The Prone Gunman (10 page)

“Unh! Unh!” said Maubert, his head pressed against the steel side of the Estafette.

Terrier ripped the .38 from the soft mouth, scraping a lip as he did so with the front sight. He kicked Maubert in the belly to encourage him.

“I feel sick,” said Maubert.

Terrier kicked him again. Maubert grimaced.

“I might have a concussion,” he said in a thick voice.

“What do you want? No, wait. Just my luck to be interrogated by someone who doesn't ask any questions. . . . ” Terrier struck his knee with the barrel of the revolver. Wincing, Maubert tucked his leg under him. “You were supposed to shoot,” he said reproachfully. “You were supposed to shoot the camel jockey. Then and only then was I supposed to shoot you in the head. I was supposed to say. . . . ” He broke off. He seemed to be struggling to speak. Suddenly, his eyes closed and he went limp. He slid quietly to the floor.

With a thumb, Terrier raised first one of Maubert's eyelids and then the other. Maubert showed no ocular reflexes. Terrier checked his pulse. The heart had stopped. Terrier stood up and spat on the corpse. He was trembling a little.

After he had taken the ring road and was driving down the Autoroute du Sud, he heard the one o'clock news, which reported an assassination attempt against the OPEC representative, who had escaped unscathed. Terrier was approaching the Nemours exit, and he began slowing down in order to leave the highway and head for Larchant. He had a rather satisfied expression on his face.

18

Impeccably dressed in a beige three-piece suit, a shirt with pale blue stripes and a tab collar with a pin, and a royal-blue silk tie, Stanley, the black man, stood motionless in the middle of the dining room of his pied-à-terre. His feet were in a cardboard box on whose side could be read the word “VITTEL.” His hands were cuffed tightly behind his back. A wide piece of white adhesive tape covered his mouth. Sweat ran slowly and regularly down the very black skin of his face, and dark haloes had begun forming under his armpits.

In a corner of the room, a hi-fi system played jazz and American popular music rather loudly: the automatic changer played Charlie Parker, Frank Sinatra, the Dizzy Gillespie big band, Ray Charles, etc., in succession. At times, Stanley seemed to shiver. At one moment, violent trembling seized his left leg. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply; the trembling stopped; he opened his eyes again and sighed.

After passing through Larchant, Terrier turned into the narrow, badly paved road that led to Stanley's weekend house. A few hundred meters down, he pulled the two right-hand wheels up onto the shoulder. The low branches lashed against the body of the Estafette. Leaving the engine running, Terrier halted and switched off the parking lights. Not a cloud in the sky, and the night was perfectly clear. Terrier waited till his eyes had adjusted to the semidarkness. Then, feeling his way in the back of the van, he put the walkie-talkie on receive. He waited again as he took the sling from the narrow case, which also contained other accessories, and attached it to the assault rifle. All that came from the little radio was an indistinct background hum, occasionally punctuated by a burst of static.

About one-forty-five, Terrier took the wheel again. Without turning on the headlights, he very slowly covered a few hundred meters. He narrowed his eyes to make out the road before him. The rifle was to his right on the floor of the cab, the walkie-talkie on the passenger seat. The Estafette made very little noise because the man had quickly slipped it into third gear and was barely touching the accelerator—just enough so the engine wouldn't stall.

Six or seven hundred meters before Stanley's house, Terrier spotted a clearing on the right among the firs and birches. He turned sharply in among the trees, mowing down a few saplings, then killed the ignition. The Estafette stood on packed dirt with sandstone showing through in places.

“Hey! . . . Hey! . . .” came a voice from the transceiver. The voice had a twang but was otherwise very distinct. “I think I see something.”

“Then shut the fuck up,” another voice hissed after a brief volley of static.

Terrier remained motionless in the cab. His lips were sealed. He had taken the .38 from his belt. The Estafette's engine cooled off quickly because of the cold outside: tiny sounds of crackling metal could be heard. The radio was silent, apart from the background hum. Terrier went back into motion: he slipped the revolver back into his belt, and the grip of the weapon bruised his stomach when he bent over to pick the Valmet up off the floor. He was delicately opening the door when the transceiver started up again.

“Hey!” said the first voice. “I got it wrong. I thought something was happening on the road, but there's zero out there.”

“You're sure?”

“Positive.”

“Fine, now shut the fuck up.”

“What's the point of having walkie-talkies,” the walkie-talkie said grumpily, “if we can't talk to each other?”

“You were told to just give a tap if you saw something. Shit! Are you going to shut up or not? Don't you understand that he might have a set, too, dickhead?

“Okay,” the first voice said stiffly. “Okay.”

