down again and lit another Gitane filter with his Criquet lighter. The quadraphonic speakers softly dispensed soft music. Gerfaut smoked and contemplated the living room, only a portion of whose lighting, the dimmest, was on at present. An elegant penumbra consequently enveloped the armchairs and matching sofa; the coffee table; the off-white plastic cubes bearing a cigarette box, a scarlet plastic lamp in the form of a mushroom, and recent issues of L’Express, Le Nouvel Observateur, Le Monde, Playboy (American edition), L’Écho des Savanes, and other periodicals; the record cabinets containing four or five thousand francs’ worth of classical, opera, and West Coast jazz LPs; and the built-in teak bookshelves with several hundred volumes representing the finest writing ever produced by humanity and a fair amount of junk.
Béa returned from the kitchen with two Cutty Sarks and a tender ironic smile. She sat down next to her husband, handed him one of the glasses, and tucked her bare feet under her. She rolled a strand of hair around her index finger.
“Okay, then,” she said, “let’s not talk about it; we’ll see later. How was your trip, otherwise? Did it go well? Did things pan out?”
Gerfaut nodded with satisfaction and offered a few details about a successfully concluded deal and about how he stood to collect a 15,000 franc commission over and above his monthly salary, which was about half that. He began to tell how at lunch the wife of the local rep had become horribly drunk and what happened then. But soon he seemed no longer to find it so amusing and abruptly ended his narrative.
“What about you?” he asked his wife. “How did you get on?”
“Oh, same old. The last two screenings of the Feldman are for tomorrow. Karmitz will distribute the thing for us, it turns out. Phew! You stink of sweat!”
“Well,” said Gerfaut, “that’s all I am, isn’t it? A stink of sweat!”
“Oh, shut up!” Pushing herself up with her feet, Béa arched her back and stretched, showing off to advantage her fine build and the harmony of its simultaneously hard and soft embodiment. “Be quiet and finish your scotch. Take a shower. Then come and make love to me.”
Gerfaut was quiet, finished his scotch, took a shower, and went and made love to her. In the doing, though, he banged his shoulder on the frame of the bathroom door, slipped, and almost fell and broke his neck in the bathtub as he was showering, twice dropped his toothbrush in the washbasin, and nearly destroyed his Habit Rouge deodorant atomizer. There were no two ways about it: either he was drunk from two drinks, or else…. Or else what?
5
The attempt on Gerfaut’s life did not take place immediately, but it was not long coming: just three days.
The day after his late-night return home, Gerfaut awoke at noon. The little girls were at school and, being semiboarders, would not be home till evening. Béa had gone out about ten, leaving a message on the pillow. She could sleep for just four or five hours and still be fresh and energetic all day long. She could also on occasion sleep for thirty hours straight in a deep, childlike slumber. The message read: 9:45 a.m. Tea in thermos – cold roast in fridge – have settled up with Maria – back in afternoon (to pack) but second screening Antégor 6 p.m. si te gusta and if you can – LOVE. (The last word was in English. The ink was purple and the handwriting was elegantly careless; Béa had used a felttip marker.)
Gerfaut went into the living room, where he found the thermos of tea on the coffee table along with zwiebacks, butter, and the mail. He drank some tea and ate two buttered zwiebacks and opened the mail. There were several subscription offers for business magazines and a few financial newsletters; a friend Gerfaut had not heard from in two years wrote from Australia that his married life had become intolerable and asked whether Gerfaut thought he should get a divorce; and on a green card Gerfaut’s chess partner had indicated his fortnightly move. Gerfaut noted the move in his notebook, thinking that he wouldn’t have the time to think about it right away, seeing that they were getting ready to leave on vacation, but then he replied mechanically, castling just as Harston had castled against Larsen when in the same position at the Las Palmas tournament of 1974. On the part of the green card left for correspondence, he wrote what was to be his address for the whole of the next month in Saint-Georges-de-Didonne.
Around two in the afternoon, shaved, showered, combed, deodorized, dressed, Gerfaut looked at himself in the hall mirror. He had a handsome pale oval face, blond hair, a forceful nose and chin; but he also had liquid blue eyes, and his gaze was slightly abstracted, slightly soft, a tad owlish and evasive. He was on the short side. Last summer, in clogs with gigantic heels, Béa had stood a few centimeters taller. His proportions, the breadth of his shoulders, his musculature were satisfactory, but no more than that; the exercises he did every day, or almost, had had some effect. Not too much of a belly for the moment, though there was danger there. The body in question was at present encased in Mariner briefs, a slate-gray jerseywool suit over a white-and-slate striped shirt with a solid-white collar and a plum-colored tie; cotton socks; and plum-colored English shoes with much visible stitching (what is perhaps called overstitching).
The elevator bore Gerfaut straight down to his Mercedes in the building’s underground garage. He started up, drove out into the street, wound his way to the Gare d’Austerlitz, and crossed the Seine. From the cassette player came Tal Farlow. In about twenty minutes Gerfaut reached the headquarters of his company, a subsidiary of ITT located just off the Boulevard des Italiens. He parked the Mercedes in the company’s underground garage. The elevator took him first to the ground floor, where he slipped the green card, restamped and readdressed to his chess partner, a retired mathematics teacher in Bordeaux, into a mailbox. The ground-floor lobby was full of oraculating working stiffs. Gerfaut got back in the elevator and went up to the second floor. The second-floor reception area was also full of oraculating workers. A potted plant gently toppled over as Gerfaut struggled out of the elevator. A union representative from the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) stood athwart the stairs leading to the third floor. He wore a checkered shirt and royal-blue canvas pants.
“Excuse me, please,” muttered Gerfaut as he pushed past.
“If Monsieur Charançon is afraid to come out,” the union delegate was shouting, “we’ll drag his fat ass out ourselves.”
A bellow of approval went up from those in possession of the lobby. Gerfaut extricated himself from the melee and went down a corridor with Gerflex vinyl flooring. He reached his door and went in. In the anteroom Mademoiselle Truong was painting her nails scarlet.
“How do you manage?” asked Gerfaut. “With nails like that. I mean, you type a lot. Don’t you break them?”
“It happens. Good morning, monsieur. Did you have a good trip?”
“Excellent, thanks.” Gerfaut made for his office.
“Roland Desroziers is in there,” warned Mademoiselle Truong. “Well, I wasn’t going to fight with him, was I?”
“No one expects you to fight,” answered Gerfaut, going into his office and closing the door behind him. “Hi there, Roland.”
“Hi there, you little cop-out,” said Desroziers, who was an ecological militant and a union delegate of the French Confederation of Labor (CFDT) and wore a black sweater and jeans; Gerfaut had been a militant with him in the early sixties in a radical fraction of the Seine-Banlieue Federation of the Unified Socialist Party (PSU). “It’s talk, talk, talk in there,” said Desroziers, “I came in here to get a drink.” He had indeed purloined Gerfaut’s Cutty Sark and was quaffing a large measure of it in a paper cup. “You don’t mind me drinking your scotch, I hope?”
“Of
