“And just after Mouzon died, the next day, Hodeng met with a serious accident.”
“Is he dead?”
“No.”
“Can he be found?”
“Monsieur Gerfaut, I am going to take you to him. I want to go with you. Give me a moment—I need a word with Éliane, so she doesn’t worry. But I want to go with you. I can because I’ve been out of work recently. And I have to, you see—I simply must go with you.”
“Fine,” said Gerfaut. “Fine, yes. Good.”
22
They found Philippe Hodeng where he was at that point in his life: in a filthy retirement home in Chelles; and in the shape that he was in at that point in his life: helpless and almost mute. He occupied a dingy dark room on the second floor of one of the four or five buildings that made up the institution. In the courtyard, sycamores laden with young leaves of garish green hung over an admixture of gravel and dog turds. Philippe Hodeng was fifty-two, but he might have been seventy or a hundred, for that matter. He sat in a wheelchair with a tartan blanket over his paralyzed legs. In falling out of the window at Mouzon & Hodeng’s offices, he had fractured his spine. At some point, he had suffered brutal trauma to the throat. His larynx had been crushed. He had undergone a tracheotomy and various other operations. He was now a cripple, and his vocal cords were destroyed. Although voice-retraining techniques existed that could have helped him, Hodeng could not afford such treatment. But, by following the instructions given in an American book, he was beginning to produce organized sounds once more by subtly contracting his diaphragm and trachea. The result, a raucous, piping, and pneumatic register, was somehow simultaneously reminiscent of François Mauriac and Roland Kirk.
Hodeng was dressed in a shiny, slim-fitting suit, a ratty nylon shirt with a gaping collar, and a Basque beret. His toothless mouth was surrounded by a multitude of white wrinkles and crevices. His glasses were green, and his hair was a yellowish white. To put it in a nutshell, his condition was desperate.
Gerfaut and Gassowitz had no difficulty finding him. They presented themselves at the reception desk, where a fat girl with unkempt hair, flabby cheeks, and rolls of flesh under her arms gave them directions without hesitation and without curiosity. The fact was that the old people in the place were left much to their own devices: the rooms were cleaned now and then, the bedding changed every couple of weeks, meals served in a refectory for those who were mobile and brought up to those who were not, and anyone who wet their bed got a chewing out. That was it.
The problems began after Gerfaut and Gassowitz entered Hodeng’s room, when the patient, reaching beneath the bedclothes, produced a small 7.65mm automatic, with the word VENUS inscribed in large letters on the grip, and pointed it at the visitors.
“Hey!” said Gassowitz. “Take it easy. We’re from Social Security.”
As he spoke, the massive Gassowitz seized an empty umbrella stand and whirled it in an arc; it caught the little automatic and wrenched it from Hodeng’s fingers and sent it skittering across the dirty carpet. Gassowitz took a step forward and nudged the weapon under the bed with the tip of his shoe. Hodeng put his wheelchair violently into reverse, whining, whistling, and grunting, and ended up backed against the wall. That was when Gerfaut and Gassowitz explained the nature of their business with him—or at least the parts Hodeng needed to know. And Hodeng supplied the information requested.
It went pretty quickly and simply.
“No! Afraid,” the invalid wheezed at one stage in the conversation. It sounded more like “Oo! Ray,” but by this time Gerfaut and Gassowitz could fairly easily understand the sounds he produced.
“They can’t do anything else to you,” said Gerfaut.
“One ... ah ... ivv.”
Gassowitz interpreted: “He says he wants to go on living.”
“Listen, Hodeng,” said Gerfaut, “I can understand that. That’s why I’ve told you some of what they did to me. It’s also why you can take it from me that either you talk or I’ll kill you. Tell me who’s behind those two bastards or I’ll kill you. Here and now. Get it? You don’t believe I’ll do it?”
After a very short moment’s reflection Hodeng nodded vigorously and asked for paper and pencil. He then covered four pages of a datebook with tiny handwriting. From time to time Gerfaut or Gassowitz interrupted him with requests for clarification. At last he had finished, and there were no further questions. Gerfaut stuffed the datebook pages in his pocket.
“We’ll try and make sure this doesn’t drop you back in the shit.”
