The Chain of Chance

by Stanisław Lem

  I wasn’t accustomed to police hospitality, much less from the French police. Then again, maybe it was too little. Not that I detected any outright discrepancies in Pingaud’s version; I had no reason to believe it was a fake investigation or that the superintendent wasn’t really retired. Still, nothing would have been easier than to set up a private meeting somewhere. I could understand it if they were reluctant to drag out the files—the files being something sacrosanct for these people—but the tape recorder alone implied they were anxious to avoid any sort of discussion. The briefing was to take place without commentary: you can’t very well pump a tape recorder. But why the elaborate cover? Barth was either thrown just as far off balance as I, or else he wanted—was obliged?—to keep any doubts he may have had to himself. My mind was still mulling over such thoughts when a rather low, self-assured, asthmatic voice came on the tape recorder.

  “Monsieur, just so there won’t be any misunderstandings—I will tell you as much of the story as discretion will allow. Inspector Pingaud has vouched for you; still, there are certain matters that are better left undiscussed. The dossier you brought with you to Paris is something I’ve known about for a long time, longer than you, and I’ll give you my honest opinion: this case doesn’t warrant an investigation. Don’t take me wrong. It’s just that I have no professional interest in anything that doesn’t come under the penal code. The world’s full of mind-baffling things—flying saucers, exorcisms, guys on TV who can bend forks from a distance—but none of that means anything to me as a policeman. Oh, when I read about such things in France-Soir, I can scratch my head and say, ‘Well, I’ll be damned!’ I may be wrong in saying the Italian affair doesn’t call for an investigation; then again, I’ve put in a good thirty years on the force. You may disagree with me; that’s your privilege. Inspector Pingaud had asked me to brief you on a case I handled a couple of years ago. When I’m finished you’ll see why it was never publicized. At the risk of being rude, I must warn you that if you ever try to publish any of this material I shall categorically deny everything. You’ll see why. It’s a question of raison d’état, and I am, after all, a member of the French police force. Please don’t take it personally; it’s a matter of professional loyalty. What I’m telling you is standard procedure.

  “The case has now been shelved, though at one time the police, the Sûreté, and even French counterintelligence were all in on it. Well, to start with, the subject’s name was Dieudonné Proque. Proque is not really a French name; originally it was Procke. He was a German Jew who, as a young boy, emigrated to France with his parents during the Hitler regime, in 1937. His parents belonged to the middle class, thought of themselves—till the time of the Nazis, that is—as German patriots, and had distant relatives in Strasbourg whose ancestors had settled in France in the eighteenth century. I’m going so far back in time because this was one of those cases calling for a thorough background investigation. The tougher the case, the more widely the net has to be thrown.

  “His father left him nothing when he died, and Proque later became an optician. He spent the occupation years in Marseilles, in the unoccupied zone, where he stayed with relatives. Except for the war years, he lived the whole time in Paris, in my arrondissement, where he ran a little optical shop out of his apartment on Rue Amélie. Since he didn’t have the resources to compete with the more established firms, business was bad, and he barely made ends meet. He made very little from sales, mostly from repairs—replacing lenses, fixing broken toys, that sort of thing. An optician for the poor. He lived with his mother, a woman going on ninety. A bachelor, he was sixty-one at the time in question. His record was clean: not one court conviction, though we knew the photo lab he’d fixed up at the back of the shop was far from being the innocent little hobby he said it was. There are people who specialize in risqué pictures—not necessarily pornography—but who are unable or unwilling to do their own developing, in which case they need someone else to handle it, someone reliable who won’t make extra prints for himself. Within limits, there’s not even anything illegal about it. Then there are those who lure people into tricky situations and take pictures for blackmail. We keep most of the blackmailers on file, and it’s not advisable for them to have their own darkroom or camera equipment or to hire a photographer who’s already had a conviction. Proque was running that kind of racket, but only as a sideline. We knew that he was developing pictures and that he usually did it when he was hard pressed financially. But that was still no reason to move in on him. And frankly, these aren’t the only things that get by the police nowadays. Not enough full-time staff, not enough funds, and not enough manpower. Besides, we knew Proque wasn’t making a bundle on the deal. He didn’t have the nerve to use extortion against any of his clients. He was the cautious type, a coward by nature, completely dominated by his mother. Every July they’d make the same trip to Normandy; they lived always in the same cluttered apartment above the shop, in the same building, with the same neighbors they’d known since before the war. A brief physical description of the man, since that’s important for you: short, thin, prematurely stooped, with a tic in his left eye and a constantly drooping eyelid. To those who didn’t know him, and especially in the afternoon hours, he gave the impression of being hard of hearing and a bit of a crank. But he was completely in his right mind, except for periodic drowsy spells—usually in the afternoon—caused by low blood pressure. That’s why he always kept a Thermos of coffee on his workbench, to help keep him awake on the job. As the years went by, these spells grew worse, to the point where he was constantly yawning and on the verge of fainting or collapsing. Finally his mother made him go to see a doctor. He saw two doctors, both of whom prescribed harmless stimulants, which actually helped for a while.

