had helped himself to. “It may be talk, talk, talk,” he observed, “but that Stalinist bureaucrat says they’re going to drag the boss’s fat ass out of here themselves—those are his exact words—so you’re going to be trampled underfoot if you sit around here drinking the rich man’s booze.”
“Shit!” said Desroziers, hurriedly sticking his nose back into the paper cup and slurping the rest of his drink. Coughing, he set the cup down. “I’m out of here!”
“Go ahead, set the place on fire, trash the computer, string Charançon up, why don’t you,” suggested Gerfaut in a dispirited tone as he sat down at his desk and reached for the whisky bottle to put it away. “All power to the workers’ councils!” he added bitterly. But the CFDT man was already gone.
That afternoon Gerfaut took care of business pending, dealt with salespeople needing directives, and conducted a long discussion with his immediate subordinate, who would be standing in for him during July, and who, truth to tell, hoped through a combination of intrigue, servility, and betrayal soon to replace him completely and definitively. Gerfaut was for his part called in to see Charançon, who had had the greatest difficulty disentangling himself from the proletarian agitation. Charançon’s face was flushed, and he wore a tiny Lions Club de France badge on his lapel and Pierre Cardin suspenders beneath his gray suit. Behind him on the wall was a poster under glass with pretty painted pink flowers and the English words HOME SWEET HOME inscribed in large, pale, pink frilly letters. Superimposed on the flowers and the pink inscription was a text in small black characters whose author was Harold S. Geneen, president of ITT. It ran as follows: In different locations around the world, almost anywhere on the globe, rather more than two hundred workdays each year are given over to executive meetings at different levels of our organization. It is during these meetings, be they in New York, Brussels, Hong Kong, or Buenos Aires, that decisions are taken based on logic, on a business logic that leads to choices that are almost inevitable, for the simple reason that we are in possession of almost all the basic elements needed to arrive at decisions. Just like our planning, our periodic meetings are designed to clarify the logic of things and expose that logic to the light of day, where its value and necessity will be apparent to all. This logic is immune to all state laws and regulations. It is a part of a natural process. There was no way of telling whether the presence of this poster in Charançon’s office testified to a discreet sense of humor or to a terminal state of alienation. Charançon congratulated Gerfaut on the success of his negotiations of the last two days, and it was agreed that his bonus would be credited to his bank account in the course of July. Charançon poured two glasses of Glenlivet.
“Thank you.” Gerfaut took the glass Charançon held out to him.
“They are completely mad,” said Charançon. “Do you remember May ‘68? They were still out on strike in the middle of July—but they had no idea what they wanted! Remember?”
“When they do find out what they want, it’ll be time for you and me to get a real job. Or pack our bags.” Gerfaut sipped his whisky. “What they wanted was the collapse of capitalism.”
“You bet your sweet ass they did, my friend!” agreed Charançon distractedly.
Back in his office, tidying up, Gerfaut was subjected to the usual erotic provocations of Mademoiselle Truong. She was continually crossing the room, bending over as far as she could to reach things, ostentatiously removing specks of dust from her eye, or standing on tiptoe, thighs and buttocks and breasts and arms all straining upward, to straighten the Air France calendar or the work schedule or one of the glass-mounted prints. At the same time, Gerfaut felt certain, had he grabbed her ass she would have screamed, made a scandal, or scratched her aggressor’s cheek with those vicious-looking scarlet nails.... Gerfaut sent her out for France-Soir (Béa always made sure to pick up the more serious Le Monde).
The paper’s suggested lottery numbers were three, seven, and twelve. Tanks and air power had been deployed against six thousand rebellious Bolivian peasants. An Eskimo had been shot and killed while trying to divert a Boeing 747 to North Korea. A Breton trawler had gone missing with its eleven-man crew. A woman had celebrated her hundredth birthday and announced her intention of voting for the left. Extratrerrestrials had abducted a dog in full view of its master, a crossing guard in the department of Bas-Rhin. And, in emulation of a recent fad on America’s West Coast, a couple had tried to fornicate in public on a French Mediterranean beach, only to be restrained and arrested by the local police. Gerfaut glanced at the funnies, then tossed the newspaper into the wastebasket.
“I’m leaving now,” said Mademoiselle Truong.
“See you tomorrow, then.”
“What do you mean, tomorrow?”
“Oh, yes, I’m sorry. Until the first of August, then. Have a nice vacation.”
“You, too, Monsieur Gerfaut.”
She left. Gerfaut left soon after. It was about seven—too late to join Béa at the screening of the Feldman film. Gerfaut didn’t want to see it, anyway. He could easily have left the office a couple of hours earlier, but he had wanted to show that, even the day before leaving on vacation, he had worked hard, gone beyond the call of duty.
After forty-five minutes of very slow progress through blocked traffic, with Lee Konitz accompanied by Lennie Tristano on the cassette player, Gerfaut left the Mercedes in its slot in the underground parking garage of his building in the thirteenth arrondissement and went up to his apartment. The little girls were there watching the regional news. (They watched anything that appeared on a television screen; for them there was no significant difference between the regional news and, say, The Saga of Anatahan.) The girls’ bags and Béa’s were almost packed. Gerfaut showered, changed, and did his own packing with the feeling that he was forgetting everything important, and served the girls cold roast beef with Heinz salad dressing and Bulgarianstyle yogurt. Then he sent them off to bed; they left the room, insulting him in a muted but earnest way.
Soon Béa arrived, in good humor. As the two of them sat in the kitchen eating cold roast beef with Heinz salad dressing, she told him that Maria had that morning begged for the key to their apartment while they were away. Supposedly, Maria had broken off with her Berber boyfriend, who was looking for her and meant to kill her. Wasn’t he the one who wanted to put her to work on the street? asked Gerfaut. Wiping the corner of her mouth with a paper napkin, Béa replied that that had been a joke. Maria’s real plan, according to Béa, was to get the run of their place so she could bring the guy over, clean out their liquor cabinet, and screw. But, all the same, protested Gerfaut, what if the guy really was stalking her, the poor kid? Poor kid, poor kid!—she was big enough to take care of herself! was Béa’s last word on the subject.
After dinner they tossed their paper plates into the trash, washed the other dishes and left them on the drainer, finished the packing, brushed their teeth, got into bed, read a few pages, she of Edgar Morin’s latest book, he of an old John D. MacDonald, and went to sleep. Gerfaut awoke shortly after two in the morning and fell prey at once to an inexplicable and terrifying insomnia. He went and took half a sleeping pill with a glass of milk. He fell asleep again with no difficulty about three. Early the next morning, they all got up and left for their vacation. Gerfaut having had the forethought to take off work as from the twenty-ninth of June, traffic was free-flowing. This, and the invention of superhighways, enabled them to reach their destination in under seven hours, including a stop for lunch and without speeding. And so, on the night of the twenty-ninth of June, the family slept at Saint-Georges-de-Didonne.
The next day was the day they tried to kill Georges Gerfaut.
6
At eleven-fifty on the
