Bird in a Cage

by Frédéric Dard

And he dragged her back into the flat, leaving the front door open.

  I stared at the rectangle of light and could hear Mme Dravet sobbing.

  I realized I had to get away at all costs. If the police found me on the premises I would be done for.

  I started going back down the stone stairs on tiptoe. But just as I got to the bottom steps the sharp pulsing siren of a police van not far off rent the air. I thought I would faint.

  The siren stopped. The gate grated on its hinges.

  I was caught on the stairs as in a net. My only recourse was to go back up, to put off the final reckoning for a bit.

  So I went back up the stairs without bothering to muffle the sound of my shoes. Maybe there would be a way out over the roof? I remembered there was a skylight right over the lift cage.

  I got to the landing where there was light. I took a quick look to see whether Mme Dravet or Ferrie were at the doorway. They weren’t. Only I saw something else, and it made me doubt my sanity. Through the set of doors that had been left open in the flat, I clearly saw Jérôme Dravet’s corpse set on the sofa in its initial position.

  But I was already past the landing. I began to wonder if I had really seen it, or if I’d been hallucinating.

  A narrow wooden stairway went on up to the attic. I climbed it as fast as I could. I could already hear the footsteps of policemen down below. I froze. I couldn’t catch my breath. My chest was caught in a terrible, vice-like contraction. There were shouts and whispers two floors down…

  My position was untenable. If the police came to look upstairs they would come upon me and then I would never get them to accept that I was there solely as a witness with too much curiosity for his own good. The small staircase went no farther. What should I do?

  With infinite caution I ran my hand along the wall as if I were stroking it. My fingers had become a blind man’s eyes, they had suddenly acquired a kind of tactile second sight.

  I felt the roughness of a door. I found a handle. I turned it, slowly. Slowly. I prayed to God that the door would yield when I pushed it.

  The door obeyed. It creaked slightly, but to me that small noise sounded like a gunshot. A few seconds standing stock-still gave me back my courage. I pushed at the door with the utmost wariness. Hope glimmered again. I’d forgotten the stiff downstairs, Mme Dravet’s play-acting and the police, and was thinking only about saving my own skin. I knew that attics always had hinged windows on the sloping roof side.

  If I found such a thing then it would perhaps be my salvation. But the more I went forward, the darker it got. I was drowning in darkness as if I was sinking into the black earth of a bog.

  Once inside the attic room I made to close the door. I did it with even more care than I had opened it.

  Once the panel was fully back in place and I’d heard the latch click shut, I reckoned I’d put a tremendous bulwark between myself and the police.

  I waited for another minute. I was living in spasms, in disconnected dots.

  There was lots of coming and going on the floor below, with people speaking words I couldn’t make out and telephones ringing.

  “They” should be calling in the medical team and informing the prosecutor’s office. Were they going to search the building?

  A more insidious fear now gripped me. I knew Mme Dravet had an accomplice. It had to be so, since while she was away her husband’s body had been brought back into the lounge.

  So whoever had done that fearful clean-up job—whether it was a he or a she—could still be in the building. Unless there was another exit I didn’t know about. Or unless that person had got away while I was dozing in the cab of the lorry.

  Could it have been to help her accomplice that Mme Dravet hadn’t bothered to lock the yard gate when she left to look for her supposed handbag?

  If the accomplice were in the building, then he or she could be in this very attic! I imagined someone crouching in the dark nearby and ready to slit my throat at the slightest provocation. I thought I could hear faint breathing. I tried to calm myself down, told myself it was my own breathing I could hear, but my fear level went on rising.

  Several times I felt like opening the door and going downstairs to meet the police.

  What stopped me each time was the thought of the young woman who was caught in a struggle with them. She had asked me to vanish several times over and I’d not done her bidding. I’d persisted in imposing myself and in stalking her. If I made myself known then it would be curtains for her as well as for me.

  “Anybody there?” I whispered.

  Nobody answered. My voice managed to do what my mind had not. It calmed me down.

  If Dravet’s wife had an accomplice, then that person would not have been so stupid as to stay on the premises until the police came by.

  There was a lot of noise in the staircase now.

  “There they go,” I thought. “They’re searching the building and the bindery.”

  I waited in a blind funk, expecting the door would burst open and that I would be caught full face in the beam of an electric torch.

  But they took their time. Now and again there were pauses in the commotion downstairs. But just when I started hoping again, the noise resumed.

  Flashes of optimism, even confidence, alternated with moments when I wanted to weep from fear and misery.

  I felt I was too near the stairs. I moved gently towards the back of the room. My elbow bumped into a doorjamb and I could feel I was getting into a more spacious area. I tried to find a skylight but there still wasn’t one. I put my hand up to touch the roof but met only air.

  As I tried to move farther on, I knocked into something. It must have been a pram (presumably Lucienne’s, from when she was a baby) because I could feel the push handle, and when I bumped into it, it moved and made a clatter.

  The noise put me back on edge. Had it been heard downstairs?