  “What I’m telling you isn’t a secret; every tenant in the building knew about it. People even knew about his shady business deals in the darkroom. The guy was so easy to see through. And in the end these pictures were nothing compared to your bread-and-butter sort of stuff. The fact is, I’m in Homicide; morals offenses are not my department. Anyway, what happened later had nothing to do with morals offenses. What else should I tell you to complete the picture? He was a collector of old postcards, used to grumble a lot about having hypersensitive skin—too much exposure to the sun made him break out all over, though he didn’t seem like the sort of man who’d go out of his way to get a suntan. But that fall his complexion started to change, became sort of coppery, the way it does when it’s been exposed to a sun lamp, and some of his regular customers, friends of his, started saying, ‘Tch, tch, Monsieur Proque, don’t tell me you’ve been going to a sunroom?!’ And, blushing like a little girl, he’d explain that he had a bad case of boils—in the most sensitive spot, he said—so bad that his doctor had prescribed radiation plus vitamins and a special skin ointment. Apparently the treatment worked.

  “That October was especially cold and rainy. Fall was also the time of year the optician was most susceptible to attacks of dizziness and fainting spells, so again he went to see the doctor, and again the doctor prescribed some pep pills. Around the end of the month, while he and his mother were eating dinner one night, he became very excited and began telling her about how he stood to make a killing on a big order for developing and enlarging lots of prints, in color and in large format. He figured on netting sixteen hundred francs on the deal, a small fortune for a man like Proque. At seven that evening he lowered the shutter and, after telling his mother he wouldn’t be back till late, shut himself up in his darkroom. Around one in the morning his mother was awakened by a noise coming from her son’s room. She found him sitting on the floor and crying ‘worse than any man has ever cried before,’ to quote the transcript. In a sobbing voice he kept screaming that he’d wasted his whole life and that suicide was the only way out, started ripping up his favorite postcards, knocking over the furniture… and there was nothing his mother could do to stop him. Though normally obedient, he completely ignored her. It was like some che
ap melodrama. She kept trailing him around the room and yanking at his clothes; he kept looking for some rope, ripped off the curtain cord but was so weak his mother had no trouble getting it away from him; he went for a knife in the kitchen, and as a last resort threatened to go down to the darkroom, where he always kept a supply of lethal chemicals on hand. But then he suddenly went limp, slumped to the floor, and before long was snoring and whining in his sleep. His mother wasn’t strong enough to lift him into bed, so she slipped a pillow under his head and let him sleep like that through the night.

