“This is getting interesting,” said Colonel Jumbo, turning back toward the tape recorder with ears pricked.
Bogart. Lord of the Jungle. Edgar Rice Burroughs. Shit!
“No, no, don’t kid yourself,” sighed Oufiri placidly. “It won’t ever get interesting, not if you mean some kind of secret testimony. We have achieved our first goal, as you know, and that was the most Butron could undertake along those lines. Butron is not enterprising. Was not enterprising. Ideas, just ideas was all he had in his tiny lily-white head.”
The marshal swiveled an open hand above his head to stress even more strongly that he was using the word “idea” in a pejorative way. He went on:
“Butron talked a lot. Generally he said all kinds of interesting things. Ninety percent bullshit, but he made up for it in quantity, at least as far as talk was concerned. When it came to action, zilch.”
“Except that—” began Jumbo.
“Zilch!” snapped the marshal. “It’s a psychological certainty.”
“There’s no such thing.”
“Oh yes there is.”
“Not in my book.”
“That’s normal. You’re a cop. Me, I’m a politician. You are too much of a practitioner, too low. I view things from higher up. And I don’t get psychology wrong. Human beings are my turf.”
Jumbo seemed about to say something, but then he gave up. Oufiri looked at him in a vaguely jocular way.
“See here,” he said. “I know how minds work. You say nothing because you know that if a statement did turn up somewhere you would be covered and only I would have problems, because it would be a political scandal. You couldn’t care less; of the two of us you’re not the politician.”
“Come on now, George, come on,” said Jumbo.
You bastard, thought Oufiri. Don’t try to pretend I didn’t skewer you there. He claims to be my friend. Well, fuck him! What else can you expect? Not friends. Friends—don’t make me laugh! Friends in the machinery of the State? No, it’s watch your ass and the devil take the rest.
“That’s what makes me superior to you . . .” began the marshal, who was a sore loser.
But then, what if Jumbo had acquiesced solely because the idea you had suddenly suggested appealed to him as a good escape route for a character like him. Perhaps he had succumbed to a real passivity, but at the same time your insight had shown him the way to go, the attitude to adopt if he was to emerge undiminished. A real shit. A cop. Hopeless romantic!
“This is what makes me superior to you,” the marshal resumed. “I operate with concepts. But here we are operating with a deep paradox: you are the one who studied at their Sorbonne, but it’s I who has hoisted myself up to the conceptual level while you were sinking further and further into the physical realm of contemporary history, warts and all.”
“What? What are you talking about?” said Jumbo, dumbfounded.
“Listen,” the marshal went on unrelentingly, “take our conversation earlier, and notice that you could not manage to envision the disappearance of armed force, of the police, whereas having been in the Congo I can conceive of the destruction of the State.”
“But George, George,” said Jumbo, shaking his head amiably.
“In short, Jumbo,” said Oufiri, “there is a notable difference between your intelligence level and mine. I’m not saying you are stupid. But your profession makes people stupid. You can’t even fuck.”
The minister-marshal was quite aware of the fact that this last assertion had no relationship to his argument, but he made it because he was getting desperate to wound Jumbo, feeling somehow he had to get his own back for something the man had done to him.
But it is startling how chance can play tricks on people. Jumbo, who had resolved not to think about his sexual fiasco with Josyane, could not, under frontal attack as he was, help considering his male member once more; and, as his psychosomatic system took the nearest available exit, he stood up, sensing the weight of a limply inflated prick in his pants.
“Since you’re so damn sure,” he said, “you be the judge. I have to take a leak.”