Three to Kill Read online

  Three to Kill

  Jean-Patrick Manchette

  Translated from the French

  by Donald Nicholson-Smith

  CITY LIGHTS BOOKS

  SAN FRANCISCO

  Original text © 1976 by Éditions Gallimard

  This translation © 2002 by Donald Nicholson-Smith

  All rights reserved.

  Cover design and photo: Stefan Gutermuth

  Book design and typography: Small World Productions

  Editor: James Brook

  This work, published as part of the program of aid for publication, received support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Service of the French Embassy in the United States. Cet ouvrage publié dans le cadre du programme d’aide à la publication bénéficie du soutien du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères et du Service Culturel de l’Ambassade de France représenté aux Etats-Unis.

  Ourvrage publié avec l’aide du ministère français chargé de la culture—Centre national du livre.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Manchette, Jean-Patrick, 1942-

  [Petit bleu de la côte ouest. English]

  Three to kill / by Jean-Patrick Manchette ; translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-87286-395-6

  I. Title: 3 to kill. II. Nicholson-Smith, Donald. III. Title.

  PQ2673.A452 P4713 2002

  843’.914—dc21

  2001042123

  CITY LIGHTS BOOKS are published at the City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133. Visit us on the Web at www.citylights.com.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  About the Author

  1

  And sometimes what used to happen was what is happening now: Georges Gerfaut is driving on Paris’s outer ring road. He has entered at the Porte d’Ivry. It is two-thirty or maybe three-fifteen in the morning. A section of the inner ring road is closed for cleaning, and on the rest of the inner ring road traffic is almost nonexistent. On the outer ring road there are perhaps two or three or at the most four vehicles per kilometer. Some are trucks, many of them very slow moving. The other vehicles are private cars, all traveling at high speed, well above the legal limit. This is also true of Georges Gerfaut. He has had five glasses of Four Roses bourbon. And about three hours ago he took two capsules of a powerful barbiturate. The combined effect on him has not been drowsiness but a tense euphoria that threatens at any moment to change into anger or else into a kind of vaguely Chekhovian and essentially bitter melancholy, not a very valiant or interesting feeling. Georges Gerfaut is doing 145 kilometers per hour.

  Georges Gerfaut is a man under forty. His car is a steel-gray Mercedes. The leather upholstery is mahogany brown, matching all the fittings of the vehicle’s interior. As for Georges Gerfaut’s interior, it is somber and confused; a clutch of leftwing ideas may just be discerned. On the car’s dashboard, below the instrument panel, is a mat metal plate with Georges’s name, address, and blood group engraved upon it, along with a piss-poor depiction of Saint Christopher. Via two speakers, one beneath the dashboard, the other on the back-window deck, a tape player is quietly diffusing West Coast–style jazz: Gerry Mulligan, Jimmy Giuffre, Bud Shank, Chico Hamilton. I know, for instance, that at one point it is Rube Bloom and Ted Koehler’s “Truckin’” that is playing, as recorded by the Bob Brookmeyer Quintet.

  The reason why Georges is barreling along the outer ring road, with diminished reflexes, listening to this particular music, must be sought first and foremost in the position occupied by Georges in the social relations of production. The fact that Georges has killed at least two men in the course of the last year is not germane. What is happening now used to happen from time to time in the past.

  2

  Alonso Emerich y Emerich had also killed people, a good many more people than Georges Gerfaut. There is no common measure between Georges and Alonso. Alonso was born in the nineteen-twenties in the Dominican Republic. His repetitious Germanic family name tells us, just like that of his friend and close comrade-in-arms General Elías Wessin y Wessin, that his family belonged to the island’s white elite and sought to signal it in this way, to underline the purity of their blood, their complete innocence of any intermixing with inferior races, Indian, Jewish, black, or other.

