“You haven’t finished the story of the fire. What happened when the man coming down the fire escape reached the ground?”
“The firemen had put a little ladder between the lowest platform of the fire escape and the ground. The man with the gray face let himself tumble down, rather than actually climb the last rungs. The lieutenant fireman has asked him if there was still anyone in the building. The man has answered without a moment’s hesitation that there was no one left. An elderly woman, who was in tears and had barely—as I understood it—escaped the flames, has repeated for the third time that a ‘young lady,’ who lived over her own room, had disappeared. The man has declared that the floor in question was empty, adding that doubtless this blond girl had already left her room when the fire broke out, perhaps in her very room: if she had forgotten to unplug an electric iron, or left on a gas burner, or an alcohol lamp …”
“And then what did you do?”
“I managed to lose myself in the crowd.”
He finishes writing what interests him in the report I have just made. Then he looks up from his papers and asks, without my seeing the link with what has preceded: “Was the woman you call your sister in the house at that time?”
“Yes, of course, since she never goes out.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“Yes, absolutely sure.”
Previously, and without any more reason, he had asked me how I accounted for the color of Laura’s eyes, her skin, and her hair. I had answered that there had probably been some kind of mix-up. This interview over, I walked toward the subway, in order to go back home.
Meanwhile, Laura is still huddled under her sheets and blankets, pulled up over her mouth. But her eyes are wide open, and she is listening hard, trying to figure out what is happening overhead. Yet there is nothing to hear, so heavy and ominous is the silence of the whole house. At the end of the hallway, the murderer, who has quietly climbed up the fire escape, is now carefully picking up the pieces of broken glass which he found broken when he reached the window; thanks to the hole left by the little triangle of windowpane which had already fallen out, the man can grasp one by one between two fingers the sharp points which constitute the star and remove them by pulling them out from their groove between the wood frame and the dry putty. When he has, without hurrying, completed this task, he need merely thrust his hand through the gaping rectangle, where he no longer risks severing the veins in his wrist, and turn the recently oiled lock without making any noise at all. Then the window frame pivots silently on its hinges. Leaving it ajar, ready for his escape once his triple crime has been committed, the man in black gloves walks silently across the brick tiles.
Already the door handle moves slightly. The girl, half-sitting up in her bed, stares wide-eyed at the brass knob facing her. She sees the gleaming spot which is the reflection of the tiny bedlamp in the polished metal turning with unbearable deliberation. As if she were already feeling the sheets crushed beneath her covered with blood, she utters a scream of terror.
There is light under the door, since I have just pressed the hall-light button on my way up. I tell myself that Laura’s screams will end by disturbing our neighbors. During the day, the schoolchildren hear them in their courtyard. I climb the stairs wearily, legs heavy, exhausted by a day of errands even more complicated than usual. I even need, tonight, the banister to lean on. At the second-floor landing, I carelessly drop my keys, which clatter against the iron bars before they reach the floor. I then notice that I have forgotten to set these keys down on the vestibule table downstairs, as I usually do each time I come in. I attribute this negligence to my exhaustion and to the fact that I was thinking about something else as I was closing my door: once again, about what Frank had just told me with regard to Laura, and which I should probably consider as an order.
This had happened at “Old Joe’s.” The band there makes such a racket that you can talk about your business without danger of being overheard by indiscreet ears. Sometimes the problem is actually to make yourself heard by the person you are talking to, whose face you get as close to as you can. At our table, there was also, at first, the go-between who calls himself Ben-Saïd, who as usual said nothing in the presence of the man whom we all more or less regard as the boss. But when Frank got up and walked toward the men’s room (or, more likely, the telephone), Ben-Saïd told me right away that I was being followed and that he wanted to warn me. I pretended to be surprised and asked if he knew why.
“There are so many informers,” he answered, “it’s only natural to be careful.” He added that in his opinion, moreover, almost all the active agents were watched.
“Then why tell me about it—me in particular?”
“Oh, just so you’ll know.”
I looked at the people at the other tables around us, and I said: “So my shadow is here tonight? You should tell me which one he is!”
“No,” he answered without even turning his head to make sure, “here it’s no use, there are almost no men here except our own. Besides, I think it’s actually your house that’s being watched.”
“Why my house?”
“They think you’re not living there alone.”
“Yes I am,” I say after a moment’s thought, “I’m living alone there now.”
“Maybe you are, but they don’t seem to think so.”
“They better let me know what they do think,” I say calmly, to put an end to this conversation.
Frank was just coming back from the men’s room. Passing by one of the tables, he said something to a man who immediately stood up and walked over to get his raincoat, hanging on a peg. Frank, who had continued on his way, then reached his chair. He sat down and said curtly to Ben-Saïd that everything was set, he should be on his way there now. Ben-Saïd left without asking for another word of information, even forgetting to say good-by to me. It was right after he left that Frank spoke to me about Laura. I listened without answering. When he finished: “That’s it, you take it from there,” I finished my Bloody Mary and went out.
