“You mean the Rue Morgue story?”
“You were so proud of that, weren’t you? All those silly lies. None of it was true.”
“Yes it was.”
“No. It never was, Lewis: it was a story, that’s all. Dupin, the Rue Morgue, the murders. . .”
His voice trailed away, as though the next words were unsayable.
“The ape.”
Those were the words: the apparently unspeakable was spoken as though each syllable had been cut from his throat.
“The ape.”
“What about the ape?”
“There are beasts, Lewis. Some of them are pitiful; circus animals. They have no brains; they are born victims. Then there are others.”
“What others?”
“Natalie was a whore!” he screamed again, his eyes big as saucers. He took hold of Lewis’ lapels, and began to shake him. Everybody else in the little room turned to look at the two old men as they wrestled over the table. Convicts and their sweethearts grinned as Phillipe was dragged off his friend, his words descending into incoherence and obscenity as he thrashed in the warder’s grip.
“Whore! Whore! Whore!” was all he could say as they hauled him back to his cell.
Catherine met Lewis at the door of her apartment. She was shaking and tearful. Beyond her, the room was wrecked.
She sobbed against his chest as he comforted her, but she was inconsolable. It was many years since he’d comforted a woman, and he’d lost the knack of it. He was embarrassed instead of soothing, and she knew it. She broke away from his embrace, happier untouched.
“He was here,” she said.
He didn’t need to ask who. The stranger, the tearful, razor-wielding stranger.
“What did he want?”
“He kept saying ‘Phillipe’ to me. Almost saying it; grunting it more than saying it: and when I didn’t answer he just destroyed the furniture, the vases. He wasn’t even looking for anything: he just wanted to make a mess.”
It made her furious: the uselessness of the attack.
The apartment was in ruins. Lewis wandered through the fragments of porcelain and shredded fabric, shaking his head. In his mind a confusion of tearful faces: Catherine, Phillipe, the stranger. Everyone in his narrow world, it seemed, was hurt and broken. Everyone was suffering; and yet the source, the heart of the suffering, was nowhere to be found.
Only Phillipe had pointed an accusing finger: at Lewis himself.
“You began all this.” Weren’t those his words? “you began all this.”
But how?
Lewis stood at the window. Three of the small panes had been cracked by flying debris, and a wind was insinuating itself into the apartment, with frost in its teeth. He looked across at the ice-thickened waters of the Seine; then a movement caught his eye. His stomach turned.
The full face of the stranger was turned up to the window, his expression wild. The clothes he had always worn so impeccably were in disarray, and the look on his face was of utter, utter despair, so pitiful as to be almost tragic. Or rather, a performance of tragedy: an actor’s pain. Even as Lewis stared down at him the stranger raised his arms to the window in a gesture that seemed to beg either forgiveness or understanding, or both.
Lewis backed away from the appeal. It was too much; all too much. The next moment the stranger was walking across the courtyard away from the apartment. The mincing walk had deteriorated into a rolling lope. Lewis uttered a long, low moan of recognition as the ill-dressed bulk disappeared from view.
“Lewis?”
It wasn’t a man’s walk, that roll, that swagger. It was the gait of an upright beast who’d been taught to walk, and now, without its master, was losing the trick of it.
It was an ape.
Oh God, oh God, it was an ape.
“I have to see Phillipe Laborteaux.”
“I’m sorry, Monsieur; but prison visitors —”
“This is a matter of life and death, officer.”
“Easily said, Monsieur.”
Lewis risked a lie.
“His sister is dying. I beg you to have some compassion.”
“Oh...well...”
A little doubt. Lewis levered a little further. “A few minutes only; to settle arrangements.”
“Can’t it wait until tomorrow?”
“She’ll be dead by morning.”
Lewis hated talking about Catherine in such a way, even for the purpose of this deception, but it was necessary; he had to see Phillipe. If his theory was correct, history might repeat itself before the night was out.
Phillipe had been woken from a sedated sleep. His eyes were circled with darkness.
“What do you want?”
Lewis didn’t even attempt to proceed any further with his lie; Phillipe was drugged as it was, and probably confused. Best to confront him with the truth, and see what came of it.
“You kept an ape, didn’t you?”
A look of terror crossed Phillipe’s face, slowed by the drugs in his blood, but plain enough.
“Didn’t you?”
“Lewis. . .” Phillipe looked so very old.
“Answer me, Phillipe, I beg you: before it’s too late. Did you keep an ape?”
“It was an experiment, that’s all it was. An experiment.”
“Why?”
“Your stories. Your damn stories: I wanted to see if it was true that they were wild. I wanted to make a man of it.”
“Make a man of it.”
“And that whore. . .”
