Missing Person (11 page)

Standing, he seemed to be of medium height. He put on a raincoat and we left the café.

When we were standing in Boulevard de Clichy, he pointed to a building, near the Moulin Rouge, and said:

"In the old days, I'd have arranged to meet you at Graff's ... Over there ... But it no longer exists ..."

We crossed the street and took Rue Coustou. He quickened his pace, glancing furtively over at the sea-green bars on the left-hand side of the road, and by the time we reached the big garage, he was almost running ... He did not stop until we had reached the corner of Rue Lepic.

"Forgive me," he said, out of breath, "but this street has some odd memories for me ... Forgive me ..."

He had really been frightened. I believe he was even trembling.

"It gets better from now on ... I'm all right now..."

He smiled, looking at Rue Lepic rising before him with its market stalls and the well-lit food stores.

We set off along Rue des Abbesses. He walked in a calm and relaxed manner. I wanted to ask him what "odd memories" Rue Coustou had for him but I did not wish to be indiscreet or reduce him once again to that nervous state which had so surprised me. And suddenly, before we had reached Place des Abbesses, he picked up speed again. I was walking on his right. As we were crossing Rue Germain- Pilon, I saw him cast a horrified look at that narrow street with its low, dark houses, which descends rather steeply to the boulevard below. He held my arm very tightly. He clung to me, as though in an effort to tear his gaze away from this street. I drew him across to the other pavement.

"Thank you ... You know... it's very funny..."

He hesitated, on the edge of confiding something.

"I... I feel dizzy every time I cross this end of Rue Germain-Pilon ... I... I have the urge to walk down it... It's stronger than I am ..."

"Why don't you walk down it?"

"Because ... Rue Germain-Pilon ... Because once there was ... There was a place ..."

He broke off.

"Oh...," he said with an evasive smile. "It's idiotic of me ... Montmartre has changed such a lot... It would take ages to explain ... You didn't know the old Montmartre ..."

How could he be so certain?

He lived in Rue Gabrielle, in a building overlooking the gardens of the Sacré Cœur. We used the back stairway. It took him a long time to open the door: three locks and a different key for each one, which he turned deliberately and with the concentration needed to open a complicated safe.

A tiny apartment. It consisted only of a drawing-room and bedroom, which must have originally been one room. Pink satin curtains, held back by cords of silver thread, separated the two rooms. The drawing-room walls were covered in sky-blue silk and the only window was hidden by curtains of the same color. Black lacquer pedestal-tables on which stood ivory or jade objects, tub easy-chairs upholstered in pale green, and a settee covered with a floral design material of a still paler green, gave the whole room the appearance of an ice-cream parlor. The light came from gilt bracket-lamps on the wall.

"Sit down," he said.

I sat down on the flowered settee. He sat beside me.

"So ... let me see it..."

I extracted the fashion magazine from my pocket and showed him the cover, on which Denise appeared. He took the magazine from me and put on glasses with heavy tortoise-shell frames.

"Yes... yes... Photo by Jean-Michel Mansoure... That's me, all right... There's no doubt about it at all..."

"Do you remember the girl?"

"I don't. I rarely worked for this magazine ... It was a small fashion journal ... I worked mainly for
Vogue,
you understand..."

He wanted to make the distinction clear.

"And you can't tell me anything else about this photo?"

He looked at me with an amused expression. In the light from the bracket-lamps, I could see that the skin of his face was covered with tiny lines and freckles.

"My dear chap, I can tell you straight away..."

He rose, the magazine in his hand, turned the key in a door which I had not noticed until then, because it was covered with sky-blue silk, like the walls. It led into a small storage room. I heard him pulling out numerous metal drawers. After a few minutes, he emerged from the room, closing the door carefully behind him.

"Here," he said. "I have an index slip with the negatives. I've kept everything, from the beginning... It's arranged by year and in alphabetical order ..."

He sat down beside me again and studied the slip.

"Denise ... Coudreuse ... That's the one, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"She never had any other photo sessions with me . . . Now I remember the girl. . . She did a lot of photos with Hoyningen-Huene ..."

