7

At the sound of Gerfaut clattering about in the kitchen and swearing between clenched teeth, the little girls came downstairs. Gerfaut didn’t bother to scold them, even though, as he saw it, it was still too early to get up.

The girls were dressed. Gerfaut dug out denim shorts and a Lacoste shirt, and all three left for the seafront. It was already hot. The beach was completely deserted. A wooden refreshment stand showed no sign of opening up. The Mercedes made a right, cruised by a motionless funfair and a cemetery, turned left, and finally parked in a side street near an antique shop that also dealt in detective stories, varnished seashells, and comic books translated from the Italian. Gerfaut and the girls found a café open and settled themselves on perforated plastic seats in red, yellow, and pastel blue. They drank bowls of gray café au lait speckled with stray coffee grounds and ate butter croissants from a nearby bakery. Then they headed back. A breeze had come up, sand whirled across the beachfront road, and the shrubs planted in wooden boxes waved back and forth like carnivorous plants. The milky coffee formed a resinous lump just below Gerfaut’s sternum.

He left the car in the street outside their rental house. In the main room, with the blinds raised and windows open, Béa sat in an immense white robe dipping a zwieback in Special for Breakfast tea from Fortnum & Mason’s. She removed a crumb from the corner of her mouth.

“Where’ve you been? What got into you? Did you go to look at the sea?”

“We had breakfast!” cried the girls, as they raced noisily out of the room and up the stairs.

Gerfaut sat down at the table.

“Do you like the house?” asked Béa.

“For God’s sake,” said Gerfaut, “why can’t we go to a decent hotel? In North Africa, the Canaries, any damn place—”

“Stop it—stop swearing!” chided Béa.

“Just so long as daylight doesn’t come into the room at half-past five in the morning, and dogs don’t bark, and cocks don’t crow, and you don’t have to hear all those horrible noises. Tell me why we can’t! We can afford a good hotel, so why not?”

“You know perfectly well why not! It’s not worth talking about it. You’re only trying to bring me down.”

“I want to bring you down? God in heaven!”

“Yes, you’d love that. But I’m not going to let you, so it’s no use talking. If you don’t like it here, you can go back to Paris.”

“If I don’t like it here! Christ!” Gerfaut surveyed the mildewed leather couch, the likewise mildewed easy chairs, the two Henry-the-Second sideboards, the two massive dining tables with their carved legs, the ten chairs (two sideboards, two dining tables, ten chairs—Christ!), and the door to the toilet, opening directly into the main room, adorned by the picture of a small boy in short pants, socks about his ankles, with blond curls, mischievous bright eyes, and rosy cheeks, turning his head cutely toward the viewer as he pisses against a Montmartre-type gas lamp.

Misreading Gerfaut’s pensiveness, Béa thought he had calmed down and rested her head on his forearm. She told him he was tired from the journey and that he had slept badly and that she understood. Granted, the house was hideous—but they hadn’t come to the seaside to stay indoors all the time. Anyway, they would rearrange things, take down the awful picture, consign one of the tables to the attic—“Christ alive,” grumbled Gerfaut, “do you realize how much those things weigh?”—and the bedrooms weren’t too bad, and the garden was just fine.

“Every year,” said Gerfaut, “I think it’s worse than the year before. Even if it’s not.”

“Every year,” retorted Béa, “you decide that we’ll never set foot here again, then you refuse to look at any houses. And when the time comes, we decide together at the very last minute that it wasn’t really so bad last year. But we never have enough time off to come up here, so my mother has to choose—not that there’s any choice left.”

“This year, I’m sure there was some choice.” Gerfaut got up from his chair and started mumbling about inflation and deflation and recovery and unemployment and how people were set in their ways and always went away in August, just for the month, so he was quite sure they could have had their pick for July.

“Listen,” said Béa, “what’s done is done.”

“Your mother’s an idiot.”

“My mother’s an idiot, yes,” agreed Béa with disarming equanimity, “and we are having lunch at her house, and you’ll do me the favor of having a shave and being polite.”

Gerfaut burst out laughing. He dropped back into his seat and laughed theatrically, first throwing his head back, then shaking it and slapping his thighs. Béa calmly finished her zwieback. Gerfaut stopped laughing and wiped his eyes.

“One of these days,” he said, “I’ll suddenly go mad and you won’t even notice.”

“If there’s any difference, I’ll notice.”

“Very funny,” said Gerfaut sadly. “Very funny, I must say. What a wit!”

He went to wash and shave. When he tried to hang his hand towel on the rail, the thing parted from the wall with a grating sound and fell to the floor, accompanied by a small quantity of plaster and two bent screws. Gerfaut left the towel, the rail, and the plaster where they lay and drove to the co-op to shop for essentials. He returned with a good supply of breakfast cereal, oil, cheese, milk, spirits, wine, and mineral water, both still and sparkling. The little girls were lobbying loudly for a television set to be rented.

