Line 697:  Conclusive destination

Gradus landed at the Côte d’Azur airport in the early afternoon of July 15, 1959.  Despite his worries he could not help being impressed by the torrent of magnificent trucks, agile motor bicycles and cosmopolitan private cars on the Promenade.  He remembered and dislike the torrid heat and the blinding blue of the sea.  Hotel Lazuli, where before World War Two he had spent a week with a consumptive Bosnian terrorist, when it was a squalid, running-water place frequented by young Germans, was now a squalid, running-water place frequented by old Frenchmen.  It was situated in a transverse street, between two thoroughfares parallel to the quay, and the ceaseless roar of crisscross traffic mingling with the grinding and banging of construction work proceeding under the auspices of a crane opposite the hotel (which had been surrounded by a stagnant calm two decades earlier) was a delightful surprise for Gradus, who always like a little noise to keep his mind off things.  (”Ça distrait,” as he said to the apologetic hostlerwife and her sister).

After scrupulously washing his hands, he went out again, a tremor of excitement running like fever down his crooked spine.  At one of the tables of a sidewalk café on the corner of his street and the Promenade, a man in a bottle-green jacket, sitting in the company of an obvious whore, clapped both palms to his face, emitted the sound of a muffled sneeze, and kept masking himself with his hands as he pretended to wait for the second installment.  Gradus walked along the north side of the embankment.  After stopping for a minute before the display of a souvenir shop, he went inside, asked the price of a little hippopotamus made of violet glass, and purchased a map of Nice and its environs.  As he walked on to the taxi stand in rue Gambetta, he happened to notice two young tourists in loud shirts stained with sweat, their faces and necks a bright pink from the heat and imprudent solarization; they carried carefully folded over their arms the silk-lined doublebreasted coats of their wide-trousered dark suits and did not look at our sleuth who despite his being exceptionally unobservant felt the undulation of something faintly familiar as they brushed past.  They knew nothing of his presence abroad or of his interesting job; in point of fact, only a few minutes ago had their, and his, superior discovered that Gradus was in Nice and not in Geneva.  Neither had Gradus been informed that he would be assisted in his quest by the Soviet sportsmen, Andronnikov and Niagarin, whom he had casually met once or twice on the Onhava Palace grounds when re-paning a broken window and checking for the new government the rare Rippleson panes in one of the ex-royal hothouses; and next moment he had lost the thread end of recognition as he settled down with the prudent wriggle of a short-legged person in the back seat of an old Cadillac and asked to be taken to a restaurant between Pellos and Cap Turc.  It is hard to say what our man’s hopes and intentions were.  Did he want just to peep through the myrtles and oleanders at an imagined swimming pool?  Did he expect to hear the continuation of Gordon’s bravura piece played now in another rendition by two larger and stronger hands?  Would he have crept, pistol in hand, to where a sun-bathing giant lay spread-eagled, a spread eagle of hair on his chest?  We do not know, nor did Gradus perhaps know himself; anyway he was spared an unnecessary journey.  Modern taximen are as talkative as were the barbers of old, and even before the old Cadillac had rolled out of town, our unfortunate killer knew that his driver’s brother had worked in the gardens of Villa Disa but that at present nobody lived there, the Queen having gone to Italy for the rest of July.

At his hotel the beaming proprietress handed him a telegram.  It chided him in Danish for leaving Geneva and told him to undertake nothing until further notice.  It also advised him to forget his work and amuse himself.  But what (save dreams of blood) could be his amusements?  He was not interested in sightseeing or seasiding.  He had long stopped drinking.  He did not go to concerts.  He did not gamble.  Sexual impulses had greatly bothered him at one time but that was over.  After his wife, a beader in Radugovitra, had left him (with a gypsy lover), he had lived in sin with his mother-in-law until she was removed, blind and dropsical, to an asylum for decayed widows.  Since then he had tried several times to castrate himself, had been laid up at the Glassman Hospital with a severe infection, and now, at forty-four, was quite cured of the lust that Nature, the grand cheat, puts into us to inveigle us into propagation.  Now wonder the advice to amuse himself infuriated him.  I think I shall break this note here.