“Like I told the cops—” The man broke off and looked at Carlo uncertainly. But Carlo was waiting for the rest. The two were alone on the edge of a cornfield; night was falling, Carlo’s Peugeot 504 was parked at the edge of a back road, a church steeple could be seen through the trees some two or three kilometers away, and there was nothing and nobody to call for help. The drifter saw no alternative to continuing, so he continued.
“Like I said to the cops, this checkbook belonging to Monsieur Gerfaut, I found it on the ground. At the Lyons railroad station—not the Lyons station in Paris, I mean the Perranche station in Lyons. It was six months ago or more, maybe even eight. I kept it because I thought I could go sometime and turn it in to a branch of the BNP Bank, because, you know, it was a checkbook from that bank, and pick up a little reward. Or, well, perhaps I thought I might use it myself, I won’t deny that, but it’s no crime just thinking about it, is it?” The drifter’s fixed grin was even more noticeable—was he perhaps smiling nervously? “But I never did use it. I kept it, that’s all. That’s all I know—I swear it on my mother’s grave.”
The drifter said nothing more and tried to look at the money dangling down his forehead, which caused him to squint. He made no effort to touch it.
“You’re reciting,” said Carlo.
“Sure I am. They kept asking me the same thing, the cops. And that policeman from Paris. They beat me, monsieur—if you are a journalist, this should be of interest to you. They made me kneel on a steel ruler, and they were hitting me on the head all the time with telephone directories, and it went on for days and days. They got me sent down for thirty days, for vagrancy. In prison I was hassled again. They wanted me to change my story, but I can’t change my story because it’s the truth.”
“You’ve got one more chance.” Carlo was irritated.
“Can I sit down? I’m tired.”
Carlo shrugged. The drifter bent his knees and subsided slowly and heavily onto his heels. Upon his release from prison his hammer had not been returned to him. But they had no right to confiscate it, because it was a tool of his trade, an allmetal hammer with a hollow shaft containing accessories such as screwdriver heads, a corkscrew, and an awl. But they had never given it back to him, and who was he to complain? Pretending to reach out to steady himself, he felt about on the ground with his right hand and his fingers closed over a flinty stone. He drew back his arm, meaning to smash it into Carlo’s knee. But Carlo stepped swiftly aside, seized the moving arm and pulled it hard, twisting slightly as he did so. The drifter’s shoulder dislocated with a sharp crack.
“Shithead!” said Carlo.
“Help! Help!”
Carlo kicked the drifter in the stomach. The man doubled up and quieted down because he could no longer shout. With his left hand Carlo sent the bowler flying and grabbed the drifter by the hair. He forced his head back and shook it. The fifty-franc bill fell into the grass and the dust and the gravel. Carlo reached into his raincoat pocket with his right hand and produced a Swiss Army knife.
“Look,” he said to the drifter, still twisting his hair.
The drifter squeaked like a mouse as the other man stuck the knife into his side and he felt it being turned then withdrawn. Blood flowed abundantly.
“Do you get it?” Carlo asked. “I am not an ordinary cop. I’m a really brutal cop, okay? Now it’s time to tell me the truth.”
The drifter told the truth about how he had come by Georges Gerfaut’s checkbook. It had no resemblance to what he had told the police or to what the press had reported (Carlo had the clippings in his wallet, including the France-Soir item entitled “Possible New Light Thrown,” etc.). The younger man made quite sure he had extracted the whole story, then dragged the drifter to the middle of the cornfield and stove his skull in with a rock. He emptied his victim’s pockets (haul: thirteen francs and seventy centimes) and relieved him of his down-at-heel shoes. Perhaps this would make things look like the outcome of a squabble between derelicts. Not that it made much difference. On his way back to the Peugeot, Carlo did not forget to retrieve the fiftyfranc bill that had fallen on the ground.
19
Yes, it was indeed well before summer that Alphonsine Raguse returned. To be precise, it was the first of May, though it has to be said that, as firsts of May go, this was one of the lousiest of the decade as far as the weather was concerned. Rain fell over three-quarters of France, and an Atlantic storm drove great waves high over the shoreline way up the estuary of the Gironde, as, for instance, at Saint-Georges-de-Didonne; a veritable hurricane tore up the Seine valley, ripping off roofs at Magny-en-Vexin and beyond it, as in Paris, and, of course, short of it also, as at Vilneuil, a hamlet exactly thirty kilometers from Magny.
