I’m losing him. In what he’s saying and, more worryingly, in placing him. The smell of burning is gradually fading. This masquerade can’t go on, he will run out of patience. He’s talking crap like this to break me down.
“Give me that photo.”
I’m breathing clouds of dust. Right now he could be anywhere. I know where Véro’s desk is. I feel along the top of it, I do it without a sound. He must have heard, I pick up a pencil and then something slim and metallic. A paperknife.
“Do you miss your hand very much?”
There’s one thing I’m sure of, you piece of shit, I’ll cut your throat in the end. I’m doing all this for you. If I had known I would see you this evening I would have brought my meat cleaver. It might have given me some courage. Anyway, I need a hand. Maybe not yours, but a hand all the same. You turned me into a physical monster, and the mental equivalent wasn’t far behind. That’s logical. I don’t know what you’ve got against these Objectivists, but they’re all I have left now.
He must be standing over by the main door. I’ll never have enough strength in my arm, or the skill to stab him with this crappy paperknife. He might have a razor twice the size in his hand. He’s going to have a great time.
Tiny flashes of light . . . he is walking over by the bubble-wrap, the exact opposite of where I thought he was . . . he is very close. To my right . . . very close . . . It’s now or never.
I climb onto the table and throw myself onto him, trying to pierce into him, striking at him as best I can but my arm feels empty, bashing his chest but it won’t go in, it’s dark, my arm is hollow, like a reed, brittle, the blade either slides over him as if stroking him or grates onto the concrete floor. With a bit of light I would be able to see him smiling smugly. I can’t slit his throat, I can’t even cut him with this shitty little blade in my powerless arm . . .
Not the tiniest little nick. I won’t be getting his hand tonight. I dealt him one last blow to keep him on the ground a few seconds longer. And I fled. Tipping over everything I could as I passed. Once outside I ran blindly through the streets for a long time, with Nico’s dead face as my only horizon.
*
I only managed to catch my breath once I was home, up in my apartment. I felt finished. I tried to gather my thoughts, to understand myself, to grasp how I could have seen a corpse – the corpse of someone I knew – and only a few minutes later to have wanted only one thing: to pierce a living man’s flesh. Briançon must be right: I’m no longer in the free territories.
*
First thing in the morning I found myself in Biarritz trying to justify God knows what to a couple of mutes. I didn’t fare any better in the oral than in the written test. The distance was too huge. I’ve done my best to drive their expressions from my mind.
Nine-thirty, Véro arrives at the office, the door is open, there’s the smell of burning, a charred picture on the ground, upturned furniture, the lights are all on in the storeroom, the shelving is on the floor, busts scattered on the ground, and the rest. I get up to have a drink of water, the cramps in my neck make me twist my head in every direction. The typewriter with an indelible “Dear you two” rolled round the carriage. The coffee machine. My billiard cue. The crumpled pieces of paper spread out over the table. I can’t see what is most urgent. Yes I can: putting the cleaver away in the cupboard. I sit back down, get up again, wander round the shower. I wouldn’t mind making a phone call, I don’t know who to. I can’t think of anyone close enough to me to cope with the lament of the vengeful amputee. All of this is because of billiards. I didn’t have enough patience for anything else. Lying on my bed, I thought of the pianist who ended up losing a hand like me. Ravel wrote him a concerto for the left hand. That’s what it is to have friends.
Soon Delmas will try to contact me. I need to be ready for it. Perhaps that’s what is urgent. He’s going to talk about Nico and an “attacker”. That makes it sound like a profession. And, actually, as far as this gentleman is concerned, I still can’t understand how he operates. Methodically or just by improvising? No weapon, apart from his serenity, his patience and some sort of Stanley knife.
I stayed on my bed for several hours, without grappling onto anything coherent. The documents are still waiting, and they’ll just have to wait. Véro must be in a bad way at the moment. I’m condemned to spend the evening here, in the same feverish state.
