Three to Kill

by Jean-Patrick Manchette

  That afternoon Gerfaut took care of business pending, dealt with salespeople needing directives, and conducted a long discussion with his immediate subordinate, who would be standing in for him during July, and who, truth to tell, hoped through a combination of intrigue, servility, and betrayal soon to replace him completely and definitively. Gerfaut was for his part called in to see Charançon, who had had the greatest difficulty disentangling himself from the proletarian agitation. Charançon’s face was flushed, and he wore a tiny Lions Club de France badge on his lapel and Pierre Cardin suspenders beneath his gray suit. Behind him on the wall was a poster under glass with pretty painted pink flowers and the English words HOME SWEET HOME inscribed in large, pale, pink frilly letters. Superimposed on the flowers and the pink inscription was a text in small black characters whose author was Harold S. Geneen, president of ITT. It ran as follows: In different locations around the world, almost anywhere on the globe, rather more than two hundred workdays each year are given over to executive meetings at different levels of our organization. It is during these meetings, be they in New York, Brussels, Hong Kong, or Buenos Aires, that decisions are taken based on logic, on a business logic that leads to choices that are almost inevitable, for the simple reason that we are in possession of almost all the basic elements needed to arrive at decisions. Just like our planning, our periodic meetings are designed to clarify the logic of things and expose that logic to the light of day, where its value and necessity will be apparent to all. This logic is immune to all state laws and regulations. It is a part of a natural process. There was no way of telling whether the presence of this poster in Charançon’s office testified to a discreet sense of humor or to a terminal state of alienation. Charançon congratulated Gerfaut on the success of his negotiations of the last two days, and it was agreed that his bonus would be credited to his bank account in the course of July. Charançon poured two glasses of Glenlivet.

  “Thank you.” Gerfaut took the glass Charançon held out to him.

  “They are completely mad,” said Charançon. “Do you remember May ‘68? They were still out on strike in the middle of July—but they had no idea what they wanted! Remember?”

  “When they do find out what they want, it’ll be time for you and me to get a real job. Or pack our bags.” Gerfaut sipped his whisky. “What they wanted was the collapse of capitalism.”

  “You bet your sweet ass they did, my friend!” agreed Charançon distractedly.

  Back in his office, tidying up, Gerfaut was subjected to the usual erotic provocations of Mademoiselle Truong. She was continually crossing the room, bending over as far as she could to reach things, ostentatiously removing specks of dust from her eye, or standing on tiptoe, thighs and buttocks and breasts and arms all straining upward, to straighten the Air France calendar or the work schedule or one of the glass-mounted prints. At the same time, Gerfaut felt certain, had he grabbed her ass she would have screamed, made a scandal, or scratched her aggressor’s cheek with those vicious-looking scarlet nails.... Gerfaut sent her out for France-Soir (Béa always made sure to pick up the more serious Le Monde).

  The paper’s suggested lottery numbers were three, seven, and twelve. Tanks and air power had been deployed against six thousand rebellious Bolivian peasants. An Eskimo had been shot and killed while trying to divert a Boeing 747 to North Korea. A Breton trawler had gone missing with its eleven-man crew. A woman had celebrated her hundredth birthday and announced her intention of voting for the left. Extratrerrestrials had abducted a dog in full view of its master, a crossing guard in the department of Bas-Rhin. And, in emulation of a recent fad on America’s West Coast, a couple had tried to fornicate in public on a French Mediterranean beach, only to be restrained and arrested by the local police. Gerfaut glanced at the funnies, then tossed the newspaper into the wastebasket.

  “I’m leaving now,” said Mademoiselle Truong.

  “See you tomorrow, then.”

  “What do you mean, tomorrow?”

  “Oh, yes, I’m sorry. Until the first of August, then. Have a nice vacation.”

  “You, too, Monsieur Gerfaut.”

  She left. Gerfaut left soon after. It was about seven—too late to join Béa at the screening of the Feldman film. Gerfaut didn’t want to see it, anyway. He could easily have left the office a couple of hours earlier, but he had wanted to show that, even the day before leaving on vacation, he had worked hard, gone beyond the call of duty.

