To try to persuade his chief, the assistant goes on:
“We’re not the only ones concerned with this case. If we don’t act fast enough, we run the risk of finding another service pulling the rug out from under us…maybe the great Fabius himself, who will pass himself off as his country’s savior once again…and get us all arrested, if he finds out we knew the truth and concealed it …You’ll be accused” of complicity, you can be sure of that.”
But the chief does not seem convinced. He growls between his teeth, with an expression of suspicion and doubt:
“. .. the truth…the truth…the truth …”
5
Madame Jean glances cautiously toward the post office. Everything is calm along the parkway.
But everything seemed just as calm before, and yet some thing happened, here, fifty yards away, at the corner of the Rue Jonas. It had already begun in September—otherwise the commissioner would not have sent for her this afternoon. Probably she was taking part in their shady deals without even knowing it. In any case, she didn’t get anything out of it.
She certainly gave the man letters, without thinking twice about it: she had enough trouble checking the numbers on the cards, without examining the faces of the people who handed them to her. He might even have come often: the little Dexter girl obviously knew him well. He said he wasn’t the one, of course, and Madame Jean wasn’t going to say anything different! They’re big enough to get out of it by themselves. Yet she had proof of the fact that he really was the one: if he was so eager to find another post office this morning, it was because he couldn’t go back to that one, where he would have been recognized right away.
When she saw him again, after lunch, he was so tired that he had fallen asleep over his table. What had he been doing all morning long? Something else besides sending a telegram, that was sure. And why was he loitering around here again?
A doctor, Emilie said—maybe. He’s well dressed; he looks important. Madame Jean tries to imagine Wallas with the heavy glasses described by the old maid; actually it makes him into quite a likely doctor. Which obviously does not keep him from being a criminal.
“There are some funny doctors around here, you know.” That’s the truth. And who don’t know much: the epidemic proved that. But this one’s sly. He’s even managed to put the commissioner in his pocket: a little more and he’d have been running the investigation! He sounded so cocky when he answered the little Dexter girl that the poor thing didn’t dare say mother word. They don’t have much chance of finding the guilty man now.
Madame Jean thinks about this strange turn of events inwhich the guilty man himself takes charge of the investigation. Since she cannot make any headway in so confusing a supposition, she deliberately turns her eyes away—and begins thinking about something else.
6
A tremendous voice fills the hall. Projected by invisible loudspeakers, it bounces back and forth against the walls covered with signs and advertisements, which amplify it still more, multiply it, reflect it, baffle it with a whole series of more or less conflicting echoes and resonances, in which the original message is lost—transformed into a gigantic oracle, magnificent, indecipherable, and terrifying.
As suddenly as it had begun, the uproar stops, again making way for the confused murmur of the crowd.
People are hurrying in all directions. They must have guessed—or imagined they guessed—the meaning of the announcement, for the agitation has redoubled. Among the curtailed movements—each of which affects only an extremely small section of the hall—between a timetable and a ticket window from an information booth to a newsstand—or even within less defined areas, animated here and there with vague, hesitant discontinuous, aleatory movements—in the middle of this swarming mass occasionally interrupted, up to now, by some less episodic trajectory, distinct currents now appear; in one corner a single file has started across the entire hall in a decisive diagonal; farther on, scattered impulses unite in a series of calls and quick steps whose impetus clears a wide passage until it comes to a halt against one of the exits; a woman slaps a little boy, a gentleman feverishly searches through his many pockets for the ticket he has just bought; on all sides people are shouting, dragging suitcases, hurrying.
Doctor Juard has neither suitcase nor ticket. He is not interested in the train schedules. He has not understood what the loudspeaker has said. Neither his movements nor his general attitude have undergone any important change since a moment ago: he takes five steps along the wall, between the snack bar and the telephones, turns around, takes two steps in the opposite direction, glances at his watch, looks up at the big clock, continues straight ahead to the first telephone booth, turns back, stops, stands still for a few seconds…and then starts slowly toward the snack bar. He is waiting for someone who has not come.
Again the warning buzzing can be heard and suddenly the whole hall echoes to the rumbling of the divine voice. It is a clear and strong voice; one must listen to it carefully to realize that what it is saying is incomprehensible.
This last message is shorter than the previous one. It is followed by no appreciable change among the crowd. Doctor Juard, who has stood stock still, begins walking toward the row of telephone booths again.
But these words that do not seem to have achieved their purpose leave him with a vague sensation of discomfort. If the announcement was not for the travelers, perhaps it concerned him: “Doctor Juard is wanted on the telephone.” He did not imagine he could be summoned by so monstrous a voice. And upon reflection, it is indeed unlikely that the official station loudspeakers should bother to transmit personal messages between train departures.
