‘You’ll find it on the shelves,’ the girl said frostily.
Then, more winningly:
‘Unless you prefer it in the deluxe Pléiade edition?’
‘No, I’ll go on browsing,’ said de Vèze.
He asked her where the crime novels were kept, crime fiction is simple, you just turn to the last page, not the back of the cover but the last page of the story, and you can see at a glance if it ends happily, then the first page, for how well the plot is set up, two basic conditions, and if he has time de Vèze skims two or three pages in the middle, to get the rhythm, the tone, as he did with the Kessel, ten years ago he was able to read an Ellroy last thing, even the murkiest of them. He can’t do that any more, nowadays he can read them during the day, especially when he’s travelling, but not the evening, in the morning an Ellroy works well, a whack with a baseball bat in the crotch or a headless woman, it inoculates you against pity and terror, you shut the book and you can go forth and confront the denizens of the new day with a soul that’s been fortified.
But no way can he read The Black Dahlia late at night, so how did you manage it ten years ago? Ten years ago you could read James Hadley Chase, in one of those crime novels this guy has a model train layout, he rapes a woman on it, the woman could feel a part of the station dig into her shoulder, it must have been Miss Callaghan Comes to Grief, someone punished a girl by pouring turps over her pubis, it took her a few moments to grasp what was happening, the idea is to rid yourself of feelings of pity and terror with turpentine tales before you drift off into sleep.
You didn’t like sleep, you fell into it still clutching a James Hadley Chase or a James Ellroy, bur nowadays you can no longer cope with violent crime thrillers before going to sleep, it means you no longer need to be inoculated against your dreams, you’re not afraid of sleep any more, that’s progress, so why do you spend an hour lingering in front of your books every night? you’re not afraid of your dreams any more and you can’t get off to sleep, and in the morning you find it harder and harder to get started, you stay up too late, you’re losing your inner buoyancy, hundreds of bloody books within easy reach and you can’t even find one in the whole mountain to keep your pillow company for half an hour, except, for the umpteenth time, Les Secrets de la princesse de Carignan.
De Vèze stops by the water’s edge, life was good, it was inevitable that Bantam Bum would have turned up at the Embassy sooner or later, no, it had all started much earlier, much earlier, one day in Moscow or Berlin or Prague a bureaucrat had pulled out de Vèze’s file and added a note recommending that he should be made the target of an operation, the note was circulated, it rose higher and higher until it reached the level at which the decision was taken.
Alternatively, someone high-ranking said find me a target, and the order went all the way down to the minor bureaucrat who sent de Vèze’s file back up, and it was de Vèze who had beaten off the competition from other contending files, something to be proud of, he was made a target, he’s certain of it, they used him for a propaganda operation, otherwise they’d never have allowed him so much freedom in Moscow, with Vassilissa, the French security services won’t admit it but he is certain he has been the object of what is called a ‘treatment’.
And now the French too are giving him the ‘treatment’, but as if he were a minor story, whereas he is certain he was at the centre of the plot, it ought to have been enough to leave him at his post in Moscow and see what happened, they might have learned a great many things, they might have made the people on the other side believe that France had known all along, that all they’d been given was duff intelligence, they could have turned the operation round, but no, the clique now in charge took the opportunity to eliminate a Gaullist, the new clique, the heirs of Pétain and the OAS, they’d wanted his hide for a long, long time.
Or again: it was the mole himself who’d fingered him, that’s it, had the mole run into him one day in Singapore? In Moscow? Or here in Paris? It was he who had written the note, who had flagged up de Veze’s name for a possible propaganda operation, de Vèze had been under surveillance since the middle of the 1960s, and one day he’d been used to protect the mole, de Vèze spoke about all this in Paris, he had been listened to, highly ingenious, one of the committee members said it was the stuff of high art, thinking of how to protect the mole even as he was being planted, with de Vèze as circuit-breaker and Berthier as fallback, and anyway the whole thing was a shambles.
And now? go away? or write a book he’d want to read? not enough money to buy a boat, I don’t even have enough money to live off, I’ve resigned, it’ll be years before I start getting my pension, someone cannier would have negotiated some sort of paid part-time contract, have to look for a job in business, won’t have time to write.
Thirty years, all of them defunct, de Vèze is now level with the Petit Pont, no, the Pont au Double, you’re mixing them up, the Petit Pont is the one before, the one that leads to the Hôtel-Dieu, the wind sweeps the slates of the buildings clean, their roof-ridges too, everything is clear and bright, a man stands in profile, facing the river, grey overcoat, very worn, houndstooth cap, an old man, virtually a tramp, he leans on his stick looking distinguished, his eyes are fixed on the opposite bank, Notre-Dame.
De Vèze halts, thinks he is closer to this man than to his own youth, and if I’ve got time to look at him it’s because I am now nothing, the currently powerful right has got rid of a Gaullist, even the Americans must have been consulted, for de Vèze it’s the end of everything, he is certain that his Minister and the President wanted to keep the Americans happy, in particular the CIA man they talk about, Walker, the whatsit-thrower, they gave him the head of a Gauilist to keep him happy.
The end of everything, de Vèze wonders if he should try to get even, if I get even will my revenge have also been planned by whoever landed me in this mess?
At the far end of the Pont au Double, just before the square in front of Notre-Dame, a number of teenagers are roller-skating, they’ve set up rows of empty Coca-Cola cans, they slalom at crazy speeds through the cans, hardly ever knock one over, it’s virtuoso stuff, they are virtuosos.
Still facing the Seine, the old man has not moved, grey coat, stick, cap, almost a tramp, suddenly he cries out:
‘On les aura! We’ll get them!’
Chapter 7. 1965, The Uses of Croquet
In which Max Goffard meets up once more with his author in Singapore and recalls the Riff wars.
In which de Vèze speaks of Bir Hakeim and decides to seduce a young woman who reads novels.
In which you rejoin Lilstein at the Waldhaus Hotel so that you might share with him the scruples of a Paris-based spy.
In which Lilstein reassures you by relating the history of Tukhachevsky.
In traditional organisations, self-esteem always begins as a provocation.
Singapore, July 1965
The grounds of a large house, pre-dinner drinks are being served.