“You can’t get a decent signal here,” asserted Gerfaut.

“We did last year!”

“You need an outside antenna.”

The girls scooted out of the house, overturning a chair as they went. They returned shouting that there was an antenna on the roof. Gerfaut surrendered and promised to take care of it.

“When? When?” the girls wanted to know.

“This afternoon, okay? I’ll go into Royan.”

They quieted down instantly as though some button had been pressed. Later, they all went on foot to Béa’s mother’s for lunch.

“You have to go to Royan for a television,” the girls reminded Gerfaut when they came out of the old witch’s house.

So Gerfaut took the Mercedes and went to rent a television in Royan. On the return trip he overtook a Lancia Beta 1800 sedan. Back at the house, whose hideousness he still couldn’t hack, he plugged the set in. Finally, he undressed, slipped into an ugly green swimsuit, and left to join Béa and the girls at the beach.

It was five o’clock. The sun was leaden but baking hot. Inflation and deflation and all the rest notwithstanding, and despite the fact that it was only the thirtieth of June, there was a good number of people on the sand and in the water. Gerfaut wondered what it would be like in three days.

It took him easily five minutes to locate Béa and the girls. All three had already been in the water, sunbathed for thirty minutes, and covered up. Ensconced in a beach chair, wearing jeans and a crepe de chine blouse, Béa was reading Alexandra Kollontai. The girls, in T-shirts and overalls, were building a sandcastle. Gerfaut opened the other folding chair and sat next to Béa. The kids scampered up to make sure the TV had been installed and, once satisfied on this score, returned to their digging. Gerfaut stripped down to his trunks. The whiteness of his skin embarrassed him. He went in the water on his own.

A few minutes later, the two hit men got out of the Lancia, which was parked on the seafront. They both wore shorts. Neither of their bodies had a trace of fat. On the contrary, they were both very muscular, and muscular in the best way—harmoniously, with none of the excess of the bodybuilder. Each cast a brief admiring glance at the other’s physique as they made their way toward the sea—and Gerfaut.

Gerfaut had entered the cold water without pleasure, advancing in stages as first his penis and balls, then his belly button, were immersed. At that point he had doubled up and plunged headlong into the drink. He was now swimming in slightly over a meter of ocean mixed with hydrocarbons, empty Gauloise packs, peach pits, orange peel, water from the Gironde River, and a trace amount of urine; all around him was a mass of little children, giggling teenage girls, beach-ball lobbers, spry old folks—there was even a black African in a bright red swimsuit. There were people at every point of the compass. In Gerfaut’s ambit, the closest were at least three meters away and the most distant some twenty-five meters in any given direction. When the two hit men in shorts approached Gerfaut, he paid no attention. So he was much taken aback, as he touched bottom long enough to catch his breath, to be punched matter-of-factly in the solar plexus by the younger of the pair.

Gerfaut fell forward slowly; his mouth was open and the water rushed into it. The young assailant grasped his torso with both hands and held the middle of his body under the water. White Streaks grabbed Gerfaut’s hair with his left hand and clamped the right on his throat, forcing his fingers into the flesh around the larynx and trying to strangle Gerfaut while simultaneously stopping him from getting his head out of the water.

As the first punch landed, Gerfaut’s solar plexus had been just level with the surface. Since the blow had been delivered at a tangent to the water, its force had been mitigated. Consequently, Gerfaut’s capacity to react was now not so compromised as it might otherwise have been.

Blindly, sensing the water running freely into his bronchial passages and his epiglottis quivering in the grasp of attacker number two, Gerfaut fumbled around in the filthy sea, brushed a pair of thighs, seized someone’s nylon-clad genitals, and did his very best to tear them off.

His throat was released. He got his face above the water. He was struck on the top of the head and the temple and forced back under once more. He had barely been able to gasp a little air. He had been vouchsafed a brief water-streaked vision of the children, the giggling adolescent girls, the ball players, and the black African. An eruption of laughter, shouting, and ocean spray (and a guy braying hysterically—“Pass, Roger, pass!”). A whole tiny universe oblivious to the fact that Georges Gerfaut was being murdered! He deliberately directed his head downward instead of trying to come up for air as one might have expected. Wrenching his body from the grasp of the blue-eyed hit man, he performed an underwater somersault and resurfaced throwing up bile, and butted the younger assailant hard on the jaw. Someone delivered a hammer blow to his kidney. A single scarlet thread of a thought occupied Gerfaut’s mind: gouge their eyes out and tear their balls off—kill these sons of bitches that are trying to destroy you!