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.
Wallas feels the day’s accumulated fatigue beginning to make his legs numb. He is not used to walking such long distances. These comings and goings from one end of the town to the other must ultimately add up to a good number of miles, most of which he has covered on foot. Leaving the police station, he headed for the Rue de Corinthe by way of the Rue de la Charte, the prefecture, and the Rue Bergere; here he found himself at an intersection of three roads: the one he was on and two possible directions opposite him, forming a right angle between them. He remembered having already passed this place twice before: the first time he had gone the right way, the second time he had made a mistake; but he could no longer remember which of these two streets he had taken the first time-moreover, they looked very much alike.
He took the one to the left, and after a few detours made necessary by the arrangement of sidewalks, he came out-much sooner than he would have believed possible-on the courthouse square, just in front of the police station.
Laurent was just leaving; he has indicated his surprise at finding Wallas here, since he had left some fifteen minutes ago. Yet Laurent has not asked for any explanation and has offered to drive the special agent to Juard’s clinic in his own car, for he was going that way himself.
Two minutes later, Wallas was ringing at Number 11. It is the same nurse who has opened the door before- the one who, this morning, had insisted so indiscreetly on keeping him there despite the doctor’s absence. He could tell from her smile that she recognized him. “They’re all the same!” He has told her he wanted to speak to Doctor Juard in person; he has emphasized the urgent nature of his visit and has given her a card on which were printed the words: “Bureau of Investigation of the Ministry of the Interior.”
He has been asked to wait in a kind of dim parlor-library. Since no one has asked him to sit down, he has walked up and down in front of the shelves filled with books, now and then reading a few titles as he passed. One whole shelf was filled with books devoted to the plague-as many historical studies as medical ones.
A woman has walked through the room, then two others and a short, thin man wearing glasses, who seemed