  In the last days of his life, Alonso was a fiftyish man with a dark complexion, a middle-age spread, and hair dyed at the temples, living on a large farm on a vast property at Vilneuil, a hamlet thirty kilometers from Magny-en-Vexin in France. In the last days of his life, Alonso went by the name of “Taylor.” What little mail he received was addressed to Mr. (or occasionally Colonel) Taylor. The neighbors and the local merchants he had any dealings with took him for a North American or maybe a Britisher who had spent years in the colonies and made his pile in import-export.

  Alonso was indeed very rich, but his existence was wretched. He lived completely alone. Nobody worked the land on his vast estate, and there was no domestic help, for Alonso wanted none. The only people he let in the house during the brief period he spent there, which constituted the last days of his life, were two guys with limited albeit precise word power who wore dark suits and came and went, in an indiscreet and out-of-character way, aboard a bright red Lancia Beta 1800 sedan. One of the two was smaller and younger than the other, with wavy dark hair and very pretty blue eyes. Women were attracted to him. After a while they would discover that the only thing he wanted from women was to be beaten. He did not beat them in return and had absolutely no wish to penetrate them. So women would break off with him, except for the perversely sadistic ones. But he got rid of the perversely sadistic ones the moment he realized they were getting pleasure from beating him. They disgusted him, he said.

  The other guy was in his forties. He had a protruding lower jaw, a big mouthful of teeth, and desiccated hair with vivid white streaks. A scar traversed his throat in a wide arc, quite impressive. He had developed the habit of lowering his chin onto his chest to conceal it. He was tall and gangly, and this way of holding his head gave him a quite peculiar look. These two had also killed people, but there was no common measure between them and Georges Gerfaut. Nor were they at all like Alonso. For both, killing people was a second career. The younger had worked earlier in the hotel industry, first as a waiter, then as a trilingual receptionist. The other was a former soldier of fortune. Georges Gerfaut is a traveling salesman. His job is to sell expensive electrical equipment manufactured by his company, a subsidiary of ITT, to individual and institutional clients in various parts of France and Europe. He has a good knowledge of the devices he sells, for he is an engineer. As for Alonso, his trade was war. He was an officer in the Dominican army and a member of the SIM (Military Investigations Unit). The best years of his life were those from 1955 to 1960, spent at the San Isidro air base. He was not engaged in war at San Isidro. The only state with which the Dominican Republic can conveniently go to war is the republic of Haiti, because it happens to occupy the same island as the Dominican Republic. All other countries are separated from the Dominican Republic by at the very least a large stret
ch of water. But in those years there was no war even with Haiti. Alonso was very comfortable with this. At the San Isidro air base, in concert with his colleague and buddy Elías Wessin y Wessin (the base commander and a man destined to play a slightly historical if ever so mediocre role), he would send planes of the Dominican air force as far as Puerto Rico, whence they returned bearing liquor and other goods thus liberated from the burden of import duty. Alonso and Elías lived like kings. And they were untouchable. For while Santo Domingo, in contrast to many other places, was untouched by war with any foreign power, here as everywhere social war was a fact of life. And here as everywhere the chief function of the armed forces was to prevail in the social war whenever the need arose. In this connection, the intelligence-gathering role of the SIM was essential. To San Isidro were regularly brought persons suspected of collusion with the class enemy, and the job of the SIM under Alonso’s direction was to make them talk by beating them, raping them, slicing them up, electrocuting them, castrating them, drowning them in places ingeniously designed for the purpose, and cutting their heads off.

