He rocked dangerously in his chair, waving his arms around him, the bandage mostly unraveled and ready to fall.
“He was exaggerating,” said the captain. “But she, the young lady, what did she say to all that?”
“She?”
There was a moment of silence.
“Well, she gave it to him!”
And immediately the laughter returned, Ah! Ah! Hee! Hee! The clever little one!
“She’s a clever one! They arrived like that at the house, and he was carrying the purse like a packet of cakes, with his fingertips, practically right under his nose. Ah, ah, ah! But that’s it, that’s comedy.” Babinot changed his tone. “We weren’t thinking yet of the tragedy . . . we found it funny, comical. He was just the way we imagined the Germans before August 2, 1914, in our criminal blindness . . .” He put his head in his hands. “Oh! When I think about it! When I think that I had one of those men under my roof, at my table! Oh! He was a sergeant, you know. And here, proof of premeditation: he said to me, in his heavy Germanic accent, ‘We zhall have de var, Monsieur Papinot, we zhall have de var!’ Oh! When I think about it! But we were trusting, as honest as gold. Often, I tell myself that my son and that Kurt could find each other face to face in a battle.”
“Not likely,” said Faurel, getting up. Finally, he’d had enough.
“Not impossible,” Babinot countered, “not impossible at all. And if that came about . . .” he winked.
•
They went out toward the car where Corbin was waiting, wild with anger at Faurel and the others who were making him stay up all night after a day of traveling, as if he were a simple taxi driver. The deputy, his father, was going a bit too far. There were days when he too easily forgot the things one owes to a bastard son, where Faurel, taking his role as a staff officer too seriously, was confused and didn’t see anything more in Corbin but an ordinary soldier like the others. He’d make him pay dearly for it when the time came. As for the others, if he’d listened only to what his little heart desired, he’d have played a trick on them. To teach them something about how to live, he’d bring them as far out as possible into the countryside, five or six hours from the town, and there, he would pretend the car broke down. Playing the innocent, he would say that he’d taken the wrong road. Since there would be no one at hand to help them, the others would be obliged to go home on foot, in the night, while he, heroic soldier and faithful servant, would pretend he couldn’t leave the car and would sleep in it until the following morning. Then he’d go home half an hour later, when he was sure they couldn’t hear him. He’d been rolling these agreeable thoughts around in his head all evening, weighing the pros and cons, and he’d finally arrived at the conclusion that it was better to act as he was supposed to toward these gentlemen, the seconds, and to make his father, the real and only one responsible, in debt to him for a few hundred francs. Even the passion for revenge didn’t make Corbin lose his head for long. Having reached this conclusion, his anger lessened. And so he seemed infinitely amiable, and even subservient, going so far as to open the doors, which he never usually did, at least when he hadn’t calculated in advance how much drinking money he would make.
“If you please, gentlemen,” said Faurel.
Corbin hurried to open the gates. It really wasn’t worth it to wake the concierge for so little. And the men climbed into the car, Babinot first. He sat himself in the back, letting his entire weight sink into the seat, dead tired. Captain Plaire sat next to him. Lucien and Moka sat facing them. Corbin turned the crank. The motor rumbled. He climbed in and took the wheel.
“Safe trip!” said Faurel.
They wished him good night and the car went off.
“Oh!” cried Babinot, continuing his interrupted story, “I don’t want my son to kill him right away. No. I want him to say his bit first, and before he kills him, to . . .” Babinot made a gesture of ripping something. “Exactly. To disfigure him!”
No one responded.
“Where are we going?” said Corbin after a moment.
Who would respond first?
“No one knows?”
“Monsieur Babinot seems very tired,” said Moka, who couldn’t take anymore either. “We should perhaps go to his place first?”
Lucien agreed. But Captain Plaire had another idea.
“Would it seem inconvenient to you all to stop by Monsieur Nabucet’s house first?” he asked.
“Not at all,” said Babinot. But he was lying.
This demand seemed odd to Lucien. Tomorrow would be soon enough to reconcile Nabucet with their negotiations. But he didn’t say anything.
“Well then,” said the captain, “if our chauffeur agrees . . .”
“Oh!” Corbin replied, “what’s it to me if I turn the wheel one way or the other . . .”