After that, the set was silent.

Terrier waited a second, then he finished opening the door and got out of the Estafette. He was carrying the rifle on its sling, with the barrel down, so he moved rather swiftly through the woods. He swung his arms to the left and right at shoulder level to part the branches, which were almost invisible in the darkness. He held the .38 in his right hand and the Lyman scope in his left. He circled around to the back of Stanley's weekend house.

The house was a small concrete cube, with a basement garage on one side and a mansard roof. Behind the shutters, all the windows were lighted up. From where he was, at the edge of the bare ground encircling the house, Terrier could vaguely hear music.

He crouched at the edge of the woods. The low-hanging branches touched the wire fencing stretched between whitewashed cement posts. He had put the .38 down on a sandstone outcropping and was holding the Lyman scope in both hands. He very slowly scrutinized Stanley's house and its immediate vicinity. Then, standing back in order to be bothered less by the low-hanging branches, he pointed the apparatus in the direction of the road, along the line of the fence that he was next to. He couldn't make out much. Suddenly, there was a brief, weak red glow at the edge of the forest, near the road. Terrier immediately put down the scope and took the Valmet off his shoulder. He unfastened the sling and slipped the revolver into his pants. Leaving rifle and scope behind, he began crawling along the fence. He crawled rapidly. The little noise that he made was inaudible because of the cold wind in the trees. After a few moments, Terrier found himself some ten meters from the empty road, and he made out the silhouette of a kneeling man in a light-colored parka, sheltered under a fir tree with his back to Terrier. The lookout was watching the road from his hiding place. A walkie-talkie and an M16 lay next to him on the sand. The man drew on his cigarette as he shielded it with his hand. Terrier got to his feet behind the man and rolled the ends of the Valmet's sling around his fists. He took three steps forward and, without a sound, throttled the smoker.

He left the corpse where it lay, after glancing at the face. It was the man who had followed him with
Le Monde diplomatique
in his pocket and later put the Bodyguard Airweight to his head in the hotel, in front of Anne, while she was naked. Passing through the interior of the forest, Terrier returned to the fence where he had left the Valmet and the scope. He stuffed the sights in the inside pocket of his jacket, slung his rifle on his shoulder, and, bent double, ran to the back of the enclosure, then scrambled up and over the fence and sprinted across the thirty meters of open ground that separated him from the house.

The rest of the house had almost no openings, the sole exceptions being the kitchen window and the bathroom skylight in the mansard roof. Terrier caught his breath and climbed the downspout at the corner of the house. From there, he hoisted himself up to the sill of the skylight. It had opaque glass and a wooden frame, and it was locked shut. Squatting on the sill, Terrier listened to the music coming up from the ground floor. It was Stanley's records that were being played. At present, it was the Dizzy Gillespie big band as recorded live at the Newport Jazz festival in the fifties. During a series of particularly aggressive riffs by the trumpet section, Terrier gave the skylight frame a good, hard kick. If he had not held onto the rain gutter with both hands, he would have lost his balance and fallen. He waited for another loud passage of music to give another kick. The screw of the latch was forced halfway out. Terrier pushed gently: the screw and the latch came apart and fell noiselessly on the thick bathroom rug below, and the skylight opened.

On the ground floor, in the middle of the dining room, Stanley was still standing in the Vittel box; he wore an agonized expression, and he was covered in sweat. His left thigh was trembling uncontrollably; he closed his eyes and grimaced; his jaws were working and his teeth grinding under the gag.

Taking care not to knock the Valmet against the frame of the skylight, Terrier inched his way through feet first and dropped down into the little room, between the bathtub and the sink. No lights were on in the bathroom, but the door was open onto the lighted hallway. Terrier picked up his assault rifle and stole a glance down the hallway. He pulled back immediately, took off his shoes, then advanced in his stocking feet.

The doors of the three bedrooms were shut. Near the bathroom, the hallway ended at a wall with one window set in it. The shutters were closed. In the other direction, the hallway continued as a balcony overlooking the dining room. Just as before in the Rue Varenne duplex, the short guy with the black eyes and the rumpled overcoat stood looking down from the balcony, with his elbows on the railing. A walkie-talkie sat next to him on the natural pine floor, and in his right hand was a Star BKM automatic pistol whose barrel rested in the crook of his left arm.

Terrier advanced very slowly down the hallway. His sweat-dampened socks did not slip on the wooden floor. He aimed the Valmet at the short guy. Out of the corner of his eye, the short guy noticed the slight movement in the hallway at the edge of his field of vision, and he immediately pressed the trigger of his automatic, which was already pointing in that direction. The 9mm bullet sent up a spray of pine splinters two meters from Terrier, who thereupon let loose with fourteen rounds at the short guy, who was busy throwing himself on his belly. Since Terrier was aiming at his legs, the short guy was almost cut in two lengthwise by the 7.62mm bullets.

