Three to Kill Read online

  Up ahead a pair of taillights—the Italian sports car? was it perhaps a Lancia Beta?—had just been enveloped by the night. Gerfaut looked about nervously, could see nothing behind but blackness. The Citroën, too, had vanished. Still gripped by the desire to continue on his way, he groaned between his teeth, shifted into reverse and backed up, zigzagging slightly, to the scene of the accident.

  He pulled over onto the shoulder between two trees, alongside the detached car door. From the cassette player came “Two Degrees East, Three Degrees West.” Gerfaut turned it off. He was possibly about to discover horribly mutilated corpses, a little girl with braids sticky with blood or people holding their guts in with both hands. Not the sort of thing you did to a musical accompaniment. He got out of the Mercedes with his waterproof electric flashlight and pointed it directly toward the Citroën. To his relief, he saw only a man, and he was standing up. A small man, with frizzy blond hair, the first signs of baldness, a sharp nose, and round glasses with plastic frames. The right lens was clearly cracked. The man was wearing a reefer and rough brown corduroy pants. He looked at Gerfaut with big frightened eyes. He was leaning against the hood of the Citroën and panting.

  “Hey, there,” said Gerfaut. “How are you doing? Are you hurt?”

  The man moved vaguely, perhaps nodding, then almost fell. Gerfaut approached anxiously. His gaze fell by chance on a damp, dark area on the man’s side that was just becoming discernible against the dark wool of his jacket.

  “You’re bleeding from your side.” Gerfaut’s mind spontaneously produced the odor of blood and its taste, and he thought, my God, I’m going to throw up.

  “Hospital,” said the man, and his lips continued to move, but he managed to add nothing more.

  It was the man’s left side that was bleeding. Gerfaut grasped his right arm, wrapped it around his own neck, and tried to hold up the injured man as he led him over to the Mercedes. A car of indeterminate make screeched by at high speed.

  “Can you walk?”

  The injured man made no reply, but he walked. Drops of sweat gathered below his receding hairline and on his upper lip where short whiskers grew.

  “S’pose they come back?” the man mumbled.

  “What? What’s that?”

  But the man would not or could not speak anymore. They reached the Mercedes. Gerfaut helped the injured man lean against the car and opened the right rear door. Grasping the backrest, the man hauled himself slowly onto the seat, where he lay on his back.

  “Shit! Shit! I’m bleeding,” he said with a mixture of regret and rancor. He spoke like a working-class Parisian.

  “You’ll be okay. You’ll be okay.”

  Gerfaut pushed the injured man’s legs in farther, slammed the back door, and climbed briskly into the driver’s seat. He was thinking that the blood would soil the leather upholstery; or perhaps he was thinking nothing. The Mercedes started up. During the journey Gerfaut said very little, and the injured man said nothing at all.

  They were at Troyes in less than ten minutes. It was twelvetwenty. There was not a cop to be seen. Gerfaut hailed a tardy passerby, who directed him to the hospital. The passerby was drunk, and the directions were confusing. Gerfaut almost missed the way, losing time. In the back, with great difficulty but without audible complaint, the injured man had removed his jacket. Beneath it he wore a black polo-neck pullover. He had folded his jacket in four and was pressing it to his side to stanch the bleeding. Just as they arrived at the hospital, he passed out. Gerfaut parked hurriedly at the entrance to Emergency. He leaped from the car and entered an ill-lit lobby.

  “A stretcher! A stretcher, quickly!” he shouted and returned to the car to open the rear doors.

  Nobody came out of the hospital. To the right of the lobby Gerfaut found a large glassed-in reception area with two girls in white blouses behind a counter and four other people: an Algerian and an old couple sitting on tubular-metal-and-plastic chairs and a guy in his thirties with a white complexion and flaccid cheeks, in a suit but no tie, leaning against the wall and biting his nails.

  “Come on! For Christ’s sake!” yelled Gerfaut.

  Two male nurses appeared in the lobby with a gurney.

  “We’re coming!”

  Efficiently, they lifted the injured man out of the car, laid him on the gurney, and left at top speed through the lobby. Before they disappeared, one of the nurses turned to Gerfaut, who was hesitantly following in their wake.