“Ssss ... too ... wid, huh?” said Hodeng with great difficulty. “Unning to live!” He indicated his useless legs, his useless throat, then the shitty room, and the shitty landscape outside; as his gestures tailed off, he smiled self-deprecatingly. “Kill him,” he whirred. “Kill at bastard, kay?”
Gerfaut and his out-of-work companion headed toward Paris in Gassowitz’s clapped-out Peugeot 203, then bypassed the city via the ring road. It took them a long time, for it was rush hour and the ring road was backed up. They weren’t talking; they were barely thinking. About six-forty-five, they took the superhighway to the west. Once past the Chartres turnoff they were able to drive fast. Gerfaut opened the canvas bag lying at his feet on the car floor. He took out the Beretta and silencer. He handled the weapon for a few moments to make sure he understood its operation. The 203 left the highway at Meulan. Gassowitz stopped in front of a pharmacy that was still open, got out of the car, and went in. He emerged with two pairs of rubber gloves of the kind used by housewives for washing dishes. He gave one pair to Gerfaut. Each man thrust his pair of gloves into a jacket pocket. The 203 set off again and took the road to Magny-en-Vexin.
“It’s one thing for you,” said Gerfaut. “I imagine you love Éliane Mouzon. As for me, though, the woman who was killed up there in the mountains, I didn’t love her, you know. She was really very beautiful, but….” He broke off and fell silent for a good minute. “Perhaps I shouldn’t be as angry as I am.”
“Do you want to stop for dinner and think things over?”
“No.”
“How about I drop you at a train station and you leave me your gun?”
“No, absolutely not,” was Gerfaut’s reply.
They passed through Magny-en-Vexin and followed the sign for the hamlet of Vilneuil. Still ten kilometers away, Gassowitz pulled over and parked on the roadside. Without speaking, the two men sat in the car and waited for night.
23
After dining on canned food and fruit in the kitchen, Alonso put the dirty dishes in the dishwasher, which already held those left from breakfast. The Sharp stereo system was playing Chopin. Elizabeth trotted in her master’s footsteps as he toured the house checking that the windows were properly locked. At each window he paused to look out through his binoculars. He had his Colt officer’s target pistol at his belt, in a holster with a flap. Alonso was dressed in well-worn khaki shorts and shirt. White chest hairs poked through the front of his shirt. He moved carefully throughout the house and was sure to inspect every single opening to the outside. The year before, two so-called private detectives had come upon him quite by chance, while hunting in the vicinity of Magny-en-Vexin for an important American criminal. And they had tried to get Alonso to talk. His response—as a matter of routine, so to speak—was to sic his contract killers on them. (It was not the first time he had drawn on the skills of Carlo and Bastien to preserve his incognito status: he had had them kill four people liable to lead his enemies to him.) And Bastien and Carlo had indeed taken care of things—except for the matter of Gerfaut, which remained for Alonso an annoying and disquieting mystery. He had insisted that the imbecile who had taken Mouzon to the hospital be taken out. Later, he had learned from the radio that Gerfaut and Carlo had disappeared and that Bastien was dead. Or perhaps it was Carlo that was dead and Bastien and Gerfaut that had vanished: he did not really know which of his hit men had perished in the flames at the gas station. Now, eleven months later, his hope
was that they were all dead—the two hit men and the imbecile, too. At all events, he had never heard another thing about them.
Alonso sat down at the desk in his study. The bullmastiff lay down on the carpet nearby. He uncapped his Parker fountain pen and spent an hour working on his memoirs. An end must be put to violence, he wrote. The best way to end violence is to punish those who resort to it, whatever their position in society. Generally speaking, such individuals are not very numerous. And that is why, in principle, representative democracy has always seemed to me the best way to run a nation. Sadly, the countries of the free world are prevented from living according to their principles, because communist subversion insinuates itself into their organism and brings on recurrent and endemic attacks of decay. Alonso got up and made yet another round of the house, and closed all the shutters. Night was falling. It was a quarter after eight. The Sharp system carried Grieg to every room, then it changed the record and carried Liszt. Alonso went upstairs with a bulky volume of Clausewitz. He drew himself a very hot bath, undressed, and slipped into the water with a grimace. He had placed the Colt on the lid of the toilet alongside the bathtub. He settled into the water with little sighs of either discomfort or pleasure. At ten-twenty-two the extremely loud Lynx alarm installed in the attic was set off, Gerfaut and Gassowitz having just then forced the barred entrance to the property.
