There was a voice in the room, a woman’s voice. Maybe it wasn’t the beast, after all. But no: through the crack of the wardrobe door Lewis could see the beast, and a red-haired young woman with him. She was talking incessantly, the perpetual trivia of a spaced-out mind.
“You’ve got more; oh you sweetie, oh you dear man, that’s wonderful. Look at all this stuff.”
She had pills in her hands and was swallowing them like sweets, gleeful as a child at Christmas.
“Where did you get all this? OK, if you don’t want to tell me, it’s fine by me.”
Was this Phillipe’s doing too, or had the ape stolen the stuff for his own purposes? Did he regularly seduce redheaded prostitutes with drugs?
The girl’s grating babble was calming now, as the pills took effect, sedating her, transporting her to a private world. Lewis watched, entranced, as she began to undress.
“It’s so… hot… in here.”
The ape watched, his back to Lewis. What expression did that shaved face wear? Was there lust in its eyes, or doubt?
The girl’s breasts were beautiful, though her body was rather too thin. The young skin was white, the nipples flower-pink. She raised her arms over her head and as she stretched the perfect globes rose and flattened slightly. The ape reached a wide hand to her body and tenderly plucked at one of her nipples, rolling it between dark-meat fingers. The girl sighed.
“Shall I… take everything off?”
The monkey grunted.
“You don’t say much, do you?”
She shimmied out of her red skirt. Now she was naked but for a pair of knickers. She lay on the bed stretching again, luxuriating in her body and the welcome heat of the room, not even bothering to look at her admirer.
Wedged underneath Solal’s body, Lewis began to feel dizzy again. His lower limbs were now completely numb, and he had no feeling in his right arm, which was pressed against the back of the wardrobe, yet he didn’t dare move. The ape was capable of anything, he knew that. If he was discovered what might it not choose to do, to him and to the girl?
Every part of his body was now either nerveless, or wracked with pain. In his lap Solal’s seeping body seemed to become heavier with every moment. His spine was screaming, and the back of his neck pained him as though pierced with hot knitting-needles. The agony was becoming unbearable; he began to think he would die in this pathetic hiding place, while the ape made love.
The girl sighed, and Lewis looked again at the bed. The ape had its hand between her legs, and she squirmed beneath its ministrations.
“Yes, oh yes,” she said again and again, as her lover stripped her completely.
It was too much. The dizziness throbbed through Lewis’ cortex. Was this death? The lights in the head, and the whine in the ears?
He closed his eyes, blotting out the sight of the lovers, but unable to shut out the noise. It seemed to go on forever, invading his head. Sighs, laughter, little shrieks.
At last, darkness.
Lewis woke on an invisible rack; his body had been wrenched out of shape by the limitations of his hiding-place. He looked up. The door of the wardrobe was open, and the ape was staring down at him, its mouth attempting a grin. It was naked; and its body was almost entirely shaved. In the cleft of its immense chest a small gold crucifix glinted. Lewis recognized the jewelry immediately. He had bought it for Phillipe in the Champs-Élysées just before the war. Now it nestled in a tuft of reddish-orange hair. The beast proffered a hand to Lewis, and he automatically took it. The coarse-palmed grip hauled him from under Solal’s body. He couldn’t stand straight. His legs were rubbery, his ankles wouldn’t support him. The beast took hold of him, and steadied him. His head spinning, Lewis looked down into the wardrobe, where Solal was lying, tucked up like a baby in its womb, face to the wall.
The beast closed the door on the corpse, and helped Lewis to the sink, where he was sick.
“Phillipe?” He dimly realized that the woman was still here: in the bed: just woken after a night of love.
“Phillipe: who’s this?” She was scrabbling for pills on the table beside the bed. The beast sauntered across and snatched them from her hands.
“Ah… Phillipe… please. Do you want me to go with this one as well? I will if you want. Just give me back the pills.”
She gestured towards Lewis.
“I don’t usually go with old men.”
The ape growled at her. The expression on her face changed, as though for the first time she had an inkling of what this John was. But the thought was too difficult for her drugged mind, and she let it go.
“Please, Phillipe…” she whimpered.
Lewis was looking at the ape. It had taken the photograph from the mantelpiece. Its dark nail was on Lewis’ picture. It was smiling. It recognized him, even though forty-odd years had drained so much life from him.
“Lewis,” it said, finding the word quite easy to say.
The old man had nothing in his stomach to vomit, and no harm left to feel. This was the end of the century, he should be ready for anything. Even to be greeted as a friend of a friend by the shaved beast that loomed in front of him. It would not harm him, he knew that. Probably Phillipe had told the ape about their lives together; made the creature love Catherine and himself as much as it had adored Phillipe.
“Lewis,” it said again, and gestured to the woman (now sitting open-legged on the bed), offering her for his pleasure.
Lewis shook his head.
In and out, in and out, part fiction, part fact.
It had come to this; offered a human woman by this naked ape. It was the last, God help him, the very last chapter in the fiction his great uncle had begun. From love to murder back to love. Again. The love of an ape for a man. He had caused it, with his dreams of fictional heroes, steeped in absolute reason. He had coaxed Phillipe into making real the stories of a lost youth. He was to blame. Not this poor strutting ape, lost between the jungle and the Stock Exchange; not Phillipe, wanting to be young forever; certainly not cold Catherine, who after tonight would be completely alone. It was him. His the crime, his the guilt, his the punishment.
His legs had regained a little feeling, and he began to stagger to the door.
“Aren’t you staying?” said the red-haired woman.
“This thing…” he couldn’t bring himself to name the animal.
“You mean Phillipe?”
“He isn’t called Phillipe,” Lewis said. “He’s not even human.”
“Please yourself,” she said, and shrugged.
To his back, the ape spoke, saying his name. But this time, instead of it coming out as a sort of grunt-word, its simian palate caught Phillipe’s inflexion with unnerving accuracy, better than the most skillful of parrots. It was Phillipe’s voice, perfectly.
“Lewis,” it said.
Not pleading. Not demanding. Simply naming, for the pleasure of naming, an equal.
The passers-by who saw the old man clamber on to the parapet of the Pont du Carrousel stared, but made no attempt to stop him jumping. He teetered a moment as he stood up straight, then pitched over into the threshing, churning ice-water.
One or two people wandered to the other side of the bridge to see if the current had caught him: it had. He rose to the surface, his face blue-white and blank as a baby’s, then some intricate eddy snatched at his feet and pulled him under. The thick water closed over his head and churned on.
“Who was that?” somebody asked.
“Who knows?”
It was a clear-heaven day; the last of the winter’s snow had fallen, and the thaw would begin by noon. Birds, exulting in the sudden sun, swooped over the Sacré Coeur. Paris began to undress for spring, its virgin white too spoiled to be worn for long.