19

Yes, it was indeed well before summer that Alphonsine Raguse returned. To be precise, it was the first of May, though it has to be said that, as firsts of May go, this was one of the lousiest of the decade as far as the weather was concerned. Rain fell over three-quarters of France, and an Atlantic storm drove great waves high over the shoreline way up the estuary of the Gironde, as, for instance, at Saint-Georges-de-Didonne; a veritable hurricane tore up the Seine valley, ripping off roofs at Magny-en-Vexin and beyond it, as in Paris, and, of course, short of it also, as at Vilneuil, a hamlet exactly thirty kilometers from Magny.

At Vilneuil, Alonso Emerich y Emerich was alarmed by the wind. He did not convey his alarm to Bastien or Carlo. In the past, he had on occasion apprised them of concerns of his (albeit concerns of another sort). For one thing, it was months since Alonso had had any contact with the two hit men; not since the Gerfaut fiasco, in fact. For another, Bastien was dead. And for yet another, Alonso had not the slightest idea what had become of Carlo or where he was now. In point of fact, Carlo was hundreds of kilometers away from Vilneuil, in a hotel room in Chambéry. He had had chicken sandwiches sent up, along with four bottles of German beer. The television was on, but the volume was muted. Carlo could easily afford a hotel with television in every room, for he had been given several contracts since Bastien’s death. He was now used to working without his partner—used to working alone, in fact, since he had no plans to take on anyone else. Not that he had given up the idea of avenging Bastien, though he no longer wore a mourning band. At this very moment, in fact, he was ignoring Armand Jammot on the television and studying his own handwritten notes concerning the timetables and routes of freight trains in the Alps. He was also perusing maps published by the National Geographical Institute at a scale of 1:25,000 covering a polygon whose points were Chambéry, Aix-les-Bains, Annecy, Chamonix, Val d’Isère, Briançon, and Grenoble. His task was a long one. As he proceeded, Carlo leaned into the wall or clasped the table tightly, performing his isometric muscle-strengthening exercises. In the metal suitcase on a baggage stand were a change of clothes, the S&W .45, the three knives and the steel, the garrote, the blackjack, and all the rest. Carlo’s toilet bag was in the bathroom, and on the bedside table was a science-fiction novel by Jack Williamson in French translation. The canvas bag containing the over-and-under M6 and the binoculars lay on the floor against the wall.

As Carlo took his first bite of chicken sandwich, Alphonsine Raguse had already been in her grandfather’s house for several hours. A thick fog blanketed the little valley. For some reason, the area escaped the ravaging wind. The mist hung in the still air like absorbent cotton laid across the ground.

Alphonsine and Gerfaut were having almost nonstop fun. Between the two of them, things were going well. They were delighted to have engaged at last in sexual congress and intended to repeat the experience as often as possible. At every moment they clasped fingers, caressed each other’s shoulders or hair, kissed one another on the temple or in the crook of the arm; their eyes glistened; they were fragrant with sweat and other bodily fluids; they giggled frequently.

Gerfaut was at the table in the main room, shirtless and barefoot, wearing cotton pants that were too short for him. Before him on the table was an ITT portable radio receiver with a long, inclined antenna. A dessert plate did service as an ashtray. Gerfaut held a Gitane filter. The radio was playing jazz, a Johnny Guarnieri piano solo, part of a program from France Musique. Not long after her first visit, Alphonsine had sent Gerfaut a money order to cover a month’s salary. He had immediately gone and bought the radio, the pants, Gitane filters, and a plastic miniature chess set which was now on the bedroom floor with its pieces set up in the final position of a Vasyukov-Polugayewski match at the USSR championships of 1965 (White resigned after the thirty-second move).

“Georges!” said Alphonsine as she broke the seal on a bottle of Isle of Jura whisky. “What a horrible first name!”

“Everybody can’t be called Alphonsine. Call me Ishmael. Call me cutie-pie, for all I care!”

“All right, that’s fine. Cutie-pie. Perfect. I dumped him, you know, my boyfriend. When I got back to Paris. I wanted to come straight back here. I’m a real shit, aren’t I?” As Gerfaut made no reply, she went on. “I wanted to, but I had commitments. And then, I wanted to think things over.” She tittered. “No, seriously, I knew I was going to come back, but I wanted to do it slowly, elegantly. Why did you shave that sexy beard off? Do you know you look a bit like Robert Redford?”

“Ugh!” It was true, he did resemble Robert Redford. But, like a lot of men, he didn’t much care for Robert Redford. “I was fed up with looking like—I don’t know, like a bandit out of an Edmond About story. Commitments—what commitments? Are you in business? You seem pretty well-heeled.”

Alphonsine pulled a stool up to the table and sat down. She poured whisky into two cracked cups, then put her elbows on the table, crossing her wrists and leaning her chin on them. She was wearing boots and suede pants. Her upper body was bare. She was not cold because a fire was roaring in the hearth. The hair at the nape of her neck was clammy with sweat. On the radio Johnny Guarnieri was superseded by a warm masculine voice retailing structuralist and leftist rubbish, then Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray began to play.

