The Erasers (33 page)

Eight short fat fingers pass delicately back and forth over each other, the back of the four right fingers against the inside of the four left fingers.

The left thumb caresses the right thumbnail, gently at first, then pressing harder and harder. The other fingers exchange positions, the back of the four left fingers vigorously rubbing the inside of the four right fingers. They interlace, lock, twist each other; the movement grows faster, more complicated, gradually loses its regularity, soon becomes so confused that nothing more can be distinguished in the swarm of joints and palms.

“
Come in,
”
Laurent says.

He rests his hands flat on the desk, fingers spread wide. It is an officer with a letter.

“
Someone slipped this under the door of the concierge
’
s lodge. It
’
s marked
‘
Urgent
’
and
‘
Personal.
’ ”

Laurent takes the yellow envelope the man hands him. The address, written in pencil, is scarcely legible:
“
Personal. Chie
f
Commissioner. Urgent.
”

“
The concierge didn
’
t see who brought this letter?
”

“
He couldn
’
t; he found it under his door. It may have already been there a quarter of a hour, or even more.
”

“
All right. Thanks.
”

When the officer has left the room, Laurent feels the envelope. It seems to contain a rather stiff card. He holds it up to the electric light, but sees nothing abnormal about it. He decides to open it with his paper knife.

It is a picture post card showing a little house in a bad imitation Louis XIII style, at the corner of a long, gloomy suburban street and a wide avenue, probably at the edge of a canal. On the back is written, also in pencil, this one phrase:
“
Meeting tonight at seven-thirty.
”
In a woman
’
s handwriting. There is no signature.

The police receive messages like this every day—anonymous letters, insults, threats, denunciations—most often very involved, usually sent by illiterates or lunatics. The text of this post card is distinguished by its brevity and its precision. The meeting place is not indicated; it must be the street corner shown on the photograph—at least so one might suppose. Ii Laurent recognized the place, he might send one or two men there at the hour arranged; but it isn
’
t worth the bother o
f
doing a lot of research to end up—at best—laying hands on some fishing boat that is smuggling in five pounds of snuff.

It would be better to be sure that this minor infraction would be effectively punished by the inspector who discovered it. The chief commissioner knows that a good deal of minor smuggling occurs with the complicity
of the police who merely take a m
odest share for themselves. It is only for serious
misdemean
o
rs
that they are required to be completely uncompromising. it the other end of the scale of crimes, one wonders what their
b
ehavior might be
…
if, for instance, a political organization f the type described by Wallas were to appeal to their
…
l
uckily, the question does not come up.

The commissioner picks up his phone and asks for the capi
t
al. He wants to have a clear conscience. Only the central
s
ervices can inform him—if they have had time to perform the
a
utopsy.

He gets his line soon enough, but he is transferred from
o
ffice to office several times without managing to get in touch
with
the proper branch. The head of the department that signed t
h
e letter ordering the release of the body told him to speak
t
o the medico-legal service; here, no one seems to know any
thing
. Transferred from one to the other in succession, he
fi
nally reaches the prefect
’
s office, where someone—he doesn
’
t
k
now precisely who—agrees to listen to his question:
“
From
t
hat distance was the bullet that killed Daniel Dupont fired ?
”

“
Just one minute, please, hold on.
”

It is only after a rather long interval, interspersed with
v
arious noises, that the answer reaches him:

“
A 7.65 bullet, fired from a distance of about four yards.
”

An answer which proves absolutely nothing, save that the
le
sson has been well learned.

Laurent then receives another visit from Wallas.

The special agent seems to have nothing to say to him. He
h
as come back here as if he no longer knew where to go. He
d
escribes the escape of the b
usinessman Marchat, the meeting
with Juard, the visit to the former Madame Dupont. The co
m
missioner, as on each occasion he himself has had dealings wi
th
the doctor, finds the latter
’
s conduct rather suspect. As for
the
divorced wife, it was obvious to everyone that she knew not
h
ing. Wallas describes the strange shopwindow the station saleswoman has made, and to Laurent
’
s great surprise, tak
e
out of his pocket the same post card the officer has just broug
ht
in.

The commissioner goes to his desk and picks up the c
ard
sent by the unknown woman. It is the same card. He rea
d
Wallas the phrase written on the back.

The scene takes place in a Pompeian-style city—and, mo
st
particularly, in a rectangular forum one end of which is occ
u
pied by a temple (or a theater, or something of the same kind the other sides by various smaller monuments divided by wid
e
paved roadways. Wallas has no idea where this image co
mes
from. He is talking—sometimes in the middle of the square-sometimes on stairs, long flights of stairs—to people he can
’t
distinguish from one another but who were at the start clearl
y
characterized and individual. He himself has a distinct rol
e,
probably a major one, perhaps official. The memory sudden
ly
becomes quite piercing; for a fraction of a second, the
entire
scene assumes an extraordinary density. But what scene?
He
has just time to hear himself say:

“
And did that happen a long time ago?
”

Immediately everything has vanished, the people, the stair the temple, the rectangular forum and its monuments. He
h
as
never seen anything of the kind.

