life, Alonso generally gave up trying to sleep at about five or six o’clock in the morning. He would leave his disordered bed and his upstairs bedroom. In the large kitchen, he would assemble a full-scale English breakfast for himself: fruit juice, cereal with milk, and a plate of fried food accompanied by strong tea; he finished off with rounds of toast that he cut in half on the slant and then spread with a thin layer of butter and a film of honey or marmalade.
After his breakfast, Alonso would pull on a tracksuit and run for a long time with short little strides across his property, across his land overrun by wild growth, in company with the bullmastiff bitch, whose name was Elizabeth. Then he went back indoors and did not budge for the rest of the day, save in response to a ring of the bell by a delivery person. In that event, he would first observe the barred entrance gate from a ground-floor window through very powerful binoculars. Once satisfied, he would leave the house and go down to the gate armed with a .38 caliber Colt officer’s target pistol and take the delivery. He never allowed the delivery person onto the property and would carry provisions up to the house himself. Sometimes the said provisions were heavy—cases of whisky, for example—and Alonso would sweat profusely, and uncontrollable trembling would seize his calves or the side of his mouth.
In the living room of the residence was a West German stereo system manufactured by Sharp. This Alonso dusted fastidiously, even though the rest of the house’s furniture and fittings were almost never cleaned and were now irrevocably covered by a layer of grease and grime. Alonso likewise dusted the quadraphonic speakers set up pretty much throughout the house, so that recordings could be heard everywhere, even in the two toilets and the two bathrooms. His tastes in music were very different from those of Georges Gerfaut. His LP collection fell into three categories. First, high classical: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven. Second, syrupy American popular singers: Mel Tormé or Billy May. Alonso never played anything from these two categories, however. What he played, from the moment he returned from his walk with Elizabeth, was Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn, or Liszt.
As he listened to this music, Alonso would be sitting in his study on the ground floor; his land, so thoroughly overgrown, would be spread out behind his ever-closed windows; his Colt officer’s target pistol would be lying on the corner of his work desk; and he would be writing his memoirs with a Parker fountain pen on sheets of onionskin. He wrote very slowly. Sometimes he failed to complete so much as a page in ten or fifteen hours of work.
He ate no lunch. Every evening around six-thirty he dined on canned food and fruit in the kitchen. Then he put the dirty dishes in a dishwasher already containing those left from breakfast. Alonso would go on working for a couple of more hours, then turn off the music, start the dishwasher, go upstairs with a book, and lie down on his still unmade and rumpled bed. He would wait for sleep to come, but oftentimes it did not. He would hear the dishwasher below going through the phases of its cycle, pausing and clicking. He would read indiscriminately in English, Spanish, or French—for the most part, the memoirs of military men or statesmen: Liddell Hart, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle; or else war novels, especially C.S. Forester. He also had a stack of back numbers of Playboy. Now and again he masturbated without much success. Several times each night he got up and wandered through the house, book in hand, middle finger keeping his place, and his limp member as often as not dangling from his pajama fly. He would check to see that all the windows were properly closed. They always were. And he would give Elizabeth an extra helping of food.
Georges Gerfaut also killed Elizabeth.
3
Georges Gerfaut was traveling on Route Nationale 19 in his Mercedes. He had just passed Vendeuvre and was approaching Troyes in the middle of the night, his two speakers serving up John Lewis, Gerry Mulligan, and Shorty Rogers. To left and right a wall of shadows fled past at 130 kilometers per hour. Then the Citroën DS overtook him.
It had given scant forewarning: a last-moment flash of its headlights, then the Citroën zipped passed the Mercedes on a blind curve, wobbled slightly as it swung back into the lane, and vanished round the next bend in less time than it took Gerfaut to say what an asshole.
Ten minutes passed before he saw the car again. In the meantime, nothing had happened, except that he had passed an old Peugeot van with inadequate lights and been passed by a little bright red sports car, probably Italian. That was all. But now suddenly his beams picked up something at the edge of the darkness. At the same time, Gerfaut saw stationary taillights on the road up ahead; he eased up on the gas; the taillights began to move and were soon literally swallowed up by the night (or perhaps they had never been stationary in the first place and some trick of the darkness had fooled him). The Citroën, in any case, was not only stationary but off the road, one fender in the ditch, the other all twisted and misshapen and rammed up against a tree trunk. A torn-off door, hurled ten or twelve meters farther along, lay half on the roadway, half on the grass, its window shattered. All this Gerfaut took in at a glance, as the Mercedes, still doing eighty, cruised past the wreckage. He was tempted to speed up. What held him back was less a sense of the proprieties, or some categorical imperative, than the idea that the people in the Citroën were no doubt there in the darkness noting his plate number and liable to report him for failing to come to the aid of a person or persons in danger. Gerfaut braked, not quickly, indeed with a distinct lack of conviction, and pulled up eighty or a hundred meters farther on.
Up ahead a pair of taillights—the Italian sports car? was it perhaps a Lancia Beta?—had just been enveloped by the night. Gerfaut looked about nervously, could see nothing behind but blackness. The Citroën, too, had vanished. Still gripped by the desire to continue on his way, he groaned between his teeth, shifted into reverse and backed up, zigzagging slightly, to the scene of the accident.
He pulled over onto the shoulder between two trees, alongside the detached car door. From the cassette player came “Two Degrees East, Three Degrees West.” Gerfaut turned it off. He was possibly about to discover horribly mutilated corpses, a little girl with braids sticky with blood or people holding their guts in with both hands. Not the sort of thing you did to a musical accompaniment. He got out of the Mercedes with his waterproof electric flashlight and pointed it directly toward the Citroën. To his relief, he saw only a man, and he was standing up. A small man, with frizzy blond hair, the first signs of baldness, a sharp nose, and round glasses with plastic frames. The right lens was clearly cracked. The man was wearing a reefer and rough brown corduroy pants. He looked at Gerfaut with big frightened eyes. He was leaning against the hood of the Citroën and panting.
“Hey, there,” said Gerfaut. “How are you doing? Are you hurt?”
The man moved vaguely, perhaps nodding, then almost fell. Gerfaut approached anxiously. His gaze fell by chance on a damp, dark area on the man’s side that was just becoming discernible against the dark wool of his jacket.
“You’re bleeding from your side.” Gerfaut’s mind spontaneously produced the odor of blood and its taste, and he thought, my God, I’m going to throw up.
“Hospital,” said the man, and his lips continued to move, but he managed to add nothing more.
It was the man’s left side that was bleeding. Gerfaut grasped his right arm, wrapped it around his own neck, and tried to hold up the injured man as he led him over to the Mercedes. A car of indeterminate make screeched by at high speed.
“Can you walk?”
The injured man made no reply, but he walked. Drops of sweat gathered below his receding hairline and on his upper lip where short whiskers grew.
“S’pose they come back?” the man mumbled.
“What? What’s that?”
But the man would not or could not speak anymore. They reached the Mercedes. Gerfaut
