The File on H. (19 page)

"Someone's knocking at the door!"

"What!" She sat up with a start; she did not understand what was going on at all.

She saw his arm move and stretch out to switch on the bedside lamp. His voice made an entirely different sound in the illuminated bedroom:

"Someone is knocking at the front door!"

The knocks could now be made out distinctly, and over the rattle, you could hear someone pleading:

"Mr. Governor, sir! Mr. Governor, sir!"

It was
his
 voice, she realized with horror. She shook her head from side to side as if to get rid of such an absurd idea. Her husband leaped out of bed and went to the window.

"Mr. Governor, Mr. Governor!" came the cry from outside, but now it was firmer and clearer.

"The English-speaking informer!" the governor said aloud, quite taken aback. "Something must have happened...."

She stared wide-eyed at her husband as he blundered around the bedroom, looking for his shirt, then his trousers, then his jacket.

"No!" she croaked, in a sob that sounded so different than her usual voice that despite his agitation, the governor stopped momentarily and looked hard at her, as if he could not quite believe that the sound had come from her. "Don't go!"

Several possible explanations for their being disturbed like this at such an hour were thundering around in her brain. Good news could not have brought the spy to hammer and yell at the door. My God, she moaned to herself, what can this new misfortune be? Maybe he had gone half crazy and was coming to take her away, to tell her husband about their relationship and to persuade him to let her go, or else he was there to humiliate him, or to mock them both, or simply to kill her husband, or perhaps to apologize. At that point, all these surmises seemed equally plausible, and just as incredible. Perhaps he had repented of what he had done, or worse still, maybe he had had a stupid crisis of conscience and, as the committed servant of the state that she had supposed he must be, was on his way to confess to his boss that he had broken a cardinal rule of conduct by revealing state secrets in exchange for a moment of pleasure.... But I did not ask him anything, I didn't even get so far as to tell him why I had asked him to come here! she protested to herself, painfully trying to justify herself. All these ideas whirled, around in her head as she stared hard at her husband, getting dressed.

"Don't go!" she pleaded a second time.

Containing his own excitement, which was no less acute than his wife's, though of quite a different order, the governor at long last replied:

"Daisy, something has obviously happened, but there is no reason for panic."

She did not have time to ask him a third time not to go out as he was already tumbling down the staircase. It's all over, she though. There was no way of stopping things now.

She jumped out of bed and went to the window. She heard the knocker at the door once again, then the voice, now growing hoarse with the shouting: "Mr. Governor, sir!  Sir!" She opened the window, and the cold, rain-soaked air chilled her through the nightdress. She could hear her husband's footsteps, and then the metallic screech of the bolts being drawn, which made her spine tingle. She held on to the sill so as not to fall, and listened to the men's voices overlapping each other. She could not make out what they were saying: their words were punctuated by groans and exclamations of anger and indignation.

They drew closer to the front door, and it would hardly have surprised her to hear the shots of dueling pistols. She was still glued to the window, like a trial defendant waiting to hear the guilty verdict. The wooden stairs creaked beneath the men's footsteps. Any minute now and they'll push through the door of this bedroom... but they went into the governor's study. She heard the noise of the telephone dial, and then her husband saying: "Hello?  Is that the police?"

What! she almost screamed out loud. The police for such a matter? How did they come to an accord so quickly? It was just not possible!

She heard her husband speaking again in his study: "It's urgent 
—
 I need ten of your best men, right away!"

Her mind went completely blank. The bedroom door swung open at last, and she stood there stock-still, bewildered at finding the bed empty. Then he must have caught sight of her silhouette at the window, and he said:

"Something awful has happened, and I must leave at once."

"But what is it? What's happened?"

"Up there, at the inn... The Irishmen have been assaulted."

"Were they killed?"

"No, but they may be hurt.... I'm off. Get back in the bed and go to sleep."

