Death Sentences (7 page)

"How'd it go?"

"I took care of them all right. Now for the stuff."

With rush hour traffic, the Corolla took thirty minutes to reach Shinjuku station.

"Wait here. I'll get it."

Sakamoto set out alone in search of the locker.

He found it near the underground entrance to a department store.

326-

He inserted the key. It wouldn't turn.

It must be out of money.

He plunked in some coins, and it opened.

Inside was a paper bag.

He pulled it out and looked inside.

A dozen odd pamphlets, thin, with yellow covers.

On the covers, about the size of a postcard, nothing was written.

Sakamoto drew a deep breath.

Then-fearfully, he took one.

(What is this thing, anyway?)

He felt angry all of a sudden.

(What on earth was all of this about?)

Why did so many people have to die, just because of some weird thing written by an insane Frenchman forty years ago?-

It made no sense to him at all.

He couldn't help thinking that it was some kind of lie, it had to be a trick, or maybe the whole thing was a sort of conspiracy.

(It's ... it's just ...

Without thinking, Sakamoto opened it.

The first line, in rather large letters, read "The Gold of Time." It looked like a title.

There followed a dense series of very small, rounded, handwritten letters, which had been transferred with mimeograph paper.

He read a few lines without thinking and, then, flustered, tore his eyes from the page. He was angry with himself for feeling so flustered.

(It's just a ..)

He clucked his tongue softly.

(Anyone who goes crazy over this stuff must have been damned crazy all along.)

No sooner had he thought this than he began to feel dizzy. It was probably just a wave of fatigue.

Looking at the stuff was strictly forbidden, even for cops, no, especially for cops.

Still, in the course of an investigation, some fragment of it might catch your eye.

To Sakamoto it looked like nothing but incomprehensible babble.

It didn't make any sense.

He felt sure of himself. There was no way a guy like him would lose his mind over this.

And so ... his mind raced.

And so, just one copy ... just this once. Before he realized it, he'd stuffed one of the copies in his pocket.

No one saw him. There was no one paying any attention to him.

A faint smile flitted across his lips.

He headed back to the car with the bag in hand.

For some reason ... he felt good.

A sensation like being tipsy ran through him.

(The Gold of Time-what nonsense!)

1

It was a raw cold afternoon.

Glowering clouds had darkened the skies for three days already.

Paris, April 2, 1948. In a timeworn cafe in Montmartre, Andre Breton was waiting for a certain young man.

He continued to wait.

But the man hadn't shown.

Instead, the cafe door was swinging open to the occasional gust of wind that would sweep in laden with dust. It swirled at Breton's feet.

Breton's left leg began to throb with an almost imperceptible yet persistent and wearisome pain.

The pain quickened his irritation. In about two weeks Breton would be greeting his fifty-second birthday. Greeting it was inevitable.

The young man wasn't showing.

The cafe window provided a view of the square.

Breton's eyes again started to wander slowly, right to left, left to right. But there was no sign of any one hurrying toward him.

He wouldn't be casually strolling. With a brusque gesture Breton pushed back his left sleeve. Three forty-five-

He was already forty-five minutes late. He should be running full out. Crossing the square, making a beeline for the cafe. Breton unconsciously rubbed at the seat of his pants where the velvet had worn smooth. As if the person he was waiting for might be conjured forth from the ragged patch.

As he asked himself the question, he became aware of its two meanings.

A sense of paradox overtook him. How unbearable to wait. But then how reassuring it was to go on waiting.

Breton remained caught between the two possibilities, unable to move.

Why was the young man not showing?

And why did he actually dread his appearance, even as he awaited him?

Why did he go on sitting here, then?

Each and every second brought fresh pain to Breton.

This was the worst. This weather pattern said it all. On a day like today he should never have left home. Today was not "the day."

There were only a few people in the square.

Not sign of someone running toward him.

Another five minutes had passed.

(Ten minutes more) Breton told himself. (That's all.)

Breton didn't know which route the young man would take.

But he doubted that he would be at a loss to find this place.

In any case, if he made it to the square, there'd be no way to mistake the cafe.

After all, the cafe-Cafe Blanche-took its name from the park.

"Sure I know the place. Place Blanche, right?" the young man had replied on the phone.

Breton didn't know if he had understood them to be meeting at the square or the cafe. But it didn't matter either way. Breton had repeatedly given him both names. And they had agreed on three o'clock.

Breton's eyes flitted across the square yet again.

Directly across the square was the Cyrano.

It was a thoroughly ordinary cafe just like this one.

Naturally, Breton would recall its name. Even today the name Cyrano had lost nothing of its brilliance and luster in the memories of so many surrealists. But only in their memories...

Before they had "discovered" the Cyrano, it had been the Celta next to the Opera House. During the enlargement of the Boulevard Haussmann, the Celta had been torn down, and Breton and company had moved to the Cyrano. For the surrealists that cafe had been a public place for agitation. Headquarters. Church. Altar. Playground.

