Henri Butron is sitting alone in a darkened study. He is wearing a smoking jacket with frog fasteners. His face is pale. He has begun to perspire. Dark glasses cover his eyes and a white hat his head. Beside him is a small tape recorder, which is on. Butron is smoking cigarillos and speaking into the recorder. He stumbles over certain words.
Night is well advanced and total silence envelops the house, which is at some distance from the port of Rouen.
Butron has finished recording. He smooths his mustache as he switches off the machine. He rewinds. He means to play the tape back. His own life fascinates him.
The doorknob squeaks. Butron leaps from his armchair. Sweat beads on his brow like oil from a pressed olive. The door doesn’t open right away because it is locked. Butron hiccups. There is no way out of the study save through that door. He should have set himself up in another room. Too late to think of that now. Someone drives a heel into the door at the level of the lock, which breaks, and the door is open. Stupidly, Butron tries to melt into the far wall. He would like to force his back right through it. His hands claw at the flowery wallpaper, his nails scoring the plaster beneath and breaking.
Two men, in no hurry, enter the study. One of them, a white man in a leather overcoat, glances at Butron, deems him harmless, and heads for the tape recorder. The tape has rewound completely and the loaded reel continues to turn wildly, the tail of the tape whipping the air. The white man turns the machine off. The other guy, a black man in a little navy-blue cap and a Royal Navy–style raincoat, halts in front of Butron and pulls a Spanish Astra automatic fitted with a makeshift silencer from his pocket. Butron has lost control of his natural functions. He has soiled his pants. The black man shoots him. The bullet pierces his heart and exits his back beneath the left shoulder blade, leaving a hole the size of a tomato; tissue and blood spatter the scratched-up wall; Butron’s heart has exploded. His head bangs into the wall and he bounces forward, landing flat on his face on the carpet. His excrement continues to leave his body for three or four seconds after he is dead.
The black guy detaches the warm silencer from his Astra and pockets it, then tosses the gun on the floor at the foot of the wall.
The white guy places the reel with the recording in an envelope, which he seals and sticks inside his leather overcoat.
Now the black man has picked up the receiver of the telephone near the tape recorder and is dialing a number.
“Butron has just committed suicide,” he announces. “You can come.”
A few moments later police surround the house. Two officers in raincoats and a round little man who must be the medical examiner enter the house. The white man and the black man shake hands with one of the men in raincoats.
“Good,” says the white man. “Well, we must be off now.”
“Ciao,” says the commissioner whose hand they shook.
The two men leave. They get into a Ford Mustang and drive toward Paris. On the way they listen to the car radio as Jackie McLean plays “Melody for Melonae.” The white man, who is driving, beats time on the leather sheath of the steering wheel and from time to time emits pathetic little chuckles. Meanwhile the black man remains motionless and after a moment falls asleep and begins to snore.
He wakes up just after the Mustang leaves the autoroute. The car is in the vicinity of Montfort-l’Amaury. It takes departmental roads from now on. It reaches a villa covered with Virginia creeper and hollyhocks. There are lights on. The men are expected.
They go into a library. Behind a table and in front of bookshelves laden with fine bindings sits a black man with a thin aquiline nose. His build is more like that of an Afar than of a black African. He is wearing an Italian suit and a good many rings. He is smoking a Bastos. He is Marshal George Clemenceau Oufiri. The two killers give him the envelope containing the tape and leave.
The marshal gets a small tape recorder from a desk drawer and loads the reel. He listens and laughs. When he laughs, you can see that some teeth have been filed down.