Authors: Victor Serge
Monsieur Gobfin concealed his nervousness, which turned him yellower. By twenty past one, the need to talk had grown so pressing that he went up to the dining room. Madame Noémi Battisti had just left the table and returned to room 17. Bruno Battisti was reading foreign newspapers and nibbling on raisins and nuts. At the other end of the room, the Negro sitting alone at a table had started his lunch. There were some other, insignificant people, like the man and woman who had business interests in Dijon, and their pale daughter, sapped by solitary vice. With no apparent hesitation, for his hesitation was inner, Monsieur Gobfin toured the tables making a slight bow beside each one, like a head-waiter.
“Monsieur Battisti, isn’t it?” he said. “We trust you find the service to your satisfaction. Today is our day for Burgundian cuisine …”
D had seen him coming. He folded the
Berliner Tageblatt
.
“Er … yes, an excellent meal, thank you very much … Couldn’t be better.”
Both felt that the emptiness of these words had done nothing to clear the air. Something made each of them hang on to the other. In D’s case, the desire to know “what’s eating this stool pigeon with the face of a worried bedbug” made him adopt a hypocritically debonair expression that was almost engaging. More complex emotions raged within Monsieur Gobfin as he wrestled with indecision, on the brink of small but unknowable risks.
“Why, you haven’t touched your coffee, Monsieur Battistini …” (Was it some kind of a ploy, to mispronounce a name he knew perfectly well?) Have you sampled our vintage marc, Monsieur?”
“Not yet.”
Monsieur Gobfin summoned the waitress. “Elodie, some marc for the gentleman … No, not a shot, bring the decanter …” He hovered between the white tables, a yellow smile suspended between his sunken cheeks. A vague sense of embarrassment gathered with each passing second. “Something’s up,” thought D. “The bedbug’s being too friendly by half …” It was a relief when the amber-filled decanter arrived with its retinue of miniature glasses.
“Let’s try some, then,” said D with composure. “But we must touch glasses together. Please sit down, Monsieur.”
Monsieur Gobfin was only too pleased to accept. The hovering stopped. “If I may be so bold …” The opaque marbles that passed for his pupils probed the room; he sat down so as not to present his back to anyone. “No good lunch is complete without some old marc,” he said meditatively. “That’s what I always say. You be the judge.” At three paces he was no more than unpleasant-looking; at a foot and a half, he looked scrawny and tough, a withered skin stretched over a narrow skull. His personality emerged from a sickly, malevolent weakness. D felt himself observed from all angles and broken down by unknown methods. He glanced ostentatiously at his watch. “Oh, but if you’re in a hurry, Monsieur Battisti …” “No, not at all.” (If I let him go, I’ll never figure it out.)
“The fact is, I’m quite perplexed,” Monsieur Gobfin began.
D appeared to be astonished.
“And why might that be? It’s none of my affair, of course, but since you bring it up …”
“The foreign press is better informed than the Paris papers, I suppose?” asked Monsieur Gobfin, either playing for time or committing a major blunder.
Very significant, that remark. Whenever he scented danger, D became perfectly, sinisterly calm.
“Surely that’s not what’s perplexing you?”
Mr. Gobfin’s wandering gaze locked for a split second onto the eyes of his companion.
“No indeed, Monsieur Battisti, you are an honest man and I don’t need to know you to be convinced of it. A man of experience too.”
All this is recklessly direct. He’s sounding me out. I’ve been nailed. How did They trace me so quickly … ? D advanced a clenched, square fist across the table. A clean and daunting fist.
“I certainly hope we’re among honest folk here,” he said. “As for experience, I don’t mind saying I’ve had my share. Some rough experiences … the colonies, and I don’t mind skipping the niceties sometimes. And too bad for people who are a little too smart for their own good.”
Gobfin responded to the veiled threat with rapture.
“Ah, then I made no mistake, Monsieur, in turning to you! I am dreadfully perplexed, and in need of advice.”
“Spit it out,” D said succinctly — perplexed himself.
“It concerns a murder.”
“You know what, I’m not a detective and I don’t care a fig about murders. I’ve seen enough of them. Just forget it. Will that do for advice?”
“No.”
Gobfin drew a small photograph from his cuff — or from a secret pocket in his sleeve, or from his tie, or from his long straight nose with a twist at the end — and flicked it with his finger in the direction of Monsieur Battisti’s fist. It was the picture of a black man, wreathed in a professional smile — the smile of jazz musicians entranced by their own cacophony.