  After forty-five minutes of very slow progress through blocked traffic, with Lee Konitz accompanied by Lennie Tristano on the cassette player, Gerfaut left the Mercedes in its slot in the underground parking garage of his building in the thirteenth arrondissement and went up to his apartment. The little girls were there watching the regional news. (They watched anything that appeared on a television screen; for them there was no significant difference between the regional news and, say, The Saga of Anatahan.) The girls’ bags and Béa’s were almost packed. Gerfaut showered, changed, and did his own packing with the feeling that he was forgetting everything important, and served the girls cold roast beef with Heinz salad dressing and Bulgarianstyle yogurt. Then he sent them off to bed; they left the room, insulting him in a muted but earnest way.

  Soon Béa arrived, in good humor. As the two of them sat in the kitchen eating cold roast beef with Heinz salad dressing, she told him that Maria had that morning begged for the key to their apartment while they were away. Supposedly, Maria had broken off with her Berber boyfriend, who was looking for her and meant to kill her. Wasn’t he the one who wanted to put her to work on the street? asked Gerfaut. Wiping the corner of her mouth with a paper napkin, Béa replied that that had been a joke. Maria’s real plan, according to Béa, was to get the run of their place so she could bring the guy over, clean out their liquor cabinet, and screw. But, all the same, protested Gerfaut, what if the guy really was stalking her, the poor kid? Poor kid, poor kid!—she was big enough to take care of herself! was Béa’s last word on the subject.

  After dinner they tossed their paper plates into the trash, washed the other dishes and left them on the drainer, finished the packing, brushed their teeth, got into bed, read a few pages, she of Edgar Morin’s latest book, he of an old John D. MacDonald, and went to sleep. Gerfaut awoke shortly after two in the morning and fell prey at once to an inexplicable and terrifying insomnia. He went and took half a sleeping pill with a glass of milk. He fell asleep again with no difficulty about three. Early the next morning, they all got up and left for their vacation. Gerfaut having had the forethought to take off work as from the twenty-ninth of June, traffic was free-flowing. This, and the invention of superhighways, enabled them to reach their destination in under seven hours, including a stop for lunch and without speeding. And so, on the night of the twenty-ninth of June, the family slept at Saint-Georges-de-Didonne.

  The next day was the day they tried to kill Georges Gerfaut.

  6

  At eleven-fifty on the night of the twenty-ninth of June, one of the men who on the following day would try to kill Georges Gerfaut sat in the Lancia Beta 1800 sedan, which was parked fifty meters from Gerfaut’s apartment building. In the back of the car were two metal suitcases. The first contained clothes, toiletries, a science-fiction novel in Italian, three very pointed and well-honed butcher knives, a sharpening steel, a garrote made of three strands of piano wire with aluminum handles, a blackjack, a 1950 model Smith & Wesson .45 caliber revolver, and a Beretta 70T automatic with silencer. The second case contained clothes, toiletries, six meters of nylon cord, and a SIG P210-5 9mm automatic target pistol. In a canvas bag on the car floor were highpower binoculars and an over-and-under M6 like those used by the U.S. Air Force, with a folding butt, one barrel being .22 caliber, the other a .410 shotgun. There were munitions, too, of various kinds, in thick wooden boxes in the Lancia’s trunk. Should such an arsenal be considered impressive or simply grotesque?

  The man in the car was at the wheel, with his chin sunk into his chest,
his back against the back of the driver’s seat, and a monthly comic book propped against the wheel’s leather cover. The comic was called Strange, and it recounted the adventures of Captain Marvel, the intrepid Daredevil, the Spider, and various other characters. The man was reading with great concentration, moving his lips. A succession of emotions registered on his face; he was identifying to the hilt.

  After a moment, the other guy, the one with the wavy black hair and pretty blue eyes, emerged from Georges Gerfaut’s building, walked back to the Lancia, and got in beside his companion. The latter put his Strange into the cubbyhole in his door and wrinkled his nose with curiosity.

  “I smell fat.”

  “Cooking fat, yes,” said the other. “The concierge was making fries. Georges Gerfaut has left on vacation for a month. I have the address. It’s in Saint-Georges-de-Didonne; the department number is 17.”

