Bird in a Cage Read online

  “There we are, all mended!”

  She was showing me the wetted edge of her cuff.

  “So what was it?”

  “Splashes from a red candle.”

  Her claim was vaguely shocking. I’d seen the two stains. I knew full well they weren’t candle wax.

  “What’ll you have?”

  “Nothing. I have to go back now. Don’t forget my daughter is on her own.”

  By moonlight the premises of Dravet & Co. looked like a set of toy cubes. Soot hadn’t yet dulled the walls and the white roughcast stood out clearly in the December night.

  “Well, then,” Mme Dravet sighed, “this is where we part. What time is it?”

  I looked at my watch.

  “Eleven forty-five.”

  “In fifteen minutes the son of God will be born again. Do you think he’ll redeem all the world’s sins in the end?”

  I suddenly felt so sad I wanted to die.

  “I don’t give a damn for the world’s sins, Mme Dravet. I don’t give a damn for the world! All I’m interested in is you. I’m sick as a dog to think we’ll not see each other again…”

  “But we will!”

  “In another life?” I grunted.

  “Don’t be unfair. Do you want to come and have a last drink before the bells ring out?”

  To stay with her a little more! To see her a little more! To hear her a little more!

  “Yes, yes and yes!”

  She opened the gloomy gate once more. I was back in the yard with the lorries parked against the wall, with the glazed awnings sheltering mountains of paper, and the smell of glue and cardboard.

  “What kinds of things does your binder bind? Books?”

  “Yes. But most of all he produces diaries.”

  When we got into the goods lift again she abruptly pressed herself against me and as the steel cage rose she gave me a kiss that was just as hot and passionate as the first one.

  The machinery had come to a halt but we were still in a wild embrace. She slid one of her legs between mine; I was hugging her tightly. Our breaths and our mouths were one.

  “Come,” she said suddenly, as she pushed me away from her.

  Her gesture was so violent it gave me a shock. She opened the sliding door and repeated almost automatically what she’d said the other time:

  “Mind the gap.”

  4

  The Second Visit

  We went into her flat as quietly as we could so as not to wake the sleeping child. Only once we were inside and the front door was closed did she switch on the light. Then she cried out. It wasn’t exactly a scream, it was more like a moan.

  “What’s the matter?” I stuttered in concern.

  She was staring at the coat rack in the hallway. A dark grey overcoat with a velvet collar was hanging on it.

  The coat had not been there when we went out.

  It mesmerized her. She was holding her breath and straining her ears as if to make out from the quality of the silence the nature of the threat hanging over us.

  For threat there was!

  I felt it so surely that I lost all sense of fright.

  “Is it your husband’s?” I whispered.

  She nodded.

  “So ‘he’ is here?”

  I was about to say something more but she put her hand over my mouth in double-quick time. She persisted in listening. What was worrying was the coat on the hook and the complete lack of sound in the flat.

  I took her hand away and kept it in mine as if to inspire courage in her. I could hear her heart thumping. I mouthed the syllables with my lips so she could understand me without my speaking aloud:

  “Was he not supposed to come back?”

  She shook her head.

  “Maybe he came for a change of clothes and went away again?”

  She shrugged. Doubtful.

  “He must have gone to bed?”

  Only the sibilant in my speech made any sound. I must have looked like a mute. But even deaf mutes make a noise!

  She shook her head again.

  What seemed to disturb the woman was not so much that the man might be dangerous, but that his presence was so unusual.

  “Should I leave?”

  I was afraid of looking like a coward by offering to go away. Suitors who slip away when the husband turns up are creeps. In any case I had no wish to run away.

  I was entirely prepared to face the anger of a jealous man. I had plenty of unused energy inside me that wanted nothing better than a chance to be let out.

  She dithered. I could understand her being in a muddle. She wasn’t sure what she wanted. Should we run away or stand our ground?

  She made her decision abruptly. In an almost firm voice she called out:

  “Is that you, Jérôme?”

  No answer! The ensuing silence was as sharp as a prick on a taut nerve.

  I shrugged.

  “I told you he’s gone away. He didn’t find you at home, so he decided to spend the rest of the evening somewhere else…”

  This time I spoke aloud.

  The woman batted her eyelids in acceptance of my guess. The lights were out in the lounge, so there was nobody there. She went down the corridor, opening each door in turn. One went into her daughter’s bedroom, so that’s where she started. I moved forward and saw little Lucienne sleeping soundly in a little bed made of a light-coloured wood. There were plywood Donald Ducks on the wall and toys strewn on the carpet.

  The door opposite the girl’s was the main bedroom. There was nobody in it. The bed was not unmade. It was a four-poster with two turned-wood columns at the foot and an extremely ornate valance.

  “You can see nobody’s here!”

  Just to make sure, she took a quick look at the kitchen and the dining room.

  Nobody there either!

  She began to seem calmer.

  “I don’t understand why he came in the middle of the night. It’s not like him at all…”

  “Maybe he wanted to wish you a happy Christmas?”

