At Naples Lafcadio booked into a hotel next to the station. He took care to have his trunk brought with him, because travellers without luggage are suspicious and he wanted to attract as little attention as he could. He then hurried to buy himself the few toiletries he needed and a hat to replace the ghastly boater (too tight at the front in any case) that Fleurissoire had left him. He had also decided to buy a revolver, but had to postpone that purchase till the morning, as the shops were already closing.
The train he wanted to catch the next morning left early. He would be at Rome in time for lunch …
He intended to announce his presence to Julius after the newspapers had reported the ‘crime’. Crime! The word seemed bizarre, and the word criminal, applied to him, totally inappropriate. He preferred adventurer, a word as flexible as his beaver hat, whose edges could also be reshaped at will.
The morning newspapers carried no news of the adventure. He waited patiently for the evening papers, eager to see Julius and to feel the game start. Like a child playing hide and seek, who does not want to be found but does want to be looked for, he became bored with waiting. He was in an intermediate state, neither one thing nor the other, that he had not known before. The people he jostled in the streets seemed particularly mediocre, disagreeable and hideous.
When evening came, he bought the Corriere from a vendor on the Corso and went into a restaurant, but as a sort of challenge to himself and as if to sharpen his desire, he forced himself to dine first, leaving the newspaper folded up on the table next to him. Then he went out onto the Corso again, where he stopped in the light from a shop window, opened it, and on page two saw this headline above one of the news stories:
CRIME, SUICIDE … OR ACCIDENT
Underneath he read this, which I translate:
A man’s jacket containing six thousand francs was found yesterday on a Naples-bound train. At Naples station, railway staff discovered a dark-coloured jacket in the luggage rack in a first-class compartment of a train from Rome, the inside pocket of which contained an open yellow envelope with six one-thousand-franc notes inside. There were no other documents to identify the jacket’s owner. Police have not yet commented on whether they are treating the find as suspicious, although the presence of such a large sum in the victim’s jacket makes it likely that, if crime was involved, theft was not the motive. There was no sign of a struggle in the compartment, apart from the discovery under a seat of a man’s shirt-cuff with the cufflink attached, in the form of two cat’s heads joined by a silver-gilt chain, cut from a semi-transparent quartz known as opalescent smoky agate or moonstone.
A thorough search is being conducted along the length of the railway track between Naples and Rome.
Lafcadio’s hands clenched on the newspaper.
‘What the hell? Now it’s Carola’s cufflinks. Who would have thought the old man had so many coincidences in him?’
He turned the page and saw:
STOP PRESS
BODY FOUND NEXT TO RAILWAY TRACKS
He did not read on, but ran to the Grand Hotel.
Asking the desk clerk for an envelope, he wrote under the name on his visiting card, put it in the envelope and asked for it to be sent up.
LAFCADIO WLUIKI
wishes to know whether Count Julius de Baraglioul is in need of a secretary
A page eventually came to collect him in the lobby where he was waiting, led him down long corridors, and presented him.
Looking around the room, Lafcadio saw a copy of the Corriere della Sera thrown down in a corner. On the table in the middle of the room a big unstoppered bottle of eau de Cologne spread its powerful scent. Julius opened his arms.
‘Lafcadio! Dear friend … how very happy I am to see you!’
His mussed hair wafted agitatedly around his temples, and he seemed oddly excited. He had a handkerchief with black polka dots in his hand and was fanning himself with it.
‘Well, you’re one of the last people I expected to see. But the one I’d most have liked to be able to talk to this evening … Was it Madame Carola who told you I was here?’
‘What a queer question!’
‘Why? As I’ve just met her … Although actually I’m not certain she saw me.’
‘Carola! Is she in Rome?’
‘Didn’t you know?’
‘I’ve just this minute got here from Sicily and you’re the first person I’ve seen. Her I don’t have any desire to see.’
‘I thought she was looking remarkably pretty.’
‘I mean, much prettier than in Paris.’
‘That’s your love of the exotic coming out – but if you’re feeling frisky …’
‘Lafcadio, such language is inappropriate between us.’
Julius tried to look stern, but only succeeded in making a face. He went on, ‘You find me extremely agitated. I’m at a turning point in my life. My head feels as if it’s on fire and my whole body is in the grip of a sort of giddiness, as if I were about to evaporate. I’ve been in Rome for three days, having come here for a sociology conference, and it has just been one shock after another. Your arrival, although of course very welcome, is the last straw … I hardly know myself any more.’
He was pacing up and down. Stopping at the table, he picked up the bottle, liberally splashed scent over his handkerchief, pressed it to his forehead like a compress and left it there.
