Buenaventura circled the little square and took the departmental road in the wake of the two police buses. He spotted the second disappearing around a tree-lined bend eight or nine hundred meters ahead. The Catalan accelerated. The old clunker vibrated. A rear quarter panel was completely split open by rust and rattled like scrap metal. Buenaventura reached the bend, then downshifted. Not very far ahead, a left turn off the departmental road, was the byroad, classified as “rural,” which led to the farm. One of the buses had pulled up on the right shoulder of the highway while the other was parked just on the turn into the byroad and blocking the way. From both buses were pouring masses of helmeted figures shrouded in voluminous black raincoats and armed with Mousquetons. Buenaventura barely slowed as he passed. He took a worried glance at the goings-on. Units were setting off at the double down the byroad. The farmhouse, though only half a kilometer away, was invisible on account of the hilly and wooded terrain. The anarchist reckoned that the cops could get there in five to ten minutes but would probably take time to surround the farm without causing alarm—a good twenty minutes in all. Buenaventura stepped on the gas, trying to remember the topography and byways in the vicinity. He covered about two kilometers before he came to another left turn. He took it, hurrying through the melting snow. Pools of cold mud exploded beneath his tires, spattering and streaking the sides of the Dauphine and spraying the windshield. The wipers struggled. The rear of the vehicle fishtailed from one side to the other of the narrow thoroughfare.
Once he decided that he had put the farmhouse between the gendarmes and himself, the Catalan looked out for the entrance to a dirt track on his left. It appeared. He braked, but too fast. The wheels locked. The Dauphine did a double one-eighty and left the road by way of the right verge. The front wheels plunged into a ditch and the car came to a halt. Buenaventura was thrown against the wheel and the impact winded him. He opened the door and jumped out.
Beads of sweat proliferated on his skin. His jaw was clenched tight. A dull groan issued from his throat. He took off his leather coat and threw it onto the snowy ground. He went to the back of the Dauphine, leant down and took hold of the rear bumper. Bracing himself with difficulty in the mud, he pulled up on the car with all his might. His face turned red and the veins stood out on his gaunt temples. Suddenly his left foot skidded and he fell flat.
“El Cristo en la mierda!” he swore ferociously.
Getting to his feet, he headed to the front of the car. He pushed his way through snow-covered brambles up the opposite side of the ditch. He positioned his feet firmly against the bank, the soles of his shoes planted in the cold loam. Then he took hold of the bumper. He gave a cry. He lifted the car, the wheels left the ditch, the Dauphine rolled backwards onto the road, and Buenaventura fell onto all fours in the mud-filled trench. He suddenly felt weak. Angrily, he threw up the marc he had ingested; his nausea was controlled, salutary, and brief.
He climbed out of the ditch, retrieved his leather coat and took the wheel once more. Maneuvering carefully, he backed up to the beginning of the dirt track. Then, in first gear, he started down it with his wheels in the enormous ruts left by tractors. Gradually he picked up speed. Here and there deep puddles had formed that had to be skated over with the impetus built up. Bouncing back and forth between the sides of the ruts, the car advanced at about 40 kph in the direction of the farmhouse.
The place was still invisible to Buenaventura: copses, uneven land and the sunken track conspired to hide it from him.
The Catalan held tight to the steering wheel. His ashen countenance was contorted by anxiety and the urge to kill. The sweat had dried on his face, but he felt it soaking his torso and his clothes. He was grinding his teeth. The Dauphine debouched into open land.
The farmhouse was on a little plateau. To the west was the byroad that led up to it. To the east were the shadowy orchard, a stretch of snow-covered stubble, and Buenaventura.
Just as he reached the edge of the plateau, the Catalan noticed that, to his right and about a kilometer away, glinting dark figures with guns were snaking their way through a bosky area. The dirt track changed direction just then, leading him towards the intruders. Buenaventura stopped, got out of the Dauphine and opened the gate to a meadow. Back in the car, he drove into the field, accelerating as much as possible, so that for a moment the vehicle seemed to be flying across the clammy earth towards the farmhouse, where no sign of life was to be seen save a pale-gray wisp of smoke against the pale-gray sky.
Over to the right the glinting figures were emerging from the bosky covert, and Buenaventura saw out of the corner of his eye that they were led by a small group of men in civilian clothing wearing dark overcoats and clear-plastic capes.
