I'm Gone Read online

  12

  They spotted the Nechilik one fine morning, still a fair distance away: a small tapering mass the color of soot and rust sitting on an ice floe punctuated by rocky outcroppings, an old broken toy on a ragged sheet. It appeared to be stuck in the ice at the foot of an eroded knoll, which was partly covered with snow but with one flank breaking into a succession of brief, bare cliffs. At that distance, the wreck appeared fairly well preserved: maintained by the still-taut shrouds, its two small, intact masts stood patiently, and the pilot house in the after part of the vessel still appeared solid enough to shelter a few shivering specters. Knowing that these regions were rich in hallucinations, moreover, and at first suspecting the boat itself to be but a phantom, Ferrer waited until he was fairly close up before fully believing in its reality.

  Illusion indeed reigns under these skies. Only yesterday they were pushing forward behind dark glasses, without which the arctic sun fills your eyes with sand and your head with dead weight, when this same sun was suddenly multiplied in the frozen clouds by parhelia: Ferrer and his guides had been blinded by five simultaneous suns aligned horizontally, one of which was the real thing—with two further stars perpendicular to the real thing. It lasted a good hour before the actual sun found itself alone once more.

  The moment they saw the wreck, Ferrer signaled to his guides to be quiet and slow down as if it were a living creature, a potentially hostile polar bear. They cut the speed on the Ski-Doos, choked their motors before approaching cautiously, with the gait of land-mine specialists, pushing their vehicles by the handlebars before leaning them against the ship’s steel hull. Then, while the two locals kept their distance from the Nechilik, pondering the object gravely, Ferrer went to board it alone.

  It was, then, a small merchant vessel, eighty feet long, on which a copper plate, riveted to the base of the rudder, stated its date of construction (1942) and place of registration (Saint John, New Brunswick). The body of the ship and its rigging seemed to be in good shape, dusted with frost and looking brittle as dead wood. What must once have been two crumpled pieces of paper flitting around deck amid the knots of ropes had become two sand roses on a background of cryogenized snakes, the whole thing preserved under a layer of ice that did not soften even under Ferrer’s boots. The latter entered the pilot house and gave it a once-over: an open log book, an empty bottle, a spent rifle, a calendar from the year 1957 decorated with a rather underdressed girl who brutally evoked and exacerbated the ambient temperature, which was –10°. The freeze-dried pages of the log prevented anyone from leafing through it. Through the cabin windows, on which no gaze had fallen in more than forty years, Ferrer glanced out at the white landscape. Then, climbing down into the hold, he immediately found what he was looking for.

  Everything seemed to be right there, as expected, squeezed into three fat metal trunks that had honorably resisted the climate. Ferrer had some difficulty loosening the lids welded shut by the cold, then, having given their contents a cursory check, he climbed back up on deck to call his guides. Angoutretok and Napaseekadlak went to join him with circumspection, reverently and not without hesitation, moving around the body of the ship as if they had illegally entered an isolated vacation home. The trunks were heavy and the iron stair leading down to the hold supernaturally slick; it was quite an ordeal to hoist them up on deck before unloading them. They attached their cargo the best they could to the trailer sleds, then caught their breath. Ferrer said nothing; the two guides giggled between themselves and swapped untranslatable jokes. The whole thing seemed to leave them basically cold, whereas he, Ferrer, was pretty moved by it all. There. It’s done. Nothing left but to go home. But they could have a little something to eat, maybe, before starting up, suggested Napaseekadlak.

  While the latter, in charge of lighting the fire, chopped away with his hatchet at the Nechilik’s mizzen mast, Ferrer, followed by Angoutretok, went back down to inspect the hold in greater detail. The few pelts that had been part of the cargo were still there as well, but unlike the rest they were not so well preserved, hard as tropical wood and with almost all the hairs fallen from the skin: no doubt they had lost pretty much all their commercial value. Ferrer nonetheless picked out a small white fox that seemed to have held up a bit better than the others and that he would thaw out to give, but to whom? We’ll see. In what appeared to have been the galley, he had to dissuade Angoutretok from opening a can of monkey meat expired nearly half a century ago. Sure, it was a shame not to be able to take the few nifty things still on board the Nechilik, pretty little copper lamps, for example, an elegantly bound Bible, a superb sextant. But they were weighted down enough as it was for the return trip, and they could not afford any excess baggage. Later, after they had eaten, it was time to head back.

