Read Out of the Dark for Free Online Page B

advantage of the moment to say:
    'How's Cartaud? How was everything yesterday on the Boulevard Haussmann?'
    She became very pale.
    'Why do you ask me that?'
    'I saw you go into his building with him.'
    I was forcing myself to smile and to speak in a lighthearted voice.
    'You were following me?'
    Her eyes were wide. When Van Bever came back, she leaned toward me and said quietly:
    'This stays between us.'
    I thought of the bottle of ether – that filthy stuff, as she called it – that I had shared with her the other night. 'You look worried …'
    Van Bever was standing before me and had tapped me on the shoulder, as if he were trying to bring me out of a bad dream. He was holding out a pack of cigarettes.
    'You want to try another pinball game?' Jacqueline asked him.
    It was as if she were trying to keep him away from me.
    'Not right now. It gives me a migraine.'
    Me too. I could hear the sound of the pinball machine even when I wasn't at the Café Dante.
    I asked Van Bever:
    'Have you heard from Cartaud lately?'
    Jacqueline frowned, probably as a way of telling me to stay off that subject.
    'Why? Are you interested in him?'
    His voice sounded sharp. He seemed surprised that I had remembered Cartaud's name.
    'Is he a good dentist?' I asked.
    I remembered the gray suit and the deep, resonant voice, which were not without a certain distinction.
    'I don't know,' said Van Bever.
    Jacqueline was pretending not to listen. She was looking away, toward the entrance to the café. Van Bever was smiling a little stiffly.
    'He works in Paris half the time,' he said.
    'And other than that, where does he work?'
    'In the provinces.'
    The other night, in the café on the Rue Cujas, there was a sort of awkwardness between them and Cartaud, and, despite the mundane conversation we'd had when I sat down at their table, it had never gone away. And I found that same awkwardness now in Jacqueline's silence and Van Bever's evasive replies.
    'The trouble with that one is he's hard to get rid of,' said Jacqueline.
    Van Bever seemed relieved that she had taken the initiative to let me in on the secret, as if, from now on, they no longer had anything to hide from me.
    'We don't particularly want to see him,' he added. 'He comes chasing after us …'
    Yes, that was just what Cartaud had said the other night. They had met him two months before in the Langrune casino. He was alone at the boule table, playing halfheartedly, just killing time. He had invited them to dinner in the only restaurant that was still open, a little up the road in Luc-sur-Mer, and had explained to them that he worked as a dentist in the area. In Le Havre.
    'And do you think it's true?' I asked.
    Van Bever seemed surprised that I would express any doubt about Cartaud's profession. A dentist in Le Havre. I had gone there several times, long ago, to board a boat for England, and I'd walked through the streets near the docks. I tried to remember arriving at the train station and going to the port. Big concrete buildings, all the same, lining avenues that seemed too wide. The gigantic buildings and the esplanades had given me a feeling of emptiness. And now I had to imagine Cartaud in that setting.
    'He even gave us his address in Le Havre,' Van Bever said.
    I didn't dare ask him in front of Jacqueline if he also knew his other address, in Paris, on the Boulevard Haussmann.
    She had a bemused look all of a sudden, as if she thought Van Bever was simplifying things and making them much less confused than they were: a man you meet in a coastal resort in Normandy and who works as a dentist in Le Havre, all very banal, really. I remembered that I'd always waited for boarding time in a café by the docks: La Porte Océane ... Did Cartaud go there? And in Le Havre, did he wear the same gray suit? Tomorrow I would buy a map of Le Havre, and when I was alone with Jacqueline she would explain it all for me.
    'We thought we would lose him in Paris, but three weeks ago we saw him again …'
    And