‘Dear young friend … allow me to call you that … I believe I have cracked my new book! What you said to me in Paris about The Air on the Heights, although I thought you went too far, makes me feel that you won’t find this one unappealing.’
His feet performed an almost balletic little jump, and the handkerchief fell on the floor. Lafcadio quickly bent over to pick it up, and, as he did, he felt Julius’s hand rest gently on his shoulder, exactly as he remembered old Juste-Agénor’s hand resting there. He smiled as he straightened up.
‘I’ve known you for such a short time,’ Julius said, ‘but tonight I can’t help speaking to you as if to a …’
He stopped.
‘I am listening to you like a brother, Monsieur de Baraglioul,’ Lafcadio said, emboldened, ‘since you see fit to invite me to.’
‘Can you see, Lafcadio, that in the circles I move in in Paris, out of all the people I frequent – the worldly, the clergy, men and women of letters, Academicians – I don’t really have anyone I can talk to, I mean anyone to whom I can confide these new preoccupations that have taken hold of me. The point being that since our first meeting – yours and mine – my point of view has completely changed.’
‘A good thing too, I’d say!’ Lafcadio said cheekily.
‘I don’t think you can really understand, not being a writer yourself, how much an erroneous outlook can inhibit the free development of your creative faculties. That’s why nothing could be further from my earlier work than the novel I’m planning today. All the logic and consistency that I demanded from my characters, I also used to insist on from myself, in order to make them genuine. It wasn’t natural. We so often prefer to lead lives that aren’t authentic rather than fail to live up to the portrait we drew of ourselves right at the beginning. It’s absurd – and by doing it we run the risk of distorting what’s best in us.’
Lafcadio was still smiling, waiting to hear what would come next and amused to see the effect his earliest remarks to Julius had had.
‘How can I explain it to you, Lafcadio? For the very first time I feel I can give myself free rein … Do you understand what those words mean: free rein? … I say to myself that I had free rein before. I tell myself I still do, and that all that’s held me back are impure considerations about my career, public opinion, and all those unappreciative judges whose approval the poet hopes for in vain. From now on I shall hope for nothing, except from myself. From now on I shall expect everything from myself: I shall expect everything from the man of sincerity, and I shall expect anything, because I also sense the strangest possibilities growing in me. And since it’s only on paper, I have no qualms about letting them out. We shall see what we shall see!’
He was breathing heavily, his shoulder thrown back, arching his shoulder blade almost like a wing, as though these new perplexities were half stifling him. Continuing irrelevantly, he said in a lower voice, ‘And since they don’t want me, those Messieurs at the Académie, I’m about to provide them with several good reasons not to admit me, which incidentally they did not have before. They did not.’
At the last words his voice abruptly became almost shrill and sing-song. He stopped, then said more calmly, ‘So, this is what I’m thinking about … Are you listening?’
‘You have my undivided attention,’ Lafcadio said, still grinning.
‘And are you following me?’
‘To the ends of the earth.’
Julius moistened his handkerchief again and sat down in an armchair. Lafcadio straddled a chair opposite him.
‘It’s about a young man, whom I want to turn into a criminal.’
‘I can’t see any difficulty with that.’
‘Wait! Wait!’ Julius, who rather liked difficulty, said.
‘Well, who’s stopping you, Monsieur-the-novelist? And from the minute you begin imagining things, from imagining everything you want?’
‘But the stranger the thing I imagine, the more I have to provide motive, explanations.’
‘It’s hardly arduous to think up a motive for a crime.’
‘I’m sure you’re right … but that’s precisely it, I don’t want a motive for the crime. All I want is to motivate the criminal. Yes: I want to bring him to the point where he commits the crime quite gratuitously, where he wants to commit a completely unmotivated crime.’
Lafcadio started to listen more closely.
‘Let’s start with him as an adolescent: I need that starting point so that we see the elegance of his character, that everything he does is for the sake of play, and that he consistently puts his pleasure ahead of what’s good for him.’
‘That’s fairly unusual, wouldn’t you say?’ Lafcadio ventured.
‘Isn’t it?’ Julius said delightedly. ‘We should also add that he enjoys exercising self-control …’
‘To the point of dissembling.’
‘So we need to give him a love of risk.’
‘Bravo!’ Lafcadio said, more and more amused. ‘And then, if he knows how to listen to the demon of curiosity, I think your pupil is ready for the wide world.’
With the thoughts of each vaulting over the other’s, and each of them overtaking and being overtaken by the other, their conversation started to sound like a game of mental leapfrog.
JULIUS: I see him practising first, becoming an expert at petty theft.
LAFCADIO: I’ve often wondered why there isn’t more petty theft. It’s true that the opportunity mostly arises for those who aren’t in need and aren’t particularly susceptible to temptation.
