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girl yourself.”
    I laughed, drearily, not without appreciation of his wit.
    “This is not being kind, my friend,” I said. “Nurture me if you must, or put me out on to the street. But let me do what I am inclined to.”
    His girl began to sing, charmingly, downstairs in the house. I had never wanted that, the nesting proximity of a shared life. Never. What then had I intended with her, my lady of shadows? Not to leave her with her husband, surely, enjoying her at random? No matter. No question could arise of it.
    To make a little conversation with grim Russe, lurking in his ancestral forests, responsible for his fellow men, I said, “And where is my beloved erstwhile companion, Philippe?”
    “My God,” said Russe. “You haven’t heard. Well, you have been hearing nothing, have you, but the sound of corks got out of bottles.”
    “Heard what?” I thought, He has run off with her. That will be it. It seemed at a great distance. It did not matter.
    “Philippe has vanished. Fifteen days now, and sixteen nights. Even the City police are alerted.”I said,
    “Well, you won’t see him again.”
    “What? Why do you say that?”
    “He will be out of the City, over the borders, with her.”
    “With whom? What do you know of this, Andre?”
    “If he purloined her, how could he stay? The old banker might have wanted satisfaction after all. Old bankers are notoriously unpredictable.”
    “If you are speaking,” said Russe stiffly, “of the von Aaron woman, she has nothing to do with this. She is in her house. She holds her salon twice a week now. Most fashionable. Everybody goes there.”
    The bed seemed to slip away under me, a boat casting off to sea.
    “He told me he was her lover.”
    “Probably he lied to you. She is supposed to be virtuous. Oh come, Andre. Philippe – is
that
what began this –”
    I wanted to get up, I was not certain why. I had some notion I should go over to Philippe’s house, and that he would be there. Then, since nothing else could then conceivably have happened, I might refind myself also. If I wished to. She no longer seemed a part of me. I had drunk Lethe, all the brandy-black glasses of it, and after all, did not recall her quite. Nearly faceless now, just the cowl of hair, the coals of the eyes – Her voice, murmuring something foul to me.
    Russe would not let me get up. His girl ran in and joined his lament. I lay back down again.
    In the middle of the night, when they were making love below, and the tweety-bird slept, I got out of the bed of bliss and dressed and crept down the house with my boots in my hand. Someone had polished them, these boots, as I saw by the glow of the moon and the street light outside the door. Polished the boots, laundered all my filthy linen, cleaned and brushed my coat. It was Philippe’s coat too, in fact. I had kept it, to go drinking in, to write and weep and vomit while wearing, to die in along some alley gutter. Well, better return it now.
    From Our Lady of Ashes came the four o’clock bell.
    I shambled towards the Wall Quarter, the old City barricade that once fenced Paradys above the river. Sometimes I laughed at the moon, she looked so like a nun, a priestess, with her bloodless face cowled by night.
    The shuttered house too was gaunt in the moonlight. Was it not somewhat like a tall thin skull, eye-sockets, nostrils, cave of mouth with its teeth knocked out. And what about that phalanx of round attic windows above? Of course, the scars of the bullets which had gone through the brain and killed it long ago.
    (In a skull then, the lizards played, darting, fighting, resting. And they had stored clothing, swords and books, and a rocking-horse, behind the bullet-holes.)
    The bell jangled mournfully. It seemed to echo away over the chasms of the City. Would anyone come, at this hour, to let me in? So frequently Philippe, with the door key, much later than this, would go in to find one of them, Hans or Poire, dozing on the wooden seat in the