“Of course!” Manneret says, smiling with the expression of a man accommodating himself to the wiles of a child or a madman. “And I’m King Boris.” He settles into a cushioned rocking chair and vaguely points to a chair for his visitor. “There,” he says, “sit down!” But the visitor prefers to remain standing, racked by his desire to be understood; he points his forefinger at his own chest and repeats, syllable by syllable: “Johnson. I’m Ralph Johnson.”
“Of course! Forgive me,” the other man exclaims in a polite tone. “A name, you know. . . . What does a name mean? And how is Mrs. Johnson?”
“There is no Mrs. Johnson,” the American says, losing patience. “Come on now, you know who I am!”
Manneret seems to think it over, lost in dim thoughts which the image of the intruder evidently disturbs. He rocks gently in his chair. The face with its feverish expression, its gray, disorderly beard, regularly rises and sinks in a slow, periodic oscillation. Finally he says, without interrupting his rocking movement which it is enough to watch for a few moments to grow dizzy: “Of course. . . . Of course. . . . But you must get yourself a wife, my boy. . . . I’ll speak to Eva about it. . . . She knows so many fine girls.”
“Listen to me,” Johnson says vehemently. “I am Ralph Johnson, Sir Ralph, the American.”
Manneret stares at him, squinting suspiciously.
“And what do you want with me?” he says.
“Money! I need money. I need it right away!” Johnson realizes that such a tone is not at all appropriate to his request. He had, of course, prepared quite another approach. Discouraged, he slumps into a chair.
But the old man, who has begun rocking back and forth again, immediately recovers his original smile and kindliness: “Listen, my boy, I gave you another fifty dollars this morning. You spend too much. . . . Is it on girls?” He winks lewdly, then adds, his voice suddenly mournful: “If your poor mother were still alive. . . .”
“Enough of this!” Johnson shouts, beside himself. “For the love of God, forget about my mother, my wife, and my sisters! I need your help. I’ll write you a formal I.O.U. that will guarantee you a lien on the Macao property. . . .”
“There’s no need for that, my boy, there’s no need for that between us. . . . You mentioned your sisters, just what are they doing now?”
Johnson, who can no longer endure the movement of the rocking chair from which he cannot tear his eyes, stands and strides up and down the room. He is wasting his time with this old addict, who will soon fall asleep anyway. There is more to be done on the other side of the water, in Victoria, among the rich moneylenders in the miserable stalls on Queens Road. His mind suddenly made up, he crosses the apartment, slams the door behind him and dashes down the stairs, ignoring the elevator.
Outside the air is hot and sultry again, all the more surprising after leaving an air-conditioned house. The old taxi is still there, waiting for him, parked at the curb. Without considering the strangeness of such solicitude on the part of the driver (the passenger he had brought here half an hour ago was quite likely to be going home at such a late hour and not to be leaving again before morning), Johnson automatically walks over to the car and is about to get in, as the Chinese holds the door open for him.
“He’s an old con man, isn’t he?” the latter says in English.
“Who is?” Sir Ralph asks sharply.
“Monsieur Manneret,” the driver says, giving his accomplice’s wink.
“But who are you talking about?” the American asks, pretending not to understand.
“Everyone knows him,” the driver says, “and only his windows are still lighted now.” At the same time, he points at a large bay window on the fifth floor, where behind the transparent curtains, the figure of a man is silhouetted against the luminous background, staring out at the deserted avenue, with only an old taxi parked at the curb, the polite driver who closes the door behind the passenger who has just climbed into the back seat, then gets into his own seat in turn, starts up without too much difficulty, and drives off at the speed of a rickshaw.
