Three to Kill Read Online Free PDF Page A

with those vicious-looking scarlet nails.... Gerfaut sent her out for France-Soir (Béa always made sure to pick up the more serious Le Monde) .
    The paper’s suggested lottery numbers were three, seven, and twelve. Tanks and air power had been deployed against six thousand rebellious Bolivian peasants. An Eskimo had been shot and killed while trying to divert a Boeing 747 to North Korea. A Breton trawler had gone missing with its eleven-man crew. A woman had celebrated her hundredth birthday and announced her intention of voting for the left. Extratrerrestrials had abducted a dog in full view of its master, a crossing guard in the department of Bas-Rhin. And, in emulation of a recent fad on America’s West Coast, a couple had tried to fornicate in public on a French Mediterranean beach, only to be restrained and arrested by the local police. Gerfaut glanced at the funnies, then tossed the newspaper into the wastebasket.
    â€œI’m leaving now,” said Mademoiselle Truong.
    â€œSee you tomorrow, then.”
    â€œWhat do you mean, tomorrow?”
    â€œOh, yes, I’m sorry. Until the first of August, then. Have a nice vacation.”
    â€œYou, too, Monsieur Gerfaut.”
    She left. Gerfaut left soon after. It was about seven—too late to join Béa at the screening of the Feldman film. Gerfaut didn’t want to see it, anyway. He could easily have left the office a couple of hours earlier, but he had wanted to show that, even the day before leaving on vacation, he had worked hard, gone beyond the call of duty.
    After forty-five minutes of very slow progress through blocked traffic, with Lee Konitz accompanied by Lennie Tristano on the cassette player, Gerfaut left the Mercedes in its slot in the underground parking garage of his building in the thirteenth arrondissement and went up to his apartment. The little girls were there watching the regional news. (They watched anything that appeared on a television screen; for them there was no significant difference between the regional news and, say, The Saga of Anatahan. ) The girls’ bags and Béa’s were almost packed. Gerfaut showered, changed, and did his own packing with the feeling that he was forgetting everything important, and served the girls cold roast beef with Heinz salad dressing and Bulgarianstyle yogurt. Then he sent them off to bed; they left the room, insulting him in a muted but earnest way.
    Soon Béa arrived, in good humor. As the two of them sat in the kitchen eating cold roast beef with Heinz salad dressing, she told him that Maria had that morning begged for the key to their apartment while they were away. Supposedly, Maria had broken off with her Berber boyfriend, who was looking for her and meant to kill her. Wasn’t he the one who wanted to put her to work on the street? asked Gerfaut. Wiping the corner of her mouth with a paper napkin, Béa replied that that had been a joke. Maria’s real plan, according to Béa, was to get the run of their place so she could bring the guy over, clean out their liquor cabinet, and screw. But, all the same, protested Gerfaut, what if the guy really was stalking her, the poor kid? Poor kid, poor kid!—she was big enough to take care of herself! was Béa’s last word on the subject.
    After dinner they tossed their paper plates into the trash, washed the other dishes and left them on the drainer, finished the packing, brushed their teeth, got into bed, read a few pages, she of Edgar Morin’s latest book, he of an old John D. MacDonald, and went to sleep. Gerfaut awoke shortly after two in the morning and fell prey at once to an inexplicable and terrifying insomnia. He went and took half a sleeping pill with a glass of milk. He fell asleep again with no difficulty about three. Early the next morning, they all got up and left for their vacation. Gerfaut having had the forethought to take off work as from the twenty-ninth of June, traffic was free-flowing.