Lingslay set down his cigar and rose.
“Allow me twenty-four hours for my decision. I will give you my answer tomorrow by telephone after thorough consideration. The matter is too important to be decided at a moment’s notice.”
The five gentlemen heaved themselves up from their armchairs. Lingslay said farewell and hurried to the door.
“As for those three thousand Jews coming into America,” Mr. Marlington blew after him with a cloud of smoke, “don’t pay them any mind. We’ll have no trouble eliminating that tiny impediment once we get there. You just leave it to me…”
Lingslay heard only the first half of the last sentence. The end was cut by the clatter of the elevator doors.
After he left, the gentlemen exchanged knowing glances.
“I wonder what sort of tricks old Lingslay is up to,” one of the armchairs said as an aside.
“And how much we’ll have to fork out for them,” added a second.
“Or maybe Lingslay is in league with the Jews to go with them alone, leaving us in Paris? Did you notice his consternation, gentlemen, when he found out that we were all visited by the Jewish delegation today?”
“Yes, in my opinion we should keep an eye on Lingslay. No doubt he’s hiding something. Lingslay’s part Jewish himself. We would be unspeakably stupid if he made fools of us and we missed out on this exceptional chance.”
“You can rest easy, gentlemen,” said Ramsay Marlington’s distinguished voice, resounding from a corner. “Lingslay and I have worked in related branches of industry for ages, and my detective has not left his side for a moment, out of longtime habit. We’ll know about his every move and be able to intervene when the time is right. Meanwhile, let’s start preparing our departure so that we aren’t caught napping.”
Unfortunately, Lingslay was not around to hear this noteworthy conversation. He was already on the street, and locating his Rolls-Royce in a row of automobiles, he threw himself down onto the soft pillows and grunted his usuaclass="underline"
“Champs-Élysées!”
An unfamiliar chauffeur’s face turned to him from behind the steering wheel.
David Lingslay at first thought that he had entered the wrong vehicle by mistake. He glanced at his monogram stitched on all the pillows, he wanted to ask, but he didn’t. As a headliner in this lunatic stage show, he was well accustomed to the daily changes in the cast of browbeaten extras made by that crazed director, Death.
He gave the exact address in a dry, metallic voice.
The chauffeur nodded in silence. The car moved.
The departing day, like a modeler able to wait no longer for a slowly dying patient, covered Lingslay’s face with a plaster mask of scorching heat. Lingslay thought about soft silk pillows one settles into like a state of semi-consciousness, and of other cushions, even silkier and more dizzying. He closed his eyes and slipped into reverie.
When he opened them he noticed that his car was stopped in front of a palace he knew all too well. The blinds in the window were tightly drawn.
“She’s asleep,” thought Lingslay tenderly, and he smiled at his own thoughts. He rang the doorbell twice. A long moment went by. Nobody answered. Lingslay rang once more. The response was silence. Was it possible there were no servants? Lingslay impatiently held down the button. The bell clattered an alarm. Again: silence.
The head of an elderly graying man peeked out from the doorway of the neighboring palace. A rotten, peevish head. The head said loudly in broken English:
“No one home. The lady died today noon. They take her to crematorium. Servants all gone,” and then it ducked away.
David Lingslay froze, his hand on the doorbell. He stood there, it seemed, for quite a while, because the next thing he noticed was the quizzical, surprised, slightly mocking face of the new chauffeur.
Lingslay went down the stairs and fell into his seat. The chauffeur turned toward him, the quizzical expression still on his face.
“Please drive just… you know… on…” Lingslay said slowly.
The chauffeur nodded respectfully. The car moved.
When late that evening David Lingslay’s automobile stopped in front of the gates to the Grand Hotel, the first floor of the Café de la Paix was already squealing with jazz, and goggle-eyed gentlemen with one foot in the grave were sitting around tables like gigantic mosquitoes sucking the red blood of cocktails through the proboscises of their straws.
Alone in his room, David Lingslay absently wound his watch, set it down on his nightstand, and slowly started to undress. The chilly touch of the sheets through the thin silk of his pajamas was the first stimulus to awaken from its torpor his consciousness of a strong, well-functioning body, and this consciousness, activated like a machine, started on its daily, infallible course.
It was only under the blankets that the forty-year-old man first clearly realized that the night before he had kissed, held, and taken a woman who was now dead of the plague.
This thought was so cold and sharp that the man felt a slight chill go down his spine.
On the surface, the deceptive social “I” of this forty-year-old gentleman known as Mr. David Lingslay – a label on a bottle of chemicals, a jumble of notations stuck to its glass – staged a revolt: his lover had died, his one and only, etc. Sorrow, screams and resignation would have been understandable, but not this vulgar egoism and fear: I’ve been infected! I’ll die! But this, like every label, did and could not affect the chemicals inside the bottle (a careless chemist sometimes switches labels) – and the body of the forty-year-old man, totally unabashed, continued its thoughts according to its own unswerving logic.
One thought meshed with the next: so if I’m infected, the plague is in me. I’ll die tomorrow at the latest. Maybe even tonight.
The forty-year-old gentleman abruptly sat down on the bed. The thought was so simple, so irreproachable in its flawless logic, so transparent and filled with oxygen, that in comparison the air in the room seemed pure carbon dioxide, and for a moment the forty-year-old man struggled to catch his breath.
“Love,” “lover,” all those categories by which David Lingslay had once defined the levels of his emotions suddenly seemed incomprehensible, like words in a foreign language. There remained an unfamiliar, infected, dead woman – not even a woman, a few pounds of ash – who now lived only inside of him, in the bacteria of the plague she’d passed on to him, which at this very moment were perhaps gnawing into his flesh and entering his bloodstream.
The forty-year-old man hit a switch to turn on the lights. The grimace of a familiar pale face contorted in the mirrored wardrobe opposite.
“Is there no way out? Is there really no way out? Let’s think calmly, now,” reasoned the body of the forty-year-old gentleman. “There have even been cases of people who caught syphilis and burnt the infected area right after intercourse, thus preventing the spread of the disease.”
“Too late,” the brain tried to protest.
“No, it might not be too late at all. It hasn’t been twenty-four hours yet. If I hurry…”
For the body, like all bodies, put the language of concrete action above abstract reasoning. The forty-year-old man leapt barefoot from his bed, tossing – or rather tearing – his pajamas from his body with superstitious revulsion, and ran naked to the dressing table. The hand of the forty-year-old gentleman snatched a jar of sublimate from the phials resting on top and, having prepared a powerful solution in the sink, started to splash himself with it, rubbing his hairy, goosebump-covered body until it went red from his genitals all the way to his face and ears.