Towards the end of the afternoon, Delmas rang to ask me to come and see him without giving me a chance to quibble about when, and I took this as a release. “In an hour would be best, and don’t be too late. . .” From his turn of phrase I realized that our relationship had just gone downhill imperceptibly.
In response I deliberately loitered. But with some excuses: as I slipped my Métro pass into the slot I realized that the world was definitely not designed for left-handed people. It only takes so many little details of that sort to come to that conclusion. Nothing too restricting, no, but it’s just a little too systematic. A travel pass – it slides in to the right, like when you open a door or put on a record. Minor things. And it gets you every time. Before I would never have noticed the way things have been conceived. I had a lot of trouble putting my travel pass away in my breast pocket, because right-handed people use the left-hand pocket. Once I had managed to emerge from these musings and to down a beer, I made my entrance at the Investigations Squad and into Delmas’s office. The man still hasn’t grasped the fact that he can’t treat me just like anyone else.
From the flush in his cheeks and the slight twist to his mouth I can tell he has just spoken my name. But he didn’t feel he had the right to raise his voice, not yet.
“Don’t you know how to be on time?”
“Yes, but everything I do takes twice as long as it would for you. In others words, for me, every hour takes two.”
Hey, I could get used to mucking about like that. I stop talking for a moment, so that he can tell me Nico is dead.
“I asked you to come because something happened yesterday which may be connected with what happened to you. Did you know Nicolas Daufin?”
Daufin . . . what, like a dolphin? If only I’d known that when we worked together . . .
“Nico . . . yes, he works at the depot.”
I haven’t picked up on his use of the past tense.
“He died yesterday in circumstances not dissimilar to your assault.”
I don’t say anything. I can’t think of anything to say. And if he gets the feeling that this isn’t news to me, bad luck. I’m rubbish at reconstructions, even emotional ones.
“What sort of . . . circumstances?”
“He was found in his depot under some shelving full of sculptures, but he was already dead when the shelves were pulled over onto him. First the attacker had tried to strangle him with a shoelace, then he struck him on the forehead with a bust. There are also signs of a struggle in the entrance. You know the layout of the depot . . .”
“Yes, I’ve worked there.”
I didn’t see the shoelace yesterday, just the blue bruising round the sides of his face. Delmas isn’t mentioning the burned painting.
“Do you go back there much?”
“Hardly ever, when I’m in the area, and I’m never in the area.”
“What about the last time, how long ago would that have been?”
Danger.
There are two possibilities: either Véro has told him about it or she hasn’t. Either way, Delmas is sneaky. The only way I can play this ball is straight down the line, onto the cushion with a little sidespin to the right.
“. . . a long time ago. Several months.”
“Before or after your accident?”
“Well before it, at least it’s a good point of reference for dating things!”
“Have you had no contact, even by telephone, with Monsieur Daufin or Mademoiselle Le Monais?”
“Véro? Do you know Véronique as well?”
“She found the body. Was she very . . . very close to
Monsieur Daufin?”
“I never really knew. They got on very well, at the time. How is she?”
“Not good.”
“That bad?”
“She took it very badly. She came out into the street and a passer-by saw her collapse. He contacted the police.”
There’s no fathoming what really goes on between people . . . They weren’t related or married. Just work colleagues. Friends. He closed up the depot, and she opened it in the mornings. Nothing ambiguous in their behaviour, no way of knowing whether they had been lovers or whether they still were. Nico said “my little girl” when he referred to his private life. No fathoming it . . .
“You and Daufin have worked together, and the two of you end up under pieces of sculpture a couple of months apart. You have to concede that that’s enough to make a connection.”
“Yes, there’s no getting away from that. Except that I was a bit luckier than him.”
“It is Mademoiselle Le Monais who inventories the collection, isn’t it?”
“It’s taken her ten years already, not to mention the ten still to go.”
“Surely not, I’ve seen to it that the process is speeded up. Personally I’ve never seen such a shambles. Starting next week we’re drafting in a team to record every last grain of dust in the place. We need to know exactly what the attacker was interested in.”
