Nada

by Jean-Patrick Manchette

  35

  ALL DAY Sunday myriads of identity checks were made across the department of Seine-et-Marne, as also in Paris, where fresh raids were mounted in known leftist circles. On Boulevard de la Chapelle a small, more or less spontaneous demonstration, accompanied by chants of “Goémond Is a Rat!” and the time-honored “The People Will Have Your Hide!” was dispersed, but skirmishes continued throughout the evening. Meanwhile, some Jewish shops were looted by Kabyles, and a Malian pimp was wounded by a revolver shot. At Place de l’Étoile, other demonstrators, from the New Order movement, were pushed back to Avenue Hoche, which they marched down shouting “Democracy stinks!” An orator from the ultrarightist Action Française Nationale Révolutionnaire, who referred bizarrely to the terrorists as “our strayed comrades,” was bludgeoned by the New Order militants.

  36

  BUENAVENTURA saw no need to stay on watch. He had turned the television off. He went and opened the back door of the weekend house and brought his moped inside, safe from hypothetical eyes. Then he looked for the bathroom, found it, and ran himself a bath. The pilot of the oil-fired heater was on and he had hot water. He undressed but winced as he did so. His arm was stiff and painful. He undid the dressing to examine his wound. His biceps was black and red. A good anarchist’s biceps, he thought with a chuckle that curled his lip.

  Opening the medicine cabinet, he found ether, which he splashed liberally over the muscle. The bathroom whirled around him. He slumped into a sitting position against the bathtub, and a great chill ran through him. Was this death? he wondered in a rush of unfettered romanticism. It was not death; it was just the ether. The Catalan got to his feet and hopped about, as his injury burned. Then the pain subsided. He slipped into the water, making sure to soak his left arm. With his right hand he poked about in his clothing, which he had tossed onto a wooden stool by the tub. As his body relaxed in the warm water, he lit a twisted and crushed Gauloise and smoked it contentedly. Ashes fell into the bathwater.

  He stayed still for a while, his face hardened by thought or by something else that hardened his face.

  Then he grabbed his automatic pistol and awkwardly removed the magazine. He had fired only once, so seven shots were left, and he had no spare ammo. He replaced the magazine with a round in the chamber, got out of the water, splashing a good deal of it on the tiled floor. He dried himself, though not properly, using just one hand. He then went back to the tub, plunged his head in the dirty water and pulled it out drenched. Taking a pair of barber’s scissors from the medicine cabinet, he set about trimming his wet mop of hair. He finished the job with a Gillette razor and shaving cream from an aerosol can, but no brush. Playfully, he sprayed a circle in shaving cream on the mirror.

  When he returned to the living room he was barefoot and wearing an old dressing gown with his automatic in the pocket. His hair was more or less closely cropped and combed. He had shaved the nape of his neck and face (without avoiding nicks), but left a sort of mouche, not very thick, indeed little more than three days’ growth of beard, beneath his lower lip. He had also shaved part of his eyebrows in hopes of altering his look, but the result was merely bizarre and liable to attract attention. In his wake he left damp footprints on the tiles. He felt cold. He found the heating thermostat in the foyer and set it for twenty degrees.

  He now explored the house. Upstairs, in a bedroom armoire, he found something to wear, weekend gear suitable for a middle manager: corduroy pants and a white turtleneck sweater stretchy enough for the sleeve to accommodate the gauze and Albuplast-tape dressing that Buenaventura had contrived on getting out of the bath. The Catalan also took a green-and-blue-checked hunting jacket with leather elbow patches. All these clothes were rather large for him, and the pants ballooned at the seat, but when you were an assassin, a fugitive, a hunted animal, you could not have everything.

  As he toured the weekend house, the hunted animal began growling, then the growl changed into a song, an old song, silly and meaningless, a waltz:

  Il m’a dit, “Voulez-vous danser?”

  J’ai dit oui presque sans penser.

  He asked me, “Would you like to dance?”

  I said yes almost without thinking.