It is the agreeable face of a dark young woman which appears i
n
its place—the stationery saleswoman from the Rue Victor-
H
ugo and the echo of her little throaty laugh. Yet her face is
se
rious.

Wallas and his mother had finally reached the dead end of a anal; in the sunlight, the low houses reflected their old
façade
s i the green water. It was not an aunt they were looking for: it as a male relative, someone he had never really known. He
d
id not see him that day either. It was his father. How could
h
e have forgotten it?

***

Wallas wanders through the city at random. The night is amp and cold. All day long, the sky has remained yellow, low,
o
vercast—promising snow—but it has not snowed, and it is
n
ow the November mists that have gathered. Winter is coming
e
arly this year.

The lights at the street corners cast reddish circles just
s
trong enough to keep the pedestrian from losing his way. It
ta
kes a good deal of care, crossing the street, not to stumble
a
gainst the curbstones.

In the neighborhoods where the shops are more numerous, le stranger is surprised to find so few shopwindows lighted.
P
robably there is no need to attract customers in order to sell ice and brown soap. There are few notion stores in this
p
rovince.

Wallas steps into a crowded, dusty shop that seems intended
fo
r the storage of merchandise rather than its retail sale. At the
re
ar, a man in an apron is nailing shut a crate.
He stops poundin
g to try to understand what kind of eraser Wallas wants. He
n
ods several times during the course of the explanation as if he
k
new what Wallas meant. Then, without saying a word, he
w
alks toward the other side of the shop; he is obliged to shif
t
a
large number of objects on his way in order to reach his go; He opens and closes several drawers, one after the other, thin for a minute, climbs up a ladder, begins searching again, wit out any more success.

He comes back toward his client: he no longer has the ite
m.
He still had some not long ago—a lot left over from before t
he
war; they must have sold the last one—unless it
’
s been p
ut
away somewhere else:
“
There are so many things here that y
ou
can never find anything.
”

Wallas dives back into the night.

Why not go back to the solitary house as well as anywhe
re
else?

As the chief commissioner pointed out to him, Doctor Juard behavior is not absolutely clear—though it is hard to see wh
at
his secret role could be. When he walked through the parlo
r
library, the little doctor glanced at Wallas out of the corner
of
his eye while pretending not to see him through his hea
vy
glasses: yet he had walked through the room on purpose
to
have a look at him. And several times during their conversati
on
half an hour later, Wallas was amazed at the strange way which Juard expressed himself: he seemed to be thinking
of
something else and occasionally even to be talking about som
e
thing else.
“
He has a bad conscience,
”
Laurent
declares
.

Perhaps, too, the businessman Marchat is not so crazy as
it
seems. After all, to go into hiding was the better part of vale It is strange that the doctor
’
s account does not make the lea
st
allusion to Marchat
’
s presence in the Rue de Corinthe at t
he
time of the wounded man
’
s arrival; he has always claimed,
to
the contrary, that he did not need anyone
’
s help; yet accordi
ng
to the commissioner, Marchat cannot have invented all
the
details he reports concerning the professor
’
s demise. If Jua
rd
knew, one way or another, that Marchat was to be murdered tonight in his turn, it would certainly be to his advantage to conceal the businessman
’
s presence in his clinic last evening He does not know that the latter has already mentioned it to the police.

Then the pneumatic message discovered at the
poste restante
window actually did concern this case—Wallas was convinced of it from the beginning. It is the summons sent to the murderer for the second crime—today
’
s—which (according to this hypothesis) should take place in this same city. The conclusions of the inspector whose report Wallas read in Laurent
’
s office could be correct about this: the existence of two accomplices in the murder of Daniel Dupont—the addressee (Andr
é
WS) and the person designated by the letter G in the text of the letter. Tonight, the former would work alone. Lastly, Marchat was right to fear an attack long before the fatal hour—as confirmed by the words
“
all afternoon
”
also appearing in the pneumatic message.

There remains the post card mysteriously slipped under the concierge
’
s door at the police station. It is extremely doubtful that the conspirators would have decided to inform the police of the time and place of their crime. It is part of their program to indicate the authorship of their crimes and to give them all the publicity possible (the Executive Services and the Ministry of the Interior have already received certain messages from the leaders of the organization), but the post card would constitute evidence capable of wrecking their plans—unless they henceforth felt so powerful that they had nothing further to fear from anyone. One would almost be led to suspect the commissioner himself of duplicity—which, from another point of view, is difficult to imagine.