“But...” Verdurier pointed at the clock, which was far short of the noon hour.
“Would you rather I talked here? It’s about Angélique...”
The clerk hastily seized his cap and followed us outside.
“What time was it when you left her yesterday afternoon?”
“But... What do you mean? I didn’t see her...”
“You loved her, didn’t you?”
“Yes...”
“She loved you?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t want her to belong to another?”
“It isn’t true...!”
“What? What isn’t true?”
“I didn’t kill her!”
“But you knew something about it?”
“No... Yes... They found her, didn’t they?”
“Yes, they found her. And in a few moments the police will be here...”
“Who are you?”
“It doesn’t matter. What do you know? Why did you insist, before I gave any hint of my business, that you didn’t kill her?”
“Because I knew Angélique would never accept that marriage. She kept telling me she’d sooner die...”
“And you?”
We were crossing the suspension bridge. Far away we could see the red roofs of Tracy.
“Me? I was going crazy...”
“Did you work in your office yesterday afternoon? Don’t bother to lie; I can ask your boss.”
“No. I asked for time off...”
“And you saw Angélique.”
“Yes... Near Loges... We went for a walk together...”
“When you left her, she was alive?”
“Yes!”
“And you didn’t see anybody lurking around? Grosjean, for instance — that is the name of the man she was supposed to marry, isn’t it?”
“I didn’t see him...” The young man was gasping with anguish, his face sweating, his lips white. “Are we going to see her?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Oh... We’re going... to...” He stopped.
“Well? Haven’t you the guts to go through with it?”
“Oh, yes! I... But you’ve got to understand...” And suddenly he burst out sobbing.
G.7 let him weep. He said not another word to him until we arrived at the watchman’s house, where the crowd parted to let Gaston Verdurier through.
The young man hid his face in his hands. He asked, “Where is she?”
But already the girl’s mother was vehemently apostrophizing him and the scene was beginning to grow chaotic, at once tragic and grotesque.
The police corporal intervened. “He’ll answer for this at Pouilly!” he said, seizing the youth by the wrist.
Verdurier was mad with suffering. I think I have never seen a human face so tortured. His eyes sought ours as though he counted on us to rescue him.
“I didn’t kill her, I swear it!” he shouted as they pushed him into a cart to take him to the city.
And when the cart was a hundred meters away you could still hear his sobs.
All this had happened so rapidly and in so curious an atmosphere that I had not even tried to form an opinion of the case.
You could have shown me the girl restored to life and I shouldn’t have been surprised. You could have told me that her official fiancé had killed her and I shouldn’t have lifted an eyebrow.
It was a splendidly sunny day. The watchman’s white house glistened.
The people couldn’t decide to break up. The confusion of the parents, who had no idea even where their child’s body might be, had something intensely dramatic about it, despite the farcical sidelights of the situation.
G.7 had not yet stepped forward officially. He looked about him. He listened.
“All right,” he said suddenly to the old boatman who had told the story of the girl brought back to life. “You weren’t at Saint-Satur yesterday evening?”
“Sure. I live there.”
“And you didn’t go to the café?”
“I dropped in for a drink. But why do you want to know?”
“You told your story there?”
“What story?”
G.7 had apparently heard enough. He turned his back indifferently and signaled me to follow him.
“No hurry,” he said. “There’s a train for Pouilly at two. In the meantime we’ve time to lunch at the inn and sample the local white wine.”
“But...”
“But what?” he asked, in the most natural manner, just as though we’d come down here for a breath of country air and a taste of the local products.
So I knew that he had just reached the solution of the case.
Two hours later we sat facing Gaston. His head hung low, his glance was evasive as he obstinately defended himself against the accusations of the police captain.
There were tears in his eyes. His face was marked with purple spots. His nails were gnawed to the quick.
“I didn’t! It isn’t true!” he sobbed with a mixture of rage and humility. “I didn’t kill anybody!”
“No...” G.7’s voice was calm. “You didn’t even kill yourself...”
I was far from understanding that phrase. But Gaston started, stared at my friend sharply, with a maddened glint in his eye.
“How... how do you know...?”
There was a bitter smile on G.7’s lips, a terribly human smile.
“All I had to do was look at you and I understood. Understood that at the last moment you wouldn’t have the guts. The last kiss... the last embrace... the desire to die rather than give each other up! Angélique leaps into the river... And then you, suddenly coming to your senses, watching the body float off downstream, drawing back, standing there, motionless, a chilling fear in your heart...”
“Shut up!”
“That evening, at Saint-Satur, you drop in at the café. You need a drink to calm you. There’s a man there, telling a horrible story. They’ve fished a girl out of the river at Tracy. They think she’s dead. But he’s got his own ideas, he has. He knew a case like that once... You listen. You’re trembling all over. Maybe you imagine Angélique being buried alive... You rush outdoors. You get to Tracy. You steal the body and carry it off into the woods...
“You try to bring her back!
“At least, that’s what I want to believe. It’s better that way, isn’t it? You stole the body to redeem yourself. It wasn’t, it couldn’t have been to make sure that Angélique was dead? That she couldn’t come back and accuse you of your cowardice?”
The young man let out a cry of horror.
“But she was dead enough,” G.7 went on. “Dead for good...” He lowered his voice. “All right. Tell us where you left her.”
And outside, five minutes later, he took a deep breath and sighed. “I don’t know why... but I’d sooner have been handling a good nasty crime...”
Like me, no doubt, he felt a certain weight oppressing his chest as two policemen accompanied the twenty-year-old lover toward the woods.
The Hit That Missed
by Walter Duranty
Walter Duranty, one of the most famous foreign correspondents of our time, is especially noted for his factual reports on Russia, where for many years he represented the New York “Times.” His career in the Soviet Union was climaxed in 1933 when he was chosen to accompany Maxim Litvinoff on the Russian statesman’s first visit to the United States.
Born in England, Mr. Duranty was educated at Harrow, Bedford, and Cambridge, and won classical scholarships at all three colleges. He has been called “a straight reporter, with a flair for the bizarre.” That flair has led Mr. Duranty into writing fiction. His success in two different literary fields is proved by his record — he is a Pulitzer Prize winner for reporting and an O. Henry Memorial Prize winner for short-story writing.
“A flair for the bizarre” would also lead a fiction writer — especially so aggressive and adventurous a newspaperman as Walter Duranty is in real life — to tales of crime and violence. In his story, “The Hit that Missed,” Mr. Duranty combines his reporting background with his nose for the bizarre: this unusual tale concerns an American news correspondent in Paris (also Mr. Duranty’s old stamping ground) who commits a “perfect” murder.