  Still singing, Buenaventura went back down to the ground floor. He left the lights on everywhere behind the closed shutters as he passed through.

  Il m’a dit, “Voulez-vous danser?”

  The Catalan entered a rather masculine office and addressed a mirror on the wall that reflected his bizarre appearance.

  “Paris must be made to dance!” he roared.

  He turned away and went around a dark worktable. His eyes were alight.

  “When it comes to making Paris dance, we’ve had it, buddy,” he declared with irony.

  He stationed himself in front of a gun rack containing two firearms—a shotgun and a carbine. He took each down in turn to check them out: a Model H Charlin shotgun with two break-action barrels, which he broke and then reclosed; and an Erma .22 midsize lever-action long rifle.

  “A foretaste of what is to come,” grumbled Buenaventura as he put the guns back in the rack.

  They did not interest him much anymore.

  “Ya se van los pastores a la Estremadura,” he started to sing in falsetto.

  “You dumb fuck of a shitty fake Spaniard!” he shouted as he passed the mirror again on his way out of the office.

  He was hungry. He went into the kitchen, opened a can of cassoulet and scoffed it with a teaspoon. It was cold. It was greasy. It was disgusting. He drank cheap red wine from a bottle broken off at the neck and a label reading “Estate bottled especially for MONSIEUR VENTRÉE.”

  His hunger assuaged, the Catalan went back into the living room and paced up and down for a few more minutes. His head was heavy. He was irritated. There was not a single fucking radio in this shithouse, in Monsieur Ventrée’s crappy Ali Baba’s cave. Then he had an idea. He returned to the kind of office, where there was a telephone. He dialed INF 1, but all he got by way of response were jumbled sounds and a distinctly unmusical dial tone. There had to be a lousy regional prefix to enter. Buenaventura was damned if he was going to look it up in the phone book. He went back into the living room and turned the TV on. The Bridges at Toko-Ri was playing, a stupid film about the Korean War. The Catalan sat down in an armchair in front of the set and passed out from all the blood he had lost.

  When he came to, the admiral played by Fredric March was confiding in Grace Kelly about his wife, who had taken a big hit on account of their son having been wiped out by the Reds.

  “She sits quietly alone in her room knitting a baby’s sweater,” said the admiral dolefully.

  “She’d do better to go get laid,” observed Buenaventura as he muted the sound.

  He went directly back to the office, wobbling a little.

  On the dark wooden table, a small electric clock encased in a solid greenish crystalline block—probably solidified shit—indicated that it was almost six in the evening, and it was true that there was no longer any daylight outside the windows. Buenaventura swore and hastily circulated through the house turning off all the lights. Returning to the office holding a small box flashlight, he opened a drawer in search of paper. He found instead a cheap little tape recorder that took minicassettes.

  “That’s even better,” he said in the semidarkness.

  He delved deeper into the drawer, which was full of minicassettes. He took one out at random. It had a handwritten label: Joël at three months.

  “Joël can go and get fucked!” said Buenaventura. “You can all go and get fucked!”

  He inserted the cassette into the recorder, made sure the batteries were sufficiently charged, attached the microphone, hit Record and dictated a complete account of the abduction of the ambassador and the siege of the farmhouse. To authenticate his testimony he supplied the serial number and provenance of the automatic used to kill the ambassador.

  He searched for an envelope, found one, slipped the cas
sette into it, and sealed it.

  On the envelope he wrote the address of a press agency. He looked for stamps but found none. Okay. He would see to that later. He put the package in the pocket of his hunting jacket. He wanted very much to smoke but had no more cigarettes. He turned the office and the living room completely upside down without finding any tobacco. He sat down again, took the recorder and stuck in another minicassette, this one labeled The Marriage of Maryse.

  “So she finally did go and get fucked,” remarked Buenaventura, whose train of thought was increasingly disordered.

  He grasped the mike, pressed Record, and as the tape began to roll he stayed still for a moment with his mouth open and his face hardened as it had been in the early afternoon in the bathtub.

