In reality I am much more interested in the matter of the fur coat. Had it gone when the police arrived? Above all, how was it still there when I came along myself? Such an oversight would be most unlikely on the part of an organization that has only too often shown proof of scrupulous care in the allotment of tasks with a view to their precise and prompt execution. Unfortunately I did not have time, before leaving in rather more of a hurry than usual, to examine in detail what looked like a ceremonial cloak made from a big-cat skin, or the skin of some other animal having thick, curly hair all down the front of its body; the object, though conspicuous enough, was rolled up in a ball in one corner and had caught my eye only as, much to my regret, I was having as a matter of urgency to search for a secret exit by which to make my escape.
The more I think about it, the surer I am that this was the same garment as is now being dragged along the beach in front of me by the enigmatic beggar prostitute, with whom I decided without hesitation to fall into step in order to examine at rather less of a distance this blood-stained skin with which she is sweeping the sand: its very full shape remains as distinctive as its warm, red-gold colour, which is the more striking, despite the powdered shell adhering among the fur and gluing it together in flaxen hanks, for reproducing the exact copper-blond tint of the girl's unkempt hair. Seeing her from behind like this, I also notice that she has under her arms, pressed against her hip, an old violin without its case. I understand immediately why she has that curious set of the neck noted earlier: it betrays her professional habit of holding the instrument pinched between collar-bone and chin.
Her pace having been too brisk for me to be able to follow her for long over ground so soft that my stick sank into it, I return slowly to the terrace of the abandoned café. Two men in light-coloured trench coats and felt hats have sat down at a table as if awaiting the return of a hypothetical waiter wearing a white jacket and carrying napkin and tray. There is something so comical about their situation in this wilderness that it seems to me preferable to ignore their presence. As soon as I reach the board floor, which is firmer despite the little dunes encroaching on it, I bear right, that is to say in the direction of the old spa hotel.
I was wrong about the torn poster, the remains of which are mixed up with the property advertisements and “Wanted” notices on the boundary fence: it is not a bull that the equestrienne is fighting but a gigantic iron-grey cayman, which has opened towards her its disproportionately large red mouth, so bright it appears to be spitting fire, while the colt, ridden without stirrups or saddle, rears up in alarm, splashing up on all sides the shallow water of a circular pool that entirely fills the stage for this still very popular act.
All down the rows of seats from top to bottom the spectators sit tense and silent, in contrast to what happens in the arenas of the Ancient World. And one can hear the tiniest sounds of the contest without difficulty. The fiery virgin has just lost her balance, hampered by the too-long lance as her intractable mount was turning abruptly, and the enormous reptile, endowed by the sheet of water with quite incredible agility, stands up for an instant on its tail and its short legs to snatch this delicious prey and swallow it at one gulp.
It is at this moment when I am least expecting it, utterly absorbed as I am by so stimulating and dangerous a spectacle, that I feel the two large hands laid firmly on my arms, one from each side, gradually squeezing me in a double vice just above the elbows. I don't need to look at these neighbours flanking me with their impressively broad shoulders to know without risk of being mistaken who they are and what they want of me. A drawing, even one on Ingres paper, would be entirely superfluous.
The only thought that might still be of some importance concerns the little device producing the magnetic signal that opens the black door of the sanctuary: having unfortunately been left in the inside pocket of the white jacket I am wearing today, it is going to fall into their hands.
I remain absolutely motionless, as prescribed. Nor do the other two attempt the least movement. It's another impasse.
So the story will have to be re-started earlier than originally intended.
Motionless, I said. That is indeed one's prevailing feeling now on entering this quarter that consists of no more than five or six little streets miraculously preserved amid the ruins and the waste ground—a few kitchen gardens have even been laid out here and there between the heaps of rubble—preserved, then, and carefully maintained on account of the historical interest of buildings that all go back to the early years of the nineteenth century and are thus very old for this part of the world.
The central avenue (if so pompous a name can suitably be bestowed on a thoroughfare of such modest length and devoid of all traffic) slopes sufficiently to make little flights of two or three granite steps necessary to restore a horizontal surface in front of each doorstep. It is spring already, the southern spring, and a still pale sun shines softly green on the new foliage of the chestnut trees. The air is mild, all sounds far-off and quiet. It is Sunday. At regular intervals a solitary, invisible bird (a phoenix thrush?) re-starts his song, only to break it off again in the middle, each time at a different point of the same long phrase that dies away in a few faltering notes as if the bird had forgotten the rest. No one is ever seen in this street, although the two or three storeys of all the houses are—it seems—occupied, one is tempted to say for residential purposes.
The story as written up in an article in The Globe starts off like a fairy-tale. A chief inspector by the name of Franck V. Francis, off-duty that day and striding along with no precise route or destination in mind, finds in the street in question, which he happens to be passing down for the first time in his life in the course of this adventurous morning walk, a lady's shoe in a very small size lying abandoned on one of those cast-iron gratings with arabesque perforations, designed for watering the trees, that have survived in certain districts dating from the colonial period . . . There, we seem to be off to a good start this time.
