Three to Kill (8 page)

14

At two in the morning, while Gerfaut was plunged in a comatose slumber, Radio Luxembourg announced that the Taunus had been identified. It was described as a vehicle rented the same day as the gas-station drama by Georges Gerfaut, a Parisian mid-level manager, who had since gone missing. Listeners were reminded that a service-station attendant and another man whose identity was still unknown had been killed on the evening of the second of July. As always on Radio Luxembourg during the night, the newsreader spoke in a neutral and low-key tone. In the same tone he reported on the situation in the Near East, on an attack on the Yugoslav embassy in Paris, and on a tragic drowning in the Loire (two children at some camp had lost their lives, along with a priest who had been in charge of them and who had gone to the rescue). The news was followed by a promotional spot for a concert sponsored by the station. Then came station identification, followed by Leonard Cohen.

It was hot. Wearing only baggy white underwear and white ankle socks, Carlo was sitting at the table in a room at the Hotel Saint-Jacques. His features were drawn and his eyes red rimmed; he looked like a man who had been weeping for a long time. He sat still and showed no reaction to the news bulletin. At the same time, he held the table tightly and performed isometric muscle-building exercises.

After the fire at the service station and the death of Bastien, Carlo had driven haphazardly, utterly stricken and sick with rage and self-recrimination. On the outskirts of Bourg-en-Bresse he had stopped to have an emergency windshield installed—a sheet of pliable plastic held in place by clips. He had thought things over and consulted maps. Then he set off again in the direction of Paris. He had been careful not to pass by the gas station, which was sure by now to be crawling with firefighters and police. Once back on the highway, he had stayed in the slow lane and never driven faster than seventy kilometers per hour. He had exited at Achères-la-Forêt around five in the morning. Somewhere in the forest of Fontainebleau he had pulled off the road and parked under the trees. Since he could not bury Bastien's body as he would have wished, he had taken the man's personal possessions from the metal suitcase and buried them—the nylon cord, the toilet bag, the clothes. The sight of Bastien's spare khaki underpants moved Carlo to tears—which tears rolled down his cheeks as he finished interring the objects and stamped down the loose earth to make it even. He had then sought words to pronounce over this pseudo-grave in lieu of a funeral oration. He could recall no prayer except for “Our Father.” From the floor of the Lancia he retrieved an old issue of
Spiderman
(not to be confused with The Spider, whose adventures appear in
Strange
magazine). He had brightened at this, returned to the grave, opened the comic book, and begun with great solemnity to read the text that introduces every Spiderman adventure and which never varies:
Before becoming a righter of wrongs and a pitiless meter-out of justice, Spiderman reigned for years over the underworld of the USA as a veritable emperor of crime. Spiderman himself perfected a fabulous armamentarium that allows him to hold any criminal gang at bay. Spiderman also enlisted the services of two scientific geniuses, Professor Pelham and Professor Erichstein. So he has technical resources at his disposal that the ordinary human brain can barely imagine.

Carlo lowered his head, closed the comic book, and meditated for a moment.

“Amen,” he said. “So be it. I will avenge you, I swear this. I'll waste that motherfucker.
Ite missa est.”

He returned to the Lancia, started it up, and got back on the road. He returned to Paris through the suburbs, taking his time. He stopped at a café in Viroflay and drank coffee and devoured six croissants. The coffee ran down his chin as he bit into the croissants.

At nine o'clock, at a garage he knew on the border between Meudon and Issy-les-Moulineaux, Carlo sold the Lancia. He could easily have had it fixed; the damage was not so great. But he preferred to sell the car at a loss because he wanted never to see it again; it reminded him too much of his life with Bastien and their happy partnership. Within the hour he had bought a plain 1973 Peugeot 504 two-door sedan, with 110 horsepower at 5,600 rpm and a top speed, in a pinch, of 175 kph; he also bought a set of realer-than-real fake identity papers in the name of Edmond Bron.

