Three To Kill. Jean-Patrick Manchette

Vilneuil, a hamlet thirty kilometers from Magny-en-Vexin in France. In the last days of his life, Alonso went by the name of “Taylor.” What little mail he received was addressed to Mr. (or occasionally Colonel) Taylor. The neighbors and the local merchants he had any dealings with took him for a North American or maybe a Britisher who had spent years in the colonies and made his pile in import-export.

      Alonso was indeed very rich, but his existence was wretched. He lived completely alone. Nobody worked the land on his vast estate, and there was no domestic help, for Alonso wanted none. The only people he let in the house during the brief period he spent there, which constituted the last days of his life, were two guys with limited albeit precise word power who wore dark suits and came and went, in an indiscreet and out-of-character way, aboard a bright red Lancia Beta 1800 sedan. One of the two was smaller and younger than the other, with wavy dark hair and very pretty blue eyes. Women were attracted to him. After a while they would discover that the only thing he wanted from women was to be beaten. He did not beat them in return and had absolutely no wish to penetrate them. So women would break off with him, except for the perversely sadistic ones. But he got rid of the perversely sadistic ones the moment he realized they were getting pleasure from beating him. They disgusted him, he said.

      The other guy was in his forties. He had a protruding lower jaw, a big mouthful of teeth, and desiccated hair with vivid white streaks. A scar traversed his throat in a wide arc, quite impressive. He had developed the habit of lowering his chin onto his chest to conceal it. He was tall and gangly, and this way of holding his head gave him a quite peculiar look. These two had also killed people, but there was no common measure between them and Georges Gerfaut. Nor were they at all like Alonso. For both, killing people was a second career. The younger had worked earlier in the hotel industry, first as a waiter, then as a trilingual receptionist. The other was a former soldier of fortune. Georges Gerfaut is a traveling salesman. His job is to sell expensive electrical equipment manufactured by his company, a subsidiary of ITT, to individual and institutional clients in various parts of France and Europe. He has a good knowledge of the devices he sells, for he is an engineer. As for Alonso, his trade was war. He was an officer in the Dominican army and a member of the SIM (Military Investigations Unit). The best years of his life were those from 1955 to 1960, spent at the San Isidro air base. He was not engaged in war at San Isidro. The only state with which the Dominican Republic can conveniently go to war is the republic of Haiti, because it happens to occupy the same island as the Dominican Republic. All other countries are separated from the Dominican Republic by at the very least a large stretch of water. But in those years there was no war even with Haiti. Alonso was very comfortable with this. At the San Isidro air base, in concert with his colleague and buddy Elías Wessin y Wessin (the base commander and a man destined to play a slightly historical if ever so mediocre role), he would send planes of the Dominican air force as far as Puerto Rico, whence they returned bearing liquor and other goods thus liberated from the burden of import duty. Alonso and Elías lived like kings. And they were untouchable. For while Santo Domingo, in contrast to many other places, was untouched by war with any foreign power, here as everywhere social war was a fact of life. And here as everywhere the chief function of the armed forces was to prevail in the social war whenever the need arose. In this connection, the intelligence-gathering role of the SIM was essential. To San Isidro were regularly brought persons suspected of collusion with the class enemy, and the job of the SIM under Alonso’s direction was to make them talk by beating them, raping them, slicing them up, electrocuting them, castrating them, drowning them in places ingeniously designed for the purpose, and cutting their heads off.