Brisk and unsuspecting, he picks up the object, which hardly looks like one of the bits of refuse that frequently spill from the bins during the over-hasty collections made in the early mornings by the municipal dustcarts; on the contrary it is practically new, all except for the heel, which is damaged near the bottom and has almost parted from the sole, an accident easily repaired—even by an amateur—with the aid of a hammer and three nails, a job that would be all the more justified in view of the fact that this is clearly an expensive article imported from Europe: a delicate evening or dress shoe in a beautiful ocean blue with just a hint of green, hand-made from the supple stomach hide of a farm-reared cayman and decorated, in the middle of the upper, with a large, imitation-stone cabochon, triangular in shape and an amazing golden colour with metallic highlights.
Closer examination further reveals a small reddish stain on the right side of the pointed tip, clearly outlined and forming a slight bulge on the turquoise skin like a drop of dried blood, though one that could scarcely have come from a wound on the foot itself, given its position. As for the very fresh marks of some slight scratching round the bottom of the heel, they make it possible to reconstruct the trivial incident in which the lady lost her shoe: the shoe (her left one) had caught in a hole in the cast-iron grating and the fragile heel had been partially torn off by being pulled out too sharply. But why had this clumsy person not subsequently recovered her property? When she could have patched things up for the time being and gone on her way, putting that foot down with slightly greater care from then on, why had she chosen to saunter on, hobbling on one shoe? Was that the whimsical behaviour of opera-goers returning home from the theatre very late at night, or possibly from the Michelet Circus, which at that time used to organize evening entertainments on a grand scale? Possibly this is yet another case of one of those wealthy foreigners who go about slightly drunk or under the influence of some allegedly mood-elevating drug and whose eccentricities the newspapers report daily.
Franck V. Francis has re
ached this point in his reflections when he notices other identical little brown splashes, dry yet shiny, presenting a polished surface and therefore very recent because no dust has had time to dull them, dotting the pavement as far as a flight of granite steps, slightly more numerous on the steps themselves where the wounded woman would have waited for a few moments while the door was being opened to her. Wanting to ring himself, the inspector then discovers that this door has no call system and, even more curiously, neither handle nor lock. Situated on the odd side between nos. 9 and 11, the house has no number either but instead a stone eye carved the wrong way up.
Our policeman hazards a knock on the wood, freshly painted black, and is disconcerted by the brazen sound given off by the panel, which is evidently not made of oak and most certainly not of pine. But despite the deep, voluminous echo that seems to reverberate beneath huge vaults loudly enough to rouse the whole building, no one opens the door to him. Nor does anyone appear at the windows (two on the ground floor down the street from the entrance and three on each of the first and second floors), which suddenly begin to look like decorative imitations: beyond the panes of ancient glass whose bumps and highlights make it hard to see through them, Inspector Francis thinks he can in places see the brick wall continuing behind the sham casement, which has been built out over it.
Deciding to come back the next day, a weekday, with an armed colleague and a formal search warrant, he continues his stroll in the direction of the sea, which he is surprised to find so close, at the end of an alley with no houses but lined with hoardings. This brings him out on the front by the old hydropathic, a de luxe hotel that has been out of use for a long time and that had its interior appointments ransacked and three-parts destroyed by the bands of runaway children who moved in with their weapons and horses after the war against Uruguay; in fact it became necessary after a few months to exterminate them systematically on account of the spectacular crimes and misdemeanours that the more audacious among them, if not the older ones, were beginning to perpetrate well beyond the zone tacitly abandoned to fringe elements, drug addicts, and perverts not amenable to any control as well as to the developers of the future. Soaring above the deserted beach is a large imperial vulture of the variety known as “firebird” on account of a legend that credits them with being able to fly into the sooty flames of carrion incinerators in order to seize their food from the fire ready-roasted. Here, however, the flesh-eating raptor's presence is easily explained by the large dead fish that the sea has been washing up for several days round all this part of the bay.
The very next morning Franck V. Francis sets out to return to his suspicious house, the black door of which has plagued him incessantly all night long. He takes the precaution of getting an expert in electronic locks and safes to accompany him. But although he spends hours wandering through vast areas under demolition he is no longer able to find the marvellous island of calm, nor the short, sloping avenue shaded by mature planes, nor the Directoire-style buildings preserved by the town-planning authorities. Moreover his assistant assures him that he has never heard of an old quarter anywhere in this sector. Franck would certainly think he had been dreaming were the delicate blue shoe with the golden stone not there in the bottom of his raincoat pocket, carefully wrapped in a semi-transparent plastic bag, to vouch for the reality of what he remembers with the precision of an engraving.