  “You need to register him, okay?”

  Gerfaut was by now standing some four or five meters inside the lobby, close to the side door leading to the reception area. The aged couple and the Algerian had not budged. The tieless thirty-year-old man had stepped up to the counter. He had a form in front of him and a ballpoint in his hand, and he was talking animatedly with one of the girls in blouses.

  “I don’t know her,” he was saying. “I found her lying on my doormat. I could see that she’d been taking something; I couldn’t leave her like that; I brought her here in my car, yes, but I don’t know who she is, I don’t know her, I don’t even know her name. I can’t help it if she decided to commit suicide on my doorstep, can I?”

  Sweat was running down his pale forehead.

  Gerfaut got out a Gitane filter and slowly retraced his steps, trying his best to appear inconspicuous, his gaze directed vaguely toward the floor. He need not have bothered: no one was paying him the slightest attention. Once outside, he got back in his car and drove off in a hurry.

  A moment or two later, a medical resident and a bareheaded policeman burst agitatedly into the reception area and loudly demanded to know where the person was who had brought in the man with gunshot wounds.

  4

  “It’s stupid. You must be mad,” said Béa.

  Béa was Béatrice Gerfaut, née Changarnier, by background Catholic on one side and Protestant on the other, Bordelaise on one side and Alsatian on the other, bourgeois on one side and bourgeois on the other; by profession a freelance press agent, formerly a teacher of audiovisual techniques at the University of Paris at Vincennes and, before that, manager of a health-food store in Sèvres—a superb and horrible mare of a woman: bigboned and elegant; with big green eyes; thick, healthy, long black hair; big, hard white breasts; wide, round white shoulders; a big, hard creamy ass; a big, hard white belly; and long, muscular thighs. At this moment, Béa stood in the middle of the living room wearing sea-green silk day pajamas with flappy elbowlength sleeves, feet bare on the plum-colored carpet beneath the immense flares of the pants. She began to pace up and down the room, trailing wisps of Jicky perfume behind her.

  “You mean you left just like that, without a word to anyone? You didn’t give your name? You don’t know the guy’s name? You didn’t even say where you found him? Do you have any idea what you’re telling me?”

  “I don’t know what it was,” said Gerfaut. “All of a sudden I was sick of it. Everything was just pissing me off. It’s a feeling I get now and then.”

  He was sitting on a leather-and-canvas sofa with decorative strapping. He had been there for just a few minutes. He had taken off his jacket and tie and undone his shoelaces. In pants and shirt, his collar open and his shoes loose, he sank back into the couch, a glass of Cutty Sark loaded with ice cubes and drowned in Perrier precariously balanced on his left knee, a Gitane filter in the corner of his mouth, and sweat stains at each armpit. Vaguely perplexed, he had an urge to laugh.

  “Sick of it?” protested Béa. “Pissed off?”

  “Look, I just wanted to get out of there.”

  “What a dope!”

  “That,” said Gerfaut, “is quite beside the point.”

  “Absolutely not. What must they have thought? You show up with a car-accident victim and then you run off. Tell me this, what are they supposed to think?!”

  “He could explain it himself. Anyway, screw it.”

  “What if he didn’t know what happened to him? What if he was in shock? Or dead?”


  “Stop shouting—you’ll wake the kids up.” It was past four in the morning.

  “I’m not shouting!”

  “All right, but you don’t have to be so damn rude.”

  “You mean assertive.”

  “No, I mean rude!”

  “Look who’s shouting now!”

  Gerfaut picked up his glass and forced himself to drain it slowly without taking a breath, his Gitane filter clasped upright between thumb and right index finger, filter downward on account of a long cylinder of ash that was threatening to fall on the floor, there being no ashtray to hand.

  “Listen,” he said, when he had finished the drink, “we’ll think it all over tomorrow. I haven’t killed anybody, I did what I had to do, and more than likely we’ll never hear any more about it.”

  “For God’s sake!”

  “Béa, please. Tomorrow, okay?”