Edouard Manneret then turns back toward the room and leaves the window, rubbing his hands. He smiles to himself with satisfaction. He feels like telephoning Lady Ava to describe the interview. But she must be asleep by now. Passing the air-conditioning control, he turns it down one notch. Then he returns to his desk and continues writing. Having covered, with her quick regular strides, the considerable distance from the dock, the young Eurasian servant girl will soon be returning with the dog. It is, as it is not difficult to guess, one of Lady Ava’s big black dogs; and the girl is named Kim. So it was not this girl, but the second servant girl (who resembles her, moreover, as perfectly as if they were twins, and whose name may also be written Kim, and is pronounced quite similarly, the difference imperceptible except to a Chinese ear), so it was not this girl who was to spend the night with their mistress. Unless it was actually the same girl, who—as soon as she was liberated by Lady Ava’s last-minute decision—had left the Blue Villa with the dog, walking directly to the Victoria dock, taking the ferry, where she notices Sir Ralph’s presence, but being careful to keep him from catching sight of her, and quickly disembarking first, upon arrival at Kowloon, continuing her nocturnal promenade under the hanging roots of the giant fig trees, soon caught up with and passed by a taxi closely followed by a rickshaw, then a little further on caught up with again by the same taxi—alone this time—of a very old model, easily recognizable by its slowness and its closed windows. It is once again this same taxi, for the third time, that she passes (it is now coming toward her) just before reaching her destination.
Besides Kim, Johnson, and the spy following him on the orders of the police lieutenant in Hong Kong, there was also on this same ferry—which is not surprising, for there are very few crossings in the middle of the night—a fourth person who deserves to be identified: Georges Marchat, Lauren’s ex-fiancé who has been wandering around for a long time, constantly ruminating on his lost happiness and his despair. Having left the party very early, where his presence was no longer justified, at first he too has walked through this residential neighborhood with its large estates concealed behind walls or bamboo fences, then he has returned for his car parked near the Blue Villa, and has taken the road around the island, stopping in all the bars and casinos still open on the coast, drinking whisky after whisky. Beyond Aberdeen, on a little beach where there is a middle-class beach club, he has picked up a rather pretty Chinese prostitute, and continued driving while trying to tell her his story, of which of course the woman has understood nothing, so blurred has the young man’s diction become and so incoherent his presentation of events. She has nonetheless offered him her services, to help him forget his unhappiness, but he has rejected her with expressions of outraged virtue, saying that he was not trying to forget but on the contrary to understand, that besides he no longer wanted to have anything to do with women, that existence itself had become meaningless, and that he was going to throw himself over a cliff into the sea. The prostitute has decided to get out of the car rather than be mixed up in this troublesome case; he has therefore let her out precisely where they were, that is, nowhere in particular, far from any village, and he has given her a fifty-dollar bill for the price of her company; she was still thanking him ceremoniously, assuring him that for such a sum she could have . . . etc., when he had already continued on his way. Driving straight ahead, faster and faster, showing less and less caution around the countless curves of the coastal road and passing through the villages, he has finally reached the outskirts of Victoria, where he is soon arrested by a police patrol, for the behavior of his car obviously revealed the driver’s drunkenness. He has shown his papers to the lieutenant at the station, who has immediately recognized in this Georges Marchat, Dutch businessman, one of the most suspicious guests among those he had interrogated at Eva Bergmann’s party this evening: the one who was carrying, at the time of the search, a loaded revolver, with one bullet in the barr
el. Questioned as to what he had done since leaving the Blue Villa, the fiancé has given the names of the places where he had been drinking (at least those which he could remember) but he has said nothing about the Chinese prostitute. The lieutenant has written the addresses in his notebook; since the businessman’s status in town was known and consequently easy to trace, he has let him go, advising him to drive slower, after having merely issued him a ticket for driving in a state of intoxication. Marchat, to recover from this incident, has made another stop in a harbor bar in order to have a few drinks; then he has driven his car onto the ferry. Neither Rim nor Johnson could meet him on board, for he has fallen asleep at his wheel once he managed to get his car onto the boat, one way or another. Wandering on the decks, he would not have been in danger of firing his revolver at the American in any case, since the weapon had been impounded some hours earlier, at the Blue Villa, by the police.