“Wardell Gray—not this tenor, the other one,” said Gerfaut, pointing uselessly at the receiver, “was found shot dead in a vacant lot. And Albert Ayler’s body was fished out of the East River. It was Lee Morgan, his girlfriend, who bumped him off. Things like that exist! They really happen!”

“When I was nineteen,” said Alphonsine absently, “I married a surgeon. He was crazily in love with me, the moron. It was only a civil marriage. We were divorced after five years, and I took him for every penny I could get. What do you mean, ‘Things like that exist’? Don’t say you’re going to start again with your tales about killers!”

Gerfaut shook his head. He seemed preoccupied, indecisive. The laughter was almost completely gone from his features.

“The Isle of Jura,” he said, turning to look at the bottle, “that’s in the Hebrides. George Orwell had a small farm there. He wanted to get his life together, but he never really had the time before he died of tuberculosis.”

“Well, you’re a cheerful character, aren’t you? A barrel of laughs. Who is this George Orwell, anyway?”

Gerfaut didn’t reply. He knocked back his cup of Isle of Jura whisky in one.

“I’ll have to make a decision one of these days,” he remarked, but he didn’t say what decision. “It’ll wait. At least till this fog lifts. Let’s go and make love, okay?”

They went and made love. The fog did not lift. For three days it did not lift. On the evening of the third day, the Peugeot 504 made its way slowly into the village with its fog lights on. It came to a halt in front of the church, across the street from the café-tabac.

Up at the Raguse house, Alphonsine and Gerfaut were at the table. Alphonsine was wearing a white terrycloth robe and thick American knop-wool socks. Gerfaut had on brown widewale corduroy pants and a plaid woolen shirt. Both he and Alphonsine smelled sweetly clean and well-soaped. They were eating bread and butter and drinking champagne. On the radio, a black woman sang about how, in the wee hours of the morning, when everyone is fast asleep, you lie awake in your bed and think of him, you can’t help it. It was night, and the fog could be seen through the windows.

In the Peugeot 504, in front of the church, Carlo had switched on the overhead light to study his maps. He ticked off the name of the hamlet on a list. He had drawn up lists of all settlements of any size in the vicinity of the various points where Gerfaut might conceivably have fallen from a train. There was a host of possibilities, because the drifter had not been very clear. Carlo’s list of most likely localities had fortyone entries. A second list, enumerating places where it was less likely but still very possible for Gerfaut to have ended up, comprised seventy-three names. There was even a third list. For forty-eight hours now, Carlo had been combing the mountains. The name of the hamlet where he now found himself occupied the twenty-third position on his first list.

The hit man put his lists and maps away, extinguished the interior light, and got out of the car. He crossed the muddy street and went into the café-tabac. Inside were three old men in tatty dark clothing and the owner, a fat man with suspenders. Carlo ordered coffee. He was brought a cup and saucer and a pot of coffee and coffee-stained sugar lumps in a plastic bowl meant to look like cut glass. Carlo asked for aspirin. And displayed his left index finger, which was bandaged up with gauze and adhesive tape.

“It’s my finger. It hurts like hell.”

“Piss on it!” exclaimed one of the old men. “Piss on it and don’t wash it till sundown.”

The hit man evinced a pale smile.

“I’d rather ... I wonder ... There wouldn’t be a doctor hereabouts, would there?” (It was the twenty-third time he had asked the question in his two-day search.)

“Afraid not. You’ll have to go back down.” The owner scrutinized the hit man. “You have to go back, anyway—the road doesn’t go any farther up the mountain.”

“So,” Carlo persisted, “if someone gets hurt or something, they go down into the valley? There’s nobody at all who ... I mean to say, there must be....”

“There used to be Corporal Raguse,” put in the old fellow who had spoken earlier. “No more a corporal than I am, I might say. He’s passed away, in any case.”

Carlo stayed chatting for another quarter of an hour or so. He found out everything he wanted to know. He thanked the owner for the aspirin, paid for his coffee and for the round of rums he had bought, and walked out. For an instant, he stood motionless in the street. Through the thick fog he strove to make out lights, perhaps even lights at the Raguse house, which was no more than five hundred meters distant. But it was hopeless: he couldn’t even see his 504 coupe four meters away.

Carlo was resolved now, in dealing with this moron Georges Gerfaut, to leave nothing to chance. The killer got back into his car and left the hamlet. Then, driving cautiously, his fog lights groping the whiteness, he descended slowly into the valley.

At Saint-Jean he found a hotel open and took a room for the night. Once settled in, he removed the dressing from his perfectly intact forefinger. He had carried the metal suitcase and the canvas bag upstairs himself. He placed both on the bed and began to lay out the things he proposed to wear the next day: cotton pants, checkered shirt, thick roll-neck sweater, boots. Then he carefully cleaned and oiled his weapons. And before going to bed he spent a long while studying his 1:25,000-scale maps. He had requested a wake-up call for five-thirty in the morning.