A Noble Profession

by Pierre Boulle

  “About what?”

  “They swear that Morvan was already dead when they got back to the farm.”

  “As a result of the torture?”

  “Not at all, Herr Doktor—as a result of several bullets in his heart.”

  Otto had made no further comment. Gleicher had given some thought to the matter, then shrugged his shoulders and dismissed his assistant, having made up his mind not to alter his plan.

  The memory of that conversation made him feel slightly uneasy, but his pride would not allow him to heed the implicit warning.

  “Very well, then,” he said. “Since your chief’s frightened, I’ll come over to your place.”

  He glanced at the forest and shivered.

  “Hang on a moment. I’m just going to get a coat.” He shut the door in Arvers’ face and went back into the living room. Colonel von Gleicher’s rheumatism did not take kindly to nocturnal walks in the country. He had lit a big log fire, in front of which he had planned to spend the rest of the evening listening to his favorite records, and he sighed at the prospect of leaving this warmth. He bundled himself up and re-luctantly dragged himself away from the hearth. Before leaving the room he paused, retraced his steps, and, with a gesture of irritation, slipped a revolver into his pocket.

  No sooner had Gleicher disappeared inside than Arvers grasped the handle of the door. He opened it without making a sound and slipped into the house close on the German’s heels. His physical appearance had undergone a change, as always happened when he did violence to his nature. The blood had drained away from his face. His movements were those of an automaton controlled by an alien will that seemed out of proportion to his own and to which he surrendered himself with a sense of pleasant abandon. In spite of his fear, he was delighted to see that his muscles obeyed the imperative commands of his mind and that he was behaving like a man of

  exceptional courage. He knew that nothing would stop him now, and already regarded the act he was about to perform as over and done with.

  This was not the first time he had let himself be guided by a sovereign power that overcame all his inner resistance. He concentrated on the vision that had obtruded on his mind’s eye a moment before and that revealed itself as a source of inexhaustible energy. He savored it in every detail and once again exultantly relived the scene of that heroic precedent.

  31

  When the Gestapo men had brought him back to the room where Morvan was lying and left him under the guard of two of their colleagues, Cousin had spent what were undoubtedly the worst hours of his life. He had said as much to Dr. Fog and, like many of his statements, this one was perfectly true.

  Sprawled in an armchair, he forced himself to keep absolutely still and to make his mind a complete blank. He made a desperate effort to divorce himself from reality by assuming the immobility and rigidity of a corpse. The only hope he allowed himself to cherish was an indefinite prolongation of this semiconscious state into which he had managed to submerge himself, thanks to the respite his executioners had granted him. He was afraid of the most commonplace manifestation of external activity that threatened to snatch him from this blessed and relatively painless inertia. The sound of a cock-crow in the middle of the night caused him an almost unbearable twinge.

  He shut his eyes so as not to see Morvan, who was stretched out on the bed. The Gestapo men had bandaged him up casually, after treating his wounds with oil and actually uttering a few words of sympathy. Their task accomplished, there was no reason for them not to show a certain amount of pity. Reckoning there was nothing more to fear from him, they unloosened his fetters. Then, after testing Cousin’s handcuffs and turning the key in the door, they sat down to a game of cards and opened the brandy they had come across while searching the house.

  During the spells of anguish, when he could not prevent himself from thinking. Cousin presumed they would send a car in the morning and take him and Morvan off to prison. He dreaded the idea, not for fear of solitary confinement—on the contrary, he hoped he would have a cell to himself—but because of the ordeal to which he would be subjected in resuming contact with the material world.

  A reflex, however, compelled him to open his eyes from time to time. Morvan had stopped groaning; he, too, lay quite still, his eyes shut tight. Yet they had been wide open when Cousin had come in and, though glazed with pain, had stared at him fixedly. Cousin had even succeeded, by means of a heroic effort, in dropping his servile manner; he straightened his back and held his head high. But a terrifying thought flashed through his mind at the very moment he adopted this pose—Morvan knew. The doors of both rooms had been left open and he himself had heard every scream. Morvan, therefore, was fully aware of his treachery; he had not lost consciousness in spite of his suffering. This was clear from the glint in his eyes; Cousin merely had to glance at them to recognize their piercing look of contempt, that manifestation of hostility that he dreaded more than anything. He detected yet another sentiment, equally odious to him—pride triumphant. The combination of these two expressions caused him intense pain, which became almost unbearable when Morvan added to it by smiling faintly—the same hateful token of derision he was to see later on Claire’s lips.

  Now at last Morvan had closed his eyes on his triumph and his contempt. They waited together like this for several hours, apparently forgotten by an enemy who had better things to attend to than them. Grateful for this unexpected period of leisure, their guards felt there was no immediate danger and gradually relaxed their vigilance.

  Cousin struggled to maintain the same position of rigidity, hoping against hope that this respite would last forever. Suddenly, in one of those irresistible reflexes that compelled him to look at Morvan, he noticed a slight change in his posture: he had rolled over onto his side and was facing the Germans. The latter had finished their game and were now slumped in their chairs half asleep. Cousin noticed that his companion’s gaze was fixed on the submachine gun that one of them had placed beside him. With slow, almost imperceptible movements, he drew back his blanket, while his eyes judged the distance between him and the weapon.

