The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By Read online

  ‘This is my friend, Louis. I’ll leave you . . .’

  ‘Come with me a moment,’ said Louis, hands in pockets, cigarette in mouth. ‘Leave all the stuff there, let’s go downstairs.’

  He took his companion to the washrooms in the basement, and there he examined him from head to toe, muttering:

  ‘Jeanne told me the whole story. I took a look at the papers. Do you often do things like that?’

  Popinga smiled. From the way his companion was looking at him, straight in the eye, with an ironic expression, he felt sure that this one would not start talking about madness or inferiority complexes.

  ‘It was the first time,’ he said, suppressing the desire to smile.

  ‘What about the other one, the old man?’

  ‘They’ve got completely the wrong end of the stick. Julius de Coster has had a financial disaster, and he’s disappeared, letting people think he was committing suicide. In fact, it was precisely because of that that I—’

  ‘Never mind, I haven’t got time for that now. Can you drive?’

  ‘A car? Of course.’

  ‘Well, if I’ve got this right from Jeanne, what you need is a safe house, while someone finds you some identity papers.’

  He took the cigar out of Popinga’s mouth to light his cigarette, and decided casually:

  ‘OK, we’ll see what we can do. You just go and wait upstairs. We’ve got a dinner party across the road.’

  It was almost midnight. The flower-seller had disappeared as had two of the negroes. From time to time, one of the doormen from a club would come in with a taxi-driver or some other person, transact a piece of business with him, have a glass of something, and go back to his position on the pavement opposite.

  Never had Popinga experienced such a dismal Christmas Eve, and at the stroke of midnight, he waited in vain to hear the bells ring. The nearest thing was a drunk who stood up and started singing a Christmas carol of which he knew only the first couple of lines. Then the landlord decided to turn on the wireless and a few moments later the café was filled with the sound of a church organ and a choir of men and boys singing a liturgical anthem.

  Kees folded up the newspapers, and ordered another coffee, since he no longer felt like drinking alcohol. He was waiting for the priest’s Dominus vobiscum as he turned to face the congregation.

  A little woman, standing in front of him in her shabby clothes, was very pale, from the cold no doubt, since she came back inside every hour looking frozen, most likely from walking up and down on the pavement.

  Cars were arriving in a continuous stream, pulling up outside the nightclubs. The three remaining negroes were having a lively argument – about what?

  The strangest thing was that at this moment all over the earth, in every church . . .

  Popinga imagined the world as if viewed from an aeroplane, supposing the plane could fly high and fast enough: a huge ball, white with snow, and dotted with cities and villages clustered round churches, their spires projecting like gigantic nails. And in all the churches there would be lights shining, incense burning, and the faithful would be silently contemplating the Christmas crib . . .

  But that wasn’t true! In the first place, in Central Europe, midnight mass would already be over, since it was one in the morning there. While in America, it was still the middle of the day. And everywhere, outside churches, negroes would be arguing, streetwalkers would be warming themselves with a coffee laced with rum after walking the pavements, while hotel doormen . . .

  So after that he gave up on the Christmas spirit. He had no wish to hum along to the church music, and in any case the café proprietor, who had no doubt thought the customers would like it, or who perhaps had once been a choirboy, was obliged to turn it off, as people couldn’t hear themselves speak and were starting to grumble.

  At once, the voices of the drinkers became audible. Smoke from cigarettes formed a blue layer two metres below the white ceiling, while opposite Popinga, a young man in a tight dinner-jacket, sitting alone in front of a glass of mineral water, was sniffing up some white powder.

  Why had that other young man asked him if he could drive a car? And what would all these people around him have said if he had suddenly stood up and declared:

  ‘I’m Kees Popinga, the Amsterdam sex maniac!’

  Since one of the French newspapers had so described him.

  At two in the morning he was still there, in the same place, and the waiter, who was getting to know him, nodded in a friendly way whenever he went past. He didn’t know what to drink next. So he imitated the young man opposite and ordered some mineral water. Then, as everyone else stood up, he was the only one to remain seated.

