The Tenth Man by Graham Greene Page A

pause and then the voice said like conscience almost in his ear, ‘You look all in, finished. I hardly recognized you. Tell me, is anyone coming?’
    ‘No.’ In childhood, in the country, in the woods behind Brinac one had believed that voices might suddenly speak out of the horns of flowers or from the roots of trees, but in the city when one had reached the age of death one couldn’t believe in voices from paving stones. He asked again, ‘Where are you?’ and then realized his own dull-wittedness—he could see the legs from the shins downwards under the green cape of the urinal. They were black pin-striped trousers, the trousers of a lawyer or a doctor or even a deputy, but the shoes hadn’t been cleaned for some days.
    ‘It’s Monsieur Carosse, Pidot.’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘You know how it is. One’s misunderstood.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘What could I have done? After all, I had to keep the show going. My behaviour was strictly correct—and distant. No one knows better than you, poor Pidot. I suppose they are holding things against you too?’
    ‘I’m finished.’
    ‘Courage, Pidot. Never say die. A second cousin of mine who was in London is doing his best to put things right. Surely you know one of them?’
    ‘Why don’t you come out from there and let me see you?’
    ‘Better not, Pidot. Separately we might pass muster, but together … it’s too risky.’ The pin-striped trousers moved uneasily. ‘Anyone coming, Pidot?’
    ‘No one.’
    ‘Listen, Pidot. I want you to take a message to Madame Carosse. Tell her I’m well: I’ve gone south. I shall try to get into Switzerland till it all blows over. Poor Pidot, you could do with a couple of hundred francs, couldn’t you?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘I’ll leave them on a ledge in here. You’ll take the message, won’t you, Pidot?’
    ‘Where to?’
    ‘Oh, the same old place. You know—on the third floor. I hope the old lady’s still got her hair. The old bitch was proud of it. Well, goodbye and good luck, Pidot.’ There was a scuffle in the urinal, and then the shuffle and pad went off in the other direction. Charlot watched the stranger go: tall and stout and black-clothed, with a limp and the kind of hat Charlot himself would have worn—so many years ago—between the Rue Miromesnil and the law courts.
    On a shelf of the urinal there was a screw of paper—three hundred francs. Whoever Monsieur Carosse was, he had the rare virtue of being better than his word. Charlot laughed: the sound was hollow among the metal alcoves. A week had gone by and he was back exactly where he had started with three hundred francs. It was as if all that time he had lived upon air—or rather as if some outwardly friendly but inwardly malign witch had granted him the boon of an inexhaustible purse, but a purse from which he could never draw more than three hundred francs. Was it perhaps that the dead man had allocated him this allowance out of his three hundred thousand?
    We’ll soon test that out, Charlot thought; what’s the good of making this last a week and be only a week older and a week shabbier at the end of it? It was the hour of apéritifs and for the first time since he had entered Paris, he deliberately stepped into his own territory, the territory of which he knew every yard.
    He had not until then properly appreciated the strangeness of Paris: an unfamiliar street might always have been an unfrequented one, but now he noticed the emptiness, the silent little bicycle taxis gliding by, the shabbiness of awnings and the strange faces. Only here and there he saw the familiar face of the customary stranger sitting where he had sat for years, sipping the same drink. They were like the remains of an old flower garden sticking up in a wilderness of weeds after a careless tenant’s departure.
    I am going to die tonight, Charlot thought: what does it matter if someone does recognize me, and he pushed through the glass door of his accustomed café and made for the very