  “Him? You obviously don’t know him. Well, it’s a real mystery… Let’s have a drink. It’s nearly midnight.”

  I grabbed her by the waist.

  “It is midnight!”

  I put my finger in the air.

  “Listen!”

  A local clock chimed twelve times, slowly. Its low pitch sent vibrations through the still night air.

  “Kiss me!” she suddenly pleaded. “I’m scared!”

  I took her in my arms.

  “Harder! Harder! I’m scared…”

  She was agitated in the extreme. She pressed herself up against me so frantically that I too got scared.

  “There, there, calm down. Scared of what? I’m here…”

  She opened the French door to the lounge and switched on the light.

  It was a dreadful sight. The man lay half-reclining on the sofa where I had sat on my first visit. He had one leg on the cushions and his back against the armrest. He was wearing a midnight blue suit. His left hand hung loose, and his right hand was all scrunched up between his cheek and the back of the sofa. Part of his skull was missing. From his right temple to the top of his head there was nothing but a bloody mess. The bullet had shattered the skull and then hit the ceiling, knocking out a lump of plaster.

  The dead man had his eyes closed. In his half-open mouth you could see the gleam of a gold front tooth.

  The woman said nothing. She reminded me of a sapling that’s had its trunk cut through by an axe but doesn’t topple over straight away. I quickly grabbed her by the shoulders to push her back into the hallway.

  She was dreadfully pale and her chin was quivering.

  She stared at the coat on the hook as if it were the corpse itself.

  “That your husband?” I asked her eventually in an almost inaudible whisper.

  “Yes.”

  You could hear people far away singing ‘O Holy Night’. The song came from outer space the way the wind comes from the in
finite.

  You caught snatches, then suddenly it got louder.

  I went back into the little lounge. The cadaver by the Christmas tree was nightmarish. The man was thirty-two or thirty-three with fairly refined features. His slightly jutting square jaw showed he was a man of action.

  I carefully made my way around the sofa. I didn’t want to touch anything, just to get a full view. I saw the gun lying between the man’s chest and the back of the sofa. He’d let go of it as he died.

  He’d been dead for a while. Probably since just after we’d left. He’d lost a lot of blood and it was all over the cushions. I looked around for a note explaining what had led him to do away with himself but there wasn’t one. Maybe it would be found later, in his clothes…

  A slight noise made me turn around. I saw the woman in the doorway leaning her head on the jamb. She was staring at her deceased husband more in disbelief than in fear.

  She did not understand.

  “Is he really dead?” she asked me.

  “Yes.”

  It was a superfluous question. When a man has a hole in his head as big as that one was, it’s pretty obvious he’s ceased to exist.

  Why the hell did it occur to him to commit suicide in front of that tree of joy, which is a hymn to life?

  The drinks trolley was still beside the sofa. And our two glasses were still on it, containing, respectively, a last drop of cherry brandy and a smear of cognac.

  “This is dreadful,” Mme Dravet murmured as she went up to the corpse.

  “Don’t touch him!” I urged her. “It’s very important.”

  “Ah yes… Because of the police.”

  “That’s right, because of the police. In suicides of this kind the tiniest detail can be of the utmost importance…”

  “Suicide?”

  “He shot himself in the head, can’t you see?”

  She really seemed not to believe it.

  For a moment we were in suspension. We knew there were things to do but we were finding it hard to behave sensibly.

  I wondered what she really felt. Was she sorry? I almost asked her, but with the corpse lying there it wasn’t possible.

  “We have to call the police.”

  “Of course we do.”

  But she didn’t make a move. The dead man’s wound fascinated her.

  Everything had happened dead fast. Proof of that was that the church bell we’d already heard was still chiming midnight. As brief as a nightmare! You dream of scary adventures, you struggle out of innumerable traps, and then suddenly you realize that the fantasy has lasted no longer than it takes to blink! Only for us, it would go on. The corpse was a real corpse that we carried on staring at because now and again we thought we saw something stir in this abandoned body! We were just fooling ourselves. We were waiting for the bad dream to be over, but it wasn’t a dream. Reality outwaits us all.

  At last Mme Dravet reacted and rushed out of the room. I could hear her going down the corridor. A minute later I could hear the ratchet of the telephone dial. Then something awful occurred to me. Something that had not occurred to me before.

  I shot out of the lounge like a lunatic. She was in her bedroom sitting on a pouf with the phone in her lap. She had just finished dialling when I snatched the phone from her.

  The receiver went flying onto the dressing table where it broke a perfume bottle. The room filled instantly with the penetrating odour of tuberose.

  The young woman seemed in a panic.

  “But why…?”

  “Wait a moment before you talk to the police.”

  The rest of what I had to say was not easy!

  “But I have to, all the same,” she protested.

  “Yes, you do have to. Only you cannot tell the cops about me! I cannot be mixed up in this kind of a business.”

  She was downhearted but her mind remained clear. I saw a flash of scorn in her eyes. I had suddenly turned into a miserable skirt-chaser who had no wish to get entangled and who was scared out of his wits at the complications it would bring.

