The Tenth Man by Graham Greene

been beached for years—the tubes were tarnished. Out of fashion in 1939, in 1944 they had the air of period pieces. An old man greeted Charlot: when the furniture was new he must have been young enough to have an eye for the fashionable, the chic, for appearances. He sat down among the steel chairs at random as though he was in a public waiting room and said sadly, ‘I suppose like everyone else you have forgotten everything?’
    ‘Oh,’ Charlot said, ‘I remember enough.’
    ‘We can’t pay much here at present,’ the old man said, ‘but when things get back to normal … there was always a great demand for our product …’
    ‘I would begin,’ Charlot said, ‘at a low salary …’
    ‘The great thing,’ the old man said, ‘is enthusiasm, to believe in what we are selling. After all, our product has proved itself. Before the war our figures were very good, very good indeed. Of course, there was a season, but in Paris there are always foreign visitors. And even the provinces bought our product. I’d show you our figures only our books are lost.’ From his manner you would have thought he was attracting an investor rather than interviewing a would-be employee.
    ‘Yes,’ Charlot said, ‘yes.’
    ‘We’ve got to make our product known again. When once it’s known, it can’t fail to be as popular as before. Craftsmanship tells.’
    ‘I expect you are right.’
    ‘So you see,’ the old man said, ‘we’ve all got to put our backs into it … a co-operative enterprise … the sense of loyalty … your savings will be quite safe.’ He waved his hand above the wilderness of tubular chairs. ‘I promise you that.’
    Charlot never learned what the product was, but on the landing below a wooden crate had been opened and standing in the straw was a table-lamp about three feet high built hideously in steel in the shape of the Eiffel Tower. The flex ran down the lift shaft like the rope of an ancient hotel lift, and the bulb screwed in on the top floor. Perhaps it was the only desk lamp the old man had been able to obtain in Paris: perhaps—who knows?—it may have been the product itself …
    Three hundred francs wouldn’t last long in Paris. Charlot answered one more advertisement, but the employer demanded proper papers. He was not impressed by the prison dossier. ‘You can buy any number of those,’ he said, ‘for a hundred francs,’ and he refused to be persuaded by the elaborate measurements of the German authorities. ‘It’s not my job to measure your skull,’ he said, ‘or feel your bumps. Go off to the city hall and get proper papers. You seem a capable fellow. I’ll keep the job open until noon tomorrow …’ But Charlot did not return.
    He hadn’t eaten more than a couple of rolls for thirty-six hours: it suddenly occurred to him that he was back exactly where he had started. He leaned against a wall in the late afternoon sun and imagined that he heard the ticking of the mayor’s watch. He had come a long way and taken a deal of trouble and was back at the end of the cinder track with his back against the wall. He was going to die and he might just as well have died rich and saved everybody trouble. He began to walk towards the Seine.
    Presently he couldn’t hear the mayor’s watch any more: instead there was a shuffle and pad whichever way he turned. He heard it just as he had heard the mayor’s watch and he half realized that both were delusions. At the end of a long empty street the river shone. He found that he was out of breath and he leaned against a urinal and waited for a while with his head hanging down because the river dazzled his eyes. The shuffle and pad came softly up behind him and stopped. Well, the watch had stopped too. He refused to pay attention to delusion.
    ‘Pidot,’ a voice said, ‘Pidot.’ He looked sharply up, but there was no one there.
    ‘It is Pidot, surely?’ the voice said.
    ‘Where are you?’ Charlot asked.
    ‘Here, of course.’ There was a