Magic Terror (8 page)

He straightened his posture and in a conversational tone said, “So you had dinner at my favorite auberge? Agreeable, isn’t it?” Hubert took one brisk stride over the narrow road, then another, pleased to have concluded one bit of business and eager to get on to the next.

A step behind him, N drew the pistol from the case and shoved the barrel into the base of Hubert’s skull. The dapper little fraud knew what was happening—he tried to dodge sideways. N rammed the muzzle into his pad of hair and pulled the trigger. With the sudden flash and a sound no louder than a cough came a sharp scent of gunpowder and burning flesh. Hubert jolted forward and flopped to the ground. N heard Martine screaming at him even before she got out of the Mercedes.

He pushed the gun into the satchel, clamped the satchel beneath his elbow, bent down to grasp Hubert’s ankles, and began dragging him to the edge of the road. Martine stood up on the far side of the Mercedes, still screaming. When her voice sailed into outraged hysteria, he glanced up from his task and saw a nice little automatic, a sibling to the one in his bedside drawer at home, pointed at his chest. Martine was panting, but she held the gun steady, both arms extended across the top of the Mercedes. He stopped moving and looked at her with an unruffled calm curiosity. “Put that thing down,” he said. He dragged M. Hubert’s body another six inches backward.

“Stop!” she screeched.

He stopped and looked back up at her. “Yes?”

Martine stood up, keeping her arms extended. “Don’t do anything, just listen.” She took a moment to work out what she would say. “We work for the same people. You don’t know who I am, but you are using the name Cash. You weren’t supposed to show up until the deal was set, so what’s going on?” Her voice was steadier than he would have expected.

Hubert’s ankles in his hands, N said, “First of all, I do know who you are, Martine. And it should be obvious that what’s going on is a sudden revision of our plans for the evening. Our people found out your friend was planning to cheat his customers. Don’t you think we ought to get him off the road before the customers turn up?”

She glanced downhill without moving the pistol. “They didn’t tell me about any change.”

“Maybe they couldn’t. I’m sorry I startled you.” N walked backward until he reached the edge of the road. He dropped Hubert’s feet and moved forward to grab the collar of his jacket and pull the rest of his body onto the narrow verge. He set the satchel beside his feet.

She lowered the gun. “How do you know my name?”

“Our contact. What’s he called now? Our divisional region controller. He said you’d be handling all the paperwork. Interesting guy. He’s an Indian, did you know that? Lives in Fontainebleau. His daughter has a rabbit named Custer.” N bent at the knees and planted his hands on either side of Hubert’s waist. When he pulled up, the body folded in half and released a gassy moan.

“He’s still alive,” Martine said.

“No, he isn’t.” N looked over the edge of the narrow strip of grass and down into the same abyss he had seen from the edge of the parking lot. The road followed the top of the gorge as it rose to the plateau.

“It didn’t look to me like he was planning to cheat anybody.” She had not left the side of the Mercedes. “He was going to make a lot of money. So were we.”

“Cheating is how this weasel made money.” N hauled the folded corpse an inch nearer the edge, and Hubert’s bowels emptied with a string of wet popping sounds and a strong smell of excrement. N swung his body over the edge and let go. Hubert instantly disappeared. Five or six seconds later came a soft sound of impact and a rattle of scree, and then nothing until an almost inaudible thud.

“He even cheated his customers,” N said. “Half the stuff in that shop is no good.” He brushed off his hands and looked down at his clothes for stains before tucking the satchel back under his left arm.

“I wish someone had told me this was going to happen.” She put the pistol in her handbag and came slowly around the trunk of the Mercedes. “I could always call for confirmation, couldn’t I?”

“You’d better,” N said. In English, he added, “If you know what’s good for you.”

She nodded and licked her lips. Her hair gleamed in the light from the Mercedes. The skimpy black thing was a shift, and her black sheer nylons ended in low-heeled pumps. She had dressed for the Arabs, not the auberge. She flattened a hand on the top of her head and gave him a straight look. “All right, Monsieur Cash, what do I do now?”

“About what you were supposed to do before. I’ll drive up to the restaurant, and you go back to town for your car. The mule who’s driving it down from Paris takes this one to Russia. Call in as soon as you get to your—what is it?—your LUD.”