  First, the hit men consulted the dark one’s diary to see what department had the number 17, and found out that it was Charente-Maritime. Then they took down a small atlas of French main roads that was attached to the right sun visor with an elastic band, perused it, located Saint-Georges-de-Didonne, and mapped out their route.

  “I drive fast,” said the one with the white streaks in his hair. “We can be there by this evening.”

  “Well, fuck that! Shit, no!” replied the dark man bitterly. “Let him wait. First, we’ll have a big meal. Then we’ll do a little sightseeing. Come on, why shouldn’t we?”

  “Mister Taylor said fast, Carlo.”

  “Taylor? What’s he got to say about it? He’s got nothing to say about it. Anyway, he’s cool, totally cool.”

  The nostrils of the man with the white streaks flared tautly.

  “Carlo, you really do smell of greasy food.”

  “What a pain in the butt you are!” Carlo reached into the back and opened one of the metal cases, took out a toilet bag and produced a bottle of Gibbs aftershave. He poured lotion into his palm and dabbed himself with it about the cheeks and under the arms. Then he put his tackle away.

  “If we don’t have to hurry,” said White Streaks, “we can stop at Le Lude. It’s charming, Le Lude. It has a delightful castle.”

  “All right then, if you say so. Start the car, for Christ’s sake! We can’t sit here forever!”

  7

  At the sound of Gerfaut clattering about in the kitchen and swearing between clenched teeth, the little girls came downstairs. Gerfaut didn’t bother to scold them, even though, as he saw it, it was still too early to get up.

  The girls were dressed. Gerfaut dug out denim shorts and a Lacoste shirt, and all three left for the seafront. It was already hot. The beach was completely deserted. A wooden refreshment stand showed no sign of opening up. The Mercedes made a right, cruised by a motionless funfair and a cemetery, turned left, and finally parked in a side street near an antique shop that also dealt in detective stories, varnished seashells, and comic books translated from the Italian. Gerfaut and the girls found a café open and settled themselves on perforated plastic seats in red, yellow, and pastel blue. They drank bowls of gray café au lait speckled with stray coffee grounds and ate butter croissants from a nearby bakery. Then they headed back. A breeze had come up, sand whirled across the beachfront road, and the shrubs planted in wooden boxes waved back and forth like carnivorous plants. The milky coffee formed a resinous lump just below Gerfaut’s sternum.

  He left the car in the street outside their rental house. In the main room, with the blinds raised and windows open, Béa sat in an immense white robe dipping a zwieback in Special for Breakfast tea from Fortnum & Mason’s. She removed a crumb from the corner of her mouth.

  “Where’ve you been? What got into you? Did you go to look at the sea?”

  “We had breakfast!” cried the girls, as they raced noisily out of the room and up the stairs.

  Gerfaut sat down at the table.

  “Do you like the house?” asked Béa.

  “For God’s sake,” said Gerfaut, “why can’t we go to a decent hotel? In North Africa, the Canaries, any damn place—”

  “Stop it—stop swearing!” chided Béa.

  “Just so long as daylight doesn’t come into the room at half-past five in the morning, and dogs don’t bark, and cocks don’t crow, and you don’t have to hear all those horrible noises. Tell me why we can’t! We can afford a good hotel, so why not?”

  “You know perfectly well why not! It’s not worth talking about it. You’re only trying to bring me down.”

  “I want to bring you down? God in heaven!”

  “Yes, you’d love that. But I’m not going to let you, so it’s no use talking. If you don’t like it here, you can go back to Paris.”

  “If I don’t like it here! Christ!” Gerfaut surveyed the mildewed leather couch, the likewise mildewed easy chairs, the two Henry-the-Second sideboards, the two massive dining tables with their carved legs, the ten chairs (two sideboards, two dining tables, ten chairs—Christ!), and the door to the toilet, opening directly into the main room, adorned by the picture of a small boy in short pants, socks about his ankles, with blond curls, mischievous bright eyes, and rosy cheeks, turning his head cutely toward the viewer as he pisses against a Montmartre-type gas lamp.

