You Who Know by Nicolas Freeling

Author:Nicolas Freeling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2023-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

LAKE LUGANO

A phrase could be found, thought Castang: he was lying on his back gazing at the ceiling; breathing shallowly since his chest hurt.

“Subsequent events interested him no more”? It wasn’t quite that: he had not been executed. Though it had, as he was beginning to gather, been a close thing.

“Knowing he is to be hanged in a fortnight”? No, because his mind had not been concentrated. Nor had he “known”. Wasn’t he more like the man in The Occurrence at Owl Street Bridge? He had gone off with the rope around his neck. He had survived. Or was it that he had not yet reached the bottom of the rope? Why was his chest so tight, painful?

There was a legend about a man “they couldn’t hang”. Trap stuck; damp had swollen the wood or something; they’d tried several times—nice for the chap in question! There’d always been these legends, in France too, stories of the blade refusing to fall. Everyone struck dumb by superstitious terror; the machine had worked perfectly when tried out that morning, and the moment they took the chap off it worked afresh. Divine intervention!

He’d never believed a word of such stuff. As a young man he’d been like all criminal-brigade cops, blood-thirsty. “Pull the string myself,” as they all said. Until he’d had to go on parade one day for the real thing, and that had cured him: he’d come away with the realisation that one could only survive this if dehumanised. So he’d survived now, and was he still human? He slept a little.

He woke, and his mind seemed preternaturally clear now, over the last few days: was that normal?

He had thought himself clever and had nearly lost his life! By a number of shifts he’d wrung out that bit of information Paul de Man had had to give. It hadn’t been much, but it was vital. Vera had done it by persuading a pliable, weak-natured sort of man (finally rather likeable) that he didn’t have to be a total shit; not for his entire existence.

They’d done it between them, the classic technique of working in pairs; the nice one and the nasty one alternating the interrogations. Castang had done this before, had even done it with a woman in the other role: the novelty was that this woman was not a professional, she was his wife; she had not known. But there lay her natural force; in her truth, in her simplicity. It would not have worked, but for that.

For the man was frightened, both by Castang’s threats and by Vera’s persuasions to look himself in the eye (and they’d been helped, on both counts, by palace surroundings and a great deal to drink), but there was something of which he was a lot worse frightened.

Well, yes … he’d been the cat’s-paw, he’d been chatted into things; he had been charmed along the road of money and power—“all this”—and sometimes he’d been shown the razor held inside a silk glove. Being the literary type (seduced by Vera also being “an artist”) he had tied himself up in fantasy scenarios.

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