A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

Paris in the small hours went by, in little scraps and montages that stood out for a moment like color-snap-shots and then flickered on past.

A man waiting for his dog to pick out an acceptable tree, with that selfless patience that only a true dog-lover has, trailing along as though he were the appendage and the dog were the master.

A pair of lovers stepping down off a sidewalk arm in arm, and nearly being grazed by her cab as it went past, so taken up were they in each other, with eyes for nothing else around them. There, she thought wistfully, could go Gilles and I, if only my luck had been different. I hope their story turns out better than ours. (But the girl was somewhat younger than she, a fact that she failed to point out to herself.)

Two men arguing heatedly on a street-corner, their arms almost resembling slowed-down propeller-blades, they spun around so. A fragment of an angry shout reached her cars. “We built Algeria from the ground up, I tell you!”

A panorama of a lighted café streamed by, all out of perspective, somehow, like a child’s crude crayon drawing of a string of railway-carriages. Nothing but large yellow window-squares, with no space left over for anything else. On the outside the tables had already been stacked up for the night, but inside there were still a few heads dotted about here and there, weaving slowly like black flies caught on yellow fly-paper.

The trees of the thoroughfare they were following were like massed black plumes, dipping almost to the ground along its sides, and the boulevard lights, peering down through them from above, seemed to cast shafts or rods of yellowish vapor, like sodium pentathol, swirling and fuming with living motes just as if they were contained inside glass test-tubes. The cab, crashing through them, shattered them noiselessly one after the other, but they re-formed behind it each time intact, like luminous magic wands.

Paris in the small hours...

The cab stopped suddenly, and they were there.

She opened her bag and thrust her hand down into it, alongside the cold heel of the gun. She made a discovery that at any other time would have been a hindrance, now was inconsequential.

She raised her head. “I have no money,” she told the driver. “I forgot to bring any along.”

He sized her up, not eye to eye but by way of the glass. He must have rated her for what she was: high class, and not the kind that would be likely to try to bilk him out of a fare. His manner noticeably didn’t change: he didn’t get excited, raise his voice, become abusive.

“What do you want to do?” he asked even-temperedly.

“I don’t know what to do,” she said.

“Shall I wait here until you come out again?” he suggested.

“Don’t do that,” she said with enigmatic brevity.

“Well then—?” He gestured helplessly.

“Here, hold this,” she said abruptly, and twisted a sizable diamond solitaire Boniface had once given her off her finger, and held it out to him. “Keep it as a pledge, until you get your fare back. I’ll give you my address: come around in a day or two, there will almost certainly be someone there to see that you get your money.”

He looked at it big-eyed, but with considerable trepidation. “I’m not sure I ought to do it,” he said dubiously. “The regulations are very severe about some things.”

“I’ll take the responsibility, you won’t get in any trouble.” She put it in the center of his hand, and took hold of his fingers and pressed them closed over it on all sides. “Now don’t detain me any longer, I have to get

He drove off at a crawl, still shaking his head to himself, and jumping it up and down undecidedly in the same hand into which she’d put it, only one hand to his wheel.

Gilles’ concierge answered her ring at the street-doorbell, and the cloudy look with which she’d been about to greet this late night-visit turned into a sunny one when she saw who the visitor was.

“Mademoiselle!” she gushed cordially. “You don’t get around to see us much any more.”

No, I don’t, thought Fabienne wryly. But whose fault is it? She said: “Don’t announce me, I’ll go right up.”

She was afraid he might bar his apartment-door to her if he were tipped-off that she was on her way up.

“Of course not,” the concierge agreed. “Anything mademoiselle wishes.”

She didn’t call Fabienne “madame” because that would have been taking too much for granted. Besides, it was none of her business.

“I won’t forget to show my appreciation,” Fabienne promised. “I’ll take care of you — later.”

The concierge protested insincerely with two back-turned palms, as though the very idea filled her with horror.

Fabienne went to the stairs at the back, and passed by the waiting birdcage elevator. For the same precautionary reason: because she did not want him to hear it bring her up. It always stopped with considerable jangling and bickering of its parts.

“Until later then,” she said over her shoulder to the concierge.

“Enjoy yourself,” the latter called after her amiably, no irony dreamed of.