The crippled Philippe Hodeng died in August. The country people who had witnessed the flight of the murderers of Alonso Emerich y Emerich were able to supply only a vague and useless description. No link could therefore be established between the killing of Alonso and Georges Gerfaut, and indeed no one even thought of it, any more than they thought of associating Gerfaut with the murders of Alphonsine Raguse-Peyronnet and an unidentified male carrying a false driver’s license in the name of Edmond Bron. For that double murder, committed in La Vanoise at the beginning of May, the only suspect is a certain Georges Sorel. The one person who could tell a great deal about Georges Gerfaut and what he was doing between July and May is Gassowitz, but Gassowitz has every reason in the world to lay low.
Gerfaut’s position is thus unassailable, and he knows it. As a leftist militant in his distant youth, he read manuals and personal narratives on keeping inquisitive policemen and investigating judges at bay. And he has indeed kept all such at bay, never wavering from his claim of total ignorance and always presenting himself as candid, cooperative, and agonized. Investigators have wearied of asking him questions, and interviews, after growing rare, have now ceased.
As for his professional life, he has succeeded, despite the economic crisis, in finding a management-level job at his old company. He has taken a cut in salary, and his responsibilities are fewer, but since he is a model employee, there is no doubt that after a probationary period his position and remuneration will be comparable to what they were before his disappearance.
During those ten months of Gerfaut’s absence, Béa remained faithful. After his reappearance she babied him a good deal for a time, then resumed her usual healthily detached attitude. Sexually speaking, everything is copacetic between Béa and her husband, except when Gerfaut drinks too much and takes ages to reach orgasm. Gerfaut drinks bourbon now in preference to scotch. This is the only way in which his tastes have altered, but the switch came in September, so it doesn’t appear to be linked to his disappearance. In August, the Gerfauts spent their vacation in Saint-Georges-de-Didonne, in a rented house that turned out almost by chance to be attractive and comfortable, so that Gerfaut was delighted with their stay. For a while, Béa urged Gerfaut to undergo psychoanalysis to try and discover what his mind was concealing, but she was met with an obstinate refusal and eventually gave up, and now never mentions it.
For Gerfaut, in short, things are hunky-dory. All the same, there are evenings when he drinks far too much Four Roses bourbon and then takes barbiturates, which instead of getting him to sleep plunge him into a state of ruminative agitation and melancholy. Tonight is a case in point. After making love, not very satisfactorily, with Béa, he lay awake as she fell asleep, then sat in the living room listening to Lennie Niehaus and Brew Moore and Hampton Hawes and drinking more Four Roses. In his journal he reflected that he could have been an artist or, better, a man of action, an adventurer, a Foreign Legionnaire, a conquistador, a revolutionary, the list goes on. Then he put his shoes and jacket back on and took the elevator down to the basement parking garage. He got into the Mercedes, which needed a serious overhaul after spending ten months garaged in Saint-Georges-de-Didonne, but which now runs fine. Gerfaut entered the outer ring road at the Porte d’Ivry. It is now twothirty or maybe three-fifteen in the morning, and Gerfaut is circumnavigating Paris at 145 kilometers per hour and listening to West Coast musicians, chiefly blues, on his tape deck.
There is no way of saying exactly how things will turn out for Georges Gerfaut. In a general way, you can see how things will work out for him, but not in detail. In a general way, the relations of production that contain the reason why Georges is racing along the ring road with diminished reflexes, playing the particular music he is playing, will be destroyed. Perhaps Georges will then show something other than the patience and servility that he has always shown up to now. It is not likely. Once, in a dubious context, he lived through an exciting and bloody adventure; after which, all he could think of to do was to return to the fold. And now, in the fold, he waits. If at this moment, without leaving the fold, Georges is racing around Paris at 145 kilometers per hour, this proves nothing beyond the fact that Georges is of his time. And of his space.
Jean-Patrick Manchette (December 19, 1942, Marseille – June 3, 1995, Paris) was a French crime novelist credited with reinventing and reinvigorating the genre. He wrote ten short novels in the 1970s and early 80s, and is widely recognized as the foremost French crime fiction author of that time. His stories are violent, existentialist explorations of the human condition and French society. Jazz saxophonist and screenwriter, Manchette was also a left-wing activist influenced as much by the writings of the Situationist International as by Dashiell Hammett.
Four of his novels have been translated into English. Two were published by City Lights Books: Three To Kill and The Prone Gunman, which is also available in a movie-tie in edition titled, The Gunman.
Also Available by Jean-Patrick Manchette
The Prone Gunman (original edition)
The Gunman (movie tie-in edition)
Three to Kill Page 12