Vertigo Read Online Free PDF

twittered round the bridges. With her severely cut grey suit and high heels, she looked something of a stranger at the fête, like a traveller waiting for a train. And from time to time she rolled the stalk of the tulip between her fingers.
    Crossing the Seine, she stopped on the bridge and leant with her elbows on the parapet, stroking her cheek with the tulip. Had she given someone a rendezvous?… Or was she simply resting?… Perhaps she was only nursing her own ennui, as she watched the swirling wake of a steamer or the fascinating undulations of the reflections in the water… She leant over the parapet, looking at herself far below in the water, with the whole sky above her and the long curve of the bridge cutting across her shoulders.
    Flavières came quite close to her, not knowing what impelled him to do so. Madeleine didn’t move. She had dropped the tulip, and a little spot of red drifted downstream, turning slowly round and round in the eddies near the bank. It floated past a barge, then farther out into the stream. Flavières found himself, too, getting interested in its fate. The farther it went and the smaller it became, the more impossible was it for him to take his eyes away. Suddenly it was there no longer. Perhaps it had sunk. Madeleine remained, however, staring down at the river. Flavières thought he could see a faint smile on her lips.
    She stood up and walked on, returning to the right bank by another bridge. And still with the same unhurried pace and the same indifference to her surroundings, she walked home. It was half past four when she disappeared through the doorway, leaving Flavières high and dry. For that was how he felt—useless, disgusted, not knowing what to dowith himself. What on earth was he going to do during the rest of the day? The hours he had spent watching Madeleine made solitude seem unbearable. He went into a café and rang up Gévigne.
    ‘Hallo!… Is that you, Paul?… Roger speaking… Can I drop in on you for a minute or two?… No, nothing’s gone wrong. I just wanted to ask you a few more questions… Right. I’ll be round in a jiffy.’
    Gévigne had spoken casually of his office, like a grand seigneur . In reality it took up the whole of one floor of a large building.
    ‘If you wouldn’t mind waiting a moment, Monsieur… Monsieur le Directeur is in conference.’
    The typist showed him into a comfortably furnished waiting-room. Bluff! thought Flavières. But it wasn’t. A moment later he saw Gévigne showing some visitors out.
    ‘Delighted to see you,’ said Gévigne when they were alone. ‘Sorry to have kept you waiting. We’re in a bit of a flap today.’
    His room was big and light. It was furnished in American style with filing cabinets and tubular steel armchairs, ash-trays on chromium pedestals. On the wall hung an immense map of Europe with a red cord running in a jagged line round pins, to indicate the present position of the front.
    ‘Well? Have you seen her?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘What did she do?’
    ‘She went to a cemetery.’
    ‘Passy?… To the grave of—’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘You see, Roger!… You see, don’t you?’
    On one corner of the desk, near the telephone, there was a photograph of Madeleine. Flavières couldn’t take his eyes off it.
    ‘The gravestone has only one name on it. Aren’t her parents…’
    ‘No. They’re buried somewhere in the Ardennes. On my side we’ve a family vault at Saint-Ouen… Pauline Lagerlac is the only relation she’s got at Passy. That’s what frightens me… Frankly, what do you think of this visit? Can you see any rhyme or reason in it?… And you can be sure it’s not the first time she’s been there.’
    ‘It certainly didn’t look like it. She didn’t ask anybody the way. Though she meandered about a bit, she obviously knew where she was going.’
    ‘Of course she did. I tell you she’s absolutely obsessed by this Pauline.’
    Gévigne paced to and fro behind his desk with his hands in his