The Collected Novels of José Saramago (380 page)

THE LETTER ADDRESSED TO THE PRIME MINISTER, BECAUSE THERE WAS A
letter, took two days to reach his hands. He realized at once that the clerk in charge of recording the letter had been less discreet than the president’s clerk, how else explain the rumors that had been flying around for the last two days, rumors which, in turn, were either the result of a leak by mid-level civil servants eager to demonstrate that they were au courant or in the know, or else had been deliberately started by the ministry of the interior as a way of stopping in its tracks any attempt by the prime minister to oppose the police investigation or, however symbolically, obstruct it. There remained the possibility, which we will describe as the conspiracy theory, that the supposedly secret conversation between the prime minister and his interior minister that took place after the former had been summoned to the presidential palace, had been far less private than one might have thought, given the padded walls, which, who knows, may have concealed a few latest-generation microphones, of the kind that only an electronic gun-dog with the finest pedigree could sniff out and find. Whatever the truth of the matter, there was nothing to be done about it, it is a sad moment for state secrets, which have no one to defend them. The prime minister is so conscious of this deplorable certainty, so convinced of the pointlessness of secrets, especially when they have ceased to be so, that, with the look of someone observing the world from a very high vantage point, as if he were saying Don’t say a word, I know everything, he slowly folded the letter up and put it in one of his inside jacket
pockets, It came straight from the blindness of four years ago, I’ll keep it with me, he said. The air of shocked surprise on his cabinet secretary’s face made him smile, Don’t worry, my friend, there are at least two other letters identical to this, not to mention the many photocopies that are doubtless already doing the rounds. His cabinet secretary’s face suddenly assumed a look of feigned innocence or abstraction, as if he had not quite understood what he had heard, or as if his conscience had suddenly leapt out at him along the road, accusing him of some ancient, or else very recent, misdeed. You can go now, I’ll call you if I need you, said the prime minister, getting up from his chair and going over to one of the windows. The noise he made in opening it concealed the sound of the door closing. From there, he could see little more than a succession of low roofs. He felt a nostalgia for the capital city, for the happy times when votes did as they were told, for the monotonous passing of the hours and days spent either at his petit-bourgeois official residence or at the national parliament, for the agitated and not infrequently jolly and amusing political crises, which were like sudden eruptions of foreseeable duration and controlled intensity, almost always put on, and through which one learned not only not to tell the truth, but, when necessary, to make it correspond, point by point, with the lie, just as the wrong side and the right side of things are, quite naturally, always found together. He wondered if the investigation would already have begun, he paused to speculate upon whether the agents taking part in the police action would be those who had fruitlessly remained behind in the capital charged with obtaining information and submitting reports, or if the interior minister would have preferred, for this new mission, people whom he knew and trusted, who were to hand and within easy reach, and, who knows, were seduced by the glamorous movie adventure element of a clandestine breaking of the blockade, crawling, with a knife tucked in their belt, underneath barbed-wire fences,
outwitting the dreaded electronic sensors with magnetic desensitizers, and emerging on the other side in enemy territory, heading for their objective, like moles endowed with the agility of a cat and with night-vision glasses. Knowing the interior minister as he did, only slightly less bloodthirsty than dracula, and even more theatrical than rambo, this was sure to be the mode of action he would order them to adopt. He was absolutely right. Hidden in the small area of forest that almost borders the perimeter of the besieged city, three men are waiting for night to become early dawn. However, not everything that the prime minister imagined from his office window corresponds to the reality we see before us. For example, these men are dressed in plain clothes, there are no knives tucked into belts, and the weapon they have in their holster is the gun which is always so reassuringly described as regulation. As for the dreaded magnetic desensitizers, there is, amongst the various bits of apparatus the men are carrying, nothing that looks as if it fulfilled that function, which, when one thinks about it, could mean merely that magnetic desensitizers are quite simply and deliberately made not to look like magnetic desensitizers. We will soon learn, however, that, at a pre-arranged time, the electronic sensors in this section of the border will be turned off for five minutes, which was considered more than enough time for three men, one by one, without undue haste or hurry, to cross the barbed-wire barrier, part of which was cut today precisely for the purpose of avoiding torn trousers and lacerated skin. The army’s sappers will be back to repair it before the rosy fingers of dawn return to reveal the threatening barbs rendered harmless only very briefly, as well as the enormous rolls of wire stretching out along both sides of the frontier. The three men are already through, in front goes the leader, who is the tallest, and they cross, in indian file, a field whose wet grass oozes and squeaks beneath their shoes. On a minor road on the outskirts of the city, about five hundred meters from there, a car is waiting to
