The Erasers

2

The Rue des Arpenteurs is a long straight street, bordered on each side by houses that are already old, whose inadequately tended two- or three-storied facades suggest the modest circumstances of the tenants they shelter: laborers, office workers, or merely fishermen. The shops are not very prosperous looking and even the cafes are few and far between-not that these people are particularly sober, but they choose to do their drinking elsewhere.

The Cafe des Allies (Wines amp; Liquors. Furnished Rooms) is located at the end of the street, number 10, only a few houses from the Boulevard Circulaire and the city proper, so that the proletarian character of the buildings in its vicinity is somewhat tempered by bourgeois features. At the corner of the parkway stands a big stone apartment building, well kept up, and opposite, at number 2, a small two-story private house with a narrow strip of garden around it. The structure does not have much style but gives an impression of comfort, even of a certain luxury; a fence and behind it a spindle-tree hedge clipped to a man’s height complete its isolation.

The Rue des Arpenteurs extends eastward, interminable and less and less prepossessing, to quite out-of-the-way neighborhoods that are obviously those of the poor: a checkerboard of muddy paths between the shacks, rusty corrugated iron, old planks, and tarpaper.

To the west, on the other side of the parkway and its canal, stretches the city proper, the streets somewhat cramped between the high brick houses, the public buildings without unnecessary ornament, the churches stiff, the shopwindows somber. The whole effect is solid, occasionally substantial, but austere; the cafes close early, the windows are narrow, the people are serious.

Yet this mournful town is not monotonous: a complicated network of canals and ponds brings in from the sea, which is only six kilometers north, the smell of kelp, the gulls, and even a few boats of low tonnage, coasters, barges, small tugs, for which a whole series of drawbridges and locks opens. This water, this movement keep people’s minds open. The freighter whistles reach them from the harbor, over the tow docks and depots, and at high tide bring the space, the temptation, the consolation of possibility.

Since their heads are on their shoulders, temptation is enough: possibility remains simply possible, the whistles have long blown without hope.

The crews are recruited elsewhere; men around here prefer to go into business, on land, the most daring among them scarcely venturing farther than thirty miles from the coast to the herring fisheries. The rest are content to listen to the ships and estimate their tonnage. They do not even go to see them, it’s too far. The Sunday walk stops at the Boulevard Circulaire: one comes out into the parkway along the Avenue Christian-Charles, then follows it along the canal to the New Dairy or to the Gutenberg Bridge, rarely below.

Farther south, on Sundays, one meets, so to speak, only neighborhood people. On weekdays, the calm here is disturbed only by the army of bicycles on their way to work.

At seven in the morning, the workers have already gone past; the parkway is virtually deserted.

At the edge of the canal, near the drawbridge at the end of the Rue des Arpenteurs, there are two men. The bridge has just opened to let a trawler through; standing near the winch, a sailor is about to close it again.

The other man is probably waiting for him to finish, but he cannot be in much of a hurry: the footbridge joining the two banks a hundred yards to the right would already have allowed him to continue on his way. He is a short man dressed in a long, rather old greenish coat and a shapeless felt hat. His back is to the sailor, he is not watching the boat; he is leaning against the iron railing at the end of the bridge. He is staring straight down at the canal’s oily water.

This man’s name is Garinati. He is the one who has just been seen going into the Cafe des Allies to ask for that Wallas who was no longer there. He is also the clumsy murderer of the day before, who only slightly wounded Daniel Dupont. His victim’s residence is that little house with the fence around it at the corner of the street, just behind his back.

The iron fence, the spindle-tree hedge, the gravel path around the house…He has no need to turn around to see them. The middle window of the second floor is the study window. He knows all that by heart: he studied it enough last week. For nothing, moreover.

Bona was well-informed, as usual, and all Garinati had to do was follow his orders carefully. Would have had, rather, for everything has just been ruined because of Garinati’s blunder: probably no more than scratched, Dupont will soon be able to return behind his spindle trees and dive back into his files and index cards among the green calf bindings.