  His wife seemed about to explode. Or, possibly, to burst out laughing—for, despite appearances, Béa was not what you would call a nag or a ball buster: as a rule she was outgoing and self-assured. After a moment, she turned away in silence and disappeared into the kitchen. The ash of Gerfaut’s Gitane fell onto the carpet. He got up and stamped on it, rubbing, spreading, erasing its traces with his shoe, then went over to the Sanyo stereo and began very quietly playing Shelley Manne with Conte Candoli and Bill Russo. Recrossing the room, he crushed his cigarette out in an alabaster ashtray, which he took back with him to the sofa, then he sat down again and lit another Gitane filter with his Criquet lighter. The quadraphonic speakers softly dispensed soft music. Gerfaut smoked and contemplated the living room, only a portion of whose lighting, the dimmest, was on at present. An elegant penumbra consequently enveloped the armchairs and matching sofa; the coffee table; the off-white plastic cubes bearing a cigarette box, a scarlet plastic lamp in the form of a mushroom, and recent issues of L’Express, Le Nouvel Observateur, Le Monde, Playboy (American edition), L’Écho des Savanes, and other periodicals; the record cabinets containing four or five thousand francs’ worth of classical, opera, and West Coast jazz LPs; and the built-in teak bookshelves with several hundred volumes representing the finest writing ever produced by humanity and a fair amount of junk.

  Béa returned from the kitchen with two Cutty Sarks and a tender ironic smile. She sat down next to her husband, handed him one of the glasses, and tucked her bare feet under her. She rolled a strand of hair around her index finger.

  “Okay, then,” she said, “let’s not talk about it; we’ll see later. How was your trip, otherwise? Did it go well? Did things pan out?”

  Gerfaut nodded with satisfaction and offered a few details about a successfully concluded deal and about how he stood to collect a 15,000 franc commission over and above his monthly salary, which was about half that. He began to tell how at lunch the wife of the local rep had become horribly drunk and what happened then. But soon he seemed no longer to find it so amusing and abruptly ended his narrative.

  “What about you?” he asked his wife. “How did you get on?”

  “Oh, same old. The last two screenings of the Feldman are for tomorrow. Karmitz will distribute the thing for us, it turns out. Phew! You stink of sweat!”

  “Well,” said Gerfaut, “that’s all I am, isn’t it? A stink of sweat!”

  “Oh, shut up!” Pushing herself up with her feet, Béa arched her back and stretched, showing off to advantage her fine build and the harmony of its simultaneously hard and soft embodiment. “Be quiet and finish your scotch. Take a shower. Then come and make love to me.”

  Gerfaut was quiet, finished his scotch, took a shower, and went and made love to her. In the doing, though, he banged his shoulder on the frame of the bathroom door, slipped, and almost fell and broke his neck in the bathtub as he was showering, twice dropped his toothbrush in the washbasin, and nearly destroyed his Habit Rouge deodorant atomizer. There were no two ways about it: either he was drunk from two drinks, or else…. Or else what?

  5

  The attempt on Gerfaut’s life did not take place immediately, but it was not long coming: just three days.

  The day after his late-night return home, Gerfaut awoke at noon. The little girls were at school and, being semiboarders, would not be home till evening. Béa had gone out about ten, leaving a message on the pillow. She could sleep for just four or five hours and still be fresh and energetic all day long. She could also on occasion sleep for thirty hours straight in a deep, childlike slumber. The message read: 9:45 a.m. Tea in thermos – cold roast in fridge – have settled up with Maria – back in afternoon (to pack) but second screening Antégor 6 p.m. si te gusta and if you can – LOVE. (The last word was in English. The ink was purple and the handwriting was elegantly careless; Béa had used a felttip marker.)

  Gerfaut went into the living room, where he found the thermos of tea on the coffee table along with zwiebacks, butter, and the mail. He drank some tea and ate two buttered zwiebacks and opened the mail. There were several subscription offers for business magazines and a few financial newsletters; a friend Gerfaut had not heard from in two years wrote from Australia that his married life had become intolerable and asked whether Gerfaut thought he should get a divorce; and on a green card Gerfaut’s chess partner had indicated his fortnightly move. Gerfaut noted the move in his notebook, thinking that he wouldn’t have the time to think about it right away, seeing that they were getting ready to leave on vacation, but then he replied mechanically, castling just as Harston had castled against Larsen when in the same position at the Las Palmas tournament of 1974. On the part of the green card left for correspondence, he wrote what was to be his address for the whole of the next month in Saint-Georges-de-Didonne.