“What about . . . ?” She waved in the direction of the auberge.

“I’ll express our profound regrets and assure our friends that their needs will soon be answered.”

“They said fieldwork was full of surprises.” Martine smiled at him uncertainly before walking back to the Mercedes.

Through the side window N saw a flat black briefcase on the backseat. He got behind the wheel, put his satchel on his lap, and examined the controls. Depressing a button in the door made the driver’s seat glide back to give him more room. “I almost hate to turn this beautiful car over to some Russian mobster.” He fiddled with the button, tilting the seat forward and lowering it. “What do we call our armament-deprived friends, anyway? Tonto calls them ragheads, but even ragheads have names.”

“Monsieur Temple and Monsieur Law. Daniel didn’t know their real names. Shouldn’t we be going?”

Finally, N located the emergency brake and eased it in. He depressed the brake pedal and moved the automatic shift from park to its lowest gear. “Get me the briefcase from the backseat. Doing it now will save time.” The Mercedes swam forward as he released the brake pedal. Martine glanced at him, then shifted around to put one knee on her seat. She bent sideways and stretched toward the briefcase. N dipped into the satchel, raised the tip of the silencer to the wall of her chest, and fired. He heard the bullet splat against something like bone and then realized that it had passed through her body and struck a metal armature within the leather upholstery. Martine slumped into the gap between the seats. Before him, a long leg jerked out, struck the dash, and cracked the heel off a black pump. The cartridge came pinging off the windshield and ricocheted straight to his ribs.

He shoved the pistol back home and tapped the accelerator. Martine slipped deeper into the well between the seats. N thrust open his door and cranked the wheel to the left. Her hip slid onto the handle of the gearshift. He touched the accelerator again. The Mercedes grumbled and hopped forward. Alarmingly near the edge, he jumped off the seat and turned into the spin his body took when his feet met the ground.

He was close enough to the sleek, recessed handle on the back door to caress it. Inch by inch, the car stuttered toward the side of the road. Martine uttered an indecipherable dream-word. The Mercedes lurched to the precipice, nosed over, tilted forward and down, advanced, hesitated, stopped. The roof light illuminated Martine’s half-conscious struggle to pull herself back into her seat. The Mercedes trembled forward, dipped its nose, and with exquisite reluctance slid off the earth into the huge darkness. Somersaulting in midair, it cast wheels of yellow light, which extinguished when it smashed into whatever was down there.

Visited by the blazing image of a long feminine leg unfurling before his eyes like a lightning bolt, N loped uphill. That lineament running from the molded thigh to the tender back of the knee, the leap of the calf muscle. The whole perfect thing, like a sculpture of the ideal leg, filling the space in front of him. When would she have made her move, he wondered. She had been too uncertain to act when she should have, and she could not have done it while he was driving, so it would have happened in the parking lot. She’d had that .25-caliber Beretta, a smart gun, in N’s opinion. Martine’s extended leg flashed before him again, and he suppressed a giddy, enchanted swell of elation.

Ghostly church bells pealed, and a black-haired young priest shone glimmering from the chiaroscuro of a rearing boulder.

He came up past the retaining wall into the mild haze of light from the windows of the auberge. His feet crunched on the pebbles of the parking lot. After a hundred-foot uphill run he was not even breathing hard, pretty good for a man of his age. He came to the far end of the lot, put his hands on the fence, and inhaled air of surpassing sweetness and purity. Distant ridges and peaks hung beneath fast-moving clouds. This was a gorgeous part of the world. It was unfortunate that he would have to leave it behind. But he was leaving almost everything behind. The books were the worst of it. Well, there were book dealers in Switzerland, too. And he still had
Kim.

N moved down the fence toward the auberge. Big windows displayed the usual elderly men in berets playing cards, a local family dining with the grandparents, one young couple flirting, flames jittering and weaving over the hearth. A solid old woman carried a steaming platter to the family’s table. The Japanese golfers had not returned, and all the other tables were empty. On her way back to the kitchen, the old woman sat down with the card players and laughed at a remark from an old boy missing most of his teeth. No one in the dining room would be leaving for at least an hour. N’s stomach audibly complained of being so close to food without being fed, and he moved back into the relative darkness to wait for the second half of his night’s work.

