From the age of eleven, escapes played a large part in my life. Today, I feel some regret about it. Was it like those childhood illnesses that have such peculiar names: whooping cough, chicken pox, scarlet fever? But I can only relate concrete details, precise places and moments. A long counter, like the ones in Pigalle or around Saint-Lazare train station.
I had always thought I was in no danger, that I enjoyed a kind of immunity in my capacity as a nocturnal spectator—as one 18th-century writer who explored the mysteries of nighttime Paris had styled himself. But in this case, my curiosity had led me a bit too far. This would be a much bigger escape than the others. I had hit bottom, and my only recourse was to push off hard with my heel to rise back to the surface. The evening before, an event had occurred that I alluded to twenty years later, in , in a chapter of a novel.
It was a way of ridding myself of a weight, of setting down in black and white a kind of partial confession. But twenty years was too short a time for certain witnesses to disappear, and I wondered what the statute of limitations was before the law would give up pursuing the perpetrators or their accomplices and drape them once and for all in a veil of amnesty and oblivion. She begged me to come. In the living room of the apartment, on the carpet, lay the body of Ludo F.
But what was she doing alone in the apartment that evening with Ludo F.? Without switching on the hall light, I took her arm and helped her down the stairs in the dark, preferring not to take the elevator.
I pulled her toward the street exit and, just as we passed by the lodge, a man came out, small and dark with a brush-cut. He watched us in the dim light as I groped at the street door. It was locked. After a moment—and that moment seemed an eternity—I spotted the button on the wall that released the latch. I heard the click and pulled it open.