  Around two in the afternoon, shaved, showered, combed, deodorized, dressed, Gerfaut looked at himself in the hall mirror. He had a handsome pale oval face, blond hair, a forceful nose and chin; but he also had liquid blue eyes, and his gaze was slightly abstracted, slightly soft, a tad owlish and evasive. He was on the short side. Last summer, in clogs with gigantic heels, Béa had stood a few centimeters taller. His proportions, the breadth of his shoulders, his musculature were satisfactory, but no more than that; the exercises he did every day, or almost, had had some effect. Not too much of a belly for the moment, though there was danger there. The body in question was at present encased in Mariner briefs, a slate-gray jerseywool suit over a white-and-slate striped shirt with a solid-white collar and a plum-colored tie; cotton socks; and plum-colored English shoes with much visible stitching (what is perhaps called overstitching).

  The elevator bore Gerfaut straight down to his Mercedes in the building’s underground garage. He started up, drove out into the street, wound his way to the Gare d’Austerlitz, and crossed the Seine. From the cassette player came Tal Farlow. In about twenty minutes Gerfaut reached the headquarters of his company, a subsidiary of ITT located just off the Boulevard des Italiens. He parked the Mercedes in the company’s underground garage. The elevator took him first to the ground floor, where he slipped the green card, restamped and readdressed to his chess partner, a retired mathematics teacher in Bordeaux, into a mailbox. The ground-floor lobby was full of oraculating working stiffs. Gerfaut got back in the elevator and went up to the second floor. The second-floor reception area was also full of oraculating workers. A potted plant gently toppled over as Gerfaut struggled out of the elevator. A union representative from the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) stood athwart the stairs leading to the third floor. He wore a checkered shirt and royal-blue canvas pants.

  “Excuse me, please,” muttered Gerfaut as he pushed past.

  “If Monsieur Charançon is afraid to come out,” the union delegate was shouting, “we’ll drag his fat ass out ourselves.”

  A bellow of approval went up from those in possession of the lobby. Gerfaut extricated himself from the melee and went down a corridor with Gerflex vinyl flooring. He reached his door and went in. In the anteroom Mademoiselle Truong was painting her nails scarlet.
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  “How do you manage?” asked Gerfaut. “With nails like that. I mean, you type a lot. Don’t you break them?”

  “It happens. Good morning, monsieur. Did you have a good trip?”

  “Excellent, thanks.” Gerfaut made for his office.

  “Roland Desroziers is in there,” warned Mademoiselle Truong. “Well, I wasn’t going to fight with him, was I?”

  “No one expects you to fight,” answered Gerfaut, going into his office and closing the door behind him. “Hi there, Roland.”

  “Hi there, you little cop-out,” said Desroziers, who was an ecological militant and a union delegate of the French Confederation of Labor (CFDT) and wore a black sweater and jeans; Gerfaut had been a militant with him in the early sixties in a radical fraction of the Seine-Banlieue Federation of the Unified Socialist Party (PSU). “It’s talk, talk, talk in there,” said Desroziers, “I came in here to get a drink.” He had indeed purloined Gerfaut’s Cutty Sark and was quaffing a large measure of it in a paper cup. “You don’t mind me drinking your scotch, I hope?”

  “Of course not,” answered Gerfaut, smiling but peeking at the bottle and the paper cup to see just how much Desroziers had helped himself to. “It may be talk, talk, talk,” he observed, “but that Stalinist bureaucrat says they’re going to drag the boss’s fat ass out of here themselves—those are his exact words—so you’re going to be trampled underfoot if you sit around here drinking the rich man’s booze.”

  “Shit!” said Desroziers, hurriedly sticking his nose back into the paper cup and slurping the rest of his drink. Coughing, he set the cup down. “I’m out of here!”

  “Go ahead, set the place on fire, trash the computer, string Charançon up, why don’t you,” suggested Gerfaut in a dispirited tone as he sat down at his desk and reached for the whisky bottle to put it away. “All power to the workers’ councils!” he added bitterly. But the CFDT man was already gone.