The Prone Gunman

by Jean-Patrick Manchette

  No one did anything. Everyone was almost motionless. Drops of perspiration ran into Cox’s eyes. Resting on his elbows and knees, he raised his head as high as possible and seemed to be looking right down into the pistol barrel pointing between his eyes. There was a little blood in Terrier’s hair, and a little more, of a brighter red, trickled from the corner of his mouth. The man seemed surprised and worried.

  “Finish it,” asked Cox. His voice was calm and subdued. “Come on,” he said. “Come on. Come on. Finish it.”

  “I can’t,” said Martin Terrier.

  He moved back slightly and leaned against the partition. The little automatic was still aimed between Cox’s eyes.

  “It’s true. I can’t do it,” Terrier repeated.

  From behind the overturned sofa, Blue Suit performed an urgent pantomime for Sammy Chen, who moved immediately to take the pistol from Terrier’s hands—though it was not quick and not easy, for he had to twist the killer’s fingers to make him release it, said fingers being clenched convulsively around the grip, the trigger, and the trigger guard of the weapon. At last, Sammy pocketed the Lilliput. Blue Suit got back to his feet.

  “Go sit down, you damn fool,” he said to Cox.

  Cox went and sat down in a corner on the floor. A few moments later, he vomited in a fabulous way, as if he were disgorging everything he had swallowed for years. No one paid much attention to the phenomenon.

  Meanwhile, Sammy Chen and Blue Suit had closely examined Terrier. Anne held back, pale faced.

  “He’s rigid,” said Sammy Chen. “Maybe he should be given a calcium injection.”

  “Are you stupid or what?” Blue Suit asked angrily. “He has a bullet in the head and another in the lung. He’s going to die.”

  “No way,” said Terrier, who was still standing, leaning against the wall, with a hole in his head and a hole in his torso and blood from his lung foaming at the corners of his mouth. “No way!” he repeated, stamping his foot.

  “In any case, he’s not mute anymore,” said Sammy Chen.

  “I’m going to call. We may as well have him taken to the hospital—you never can tell, and it’s no skin off our nose,” said Blue Suit as he turned and made for the telephone.

  “You’re beautiful,” said Terrier, looking at Anne. He seemed to have some difficulty in putting words together. “Beautiful,” he repeated. “Beautiful.”

  “He’s not mute anymore, but he’s blabbering,” said Sammy Chen.

  “Beautiful, beautiful.”

  Terrier didn’t die. He was taken by ambulance to a hospital, where he spent nearly three hours on the operating table.

  “The lung’s no problem,” the surgeon said afterward to the man in the blue suit. “The patient is in rather good physical condition, and, well, in short, I’m not going to bore you with technical details, but in this regard he’ll be like new. The real problem is the bullet in the brain.”

  “You left it there?”

  “If I tried to remove it, I’d kill him. It’s practically in the geometric center of the skull. I don’t know why it didn’t cause more obvious damage. This man should be dead or totally or partially paralyzed, or at least in a coma or something. In fact, his reflexes are normal, and his mind doesn’t seem to be affected. We observe only an episodic tendency to blabber. But only when he’s under sedation.”

  “That’s strange, isn’t it?” asked Blue Suit.

  “Very strange.”

  “Can I see him?”

  “Would tomorrow morning be all right?” asked the surgeon. “He’s resting at the moment. He’s sleeping, and he needs it.”

  “Does he talk in his sleep?”

  “As I said, every now and then he blabbers. Well, I call it blabbering. It’s very strange.”

  “I want a tape recorder put in his room,” said Blue Suit. “Voice activated. I’ll bring you one. I want everything recorded. Even this blabbering or whatever you call it.”

  The next morning, the man in the blue suit found Martin Terrier in good shape, even though the professional killer was on a drip.

  “I’m ready to cooperate with you,” said Terrier. “I don’t believe I’m going to die. And I don’t think you’re going to kill me. I can be useful to you, as I understand it. I’m willing. But under certain conditions.”

  “Okay, let’s see about that,” said Blue Suit.

  They came to an agreement that same day. Thereafter, they had daily conversations, first at the hospital and then, beginning two weeks later, on an isolated estate, where Terrier was transferred during his convalescence. The property was spacious and luxurious, and not far from Montfort-l’Amaury. The house itself was surrounded by modest grounds enclosed by a wall. A few armed men provided the domestic service, and they patrolled the park with attack dogs. Anne was accommodated upstairs in the room next to Terrier’s. This was one thing that the professional killer had demanded. He had also asked for Cox’s head, but without great conviction; the request was refused. Cox was posted to South America, where he occupied a subordinate position in the company’s Bogotá station for six months. Then he put both barrels of a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the two triggers with his big toe. Was he perhaps still looking for oral fulfillment when he placed the hollow cylinders of cold steel between his teeth? In any case, what he found was death, and he was buried once a specialist had reassembled the pieces of his head. His corpse was very skinny.

