“Nothing … problems …”
“But what?”
“Apparently you’ve been making an ass of yourself, and he’s going to be turned in … because of you.”
“Oh? … Why him?”
“Because Frank gave him orders to take care of you, and he doesn’t want to play informer.”
“He’s a good guy! … What kind of an ass?”
“You’ve been hiding someone at your place, someone who was supposed to be taken care of a long time ago.”
“Oh, so that’s it.”
“I told him he was crazy.”
“Thanks a lot. And what do you really think?”
She does not answer immediately. She pretends to think she’s going to find another carton by picking up three dead leaves. Then she straightens up and stares right at me, as though by accident, with a kind of calculated insistence. I have already said, I think, that her lips are fleshy, sharp-edged, shiny as if they were always faintly moist; and her face is like warm milk, in the darkness. I’d like someone to tell me, some day, how much Puerto Rican blood this pretty whore is supposed to have.
“Well,” she says, too slowly, “I think he’s crazy, of course.”
When she talks, her mouth moves in the half-darkness of the depths: like some aquatic animal whose wavering curves constantly shift, but without ever losing their lovely symmetry, suggesting those ink blots you spread on a sheet of paper folded in half.
“All right, fine,” I say, “and it would be better for you to mind your own business.” But I immediately regret this useless remark. As a matter of fact, I thought I made out a gleam of hatred and violence in her big green eyes. Naturally it can only be my imagination: it is not even light enough, here in the bushes, to make out the color of her eyes, if I didn’t know it already.
JR straightens up calmly, with the gesture of a wild animal, with twists and curves that seem to be filmed in slow motion. Without hurrying, she begins moving away. The naked flesh of her round white neck gleams like a knife blade when she passes under the direct light of the streetlamp.
I say, trying to seem better-humored: “And the man with the want ad—how’s that going?”
“Fine,” she answers, “thanks.”
“Are you going back there?”
“Yes, tonight. But it would be better for you to mind your own business.”
Watching her head casually for the car, I was thinking that she must have as beautiful a body as they say, to show it off that way in stretch pants and a sweater. It occurs to me, at the same time, what a lovely corpse you could make out of that lovely white flesh.
Straightening up, I felt a sharp pain in my knees, stiff from the position my legs had been in for too long. While the joints recovered their normal function, I rubbed my hands together two or three times, to brush off the little pieces of dirt or dry twigs that had stuck against the palms and finger tips.
It was that night that we lost all contact with her. I heard about her disappearance the next day, when I reached the office, without having seen her again myself since the business with the cigarettes. We had not said anything else before we separated; the load was all there: there was the same number of packages as on the shipping list. JR drove the Buick back to the garage herself, the night man confirmed her arrival there at the usual time. She left right away in her own car, in order to go home and change: she took a bath, washed her hair, perfumed her entire body and made up carefully; then she decided to press the green silk dress she was supposed to wear that night, as has already been said. The only jewelry she wore was a tiny gold chain she slipped over her head, with a simple cross attached to it.
“And what did Ben-Saïd do after he left her?”
“I don’t recall that he was particularly concerned about her. I myself was busy with the counting and checking of the cigarette cartons. When the Buick drove away, Ben-Saïd grumbled some vague good night, and I think I remember that he made some ironic allusion, between his teeth, to the rumors of a big fire we could hear in the distance, toward Harlem. Then he vanished between the trees, doubtless intending to walk across the park toward Columbia. I took the subway, as usual, to get home. There I found Laura, who was very upset because I was late. I briefly explained the reason for the delay, but in order not to risk making her even more nervous by reawakening her own memories, I didn’t mention JR’s disappearance; I have already described this deliberate omission, as well as all the rest of my evening.”
“All right … The garage you’re talking about is in lower Manhattan, at the entrance to the tunnel; JR’s apartment is the one on a Hundred and Twenty-third Street?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“How much time do you think she can have taken to get from Central Park to the tunnel, and then to drive back up as far as Harlem?”
“It was late, the streets were empty…”
“How do you know, since you went home by subway?”
“I took the subway at the Madison Avenue station.”
“That’s not very convenient, if you were going home.”
“It’s not much longer. And it’s easier to change.”
“Where did you get those details, about her bath, her perfume, the green dress, since you say you didn’t see her again?”
“It’s the outfit she was supposed to wear on such occasions. It’s all written on her punch card, in the office files.”
“Even the little gold cross?”
“Yes, of course.”
“But how can you know about her deciding to press her dress?”
“She told us about it when she left: ‘I have to get going so I can press my dress!’”
“Yet you have just indicated, in your report, that you hadn’t exchanged any further conversation with her, after the little argument in the japonicas. Perhaps she was telling Ben-Saïd that business about her dress?”
“Yes, probably.”
“Then Ben-Saïd could confirm her intention to press her dress?”
“No, I don’t think so—he didn’t hear her. I’ve already said that he wasn’t paying attention right then. Besides, it must have been a little earlier that she said that, before our discussion … You called it an argument just now; no, that’s an exaggeration: they were just ordinary words, nothing special, things we said while we were doing our work.”