  “I made a mistake,” he said abruptly. “Leftist terrorism and State terrorism, even if their motivations cannot be compared, are the two jaws of . . .”

  He hesitated.

  “. . . of the same mug’s game,” he concluded, and went on right away: “The regime defends itself, naturally, against terrorism. But the system does not defend itself against it. It encourages it and publicizes it. The desperado is a commodity, an exchange value, a model of behavior like a cop or a female saint. The State’s dream is a horrific, triumphant finale to an absolutely general civil war to the death between cohorts of cops and mercenaries on the one hand and nihilistic armed groups on the other. This vision is the trap laid for rebels, and I fell into it. And I won’t be the last. And that pisses me off in the worst way.”

  The Catalan stared into the shadows and mechanically rubbed his mouth with his hand. He had a vision of his father, whom he had never seen. The man was on a barricade, or more precisely in the process of stepping over it, with one leg up in the air; it was the evening of May 4, 1937, in Barcelona, and the revolutionary proletariat had risen against the bourgeoisie and the Stalinists. In a fraction of a second a bullet was going to strike Buenaventura’s father, and in a fraction of a second he would be dead, while in a few days the Barcelona Commune would be crushed and very soon its memory would be buried in calumny.

  “The condemnation of terrorism,” Buenaventura said into the mike, “is not a condemnation of insurrection but a call to insurrection.”

  He interrupted himself once more, and a snicker twisted his lips.

  “Consequently,” he added, “I pronounce the Nada group dissolved.”

  He stopped recording.

  “And with unanimous support yet again!” he shouted in the darkness. “The old traditions must be respected.”

  He took the cassette from the recorder, thrust it into another envelope, which he closed and on which he wrote: First and Last Theoretical Contribution of Buenaventura Diaz to His Own History. He put the envelope into the pocket of the hunting jacket and went into the living room to get the television news.

  “Commissioner Goémond, the man who this morning led the assault intended to free the U.S. Ambassador,” began a newscaster even before the policeman’s image appeared on the screen. Then, as Goémond’s head and shoulders materialized, he went on: “and I offer this information with strict reservations, based on a dispatch just in: Commissioner Goémond, has thus reportedly—and I stress ‘reportedly’—been suspended on direct orders from the minister of the interior.”

  “Well,” said Buenaventura, “if that isn’t something else.”

  37

  “YOU CAN'T do that!” objected Goémond.

  “Sure I can, Goémond. Who do you think you are?” replied the chief of staff.

  “I acted on your instructions.”

  “Your name has been chanted in the streets of Paris,” said the chief of staff. “They are shouting ‘Goémond is a swine’ and ‘Today’s pig is tomorrow’s bacon.’ ”

  “Those are death threats.”

  “Stop talking nonsense, Goémond.”

  “Very well then, let me talk some sense,” answered Goémond in a toneless voice. “Do you really think this is a time to expose yourself to scandal by firing me?”

  “You are not fired. You are suspended.”

  “Answer my question!” shouted Goémond.

  “If I care to, I will!” yelled back the chief of staff, rising from his chair red in the face. “Goémond, really, you would be well advised to back off! Do you understand me, commissioner? Just back off! And sit down!”

  Goémond sat down and held his tongue. His interlocutor strode angrily up and down the office.

  “For some time now, commissioner, you’ve been putting too much stock in yourself. Perhaps you think you’re above the law? You conducted this operation with a brutality that cannot and will not be tolerated. You took it upon yourself . . .”

  “Upon myself?”

  “Be quiet. You are in no position to interrupt me. You took it upon yourself to order an assault on the farmhouse even though you knew full well that this was liable to cost the ambassador his life. You let yourself be swayed by pre­judicial impulses, Goémond, by a sick passion. You’re verging on psychosis, Goémond! I remember your own words: ‘If it were just up to me, I’d put them up against the wall.’ ”

  “I don’t remember your own words,” said the commissioner in a strained voice, “but I do know what I understood.”

  “Not another word, Goémond!” said the chief of staff. “I have no time for your fantasies!”

