The Erasers

by Alain Robbe-Grillet

  “Anna doesn’t read the papers; and besides she’s leaving the city today to go to her daughter’s, she’ll be out of the way of indiscreet questions. As for my murderer, he only saw me lock myself into my room; he couldn’t know where he hit me. He’ll be all too happy to learn of my death.”

  “Of course, of course…But you say yourself that they’re so perfectly organized, that their information service…”

  “Their main advantage is that they believe in their strength, in their success. We’ll help them believe it this time. And since the police have been quite powerless up to now, we’ll do without them, at least temporarily.”

  “All right, all right, if you think…”

  “Listen, Marchat, I talked to Roy-Dauzet tonight on the phone, for almost an hour. We’ve weighed our decision and all its consequences. It’s our best chance.”

  “Yes…Maybe…And suppose your conversation had been tapped?”

  “We’ve taken the necessary precautions.”

  “Yes…precautions…of course.”

  “Let’s get back to those papers: I absolutely have to take them with me tonight and I obviously can’t go back there myself. I’ve sent for you to ask you to do this favor for me.”

  “Yes, yes…of course…But here again, you see, it’s really a policeman’s job. …”

  “Not really, not at all! Besides, it’s impossible now. What have you to be afraid of, anyway? I’m giving you the keys and you’ll go there quietly this afternoon, after Anna leaves. All you have to do is fill a couple of briefcases. You’ll bring them straight back here. I’ll leave from here around seven, in the car Roy-Dauzet is sending; I’ll be at his place before midnight.”

  The little doctor stands up and straightens his white smock.

  “You don’t need me now, do you? I’m going to see one of my expectant mothers. I’ll stop by again later.”

  The timorous overcoat stands up too and shakes his hand: “Good-bye, Doctor.”

  “My pleasure, Monsieur.”

  “Do you trust that man?”

  The wounded man glances at his arm:

  “He seems to have done his work well.”

  “No, I’m not talking about the operation.”

  Dupont makes a broad gesture with his good arm:

  “What do you want me to tell you? He’s an old friend; besides, you’ve noticed he’s not very talkative!”

  “No, not…certainly not very talkative.”

  “What do you think? That he’s going to turn me in? Why? For money? I don’t think he’s stupid enough to get mixed up in this business more than he has to. All he asks is to see me leave as soon as possible.”

  “He looks…He doesn’t seem…how can I put it?…He looks wrong.”

  “Don’t exaggerate. He looks like a slightly overworked doc^ tor, that’s all.”

  “They say…”

  “Of course, they say! Besides, they say it about every gynecologist in the country, or just about. And besides, what does that have to do with it?”

  “Yes…of course.”

  A pause.

  “Marchat, tell me the truth, you really don’t want to go get those papers, do you?”

  “Yes I do…oh yes I just think it isn’t…exactly safe.”

  “It is for you! That’s just why I’m not asking someone in the group to do it. They don’t have anything against you! You know they don’t kill just anyone whenever they feel like it. In the last nine days there’s been a murder committed regularly, between seven and eight at night, every day, as if they had made this little detail into a rule. I’m yesterday’s victim and my case seems to have been closed. Today they’ve chosen their new victim, and it’s obviously not you—it probably won’t even be in this city. Besides, you’ll be going to my house in broad daylight, when no one has anything to fear.”

  “Yes, yes…Of course.”

  “Will you go?”

  “Yes, I’ll go…as a favor to you…if you think it’s essential.…I don’t want to look like I’m working for your group either This is no time to seem to be on too good terms with you…is it? Don’t forget, I’ve never agreed with you on fundamental issues… I’m not saying this in defense of…of these…of this…”

  The doctor listens to the regular breathing. The young woman is sleeping. He will come back in an hour. It is just eight. Dupont will not leave the clinic until seven tonight, he said. Why did Dupont have to call him in? Any doctor…Bad luck.

  Seven tonight. A long day. Why do people always call him in

  for things like this? Refuse? No, he has already accepted. He

  will do what is asked of him one more time. And then? With

  the other one, he had not had any choice! All he needed was

  this new problem

  The other one. It’s not so easy to get away from him. Wait.

