Asking for It

Two Young men with junior executive haircuts were taking a drink together after a long hot day at the office. They worked in the Marseilles branch of the E. T. & Orient Line and it was in Alec Weaver's apartment where they now had their drinks.

Alec's features were not unpleasing and his smile was that of one who is anxious to please. The combination can suggest a certain vulnerability. "I should like," said Alec, "to write a story about a murderee."

His friend was Jay Wisden, who had a face like his name a face with a pipe in it. He now removed this accessory. At once (continued on page 130)asking for it(continued from page 93) he looked as naked and surprised as the shortsighted do when they strip off their glasses. "Since when have you had the notion of becoming a writer?"

"Only of this one thing. It might solve a problem that sort of has me hooked. Why should anyone want to get himself bumped off? It's been stuck in my mind for ages. I can almost see the guy. And yet . . . no, I can't see him."

"He probably looks like any other nut."

"What makes him tick? And how does he bring it off?"

"No good asking me, brother. After all, you know the experts."

"At the Striptease, you mean. I wish I'd never taken you there. To me, Louis Camatte is just another businessman."

"Not to me, he's not."

"He lives for his kids. Good schools, nice friends; that's what he wants for them. He's proud of that horrible wedding cake of a villa. He wants to cover Marie with fur coats and diamonds and things."

"They say she needed a bit of covering in the old days."

These words hung in the air as if they had no place to go. Unwilling to take them in, Alec stared out of the window. Far down the street, between high buildings, the water of the port showed as blue as a flag.

Jay wondered if he had said the wrong thing. He reinstated his pipe and, with it, his look of sagacity. "Didn't you tell me one time there was a girl you dreamed up and couldn't stop thinking of? Did you have to write a story about her?"

"No. But, by God, I made one up, though! Under the influence of that shrink I went to in New York. Mimi. A slave."

"Black?"

"No. Just a type. A physical type. Psychological, too. Certainly a sexual type. The slave. Masochistic. Made to be kept down. Crushed flat. Brutalized. And yet--look out! A woman like a snake."

"Treacherous?"

"Asking to be trodden on. But tread on her--and you're done for. Do I make myself clear?"

"Clear enough," said Jay, lighting up. Anything is clear enough to a man who is lighting up.

"It was the summer before I transferred here. I couldn't stop thinking about her. She became so real I thought I might be going round the bend. It was mostly because of her I wasted my money on that shrink. Fifteen hundred bucks! And stuck in the city the whole summer!"

"But he got rid of her?"

"He did, more or less, I suppose. But see what a con the whole thing amounts to. He hooked her up with certain dreams I had and things I remembered from when I was a kid; and he got me believing that this was a nursemaid I had when I was about four. Mamie, her name was. Which seemed to make it plausible."

"Seems so to me, I must say." And Jay emitted a judicious smoke ring, which, however, was already disintegrating.

"Wait till you hear what this bird cooked up. When I was five, we spent a couple of weeks in Atlantic City."

"A traumatic experience in itself, I imagine."

"This girl was supposed to take me to the beach in the afternoons. Instead, on certain days, she took me to a cheap lodginghouse. To a back room, up three flights of stairs--dirty stairs. And there she left me hanging about on the landing, while she was in there with a man--a Marine."

"Audibly?"

"Very much so. Until one day I thought she was shouting for me."

"So you opened the door?"

"And there she was! Under him. A hideous, sweating, gobbling brute! Mamie! Crushed down! Brutalized! And, blast her, enjoying it!"

"Classical situation. And I notice the effect lingers."

"Yes. I can see it now. Smell it, too. That shabby landing. The sun coming through a dirty window onto a wall the color of puke. And the waiting. And the wondering. And opening the door. It seems I opened it slowly, because the first thing I saw was the belt and the Marine's cap. On a chair. And then--the bed."

"Well, I can understand your being a bit obsessed with your Mimi or Mamie or whatever you call her. But what's all this got to do with the other character--the murderee?"

"Oh, nothing at all. Absolutely nothing. Nothing to do with him. I was just giving you another example of the way I can get hooked on a person. But wait till you hear the payoff."

Emitting smoke, Jay waited.

