XII
back to my seat, my moving cage, eyelids closed: there’s nothing to be done, it doesn’t matter that I’m exhausted pathetic half-drunk bladder emptied I still can’t manage to persuade Morpheus to carry me far away from this train for a while, to find Andrija in a heroic dream, Stéphanie in an erotic dream, or even a nightmare inspired by the thousands of dead in my suitcase with the horror photos, I open my eyes, the little crossword-puzzle couple is quiet, calm, she’s sleeping with her head on her companion’s shoulder, he’s reading, that’s what I should do, go back to my book, find Intissar and the heavenly Palestinians, I remember as a child with my sister in order to pass the time during long car trips we’d play at guessing the starting point and final destination of the cars we passed, where does the little crossword-loving couple on the other side of the aisle come from, where are they going, it’s too simple in a train I know they got on in Milan and are going to Florence or Rome, but to do what, I have the feeling he’s a professor, a teacher of something, of the violin why not — yes, that’s it, he’s a violin teacher, he looks like a fiddler he reminds me of a friend of my mother’s she played chamber music with, his companion had been his student, that’s for sure, although she looks more like a harpist or a flautist: corduroy slacks, flowered blouse, long hair not too clean, or at least not as clean as it would be if this woman had been, let’s say, a pianist or a violist, being a spy makes you observant — plunged into the Boulevard Mortier in the headquarters of darkness and secrecy, of strategic or trivial information, often you forget where you are, the job becomes routine, the investigations, the crosschecking, the files, the summaries, the reports, the correspondents, the secret agents, the middlemen, the friends, the enemies, the propaganda, the sources, the manipulation, the human or technological information, all that blends in with normality, with the everyday, the way a civil servant makes entries in the big register of births, marriages and deaths, without them affecting him in the slightest, their births, deaths, marriages, divorces, adoptions, marginalia: the passion that was there in the beginning evaporated quickly, Lebihan the man of oysters and pelada was right, he said to me scratching himself you’ll see, it’ll pass, like an itch, I guess, the curiosity the joy of learning evaporate in time — the first two years I was convinced my recruitment had been an error, that the administration would realize very quickly it had made a mistake, that my past and my family’s past disqualified me as a spy in the service of the Republic, surely the director of the preliminary security clearance had done his job poorly, despite the three months or so of various investigations after the result of the recruitment exam, I wondered how the Agency could have decided to include such a politically and militarily dubious element, susceptible to slightly pro-fascist and foreign sympathies, it was one more mystery among the mysteries of that Temple of Isis that is our quarters where only the initiates meet, priests, demiurges, and oracles of the shadows, how naïve I was — of course the gods of the Boulevard had planned a fate for me, they hadn’t overlooked a thing about me, quite the contrary, when the time came they would make use of these defects or these qualities, with time and numbed by habit and state-employment preoccupied with myself I had forgotten that I was a pawn like any other in the quarrels of Zeus, Hera, Apollo and Pallas Athena, a pawn used for carrying out an aim as obscure as the clouds amassed over inaccessible Olympus, that’s one way to console yourself, I could also say OK I was fooled deceived manipulated used, nothing else, and even this suitcase of hidden documents, of my endless investigations hadn’t escaped them, they probably wanted it, facilitated my task, just in case, all that might be useful one day, one day all this will have its usefulness, you don’t escape, probably despite my precautions they’ll learn the identity of Yvan Deroy soon enough and will add it to my file, you never know, they might have need of the good Francis some time or other, they might need his information, his knife, his naïvety, maybe someday Stéphanie having reached the top of the information hierarchy will try to get her revenge, beloved of the gods she’ll only have to ask them for my head and the Kraken will appear on a private Italian beach, at Porto Ercole, Hercules Port, on the Argentario for example they’ll put an unknown substance in my
spaghetti alle vongole and I’ll die of drowning an hour later when I dive into the Mediterranean, the blue cemetery, at the very spot where Caravaggio, another lord of decapitation, dropped dead: an impeccable and very Italian death, a French tourist passed away from a heart attack after drinking copiously at a meal. Rapidly approaching his fiftieth year, the Frenchman Yvan Deroy, on vacation on Mount Argentario, joined the sad list of the imprudent who don’t wait for three hours after lunch before swimming, the local paper will say, between two society gossip columns, and my death will not shake the cosmos, far from it, at most they’ll find a little place to put my body on the White Island at the mouth of the Danube where they buried Achilles, if I haven’t been eaten by the morays and congers, next to Andrija great tamer of mares, and basta — I want to open the suitcase, to reassure myself, my life insurance, they’d say in spy movies, life insurance that I’ll sell to feverish cardinals and Franciscans, agents of the Great Archivist, I get up, the little suitcase is still discreetly handcuffed to the steel bar of the luggage rack, I can’t be bothered to get the key out, I could pick up Rafael Kahla’s book again, find Intissar and her Lebanese adventures again, in Cairo during the informal meeting of honest traffickers half the participants came from Lebanon, and I myself was coming from Beirut where I had met the secretary of the richest of them, Rafiq Hariri the good-natured, fond of grilled quail and lamb tartare who had assured us of his participation, both personal and financial, by no means negligible, in our work, an offering to the gods of the Zone, so they would be merciful to him: of the Lebanese present in Cairo at the time the great majority died prematurely, Elie Hobeika the butcher of Shatila blown up in his car on January 24, 2002, Mike Nassar a major gun-runner on March 7 of that same year, and so on, Ghazi Kanaan the vigorous ogre welcomed all these future corpses to his home for dinner, on January 22 Elie Hobeika is invited over to the home of the Syrian with the prominent features, what does he say to him, they certainly don’t talk about the Palestinians massacred in the camps in 1982 in front of the eyes of the Israeli army, nor of the Islamists reduced to ashes by the government of Damascus that same year, maybe they talk about the proceedings that Belgium is instituting against Ariel Sharon for crimes against humanity, in which Hobeika is summoned to testify, they smile, maybe they even laugh at the good joke the Belgians have just played on Sharon, it’s highly unlikely but you never know — the Syrians wanted above all not to lose in the post-9/11 storm, the invasion of Iraq, the Oriental New Deal of Bush the simple, the ardent, Damascus was afraid, poor Hobeika, everyone had wanted his death, the Palestinians, the Israelis, the Lebanese, that’s maybe why Ghazi Kanaan invited him to dinner, he caresses him one last time like a sick old dog before it’s euthanized, he knows he’s going to sacrifice Hobeika before he talks too much, urged on by the necessity of the noose that’s tightening, and basta, in novels they call it sacrificing a pawn, or in trade jargon “clarifying the situation,”