At Vilneuil, Alonso Emerich y Emerich was alarmed by the wind. He did not convey his alarm to Bastien or Carlo. In the past, he had on occasion apprised them of concerns of his (albeit concerns of another sort). For one thing, it was months since Alonso had had any contact with the two hit men; not since the Gerfaut fiasco, in fact. For another, Bastien was dead. And for yet another, Alonso had not the slightest idea what had become of Carlo or where he was now. In point of fact, Carlo was hundreds of kilometers away from Vilneuil, in a hotel room in Chambéry. He had had chicken sandwiches sent up, along with four bottles of German beer. The television was on, but the volume was muted. Carlo could easily afford a hotel with television in every room, for he had been given several contracts since Bastien’s death. He was now used to working without his partner—used to working alone, in fact, since he had no plans to take on anyone else. Not that he had given up the idea of avenging Bastien, though he no longer wore a mourning band. At this very moment, in fact, he was ignoring Armand Jammot on the television and studying his own handwritten notes concerning the timetables and routes of freight trains in the Alps. He was also perusing maps published by the National Geographical Institute at a scale of 1:25,000 covering a polygon whose points were Chambéry, Aix-les-Bains, Annecy, Chamonix, Val d’Isère, Briançon, and Grenoble. His task was a long one. As he proceeded, Carlo leaned into the wall or clasped the table tightly, performing his isometric muscle-strengthening exercises. In the metal suitcase on a baggage stand were a change of clothes, the S&W .45, the three knives and the steel, the garrote, the blackjack, and all the rest. Carlo’s toilet bag was in the bathroom, and on the bedside table was a science-fiction novel by Jack Williamson in French translation. The canvas bag containing the over-and-under M6 and the binoculars lay on the floor against the wall.
As Carlo took his first bite of chicken sandwich, Alphonsine Raguse had already been in her grandfather’s house for several hours. A thick fog blanketed the little valley. For some reason, the area escaped the ravaging wind. The mist hung in the still air like absorbent cotton laid across the ground.
Alphonsine and Gerfaut were having almost nonstop fun. Between the two of them, things were going well. They were delighted to have engaged at last in sexual congress and intended to repeat the experience as often as possible. At every moment they clasped fingers, caressed each other’s shoulders or hair, kissed one another on the temple or in the crook of the arm; their eyes glistened; they were fragrant with sweat and other bodily fluids; they giggled frequently.
Gerfaut was at the table in the main room, shirtless and barefoot, wearing cotton pants that were too short for him. Before him on the table was an ITT portable radio receiver with a long, inclined antenna. A dessert plate did service as an ashtray. Gerfaut held a Gitane filter. The radio was playing jazz, a Johnny Guarnieri piano solo, part of a program from France Musique. Not long after her first visit, Alphonsine had sent Gerfaut a money order to cover a month’s salary. He had immediately gone and bought the radio, the pants, Gitane filters, and a plastic miniature chess set which was now on the bedroom floor with its pieces set up in the final position of a Vasyukov-Polugayewski match at the USSR championships of 1965 (White resigned after the thirty-second move).
“Georges!” said A
lphonsine as she broke the seal on a bottle of Isle of Jura whisky. “What a horrible first name!”
“Everybody can’t be called Alphonsine. Call me Ishmael. Call me cutie-pie, for all I care!”
“All right, that’s fine. Cutie-pie. Perfect. I dumped him, you know, my boyfriend. When I got back to Paris. I wanted to come straight back here. I’m a real shit, aren’t I?” As Gerfaut made no reply, she went on. “I wanted to, but I had commitments. And then, I wanted to think things over.” She tittered. “No, seriously, I knew I was going to come back, but I wanted to do it slowly, elegantly. Why did you shave that sexy beard off? Do you know you look a bit like Robert Redford?”