Then Carlo had returned to Paris, passing without knowing it by Liétard's photo shop near the Issy town hall, and taken a room at the Hotel Saint-Jacques. He had not budged since. He slept there, he ate there; only once had he gone out—to see a film showing in a theater on the ground floor of the hotel building. In his room he also did exercises, isometric or otherwise, but what he did mainly was mourn Bastien. And wait for things to cool down.

15

In point of fact, there was a whole campful of Portuguese loggers less than fifty meters from Gerfaut when he stopped and fell asleep. Had he taken but a few more steps he would perhaps have come upon them; he might equally well have passed them by in the night without ever seeing them.

The particular Portuguese logger who stumbled upon Gerfaut had not gone very far at all from the camp, having stepped away to piss or something of that order. The man was tall and robust, dark in complexion but clean shaven, with prominent yellow teeth. He wore dark gray herringbone trousers and a cheap Jacquard pullover that was too small for him and patched at the elbows; it had once been white with a red motif, but repeated washing had turned the whole thing a filthy pink color. A floppy black beret completed the picture. The Portuguese came over and contemplated Gerfaut, who at that moment opened his eyes and returned the man's stare.

“Good morneen,” said the Portuguese in badly mangled French. He licked his lips and smiled.

Gerfaut responded as best he could to the salutation and tried to get up, but he fell back on the ground. He felt extremely weak, ill, and tired.

“Thirsty,” he mumbled.

“Oh, yes,” said the Portuguese. “Slip all night here, yes?” (The man pointed to the ground.) “Very cull.”

“What?”

“Cull! Very cull! No hot,” the man explained to Gerfaut, who seemed very rattled. “You want vino, yes?”

“Vino, sí,” replied Gerfaut, nodding vigorously. “Habla español?” The logger's response was vague. “Yo perdido. Muy malo. Cold.”

“Yes, cull,” went the man.

“Achoo!” said Gerfaut, and to stress the point he made a gesture indicating that he was coming down with bronchitis (which is easier than might be supposed).

The Portuguese helped Gerfaut to his feet and led him to the campsite. Along the way, still convinced that his interlocutor understood Spanish, Gerfaut kept offering useless interjections such as “Qué mala suerte!” and “Qué barbaridad!” while pointing to his swollen foot or his blood-scabbed forehead.

There were eight loggers, encamped beneath a canvas sheet held up by stakes. Their blankets were filthy, and they slept on bundled branches and leaves. They had stale bread, a little Algerian wine, cheese, bad coffee, big sacks of dried peas and beans, and three magazines filled with obscene photographs. Their professional equipment consisted of axes and saws and two Homelite chain saws. Their presence in France was illegal, they had no kind of social security, and they earned only slightly more than half the minimum wage for some sixty to seventy hours of work per week. They gave Gerfaut bread and pea soup, and two doses of powdered aspirin dissolved in wine. They didn't know what to do with him. As he was shivering and sweating terribly, they rolled him up in a couple of smelly blankets.

“Someone will be coming,” the logger with the best French told Gerfaut.

Then the men picked up their axes, their handsaws, and their Homelites and disappeared among the trees. The morning light was rather splendid, for those who like that sort of thing. Bronchitis or not, swollen foot or not, Gerfaut would likely have been physically able to resume his journey to the valley bottom, and he considered the possibility after the loggers had been gone for over two hours. But his moral fiber had weakened momentarily—ever since he had been found, ever since he had been taken care of.

He waited for the lunch hour, listening hard for the distant sound of the chain saws, but was unable to decide whether this was what he could hear or whether it was merely the wind in the branches. He dragged himself across the ground and picked up the girlie magazines. The text was in English and very poor, not just from the literary point of view but even in terms of sexual fantasy. As for the pictures, they were of corpulent women with vulgar, even brutal features. Gerfaut's taste was more sophisticated, inclining him more toward scrawny women with high cheekbones. Inasmuch, that is, as his taste could be said to incline him toward anything at all. He turned to the readers' letters. A single great debate informed the magazine's columns: big breasts versus big asses. To Gerfaut this seemed like a false problem. He was bored silly.

