CROSSING PARIS
579
lights extinguished, trickled a barely perceptible thread of music.
"You have no right," Martin kept saying. "You will hear about
this, even though you are cops."
The policemen replied only by elbow thrusts, sharp and well–
aimed. Martin saw himself assured of a haven, where until the fol–
lowing day he would be sheltered from the silence, from the solitude,
from the stem looks of his landlady and his friends. He was feeling
himself more free already, and he thought again of the one who had
just died by
his
hand. His heart began to swell with a tender regret.
His remorse was mixed with affection, and its weight was not without
some sweetness.
The group came out into a square where the moon shone full
upon them. The inspector, who was walking some steps ahead of the
others, stopped in the radiance and made a sign to them to stop also.
Martin had a brief pang of anguish at the thought that they might
be going to give him his liberty. The place was as empty, as men–
acing, as Pigalle Square. The inspector held in his gloved hands a flat
rectangular package wrapped in newspaper. He opened it with
clumsy, brutal haste, impeded as he was by his big woollen gloves,
as if he had all at once been seized by irresistible impatience.
"You knew a painter who called himself Gilouin?"
"No," replied Martin.
The inspector thrust before his eyes an album with a grey cloth
cover, which he had just taken from its envelope. The album was
open at a page marked with a strip of newspaper. Martin saw the
portrait, the date.
"Why did you kill him?"
Martin did not answer. His silence became terribly prolonged.
The inspector and the policemen watched him anxiously, avidly await–
ing the moment when the silence would amount to a formal confession.
Martin did not at
all
share this tension. He was experiencing the con–
solation of seeing his destiny now in harmony with the new image of
himself which was reflected by the mirror of his everyday world. The
solitude and silence of the streets, which he had so often braved in
the course of his nocturnal errands, no longer held any threat. He
had nothing more to fear.
"Why did you kill him?" repeated the inspector, in a kinder
VOIce.