“One last question: you say you didn’t indicate, that night, to the woman you call your sister, that JR had disappeared. How could you have done so, since you didn’t know she had disappeared? And since there could have been no question of anything of that kind, as a matter of fact?”
“You’re right, I hadn’t thought of that. So it would be only the next morning that I must have thought of hiding that disappearance from her.”
“If your suppositions are confirmed, Joan—at that hour—is still at home, calmly pressing her dress and glancing absently at the night program on the television screen. Since the apartment is overheated, she has not bothered, as she leaves the bathroom, to put on a robe or any other garment. Only her high-heeled green leather shoes and her black stockings, embellished with a narrow ruffle of pink lace instead of a garter at the top of her thighs. Above this line, all she lacks is her dress, which she will put on as soon as she completes the task over which she is bending so industriously now; in other words, all that she is wearing, besides, at this moment, is her little gold cross.
On the white sheet covering the little tapering ironing-board, she has also laid a pair of large chromium-steel sewing scissors which she has just used to cut a thread hanging from the seam of the lower hem; the two sharp blades, open in a V, gleam in the light of a gooseneck lamp whose light they reflect in a crisscross of rays. Not far away, at the same height as the board, the curly hair of her pubic area (of modest dimensions and perfectly equilateral triangular shape) is of the same shining bright red as the long hair which, after the movement of the iron, resumes its natural position over the curve of her shoulders, until it is raised i
n a loose bun, ready to tumble down at the lightest touch.
Occasionally, the young woman glances at the little screen, which shows a documentary film about the religious ceremonies of central Africa, in the course of which seven young girls of noble rank, belonging to vanquished tribes, are to be impaled on the sexual organ of the fertility god, in the sacred shade of the oil palms laden with their fruit and—the narrator adds—to the obsessive rhythm of the war drums. It does not seem, according to the uniform hue of the protagonists, that the conflicts which are at the source of these customs can be imputed to the unreconcilable coloring of their skin; the only notable difference, as a matter of fact, is that the skin of the captives remains entirely visible, since they are naked, while that of the executioners and the musicians partly disappears under masks and crude geometric patterns daubed with white paint. In any case, the color television set is very effective for this kind of film, which is called, moreover, The Red and the Black. JR stops a moment in her work, the iron suspended in mid-air about eight inches from die green silk, staring at the executions shown in closeup. The tip of her tongue still sticks out between her lips, as it always does when she performs some exacting domestic task, according to a childhood habit.
At the most interesting moment, a tiny smile of satisfaction passes like the shadow of a bird of prey over her porcelain face, while the pink tongue slowly returns to its place. And while the blood gushes down the inner surface of the brown thighs which are gradually covered by a scarlet network, the young woman unconsciously begins caressing herself against the pointed end of the felt-covered ironing-board. This is the moment when she heard the balcony window opening behind her.
The moment has come, then, to describe exactly how things are arranged. This apartment is one with modern equipment and decoration, in a building about fifty years old. Inside it is all polished surfaces, whiteness, mirrors, reflections, sharp corners, whereas against the brick façade of the building rises the zigzag frame of the black iron fire escape …
But these metal steps have already been used too often—as has been observed several times over—and the killer, arriving ahead of JR, has chosen to get into the apartment by using a skeleton key (there are always a number at the office, for all the locks of our various agents), and then, without difficulty, to climb out on the balcony, pulling the window shut after him in such a way as to suggest that it is closed as usual, and to wait there for the right moment. The girl, in effect, has had no suspicions. She undressed immediately. But he has preferred to give her time to wash and perfume her body. Then, he had no need for a freshly ironed dress, it was only the television documentary—which he too was watching from behind the pane—which somewhat delayed his appearance. Nor was this time wasted, moreover, for it allowed him to notice, according to the sounds which reached him from the other windows, that the neighbors were all tuned in to the same program, the only possible one, no doubt, at this late hour. The continuous pounding of the war drums and the endless shouting on the sound track will therefore greatly facilitate his enterprise, giving him plenty of time to stage the murder according to his tastes.
But now a preliminary question arises: how could JR have heard the window opening, when it was not even really closed, during such a racket? Unless such a detail is utterly without consequence (since it would change nothing in the episode if the murderer had come up to his victim from behind, without her realizing he was there), it might very well be the sudden cold on her naked flesh which has made her turn around.
Whatever the case she then sees a uniformed policeman (it is a fake uniform and a mask that the man is wearing, but she can hardly be aware of the fact) who, regulation pistol aimed at her belly, advances toward her, ordering her to keep still and not to move. Raising her hands in the air in astonishment, though she has not been asked to do so, she drops the hot iron on her green dress, where, the thermostat being jarred in its fall, it will leave a large triangular hole in the pubic area. As for the iron fire escape—now that I think of it—it will be used after all: to make a getaway while the fire breaks out, as has already been described.
At the bottom of the ladder which connects the last landing and the sidewalk, the firemen, who are still looking for possible arsonists, seem immediately reassured by the black raincoat, the boots, the leather shoulder strap, the officer’s stripes and the visored cap (the gun has remained upstairs).
