He glimpses his face in the mirror over the fireplace and, beneath it, the double row of objects arranged on the marble: the statuette and its reflection, the brass candlestick and its reflection, the tobacco jar, the ashtray, the other statuette-a splendid wrestler about to crush a lizard.
The athlete with the lizard, the ashtray, the tobacco jar, the candlestick…He takes his hand out of his pocket and extends it toward the first statuette, a blind old man led by a child. In the mirror, the hand’s reflection advances to meet it. Both remain momentarily suspended over the brass candlestick-hesitating. Then the reflection and the hand come to rest, one opposite the other, calmly at equal distances from the mirror’s surface, at the edge of the marble and at the edge of its reflection.
The blind man with the child, the brass candlestick, th‹ tobacco jar, the ashtray, the athlete crushing a lizard.
The hand again advances toward the bronze blind man-the image of the hand toward that of the blind man… The two hands, the two blind men, the two children, the two empty candlesticks, the two earthenware jars, the two ashtrays, the two Apollos, the two lizards…
He still remains hesitating for some time. Then he resolutely grasps the statuette on the left and replaces it by the terracotta jar; the candlestick replaces the jar, the blind man the candlestick.
The tobacco jar, the blind man with the child, the candlestick, the ashtray, the splendid athlete.
He examined his work. Something still disturbs him. The tobacco jar, the blind man, the candlestick He reverses the last two objects. The earthenware pot and its reflection, the blind man and his reflection, the candlestick, the athlete with the lizard, the ashtray.
Finally he pushes the little red ashtray about an inch toward the corner of the marble mantelpiece.
Garinati leaves his room, locks the door behind him, and begins walking down the long spiral of the staircase.
Along a canal. The blocks of granite that line the quay; under the dust gleam occasional crystals, black, white, and pinkish. To the right, a little farther down, is the water.
A rubber-coated electric wire makes a vertical line against the wall.
Below, to pass over a cornice, it makes a right angle, once, twice. But afterward, instead of following the inner surface, it stands away from the wall and hangs free for about a foot and a half.
Below, fastened again against the vertical wall, it describes another two or three sinusoidal arcs before finally resuming its straight descent.
The little glass door has creaked loudly. In his hurry to get away, Garinati has opened it a little more than he should have.
The cube of gray lava. The warning buzzer disconnected, the street that smells of cabbage soup. The muddy paths that fade away, far away, among the rusty corrugated iron.
The bicycles coming home from work. The wave of bicycles flows along the Boulevard Circulaire.
“Don’t you read the papers?” Bona bends over toward his briefcase.
Garinati puts his hands over his ears to get rid of that irritating noise. This time he uses both hands, which he keeps pressed hard against each side of his head for a minute.
When he takes them away, the whistling sound has stopped. He begins walking, carefully, as though he were afraid of making it start all over again by movements that might be too sudden. After a few steps he is once again standing in front of the apartment house he has just left.
After a few steps more he sees, glancing up at a gleaming shop, the brick house at the corner of the Rue des Arpenteurs. It is not the house itself, but a huge photograph of it carefully arranged behind the glass.
He goes in.
There is no one in the shop. Through a door in the rear comes a dark young woman who smiles at him politely. He glances toward the shelves covering the walls.
One showcase entirely filled with candy, each piece wrapped in brightly colored paper and sorted out in large round or oval jars.
One showcase completely full of little spoons, in groups of twelve-in parallel rows, other rows fan-shaped, in squares, in circles…
Bona would go to the Rue des Arpenteurs, ring at the door of the little house. The old deaf servant would finally hear and come to the door.
“Monsieur Daniel Dupont, please.”
“What did you say?”
Bona would repeat, louder:
“Monsieur Daniel Dupont!”
“Yes, this is the house. What do you want?”
“I came to find out how he was… Find out how he was!”
“Oh, I see. Very kind. Monsieur Dupont is quite well.”
Why should Bona go to find out how he was, since he knows the professor is dead?
Garinati stares, under the platform, at the girders and cables gradually disappearing from sight. On the other side of the canal, the huge drawbridge machinery hums smoothly.
It would be enough to insert some hard object-it could be of quite small size-into one of the essential gears in order to stop the whole system, with a shriek of wrenched machinery. A small, very hard object that would resist being crushed: the cube of gray lava…
What would be the use? The emergency crew would come at once. Tomorrow everything would be in operation as usual-as if nothing had happened.
“Monsieur Daniel Dupont, please.”
“What did you say?”
Bona raises his voice:
“Monsieur Daniel Dupont.”
“Yes, I hear you! You don’t have to shout, you know. I’m not deaf! What do you want Monsieur Dupont for now?”
“I came to find out how he is.”
“How he is? But he’s dead, young man! Dead, you hear? There’s no one else here, you’ve come too late.”
The little glass door creaks loudly.
Something to say to that Wallas? What would he have to say to him? He takes the post card out of his pocket and stops to look at it. You could almost count the granite crystals in the curb of stone in the foreground.
A ball of crumpled paper-bluish and dirty. He kicks it, two or three times.
A plaque of black glass attached by four gilded screws. The one on the upper right has lost the decorative rosette that concealed its head.
A white step.
A brick, an ordinary brick, a brick among the thousands of bricks that constitute the wall.
That is all that remains of Garinati around five in the evening.
The tug has now reached the next footbridge and in order to pass under it begins lowering its smokestack.
Looking directly down, the cable still runs along the surface of the water, straight and taut, scarcely bigger around than a man’s thumb. It rises imperceptibly above the glaucous wavelets.
And suddenly, preceded by a ripple of foam, appears from under the arch of the bridge the blunt bow of the barge, which moves slowly on toward the next bridge.
The little man in the long greenish coat who has been leaning over the parapet straightens up.
CHAPTER FIVE
1
And night is already falling-and the cold fog comes in from the North Sea; the city seems to fall asleep in it. There has been almost no day at all.
Walking along past the shopwindows that light up one after the other, Wallas tries to distinguish the usable elements of the report Laurent has given him to read. That the motive of the crime is not theft, he is-in the precise sense of the words-“paid to find out.” But why go so far as to imagine this duplication of the murderer? It does not take anyone any further to have supposed that the man who fired the fatal shot is not the man who pointed out the familiar way across the garden and through the house. Moreover, the argument about the footsteps on the lawn is not very convincing. If someone were already walking on the brick rim of the path, the other man could have walked behind him or rather in front of him, since he was the only one supposed to know the way. This is the position it is easiest to imagine the two night prowlers adopting. In any case, no one needed to walk on the lawn; if anyone did, it must be for some other reason-or else for no reason at all.