When the boat lands at Kowloon, Georges Marchat is still asleep, slumped over his wheel. The sailors on board supervising the disembarkation of automobiles shake him to wake him up; but for an answer they obtain only snores, then incoherent words, among which perhaps figure the words “whore” and “kill” still, in order to identify them among the vague syllables which do not manage to leave his throat, one would have to be aware of the young man’s misfortunes. The sailors have no time to waste on explorations of this kind: the car is blocking those behind it, which are already indicating their impatience by blowing their horns. They therefore shove Marchat away from the wheel, in order to be able to maneuver it through the lowered window while the big car is pushed off the ferry, a maneuver accomplished without much difficulty, since the dock is on a level with the deck. The sailors then push Marchat and his car a little farther, alongside a closed depot. The businessman has slid across the seat and is snoring drunkenly.
Johnson and his spy, whose respective vehicles have left several minutes ago, could not have observed the incident. As for Kim, first to disembark of all the passengers—who step back with timid and reproving expressions, caused by the growling of the black dog—she is already far away. She has no special reason to go to Manneret’s tonight; moreover she has been assigned no particular mission by her mistress, who thinks she is sleeping in her little room. Yet the girl, without having anything to do here, walks on as decisively as if she were feeling—as is more and more often the case—an absolute necessity to see the Old Man; and she is sure that he is expecting her too. She does not even wonder about the purpose of the experiments he makes on her, during each of her visits: she is not concerned to know if the drinks and injections he gives her are actually drugs he is testing, or magical philters which alienate the subject’s will in order to leave her defenseless in the power of a third person, or of the experimenter himself. The latter, moreover, has not abused his powers hitherto, at least insofar as she can discover in her moments of complete consciousness. Of the hours she has spent in the modern Kowloon apartment, which looks like a fashionable clinic, some seem to her to have lasted very long; but there are others of which she has no recollection at all.
So that night, Kim finds Edouard Manneret seated at his desk; his back is to the door, as has already been said, and he does not even turn around to see who is coming in. So it is true, probably, that he knew she would come at this very moment. In any case it has been reported that she knocks at the apartment door and enters at once without waiting for an answer. Does she have her own key to get into the apartment or had Manneret left his key in the lock—or simply pushed the door closed, without latching it—in order not to have to get up again? But hasn’t Johnson, a moment before, been obliged to wait for Manneret to come and open the door? Then it would be Johnson who had left the door not completely closed upon his departure: this is, as a matter of fact, what sometimes happens when a door is slammed too hard and the bolt reopens immediately, in the recoil of the impact. . . . All these details are probably of no importance, especially since the images of this visit have already appeared, in what precedes, apropos of the brown envelope containing the forty-eight sachets of powder, which the servant girl had collected for Lady Ava. The only question that remained was what she had done with the dog: she could not have brought it into the house, since these delicate animals cannot endure air-conditioned premises, or at least too great variations of temperature between the street and indoors. (Is this the reason why the Blue Villa, their habitual domicile, is still equipped with only prewar ventilators?) The solution of this problem now seems easy: Kim has left the dog in the building’s vestibule, between the outer door to the street and the double glass door which leads to the stairway or to the elevators. With a customary gesture she has attached the end of the leash to a ring which seems to be here for this purpose, but whose presence she had not noticed upon her last visit. She would obviously have done better to keep the dog as a bodyguard until the third floor (or until the fifth?); this is what she thinks a little later, like every other time, while she retreats toward the corner of the room, the Old Man advancing slowly, matching step for step, with a face that frightens her, gradually gaining on her, his head towering over her now, motionless, the thin mouth, the carefully trimmed goatee, the mustache that looks like cardboard and the eyes gleaming with criminal madness. He is going to kill her, torture her, cut her up with a razor. . . . Kim tries to scream, like every other time, but, like every other time, no sound leaves her throat.
