"Right. We’ll leave tonight so as to be in position by daybreak. We musn't let this opportunity slip through our fingers. Then, if anything goes wrong tomorrow, we’ll still have another day.”
They fell silent. He was hoping she would acknowledge his audacity with at least a word or two of commendation but, having recovered from her surprise, she now seemed to be absorbed in her own thoughts. He waited anxiously for the outcome of this inner deliberation.
“How are you going to kill him, darling?” she finally asked.
He could see she was preparing a counterattack. Her gentle, insidious tone and the "darling,'’ which she herself never used in private, were enough to reveal her intention. The word “kill” almost made him jump out of his skin. He managed, however, to retain an appearance of composure.
“I’ll take one of the revolvers that are hidden in your mother’s house.”
“But you don't seem to realize . . . It’ll have to be done in silence.”
Each word was charged with a special ferocity. She went on methodically, as though explaining a theorem to a child.
“The shots couldn’t fail to be heard, not only by his bodyguard but also by the French police post that is hardly any distance away. Although the forest is fairly dense in the neighborhood of the inn, it doesn’t stretch very far. They’d be bound to find us. No, that’s out of the question.”
She pretended to turn the matter over in her mind, like an eager colleague who was trying to work out for him the best solution to a tricky problem.
“Cut his throat? Perhaps. But you told me that requires a perfect and rather difficult technique. Let’s see, now ... I think,” she concluded, looking him straight in the eyes, “I think this would be an ideal opportunity to use your piano wire.”
He broke out into a cold sweat and at the same time felt a violent urge to strangle her rather than anyone else. He was the one—as usual—who had first brought up the question of piano wire: in London, when they were assembling their operational kit.
“It’s worth taking a few lengths with us,” he had said. “You can’t always find what you want on the spot just when you happen to need it.”
Flaunting his experience, he had then told her what he had learned in his special training course—according to some experts, strangling was the easiest and surest method of getting rid of an enemy in silence; the use of a knife required too much practice.
This was an obvious occasion for using piano wire; she was right. But in her suggestion he detected the devilish urge to test him to the utmost limit by multiplying the dangers of the task he had set himself in a moment of madness. “Strangling,” “stabbing”—these words caused him no concern in a training camp in England, so remote and improbable appeared the act they represented. Here, today, when it was a question of a few hours, the terms assumed a very different aspect.
He was caught in a trap. He could not think of a single valid objection to the terrible logic of her conclusion: a pistol shot was clearly unwise. It had to be the piano wire, which he himself had praised and which he had insisted on bringing along, in the event of circumstances of this very kind. At a pinch, he could still choose between this method and a knife, but he would have to make up his mind immediately; he could not stand the torment of her gaze a moment longer. She required an immediate reply and could scarcely wait to inflict that smile of hers on him again.
“I choose the wire,” he said in a flat voice.
From his mode of expression, one might have sup- posed he himself was the intended victim. He realized this and corrected himself, managing to assume a steadier tone in a heroic attempt to correct the ambiguous turn of phrase from which his merciless companion might be able to divine his pitiful state of mind.
“You're right, darling, it’s the surest method. I’ll jump on him from behind and strangle him. He won’t have time to utter a sound.”
20
“He couldn’t bring himself to do it. At the last moment he suddenly lost his nerve and col- lapsed like a pricked balloon. Thank heavens! If he had managed to bring it off, I think I should have given up the struggle. He was compelled to show his cowardice, but he did not admit it.”
In front of her mother, Claire forced herself to assume an exultant tone. As a matter of fact, she was at the end of her rope. The constant battle she waged against Arvers was beginning to wear her down as much as him. She did her best to look upon her adversary’s failure as a victory, whereas it was nothing more than a point in her favor after a long series of setbacks.
“Tell me about it.”
The old woman retained her usual self-possession. It would have needed a grear deal more than an abortive attempt on the life of a German to crush her spirit. She still had the same sullen, stubborn, obdurate expression that nothing could alter except, perhaps, the fulfillment of her highest hope—a hope that had grad- ually turned her features into a strained and frozen mask.
Claire had just arrived, out of breath, overwrought, and on the point of collapse. Her mother seemed annoyed to see her displaying such lack of self-control, and she scarcely seemed to give a thought to the danger her daughter had courted. She poured out a drink for her and repeated gruffly:
“Tell me about it.”
Claire took a deep breath and managed to master her feelings sufficiently to embark on her story. The previous evening, she had told her mother about the scheme Arvers had in mind. She reported their enemy’s gestures and actions to her every day, conscientiously listening in return to her advice, or, rather, her orders.
“We set out after dark. He hadn’t eaten anything all evening and had locked himself in his room earlier. I managed to get quite close to him before leaving the villa. It wasn’t too easy; he obstinately kept moving away. He smelled of liquor.”
“He smelled of liquor,” her mother echoed with satisfaction.
She made a mental note of every detail of Arvers’ behavior, no matter how trivial. These she mentally pieced together to form a sort of file that grew larger each day, and which she thought would finally burst open someday, revealing the truth.
“He smelled of liquor even though he had taken the precaution of cleaning his teeth. I heard him. He must have spent most of the evening at the bottle. We walked down the road in silence, then I led the way along the shortcuts. I could hear him gasping for breath just behind me. He could hardly keep up. I went on walking as fast as I could.”