“You’re a brave man,” the chief says in a tough voice. “You didn’t see anything abnormal?”
“No, captain, everything’s all right. No one is left in the house. You can go ahead.”
“A case of arson?”
“No—an iron with a defective thermostat.”
A few minutes later, the whole building collapses in the uproar of an explosion. (In New York, when a building is on fire and the firemen have no hope of extinguishing the blaze by means of their hoses before the flames reach the adjacent structures, it is a practice to destroy the damaged building at once by means of dynamite, whose explosion does more work in one second than a thousand tons of water, according to a procedure worked out for oil wells.) Afterward, all I had to do was to take the subway in order to get home.
Ben-Saïd, who has also been listening, in silence, to the sirens and the final explosion, broke his silence momentarily to murmur something about “the monstrous negligence of the authorities.” Since he never smiles, I cannot swear this was a joke. Then he left, walking alone across the park. He vanished almost immediately into the darkness. When I reached home myself …
“Could your young sister testify to exactly what time it was when you got there?”
“No, certainly not—she never has a clock in sight, nor a watch on her wrist, nor anything that might allow her to give that kind of information. You know there’s no telephone in the building any more: it’s been turned off because of the imminent demolition; so Laura can’t even call to find out the time from the operator. This total ignorance of time in which she has been kept is the consequence of a decision taken with the doctor’s advice: any reference to time—as I have already said—awakens her anxiety. The disadvantage of the present system is that now she always imagines that I am late; and if my work at the office or elsewhere has actually lasted longer than usual, she has the impression of a much greater delay than is actually the case. This evening, for example, I find her waiting for me at the library door, on the ground floor, holding an open book as if she had just interrupted her reading when she heard my key turning in the lock of the door to the building; I know perfectly well that as a matter of fact she has been standing there, in that position, for at least an hour, listening for the sounds of my return. She is standing in the …”
“What kind of book was she holding?”
“A detective story, of course: that’s all there is in the house, and very few of those, so that she is always reading the same ones over and over. The walk of this large ground-floor room are covered with shelves, from floor to ceiling; but they are all empty, or almost all; we still call it the library, because of its initial purpose. Without having to turn around, I immediately notice, in the mirror over the vestibule table, on the marble top of which I set down my keys when I come in each evening, that the book pressed against Laura’s dress, at the height of the pubic region, held open by the forefinger marking her place, does not belong to our scant collection. The cover, whose colors are at once loud and dull according to the tradition of the genre, nonetheless remind me of none of the ones familiar to me, which I even know by heart down to their last detail, having encountered them almost everywhere in the house, set down at random on the furniture, cluttering up the tables and chairs, lying on the floor, which has always suggested to me that Laura was reading all these books at once and that in this way she mixed up from room to room, according to her own movements, the itineraries of the detectives carefully calculated by die author, thereby endlessly altering the arrangement of each volume, leaping more-over a hundred times a day from one wo
rk to the next, not minding her frequent returns to the same passage nonetheless stripped of any apparent interest, whereas she utterly abandons on the contrary the essential chapter which contains the climax of an investigation, and consequently gives its whole meaning to the rest of the plot; and all the more since many of these mass-produced bindings having failed to with-stand the occasionally brutal negligence of this way of reading, they have lost, over the months, a corner of a page, here and there a whole page, or even two or three signatures all at once.
But, if a new volume (not new, for this one seems in a condition resembling that of the others) has just been introduced into the cycle, it must be that someone has come here in my absence. Laura herself cannot go out, since, for safety’s sake, I lock the door when I leave. Someone from outside, on the other hand, might perfectly well be in possession of a skeleton key or a burglar’s kit, or might even have a key made for himself by a locksmith, saying it is the key to his house and that he has lost his own, tonight, during a struggle with three hoodlums in an empty subway car.
Under the astonished eyes of the man in the felt hat pulled down over his eyes, still at his post in the recess of the house across the street only a little closer to the corner in order to observe the unexpected scene without danger of being noticed, while he once again, with a mechanical gesture, stuffs his black-gloved hands into the deep pockets of his raincoat glistening with rain, the locksmith arrives, then, and tranquilly goes about his work at the top of the outside steps, with all his equipment, which he sets down on the doorstep after having checked, in a little notebook with a worn cover, removed a moment before from his jacket, that the number of the building corresponds with the one given by his customer, who has not been able to accompany the necessary workman, for he wants to take advantage of the two hours required by the operation to take care of an urgent errand: to inform the police, at the closest station, of the attack made upon him this morning at dawn.
The locksmith is an old man, bald and myopic, who does not seem disturbed in the slightest by the little raindrops still falling, now that the worst of the shower is past, on the shoulders of his jacket and on his gleaming skull. Carefully he introduces a metal blade into the lock, which he then turns very gently, listening, his ear almost pressed against the door, to the tiny noises caused by the possible contacts with the parts it touches, in order to discern their hidden nature. As a matter of fact, the customer, as usual under such circumstances, was unable to describe, even roughly, the shape and arrangement of the notches on the lost key.
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