“Ugh!” It was true, he did resemble Robert Redford. But, like a lot of men, he didn’t much care for Robert Redford. “I was fed up with looking like—I don’t know, like a bandit out of an Edmond About story. Commitments—what commitments? Are you in business? You seem pretty well-heeled.”
Alphonsine pulled a stool up to the table and sat down. She poured whisky into two cracked cups, then put her elbows on the table, crossing her wrists and leaning her chin on them. She was wearing boots and suede pants. Her upper body was bare. She was not cold because a fire was roaring in the hearth. The hair at the nape of her neck was clammy with sweat. On the radio Johnny Guarnieri was superseded by a warm masculine voice retailing structuralist and leftist rubbish, then Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray began to play.
“Wardell Gray—not this tenor, the other one,” said Gerfaut, pointing uselessly at the receiver, “was found shot dead in a vacant lot. And Albert Ayler’s body was fished out of the East River. It was Lee Morgan, his girlfriend, who bumped him off. Things like that exist! They really happen!”
“When I was nineteen,” said Alphonsine absently, “I married a surgeon. He was crazily in love with me, the moron. It was only a civil marriage. We were divorced after five years, and I took him for every penny I could get. What do you mean, ‘Things like that exist’? Don’t say you’re going to start again with your tales about killers!”
Gerfaut shook his head. He seemed preoccupied, indecisive. The laughter was almost completely gone from his features.
“The Isle of Jura,” he said, turning to look at the bottle, “that’s in the Hebrides. George Orwell had a small farm there. He wanted to get his life together, but he never really had the time before he died of tuberculosis.”
“Well, you’re a cheerful character, aren’t you? A barrel of laughs. Who is this George Orwell, anyway?”
Gerfaut didn’t reply. He knocked back his cup of Isle of Jura whisky in one.
“I’ll have to make a decision one of these days,” he remarked, but he didn’t say what decision. “It’ll wait. At least till this fog lifts. Let’s go and make love, okay?”
They went and made love. The fog did not lift. For three days it did not lift. On the evening of the third day, the Peugeot 504 made its way slowly into the village with its fog lights on. It came to a halt in front of the church, across the street from the café-tabac.
Up at the Raguse house, Alphonsine and Gerfaut were at the table. Alphonsine was wearing a white terrycloth robe and thick American knop-wool socks. Gerfaut had on brown widewale corduroy pants and a plaid woolen shirt. Both he and Alphonsine smelled sweetly clean and well-soaped. They were eating bread and butter and drinking champagne. On the radio, a black woman sang about how, in the wee hours of the morning, when everyone is fast asleep, you lie awake in your bed and think of him, you can’t help it. It was night, and the fog could be seen through the windows.
In the Peugeot 504, in front of the church, Carlo had switched on the overhead light to study his maps. He ticked off the name of the hamlet on a list. He had drawn up lists of all settlements of any size in the vicinity of the various points where Gerfaut might conceivably have fallen from a train. There was a host of possibilities, because the drifter had not been very clear. Carlo’s list of most likely localities had fortyone entries. A second list, enumerating places where it was less likely but still very possible for Gerfaut to have ended up, comprised seventy-three names. There was even a third list. For forty-eight hours now, Carlo had been combing the mountains. The name of the hamlet where he now found himself occupied the twenty-third position on his first list.
The hit man put his lists and maps away, extinguished the interior light, and got out of the car. He crossed the muddy street and went into the café-tabac. Inside were three old men in tatty dark clothing and the owner, a fat man with suspenders. Carlo ordered coffee. He was brought a cup and saucer and a pot of coffee and coffee-stained sugar lumps in a plastic bowl meant to look like cut glass. Carlo asked for aspirin. And displayed his left index finger, which was bandaged up with gauze and adhesive tape.
“It’s my finger. It hurts like hell.”
“Piss on it!” exclaimed one of the old men. “Piss on it and don’t wash it till sundown.”
The hit man evinced a pale smile.
“I’d rather ... I wonder ... There wouldn’t be a doctor hereabouts, would there?” (It was the twenty-third time he had asked the question in his two-day search.)
“Afraid not. You’ll have to go back down.” The owner scrutinized the hit man. “You have to go back, anyway—the road doesn’t go any farther up the mountain.”
