“We each had one. He has a married daughter, too. She and her husband lived with us for a while, but now they’re living on Quai de Passy.”
“Good … very good … Did your husband actually go to his office?”
“Yes.”
“Did he come home for lunch?”
“He nearly always lunched in a restaurant close to Les Halles, not far from his office.”
“When did you begin to feel anxious?”
“That evening, about eight o’clock.”
“In short, you’ve not seen him again since the morning of January 13?”
“I called him up soon after three to ask him to send Joseph along with the car, as I had to go out.”
“Did he sound his usual self when he spoke to you over the telephone?”
“Absolutely.”
“He didn’t tell you he would be late, or mention the possibility of a journey?”
“No.”
“He just failed to come home to dinner at eight o’clock? Is that right?”
“That’s right.”
“And since then he’s given no sign of life. I suppose they’ve seen nothing of him in the office either?”
“No.”
“And what time did he leave Rue Montorgueil?”
“About six. He never told me, but I knew that instead of coming straight home he used to stop at the Cintra, a café on Rue Montmartre, for a drink.”
“Did he go there that evening?”
With dignity: “I have no idea.”
“May I ask you, madame, why you have waited three whole days before coming to inform us of Monsieur Monde’s disappearance?”
“I kept hoping he would come back.”
“Was he likely to go off like this?”
“It never happened before.”
“Did he never have to go off into the provinces suddenly on business?”
“Never.”
“And yet you went on waiting for him for three days?”
Without replying, she stared at him with her little black eyes.
“I suppose you informed his daughter, who, you tell me, is married and lives on Quai de Passy?”
“She came to the house herself and behaved in such a way that I had to throw her out.”
“You don’t get on with your stepdaughter?”
“We never see one another. At least, not for the last two years.”
“But your husband still saw her?”
“She used to hunt him out in his office when she needed money.”
“If I understand you correctly, your stepdaughter recently needed money and went to Rue Montorgueil to ask her father for some. I suppose he usually gave it to her?”
“Yes.”
“And there she learned that Monsieur Monde had not reappeared.”
“Probably.”
“And then she rushed off to Rue Ballu.”
“Where she tried to get into the study and search the drawers.”
“Have you any idea what she wanted to find?”
Silence.
“In short, supposing Monsieur Monde should be dead, which seems to me unlikely …”
“Why?”
“… unlikely, the question would arise whether he had left a will. What were the terms of your marriage?”
“Separate maintenance. I have an income of my own and some property on Avenue de Villiers.…”
“What is your stepson’s opinion about his father’s disappearance?”
“He hasn’t got one.”
“Is he still on Rue Ballu?”
“Yes.”
“Did your husband make any arrangements before he left? About his business affairs, for instance. I suppose these require some working capital.…”
“The cashier, Monsieur Lorisse, has his signature.…”
“Did the cashier find the usual sums in the bank?”
“No. That’s the point. On January 13, just before six, my husband went to the bank.”
“It must have been closed?”
“To the general public, yes. Not to him. The clerks work late, and he went in by the side door. He withdrew three hundred thousand francs, which he had had in his account.”
“So that next day the cashier was in difficulties?”
“No, not next day. He had no important deal to put through that day. It was not until yesterday that he needed to pay out certain sums, and then he learned that the money had been withdrawn.”
“If I understand correctly, your husband, when he disappeared, left no money either for his business or for yourself and his children?”
“That’s not quite correct. The greater part of his capital, represented by various securities, is in his safe at the bank. Now he has withdrawn nothing from the safe lately, he has not even visited it, so the bank manager tells me. As for the key, it was in its usual place at home, in a small drawer in his desk.”
“Have you power of attorney?”
“Yes.”
“In that case …” he said, with unintentional off-handedness.
“I went to the bank. I had promised the cashier to let him have the money. I was refused access to the safe on the pretext that I could not certify that my spouse was still living, according to the accepted formula.”
The Superintendent heaved a sigh, and nearly took a cigar out of his case. He had understood. He was in for it.
“So you want us to make an investigation?”
She merely stared at him once again, then rose, twisting her neck to look at the time.
A minute later she walked through the waiting room, where the woman in the shawl, leaning sideways under the weight of the baby she was carrying on her arm, was humbly explaining that for the last five days, ever since her husband had been arrested during a brawl, she had been penniless.
When Madame Monde had crossed the sidewalk, on which the police-station lamp shed a red glow, and when Joseph the chauffeur had swiftly opened the door of the car and closed it behind her, she gave him the address of her lawyer, whom she had left an hour previously and who was expecting her return.
Everything she had told the Superintendent was true, but sometimes nothing is less true than the truth.
Monsieur Monde had wakened at seven o’clock in the morning; noiselessly, and without letting any cold air under the covers, he had slipped out of the bed where his wife lay motionless. This was his invariable habit. Each morning, he pretended to believe she was asleep. He avoided lighting the bedside lamp, and crept around the huge bed in the darkness, which was streaked by faint gleams of light filtering through the shutters; barefooted, holding his slippers in his hand. And yet he knew that if he glanced at the pillow he would see his wife’s little black eyes gleaming.
