The Interpreter (17 page)

For the moment, the mist showed no signs of lifting; the weak winter sun lightened it but never really broke through. By midday, though, the sky was dazzlingly bright, the light falling sharply on everything in sight and sending out cold reflections. An endless landscape of blurred fields sped past the windows; an occasional house loomed up through the purplish haze, then sank away into the blind eye of my rear-view mirror. I drove for hours without seeing a living soul, without encountering any other roads; sometimes a canal would appear to the side of the track, then wander off again to lose itself in meadows stiff with frost. Finally, in the distance, I saw a dense wall of tree trunks coming towards me through the mist, and found myself engulfed in a fir wood covering one slope of a hill, the road running up it in broad curves. When I emerged from the wood in a clearing at the top, I saw a broad plain stretched out below me, and a bend in a dark, muddy river flowing through fields lightly veiled by the tender green of the new corn. The track now ran downhill through leafless poplar groves, then joined a larger road covered with smooth, black asphalt. Just as I slipped into the flow of traffic, a pale sun finally revealed itself, causing the whole landscape to glitter unexpectedly: points of brightness sparkled on the recently upturned earth, on the metal of the cars, on the scrawls of ice in the ditches. At last I glimpsed a rusty signpost at the side of the road, and slowed down to read it: thirty kilometres to Suceava. Without noticing it, I had entered Romania.

After a dozen kilometres or so, I stopped to fill up with petrol and buy a few provisions. Going into the bar, I cast a nervous glance over its occupants, a tingle of excitement running down my spine. I fingered the gun in my pocket, feeling a nasty smile form on my lips; I ordered some sausage and coffee and ate hurriedly, glancing around warily as I did so. The barman had abandoned his post to go and wash the kitchen floor; I could see him through the half-open door. Such few customers as there were were smoking in silence and drinking large tankards of beer. I put my cup on the counter and walked towards the door almost with regret, then turned to wink at the girl at the till, who picked up my crumpled banknotes hastily, pulling her cardigan over her chest in embarrassment. I drove out of the forecourt, past the garage building, parked behind an abandoned articulated lorry and locked myself in – it was time to get some sleep. I set off again around dusk, following the signs to the Hungarian border.

I still can't really understand how it was that I became a bandit. I was clearly drunk on the sheer thrill of risk-taking. All sense of caution fell away, and I was gripped by an urge to risk my life in order to get the measure of the destiny that was dogging me. I enjoyed shuffling its cards, but in no way was I seeking a way out: rather than submit to the sentence it had in store for me, I preferred to cock a snook at it by laying myself open to an alternative, equally unpredictable downfall. Sated with the danger into which I was plunging so heedlessly, I forgot about the interpreter and Dr Barnung; but I must admit that my criminal undertakings may also have been fed by a pinch of vanity – poor things, perhaps, but my own. I even went as far as to think that, had my bosses back there in Geneva come to hear of them, they would have been proud of me. After all, they were forever urging me to try out new ideas. Inventiveness, daring, personal initiative, that's what all bureaucracies are lacking; I'd been hearing that for years. I was proud of this new skill I'd acquired entirely on my own; with a stab of annoyance, I even began to regret that I could no longer enter the lists for promotion to the post of director-general. I committed every robbery hoping to read about it in the next day's papers, and at night I'd fall asleep imagining the headlines.

‘Odessa murderer strikes again', ‘Swiss criminal holds police at bay', ‘Felix Bellamy, the Beast of Bukovina'.

I bought all the newspapers that mentioned me and piled them up on the back seat; I still have some cuttings, and carry them about with me in my wallet. I drove along highways and byways, pillaging shops, attacking stationary articulated lorries and isolated houses, but my true passion was the petrol stations on the A576. There was something particularly thrilling about training a gun on a roomful of people while the traffic rolled quietly by behind my back; someone might turn on me at any moment, one of the men I was threatening might pull out a gun himself, the police might burst in. In fact, none of this ever happened; those grim faces were afraid of me, people were quaking, some of them crying. They were at my mercy: I could kill them one by one with a bullet in the head or torture them slowly, firing at them limb by limb. I could do anything – except exchange my fate with theirs. I could have selected one of them at random, stuck my pistol in his hand and taken his place among the rest. I could have freed myself of myself, of that unknown me who was pursuing me, whose poisonous breath I felt upon my neck.