“Natalie.”
“She seduced it.”
Lewis felt sick. This was a convolution he hadn’t anticipated.
“Seduced it?”
“Whore,” Phillipe said, with infinite regret.
“Where is this ape of yours?”
“You’ll kill it.”
“It broke into the apartment, while Catherine was there. Destroyed everything, Phillipe. It’s dangerous now that it has no master. Don’t you understand?”
“Catherine?”
“No, She’s all right.”
“It’s trained: it wouldn’t harm her. It’s watched her, in hiding. Come and gone. Quiet as a mouse.”
“And the girl?”
“It was jealous.”
“So it murdered her?”
“Perhaps. I don’t know. I don’t want to think about it.”
“Why haven’t you told them; had the thing destroyed?”
“I don’t know if it’s true. It’s probably all a fiction, one of your damn fictions, just another story.”
A sour, wily smile crossed his exhausted face.
“You must know what I mean, Lewis. It could be a story, couldn’t it? Like your tales of Dupin. Except that maybe I made it true for a while; did you ever think of that? Maybe I made it true.”
Lewis stood up. It was a tired debate: reality and illusion. Either a thing was, or was not. Life was not a dream.
“Where is the ape?” he demanded.
Phillipe pointed to his temple.
“Here; where you can never find him,” he said, and spat in Lewis’ face. The spittle hit his lip, like a kiss.
“You don’t know what you did. You’ll never know.”
Lewis wiped his lip as the warders escorted the prisoner out of the room and back to his happy drugged oblivion. All he could think of now, left alone in the cold interview room, was that Phillipe had it easy. He’d taken refuge in pretended guilt, and locked himself away where memory, and revenge, and the truth, the wild, marauding truth, could never touch him again. He hated Phillipe at that moment, with all his heart. Hated him for the dilettante and the coward he’d always known him to be. It wasn’t a more gentle world Phillipe had created around him; it was a hiding place, as much a lie as that summer of 1937 had been. No life could be lived the way he’d lived it without a reckoning coming sooner or later; and here it was.
That night, in the safety of his cell, Phillipe woke. It was warm, but he was cold. In the utter dark he chewed at his wrists until a pulse of blood bubbled into his mouth. He lay back on his bed, and quietly splashed and fountained away to death, out of sight and out of mind.
The suicide was reported in a small article on the second page of Le Monde. The big news of the following day however was the sensational murder of a redheaded prostitute in a little house off the Rue de Rochechquant. Monique Zevaco had been found at three o’clock in the morning by her flat mate, her body in a state so horrible as to “defy description”.
Despite the alleged impossibility of the task, the media set about describing the indescribable with a morbid will. Every last scratch, tear and gouging on Monique’s partially nude body — tattooed, drooled Le Monde, with a map of France — was chronicled in detail. As indeed was the appearance of her well-dressed, over-perfumed murderer, who had apparently watched her at her toilet through a small back window, then broken in and attacked Mademoiselle Zevaco in her bathroom. The murderer had then fled down the stairs, bumping into the flat mate who would minutes after discover Mademoiselle Zevaco’s mutilated corpse. Only one commentator made any connection between the murder at the Rue des Martyrs and the slaughter of Mme Zevaco; and he failed to pick up on the curious coincidence that the accused Phillipe Laborteaux had that same night taken his own life.
The funeral took place in a storm, the cortege edging its pitiful way through the abandoned streets towards Montparnasse with the lashing snow entirely blotting out the road ahead. Lewis sat with Catherine and Jacques Solal as they laid Phillipe to rest. Every one of his circle had deserted him, unwilling to attend the funeral of a suicide and of a suspected murderer. His wit, his good looks, his infinite capacity to charm went for nothing at the end.
He was not, as it turned out, entirely unmourned by strangers. As they stood at the graveside, the cold cutting into them, Solal sidled up to Lewis and nudged him.
“What?”
“Over there. Under the tree.” Solal nodded beyond the praying priest.
The stranger was standing at a distance, almost hidden by the marble mausoleums. A heavy black scarf was wrapped across his face, and a wide-brimmed hat pulled down over his brow, but his bulk was unmistakable. Catherine had seen him too. She was shaking as she stood, wrapped round by Lewis’s embrace, not just with cold, but with fear. It was as though the creature was some morbid angel, come to hover a while, and enjoy the grief. It was grotesque, and eerie, that this thing should come to see Phillipe consigned to the frozen earth. What did it feel? Anguish? Guilt? Yes, did it feel guilt?
It knew it had been seen, and it turned its back, shambling away. Without a word to Lewis, Jacques Solal slipped away from the grave in pursuit. In a short while both the stranger and his pursuer were erased by the snow.