Only when he reached the bathroom did he take a deep breath; he turned the bath on full and plugged in his electric razor.
He was a stout, or more precisely a corpulent, man. His scanty hair was fair, and in the morning, when it was ruffled, it gave his rosy face a childish look.
Even his blue eyes, all the time he watched himself in the glass while shaving, wore an expression of surprise that was like a child’s. It was as if every morning, when he emerged from the ageless world of sleep, Monsieur Monde felt surprised to meet in his mirror a middle-aged man with wrinkled eyelids and a prominent nose topping a sandy toothbrush mustache.
Pouting at himself to stretch the skin under the razor, he invariably forgot the running bath water and would rush to the faucets just as the sound of the overflow betrayed him, through the door, to Madame Monde.
When he had finished shaving he would look at himself a little longer, complacently yet with a certain pang of regret because he was no longer the chubby, somewhat ingenuous young man he had once been, and could not get used to the idea of being already embarked on the downward slope of life.
That morning, in the bathroom, he had remembered that he was just forty-eight years old. That was all. He was forty-eight. Soon he would be fifty. He felt tired.
In the warm water he stretched out his muscles as though to shake off the fatigue accumulated during all those years.
He was nearly dressed when the ringing of an alarm clock overhead told him that his son Alain was now about to get up.
He finished dressing. He was meticulous about his appearance. He liked his clothes to be uncreased and spotless, his linen soft and smooth, and sometimes on the street or in his office he would look down with satisfaction at his gleaming shoes.
He was forty-eight years old today. Would his wife remember? His son? His daughter? Nobody, most likely. Perhaps Monsieur Lorisse, his old cashier, who had been his father’s cashier, would say to him solemnly: “Best wishes, Monsieur Norbert.”
He had to go through the bedroom. He bent over his wife’s forehead and brushed it with his lips.
“You won’t be needing the car?”
“Not this morning. If I need it in the afternoon I’ll call you at the office.”
His house was a very odd one; as far as he was concerned, there was not another one like it in the world. When his grandfather had bought it, it had already had a number of owners. And each of them had altered it in some way, so that there was no longer any recognizable plan. Some doors had been blocked up, others put in in different places. Two rooms had been thrown into one, a floor had been raised, and a passage introduced with unexpected twists and even more unexpected steps on which visitors were apt to stumble, and on which Madame Monde herself still stumbled.
Even on the sunniest days the light in the house was dim and soft as the dust of time, and as though imbued with a fragrance that might have been insipid but that seemed sweet to one who had always known it.
Gas pipes still ran along the walls, and there were some burners on the back staircase, while in the attic lay dozens of kerosene lamps of every sort of date.
Some of the rooms had become Madame Monde’s province. Alien, characterless pieces of furniture mingled with the old things that belonged to the house, and she had sometimes driven them out into the storeroom, but the study had remained intact, just as Norbert Monde had always known it, with its red, yellow, and blue stained-glass windows which lit up one after the other as the sun ran its course, and awakened bright little colored flames in every corner.
It was not Rosalie but the cook who brought up Monsieur Monde’s breakfast, because of a strict timetable decreed by Madame Monde which determined where every member of the household had to be at various times of day. This was all to the good, for Monsieur Monde disliked Rosalie, who, despite the image her name suggested, was a gaunt and sickly girl who vented her spite on everyone except her mistress.
That morning, January 13, he read his papers while dipping croissants in his coffee. He heard Joseph opening the main gate to take out the car. He waited a little, staring at the ceiling as though he hoped his son might be ready to set off at the same time as himself, but this practically never happened.
When he went out it was freezing, and a pale winter sun was rising over Paris.
No thought of escape had as yet crossed Monsieur Monde’s mind.
“Morning, Joseph.”
“Morning, monsieur.”
As a matter of fact, it started like an attack of flu. In the car he felt a shiver. He was very susceptible to head colds. Some winters they would hang on for weeks, and his pockets would be stuffed with wet handkerchiefs, which mortified him. Moreover, that morning he ached all over, perhaps from having slept in an awkward position, or was it a touch of indigestion due to last night’s supper?
“I’m getting flu,” he thought.
Then, just as they were crossing the Grands Boulevards, instead of automatically checking the time on the electric clock as he usually did, he raised his eyes and noticed the pink chimney pots outlined against a pale blue sky where a tiny white cloud was floating.
It reminded him of the sea. The harmony of blue and pink suddenly brought a breath of Mediterranean air to his mind, and he envied people who, at that time of year, lived in the South and wore white flannels.
The smell of Les Halles came to meet him. The car stopped in front of a porch over which was written in yellow letters: “Norbert Monde Corp., brokers and exporters, founded 1843.”
Beyond the porch lay a former courtyard which had been covered over with a glass roof and looked like the concourse of a railway station. It was surrounded by raised platforms on which trucks were being loaded with cases and bundles. Warehousemen in blue overalls were pushing trolleys and greeted him as he went by: “Morning, Monsieur Norbert.”