There was a silence in the car following this observation. That young man’s got a funny attitude, thought the captain.
The glow of the headlights cut into deserted streets like a knife. Corbin drove as fast as he could, trying to impress his “clients” with speed.
The captain tried to recognize the location, but it was no use. They were going too fast, the night was too dark. Finally he recognized the convent wall he’d walked along with Nabucet that morning. They were getting close.
Unbelievable. The little car trip hadn’t lasted more than five minutes. It must be that the town was not, in fact, very big. And five minutes had been enough for Monsieur Babinot to fall asleep. He wasn’t snoring yet, but, hands crossed over his stomach, he let his head drop onto his shoulder. Poor Monsieur Babinot! He wasn’t used to staying up late.
“Here it is,” said Corbin.
He slowed down. The car stopped in front of Nabucet’s door.
“One moment,” said the captain, getting out. “Would you please use your . . .what do you call it? Horn?”
“Horn, yes,” said Corbin, leaning on the horn.
Now that was a good idea! If it was about playing Nabucet a little serenade, all right.
“That’s enough,” said the captain. “They’ll think it’s the last judgment.”
“Very well.”
“I don’t see any lights. I’m going to ring the bell. Is Monsieur Babinot really asleep?”
“I believe so,” said Moka.
“We’ve got to wake him up. I’m going to need him to be there, and you too, gentlemen, if you please.”
“Us?” said Lucien.
“Just for a moment.”
“Should we get out?” said Moka.
“That would be preferable.”
Babinot slept with closed fists. Now he was snoring.
“Monsieur Babinot!” said the captain, putting his hand through the door. He shook his shoulder. “Monsieur Babinot, please!”
There was no response except even louder snoring.
“Monsieur Babinot!”
What glorious dream had Babinot plunged into?
“Alert! Alert!” he suddenly cried, jumping out of his seat so fast that his head hit the roof of the car. That bang on the head must have made him remember his rascals, since he added, “Where are they? Where are they?”
Corbin turned in his seat. He shrugged, lit a cigarette. “Nuts!”
“What is it?” asked Babinot, coming back to himself a little. “Where are we?”
“In the middle of the countryside,” said Corbin.
“Countryside? How can we be in the countryside? We’re in the countryside?”
“Our mission isn’t finished, Monsieur Babinot,” said the captain. “We have a word to say to Monsieur Nabucet. That’s his door!”
“Oh!” cried Babinot, “that’s right! I must have dozed off in the car?”
“That’s it.”
Lucien and Moka got out.
“Should I get out too?” said Babinot.
“But you most of all,” the captain replied.
Only Corbin didn’t move. The captain approached Nabucet’s house, where all seemed to be sl
eeping. Not a light. He rang. Ferocious barking replied.
“Watch out. He has a terrifying dog.”
“His guard dog,” said Babinot. “I know it.”
“Do you know if he’s leashed?” asked Moka. He was scared silly. Anything but guard dogs!
“No, he’s not on a leash.”
Moka trembled. “Ring louder!”
The captain rang again. Corbin, seeing that they weren’t getting anywhere, took it upon himself to sound the horn. It was worse than the first time. The racket became unbearable. The furious howling of the dog, the horn, the bell that Plaire kept on ringing, persuaded that Nabucet didn’t want to open up, made a hullaballoo of all the devils.
Finally, two shades clicked open. Corbin stopped honking, the captain stopped pulling on the bell, and even the dog himself, leaping behind the gate like a wild beast, quieted his growls.
“What is it?” said a voice that they didn’t recognize as Nabucet’s, which gave Moka the horrible thought that they had the wrong house. “What is it?”
It was old Anna.
“We want to see Monsieur Nabucet,” said the captain.
“Oh!”
“We want to see him right away.”
“Oh! But who’s there?”
“It’s Captain Plaire speaking, Anna.”
“Give her my name too,” said Babinot, pressing the captain’s elbow. “She knows me. That’ll soften her.” He didn’t have the energy to shout himself.
“It’s Captain Plaire and Monsieur Babinot.”
“Oh!” Anna’s voice rose. “Oh! Monsieur Babinot too!”
“And two other friends. Hurry, Anna. Go wake Monsieur Nabucet. We have something very urgent to say to him.”
