assassination, with the blood streaming down his face from a wound just over the brow ridge; but despite this detail, the facial expression is the calm smiling one which has been popularized by countless reproductions of every kind. These masks, even the ones without a bullet hole in them, must be on display only to indicate the extreme skill of the establishment (so that passers-by can discover the lifelike character of the resemblance to familiar features, including those of the president in office who is seen every day on the television screen); they are certainly not often used here in town, contrary to the anonymous faces which constitute the lower row, each accompanied by a brief caption to indicate its use and merits to the shop’s clientele, for instance: “Psychoanalyst, about fifty, distinguished and intelligent; attentive expression despite the signs of fatigue which are the mark of study and hard work; worn preferably with glasses.” And next to it: “Businessman, forty to forty-five, bold but serious; the shape of the nose indicates shrewdness as well as honesty; an attractive mouth, with or without mustache.”
The wigs—for both sexes, but particularly for women—are set in the upper part of the window; in the middle, a long cascade of blond hair dangles in silky curls down to the forehead of one of the presidents. Finally, at the very bottom, paired on a strip of black velvet laid flat, false breasts (of all sizes, curves and hues, with various nipples and aureoles) are set out for—so it seems—at least two functions. As a matter of fact, a little diagram on one side shows the way of attaching them to the chest (with a variant for male bodies), as well as the way of keeping the edges imperceptible, for only this delicate point can betray the device, so perfect is the imitation of the flesh as well as of the texture of the skin. And elsewhere, however, one of these objects—which also belongs to a pair, the second breast being intact—has been riddled with many needles of various sizes, to show that it can also be used as a pincushion. All the facsimiles exhibited here are so lifelike that it is surprising not to see forming, on the pearly surface of this last one, tiny ruby drops.
The hands are scattered all over the shopwindow. Some are arranged so as to form anecdotal elements in contact with some other article: a woman’s hand on the mouth of the old “avant-garde artist,” two hands parting a mass of auburn hair, a very black hand—a man’s hand—squeezing a pale pink breast, two powerful hands clutching the neck of the “movie starlet.” But most of the hands soar through the air, agile and diaphanous. It even seems to me that there are a lot more of them tonight than on other days. They move gracefully, hanging on invisible threads; they open their fingers, turn over, revolve, close. They really look like the hands of lovely women recently severed—several of them, moreover, have blood still dripping from the wrist, chopped off on the block with one stroke of a well-sharpened axe.
And the decapitated heads too—I had not noticed it at first—are bleeding profusely, those of the assassinated presidents, but all the rest even more: the lawyer’s head, the psychoanalyst’s, the car salesman’s, Johnson’s, the waitress’s, Ben-Saïd’s, the trumpet-player at “Old Joe’s” this week, and the head of the sophisticated nurse who receives patients for Doctor Morgan in the corridors of the subway station of the line I then take to get back home.
On my way upstairs, as I reach the second-floor landing, I happen to drop my keys, which ring against the iron bars of the banister before falling on the last step. It is then that Laura, at the end of the corridor, begins screaming. Luckily, her door is never locked. I walk into her room, where I find her half-naked, crouching in terror on her rumpled bed. I calm her by the usual methods.
Then she asks me to tell her about my day. I tell her about the example of arson which has destroyed a whole building on One Hundred and Twenty-third Street. But since she soon starts asking too many questions, I change the subject by telling her the story—I saw it myself only a little while later—of that ordinary couple who visited the mask-maker on the advice of the family physician: they each wanted to order the other’s face, in order to be able to act out in reverse the psychodrama of their conjugal difficulties. Laura seems amused by this situation, to such a degree in fact that she forgets to ask me what I was doing in such a shop and how I could have managed to hear what was said. I do not tell her that the shopkeeper works with us, nor that I suspect him of being a cop. Nor do I tell her about JR’s disappearance and the investigations into her case which have taken up most of my working time.
It is at the office that I hear the news. I have already told how this office works. To all appearances, it is a placement office of the United Manichean Church. But in reality, the domestics by-the-month, lady’s companions or various slaves, the part-time secretaries, the high-school-student baby-sitters, the call girls paid by the hour, etc, are so many information agents—of organized crime and propaganda—which we thereby manage to introduce into the establishment. The rings of call girls, high-class prostitutes and concubines obviously constitute our best cases, since from them we get both irreplaceable contacts with men in office and also the larger part of our financial resources, not to mention the possibility of blackmail.
JR had been placed as a baby-sitter the week before, in answer to a tiny advertisement in The New York Times: “Unmarried father wants young girl, pleasant appearance, docile character, for night sessions with rebellious child.” The child in question actually existed, despite the oddly promising text of the advertisement: the words “docile” and “authoritarian” figuring, as is well known, high on the list of specialists’ code words. In principle, what was involved should have been the participation in the training of a novice mistress, giving her if need be a good example of submission.
Therefore we sent JR, a handsome white girl with a fine head of auburn hair which always creates a good effect in intimate scenes, who had already handled similar cases on several occasions. She arrives that same evening at the address given, on Park Avenue, between Fifty-sixth and Fifty-seventh Streets, wearing a very short, close-fitting green silk dress which has always given us good results. To her great surprise, it is a little girl of twelve or a little older who opens the door; she is alone in the apartment, she says in answer to JR’s embarrassed question, her name is Laura, she is thirteen and a half, and she offers JR a glass of bitter lemon while they chat, to get to know each other …
JR insists: “I really wanted to see your father …” But the little girl immediately declares, quite offhandedly, that in the first place that is impossible, since he’s gone out, and besides, “you know, he’s not really my father…,” these last words whispered in a much lower tone, confidentially, with a tiny smothered laugh to end the sentence in a very good imitation of polite embarrassment. Having absolutely no interest in the problem of adopted or illegitimate children, JR would have been ready to leave right away, if the opulence of the house—the avant-garde millionaire style—hadn’t made her stay after all, to satisfy her professional conscience. So she drank the lemon the little girl served her in a kind of boudoir where the seats and little tables were inflated by pressing on electric buttons. To make conversation, and also because it might be a useful piece of information under other circumstances, she asked if there were no servants.
“Well, there’s you,” Laura answered, with her prettiest smile.
“No, I mean, to do the housework, the cooking …”
“You don’t plan to do any housework?”
“Well, I … I didn’t think that was what I came for … There’s no one else?”
The little girl’s expression now contrasted with her previous simperings of a child pretending to be the lady of the house. And in a very different tone of voice, remote and as though filled with melancholy, or despair, she finally said, as if with great reluctance: “There’s a black woman, mornings.”
Then neither of us said another word for what seemed to me quite a long time. Laura sipped her bitter lemon. I decided she was unhappy, but I wasn’t there to deal with that question. And at that moment, there were steps in the next room, heavy and determined steps on a creaking floorboard; at