About ten-thirty, he had tossed the magazines away and was feeling infinitely wretched and ill, indeed almost at death's door, when one of the Portuguese loggers reappeared, bringing with him an old man in a hat. Long white hair fell to the old man's shoulders and over his brown wide-wale corduroy jacket. He greeted Gerfaut with a grunt and knelt down beside him. Throwing back the blankets in which Gerfaut was bundled, he rolled up his left pants leg and examined and palpated his bad foot.

“Do you speak French? Who are you?” Gerfaut's questions drew no response. The old man went on manipulating Gerfaut's foot with the fixed concentration of a truffle pig.

“But tell me, at least,” cried Gerfaut feebly, overcome by anxiety and confusion, “I'm in France, aren't I? These are the Alps, surely?”

The old man dug his fingers into Gerfaut's inflamed flesh and exerted a vigorous twisting pressure. Gerfaut screamed. Tears burst through his tightly closed eyelids and streaked his grubby bearded jowl. He ground his bared teeth. He raised his elbows from the ground and tried to touch his ankle, but the old man thrust him away and Gerfaut fell flat on his back. From his jacket pocket the old man produced a Nescafé can, which he opened. It held a viscous yellow paste that looked to Gerfaut like axle grease. The man took a generous handful of the stuff and smeared it over Gerfaut's instep, which he then massaged energetically.

“Yes, of course you're in the Alps. Of course you're in France. What's the matter with you? You're in La Vanoise, that's where you are.”

“You're a bonesetter?”

“I don't care for that word. I'm a military nurse. So what happened to you? You're a tourist, huh? Shouldn't be running up hill and down dale with a foot in this condition.” He applied a square of gauze to Gerfaut's instep and began winding a stretch bandage around his foot.

“I fell from a train.”

“I've set the bones straight,” said the old man. “I am Corporal Raguse. What train? What is your name?”

“Georges,” answered Gerfaut. “Georges Sorel,” he added hastily. “I fell from a freight train the other night. I'm a vagabond. Do you understand? I'm on the railroad. Not a railroad worker—I travel on the railroad. I'm a tramp.” Gerfaut was out of breath by the time he had said all this.

Corporal Raguse stood up wiping his hands on a purple-check handkerchief. He started putting everything he had taken out back in his pockets: the can of ointment and the containers for the gauze dressings and crepe bandages—flat, oblong tin boxes, not a little rusty, with hinged lids.

“You shouldn't be moved at all before tomorrow. These Portuguese will take care of you. They are good people. Tomorrow morning I'll come for you with a mule.”

“Another night here? But I am ill,” protested Gerfaut.

“Don't argue. Drink some wine.”

“I have no money.”

“I don't do this for money,” said Raguse. “I do this to help my fellow man.”

16

Corporal Raguse had long since left the military and indeed had never been a corporal. He could barely be said to have been a soldier at all. Too young for the First, he was almost too old for the Second World War. He had nevertheless acquired some nursing and mule-driving skills while waiting six months for an improbable Italian attack. He had used firearms only during the German occupation and very rarely against human targets. The whitewashed room where he put Gerfaut after fetching him with his mule was oddly decorated with a portrait of Stalin and one of Louis Pasteur (the latter, in reality, being a photograph of Sacha Guitry playing Pasteur in an old film). Gerfaut spent a week in bed in that room, reading the
Vermot Almanac,
Maurice Maeterlinck's
Life of the Bee,
and the startling autobiography of one Father Bourbaki, missionary and aviator. Gerfaut's imagination was especially piqued by the part of this last work wherein the bloodthirsty cleric, between two bouts of
boche
-killing, tried to solve a problem concerning his pennant. A tricolor adorned by the sacred heart of Christ, this pennant was continually ripping on account of the speed of the black-beetle-cum-warrior's airplane, to whose bracing wire the thing was attached. Bourbaki eventually solved his problem by laminating the pennant in Muscovy glass. The remainder of the book, thronged by “leprous negroes,” was tedious in the extreme.