Having reached the row of telephone booths once again, the little doctor realizes that the latter are not marked with numbers making it possible to distinguish them, and that consequently the voice could not have specified which telephone he should answer. Now he would have to pick up all the receivers, one after the other… This presents no insurmountable difficulty, and if a station employee came to ask him to account for his behavior, he would explain that no one has told him which of these telephones he was wanted on. Nothing more natural, after all. Unfortunately, he risks intercepting other messages and consequently finding himself mixed up in some new drama, as if the situation in which he is struggling were not complicated enough already. He thinks back to the unlucky day when he made the other man’s acquaintance, following an error of the same kind: he had dialed the wrong number, and immediately events had followed one another so quickly that he had not been able to disengage himself; one thing led to another and he ended up by agreeing to…Besides, the other man left him no choice.
Then was there only one surgeon in the whole town, so that Dupont too had to come to his clinic to hide out? To the clinic of Doctor Juard, the “gang doctor!” This title, though rather unsuitable in fact, corresponds none the less to the state of mind he himself has been in since that single encounter; he feels tied hand and foot; and since there is no question of his using what he knows against them, he can only see the other side of his position: he is in their hands, at their mercy. At the first slip they will get rid of this useless supernumerary. If they knew, for instance, that their latest victim has been hiding in his own clinic since last night…
Why doesn’t that Wallas get here? Juard is growing impatient. He wasn’t the one who asked for an interview; all he did was to arrange the meeting place, to keep the special agent’s investigations away from the clinic. There are too many people sniffing around the phony dead man already.
Occasionally the little doctor is astonished that the catastrophe has not already occurred. Dupont is supposed to have been dead some twenty hours by now; Juard himself, who has given him asylum…He couldn’t betray the professor’s confidence either and hand him over to his enemies. Moreover, where would he find them? He’ll use this excuse, he’ll claim he didn’t know where the bullet came from either, he’ll say… But what good would it all do? The other man isn’t u
sed to weighing the fate of his victims so long. Juard has realized from the start, without exactly admitting it to himself, that he was condemning himself by helping the professor—besides, he considered his help absurd: the other man doesn’t let himself be fooled so easily as that.
Yet nothing has happened yet today. Time is passing quite normally. Dupont is calmly waiting for the car the minister promised. As the time set for Dupont’s departure approaches, the little doctor’s confidence increases despite himself.
But now he is afraid that this Wallas—who needed him?—might spoil everything at the last minute; he is anxious about this delay that nothing in the special agent’s insistence a half-hour ago could have suggested. Juard could take advantage of it to get away without seeing him, particularly since his professional obligations do not allow him to stay here until tonight; but he cannot make up his mind to leave: the policeman might arrive from one minute to the next, and if he sees no one at the rendezvous he will go back to the Rue de Corinthe—which must be avoided at all costs.
The little doctor continues to walk back and forth between the snack bar and the telephones, five steps in one direction, five steps in the other. He does not know which side to take…he stops a moment. He glances at his watch—although he had seen the time on the big clock scarcely twenty seconds before. He sets limits beyond which he will wait no longer; but he exceeds them, one after the other—and still does not leave.
To the left of the clock is posted a sign a foot and a half high in red capital letters:
DO NOT BLOCK EXIT
Symmetrically posted, a slogan in blue letters on a yellow background: “Don’t Leave Without Taking The Times.”
All at once Juard decides someone is playing tricks on him; this notion strikes him with such violence that it gives him an almost physical sensation, analogous to that afforded by a misstep that causes a sudden loss of balance.
The man named Wallas doesn’t care about being on time at this absurd rendezvous: it’s the clinic he’s interested in! He is there at this very moment, busily rummaging through everything; since he has a search warrant, no one dares say a thing. By choosing this unexpected spot—the station—Juard has only reinforced the special agent’s suspicions, while giving free rein to his curiosity.
Perhaps there is still time to keep Dupont from being discovered. Juard has not a minute to lose. While he is crossing the hall, he thinks of a way to arrange matters, when a new cause for alarm strikes him: this Wallas is a phony policeman, he’s looking for the professor in order to kill him
The little doctor stops short in order to think.
He is in front of the newsstand, whose wares he pretends to be examining. Don’t leave without taking The Times. He steps forward on the pretext of buying the evening edition.
A customer, bending over the counter, straightens up an( steps back a little to make room for Juard in front of the tiny stand; then he exclaims:
“Oh, Doctor!” he says, “I was looking for you.”
***
Doctor Juard has now described for the third time the discovery of the burglar in the study, the revolver shot, the “flesh wound,” and death on the operating table. He knows his story by heart by this time; he is aware of repeating it more naturally than he did this morning in the commissioner’s office; and when he is asked an additional question, he furnishes the requested detail without difficulty, even if he improvises. This fiction has gradually assumed enough weight in his mind to dictate the right answers to him automatically; it continues of its own accord to secrete its own details and hesitations—just as reality would, in such circumstances. Juard is not far, at moments, from being taken in himself.
His interlocutor is not trying, moreover, to complicate his task. He furnishes the next clue appropriately: it is obvious that he is already accustomed to this version of the facts and does not dream of contesting it.