All of a sudden the Dauphine pitched forward. Its wheels churned into a pile of soft greasy compost. Buenaventura went into reverse and hit the gas pedal. The clutch gave out. The engine roared to no avail as the car sank into the muck. Tucking his leather coat under his arm, the Catalan got out and began running towards the farmhouse three hundred meters away. He also began shouting at the top of his lungs.
31
WHEN BUENAVENTURA started shouting at the top of his lungs it was ten o’clock in the morning, and Sunday. Ambassador Richard Poindexter was eating ham and eggs brought to him in his bed. Meyer was guarding him, his pistol on the chair next to him, with half an eye on Poindexter and half on a battered science fiction novel. The others were down below. In the kitchen Épaulard and Cash were washing dishes in cold water. In the common area by the fire D’Arcy was drinking a beer and getting ready to go upstairs to sleep, having watched the ambassador from two in the morning on.
The alcoholic frowned, put his beer down and went over with heavy steps to the kitchen door.
“Hey, can’t you hear anything?”
Épaulard turned.
“No,” he said, but seeing D’Arcy’s worried expression he frowned in his turn, reached for the faucet and turned the water off.
In the sudden silence they all heard sustained but reedy shouts. Cash, her hands still wet, opened the kitchen window, which gave onto the rear of the farmhouse. Straight away, between the dark trees, an agitated form could be seen running across the stubble, hollering and getting closer.
“It’s Buen,” said D’Arcy.
Épaulard’s gaze raked the fields and his heart missed a beat when he spotted other figures in motion over to the left, shimmering.
“To the left,” he said. “Cops.”
“I’m going to check the front,” said D’Arcy. “I’ll get the Jaguar going. Bring the ambassador.”
He left the kitchen, crossed the common area in a flash and opened the windowed front door. Beyond the land that ran from the farmhouse to the byroad, the alcoholic saw nothing to worry about. Everything was whitish and deserted. He rushed to the garage, entered, got into the car and started it up.
In the house, Cash was bounding up the stairs four at a time.
Épaulard remained at the open kitchen window watching the Catalan, who had entered the orchard. On the way Buenaventura had surrendered his coat to barbed wire. Now he was running through the dark fruit trees. He had stopped shouting for he was out of breath.
“André Épaulard! Buenaventura Diaz! Véronique Cash! All of you!” came a voice powerful and distant like the voice of Zeus. “You are surrounded!”
The megaphone transmitted a sigh. Two hundred meters away, the cops were out of breath too. Goémond paused, taking the megaphone from his mouth. Three plainclothes policemen were by his side, as well as a gendarmerie officer and his radio operator. Short-winded, the commissioner pointed silently to the operator’s walkie-talkie. The radio man passed it to him. Goémond leant against the trunk of a cherry tree.
“Blue Two,” he puffed. “Blue Two, can you read me? Goémond here. Over.”
“Blue Two,” the device responded. “We are at the western edge of the farm, on the byroad. Sixty meters from the house, along the embankment. We are not moving
forward. I await your orders. An individual has just exited the farmhouse and entered the north wing. Over.”
“I’ll be in charge of ultimatums,” said Goémond. “If fire is opened, prevent anyone from leaving in your direction. Fire on the front of the house and use grenades. Over.”
“Understood. Out.”
Goémond returned the walkie-talkie to the radio operator and put the megaphone to his lips once more.
“Hey! You! The guy running towards that farm! Stop immediately or we shoot. This is the police. Stop right now!”
Buenaventura began zigzagging between trees.
“Open fire on him!” ordered Goémond.
“But commissioner—” began the officer.
“Fire on him, goddammit!”
The officer glowered and turned towards his gendarmes, who were deployed to his right and twenty meters behind him.
“Estève!” he shouted. “Open fire on that guy running!”
Gendarme Estève, an elite sniper, put a knee to the ground and positioned his carbine. Buenaventura was sprinting for the farmhouse.
“Aim at his legs!” said the officer.
“Aim anywhere!” shouted Goémond.
Hesitant, Estève fired somewhat randomly. Buenaventura pivoted, flailed his arms to keep his balance but tumbled onto his back. He got up right away and threw himself headfirst against the farmhouse back door, which sprang open. The Catalan fell through, landed flat on his belly, frantically pulled his legs in beneath him and kicked the door shut with an ankle. At that moment a white cloth appeared and waved out of the kitchen window.
“They’re surrendering,” exclaimed the gendarmerie officer with a sigh of relief.