“The murderer.”
This could be a consummately skillful move. D was nonplussed. What could be neater, at the right moment, than to whip out the ace of spades where the ace of clubs was expected?
“So what,” he said, his breathing labored. “There are murderers all over Paris. What’s it to you?”
(Are They about to have me arrested for murder? To request extradition, after framing me? There’s no treaty … but there might be an international police convention I don’t know about … hadn’t thought of that … This Negro fellow might have accomplices, he’s been bribed to accuse me …)
Monsieur Gobfin, having produced his effect — or simply unstoppered by relief — now became garrulous, pouring himself out in breathy tones of irresistible intimacy. “The place de Clichy murder … Come come, Monsieur, you must have read the newspapers, it was exactly a week ago …”
(Exactly a week? I have no alibi, I’ll never be able to say who I was with … We were working on the Crime of the Capital of the World …)
“A young sculptor, queer, you know, very good family, millionaire parents, does that ring a bell?”
“No.”
“Found in his studio, hands tied, throat cut … naked … Now do you see?” “Vaguely …” D searched his memory, at the same time wondering whether it wasn’t a fiction. Adolescence, nakedness, tied hands, he recalled the gist of it or imagined he did. “But between you and me, like I said, I don’t give a good goddamn!”
The “get off my back with your sordid gossip,” clearly implied in that last retort, could scarcely escape the cloying attention of his host. Either because he had made up his mind to persist or because he was just bursting with it, Monsieur Gobfin became even more confidential.
“Look straight ahead. I believe we have the killer.”
The Negro wiped his mouth and inserted a toothpick. His placid stare brushed against the more troubled gaze of Monsieur Battisti. “A trap,” thought D. “They’re both in it together, the black and this creep … To mix me up in some botched arrest — and by mistake — fine jam I’m in.” There was an obvious resemblance between this sharply etched, vigorous, shiny black head and the one in the photo. The living head, with its purplish lips and sharply etched eyes, pure white and pure black, appeared to D is if about to be chopped off. He saw the coppery tint, paler at the cheek-bones — a sign of previous interbreeding, like the delicate ridge of the nose. “The man in the picture is much blacker, I’d say …”
“A trick of the light. The light is behind us. Look at his hand.”
Darker than the face, the big hand curled loosely on the white cloth suggested animal strength refined by the exercise of some craft — a hand deft with a mandolin, a trapeze bar, a sharpened razor … Why not?
“Hmm. An honest hand, why not?” Monsieur Battisti said. “You’re letting your imagination run away with you.” Monsieur Gobfin eyed the clenched fist on their own table and felt an unpleasant intimation of anxiety.
“In short, Monsieur Battisti, what do you think?”
“I’m loath to think anything. Except you should err on the side of caution. A mistake could land you in all kinds of trouble …”
To stand up with no more ado, to say to this groveling sneak, “I’ve had enough. Now get my bill, you’ve thoroughly put me off your grisly fleabag …” — would that be reasonable? D weighed up the unspoken tenors of the conversation. “It needs careful consideration. Do you have any other pictures of the same sort?”
“Not many. The inspector doesn’t like to let them go.”
Mr. Gobfin opened a scuffed leather wallet. First he pulled out the photo of a frail-looking woman, probably blond, pretty, her eyes round with fright. A series of white numbers barred her chest. “Chronic swindler, I know her … She’s awfully nice to me since she learned that I carry this around, if you catch my meaning.”
“Say no more.”
“Her sort, you just got to know how to handle them,” snickered Gobfin, olive-yellow. “Then they’re nice as can be … Here, look, one that came in this morning.”
D recognized himself straightaway. The picture had been snapped in the street without his knowledge. They were taking no chances! Or had I already been spotted? By whom? It was from six months ago, on his return from Madrid, with sixty frames from the Alcántara file rolled into the handle of a shaving brush … “Who is it?” he asked casually. Taken unseen on the big boulevards, the picture showed a man with tortoiseshell glasses and a broad smile, wearing a felt hat that obscured the upper part of his face, the collar of his coat turned up; he was standing beside a car. Beyond was a pharmacy, and two ladies seen from behind … A male shoulder faced the hatted man. Whose? On the back of the picture, in copperplate hand: X, alias Isoray; Marcien, alias Zondero-Ribas; Juan, alias Steklansky; Bronislaw … (1. The photo unquestionably comes from Them, from our people. 2. They haven’t got a more recent one, good. Or They don’t choose to release a clearer one … Good. 3. They haven’t listed my alias as Malinesco, Clément, in order to comb through the flat in peace … Therefore I’m being denounced as an agent of the others … Which others? 4. A useless photo. Only the lower half of the face is at all recognizable.)