  He was clearly preparing to perform some desperate act. He tested the strength of his arms to see if they could supplement the thrust of his crippled legs. Cousin hated him even more for making this attempt: he regarded as sacrilege anything that threatened to drag him out of his voluntary torpor. He was filled with rage at the idea of being snatched out of the only state he found bearable, and especially by Morvan, who only wanted to humiliate him further by a gesture of absurd temerity.

  If he did not cry out to warn the guards, it was only because he was once again completely paralyzed. The prospect of violence had deprived him of the power of speech. Dumfounded and petrified, he could only look on as Morvan made his final preparations. He did not move a muscle when the latter threw back his blanket and, shoving himself forward with his arms, snatched up the submachine gun and mowed down the guards with a couple of bursts before collapsing himself, overcome with pain.

  The sound of the firing was succeeded by a long period of silence. The Germans, shot at point-blank range, lay dead on the floor. Sprawled diagonally across the bed, Morvan also lay motionless. Cousin sat in a similar state of complete immobility; he was waiting for his paralysis to lessen.

  This process began with the release of his mental faculties, which gradually recovered their power. Soon afterward he became conscious of reality and was once again capable of rational thought. He realized then that the situation he had done his utmost to avoid was now even more dreadful than when he was still in the hands of the enemy.

  Nothing held him back. He merely had to open the door and he would be free. Free? Free to go back among friends, to answer all their questions and tell them the whole story? It was at this precise point that something was set in motion in his mind and he understood for the first time the imperious commands of that sovereign power which, mindful of his interests, was now calling upon him to take action. At the same time he
felt that the chains that had seemed to bind him tightly were loosening.

  The voice commanded that he should first get out of his handcuffs. He applied himself to this task without hurrying, with the cool deliberation inspired by his urge to obey. It was not very difficult; in a short time he succeeded in setting himself free, without ceasing to watch Morvan out of the corner of his eye, without making a sound that might have alerted him. At that moment he was imbued with the resolution and calm courage of the hero who inhabited his dreams, and he rejoiced at the thought.

  Morvan opened his eyes and saw that Cousin was free. He seemed to divine his intention and reached down for the submachine gun, which had fallen by the side of his bed. Cousin forestalled him. Nothing hindered the play of his muscles any longer, and his instinct of self-preservation was matched on the physical plane by perfect coordination. He leaped forward and snatched up the weapon just as Morvan was about to lay hands on it. He counted this success as his first victory.

  But the elimination of a troublesome witness was not the essential part of his act. The mind makes many other demands! It demands belief in its own virtue. His own mind now demanded that Morvan be the traitor and he, Cousin, a judge created by a divine Providence. It was no effort for him to perform this sublime intellectual feat. He even raised himself to such heights of credulity that he felt the need to express himself out loud, to shout so as to convince Morvan even more of his utter ignominy.

  “Swine! Traitor! Think of your comrades who are even now paying for your foul crime with their own precious blood!”

  He raged at Morvan for the best part of a minute, in the grip of a fury it was only natural for the hero of his dreams to feel in these circumstances. He spat in his face and clouted him over the head before emptying the rest of the magazine into his breast.

  The sound of his words had intensified his righteous indignation. At the thought of those dead comrades, sacrificed through cowardice, his anger knew no bounds. And such was the miracle of his imagination that when he found himself the sole survivor in the room, when he saw that Morvan was dead beyond all doubt and that his own voice could not be heard by any ear but his own, he still went on in the same tone.

  Alone among the dead, for his ear alone, he uttered the words that put his sacred mission in its true perspective and made him appear as the glorious avenging angel:

  “This is the just reward for all traitors.”

  32

  He had recovered this same state of grace when he entered the villa at Gleicher’s heels, and once again he whispered the romantic words that gave expression to his radiant metamorphosis:

  “This is the just reward for all traitors.”

  And at that moment, just as when he had shot Morvan dead, professional artistic distortion coming to his aid, a fierce, intransigent patriotism strengthened his arm.

  He knew every inch of the villa, which was constructed on the same plan as his own. The living room, which opened out onto a long corridor, was the only part of the house that Gleicher used. He slept there on a sofa, after playing his favorite records over and over again. Arvers was acquainted with his habits. In the middle of the night, he knew, he would always find Gleicher there sitting in front of a log fire, prepared to listen to the music till daybreak. He was also well aware that the German never left the house without his overcoat. He had rehearsed all the necessary gestures and now performed them with clockwork precision.

  He slipped past the door of the living room and hid behind a cupboard. He had taken from his pocket the object Austin and Claire had noticed: it was the piano wire he had not been able to bring himself to use on Bergen. He wound the two ends around his wrists to get a firmer grip and tested the tension of his muscles. Gleicher was on his way back, buttoning up his coat, without having bothered to turn off the phonograph. He emerged from the room and had taken one step toward the front door when Arvers pounced on him.

