A little later in the evening, a macabre piece of news had spread among the guests: one of the people who was expected today, a young man named Georges Marchand, known in town as such a serious boy, had just been found murdered in his own car. A Chinese prostitute, who was supposed to have spent part of the evening in his company (they had been seen together in a club, near Aberdeen), had been closely questioned by the police; although the victim’s wallet had disappeared, it was thought to be a morals case rather than just a matter of theft. From this point on, comments and suppositions developed copiously, sometimes seasoned with quite preposterous details by which Marchand himself would doubtless have been astonished. The theatrical performance, scheduled for eleven, has occurred in spite of everything: this Marchat, or Marchand, was not a habitué of the house, and it was almost by accident that he had been invited this time. No one in the audience, moreover, knew him except by name; most people had never even heard of him.
The main item on the program was a brief traditional comedy in two acts, with three characters: a woman is caught between two men, engaged to one, she begins to fall in love with the other, etc. The part of the young woman is played by Loraine, and that is the play’s sole interest. In the middle of the first act, selecting a moment when the stage is almost in darkness and consequently reflects no light into the darkened theater, I stand up furtively and reach the little exit door, which I find by groping my way. But I must have come to the wrong door in the darkness, for I do not recognize the place to which the corridor I have followed leads. It is a kind of filthy courtyard, lit by huge oil lamps, which must be used to store props, for parts of the sets are strewn here and there in great confusion. Against a half-dead clump of banana trees is leaning a huge plywood panel whose painted surface represents a stone wall, huge rough-cut slabs which protrude irregularly, with iron rings set at various heights, to which are attached old rusty chains, the whole thing painted in rather clumsy trompe-l’œil. A little farther away, in front of the gable end of a shed, I also make out in the dim light a fashionable shop front seen from the street: in the window under its English lettering, a mannequin in a clinging dress holds a big black dog on a leash. Without footlights and thrown here pell-mell, the whole thing no longer produces any sense of depth. I also discover some pieces of furniture which must belong to the opium den scene, as well as several door frames, windows, sections of stairs, etc.
Besides these pieces of stage sets, the courtyard is encumbered by a quantity of discarded objects: a dilapidated rickshaw, old rice-straw brooms, dismantled trestles, several plaster statues, many open crates in which are heaped the debris of dishes or broken glasses; in particular, there is a crate full of broken, chipped, footless champagne glasses, some even reduced to tiny, unrecognizable slivers. As I look for a way out of this chaos, I pass through regions which are not lit at all. I bump into piles of things which I afterward guess, from touching them, to be piles of thick magazines, on smooth paper, the size of the Chinese tabloids. Groping with one hand, I then touch something cold and moist which makes me recoil quickly. But, in a similar direction, and with the hope, still, of discovering a way through the increasing number of piles of paper, I stumble over other similar objects—flat, cold, rather sticky objects—whose nature I finally gather, from the stronger smell given off here: a huge number of big fish, probably regarded as inedible.
At this moment, I hear a voice behind me and turn around, more quickly than the situation demands. There is someone else in thie courtyard: a man standing, motionless, whom I had taken for a statue; he points his arm in one direction, saying in awkward English: “It that way.” I thank him and follow his advice. But it is not an exit he was pointing to, as I had thought; it is the toilet, also lit by an oil lamp, also filthy, its whitewashed walls covered with graffiti. There are chiefly Chinese inscriptions, most of them pornographic and indicating more imagination than is customary in such places. I also make out one sentence in English: “Funny things go on in this house,” and a little lower, in the same careful though clumsy handwriting: “The old lady is a slut.” I come out again only after having remained inside long enough not to disappoint my guide, in case he is still watching. But I am then filled with doubts concerning what he was pointing out to me just now, for I am now in front of an exit I didn’t suspect, a passage through dense flowering hibiscus bushes, and suddenly I am back in the villa’s grounds. I soon realize I am in the area of the groups of statuary I have mentioned several times, but tonight I see here a subject I am not yet familiar with and which probably wasn’t here before, for it would have attracted my attention by its location at the intersection of two paths as well as by the dazzling whiteness of the new marble; it is doubtless a new acquisition of Lady Ava’s. The surrounding earth, moreover, seems to be trampled in places, freshly spaded in others, as if a team of workmen had been working quite recently to install the piece. The pedestal has been buried so as to place the two figures on the same level as the people passing by, and they are life-size as well. This piece is called: “The Poison” this word is clearly legible despite the darkness (to which my eyes are growing accustomed), for it is carved in large capital letters on the horizontal surface of the white marble, each letter underlined by a line of black paint. A man with a goatee and a monocle, dressed in a kind of frock coat, who is holding a little bottle in one hand and a stemmed glass in the other (a doctor?), is leaning over a girl entirely naked, her mouth open, her hair loose, who is squirming on the ground two steps away from him.