  Until seven tonight.

  Why does Dupont have to get his friends mixed up in a mess like this! Marchat decides it’s just nerve; and he is supposed to seem pleased into the bargain! What about his wife? Why couldn’t she go? He has plenty of time to meet her; she or anyone else, until seven tonight.

  About to leave the little white room, he turns back toward the wounded man:

  “And your wife—she knows about this?”

  “The doctor has informed her of my death by letter. It was more correct. You know we haven’t met for a long time. She won’t even ask to see ‘my remains.’ On that score, everything’s going to be fine.”

  Evelyn. What is she doing now? Maybe she will come anyway, why not? A dead man’s not exactly her type, though. Who else might try? But no one will know which clinic. They just have to say it’s not this one. Until seven tonight.

  5

  Since they all agree, it’s perfect. Commissioner Laurent closes the dossier and lays it with satisfaction on the pile to the left. The case is closed. Personally, he has no desire to get involved with it.

  The investigations he has had made already have not produced the slightest result. Many distinct fingerprints left all over the place, as though intentionally, have been picked up; they must belong to the murderer, but they do not match anything registered in the enormous police file. The other details collected have offered no suggestion as to what lead to follow. Nothing has been brought in by the usual informers either. Under such conditions, where do you start? It’s highly unlikely that the murderer belongs to the criminal circles of the port or the city: the file is too complete and the informers too numerous for a criminal to be able to escape their networks altogether.

  Laurent knows this from long experience. At this hour he would normally have heard something already.

  What then? A chance beginner? An amateur? A lunatic? Such cases are so rare; and besides, amateurs always leave traces and can be picked up right away. One solution, obviously, would be that they were dealing with someone coming from far away just to commit this murder, and then leaving immediately after. Yet his work seems a little too well done not to have required a good deal of preparation….

  After all, if the central services want to take the whole thing over themselves, even to the point of taking away the victim’s body before an inquest, it’s all right with him. He is certainly not going to complain. For him, it’s as if the crime had never happened. After all, if Dupont had committed suicide it would have come down to exactly the same thing. The fingerprints could be anyone’s, and since no one alive saw his attacker…

  Better still: nothing at all has happened! A suicide still leaves behind a corpse; and now the corpse is vanishing without a word, and his superiors are asking him to keep out of it. Perfect!

  No one has seen anything, heard anything. There is no victim. As for the murderer, he has fallen from the sky and must be far away by now, well on his way back to wherever he came from.

  6

  The scattered fragments, the two corks, the little piece of blackened wood: now they look like a human face, with the bit of orange peel for the mouth.
The oil slick finishes off a grotesque clown’s face, a Punch-and-Judy doll.

  Or else it is some legendary animal: the head, the neck, the breast, the front paws, a lion’s body with its long tail, and an eagle’s wings. The creature moves greedily toward a shapeless prey lying a little farther on. The corks and the piece of wood are still in the same place, but the face they formed a moment ago has completely disappeared. The greedy monster too. Nothing remains, on the canal’s surface, but a vague map of America; and even that only if charitably interpreted.

  “And suppose he turns the light on again before opening the door wide?” Bona, as usual, was not willing to admit the objection. There was nothing to argue about. Still, it turned out, as a matter of fact, as if Dupont had turned the light on again: even if Garinati had been able to turn out the light in plenty of time, suppose Dupont, coming in, had turned on the light again before pushing the door all the way open—it came down to the same thing. He would have been seen in the room with the light on, anyway.

  Besides! Bona has made a mistake in any case: Since he—to whom the job had been entrusted—had not turned out the light.

  Forgotten? Or done on purpose? Neither one nor the other. He was going to turn out the light; he was going to do it just at that moment. Dupont came back upstairs too soon. What time was it exactly? He did not act fast enough, that’s all; and all things considered, if he did not have time enough, it was still a mistake in calculation, a mistake of Bona’s. How is he going to fix that now?