JULIUS: Who aren’t in need – exactly. He’s one of those. But he’s only drawn to opportunities that demand some skill from him, some cunning …
LAFCADIO: And those that expose him to some danger, probably.
JULIUS: As I said, he enjoys risk. The point being that he loathes crookedness: he’s not a thief in the ordinary sense, he just enjoys moving objects surreptitiously from one place to another. He has a magician’s talent for making things vanish.
LAFCADIO: And the fact that he goes unpunished eggs him on …
JULIUS: But irritates him at the same time. If he isn’t getting caught, it means he must be playing too easy a game.
LAFCADIO: So he urges himself on to riskier and riskier scenarios.
JULIUS: Yes, I make him reason along exactly those lines …
LAFCADIO: Are you quite sure that it’s a process of reasoning?
JULIUS (going on): It’s through the need he has to commit the crime that the perpetrator gives himself away.
LAFCADIO: We’ve established that he’s very clever.
JULIUS: Yes, all the cleverer for acting completely coolly. Think about it: a crime unmotivated by either passion or need. His reason for committing the crime is precisely that of committing it without a reason.
LAFCADIO: You’re reasoning out his crime. He just commits it.
JULIUS: There’s no reason to suppose someone’s a criminal because he commits a crime without having a reason to.
LAFCADIO: You’re being too subtle. When you take him that far, he surely becomes what we call ‘a free man’.
JULIUS: At the mercy of the first opportunity.
LAFCADIO: I can’t wait to see him at work. What do you plan to suggest to him?
JULIUS: Well, I hadn’t quite made up my mind. Yes – until this evening I hadn’t decided … Then suddenly tonight the paper broke some news that gave me exactly the situation I was looking for. Providential – but frightful too. I can hardly believe it. Someone has just murdered my brother-in-law!
LAFCADIO: What? The old man on the train was—
JULIUS: He was Amédée Fleurissoire, to whom I’d lent my ticket and whom I had just seen off at the station. An hour earlier he had cashed a cheque for six thousand francs at my bank, and because he had the money in his pocket he was nervous when we said goodbye. He was nursing dark thoughts, black thoughts – how can I describe it? Forebodings. Then in the train … But you’ve seen the paper.
LAFCADIO: Only the headline.
JULIUS: Let me read it to you (opening the Corriere). I’ll translate:
‘The police, who have been searching the length of the railway track between Rome and Naples, have this afternoon, in the dry bed of the Volturno river five kilometres from Capua, recovered the body of the man they believe was the owner of the jacket found yesterday evening in the carriage of a Naples-bound train. The man is of average height and build and approximately fifty years of age. [‘He looked older than he was.’] No documents were found with the body that offered any clues to its identity. [‘Fortunately that gives me the time to collect myself.’] He had apparently been thrown out of the carriage with sufficient force to clear the parapet of a bridge whose stonework was undergoing repairs and had been replaced by wooden scaffolding. [‘What a prose style!’] The bridge stands more than five metres above the river, and the victim is thought to have died as a result of the fall, his body carrying no trace of other wounds. He was discovered in shirtsleeves, and on his right wrist wore a shirt-cuff similar to the cuff found on the train, although the cufflink was missing … [‘What’s the matter?’]
Julius stopped. Lafcadio had been unable to suppress a start at the thought that the cufflink had been removed after the body had landed in the river bed. Julius continued.)
‘His left hand was still clutching a soft felt hat …’
‘Soft felt! Philistines!’ Lafcadio muttered.
Julius stuck his nose over the top of the newspaper.
‘What strikes you as so surprising?’
‘Nothing, nothing! Go on.’
‘… soft felt hat which was much too large for his own head and may belong to his aggressor. The manufacturer’s name had been carefully removed from the lining, out of which a piece of leather the shape and size of a laurel leaf was missing …’
Lafcadio got to his feet and stood behind Julius, to read over his shoulder and perhaps also to conceal his pallor. It was irrefutable: his crime had been retouched. Someone else had been at the scene and had cut the name from the lining, probably the same stranger who had made off with his suitcase.
Julius read on:
‘… which seems to indicate that the crime was premeditated. [‘Why specifically this crime? My hero had perhaps taken his precautions entirely at random …’] As soon as the police had made their report at the scene, the body was transferred to Naples to establish the man’s identity. [‘Yes, they’ve the means to do that, and are used to preserving bodies there for a long time …]’
‘How can you be sure it was him?’ Lafcadio’s voice shook slightly.
‘It can’t be anyone else. I was expecting him for dinner this evening.’
‘Have you informed the police?’