  “I know what you are thinking, but you are wrong. I’m asking you to leave me out for your own protection. My presence in your flat tonight can do you a lot of harm. I am very far from being an acceptable alibi.”

  She had almost stopped breathing. With her lips open a slit and her eyes agog she looked like she might faint any minute. Her catatonic state alarmed me.

  “Do you feel sick?”

  “No. Tell me more.”

  Tell more! That was so hard, after what had just happened!

  “I told you my story earlier this evening. But not all of it. The rest of it is untellable…”

  I stopped talking. In exasperation she started screaming at me:

  “Tell me! You can see I can’t take any more!”

  “The woman I ran away with… Three months later she’d cooled off and wanted to leave me… So I… I killed her! I had an emotional breakdown! That’s what my lawyer called it, anyway. I was tried in Aix-en-Provence and got ten years… Yesterday I was released from the Baumettes prison in Marseilles, I got remission.”

  I said that all in one go without looking at her. I kept my eyes on the phone on the floor. It looked like a dead animal. I picked it up and put the receiver back in the cradle.

  “I’m an ex-con, Mme Dravet. If the police know that we spent part of the evening together, your husband’s suicide is going to look suspicious, you see. I know the cops! They’re always inclined to put the worst interpretation on things.”

  She put her head in her hands. Her nightmare wasn’t over. It was acquiring strange sequels.

  “On the other hand,” she muttered, “we can’t be suspects. We were together. We didn’t spend any time apart.”

  “Who says so? You do and I do. If the police thought we were in cahoots we’d be in a fine pickle. Mud sticks. I’ve already killed someone, don’t you see!”

  She gave me a look full of fear and shrank away from me. That woman had just taken on board that I was a murderer and she was feeling what everybody feels in like circumstances: fear and repulsion.

  “Get out!”

  “All right…”

  “Leave this flat immediately!” she thundered.

  “Perhaps we should first agree on—”

  “No! I don’t know you! Once you’re out that door I will never have set eyes on you, do you get it?”

  “As you wish. Only the police—”

  “I’ll take care of them. Go away!”

  I went out of the room backwards, alarmed by her evil stare. In the two or three hours we’d spent together I thought she was weak and lost but now, all of a sudden, she had turned strangely cold and decisive in adversity. She wasn’t behaving at all like a victim any more. Her whole being expressed a lack of pity, which was quite painful to me. I tried to recall the affectionate pout she put on when I first took her in my arms.

  It wasn’t the same woman.

  I sobered up completely in the hallway.

  There was a dead man in this flat. I was in the same place without a reason I could own up to, and I was just out of jail!

  I realized the flat was nothing but a skein of snares. I was on my way out when I remembered my cognac glass standing less than two feet from the corpse. It must have had first-rate samples of my fingerprints all over it.

  I went back into the lounge to clean the glass with my handkerchief. I also wiped the neck of the squat cognac bottle, and then to make doubly sure I wiped the rim of the drinks trolley and the marble shelf of the mantelpiece. Finally, I dusted the handle of the lounge door.

  As I was putting my handkerchief back in my coat pocket my fingers encountered the crumpled cardboard box that had contained the tree decoration. I had almost missed it! I didn’t think fingerprints would have taken on such a rough surface but it was wiser to leave nothing behind.

  I went up to the tree. I was stretching out my arm to remove the little silver cage but it froze in mid-air as if I’d been str
uck with paralysis: the cage and its cloth bird had vanished.

  I parted the branches of the tree to see if it had perhaps fallen off, but however much I looked there was nothing to be found. Someone had removed it.

  I heard Mme Dravet’s footsteps in the hallway.

  “Still not gone?” she said in surprise.

  She looked at me with suspicion. She glanced at my hands, then at her husband’s corpse. Was she worried I might have shifted something?

  She looked more and more like Anna. She had the same blank stare that was Anna’s when she told me it was “all over between us” and that she wanted to go back to her husband.

  All the same I would have liked to hold her in my arms again and offer soothing words.

  “Excuse me. I’m leaving now.”

  She opened the front door for me. I think she mumbled adieu but I’m not sure.

  5

  A Piece of Advice

  The door slammed shut behind me and I found myself in darkness. A piercing smell of glue wafted up from downstairs. I struck a match to see where I was going. To my left was the stairwell and straight ahead was the goods lift.

  I went into the steel cage. It was long and narrow like a hospital lift, designed to carry people lying on stretchers.

  I looked for the control panel. The match was nearly burned down to my finger. I could see two switches: a black one and a red one. Red was at the top, black below. That’s the one I pressed. The lift cage gave an electric shudder and began to go down very gently. I dropped the match, which burned itself out on the floor. A tiny slip of white paper caught fire and I put it out with the sole of my shoe. The faint gleam of light vanished.

  On seeing the two lorries parked in the yard I wondered about Dravet’s own car. Surely he hadn’t come home on foot? And if not, then what had become of his car? I looked around but I couldn’t see it anywhere. Nor was it to be found in the street. Had someone dropped him off? Was that someone the same person who had removed my silver-spangled cardboard cage?