him.
Nevertheless, Sir, I hasten to add that I completely disagree with F.’s views regarding the moral quality of the people who took us to the house where we found the corpse.
The tall masked man with whom I spoke at some length could not possibly be a cowardly murderer. F. spent almost no time with us and had little opportunity to study the other men involved. All his indignation and loathing stem from that one inexplicable and shocking remark, which he happened to overhear.
I dealt with only one of those men – the tallest – but I spent the whole night talking to him. Obviously, I could not study his facial expressions, but I could see his large, bright, intelligent eyes and hear his clear, strong, resonant voice, whose modulated tones followed the ebb and flow of his feelings.
During our discussions and conversations, and throughout our interrogation of A.M.C., I listened with interest, sympathy and sometimes admiration to his sincere and fluent way with words, fresh and vivid without ever being flowery, eloquent but with no pretensions to oratory. His voice was like the limpid mirror of a vigorous, upright, perceptive, sensitive nature. He had bursts of enthusiasm, flashes of righteous indignation and moments of melancholy that doubtless sprang from the fount of tears that all exceptionally good and honest people have at the core of their being. In short, he seemed to me a loyal and honourable soul and, with my wide experience of the world and my knowledge of our all too human capacity for deceit, I am not easily fooled in these matters, especially given the singularly testing situation in which we found ourselves. These, Sir, are the main reasons that, right from the start, prevented me from making public the name of my friend, who is now forcibly detained in a private prison. F. is a public figure, almost a celebrity. Everyone in Lisbon would be sure to recognise his name as that of one of our most acclaimed writers, just as everyone would be familiar with his proud, provocative, immaculately dressed figure, in marked contrast to the depressingly uniform creatures one sees in the streets, in literary salons and in theatres.
If I were to report my friend’s disappearance to the police, it is almost certain that they would find a means of locating him, but would that not be tantamount to denouncing, as criminals, the taller of the masked men and his companions, whom I still consider to be innocent?
Indeed, despite the revelation about the missing £2,300, F.’s letter only confirms my impression.
The following passage appears in his letter:
There was one way of finding out if he was or was not a close friend of mine: all I needed was to get hold of his watch; even blindfolded, I could identify its owner simply by running my hand over it. If he was the person I thought he was, his watch case would be as smooth as enamel, apart from the raised coat of arms in the centre.
Now, the watch to which he alludes was, if you remember, the very one I described in the second letter I sent to this newspaper, the one belonging to the masked man sitting opposite me in the carriage, and which I was able to see clearly while it hung, suspended on its chain, from his fob pocket. Therefore, the masked man who escorted F. to the room in which he is being held prisoner is, as he thought, a good friend of his.
Without sowing the seeds of a remorse that will later cast an eternal shadow over my life, how can I report to the police a fact, a name, a particular circumstance, that will not only set them on the trail of this crime, but will also reveal the identities of the people – whether innocent or guilty – who are inevitably caught up in it?
Will the facts I have given to you, the letters I so precipitately began sending to you, and which today, under the cover of anonymity, I feel a moral obligation to conclude and abandon, will they not seem – to the lofty, cold, incorruptible severity of decent men – to be a betrayal of the unwritten laws of friendship, an offence against the inviolability of secrecy, against that private religion based on delicacy, sensitivity and perfection: a religion which, for honest souls, forms part of the supreme principles of the foremost of all religions, that of character?
But should I then do nothing? Remain dumb, inert, neutral in the face of this obscure but dreadful event? Can I really impassively and silently accept responsibility for this vile murder, of which I am the only witness who has the opportunity, freedom and capacity to act?
What would your readers do, if, for a moment, they were to imagine themselves in the same unique and exceptional circumstances?
In the wave of conjectures, plans, resolutions and obstacles overwhelming me, I felt utterly alone in my hiding place, anxious and nervous, and feeling that I had not a moment to lose, I could think of only one clear, practical way forward: to publish an anonymous account of what had happened to me and thus hand my story over to society in the hope that others, the public, might find a solution to a problem I was unable to resolve by myself.
I have received not one word of advice, analysis or criticism!
I feel profoundly sad, exhausted, ill. I need fresh air, freedom, room to move about in. I cannot stay endlessly immobile, like a convict, with the ball and chain of a mystery around my ankle.
Two days after you receive this letter, I will have left for foreign parts. At this time of war with Prussia, the field ambulances of the French army need surgeons. I intend to enlist as a doctor. My country can do without me, and I, like any man in the presence of irremediable misfortune, feel the sweet need to be useful. You know my destiny. One day you will know my name.
In bidding farewell – doubtless for ever – to your readers, whom I have held captive with my account of this grim affair, may I be permitted a final word?
It is A.M.C., whose name I dare not reveal by writing it in full, A.M.C., whom I neither blamed nor accused, contrary to what his friend Z. alleged when he sprang to his defence in these columns, it is A.M.C. – whatever the reasons that led him to intervene in the circumstances surrounding the crime – who knows the inside story and holds the thread of the plot which I have tried in vain to find.
If these lines should reach the eyes of that young man, I ask one thing only, in the name of his personal honour and dignity and in the name of the honour and dignity of the other people involved in this whole strange business. Go to the post office and collect the letter that I will be sending to you this very day. In it I will tell you who I am and where you will be able either to write to me or come and speak to me in person. Should your age, position in society, concerns about your career, your family’s peace of mind, your own lack of authority in this matter, or indeed any other reason, prevent you from seeing this affair through to its ultimate consequences and thus uncovering the secret truth behind this mystery, then address yourself to me. We will work together on this worthy and honourable task. I take full responsibility for any consequences that may arise from it, and I have the means to protect your name, your person and your reputation from any suspicion that may overshadow or sully it.
As for you, my dear, honest F., I do not believe you have been the victim of a treacherous and unworthy ambush! In my view, the only danger you face now is your own prickly nature, your scruples, your courage and, finally, your pride.
They cannot possibly have killed you in cold blood in that clandestine prison which, only a short time ago, you still illuminated with your patience and your wit. On the other hand, it seems entirely possible, even logical, that by now, in order to satisfy your honour, you have felt obliged to gamble your life away in an exchange of sword thrusts or bullets with one of your mysterious fellow residents.
A vague, sad sense of foreboding hangs over me… Poor F.! Are we fated never to meet again? What if the fateful day on which we set out together from Sintra – carefree and joyful, sighing over our happinesses, smiling at our misfortunes – what if that marked the end of our years of sweet friendship?
It is the sorrows and misadventures of others that have dragged us into this terrifying, implacable whirlpool of raw human solidarity!
What can one do?
If this is life, then we must bravely accept it and avante! Expect to be unfortunate, since that is the surest way to be happy!