The Erasers

4

“In my opinion, this letter proves nothing at all.” Laurent flattens the sheet out on his desk with his open hand. “Then nothing ever proves anything.”

“But,” the commissioner remarks, “that’s what I just finished telling you.”

As though to console Wallas, he adds:

“Let’s put it this way: with this letter, you can prove anything you want-you can always prove whatever you want-for instance, that you are the murderer: the post office employee recognized you, and your name has a certain resemblance to this discreet ‘WS’ that indicates it. You don’t happen to be named Andre, do you?”

Wallas finds himself faced again with the commissioner’s jokes. He nevertheless answers, out of civility:

“Anyone can have letters sent to him under any name. All you need to do is buy a postal number; no one asks for the purchaser’s real identity. The latter could just as well get himself called ‘Daniel Dupont’ or ‘Chief Commissioner Laurent.’ It’s only unfortunate that we haven’t discovered the place where he received his mail sooner; we would have picked it up this morning too. I repeat that you have to send a man to the Rue Jonas right away, to wait for his possible return; however, since he himself told them he wouldn’t be back, this precaution will probably be of no use. All we can do is send for that girl and question her. Maybe she’ll give us some clue.”

“Don’t get excited,” Laurent begins, “keep calm. Actually, I don’t see any reason why this Monsieur WS should be the murderer. What do you really know, when you come down to facts? With the help of a fanciful woman and a drunk man, you’ve been induced to accept mail, some mail that didn’t belong to you from a poste restante window. (Please note, by the way, that this is absolutely irregular: in this country, the police have no right to force the postal authorities to hand over private correspondence; you must have a court order for that.) All right. Who was this letter addressed to? To a man who looks like you. On the other hand, you also happen to resemble (though the testimony is more suspect) someone who is supposed to have walked past the little house and “stuck his arm between the bars of the fence” at around five o’clock. You have decided, consequently, that this person then went into this same post office. All right. That would certainly be a coincidence-which the letter in question should explain. But just what does this letter say? That the sender (who signs himself J.B.) will expect this ‘Andre WS’ sooner than they had previously arranged (“after quarter to twelve”)-unfortunately the location of their rendezvous is not specified; that, because of the defection of a third person designated by the letter G, this same WS will need the whole afternoon to do some job, concerning which we are given no clues except that part of it was already completed yesterday (besides, you have to admit that one wonders what could still be done as regards Dupont’s murder). Aside from that, I can find only a little phrase whose meaning neither you nor I can figure out, but which we can probably dismiss as secondary-you agree with me on that. Finally, to finish up, we find that one word is illegible in one of the sentences you consider indicative-a word of seven or eight letters that looks like ‘ellipse’ or ‘eclipse’ or that could be ‘align’ or ‘idem’ or a lot of other things.”

Laurent then declares that the possession of a postal box does not indicate necessarily criminal intentions any more than the use of a pseudonym. The city’s six post offices have a total of several thousand addressees of this nature. Some of the latter-less than a quarter, it appears-carry on a purely sentimental or para-sentimental correspondence. One must also include about the same number of more or less fictional commercial-philanthropic enterprises such as marriage agencies, employment offices, Hindu fakirs, astrologists, spiritual mentors,…etc. The rest, say more than half, consists of businessmen of whom only a tiny proportion are actually crooks.

The pneumatic message has been sent from post office number 3, the one serving the inner harbor and the northeast suburbs. It is, as always, a matter of a sale of wood, or of some operation relating to it: adjudication, transportation, cargo or some such thing. Since the market suffers extremely variable daily fluctuations, it is essential for the middle men to know how to take advantage of it quickly; a delay of twenty-four hours in a transaction can sometimes ruin a man.

J.B. is a commission-merchant (perhaps unlicensed-it isn’t necessarily so). G and Andre WS are two of his agents. They cooperated yesterday on a deal which is to be closed tonight. Without G’s cooperation, the second agent must be on hand sooner than usual in order not to be left behind.