LITMIR.BIZ

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      5

      The attempt on Gerfaut’s life did not take place immediately, but it was not long coming: just three days.

      The day after his late-night return home, Gerfaut awoke at noon. The little girls were at school and, being semiboarders, would not be home till evening. Béa had gone out about ten, leaving a message on the pillow. She could sleep for just four or five hours and still be fresh and energetic all day long. She could also on occasion sleep for thirty hours straight in a deep, childlike slumber. The message read: 9:45 a.m. Tea in thermos – cold roast in fridge – have settled up with Maria – back in afternoon (to pack) but second screening Antégor 6 p.m. si te gusta and if you can – LOVE. (The last word was in English. The ink was purple and the handwriting was elegantly careless; Béa had used a felttip marker.)

      Gerfaut went into the living room, where he found the thermos of tea on the coffee table along with zwiebacks, butter, and the mail. He drank some tea and ate two buttered zwiebacks and opened the mail. There were several subscription offers for business magazines and a few financial newsletters; a friend Gerfaut had not heard from in two years wrote from Australia that his married life had become intolerable and asked whether Gerfaut thought he should get a divorce; and on a green card Gerfaut’s chess partner had indicated his fortnightly move. Gerfaut noted the move in his notebook, thinking that he wouldn’t have the time to think about it right away, seeing that they were getting ready to leave on vacation, but then he replied mechanically, castling just as Harston had castled against Larsen when in the same position at the Las Palmas tournament of 1974. On the part of the green card left for correspondence, he wrote what was to be his address for the whole of the next month in Saint-Georges-de-Didonne.

      Around two in the afternoon, shaved, showered, combed, deodorized, dressed, Gerfaut looked at himself in the hall mirror. He had a handsome pale oval face, blond hair, a forceful nose and chin; but he also had liquid blue eyes, and his gaze was slightly abstracted, slightly soft, a tad owlish and evasive. He was on the short side. Last summer, in clogs with gigantic heels, Béa had stood a few centimeters taller. His proportions, the breadth of his shoulders, his musculature were satisfactory, but no more than that; the exercises he did every day, or almost, had had some effect. Not too much of a belly for the moment, though there was danger there. The body in question was at present encased in Mariner briefs, a slate-gray jerseywool suit over a white-and-slate striped shirt with a solid-white collar and a plum-colored tie; cotton socks; and plum-colored English shoes with much visible stitching (what is perhaps called overstitching).

      The elevator bore Gerfaut straight down to his Mercedes in the building’s underground garage. He started up, drove out into the street, wound his way to the Gare d’Austerlitz, and crossed the Seine. From the cassette player came Tal Farlow. In about twenty minutes Gerfaut reached the headquarters of his company, a subsidiary of ITT located just off the Boulevard des Italiens. He parked the Mercedes in the company’s underground garage. The elevator took him first to the ground floor, where he slipped the green card, restamped and readdressed to his chess partner, a retired mathematics teacher in Bordeaux, into a mailbox. The ground-floor lobby was full of oraculating working stiffs. Gerfaut got back in the elevator and went up to the second floor. The second-floor reception area was also full of oraculating workers. A potted plant gently toppled over as Gerfaut struggled out of the elevator. A union representative from the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) stood athwart the stairs leading to the third floor. He wore a checkered shirt and royal-blue canvas pants.

      “Excuse me, please,” muttered Gerfaut as he pushed past.

      “If Monsieur Charançon is afraid to come out,” the union delegate was shouting, “we’ll drag his fat ass out ourselves.”

      A bellow of approval went up from those in possession of the lobby. Gerfaut extricated himself from the melee and went down a corridor with Gerflex vinyl flooring. He reached his door and went in. In the anteroom Mademoiselle Truong was painting her nails scarlet.

      “How do you manage?” asked Gerfaut. “With nails like that. I mean, you type a lot. Don’t you break them?”

      “It happens. Good morning, monsieur. Did you have a good trip?”

      “Excellent, thanks.” Gerfaut made for his office.

      “Roland Desroziers is in there,” warned Mademoiselle Truong. “Well, I wasn’t going to fight with him, was I?”

      “No one expects you to fight,” answered Gerfaut, going into his office and closing the door behind him. “Hi there, Roland.”

      “Hi there, you little cop-out,” said Desroziers, who was an ecological militant and a union delegate of the French Confederation of Labor (CFDT) and wore a black sweater and jeans; Gerfaut had been a militant with him in the early sixties in a radical fraction of the Seine-Banlieue Federation of the Unified Socialist Party (PSU). “It’s talk, talk, talk in there,” said Desroziers, “I came in here to get a drink.” He had indeed purloined Gerfaut’s Cutty Sark and was quaffing a large measure of it in a paper cup. “You don’t mind me drinking your scotch, I hope?”

      “Of course not,” answered Gerfaut, smiling but peeking at the bottle and the paper cup to see just how much Desroziers had helped himself to. “It may be talk, talk, talk,” he observed, “but that Stalinist bureaucrat says they’re going to drag the boss’s fat ass out of here themselves—those are his exact words—so you’re going to be trampled underfoot if you sit around here drinking the rich man’s booze.”

      “Shit!” said Desroziers, hurriedly sticking his nose back into the paper cup and slurping the rest of his drink. Coughing, he set the cup down. “I’m out of here!”

      “Go ahead, set the place on fire, trash the computer, string Charançon up, why don’t you,” suggested Gerfaut in a dispirited tone as he sat down at his desk and reached for the whisky bottle to put it away. “All power to the workers’ councils!” he added bitterly. But the CFDT man was already gone.

      That afternoon Gerfaut took care of business pending, dealt with salespeople needing directives, and conducted a long discussion with his immediate subordinate, who would be standing in for him during July, and who, truth to tell, hoped through a combination of intrigue, servility, and betrayal soon to replace him completely and definitively. Gerfaut was for his part called in to see Charançon, who had had the greatest difficulty disentangling himself from the proletarian agitation. Charançon’s face was flushed, and he wore a tiny Lions Club de France badge on his lapel and Pierre Cardin suspenders beneath his gray suit. Behind him on the wall was a poster under glass with pretty painted pink flowers and the English words HOME SWEET HOME inscribed in large, pale, pink frilly letters. Superimposed on the flowers and the pink inscription was a text in small black characters whose author was Harold S. Geneen, president of ITT. It ran as follows: In different locations around the world, almost anywhere on the globe, rather more than two hundred workdays each year are given over to executive meetings at different levels of our organization. It is during these meetings, be they in New York, Brussels, Hong Kong, or Buenos Aires, that decisions are taken based on logic, on a business logic that leads to choices that are almost inevitable, for the simple reason that we are in possession of almost all the basic elements needed to arrive at decisions. Just like our planning, our periodic meetings are designed to clarify the logic of things and expose that logic to the light of day, where its value and necessity will be apparent to all. This logic is immune to all state laws and regulations. It is a part of a natural process. There was no way of telling whether the presence of this poster in Charançon’s office testified to a discreet sense of humor or to a terminal state of alienation. Charançon congratulated Gerfaut on the success of his negotiations of the last two days, and it was agreed that his bonus would be credited to his bank account in the course of July. Charançon poured two glasses of Glenlivet.

      “Thank you.” Gerfaut took the glass Charançon held out to him.

      “They are completely mad,” said Charançon. “Do you remember May ‘68? They were still out on strike in the middle of July—but they had no idea what they wanted! Remember?”

      “When

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