Next Episode (5 page)

Enthusiastically and with sensational style, I travelled the last leg between me and the famous Professor H. de Heutz. From Aigle to the Château de Chillon I drove like a maniac and then, after a bottleneck outside Montreux-Vevey, I set off again for the gates of the beloved city of Lausanne, driving through it blindly. Around ten o’clock I slowed down: I was finally in Geneva. Taking the road to Lausanne had brought me to the Quai des Bergues and I drove along it, breaking every one of this Calvinist country’s traffic laws. Then, after crossing the Rhône at the very spot where the Helvetians would have crossed if they hadn’t been wiped out by Caesar, I went down several streets and arrived, fresh as a daisy, at the door of the Société d’Histoire de la Suisse Romande. My Swiss-made watch showed twelve minutes past ten.

“Excuse me, Madame, is this where Professor de Heutz is lecturing …?”

“You’re too late, Monsieur. Surely you don’t think at this hour of the night …”

“Do you know where he might be, by any chance? I’m a colleague …”

“Geneva’s a big city. You can always try, but where? I suggest you get in touch with Monsieur Bullinger, our president. He often drops by the Café du Globe after our lectures …”

A few minutes later I was parked diagonally on the Quai du Général-Guisan near the Globe. I was amazed to realize that the lecture on “Caesar and the Helvetians,” which I’d promised myself to attend when I was drinking a beer in Vevey, had been given in my absence by the man I’d been pursuing from one canton to the next.

The Globe terrace was still all lit up and crowded. Inside, I could make out the silhouettes of other customers and waiters. Before going into action, I pretended for a while that I was just hanging around and looked in jewellers’ windows till I spotted a blue Opel parked across from the café. From a seat on the terrace, I could keep an eye on the car; then, after its owner had gone inside, I’d still have time to get to my Volvo, parked a little further away, and chase the Opel. Once I was sitting over a Feldschlossen with a thick head of foam, I reviewed the situation. Pastor Nussbaumer knew that I wanted to meet H. de Heutz, as did the receptionist at the Société d’Histoire de la Suisse Romande: both had every reason to believe that I was also a colleague and friend of H. de Heutz. (In case I made a mess of things, my Volvo would head for Italy and I’d go back to playing a Canadian Press correspondent in Switzerland, domiciled at 18 boulevard James-Fazy, Geneva.) Furthermore, the Belgian historian has nothing to do with the banker Carl von Ryndt, whose disappearance would surely be of no concern to Pastor Nussbaumer or to the honourable members of the Société d’Histoire de la Suisse Romande or even to the waiter who’d brought me my beer. Of course the bellhop at the Rochers de Naye in Montreux knew that a man corresponding vaguely to my anthropometric record was looking for a man named von Ryndt and was getting ready to travel from Montreux to Château d’Oex to meet him. But that bellhop, who was as discreet as a banker, would only be
able to assert that I hadn’t found my man at Château d’Oex because, in any event, I’d stopped looking for von Ryndt at Château d’Oex and had begun, after metamorphosing into a Romanist, to look for one H. de Heutz, acknowledged expert on Scipio Africanus and Caesar’s wars. On the terrace of the Café du Globe, three customers were airing their scholarly opinions about Balzac in pure native Genevan accents.

“You know Simenon’s theory? Fascinating, absolutely fascinating. He maintains that Balzac may have been impotent …”

“But that theory has two flaws, dear friend: first, it’s completely unverifiable; and second, it’s inconsistent with the facts. Remember Balzac’s affair with Madame Hanska … That happened right here in Geneva – and not on paper! Their subsequent correspondence contains precise references to their amorous meetings in Geneva …”

“But that’s just it, it was his use of verbal extravaganzas to describe simple meetings that Simenon thought were fishy. Once a man has possessed a woman, he no longer needs to write to her in the persuasive mode. One persuades the woman first …”

“Unless a man has left a woman with child, there’s always room to suspect impotence. It’s a terrible nuisance …”

“I also find it hard to believe that Geneva was harmful to Balzac and that it was in our city that he experienced such a humiliation. It’s nothing to be proud of. As well as the fact that this unfortunate rumour would be bad for tourism …”

There was a burst of laughter at the other table while I rested from my mad race by gazing at the inert space of the lake, waiting to kill the time of a man of whom all I knew was his ability to change identities. What wonderful moments I spent on that terrace, waiting for one of my numerous neighbours to get up and go to the blue Opel parked along the Quai du Général-Guisan. Geneva struck me as the pleasantest spot in the world for a terrorist to wait for the man he’s going to kill. Antechamber of revolution and anarchy, the ancient city
constricted by the Rhône enchanted me because of its sweetness, its nocturnal calm, and its lights reflected in the lake. I felt great, even wonderful. My thoughts were flying off in every direction.