The offices stood in a row along one side, just as in a railway station, with glazed doors and a number over each of them.
“Morning, Monsieur Lorisse.”
“Morning, Monsieur Norbert.”
Was he going to wish him a happy birthday? No. He hadn’t remembered it. And yet yesterday’s page in the calendar had already been torn off. Monsieur Lorisse, who was sixty-six, was sorting letters without opening them and setting them out in little heaps in front of his employer.
The glass roof over the courtyard was yellow this morning. It never let the sunlight through because of the layer of dust that covered it, but on fine days it was yellow, almost pale yellow, though sometimes, in April for instance when a cloud suddenly hid the sun, it turned so dark that the lights had to be switched on.
The question of sunlight proved to be an important one that day. And then there was a complicated business about a flagrantly untrustworthy client from Smyrna, with whom they had been in litigation for the past six months or more and who always found a way to evade his obligations, so that although he was in the wrong they would end, out of sheer weariness, by allowing him to be in the right.
“Is the consignment for the ‘Maison Bleue’ of Bordeaux ready?”
“The truck will be leaving presently.”
About twenty minutes past nine, when all the employees were at their posts, Monsieur Monde saw Alain come in and make his way to the Foreign Trade Department. Alain, although his son, did not come in to say good morning to him. It was like that every day. And yet every day it made Monsieur Monde unhappy. Every day he felt like telling Alain: “You might at least look in at my office when you get here.”
A sort of diffidence, of which he was ashamed, prevented him from doing so. Besides that his son would have misinterpreted such a suggestion as an attempt to keep a check on his punctuality, for he was invariably late. Heaven knows why; five minutes earlier, he could have gone with his father in the car.
Was it from a spirit of independence that he traveled to the office alone, by bus or by métro? And yet a year ago, when in view of his patent inability to pass his bachot he had been asked what he would like to do, he had replied of his own accord, “I’d like to join the business.”
Not until ten or eleven o’clock would Monsieur Monde pay an apparently unpremeditated visit to the office of the Foreign Trade Department, and laying a casual hand on Alain’s shoulder murmur: “Good morning, son.”
“Good morning, father.”
Alain was as delicate as a girl. He had a girl’s long curling eyelashes, which fluttered like a butterfly’s wings. His ties were always in pale pastel shades, and his father disliked the lace-edged handkerchiefs that adorned his jackets.
No, it wasn’t flu. Monsieur Monde felt uncomfortable all over. At eleven his daughter called him up. There happened to be two important clients in his office.
“Excuse me, please.”
And his daughter, at the end of the line: “Is that you? … I’m in town.… Can I call in at your office? … Right away, yes …”
He could not see her right away. He would have to spend at least an hour longer with his clients.
“No, this afternoon I can’t.… I’ll look in tomorrow morning.… It can wait.”
Money, obviously! Again! Her husband was an architect. They had two children. They were always short of money. What on earth did they do with it?
“Tomorrow morning, r
ight.”
Well! She hadn’t remembered his birthday either.
He went to lunch all by himself in a restaurant where his place was always reserved and where the waiters called him Monsieur Norbert. The sun was shining on the tablecloth and the carafe.
He caught sight of himself in the glass as the cloakroom attendant was handing him his heavy overcoat, and thought he looked older. The mirror must have been a poor one, for he always saw himself with a crooked nose.
“See you tomorrow, Monsieur Norbert.”
Tomorrow … Why did the word remain so firmly fixed in his mind? The year before, at about this same date, he had felt tired, listless, ill at ease in his clothes, just as he was feeling now. He had mentioned it to his friend Boucard, who was a doctor and whom he frequently met at the Cintra.
“Are you sure there’s no phosphate in your urine?”
He had taken a glass jar from the kitchen furtively, without saying a word; he remembered it had held mustard. Next morning he had urinated into it and had seen a sort of fine white powder dancing in the yellow liquid.
“You ought to take a holiday, have a change. In the meantime, take this at night and in the morning.…”
Boucard had scribbled out a prescription. Monsieur Monde had never dared urinate into the glass again; he had thrown it out into the street, after deliberately breaking it so that nobody could think of using it. He knew that wasn’t what was the matter with him.
Today, at three o’clock, feeling disinclined to work, he was standing in the courtyard on one of the platforms, vaguely watching the comings and goings of warehousemen and drivers. He heard the sound of voices in a tarpaulin-covered truck. Why did he listen? A man was saying:
“The boss’s son is always after him, making propositions.… Yesterday he brought him flowers.…”
Monsieur Monde felt himself turn quite white and stiffen from head to foot, and yet he had really learned nothing new. He had suspected the truth for some time. They were talking about his son and a sixteen-year-old assistant warehouseman who had been taken on three weeks before.
So it was true!
He went back to his office.
“Madame Monde wants you on the phone.” She needed the car.
Monsieur Monde Vanishes Page 2