The Fugitive Read Online Free PDF Page B

couldn’t stand the punks. I walked over and told them not to do it outside of the Gibus Club; those of us who worked at the movie house would necessarily be dragged into it, and we didn’t want the police snooping around, asking questions, or even worse, a permanent police guard outside of the club. We got to talking, and a little while later I was lending them the benefit of my experience of fighting the local fascists back in the streets of Padua, laying out scenarios for potential campaigns of urban guerrilla warfare. The boys liked my ideas, and in the end we came up with a plan. In order to get the punks away from the Gibus, a small group of the fastest kids would provoke them, and then cut and run. They would draw the punks out to an isolated square, ideal for our purposes. The conditions that I had imposed—no weapons, and especially no punk “hamburgers”—were finally agreed to, however reluctantly.
    The following evening, when I got home from work, I found the courtyard filled with kids, many of them accompanied by older brothers. We shook hands all around, and then moved out to our various positions. What I was doing violated all the rules of clandestine security, but I was going to have to live in that neighborhood for who knows how much longer and I wanted to be accepted. Everything went according to plan, and the enemy went down in painful defeat. As long as I lived in that neighborhood, there were no more attacks against North Africans.
    When I became Jason, an English computer expert, I returned to a calmer and far more comfortable lifestyle. The cover verged on perfection; the one tiny defect was my complete ignorance of the English language and computers.
    There was a real Jason, who had rented the house, through an agency, from England. One of his secretaries, who was also perfectly English, had gone to pick up the keys. No one had ever seen him (fortunately! He was short, painfully skinny, and a redhead. I could never have pretended to be him), so when I moved into the apartment, everyone immediately assumed I was him.
    In order to get through my first meeting with the concierge—concierges tend to be nosy, gossipy, and duplicitous—I showed up in the company of my supposed secretary, who served as interpreter during our initial introduction. In order to limit my contacts with the concierge to hellos and goodbyes, we had decided that Jason, newly arrived from the far side of the English Channel, did not know a word of French. For the entire time that I lived in that apartment building, I said
bonjour
and
bon soir
in an accent that I had adopted from the French renditions of Laurel and Hardy. The concierge must have been about forty. When I noticed the wedding band on her finger, I wondered what her husband did for a living. He was a cop, naturally, as I deduced from his uniform. Luckily, he was a laid-back cop. Once he got home, he forgot about his work and minded his own business. The tenants were his wife’s concern.
    The time came to leave Paris and Europe. To get across the borders that awaited me, I went back to the guise of an Italian tourist. I didn’t need a place of my own anymore, so I moved to Pigalle, where I stayed with a friend, a woman from Peru. Though the neighborhood was quite seamy, it was a perfect backdrop for the tourist disguise; there was a never-ending supply of tourists, at all hours of the day and night. There was one pitfall, however. I had to avoid bumping into tourists from Padua; before my stay in Pigalle, I had no idea of the uncontrolled passion that my fellow Paduans seemed to have for Pigalle and its sinful nightclubs, all sex and sequins. The Paduans arrived by the busload. I even ran into a high school science teacher of mine, a notorious ballbreaking prude—but now he was tipsy and giddy. Our paths crossed as I was stepping out of a smoke shop; the only reason he failed to recognize me is that he was too busy nudging his