  A quarrel had broken out at the bar. Voices were heard shouting. Someone was brandishing a soda siphon, which smashed on a table, and next moment a close-packed knot of people burst out on to the pavement, where a confused gathering could be seen.

  A whistle was blown somewhere. Popinga, without showing concern, picked up his newspapers, went down to the washroom and locked himself inside a stall, where he set about reading mechanically an article about Dutch expansion in the eighteenth century.

  When he came back upstairs, a quarter of an hour later, everything was calm again and there were no pieces of the siphon to be seen on the floor. Some customers had left. The waiter approached him conspiratorially and winked, having noticed his client’s prudent disappearance.

  ‘Did they arrest many people?’ Popinga asked.

  ‘Oh, you know, Christmas Eve, they’re going to be lenient. They took a couple of people off to the station, but they’ll let them go in the morning . . .’

  Bringing a whiff of perfume with her, Jeanne Rozier now entered the café, wearing an evening dress, her skin looking moist and warm, like someone who has just been dancing energetically. She had come on a quick neighbourly visit, having thrown a coat over her bare shoulders.

  ‘You’re all right, aren’t you? Someone said there was a scuffle.’

  ‘Nothing to worry about.’

  ‘I think Louis is going to take care of you. He hasn’t made his mind up yet, but that’s the way he is. Only, mind you don’t leave here until I come back. If you knew how stuffy it is over there! Hardly room to pick up your fork.’

  She seemed to be taking him under her wing, yet at the same time she was still eyeing him warily, as if she found him disturbing.

  ‘Not getting too bored, are you?’

  ‘No, not at all.’

  She had left the café before he noticed that now she was addressing him more respectfully and not calling him ‘sonny boy’, which pleased him. This woman had understood. She wasn’t a birdbrain like Pamela, who could do nothing but laugh in a silly way.

  He took his notebook from his pocket. He wrote on the page where he had jotted down the opinions of Mama, the railway clerk, Copenghem, the porter at the Carlton and others:

  Jeanne Rozier certainly doesn’t consider me a madman!

  Another woman, like the one who had come into the café several times, now asked him if he would buy her a drink, and he handed her five francs, indicating that she would get nothing more from him.

  He had carefully folded up the newspapers. He was waiting. Twice, he thought of Frida’s strange eyes, and wondered what she would do in life.

  He was feeling hot in this café, but his head had never seemed so cool, his mind so clear. Would his wife carry out her plan of becoming a housekeeper in a hotel in the Dutch East Indies?

  The idea occurred to him to send to the Morning Post, for the benefit of Julius de Coster, a little announcement saying simply ‘How are you?’

  He could do anything he pleased! He could be anyone he wished, now that he had given up trying so hard, for everyone else’s benefit, to be Kees Popinga, authorized signatory in a shipping firm.

  How strange to have taken all that incredible trouble to perfect his character, so that even to the shrewdest gaze, no detail gave anything away. Which hadn’t prev
ented Copenghem saying to the press . . .

  He could, if he felt like it, just order an entire bottle of gin or cognac. He could have gone off with the woman he had given five francs to. He could have asked the nervous young man for some cocaine. He could have . . .

  ‘A mineral water, please, waiter.’

  This was by way of registering a protest against what he could have done. And also because he was feeling good just now, very good, with a clarity of thought that was intoxicating. He was even certain that he would be able to make Jeanne Rozier fall in love with him, in spite of her pimp.

  She it was who eventually came back, by now a little tipsy, at four in the morning. She seemed surprised to find him still there, and said with warmth:

  ‘Well, you’re very faithful, aren’t you?’

  Then in a different voice:

  ‘Louis and the others are suspicious. I’ve done what I can. This is all I managed to get out of them. In a few minutes, they’ll leave the club and will take two cars. Then they’ll head straight off for Porte d’Italie. Do you know where it is?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Never mind. In that case, you probably won’t succeed. They want you to take a car too. At Porte d’Italie they’ll wait a bit, and as soon as you arrive, you should flash your lights. And then you just follow them.’

