Three to Kill (3 page)

5

The attempt on Gerfaut's life did not take place immediately, but it was not long coming: just three days.

The day after his late-night return home, Gerfaut awoke at noon. The little girls were at school and, being semiboarders, would not be home till evening. Béa had gone out about ten, leaving a message on the pillow. She could sleep for just four or five hours and still be fresh and energetic all day long. She could also on occasion sleep for thirty hours straight in a deep, childlike slumber. The message read:
9:45 a.m. Tea in thermos – cold roast in fridge – have settled up with Maria – back in afternoon (to pack) but second screening Antégor 6 p.m. si te gusta and if you can – LOVE.
(The last word was in English. The ink was purple and the handwriting was elegantly careless; Béa had used a felttip marker.)

Gerfaut went into the living room, where he found the thermos of tea on the coffee table along with zwiebacks, butter, and the mail. He drank some tea and ate two buttered zwiebacks and opened the mail. There were several subscription offers for business magazines and a few financial newsletters; a friend Gerfaut had not heard from in two years wrote from Australia that his married life had become intolerable and asked whether Gerfaut thought he should get a divorce; and on a green card Gerfaut's chess partner had indicated his fortnightly move. Gerfaut noted the move in his notebook, thinking that he wouldn't have the time to think about it right away, seeing that they were getting ready to leave on vacation, but then he replied mechanically, castling just as Harston had castled against Larsen when in the same position at the Las Palmas tournament of 1974. On the part of the green card left for correspondence, he wrote what was to be his address for the whole of the next month in Saint-Georges-de-Didonne.

Around two in the afternoon, shaved, showered, combed, deodorized, dressed, Gerfaut looked at himself in the hall mirror. He had a handsome pale oval face, blond hair, a forceful nose and chin; but he also had liquid blue eyes, and his gaze was slightly abstracted, slightly soft, a tad owlish and evasive. He was on the short side. Last summer, in clogs with gigantic heels, Béa had stood a few centimeters taller. His proportions, the breadth of his shoulders, his musculature were satisfactory, but no more than that; the exercises he did every day, or almost, had had some effect. Not too much of a belly for the moment, though there was danger there. The body in question was at present encased in Mariner briefs, a slate-gray jerseywool suit over a white-and-slate striped shirt with a solid-white collar and a plum-colored tie; cotton socks; and plum-colored English shoes with much visible stitching (what is perhaps called overstitching).

The elevator bore Gerfaut straight down to his Mercedes in the building's underground garage. He started up, drove out into the street, wound his way to the Gare d'Austerlitz, and crossed the Seine. From the cassette player came Tal Farlow. In about twenty minutes Gerfaut reached the headquarters of his company, a subsidiary of ITT located just off the Boulevard des Italiens. He parked the Mercedes in the company's underground garage. The elevator took him first to the ground floor, where he slipped the green card, restamped and readdressed to his chess partner, a retired mathematics teacher in Bordeaux, into a mailbox. The ground-floor lobby was full of oraculating working stiffs. Gerfaut got back in the elevator and went up to the second floor. The second-floor reception area was also full of oraculating workers. A potted plant gently toppled over as Gerfaut struggled out of the elevator. A union representative from the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) stood athwart the stairs leading to the third floor. He wore a checkered shirt and royal-blue canvas pants.

“Excuse me, please,” muttered Gerfaut as he pushed past.

“If Monsieur Charançon is afraid to come out,” the union delegate was shouting, “we'll drag his fat ass out ourselves.”

A bellow of approval went up from those in possession of the lobby. Gerfaut extricated himself from the melee and went down a corridor with Gerflex vinyl flooring. He reached his door and went in. In the anteroom Mademoiselle Truong was painting her nails scarlet.

“How do you manage?” asked Gerfaut. “With nails like that. I mean, you type a lot. Don't you break them?”

“It happens. Good morning, monsieur. Did you have a good trip?”

“Excellent, thanks.” Gerfaut made for his office.

“Roland Desroziers is in there,” warned Mademoiselle Truong. “Well, I wasn't going to fight with him, was I?”

“No one expects you to fight,” answered Gerfaut, going into his office and closing the door behind him. “Hi there, Roland.”

“Hi there, you little cop-out,” said Desroziers, who was an ecological militant and a union delegate of the French Confederation of Labor (CFDT) and wore a black sweater and jeans; Gerfaut had been a militant with him in the early sixties in a radical fraction of the Seine-Banlieue Federation of the Unified Socialist Party (PSU). “It's talk, talk, talk in there,” said Desroziers, “I came in here to get a drink.” He had indeed purloined Gerfaut's Cutty Sark and was quaffing a large measure of it in a paper cup. “You don't mind me drinking your scotch, I hope?”

“Of course not,” answered Gerfaut, smiling but peeking at the bottle and the paper cup to see just how much Desroziers had helped himself to. “It may be talk, talk, talk,” he observed, “but that Stalinist bureaucrat says they're going to drag the boss's fat ass out of here themselves—those are his exact words—so you're going to be trampled underfoot if you sit around here drinking the rich man's booze.”

