Hubert Aquin - Next Episode

Then we went back to the darkened city. We took a few steps towards the Hôtel d’Angleterre, stopping before we reached its crowded terrace. We took a table on the terrace of the Château d’Ouchy, turning our backs on the fading sun, looking out on our left at the coastline with its grand hotels and on our right at the gloomy Alps adrift on the lake. It was at that same table, over a gin and tonic and with the grand perspective of the Lepontine Alps sweeping to infinity, that K told me about the Mercedes 300SL with Zurich plates. Lost in K’s black eyes, I had trouble following her complicated revelations, especially because I was gazing, thrilled, at her full lips and delighting in her long sentences that were often enigmatic, though they were familiar to me.

“He’s a banker,” she said to me.

“What’s his name again?”

“Carl von Ryndt. But of course you can’t trust it. He’s a banker like thousands of other Swiss. In Basel a few months ago he was calling himself de Heute or de Heutz. He claimed to be Belgian (he even affected the accent) and that he was writing a thesis on Scipio Africanus …”

“Mystifying!”

“But listen to this! Pierre — the boss, that is — had him followed, which wasn’t easy with a bird like him. I’ll spare you the historical theories he was basing his thesis on. There’s something frightening, believe me, about giving yourself a cover like that: it’s nearly as complicated as trying to pass as an apostolic nuncio and actually saying a pontifical mass complete with deacons and the rest … In any event, von Ryndt couldn’t surprise me any more. In Basel he was so successful at passing himself off as a historian of the Roman wars that he actually gave scholarly lectures on Scipio Africanus. We know now that von Ryndt is supposedly writing a thesis that was actually written a hundred years ago by some famous man nobody’s ever heard of! He spends less time in the university library than in the annex of the Federal Palace in Berne, claiming he’s doing research in the federal capital: for a long time von Ryndt played a Belgian historian, very studious and specializing in a generally unknown period of Roman history. By the end of our investigation, de Heute or de Heutz — von Ryndt’s double, that is — proved to be incredibly shrewd and downright dangerous for us … You know, since my separation I’ve looked at things more coldly than I used to. To tell the truth, I changed my philosophy of life by making a mess of my own … What are you thinking about? You look so sad suddenly … Disaster doesn’t frighten me any more. I don’t think I’ll ever live through another period as bleak as the past twelve months, which I spent in hotel rooms in Manchester, London, Brussels, Berne, or Geneva, in transit in all those cities and obliged to keep up a bold front. I think I went through a severe depression: I was on medication for a while, but I’ve never gone for treatment. Now it’s over. How do I seem to you? Look how wonderful it is on the lake just now. If I were a millionaire, I’d buy a villa here on the shore of the lake. And when I was depressed, I wouldn’t budge from my villa. I’d just stay there and look at the mountains, the way we’re doing right now …”

“It’s wonderful around Vevey. Do you know Clarens? No … Or maybe on the shore between St-Prex and Allaman — but I’m dreaming too. We’ll never be millionaires unless we make off with the funds of the organization and pull some successful holdups … But if I ever made a million, I wouldn’t sink my capital into a Swiss chalet. I’d rather open an account at the Fabrique Nationale or Solingen …”

“You’re right. There’s no golden retirement for us, not even a peaceful life as long as we can’t live normally in our country. Tonight, I’m in Lausanne. In a few days the organization will send me somewhere else …”

I was lost in her gaze, a black lake where just that morning I had seen the sun emerge, bare and flamboyant. I was sad with K’s sadness, happy when she seemed happy, and I became a revolutionary again when she alluded to the revolution that had brought us together and that still obsesses me, unfinished …

“Over the past six months, he’s been seen in Montreal three times as far as we know. We have proof that he’s in contact with Gaudy and that this von Ryndt (or the Belgian) is Gaudy’s emissary in Europe. Now do you understand?”

“I understand … and at this point I wouldn’t wait one second more to accept the obvious, I’d swing into action. It’s just that while we’re talking about von Ryndt, he may have changed his name yet again …”

K gave me a long look that was both defiant and loving. We understood one another, and she went on quite simply:

“We have to settle this problem in the next twenty-four hours … Don’t you agree? But let me tell you a little more about him. Von Ryndt is president of the Banque Commerciale Saharienne at 13 or 14 rue Bonnivard in Geneva. He’s also on the board of the Union des Banques Suisses. I’ll pass over the relationship between the UBS and the Berne Secret Service. But you know that the UBS is a powerful federal lobby, and you also know that article 47b of the federal constitution, which guarantees anonymity to anyone using Switzerland as a safety deposit box, may, at a certain level and very discreetly, break the rules. When you get right down to it, von Ryndt is a visionary who knows about certain secret funds, the organization’s for instance, and who can therefore freeze them simply by eliminating the few patriots with legal access to them. It’s even possible that whenever a deposit is made into a Swiss bank account, there’s a duplicate that through von Ryndt is deposited in RCMP files in Ottawa, in Montreal, and maybe even with our ‘friends’ the CIA. And as every foreigner’s stay on Swiss soil is recorded in meticulous detail, by working methodically von Ryndt and his colleagues can know which of us is making the transfers and so forth …”

“Carl von Ryndt, Banque Commerciale Saharienne, 13 rue Bonnivard, Mercedes 300SL with Zurich plates. I’ll remember that. But does this Banque Commerciale Saharienne really exist, or is it like our Laboratoire de Recherches Pharmaco-logiques SA?”

K gave me all the co-ordinates of the man with the powerful car that would soon be of no use to him. Then around six-thirty p.m. we separated, after arranging to meet twenty-four hours later on the terrace of the Hôtel d’Angleterre under the window of the room we’d just left, drunk on each other, in love.

NOW THAT IT’S well past my deadline, I’m trying to recall, in order, the minutes between the time when I left K at the Château d’Ouchy and the next day when I went back to the terrace of the Hôtel d’Angleterre, but I keep getting lost in this official report. I skid on the hairpin turns of memory just as my Volvo continued to skid on the Col des Mosses between Aigle and Etibaz before I came back to Château d’Oex. My first information about von Ryndt took me to the Hôtel des Trois Rois in Vevey, and from there I went to the Rochers de Naye at Montreux, still looking for the banker with the 300sL. According to the bellhop I smoothed over with Swiss francs, von Ryndt was going to meet a notary called Rubattel in Château d’Oex, on the Chemin du Temple near Schwub’s pharmacy. I figured it would take me an hour to drive from the heart of Montreux to Château d’Oex if I pushed it. But I stepped on my Volvo’s gas pedal hard enough to warp the sheet of steel under my feet. Traffic between Montreux and Yvorne was heavy and it was unbelievably hard to stay on schedule. In my Volvo, stuck in the demoralizing stream of cars, I felt as if time were working against me, and I was certain that von Ryndt was living out his final hours in the offices of the Union Fribourgeoise de Crédit. I tried hard to pass the fools ahead of me who were doing sixty kilometres an hour. I was struggling at the wheel, sweating so much that my shirt was soaked under my left armpit, where I could feel the weight of my Colt 38 automatic, firmly sheathed in its holster. Before I drove into Aigle, I literally leapt onto the bypass road on the way to Sepey and Saanen. As soon as I’d left the Pont de la Grande Eau, I switched on my high-beams and drove at breakneck speed along the steep wall of the mountain. At the first hairpin turn I realized that the car was straining on its axle. But as I climbed towards the Diablerets, I continued to take each curve at maximum speed, reducing my ties to the ground to a plaintive squeal. At every turn I reduced the slim margin separating me from a swerve — a bold procedure that gained me a few seconds.