  “Have you never thought of going back to work for the company?” Blue Suit asked Terrier during one of their interviews. A tape recorder was running in plain sight on the table. Blue Suit would sometimes stop it to speak in confidence with Terrier. Two hidden machines recorded everything that was said; other recorders were hidden in Terrier’s and Anne’s rooms.

  “Isn’t that what I’m doing now?”

  “I mean, in your old job,” said Blue Suit. He put the visible tape recorder on pause. “As a killer.”

  “That’s impossible,” said Terrier. “I’ve become incapable of killing. I realized it the day I caught those two bullets. I really wanted to kill Cox, but I couldn’t do it. I think I could kill to defend myself or to defend Anne. Or if I was extremely angry. Otherwise, no.”

  “Martin Terrier is normal, inasmuch as the concept of normality is operative,” explained one of the psychiatrists who were studiously examining the audiotapes.

  “Everything confirms it,” said the other psychologist. “Do you want to listen to a recording made Friday evening in the woman’s room?”

  “No, thanks. I know already. How do you interpret it?”

  “Given that we don’t have recourse to optical recordings, the interpretation is necessarily limited. Climax occurred three minutes after penetration, and that was preceded by one minute of foreplay.”

  “Isn’t that extremely brief?” asked Blue Suit.

  “Yes, of course, if we compare this behavior to that of cultivated and imaginative people like you and me. But it’s very close to the American national average of the fifties.”

  “Excuse me,” said the other psychiatrist, “but the study you’re alluding to is open to challenge in terms of science, as you well know.”

  “Don’t start arguing,” commanded Blue Suit. “Have you analyzed the blabbering?”

  “It’s groaning,” said the second psychiatrist. “The subject groans in his sleep.”

  “I’m more in favor of the term ‘blabbering,’” said the first psychiatrist.

  They started to bicker. To put an end to it, Blue Suit sent copies of all the sounds that Martin Terrier made in his sleep to company headquarters, not far from Washington, D.C. These recordings were subjected to lengthy examination by many people and many computers, with no tangible result.

  After a few months, at the end of spring, Terrier stopped blabbering at night. He had slipped into a depression. He often spent hours drinking anisette and listening to Maria Callas records, after which he would fall into a stupor.

  “You’re going to publ
ish a book of memoirs,” Blue Suit told him one summer morning.

  “You’re not in your right mind,” said Terrier. “I’m not capable of that. I can’t write.”

  “It’s already written,” said Blue Suit as he sat down. He deposited a stack of photocopies on a round table. “I had one of our academics write it. I’ll read it with you, and we’ll correct the details. Improbabilities and inaccuracies must be avoided.”

  “You can hardly avoid inaccuracies!” Terrier laughed sadly.

  “I’m speaking of verifiable inaccuracies. Those are the ones to avoid.”

  “Fine,” said Terrier. “I’ll do my best.”

  They spent more than twenty hours over the course of a week carefully examining the manuscript. Written in the first person, the work related just eight assassinations, which were ordered by Moscow, and gave many details on the training that Terrier was supposed to have received in Odessa and on the organization of the KGB and its ties with other secret services and with international terrorism. In the first chapter, the author recounted how in his adolescence he had espoused communist ideals. In the penultimate chapter, the narrator made a wrenching self-criticism. Abjuring his political convictions, which had not withstood the test of reality, he left his masters. They set Italian terrorists on his heels, who sadistically murdered one of his girlfriends and pursued him across France.

  “In fact,” asked Terrier at this point in their reading, “what really happened?”

  “In general, that’s what happened,” said Blue Suit. “Only the details were a little more complicated. Cox gave you up to Rossana Rossi. But he didn’t want you to get killed; he merely wanted to make trouble for you, to make you come back. So you had to be put on your guard. He had your apartment ransacked, he had you threatened on the phone, and he put an inept tail on you. He finally gave you up to Rossana Rossi, but only after your departure from Paris.”

  “Who massacred Alexa Métayer and my cat?” asked Terrier.

  “Cox always maintained that it was the Rossi group. That’s likely, because it was Rossana who left the dead cat at your hotel. Anyway, the details are no longer important. Right?”

