For twenty-four hours now I’ve hardly slept. At two a.m. I was still following a shadow that was following me, and at sunrise, around half-past five, I was facing my personal enemy number one, demoralized from listing the mistakes that had brought me to this sorry pass, unable to imagine anything to fill the conversational gaps except the story of a nervous breakdown: two children, abandoned wife, escape, my pitiful ambition to rob banks and my final resolution to make judicious use of my special Colt, blowing my brains out in a vacant lot in Carouge. Since yesterday I haven’t had time to recover except during a few hours of comatose sleep. And now in a sense I’m enjoying an infinitesimal intermission which will give me just enough time to figure out what’s happened to me and to prepare myself for what’s ahead, an infinite margin of obstacles and time separating me from our meeting on the terrace of the Hôtel d’Angleterre. The latest events surprised me so much that I have trouble recalling the order in which they occurred. I remember H. de Heutz leaning against the trunk of the car, overcome by suffering and constantly recalling his final hours with his wife and children in Belgium, somewhere in the former Austrian Netherlands. At the last moment, he told me, he’d hesitated between suicide in the Meuse and flight. He also told me that what hurt him most was his vague recollections of his two little boys, for he couldn’t clearly recall their features or the timbre of their voices. H. de Heutz wept abundantly as he described his appalling life.
And that was when I perceived a sign! Everything began to move at lightning speed; first, I ran through the Coppet woods, heading for what I assumed to be the very heart of the forest. After a few minutes of this frantic race I came to a promontory that looks down on the village of Coppet. There, in a dazzling landscape just above the turquoise water and facing the Roc d’Enfer that stands at the front of the tangled group of massifs, I pricked up my ear: no suspicious sounds, none I could make out at any rate. Groping in my back pocket, I realized that I still had the keys for the Opel. Oh well, H. de Heutz didn’t need them now: he’d simply got into the other person’s car. For a moment it seemed to me (but was I mistaken?) that the other person was a woman: no doubt the one who’d been walking on H. de Heutz’s arm through the streets of Geneva and had suddenly disappeared as if by magic. How could I be sure? I’d only caught a glimpse of the car: I hadn’t so much seen it as guessed at it. It had practically sprung up behind me, silently, on the small road. It was H. de Heutz’s smile that made me sense it, his gaze that made me react, even more than the tires gliding along the asphalt and the engine’s imperceptible roar. That was when I realized I was surrounded and therefore had no choice: his sudden intrusion was forcing me to execute H. de Heutz before a witness and, at worst, expose myself to a surprise shot by the intruder. I turned around, I saw the car slip behind the leaves, and I spied the other person at the wheeclass="underline" a woman. I saw her blonde hair first. But could I trust such a fleeting sight taxed in advanced by such hallucinatory circumstances? The blonde hair was probably a side effect of the sun’s brightness and my own dazzlement, so that I couldn’t actually be sure the other person is a woman, one who improbably has blonde hair. A fleeting sight distorted by danger, what I remember is vague and uncertain, unless fear made my vision particularly keen! Anyway … When I heard a car door slam, I quickly realized that if I tried to get away in the Opel, I’d erupt into the middle of the woman’s field of vision and give her a moving target. I kept H. de Heutz in my sights while I walked around the car. Once I was in front of the grille I was in a better position. H. de Heutz was facing me, right in the middle of the historic space where the other person’s silhouette would soon appear. The seconds galloped by faster than my thoughts. I came within a hair’s breadth of pressing the trigger, spelling the end of H. de Heutz. But what would happen then? The other person, the blonde woman, was very close to me but I didn’t know exactly where: I could only sense her. If I had rushed to kill H. de Heutz, she’d have emptied her magazine into my head and I’d have collapsed inopportunely. Before I lost my way in this brisk current of possibles and imponderables, I made a hint of a movement of retreat, on tiptoe at first, keeping my gun pointed at H. de Heutz, who was looking at me; then, after I was far enough away that my footsteps were muffled, I started running towards what I thought was the heart of the forest — only to find myself, after a few minutes of an exhausting sprint, in the natural observatory that looks down on the village of Coppet, opposite the gutted temple of the Dents du Midi, alone at last, absolutely alone, not yet knowing if I was threatened or unpunished, but well aware that H. de Heutz was no longer within range of my gun and that though I’d narrowly escaped a second trap, I had failed doubly in my mission. H. de Heutz was still alive. And the deadline for my meeting with K, closer now, was haunting me.
One o’clock sounded at the Coppet town hall. In spite of everything, a tremendous sense of well-being flooded me and I filled my lungs with the cool air that a light breeze was wafting towards the vineyards in the back country. All around me a deep calm prevailed. The hazy high noon suggested sweetness and rest. A thin light bathed the valley of the Rhône and the raging architecture of the landscape that unfolds around Coppet in as many styles as there are eras, from the recent civilizations of the southern valley to the folds of high glacial antiquity. Stationed on this promontory, able to take in at a single glance the turbulent opening that, from the Furka to Viège, from Viège to Martigny by way of the steep corridor of the Haut-Valais, has impetuously carved the slopes, the ridges, and the granite walls that are constantly hacked to pieces on the heights, tangled in a calcareous embrace from the Haut de Cry to the Dent de Morcles, I gazed out at the incomparable script of this anonymous masterpiece that was written in the debris of avalanches, of morainal streaks and poorly carved splinters of an implacable genesis. I took a long look at this interrupted landscape that extends in a flared cirque from the foothills of the Bernese Alps to the glorious peaks of the Valais massifs and the Pennine Alps. Then I took a few steps on the promontory and sprinted down a small path that brought me to Coppet, to a small square bounded on the south by the awe-inspiring passage of the Rhône and that, imperceptible, of floating mountains. Around this tiny square, shops displayed themselves to the passerby. My appetite restored by the sight of the window of a fancy-food shop, I decided to treat myself to a good lunch. The clock on the town hall showed ten past one. In just a few minutes I was on the Grand-Rue heading for the centre of Coppet.
I stopped at the Auberge des Émigrés whose back gave onto the lake, its front on the Grand-Rue. I took a table for two by the window so that I was facing against the current of the Rhône and into the alluvial chasm set into its walls of spires and crystalline massifs. Delighted to be sitting down after so many hours of hunting and being hunted, I suddenly felt free of any worry about H. de Heutz. I’ll have plenty of time to think effectively, I mused, when I have something in my stomach. First I ordered crêpes stuffed with ham and Emmenthal and a bottle of Réserve du Vidôme. Things were going well. The Auberge des Émigrés is a very pleasant place; I was practically alone. A couple at the back were speaking English. The fruity taste of the white wine from the hills of Yvorne finally convinced me that I’d been right to come to this restaurant; anyway, I had to eat, because I wouldn’t have been able to keep up the frightening tempo of this race with the hagiographer of Scipio Africanus much longer. Forgetting for a moment that the appearance seemingly by magic of a blonde woman at the wheel of a car had kept me from finishing off H. de Heutz, I tucked into the crêpes hungrily, stopping now and then for a sip of the well-chosen fruity white wine. I’d get my wits back after a good meal. And it was delicious! After the crêpes came sautéed chicken from Mont Noir in a thick sauce, with a fine vintage Château Puidoux. With no pressure of time, I succumbed to the pleasure of eating and drinking and to the no less intoxicating one of being on a balcony above the lake in this ancient landscape, where I was happy to stop and peer out at its smallest folds. Over more than forty-eight hours I’d lost my way a thousand times in this collage of mountains and an awe-inspiring valley, never breaking away from it. Only the axis had changed since the moment when I spotted the woman I love near Place de la Riponne.