“Could you suggest from approximately what distance the shot was fired?”
“About five or six yards; it’s difficult to give an exact figure.”
“The bullet penetrated the body from in front?”
“Yes, directly in front, between the fourth and fifth ribs. For a bullet fired by a man running away, it was skillfully aimed.”
“There was no other wound, was there?”
“No, just the one.”
The dialogue moves along easily—so easily that it becomes almost disturbing, like the overly cunning camouflage of a trap. Juard wonders if Wallas does not know more than he is admitting.
Isn’t it obvious, in fact, that the special agent knows the whole truth? He wouldn’t have been transferred from the capital for just a burglary. Then what is he trying to get out of the doctor? The latter cautiously asks a few indirect questions to try to find out if it is really necessary to continue this farce; but Wallas remains immured in their original conventions, neither because he feels they are more certain or because he has not understood the signals of complicity Juard has made to him, or else for still other reasons.
The little doctor would especially like to know what kind of protection he can count on from the police. Despite the misunderstanding that burdens their conversation, he has a certain sympathy for Wallas; but he does not have the impression that his help could be very effective in dealing with so powerful an organization. He does not even wear a uniform. As for the men from the police station, though they have more apparent prestige, Juard is too close to them not to know how much he can expect from them and what he can count on there.
The relative confidence Wallas inspires in him still does not keep him from staying on the defensive: the so-called “special agent” may also be in the other man’s pay.
On the other hand, it is not impossible that his sincerity is so complete that he doesn’t even know what has really happened.
Juard returns to his clinic. He has been able to obtain neither information nor promises from Wallas. He has less and less hope of any possible help from the authorities, were things to go badly. They would be quicker to condemn him as an accomplice.
Whichever way he turns, he is just as guilty. The issue, as he sees it, is inevitably a fatal one.
Given these various dangers, the special agent, who at first inspired him with unexpected fears, now seems on reflection much less dangerous, if not exactly a savior. Juard is even about to reproach himself for his own suspicions: shouldn’t he have told the truth—of which Wallas certainly seems, after al basically ignorant…
But the little doctor then remembers the last words he spoket as he was leaving: “Sometimes you go through hell and high water to find a murderer…” He has immediately regretted them, for they applied all too clearly—much more clearly than he had planned—to the present situation. Now he is pleased at having spoken them. Wallas, thanks to him, now possesses the key to the riddle; if he considers it carefully and knows how to deal with what he finds, he will not be following a false lead. However, Juard has not felt that the special agent paid particularly close attention to his last words.
Back in the Rue de Corinthe, the doctor is going to rejoin Daniel Dupont in the little white room. As is customary in the clinic, he walks in without knocking. The professor, who has his back to the door, starts when he hears him.
“You frightened me.”
“I’m sorry,” Juard says, “I came in as if this were my own room. I don’t know what I was thinking of.”
Dupont must have been walking back and forth between the bed and the window. He looks annoyed.
“How’s the arm?” Juard asks.
“Fine, just fine.”
“Any fever?”
“No, none. I’m all right.”
“It would be better not to move around too much.”
Dupont does not answer. He is thinking about something else. He walks over to the window, pulls aside one of the curtains—only an inch or so—so as to look out into the street without being seen.
“Marchat hasn’t come back,” he sa
ys.
“He’ll be here soon,” the doctor says.
“Yes…He’ll have to hurry.”
“You’ve still got plenty of time.”
“Yes…not so much.”
Dupont lets go of the curtain. The light material falls back, getting the pattern of the embroidery appear again. Before becoming quite motionless, the curtain is still shaken by a few tiny oscillations—quickly dying away—a faint trembling.
The professor lowers his arm with a certain slowness, that of a man who has nothing else to do afterward—and therefore has no reason to move rapidly. He is waiting for someone who has not come; in order to conceal his nervousness—and to master it somewhat—he forces himself to observe this exaggerated moderation. He lowers his arm.
His hand, instead of hanging naturally, moves up his leg, hesitates at the bottom of his jacket, lifts it slightly, moves down again, rises again, passes underneath the bottom of the jacket and finally vanishes into the trouser pocket.
Dupont turns around to face the doctor.
7
He glimpses his face in the mirror over the fireplace and, beneath it, the double row of objects arranged on the marble: the statuette and its reflection, the brass candlestick and its reflection, the tobacco jar, the ashtray, the other statuette—a splendid wrestler about to crush a lizard.
The athlete with the lizard, the ashtray, the tobacco jar, the candlestick …He takes his hand out of his pocket and extends it toward the first statuette, a blind old man led by a child. In the mirror, the hand’s reflection advances to meet it. Both remain momentarily suspended over the brass candlestick—hesitating. Then the reflection and the hand come to rest, one opposite the other, calmly at equal distances from the mirror’s surface, at the edge of the marble and at the edge of its reflection.
The Erasers Page 18