A little farther along the same bamboo-lined path, I glimpse the scene already described in which Lauren, having already exclaimed: “Never! Never! Never!”, fires a pistol at Sir Ralph, who is standing about ten feet from her, the young woman having immediately dropped her weapon and remaining with her fingers spread, her arm half-extended forward, stunned by her own action, not even daring to look any longer at the wounded man, who has merely slumped a little, his back hunched, one hand clutching his chest and the other stretched backward, seeming to grope for something to cling to, before falling to the ground. But this scene no longer has much meaning now. And I continue on my way to the house. The entrance hall is empty, as is the large salon. Everyone must still be in the little theater, where the performance is probably not yet over; I walk down the red-carpeted stairs that lead to the theater.
But the theater is empty too, though Lady Ava is still on stage, performing alone before the empty chairs. Is this merely a rehearsal for a coming performance, which she is perfecting after the audience has left, tonight’s play being over? (If I am not mistaken, at least, in supposing there has been a performance tonight.) Choosing at random, I sit in the middle of a row of chairs. Lady Ava has just worked the mechanism which closes the panel concealing the secret safe. She turns back toward the footlights and continues, still in her weary, broken, discouraged, scarcely audible voice: “There. Everything’s ready. . . . Once again, I’ll have settled the way things are arranged around me. . . .” Then, after a very noticeable pause: “There’s nothing else to do.” At this moment she stands perfectly still, very straight, at the very edge of the stage, precisely in the center. And the heavy velvet curtain begins closing, its two halves—one on each side—falling slowly, obliquely, from the flies. Instinctively I begin applauding. The actress bows, once, as the curtain goes up again, and I applaud more vigorously. But my solitary energy does not manage to generate much volume, this thin, stubborn sound, on the contrary, making the theater’s emptiness all the more apparent. Hence the curtain, coming down a second time, closes for good as the lights come on in the theater. I walk to the exit, surprised nonetheless by the absence of an audience.
After the double swinging door, with its traditional pair of round windows, I meet Lady Ava coming from the wings, without having changed her costume or her make-up. She smiles at me sadly. “It was nice of you,” she says, “to stay to the end. The play’s absurd. And I’m an old actress no one cares about. . . . They all left, one
after the other.” I’ve offered her my arm and she has leaned on it to climb the stairs. She was heavy and clumsy, as if she had suddenly been suffering from rheumatism in all her joints. I have feared she would never reach the top of the stairs. She has stopped halfway up to rest, and has said: “Won’t you stay and take a glass of champagne?” I haven’t dared refuse, for fear of seeming to abandon her in my turn.
We have settled down in the little mirrored salon, where there are all the Chinese bibelots in cases. There could be no question of ringing for a servant at this hour, of course, so that I have had to get a bottle myself, from the bar refrigerator, in the next room. But I have found only a few chipped glasses, which had probably been put aside to be thrown away afterward. Lady Ava had no more idea than I where the others were kept. Since these were clean, I have selected the two glasss in best condition and returned to the little salon. I have uncorked the bottle, and we have drunk in silence. On the little table, beside our glasses, was the photograph album. I have picked it up in order to leaf through it, more for something to do than out of genuine curiosity, since I have already looked at it a hundred times. And it has fallen open by chance to a very blond and beautiful girl I didn’t know. Taken at full length, standing facing the camera, she is wearing only a black lace corset and a pair of openwork stockings; she has no shoes; a slender black velvet ribbon encircles her neck. She is holding her arms up, hands hanging limp, wrists crossed, just over her forehead. Her weight rests on her right hip, her left leg is a trifle bent, the knee ahead of the right one. “Her name’s Loraine,” Lady Ava says after a rather long pause.
