Three to Kill (6 page)

11

It was the telephone that woke Gerfaut. He sat up with a grunt, almost fell off the couch, and caught himself by grabbing the back of it with one hand as he rubbed his eyes with the other, clenched-fisted, rather as the hit man Bastien had done an hour and a half earlier. It took Gerfaut a moment to remember where he was. His eyes were crusted, his breath fetid, his tongue dry. He went toward the telephone, scratching through the opening of his shirt at the middle of his chest, where some men have a thicket of hair. He picked up the receiver. As he did so, he noticed with irritation that the stereo had been on all night. Someone shouted into his ear, and at first he didn't know who it was, then he realized it was Béa.

“Oh, wait a second, excuse me.”

She shouted again. She was sobbing. She wanted an explanation. Gerfaut meanwhile was crossing the room, managing, not without difficulty, to carry the whole telephone with him. Reaching the stereo, he turned the power off, briefly felt the turntable, the tuner, and the amp (the two last were very hot to the touch), and winced.

“What happened was I had a fit of depression.” He sat down on the couch and placed the phone on his lap while holding the receiver to his ear with his shoulder. He looked around for a cigarette. Béa was shouting over the line.

“Hello!” he shouted in his turn. “I hear you very badly.” With his finger Gerfaut kept rotating the dial. Each time he did so communication was interrupted. “Hello? Hello?” he shouted. “Béa? I don't know whether you can hear me. Don't get worried. I love you. Just a bit of depression. I am coming back. Hello? I said I'm coming back. I'll be there this evening. Tomorrow at the latest. Hello?” He was still fooling with the dial, and everything he said reached Béa badly broken up. For her part she had the greatest trouble making herself understood.

Gerfaut ended the conversation abruptly by depressing the crossbar of the telephone with his index finger. Letting the bar back up, he listened for the dial tone, then replaced the receiver and put the telephone back in its usual place. Then he unplugged it altogether. Let Béa call back if she wanted to. She would hear unanswered rings; he would hear nothing at all, not even a ring.

He went through to the kitchen and made himself some tea. As it was brewing, he showered, shaved, and changed—and the two hit men kept rolling toward Paris in their bright red Lancia Beta 1800 sedan. Gerfaut drank his tea and swallowed spoonfuls of marmalade without any bread and read a few pages of an old issue of
Fiction
magazine. When he had finished, he plugged the telephone in once more and called a car-rental company and then a taxi service.

Around eleven o'clock, a cab dropped Gerfaut off at a garage, where he took possession of the Ford Taunus he had reserved. For a time he drove around Paris aimlessly. The two hit men were speeding along the highway. Carlo had taken the wheel. Bastien dozed to his right. They had quarreled for a moment when Bastien told Carlo the exact wording of the telegram. Carlo had maintained that it made most sense to wait in Saint-Georges for Gerfaut to return. But Bastien argued that the words “letter to follow” in the message indicated that Gerfaut was not coming back any time soon. They exchanged several volleys of “soft in the head” and “retard.” In the end, Bastien had weakened. He sat up abruptly and swore.

“I dreamed of the old man again.”

“Me, I never dream.”

“Me, neither, not usually.”

“Sometimes I wish I did.”

“Sometimes,” said Bastien, “I dream of castles, castles—how can I explain it to you? I dream of castles that are all gold, with towers and spires. I know—just like Mont-Saint-Michel, you know what I mean? But mountainous—the landscape all around is mountainous—and mists everywhere.”

“What I'd like is to dream of women.”

“No, no. Not me.”

“That woman the other time,” said Carlo. “I liked that.”

The other time, after throwing the old man out of the window, they had gone to the woman's house. They made quite sure that she knew nothing. Absolutely sure. At one point, Carlo had forced the woman to beat him. She had not liked it. Nor had she liked the rest. Carlo had liked it a lot.

Generally speaking, even if you went back to the very beginning, to the Mouzon contract, you had to say that all their business dealings with Colonel Taylor had gone like clockwork. But then they had run into this moron Georges Gerfaut. A traveling salesman, though, is usually very easy to kill. Carlo and Bastien were well placed to draw comparisons because they had exercised their skills in the most varied social milieus. They were now beginning to get quite angry with Georges Gerfaut.

