skillfully aimed.”
“There was no other wound, was there?”
“No, just the one.”
The dialogue moves along easily-so easily that it becomes almost disturbing, like the overly cunning camouflage of a trap. Juard wonders if Wallas does not know more than he is admitting.
Isn’t it obvious, in fact, that the special agent knows the whole truth? He wouldn’t have been transferred from the capital for just a burglary. Then what is he trying to get out of the doctor? The latter cautiously asks a few indirect questions to try to find out if it is really necessary to continue this farce; but Wallas remains immured in their original conventions, neither because he feels they are more certain or because he has not understood the signals of complicity Juard has made to him, or else for still other reasons.
The little doctor would especially like to know what kind of protection he can count on from the police. Despite the misunderstanding that burdens their conversation, he has a certain sympathy for Wallas; but he does not have the impression that his help could be very effective in dealing with so powerful an organization. He does not even wear a uniform. As for the men from the police station, though they have more apparent prestige, Juard is too close to them not to know how much he can expect from them and what he can count on there.
The relative confidence Wallas inspires in him still does not keep him from staying on the defensive: the so- called “special agent” may also be in the other man’s pay.
On the other hand, it is not impossible that his sincerity is so complete that he doesn’t even know what has really happened.
Juard returns to his clinic. He has been able to obtain neither information nor promises from Wallas. He has less and less hope of any possible help from the authorities, were things to go badly. They would be quicker to condemn him as an accomplice.
Whichever way he turns, he is just as guilty. The issue, as he sees it, is inevitably a fatal one.
Given these various dangers, the special agent, who at first inspired him with unexpected fears, now seems on reflection much less dangerous, if not exactly a savior. Juard is even about to reproach himself for his own suspicions: shouldn’t he have told the truth-of which Wallas certainly seems, after al basically ignorant…
But the little doctor then remembers the last words he spoket as he was leaving: “Sometimes you go through hell and high water to find a murderer…” He has immediately regretted them, for they applied all too clearly-much more clearly than he had planned-to the present situation. Now he is pleased at having spoken them. Wallas, thanks to him, now possesses the key to the riddle; if he considers it carefully and knows how to deal with what he finds, he will not be following a false lead. However, Juard has not felt that the special agent paid particularly close attention to his last words.
Back in the Rue de Corinthe, the doctor is going to rejoin Daniel Dupont in the little white room. As is customary in the clinic, he walks in without knocking. The professor, who has his back to the door, starts when he hears him.
“You frightened me.”
“I’m sorry,” Juard says, “I came in as if this were my own room. I don’t know what I was thinking of.”
Dupont must have been walking back and forth between the bed and the window. He looks annoyed.
“How’s the arm?” Juard asks.
“Fine, just fine.”
“Any fever?”
“No, none. I’m all right.”
“It would be better not to move around too much.”
Dupont does not answer. He is thinking about something else. He walks over to the window, pulls aside one of the curtains-only an inch or so-so as to look out into the street without being seen.
“Marchat hasn’t come back,” he says.
“He’ll be here soon,” the doctor says.
“Yes…He’ll have to hurry.”
“You’ve still got plenty of time.”
“Yes…not so much.”
Dupont lets go of the curtain. The light material falls back, getting the pattern of the embroidery appear again. Before becoming quite motionless, the curtain is still shaken by a few tiny oscillations-quickly dying away-a faint trembling.
The professor lowers his arm with a certain slowness, that of a man who has nothing else to do afterward- and therefore has no reason to move rapidly. He is waiting for someone who has not come; in order to conceal his nervousness-and to master it somewhat-he forces himself to observe this exaggerated moderation. He lowers his arm.
His hand, instead of hanging naturally, moves up his leg, hesitates at the bottom of his jacket, lifts it slightly, moves down again, rises again, passes underneath the bottom of the jacket and finally vanishes into the trouser pocket.
Dupont turns around to face the doctor.
7
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.