  On 30 May 1961, Trujillo the Benefactor of the Fatherland got himself riddled with bullets on a road by a commando group whose members, along with some accomplices, were later apprehended. For Alonso and Elías the halcyon days were over, or almost. The sons of the Benefactor held on for 180 days; subsequently, under Balaguer’s presidency, Alonso and Elías got the chance to prepare for the 1962 elections by massacring peasants in Palma Sola and eliminating the loyalist General Rodríguez Reyes. After the small-time democrat Juan Bosch was elected, Elías ousted him in favor of Donald Reid Cabral, Santo Domingo representative of the CIA—and of Austin cars. Less than two years later, Elías saw clearly that the democratic ex-cop Caamano would bring a revolution in his wake, and he had a wild old time unleashing his tanks, Mustangs, and Meteors, which were deployed notably in Santo Domingo’s northern suburbs. These were the most dangerous areas, with their workers’ militias and other swine plundering (horresco referens) the great Pepsi-Cola plant near the cemetery for bottles with which to make Molotov cocktails. The Americans, however, who just like Elías had perceived the real danger behind Caamano’s moderate and so to speak Kennedyesque pronouncements, and consequently furnished Elías with overwhelmingly decisive support in terms of logistics, arms, munitions, helicopters, aircraft carriers, marines, an air bridge (1,539 flights), and a lousy stinking “neutral” corridor—the Americans, once victory was assured, promptly ditched Elías and exiled him to Miami. Tough.

  Alonso, for his part, had been out of it since 1962. Alonso did not share Elías’s thirst for power, merely his love of luxury. He had overseen the departure of the Benefactor’s family, complete with corpse, national archives, and a truly amazing amount of money. This task had given him ideas. As the 1962 elections brought Juan Bosch to power, Alonso flew off to exile and to the vast pile of dough that he had sent on ahead.

  It is possible that Alonso’s mind deteriorated over the next few years—years for him of ever-more-hasty house moving. Or perhaps, after all, he had been a near-dimwit from the outset. It is well to bear in mind that even at the pinnacle of his power he was nothing more than a high-ranking military policeman, for this makes it less startling to contemplate him in the last years of his life, terrorized, admitting no one to his house, no gardener or household help, lest it be an agent of the CIA, of the Dominican government, or of some group of exiled Dominican revolutionaries. Truth to tell, Alonso was getting old. By the time he settled in France, not far from Magny-en-Vexin, he was a broken man. Broken enough, at any rate, to decide that he would not move again. Let us remember, too, that here was someone who, faced by the widow of an executed man refusing to believe her husband was dead, sent her the man’s head through the mail, with a little something stuffed in its mouth. One would have to say that, even if Alonso’s specific fears were unjustified, their basis was rational enough.

  Not even the postman was allowed in: what scarce mail arrived had to be delivered to a box at the edge of the road, outside the barred entrance to the property. And, just in case the mail carrier might be tempted to overstep this rule, as indeed for any comparable eventuality, Alonso kept a dog trained for fighting, a bullmastiff bitch.

  The land around the residence thus lay fallow, producing nothing, while the interior of the house, in the absence of any staff to look after things, fell likewise into disrepair. The locals grumbled to see the land going to waste and several times contemplated a protest. No doubt they would eventually have mounted one had not Alonso’s death settled the question.

  Until that moment, in the last days of his life, Alonso generally gave up trying to sleep at about five or six o’clock in the morning. He would leave his disordered bed and his upstairs bedroom. In the large kitchen, he would assemble a full-scale English breakfast for himself: fruit juice, cereal with milk, and a plate of fried food accompanied by strong tea; he finished off with rounds of toast that he cut in half on the slant and then spread with a thin layer of butter and a film of honey or marmalade.

  After his breakfast, Alonso would pull on a tracksuit and run for a long time with short little strides across his property, across his land overrun by wild growth, in company with the bullmastiff bitch, whose name was Elizabeth. Then he went back indoors and did not budge for the rest of the day, save in response to a ring of the bell by a delivery person. In that event, he would first observe the barred entrance gate from a ground-floor window through very powerful binoculars. Once satisfied, he would leave the house and go down to the gate armed with a .38 caliber Colt officer’s target pistol and take the delivery. He never allowed the delivery person onto the property and would carry provisions up to the house himself. Sometimes the said provisions were heavy—cases of whisky, for example—and Alonso would sweat profusely, and uncontrollable trembling would seize his calves or the side of his mouth.