The light switch near the door, a porcelain button with a metal plate. Bona had said to turn off the light; he did not do this, and everything was ruined. The tiniest flaw…Is it so certain? The hallway had remained lighted, of course; but if the bedroom had been in darkness, Dupont might not have waited to open the door wide to turn on the light. Maybe? Find out! Or would he have really done it? And the tiniest flaw was enough. Maybe.

Garinati had never gone into this house before, but Bona’s information was so exact that he could just as well have moved around inside it with his eyes closed. At five to seven he has reached the house, calmly walking down the Rue des Arpenteurs. No one around. He has pushed open the garden gate.

Bona had said: “The buzzer won’t work.” Which was true. The bell has remained noiseless. Yet that very morning, when he had passed in front of the house (“There’s no use your prowling around there all the time”), he had surreptitiously pushed open the gate, just to see, and he had distinctly heard the bell. No doubt the wire had been cut during the afternoon.

It was already a mistake to have tried the gate in the morning; coming in this evening, he was afraid for a second. But the silence has reassured him. Had he ever really had any doubts?

He has carefully closed the gate, but without letting the latch catch, and walked around the house on the right side, keeping on the lawn to avoid making the gravel crunch. In the darkness, he could just make out the path, paler between the two flowerbeds and the well-clipped top of the spindle trees.

The study window, the one in the middle of the second story on the canal side, is brightly lighted. Dupont is still at his desk. It’s all just the way Bona said it would be.

Leaning against the wall of the shed, at the back of the garden, Garinati waits, his eyes fixed on the window. After a few minutes the bright light is replaced by a fainter glow: Dupont has just turned out the big desk lamp, leaving only one of the bulbs on in the ceiling fixture. It is seven o’clock: he is coming downstairs to eat.

The landing, the staircase, the hall.

The dining room is to the left, on the ground floor. Its shutters are closed. At the back of the house, the kitchen shutters are closed too, but a faint light filters through their slats.

Garinati approaches the little glass door, being careful not to expose himself to the light coming from the hallway. At the same moment the dining room door is closed again. Dupont already? He has come down quickly. Or else the old housekeeper? No, she’s coming out of the kitchen now. So it was Dupont.

The old woman moves off toward the other end of the hall; but her hands are empty; he will have to wait longer. She comes back almost at once, leaving the dining room door open. She goes back into her kitchen and soon reappears carrying an enormous tureen in both hands, comes back into the dining room and this time closes the door behind her. Now is the moment.

Bona said: “You have almost five minutes to get upstairs. The old woman waits until he has finished his soup.” Probably she is taking orders for the next day; since she is rather deaf it probably takes some time.

Noiselessly, Garinati slips inside. “The hinges will creak if you push the door too far.” Violent desire, suddenly, to try all the same; to push it open a little farther, only a little; just to see how far he can go. A few degrees. Just one degree, one single degree; a little margin for error…But the arm stops, sensible. On the way out, instead.

They are not very careful in this house: anyone could come in.

Garinati has closed the door without a sound. He walks carefully on the tiles where his crepe soles make an almost imperceptible hissing noise. On the steps and upstairs there are thick carpets everywhere, that will be even easier. The hall is lighted; the landing too, upstairs. No more difficulty. Walk up, wait until Dupont comes back, and kill him.

On the kitchen table there are three thin slices of ham spread out on a white plate. A light dinner: fine. Provided he doesn’t empty the whole tureen. You shouldn’t overeat if you want to sleep without dreaming.

Things take their immutable course. With calculated movements.

The perfectly adjusted machinery cannot hold the slightest surprise in store. It is merely a matter of following the text, reciting phrase after phrase, and the words will be fulfilled and Lazarus will rise from his tomb, wrapped in his shroud

He who advances like this, in secrecy, to carry out the order, knows neither fear nor doubt. He no longer feels the weight of his own body. His footsteps are as silent as a priest’s; they glide over the rugs and tiles, as regular, as impersonal, as definitive.

A straight line is the shortest distance between two points.