  Misreading Gerfaut’s pensiveness, Béa thought he had calmed down and rested her head on his forearm. She told him he was tired from the journey and that he had slept badly and that she understood. Granted, the house was hideous—but they hadn’t come to the seaside to stay indoors all the time. Anyway, they would rearrange things, take down the awful picture, consign one of the tables to the attic—“Christ alive,” grumbled Gerfaut, “do you realize how much those things weigh?”—and the bedrooms weren’t too bad, and the garden was just fine.

  “Every year,” said Gerfaut, “I think it’s worse than the year before. Even if it’s not.”

  “Every year,” retorted Béa, “you decide that we’ll never set foot here again, then you refuse to look at any houses. And when the time comes, we decide together at the very last minute that it wasn’t really so bad last year. But we never have enough time off to come up here, so my mother has to choose—not that there’s any choice left.”

  “This year, I’m sure there was some choice.” Gerfaut got up from his chair and started mumbling about inflation and deflation and recovery and unemployment and how people were set in their ways and always went away in August, just for the month, so he was quite sure they could have had their pick for July.

  “Listen,” said Béa, “what’s done is done.”

  “Your mother’s an idiot.”

  “My mother’s an idiot, yes,” agreed Béa with disarming equanimity, “and we are having lunch at her house, and you’ll do me the favor of having a shave and being polite.”

  Gerfaut burst out laughing. He dropped back into his seat and laughed theatrically, first throwing his head back, then shaking it and slapping his thighs. Béa calmly finished her zwieback. Gerfaut stopped laughing and wiped his eyes.

  “One of these days,” he said, “I’ll suddenly go mad and you won’t even notice.”

  “If there’s any difference, I’ll notice.”

  “Very funny,” said Gerfaut sadly. “Very funny, I must say. What a wit!”

  He went to wash and shave. When he tried to hang his hand towel on the rail, the thing parted from the wall with a grating sound and fell to the floor, accompanied by a small quantity of plaster and two bent screws. Gerfaut left the towel, the rail, and the plaster where they lay and drove to the co-op to shop for essentials. He returned with a good supply of breakfast cereal, oil, cheese, milk, spirits, wine, and mineral water, both still and sparkling. The little girls were lobbying loudly for a television set to be rented.

  “You can’t get a decent signal here,” asserted Gerfaut.

  “We did last year!”

  “You need an outside antenna.”

  The girls scooted out of the house, overturning a chair as they went. T
hey returned shouting that there was an antenna on the roof. Gerfaut surrendered and promised to take care of it.

  “When? When?” the girls wanted to know.

  “This afternoon, okay? I’ll go into Royan.”

  They quieted down instantly as though some button had been pressed. Later, they all went on foot to Béa’s mother’s for lunch.

  “You have to go to Royan for a television,” the girls reminded Gerfaut when they came out of the old witch’s house.

  So Gerfaut took the Mercedes and went to rent a television in Royan. On the return trip he overtook a Lancia Beta 1800 sedan. Back at the house, whose hideousness he still couldn’t hack, he plugged the set in. Finally, he undressed, slipped into an ugly green swimsuit, and left to join Béa and the girls at the beach.

  It was five o’clock. The sun was leaden but baking hot. Inflation and deflation and all the rest notwithstanding, and despite the fact that it was only the thirtieth of June, there was a good number of people on the sand and in the water. Gerfaut wondered what it would be like in three days.

  It took him easily five minutes to locate Béa and the girls. All three had already been in the water, sunbathed for thirty minutes, and covered up. Ensconced in a beach chair, wearing jeans and a crepe de chine blouse, Béa was reading Alexandra Kollontai. The girls, in T-shirts and overalls, were building a sandcastle. Gerfaut opened the other folding chair and sat next to Béa. The kids scampered up to make sure the TV had been installed and, once satisfied on this score, returned to their digging. Gerfaut stripped down to his trunks. The whiteness of his skin embarrassed him. He went in the water on his own.

  A few minutes later, the two hit men got out of the Lancia, which was parked on the seafront. They both wore shorts. Neither of their bodies had a trace of fat. On the contrary, they were both very muscular, and muscular in the best way—harmoniously, with none of the excess of the bodybuilder. Each cast a brief admiring glance at the other’s physique as they made their way toward the sea—and Gerfaut.