  ‘Wait. Is Porte d’Italie left or right when I go out of here?’

  ‘Neither, you have to go straight across the whole of Paris.’

  ‘Never mind, I’ll ask a policeman.’

  ‘Are you mad, or perhaps you didn’t understand? You’re supposed to take a car, one of the cars belonging to people dining in a nightclub.’

  ‘I get it. But that’s just what one should do, ask a policeman, then they won’t suspect you of anything.’

  ‘Well, try it then! I warn you that Louis and his pals won’t wait very long. And mind, don’t pick a fancy car. Just an ordinary make.’

  She had sat down beside him, and for a second he regretted not having taken advantage of her presence before, when he had had the leisure. How had he failed to notice that she was really worth it?

  ‘When will I see you again,’ he asked in a low voice.

  ‘I don’t know. It depends on Louis. Look out! Here they come.’

  He paid for his drinks, pulled on his overcoat, and rolled up the papers to put them in his pocket. Two cars left at almost the same moment from the impressive queue which was parked all along the street.

  ‘Aren’t you going to say goodbye?’

  ‘Yes. I really like you. You’re a good woman.’

  And once out on the street, feeling that she was watching him through the window, he walked along the pavement like a man whose only thought is to go home, glanced at two or three cars, got into the fourth, and pressed the starter.

  The car came to life at once, and moved away from the kerb, following for a moment in the wake of a long limousine in which there were several women, and when Popinga turned round to wave goodbye to Jeanne Rozier, the tobacconist’s on Rue de Douai where he had celebrated Christmas Eve was no longer in sight.

  5.

  In which Popinga is disappointed to find a Kees Popinga wearing a workman’s pullover and dungarees and moping about in a service station, and in which he once again demonstrates his independence

  It was barely ten in the morning. The concierge was only just up, and the mail was still piled in a corner of her lodge, alongside an unopened milk bottle and a loaf of fancy bread. The streets were empty, with that heartbreaking emptiness of mornings after festivities: even the taxis were not at their rank, and the only passers-by were a few of the faithful on the way to Christmas Day mass, their noses red with cold.

  ‘What is it?’ mumbled Jeanne Rozier huskily, when after a few minutes she began to register a noise but without connecting it to the door of her apartment.

  ‘Police!’

  At this word, she was at once wide awake, and feeling with her toes for her slippers, she muttered:

  ‘Wait a minute . . .’

  She was at home in Rue Fromentin. She had slept alone and her green silk dress was tossed across a chair, her stockings at the foot of the bed. She still had on the slip she was wearing the day before and threw a peignoir over it before opening the door.

  ‘What do you want?’

  She knew this inspector vaguely by sight. He came into her bedroom, removed his hat, turned on the light and simply declared:

  ‘Chief Inspector Lucas wants to see you. My orders are to take you to Quai des Orfèvres.’

  ‘Works on public holidays now, does he?’

  Perhaps Jeanne Rozier was more beautiful as she was now, just out of bed, than fully dressed. Her auburn hair fell in tousled locks round her face, and her eyes without makeup expressed a kind of animal distrust.

  She had begun to put her clothes on, without troubling herself about the inspector, who was smoking a cigarette, and did not take his eyes off her.

  ‘What’s it like outside?’ she asked.

  ‘Freezing hard.’

  She put on a minimum of makeup. Once in the street, she asked:

  ‘You haven’t come in a taxi?’

  ‘No, I didn’t have authority to do that.’

  ‘In that case, I’ll pay. I don’t want to go halfway across Paris on a bus!’

  When they arrived at police headquarters in Quai des Orfèvres, where the corridors and most of the offices were empty, she had, without letting her thoughts show, envisaged all the imaginable hypotheses, and was ready with a reply for any questions the chief inspector might ask her.

