Simon escapes through the passenger door and crawls over to Hamed, who is slumped over the body of Mustache No. 1. He turns Hamed over and discovers, to his relief, that he is still alive. One of the Japanese men comes over and supports the wounded young gigolo’s head. He feels his pulse and says “Poison,” but Simon initially hears “poisson” and he thinks of Barthes’s analyses of Japanese food before understanding dawns on him as he looks at Hamed’s yellow complexion and yellow eyes and the spasms that shake his body, and he yells for someone to call an ambulance and Hamed tries to say something to him, he struggles to sit up a bit, and Simon leans over and asks about the function but Hamed is completely incapable of reciting a word because everything is whirling inside his head: he sees his poor childhood in Marseille again and his life in Paris, his friends, his tricks, the saunas, Saïd, Barthes, Slimane, the cinema, croissants at La Coupole, and the silken reflections of the oiled bodies that he rubbed himself against, but just before dying, while the sirens scream in the distance, he has time to whisper: “Echo.”
31
When Jacques Bayard arrives, the police have secured the area but the Japanese have disappeared and so has Mustache No. 2, the man knocked over by the Fuego. Hamed’s body is still laid out flat on the pavement alongside his attacker’s, whose umbrella is sticking out of his chest. Simon Herzog is smoking a cigarette, a blanket wrapped around him. No, he has nothing. No, he doesn’t know who those Japanese guys are. They didn’t say anything, they just saved his life and then left. With the Fuego. Yes, the second mustachioed man is probably injured. He must be hard as nails to have gotten up after being hit like that in the first place. Jacques Bayard contemplates the two wrecked cars, perplexed. Why a DS? Production of that model ended in 1975. The Fuego, on the other hand, is so new that it’s fresh from the factory and is not yet on sale. Someone draws an outline in chalk around Hamed’s corpse. Bayard lights a Gitane. So the gigolo’s calculation was wrong: the information he possessed did not protect him. Bayard concludes that the men who killed him did not want to make him talk but to shut him up. Why? Simon tells him Hamed’s last words. Bayard asks what he knows about this seventh function of language. Still in shock, but professorial by instinct, Simon explains: “The functions of language are linguistic categories that were once the subject of a theory by a great Russian linguist named…”
Roman Jakobson.
Simon goes no further in the lecture he was about to give. He remembers the book on Barthes’s desk, Essays in General Linguistics by Roman Jakobson, opened at the page on the functions of language, and the sheet of notes that served as a bookmark.
He explains to Bayard that the document for which four people have already been killed was perhaps right under their noses when they searched the apartment on Rue Servandoni, and pays no heed to the policeman standing behind them who then walks away to make a telephone call once he’s heard enough. He cannot see that the policeman has a finger missing on his left hand.
Bayard, too, thinks he’s heard enough, even if he still doesn’t really understand this thing about Jakobson; he pushes Simon inside his 504 and zooms off toward the Latin Quarter, escorted by a van full of uniformed officers, including the one with the severed finger. They arrive in Place Saint-Sulpice, sirens howling, and that is probably a mistake.
There is an entry code beside the heavy double doors, and they have to hammer on the window of the concierge’s office. She opens it for them, stupefied.
No, nobody has asked to see the attic room. Nothing special has happened since the installation of the entry code by a Vinci technician last month. Yes, the one with the Russian accent, or maybe it was Yugoslav, or maybe Greek. Actually, it’s funny, he came back today. He said he wanted to do an estimate for installing an intercom. No, he didn’t ask for the key to the seventh-floor room, why? It’s hanging on the board, with the others, look. Yes, he went upstairs not five minutes ago.
Bayard takes the key and climbs the stairs two by two, followed by half a dozen policemen. Simon remains downstairs with the concierge. On the seventh floor, the door to the attic room is locked. Bayard inserts the key in the lock, but it’s obstructed by something: another key, on the inside. The key that was not found on Barthes, thinks Bayard, as he bangs on the door and shouts, “Police!” They hear a noise inside. Bayard orders the door smashed down. The desk looks intact, but the book is no longer there, nor is the page of notes, and there is nobody in the room. The windows are shut.
But the trapdoor to the apartment below is open.
Bayard screams at his men to get downstairs but by the time they have turned around, their prey is already on the stairs and they bump into Barthes’s brother, Michel, coming out of his apartment in a panic because an intruder just came through the hole in his ceiling. So the Vinci technician is now two floors below them, and on the ground floor, of course, Simon, who has no idea what is going on, is shoved out of the way by the man, who sprints out of the building at top speed, and when he slams the double doors shut behind him, the mechanism that he himself installed is triggered, locking them inside.
Bayard rushes into the concierge’s office and grabs the telephone. He wants to call for backup, but it’s a rotary phone and the time it takes him to compose the number feels enough for the man to have reached Porte d’Orléans, or maybe even the city of Orléans.
But the man is not going in that direction. He wants to escape by car, but two policemen left on guard outside prevent him from picking up his vehicle, parked at the end of the street, so he runs toward the Jardin du Luxembourg while behind him the two officers shout their first warnings. Through the double doors, Bayard shouts, “Don’t shoot!” He wants the man alive, of course. When his men finally manage to free the mechanism, by pressing on the button embedded in the wall, the guy has disappeared but Bayard has sounded the alert. He knows that the area is being sealed off and the man won’t get far.
The man runs through the Jardin du Luxembourg and he can hear the policemen blowing their whistles behind him, but the passersby, used to joggers and the park guards’ whistles, pay no notice until he finds himself face-to-face with a cop. The cop tries to tackle him, but the man runs smack into him, like a rugby player, knocks him down, steps over him, and continues running. Where is he going? Does he know? He changes direction. One thing is sure: he has to get out of the park before all the exits are blocked.
Bayard is now in the van, giving orders by radio. Police officers have fanned out around the Latin Quarter. The fugitive is surrounded. He’s screwed.
But this man is resourceful. He hurtles down Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, a narrow one-way street, which prevents any cars from following him. For some reason known only to him, he must cross over to the Right Bank. Coming out of Rue Bonaparte, he runs onto the Pont-Neuf, but that is where his race ends, because at the other end of the bridge, police vans block the way, and when he turns around he sees Bayard’s van cutting off his retreat. He’s trapped like a rat. Even if he jumps in the river, he won’t get far, but maybe he has one last card to play, he thinks.
He climbs onto the parapet and holds out a piece of paper he has taken from his jacket. Bayard approaches him, alone. The man says one step farther and he’ll throw the paper in the Seine. Bayard stops dead, as if he’s just walked into an invisible wall. “Calm down.”
“Don’t come any nearrrer!”
“What do you want?”
“A car with a full tank of gas. If not, I thrrrow the document in the rrriver.”