"Who?"

"Hoyningen-Huene, a German photographer ... Yes, of course... That's it... She did a lot of work with Hoyningen- Huene ..."

Each time Mansoure pronounced this name with its plaintive, lunar resonance, I felt Denise's clear eyes on me, like that first time.

"I have the address she gave me then, if it's of any interest..."

"It is," I answered in an eager voice.

"97, Rue de Rome, Paris, XVIIth arrondissement. 97, Rue de Rome ..."

Suddenly he raised his head and looked at me. His face was frighteningly white, his eyes wide open.

"97, Rue de Rome ..."

"What's the matter?..." I asked.

"Now I remember the girl very well... I had a friend who lived in the same building ..."

He looked at me in a suspicious manner and seemed as agitated as when he had crossed Rue Coustou and the top of Rue Germain-Pilon.

"An odd coincidence ... I remember it very well... I picked her up at her place, in Rue de Rome, to take the photos and I took the opportunity of dropping in on this friend ... He lived on the floor above."

"You went to her place?"

"Yes. But we took the photos in my friend's apartment... He stayed with us ..."

"Who was the friend?"

He was growing paler and paler. He was frightened.

"I'll... explain ... But first I must have a drink ... to steady myself..."

He rose and walked across to a little table on casters, which he wheeled over in front of the settee. On the upper tray were some small carafes with crystal stoppers and silver labels engraved with the names of the liqueurs, like the chains the Wehrmacht musicians used to wear around their necks.

"I've only got sweet liqueurs ... Do you mind?"

"Not at all."

"I'm going to have a little Marie Brizard ... how about you?"

"I'll have the same."

He poured the Marie Brizard into narrow glasses and when I sipped this liqueur, it blended in with the rather cloying satins, ivories and gilt around me. It expressed the very essence of this apartment.

"This friend of mine who lived in Rue de Rome ... was murdered..."

He had uttered the last word hesitantly and was clearly making an effort on my account, or he would not have had the courage to use so unambiguous a word.

"He was a Greek from Egypt... He wrote poetry, and a couple of books ..."

"And do you think Denise Coudreuse knew him?"

"Oh . . . She must have run into him on the stairs," he said impatiently, since this detail was of no significance to him.

"And ... Did it happen in the building?"

"Yes."

"Was Denise Coudreuse living in the building at the time?"

He had not even heard my question.

"It happened at night... He had brought someone up to his apartment... He brought anyone up to his apartment..."

"Was the murderer found?..."

He shrugged.

"That kind of murderer is never found... I was sure this would happen to him in the end... If you'd seen what some of those boys he invited up there in the evening looked like ... I'd have been scared even during the day..."

He gave a strange smile, wracked with emotion and at the same time full of horror.

"What was your friend's name?" I asked him.

"Alec Scouffi. A Greek from Alexandria."

He got up suddenly and pulled aside the sky-blue silk curtains which covered the window... Then he returned to his place beside me on the settee.

"You must forgive me... But there are times when I get the feeling someone is hiding behind the curtains ... A little more Marie Brizard? Yes, a drop more ..."

He forced himself to sound jolly and gripped my arm as if to prove to himself that I was really there, beside him.

"Scouffi had set up in France ... I knew him in Montmartre ... He wrote a very nice book called
Ship at Anchor..."

"But Mr. Mansoure," I said in a firm voice, articulating each syllable clearly, so that this time he would have to respond to my question, "if, as you tell me, Denise Coudreuse lived on the floor below, she must have heard something unusual that night... She must have been questioned as a witness ..."

"Perhaps she was."

He shrugged his shoulders. No, it was clear that this Denise Coudreuse who meant so much to me and whose every movement I would have liked to have known, didn't interest him at all.

"The most awful thing about it is that I know the murderer . . . You wouldn't have believed it, because he'd the face of an angel... But when he looked at you with those hard, gray eyes ..."

He shivered. It was as though the man he was talking about was there, in front of us, and was transfixing him with his gray eyes.

