Both of them watch the iron edge of the platform, which gradually reaches the level of the street. At the moment it does, the noise suddenly stops; in the silence they hear the electric bell that authorizes them to cross. As he passes through the gate, the bicyclist repeats:
“I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Wallas says. “Good luck!”
“Good-bye, Monsieur,” the bicyclist says.
He jumps onto the seat and rides off. Is it really going to snow? It’s still not cold enough, probably; it’s only the sudden change in the weather that is surprising. Wallas, halfway across the bridge, passes the workman in the pea jacket who is about to reopen the barrier.
“Back already, Monsieur?”
“Yes,” Wallas answers. “I had just time enough while the bridge was opening and closing. The prefecture is over there, isn’t it?”
The other man turns back. “Time to do what?” he thinks. He says:
“Yes, that’s right. Take the Rue de Berlin: it’s the shortest way.”
“Thank you, Monsieur.”
“Have a good walk, Monsieur.”
Why isn’t that barrier controlled automatically, from the other end? Wallas realizes, now, that the Rue Janeck is not really straight: actually it curves south by a series of imperceptible angles. On the school sign showing two children carrying schoolbooks over their shoulders and holding hands, he can see the remains of a butterfly pasted on upside down and torn off. After the double door-Girls Boys-the courtyard wall disappears under the Indian chestnut trees, the reddish leaves and the split husks of the nuts; the little boys have carefully gathered the shiny kernels, the source of many games and much commerce. Wallas crosses to look at the names of the streets branching off to the left.
At one intersection Wallas notices opposite him the dyspeptic gentleman he has seen before, crossing the street. He doesn’t look any better after having eaten breakfast; perhaps it is worry and not stomach trouble that gives him that expression. (He looks like Fabius!) He is wearing black: he is going to the post office to send a telegram announcing someone’s death.
“Oh, it’s for sending a telegram. Nothing serious, I hope?”
“A death, Madame.”
The mournful gentleman passes Wallas and turns into the cross street: Rue de Berlin; Wallas walks in step with him.
So earlier this morning he should have kept straight ahead, judging by the direction of this street. The black back advances at the same speed as Wallas and shows him the way.
3
The man in the black overcoat passes on the left sidewalk and turns into a narrow street; consequently Wallas loses sight of him. A pity, for he was a good companion. So he was not going to send a telegram from the post office after all, unless he knows a short cut leading directly to the Avenue Christian-Charles. It doesn’t matter, Wallas prefers to follow the main avenues, particularly since he has no reason to go to that post office.
It would certainly have been easier to tell that woman right away that he wanted to cover the principal streets of the city, which he was visiting for the first time; but then would not some scruple have obliged him to talk about the other trip?-the sunny little streets where he had walked with his mother, the dead end of a canal between the low houses, the hull of the abandoned boat, that relative (his mother’s sister, or half-sister?) they were supposed to meet-it would have looked as though he were hunting down his childhood memories. As for passing himself off as a tourist, aside from the unlikelihood of the excuse at this time of year in a city completely barren of appeal for an art lover, this offered still greater dangers: where would the woman’s questions have led him then, since the post office had been enough to create the telegram, quite naturally, in order to avoid new explanations and out of a desire, too, not to contradict her. By trying to be pleasant and discreet, into what imaginary adventures would he finally be dragged!
“You’re not from around here, Monsieur?”
“No, I’m a detective and I arrived here last night to investigate a political murder.”
That was even less likely than all the rest. “The special agent,” Fabius is always repeating, “should leave as few traces as possible in people’s minds; it is therefore important for him to maintain a behavior as close as possible to the normal in all circumstances.” The caricature, famous in the Bureau of Investigation and in the whole Ministry, represents Fabius disguised as an “idler”: hat pulled down over his eyes, huge dark glasses, and an outrageously false beard hanging to the ground; bent double, this creature prowls “discreetly” through the countryside, among the startled cows and horses.
This disrespectful image actually conceals a sincere admiration on the part of his collaborators toward their old chief. “He’s failed a lot,” his enemies whisper to you sanctimoniously; but those who work with him every day know that despite certain inexplicable obstinacies, the illustrious Fabius remains worthy of his legend. Yet, despite his attachment to somewhat old-fashioned methods, even his adherents reproach him occasionally for a kind of irresolution, a marked discretion that makes him hesitate about accepting even the most established facts. The perspicacity with which he detected the slightest weak point in a suspicious situation, the intensity of impulse that carried him to the very threshold of the enigma, his subsequent indefatigable patience in recomposing the threads that had been revealed, all this seemed to turn at times into the sterile skepticism of a fanatic. Already people were saying that he mistrusted easy solutions, now it is whispered that he has ceased to believe in the existence of any solution whatever.
In the present case, for instance, where the purpose is clear enough (to uncover the leaders of an anarchist organization), he has shown excessive hesitation from the start, seeming to be concerned with it only reluctantly. He has not even bothered to avoid making quite preposterous remarks in front of his subordinates, pretending to consider the conspiracy either as a series of coincidences or as a Machiavellian invention of the government. One day he remarked quite coolly that such people were philanthropists and were merely trying to further public welfare!
Wallas does not like such jokes, which serve only to get the Bureau accused of negligence, even of collusion. Obviously he cannot feel toward Fabius the blind veneration some of his colleagues show: he did not know him during the glorious years of struggle against the enemy agents during the war. Wallas has worked for the Bureau of Investigation only a short time, before that he was in another branch of the Ministry of the Interior, and it is an accident that he happens to have this job. Hitherto, his work consisted mostly in the surveillance of various theosophical societies against which Roy-Dauzet, the minister, had suddenly conceived a resentment; Wallas has spent several months attending meetings of the members, studying their extravagant brochures, and gaining the confidence of semi-lunatics; he has just finished his assignment with a voluminous report on the activities of these societies, all quite harmless, as it turns out.
As a matter of fact, the role of this marginal police force is generally quite pacific. Established originally with counterespionage as its real purpose, since the armistice it has become a kind of economic police whose chief function is to check the actions of the cartels. Subsequently, each time a financial, political, religious or other group has seemed to threaten the security of the state, the Bureau of Investigation has taken action and proved itself, on two or three occasions, to be of invaluable assistance to the government.
This time, something quite different is involved: in nine days, nine violent deaths have occurred one after another, of which at least six are definitely murders. Certain resemblances among these various crimes, the nature of the victims, as well as the threatening letters received by other members of the organization to which the nine dead men may have belonged, clearly show that it is a single case that must be dealt with: a monstrous campaign of intimidation-or even of total destruction-conducted (by whom?) against these men whose political role, though not official, is no doubt extremely important and who, for this reason, benefit…from a…
The Place de la Prefecture is a wide square bordered on three sides by buildings with arcades; the fourth side is occupied by the prefecture, a huge stone building ornamented with scrolls and scallops, fortunately few in number-in short, of rather somber ugliness.