Raguse had put Gerfaut's foot in plaster, and for the first few days he brought food to his bedside: in the morning, light coffee, fresh cheese, and a rotgut brandy that the former male nurse distilled himself from overripe fruit, notably pears and quinces; and, for both lunch and dinner, soup and bread, dried sausage with great blotches of rancid fat, cheese, sometimes mackerel in white wine from a long narrow can, and an acidic, light-colored red wine.

“You have to eat, Sorel,” the Corporal would tell him. “Have to get your strength back. Your tissues have to repair themselves.”

Before long, Gerfaut was able to hobble from his bedroom to the table of the main room. The Raguse house, built into the side of a hill away from the village, had mortarless stone walls and a slate roof. Inside, the walls were covered with a mud-andsand roughcast and whitewashed. Large blocks of granite rested on the roof to ensure that the slates didn't fly off in a high wind. Properly speaking, it was a single-story house, but because of its hillside situation there was space beneath for a combination cellar and stable opening over the downslope. Here Raguse kept his bottles, his provisions, his still, and his mule. Above were the main room, with a very large fireplace and a basalt sink, and two bedrooms. The rooms had small windows with small panes and small wooden shutters with heart-shaped cutouts.

“I knew right away you weren't a real vagrant,” said Raguse, his mouth full of cheese, pouring them both wine. They had just sat down to lunch. The massive table was thickly overlain with dirt. Glowing embers sputtered in the fireplace. An unkempt fair beard now covered Gerfaut's lower face. His injured foot was still weak. The wound on his scalp had healed, but a stripe of white would mark the spot amid Gerfaut's otherwise blond hair for the rest of his life.

“I dumped my wife. Yes, that's it—that's what I did.”

“I'm not asking you anything. Come with me.”

His mouth still full of cheese, his felt hat on his head, the old man got to his feet with a grunt, closed his Opinel knife with a guillotine-like snap, and thrust it into his jacket pocket. He then went toward his bedroom. At a loss for words, Gerfaut got up too and quickly drained his glass.

“Can you shoot, Sorel?”

“What?”

“Shoot,” repeated Raguse, disappearing into his room.

Gerfaut followed him. It was the first time he had set foot in Raguse's room, which scarcely differed from his own. Old furniture, metal bedstead—just the same. A post-office calendar offered a nighttime view of the Champs-Elysées. On a shelf stood a frame aerial for a radio receiver—though no radio was to be seen anywhere in the place. It incorporated a hideously tinted portrait of Martine Carol. There was a large chest. A wardrobe. And a gun rack holding a double-barreled Falcor, a Charlin, and a Weatherby Mark V rifle with Imperial sights. Raguse took down the Weatherby.

“Well, we'll just see.”

“I'm not some kind of crook on the run, if that's what you're thinking.”

“I know that, son.”

Raguse had opened the chest and taken out ammunition, which he was now loading into the weapon. This done, he plunged his hand back into the chest, where folded fabrics could be seen, along with rusty tins, assorted boxes, tools, and the like. He produced a pair of binoculars. The two men left the room, then the house. Gerfaut limped along with his plaster. The sunshine made him dizzy. Raguse took a few steps, then indicated the grassy slope that rose behind the house toward the forest above. He narrowed his dark eyes, which all but disappeared in the folds of flesh. He looked irritable now, pained.

“There has to be an empty green-pea can on a stick about a hundred meters up there. Can you see it, young fellow?”

“No. Oh, wait a second. Yes, maybe.”

Raguse passed the gun to Gerfaut. “Make sure there's nobody about and take a shot at it.”