And then he stepped forward again, for headlights had come beaming upward from below the lot. N moved into the gauzy light and once again experienced the true old excitement, that of opening himself to unpredictability, of standing at the intersection of infinite variables. A Peugeot identical to his in year, model, and color followed its own headlights into the wide parking lot. N walked toward the car, and the two men in the front seats took him in with wary, expressionless faces. The Peugeot moved alongside him, and the window cranked down. A lifeless, pockmarked face regarded him with a cold, threatening neutrality. N liked that—it told him everything he needed to know.

“Monsieur Temple? Monsieur Law?”

Without any actual change in expression, the driver’s face
deepened,
intensified into itself in a way that made the man seem both more brutal and more human, almost pitiable. N saw an entire history of rage, disappointment, and meager satisfactions in his response. The driver hesitated, looked into N’s eyes, then slowly nodded.

“There’s been a problem,” N said. “Please, do not be alarmed, but Monsieur Hubert cannot join you tonight. He has been in a serious automobile accident.”

The man in the passenger seat spoke a couple of sentences in Arabic. His hands were curled around the grip of a fat black attaché case. The driver answered in monosyllables before turning back to N. “We have heard nothing of an accident.” His French was stiff but correct, and his accent was barbaric. “Who are you supposed to be?”

“Marc-Antoine Labouret. I work for Monsieur Hubert. The accident happened late this afternoon. I think he spoke to you before that?”

The man nodded, and another joyous flare of adrenaline flooded into N’s bloodstream.

“A tour bus went out of control near Montory and ran into his Mercedes. Fortunately, he suffered no more than a broken leg and a severe concussion, but his companion, a young woman, was killed. He goes in and out of consciousness, and of course he is very distressed about his friend, but when I left him at the hospital Monsieur Hubert emphasized his regrets at this inconvenience.” N drew in another liter of transcendent air. “He insisted that I communicate in person his profound apologies and continuing respect. He also wishes you to know that after no more than a small delay matters will go forward as arranged.”

“Hubert never mentioned an assistant,” the driver said. The other man said something in Arabic. “Monsieur Law and I wonder what is meant by this term, ’a small delay.’”

“A matter of days,” N said. “I have the details in my computer.”

Their laughter sounded like branches snapping, like an automobile landing on trees and rocks. “Our friend Hubert adores the computer,” said the driver.

M. Law leaned forward to look at N. He had a thick mustache and a high, intelligent forehead, and his dark eyes were clear and penetrating. “What was the name of the dead woman?” His accent was much worse than the driver’s.

“Martine is all I know,” N said. “The bitch turned up out of nowhere.”

M. Law’s eyes creased in a smile. “We will continue our discussion inside.”

“I wish I could join you, but I have to get back to the hospital.” He waved the satchel at the far side of the lot. “Why don’t we go over there? It’ll take five minutes to show you what I have on the computer, and you could talk about it over dinner.”

M. Temple glanced at M. Law. M. Law raised and lowered an index finger and settled back. The Peugeot ground over pebbles and pulled up at the fence. The taillights died, and the two men got out. M. Law was about six feet tall and lean, M. Temple a few inches shorter and thick in the chest and waist. Both men wore nice-looking dark suits and gleaming white shirts. Walking toward them, N watched them straighten their clothes. M. Temple carried a large weapon in a shoulder holster, M. Law something smaller in a holster clipped to his belt. They felt superior, even a bit contemptuous toward M. Labouret—the antiques dealer’s flunky, as wed to his computer as an infant to the breast. N came up beside M. Temple, smiled, and ducked through the fence. “Better if they don’t see the screen,” he told their scowling faces. “The people in the restaurant.”

Already impatient with this folly, M. Law nodded at M. Temple. “Go on, do it.” He added something in Arabic.

M. Temple grinned, yanked down the front of his suit jacket, bent down, clamped his right arm across his chest, and steadied himself with the other as he thrust his trunk through the three-foot gap. N moved sideways and held the satchel upright on the top of the fence. M. Temple swung one leg over the white board and hesitated, deciding between raising his right leg before or behind. Leaning left, he bent his right knee and swiveled. A tasseled loafer rapped against the board. N took another step along the fence, pulling the satchel to his chest as if protecting it. M. Temple skipped sideways and pulled his leg through. Embarrassed, he frowned and yanked again at his jacket.