All of this was taking place in the late nineteen sixties. Butron was talking, plants were growing, private cars were moving along roads and streets, little Chinese babies were being born continually, like raindrops, plink, plunk, plink. Elle, the women’s weekly, in the throes of a full-blown reality-reversing delusion, was wondering: “In 1968, what will we be like? We’ll be like ourselves, but younger.” Meanwhile gendarmes in Fontainebleau were putting a stop to the depredations of twenty or so school-age children who were organizing shoplifting contests among themselves. “Hippies are a cancer on society,” a police psychiatrist in Buenos Aires was telling the press. “The police,” he added, “are the ax that will remove it.” Butron was losing blood, but not that much. The fascist colonels ruling Greece had just gotten the idea of selling their coup d’état to tourists, and with that in mind produced a new advertising slogan: VISIT GREECE AND LEARN THE TRUTH. Motorists were fighting over parking spaces. Laveuglant was trying desperately to reach Oufiri and beg him to release N’Gustro. When he could not get through, he dialed several other numbers. His friends in the police were many. He pleaded with them to find Butron. Eventually it was Jumbo whom he got on the line. (At that moment the colonel had not yet returned to the villa where Oufiri was waiting for him.) “I beseech you to stop trying to eliminate Butron,” bleated Laveuglant. Jumbo sneered on the other end of the line. The police were checking rented rooms in search of Butron. “I shall go to prison happy and singing,” Monsignor Jorge Marcos de Oliveira, bishop of Santo André, was declaring to the television cameras in São Paulo. “I have no intention of converting any Communist [sic], for I have encountered a great Christian spirit and great seriousness and sincerity among persecuted Communists.” Two inspectors from the police intelligence agency visited the maid’s room occupied by Anne Gouin on Boulevard Saint-Germain, called her “little lady” in the tone of voice they use, the cops, and left when they realized that Henri Butron was not there, telling Anne to call them if he showed up. At that time Eddy Alfonsino’s red MG had been out of the tunnel to the West Autoroute, where a police barrier was being set up, for quite a while. The car was heading for Rouen. Butron kept lifting up dressings to inspect his wounds. Eddy reprimanded him for this. The MG went faster and faster. It passed Mantes-la-Jolie to its right. Laveuglant was biting his nails, frantic with worry in his posh office. Suddenly, jostling the nervous secretary with the voluminous knockers, Defeckmann ploughed his way into his sanctum. “I advise you to accept the facts and stop making waves,” he said to a dumbstruck Laveuglant. “This matter is beyond your control from now on.”
Laveuglant answered him condescendingly: “What’s the meaning of this?” he said in essence. “By what possible right do you make such an unspeakable intrusion?” Defeckmann had sat down uninvited in an egg chair. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and looked like one of those Oriental-language students who spend so much time reading Chinese that they mutate, wear robes, smoke opium, and stay for decades meditating in their rooms.
“I’m only a journalist,” he said languidly. “But I’m a Western journalist. The word ‘Western’ makes all the difference.”
“You can just get the hell out of here,” said Laveuglant.
He was in such a state that he seemed on the point of punching the journalist in the mouth. The latter brought him up short by telling a sibylline joke.
“Do you know the one about the crazy guy painting his ceiling? Another crazy guy comes up and tells him to hold on tight to the paintbrush because he’s taking the ladder away.”
Laveuglant sat back down.
“I don’t understand a thing anymore,” he said, but his tone was calmer now.
“I am better placed than anyone to know what is going on,” declared Defeckmann as he accepted a scotch. “Let me be the judge of the way to proceed. Pass the torch. You know nothing. Less than nothing now. Butron will get what he deserves. I can guarantee you that.”
“Can you really?”
The American nodded. Laveuglant was sweating disgracefully.
“Butron will turn against me,” he said. “I can’t write him off.”
And he went on to mention the photographs Butron had taken and the telephone recording. Defeckmann pretended to laugh and ashed his cigarette on the pale gray carpet.
