Free A Void by Georges Perec Page A

I," adds Olga.
    "Good," says Hassan, consulting his watch. "Gracious, I must
    run! My train's at 4.50. So long! Till Monday night!"
    "God go with you," murmurs Olga piously.
    "Ciao," says Amaury.
    Striding away, Hassan is soon out of sight. With Olga follow-
    ing him, Amaury idly strolls from animal to animal; but, finding
    nothing of any import, asks Olga out to a charming lunch.
    Whilst Amaury is at Paris's zoo, Ottavio Ottaviani is paying a
    visit to its hospitals, Broca, Foch, Saint-Louis and Rothschild;
    and inquiring in many of its commissariats. Nobody has any
    information for him about Anton Vowl.
    At midnight, though, hurrying on towards Lipp, at that busy
    Vavin-Raspail roundabout, who should our Corsican run into
    but Amaury, who quickly grasps his arm and mouths at him in
    a vivid dumb-show, "Don't go in, Lipp is simply crawling with
    cops!"
    "Not too far off," says Ottaviani, who occasionally had a habit
    of confiding information not normally for public consumption,
    "not too far off is an individual whom this country's top brass
    want, shall I say . . . to go missing."
    5 5
    "Missing?" Amaury, thinking to catch a whiff of his quarry,
    practically jumps out of his skin.
    "Damn it!" says Ottaviani, cursing his stupidity at passing on
    such hush-hush information to a layman.
    "Now, now, Ottaviani, out with it! Vowl is also missing!"
    "This affair has nothing to do with him," affirms Ottaviani.
    "How do you know?" says Amaury, adding, with an authority
    that allows no pussyfooting on Ottaviani's part, "Who is this
    individual?"
    "A Moroccan," admits Ottaviani.
    "A Moroccan!" shouts Amaury.
    "Shhh," murmurs Ottaviani, looking around anxiously. 'That's
    right, a Moroccan. A Moroccan solicitor . . . "
    "Hassan Ibn Abbou!" Amaury proclaims in triumph.
    5 6
    1
    In which an unknown individual has it in for
    Moroccan solicitors
    "No," says Ottaviani with his usual sang-froid, "it isn't Ibn Abbou
    but Ibn Barka."
    "Oh, thank God, that's a load off my mind," says Amaury with
    a sigh, afraid, without knowing why, first for Hassan Ibn Abbou,
    and, a fortiori , if almost subliminally, for his own skin. For if
    Anton Vowl falls victim to an abductor (or abductors), who's to
    say that this abductor (or abductors) won't now try to lay a hand
    on his faithful companions, Olga, Hassan and so forth?
    Conson, with Ottaviani dogging him, walks off to Harry's Bar,
    sits down (in a dark ill-lit booth so as to avoid gossip), signals
    to a barman and asks for a whisky, a Chivas, straight. Ottaviani's
    fancy is for a Baron but without any thick, sudsy collar of froth
    on top. Munich or stout? Our Corsican hums and haws for an
    instant, saying at last "Oh, Munich'll do," simply as a way of
    dismissing a barman who visibly cannot wait to chat up a pair
    of young girls in an adjoining booth and is sarcastically, not to
    say "smart-asstically", humming "Why am I waiting?".
    Without choosing to go into all its various ins and outs,
    Ottaviani sums up what was most scandalous about Ibn Barka's
    kidnapping. It was a total cock-up from start to finish. Paris-Soir,
    a right-wing rag that was normally of a rampantly colonialist
    bias, sought to stir things up by publishing a lot of juicy, malici-
    ous rumours. Public indignation was at boiling point. Diplomats
    would go to ground, politicians usually avid for publicity would
    5 7
    abruptly drop out of sight. Papon took an oath that it had noth-
    ing to do with him. Souchon, though, at last had to own up to
    it, as did Voitot. All Matignon took fright at a diary by Figon
    incriminating a high-court dignitary, which was finally, if not
    without difficulty, shown up as a fabrication. Oufkir had an alibi
    - if you could call so ridiculous a story an alibi! Nor, following
    Fugon's hara-kiri a la Mishima (in fact, so rumour had it, this
    was not a totally voluntary affair, for, calmly placing a sword in
    front of him, and saying only, in an odd transatlantic twang, that
    "a man's gotta do what a man's gotta