“I’m going, I’m going.”
“Couldn’t she have tied up the dog first?” Moka asked. He thought the dog was going to manage to jump over the gate, as he had been trying to do since he first heard them.
Widows were lighting up in the house. In front of the gate, they said nothing else. Corbin was smoking, his head on his crossed arms, leaning against the wheel.
Finally a light went on in the vestibule. And not only in the vestibule, but also outside, in front of the doorway a globe of light suspended like an antique lantern suddenly flashed. The front of the house looked chalky under the harsh light that washed over them. The sound of a key. The door opened, and Nabucet himself appeared on the threshold, wrapped in a magnificent dressing gown with braided fastenings.
“Here, Pluto,” he commanded in his sharpest voice. They saw the dog approach his master and sit right at his master’s feet. “Go inside, and try to stay calm.”
Moka let out a big sigh.
Nabucet approached with a quick step across the garden path, the sand crunching under his leather slippers. He opened the gate. “I’m overcome, gentlemen, that you took the trouble of coming so far in the middle of the night. Please come in, I pray you. He sent a worried look toward Lucien and Moka. Was it normal for the other one’s seconds to visit his opponent? It seemed irregular to him.
He opened the gate wide.
Captain Plaire and Babinot went in, took a few steps into the garden, then the captain stopped and said, “Now that I think about it, perhaps it’s not worth going inside. What do you think, Monsieur Babinot?”
“My God,” said Babinot, “I don’t understand.”
“What do you mean by that, Paul?” asked Nabucet. “You don’t want to come in?”
“No,” replied the captain.
At the same time, he took the written agreement they’d so laboriously worked on at Faurel’s out of his pocket.
“Here,” he said, “is a little piece of paper that we all wrote together, and we’re all in agreement. But this document is deficient. The duel will not take place, Nabucet. You were very careful not to tell me who your opponent was, you bastard! And now,” he said, advancing, “now you’ll have to square with me!”
And holding the agreement up to Nabucet’s face, he swiped his nose with it.
“There! I’m the one you’ll fight. Tomorrow. Tomorrow morning, two of my officer friends will be at the disposal of your seconds, and since you like swords so much, as the offended party, I hope you’ll choose swords again, you pig! Go. Go inside so I don’t have to see your filthy snout anymore. And hurry up,” shouted the captain, running after Nabucet with his hand raised.
Nabucet, frozen with surprise and terror, incapable of a gesture or a word, floundering, gave an animal cry, a sort of rabbit’s scream . . .
“Coward!” shouted the captain.
Suddenly Nabucet screeched, “It’s an ambush!” And he ran into the house as fast as he could, covering his ears with his hands. “Help! Help!”
The captain, hands on his hips, watched him run. “What a stinking little fool,” he muttered.
And the door slammed, the light went out. The only light left came from the lamps on the road.
“Quick, quick,” cried Moka, “he’ll set his dog on us!”
They all got back into the car.
Corbin watched the scene without moving. He spat his cigarette butt out the door and drove off.
Silence. And the car rolled past the walls of the convent once again.
“And now?” said Corbin after some time.
He received the order to drop off Babinot.
That one wasn’t sleeping, but worse: he’d been stupefied into silence. He still hadn’t been able to understand what he’d just seen. And Moka wasn’t very far from the same state as Babinot.
“All in a day’s work,” said Corbin.
The captain didn’t answer. No one did. And the car rolled on in the night. They dumped Babinot at his door as if he were a drunk. He even staggered, and Moka had, of course, to ring the bell for him. When Babinot returned to his wife, who had waited up for him, Moka got back in the car.
“Whose turn is it?”
They dropped off the captain first. And finally, it was agreed that they’d take Lucien to Madame de Villaplane’s. Then Moka would go to Cripure’s house. But the plans were complicated once more.
They found that the boardinghouse was in a state of extraordinary uproar. Lights were burning in all the windows, and the door to the street was wide open. Lucien had barely set foot in the foyer when he heard the noise of steps, of calls.
Moka and Corbin joined him.
By all appearances, something strange was going on in the house. They called out. But someone was coming down the stairs as fast as possible, and they found themselves nose to nose with Kaminsky—Kaminsky in his pajamas, uncombed, his face gray with fear, and a wicked gleam of joy in his eyes.