About one-thirty that afternoon, Gerfaut dug into frankfurters and fries in a café-restaurant. In theory, it was a fine clear day, but in practice you couldn't see very far on account of the air pollution. The women passing by wore scanty summer clothing. But as for everything else—the cars moving at a crawl through clouds of exhaust fumes and jazz from Radio FIP 514, the hollow eyes of the rushing people, the general din, the watery and adulterated taste of the sausages as Gerfaut bit into them—it was all shit. He would so much rather have been in a place where he could see things around him that were not in his own image, where everything did not speak to him of himself—in short, an inanimate landscape. He returned mechanically to his apartment, arriving about three-thirty. He tidied up, then played music very loud—the Joe Newman Octet with Al Cohn—as he tossed a few things into a small suitcase. Almost immediately, the doorbell started ringing repeatedly in a most authoritative way. Gerfaut ran to the couch, where he had left the jacket he had been wearing when he left Saint-Georges-de-Didonne. He took the Star from a pocket, released the safety, and cocked the weapon. He went to the door, unlocked it, and sprang back with the automatic behind his back and his finger on the trigger. After a moment, the concierge of the building pushed the door open and contemplated Gerfaut with concern: he had tripped, and he stood with legs crossed, balancing on his heels, one arm still behind his back and his other elbow against the wall for support.

“Oh, it's you, Monsieur Gerfaut,” she said doubtfully. “Aren't you on vacation?”

“Huh?” Gerfaut backed into the living room. A few seconds later, the volume of the music was lowered considerably, and when Gerfaut returned he no longer had one hand behind his back.

“Weren't you supposed to be on vacation?”

“Yes, indeed. But I came back. I forgot something.”

“You must excuse me. I was on the stairs and I heard music. I wondered who in heaven's name would be playing music at Monsieur and Madame Gerfaut's.”

“You were right,” said Gerfaut. “That was kind of you. In fact, it's reassuring to know you keep such an eagle eye on things.”

“We do what we can, but we are only human, you know. By the way, two gentlemen from your work came around asking for you.”

“Two gentlemen,” Gerfaut repeated noncommittally, careful not to sound curious.

“Well, I should say one gentleman. The other waited in their car. I hope I was right to give your address.”

“My address,” said Gerfaut in the same tone as before.

“At the seaside, I mean.”

“Oh, yes, of course. A young dark fellow and a tall guy with white in his hair, was that it?”

“The young one, yes, definitely. The other....” The concierge indicated with a hand gesture that she had not been close enough to get a clear view of the second man.

Gerfaut was now leaning with his shoulder against the wall. He was staring vacantly at a point somewhere above the concierge's head and appeared to be musing, daydreaming. His silence and distractedness made the concierge uncomfortable.

“Oh, well, I'll have to be going. It's very nice talking to you, but I have lots of things to do.”

For the last ten minutes, the Lancia had been standing on a pedestrian crossing just under a hundred meters from the building's entrance. A woman came out with an Airedale on a leash. The Airedale was sixty centimeters long and a male (unlike Alonso's bullmastiff, Elizabeth, who measured nearly seventy centimeters). The woman with the Airedale crossed the street in front of the building and got into a Datsun Cherry parked opposite. She started up the car and left. Carlo had his motor running the moment he saw the woman's right-hand blinker light up. The Datsun was barely out of its spot when he slid into it. Carlo was alone in the Lancia. Bastien was keeping watch from a café with a good view of the parking lot on the far side of the Gerfauts' building. The two hit men had begun by telephoning Gerfaut's apartment from the café. The phone had rung, but no one had picked up.

“You wait and see, shithead!” Carlo had said vehemently. “He's gone back to his wife.”

All the same, Carlo was not very keen to drive the six or seven hundred kilometers all over again just to check this out.

The two agreed, therefore, that to start with they would simply wait and watch. See if Georges Gerfaut came home. If he didn't, when night fell they would break into his apartment to make absolutely sure.

And if he wasn't there, they would send a fake telegram to Saint-Georges informing the guy that there was a water leak and that he should call home as soon as possible. The two would then spend the night in the apartment. In the vacation period, Carlo and Bastien loved to spend nights in temporarily vacant apartments. Especially Bastien.