  Slowed down by the weight, it took them a long time to reach Port Radium. Like a switchblade that flips open without warning, small shafts of steely wind sometimes rose to cut their momentum, slow their pace, and the polar spring opened unexpected breaches in the permafrost: once Ferrer fell in to mid-thigh; then it was a whole ordeal to pull him back out and dry him off, warm him up. They spoke still less than on the trip out, ate quickly, slept lightly. Ferrer, in any case, thought only of his booty. At Port Radium, through second cousins, Angoutretok found him a room with a cement floor in a kind of club or activity center, which was the closest thing around to a hotel. Finally, alone in his room, Ferrer opened the crates and took stock of their contents.

  As anticipated, they were indeed filled with exceedingly rare Paleoarctic art, falling into the various styles that Delahaye and other experts had introduced him to. There were, among other things, two sculpted mammoth tusks covered with blue vivianite, six pairs of snow goggles made from reindeer antlers, a small whale carved in baleen, an ivory corset with laces, a device for putting out caribou eyes made from broken caribou bone, inscribed tablets, quartz dolls, knickknacks made of seal ulna and musk-ox horn, engraved narwhal and sharks’ teeth, rings and stamps forged from meteorite nickel. There were also a fair number of magical or funerary objects shaped like pretzels or sprockets, made of soapstone or polished nephrite, red jasper, green slate, and flint in blue, gray, black, and every color of serpentine. Then masks of all kinds and, to top it off, a collection of skulls with their mouths plugged by obsidian rails, their eye sockets obstructed by balls of walrus ivory encrusted with onyx pupils. A fortune.

  13

  Let us shift horizons for a moment, if you will, to rejoin the man who answers to the name of Baumgartner. Today, Friday, June 22, while Ferrer is trudging over the ice floe, Baumgartner is wearing a checkered suit of anthracite-colored virgin wool, slate-gray shirt, and iron-gray tie. Although summer has officially just arrived, the sky matches his outfit, basely expectorating a brief, intermittent spittle. Baumgartner is walking up Rue de Suez, served by the metro stop Château-Rouge, in Paris’s 18th arrondissement. It’s one of those small streets off Boulevard Barbès festooned with African butcher shops, live fowl purveyors, parabolic antennas, and joyful polychromatic fabrics of the bazin, batik, and java varieties, printed in the Netherlands.

  On the even-numbered side of Rue de Suez, most of the doors and windows of the depressing old buildings are blinded by roughly mortared concrete blocks, the sign of expropriation or impending annihilation. One of these is not entirely obstructed: two windows on the top floor still breathe, though faintly. Protecting faded curtains, their panes are matte with dust—one of them cracked diagonally and reinforced with packing tape, the other, missing, replaced by a framed black trash bag. Stuck in mid-swing, the building’s entrance door at first looks onto two mismatched rows of anonymous, disemboweled mailboxes, then on a staircase with uneven steps and hugely fissured walls. Here and there, courtesy of the city’s public works department, references flanked by handwritten dates bear witness to the implacable progress of these fissures. Since the light switch is out of order, Baumgartner gropes his way blindly to the top floor. He knocks on a door, is about to pus
h it open without waiting for an answer when it seems to fly open by itself and a tall, gaunt fellow of about thirty rushes past Baumgartner, practically knocking him over. In the darkness, Baumgartner can barely make the man out: long face and balding forehead, nasty smile and aquiline nose, mitts tapered in curlicues, taciturn and no doubt with good night vision, since he charges surefootedly down the black stairway.

  Opening the door, Baumgartner knows he won’t want to close it again behind him. And in fact, the stifling funk-hole he enters does not inspire a sense of well-being; it’s a kind of interior wasteland, a wasteland turned inside out like a glove. While it is bounded by four walls and protected by a ceiling, the floor is indistinguishable under the garbage, wrappings of expired foodstuffs, heaps of ratty togs, shredded magazines and moldy flyers made all but unreadable by the slop of a candle, planted in a can set on a crate. Overheated by a butane burner, the air is no more than a block of odors, part stuffiness, part mildew, and part burnt gas. It’s hard to breathe. A radio-cassette player, at the foot of a mattress, broadcasts something indistinct at low volume.