“Shit!” said Desroziers, hurriedly sticking his nose back into the paper cup and slurping the rest of his drink. Coughing, he set the cup down. “I'm out of here!”

“Go ahead, set the place on fire, trash the computer, string Charançon up, why don't you,” suggested Gerfaut in a dispirited tone as he sat down at his desk and reached for the whisky bottle to put it away. “All power to the workers' councils!” he added bitterly. But the CFDT man was already gone.

That afternoon Gerfaut took care of business pending, dealt with salespeople needing directives, and conducted a long discussion with his immediate subordinate, who would be standing in for him during July, and who, truth to tell, hoped through a combination of intrigue, servility, and betrayal soon to replace him completely and definitively. Gerfaut was for his part called in to see Charançon, who had had the greatest difficulty disentangling himself from the proletarian agitation. Charançon's face was flushed, and he wore a tiny Lions Club de France badge on his lapel and Pierre Cardin suspenders beneath his gray suit. Behind him on the wall was a poster under glass with pretty painted pink flowers and the English words HOME SWEET HOME inscribed in large, pale, pink frilly letters. Superimposed on the flowers and the pink inscription was a text in small black characters whose author was Harold S. Geneen, president of ITT. It ran as follows:
In different locations around the world, almost anywhere on the globe, rather more than two hundred workdays each year are given over to executive meetings at different levels of our organization. It is during these meetings, be they in New York, Brussels, Hong Kong, or Buenos Aires, that decisions are taken based on logic, on a business logic that leads to choices that are almost inevitable, for the simple reason that we are in possession of almost all the basic elements needed to arrive at decisions. Just like our planning, our periodic meetings are designed to clarify the logic of things and expose that logic to the light of day, where its value and necessity will be apparent to all. This logic is immune to all state laws and regulations. It is a part of a natural process.
There was no way of telling whether the presence of this poster in Charançon's office testified to a discreet sense of humor or to a terminal state of alienation. Charançon congratulated Gerfaut on the success of his negotiations of the last two days, and it was agreed that his bonus would be credited to his bank account in the course of July. Charançon poured two glasses of Glenlivet.

“Thank you.” Gerfaut took the glass Charançon held out to him.

“They are completely mad,” said Charançon. “Do you remember May ‘68? They were still out on strike in the middle of July—but they had no idea what they wanted! Remember?”

“When they do find out what they want, it'll be time for you and me to get a real job. Or pack our bags.” Gerfaut sipped his whisky. “What they wanted was the collapse of capitalism.”

“You bet your sweet ass they did, my friend!” agreed Charançon distractedly.

Back in his office, tidying up, Gerfaut was subjected to the usual erotic provocations of Mademoiselle Truong. She was continually crossing the room, bending over as far as she could to reach things, ostentatiously removing specks of dust from her eye, or standing on tiptoe, thighs and buttocks and breasts and arms all straining upward, to straighten the Air France calendar or the work schedule or one of the glass-mounted prints. At the same time, Gerfaut felt certain, had he grabbed her ass she would have screamed, made a scandal, or scratched her aggressor's cheek with those vicious-looking scarlet nails.... Gerfaut sent her out for
France-Soir
(Béa always made sure to pick up the more serious
Le Monde)
.

The paper's suggested lottery numbers were three, seven, and twelve. Tanks and air power had been deployed against six thousand rebellious Bolivian peasants. An Eskimo had been shot and killed while trying to divert a Boeing 747 to North Korea. A Breton trawler had gone missing with its eleven-man crew. A woman had celebrated her hundredth birthday and announced her intention of voting for the left. Extratrerrestrials had abducted a dog in full view of its master, a crossing guard in the department of Bas-Rhin. And, in emulation of a recent fad on America's West Coast, a couple had tried to fornicate in public on a French Mediterranean beach, only to be restrained and arrested by the local police. Gerfaut glanced at the funnies, then tossed the newspaper into the wastebasket.

“I'm leaving now,” said Mademoiselle Truong.

“See you tomorrow, then.”

“What do you mean, tomorrow?”

“Oh, yes, I'm sorry. Until the first of August, then. Have a nice vacation.”

“You, too, Monsieur Gerfaut.”

She left. Gerfaut left soon after. It was about seven—too late to join Béa at the screening of the Feldman film. Gerfaut didn't want to see it, anyway. He could easily have left the office a couple of hours earlier, but he had wanted to show that, even the day before leaving on vacation, he had worked hard, gone beyond the call of duty.

After forty-five minutes of very slow progress through blocked traffic, with Lee Konitz accompanied by Lennie Tristano on the cassette player, Gerfaut left the Mercedes in its slot in the underground parking garage of his building in the thirteenth arrondissement and went up to his apartment. The little girls were there watching the regional news. (They watched anything that appeared on a television screen; for them there was no significant difference between the regional news and, say,
The Saga of Anatahan.
) The girls' bags and Béa's were almost packed. Gerfaut showered, changed, and did his own packing with the feeling that he was forgetting everything important, and served the girls cold roast beef with Heinz salad dressing and Bulgarianstyle yogurt. Then he sent them off to bed; they left the room, insulting him in a muted but earnest way.