“An embezzler?” ventured Monsieur Battisti.
“A suspicious foreigner, suspected spy … You think one of those birds would ever come to a decent unassuming place like this? They stay at palatial hotels.”
Monsieur Gobfin looked Monsieur Battisti straight in the eye for the first time.
“At any rate,” said Battisti lightly, “I think you’re after the wrong Negro.”
“And I,” Gobfin responded, “am almost certain I am not — especially since our little chat. If you’ll excuse me …” The marionette withdrew, leaving after him the image of his politest smile — the smile of a stool pigeon in a dull black suit.
* * *
D did not wish to show any sign of alarm: the Battistis remained at the hotel. Past the reception desk, the hallway expanded into a very modest lounge, furnished with a rattan couch and armchairs. A round table was littered with tourist magazines. This inhospitable setting was a good place to observe the outlines of people passing in the street, note the comings and goings on the stairs and elevator, and keep an eye on Monsieur Gobfin. The lounge was rarely vacant. Sometimes there was an ordinary-looking fat gentleman smoking and lolling drowsily over his paper. Sometimes a younger man, pencil in hand, attempting the crossword. Neither was interested in this corner of the world — the bottom of a jar where they were waiting to shrivel dry for all eternity. D settled into an armchair opposite the stout reader. The man blew his nose. Monsieur Gobfin, at his post, unhooked the telephone receiver. “Allo, Félix? Gobfin here. Send us a taxi on the dot of five twenty-five.” An ordinary request to all appearances but which, D noted, contained the figure 525. A female voice rang out shrilly, accompanied by muted trumpets of deliverance: “And you didn’t forget to order me a cab for five thirty?” “Not to worry, Madam, it’ll be here.” Still, five thirty was not 525 and this woman’s car might have been ordered beforehand … The trumpets faded away. The fat man folded his paper and moved off, with a heavy stare at D. He didn’t leave his key at the desk on the way out, passing Monsieur Gobfin without so much as a nod. Rude of him. Should I follow? As D tried to make up his mind, the appearance of Nadine rescued him from a budding obsession, but now Gobfin had picked up the phone again … “Well then,” Nadine said, “are you coming?” D blinked a signal; idly he toyed with his lighter before touching it to the cigarette. Gobfin was calling a Monsieur Stevenson on the line. A novelist’s name that had passed into the public domain,
Treasure Island
, and this Stevenson in turn will be communicating with a Mr. Milton on the subject of
Paradise Lost
, you can bet your life. “Yes, sir, I received a wire for you at three forty … Yes, sir …” One hour and forty minutes’ delay in reporting the arrival of a telegram? Fishy, that. And what’s three forty, 340, in code? I’m going crazy, D thought. He went outside. So many people, hard to tell anyone apart. The stout reader was returning to the hotel with a Spanish-looking woman on his arm. “They’re going to bed, that’s all, that’s why he kept his key … Unless he went to fetch her in order to finger me …” The couple, bent forward, dived through the doorway as though headlong into a hole.
It’s not in their interest to have me arrested. After all, I could claim the protection of the French authorities. They’re only trying to locate me, which is worse. And have they? The question mark revolved around Monsieur Gobfin. The pros and cons oscillated evenly, like a pendulum. “Nadine, I need to check the back issues of
Le Matin
.” The hubbub of the city always comforted D, even if it’s a mistake to feel any safer, any more alone, any more lost on a pavement teeming with lives than behind walls protected by secrecy. It must be that mingling with other men and women restores our means of contact, of direct hand-to-hand combat. A host of random factors can work against the lone figure in the melee. Some of the odds are with him; but when he is pitted against huge, well-equipped organizations, the grim probabilities outweigh the lucky chances. All the same, big-city streets — sown with traps though they might be — appeared to give D the initiative. The city dweller, even when invisibly surrounded, relies upon himself at every turn. He reacts to encounters with the life-preserving ingenuity of a beast in its native forest, that sees a bolt-hole in every bush — a cruel illusion, if the beaters have done their job. But the hunters are also sure to make mistakes, and if their quarry doesn’t panic, there’s always a chance of salvation. What sets man apart from beasts is that humans have the option not to panic.