I always used the same strategy for my attacks: I'd hide the car in some track in the surrounding countryside and approach my goal by foot. I'd wait until there were few enough people in the service station for me to be able to observe them at length and assess their reactions. At such moments I felt strangely powerful: I was afraid of no one and nothing, not even of my convulsions, though these, it was true, were becoming increasingly few and far between. They added yet another grim note to the fear felt by my victims as, pistol cocked, I would begin to jabber and howl, wide-eyed and quivering. At such times, too, I felt my body monstrously enlarged, as though, until that point, it had been nothing more than a cold statue, and I had come into possession of it then and there. I saw my own flesh magnified as though under a microscope, my hairs like posts implanted in my skin, my wrinkles like canyons in a petrified desert, my bones like deformed encrustations created from a jet of red-hot lava which had suddenly solidified. When in the grip of such hallucinations I would note the tug of each muscle, the impulse of every nerve, taking stock of their efficiency, amazed by their effortless infallibility, surprised to find myself so resilient, my movements as deft and firm as those of a healthy man. A strange tingling sensation would creep along my limbs; they felt refreshed, as though cleansed of some lingering poison. It was as though all that was left of me was my body; something which had prevented it from developing was falling away. This hollow armature of flesh and bone was growing exponentially, capable now of unheard-of feats. Perhaps, in fact, one single shove would have knocked me off my feet; if one of my victims had had the courage to come up to me and twist my wrist I would have dropped the gun and fallen to my knees in pain, lain spread-eagled in the sawdust, alive yet dead, like a lizard's chopped-off tail. Sometimes a deathly chill would creep over me, as though I were turning to ice, but then the sheer thrill of the engagement would heat my blood, sending it beating through my temples, surging through my veins; I would stamp my feet wildly and shriek out my threats, clutching the butt of my gun and feeling that I too was made of gunmetal. I'd fire the odd shot in the confusion, picking off the glasses in their racks, or aiming at the electronic games. I didn't waste my bullets, though; I'd found some cartridge clips in Radu's car, but I was nervous about running out of ammunition. After my attacks I'd run away off into the countryside, lock myself in the car, hide the money and pistol under the seat and call a number chosen at random from the list on Radu's mobile:

‘This is Felix Bellamy. I've just robbed the Astori Service Station on the A576. I'm the person who killed Radu, the one you wanted to chop up and sell by the kilo, the one who will eventually do for the lot of you, one by one!'

I'd burst out into peals of vicious laughter, turn off the phone, close my eyes and stretch out on the seat, waiting until the blare of sirens had died down on the main road. I'd set off again a few hours later, quite unfazed, driving coolly past the station I'd just ransacked. I often slept in the car; sometimes, when I felt insecure, I'd drive into a town, select a smart hotel and stay there for a day or two. I was sorry to have to throw Radu's mobile away when the battery ran down; it amused me to terrorise his friends with my phone calls. But by now I no longer needed to build up a reputation; at least some of the fur-hatted surgeon's henchmen would not have had a good night's sleep for quite some time.

For the brief period when I was travelling the roads of Romania like a buccaneer, my physical problem seemed to vanish. My convulsions became rarer, I no longer suffered from nausea or dizziness; even the raging sweating fits to which I had previously been subject, leaving me in a state of utter prostration, suddenly stopped. I had a hearty appetite, and fell into a deep and dreamless sleep the moment my head touched the pillow. I would wake up refreshed, clear-headed, my mind crystalline as the morning air. I'd get back into the car and set off on my looting sprees as though they were my daily task, a new profession I had found for myself, one which I practised scrupulously and well. It was as though I were in the grip of a sort of hypnosis, as though I were obeying an instinct. I knew that what I was doing was monstrous, but I had no sense of guilt; taking out my gun and pointing it at the defenceless clients of the petrol stations I found along my way had become a bodily need, an impulse I could not resist. I was acting like an animal; for the few minutes my assaults lasted, I truly felt that I had been transformed into some lesser being. I must have cut a terrifying figure, because people backed off even before I pulled out my gun. Perhaps my face took on the rapacious look of the interpreter; perhaps, like his, my words came out as eldritch howls; yet when I looked at myself in the rear-view mirror when I got back into the car, my face looked completely normal, and it was only slowly that I realised what I had done. My baffled mind was a brazier in which a great fire had at last been extinguished, still clouded by dense smoke; all that remained after such devastation was shrouded in fog.

