It was an ape.
  Oh God, oh God, it was an ape.
  
  'I have to see Phillipe Laborteaux.'
  'I'm sorry, Monsieur; but prison visitors -''This is a matter of life and death, 
officer.' 'Easily said, Monsieur.'
  Lewis risked a lie.
  'His sister is dying. I beg you to have some compassion.' 'Oh.. .well...'
  A little doubt. Lewis levered a little further. 'A few minutes only; to settle 
arrangements.' 'Can't it wait until tomorrow?'
  'She'll be dead by morning.'
  Lewis hated talking about Catherine in such a way, even for the purpose of this 
deception, but it was necessary; he had to see Phillipe. If his theory was correct, 
history might repeat itself before the night was out.
  Phillipe had been woken from a sedated sleep. His eyes were circled with darkness.
  'What do you want?'
  Lewis didn't even attempt to proceed any further with his lie; Phillipe was drugged as 
it was, and probably confused. Best to confront him with the truth, and see what came of 
it.
  
  'You kept an ape, didn't you?'
  
  A look of terror crossed Phillipe's face, slowed by the drugs in his blood, but plain 
enough.
  'Didn't you?'
  'Lewis. . .' Phillipe looked so very old.
  'Answer me, Phillipe, I beg you: before it's too late. Did you keep an ape?'
  'It was an experiment, that's all it was. An experiment.'
  'Why?'
  'Your stories. Your damn stories: I wanted to see if it was true that they were wild. I 
wanted to make a man of it.'
  'Make a man of it.'
  'And that whore. . .'
  'Natalie.'
  'She seduced it.'
  Lewis felt sick. This was a convolution he hadn't anticipated.
  'Seduced it?'
  'Whore,' Phillipe said, with infinite regret.
  'Where is this ape of yours?'
  'You'll kill it.'
  'It broke into the apartment, while Catherine was there. Destroyed everything, 
Phillipe. It's dangerous now that it has no master. Don't you understand?'
  'Catherine?'
  'No, she's all right.'
  'It's trained: it wouldn't harm her. It's watched her, in hiding. Come and gone. Quiet 
as a mouse.'
  'And the girl?'
  'It was jealous.'
  'So it murdered her?'
  'Perhaps. I don't know. I don't want to think about it.'
  'Why haven't you told them; had the thing destroyed?'
  'I don't know if it's true. It's probably all a fiction, one of your damn fictions, 
just another story.'
  A sour, wily smile crossed his exhausted face.
  'You must know what I mean, Lewis. It could be a story, couldn't it? Like your tales of 
Dupin. Except that maybe I made it true for a while; did you ever think of that? Maybe I 
made it true.'
  Lewis stood up. It was a tired debate: reality and illusion. Either a thing was, or was 
not. Life was not a dream.
  'Where is the ape?' he demanded.
  Phillipe pointed to his temple.
  'Here; where you can never find him,' he said, and spat in Lewis' face. The spittle hit 
his lip, like a kiss.
  'You don't know what you did. You'll never know.'
  Lewis wiped his lip as the warders escorted the prisoner out of the room and back to 
his happy drugged oblivion. All he could think of now, left alone in the cold interview 
room, was that Phillipe had it easy. He'd taken refuge in pretended guilt, and locked 
himself away where memory, and revenge, and the truth, the wild, marauding truth, could 
never touch him again. He hated Phillipe at that moment, with all his heart. Hated him 
for the dilettante and the coward he'd always known him to be. It wasn't a more gentle 
world Phillipe had created around him; it was a hiding place, as much a lie as that 
summer of 1937 had been. No life could be lived the way he'd lived it without a reckoning 
coming sooner or later; and here it was.
  That night, in the safety of his cell, Phillipe woke. It was warm, but he was cold. In 
the utter dark he chewed at his wrists until a pulse of blood bubbled into his mouth. He 
lay back on his bed, and quietly splashed and fountained away to death, out of sight and 
out of mind.
  
  The suicide was reported in a small article on the second page of Le Monde. The big 
news of the following day however was the sensational murder of a redheaded pros-titute 
in a little house off the Rue de Rochechquant. Monique Zevaco had been found at three 
o'clock in the morning by her flat mate, her body in a state so horrible as to 'defy 
description'.
  Despite the alleged impossibility of the task, the media set about describing the 
indescribable with a morbid will. Every last scratch, tear and gouging on Monique's 
partially nude body - tattooed, drooled Le Monde, with a map of France - was chronicled 
in detail. As indeed was the appearance of her well-dressed, over-perfumed murderer, who 
had apparently watched her at her toilet through a small back window, then broken in and 
attacked Mademoiselle Zevaco in her bathroom. The murderer had then fled down the stairs, 
bumping into the flat mate who would minutes after discover Mademoiselle Zevaco's 
mutilated corpse. Only one commentator made any con-nection between the murder at the Rue 
des Martyrs and the slaughter of Mme Zevaco; and he failed to pick up on the curious 
coincidence that the accused Phillipe Laborteaux had that same night taken his own life.
  
  The funeral took place in a storm, the cortege edging its pitiful way through the 
abandoned streets towards Montparnasse with the lashing snow entirely blotting out the 
road ahead. Lewis sat with Catherine and Jacques Solal as they laid Phillipe to rest. 
Every one of his circle had deserted him, unwilling to attend the funeral of a suicide 
and of a suspected murderer. His wit, his good looks, his infinite capacity to charm went 
for nothing at the end.