Alec, after one of those pauses that seem to allow for a change of gear, resumed in a steady, precise and reasonable tone. "Nothing could be clearer. Nothing could be more real than that memory. All the same, Jay, it was all a lot of crap. When I got my transfer, I came over here by boat. I think I told you that. Very well, on that boat, out from under the influence of that so-called analyst, walking my ten times around the deck one morning, I suddenly realized that that particular episode could never have happened. Listen to this: My father went broke and had his breakdown when I was four. After that, there wasn't any money for any nursemaid--Mamie or Mimi or anything you like--to take me around. The year after, when I was five, like I said, it's true we did go to Atlantic City. For a cheap couple of weeks. My mother and me, and nobody else at all. No lodging-house, no stairs, no back room, no door to open; absolutely nothing at all."

"Might have been something you'd seen and forgotten," said Jay. "Something you'd seen in the park."

"In my opinion, it was nothing at all," insisted Alec. "Nothing but a bloody egg laid in my head by that shrinker. Hatched out under his expectant silences. You feel you have to say something."

"And you certainly did. But isn't there always some little germ of reality in these things?" asked Jay. "Maybe something you don't even recognize at the time. As, for example, with this murderee who's got stuck in your mind. Somebody's triggered the thought."

"I know nobody like that," said Alec.

"You know one fellow who's certainly asking for it." And Jay lifted up the stem of his pipe and he pointed it at the ceiling of Alec's living room. A little smoke oozed out, as from the barrel of a pistol that has just been fired. The pipe pointed, at an angle slanting up through several floors, to a row of flimsy structures on the roof of this bad modern building; structures such as are called ateliers by the agents and, by the occupants, hutches.

"You can't possibly mean André," said Alec.

"That young man," said Jay, "is my choice as most likely to succeed in ending up at the bottom of one of the calanques, with a hole in his head and a couple of yards of heavy chain wrapped around him. Like those two they fished up at Easter."

"You're out of your bloody mind," cried Alec. "You're talking about a guy who loves his life, loves his work--"

"You call it work? Picking out a few bars on the piano and making with the offcolor monolog in between?" Jay blew out long clouds of contempt for this ignoble occupation.

"That's not fair, Jay. That's what he does at the Striptease. Everyone's got to eat. It's what he does in the daytime that matters."

"Exactly," said Jay.

"He composes. People say he's got talent. Certainly he lives for his music, and he--"

But Jay was enveloping himself in a smoke cloud so dense that Alec was forced to stop and look and, hence, to listen. One should beware of voices speaking out of clouds. "It's the music he makes with Marie Camatte I'm thinking of," said Jay.

"How do you know?" cried Alec in almost childish distress. "What have you ever seen to make you say a thing like that? It's not true, and I don't think you should go around saying such things."

Jay was not the man to press a point where he saw it was causing pain. "Well," (continued on page 238)asking for it(continued from page 130) said he, "the Camattes are your friends, not mine. I've only seen them when you've dragged me to that lousy night club. And all I ever saw, with my own eyes, was the glazed sort of look people wear when they're playing footsie under the: table. And maybe what you'd call a smoldering glance or two."

"On the strength of which you take the typical small-town view of the French! No wonder there's all this anti-U. S. feeling over here!"

Magnanimity, even in a pipe smoker, has its limits. Like all limits, they are reached sooner than one expects. "Alec," said Jay, "you're the world's all-time champ at seeing a thing, or saying a thing, and then forgetting it. You told me yourself you'd caught sight of Marie, more than once, on her way out of this building, evidently from André's."

"Only twice," said Alec. "And I thought nothing of it. He's young and he's hard up and talented." This small, weak thought was uttered in a small, weak voice. It seemed anxious to slip away unnoticed.

Jay threw only the smallest of jokes after it; to do less would have been more conspicuous. "You must let me bring a bottle next time," said he, rising. "Now I've got to get home or the kid won't go to sleep."

Alec walked this upright family man to the stair well. Pressing the button, he evoked only the considerable silence of a dead elevator. "These functional dumps are fine," said Jay, "only nothing ever functions." With that, he set off down the stairs and soon the sound of his foot-falls died away.

Alec stood for quite a long time, feeling completely empty, unable to think of anything at all. Any period is long if spent doing nothing on an empty landing. Indeed, in the silence, it seemed as if time had come to a stop. It was set going again by the tick, tick, tock not of a stately clock but of a pair of high heels coming down from the upper floors.

In this building, made all of concrete, the elevator was often out of order, and many pairs of high heels descended that naked, echoing, rather grimy staircase. Nevertheless, Alec knew, as they say, that this was Marie Camatte who was coming down. He therefore felt a paralyzing sense of the inevitable, like a giant hand on the back of his neck, as she turned on the last landing and came into view.