In the street, just in front of the door, there were two homosexuals, walking arm in arm with their little dog on a leash. The taller one turned around and stared at me with an insistence I couldn’t explain. Then he whispered something into his friend’s ear, while they continued their stroll, walking with tiny steps. I thought that maybe I had a speck of dirt somewhere on my face. But when I rubbed the back of my hand over my cheeks, all I could feel were the hairs of my beard.
At the first shopwindow I came to, I stopped to examine my face in the glass. At the same time I took advantage of the occasion to glance back and I glimpsed Frank coming out of “Old Joe’s.” He was accompanied by Ben-Saïd, I am ready to swear to it, though the latter had already left at least three-quarters of an hour before. They were walking in the opposite direction from mine, but I was afraid one or the other would turn around, and I pressed up closer against the glass, as if the contents of the shopwindow were enormously interesting to me. It was only the wig-and-mask shop, though, whose display I have been familiar with for a long time.
The masks here are made out of some soft plastic material, very realistically fashioned, and bear no relation to those crude papier-mâché faces children wear at Halloween. The models are made to measure according to the customer’s specifications. In the middle of the objects exhibited in the window, there is a large placard imitating hurriedly daubed-on graffiti: “If you don’t like your hair, try ours. Feel like jumping out of your skin? Jump into ours!” They also sell foam-rubber gloves which completely replace the appearance of your hands—shape, color, etc.—by a new external aspect selected from a catalogue.
Framing the central slogan on all four sides, are neatly lined up the heads of some twenty presidents of the United States. One of them (I forget his name, but it’s not Lincoln) is shown at the moment of his assassination, with the blood streaming down his face from a wound just over the brow ridge; but despite this detail, the facial express
ion is the calm smiling one which has been popularized by countless reproductions of every kind. These masks, even the ones without a bullet hole in them, must be on display only to indicate the extreme skill of the establishment (so that passers-by can discover the lifelike character of the resemblance to familiar features, including those of the president in office who is seen every day on the television screen); they are certainly not often used here in town, contrary to the anonymous faces which constitute the lower row, each accompanied by a brief caption to indicate its use and merits to the shop’s clientele, for instance: “Psychoanalyst, about fifty, distinguished and intelligent; attentive expression despite the signs of fatigue which are the mark of study and hard work; worn preferably with glasses.” And next to it: “Businessman, forty to forty-five, bold but serious; the shape of the nose indicates shrewdness as well as honesty; an attractive mouth, with or without mustache.”
The wigs—for both sexes, but particularly for women—are set in the upper part of the window; in the middle, a long cascade of blond hair dangles in silky curls down to the forehead of one of the presidents. Finally, at the very bottom, paired on a strip of black velvet laid flat, false breasts (of all sizes, curves and hues, with various nipples and aureoles) are set out for—so it seems—at least two functions. As a matter of fact, a little diagram on one side shows the way of attaching them to the chest (with a variant for male bodies), as well as the way of keeping the edges imperceptible, for only this delicate point can betray the device, so perfect is the imitation of the flesh as well as of the texture of the skin. And elsewhere, however, one of these objects—which also belongs to a pair, the second breast being intact—has been riddled with many needles of various sizes, to show that it can also be used as a pincushion. All the facsimiles exhibited here are so lifelike that it is surprising not to see forming, on the pearly surface of this last one, tiny ruby drops.
The hands are scattered all over the shopwindow. Some are arranged so as to form anecdotal elements in contact with some other article: a woman’s hand on the mouth of the old “avant-garde artist,” two hands parting a mass of auburn hair, a very black hand—a man’s hand—squeezing a pale pink breast, two powerful hands clutching the neck of the “movie starlet.” But most of the hands soar through the air, agile and diaphanous. It even seems to me that there are a lot more of them tonight than on other days. They move gracefully, hanging on invisible threads; they open their fingers, turn over, revolve, close. They really look like the hands of lovely women recently severed—several of them, moreover, have blood still dripping from the wrist, chopped off on the block with one stroke of a well-sharpened axe.
And the decapitated heads too—I had not noticed it at first—are bleeding profusely, those of the assassinated presidents, but all the rest even more: the lawyer’s head, the psychoanalyst’s, the car salesman’s, Johnson’s, the waitress’s, Ben-Saïd’s, the trumpet-player at “Old Joe’s” this week, and the head of the sophisticated nurse who receives patients for Doctor Morgan in the corridors of the subway station of the line I then take to get back home.
On my way upstairs, as I reach the second-floor landing, I happen to drop my keys, which ring against the iron bars of the banister before falling on the last step. It is then that Laura, at the end of the corridor, begins screaming. Luckily, her door is never locked. I walk into her room, where I find her half-naked, crouching in terror on her rumpled bed. I calm her by the usual methods.
Then she asks me to tell her about my day. I tell her about the example of arson which has destroyed a whole building on One Hundred and Twenty-third Street. But since she soon starts asking too many questions, I change the subject by telling her the story—I saw it myself only a little while later—of that ordinary couple who visited the mask-maker on the advice of the family physician: they each wanted to order the other’s face, in order to be able to act out in reverse the psychodrama of their conjugal difficulties. Laura seems amused by this situation, to such a degree in fact that she forgets to ask me what I was doing in such a shop and how I could have managed to hear what was said. I do not tell her that the shopkeeper works with us, nor that I suspect him of being a cop. Nor do I tell her about JR’s disappearance and the investigations into her case which have taken up most of my working time.