  “The next morning he was his normal self again, though extremely demoralized. He complained of a bad headache, said he felt as if he’d been drinking the whole night, though in fact all he’d had to drink was a quarter of a bottle of wine at lunch, and a weak table wine at that. After taking a couple of aspirin tablets, he went down to the shop, where he spent a routine day. He had very few customers as an optician, and since he spent most of his time in the back polishing lenses or in the darkroom developing photos, the shop was usually empty. That afternoon he waited on a total of four customers. He kept a record of every order, even the most minor repair job done on the spot. If the customer was a stranger, he’d merely jot down the order. Needless to say, he didn’t keep a record of his photographic work.

  “The next two days were also uneventful. On the third day he got an advance for the enlargements and prints, though of course he was shrewd enough not to enter this amount in the cash receipts. That night he and his mother ate more extravagantly than usual, at least by their standards: an elegant wine, a special fish dish—oh, I can’t remember all the dishes any more, though there was a time when I knew all of them by heart, even what kind of cheeses they ate for dessert. The following day he received another batch of undeveloped film, from the same client. During lunch he was in an excellent mood, telling his mother all about his plans for building a house; then, in the evening, he shut himself up in his darkroom again. Around midnight his mother heard a terrible commotion, went downstairs, stood in the hallway, and knocked on the back door of the darkroom. Through the plywood partition she listened to him ranting and raving, breaking things, turning the place upside down… Panic-stricken, she ran to get her neighbor, an engraver whose workshop was just down the street. The neighbor, an easygoing old widower, used a chisel to pry open the bolt on the partition door.

  “It was dark inside, hardly any noise. They found Proque lying on the floor; scattered all around him were the partially developed and still sticky negatives of pornographic photos. They were everywhere, many of them tom and others still glued together. The linoleum floor was covered with chemicals, all the reagent bottles had been smashed to smithereens, the enlarger lay damaged on the floor, there were acid bums on Proque’s hands and holes in his clothes, the faucet was running full blast, and he was soaked from head to foot—apparently after trying to revive himself by sticking his head under the faucet. From the looks of it, he’d tried to poison himself, by mistake grabbed some bromide instead of cyanide, and went into a narcotic stupor. He put up no resistance when his neighbor practically carried him back to his apartment. His mother testified that after the neighbor left, Proque tried to go on another rampage but was too worn out physically. The scene that followed was again straight out of some second-rate comedy: he flopped around in his bed, tried to rip up his top sheet to hang himself, stuffed his pillowcase into his mouth, and all the time kept shrieking, crying, swearing. As soon as he tried to get to his feet he collapsed and fell asleep on the floor, as he had the time before.

  “He woke up the next day feeling miserable as hell. The sight of all the damage he’d caused only made him feel guiltier and more despondent, so he spent the whole morning picking up the pieces, rinsing things off, trying to salvage what was left of the negatives, and mopping up the mess. When he was finished cleaning up the darkroom, he took his cane—he was having another one of his dizzy spells—and went out to stock up on a new supply of chemicals. That evening he complained about having some sort of mental illness, asked his mother if she knew of any cases of insanity in the family, and refused to believe her when she said she didn’t. The very fact that he could accuse her of lying convinced her that he wasn’t fully recovered yet, since in the past he wouldn’t have dared even to raise his voice to her. Never before had he acted so aggressively, but then she could understand how a person might lose his self-control after two consecutive attacks of hysteria, which would’ve been enough to make anybody think he was going insane. He promised his mother that if it ever happened again he’d go straight to a psychiatrist. It wasn’t like him to make such rash decisions; it had taken him weeks to go see a dermatologist, and then not until his boils were really killing him. Not because he was tightfisted—he had no need to be, since he was medically insured—but because he couldn’t put up with the slightest change in his routine.

  “Not long after that he had a falling out with his client because several of the pictures turned up missing. We still don’t know what transpired between them; it’s the only major dark spot in the whole affair.

