Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

Two men arguing heatedly on a street-corner, their arms almost resembling slowed-down propeller-blades, they spun around so. A fragment of an angry shout reached her cars. “We built Algeria from the ground up, I tell you!”

A panorama of a lighted café streamed by, all out of perspective, somehow, like a child’s crude crayon drawing of a string of railway-carriages. Nothing but large yellow window-squares, with no space left over for anything else. On the outside the tables had already been stacked up for the night, but inside there were still a few heads dotted about here and there, weaving slowly like black flies caught on yellow fly-paper.

The trees of the thoroughfare they were following were like massed black plumes, dipping almost to the ground along its sides, and the boulevard lights, peering down through them from above, seemed to cast shafts or rods of yellowish vapor, like sodium pentathol, swirling and fuming with living motes just as if they were contained inside glass test-tubes. The cab, crashing through them, shattered them noiselessly one after the other, but they re-formed behind it each time intact, like luminous magic wands.

Paris in the small hours...

The cab stopped suddenly, and they were there.

She opened her bag and thrust her hand down into it, alongside the cold heel of the gun. She made a discovery that at any other time would have been a hindrance, now was inconsequential.

She raised her head. “I have no money,” she told the driver. “I forgot to bring any along.”

He sized her up, not eye to eye but by way of the glass. He must have rated her for what she was: high class, and not the kind that would be likely to try to bilk him out of a fare. His manner noticeably didn’t change: he didn’t get excited, raise his voice, become abusive.

“What do you want to do?” he asked even-temperedly.

“I don’t know what to do,” she said.

“Shall I wait here until you come out again?” he suggested.

“Don’t do that,” she said with enigmatic brevity.

“Well then—?” He gestured helplessly.

“Here, hold this,” she said abruptly, and twisted a sizable diamond solitaire Boniface had once given her off her finger, and held it out to him. “Keep it as a pledge, until you get your fare back. I’ll give you my address: come around in a day or two, there will almost certainly be someone there to see that you get your money.”

He looked at it big-eyed, but with considerable trepidation. “I’m not sure I ought to do it,” he said dubiously. “The regulations are very severe about some things.”

“I’ll take the responsibility, you won’t get in any trouble.” She put it in the center of his hand, and took hold of his fingers and pressed them closed over it on all sides. “Now don’t detain me any longer, I have to get

He drove off at a crawl, still shaking his head to himself, and jumping it up and down undecidedly in the same hand into which she’d put it, only one hand to his wheel.

Gilles’ concierge answered her ring at the street-doorbell, and the cloudy look with which she’d been about to greet this late night-visit turned into a sunny one when she saw who the visitor was.

“Mademoiselle!” she gushed cordially. “You don’t get around to see us much any more.”

No, I don’t, thought Fabienne wryly. But whose fault is it? She said: “Don’t announce me, I’ll go right up.”

She was afraid he might bar his apartment-door to her if he were tipped-off that she was on her way up.

“Of course not,” the concierge agreed. “Anything mademoiselle wishes.”

She didn’t call Fabienne “madame” because that would have been taking too much for granted. Besides, it was none of her business.

“I won’t forget to show my appreciation,” Fabienne promised. “I’ll take care of you — later.”

The concierge protested insincerely with two back-turned palms, as though the very idea filled her with horror.

Fabienne went to the stairs at the back, and passed by the waiting birdcage elevator. For the same precautionary reason: because she did not want him to hear it bring her up. It always stopped with considerable jangling and bickering of its parts.

“Until later then,” she said over her shoulder to the concierge.

“Enjoy yourself,” the latter called after her amiably, no irony dreamed of.

After a brief interval, the lower-hall lights went out. But there were lights at each floor-level along the stairs. It was only two flights; he lived on the third.

She took out the key he had once given her and put it in, and the door opened before her no more dramatically than it had at any other time. For instance, when she would let herself in to fix tea for him before he came home from work.

She stepped past the threshold. The light was on at the back of the bachelor-apartment, in the end-room, which was the bedroom. She could see it from where she was. The intervening room was dark.

As matter-of-factly as though this were any ordinary visit, she put her hand to the wall and turned on the light-switch, and then went on by.

“Who’s out there?” his voice called out.

“Fabienne,” she said with deathly intensity. “Tu te souviens de moi?” Remember me?

His voice said again, but to somebody else in the room with him, “I told you! I told you this would happen!”

She appeared in the bedroom-entrance, looking in at him. “Yes, you told!” she cried out shrilly as they came face to face. “You told well! You told right!”

That was all she said to him, nothing more, not another word.

He was completely dressed, save for his jacket and his tie, and the top button at the collar of his shirt. Her eye, glancing quickly over him, took in the detail of the finely pleated shirt he had worn at her party, without really seeing it at all.

But the girl behind him, sitting up in the bed, was just as completely not dressed. There was nothing to her at all, nothing to her from head to foot. A mop of scrambled black hair, large frightened eyes like those of a calf, a thin pipe-stem of a neck, bony shoulders the shape of a coat-hanger, a scrawny parody of breasts like an adolescent’s. She had nothing, nothing at all but one thing. But the one thing she had gave her the victory. She had: youth.

“You want him?” Fabienne cried out to her bitterly. “Take him! I give him to you! I give him to you like this, with my compliments!”

She pried open her handbag, scooped the gun out, and stood pointing it at him. The handbag fell with a discarded flutter, its lining coming up out of it like an air-blister.

His fate didn’t even have time to get white, just incredulous.

Instead of holding it close in to her own body and firing it from there as a man would have, she thrust it out toward him, as if it were a weapon with a cutting or stabbing point. Thus it was the easiest thing in the world for him to grasp her forearm and up-end it, backing the gun away from himself.

It clicked sterilely, once, midway between them.

But she was pulling, straining, in reverse impetus now, to get her arm away from him. And in his reflex of self-defense, he had caught it in an awkward place, midway to the elbow. Now, trying to shift his grasp to her wrist, the more natural place to hold her by, his grip slackened for an involuntary instant. Her arm, freed with all the straining effort she was putting into it, sprang back like a suddenly released mainspring, and the gun imbedded itself into her own breast. The impact itself must have detonated it.

There was a hollow, reverberating thud, like the sound an empty flower-pot might make if it were dropped many stories down an air-shaft. A minimal amount of smoke came up between their faces, not much more than if one of them had just released the vestiges of some long-pent-up cigarette-inhalation.