The Little Man From Archangel (15 page)

'When? Who to? It's not possible.'

'I am not at liberty, at present, to disclose the name of the person to whom she made these confidences, but I can assure you that she made them, and not just to one person.'

Jonas was capitulating. It was too much. They had just gone too far. That the neighbours had turned against him he could endure, by gritting his teeth.

But that Gina . . .

'Listen, Superintendent. . .'

He stretched out his hands in supplication, in a final outburst of energy.

'If she was afraid of me, why . . .'

What was the use? In any case, the words failed him. He had forgotten what he was going to say. It no longer mattered.

Afraid of him!

'Keep calm. Once again I am not accusing you of anything. An inquiry has been opened as a result of your wife's disappearance and it is my duty not to neglect anything, to listen to all the evidence.'

Without realizing, he nodded his approval.

'The fact is that for some mysterious reason, ever since the morning when your wife's disappearance was noted, you have been lying.'

He did not protest, as he had done with Inspector Basquin.

'Afraid of me!' he kept repeating to himself with bitter obstinacy.

'This has inevitably given rise to certain rumours.'

His head went on nodding affirmatively.

'All I am asking is to clear the matter up with your help.'

The face and outline of the superintendent suddenly danced in front of his eyes and he felt himself being overcome by a weakness which he had never known before.

'You . . . you haven't a glass of water?' he had time to stammer.

It was the first time in his life that he had fainted. It was very hot in the room. The superintendent rushed to the door and Jonas had time to hear water flowing from a tap.

He could not have been unconscious for more than a few seconds, for when he opened his eyes, the glass was clinking against his teeth and the cold water was trickling down his chin.

He looked without resentment, his eyes half-closed, at the man who had just caused him so much pain, who now stood bending over him.

'Do you feel better?'

He blinked his eyelids, as he did to greet the Widower, who was rather like the superintendent to look at. Perhaps after all the superintendent was a decent fellow and was sorry for him? 'Have another drink.'

He shook his head. He was embarrassed. A nervous reaction made him suddenly feel like crying. He mastered himself, but it was a good minute before he was able to speak. Then it was to stammer: 'I am sorry.'

'Relax and keep quiet.'

The superintendent opened the window, suddenly letting in the noises from the street, went and sat down in his place again, not knowing what to do or say.

VII

'I
DON
'
T
think, Monsieur Milk,' the superintendent was saying, 'that you have quite grasped the point. Once again, for some reason or other, your wife has disappeared, and we have been asked to investigate. We have had no choice but to collect statements and check certain rumours which were circulating.'

Jonas was calm again now, too calm, and the smile on his face looked as if an india-rubber could have wiped it away. He was looking at the other politely, his mind elsewhere; in actual fact he was listening to the crowing of a cock, which had just broken, strident and proud, into the noises from the street. At first it had surprised him so much that he had a feeling of unreality, of floating, until he recalled that just opposite the police station there was a man who dealt in birds and farmyard animals.

By rising from his chair he could have seen the cages piled on top of one another on the pavement, hens, cocks and pedigree ducks underneath, then on top, parakeets, canaries and other birds, some bright red, others blue, whose names he did not know. To the right of the door, a parrot stood on its perch and passers-by were constantly amazed that it was not attached.

In the Square a woman with a shrill voice, a costermonger, was calling on the world at large to buy her fine salads and the intervals in her monotonous cry were roughly regular, so that he ended up by waiting for it.

'I went about it a bit brutally, perhaps, and I am sorry . . .'

Jonas shook his head as if to say that all was well.

Gina was frightened of him. The rest did not matter. He could stand up to anything now, and the superintendent had no need to approach the question in a roundabout way.

'I will not conceal from you that there is another somewhat disturbing piece of evidence. On Wednesday, shortly before midnight, a woman was leaning out of her window, in the Rue du Canal, a quarter of a mile from where you live. She was waiting for her husband who, for reasons that need not concern us, had not returned home at the usual time. Anyway, she saw a rather small man, about your size, who was carrying a large sack on his shoulder, heading towards the lock and keeping close to the wall.'

'Did she recognize me?'

He was not angry, or indignant.

'I did not say that, but clearly it is a coincidence.'

'Do you think, Superintendent, that I would have had the strength to carry my wife from the Place du Vieux-Marché to the canal?'

If Gina was very little bigger than he was, she was heavier and he was not a strong man.

Monsieur Devaux bit his lips. Since Jonas had fainted, he was less at his ease and was minding how he went, without realizing that it was no longer necessary. Isn't there a moment when the intensity of pain brings on insensitivity? Jonas had passed that crisis and, while he listened to what was being said, he was concentrating on the noises from the street.

It wasn't the same sound as in his quarter. The cars were more frequent, the pedestrians in more of a hurry. The light itself was different, and yet it was not ten minutes' walk from here to the Vieux-Marché.

The cupboards, behind the superintendent, were made of mahogany like the desk, with green baize cloth stretched behind gold-coloured lattice work, and above, in a wooden frame, could be seen a photograph of the President of the Republic.

'I thought of that objection, Monsieur Milk. But you are not unaware, if you read the papers, that this problem has often, alas, been overcome.'

He did not understand straight away.

'You cannot have failed to read or hear stories of dismembered bodies being found in rivers or waste land. Once again, I am not accusing you.'

He was not being accused of cutting Gina into pieces and carrying them into the canal!

'What we have to do now, unless your wife reappears or we find her, is to exculpate you from the affair, and therefore to study all the possibilities calmly.'

He was replacing his spectacles in order to cast an eye over his notes.

'Why, after her disappearance, were you in such a hurry to take your washing and hers to the laundry?'

