When she seemed dead, I released my grip. I undressed very fast and came back to her. Her flesh was warm and sweet, her limbs were quite limp, the joints obedient; she had become as malleable as a rag doll.
Again I had that impression of tremendous fatigue which I had already experienced on my way upstairs a moment before. Laura fell asleep at once in my arms.
“Why is she so nervous? You know that means an extra danger—for no reason.”
“No,” I say, “she doesn’t seem abnormally nervous … After all, she’s very young … But she’ll be all right. We’re going through a rather hard time.”
Then I tell him about the man in the black raincoat keeping watch on my door. He asks me if I’m sure I’m the person being watched. I answer no—I don’t think it’s me, in fact. Then he asks me, after a pause, if there’s someone else to be shadowed in the neighborhood. I answer that I wouldn’t know, but that there could be someone without my having any idea of it.
Tonight, when I left, the man was in his usual place, still in the same clothes and the same position: his hands deep in his raincoat pockets, his feet wide apart. There was no one near him, now, and his entire attitude, so assertive in his clothes—like a man on sentry duty—was so completely lacking in discretion that I wondered if he was really trying to avoid notice.
I had scarcely closed the door behind me when I saw the two policemen coming toward us. They were wearing the flat caps of the tactical police, the front edge very high, with the shield beneath and a broad shiny visor. They were walking in step, as though on patrol, right down the middle of the street. My first impulse was to reopen my door and get back inside until the danger was past, observing from behind the little grille the sequence of events. But then I thought that it was absurd to hide so obviously. Moreover, the gesture I made toward the key in my pocket could only be that belated mechanical precaution I have already mentioned.
I calmly walked down the three stone steps. The man in the raincoat had not yet noticed—apparently—the presence of the tactical police, which seemed strange to me. Though they were still about two blocks away, you could hear the regular noise of their boots on the pavement quite distinctly. There was not one car in the street, which was deserted except for these four people: the two policemen, the motionless man, and myself.
Hesitating a second between the two possible directions, I thought first that it would be better to take the same direction as the policemen and to turn at the first intersection, before they could have seen my fact at close range. As a matter of fact it is very doubtful that they would have marched any faster, without a specific reason, in order to catch up with me. But after three steps in that direction, I decided that it would be better to face the ordeal directly, rather than to draw attention to myself by behavior which might seem suspicious. So I turned around in order to walk along the housefronts in the other direction, toward the policemen who were continuing their steady, straight march. On the opposite sidewalk, the man in the felt hat was staring at me calmly, as though with complete indifference: because there was nothing else to look at.
I walked on, looking straight ahead of me. The two policemen had no particular character: they were wearing the usual navy-blue jacket and leather belt and shoulder strap, with the pistol holster on one hip. They were of the same height—quite tall—and had rather similar faces: frozen, watchful, vacant. As I passed them, I did not turn my head toward them.
But, a few yards farther on, I wanted to know how the meeting with the other man would turn out, and I glanced back. The man in the black raincoat had finally noticed the policemen (probably when they were between him and me, in the line of his gaze, which was still fixed on me), and he made, just at that moment, a gesture with his right hand toward the turned-down brim of his hat …
There wasn’t even time for me to wonder about the meaning of this gesture. The two policemen, quite unpredictably, with one accord turned around to stare at me, freezing me where I stood.
I can’t say what they did next, for I immediately went on walking, with an instinctive about-face whose abruptness I immediately regretted. Moreover, hadn’t my entire behavior since the beginning of the scene given me away: a hesitation (and doubtless a movement of withdrawal) on the threshold upon noticing the policemen, then an unaccountable change of direction which betrayed the initial intention of running away, finally an excessive stiffness at the moment of passing the patrol, whereas it would have been more natural to glance as though by chance at the two men, especially if I was to turn around to look at them subsequently as they walked away from me. All of which, obviously, justified their suspicions and their desire to see what this individual was up to behind their backs.
But what was the relation between this understandable suspicion and the gesture made by the other man? That almost looked like a tiny salute: the hand, which till then had never left the raincoat pocket, suddenly appearing and rising casually to the indented brim of the soft hat. It is difficult in any case to suppose that it was the intention of this placid sentry to lower the felt any farther over his eyes in order to conceal his face from the policemen altogether … Instead, doesn’t the hand emerging from the pocket and slowly rising point to the man walking away, wanted by the inspectors for several days and whose suspicious behavior has yet again aggravated the already heavy charges weighing upon him?
However, he continues on his way nonetheless, walking faster in fact, while trying not to let this be too apparent to the three witnesses behind him: in front of the building painted bright blue, the two policemen are still frozen like statues, their expressionless gaze fixed on this receding figure, soon tiny at the end of the long straight street, while the gloved hand of the man in black, completing a slow trajectory, has just come to rest against the far edge of the felt hat.
Over there, as if he imagined he was henceforth out of sight, the suspect person begins going down the invisible staircase of a subway entrance which is in front of him, level with the ground, thereby losing successively his legs, his torso and his arms, his shoulders, his neck, his head.
Laura, behind the window corresponding to the third-floor corridor, at the very top of the fire escape, looks down at the long street, at this hour quite abandoned, thus making the three disturbing presences all the more remarkable. The man in black whom she has already noticed the last few days (how many?) is at his post, as she suspected he would be, in his usual shiny raincoat. But two policemen in flat caps, wearing high boots and pistol holsters, walking side by side down the middle of the pavement, have also stopped now a few steps from the first observer—who gestures to them with one hand—and turn around in unison to look at what he is pointing at: the window where Laura is standing.
She quickly steps back, quickly enough for neither the policemen nor their informant to be able to complete their head-movements upward before she herself has vanished from the place indicated by the black-gloved hand. But her recoil has been so rapid and spontaneous that it is accompanied by a clumsy gesture of her left hand, on which the heavy silver ring has just knocked violently against the pane.
The impact has produced a loud, distinct noise. At the same time has appeared, extending across the entire surface of the rectangle, a star-shaped fracture. But no piece of glass falls out, unless, much later, it is a tiny pointed triangle, about half an inch long, which slowly leans inward and falls on the tiles with a crystalline sound, breaking in its turn into three smaller fragments.
Laura stares a long time at the broken pane, then through the next one, which is similar but intact, at the blue wall of the house on the other side of the street, then at the three tiny splinters of glass scattered on the floor, and again at the starred pane. From the withdrawn position she now occupies in the corridor, she no longer sees the entire street. She wonders if the men watching her have