Then she talks about her professional problems; and, apropos of the risks of being betrayed to the police or of even swifter retaliatory measures, she tells me once again about the death of Edouard Manneret. He was in the habit of leaving his apartment door open at hours when he was likely to receive visits, not wide open, but the bolt lying outside the lock, so that the door could be pushed open without his even noticing it, since he usually worked in an office at the other end of the hallway. The murderer was, apparently, well-informed as to the house, since he even knew where the safe was and how it worked. . . . I interrupt Lady Ava to ask her about this Manneret whom she has already mentioned to me several times. She answers that he was the putative father of those twin girls—whose mother was a Chinese prostitute—now in her employment, supposedly as servants, but whom she actually regards as her adoptive daughters. To say something agreeable, while appearing to take an interest in her stories, I tell her about the rather different relationship which gossip has suggested between the servants and their mistress. But Lady Ava objects more vehemently than the subject seems to me to require. “People will say anything,” she says finally, her voice full of bitterness. Then, changing the subject abruptly, she adds: “Our telephone number’s been changed. Now it’s one, two hundred thirty-four, five hundred sixty-seven.”
“Fine,” I say. “At least that’s easy to remember.” This time, I have determined to leave. I stand up to say good-by, but I make the mistake of coming a little too close to one of the glass cases, where I glance distractedly at the shelf which holds the ivory statuettes. Lady Ava, who evidently is afraid to be left alone and is desperate for something to talk about, tells me that these come from Hong Kong, and she asks me if I’ve been there. I answer that of course I have; everyone knows Hong Kong, its harbor and the hundreds of tiny islands in the area, the sugar-loaf hills, the new airport on its promontory, the double-decker buses from London, the pagoda-shaped sentry boxes in which the policemen direct traffic at the intersections, the ferry which plies between Kowloon and Victoria, the big-wheeled red rickshaws whose green hoods form a broad shield over the passenger, without completely sheltering him from the sudden torrential rains which do not even diminish the speed of the barefoot runner, the throng in black canvas pajamas which closes its huge parasols, under which it took shelter from the sun a moment earlier, to seek refuge now in the arcades, the long streets with their covered galleries whose massive square pillars are covered, from top to bottom, on all four sides, by vertical posters with enormous ideograms: black on yellow, black on red, red on white, white on green, white on black. The sweeper steps back a little farther under the arcade, against the pillar, the water dripping from the upper floors (where the balconies are covered with drying laundry) is beginning to penetrate his shallow cone-shaped hat; the page of the magazine he is holding is already soaked through. Since he has looked at it enough, and can learn nothing more from the illustrations now, he decides to get rid of it; with an indolent gesture, he lets it drop back into the gutter.
The gutter is now inadequate to hold the water which continues falling from the sky; and it is the whole roadway, transformed into a stream from one sidewalk to the other, which carries the various rubbish accumulated since morning, while the intrepid rickshaw, drawn at a rapid gait by a coolie, raises in passing little fountains of muddy liquid. All the pedestrians, on the other hand, have taken shelter under the gallery, already so crowded by the encroaching displays of fruit or fish that there is almost no room to move. And it requires the huge black dog, whose low growls frighten the bystanders, for Kim to be able to make her way to the narrow stairs which, easily pivoting to her left, she begins to climb without . . . No, now the irritating problem of the dog arises again in all its acuity. It has been said somewhere that the servant girl left it in the vestibule between the door to the street and the lobby where the elevators are, but this is surely a mistake, or else it referred to another time, another moment, another day, another place, another building (and perhaps even another dog and another servant girl), for there are neither elevators nor lobby here, nor street door, but only a steep narrow staircase, without light or railing, flush with the facade of the building without any kind of door and rising in a single flight, without any intermediate landing on which to rest between floors.
Kim glances around to see what she can do with the bothersome animal. The next time, certainly, she will leave it behind, if there is a next time. Meanwhile, she must find a place for it somewhere. She does not see the smallest ring in the wall, even a rusty nail to which she could fasten the loop of the leash; and the unprepossessing way the animal behaves with strangers—Chinese or white—makes it quite impossible to entrust it to one of these unoccupied little men waiting here for the rain to stop, and who before that were perhaps waiting for it to begin, sitting on the ground in the corners or else standing, leaning against piles of crates or against the square pillars, staring through half-closed eyes at the young Eurasian girl who has just stopped in front of them, accompanied by her thoroughbred dog, and whom they immediately assimilate into their dreams.