  The features of the young man stretched out on the purulent foam mattress, in a knot of blankets and deflated cushions, are not too distinct either. Baumgartner comes nearer, and this young man with his closed eyes does not look very fresh. He might even look a little bit dead. The radio-cassette player acts as a stand for a small spoon and a hypodermic needle, a scrap of dirty cotton wool, and the remains of a lemon. Baumgartner immediately gets the picture, but he’s worried all the same.

  “Hey, Flounder,” he says, “hey. Flounder.”

  As he bends over, he sees that The Flounder is breathing. It looks like a mild case of discomfort, or else too much comfort. In any case, even closer up, even adding a candle, whatever the distance and the light, The Flounder’s physiognomy remains ill-defined, as if Nature had exempted him of a specific appearance. He’s a pale, charmless person, wearing dark clothes that have no charm either; still, he doesn’t seem excessively dirty. Besides, he’s opening one eye.

  He’s even rising wearily onto his left forearm and stretching out a hand to Baumgartner, who pulls back his own as soon as possible from those tepid and slightly oily fingers; who recoils and, his eyes casting about for a seat, notices only a wobbly bench. He gives up and remains standing. The other falls back on his support, complaining of nausea. “What I need,” he says in a slow-motion voice, “is some tea. Maybe. But on the other hand, I really don’t feel like getting up. I really really don’t.”

  Baumgartner makes a face but it seems he can’t really refuse; apparently he needs to have the other regain his senses. Making out an abstract kettle sitting next to an obscure sink, he fills it and places it on a butane stove, then unearths from the bottom of the wasteland a cup without a handle and a cracked bowl. These receptacles are disproportionate. The man called The Flounder, his eyes closed again, now alternately smiles and grimaces. While waiting for the water to boil, Baumgartner searches in vain for some sugar, fishes out some leftover lemon rinds for lack of anything better. The radio continues to kill time. “So,” says The Flounder when he’s drunk his tea, “when do we start?”

  “A matter of days,” answers Baumgartner, pulling a cell phone from his pocket. “It should be over and done by the end of this month. The thing is, from now on I have to be able to reach you at all times,” he says, holding the phone out to the young man. “You’ll have to be ready the moment the stuff shows up.”

  The Flounder snatches the phone away, simultaneously exploring his left nostril with his index finger, then, having examined in turn the phone and his finger: “Cool,” he concludes from his examination. “What’s the number?”

  “Forget about the number,” says Baumgartner. “I’m the only one who knows it, and that’s how I like it. I should tell you one thing about this phone right away. It’s not set to make outgoing calls, okay? It only receives. Its only use is for you to listen to me when I call you, you got that?”

  “Fine,” says the young man, now blowing his nose into his sleeve.

  “So naturally you keep it on you at all times,” says Baumgartner, refilling the receptacles.

  “Naturally,” says The Flounder. “The thing is, though, I might need a little something up front.”

  “Of course,” allows Baumgartner, digging in his pocket for six five-hundred-franc bills folded in a paper clip.

  “Great,” comments The Flounder, handing back the paper clip. “Though a little more would be even better.”

  “No way,” says Baumgartner, nodding toward the equipment lying on the radio. “I know you, you’ll blow it all on that shit.” During the negotiations that follow, at the close of which he ends up shelling out four more bills, Baumgartner mechanically unbends the paper clip until he obtains a more or less rectilinear stem.

  Later, in the street, Baumgartner verifies that no residual filth, no miserable molecule floating in the air at The Flounder’s has landed on his clothes. Still, he brushes them off as if the polluted ambience alone had contaminated them, even though he had been careful not to come into contact with anything; he’d just have to wash his hands and maybe brush his teeth when he gets home. Meanwhile, he walks back to the Château-Rouge station to return to his new domicile. It’s still an off-peak hour and the metro is only half full: a number of bench seats are available, but Baumgartner opts for a fold-down seat on the aisle.