They knew his slightest acts, as if he had been living in a glass cage.

'Because it was laundry day.'

'Was it you who normally counted the washing and made up the parcel ?'

'No.'

No and yes. Which proved how difficult it is to express an absolute truth. It was among Gina's duties, as in other households, and Gina usually attended to it. Only she never knew which day of the week it was and sometimes Jonas reminded her, while she was doing their room:

'Don't forget the laundry.'

It was also a habit of theirs to put the pillow-case with it under the counter, so as not to hold up the van driver, who was always in a hurry.

Gina lived in disorder. Indeed, had she not forgotten, before leaving, to wash the pan in which she had cooked the herrings? Jonas, who had lived alone a long time and had not always had a maid, had kept up the habit of thinking of everything and often, when Gina was away, of doing the chores she ought to have taken on.

'Your wife has just disappeared, Monsieur Milk. You told me a short while ago that you were in love with her. Yet you took the trouble to devote yourself to a job which men do not normally do.'

He could only repeat:

'It was laundry day.'

He felt that the other was examining him curiously. Basquin, too, had looked at him like that at certain moments, as a man who is trying to understand, but without success.

'You were not trying to hide compromising traces?'

'Traces of what?'

'On the Friday or the Saturday, you also turned out your kitchen.'

How often this had happened before Gina's day, when the maid was ill, and even after his marriage!

'These are details of no significance individually, I agree, but which added together are nothing if not disturbing.'

He nodded in agreement, a submissive schoolboy.

'You have no idea what liaisons your wife may have formed of late?'

'None.'

'Has she been away more often than usual?'

'No.'

As always, in the morning, she would roam about the market, preferably in dressing-gown and slippers. In the afternoon she would probably dress, powder her face, put on scent and go and do her shopping in the town, or see one of her girl friends.

'Hasn't she received any letters either?'

'She never has had any letters at the house.'

'Do you think she received them somewhere else, at the poste restante, for example?'

'I don't know.'

'What you must admit is curious, seeing that you are an intelligent man, is that she should have gone off without taking any clothes, not even a coat and, according to your own statement, almost without any money. She didn't take a bus, nor the train, we have confirmed that.'

In the end he felt it better to mention the stamps. He was tired, he was in a hurry to get outside this office, and not have to listen to any more of these questions which had so little relation to reality.

'My wife,' he said, smarting at being finally driven to it, and with a sense of betrayal, 'had premeditated her departure.'

'How do you know, and why didn't you say so to Inspector Basquin?'

'In the wardrobe with the looking-glass in our bedroom there is a box which used to contain my rarest stamps.'

'Did she know about it?'

'Yes.'

'Are these stamps of any great value?'

'Several million francs.'

He wondered if he had been wise to speak, for the superintendent's reaction was not what he had expected. He was being looked at, not with incredulity, but with a hint of suspicion.

'You mean that you possessed several million francs' worth of stamps?'

'Yes. I began collecting them at school, when I was about thirteen, and I have never given it up.'

'Who, apart from your wife, has seen these stamps you possess?'

'Nobody.'

'So that you cannot prove that they were in the cupboard?'

He had become calm, patient, detached almost, as if it were no longer anything to do with Gina and himself, and that was perhaps because he was on professional ground.

'I can prove, as far as most of them are concerned, that I acquired them at a particular moment, either by purchase or by exchange, some of them fifteen years ago, some two or three years ago. Philatelists form a fairly small circle. It is nearly always known where the rarer specimens are to be found.'

'Excuse my interrupting you, Monsieur Milk. I know nothing about philately. I am trying, at present, to put myself in the position of a jury. You are saying that while still living in a manner which I would, with all due respect, describe as very modest, and I hope I don't offend you, you say that you had several millions' worth of stamps and that your wife has taken them away with her. You go on to say that as far as most of them are concerned, you are able to establish that they came into your possession a number of years ago. Is that correct?'

He nodded his head, listening to the cock, which was crowing once more, and the superintendent, exasperated, got up to close the window.

'Do you mind?'

'As you wish.'

'The first question that will arise is whether, last Wednesday, these stamps were still in your possession, for there was nothing to stop you from reselling them a long time ago. It is possible for you to prove this was not so?'

'No.

'And can you prove that you have not still got them?'

'They are no longer in the box.'

'We are still in the realms of theory, aren't we? What was there to prevent you from having put them somewhere else?'

'Why should I?'

In order to incriminate Gina, that is what the superintendent was thinking. To make it seem that she had gone off taking his fortune with her.

'Do you see now how difficult and delicate my task is? The inhabitants of your neighbourhood, for some reason unknown to me, seem to have a grudge against you.'

'Up to these last few days, they have been very nice to me.'

The superintendent was studying him closely and Jonas found the explanation in his eyes. He did not understand either. Human beings of all sorts had been in and out of his office and he was accustomed to the most unusual kinds of confidences. But Jonas baffled him, and he could see him pass from sympathy to irritation, amounting at times to aversion, only to start again and try to find a fresh point of contact.

Had it not been the same with Basquin? Didn't that go to prove that he was not like other men? Would it have been different in the country where he was born, at Archangel, among the people of his own race?

All his life he had sensed it, intuitively. Even at school he made himself inconspicuous, as if in order to be forgotten, and he had been uncomfortable when, against his will, he came top in his class.

Hadn't they encouraged him to consider himself at home in the Vieux-Marché? Hadn't they suggested, at one moment, that he should join a shopkeeper's defence committee, and even become the treasurer? He had refused, feeling that it was not his place.

It was not without good reason that he had shown such humility. He could only assume that he had not shown enough, since they were turning against him.