第79章

Meantime, the Assistant Commissioner was already giving his order to a waiter in a little Italian restaurant round the corner - one of those traps for the hungry, long and narrow, baited with a perspective of mirrors and white napery; without air, but with an atmosphere of their own - an atmosphere of fraudulent cookery mocking an abject mankind in the most pressing of its miserable necessities.In this immoral atmosphere the Assistant Commissioner, reflecting upon his enterprise, seemed to lose some more of his identity.He had a sense of loneliness, of evil freedom.It was rather pleasant.When, after paying for his short meal, he stood up and waited for his change, he saw himself in the sheet of glass, and was struck by his foreign appearance.He contemplated his own image with a melancholy and Inquisitive gaze, then by sudden inspiration raised the collar of his jacket.This arrangement appeared to him commendable, and he completed it by giving an upward twist to the ends of his black moustache.He was satisfied by the subtle modification of his personal aspect caused by these small changes.`That'll do very well,' he thought.`I'll get a little wet, a little splashed--'

He became aware of the waiter at his elbow and of a small pile of silver coins on the edge of the table before him.The waiter kept one eye on it, while his other eye followed the long back of a tall, not very young girl, who passed up to a distant table looking perfectly sightless and altogether unapproachable.She seemed to be an habitual customer.

On going out the Assistant Commissioner made to himself the observation that the patrons of the place had lost in the frequentation of fraudulent cookery all their national and private characteristics.And this was strange, since the Italian restaurant is such a peculiarly British institution.

But these people were as denationalized as the dishes set before them with every circumstance of unstamped respectability.Neither was their personality stamped in any way, professionally, socially or racially.They seemed created for the Italian restaurant, unless the Italian restaurant had been perchance created for them.But that last hypothesis was unthinkable, since one could not place them anywhere outside those special establishments.One never met these enigmatical persons elsewhere.It was impossible to form a precise idea what occupations they followed by day and where they went to bed at night.And he himself had become unplaced.It would have been impossible for anybody to guess his occupation.As to going to bed, there was a doubt even in his own mind.Not indeed in regard to his domicile itself, but very much so in respect of the time when he would be able to return there.

A pleasurable feeling of independence possessed him when he heard the glass doors swing to behind his back with a sort of imperfect baffled thud.He advanced at once into an immensity of greasy slime and damp plaster Interspersed with lamps, and enveloped, oppressed, penetrated, choked, and suffocated by the blackness of a wet London night, which is composed of soot and drops of water.

Brett Street was not very far away.It branches off, narrow, from the side of an open triangular space surrounded by dark and mysterious houses, temples of petty commerce emptied of traders for the night.Only a fruiterer's stall at the corner made a violent blaze of light and colour.Beyond all was black, and the few people passing in that direction vanished at one stride beyond the glowing heaps of oranges and lemons.No footsteps echoed.

They would never be heard of again.The adventurous head of the Special Crimes Department watched these disappearances from a distance with an interested eye.He felt light-hearted, as though he had been ambushed all alone in a jungle many thousands of miles away from departmental desks and official inkstands.This joyousness and dispersion of thought before a task of some importance seems to prove that this world of ours is not such a very serious affair after all.For the Assistant Commissioner was not constitutionally inclined to levity.

The policeman on the beat projected his sombre and moving form against the luminous glory of oranges and lemons, and entered Brett Street without haste.The Assistant Commissioner, as though he were a member of the criminal classes, lingered out of sight, awaiting his return.But this constable seemed to be lost for ever to the force.He never returned: must have gone out at the other end of Brett Street.

The Assistant Commissioner, reaching this conclusion, entered the street in his turn, and came upon a large van arrested in front of the dimly lit window-panes of a carter's eating-house.The man was refreshing himself inside, and the horses, their big heads lowered to the ground, fed out of nose-bags steadily.Farther on, on the opposite side of the street, another suspect patch of dim light issued from Mr Verloc's shop front, hung with papers, heaving with vague piles of cardboard boxes and the shapes of books.The Assistant Commissioner stood observing it across the roadway.

There could be no mistake.By the side of the front window, encumbered by the shadows of nondescript things, the door, standing ajar, let escape on the pavement a narrow, clear streak of gaslight within.

Behind the Assistant Commissioner the van and horses, merged into one mass, seemed something alive - a square-backed black monster blocking half the street, with sudden iron-shod stampings, fierce jingles, and heavy, blowing sighs.The harshly festive, ill-omened glare of a large and prosperous public-house faced the other end of Brett Street across a wide road.This barrier of blazing lights, opposing the shadows gathered about the humble abode of Mr Verloc's domestic happiness, seemed to drive the obscurity of the street back upon itself, make it more sullen, brooding, and sinister.