The Successor Read Online Free

beneath the surface, the causes of the broken engagement and the suicide, the analyst, as might be expected, threw in the towel. In accordance with his recently acquired custom of adding long supplementary notes to everything he wrote, he accompanied his request for early retirement with a long account of the state of his health that winter, which was backed up by two medical certificates one of which was headed “impotence.”
    His colleagues had no intention of following suit, though that did not stop them dreaming of one day having the Albania files removed from their purview. Any other desk would be better, even one with an abysmal reputation, like the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation, or some African countries with frontiers that were less a reflection of political changes than of the desert winds, as they had been centuries earlier.
    They sighed deeply, cursing that “basket case of a country,” and went back to the unyielding file, attempting to start over as simply as possible.
    Murder or suicide? If a murder, who was the culprit? For what motive? Most of the material that had been collected continued to point to the very highly placed official whose silhouette had been seen slipping into the Successor’s residence in the course of the fateful night. Some reports even went so far as to give a name to the person suspected of being that shadow: Adrian Hasobeu, the minister of the interior. He had just left that job to go up a further rung in the hierarchy. All intelligence forecasts made him the Successor’s most likely replacement.
    A host of other details combined with the fleeting shadow to make the fog even murkier. The Successor’s request to be awakened at eight; his wife sleeping like a log; the tang of gunpowder that had greeted her when she opened the door on the stroke of eight. All those comings and goings in the
Bllok
throughout the night. The wind and the rain that kept changing direction. Two men had apparently been seen from the outside (perhaps by one of the sentries) going up or down the staircase of the residence. Thanks to a flash of lightning, they had been glimpsed on the first-floor veranda propping the Successor up like a tailor’s dummy.
    Was he still alive when they took him back up — or down? Had he fainted? Was he wounded? Or dead? Were they taking him to the basement or to the morgue? To have him made up to look presentable, perhaps? Or to move the wound, by stopping up the bullet hole, for instance, and replacing it with another? However, there was a secret passageway in the basement that nobody knew about …
    All these ingredients churned unrelentingly in somber spirals moving now slower, now faster, swirling this way and that, in whorls that came and went, disappeared and reappeared, and finally sank out of sight. But in every variant of the mix, the ingredients themselves remained irreducible and in the end came to resemble shards of glass, or a substance that was simultaneously the stock and the fermenting agent without which no mystery could have risen.
    Intelligence analysts were near the end of their rope as they struggled over the Albania files. It was the first time they had switched from one theory to another with such abandon. For instance, the first idea that occurred to anyone looking at the information about the silhouette was that it belonged to the Successor’s assassin. But you only had to look at things in their proper order to realize that such a deduction was far from safe. Even assuming that the said silhouette (and assuming it was Adrian Hasobeu’s) had gotten into the residence, how could you be sure what the purpose of the late-night visit was? Was he on his way to commit murder, or to push the Successor to kill himself? But what if instead of either of these he had been aiming to persuade the Successor not to pull the trigger, seeing that at the Politburo meeting scheduled for the next day he was going to be forgiven?
    To cap it all, there was the secret