  He let her wait a good fifteen minutes on principle, but Jeanne Rozier was too used to the procedure to show the least impatience.

  ‘Come in, my dear. My apologies for getting you out of bed so early.’

  She sat down next to the mahogany desk, put her handbag on it and looked at Chief Inspector Lucas, who was bald and avuncular.

  ‘We haven’t seen you here for some time, have we? Let me see, the last time, if I remember correctly was three years ago, something to do with drugs. So? You’re no longer with Louis?’

  The first two sentences had been amiable in tone, in order to create an atmosphere, but Jeanne gave a shudder at the last, replying, nevertheless:

  ‘Now who told you that?’

  ‘I don’t quite recall. Last night, I was out for the evening in Montmartre and someone told me you’d taken up with a foreigner, a German or an Englishman?’

  ‘Really!’

  ‘That’s why I asked you to come. I wouldn’t want you to get into any trouble.’

  To listen to them, one would think they were old friends. The inspector was pacing up and down, his fingers tucked under his waistcoat. He had offered a cigarette to his visitor and she was smoking it, sitting with her legs elegantly crossed, gazing out at the deserted embankment of the Seine, and the end of a bridge where buses were crossing.

  ‘I think I know what you mean,’ she murmured after a moment’s thought. ‘I’m sure you’re talking about one of my clients from the day before yesterday.’

  And Lucas feigned astonishment:

  ‘Ah, a client. I was told—’

  ‘They couldn’t have told you anything different. If someone said anything at all, it would be Freddy the maître d’ at Picratt’s. They were just about to close when this Dutchman came in, determined to have a good time. He invited me to his table and ordered champagne. When the bill came, he had to change some florins. We went to Rue Victor-Massé, the place I always go, because it’s clean. We went to bed. And he never even touched me.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Search me. In the morning I’d had enough of sleeping alongside this big fat man full of soup, so I left.’

  ‘With his money?’

  ‘No, I woke him up and he gave me a thousand francs.’

  ‘For doing nothing?’

  ‘Well, that wasn’t my fault, was it?’

  ‘And you went home.
Where you found Louis?’

  She nodded.

  ‘What’s he doing these days, your Louis? Apparently he wasn’t there this morning.’

  At this Jeanne Rozier’s eyes blazed.

  ‘Yes, and if you can tell me where he is, I’d very much like to know!’ she said angrily.

  ‘You didn’t spend last night together, then?’

  ‘But we did! We’d had a nice party, just with a few friends. And some little minx must have made eyes at him. All I know is he disappeared, and he didn’t sleep at home.’

  ‘Working a lot, is he?’

  She laughed cynically.

  ‘Why would he be working? Would he need me if he was working?’

  Lucas smiled.

  Jeanne Rozier sighed, to indicate that she was wondering if that was all. Both of them had played a role to perfection and both were still harbouring suspicions and secret thoughts.

  ‘Can I go back to bed now?’

  ‘Yes, of course. But tell me, if you were to come across that Dutchman again—’

  ‘First thing I’d do, I’d slap his face,’ she declared. ‘I can’t stand perverts. If you think I don’t know why you’ve been asking me all these questions for a quarter of an hour! I read the papers too, you know! When I think I might have ended up like that dancer in Amsterdam . . .’

  ‘So you recognized him from the photograph?’

  ‘Well, I’d be lying if I said I did, because he doesn’t look much like the photo. But I guessed, all the same.’

  ‘And he didn’t tell you anything? Or give you any idea what he was going to do next?’

  ‘He asked me if I knew the south of France. I think he might have mentioned Nice.’

  She was standing up now. The chief inspector thanked her, and a quarter of an hour later Jeanne Rozier was on her way home, where instead of going back to bed she took a hot bath, then dressed soberly.

  It was about half past midday when she went into Chez Mélie, a restaurant frequented by regulars, where she sat down at a table and ordered a glass of port, since she wasn’t hungry.