Tropic Moon by Georges Simenon

The loggers are sticking together. Not one will talk, and that’s natural. Any other time and we probably could have hushed the whole thing up. You didn’t see anyone leave in the course of the night?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œYou’ll have to come to our house for dinner one of these evenings. My wife will be delighted to meet you. And don’t forget that we have a club, a very modest club, just across from the pier. It’s better than nothing. Anytime you feel like a couple of hands of bridge …”
    He rose, putting an end to the meeting with the ease of a man used to conducting official business.
    â€œGood-bye, my dear friend. If there’s anything at all I can do for you, don’t hesitate to ask.”
    Timar saluted awkwardly, with a slightly excessive degree of ceremony. Outside he saw the sea again, flat as a pond, and the image that had haunted him that morning came back. It was a map of France, a tiny little France right at the edge of the ocean, the familiar map with its rivers, its administrative regions whose shape he knew by heart, its towns. The governor was from Le Havre, his wife from Cognac. One of the loggers came from Limoges, another from Poitiers. Bouilloux had been born in the Morvan.
    They were all neighbors. Timar, in La Rochelle, could have visited every one of them in a couple of hours. And they were gathered here, a mere handful of them, on a narrow strip of land carved out of the equatorial jungle. Boats came and went, little boats like the one he’d seen this morning, with flies buzzing around the winches. And up there, overlooking Libreville, was the cemetery—a fake.
    Timar passed the SACOVA building, spotted the director in the back, behind a counter crowded with black women. They greeted each other with a wave of the hand.
    At that point it wasn’t just the misery of homesickness that had him in its grip: it was a sense of futility. The futility of being here! The futility of struggling against the sun that penetrated his every pore. The futility of the quinine that lifted his spirits and that he swallowed every night. The futility of living and dying, only to be buried in a fake cemetery by four half-naked blacks.
    â€œWhatever made you want to come to Gabon?” the governor had asked.
    What about him? What about all the others? What about that SACOVA employee, up there in the middle of the jungle, who threatened to shoot anyone who came to take his place?
    It was August. In La Rochelle, near the harbor entrance, on the beach with its border of salt cedar, young men and girls were lying on the sand.
    â€œTimar? He went off to Gabon.”
    â€œLucky bastard! What an adventure!”
    Because that’s how they’d talk. While he was just sitting here, his legs weak, in a countryside that was the color of rust. The idea of going back flitted through his head, but he rejected it outright.
    True, he was the nephew of Gaston Timar, counselor general and future senator. But what he hadn’t said was that his father worked for the town council, that he’d had to leave the university for lack of funds, that he didn’t even have enough money to go out with his friends to a café or nightclub.
    The flatboat that was supposed to take him to his post in the interior was still lying on the sand among the native canoes. Nobody was working on it; nobody was worrying about repairing it.
    Suddenly—and so abruptly that he startled himself—Timar made a decision. Gasping at his own audacity, he carried it out. A garage where they repaired cars, machines, and boats faced the sea. He went in. A white man was trying to start up an old car by getting some blacks to push it.
    â€œCould you fix that boat there?”
    â€œWho’s paying for it— SACOVA ?” The man waved his finger to show he wouldn’t do it.
    â€œNo. I’ll pay.”
    â€œThat’s different. You realize it could run to several thousand