I was going to have to get rid of Radu's car; it was beginning to arouse suspicion, even in the remote mountain service stations where I went to fill up with petrol to avoid the A576. One afternoon, driving towards Cluj, where I was intending to spend the night, I noticed the hangar of a brand new shoe factory just off the road, with several luxury cars with foreign number plates parked outside it. I turned off the engine and peered at the prefabricated building through the wire netting. Suddenly I heard a blind go down, then, one by one, all the lights went out. I picked up Radu's rucksack, got out of the car and slithered down the grass bank until I came to the point where the wire netting ended. I saw a group of people come out of the building and gather for a few minutes on the gravel, chatting and smoking before throwing down their butt ends and getting into their cars, driving off rapidly down the road which was now vanishing into the evening mist. Once clear of the gates, one of them – a grey Mercedes – had drawn up in the darkness to the side of the little road, well clear of the streetlights. A man got out, holding a mobile phone to his ear, walking and talking at the same time, staring at the tips of his shoes. I ran down the hill a little further and took up a position at the edge of the ditch, in order to have a better view. I couldn't see anything inside the car; the tinted windows reflected dark reddish clouds. The man carried on talking. Numb with cold as he probably was, he had one of his hands in his pocket. I could see his breath above the boot; I leapt across the ditch, threw open the car door and jumped in, hearing him shout as I turned the engine on. I heard gunfire, and a bang on the boot lid; while I was watching the man turn around and try vainly to run after me, I felt a pair of cold hands pressing on my throat, and pointed nails digging into my eyes. I braked sharply, turned round on the seat as best I could and directed a few vicious punches in the direction of my assailant before driving on at speed, my tyres smoldering on the asphalt. I hit something soft and yielding, whose scent would linger on my sleeve for quite some time. I heard a gasp, a coughing fit, and then a feeble moan from time to time. I left the A576, drove up into the mountains for a few kilometres and stopped at the edge of a village; I got out of the car and opened the back door, to find a young girl curled up on the seat, just visible in the yellow glow of the safety light. I made a cautious move in her direction, but she instantly began kicking and shrieking like a madwoman. Afraid of attracting attention, I got in and drove off again, in search of a suitable place both to rob a Romanian car and to rid myself of my unwelcome visitor. I drove slowly, down dark empty roads, through nameless villages, past isolated farms, by empty haylofts and old agricultural machinery sunk in the dripping mist of dismal fields.

‘I didn't mean to hurt you!' I tried saying in Romanian, peering at my prisoner in the rear-view mirror, but she was too terrified to answer; she was breathing with difficulty and sobbing quietly.

‘Don't be afraid. I won't come anywhere near you!' I insisted. ‘All I'm interested in is the car. As soon as we're back on the main road I'll let you out, I promise!'

That seemed to calm her down, though she continued sobbing; she sat stock-still, watching my every movement.

‘And where would you drop me? On the roadside?' she asked after a bit.

‘I'll drive you wherever you want to go,' I told her gallantly.

‘I want to go to Cluj, to my hotel,' she said testily, between sobs.

‘I can't go to Cluj with this car, at least not until I've changed the number plate. I'd have the police straight on my tail!' I objected politely but firmly.

‘So what are we going to do?' she asked plaintively.

‘Haven't you got a mobile?' I was beginning to lose patience.

‘The battery's flat. And my clients are waiting for me at Cluj, for a working dinner!' Now she too was becoming angry.