“Do you have a car?”
He’d heard them coming.
“Yes,” said Corbin.
“Good. So we can bring her. Don’t move . . .”
He was going back upstairs.
“Hey! You, sir, who I don’t even know . . .”
“Yes,” said Kaminsky, turning around.
And Corbin replied, “I’m the driver, you understand.”
Kaminsky approached, conciliatory, and he spoke to Moka. “Please, Monsieur Moka,” he said, “could you ask your friend if he’d be kind enough to drive Madame de Villaplane to the hospital?”
“That depends on what’s wrong,” said Corbin. He wasn’t going to get himself mixed up in some dirty business.
“Stuffed with sleeping pills,” said Kaminsky, in a hurry to go back to the sick woman.
“Is it serious?” said Corbin.
“Oh! Seven or eight packets . . . the stupid bitch!” he muttered, clenching his teeth . . . And he added, “You’ll stay, won’t you? You’ll let us use the car? Monsieur Moka, would you be so kind as to alert the police?”
Simone called from upstairs, “Otto! Otto! Come quick!”
Lucien looked on in wonder.
CRIPURE was sleeping.
Having abandoned Toinette’s portrait on a chair, he’d taken refuge in the kitchen. A single
thought: to lie down next to Maïa, to forget, to sleep if it was possible. He’d undressed in haste, his teeth chattering, and slipped into bed. Maïa had barely moved, sighed, and he’d stayed immobile next to her, not hoping to sleep, yet sleep had come like a blow.
In the study, the lamp burned on.
He dreamed. The Clopper had disappeared for a long time, perhaps he was even dead. No one saw him anymore. At night, no one heard his dragging step, no one heard the stones ring with the sound of his cane’s iron tip. Cripure found himself seated in a large empty room, all alone, but on the side he heard voices, what was undoubtedly Babinot’s voice, since it was so nasal. In any case, it wasn’t at the school. “And why, gentlemen, for what reeeason does he drag his foot?” asked Babinot’s voice. “Oh! I am at school,” said Cripure to himself. And, in fact, he only had to turn his head to see Babinot before him, at his lectern, and all around Babinot about thirty little Cloppers, perched on their desks like toads with golden eyes. “Why, messieurs, whyyy does he drag his foot?” repeated Babinot, a finger raised. “Because,” he repeated, leaning forward, “go on, gentlemen, go on, come now!”
“Because he jumped out the window!” the choir of little cloppers said in chorus.
“Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!” sang Babinot, to the tune of “Cadet Rousselle,” doing a pirouette, “he jumped!
“Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! he jumped!
And his little foot he bumped . . .”
And all the little cloppers started singing with him. Then there were no little cloppers. Even Babinot disappeared. Cripure found himself sitting on the terrace of a café, the Café Machin; he asked the waiter, “But, in the end, why did he jump?”
“It was when the husband came back,” the waiter replied. “It happened two thousand years ago, two thousand years, two thousand years, that that river is exactly two thousand meters wide.” Cripure wasn’t, in fact, seated at the Café Machin anymore, but instead by a river so wide he couldn’t see the other bank. The waters were yellow, muddy, and the trees planted on the banks looked like rifles. Cripure fished with a line, his head hidden under a straw hat, which oddly had the form of the police hats Maïa folded out of the newspaper, even his favorite newspaper L’Oeuvre. It wasn’t a fish Cripure was after. Something precious, he didn’t know what it was, had fallen into the water, and it was this something he was trying to reel in at the end of his rod. A boat appeared in the middle of the river, a sort of fishing boat with a blue sail, and, on the back of the ship, Nabucet’s horrible face. But only for a moment, since the ship was suddenly engulfed by the river, leaving an ironic ripple. The sail detached and flew. It lifted, raced in one long streak up to the heavens like a Bastille Day firework, sticking like a golden spike, becoming a star. And from that new star, like an aeronaut from his parachute, like a spider on the end of his thread, the Clopper solemnly sank. No more river. The black street, and the Clopper with his star in his hair, which became the street lamp. “Attention,” continued a commentator, “a terrible drama is about to unfold.” So, thought Cripure, he isn’t dead yet? And he hid behind his window shade.
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