  Several minutes had passed since Arvers had disappeared inside, and Austin was still pondering over his strange behavior. He listened in vain: the phonograph drowned every other sound.

  The music finally stopped and the house fell silent. Standing beside him, her brow wrinkled, Claire seemed to be working out a problem in her head. Suddenly she put a hand to her forehead and cried out in a tone of despair:

  “The tape, the tape recording! That’s what he’s after; he’d do anything to get his hands on it.”

  Her voice rang out in the silence. Austin seized her by the arm to keep her quiet, but she shook him off and again cried out:

  “He’s going to destroy it. We’ll be too late.”

  She started running toward the villa, throwing caution to the winds, and pushed open the front gate with a metallic clang that made Austin wince. He followed her, realizing there was no point in hiding since she had almost certainly revealed their presence.

  He caught up with her on the doorstep. He caught up with her there because that was where she had stopped dead in her tracks, as he also did, at Arvers’ sudden reappearance on the threshold. A smile of triumph hovered on his lips. Behind him they could see a lifeless body stretched out in the corridor. He pushed the door open with a sweeping, almost spectacular ges- ture and stood aside to let them view his handiwork.

  He showed no sign of surprise; in fact, he seemed to be expecting them. He was no longer frightened of them—rather the reverse. He rejoiced in their presence here and also in his own perspicacity that had led him to foresee it. They had turned up at the very moment he had hope —as providential witnesses to his valor.

  Having derived sufficient pleasure from their bewilderment, he broke the silence in a tone of supreme detachment.

  “I’ve liquidated him,” he said.

  “What!”

  Austin, in turn, had been unable to suppress a cry of amazement. His nerves were strained by the long nocturnal vigil and, above all, by the ghastly sensation of being surrounded on all sides by lunatics who were trying to pass themselves off as sane.

  “Gleicher—I’ve just liquidated him,” Arvers explained calmly. “He was a traitor. I had suspected it for some time, but I only had proof of it tonight. . . . I strangled him.”

  He felt he was waking up to a glorious dawn after a hideous nightmare. It cost him scarcely any effort to assume the air of negligence that fitted in with his present frame of mind.

  “I strangled him with a length of piano wire. It's the surest way and the most silent.”

  Claire, having recovered from her surprise, pushed him aside and, stepping over the body without so much as glancing at it, rushed into the living room. She made straight for the fireplace, then stood there wringing her hands. The grate was red-hot, the logs crackling. A poker half embedded in the embers suggested that the fire had been rekindled recently. She rummaged among the glowing ashes but could find no identifiable remains. Then she suddenly noticed a flat leather cylinder case lying on the table. In a towering rage she snatched it up and hurried back to the front door. Arvers was in the process of telling Austin the whole story.

  “I had my suspicions about his loyalty, but it was only tonight, when he turned up for the meeting, that I knew for sure—all he had in mind was to lead you into a trap. How do I know? I overheard a conversation between him and his assistant.”

  He was making up the story as he went along, like an expert novelist who, on taking up his pen, has not yet worked out his plot in detail but whose inspiration is directed at each fresh chapter by the general idea of his book: a beacon serving both as guide and support in his efforts to produce out of the void the necessary chain of events. He had recovered all his intellectual faculties and confidence in his own mastery.

  “Yes, as you still hadn’t arrived, I pretended to go upstairs and leave them together. In actual fact, I listened at the door. It was then I heard this conversation, which left me in no doubt as to their intentions. To begin with, I realized at once that Gleicher was the important figure, a senior Abwehr officer. . . . Otto?—a me
re subordinate. They had been deliberately misleading us right from the start. I also discovered that all the information they had provided was manufactured by the Abwehr—a vast deception scheme, in fact.”

  Not knowing exactly how much his chief had found out, he took great pains not to diverge too far from the actual facts. What he said tallied so closely with what Austin had seen for himself that the latter was disconcerted and began almost to reproach himself for having thought of Arvers as a traitor.

  “After that it was only too clear what Gleicher’s intentions were. There was no question of establishing contact with the Allies. They were both sniggering at the thought of this trick and at our gullibility. All they were after was to get one or several members of our service into their clutches and thus deliver a fatal blow to our clandestine organization. The trap wasn’t set for

  tonight, but for another meeting he was going to arrange later. There was already considerable danger in his meeting you and being able to identify you.

  “I was appalled. It was lucky you didn’t show up. I only began to breathe freely again after they left. Then I followed them in the dark. I heard the car. It was Otto, and I knew that Gleicher would be spending the night here.”

  Based as it was on facts that were strictly true, the story was taking shape of its own accord. Even if they had spied every gesture he had made in the course of the evening, they could not question a single point in his tale.

  Austin would have given anything just then to have been able to lay bare Arvers’ cranium and look into the tortuous folds of his brain; for a moment he felt that this was the only certain means of arriving at the truth when confronted with such a mind. But Austin was mistaken. If he had been in a position to carry out the operation and inspection, even then, in the innermost whorls of the gray matter, he would have found nothing but confirmation of the noble intentions that permeated the story.