Stricken, Alonso dropped On War between his legs into the hot water. He bounded from the bathtub in a great spray of water and grabbed his gun. The weapon slipped from his fingers and fell to the floor. Alonso dropped on all fours to retrieve it. In the overgrown garden in front of the residence, Gerfaut and Gassowitz halted for a moment at the wail of the alarm, which must have been audible for kilometers around. Alonso’s house was about one hundred meters from its nearest neighbors in the hamlet. Gerfaut groaned, then raced on. In his left hand was the Beretta, and in his right, one of the tire irons the two men had used to pry open the iron entrance gate. Gassowitz hesitated a moment longer, then chased after Gerfaut. He held the other tire iron and a square Wonder flashlight that was turned off. It was not yet pitch black—you could still just see where you were going. Gerfaut had reached the front of the house and was already going to work on a shutter with his tire iron.
In the upstairs bathroom Alonso got back to his feet, Colt in hand. His eyes were bulging, and he was having difficulty breathing. His pallid, pudgy body streamed with bathwater. He made a series of staccato and incomplete movements suggesting he meant to dash toward the door or at least dash somewhere. Mechanically, he rescued his book from the bottom of the bath, scowling in irritation; he shook water from it, then pivoted in search of somewhere to put it down. Through the wild racket of the incessantly bleating alarm, Alonso heard Elizabeth’s furious barking down on the ground floor; he also heard wood and glass shattering.
Gerfaut had ripped open the window shutters of the study, heaved himself up onto the window ledge without the slightest precaution and driven his heel through the glass. The lights were on in the room. Gerfaut climbed through the window and ended up on the writing desk. Snarling, the bullmastiff leaped for his throat. Gerfaut discharged the Beretta into the animal’s maw. The dog was catapulted sideways into a wall, splattering it with blood. She slid along the floor, regrouped, and returned to the attack, growling horribly. Part of her lower jaw was missing, and what was left of it was all broken and twisted, yet she sprang onto the writing desk and tried to bite the intruder. Meanwhile, Gassowitz in his turn had hoisted himself onto the windowsill. Gerfaut fired three times into the dog’s body, then kicked her to the floor. Elizabeth fetched up once more against the wall, still alive, thrashing about and trying to get back up. Gerfaut began to vomit. He clambered from the desk, scattering the onionskin that Alonso used for writing his memoirs. He rushed at the dog, thrust the barrel of the Beretta against her skull and frenziedly pulled the trigger. He quickly emptied the weapon. The bullmastiff bitch was dead. Still retching, Gerfaut tore the magazine from the automatic, took another clip from his jacket pocket, reloaded, and recocked the gun.
“Oh, boy!” exclaimed Gassowitz as he contemplated the carnage.
Then Alonso burst into the study, naked, plump, and dripping wet, with a gun in one hand and a large sodden book in the other. He raised his weapon, but Gerfaut was faster and he put a bullet in Alonso’s belly. The naked man fell into a sitting position with his back against the frame of the communicating door. He let go of his gun and his book and, grimacing with pain, brought both hands to the place where the projectile had entered his body.
“I am Georges Gerfaut,” said Georges Gerfaut. “And you are Alonso Eduardo Rhadamès Philip Emerich y Emerich, am I right?”
“No, I am not! I’m not him!” said Alonso. “Oh! Oh! This hurts!”
“It’s him, all right,” said Gassowitz.
“What did you say?” asked Gerfaut, who could not hear Gassowitz on account of the still-wailing alarm, not to mention the Liszt.
“Yes!” screamed Alonso. “Yes! It is me! I’ll wipe you out! I’ll find you! I shit on you!”
The effort of shouting exhausted Alonso. He leaned his head against the door frame and began to moan softly. Gerfaut raised the Beretta. Gassowitz grabbed his arm.
“Let him suffer.”
Gerfaut lowered the gun. Blood was pouring from the naked man’s stomach.
“No, that’s intolerable,” said Gerfaut. And he brought the Beretta back up, advanced two steps, and killed Alonso instantly with a shot to the head.
