In Case of Emergency by Georges Simenon

Author:Georges Simenon [Simenon, Georges]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Amazon: B0021JHYR0
Publisher: Manor Books
Published: 1974-12-13T22:00:00+00:00

Old fool!

V

Saturday, November 24

FOR two weeks now I haven't had a minute to open this dossier and I've been living on my own momentum, convinced that the time will co me when I shall collapse of exhaustion, incapable of one further step or word. Never before have I foreseen the possibility that talking may be beyond my strength, and it is a fact that I'm already beginning to talk less, from tiredness.

I'm not the only one to think of this eventual breakdown of my nerves. I read the same uneasiness in the expressions of the people around me and they are beginning to watch me surreptitiously like someone who's seriously ill. What do they know at the Palais about my intimate life? I have no idea, but there's a certain firmness in some handshakes, and there's the way they say, without insisting:

'Don't overdo it!'

Pémal, usually optimistic, raised his eyebrows as he took my blood-pressure the other day, in the den where I had to receive him hurriedly because I had a client in my office and two more in the waiting-room.

'I suppose it's useless to ask you to rest?'

'Impossible for the moment. It's up to you to see to it that I keep going.'

He gave me some vitamins or other, by injection, and since then a nurse comes every morning to give me another, between one door and the other, in the time it takes me to go into my den and let down my trousers. Pémal doesn't really have much faith in them.

'A time comes when you can't stretch the spring any tighter.'

That's the impression I have—of a spring which is beginning to quiver and which is about to snap. I feel all over my body something like a tremor which I'm powerless to stop and which is sometimes agonizing. I hardly sleep. I haven't got time. I don't even dare to sit down in an easy-chair after meals, because I'm like those ailing horses which avoid lying down for fear of not being able to get up again.

I am making an effort to meet my obligations on all fronts and it's a matter of vanity to me to accompany Viviane to fashionable occasions, to cocktail parties, to dress rehearsals, to dinner at Corine's and anywhere else where I know it would be embarrassing for her to be seen alone.

She's grateful for it, although she doesn't mention it to me, but she is worried. As if it had been deliberately arranged, I've never had so many cases, at the Palais, nor such important ones, which I can't delegate to anyone else.

The South American ambassador, for instance, came to see me on Monday as arranged and, even though I hadn't been altogether wrong about the nature of his problems, I hadn't guessed the truth. They've got the arms. It's his father who intends to seize power by means of a coup d'état which is supposed to be brief and not too bloody. According to my informant, whose voice had become

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