The reports, especially those of the powerful automatic rifle, had reverberated deafeningly in the hallway, and the air reeked of cordite. Terrier quickly pulled back into the doorway of the bathroom and waited. Downstairs, the Dizzy Gillespie record was over, and the automatic changer clicked. The short guy's corpse was bleeding all over. He had pieces of his brains in his ear and between his teeth. The walkie-talkie, though intact, was silent. Not a sound came from the bedroom. No door opened. Terrier sighed and poked at his ear with his little finger. Downstairs, the record player clicked again, and Ray Charles began enthusiastically to shout hallelujah, he loved her so.

After a moment, Terrier put his shoes back on and went and opened the doors of the bedrooms, taking precautions. The rooms were all lit up, but no one was inside. In the first room, the bed was unmade, men's clothing was thrown over a seatback, and on a little desk was a framed photograph of two black men in their sixties, dressed up in their Sunday best. The second room had not been occupied recently. The mattress on the bed was bare. A vacuum cleaner and boxes of old magazines were set against one wall. There was dust on the furniture. In the third, Terrier found blond hair on the rumpled bed and an empty cognac bottle lying in the corner. Another bottle had been thrown at the door; the pieces were on the floor, and cognac had splattered the wall and run down to the floor.

Holding the Valmet out in front of him, Terrier advanced along the balcony. With one shoulder against the corner of a wall, he surveyed the dining room below, where Stanley, standing in the noncarbonated mineral-water box, his stocking feet on a squat metallic cylinder reminiscent of a pressure cooker, strained his neck muscles to see behind him. He saw Terrier on the balcony at the head of the flight of stairs leading down to the dining room. Stanley groaned sharply behind his gag. The muscles tightened in Terrier's neck. He groaned like Stanley. Then he came quickly down the stairs, keeping the Valmet at the ready and glancing warily this way and that.

Without for the moment concerning himself with Stanley, who was shaking, sweating, and groaning, Terrier went briskly through the ground-floor rooms and found no one. He came back to Stanley and ripped off his adhesive-tape gag.

“I'm standing on a mine,” said Stanley.

Terrier gave him a perplexed look. Then he raised his eyebrows and proceeded to examine the flat cylinder of dull metal on which Stanley stood trembling in his stocking feet.

“My left heel is on the detonator,” said Stanley. “It was armed by my stepping on it. They made me step on it.” A terrible trembling ran up and down his left leg. “If I raise my foot, it goes off. I can't hold on much longer. Hurry up—go to the kitchen and get a knife from the table drawer.”

Terrier rushed to the kitchen, opened the table drawer, found a carving knife, and returned to Stanley.

“I'll do it myself,” said the black man. “It's too dangerous. We'll have to cut the chain of the handcuffs. Go down in the cellar. There's a toolbox. Bring up the wire cutters.”

Terrier put a knee on the floor near the Vittel box, set down the Valmet, and crouched down to examine the box and Stanley's feet.

“No, stop, no, shit,” said Stanley. “Go get the wire cutters. Please, Christian—it's too dangerous.”

Holding the knife handle in one hand and the point of the blade in the other, Terrier slid the knife under the black man's left foot, slowly interposing the blade between the man's heel and the detonator. The heel was trembling. Sweat ran down Stanley's face. Once the blade was interposed between the detonator and the foot, Terrier raised his eyes toward Stanley and nodded and smiled. Stanley dropped to the floor. He curled up, then stretched out, then curled up again. His muscles quivered all over, and suddenly he urinated in his impeccable trousers. With one knee on the floor, Terrier looked at him and kept the blade of the knife pressed against the detonator.

“I've just taken a piss,” observed Stanley. “What fucking bastards. I think they've got your chick, you know. They got the jump on me late in the afternoon. I think they took her away about an hour ago. They put me here, on this thing.” He shook his head. “What fucking bastards,” he repeated. All at once, he seemed to grasp Terrier's position; he moved quickly then, bending his knees, passing his handcuffed wrists under his heels, and then standing back up, with his hands in front of him. “Wait,” he exclaimed uselessly. “We have to put something on the blade, something heavy. I have some bricks in the cellar. Will you go down? Bring me up the wire cutters, too. My legs have turned to jelly. Go on—I'll hold the knife.”

On all fours near the Vittel box, Stanley pressed both fists down onto the blade. His fists were trembling. He half smiled at Terrier, who had extricated himself and was heading toward the cellar.