“Carl von Ryndt, Banque Commerciale Saharienne, 13 rue Bonnivard, Mercedes 300SL with Zurich plates. I’ll remember that. But does this Banque Commerciale Saharienne really exist, or is it like our Laboratoire de Recherches Pharmaco-logiques SA?”
K gave me all the co-ordinates of the man with the powerful car that would soon be of no use to him. Then around six-thirty p.m. we separated, after arranging to meet twenty-four hours later on the terrace of the Hôtel d’Angleterre under the window of the room we’d just left, drunk on each other, in love.
5
NOW THAT IT’S well past my deadline, I’m trying to recall, in order, the minutes between the time when I left K at the Château d’Ouchy and the next day when I went back to the terrace of the Hôtel d’Angleterre, but I keep getting lost in this official report. I skid on the hairpin turns of memory just as my Volvo continued to skid on the Col des Mosses between Aigle and Etibaz before I came back to Château d’Oex. My first information about von Ryndt took me to the Hôtel des Trois Rois in Vevey, and from there I went to the Rochers de Naye at Montreux, still looking for the banker with the 300sL. According to the bellhop I smoothed over with Swiss francs, von Ryndt was going to meet a notary called Rubattel in Château d’Oex, on the Chemin du Temple near Schwub’s pharmacy. I figured it would take me an hour to drive from the heart of Montreux to Château d’Oex if I pushed it. But I stepped on my Volvo’s gas pedal hard enough to warp the sheet of steel under my feet. Traffic between Montreux and Yvorne was heavy and it was unbelievably hard to stay on schedule. In my Volvo, stuck in the demoralizing stream of cars, I felt as if time were working against me, and I was certain that von Ryndt was living out his final hours in the offices of the Union Fribourgeoise de Crédit. I tried hard to pass the fools ahead of me who were doing sixty kilometres an hour. I was struggling at the wheel, sweating so much that my shirt was soaked under my left armpit, where I could feel the weight of my Colt 38 automatic, firmly sheathed in its holster. Before I drove into Aigle, I literally leapt onto the bypass road on the way to Sepey and Saanen. As soon as I’d left the Pont de la Grande Eau, I switched on my high-beams and drove at breakneck speed along the steep wall of the mountain. At the first hairpin turn I realized that the car was straining on its axle. But as I climbed towards the Diablerets, I continued to take each curve at maximum speed, reducing my ties to the ground to a plaintive squeal. At every turn I reduced the slim margin separating me from a swerve — a bold procedure that gained me a few seconds.
Time passes and I take forever to cross the Col des Mosses. Each turn surprises me in third gear when I should have already started to gear down; each sentence disconcerts me. I burn words, stages, memories, and I keep freeing myself from the tracery of this interpolated night. The event that’s already too far ahead of me will unfold shortly, in a few minutes, when I arrive at the trough of the valley and the essential level of my double life. This winding road that flies past in my high-beams suddenly slows down before I get to Château d’Oex. The asphalt ribbon that weaves between Les Mosses and Le Tornettaz brings me here, close to the Cartierville bridge and the Montreal Prison, less than a fifteen-minute drive from my legal domicile and my private life. All the curves I passionately embrace and the valleys I escort bring me inevitably into this stifling pen populated by ghosts. I want out of here. I’m afraid of getting used to this shrunken space; I’m afraid that greedily drinking in the impossible will change me, and that when I’m set free I won’t be able to walk on my own two feet. I’m afraid of waking up degenerated, stripped of identity, annihilated. Someone who isn’t me, with eyes wild and brain purged of any antecedent, will walk through the gate on the day of my liberation. My pain is too exhausting to let me experience, to try to designate the slightest relief. That, no doubt, is why, whenever I gather momentum in this choppy narrative, I immediately forget why I’ve been pursuing it. I can’t help thinking that my written race in the shadow of Les Mosses and Le Tornettaz is a futile one, when I remind myself that I’m a prisoner here in an unassailable cage. I spend my time encoding passwords, as if I were eventually going to escape! I streamline my sentences so they’ll take flight sooner! I send my proxy by Volvo into the Col des Mosses, help him reach the upper level of the pass without a hitch, and send him racing down the other side of the mountain at hair-raising velocity, thinking that the higher speed will have an effect on me and let me avoid a spiral fall into an unmoving ditch. Everything breaks free here except me. Words slip by, and time, the Alpine landscape, and the Vaudois villages, while I, I shudder in my immanence and perform a dance of possession inside a prescribed circle.
At Château d’Oex, the clock in the steeple shows half-past eight when, after an hour of investigation between the offices of the Union Fribourgeoise de Crédit and the villa of the Pastors of the National Church, I set off again along the same road but in the opposite direction, looking not for the president of the Banque Commerciale Saharienne but for a Belgian citizen fascinated by Roman history and with a mandate to make trouble for us. The 300SL had vanished somewhere between Montreux and the Pastors of the National Church. According to official sources, Scipio Africanus was travelling in a blue Opel — more appropriate for a university professor. My information came from Pastor Nussbaumer, himself a specialist in the historiography of the Sonderbund. After identifying myself as a specialist in the Punic wars, I questioned him subtly. As God is my witness, I was quite surprised to learn through this subterfuge about the presence in Switzerland of a colleague who knew Scipio Africanus like the back of his hand. My conversation with Pastor Nussbaumer boosted my morale and put me in great shape for climbing the darkened wall of the Mosses in one go, which I did with a briskness and precision that could have qualified me for the Rallye des Alpes. Once I’d reached the highest point of the pass, I didn’t give myself a moment’s respite: I floored the gas pedal along the only straight part of the road and, at the end, stepped on the brake before gearing down to take on the first of a long series of turns. From parabola through ellipse and double S-curve, I get to the Sepey and then all the way to the Rhône in the vicinity of Aigle. In nineteen minutes and twelve seconds — timing unofficial but accurate — I travelled the distance between Les Charmilles, where I’d seen the Reverend Nussbaumer, and the cog-railway station just outside Aigle. I was proud, and rightly so, of my schuss performance and of the way my Volvo hugged the road.
Enthusiastically and with sensational style, I travelled the last leg between me and the famous Professor H. de Heutz. From Aigle to the Château de Chillon I drove like a maniac and then, after a bottleneck outside Montreux-Vevey, I set off again for the gates of the beloved city of Lausanne, driving through it blindly. Around ten o’clock I slowed down: I was finally in Geneva. Taking the road to Lausanne had brought me to the Quai des Bergues and I drove along it, breaking every one of this Calvinist country’s traffic laws. Then, after crossing the Rhône at the very spot where the Helvetians would have crossed if they hadn’t been wiped out by Caesar, I went down several streets and arrived, fresh as a daisy, at the door of the Société d’Histoire de la Suisse Romande. My Swiss-made watch showed twelve minutes past ten.
“Excuse me, Madame, is this where Professor de Heutz is lecturing …?”
“You’re too late, Monsieur. Surely you don’t think at this hour of the night …”