“Did Monsieur Dupont shoot at the man running away?” he asks, although he knows the answer in advance: when Du-pont came back with his revolver, the murderer had disappeared. Wallas would like to show the gun to Commissioner Laurent, but the housekeeper hesitates about letting him take it, then she gives in with a shrug:
“Take it with you, young man. What use is it here now?”
“I’m not asking you for a present. This pistol is a piece of evidence, you understand?”
“Take it, I tell you, since you want it so much.”
“And you don’t know if your employer had used it before, for something else?”
“What do you think he would use it for, young man? Monsieur Dupont was not a man to shoot off his revolver in the house to amuse himself. No, thank God. He had his faults, but…” Wallas puts the pistol in his overcoat pocket.
The housekeeper leaves her visitor; she has nothing else to tell him: her late employer’s difficult character, the strenuous washing of the bloodstains, the criminal doctor, the continuing negligence of the telephone company… She has already repeated all this several times; now she has to finish packing her suitcases in order not to miss the two o’clock train that will take her to her daughter’s. It is not a very nice time of the year to be going to the country; still, she has to hurry. Wallas looks at his watch: it still shows seven-thirty. In Dupont’s bedroom, the bronze clock on the mantelpiece, between the empty candlesticks, had also stopped.
Yielding to the special agent’s urging, Madame Smite finally admits that she is supposed to give the house keys to the police; somewhat reluctantly she gives him the key to the back door. He will close it himself when he leaves. The housekeeper will leave by the front door, for she also has the keys for it. As for the garden gate, the lock has not been working for a long time. Wallas remains alone in the study. Dupont lived in this tiny room, he left it only to sleep and to take his meals, at noon and at seven at night. Wallas approaches the desk; the inspectors appear to have left everything as it was: on the blotter is lying the sheet of paper on which Dupont had written only four words so far: “which can not prevent…”-”…death…” obviously. That is the word he was looking for when he went downstairs to eat.
CHAPTER TWO
1
It is certainly the sound of footsteps; footsteps on the stairs, coming closer. Someone is coming up. Someone is coming up slowly-no: carefully; perhaps cautiously? Holding on to the banister, judging from the sound. Someone who becomes breathless from a climb which is too stiff for him or who is tired from having come a long distance. They are a man’s footsteps, but deliberate, muffled by the carpet-which gives them, at moments, something of a timorous or clandestine quality.
But this impression does not last. At closer range, the footsteps sound spontaneous, uninhibited: the footsteps of a relaxed man peacefully climbing the stairs.
The last three steps are taken more vigorously, probably in haste to reach the landing. The man is in front of the door now; he stops a moment to catch his breath…
(… one knock, three short quick knocks…)
But he does not remain there more than a few seconds and begins to climb the next flight. The steps die away toward the top of the building.
It was not Garinati.
It is ten o’clock, though: Garinati should be coming. He should even have been here over a minute ago; he’s late already. Those footsteps on the stairs should have been his.
He walks upstairs somewhat in that way, but he makes even less noise, though setting his feet down more firmly, step after step without any particular attention, without the least…
No! It’s impossible to involve Garinati in this business any longer: after tonight, someone else will have to replace him at his job. For a few days at least he will have to be kept under cover and watched; afterward, maybe, he could be given some new job, but one without any serious risks.
For several days he has seemed somewhat tired. He complained of headaches; and once or twice, he said peculiar things. During the last meeting he even went so far as to be downright difficult: uneasy, hypersensitive, constantly asking about details long since settled, and more than once raising unreasonable objections and turning sullen if they were rejected too quickly.
His work has suffered from it: Daniel Dupont did not die immediately-every report confirms this. It does not matter really, since he died all the same and, what’s more, “without regaining consciousness”; but from the point of view of the plan, there is something irregular about it: Dupont did not actually die at the time his death was scheduled for. Without any doubt, it is Garinati’s exaggerated nervousness that is responsible. Afterward he did not come to the prescribed meeting place. Finally, this morning, despite the written order, he is late. No question about it, he is not the same man any more.
Jean Bonaventure-called “Bona”-is sitting on a garden chair, in the middle of an empty room. Beside him, a leather briefcase is lying on the floor-a pine floor distinguished by no particular quality save an obvious lack of care. The walls, on the other hand, are covered with a paper in good condition, if not new: tiny multicolored bouquets uniformly decorating a pearl-gray background. The ceiling too has obviously been whitewashed recently; in the center, a wire hangs down with an electric light bulb at the end.
A square window without curtains provides what light there is. Two doors, both wide open, lead into a darker room on one side, and on the other into a little hall to the entrance door of the apartment. There is not a stick of furniture in this room except for two wrought-iron chairs painted the usual dark green. Bona is sitting on one; the other, facing him, about six feet away, remains empty.
Bona is not dressed for sitting indoors. His overcoat is tightly buttoned up to the collar, his hands are gloved, and he keeps his hat on.
He is waiting, motionless on this uncomfortable chair, bolt upright, his hands crossed on his knees, his feet riveted to the floor, betraying no impatience. He is looking straight ahead at the little spots left by the raindrops on the windowpanes and, beyond, over the huge blue-glazed window of the factories on the other side of the street, at the irregular buildings of the suburbs, rising in waves toward a grayish horizon bristling with chimneys and pylons.
Usually this landscape has little relief and looks rather unattractive, but this morning the grayish yellow sky of snowy days gives it unaccustomed dimensions. Certain outlines are emphasized, others are blurred; here and there distances open out, unsuspected masses appear; the whole view is organized into a series of planes silhouetted against one another, so that the depth, suddenly illuminated, seems to lose its natural look-and perhaps its reality-as if this over-exactitude were possible only in a painting. Distances are so affected that they become virtually unrecognizable, without it being possible to say in just what way they are transformed: extended or telescoped-or both at once-unless they have acquired a new quality that has more to do with geometry… Sometimes this happens to lost cities, petrified by some cataclysm for centuries-or only for a few seconds before their collapse, a wink of hesitation between life and what already bears another name: after, before, eternity.
Bona watches. Eyes calm, he contemplates his work. He is waiting. He has just astounded the city. Daniel Dupont died, yesterday, murdered. Tonight, at the same hour, an identical crime will echo this scandal, finally wrenching the police from their routine, the papers from their silence. In a week, the organization has already sown anxiety in every corner of the country, but the powers that be still pretend to regard these acts as unconnected accidents of no importance. It will take this highly unlikely coincidence that is being prepared to set off the panic.