carry them through the silence of the night to their destination in the capital, a bogus insurance and reinsurance company which a complete dearth of clients, whether local or foreign, had not as yet managed to bankrupt. The orders that these men received directly from the lips of the interior minister are clear and categorical, Bring me results and I won’t ask by what means you obtained them. They have no written instructions with them, no safe-conduct pass to cover them or which they could show as a defense or as a justification if things should turn out worse than they expect, and there is, of course, always the possibility that the ministry would simply abandon them to their fate if they committed some action that might prejudice the state’s reputation and the immaculate purity of its objectives and processes. These three men are like a commando group entering enemy territory, there seems no reason to think that they will risk their lives there, but they are all aware of the delicate nature of a mission that demands a talent for interrogation, flexibility in drawing up strategy and swiftness in carrying it out. All to the maximum degree. I don’t think you’ll need to kill anyone, the interior minister had said, but if, in an extreme situation, you consider that there’s no other option, then don’t hesitate, I’ll sort things out with the minister for justice, Whose post has just been taken over by the prime minister, remarked the leader of the group. The interior minister pretended not to hear, he merely glared at the importunate speaker, who had no alternative but to look away. The car drove into the city, stopped in a square so that they could change drivers, and finally, after going round various blocks thirty or so times in order to throw off any unlikely pursuer, deposited them at the door of the building where the insurance and reinsurance office has its base. The porter did not come out to see who was arriving at what was a most unusual hour for an office building, one assumes he had received a visit from someone the previous afternoon who had persuaded him gently
to go to bed early and advised him not to slip out from between the sheets, even if insomnia kept him from closing his eyes. The three men took the lift up to the fourteenth floor, went down a corridor to the left, another to the right, a third to the left, and finally reached the office of providential ltd, insurance and reinsurance, as anyone can read on the notice on the door, in black letters on a tarnished, rectangular brass plate, affixed with nails that have brass heads in the shape of truncated pyramids. They went in, one of the subordinates turned on the light, the other closed the door and put the security chain on. Meanwhile the leader of the group walked through the various rooms, checked phone lines, plugged in machines, went into the kitchen, into the bedrooms and bathrooms, opened the door to what was intended to be the filing room and had a quick look at the various armaments stored in there, at the same time breathing in the familiar smell of metal and lubricant, he will inspect it all properly tomorrow, piece by piece, weapon by weapon. He summoned his assistants, sat down and told them to sit down too, Later this morning, at seven o’clock, he said, we will begin the work of following the suspect, notice that I call him the suspect, even though, as far as we know he has committed no crime, I do so not only to simplify communication between ourselves, but also because, for security reasons, it is best that his name is not mentioned, at least not during these first few days, I would add that with this operation, which I hope will last no longer than a week, our first objective is to get an idea of the suspect’s movements around the city, where he works, where he goes, who he meets, the usual routine for a basic investigation, reconnoitring the terrain before making a direct approach, Should he be aware that he’s being followed, asked the first assistant, Not for the first four days, but after that, yes, I want him to feel worried, uneasy, Having written that letter, he must surely be expecting someone to come looking for him, We’ll do that when the moment comes, what I
want, and it’s up to you to achieve this effect, is to frighten him into thinking that he’s being followed by the people he denounced, By the doctor’s wife, No, not by her, but by her accomplices, the people who cast the blank votes, Aren’t we taking things a bit fast, asked the second assistant, we haven’t even started work yet, and here we are talking about accomplices, All we’re doing is making a preliminary sketch, a simple sketch, that’s all, I want to put myself in the shoes of the guy who wrote that letter and, from there, try to see what he sees, Well, a week spent tailing the guy seems far too long to me, said the first assistant, it should take us three days at most to bring him to boiling point. The leader frowned, he was going to say, Look, I said one week and it will be one week, but then he remembered the interior minister, he didn’t recall him having expressly asked for rapid results, but since that is the