Three to Kill by Jean-Patrick Manchette Page A

scratching through the opening of his shirt at the middle of his chest, where some men have a thicket of hair. He picked up the receiver. As he did so, he noticed with irritation that the stereo had been on all night. Someone shouted into his ear, and at first he didn’t know who it was, then he realized it was Béa.
    â€œOh, wait a second, excuse me.”
    She shouted again. She was sobbing. She wanted an explanation. Gerfaut meanwhile was crossing the room, managing, not without difficulty, to carry the whole telephone with him. Reaching the stereo, he turned the power off, briefly felt the turntable, the tuner, and the amp (the two last were very hot to the touch), and winced.
    â€œWhat happened was I had a fit of depression.” He sat down on the couch and placed the phone on his lap while holding the receiver to his ear with his shoulder. He looked around for a cigarette. Béa was shouting over the line.
    â€œHello!” he shouted in his turn. “I hear you very badly.” With his finger Gerfaut kept rotating the dial. Each time he did so communication was interrupted. “Hello? Hello?” he shouted. “Béa? I don’t know whether you can hear me. Don’t get worried. I love you. Just a bit of depression. I am coming back. Hello? I said I’m coming back. I’ll be there this evening. Tomorrow at the latest. Hello?” He was still fooling with the dial, and everything he said reached Béa badly broken up. For her part she had the greatest trouble making herself understood.
    Gerfaut ended the conversation abruptly by depressing the crossbar of the telephone with his index finger. Letting the bar back up, he listened for the dial tone, then replaced the receiver and put the telephone back in its usual place. Then he unplugged it altogether. Let Béa call back if she wanted to. She would hear unanswered rings; he would hear nothing at all, not even a ring.
    He went through to the kitchen and made himself some tea. As it was brewing, he showered, shaved, and changed—and the two hit men kept rolling toward Paris in their bright red Lancia Beta 1800 sedan. Gerfaut drank his tea and swallowed spoonfuls of marmalade without any bread and read a few pages of an old issue of Fiction magazine. When he had finished, he plugged the telephone in once more and called a car-rental company and then a taxi service.
    Around eleven o’clock, a cab dropped Gerfaut off at a garage, where he took possession of the Ford Taunus he had reserved. For a time he drove around Paris aimlessly. The two hit men were speeding along the highway. Carlo had taken the wheel. Bastien dozed to his right. They had quarreled for a moment when Bastien told Carlo the exact wording of the telegram. Carlo had maintained that it made most sense to wait in Saint-Georges for Gerfaut to return. But Bastien argued that the words “letter to follow” in the message indicated that Gerfaut was not coming back any time soon. They exchanged several volleys of “soft in the head” and “retard.” In the end, Bastien had weakened. He sat up abruptly and swore.
    â€œI dreamed of the old man again.”
    â€œMe, I never dream.”
    â€œMe, neither, not usually.”
    â€œSometimes I wish I did.”
    â€œSometimes,” said Bastien, “I dream of castles, castles—how can I explain it to you? I dream of castles that are all gold, with towers and spires. I know—just like Mont-Saint-Michel, you know what I mean? But mountainous—the landscape all around is mountainous—and mists everywhere.”
    â€œWhat I’d like is to dream of women.”
    â€œNo, no. Not me.”
    â€œThat woman the other time,” said Carlo. “I liked that.”
    The other time, after throwing the old man out of the window, they had gone to the woman’s house. They made quite sure that she knew nothing. Absolutely sure. At one point, Carlo had forced the woman