At this point in the narrative, Johnson stops: he thinks he has heard a scream, quite close, in the silence of the night. It is on foot that he has returned to the dock, from the hotel to which he had been driven back by the taxi with the closed windows. Taking his key from the rack, the Communist porter has informed him that a police inspector has just searched his apartment, though he has discovered no trace of this in the living room nor in the bedroom nor in the bathroom, so skillfully has the investigation been carried out. This discretion has disturbed him more than the too obvious surveillance of which he has hitherto been the object. Without taking time to change, he has merely armed himself with his revolver, which was still in its place in the shirt drawer, and has gone back downstairs. It was pointless to call a car: the scheduled departure of the next ferry left him plenty of time to get there by walking at an ordinary pace. Perhaps Johnson more or less consciously thought he could thereby avoid the indiscreet or disturbing comments of the persistent driver. But when he passed through the revolving door, he saw at once that the taxi was no longer there. Had it been parked in the square planted with traveler’s palms behind the hotel? Or had it, despite the hour, found another passenger? The American has subsequently observed nothing unusual around him, until the moment when, walking out onto the dock, he has heard that scream, a kind of gasp, or a moan which was not strictly a call for help, or some kind of a low and rather hoarse voice, or any sound from the nearby harbor, filled with junks and sampans that house whole families. Johnson has accused himself of being too nervous. On the dock as in the streets that led there, there was not a living soul; access to the ferry was open, but not attended, and for the moment neither passenger nor car was embarking. The waiting room was also empty and the ticket window seemed abandoned. In order to pass the time until the employee’s return—there was no emergency—Johnson has gone back out onto the dock.
Now he has noticed the businessman Marchat’s big car parked in front of the depot, a red Mercedes, probably the only one in the whole Colony. He has wondered what it was doing there and walked over to it, having nothing else to do. At first he has supposed that there was no one in the car, but after bending over on the driver’s side, where the window was lowered, he has seen the young man lying on the seat: his temple was broken, the eyes out of their sockets, the mouth open, the hair sticky in a little puddle of already coagulated blood. From all appearances he was dead. On the floor of the car, near the emergency brake, there was a revolver. Without touching anything, Johnson has rushed to the telephone booth which stands against the glass wal
l of the waiting room outside. And he has called the police. He has given the description of the car and the exact point where it was parked, but he has decided not to name the victim; and he has hung up without having given his own name either. When he has returned to the ticket window the employee was still not there; he has appeared only about thirty seconds later and has given him a token without looking at him. Johnson has gone aboard through the automatic turnstile, after having dropped the token into the slot. The boat was almost empty; it left immediately afterward, when the sound of a police car’s alternating siren could be heard in the distance. At Victoria, Johnson has taken a taxi, which has been driven rapidly, so that he has reached the Blue Villa early, around ten after nine more precisely.
Upon entering the large salon, he has been approached by that bald, stocky man whose skin is shiny and whose complexion is so red that he seems in constant danger of suffering a fit of apoplexy. The American, who had no reason to refuse, has accompanied him to the buffet to drink a glass of champagne, thereby making himself a party to interesting comments on the latest fraudulent intrigues devised by the importers of non-distilled alcoholic drinks. The fat man has thus monopolized him longer than Sir Ralph had feared; a good part of his life had been spent in remote countries and he described all kinds of scandalous situations, which he intended to cite as profitable examples for his friends and acquaintances; this evening, for example, apropos of illegal beverages, he has begun describing in detail the methods employed somewhere to make young girls, selected for their beauty in the street or even at parties, lose all desire for resistance, the girls then being imprisoned in special brothels in the city in order to serve the needs of thrill-seekers and sexual perverts. He was beginning to tell how a father had one day, quite by accident, recognized his own daughter in one of these houses, when the American, tired of his indiscreet chatter, had at last found an excuse to interrupt this over-resourceful narrator, or at least to stop listening to his stories: he had gone off to dance. For this purpose his choice had fallen on a partner whom he had never seen before this evening: a blond young woman in a decollete white dress who moved gracefully. He found out later that her name is Loraine, that she had recently arrived from England, and that for the moment she was living at Lady Ava’s.
La Maison de Rendez-Vous and Djinn Page 16