The Cyrano era had lasted till the start of World War II. In the Cyrano, dreams had unfolded, spirits had clashed, and poems had met, and amid the wild clamor, directives to overthrow the powers that be had been issued.

That is what the Cyrano had been at one time. None of them would forget it. In the present, however, the Cyrano had completely lost its power of attraction.

The War, the Occupation, and then "liberation" had wiped it all away. Stripped of its magic, the Cyrano had turned back into a mere pumpkin.

You could still see the Cyrano from here.

Breton slowly and calmly exhaled, as if reluctant to give up the breath he had unconsciously been holding.

Invisible forces still emanated from Place Blanche. You could feel it. Or at least many people still believed it to be so.

Breton felt it, too, without a doubt. But there was something very weak about it. Something was missing.

Was it an effect of the fever? Was it an effect of the humidity issuing from the mouths of people breathing?

Or maybe the fever had already spread to the point where even the ambient temperature had reached saturation?

If so ...

Breton pushed back his sleeve with a panicked gesture to check his watch.

Five minutes had passed. But the young man hadn't shown. He hadn't come.

(Five minutes more)

In five minutes it would be four o'clock. In another hour or so, the group would gather as usual. That was their routine. Even ruined by the war, the surrealists kept this routine.

But today he found the thought of meeting with them strangely disagreeable.

(Why?)

Best to leave, Breton advised himself. Five minutes more, and then he had best go.

On the imitation mahogany table a glass filled with red fluid had been casually yet deliberately placed in the manner of a still life.

That's-(Ah!) -Place Blanche.

Breton had not even once raised the glass to his lips.

He felt afraid to reach for it. But he was not at all loath to destroy the harmonious composition on the table. On the contrary.

He would like to knock over the glass, to dash its contents across the table. Locked in battle against this impulse, he could not lift a finger.

He was struggling.

(Why?!)

Why must he endure so much?

Why wasn't he coming?-

He ... (Hu Mei ... Who May ...)

That is the young man's name.

That was the name he had used with Breton. Breton didn't know if it was his real name.

In conjunction with the name, Breton recalled two eyes, too large for the beautiful face.

(Who May.)

It rang with mystery.

Involuntarily he had asked the question back.

With a faint curl of the lips, the young man had thereupon traced his name in the air with dark delicate fingers, in three letters: W-H-O.

That he remembered distinctly.

The young man had been merely nineteen at the time.

The response had left Breton baffled.

February 1943. During his exile in New York. That had been their first encounter.

2

July 1940-the fall of Paris, and with the unconditional surrender to the German army and the establishment of the Vichy regime of the Etat Francais, Breton and the others fled to Marseilles.

It was in the following year that, after meeting Levi-Strauss on the island of Martinique, Breton sailed for America. He arrived in New York in August, at the height of summer. Breton was not the only exile. Due to the crackdown on artists, a number of other surrealists came to New York, such as Duchamp, Tanguy, Ernst, Masson, and Matta. Their presence made it possible to hold the first International Exhibition of Surrealism in the United States.

"I was there a short while, and yet ..." In an interview with Andre Parinaud broadcast on Radio France, Breton would reminisce: "I knew true happiness in New York. For instance, the joy of occasional lunches in the company of my friend, the truly admirable Marcel Duchamp, far from the cares of the world.... And then I met with unexpected happiness, which took me totally by surprise but, well, I probably shouldn't speak too loudly of it in this context.... I simply wanted to say

Surely this "unexpected happiness" was a reference to his meeting Elisa, who would become his second wife. Or so it is believed.

Yet in New York, Breton made another unforgettable encounter, which would bring him both great joy and extreme duress.

It was Who May whom he met.

February 1943.

Breton had a cocktail in hand at the time.

It was a small party in Manhattan, with about forty in attendance, at an apartment facing Sixth Avenue.

More than half of them were artists in exile like Breton.

They had already drunk all the champagne.

A new cocktail, "invented" on the spot, then made the rounds.

Liquid of an extraordinary color was poured into the glass in Breton's hand. An American art student, an aspiring sculptor, dubbed the drink VVV, or Triple V. VVV was the name of a journal of surrealism that Breton, Duchamp, Ernst, and others had launched the previous year in New York with David Hare as editor-in-chief.

The three Vs or triple V were a declaration: "V as a vow to return to a habitable and thinkable world, Victory over the forces of regression and death currently unleashed on the earth, but again V beyond the first Victory .... Victory over all that tends to perpetuate the enslavement of man by man, and beyond that double V, that double Victory, V again over all that is opposed to the emancipation of the mind."

Clearly, however, in the instance of the art student naming the drink, V was not for victory but for vodka.

Breton swallowed the dreadful drink in a single gulp, and before he was aware of it, he found himself muttering curses, directed at Americans in general.

That was the moment.

The door to the apartment opened.

It was some late arrivals, Patrick Waldberg accompanied by a young man.

Waldberg looked around the room and then strode over to Breton.

"He begged me to introduce him to you."