Out of the Dark by Patrick Modiano Read Free Book Online Page B

waited to switch to the Miromesnil line in the Havre-Caumartin station. I had plenty of time. Jacqueline wouldn't call me at the hotel before ten o'clock. I let two or three trains go by. Why had she sent me on this mission rather than Van Bever? And had she really told him I would be going after the suitcase? With her, you never knew.
    Coming out of the métro I was feeling apprehensive, but that soon faded. There were only a few other pedestrians in the street. and the windows of the buildings were dark: offices whose occupants had just left for the day. When I came to number 160 I looked up. Only the fifth-floor windows were lit.
    I crossed the lobby in the dark. The elevator climbed slowly and the yellow light of the ceiling lamp over my head cast the shadow of the grillwork onto the stairway wall. I left the elevator door ajar to give me light as I slipped the key into the lock.
    Around the vestibule, the double doors of the rooms were all wide open, and there was a white glow coming from the streetlights on the boulevard. I turned to the left and stepped into the dentist's office. Standing in the middle of the room, the chair with its reclining leather back made a sort of elevated couch where you could stretch out if you liked.
    By the light from the street I opened the metal cabinet, the one that stood near the windows. The suitcase was there, on a shelf, a simple tinplate suitcase like the ones soldiers on leave carry.
    I took the suitcase and found myself back in the vestibule. Opposite the dentist's office, a waiting room. I flipped the switch. Light fell from a crystal chandelier. Green velvet armchairs. On a coffee table, piles of magazines. I crossed the waiting room and entered a little bedroom with a narrow bed, left unmade. I turned on the bedside lamp.
    A pajama top lay on the pillow, crumpled into a ball. Hanging in the closet, two suits, the same color gray and the same cut as the one Cartaud was wearing in the café on the Rue Cujas. And beneath the window, a pair of brown shoes, with shoe trees.
    So this was Cartaud's bedroom. In the wicker wastebasket I noticed a pack of Royales, the cigarettes Jacqueline smoked. She must have thrown it away the other night when she was here with him.
    Without thinking, I opened the nightstand drawer, in which boxes of sleeping pills and aspirin were piled up next to a stack of business cards bearing the name Pierre Robbes, dental surgeon, 160 Boulevard Haussmann, Wagram 1318 .
    The suitcase was locked and I hesitated to force it. It wasn't heavy. It was probably full of banknotes. I went through the pockets of the suits and finally found a black billfold holding an identity card, dated a year earlier, in the name of Pierre Cartaud, born 15 June 1923 in Bordeaux (Gironde), address 160 Boulevard Haussmann, Paris.
    So Cartaud had been living here for at least a year … And this was also the address of the person known as Pierre Robbes, dental surgeon. It was too late to question the concierge, and I couldn't very well appear at his door with this tinplate suitcase in my hand.
    I had sat down on the edge of the bed. I could smell ether, and I felt a sudden pang, as if Jacqueline had just left the room.
    On my way out of the building I decided to knock on the glass door of the concierge's office, where a light was on. A dark-haired man, not very tall, opened it a crack and put his head out. He looked at me suspiciously.
    'I'd like to see Dr. Robbes,' I told him.
    'Dr. Robbes isn't in Paris at the moment.'
    'Do you have any idea how I could get in touch with him?'
    He seemed more and more suspicious, and his gaze lingered on the tinplate suitcase I was carrying.
    'Don't you have his address?'
    'I can't give it to you, monsieur. I don't know who you are.'
    'I'm a relative of Dr. Robbes. I'm doing my military service, and I have a few days' leave.'
    That seemed to reassure him a little.
    'Dr. Robbes is at his house in Behoust.'
    I couldn't quite make out the name. I asked him