The dog, meanwhile, not having the same scruples as its mistress and taking advantage of the latter’s momentary confusion on its account, has tugged sharply on the leash, whose free end has surreptitiously slid out of the hand with its lacquered nails; and the dog has dashed into the stairway whose first flight it has covered in several bounds, disappearing in a second into the darkness, its presence then indicated only by the sound of its paws on the steps, which the curved claws scratch in their haste, and by the slapping noise of the leather leash that flies after it, snapping like a whip at the walls and the floor. There is, after all, no reason not to let it run upstairs. The only thing the old lady forbids is taking her precious beasts into air-conditioned buildings, which could scarcely be the case in this old house without any comforts and open to weather. Kim has only to follow the dog: in her turn she climbs the steep, narrow, wooden steps, a little more slowly, of course, and doubtless with a little more difficulty despite her apparent ease, the lateral slit of the tight dress not permitting her legs enough freedom, and the absence of light constituting a further obstacle for eyes accustomed to the bright sun outside.
On the second floor, at the top of this straight stair-case as steep as an attic ladder, which rises perpendicularly to the street, there is a tiny rectangular landing
off which open three doors: one to the right, one straight ahead, one to the left. No plaque indicates the name of the tenants who live here, nor, as is also possible, the modest firms which might have their offices behind these plain wooden doors, all three painted the same color brown, and now peeling. After having hesitated a moment, the servant girl decides to knock at the first door, the one on the right. No answer reaches her ears. Her eyes gradually becoming accustomed to the dark, she checks to see whether the door frames reveal any buzzer, or bell pull, or knocker. Then she knocks again, but still softly. As a final expedient, she tries to turn the filthy wooden handle, worn by use. It does not even turn on its axis; it would seem this door is no longer used.
Kim then tries the second door: the one in the middle. Seeing no buzzer here either, she knocks, without any better result. But this time the handle (in every point identical with the first) works, and the bolt slides out of the lock. The key had not been turned inside. Kim pushes the door open and finds herself on the threshold of a room so small that she has no need to step inside to take in at a glance the unpainted wooden table almost invisible under the stacks of files, the walls covered with pigeonholes whose crude planks, nailed roughly together, contain a considerable number of the same files, and the floor on which are lying in disorder, in every corner, still more files, always made in the same fashion (two pieces of canvas-bound cardboard held together by a strap misshapen by wear), and some of which disgorge a part of their contents: heavy manila folders of various colors, each bearing a huge black ideogram, drawn by hand with a thick brush. Behind the table, there is an ordinary chair with a straw seat. From the ceiling hangs a bare bulb, not lighted, the daylight entering the room by a tiny square opening, without a pane of glass but screened, set above the pigeonholes in the wall facing the door. There must be another means of access to this room, on the left or right side, for the servant girl is now faced by a man, whereas no one was in the room—neither on the chair nor elsewhere—at the moment she opened the door from the landing. He is a middle-aged Chinese, whose expressionless face is made still more impersonal by the absent gaze of myopia, behind steel-rimmed glasses. Dressed in a suit of European cut made of some thin, shiny material, his body is so slender—even nonexistent, it would seem—that the coat and trousers, though not extravagantly tailored, seem to float around a simple wire armature. The two persons say nothing, each seeming to think it the other’s obligation to speak first: the Chinese because he is the one being disturbed, the girl because she hopes to have nothing to ask, from the moment that she is expected and that the man with whom she has an appointment obviously knows why she has come. Unfortunately she sees that the latter shows no intention of speaking, nor of letting her in without an explanation, nor even of encouraging her by a word or a gesture to indicate the purpose of her visit, which would however have facilitated her speaking. She therefore finally decides to say something on her own initiative. Very rapidly, she stammers a quite incoherent phrase, asking if this is where the agent lives, if the gentleman to whom she is speaking is the one she is supposed to meet here, if the merchandise is ready for her to take away, as planned. . . . But no sound can have come from her mouth, for the little man in the empty suit continues staring at her exactly as before, still waiting for her to make up her mind to speak. It was, as a matter of fact, impossible for her to have broached so many questions in so few words (moreover she does not even know what words were involved). Everything has to be begun all over again.
La Maison de Rendez-Vous and Djinn Page 17