‘Not yet. I need to put my thoughts a little more in order before I do. I’m already in mourning, so from that side of things (I mean, the dress side) I’m all right, but you have to understand that as soon as the victim’s name is released I shall have to let all my family know, send telegrams, write letters, put it into the papers, arrange the funeral, go to Naples to claim the body … Oh! My dear Lafcadio, with this conference going on, which I’ve committed myself to taking part in, would you mind very much acting as my representative and collecting the body instead of me?’
‘Can we decide that later?’
‘Assuming it doesn’t upset you too much, of course. In the meantime I’m saving my poor sister-in-law some cruel hours of uncertainty. It’s very unlikely that she would connect her husband with these vague newspaper reports … I return to my subject.
‘So, when I read the Corriere report I said to myself: This crime, which I can visualise so easily, which I can reconstitute, which I can see – I’m positive I know what made the perpetrator do it, and I know that if it hadn’t been for the lure of those six thousand francs, the crime wouldn’t have been committed.’
‘Yes, exactly: let’s suppose for a moment that there had been no six thousand francs or, better still, that the criminal hadn’t taken them: he’s my man.’
Lafcadio had already got to his feet. He retrieved the newspaper that Julius had dropped and opened it at page two.
‘I see you haven’t read the earlier edition: in fact the … criminal didn’t steal the six thousand francs,’ he said, as coolly as he could. ‘Here, read this: “This makes it likely that, if crime was involved, theft was not the motive.”’
Julius snatched the page that Lafcadio was holding out to him and read it eagerly, then rubbed his eyes with his hand, sat down, stood up again abruptly, stepped over to Lafcadio and seized both his arms.
‘Theft not the motive!’ he exclaimed, and as if in the grip of a fit shook Lafcadio fiercely. ‘Theft not the motive! But then …’ He pushed him away, rushed to the other end of the room, fanning himself, hitting his forehead and blowing his nose. ‘Then I know, good God, I know why this scoundrel killed him … Oh, my unlucky friend, oh, poor Fleurissoire! He was telling me the truth all along! And I thought he’d gone mad … This is absolutely dreadful.’
Lafcadio waited, astonished, for the attack to subside. He felt faintly annoyed: it seemed to him that Julius did not deserve to be let off the hook so easily.
‘I thought that was exactly what you—’
‘Be quiet! You don’t know anything about it. And here I am wasting my time with you, making up ridiculous scenarios … Quickly! My stick and my hat!’
‘Where are you rushing off to?’
‘To inform the police, of course!’
Lafcadio blocked the doorway.
‘Explain it to me first,’ he said commandingly. ‘Good Lord, anyone would think you’d gone mad.’
‘No, I was mad before, I’ve just woken up from my madness … Oh, poor Fleurissoire! Unlucky friend! Saintly victim! His death has stopped me on the path of disrespect and blasphemy just in time. His sacrifice has saved me. And to think I mocked him!’
He had started pacing up and down again. Suddenly stopping and putting his stick and hat down on the table next to the bottle of eau de Cologne, he stood squarely in front of Lafcadio.
‘You want to know why the scoundrel killed him?’
‘I thought he did it without a motive.’
Julius said furiously, ‘First and foremost, there is no crime without a motive. He was eliminated because he knew a secret … which he’d entrusted me with, a secret of considerable magnitude and certainly too important for him to deal with. They were afraid of him. Do you understand? So … Oh, it’s easy for you to laugh, you who understand nothing of the ways of faith.’
Then, very pale, standing very straight: ‘And I am the one who has inherited this secret.’
‘Be careful then! It’s you they’re going to be afraid of now.’
‘Now you see why I must go and warn the police immediately.’
‘One more question,’ Lafcadio said, stopping him again.
‘No. Let me go. I’m in a frantic hurry. The continual surveillance that almost drove my poor brother-in-law mad will be focused on me from now on, you can be quite certain. You have no idea whatsoever how clever these people are. They know everything, I tell you … It becomes more opportune than ever that you should go and collect his body instead of me … Watched as I am at this moment, it’s impossible to say what might become of me. I ask you to do this as a personal favour to me, Lafcadio, dear friend.’ He put his hands together imploringly. ‘At this moment my head is spinning, but I’ll make some enquiries at the questura, to provide you with the proper authorisation. Where can I send it to you?’
‘It’ll be more convenient if I take a room here. I’ll see you tomorrow. Goodbye. Hurry!’
He let Julius go. A feeling of deep disgust rose in him and almost a kind of hatred, against himself, against Julius, against everything. He shrugged his shoulders, then took out of his pocket the Thomas Cook ticket wallet in the name of Baraglioul that he had removed from Fleurissoire’s jacket, put it on the table where it would be seen, next to the bottle of eau de Cologne, switched off the light and went out.