He closed the door, and Daisy returned to the window. Though she was shivering from head to toe, she stayed there until the sound of the men's voices and the noise of the motorcars had faded into the far distance.

"What a crazy night!" She sighed, putting her hand to her forehead and closing her eyes. Then she muttered a correction: "As if the day was sane..."

When the governor returned, in the small hours, he gave an extremely vague account of events to his wife. Instead of casting any light on matters, his words extinguished the very last glimmer of her understanding.

Twice or three times, she was on the point of asking questions to get him to go over it all again, but her persuaded her to let him be.

"Don't ask me anything. I really didn't understand most of what went on myself. It's all such a mess.... Whew! What a mix-up! What a puzzle! I'm going to try to sleep for an hour or two, to get over it. My head feels like it's going to burst."

She waited for him to wake, in the hope of getting something more precise out of him, but in vain. He had become even more sibylline. As if he had taken his nap solely in order to justify his mental confusion, he appeared quite unable to tell whether the events of his story had really taken place or some of them came from a dream. All he recounted seemed so far from credible that Daisy thought he was trying to pull the wool over her eyes, and she promptly began to speculate that maybe the spy had taken the opportunity during the journey to.... But she abandoned that suspicion right away when the telephone rang, and the affair, echoing and amplifying along the telephone lines, became ever more substantial and convoluted.

That fact is that later on, when it was full daylight and the first reports reached her, followed by the statements and depositions, and much later, when everything had been written down and properly sorted out in the prosecutor's files, and even when some of the events had been mentioned in the press, things became hardly clearer than they had been in the story the governor told his wife before dawn on that unforgettable day. Daisy suspected that it was actually the same story, simply decorated with a few details.

According to the various reports and eyewitness accounts (the main witness being the English-speaking informer), the affair could be summed up more or less as follows:

Toward two in the morning, the informer, who had been obliged to take over Dull Baxhaja's job after the latter's unjustifiable dereliction of duty and was therefore in the attic, directly above the Irishmen's bedroom, heard first a noise, then a sharp scream. All the other witnesses corroborated the scream, but the explanations given varied widely. They spy declared in his report that he believed the scream to have recognizably the voice of Martin (which tallied with Martin's having been the first to be injured by the assailants), but others, including Martin himself, claimed the scream had come from someone else. Some said it was one of the other guests at the hotel; some said it must have been a bandit, yelling out because he had bumped into something, or had been hit in the dark by Martin, or, even more simply, just to create an atmosphere of terror before the attack. As for Shtjefen, he thought it was the Irishmen who had shrieked, which would have been the most plausible explanation had Martin not said he was certain that he heard the shout before the bandit broke down the foreigner's door. Some even went so far as to think that the shout had come from the informer himself...

As he leafed through the file, the governor was amazed to see how much significance most of the people present at the inn that night attached to the shout, though in truth it could hardly be considered a major element in explaining the overall facts of the case. He confessed his puzzlement to the witnesses, who stared at him as if he had just committed to an unbelievable faux pas, and the governor became ever more inclined to believe that no one had actually shouted, and the shout that each of them thought had been uttered by another was only the inner shriek none of them had been able to restrain.

So, hard upon this actual or supposed yell, the front door of the inn was broken down by a gang of persons unknown, whom everyone, in the first moments of mayhem, had taken to be bandits, or murders, or fugitives from a lunatic asylum. The first to stand up to them was Martin, who got hit on the head with a crowbar. Some of the hotel guests were armed, but none of them managed to use their weapons 
— 
because of the dark and the element of surprise, and also for fear of hitting a bystander. The innkeeper succeeded in getting an oil lamp lit, but someone, no doubt one of the bandits, smashed it out his hands. Nonetheless, in the few moments of light that it gave, the lamp had allowed him to identify the hermit Frok, and that identification was to prove fatal to the assailants. In chaos and confusion, stumbling in the dark over Martin's injured body, they made for the wooden staircase so as to reach the second floor and thus the Irishmen's room, proving that they had come with precisely that intention. As the bandits began to force their door open, the Irishmen started to shout: "What's going on? Who goes there? Help!" The spy was at this moment still up in the attic, and so he heard everything that happened subsequently: the door broken down, the screaming of the intruders and of their victims, groans, curses, and blows delivered to a metallic object. At that point he left his observation post, clambered down by the means of the window frame to the backyard inn, and rushed into town to make his report.

