“Basically,” said Maubert, “anyone could do your job. I bet they pay you well, but anyone could do it. You’re paid for running the risk. For the responsibility. I mean, if you’re nabbed one day, you’re nabbed as a killer—that’s what I mean when I say ‘risk.’ They don’t pay you for your skills.”
With both hands, Terrier offered Maubert the Valmet in the dark. Maubert laughed nervously and shook his head. He drew on his cigarette as Terrier placed the assault rifle back on his lap and smiled.
“No, thanks,” said Maubert. “Besides. . . . ” He thought for a moment. “Besides, you’re certainly paid for your reflexes, too. Think about it, I’ve never killed anyone. I mean, not in cold blood. In war, yes.” He spoke softly in the darkness out of caution. For one thing, every time the lights turned green, traffic surged down the avenue; for another, the occasional pedestrian hastened through the freezing night right past the Estafette. “I’m sure I’d be capable of killing in cold blood. But if something went wrong, I don’t know how I’d react. You always have the right reflexes, don’t you? That’s why they pay you so much, right?”
In the darkness, Terrier shrugged. Maubert was quiet for a moment. Then:
“What do I open so you can shoot?”
Terrier leaned forward and stretched out an arm. He tapped on one of the two lower panels of the back of the van as if he were knocking softly to be let in, then he leaned back again. Maubert nodded.
“Your girl really made a play for me, you know,” he said abruptly. He cleared his throat. “I don’t know anything about your relationship. But she offered herself openly, you know what I mean? As a general rule, it’s not my style to fuck around on a job. But this was different. She took me by surprise. I mean, it was something violent. She’s a little nuts, I have to say.”
The walkie-talkie on the metal floor began spitting out incomprehensible words. Maubert picked it right up.
“Goldfish,” he said. “Repeat.”
He listened. He squinted. He put the set down.
“The target is early,” he said worriedly. “He’s on his way.”
It was close to midnight. Traffic had increased after the movies had let out. Here and there, along the part of the avenue near the roundabout, small groups of pedestrians and couples were returning to their cars, starting their engines, and letting them warm up before setting off.
“Shit, what a fuck-up,” said Maubert.
Terrier had crossed his arms and slipped his fingers under his armpits. Maubert quickly opened the rear door that Terrier had designated.
“You haven’t attached the sight,” he said anxiously.
Terrier shrugged again. He unfolded his arms and flexed his fingers. Then he stretched out on the metal floor and raised the Valmet. The position of the prone gunman was perfect. He had a clear view of the roundabout and the first two hundred meters of Avenue Montaigne. Maubert quickly moved back past Terrier’s extended body and positioned himself behind the shooter. A full minute passed. Then the sound of whistles filled the crossroads. And, exactly as Maubert had described it earlier, four motorcycle cops bolted from the roundabout, followed by a Citroën SM, a Citroën Pallas, and another Citroën SM. Terrier aimed his weapon at the Citroën Pallas as soon as he saw it. The convoy turned into the avenue. All of a sudden, Terrier rolled over on his back. He glimpsed Maubert leaning over him with the Smith & Wesson in his hand. With all his strength, Terrier smashed the butt of his weapon into the man’s testicles. Maubert’s face was incredibly contorted; he doubled up. Swinging the butt down, Terrier knocked the revolver from his hand. Then he grabbed the crumpling, mustachioed man by the ears and beat his face against the floor. At that instant, at least three automatic weapons let loose along the avenue. Dropping the unconscious Maubert, Terrier jumped over the seatbacks and took the wheel of the Estafette. As he started up, he saw out of the corner of his eye that one of the motorcycle cops had fallen and that the other three were desperately trying to stop. An out-of-control Citroën SM, its windshield shattered, plowed into one of them and sent him sailing into the gutter before it climbed the sidewalk and hit a tree. Tires screeching, the Pallas zigzagged, and bullet holes appeared in its side as it successfully avoided the two unharmed motorcycle cops by veering from side to side almost on two wheels; eventually, it made its escape and snaked off toward Place de l’Alma. Meanwhile, the second SM spun around in the middle of the avenue and came to rest against the traffic island at the mouth of Rue Bayard. Two or three concealed shooters continued spraying, and the windows of the second SM crumbled. There were no tracer bullets.
During these same few seconds, the Estafette had started. Engine roaring, it tore out of its parking place, turned into the service road, and immediately swerved into Rue Bayard, which it took in the wrong direction. A Citroën 2CV was approaching slowly. Terrier turned on the headlights and accelerated. The little car swerved abruptly and jammed itself between two vehicles parked in front of Radio Luxembourg. The Estafette ripped off one of the little car’s fenders as it went by and continued on toward the east, still accelerating. Far behind, at the junction of Avenue Montaigne and Rue Bayard, gunfire could still be heard, but it was more and more sporadic.
Terrier turned left at the end of Rue Bayard, which brought him back to the Champs-Elysées roundabout. He immediately turned right, then right again a little farther on; finally, he took the expressway along the Right Bank. From time to time he glanced at Maubert, who lay on the floor of the van. The man seemed to be unconscious. Terrier had taken Maubert’s .38 and stuck it in his pocket. The Valmet assault rifle was propped next to him on the passenger seat.
Past Châtelet, the Estafette stopped for a red light. Terrier quickly took advantage of the moment to climb into the back, where Maubert was beginning to stir. He hit him hard in the back of the head with the butt of the Smith & Wesson before returning to the wheel and setting off again. Maubert had stopped moving. Terrier turned the radio back on. Between various pieces of light music, a woman with a pensive and lascivious voice chewed the fat with more or less forlorn human beings who called her on the phone to tell her that they loved Tchaikovsky or that they were sad or things of that sort. Terrier’s face was covered in sweat, and his lips were in continual motion.
He left the expressway at the exit for the Gare de Lyon. He reached Place de la Nation, then came to Vincennes—not the park with its frequent police patrols, but the residential streets. He parked in a dark, narrow street. He went into the back of the van, sat Maubert up against the wall, and aimed the beam of the rubber-covered flashlight in his eyes. He pinched his cheeks and slapped him several times. Maubert half opened his eyes. He seemed drowsy. He couldn’t focus. Terrier, who still had Anne’s notebook and its little pencil, scribbled something and thrust it under Maubert’s nose. The mustachioed man appeared to try and concentrate. His eyes were unfocused, and he kept blinking. He couldn’t manage to read. Terrier lost his patience. He stuck the short barrel of the Smith & Wesson in Maubert’s mouth, knocking him in the teeth.
“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 Mauber
t’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 und
er 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.
The Prone Gunman Page 10