The Erasers

5

Wallas is alone again, walking through the streets.

This time he is going to see Doctor Juard; as Laurent has just repeated to him: that is the first thing to do. He has managed to obtain the cooperation of the municipal police in the surveillance of the little post office and the questioning of the young woman working there. But he could see that the commissioner’s mind was henceforth made up: there is no terrorist organization, Daniel Dupont has killed himself. This is the only explanation Laurent regards as reasonable; he admits that “minor details” are temporarily at variance with this notion, yet each new element that is brought to his attention immediately becomes an additional proof of suicide.

This is the case, for instance, with regard to the revolver which Wallas has found in the professor’s house. The caliber of the weapon corresponds to that of the bullet turned in by the doctor; and this bullet just happens to be missing from the clip. Finally, and most significant to the commissioner’s way of thinking, the revolver was jammed. This fact, determined in the police laboratories, would be a capital one: it explains why Dupont, merely wounded by his first bullet, did not fire a second shot. Instead of being ejected normally, the shell has remained jammed inside; this is why it has not been found on the floor in the study. As for the rather blurred fingerprints taken from the grip, their arrangement is not incompatible with the gesture the commissioner has imagined: the index finger on the trigger as though to fire straight ahead, but the elbow stuck out and the wrist twisted in such a way that the muzzle of the gun is pressed, at only a slight angle, between the two ribs. Despite this inconvenient position, the weapon must be held firmly so that it remains in place…

A deafening shock in the chest, immediately followed by an extremely sharp pain in the right arm; then nothing more-then nausea, which is certainly not death. Dupont stares at his revolver with astonishment.

His right arm moves without difficulty, his head is clear, the rest of his body would also respond if he called upon it to do so. He is nevertheless certain of having felt the detonation and the rending of his flesh in the region of his heart. He should be dead; now he finds himself sitting at his desk as if nothing had happened. The bullet must have swerved. He must finish the job as soon as possible.

He turns the muzzle toward himself again; he presses it against the material of his vest, in the place where the first hole must already be. Fearing he might weaken, he puts all his strength into contracting his finger But this time nothing happens, absolutely nothing. However hard he tightens his finger on the trigger, the weapon remains inert.

He lays it on the desk and puts his hand through several exercises to prove to himself that it is functioning normally. It is the revolver that is jammed.

Although hard of hearing, old Anna, who was clearing off the table in the dining room, has obviously heard the explosion What is she doing? Has she gone out to call for help? Or is she coming upstairs? She never makes any noise with her felt slippers. Something must be done before she reaches him. He must get out of this absurd situation.

The professor tries to get up; he succeeds easily. He can even walk. He goes to the mantelpiece to look at himself in the mirror; he moves a pile of books aside. Now he sees the hole, a little too high; the material of his vest, torn, is faintly stained with blood; almost nothing. He need only button his jacket and it won’t show any more. A glance at his face: no, he doesn’t look so bad. He turns back to his desk, tears up the letter he has written to his friend Juard before dinner, and throws it in the wastebasket…

Daniel Dupont is sitting in his study. He is cleaning his revolver.

He manipulates it with care.

After having checked the proper functioning of the mechanism, he puts the clip back in place. Then he puts his rag away in a drawer. He is a meticulous man, who likes every task to be executed properly.

He stands up and takes a few steps on the water-green carpet that muffles every sound. There is scarcely any room to walk in the little study. On every side books surround him: law, social legislation, political economy… Down below, to the left, at the end of the long shelves, stands the row of books he himself has added to the series. Not much. There were two or three ideas nevertheless. Who has understood them? Too bad for them; that’s no reason to kill oneself in despair! The professor smiles faintly, rather contemptuously, thinking again of the preposterous notions that had suddenly passed through his mind just now, while he was holding the revolver… People would have thought it was an accident.

He stops in front of his desk and glances one last time at this letter he has just written, to a Belgian colleague interested in his theories. It is a clear, dry letter; it gives all the explanations necessary. Perhaps, when he has eaten dinner, he will add a warmer word at the end.

Before going downstairs he must put the revolver back in the light table drawer. He wraps it up carefully in the piece of rag he has just put away absent-mindedly. Then he turns out the large lamp on his desk. It is seven o’clock…

When he came back upstairs to finish his letter, he found he murderer waiting for him. It would have been better if he had kept the revolver in his pocket… But who said that he had examined it just that day? He would have removed the old hell that jammed the mechanism. The laboratory only indicted that the weapon was “well cared for” and that the missing bullet had been “recently” fired, that is, after the last cleaning-which could, after all, date from several weeks ago, even several months. Laurent translated this as follows: Dupont leaned it yesterday, in order to use it that very evening.

Wallas is now thinking that he should have been able to convince the commissioner. The latter’s arguments often seemed worthless, and it was certainly possible to prove it to him. Instead of which, Wallas has let himself get involved in utile arguments over secondary points-or even discussions having no relation to the crime whatever-and when he wanted D make the broad outlines of the case clear, he did so with phrases so clumsy that this whole story of the secret society and the timed murders assumed an unreal, gratuitous, “badly put together” quality in his mouth.

As he talked, he grew more and more aware of the unbelievable character of his account. Moreover, maybe this was not matter of the words he was using: others chosen with more care might have suffered the same fate; it was enough for him t pronounce them for them to cease to inspire confidence. Walls consequently reached the point of no longer trying to reason against the ready-made formulas that naturally occurred t him; they were the ones that were easiest.