  The commissioner’s lips moved silently for a moment, then he calmed down. He took several deep breaths. The chief of staff had stopped pacing and was looking at him with a probing expression.

  “All right,” sighed Goémond. “So I’m the scapegoat.”

  “I’d be grateful if you refrained from using that absurd and tendentious word after you leave this office,” said the chief of staff, and he pursed his lips.

  “Grateful to what degree?”

  The chief of staff went behind his desk and sat down. He lit a Gitane Filtre and contemplated Goémond through the smoke, blinking.

  “Very likely disciplinary measures will have to be taken, I have to tell you,” he said. “A spell away won’t do you any harm. You will be going to provide technical assistance to the niggers.”

  “With the niggers!” exclaimed Goémond with a nervous shudder.

  “Somewhere in Africa, yes, which wouldn’t be a bad solution. If you have sadistic tendencies, you can give them free rein out there. Anyway, we’ll see. It’s not up to me, you realize.”

  Goémond said nothing. The chief of staff shrugged.

  “I’m sorry about this,” he said. “But things have been building up. There was the suicide attempt of the Meyer woman. The complaints of the gendarmes, you know how they are . . . For the public the whole episode reeks of brutality, and even the Americans noticed. I’ve had the Foreign Office on the line. A shit storm, if you’ll excuse the expression. Anyway, in a word, there it is.”

  The chief of staff got back to his feet, signaling that the interview had gone on long enough. Goémond got up too, red faced, eyes bulging, mustache aquiver. He held himself in check.

  “Try to make sure you grab that last anarchist,” he said huskily. “If he opens his trap, the shit will really hit the fan.”

  “Goodbye, Goémond,” said the chief of staff. “You have permission to go to your office and deal with pending matters and hand things off. Then it’s back home for you, Goémond. Understand? Bed rest!”

  “Goodbye,” said Goémond, and left.

  The night air struck his sweaty skin like a cold shower. He walked hesitantly to his car. He got in and sat motionless, his hands tight on the steering wheel, staring into space. The commissioner was a broken man for just over thirty seconds. Then he knew what he still had to do (the idea struck him like a thunderbolt) if he was to take his revenge. He started up and headed at speed for his office.

  When he entered the room where Treuffais was handcuffed to the radiator, the philosophy teacher raised his head feebly. His eyes were deep hollows. Goémond drew his blackjack from his
inside pocket and struck Treuffais in the head. The young man closed his eyes, his jaw dropped open, and he toppled over alongside the wall.

  Two deputies had come in behind the commissioner.

  “Take him out by the door to the courtyard and put him in my car,” ordered Goémond. “In five or ten minutes, start off and go and wait for me at his address.”

  “Boss,” said the younger of the policemen, “are you sure you know what you are doing? I mean . . . Why not drop it?”

  “Why?” cried Goémond, and his cry sounded like a cat yowling. “Why!” he repeated, more softly this time, and he left the room shrugging and repeating the word in an amused tone.

  Downstairs, he waited for a moment or two to give the journalists, tipped off by a calculated leak, time to gather, then left the building to be met on the sidewalk by popping flashbulbs that lit up the night, mikes held out and questions hurled. Dazzled, Goémond elbowed his way through the crowd like a Hugolian oarsman.

  “Let me pass. Gangway, gangway. Come on.”

  He reached the black Citroën DS that he had had brought to the front entrance. He turned back to the mob assailing him.

  “I have only one thing to say. Only one thing!” he shouted above the racket. “They want to scapegoat me, but with the ambassador business I was strictly obeying orders.”

  He sniggered. The questions redoubled. People were pushing and shoving to get closer to him. Trampling one another. Goémond reveled in his power. Once again sweat began trickling down his sickly broad brow.

  “And another thing!” he yelled. “We had known since last month about the intended abduction of the U.S. Ambassador. I had an informant inside the Nada group. He didn’t take part in the final preparations for the job, but until the beginning of the week he was aware of what the anarchists were planning. He did not know the exact date of the attack, but that’s the only thing he didn’t know.”