      On 30 May 1961, Trujillo the Benefactor of the Fatherland got himself riddled with bullets on a road by a commando group whose members, along with some accomplices, were later apprehended. For Alonso and Elías the halcyon days were over, or almost. The sons of the Benefactor held on for 180 days; subsequently, under Balaguer’s presidency, Alonso and Elías got the chance to prepare for the 1962 elections by massacring peasants in Palma Sola and eliminating the loyalist General Rodríguez Reyes. After the small-time democrat Juan Bosch was elected, Elías ousted him in favor of Donald Reid Cabral, Santo Domingo representative of the CIA—and of Austin cars. Less than two years later, Elías saw clearly that the democratic ex-cop Caamano would bring a revolution in his wake, and he had a wild old time unleashing his tanks, Mustangs, and Meteors, which were deployed notably in Santo Domingo’s northern suburbs. These were the most dangerous areas, with their workers’ militias and other swine plundering (horresco referens) the great Pepsi-Cola plant near the cemetery for bottles with which to make Molotov cocktails. The Americans, however, who just like Elías had perceived the real danger behind Caamano’s moderate and so to speak Kennedyesque pronouncements, and consequently furnished Elías with overwhelmingly decisive support in terms of logistics, arms, munitions, helicopters, aircraft carriers, marines, an air bridge (1,539 flights), and a lousy stinking “neutral” corridor—the Americans, once victory was assured, promptly ditched Elías and exiled him to Miami. Tough.

      Alonso, for his part, had been out of it since 1962. Alonso did not share Elías’s thirst for power, merely his love of luxury. He had overseen the departure of the Benefactor’s family, complete with corpse, national archives, and a truly amazing amount of money. This task had given him ideas. As the 1962 elections brought Juan Bosch to power, Alonso flew off to exile and to the vast pile of dough that he had sent on ahead.

      It is possible that Alonso’s mind deteriorated over the next few years—years for him of ever-more-hasty house moving. Or perhaps, after all, he had been a near-dimwit from the outset. It is well to bear in mind that even at the pinnacle of his power he was nothing more than a high-ranking military policeman, for this makes it less startling to contemplate him in the last years of his life, terrorized, admitting no one to his house, no gardener or household help, lest it be an agent of the CIA, of the Dominican government, or of some group of exiled Dominican revolutionaries. Truth to tell, Alonso was getting old. By the time he settled in France, not far from Magny-en-Vexin, he was a broken man. Broken enough, at any rate, to decide that he would not move again. Let us remember, too, that here was someone who, faced by the widow of an executed man refusing to believe her husband was dead, sent her the man’s head through the mail, with a little something stuffed in its mouth. One would have to say that, even if Alonso’s specific fears were unjustified, their basis was rational enough.

      Not even the postman was allowed in: what scarce mail arrived had to be delivered to a box at the edge of the road, outside the barred entrance to the property. And, just in case the mail carrier might be tempted to overstep this rule, as indeed for any comparable eventuality, Alonso kept a dog trained for fighting, a bullmastiff bitch.

      The land around the residence thus lay fallow, producing nothing, while the interior of the house, in the absence of any staff to look after things, fell likewise into disrepair. The locals grumbled to see the land going to waste and several times contemplated a protest. No doubt they would eventually have mounted one had not Alonso’s death settled the question.

      Until that moment, in the last days of his life, Alonso generally gave up trying to sleep at about five or six o’clock in the morning. He would leave his disordered bed and his upstairs bedroom. In the large kitchen, he would assemble a full-scale English breakfast for himself: fruit juice, cereal with milk, and a plate of fried food accompanied by strong tea; he finished off with rounds of toast that he cut in half on the slant and then spread with a thin layer of butter and a film of honey or marmalade.

      After his breakfast, Alonso would pull on a tracksuit and run for a long time with short little strides across his property, across his land overrun by wild growth, in company with the bullmastiff bitch, whose name was Elizabeth. Then he went back indoors and did not budge for the rest of the day, save in response to a ring of the bell by a delivery person. In that event, he would first observe the barred entrance gate from a ground-floor window through very powerful binoculars. Once satisfied, he would leave the house and go down to the gate armed with a .38 caliber Colt officer’s target pistol and take the delivery. He never allowed the delivery person onto the property and would carry provisions up to the house himself. Sometimes the said provisions were heavy—cases of whisky, for example—and Alonso would sweat profusely, and uncontrollable trembling would seize his calves or the side of his mouth.

      In the living room of the