The Successor Read Online Free PDF Page B

must come out, irrespective of whether it was to any particular person’s taste. The minister’s eyes sparkled with sincere indignation.
    At the meeting over the Chinese, sincerity was precisely what had been lacking in the delegates from the Party Committee. They had feigned outrage by pounding the tabletop and making their voices quaver, but it was manifest that their hearts were as cold as damp kindling. All the same, the terror that cold fury can arouse is no less fearful than others — the sort that is accompanied by oohs and aahs. But at the end of the meeting, when they were waiting in petrified fear for the sentences to be declared, the first rumors of the break with Peking began to circulate, and the campaign was stopped in its tracks, as if by magic.
    Everything would be done by the rules, the minister went on with unchanging indignation. Apart from the autopsy, there would be a reenactment. A shot would be fired in the bedroom with the weapon that the victim had used. They would then verify whether the noise could be heard outside. In the garden, where the residence’s guards were on duty. On the landing. In the bedrooms where the other family members were sleeping. Everything would be carefully taken down. They would pick a stormy night with weather similar to that of December 14. Shots would be fired with a silencer, then without one.
    The doctor’s eyes met the architect’s, without meaning to. What self-destroyer had ever fitted a silencer to the gun he was going to use? But instead of a glimmer of disbelief, what shone in the architect’s eyes was the same feverish euphoria as before.
    Did he really understand nothing, or was that just a way of protecting himself?
    “We’ll begin with the test with the silencer on,” the minister repeated, but, as if he could read the doctor’s thoughts, he added immediately, “I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that this whole … business is strictly confidential.”
    He was on the verge of saying explicitly that at the end of the story the Successor’s death would be shown to have been murder, that the man would be declared a Martyr of the Revolution, and that all the suspicions that had darkened his name like so many leaden clouds would be blown away there and then. That fact would lead directly to the punishment of those who had brought the Successor down.
    “Be that as it may,” the minister went on as he glanced at the doctor with just an ounce of affection, “the key to the whole business is the autopsy.”
    Of course it is, Petit Gjadri thought.
    In his heart of hearts, he had always known that one day or another an autopsy would be his undoing.
    Do you think your words fill me with joy? he responded inwardly to the minister’s remarks.
    Obviously he knew what the score was. In times like these, any given autopsy could be interpreted and then reinterpreted on a whim or a change of wind. The results might be appropriate to the general climate on this day, and not at all acceptable the day after. Barely a few weeks ago, Kano Zhbira, a former member of the Politburo who had committed suicide quite a few years back, had been exhumed from the Martyrs of the Motherland Cemetery. It was his third unearthing! Every tack and turn in the political line exercised its primary effect on human remains, not on the national economy. Zhbira’s posthumous rheumatism —
rheumatismus post mortem
, a condition that does not yet afflict us — was a better indicator of political change than any analyst’s prediction. Immediately after his suicide (together with rumors that it had been murder, of course) he had been buried with full honors in the Martyrs’ Cemetery. Shortly thereafter, he had been hauled up at the request of the Yugoslavs and transferred to Tirana’s municipal graveyard, signs of anti-Yugoslavianism having been detected in his file. A year later, after the break with Yugoslavia, he was dug up again so as to be put back in his original tomb in the