Gassowitz and Gerfaut looked at one another. Then they remembered that the alarm was still howling and that this was no time to dawdle. One after the other, they clambered in turn onto the writing desk and thence onto the window ledge, before jumping back down into the wild garden. They ran, tripping over tufts of grass and bushes, until they got to the gateway. On the road outside were three men with flashlights, country people from the hamlet wearing work overalls and berets or caps.
“What’s going on?” they demanded of Gerfaut and Gassowitz as the two emerged from the property.
Gerfaut and Gassowitz pushed past the men and took off running down the road.
“Stop! Thief!” shouted the locals.
Gerfaut and Gassowitz reached the dirt road at whose entrance they had parked the old 203. They got into the car panting, hearts thumping. The locals did not give chase; they conferenced in the road and agreed that they ought to go and see what was happening at Mister Taylor’s and then later, if need be, alert the police. The 203 reversed out of the dirt road about a hundred meters from the locals, turned and drove away from them, and vanished round a bend.
“That was disgusting,” said Gerfaut.
“No,” answered Gassowitz. “It made me feel better. Because Éliane has been avenged, you know what I mean?”
“Yes, you think so?” Gerfaut’s tone was positive now.
Later, as they headed down the highway toward Paris, Gerfaut asked Gassowitz if he would drop him off at Place d’Italie when they got to the city. Which is what Gassowitz did, just after ten-fifteen that night. The two men shook hands. The 203 disappeared. Gerfaut was a stone’s throw from home, meaning from his permanent address. He walked over, took the elevator up to his floor, and rang his own doorbell. Béa opened the door to him. She opened her mouth wide and her eyes wide, and she looked at him and covered her mouth with her hand in stupefaction.
“I’m back,” said Gerfaut.
24
After Béa had asked him, tonelessly, to come in, Gerfaut went through to the living room, which had not changed. His expression was intense, preoccupied. He automatically turned on the quadraphonic system and played a record; his choice was a duet by Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh. Then he went and sat on the couch. Béa stood in the doorway of the room, looking at him. Abruptly, she turned and went into the kitchen. There she leaned for a moment against the wall. Her jaw worked as though she were speaking, but she did not speak. Finally, she came out with a gl
ass of Cutty Sark with plenty of ice and water for Gerfaut and a glass of Cutty Sark straight up for herself. Gerfaut said thank you. He was leafing through some papers on the coffee table. Among them was a six-month-old letter from his chess partner, the retired math teacher in Bordeaux, in which the latter explained to Gerfaut, in a measured way that barely concealed his underlying irritation, that he had no choice but to consider Gerfaut the loser by default in view of his failure to reply within a reasonable time to Black’s seventh move (7... Dc7). Gerfaut looked up.
“What did you say?”
“I said, where did you come from?” said Béa in a hollow voice.
“I don’t know.”
“You smell of vomit. There’s vomit on your pants. You’re filthy.” She sobbed, then rushed to Gerfaut on the couch, encircling him in her arms and pressing her body tightly against his. “Oh, my darling, my darling, my sweetheart, where have you been?”
“But it’s true. I don’t know.”
And that has been his story ever since. He claims that he doesn’t know. Though he was not the first person to use the word amnesia in his case, he now readily speaks of his memory loss when the subject comes up. According to him, he remembers nothing of his own experience between the moment on a July evening when he left his vacation house in Saint-Georgesde-Didonne to buy cigarettes and the moment on a May evening when he found himself wandering not far from his home in Paris with vomit on his pants. His account, be it said, is lent a measure of credibility by a scar on his scalp which is consistent with a gunshot wound, or a blow from a blunt instrument, that might well have administered a severe shock to the brain.
Gerfaut was interrogated several times by the police and by an examining magistrate. A judicial investigation was in fact opened into the deaths of Bastien and, particularly, of the young gas-station attendant. Gerfaut conceded the possibility of his having rented the Taunus, along with the possibility that his amnesia may have been brought on by a shock received during the mayhem at the service station. Which would mean that his memory loss was retroactive; but such a thing is not rare in the annals of medicine—far from it. Similarly, in the event of Liétard’s testifying, Gerfaut had intended to assert that he had no recollection of having visited him, nor of the content of any conversation with him, nor of any mind-boggling tale about hired killers. That was never required, however, since Liétard—who reads no newspapers and barely ever listens to the radio and is interested only in the movies—never testified, indeed did not know that Gerfaut had mysteriously disappeared from July to May, and knows nothing of it to this day.
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