“She was a whore,” he suddenly exclaimed. His hands were fists. Lewis had never seen Phillipe make a fist in his life. Now his nails bit into the soft flesh of his palm until blood began to flow.
“Whore,” he said again, his voice too loud in the little cell.
“Keep your row down,” snapped the guard.
“A whore!” This time Phillipe hissed the accusation through teeth exposed like those of an angry baboon.
Lewis could make no sense of the transformation.
“You began all this -” Phillipe said, looking straight at Lewis, meeting his eyes fully for the first time. It was a bitter accusation, though Lewis didn’t understand its significance.
“Me?”
“With your stories. With your damn Dupin.”
“Dupin?”
“It was all a lie: all stupid lies. Women, murder—”
“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.