Marie came from one of those ancient pockets of Marseilles where the houses are eight floors high and the streets scarcely eight feet wide. Those tall houses are linked by rooms erupting from their upper stories, bridging the narrow alleys and running like lava over the roofs of lesser buildings. In each room, a family or a whore. Not infrequently, both.

In the doorways, and in the shadows of shops, you sometimes see the most extraordinary faces: Roman faces, Greek faces, Phoenician faces; faces with the profiles of vipers and the whiteness of those night-blooming flowers that smell sweetly of flesh. They are the faces of the slaves of Tyre and Sidon--and of certain of the queens of silent movies.

Marie had such a face and it seemed at all times ready to tilt unbearably far back under the insolent devouring kiss of its natural mate, the Sheik of Araby, or the mate of the last coaster to dock.

"That face is my fate." Someone else had already said it, but Alec felt it. He felt it every time he saw Marie, and the feeling was accompanied by a heart-laboring, bowel-twisting sensation that tried to pass itself off as passionate love. Actually, it was the ugly sister of the love family--that quite hideous sister, the dull, persistent ache of an unhealable wound.

Those suffering from unhealable wounds readily assume a reproachful expression. This causes people to feel they have been found out, a feeling that can arouse guilt, fear and rage in the best of us. These things showed on Marie's face for a moment. They were quickly covered by the sweetest of smiles, but Alec had seen them. It is not pleasant to be greeted by a look of that sort when one has been waiting on a dirty landing for several minutes, or possibly for 20 years.

Alec stepped in front of Marie without either a smile or an extended hand. "Come into my place," he said. "I've something to say to you."

Marie put on the appropriate look of wonder, but she had observed that Alec spoke as if he had no breath in his lungs. She had learned quite early in life that when a man speaks in that way, he means business. She therefore allowed him to march her through the open door of his apartment, and she was suitably impressed by the backward kick with which he slammed the door shut behind them. "I'm late already," she said. "Louis will wonder what has happened to me."

"No doubt André could tell him."

"André? What has André to do with it?" Marie tried the effect of a look of lofty offense, a period piece as absurd and pathetic as a moth-eaten old fox fur would be, with a bunch of limp and faded artificial violets pinned on it, dragged out of some trunk in the attic. "Is it possible you suggest I was visiting André? Perhaps I have other friends in this building."

Alec permitted himself a look of contempt for this pitiful alibi, so easy to check up on.

Marie, a creature of the alleys, knew a blind one as soon as she set foot in it. "But why should I not tell you the truth?" said she. "It is a little secret, but not from you. Louis has some business friends who are coming from Nice to meet him at the club this evening. So I thought I would tell André one or two funny little things about each of them, for him to work into his act."

"No doubt he had other friends last Thursday. Were they also from Nice?"

"Last Thursday? I fail to see--"

"You failed to see me, but I saw you. And I saw you on Monday, too, you dirty little whore!"

"You're jealous!"

What a relief it is, after a lot of fencing, to get down to brass tacks! The next moment, Marie was plastering herself upon Alec, flickering her fingers like snake's tongues up his arms, along his jaw, around his neck; engulfing the stiff, resentful fool in kisses as red and sticky and sweet as stolen jam, pouring a froth of confessions and reproaches and endearments all over him, telling him that André was a boy, a toy, a mistake, a nothing. "A nothing! A nothing! A nothing! It was all because of you. I love you. You close your eyes. You turn away. You ignore me. You look at me as if I were dirt." All this sounds much better in French, especially if one's French is not of the best.

To Alec it had the magic of that double talk that is uttered by our most discreditable desires, through the mouths of creatures of our own creation, in our dreams. It offered him his love and his slave, an abject repentance and a rival belittled to nothing at all. Nothing was lacking to complete his pleasure, except perhaps pleasure itself.

The fact is, the realization of a fantasy, like the foot of the rainbow on the site of the mirage, inevitably turns out to be just another bit of the same old desert. Alec, seeking it under Marie's skirt, had for a delightful moment the excusable illusion of having found it.

Unfortunately, he could not refrain from just one more question. "But if he was such a mistake, why didn't you drop him right away?"

"Because he is so weak, so stupid. In his despair he'd have done something foolish. Right there in the club, perhaps; right under Louis' eyes. And then . . . you know what Louis is!"