To top it off, opposite him was the commissioner’s cynical face, whose all too obvious incredulity completely annihilate the plausibility of Wallas’ constructions.

Laurent has begun asking himself precise questions. Who are the victims? What, exactly, was their role in the state Hasn’t their sudden and collective disappearance already caused an appreciable void? How does it happen that no one speaks of it in society, in the newspapers, in the street?

In reality, this is easily explained. It is a matter of a rather numerous group of men scattered throughout the country. Fc the most part, they occupy no official positions; they are not supposed to belong to the government; their influence is nevertheless direct and considerable. Economists, financiers, head of industrial corporations, men in charge of union council! jurists, engineers, technicians of all kinds, they prefer remaining in the background and leading quite obscure lives; their names are meaningless to the public, their faces completely unknown. Yet the conspirators make no mistake about them they know how to reach, through them, the very core of the nation’s politico-economic system. Up to now, everything possible has been done in high places to conceal the gravity of the situation; no publicity has been given to the nine murders already committed, several have even been treated as accidents the newspapers are keeping quiet; public life continues i usual, to all appearances. Since leaks are likely in a service i enormous and as ramified as that of the police, Roy-Dauzet has decided that the latter should not be directly assigned to the terrorists. The minister has more confidence in the various information services he controls and whose personnel, at least, is personally committed to him.

Wallas has answered the chief commissioner’s questions as well as he could, without betraying any essential secrets. But he realizes the weaknesses of his position. These background characters who clandestinely run the country, these crimes no ne mentions, these secret services marginal to the actual police, and lastly, these terrorists, more mysterious than all the rest-here is enough here to disturb a self-confident official who is hearing about them for the first time… And probably the tory could be invented entirely and would still leave every-ne the possibility of believing it-or not-and these successive revelations, in one direction or another, would only modify its nature in exactly the same way.

Laurent, pink and plump, sitting comfortably in his official armchair among his salaried informers and his files, contracted the special agent so categorically that the latter has suddenly felt his very existence threatened: himself a member of one of these vague organizations, Wallas himself could just as well be, like the conspiracy, a pure invention of an overly imaginative minister; it is to this status, in any case, that his iterlocutor seems to relegate him. For the commissioner now declared his opinion without bothering about appearances or discretion: they were dealing, once again, with one of Roy-Dauzet’s whims; the fact that people like Fabius had any confidence in it was not enough to make it hold water. Moreover, their disciples went still further in their extravagance, like that Marchat-who, unfortunately, might even go so far as to die at seven-thirty tonight by suggestion…

The businessman’s intervention has obviously been of no help at all.

Wallas has left, taking with him the dead man’s revolver. Laurent did not want it: he had nothing to do with it; since Wallas was in charge of the investigation, he should hold on t the “items of evidence.” At the commissioner’s request, tit laboratory had returned the weapon in the state in which it ha been found, that is, with the empty shell that kept it from functioning.

Wallas walks on. The arrangement of the streets constantly surprises him in this city. He has followed the same route 2 this morning ever since he left the prefecture, and yet he ha the impression of walking much longer than he had to the fir‹ time, to cover the distance from the police station to Doctor Juard’s clinic. But since all the streets in the neighborhood look alike, he could not swear that he has always taken precisely the same ones. He is afraid of having veered too far to the left an hence passed the street he was looking for.

He decides to go into a shop to ask the way to the Rue de Corinthe. It is a small bookstore that also sells stationery, pencils, and paints for children. The saleswoman stands up to wait on him:

“Monsieur?”

“I’d like a very soft gum eraser, for drawing.”

“Yes of course, Monsieur.”

The ruins of Thebes.

On a hill above the city, a Sunday painter has set up his ease in the shade of cypress trees, between the scattered shafts c columns. He paints carefully, his eyes shifting back to his subject every few seconds; with a fine brush he points up man details that are scarcely noticeable to the naked eye, but which assume a surprising intensity once they are reproduced in the picture. He must have very sharp eyes. One could count the stones that form the edge of the quay, the bricks of the gabled end, and even the slates in the roof. At the corner of the fence the leaves of the spindle trees gleam in the sun, which emphasizes their outlines. Behind, a bush rises above the hedge, a bare bush whose every twig is lined with a bright streak where the light hits it, and a dark one on the shadow side. The snapshot has been taken in winter, on an exceptionally clear day. What reason could the young woman have for photographing this house?

“It’s a pretty house, isn’t it?”

“Well yes, if you like it.”

She cannot have been the tenant who preceded Dupont; the latter took up residence there some twenty-five years ago, and inherited it from an uncle. Has she been the servant there? Wallas sees again the gay, slightly provocative face of the saleswoman; thirty to thirty-five years old at the most, prepossessing maturity with full, rounded form; warm complexion, shining eyes, dark hair, an uncommon physical type in this country-actually reminiscent of the women of southern Europe or the Balkans.

“Well yes, if you like it.”

With a throaty little laugh, as if he had just indulged in some flattering compliment. His wife? That would be strange. Didn’t Laurent say she was running a shop now? Around fifteen years younger than her husband…dark, with black eyes… that’s who it is!

Wallas leaves the bookstore. A few yards farther on, he reaches a crossroad. Opposite him stands the red placard: “For drawing, for school, for the office…”

It is here that he got off the streetcar, before lunch. Again he follows the arrow toward the Victor-Hugo stationery shop.