  “Right,” said Terrier. “Right. They’re no longer important.”

  At the end of the book, the narrator went back to work to attack Sheikh Hakim, whom the PLO wanted eliminated. But he sabotaged the assassination attempt with the help of the French DST, whom he had contacted and whose undercover agent encountered a heroic death.

  “And you find all this credible?” asked Terrier.

  “Of course. You can trust me on that. I’ve overseen several books of this kind.”

  Blue Suit smiled confidently. The next day, he received a message from his superiors, who forbade publication of the work on the grounds that it was perfectly ridiculous.

  22

  “So what does this mean: ‘we’re canceling everything’?” Terrier asked when Blue Suit brought him up to date. “What does this mean: ‘we’re dropping it’? Shit!” he yelled. “I’ve practically learned this damn book by heart for my testimony!”

  “There won’t be any testimony,” said Blue Suit. His face was haggard, and his blue suit was rumpled; he had cut himself shaving. “Everything has been canceled. The operation has been terminated. You have been declared legally incompetent. On the judicial level, your case has been dismissed. It will be said that you have been committed to a psychiatric clinic in the United States. Don’t interrupt me, you little shit—I’ve had it up to here with you!” he shouted when Terrier protested vociferously. “In fact, we’re going to put you back in circulation, tucked away somewhere with a false identity. We don’t want to hear any more out of you. You should be glad to be so lucky.”

  “Lucky?” Terrier yelped.

  “You massacre three dozen people, and we’re nice enough to put you back on square one!” the other man yelled. “You don’t call that luck?”

  “I don’t know,” said Terrier said slowly in an undertone.

  23

  Anne left him in the autumn of that year. At first, she had agreed to live with Martin Terrier, to start a new life under a new identity in a town in the French Ardennes. The fact that the man had sustained a passion for her for so long, combined with the violent experiences they had shared, had made a deep impression on her, or at least so we may surmise.

  But she soon tired of an existence entirely lacking in adventure—not to mention money, for Martin Terrier, under his new identity and with his current abilities, could find work only in the restaurant business: he was now a waiter in a brasserie. She also grew tired of three-minute coitus, or so we may surmise. In any case, she left suddenly and without explanation. And she has not reappeared in Nauzac, although she owns property there. May we surmise that she is running around the world and leading a passionate and adventurous life? We may; it’s no skin off our nose.

  24

  Martin Terrier had no visible reaction when he grasped that Anne had left for good (if indeed he grasped it). During the night, he had audible reactions: he moaned or maybe groaned in his sleep, making that noise that others had called blabbering and had even tried to decode.

  Every now and then, these days, Terrier still blabbers in his sleep. Otherwise, as a waiter in a brasserie, he is normal. He performs his duties properly, even if he is sometimes physically clumsy. It has recently been noted that this clumsiness increases when he drinks. Late at night, young people occasionally have fun buying him drinks until he behaves in an eccentric manner. He has even climbed up on a table and bleated like a sheep, interspersing this with grand operatic arias. Each time he is brought to such extremes, he gets angry and violent immediately afterward. But he is not dangerous, for he has indeed become so very clumsy that when he tries to hit someone, he succeeds only in falling on his face.

  He lives in a small apartment.

  25

  And sometimes this happens: it’s winter, and it’s dark. Coming down directly from the Arctic, a freezing wind rushes into the Irish Sea, sweeps through Liverpool, races across the Cheshire plain (where the cats lower their trembling ears as it howls and passes over); this freezing wind crosses England and the Straits of Dover; it traverses gray plains and comes knocking directly on the windowpanes of Martin Terrier’s small apartment, but these windowpanes do not vibrate, and this wind has no force. On such nights, Terrier sleeps quietly. In his sleep, he has just assumed the prone firing position.

  Paris, 1979–1981

  Jean-Patrick Manchette (December 19, 1942, Marseille – June 3, 1995, Paris) was a French crime novelist credited with reinventing and reinvigorating the genre. He wrote ten short novels in the 1970s and early 80s, and is widely recognized as the foremost French crime fiction author of that time. His stories are violent, existentialist explorations of the human condition and French society. Jazz saxophonist and screenwriter, Manchette was also a left-wing activist influenced as much by the writings of the Situationist International as by Dashiell Hammett.

  Four of his novels have been translated into English. Two were published by City Lights Books: Three To Kill and The Prone Gunman, which is also available in a movie-tie in edition titled, The Gunman.

  Also Available by Jean-Patrick Manchette

  Three to Kill

  The Gunman (movie tie-in edition)