When the governor and the policemen arrived, they found a nightmarish spectacle. By the light of the sole oil lamp that had remained unbroken, they could make out the traces of the vandals' attack. Apart from Martin, several travelers had been injured, as had one of the Irishmen. The other scholar was weeping, with his head between his hands. All their equipment had been broken beyond repair, especially the tape recorder, which had apparently been the main target of the brigands' fury. Not content just to smash up the machine, they had torn the reels to shreds and thrown cut-up bits of tape all around the room.

It had all taken only a few seconds. But by the time the travelers downstairs had come to their senses, the bandits had already evaporated into the night. According to the innkeeper, at the time when the governor arrived with the police escort, the brigands could not yet be very far away. One of the fugitives had probably been injured when a hotel guest opened fire (everyone had heard the cry of pain), so that the governor, if he cared to take the trouble, could very probably lay hands on part of the gang.

Just as the governor had ordered the policemen to set off on the bandits' trail and capture them before they reached the high mountains, Shtjefen recalled an important detail that he had theretofore failed to give: he had recognized one of the vandals as being Frok.

The manhunt began immediately. Fortunately for the pursuers, there was faint moonlight, so the policemen, driving slowly along the main north road with their van lights extinguished, could make out the bandits' silhouettes from a long way off. The first to be caught were the injured man and the two companions who were helping him along. The others were taken a little farther on, just at the foot of the mountains. As for Frok, he was found in his cave, ranting and raving.

The whole town of N— was buzzing with the story from dawn the next day. A small crowd gathered in the street in front of the prison, expecting to catch sight of this band of hooligans, whose motives remained a mystery. Despite the drizzle that began to fall, the crowd did not disperse. They hung around until at long last the prisoners appeared at the end of the street, chained together in pairs. Their waxen faces looked even paler under the locks of hair that the rain had glued to their foreheads. Their eyes bulged as if they were ready to pop out of their sockets.

"It's the hermit Frok! It's Frok!" two or three people whispered fearfully as the small procession of prisoners and policemen drew near. "Look at the rascal!"

"Good God, their hands are all bleeding!" an old woman muttered. "People should not be treated like that."

"No, granny, you've got it wrong," someone explained. "That's not blood you can see on their hands, but rainwater dripping off their rusty handcuffs."

The report that appeared two days later in one of the national newspapers began with a description of the men arrested, referring to them variously as bandits, fanatics, and members of a secret sect. The article went on to give a few details of the case and ended with a picture of the smashed machine and reels, alongside a short and completely impenetrable interview with one of the foreign scholars. "Now the epic is scattered again, just as it was before," one of them had declared with tears in his eyes, pointing to the pile of shredded magnetic tape. "We tried to put it all back together, but it has been torn to pieces, just like that... as if it had been hit by a natural disaster." The journalist emphasized that the foreign scholar had used the word
catastrophe
 several times, qualifying it on one occasion as
cosmic
.

T
HEY BARRICADED THEMSELVES
in a room at the Globe Hotel for forty-eight hours and refused to meet anyone. On the third day, they took a dray to the Buffalo Inn to collect their cases. The sky was overcast, and it was as cold as a winter's day. In Martin's absence, Shtjefen helped them carry their bags to the carriage, almost without a word. They left the wreckage of the tape recorder there, since it was no more than a piece of junk, like most of the reels of now unplayable tape. They were tempted to take some of the less damaged reels with them in the hope that something usable would remain, but in the end Bill said: