Daria wondered: “Don’t you have the feeling of deserting?”
“Deserting what, the secret execution cellar? If I thought I had five chances in a hundred of surviving until the war, I’d swallow the disgust, the horror, the remorse, and I’d stay, I would! Can you honestly give me those five chances?”
“No.”
Her tension had subsided.
“What about me, Sacha, what do you think will happen to me?”
“Let me ponder that a moment. Would you like some port, a vermouth?”
They were two peaceful customers in a small brown café, a reconciled couple preparing to go home and resume everyday life. Madame Lambertier, who couldn’t abide histrionics, glanced over from behind the till and felt reassured. You see, when you truly care for each other all it takes sometimes is to have things out, candidly, in good faith… Madame Lambertier also maintained that a decent, well-kept establishment with a family atmosphere, so to speak, encourages marital reconciliation (at least at the times when ponces, tarts, cops, spivs, and other lowlifes who bring in the serious money are not around…). “Marie,” she hissed, “give them the good vermouth, for heaven’s sakes!” Meanwhile D was not pondering so much as letting the problem resolve itself in his mind.
“You’re compromised, Daria, by your long-standing relationship with me and a few others… But who isn’t, these days. Krantz more than you. Fifty-fifty, I’ll give you that much.”
“Then I’m staying. I wasn’t sure before, I was going to beg you to take me away no matter where. Because I also run out of strength sometimes. I cry, I smoke, I’ve tried to drink. I tried picking up a lover in a nightclub: it was gruesome enough to keep me chaste for a long time… I take tranquilizers and sleeping pills. I have this elderly doctor, a very good man for whom I’ve had to make up the most hair-raising love affairs, with constant twists worthy of a film… He must think I’m deranged. His advice is hopeless, but his pills do the trick. But you’ve steadied me. You’ve convinced me I must stay.”
D felt a pang of joy, as though this proved that he himself was no traitor… He listened to Daria’s affectionate voice “…and let’s keep a possibility of contact, I have no right to know where you’re going, but please make sure that if I feel frantic and lost, if I’m all alone in the world, I can come and find you both…”
“I will, Dacha.”
(It’s dangerous, but I will…)
They parted with a brief, friendly hug, in the midst of the racket made by an incoming brewer’s truck. The boulevard stretched before them, stark and bright under the milky sky.
On reaching the hotel desk, Monsieur Bruno Battisti felt a sickening jolt. There was a letter in the pigeonhole of room 17. IMPOSSIBLE since the addressee had no existence for anyone! A summons from the French Sûreté? A message from Krantz, meaning they’ve got me? Monsieur Battisti took the letter from Gobfin’s fingers, affected to barely glance at it, laid it on the desk, and said, with some exaggeration of his courteous manner so as to gain a little time with himself, “Please be so kind, Monsieur, as to prepare my bill, we’re leaving in an hour.”
At this, Monsieur Gobfin showed such surprise that he instantly appeared even sallower, knobbier, and more shifty-eyed than before.
“You don’t say, Monsieur Battisti!”
“I’ve just said so. We’re catching the fast train to Nice.”
“Ah, what a pity,” Monsieur Gobfin sighed, looking deeply put out. He half bowed, for a lady was coming down the stairs. Confidentially: “Could you not delay your departure — only till tomorrow morning, Monsieur Battisti?”
Monsieur Battisti, who would gladly have driven his heavy fist right between Quince-Face’s turbid eyes, merely muttered, “Whatever for?” in a low growling that said “bugger off.” Even more intimately now, Monsieur Gobfin filtered “serious accident” words through his clenched teeth: “The police were here…” There’s no mistaking that voice. Monsieur Battisti took it without blanching, taut as a bow already (and with the envelope of the IMPOSSIBLE letter under his palm). Play close to your chest — for what it’s worth!
“What of it?”
“You’ll miss the arrest.”
To double up with full-throated laughter, if that were allowed, what a relief! A madman! In this mad world, madmen pretend to be calm even at the reception desks of small hotels! So yesterday’s fat man really was there for me. The dame in the tit-crushing corset, whom he brought, was there for a sight of me. A brilliant piece of tailing, a prodigious feat! And now this crackpot lamenting my absence at the arrest — or pulling my leg! No future, a dark hole. Upstairs Nadine, suspecting nothing, poor Nadine… Now that the game was as good as up, Monsieur Battisti switched to puzzlement, so awkwardly that Gobfin, who had been scrutinizing his client’s tie, was taken aback.
“Arrest, what arrest?”
The burly ginger-haired Englishman from room 6, wearing a narrow-brimmed felt hat and a gray shiny overcoat — the kind popular with sailors on leave — was handing in his key.
“No letters?”
“No, sir. Will you take your evening meal in your room like yesterday, Monsieur Blackbridge?”
Monsieur Blackbridge’s gullet emitted a sound like chains screeching over a rusty pulley… A scene out of a third-rate melodrama with a noir ending, Blackbridge, Black Bridge, just the name to slug me from behind precisely in the next instant. The chain over the pulley — the chain, the cell — how easily we’re scuppered! Frau Lorelei Hexenkrantz, Madame Lorelei “the Witch” Krantz will step out of the lift… The world’s lunacy is artistically organized down to the smallest detail.
“No.” (The Englishman swallowed back a half laugh, like a chain rattling down a well.) “I’m going to Tabarin.”
“A wonderful show, Monsieur Blackbridge,” uttered Gobfin suavely.
The narrow-brimmed hat, the iron-gray overcoat were sucked out into the street. The witches carried off this ruddy man who imagined he was sauntering down rue de Rochechouart toward a sabbath of naked thighs… Battisti unclenched his jaws to repeat, as though landing a punch, “What arrest?”
And Monsieur Gobfin lit up, with a drowned man’s smile: “The Negro’s, of course!”
What Negro? Surely you’re not about to tell me I’m black? Anything is possible when madmen start to babble.
“It’ll be most discreetly done, in his room or in the corridor. We don’t expect any trouble. Two inspectors are already standing by in the dining room.”
Things slide mysteriously back into place; what was spinning out of control returns to equilibrium; you thought the plane was nose-diving right into the hard rim of the mountains, but the wings level off, the journey continues…
“Oh, quite right,” said Monsieur Battisti, “a great pity as you say. But time is money, my friend. Won’t this mean unwelcome publicity for the hotel?”
“Far from it!” Monsieur Gobfin said. “The crime was not committed on our premises, you understand.”
I’d like to know what crimes haven’t been committed here, you smarmy rat, was what Monsieur Battisti almost replied — but now the plane was diving down again toward a carpet of Paleozoic rocks: Monsieur Battisti picked up the IMPOSSIBLE letter. Curtly: “The bill, please, and fast. We’re off in half an hour.”
We’ll soon see whether that creep doesn’t grab the telephone! Battisti withdrew to the rattan sofa; Gobfin, on cue, unhooked the ear trumpet. Battisti kept an eye on him while dazedly reading the envelope again. Interior Ministry… No, what? Vatella and Misurini, Pasta Wholesalers… “Monsieur César Battistini…” Triple blockhead! Or is it a deliberate put-on, the better to gauge my reactions? Gobfin was talking through the receiver to a laundrywoman: “…and a mistake, Madame, in the linen count… We make it twenty pairs of double sheets, sixteen pairs of single sheets, forty-four pillowcases, six dozen napkins…” Monsieur Battisti’s ear listened for figures that might be a code… A news vendor pitched his falsetto into the lobby, “Speeee-cial edition! Ministerial criii-sis…” The Negro gentleman ambled in, stylish in his way, with the smooth suppleness of a dancer, the murderer nearing the scaffold, awaited on the first floor by two inspectors drinking red wine, what else. Monsieur Gobfin murmured, “Just a moment, don’t hang up…” and handed the Negro his room key, his key to the other world where you might arrive pulling a basket on a string containing your head which is no longer attached to your shoulders. “For pity’s sake, porter, put it back on now that I’ve paid for my sins.” You’d have to be a ventriloquist to say it, waving your distracted hands about… Gobfin was beaming with an air of pleased obsequiousness — at the counter of the imagined other world. “Thank you,” the Negro said without moving his lips, a ventriloquist already! Ready for his fate. Monsieur Battisti pushed his brief reverie aside.