  In the metro, whatever the train’s fullness coefficient, and even when it’s empty, Baumgartner always prefers fold-down seats to the main benches, unlike Ferrer who prefers the latter. On the benches, which face each other in pairs, Baumgartner would unavoidably be exposed to sitting next to or opposite someone, most often both at the same time. Which would lead to still more frictions and inconveniences, contacts, difficulties in crossing or uncrossing his legs, parasitic glances, and conversations about which he couldn’t care less. All things considered, even in rush hour when you have to stand up to make room, the fold-down seat strikes him as superior in every way. It is individual, mobile, and of flexible use. It goes without saying that the all-too-rare single fold-down seat is to his mind better still than the paired fold-down seat, which presents its own share of promiscuous inconveniences—the latter, in any case, less egregious than the nuisances of the bench. That’s just how Baumgartner is.

  Half an hour later, back in his new lodgings on Boulevard Exelmans, discovering the small bit of iron wire between his fingers, Baumgartner simply cannot bring himself to throw it out. He plants it in a pot of flowers and goes to lie down on the sofa. He’s just going to rest his eyes for a moment. He’d love to take a nap, get away from all this for twenty minutes, maybe even a half hour if that’s all right, but no, not a chance.

  14

  Ferrer had not slept a wink that night either, of course. Kneeling before the open trunks, he had turned each of the objects in all directions at least a thousand times. By now he was exhausted, no longer had the strength to look at them, no longer knew what he was seeing, lacked even the energy to be happy. Riddled with aches and pains, he got up with groans of protest, walked to the window and saw that the sun was already rising. But no, his mistake, in Port Radium the sun had not slept any more than he had.

  Ferrer’s room looked like a small one-person dormitory, which seems like a contradiction in terms and yet it’s so: blank, characterless walls, lightbulb dangling from the ceiling, linoleum floor, cracked sink in one corner, bunk beds of which Ferrer chose the lower, out-of-order TV, closet containing only a deck of cards—auspicious at first, but in fact unusable because it was missing the ace of hearts—strong odor of frying pan and gurgling heater. Nothing to read but in any case Ferrer didn’t much feel like reading, and finally he managed to sleep.

  After the visit to the Nechilik, they were catching their breath in Port Radium. Each time they caught it, moreover, a torrent of spiraling steam, dense as cotton wool, escaped from their lips before crashing against the frozen marble of the a
ir. Once Angoutretok and Napaseekadlak were thanked, paid, and heading back to Tuktoyaktuk, Ferrer had to remain for two solid weeks in this town, where the hotel choices came down to his room, which was next to a laundromat. Whether the building was a club, an annex to something, or an activity center, Ferrer would never know for sure, given that it was always empty and the manager mute. Or in any case not very chatty, for perhaps at heart he was suspicious, so rare were tourists in those god- and man-forsaken holes: the days are endless, the distractions nonexistent, and the weather stinks. Given that there’s no police station or representative of any authority whatsoever, one might suspect the resident stranger of fleeing some form of justice. A fair number of days and dollars, smiles and sign language were required for Ferrer to finally take the edge off the manager’s circumspection.

  Nor was it easy to find, among the populace of Port Radium, an artisan capable of making containers suited to the Nechilik’s cargo. All the more difficult in that wood practically doesn’t exist in these climates: you don’t find any more of that than of anything else, but as always anything is possible if you’re willing to pay the price. Ferrer met the manager of the supermarket who agreed to adapt to the desired size some solid television, refrigerator, and machine-tool crates. It would take a while, and Ferrer had to wait. Usually keeping to his room since he didn’t like to leave his antiques; getting bored rigid when he couldn’t stand to look at them anymore. Port Radium can really be a drag, nothing much happening here, especially on Sunday when tedium, silence, and the cold worked together at peak efficiency.

  He occasionally went out for a walk, but there wasn’t much of anything to see, either: three times more dogs than people and twenty little houses in mellow colors, with tin roofs, along with two lines of buildings fronting the port. In any case, given the temperature, Ferrer never stayed out for long. Through the almost empty streets he took a quick stroll around these houses built with rounded corners to keep the cold from catching in the angles, to leave the least possible hold for ice. Heading toward the dock, he skirted the yellow clinic, the green post office, the red supermarket, and the blue garage, in front of which stood rows of Skidoos. At the port, other rows of boats on drydock awaited a more clement season. Most of the snow on the ground had melted but the ice floe, pierced only by a narrow channel, still obstructed a large portion of the bay.