4
IT WAS NEARLY six o’clock when we left our room in the Hôtel d’Angleterre. The sun, source of our love and our intoxication, was already growing hazy behind the Cornets de Bise, draining the great valley of its significance. But in us the star still blazed with its hypnagogic brilliance. We sauntered to the Quai des Belges, nonchalantly joining workers and lovers. Then we went closer to the lake. Drunk with the intoxication of bygone days, we strolled along the big jetty and the wharf. The steamer Neuchâtel was moored there, surrounded by a noisy, cheerful crowd. We sat some distance from the white boat and the crowd on the diminishing line of rocks that emerged from the blue water of Lac Léman. If only this landscape would imprison me again in its beautiful improbability, I could die without bitterness! If only I could stroll hand in hand with K again on the shores of Ouchy, if I could totter along these eroded rocks and sit close beside K, so close that her twilight hair would brush my cheek! Because I could be delirious here, with my back to the terraced city as I faced the torn depths of the great nearby mountains, close to the woman, a free spirit, who walked on the water and whom I love! And what did our happiness consist of as we gazed at its darkened glints in the cypresses that camouflaged the steamer Neuchâtel in the serene water of the lake and on the great Alps whose dazzling flanks loomed up before us? What had filled this time except perhaps the long and ardent journey that had gone before and the recent explosion of our pleasure: twelve months and one night of falling between Place de la Riponne and the revolutionary dawn that overwhelmed the sky, the whole chain of the Alps, visible and invisible, and our bodies reunited in 1816. While we were becoming the epicentre of a grandiose universe, a consummate serenity followed the laceration of pleasure. At this moment, on these rocks spared by erosion and in the midst of our dizziness, there were no obstacles to my euphoria: I was adrift in plenitude, invested with love and the dawn. Something glorious was at work in me, while the exhausted sun was descending with the waters of the Rhône and K, chilly or perhaps melancholy, moved tenderly close to me.
Then we went back to the darkened city. We took a few steps towards the Hôtel d’Angleterre, stopping before we reached its crowded terrace. We took a table on the terrace of the Château d’Ouchy, turning our backs on the fading sun, looking out on our left at the coastline with its grand hotels and on our right at the gloomy Alps adrift on the lake. It was at that same table, over a gin and tonic and with the grand perspective of the Lepontine Alps sweeping to infinity, that K told me about the Mercedes 300SL with Zurich plates. Lost in K’s black eyes, I had trouble following her complicated revelations, especially because I was gazing, thrilled, at her full lips and delighting in her long sentences that were often enigmatic, though they were familiar to me.
“He’s a banker,” she said to me.
“What’s his name again?”
“Carl von Ryndt. But of course you can’t trust it. He’s a banker like thousands of other Swiss. In Basel a few months ago he was calling himself de Heute or de Heutz. He claimed to be Belgian (he even affected the accent) and that he was writing a thesis on Scipio Africanus …”
“Mystifying!”
“But listen to this! Pierre — the boss, that is — had him followed, which wasn’t easy with a bird like him. I’ll spare you the historical theories he was basing his thesis on. There’s something frightening, believe me, about giving yourself a cover like that: it’s nearly as complicated as trying to pass as an apostolic nuncio and actually saying a pontifical mass complete with deacons and the rest … In any event, von Ryndt couldn’t surprise me any more. In Basel he was so successful at passing himself off as a historian of the Roman wars that he actually gave scholarly lectures on Scipio Africanus. We know now that von Ryndt is supposedly writing a thesis that was actually written a hundred years ago by some famous man nobody’s ever heard of! He spends less time in the university library than in the annex of the Federal Palace in Berne, claiming he’s doing research in the federal capitaclass="underline" for a long time von Ryndt played a Belgian historian, very studious and specializing in a generally unknown period of Roman history. By the end of our investigation, de Heute or de Heutz — von Ryndt’s double, that is — proved to be incredibly shrewd and downright dangerous for us … You know, since my separation I’ve looked at things more coldly than I used to. To tell the truth, I changed my philosophy of life by making a mess of my own … What are you thinking about? You look so sad suddenly … Disaster doesn’t frighten me any more. I don’t think I’ll ever live through another period as bleak as the past twelve months, which I spent in hotel rooms in Manchester, London, Brussels, Berne, or Geneva, in transit in all those cities and obliged to keep up a bold front. I think I went through a severe depression: I was on medication for a while, but I’ve never gone for treatment. Now it’s over. How do I seem to you? Look how wonderful it is on the lake just now. If I were a millionaire, I’d buy a villa here on the shore of the lake. And when I was depressed, I wouldn’t budge from my villa. I’d just stay there and look at the mountains, the way we’re doing right now …”
“It’s wonderful around Vevey. Do you know Clarens? No … Or maybe on the shore between St-Prex and Allaman — but I’m dreaming too. We’ll never be millionaires unless we make off with the funds of the organization and pull some successful holdups … But if I ever made a million, I wouldn’t sink my capital into a Swiss chalet. I’d rather open an account at the Fabrique Nationale or Solingen …”
“You’re right. There’s no golden retirement for us, not even a peaceful life as long as we can’t live normally in our country. Tonight, I’m in Lausanne. In a few days the organization will send me somewhere else …”
I was lost in her gaze, a black lake where just that morning I had seen the sun emerge, bare and flamboyant. I was sad with K’s sadness, happy when she seemed happy, and I became a revolutionary again when she alluded to the revolution that had brought us together and that still obsesses me, unfinished …
“Over the past six months, he’s been seen in Montreal three times as far as we know. We have proof that he’s in contact with Gaudy and that this von Ryndt (or the Belgian) is Gaudy’s emissary in Europe. Now do you understand?”
“I understand … and at this point I wouldn’t wait one second more to accept the obvious, I’d swing into action. It’s just that while we’re talking about von Ryndt, he may have changed his name yet again …”
K gave me a long look that was both defiant and loving. We understood one another, and she went on quite simply:
“We have to settle this problem in the next twenty-four hours … Don’t you agree? But let me tell you a little more about him. Von Ryndt is president of the Banque Commerciale Saharienne at 13 or 14 rue Bonnivard in Geneva. He’s also on the board of the Union des Banques Suisses. I’ll pass over the relationship between the UBS and the Berne Secret Service. But you know that the UBS is a powerful federal lobby, and you also know that article 47b of the federal constitution, which guarantees anonymity to anyone using Switzerland as a safety deposit box, may, at a certain level and very discreetly, break the rules. When you get right down to it, von Ryndt is a visionary who knows about certain secret funds, the organization’s for instance, and who can therefore freeze them simply by eliminating the few patriots with legal access to them. It’s even possible that whenever a deposit is made into a Swiss bank account, there’s a duplicate that through von Ryndt is deposited in RCMP files in Ottawa, in Montreal, and maybe even with our ‘friends’ the CIA. And as every foreigner’s stay on Swiss soil is recorded in meticulous detail, by working methodically von Ryndt and his colleagues can know which of us is making the transfers and so forth …”