  I had to stay completely still from then on, otherwise I could knock over any one of the discarded objects that people store in attics. With the utmost carefulness I lay down on the floor, on the boards. I found the fringe of an old rug and lay my cheek on it.

  Putting your head in the sand is sometimes a good strategy. With my eyes closed and my body completely still I felt invulnerable. If anyone came up and searched the attic with a torchlight, he might even miss me altogether.

  Hope returned. Although Dravet’s corpse had been handled, suicide remained the most likely explanation and the authorities would probably just go through the motions.

  I could make out the sounds of an ambulance bell, of doors being opened and shut, of people calling…

  They were still walking and talking on the floor below. Many times I heard the metallic click of a telephone being hung up. Later on there were screams and sobs; at the time, I thought they must have informed Dravet’s family and that the wailing came from his relatives.

  I looked at my watch. The gleam of its phosphorescent dial made a tiny breach in the dark. In such a total blackout, it stood out like a vision. I couldn’t see the watch itself, only the circle of numbers and the two spear-like hands.

  Six o’clock… Six twenty… A quarter to seven…

  An hour and a half had elapsed since they found the body. So they were not going to search the premises. If the police had suspected anything they would have done a search straight away.

  Was I saved?

  I hardly dared believe it. I would still have so many hurdles to jump. I would have to leave the attic, get down the stairs, cross the yard.

  If there was anyone with Mme Dravet, how could I explain why I was in the building? And if she went out, how would I then open the locked door and the gate?

  9

  The Switch

  I heard the clocks strike seven. Local church bells had long been chiming hours and half hours without my noticing. It’s true the building was now completely quiet and that the only noises to reach me came from outside. There was hardly any traffic on this Christmas Day. Heavy d
elivery vehicles clattered over the cobblestones. A few mopeds were making a racket as they performed incomprehensible circuits around the area.

  Should I wait longer? I was in a soggy, lethargic state that deprived me of willpower.

  If I waited too long, I would get tangled up in the flood of relatives and friends who would pour in once the news got around. This present inactivity was a window of opportunity that I simply had to make use of.

  As I was making ready to stand up I heard someone walking up the wooden staircase leading to the attic with a firm and rapid step. It scared me stiff. Someone was coming and there was no mistake about it. And whoever it was wasn’t being shy. He was coming straight at me. The first door opened. The footstep halted for a second. Then it moved closer in more slowly. It was soon a few inches from my face.

  The gentle click of a switch and then a stunning surge of light, like when you try to look at the sun for a second. I was blinded by the sudden and utterly unexpected illumination.

  In the midst of the glare stood Mme Dravet like some miraculous apparition. My eyes quickly adjusted to the light. She was alone. She had her two hands crossed tightly on her chest and was staring at me with horror, as if I was a profoundly repulsive object.

  It’s a sure thing that I had just given her the worst scare of her life.

  Our eyes crossed in a flash. My attention was captured almost immediately by the décor and I think I screamed. A scream from the gut. The scream of a man thunderstruck by a revelation.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked in a grating voice.

  Instead of answering, I tried to make sense of it. I wanted to understand the trick. I wasn’t in an attic but in the Dravets’ lounge. There was the sofa, the armchair and the gramophone on the low table. There was the drinks trolley with Ferrie’s glass on it and mine, and I suddenly realized it was what I had bumped into in the dark and taken for a pram! There was also the Christmas tree and its tinsel decorations. My silvered cage and its blue and yellow cloth bird were hanging on the tip of a branch like a trinket intended to make fun of me.

  The lounge door was of course glazed and I could see the hallway with its coat stand with no coat hanging on it.

  “Come on, own up, what are you doing here?”

  She didn’t just sound angry, most of all she sounded in despair.

  I put my hands to my head the way ham actors do on stage to express shock and horror.

  “I do not understand…”

  “You do not understand why you spent the night here?”

  “Hang on.”

  I went over in my mind the path I had taken in the night.

  I had climbed one floor. I had gone across the landing in front of the Dravets’ flat, and through the open main door I had caught sight of the lounge. A short but complete sight of the room. The corpse was on the sofa…

  I had seen the tree, the gramophone, the drinks trolley…

  “Hang on.”

  Something went click inside the exhausted woman. She took two steps forward and sank into the armchair.

  “Are you trying to make me believe you haven’t got it?” she sighed as she closed her eyes.

  I ran out of the lounge to the other end of the hallway. Like a clairvoyant I opened each door as I came to it. All of them opened onto entirely empty rooms with freshly plastered walls that hadn’t yet been painted.

  Then I went back to her. She had big blue circles under her eyes, and her cheeks looked hollower than before.

  “I am dog tired,” she murmured. “So tired I wouldn’t mind if I died right now.”

  I sat down on the sofa, facing her. Instinctively, I followed her example in flopping down. We were both completely worn out.

  “There are two identical flats on top of each other, right?”

  “My father-in-law had the second one built for his second son, who’s in the army in Algeria.”