It is at the office that I hear the news. I have already told how this office works. To all appearances, it is a placement office of the United Manichean Church. But in reality, the domestics by-the-month, lady’s companions or various slaves, the part-time secretaries, the high-school-student baby-sitters, the call girls paid by the hour, etc, are so many information agents—of organized crime and propaganda—which we thereby manage to introduce into the establishment. The rings of call girls, high-class prostitutes and concubines obviously constitute our best cases, since from them we get both irreplaceable contacts with men in office and also the larger part of our financial resources, not to mention the possibility of blackmail.
JR had been placed as a baby-sitter the week before, in answer to a tiny advertisement in The New York Times: “Unmarried father wants young girl, pleasant appearance, docile character, for night sessions with rebellious child.” The child in question actually existed, despite the oddly promising text of the advertisement: the words “docile” and “authoritarian” figuring, as is well known, high on the list of specialists’ code words. In principle, what was involved should have been the participation in the training of a novice mistress, giving her if need be a good example of submission.
Therefore we sent JR, a handsome white girl with a fine head of auburn hair which always creates a good effect in intimate scenes, who had already handled similar cases on several occasions. She arrives that same evening at the address given, on Park Avenue, between Fifty-sixth and Fifty-seventh Streets, wearing a very short, close-fitting green silk dress which has always given us good results. To her great surprise, it is a little girl of twelve or a little older who opens the door; she is alone in the apartment, she says in answer to JR’s embarrassed question, her name is Laura, she is thirteen and a half, and she offers JR a glass of bitter lemon while they chat, to get to know each other …
JR insists: “I really wanted to see your father …” But the little girl immediately declares, quite offhandedly, that in the first place that is impossible, since he’s gone out, and besides, “you know, he’s not really my father…,” these last words whispered in a much lower tone, confidentially, with a tiny smothered laugh to end the sentence in a very good imitation of polite embarrassment. Having absolutely no interest in the problem of adopted or illegitimate children, JR would have been ready to leave right away, if the opulence of the house—the avant-garde millionaire style—hadn’t made her stay after all, to satisfy her professional conscience. So she drank the lemon the little girl served her in a kind of boudoir where the seats and little tables were inflated by pressing on electric buttons. To make conversation, and also because it might be a useful piece of information under other circumstances, she asked if there were no servants.
“Well, there’s you,” Laura answered, with her prettiest smile.
“No, I mean, to do the housework, the cooking …”
“You don’t plan to do any housework?”
“Well, I … I didn’t think that was what I came for … There’s no one else?”
The little girl’s expression now contrasted with her previous simperings of a child pretending to be the lady of the house. And in a very different tone of voice, remote and as though filled with melancholy, or despair, she finally said, as if with great reluctance: “There’s a black woman, mornings.”
Then neither of us said another word for what seemed to me quite a long time. Laura sipped her bitter lemon. I decided she was unhappy, but I wasn’t there to deal with that question. And at that moment, there were steps in the next room, heavy and determined steps on a creaking floorboard; at first I didn’t think of how old it was to have that kind of floor in such an apart
ment building. I said: “Is there someone next door?”
The child answered: “No,” with that same remote expression.
“But I just heard someone walking … Listen, there it is again! …”
“No, it can’t be, there’s never anyone there,” she answered, in her most stubborn manner, against all appearances.
“Then perhaps you have neighbors?”
“No, there are no neighbors. This is all the apartment!” And with a sweeping gesture, she included the vicinity of the boudoir in all directions.
Nonetheless she got up from her pneumatic chair and took a few nervous steps to the large bay window which seemed to open onto nothing but the unvarying gray sky. That was when I noticed how silent her own footsteps remained on the white carpeting thick as fleece, even when she tapped on the floor with her little black patent-leather shoes.
If little Laura’s intention had been to drown out by her movements the noises of the adjoining room, it was a miscalculation in any case, especially since they continued all the louder behind the partition, from which came now the quite recognizable echoes of a struggle: trampling, furniture knocked over, heavy breathing, clothes ripped, and even, soon after, groans, muffled pleas, as though uttered by a woman who for unknown reasons dares not raise her voice, or is materially prevented from doing so.
The little girl, too, was listening now. When the moaning assumed a more particular character, she gave me a sidelong glance, and I had the impression that a fugitive smile passed across her lips, or at least between her half-closed eyelids which had perceptibly winked. But then there was a fierce scream, so violent that she made up her mind to go and see, though without seeming in any way surprised or alarmed.
Having left my seat at the same moment, in an instinctive movement, I saw the door close behind Laura; then, since there was nothing more to be heard, I turned my head toward the sheet of glass. I was thinking, of course, of the fire escape; but aside from the fact that no such thing exists on any building of recent construction, I would have been very reluctant to use, once again, this convenient means of regaining the street, the subway, my abandoned house … In a few meditative steps, however, I reach the huge bay window, and raise the thick tulle curtains covering it.
Project for a Revolution in New York Page 4