Your Monday Moment of Noir

"He hadn't been drinking. He was sober. He hadn't been out listening to jazz. He'd spent the night in the desert of his bed. A subway station, black and metallic, stood in the middle of the intersection. At last a yellow cab pulled up to the sidewalk and a dozen nightclub patrons rushed in its direction. Not without difficulty, the cab drove off again, empty. Perhaps nobody was going the right way. Two wide streets, almost deserted, with garlands of luminous globes running down the sidewalks. On the corner, its high windows lit violently, aggressively, with boastful vulgarity, was a sort of long glass cage where people could be seen as dark smudges and where he went in just so as not to be alone."

Trois Chambres à Manhattan
by Georges Simenon
(Presses de la Cité, 1946)