“It’s not just a matter of catching him,” said Laveuglant. “He made it quite clear: even if he is dead, the stuff will show up in the papers.”
“In the papers, huh?” said Defeckmann, laughing. “I see. May I make a phone call?”
Laveuglant was by now in no shape to respond. Defeckmann called Colonel Jumbo. The two used the familiar pronoun. Laveuglant was drowning his agitation in Suze. His composure was crumbling.
Eddy Alfonsino was at the wheel of his red MG, leaving Rouen for Paris, thinking vaguely about his pal’s hassles and, just as vaguely, of his own affairs. Ben Debourmann, in bed in his hotel, whose address was known to Defeckmann, was tying one on with rosé de Provence while Jacquie Gouin, next to him, cold and pallid, waited with one hand on the telephone. She was all business but certain withal that she was beautiful.
Butron, unhappy with his physical appearance, which had suffered in the explosion of the booby-trapped car, threw aside his blood-soaked shirt, put on another one, in pink crepe, and a smoking jacket with frog fasteners, placed a little white hat at an angle on his head and then, satisfied, sat down at his desk to tell all to his small tape recorder.
By this time, in Debourmann’s hotel room, two of Colonel Jumbo’s henchmen had just burst in, one white, the other black. The latter shut the woman in the bathroom, but she screamed and hammered on the door, so he reopened it, slapped her and threatened to do her violence if she did not shut the fuck up. The white woman quieted down despite an urge to have violence done to her. The Negro immediately closed the door again. He rejoined his companion, who was holding Debourmann at gunpoint with an Astra automatic fitted with a silencer. The two then fell upon the stupid liberal and beat him up, putting brass knuckles to work on his torso and solar plexus. Debourmann was soon flat on his face on the carpet, tormented by dreadful pain. He lost control of his natural functions. He rolled around in his shit. Then the two henchmen, paying no further mind to the liberal, proceeded to ransack the whole place. It did not take them long to find the tape, which had been concealed in an idiotic way by the idiotic liberal. All the same, they went on wreaking havoc, shredding fabrics and slashing open armchairs, mattresses and the like. They tore out baseboards and cable raceways and tossed around everything but the kitchen sink. Only when everything had been demolished did they seem satisfied and ready to leave, at which point Debourmann, the asshole, spoke to the black one of the pair:
“You should be ashamed of yourself. You are betraying your brothers of color!”
The Negro, very calm, went back over to the human wreck writhing on the soiled carpet and sobbing with fury. Taking a banana from his pocket, he smashed it, without brutality, into the intellectual’s maw. Then the two henchmen took off.
•
Laveuglant’s hands were beginning to bleed. He had bitten his nails to the quick. He let his weary secretary leave. It was night in the capital city choking from exhaust fumes. The phone rang. Laveuglant went over to pick up, staggering, because he was half in the bag.
“Oh really?” he said. “Oh shit!”
He hung up right away and tried to dial a number three times before getting Defeckmann on the line and speaking to him more or less as follows: “My friends in the police have just warned me. Since N’Gustro’s collaborators are moving heaven and earth and since shards of truth have taken vague form in the minds of a number of bureaucrats, the affair cannot be concealed any further. There is no way to avoid an arrest warrant for Butron. Tomorrow morning it will be. The police will go to Butron’s two addresses. He is certainly not in Paris, but I’m not sure about Rouen.”
Laveuglant trembled as he spoke.
“As to that,” said Defeckmann in a bored way, “nothing of what you fear is going to appear in the press. The photos and tape recordings that you mentioned to me never existed. Never.”
“I’m delighted to know it,” said Laveuglant. “But that still leaves Butron himself.”
“As to that,” said Defeckmann again, “should Butron really be in Rouen, and supposing I were to go there, would you happen to know a congenial policeman who might make my journalistic tasks easier? Someone whom you could recommend to me, and to whom I could be recommended by you?”
“Goémond,” answered Laveuglant.
A short time later Colonel’s Jumbo’s two thugs were driving at full throttle down the West Autoroute.
All the while Butron kept on talking.