The minister of justice laughed so hard he farted. His mouth was open as wide as that of a big oven. His filed–down teeth were glittering, his gold ones even more. His thick violet tongue writhed in its kennel. His glottis vibrated.
Jumbo was more restrained. He was sitting straight up and shaking his head with a companionable smile. His right hand was tapping his thigh.
The marshal stopped laughing with difficulty and wiped his eyes, which were streaming with tears of mirth.
He sighed several times very deeply, blissfully, his throat still jolted by barely repressed bursts of laughter.
“It would almost be worth letting the tape circulate,” he said. “Can you picture the look on Laveuglant’s face?”
“Well, yeah.”
“After a performance like this, he’s toast,” lamented the marshal merrily, and immediately wiped his face again.
“That’s not funny.”
“Of course it is.”
“We are losing a useful man,” insisted Colonel Jumbo.
“Useful men, pooh,” said Oufiri. He waved his hands about. “We have no shortage of them.”
“And what’s more,” he went on, “he didn’t know his place. Let me tell you something. He’s a racist, Laveuglant. He works with us but he despises us. He thinks like the Communists. He thinks we’re just puppets. He doesn’t believe we could seriously trick him.”
“Well, right now,” said Jumbo, “he got tricked.”
“Yup,” said Oufiri.
And he said it with a vicious satisfaction very different from his explosion of hilarity moments earlier. Then his brow cleared once more.
“This Butron, though,” he said, “I accuse! I accuse! Émile Zola, whoopee!”
Thereupon the minister of justice executed a few stumbling entrechats. He was awash in sheer happiness.
“What time is it?”
“Five past five.”
George Clemenceau Oufiri resumed his little entrechats.