…footsteps so light they leave no trace on the surface of the sea. The stairs in this house have twenty-one steps, the shortest distance between two points…the surface of the sea…

Suddenly the limpid water grows cloudy. In this setting determined by law, without an inch of land to the right or left, without a second’s hesitation, without resting, without looking back, the actor suddenly stops, in the middle of a phrase… He knows it by heart, this role he plays every evening; but today he refuses to go any farther. Around him the other characters freeze, arm raised or leg half bent. The measure begun by the musicians goes on and on He would have to do something now, speak any words at all, words that would not belong to the libretto…But, as every evening, the phrase begun concludes in the prescribed form, the arm falls back, the leg completes its stride. In the pit, the orchestra is still playing with the same vigor.

The stairs consist of twenty-one wooden steps, then, at the very bottom, a white stone step, noticeably wider than the rest and whose rounded outer edge bears a brass column with complicated decorations and, as a finial, a jesters head wearing a cap with three bells. Higher up, the heavy, varnished banister is supported by turned wooden rails flaring slightly toward the base. A strip of gray carpet, with two garnet stripes at the edges, covers the stairs and extends, across the hall, to the front door.

The color of this carpet has been omitted in Bona’s description, as well as the detail of the brass finial.

Another man, in this same place, weighing each step, would come…

Above the sixteenth step, a small painting is hanging on the wall, at eye level. It is a romantic landscape representing a stormy night: a flash of lightning illuminates the ruins of a tower; at its foot two men are lying, asleep despite the thunder or else struck by lightning? Perhaps fallen from the top of the tower. The frame is made of carved and gilded wood; both painting and frame seem to be of rather ancient date. Bona has not mentioned this painting.

The landing. Door to the right. The study. It is just as Bona has described it, even more cramped maybe and more crowded: books, books everywhere, those lining the walls almost all bound in green leather, others, paper-backed, piled carefully on the mantel, on a stand, and even on the floor; still others lying casually on the end of the desk and on two leather armchairs. The desk, of dark oak, long and monumental, virtually fills the rest of the room. It is completely covered with files and papers; the big desk lamp, set in the middle, is out. A single bulb is turned on in the ceiling fixture.

Instead of walking straight across the small free area of green carpet, between the door and the desk (the floor creaks there), Garinati passes behind the armchair, squeezes between the stand and a pile of books and reaches the desk from the other side.

“Standing behind the desk and holding the back of the desk chair in front of you with both hands, you will take note of the position of all the objects and of the door. You have time: Dupont doesn’t come back up before seven-thirty. When you are perfectly sure of everything, you’ll go and turn out the ceiling light. The switch is against the door jamb; you have to push it toward the wall, if you push it in the other direction two more bulbs go on. Then you’ll come back, still by the same way, and stand behind your chair in exactly the same position as before; you’ll wait, the loaded revolver in your right hand, your eyes fixed on the doorway. When Dupont opens it, he will be silhouetted clearly in the opening against the lighted hallway; invisible in the darkness, you’ll take aim easily, resting your left hand on the back of the chair. You’ll fire three times at his heart, and you’ll leave, without excessive haste; the old woman will have heard nothing. If you meet her in the hall, don’t let her get a good look at your face; push her aside, but not roughly. There will be no one else in the house.”

The only distance between two points.

A kind of cube, but slightly misshapen, a shiny block of gray lava, with its faces polished as though by wear, the edges softened, compact, apparently hard, heavy as gold, looking about as big around as a fist; a paperweight? It is the only trinket in the room.

The titles of the books: Labor and Organization, The Phenomenology of the Crisis {1929), Contribution to the Study of Economic Cycles, and the rest in keeping. Not interesting.

Light switch against the door jamb, porcelain and chromium-plated metal, three positions.

He had been writing, four words at the top of a sheet of blank paper: “which can not prevent…” It was just then that he went downstairs to eat; he must not have found the word that came next.

Footsteps on the landing. The light! Too late to reach it now. The door opening and Dupont’s stupid stare…

Garinati has fired, only one shot, trusting to instinct, at a fragment of an escaping body.

The tiniest flaw…Maybe. The sailor has just finished cranking the winch; the drawbridge is back in place.

Leaning over the handrail, Garinati has not moved. He watches the oily water ripple at his feet in a recess of the quay; a few pieces of flotsam have accumulated here: a piece of tar-stained wood, two old corks, a piece of orange peel, and smaller fragments, half decomposed, difficult to identify.