  Dupont was wounded, apparently. But not seriously enough to keep him from running away, getting out of danger; Garinati distinctly heard him turning the key in the lock. There was nothing else for him to do but leave. The gray carpet, the twenty-two steps, the shiny banister with its brass finial at the end. Things lost a little of their consistency again. The revolver shot made such a funny noise; unreal; phony. It was the first time he had used a silencer. Ping! Like an air pistol; not loud enough to scare a fly. And right afterward everything was filled with cotton.

  Maybe Bona knows already. From the papers? It was too late for the morning papers; and who would bother to report this nonexistent crime? “Attempted murder: a marauder fired a silent pistol at a harmless professor “ Bona always knows.

  Coming home the night before, Garinati found a note in his chief’s handwriting. “Why didn’t you come afterward, the way we’d planned? I have a job for you: they’re sending a special agent. A Monsieur Wallas who’ll take a room in the theater of operations. You should have come this morning! Everything’s going fine. I’ll expect you Tuesday morning at ten. J.B.” It was as if he had already heard about the success of the job. The fact is, that he does not imagine that it could have failed. When he has made up his mind about something, it can only happen the way he has planned. “You should have come this morning.” No! It’s time for him to come now.

  He has not had much trouble catching up with him, this Wallas, but he missed him, him too. He’ll find him again easily. But for what? To tell him what? Early this morning, methodically looking for him in the neighborhood, Garinati kept feeling he had something urgent to tell him; he no longer knows what it was. As if he had been told to help him in his task.

  All right, first of all he would have to decide how he was going to make up for yesterday’s bad luck. Rendezvous at ten. Bona attached a lot of importance to the day and the time when Dupont was supposed to have been killed. Too bad; for once he will have to put up with it. And the others Garinati does not know, the whole organization around Bona, even above him, that huge machine—is it going to be stopped just because of him? He will explain that it was not his fault, that he did not have time, that it did not work out the way it had been planned. But nothing is lost: tomorrow, tonight maybe, Dupont will be dead.

  Yes.

  He will go back and wait for him behind the spindle-tree hedge, in the study full of books and papers. He will go back there freely, clearheaded and revived, careful, “weighing each of his footsteps.” On the desk is lying the cube of stone with its rounded corners, its faces polished by wear….

  The ruined tower lit up by the storm.

  Twenty-one wooden steps, one white step.

  The tiles of the hallway.

  Three slices of ham on a plate, through the half-open door.

  The dining room shutters are closed; the kitchen shutters too, a faint gleam filtering through their slats.

  He walks on the lawn to avoid making the gravel crunch on the path, which he could see because it was paler than the two flower beds on either side. The study window, in the middle of the second story, is brightly lighted. Dupont is still up there.

  The buzzer that makes no noise, at the gate.

  Five to seven.

  The endless Rue des Arpenteurs, invaded by the smell of herring and cabbage soup, from the dark suburbs and the muddy checkerboard of paths between the miserable shacks.

  At nightfall, Garinati has wandered around, waiting until it’s time, among this filthy vegetation of latrines and barbed wire. He has left Bona’s written instructions, long since learned by heart, in his room.

  These papers—exact sketches of the garden and the house, minute descriptions of the premises, details of the operations to be performed—these papers are not in Bona’s handwriting; he has written out only certain items concerning the murder proper. As for the rest, Garinati does not know who the author is; who the authors are, rather, for several people must have gone into the house to make the necessary observations there, discover the arrangement of furniture, study the domestic habits, and even the behavior of each board underfoot. And someone has silenced the buzzer at the gate during the afternoon.

  The little glass door has made a deep creak. In his rush to escape, Garinati has opened it a little wider than he should have.

  It still remains to be seen if…

  Go back without waiting. The old deaf woman is alone now. Walk back up there and find out for himself. The room being in darkness, find out at exactly what moment the unexpected hand turns on the light.

  Anyone else, in his place…Unexpected. His own hand.

  The murderer always returns

  And if Bona finds out? He shouldn’t be hanging around here either! Bona. Bona…Garinati has straightened up. He starts across the bridge.

  It looks as though it were going to snow.

  Anyone else in his place, weighing each of his footsteps, would come, clearheaded and free, to carry out his task of ineluctable justice.

  The cube of gray lava.

  The buzzer silenced.

  The street that smells of cabbage soup.