  In the living room of the residence was a West German stereo system manufactured by Sharp. This Alonso dusted fastidiously, even though the rest of the house’s furniture and fittings were almost never cleaned and were now irrevocably covered by a layer of grease and grime. Alonso likewise dusted the quadraphonic speakers set up pretty much throughout the house, so that recordings could be heard everywhere, even in the two toilets and the two bathrooms. His tastes in music were very different from those of Georges Gerfaut. His LP collection fell into three categories. First, high classical: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven. Second, syrupy American popular singers: Mel Tormé or Billy May. Alonso never played anything from these two categories, however. What he played, from the moment he returned from his walk with Elizabeth, was Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn, or Liszt.

  As he listened to this music, Alonso would be sitting in his study on the ground floor; his land, so thoroughly overgrown, would be spread out behind his ever-closed windows; his Colt officer’s target pistol would be lying on the corner of his work desk; and he would be writing his memoirs with a Parker fountain pen on sheets of onionskin. He wrote very slowly. Sometimes he failed to complete so much as a page in ten or fifteen hours of work.

  He ate no lunch. Every evening around six-thirty he dined on canned food and fruit in the kitchen. Then he put the dirty dishes in a dishwasher already containing those left from breakfast. Alonso would go on working for a couple of more hours, then turn off the music, start the dishwasher, go upstairs with a book, and lie down on his still unmade and rumpled bed. He would wait for sleep to come, but oftentimes it did not. He would hear the dishwasher below going through the phases of its cycle, pausing and clicking. He would read indiscriminately in English, Spanish, or French—for the most part, the memoirs of military men or statesmen: Liddell Hart, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle; or else war novels, especially C.S. Forester. He also had a stack of back numbers of Playboy. Now and again he masturbated without much success. Several times each night he got up and wandered through the house, book in hand, middle finger keeping his place, and his limp member as ofte
n as not dangling from his pajama fly. He would check to see that all the windows were properly closed. They always were. And he would give Elizabeth an extra helping of food.

  Georges Gerfaut also killed Elizabeth.

  3

  Georges Gerfaut was traveling on Route Nationale 19 in his Mercedes. He had just passed Vendeuvre and was approaching Troyes in the middle of the night, his two speakers serving up John Lewis, Gerry Mulligan, and Shorty Rogers. To left and right a wall of shadows fled past at 130 kilometers per hour. Then the Citroën DS overtook him.

  It had given scant forewarning: a last-moment flash of its headlights, then the Citroën zipped passed the Mercedes on a blind curve, wobbled slightly as it swung back into the lane, and vanished round the next bend in less time than it took Gerfaut to say what an asshole.

  Ten minutes passed before he saw the car again. In the meantime, nothing had happened, except that he had passed an old Peugeot van with inadequate lights and been passed by a little bright red sports car, probably Italian. That was all. But now suddenly his beams picked up something at the edge of the darkness. At the same time, Gerfaut saw stationary taillights on the road up ahead; he eased up on the gas; the taillights began to move and were soon literally swallowed up by the night (or perhaps they had never been stationary in the first place and some trick of the darkness had fooled him). The Citroën, in any case, was not only stationary but off the road, one fender in the ditch, the other all twisted and misshapen and rammed up against a tree trunk. A torn-off door, hurled ten or twelve meters farther along, lay half on the roadway, half on the grass, its window shattered. All this Gerfaut took in at a glance, as the Mercedes, still doing eighty, cruised past the wreckage. He was tempted to speed up. What held him back was less a sense of the proprieties, or some categorical imperative, than the idea that the people in the Citroën were no doubt there in the darkness noting his plate number and liable to report him for failing to come to the aid of a person or persons in danger. Gerfaut braked, not quickly, indeed with a distinct lack of conviction, and pulled up eighty or a hundred meters farther on.