The Figures of Beauty Read Online Free

intended unsettling effect on those the inspector was required to interview. There was a row of six different gauges of shotgun shells lined up across the top of a metal cabinet. And there was a poster for a Goya exhibition at the Orangerie. It was of Saturn. Eating his son.
    Inspector Levy passed Oliver the large black and white photographs. They gleamed like movie stills. The policeman watched Oliver carefully as he looked at them. He rested his chin thoughtfully between his thumb and forefinger.
    Oliver passed the pictures back.
    “Your forearms, please, Monsieur.”
    Oliver looked blankly at the inspector.
    “Please. Will you roll your sleeves?”
    Oliver did as requested and rotated his bare forearms for inspection. Levy leaned forward, disappointed with the absence of information on Oliver’s unmarked arms. He nodded.
    “The body …” he said. He switched momentarily to French, as if to make sure there was no confusion. “
Le pendu
… showed signs of addiction.”
    “Oh,” Oliver said.
    Inspector Levy was beginning to think there was nothing to this. Nothing, that is, beyond the obvious: a tourist stumbles on a suicide. There are many in Paris.
    Tourists.
    Suicides.
    Still, it was a little strange.
    “It is curious,” the inspector said, “that of all the people in all of this city who might have made this discovery … It is curious that the body of this unfortunate young man should be found by another American of about the same age.”
    “Canadian,” Oliver corrected.
    Inspector Levy seemed unimpressed with the distinction. “North American,” he conceded. “Even so. Two young men. From towns less than two hundred kilometres apart.”
    “There’s a border,” Oliver said. “Between them.”
    The inspector shrugged. “Still. A little strange, don’t you think?”
    Oliver remained silent.
    “And the knot. It would not have been easy to tie, don’t you think? Alone.”
    “I don’t know,” said Oliver.
    The inspector butted a cigarette into a well-occupied ashtray. He stared at Oliver with an expression weighted with his professional obligation to disbelieve all protestations of innocence. He considered the facts. And, as he had done so many times before, he considered possible interpretations.
    Monsieur Oliver Hughson had been nowhere near his hotel. What was he doing by himself, by the river, so late?
    They fished bodies out of the river almost every night. Hangings were less common but by no means rare. Was Monsieur Hughson there to assist a friend? To fulfill a pact? To abet a lover? Or was there no connection to the deceased and was Monsieur Oliver Hughson there to commit suicide himself? Or—as had to be considered in May 1968—was he a revolutionary intent on an act of insurrection that had been foiled by an unanticipated encounter with a dead junkie hanging from the struts of a footbridge?
    All were possibilities. What believable story could be spun from them?
    Or was Monsieur Oliver Hughson just an idiot tourist? In which case no story was necessary.
    This was more likely, Levy decided. Still, tourists tended not to stay up all night, by themselves. It had been well after midnight when Monsieur Oliver Hughson called the police. But why call the police if you are planning to kill yourself. Or someone else? Or blow up the Pont de l’Alma? Which hardly seemed like the kind of bridge anyone would bother blowing up.
    Inspector Levy had a headache. He was very tired.
    He was saddened by his inability to piece together anything unusual that might, in an unexpected and brilliant way, connect the facts at hand. From a policing point of view, improbability was far from satisfactory. It bothered him.
    But there it was: a coincidence. And the more Inspector Levy stared at Oliver the more he seemed to regret a universe in which things just happened, for no reason. But that’s the way things were in May in 1968 in Paris.
    “Everything I have told you is true,” Oliver said.
    Levy considered