I could see Balzac sitting where I was seated as he dreamed up the
Story of the Thirteen
, ecstatically imagining an elusive and pure Ferragus, conferring on the fictitious
übermensch
the powers that, according to my nameless neighbours, had been cruelly lacking in the novelist himself. The triumphal potency of Ferragus avenged his own shameful debacle, and the virile action that lit up those blazing pages stood in for acts that had not taken place in a melancholy bed in the Hôtel d’Arc or somewhere else. Ferragus haunted me that evening in this city that had treated the novelist badly; Balzac’s fictitious and enigmatic avenger slowly entered me, inhabiting me as a secret society might infiltrate a corrupt city, transforming it into a citadel. The shadow of the great Ferragus shielded me, his blood injected an inflammable substance into my veins: I too was ready to avenge Balzac no matter what by draping myself in his character’s black cape.

I was ready to strike, impatient even, when I saw two silhouettes cross the street and go up to the blue Opel parked across from the lake. In the time it took me to drop a few Swiss francs on the table, H. de Heutz had opened the Opel’s door. I was at the wheel of my Volvo and I’d started it when H. de Heutz’s car began to move rather slowly along the Quai du Général-Guisan. Despite the distance I kept between the Opel and me, I saw that there was a woman with him. The road H. de Heutz took was fairly complicated, travelling along nearly deserted streets that posed problems of discretion for me; finally he parked on Place Simon-Goulart, which fortunately I was familiar with, so I was able to park unnoticed. From a distance I saw him get out of the car with the woman; they started slowly along the sidewalk, arm in arm, heading for the Quai des Bergues. I followed them, careful not to
attract their attention. In any case, my dear expert on Scipio Africanus wasn’t behaving like a hunted man. I was unsure what to make of the woman whose arm he was holding, nor did I know how to put her inside the parentheses of zero hour. I was still thinking about it when events compelled me to linger unwisely over the movements of the clocks displayed in every shop window. Then, at the corner of rue du Mont-Blanc, the woman disappeared as if by magic, making me realize that her departure was even more puzzling than her cumbersome presence; H. de Heutz continued strolling, his pace more agile now. In fact, he was going much too quickly for me. I found it hard to follow him without adopting his hurried rhythm and thus attracting attention.

I’d have been better off staying in the Volvo and tailing him in peace. Too late now to retrace my steps. There was something unrealistic, insane about this nighttime stroll. H. de Heutz and I were proceeding towards the Carouge neighbourhood, once a refuge for Russian revolutionaries, almost at a run. H. de Heutz was leading me despite myself into the river of the great revolution. And while I was dreaming of the famous exiles who had roamed the narrow, desperate streets of Carouge long before us, just when I least expected it, I took a blow on my back and another, harder one on my neck. A crack developed in the Geneva night, and I felt I was being manipulated by a great many skilful hands.

T
HE ROOM I
was in was magnificent: three big French windows opened onto a charming garden, and at the very end of the landscape, a shimmering surface that made me think I was still in Switzerland, in a salon, what’s more – and what a salon! I was fascinated by the large armoire with its marquetry angel figures, wood on wood. Perfectly stunning. Mechanically, I asked:

“Where am I?”

“At the chateau.”

“Which chateau?”

“The chateau of Versailles, idiot.”

“Ah …”

Little by little I was emerging from a comatose sleep and at the same time becoming aware of a throbbing pain in the back of my neck, which immediately drove away the amnesia from which I’d been suffering. I realized that the night was over. Twenty-four hours had elapsed since dawn in the Hôtel d’Angleterre. I was lost, truly lost and – this I realized when I made an automatic move – unarmed.

“So your mind is working again?”

The man stood facing me with his back to the light so that I couldn’t make out his face. But I realized that he knew what he was talking about and that if I wanted to have a useful
exchange with him, I’d better get my wits back as quickly as possible.