The old man brought the glasses up to his eyes, paying no further attention to Gerfaut. Far from comfortable in his role, Gerfaut awkwardly fitted the weapon into his shoulder. In the sights, once he had properly brought them to bear, he could see his target clearly. He aimed as best he could. When he pressed the trigger nothing happened; he had omitted to release the safety. He released it and tried again. The gun went off, but he missed the can and couldn't even see a point of impact.

“Ridiculous,” declared Raguse without lowering the binoculars. “Imagine you're shooting at something you want to hit, young fellow. An animal, whatever you want. A guy.”

Gerfaut pulled back the bolt, his gaze fixed on the ground, and accidentally ejected a new cartridge. Then he took aim again carefully, held his breath, and blew a large hole in the green-pea can at a hundred meters.

They went back to the house.

“A very fine gun,” said Gerfaut politely, handing the Weatherby back to the old man so he could clean it and put it back in its place.

“You said it!” cried the old man. “It's worth its weight in gold. A German it was that gave it to me, twelve years ago. I saved his life, more or less. A hunter. I found him with a leg bust to blazes—a bit like you, but it was higher up.”

“I'm going to have to leave here soon.”

Raguse looked at Gerfaut sharply.

“I'm not looking for payment. I have everything I need. My granddaughter sends me money every month, and I don't even spend it all. I put it in the savings bank in Saint-Jean. I don't need a thing. If what you're thinking, young fellow, is that you have to go off and earn money just to pay me for my trouble, you can think again.”

“I can't spend the rest of my life here.”

“Till I take the plaster off, you're as well off here as anywhere. Then, if this place is not to your liking.…”

“Not at all,” Gerfaut hastened to reply. “I like it fine here.”

“You can help out,” said Raguse with enthusiasm. “Have you ever hunted?”

Gerfaut shook his head. Raguse returned the Weatherby to the gun rack and closed his chest. They went back into the main room.

“Hunting is my only pleasure,” said Raguse, looking sly and boyish now. “The National Forest of La Vanoise can kiss my ass,” he declared contentedly. “But I can't see clearly anymore. Once I get that plaster off, perhaps you'll help me. We can go hunting together, and you can be my extra pair of eyes, as you might say.”

“Why not?” answered Gerfaut with an affable smile—was it a derisive smile or a plain dumb smile? “Why not? I'm no use anymore. I'm nowhere. Lost. I might as well be someone's extra pair of eyes.”

That night Gerfaut had nightmares with Béa and the girls in them, and the two killers in their red car, and Baron Frankenstein transporting glass jars filled with extra pairs of eyes.

At the beginning of September, Gerfaut's plaster started falling apart of its own accord. Raguse finished the job. Gerfaut was greatly relieved to be able at last to scratch his foot. He still limped a little, and the old man muttered that it would never straighten itself out, and Gerfaut said that he could care less. Then Raguse rooted in his old chest and began poring over greasy old manuals with bindings crumbling away by themselves. They had anatomical drawings of men with mustaches. The Corporal gave Gerfaut an exercise program to be followed every day in order to reduce his limp and, above all, to obviate any possible misalignment of the spinal cord or of other bones.

Gerfaut made himself useful by running little errands in the village; he would pick up tobacco, for instance, or Riz la Croix cigarette papers, or lighter fluid when the need arose. Occasionally, at the café-tabac, he would glance through the regional paper,
Le Dauphiné Libéré
, to see what was happening in the world. Sporting events took up as much space as ever. Third World riots, famines, floods, epidemics, assassinations, palace revolutions, and local wars still followed one another in quick succession. In the West the economy was not working well, mental illness was rife, and social classes were still locked in struggle. The Pope deplored the unrestrained hedonism of the age.