He goes back to Opera House Square with the intention of tracing exactly the route taken from the old bridge the day before. The muddy waters of the river, swollen by the spring rains, were battling yesterday as they are today against the rising tide. But this morning, leaning against the stone parapet, there was a very young girl—twelve or thirteen years old, possibly, and quite pretty despite the slovenliness of her dress, or on the contrary because of it—selling roses singly. Her left arm steadied a light tray that was made out of a fruiterer's crate suspended from her neck on a length of perished hemp rope, while with her right hand she presented, slightly to one side at breast height, a single bloom held vertically in the way one sees in Renaissance paintings in museums, which is where the child's faraway look also seemed to have come from, the child herself being frozen in her hieratic pose as if crushed under the whole ancestral weight of it.
This image disturbed the inspector without his knowing quite why. He had the impression that he recognized her as a figure familiar to him from his everyday life, and yet he could have sworn she had not been there or anywhere else the day before or on any other day. Unless his memory wholly deceived him he believed he could state that he had never seen the little girl before. He was reminded of the slogan of the security forces, “Never trust a child!” but he did not manage to laugh at it with much enthusiasm.
In desperation he returned to his office, where he dared not say too much about his discovery and his disappointment for fear of being made fun of. No disappearance of a young lady from the fashionable world had been entered in the registers. To take his mind off the problem he began studying the file on the suspect cans of salmon in piquant sauce under investigation for containing the flesh of animals poisoned by nocturnal effluent from the very factories where they were canned, ramshackle installations situated at the edge of the water into which they poured illicit by-products every evening after the last shift had gone home.
And it was not until three days later that they had found, floating half-submerged at the foot of the cliff that closes off the northern end of the longest of the beaches, the body of a girl whose ample head of hair, blond with russet highlights, mingled with the veils and threads of seaweed bobbing on the swell in one of those holes about ten metres deep that communicate with the open sea beneath the piled-up rocks. Franck had then remembered the imperial vulture spotted in the vicinity the previous Sunday. He had thought about it even more insistently when the exceptionally small size of the drowned girl's feet was pointed out to him.
Arriving on the scene when the forensic pathologist—that day it was Dr. Morgan—had already taken his instruments from his black-leather bag and spread them out in the centre of the large flat rock overlooking the irregular hollow in the granite, where it formed a sort of natural swimming-pool, Franck had not been able to stand seeing the surgeon carry out the routine prelimary investigations on the smooth white body laid out in full daylight, polished like a piece of marble, a classical statue with eyes wide open and not a trace of swelling or bruising to disfigure it. Reluctant to admit a discomfiture that was incomprehensible in view of the job he did and the kind of sight that was all in a day's work to him, he had recovered his composure and at the same time found an alibi in gazing at the blue water, which was full of eddies and gilded undulations and too deep for him to see the bottom.
He had then returned by way of the Grand Spa Hotel, once famous for its thousand and one luxurious rooms ranged on either side of interminable corridors, the massive but now partially burnt-out silhouette of which was with time and progressive dilapidation taking on an increasingly ghostly appearance.
Next day he had learned that, soon after his departure from the cliff, one of the large black dogs belonging to the police, which for an hour had been sniffing among the pools and in the crevices between the rounded rocks and the clumps of seaweed smelling of iodine in search of unlikely trails, had fetched in its mouth from somewhere or other a delicate, blue, crocodile-skin shoe in a very small size. The trimming—knot, rosebud, or cabochon—had been torn off. Contrary to Franck's expectations (in fact he had only checked the detail for form's sake, so sure had he been of the answer), this was again a left shoe, the heel of which had become half detached in some mad chase, or fall, or fight . . . or what else? Unable to bear it any longer and at the risk of giving away, when there is no real need to do so, an identity hitherto kept cleverly concealed, I run home and pull open the draw with the false bottom. Everything is in place in the secret compartment: the little register covered with black oil-cloth, the needles and syringes, the keys to the Cadillac and the othe
r two cars, etc. But the transparent plastic bag, in which I kept her evening shoe to remind me of the woman called Angelica, is empty.
I telephone the office. Morgan answers. No, the girl didn't drown; she was already dead on entering the water, where she spent not several days but barely two or three hours. You could always, the doctor adds, claim it was a case of an overdose, because she had quite a few pretty odd things in her blood. (Does the fool suspect something?) No further details? asks Inspector Francis with as much detachment as he can still muster. No, apart from a punctured pink-rubber beach ball that the second dog had found and that, according to him, had also belonged to the victim.
Franck V. Francis feels a sudden hollowness inside, a rush of blood to his head, and his legs giving way: the abrupt surfacing to consciousness of an irreparable false move made in the last few days, or at least in his account of them. He stammers several unintelligible words and replaces the receiver. He sits down on the first support within reach (the heavy brass-bound trunk!), but without managing to recover his normal faculties.
He is overcome by a falling sensation: a drop of the kind experienced in nightmares, when the ground one expects to reach at any moment instead subsides further and further beneath feet deprived of their function. From what abyss will he have afterwards to re-begin? This is the last sentence that flashes through his mind, with the soldiers of the special militia already hammering at the armour-plated door, just before he loses consciousness.
Recollections of the Golden Triangle Page 2