  “The following week passed quietly. Proque became more subdued and never brought up the subject of his mental illness again. That Sunday he and his mother went to see a movie. Then on Monday he went completely berserk. It happened like this. Around eleven in the morning he walked out of the shop without bothering to close the door behind him. Nor did he bother to return his friend’s greeting—an Italian who ran a little candy store on the corner—when the man called out to him from in front of the shop. The Italian later testified that Proque looked ‘somehow funny.’ Proque went straight inside the shop, bought some candy, said he’d pay for it on his way back—which wasn’t like him at all—because by then he’d be ‘rolling in dough,’ climbed into a taxi even though it was a good ten years since he’d last taken one, and told the driver to take him to Avenue de l’Opéra. There he made the driver wait and came back fifteen minutes later yelling and waving an envelope full of cash, gave holy hell to some street tramp who tried to make off with the money, climbed back into the taxi, and told the driver this time to take him to Notre Dame. When he reached the island, he paid the fare with a hundred-franc note—the cabby said he saw only hundred-franc notes inside the envelope—and before the cab had even pulled away from the curb, started to climb over the bridge railing. A passer-by grabbed hold of his leg, there was a scuffle, the cabby jumped out of the car, but not even the two of them could handle him. A gendarme showed up, and together they managed to shove him into the taxi, leaving the hundred-franc notes lying on the sidewalk. When Proque wouldn’t stop being hysterical, the gendarme handcuffed him, and they headed straight for the hospital. On the way there, Proque pulled a fast one. After the car drove off he collapsed on the seat, went completely limp, then suddenly lunged forward, and before the gendarme could stop him—they were driving in heavy traffic now—grabbed hold of the steering wheel. The cab rammed straight into a Citroën’s front door, pinning the driver’s arm between the steering wheel and the door. The gendarme managed to get Proque to the hospital in another taxi. At first the hospital didn’t treat his case too seriously, since all he did was stand there in a daze, whimper a little, and refuse to answer any questions. Finally he was admitted for observation, but later, when the chief physician was making his rounds, Proque turned up missing. He was found under the bed, wrapped in a blanket pulled out from under his sheet, and huddled up so close to the wall that it was a while before he was even noticed. He was unconscious from loss of blood, having slashed both wrists with a razor blade smuggled from his clothes into his hospital gown. It took three blood transfusions, but they pulled him through, though he later developed complications due to his poor heart condition.

  “I was assigned to the case the day after the incident on the Île St-Louis. Though there was nothing to warrant an investigation by the Sûreté, the lawyer representing the owner of the Citroën, figuring this was a good chance to milk the police,
came up with a version charging the police official on duty with criminal negligence. Having in his custody a deranged criminal, the lawyer claimed, the policeman was responsible for allowing the taxicab to collide with his client’s car, causing bodily and property damage as well as severe psychological shock to his client. Since the police were criminally liable, any compensation for damages would have to come out of government funds.

  “Hoping to gain an advantage, the lawyer leaked his version to the press, which had the effect of escalating the whole affair, since now it was the prestige of the Police Judiciaire that was at stake. It was at this point that I was called in to make an investigation.

  “The preliminary medical report indicated Proque had suffered an acute psychosis caused by a delayed attack of schizophrenia, but the longer he was kept under observation after his suicide attempt, the less this diagnosis seemed to hold up. In the space of just six days he had become a thoroughly broken and wasted old man, but he was completely sane in all other respects. On the seventh day of his stay in the hospital he made a deposition. He testified that instead of paying him the sixteen hundred francs they had agreed upon, his client had paid him less than one hundred fifty, for failing to deliver all the prints. That Monday, while he was grinding some lenses for a new fitting, he suddenly became so furious he dropped everything and left the shop, ‘to get what he had coming to him.’ He had no recollection of going into the candy store or of anything that happened on the bridge, only that his client had come up with the balance of the money after Proque went to his apartment and made a stink. Later that night, after making his deposition, Proque suddenly took a turn for the worse. He died early the next morning of heart failure. The doctors were unanimous in ascribing it to a reactive psychosis.