“So,” Carlo persisted, “if someone gets hurt or something, they go down into the valley? There’s nobody at all who ... I mean to say, there must be....”
“There used to be Corporal Raguse,” put in the old fellow who had spoken earlier. “No more a corporal than I am, I might say. He’s passed away, in any case.”
Carlo stayed chatting for another quarter of an hour or so. He found out everything he wanted to know. He thanked the owner for the aspirin, paid for his coffee and for the round of rums he had bought, and walked out. For an instant, he stood motionless in the street. Through the thick fog he strove to make out lights, perhaps even lights at the Raguse house, which was no more than five hundred meters distant. But it was hopeless: he couldn’t even see his 504 coupe four meters away.
Carlo was resolved now, in dealing with this moron Georges Gerfaut, to leave nothing to chance. The killer got back into his car and left the hamlet. Then, driving cautiously, his fog lights groping the whiteness, he descended slowly into the valley.
At Saint-Jean he found a hotel open and took a room for the night. Once settled in, he removed the dressing from his perfectly intact forefinger. He had carried the metal suitcase and the canvas bag upstairs himself. He placed both on the bed and began to lay out the things he proposed to wear the next day: cotton pants, checkered shirt, thick roll-neck sweater, boots. Then he carefully cleaned and oiled his weapons. And before going to bed he spent a long while studying his 1:25,000-scale maps. He had requested a wake-up call for five-thirty in the morning.
20
“I’m free!” cried Gerfaut. “I can make whatever I want of my existence. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about.”
“You should go easy with that booze.” Alphonsine’s tone was not severe; she was smiling.
“I’m free!” Gerfaut added more liquor to his black coffee and drained the cup. “How would you like to come with me and kill something on the endangered-species list?” He leaped from the bed and clumsily pulled on his pants. He was in high spirits. “I don’t love you, you know. You are very beautiful but a distinctly average person. I find you highly desirable.”
“You’re sloshed. Do you really want to go out?” Alphonsine pouted briefly. “Oh, well, perhaps it’ll sober you up.”
When the hit man saw the couple emerge from the house, a muscle twitched at his jaw line. Otherwise, the man was motionless, watching. As the crow flies, he was about seven hundred meters from the Raguse house and some two hundred and fifty meters higher up. He lay prone in a clump of low trees and continued to observe the house through his binoculars. The canvas bag was half-open beside him. Carlo had left the hotel at six, after settling up in cash. He h
ad driven the length of a nearby valley as far as a pass, whence he had hiked six kilometers along narrow paths, reaching his present base of operations around seven-thirty. With him he had the automatic, its silencer, and the M6. The M6 was assembled, its back sight adjusted. Now he waited. It was twelve-fifteen. Gerfaut and the woman seemed to be laughing and jostling one another. Gerfaut had a gun slung over his shoulder. The hit man examined it through the powerful glasses. It looked like a respectable weapon—a Mauser-Bauer, perhaps, or a Weatherby. Or maybe an Omega III, like the one once presented to John Wayne—but, no, the breech was different.
The two were climbing straight toward the hit man. If they followed the path they were now on, they would soon veer left and then pass a little later less than three hundred meters from Carlo’s position, putting themselves within perfect range. Should they not change direction and continue their ascent across pastureland, it was even possible that he would be able to pop them with the pistol, nice and quietly. The woman had to be killed, too, to prevent her from raising the alarm. Carlo had originally intended to wait until one or the other of them, or even both, left the house and then slip inside. As it was, things were working out even more simply. His victims were coming to him.
Three minutes later, following the path, Gerfaut and Alphonsine bore left. Very soon afterward, they were two hundred and sixty meters from the hit man and level with him. Alphonsine lost her footing slightly just ahead of Gerfaut and lurched to the right. Gerfaut put both his hands on her head and ran his fingers through her hair. As he did so, he laughed and rubbed his body against the young woman’s, feeling her ass against him.
“You know,” he said gaily, “I’m an idiot. A dumb cluck. What a crazy idea to go wandering around the mountains like this. I’ve had it up to here with these mountains. We are not weekenders, not—I don’t know....”
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