“What nonsense,” one or another seasoned reader of newspapers declared in Corelli’s café. “She’d be older.”
“She is older,” the chief of police would reply with a smirk from behind the billiard table.
“Is it true what they’re saying here about her?” regulars of the café called to Rauch from their tables, waving the paper. Rauch grimaced, as if amid the ascetic click of billiard balls he had suddenly heard ocean rollers, Ludwig Neumann’s public loudspeakers, or the thump of thick glass tankards.
“The truth is a fraud,” he would reply tartly. “I’m just a director of a theater selling tickets to shows, it’s all above board.”
The next day Natalie Zugoff came across this all-knowing newspaper beside the mirror in her dressing room. She read German with difficulty, but she struggled through to the end of the article and for a long while stared searchingly at her own reflection, after which she abruptly crushed her glass cigarette holder between her fingers. Her hand bled; the artiste blanched and fainted. Amid the ensuing confusion and chaotic to-and-fro people called for smelling salts and for ice to put on her temples. After this incident an icy glint remained in her eyes, making the little boy shudder the following morning.
As the maids put him to bed in the evening they felt his hot breath on their faces. The doctor, summoned in Natalie Zugoff’s absence, took the boy to the town hospital. It was something contagious; some of the hotel guests saw door handles being disinfected, though the proprietor of the hotel reassured them for all he was worth. The next day the artiste sent the black boy a gift — a new music box wrapped in rustling golden paper. As he lay in his hospital bed he wound it up over and over with a weakening hand, then the Sisters of Charity did it for him. He fell asleep to the mechanical melody, which slowed down like his pulse. The strain of typhoid was an unusual one, the course of the sickness rocky, the prognosis poor.
“I’m terribly sorry,” the doctor said as he took Natalie Zugoff’s hand. She gave a sob, burying her face in the starched folds of the doctor’s white coat.
“The press is a swamp. Those hacks have no heart,” she stammered with a lump in her throat.
Laid out by the venom of the typhoid, the black boy was unable to take part in the excursion by hot-air balloon on which d’Auxerre invited Natalie Zugoff one Sunday. Reduced to despair, heedless of the complex and uncertain laws of aerodynamics, she consented to board the basket suspended beneath the balloon. Her long scarf fluttered behind as they rose over the old parade ground. Then they disappeared in a gap in the clouds and that was the last the spectators staring into the sky saw of them.
The tiny Chinese lapdog was left behind at the hotel. When Natalie Zugoff had wanted to tuck it into her muff, it transpired that it had vanished into thin air; several hours later it was found, sick from cigarette smoke, asleep beneath a pile of costumes. The windows had to be opened. Suitcases lay piled in the corner; the breeze ruffled the clothing scattered about on chairs. In the next room a dozen or more music boxes littered the floor. The telephone at the reception desk rang off the hook.
“We know nothing, sir. She didn’t check out of her room. Very well, I’ll pass on the message immediately if only I have the opportunity,” the desk clerk would say into the receiver.
A concerned crowd gathered noisily in front of the theater until Rauch appeared on the balcony like a regent when the queen is absent.
“Please go back to your homes and be of good hope,” he appealed. “I’ll put up an announcement the moment I have any news.”
In the meantime performances had to be canceled, causing losses for the theater — the box office refunding the cost of unused tickets.
During her morning rounds the maid found the proprietor of the hotel in Natalie Zugoff’s room clutching an armful of rustling gowns.
“Leave it,” he ordered when she began to strip the bedding to have it laundered. He loosened his cravat and lay down on the unmade bed, pressing his cheek into the pillows that still retained the scent of Natalie Zugoff’s tears.
The search that the chief of police immediately ordered drew a blank. The balloon had vanished without a trace, the French military mission knew nothing of the whereabouts of the missing Captain d’Auxerre. Successive hypotheses concerning the case crashed into one another in ever more complicated collisions, like hard and immaculately smooth billiard balls trapped in a frame lined with green baize.
“If you want to know what I think,” the chief of police would say to Rauch over their evening game of billiards, exhausted as he was by the hopelessness of the search that had been going on for weeks, “when someone in full command of their senses gives no sign of life, the worst has to be suspected — that’s how things look in the experience of the police.”
“So it’s possible. .?”
“I’m afraid it may be certain,” the chief of police confirmed. His arm twitched, causing a premature shot. Missing its target, the ball rocketed around the table all on its own, bouncing off the cushions.
Rauch was intending to visit the black boy in the hospital. A plush teddy bear waited in the director’s office for its moment. But when that moment came, the orderlies were just covering him over — blacker than ever and thin as death — with a sheet bearing the hospital stamp. Rauch walked away with the teddy bear under his arm. From that time on the teddy bear got in the way wherever Rauch put it down.
During this time a white grand piano arrived in Stitchings in a huge wooden crate, a gift for Rauch, along with a bill of lading and an invoice that Rauch snatched up impatiently as perhaps being the long-awaited sign of life sent at last by Natalie Zugoff. But he learned only that the piano had been ordered by her long before, at the beginning of the season. He racked his brains in vain trying to figure out what had inspired this gesture. The Chinese lapdog slept in the pocket of his silk dressing gown, where Rauch kept it so as not to tread on it accidentally when, as he was wont, he would wonder through his apartment, leafing through books, rummaging among his musical scores, opening bottles of perfume. Tormented by insomnia and by questions to which there were no answers, in the night he would sit down at the white piano. The musical phrases he played would limp like wounded animals, retreating unsteadily, fading away, then returning with a painful, insistent question. Why this way? Was there nothing for anyone? The sounds made the Chinese lapdog nervous, and an inquiring whimper would come from the pocket of the dressing gown.
“Jamais,” Rauch would reply. “Now it’s certain. She’s not coming back.”
He would conclude this line with a tragic chord. His stiff fat fingers would not obey him; they danced across the keys without grace, exactly the way Natalie Zugoff had once tried to describe it. In the early morning Rauch wept bitterly and, kneeling, kissed the white legs of the piano.
The one consolation given to him he found in the Hotel Angleterre. The maître d’, bowing, would lead him to the best table. Over the soup Rauch would choose an entrée, explaining his wishes to the waiter between mouthfuls.
“Double helpings of everything,” he would remind him.
He devoured double portions, getting gravy on the hem of the white napkin tucked into his collar. Before dessert he would fix his inconsolable gaze on the menu and return to the appetizers. Finally, as he was drinking his coffee and finishing his torte, he would reach for the menu one last time and look it over sadly, not finding anything more to eat. “Why do you never have artichokes?” he would ask in the end reprovingly.