“I’d like a glass of water …”

“Here there is nothing to drink but champagne … So we’re playing spy, are we? Wandering around at night with a gun, pursuing honest taxpaying citizens who have all their papers in order? What a disgrace for Switzerland.”

“I think there’s been a misunderstanding.”

“If that’s so, you’d better start explaining …”

I had to be quick and confident or I’d never be able to pull myself out of this faux pas. I needed to think up a quick retort, and since I no longer had a weapon to draw, I’d have to empty my dialectical magazine on this stranger who was standing between me and the daylight. Alas, the seconds of silence that were mounting up restored neither my reflexes nor my presence of mind. My speech was still slurred and I couldn’t even reason clearly in the hope of resuming control of the situation. Right now I can’t even whisper to my double the formulaic remarks that would get him out of this jam. The other man’s para-helical silhouette is blocking me; outrageously, he fills the entire landscape where I dream confusedly of running along streams to the enchanting lake. I’m paralyzed by something that resembles a thrombosis; and I can’t take myself out of the national catatonia that has me frozen here on a Louis xv armchair – or maybe it’s Regency – before a placid stranger who doesn’t even know what I’m doing in his life, whereas I, who know all too well, have to silence him and above all, yes, above all, and as soon as possible, come up with another explanation, improvise on the spot a scenario that will get me out of this place …

“I want to see your superior,” I tell him.

“It’s un-Christian to disturb someone this early in the morning …”

“I don’t care, I have to see him. I’m on an official mission and I have to know whom I’m dealing with before I disclose
my identity. I’m serious: be quick, it’s very important … for you. In fact … I have a feeling that we’re in the same line of business and, besides, that we work for the same interests …”

There were many drawbacks to making the first move, especially because I didn’t know yet if my adversary had a clear picture of why I’d shadowed him the night before. I had to proceed cautiously and dissemble with style or I was liable to be taken unawares. The memory of the ruined evening that saw my elaborate race from the Château d’Ouchy to the Hôtel des Rochers de Naye in Montreux, then my round trip across the Col des Mosses to Château d’Oex with a stop in Geneva where I practised my running, was bitterly humiliating. While drawing on all the resources of my pride as I tried to look intelligent, I was still obsessed by my failure. The worst humiliation was still to come because, in a few hours, if I should be set free, I’d have to show K how ineffectual I’d been, give her a detailed account: my automobile exploit, my euphoria on the terrace of the Café du Globe, and my final rout. All things considered, I was disqualified by H. de Heutz, and if I’m now steering clear of a detailed review of my mission, it’s so I won’t twist the knife in the wound.

My armed guard was standing motionless between the windows while I, rotting with shame and impatience, stood against the light from the vast, extra-luminous landscape that spread out beyond the chateau. How to adopt a haughty attitude when all you want to do is cry and use the telephone, as if that were something to do in such a situation? Anyway, I didn’t have K’s number, and the only way we’d agreed to get in touch was to meet on the terrace of the Hôtel d’Angleterre late that afternoon. In the meantime, in return for such a display of imagination and boldness I had only one thing to do: leave the leaden chateau where an unknown man, H. de Heutz no doubt, was letting the butt of his 45 protrude from his jacket and, not without elegance, questioning me and forcing me to answer before I’d got my wits back. He interrogated me, and
there was no question of not answering: it would have been impolite and awkward and it would have prolonged an incarceration that as far as my honour was concerned had already lasted too long. So I reply after a fashion. I speak, but what do I actually say? I don’t make any sense. My improvised remarks veer into insinuations. Why in hell should I recount this tangled tale about my office in Geneva and tell him that a phone call would set matters straight and bring this ridiculous misunderstanding to an end? I’m talking nonsense.

It’s painful, this conversation with me at the centre. I keep it from flagging, I say whatever comes into my head, I unwind the bobbin, I make connections, I cause no end of trouble. Then I really go overboard, tell him I’m having a nervous breakdown, try to look as if I’m high on drugs. And all this business about financial problems, the tall tale about my two children and my wife whom I’ve abandoned: a pack of lies … He still hasn’t moved. If he hasn’t slapped me, it may be because he’s taken the bait. Maybe I’ve even given him a good show. I make a last-ditch effort and go on telling my implausible story …