Shit! I’m bleeding,” he said with a mixture of regret and rancor. He spoke like a working-class Parisian.
“You’ll be okay. You’ll be okay.”
Gerfaut pushed the injured man’s legs in farther, slammed the back door, and climbed briskly into the driver’s seat. He was thinking that the blood would soil the leather upholstery; or perhaps he was thinking nothing. The Mercedes started up. During the journey Gerfaut said very little, and the injured man said nothing at all.
They were at Troyes in less than ten minutes. It was twelvetwenty. There was not a cop to be seen. Gerfaut hailed a tardy passerby, who directed him to the hospital. The passerby was drunk, and the directions were confusing. Gerfaut almost missed the way, losing time. In the back, with great difficulty but without audible complaint, the injured man had removed his jacket. Beneath it he wore a black polo-neck pullover. He had folded his jacket in four and was pressing it to his side to stanch the bleeding. Just as they arrived at the hospital, he passed out. Gerfaut parked hurriedly at the entrance to Emergency. He leaped from the car and entered an ill-lit lobby.
“A stretcher! A stretcher, quickly!” he shouted and returned to the car to open the rear doors.
Nobody came out of the hospital. To the right of the lobby Gerfaut found a large glassed-in reception area with two girls in white blouses behind a counter and four other people: an Algerian and an old couple sitting on tubular-metal-and-plastic chairs and a guy in his thirties with a white complexion and flaccid cheeks, in a suit but no tie, leaning against the wall and biting his nails.
“Come on! For Christ’s sake!” yelled Gerfaut.
Two male nurses appeared in the lobby with a gurney.
“We’re coming!”
Efficiently, they lifted the injured man out of the car, laid him on the gurney, and left at top speed through the lobby. Before they disappeared, one of the nurses turned to Gerfaut, who was hesitantly following in their wake.
“You need to register him, okay?”
Gerfaut was by now standing some four or five meters inside the lobby, close to the side door leading to the reception area. The aged couple and the Algerian had not budged. The tieless thirty-year-old man had stepped up to the counter. He had a form in front of him and a ballpoint in his hand, and he was talking animatedly with one of the girls in blouses.
“I don’t know her,” he was saying. “I found her lying on my doormat. I could see that she’d been taking something; I couldn’t leave her like that; I brought her here in my car, yes, but I don’t know who she is, I don’t know her, I don’t even know her name. I can’t help it if she decided to commit suicide on my doorstep, can I?”
Sweat was running down his pale forehead.
Gerfaut got out a Gitane filter and slowly retraced his steps, trying his best to appear inconspicuous, his gaze directed vaguely toward the floor. He need not have bothered: no one was paying him the slightest attention. Once outside, he got back in his car and drove off in a hurry.
A moment or two later, a medical resident and a bareheaded policeman burst agitatedly into the reception area and loudly demanded to know where the person was who had brought in the man with gunshot wounds.
4
“It’s stupid. You must be mad,” said Béa.
Béa was Béatrice Gerfaut, née Changarnier, by background Catholic on one side and Protestant on the other, Bordelaise on one side and Alsatian on the other, bourgeois on one side and bourgeois on the other; by profession a freelance press agent, formerly a teacher of audiovisual techniques at the University of Paris at Vincennes and, before that, manager of a health-food store in Sèvres—a superb and horrible mare of a woman: bigboned and elegant; with big green eyes; thick, healthy, long black hair; big, hard white breasts; wide, round white shoulders; a big, hard creamy ass; a big, hard white belly; and long, muscular thighs. At this moment, Béa stood in the middle of the living room wearing sea-green silk day pajamas with flappy elbowlength sleeves, feet bare on the plum-colored carpet beneath the immense flares of the pants. She began to pace up and down the room, trailing wisps of Jicky perfume behind her.
“You mean you left just like that, without a word to anyone? You didn’t give your name? You don’t know the guy’s name? You didn’t even say where you found him? Do you have any idea what you’re telling me?”
“I don’t know what it was,” said Gerfaut. “All of a sudden I was sick of it. Everything was just pissing me off. It’s a feeling I get now and then.”
He was sitting on a leather-and-canvas sofa with decorative strapping. He had been there for just a few minutes. He had taken off his jacket and tie and undone his shoelaces. In pants and shirt, his collar open and his shoes loose, he sank back into the couch, a glass of Cutty Sark loaded with ice cubes and drowned in Perrier precariously balanced on his left knee, a Gitane filter in the corner of his mouth, and sweat stains at each armpit. Vaguely perplexed, he had an urge to laugh.
“Sick of it?” protested Béa. “Pissed off?”
“Look, I just wanted to get out of there.”
“What a dope!”
“That,” said Gerfaut, “is quite beside the point.”
“Absolutely not. What must they have thought? You show up with a car-accident victim and then you run off. Tell me this, what are they supposed to think?!”
“He could explain it himself. Anyway, screw it.”
“What if he didn’t know what happened to him? What if he was in shock? Or dead?”
“Stop shouting—you’ll wake the kids up.” It was past four in the morning.
“I’m not shouting!”
“All right, but you don’t have to be so damn rude.”
“You mean assertive.”
“No, I mean rude!”
“Look who’s shouting now!”
Gerfaut picked up his glass and forced himself to drain it slowly without taking a breath, his Gitane filter clasped upright between thumb and right index finger, filter downward on account of a long cylinder of ash that was threatening to fall on the floor, there being no ashtray to hand.
“Listen,” he said, when he had finished the drink, “we’ll think it all over tomorrow. I haven’t killed anybody, I did what I had to do, and more than likely we’ll never hear any more about it.”
“For God’s sake!”
“Béa, please. Tomorrow, okay?”
His wife seemed about to explode. Or, possibly, to burst out laughing—for, despite appearances, Béa was not what you would call a nag or a ball buster: as a rule she was outgoing and self-assured. After a moment, she turned away in silence and disappeared into the kitchen. The ash of Gerfaut’s Gitane fell onto the carpet. He got up and stamped on it, rubbing, spreading, erasing its traces with his shoe, then went over to the Sanyo stereo and began very quietly playing Shelley Manne with Conte