Alec realized that he knew perfectly well what Louis was. Louis was the owner. It is the owner who makes the slave, crushing her down, brutalizing her, devouring her all to himself, keeping other people out on the landing.

"Louis is dangerous," said Marie. "That one"--pointing above--"is nothing but a child. But Louis terrifies me. I am afraid to let myself hate him as much as I want to hate him. I have to pretend always. That is my life. Yours, too, now. He must never, never suspect."

"Oh, I don't know about that," said Alec with one of those smiles one should never indulge in. It might have been a smile on the lips of an unhealable wound. "Perhaps we will let him suspect André."

"Oh, no, no, no!" cried Marie sharply. She had no wish to annoy Alec by a contradiction; the words just slipped out. "He'd kill him."

"You said he was a mistake. You said you couldn't get rid of him. Don't you want to get rid of him?"

"But he'd kill me, too."

"Oh, no, my dear. Quite the opposite." Alec was enjoying the intoxicating but rather dangerous sensation of great cleverness. He had seen the whole scene in one of those flashes that, like lightning flashes, are rightly called blinding, because they make us automatically close our eyes, or because after them the darkness is darker than before. "You shall be away somewhere quite safe. Louis will wipe André out. We shall know that he has done it. A word dropped into the right ear--and Louis will be wiped out, too. And you, my love, will be wiped clean." The word wipe passed back and forth over everything he said, as over a dirty windscreen, but with no great gain in visibility.

"You're mad!" said Marie.

"Free of Louis and free of André!" continued Alec in a positive orgasm of fancy. "Clean and free and happy!" He almost added the words "And with the man you love," but considerations of taste restrained him. Instead, he started warbling a solo about transferring to the Colombo office, or Alexandria, or even Osaka.

Completely mad! thought Marie. And, as if prompted by Alec's unuttered phrase, she raised her momentarily tender eyes to heaven, always assuming heaven to be situated just where Jay had pointed with his pipe. Then, narrowing those same eyes a little, she seemed to be gazing with concentration through Alec's nonexistent dirty windscreen, along a dimly seen road that, with all the wiping he had indulged in, was gradually becoming clearer. "It is necessary to be practical," said she.

"You speak of dropping a word into the right ear," she continued. "Whose ear is that? Have you any particular person in mind?"

"Anyone at the commissariat," said Alec. "One policeman is as good as another, I suppose, in a matter of this sort."

"You are very clever," said Marie. "It is because you are so clever that I adore you. But sometimes the little goose knows something that the clever fox doesn't know. One policeman is not as good as another. Say your word to the wrong man at the commissariat--and you might be saying it into Louis' own ear. That is how they are with him, most of them: close--like that! Then you and I, my friend, we would both be wiped out, as you call it."

"Let me think a moment," said Alec.

"No. But listen a moment. There is one of them who is not Louis' friend. Far from it. Out to get him. But he has never been able to make anything stick. Now, forget André. Why should you wish to hurt André, a boy, a mere child; two, three years younger than you are? The police are not going to be interested in what happens to a little nobody like that. But there were two men, men of importance, who had business dealings with Louis. And a little disagreement. And a fishing boat, dragging its anchor--you read about it--caught the chain that was wrapped around one of them and fished him up. And then they found the other.

"They know who did it. This man I spoke of, Inspector Grimeaux--remember that name--knows damn well that Louis did it. But he lacks one thing to make it stick.

"I have it. It is nothing but a scrap of paper, but I found it in my hand and I kept it. For insurance. I will seal it up in an envelope and bring it back to you within the half hour. Meanwhile, call the commissariat and insist on speaking to Inspector Grimeaux. Don't say a word to anyone else. You will get yourself murdered, Alec, if you talk to anyone but Inspector Grimeaux. When he is on the phone, tell him, not talking loudly, that you have just what he needs--a certain letter--in the affair of Louis Camatte and the Calvi brothers. Tell him you will hand it to him in person, at a private rendezvous, somewhere outside the town. He'll tell you a place and an hour when he'll pass by in his car and pick you up. If he has a friend with him, that will be quite all right. Go with them. Give them what I am going to bring you. And everything will go just as you want it to. And I shall have helped you!

"And then, my love," said she, raising her eyes heavenward again, "we shall be free, and happy, and rich--for I know where the money is--and we can go far, far away, and live in Monte Carlo."