There you are . . . she’s been waiting for her work experience people long enough, poor Véro . . . I wish them luck, the little new boys. It will be several months before they realize that one pathetic little rolled-up painting has disappeared. Even Véro has never heard of “The Objectivists”.
One of his henchman comes in and asks if he wants a coffee. Delmas says no and offers me one. I accept.
“Tell me . . . what do you do at the moment?”
I realize that this is the most important question. That this is what he got me here for. It takes me a little while to adopt a natural pose, the time it takes for me to snap the sugar lump between my fingers. It’s a knack I perform more and more proficiently, and it’s my way of showing the superintendent that, for me, the most difficult laws are ergonomic ones. Because the others, the ones that justify his practices and determine my freedom, the ones we apply without knowing it and we violate without any pleasure, the ones that generalize individual cases . . . those laws are hardly anything to do with me.
“Not much. I’m trying to become left-handed.”
“Is it difficult?”
“It’s slow. What are you? Right-handed?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you’re with nine tenths of the human race, and you’re better off there, because you know about the problems of minorities as well as I do. At the moment I’m trying to make myself a little place amongst the other one tenth. But I already know that I’ll never have the benefits of a true left-hander’s short circuiting.”
He doesn’t seem to know what that is. There isn’t even time to explain, he’s onto the next thing. The man couldn’t give a stuff about the short circuit, that hundredth of a second quicker response time which is enough to mean there are five left-handed people in the six-strong French fencing team, and three of the world’s top five tennis players are left-handed. And I’ll never enjoy that, that tiny advantage. You have to be born with it. But the superintendent couldn’t give a stuff about that . . .
“Are you going to work at the gallery?”
“We’ll see. For now I just want to wipe all of that out.”
After a short, irritated silence, he turned calmly towards the window. I felt uncomfortable because I could no longer see his eyes.
“I’m going to find him.”
No point asking who. It sounded like an impossible challenge, an appointment with fate. Did he say it for me? Against me? No way of knowing.
“I’m going to concentrate on him alone. The Post-Impressionists can wait.”
I smiled at this last sentence which, taken out of context, captured all the agonies of Van Gogh. It gave me an opportunity to ask him about something that had intrigued me since our first conversation.
“What about you . . . did you like painting before you joined the police or was it the other way around? I mean . . . how did this specializing come about?”
After a long silence he turned back towards me, still very calm, a little absent.
“You don’t end up in this office by chance.”
I looked around the desk and on the walls for some sort of clue. And I found nothing, not even a poster.
“You must keep abreast of what’s going on in Paris, don’t you?”
“I don’t have time, I miss all the exhibitions I want to see. . . Before joining the force I wanted to. . . In 1972 I went to see a Francis Bacon exhibition. . . I was already a policeman. . . Do you know Bacon? Apparently he got the urge to paint almost by chance, when he saw some Picassos . . .”
And the chain stopped there, I thought.
“It must be a good job.”
“Sometimes it is, but the bulk of it is people handling stolen goods, fakes, thefts . . . well, you see the sort of thing.”
“You must see some amazing stuff, don’t you?”
As I said that I realized I asked exactly the same question of taxi drivers, anything to avoid talking about the weather.
“Yeah . . . sometimes. . . There are nutters everywhere but, in the arts, you could say we get our fair share.”
If I ask for any details, he’ll cut me dead, switch us back into our proper roles.
“Once I tailed an incredible guy, he specialized in Picasso, and his only distinguishing feature was that he had the Demoiselles d’Avignon tattooed at the top of his shoulder. Can you imagine checking that out on suspects when you’re making discreet enquiries? Not long ago we cornered a Rembrandt in the Métro. Yes, a Rembrandt, rolled up in a tube of cardboard. Not listed anywhere. We don’t get things like that every day. . . Right, well, I’m going to keep a very close eye on all this and I’d like it if we stayed in touch, I may need you. There may be no connection between your business and Monsieur Daufin’s death, but I don’t really believe that. I won’t keep you any longer.”