  The muddy paths that disappear, far away, among the rusty corrugated iron.

  Wallas.

  “Special agent…”

  CHAPTER ONE

  1

  Wallas is leaning against the rail, at the end of the bridge. He is still a young man, tall, calm, with regular features. The clothes he is wearing and his idle air provide, in passing, a vague subject of remark for the last workmen hurrying toward the harbor: at this time, in this place, it does not seem quite natural not to be wearing work clothes, not to be riding a bicycle, not to look hurried; no one goes for a walk on Tuesdays early in the morning, besides, no one goes for a walk in this neighborhood. Such independence of the place and the time has something a little shocking about it.

  Wallas himself thinks how chilly it is and that it would be pleasant to warm himself up by pedaling across the smooth asphalt, swept on by his own momentum; but he stands where he is, clinging to the iron railing. The heads, one after the other, turn toward him. He adjusts his scarf and buttons his overcoat collar. One by one the heads turn away and disappear. He has not been able to get breakfast this morning: no coffee before eight in that café where he has found a room. He glances mechanically at his watch and notices that it has not started again; it stopped last night at seven-thirty, which has not made things easier for his trip or for anything else. It stops every once in a w
hile, he does not really know why—sometimes after a shock, not always—and then starts again afterward, all by itself, with no more reason. Apparently there is nothing broken inside, it can also run for several weeks at a stretch. It is unpredictable, which is rather annoying at first, but you can get used to it. It must be six-thirty now. Is the manager thinking about going up to knock at the door as he promised? Just in case, Wallas has wound the traveling alarm clock he had taken the precaution to bring along, but he has awakened a little earlier anyway: since he was not sleeping, he might as well begin right away. Now he is alone, as though left behind by the wave of bicyclists. Before him, vague in the yellow light, extends the street along which he has just walked before turning the corner onto the parkway; to the left an imposing five-story apartment building with a stone facade stands at the corner, and facing it a brick house surrounded by a narrow garden. It was there that this Daniel Dupont was killed yesterday by a bullet in the chest. For the time being, Wallas does not know any more than that.

  He arrived late, last night, in this city he scarcely knows. He had been here once already, but only for a few hours, when he was a child, and he does not have any very precise memory of the place. One image has remained vivid to him, the dead end of a canal; against one of the quays is moored an old wreck of boat—the hull of a sailboat? A low stone bridge closes off the canal. Probably that wasn’t exactly right: the boat could not have passed under the bridge. Wallas continues on his way toward the center of the city.

  Having crossed the canal, he stops to let pass a streetcar returning from the harbor, its new paint gleaming—yellow and red with a gold coat-of-arms; it is completely empty: people are going in the other direction. Having reached Wallas, who is waiting to cross the street, the car stops too, and Wallas finds himself facing the iron step; then he notices beside him the disk attached to a lamppost: “Streetcar Stop” and the figure 6 indicating the line. After ringing a bell, the car starts up again slowly, its machinery groaning. It seems to have finished its trip. Last night, as he came out of the station, the streetcars were so jammed that he was unable to pay his fare before getting off; the conductor could not walk through the car because of the suitcases. The other riders informed him, with some difficulty, of the stop nearest this Rue des Arpenteurs, of whose existence most of them seemed quite unaware; someone even said that it was not in this direction at all. He had to walk a long time along the badly lighted parkway, and once he found it, he noticed this café that was still open, where they gave him a room, not very luxurious of course, but good enough. He was quite lucky actually, because it would not have been easy to find a hotel in this deserted neighborhood. “Furnished Rooms” was written in enamel letters on the window, but the manager hesitated before answering; he seemed annoyed, or in a bad mood. On the other side of the embankment Wallas turns into a street paved with wood, which must lead toward the center of town; “Rue de Brabant” is written on the blue plaque. Wallas has not had time, before leaving, to get hold of a map of the city; he plans to do so this morning as soon as the stores open, but he is going to take advantage of this respite he has before going to the police station, where normal service does not begin until eight, to try and find his way alone through the labyrinth of streets. This one seems important despite its narrowness: apparently long, it dissolves into the gray sky in the distance. A real winter sky; it looks as though it were going to snow.