CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Louvet, 1

THE LOUVETS’ FLAT on the first floor right. An executive’s living room. Walls hung with yellow leather; a sunken grate in a hexagonal fireplace, and a made-up fire on the point of flaming; an integrated suite of audio-visual equipment: stereo, tape-deck, TV, slide projector; sofa and matching armchairs in buttoned natural leather. Purple, cinnamon, and toast-coloured hues; a low table tiled with small brownish hexagonal tiles, supporting a dish-bowl containing a set of poker dice, several darning eggs, a miniature bottle of angostura bitters, and a champagne cork that is actually a lighter; a pack of matches advertising the San Francisco club it comes from, Diamond’s; a naval officer’s desk, with a modern imported Italian lamp, a slender skeleton of black metal which can be made to hold almost any position; an alcove hung with red curtains and a bed buried under tiny multicoloured cushions; on the rear wall, a large watercolour depicting musicians playing antique instruments.

The Louvets are away. They travel a lot, on business and for pleasure. Louvet looks – perhaps a bit too much – like the image people have of him, and which he shares: English fashions, Viennese moustache. Madame Louvet is a very stylish woman, coming on forty, who likes to wear culottes, yellow check waistcoats, leather belts, and chunky tortoiseshell bracelets.

There is a photograph showing them on a bear hunt in the Andes, in the Macondo area; they are posing with another couple who can only be described as exercises in the same style: all four wear khaki combat jackets full of pockets and pouches. In the foreground, Louvet half-squats with one knee on the ground and a gun in his hand; behind him his wife is seated on a deckchair; behind the deckchair the other couple are standing.

A fifth person, no doubt the guide whose job it was to go with them, stands a little to the side: a tall man with close-cropped hair, looking like an American GI; dressed in camouflage fatigues, he seems totally rapt in reading a cheap detective novel with an illustrated jacket, entitled El Crimén piramidal.