demand most often heard from the lips of those in charge, and since there was no reason to think that the present case would be any exception, quite the contrary, he showed no more reluctance in agreeing to the period of three days than that considered normal between a superior and a subordinate, on the rare occasions when the person issuing the orders is forced to give in to the reasoning of the person receiving them. We have photographs of all the adults who live in the building, I mean, of course, those of the male sex, said the leader, adding unnecessarily, One of them is that of the man we are looking for, We can’t start following him until we’ve identified him, said the first assistant, True, replied the leader, but nevertheless, at seven o’clock, I want you to be strategically positioned in the street where he lives and to follow the two men you think most closely resemble the kind of person who would have written that letter, that’s where we’ll start, intuition and a good police nose must have their uses, Can I say something, asked the second assistant, Of course, To judge by the tone of the letter, the guy must be a total bastard, Does that mean, asked the first assistant, that we should only follow the ones who
look like bastards, then he added, Although in my experience, the worst bastards are precisely the ones who don’t look like they’re bastards, It would have made much more sense to have gone straight to the identity card people and asked for a copy of the guy’s photograph, it would have saved time and work. Their leader decided to cut this discussion short, I presume you’re not intending to teach the priest to say the our father or the mother superior the hail mary, if they didn’t tell us to do that it must be because they didn’t want to arouse any curiosity that could have caused the operation to be aborted, With respect, sir, I disagree, said the first assistant, everything indicates that the guy is dying to spill the beans, in fact, I think if he knew we were here, he’d be banging on our door right now, You may be right, said the group leader, struggling to control the irritation he felt at what had every appearance of being a devastating critique of his plan of action, but we want to know as much as we can about him before we make direct contact, How’s this for an idea, piped up the second assistant, Not another one, said his chief sourly, This is a good one, I guarantee it, one of us disguises himself as an encyclopedia salesman, that way we’ll be able to see who opens the door, That encyclopedia salesman trick went out with the ark, said the first assistant, besides, it’s usually the wives who come to open the door, I mean, it would be a great idea if our man lived on his own, but, as I recall from what he says in the letter, he’s married, Oh, rats, exclaimed the second assistant. They sat in silence, looking at each other, the two assistants knowing that the best thing now would be to wait for their superior to have an idea of his own. They would, in principle, be prepared to applaud it even if it was as leaky as an old boat. The leader of the group was weighing up everything that had been said, trying to fit the various suggestions together in the hope that two pieces of the puzzle might just slot into place and that something would emerge, something so holmesian, so poirotesque, that it would make these two men under
orders from him open their mouths wide in amazement. And suddenly, as if the scales had fallen from his eyes, he saw the way forward, Most people, he said, unless, of course, they’re physically incapacitated, don’t spend all their time stuck at home, they go out to work, go shopping or for a walk, so my idea is that we should wait until there’s no one in the apartment and then break in, the guy’s address is on the letter, we’ve got plenty of skeleton keys, and there are bound to be photos around, it wouldn’t be hard to identify him from the various photographs and that way we’d have no problem following him, and if we want to find out when the place is empty, we’ll use the phone, we’ll get his number tomorrow from directory inquiries, or we could look it up in the telephone book, one or the other, it doesn’t really matter. As he uttered this rather lame conclusion, he realized that the pieces of the puzzle really didn’t fit. Although, as explained before, the two assistants’ attitude toward the results of their leader’s cogitations was one of total benevolence, the first assistant, trying to find a tone of voice that would not wound his chief’s susceptibilities, felt obliged to observe, Correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t it be best, since we know the guy’s address, just to go and knock on his door and ask whoever answers Does So-and-so live here, if it’s him, he’ll say Yes, that’s me, if it’s his wife, she’ll probably say I’ll just go and call my husband, that way we would have the bird in our hand without having to beat about the bush. The leader raised his clenched fist like someone about to give the desk an almighty thump, but, at the last moment, he checked the violence of that gesture, slowly lowered his arm and said in a voice that seemed to fade with every syllable, We’ll examine that possibility tomorrow, I’m going to bed now, good night. He was just going over to the door of the bedroom he would occupy during the time the investigation lasted when he heard the second assistant ask, So do we still start the operation at seven o’clock as planned. Without turning round, the group leader replied, That plan