“Who can I get in touch with to see how Véro is getting on?”
“Baujon Hospital, but no one can see her at the moment. She’ll stay there for a few days, I think. You can never really tell with nervous breakdowns.”
I left his office feeling a bit stunned and, rather stupidly, I thanked him.
Delmas treated me like a normal person, not like a victim, and it made a change from the well-meaning embarrassment I’ve been treated to since my accident. It proves that the world doesn’t stop at the end of my right wrist.
*
I have finished a bottle of over-chilled, slightly acrid Chablis and gone back to my table where my booty of crumpled paper is spread out. There isn’t much there, actually, but it’s all good. The Young Painters’ Exhibition was put on in March, and the press cuttings include a few articles about the general tendencies but three of them report the unscheduled intervention made by four uncontrollable and completely uninhibited individuals on the twenty-seventh. The most interesting piece is from the June issue of a rag called Art Libre which no longer exists . . . and more’s the pity.
[. . .] And then, amid a general purring which seemed to be the sum total of the Parisian response to the fine arts, we saw a note of dissent. Four young men burst into the gallery at the end of the evening. Just as masters and pupils were succumbing to the plaudits, this foursome hurled stones into the swamp of consensus and respectability. They shouted, calling for death to galleries and to their guard dogs, the “minor patrons of the arts”. They took down paintings so that they could exhibit their own, they handed out leaflets and were extremely rude about the exhibitors [. . .]
Another review reproduced the text in the leaflet.
Since art is dead, let’s give it a proper funeral!
We, the Objectivists, proclaim that art was killed b
y business interests, gallery owners, critics and other legitimizing bodies.
The Objectivists won’t be cutting a single ear off.
It’s too late.
The Objectivists will never make any claims, they do not exist, they will NEVER speculate about the names of any of their members. People don’t sign corpses.
The Young Painters’ Exhibition is just a hospice for aesthetics.
The Fine Arts are being assassinated.
And a good thing too.
In the third there is an account of the end of the evening. Some are scandalized, others acutely interested.
One of the exhibitors, feeling he had been insulted more than the others, tried to inform the police, but the organizers succeeded in quelling the climate of violence which was becoming a serious threat to their exhibition. By contrast, Edgar Delarge, owner of the Europe Gallery and famous for his pursuit of new talent – although some would say he confuses talent with mockery – announced that he was interested (!) in the young pseudo-revolutionaries. The four individuals, whose only merit was to remain true to the stance they had adopted, shouted him down for his “noxious trading in manure on canvas”. (sic).
I so needed them to have existed.
The four of them had succeeded in creating this mayhem. Chemin may be losing his teeth, but his memory is still reliable. It’s all there: the cradle of the Fine Arts, the rebellion, the spitting in the face of business interests, the contempt for appointed officials, the anonymity and the refusal to acknowledge their own work. Morand was there before becoming Morand.
And then there was this gallery owner, Delarge, an “entrepreneur” like the others, but this one had the enterprise to “declare his interest”. You really had to be mad, or to love a bit of scandal, or to love the Objectivists to stand up to their insolence. That’s where I can carry on my research because, in its own quiet way, their assault of 27 June bore some fruit . . . even if it only amounted to influencing the acquisitions committee. And why couldn’t they have broken with their great claim of integrity a second time? Surely Delarge must remember, he could tell me about his confrontation with them, or even describe it physically, he may have seen their studio or kept an eye on the rest of their output. At least he could tell me what it was about these young terrorists that he liked so much. And as I turn to look at Attempt 30 for the thousandth time, I feel I would like someone else – someone more informed and impassioned – to explain in simple words what it is that I feel. Chemin could have been that person but he lost his eye long ago, somewhere in a chromo of the Everglades. And I need to know everything because behind this painting there is a lunatic, a twisted mind who crushes memories, cuts off hands and caves in skulls. A gentleman with a Stanley knife. A madman who talks in the dark. And I’ll find him before Delmas.