The Figures of Beauty Read Free Page B

actually laid eyes on how big that something was.
    Everything was new to him. Everything was strange. Even the air, he thought, was different from any air he’d known. Smoke came from somewhere in a city that was so big he couldn’t imagine from how far it could be drifting. The echoes of amplified voices and roiling crowds were coming from a distance he could not guess. It all seemed grey: part exhaust, part running gutters, part the littered proclamations of the strike, part the long-settled drift of black tobacco.
    Oliver had attended to his banking earlier that day at the Société Générale at Place de l’Opéra, signing the required forms, providing the appropriate documentation. He had protested in not very competent French—and to no avail anyway—when he was informed of how long it would take for the Grace P. Barton Memorial Travel Bursary to be made available for his withdrawal. He would have to manage for three business days on the cash he had in his wallet.
    He walked for the rest of the afternoon. He stopped in a café for a sandwich and a glass of red wine. And then he started walking again. All evening he had it in mind that he would soon come to a wide boulevard with windows full of suitcases and cheap shoes and with a café on the corner of a narrow, whitewashed street that had a sign somewhere near the middle. His hotel had been recommended in the copy of
Europe on Five Dollars a Day
that his parents had given to him.
    But it was very late when he decided to make his way along the cobbled banks of the Seine. He was beginning to think that he would soon feel tired. But he liked the idea of walking along the river late on a moonlit night. It seemed the kind of thing a young traveller did in Paris.
    This would prove to be a problem.
    “You were on your way back to your room?” Inspector Levy asked. He looked at Oliver searchingly for a moment and then glanced down at the papers on his desk.
    Oliver could see his own handwriting on the form on the top of the papers, with the name and address of the hotel at which he was staying. Inspector Levy was considering all routes by which one might walk from the Louvre to the Rue de Saussure. Following the river wasn’t one of them. He gave the wan, insincere smile that Parisians reserve for the stupidities of tourists. “You were lost, Monsieur?”
    The Seine had been black and smooth that night, only wrinkled here and there with the reflection of yellow lights from the embankment. Traffic had droned in the distance.
    Occasionally, a little wave had slapped the dark stone wall below. Oliver’s loosely fitting desert boots had slopped along the wet bricks. And this is what happened.
    Oliver approached the narrow bridge that crosses from the Avenue de New York on the Right Bank to the Quai Branly on the Left. He stepped out of the soft light of the moon. Then he walked directly into a pair of dangling shoes.
    The face, a young man’s, was swollen black. His lank, blond hair was long but, except for the sideburns, not stylishly so. He wore a work shirt, rolled jeans, no socks, and hard-soled black shoes. Oliver let out a little yelp that he hadn’t heard come from inside himself before.
    Inspector Levy had eyes deeply encircled with weariness. Oliver had never encountered a sadder, more tired gaze. Two fingers of the inspector’s left hand were yellow. He smoked unfiltered Gauloises throughout the interview.
    Levy sat behind a neatly ordered desk. The photographs the attending constables had taken of the hanging body were already in front of him. The darkroom was the most efficient departmentin the station. Sometimes he thought: the only efficient. To his left was an old typewriter. The walls of his office were a dirty beige, and his tall windows opened onto the courtyard of the prefecture. It was almost four in the morning. The night was chilly and damp. The city’s lights, caught by the night clouds, kept the sky a solid, unmoving grey.
    The decor had the