  I got it. But not really. It was more subtle than that. I grasped that I was on the brink of understanding it all, because I now had all the pieces to put together.

  “And you furnished the lounge of this flat exactly like your own place?”

  “That wasn’t very difficult to do.”

  “True. You said you were a set designer…”

  “You don’t need a degree to put a coat of whitewash on a hallway and a lounge, or to buy the same sofa, armchair, gramophone and drinks trolley as the ones you’ve got already…”

  “You murdered him, didn’t you?”

  “You already know I did.”

  That was a woman’s insight. She’d known my own thoughts before I had.

  “You picked me up in the restaurant because you needed a witness.”

  “Picked…”

  “Well, let’s say, ‘encouraged’ me. You played the part perfectly. Every minute seemed to be pure chance, but in reality you were conducting the whole operation with a firm hand!”

  “Yes, danger gives you strength.”

  “So you arranged things to get me in here. You insisted I pour myself a drink.”

  “Before leaving this room I had to know what liqueur you would choose.”

  “So you could put the same one in a glass downstairs?”

  She nodded. Underneath it all, was she really bothered by my being there? Wasn’t she secretly pleased to have someone to confide in? Wasn’t her strange secret too heavy to bear alone?

  “And you put on a record because of the bang?”

  “Obviously.”

  I grinned.

  “Wagner! Right man for the job…”

  Time passed and she didn’t say a word. She wanted to confess, but only in the way clumsy penitents confess, by responding to questions.

  I had a hundred questions, a thousand questions, too many questions to ask. I didn’t know which to choose.

  The simplest way to get to the bottom of Dravet’s murder was by following chronological order.

  “When you left this room you went down one floor with Lucienne?”

  Hearing her daughter’s name brought tears to her eyes. I saw them form into drops on the tips of her long lashes and pause there for a minute before breaking free and flowing down her beautiful, tortured face.

  “You put her to bed quickly?”

  She nodded in a way that could have been taken for a yes but I think that the truth is she wanted to shake away more tears that were forming under her eyelashes.

  “Then you went into the lounge—the real one—to kill your husband, for that’s where he was. But, to start with, I don’t understand…”

  “At noon I’d given him three delayed-action phenobarbital capsules inside chocolates. They contain several different sleep-inducing substances that are released in sequence. With the right dose, you can put someone to sleep for hours and hours…”

  A faint smile puckered her lips for an instant.

  “The proof of it being…”

  “So, he was asleep?”

  “Yes.”

  She knew full well what I was thinking. If things went badly for her, no jury would allow for mitigating circumstances. She had killed a sleeping man in cold blood with lengthy, cunning and patient premeditation.

  “I scare you, don’t I? You think I am a monster.”

  I shrugged.

  “It’s not for a man like me to judge you.”

  She put out her hand very gently, the way she had in the cinema. For a split second I thought it was starting all over again.

  I took her hand and squeezed it. All I asked from the heavens was a few minutes’ respite. I was expecting a ring of the doorbell or the tinny sound of the telephone.

  “Nobody was concerned about him being away yesterday afternoon?”

  “One person: his mistress. In the morning the bindery was open and working. She went to see him quite shamelessly in his office and my husband’s secretary told me they had had a row about Christmas Eve. In the late afternoon she telephoned the flat, without saying who she was. She wanted to speak to Jér
ôme. I said he’d gone out.”

  “I hope the police know about the argument?”

  “They must.”

  “It supports the suicide story. By the way, how did the cops react?”

  She thought for a moment.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, what attitude did they take?”

  “They’re like doctors, they don’t say anything. They took photographs and made measurements. They put the gun into a plastic bag.”

  “And then?”

  “They sealed the lounge door!”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. I imagined that when the police have a clear case of suicide on their hands they don’t take so many precautions.

  But that was just the opinion of a non-professional. If the police had really suspected something, they would have searched the whole building.

  “OK. You killed him… You had gloves on, I suppose?”

  “Yes. But he pulled the trigger. I just held his hand, you see.”

  Like you hold the hand of an illiterate to make him sign his name. She had made Dravet sign his own death.

  “Two drops of blood spattered your cuff.”

  “I noticed you were worried about those stains. They bothered you before we found the body. I almost ditched you when we came out of the café.”

  They were harsh words, but she softened them by little squeezes of her hand.

  “What did you do with the gloves?”

  “I dropped them down a sewer grating during our walk in the moonlight; didn’t you notice?”

  “No,” I confessed, rather pathetically.

  I wanted to know every detail. There was something spectacular about the affair that fascinated me.

  “So you shot him, and then?”

  “I poured a drop of cognac in one glass and a drop of cherry brandy in the other… I put both glasses on the shelf of the drinks trolley.”

  “So that’s why when we were about to go out a bit later you took the glass I’d put on the mantelpiece and placed it on the trolley the way it was downstairs?”

  “Did you notice?”

  “Well, you can see…”

  “We chatted. We went out.”

  “And when we came back you stopped the lift on the first floor instead of the second. So I wouldn’t notice the difference in the time it took, you kissed me…”