“It's like we're tourists,” he would say. “People's apartments are like other countries.”

“Oh, shut up, dickhead,” Carlo would reply.

In short, if it turned out by the next morning that Gerfaut had indeed returned to Saint-Georges-de-Didonne, they would take stock—but they would no doubt go back there and kill him, most likely with a rifle.

“Because,” declared Carlo emphatically, “I have had it up to here with half-measures.”

“I'm just a bit depressed,” Gerfaut was writing. “It will blow over. Please don't get upset. I plan to come back by a roundabout route—do a little touring, drive through the Massif Central.” Once again he closed his letter with declarations of love. He promised to be in Saint-Georges “within three days, four at the most.” He sealed the envelope, addressed it to Béa, and went down to mail the letter. Carlo was stunned to see him come out of the building. Gerfaut had the letter in his hand. He walked the fifty meters to a mailbox near the corner of the building and dropped the envelope in the slot. Then he returned to the entrance and went back in. Carlo started the car, drove around the building as quickly as he could, and stopped with a great screech of brakes in front of the café where Bastien was ensconced. Gerfaut took the elevator from the lobby to the basement, climbed into the rented Ford Taunus, and started the engine. Carlo was now making emphatic hand gestures directed at Bastien. The man with the white streaks in his hair placed five francs on the counter and rushed out of the bar. The bottle-green Ford Taunus, with Gerfaut at the wheel, exited the parking garage and merged into the traffic. Bastien got into the Lancia next to Carlo, and the two set about tailing the Taunus.

“He really pisses me off, this guy,” said Carlo in disgust.

It was four-thirty in the afternoon. Gerfaut headed for the Porte d'Italie and got onto the Autoroute du Sud, the superhighway to the Mediterranean.

“Where the fuck is the prick going?” fumed Carlo.

It was the second of July, and people were still leaving on vacation. The traffic was jammed up all the way to Orly airport. Thereafter it thinned out somewhat, moving faster and more dangerously. Gerfaut did not bear right in the direction of Orléans but continued on toward Lyons.

“This is crazy. Where's he going now?” A note of genuine anxiety inflected Carlo's fury.

“I agree with you on that,” said Bastien. “I think we go now.”

“Go now? What the hell does that mean, ‘go now'?”

“Pull up alongside,” replied Bastien.

Carlo calmed down instantly. He even lifted his foot slightly from the gas pedal. The distance between the Lancia and the Taunus began to grow, soon surpassing five hundred meters.

“No! Never on the highway. That's the rule. No, my friend. Shit, a highway is an absolute trap.”

“Suppose we wait till just before an exit,” White Streaks suggested. “We ram him and get off right away.”

“Right. And at the exit we run straight into motorcycle cops. You really are a dumb shit.”

“That's not what you usually say.”

“Give me a fucking break, okay?”

Bastien fell silent.

Just as night was falling, Gerfaut abruptly left the highway. Because of the delays near Paris they were only now approaching Mâcon. The two hit men had not eaten dinner. Nor had Gerfaut. The Taunus went through Mâcon and forged southwest. For a brief moment its sidelights came on. As yet, the Lancia had none of its lights on. Carlo was leaning forward slightly in his seat, his eyes narrowed. He drove fast. The distance between the Taunus and the Lancia had shrunk. Then one of the Lancia's tires blew out. The Italian car wove back and forth from one side of the road to the other. Carlo clung tightly to the wheel, teeth clenched, and uttered not a sound. Bastien jammed his head onto the headrest and crossed his arms across his face. The blown tire, left rear, swelled and began to shred. Its temperature rose violently. A cloud of white smoke rose behind the Lancia, and the stink of burnt rubber filled the car. Eventually, as Carlo shifted down into second, the vehicle rolled onto the right shoulder and came to rest in a gravel pile. Carlo and Bastien leaped from the car, cursing wildly, especially Carlo. They got out the jack and the spare tire. The taillights of the Taunus had disappeared round a bend far ahead. Bastien took a flashlight from the glove compartment and held it on Carlo as he changed the tire in one minute and forty seconds.