After a brief period of natural curiosity, the villagers, old for the most part and less numerous than the houses, were content to accept a few half-truths and stopped asking Gerfaut questions. In the past, Corporal Raguse had taken in injured animals, lodged stray hikers, and allowed British campers to pitch tents in the meadow behind his house. Gerfaut seemed like just another of his broken wings, a taciturn semi-vagrant, a bit simple but serviceable enough, who gave the old man a hand. He even helped the local police shove their vehicle out of the mud one time when they had ventured this far up the mountainside during an early-autumn rainstorm. On another occasion, he had paid for a round of drinks at the café-tabac, then told his troubles: his wife had left him; he had once been a manager in a big firm, but he had left everything behind—just as a lot of people did, so it was said, in America: they become
dropahoutes.

“A
dropahoute,
yes, that's it!” said Gerfaut. “That's me exactly! Cheers, everybody!” And he emptied his glass.

When fall came, Raguse began getting Gerfaut used to long mountain walks. These became longer and longer, and after a few weeks the two men took guns with them and the walks turned into hunting trips.

Usually, they rambled in the wooded area. From time to time, they would bag game birds: partridge, plover, hazel grouse, capercaillie, or else a squirrel or hare. Raguse, whose eyesight had become really poor, missed everything he took aim at. After a time, he virtually gave up shooting altogether and let Gerfaut take over.

One day in late October, with the Weatherby, Gerfaut and Raguse climbed higher than they ever had before. There had been a few snowfalls, then milder weather had returned. They crossed the forest and went up through the mountain pastures with their bilberry patches and clumps of rhododendrons. Granite crags and snowy hillocks soon defined their whole horizon. The two men followed the rock-strewn path upward. The old man seemed delighted. Gerfaut's feelings were amorphous. Indeed, for as long as he had been on the mountainside he had remained in a kind of stupor. At this moment, he contemplated the scenery without finding it either beautiful or ugly; he felt his bad leg protest but gave no thought to pausing; sweat trickled down his back and over his rib cage, the wind raked his face, but he paid these things no mind.

In mid-afternoon they halted at a stone refuge with wooden partitions, a hearth, and charcoal inscriptions on the rock of the interior walls; hikers had clearly wanted to leave a trace of their visit to a place so high above sea level. Gerfaut felt no such compulsion. They carried on, and an hour later Raguse, whose enfeebled vision the Weatherby's sights made up for quite effectively, succeeded for once in bringing down a horned animal at some four hundred meters. Whether a chamois or an ibex Gerfaut had no idea, for he didn't know the difference; it might as well have been an antelope or a snail—he didn't give a damn. They went to retrieve the carcass and spelled each other dragging it downhill. By the time they got home, it was darkest night. Raguse was producing an endless stream of taunts and obscenities directed at the National Forest of La Vanoise and its gamekeepers. Gerfaut never did try to discover the motive for the old man's animus.

During the night they cut up their prize. They salted quarters. The hide was set aside, as was the halved head. In the days following, Raguse set about tanning the one and stuffing the other.

“I'll sell them to idiots. They can stick them in their drawing rooms.”

“What in God's name am I doing here?” asked Gerfaut irritably. “Can you please tell me that?” He had just downed several healthy tots of fruit brandy; these days he was drinking more and more heavily. “I spend my time doing sweet fuck-all.”

“Look here, Sorel. You can leave, you know. Any time you want. You're a free man.”

“Yes,” said Gerfaut, “but it's the same shit everywhere.”

By and large, though, Gerfaut got on pretty well with the old man. They went on more expeditions. On other days, and more and more often now that the cattle had come down from the Alpine pastures and been returned to their cowsheds, Raguse was called on for veterinary help, and Gerfaut would go along to give him a hand, hold the lamp, and the like. He learned how to grasp a cow's horns and force her head down so that Raguse could remove a foreign body from the beast's eye, which he did with the help of a butter-soaked feather or sometimes merely by flinging powdered sugar into the eye, causing it to water so violently that the irritant was washed out. This was just about all Gerfaut learned.