Soon Béa arrived, in good humor. As the two of them sat in the kitchen eating cold roast beef with Heinz salad dressing, she told him that Maria had that morning begged for the key to their apartment while they were away. Supposedly, Maria had broken off with her Berber boyfriend, who was looking for her and meant to kill her. Wasn't he the one who wanted to put her to work on the street? asked Gerfaut. Wiping the corner of her mouth with a paper napkin, Béa replied that that had been a joke. Maria's real plan, according to Béa, was to get the run of their place so she could bring the guy over, clean out their liquor cabinet, and screw. But, all the same, protested Gerfaut, what if the guy really was stalking her, the poor kid? Poor kid, poor kid!—she was big enough to take care of herself! was Béa's last word on the subject.

After dinner they tossed their paper plates into the trash, washed the other dishes and left them on the drainer, finished the packing, brushed their teeth, got into bed, read a few pages, she of Edgar Morin's latest book, he of an old John D. MacDonald, and went to sleep. Gerfaut awoke shortly after two in the morning and fell prey at once to an inexplicable and terrifying insomnia. He went and took half a sleeping pill with a glass of milk. He fell asleep again with no difficulty about three. Early the next morning, they all got up and left for their vacation. Gerfaut having had the forethought to take off work as from the twenty-ninth of June, traffic was free-flowing. This, and the invention of superhighways, enabled them to reach their destination in under seven hours, including a stop for lunch and without speeding. And so, on the night of the twenty-ninth of June, the family slept at Saint-Georges-de-Didonne.

The next day was the day they tried to kill Georges Gerfaut.

6

At eleven-fifty on the night of the twenty-ninth of June, one of the men who on the following day would try to kill Georges Gerfaut sat in the Lancia Beta 1800 sedan, which was parked fifty meters from Gerfaut's apartment building. In the back of the car were two metal suitcases. The first contained clothes, toiletries, a science-fiction novel in Italian, three very pointed and well-honed butcher knives, a sharpening steel, a garrote made of three strands of piano wire with aluminum handles, a blackjack, a 1950 model Smith & Wesson .45 caliber revolver, and a Beretta 70T automatic with silencer. The second case contained clothes, toiletries, six meters of nylon cord, and a SIG P210-5 9mm automatic target pistol. In a canvas bag on the car floor were highpower binoculars and an over-and-under M6 like those used by the U.S. Air Force, with a folding butt, one barrel being .22 caliber, the other a .410 shotgun. There were munitions, too, of various kinds, in thick wooden boxes in the Lancia's trunk. Should such an arsenal be considered impressive or simply grotesque?

The man in the car was at the wheel, with his chin sunk into his chest, his back against the back of the driver's seat, and a monthly comic book propped against the wheel's leather cover. The comic was called
Strange,
and it recounted the adventures of Captain Marvel, the intrepid Daredevil, the Spider, and various other characters. The man was reading with great concentration, moving his lips. A succession of emotions registered on his face; he was identifying to the hilt.

After a moment, the other guy, the one with the wavy black hair and pretty blue eyes, emerged from Georges Gerfaut's building, walked back to the Lancia, and got in beside his companion. The latter put his
Strange
into the cubbyhole in his door and wrinkled his nose with curiosity.

“I smell fat.”

“Cooking fat, yes,” said the other. “The concierge was making fries. Georges Gerfaut has left on vacation for a month. I have the address. It's in Saint-Georges-de-Didonne; the department number is 17.”

First, the hit men consulted the dark one's diary to see what department had the number 17, and found out that it was Charente-Maritime. Then they took down a small atlas of French main roads that was attached to the right sun visor with an elastic band, perused it, located Saint-Georges-de-Didonne, and mapped out their route.

“I drive fast,” said the one with the white streaks in his hair. “We can be there by this evening.”

“Well, fuck that! Shit, no!” replied the dark man bitterly. “Let him wait. First, we'll have a big meal. Then we'll do a little sightseeing. Come on, why shouldn't we?”

“Mister Taylor said fast, Carlo.”

“Taylor? What's he got to say about it? He's got nothing to say about it. Anyway, he's cool, totally cool.”

The nostrils of the man with the white streaks flared tautly.

“Carlo, you really do smell of greasy food.”

“What a pain in the butt you are!” Carlo reached into the back and opened one of the metal cases, took out a toilet bag and produced a bottle of Gibbs aftershave. He poured lotion into his palm and dabbed himself with it about the cheeks and under the arms. Then he put his tackle away.

“If we don't have to hurry,” said White Streaks, “we can stop at Le Lude. It's charming, Le Lude. It has a delightful castle.”

“All right then, if you say so. Start the car, for Christ's sake! We can't sit here forever!”