"A vile little rotter ... The last time I saw him was during the Occupation, in a basement restaurant in Rue Cambon ... He was with a German …"

His voice trembled at the memory, and even though I was obsessed with thoughts of Denise Coudreuse, this shrill voice, this passionate protest, as it were, impressed me in a way I could hardly justify to myself, and which made it clear that he was, in fact, jealous of his friend's fate and resented the man with the gray eyes for not having murdered
him.

"He's still alive ... Still in Paris ... I found out through someone ... Of course, he no longer has that angel face ... Would you like to hear his voice?"

I had no time to respond to his surprising question: he had picked up the telephone, on a red leather pouf next to us, and was dialing a number. He handed me the receiver.

"You'll hear it... Listen... He calls himself 'Blue Rider'..."

At first all I heard were the short bursts of ringing which indicated that the line was busy. And then, in the intervals between the ringing, I began to make out the voices of men and women sending messages to each other: "Maurice and Josy would like René to phone ..."; "Lucien is waiting for Jeannot at Rue de la Convention..."; "Mrs. du Barry is looking for a partner ..."; "Alcibiades is alone this evening ..."

Skeletal conversations, voices seeking each other out, in spite of the ringing which obliterated them at regular intervals. And all these faceless beings trying to exchange telephone numbers, passwords, in the hope of some rendezvous. Finally I heard a voice that was more distant than the others and which kept repeating:

"'Blue Rider' is free this evening ... 'Blue Rider' is free this evening . . . Give your phone number . . . Give your phone number ..."

"Do you hear him?" asked Mansoure. "Do you hear him?"

He pressed his ear to the receiver, bringing his face up to mine.

"The number I dialed hasn't belonged to anyone for a long time," he explained. "And they found out they could communicate that way."

He stopped speaking, so as to be able to listen to "Blue Rider" better. For me all these voices were voices from beyond the grave, voices of vanished people - wandering voices which could respond to each other only through a discontinued telephone number.

"It's dreadful, dreadful ..." he repeated, pressing the phone to his ear. "The murderer ... Do you hear?..."

He hung up abruptly. He was bathed in sweat.

"I'll show you a photograph of the friend this little villain murdered ... And I'll try to find his novel,
Ship at Anchor,
for you ... You should read it..."

He rose and went into the other room which was separated from the drawing-room by the pink satin curtains. I noticed a very low bed with a guanaco fur thrown over it, half hidden by the curtains.

I had walked over to the window and was looking down at the rails of the Montmartre funicular, the gardens of the Sacré Cœur and, further off, the whole of Paris, with its lights, its roofs, its shadows. Denise Coudreuse and I had met one day in this maze of roads and boulevards. Paths that cross, among those of thousands and thousands of people all over Paris, like countless little balls on a gigantic, electric billiard table, which occasionally bump into each other. And nothing remained of this, not even the luminous trail a firefly leaves behind it.

Mansoure, out of breath, re-emerged from behind the pink curtains, holding a book and several photographs.

"I've found them!... I've found them!..."

He was radiant. He had no doubt feared that he had mislaid these relics. He sat down opposite me and handed me the book.

"There you are... It's a prize possession, but I'll lend you it... You simply must read it... It's a fine book ... And he really had a presentiment... Alec foresaw his own death..."

His face darkened.

"I'll give you two or three photos of him as well..."

"But don't you want to keep them?"

"No, no! Don't worry... I've dozens like them ... And all the negatives! ..."

I wanted to ask him to print a few photos of Denise Coudreuse for me, but did not have the nerve.

"It's a pleasure to give a fellow like you photos of Alec..."

"Thanks."

"You were looking out of the window? A nice view, isn't it? And to think that Alec's murderer is somewhere out there..."

And with a movement of the back of his hand against the window, he took in the whole of Paris, below.

"He must be an old man, now ... an awful old man ... made up ..."

With a shudder, he closed the pink satin curtains.

"I prefer not to think about it."

"I'll have to be going back," I said. "Thanks again for the photos."