“It’s a trick,” opined Goémond.
From the farmhouse’s upper floor, through a window barely wider than an arrow slit, someone opened up with a submachine gun.
32
CASH HAD raced up the stairs four at a time. She dashed into the ambassador’s room. Meyer was on his feet with his automatic in his hand. The science fiction novel had fallen onto the floor. The brasserie waiter was visibly alarmed.
“What’s happening? Who is that shouting?”
“Quick! You have to take the ambassador downstairs!” screamed Cash, rushing to the window that looked out from the front of the house.
She saw the opened garage doors. From her high vantage point she also saw a string of black-helmeted heads lined up sixty meters away along the byroad’s snowy embankment.
“Shit!” she said to Meyer. “It’s too late. Stay right here. Keep an eye on that fat idiot. Stay right here. I’ll be back.”
She disappeared instantly into the hallway and entered her room with its unmade bed. She thrust her hand under the bed and pulled out the Sten gun and magazines wrapped in rags. She fitted a magazine to the weapon. Carbine fire rang out from below. Immediately afterwards there was a ruckus at the back door of the farmhouse.
Meanwhile, standing at the kitchen window, Épaulard was paralyzed by indecision and an extraordinary torpor as he watched the Catalan spin, fall, get up and hurtle into the door. The fifty-year-old grabbed a white dish towel and waved it.
“Cease fi—”
Cash shot across the bedroom, broke the window in the hallway with the Sten’s barrel and simultaneously pulled the trigger, emptying her whole magazine at random. The rounds scattered, shredding the dark branches of the dark trees.
“Fire!” cried Goémond at the top of his voice.
Electrified by his command, by the burst of submachine-gun fire, and by the fragments of wood raining down on their helmets, the gendarmes obeyed as one man. Windowpanes shattered around Épaulard. Amazed that he was not hit, the fifty-year-old wheeled and made a dash for the kitchen door and got the impression that someone had given him a big clap on the back. He closed his eyes and fell flat on his stomach on the tiled floor. Above him bullets buried themselves in the walls, ricocheted around the kitchen, shredded the sailing ship on a post office calendar, and riddled the fridge with holes.
“Where’s my piece?” asked Épaulard, slurring the words, but nobody answered.
At the same time, the fire from the gendarmes was ravaging the hutches backing onto the farmhouse’s rear, and rabbits could be seen flying up into the air, twirling and almost exploding, and heard squealing, which added to the pandemonium.
At the same time too, the gendarmerie officer, white with fury, had taken three steps sideways and was yelling for cease-fire when half the contents of Cash’s second magazine struck him in a scatter, most of the projectiles being pancaked by his bulletproof vest but others striking him in the head. He fell on his side and began screaming in pain. His cries were pitiful, unbearable. The gendarmes redoubled their fire so as not to hear them and to avenge their leader, and they were spurred on by Goémond’s megaphone. The commissioner fell back slightly with his deputies, aligning with the gendarmes’ left flank. Meanwhile the radio operator crawled over on his belly to the wounded officer. He turned him on his back, which only worsened the man’s horrible screams. Taking him beneath the arms, he hauled him out of the anarchists’ line of fire. The officer passed out, and his wailing ceased.
Buenaventura, his left arm throbbing with pain, reached the foot of the stairs on all fours. The front windows shattered and tumbled like broken chandeliers. The other detachment of gendarmes, positioned in front of the house, had joined the action following their orders. Their rounds peppered the back wall and the staircase. An empty beer bottle on the table exploded.
“Is there anyone down here?” shouted Buenaventura.
“Yes,” replied Épaulard from the kitchen, but his voice was too weak for the Catalan to hear it.
“Launch grenades!” ordered Goémond in a resounding voice. “Smoke the rats out of their hole.”
Plunk! went the gas grenade launchers. Two projectiles passed through the kitchen window and bounced on the tiles.
“My back must be broken,” said Épaulard with his lips touching the floor. “I can’t move my arms and legs. Don’t come to get me; you couldn’t move me in any case.”
He did not know whether anyone could hear him. Then the two grenades exploded. They were nonlethal, producing only a limited shock wave and dispersing CS gas. Épaulard’s body jerked and his sides, legs and back were struck by shrapnel. He began to cough with difficulty. The kitchen was full of gas, which escaped rather slowly through the window.
Buenaventura was crouching at the foot of the stairs. He felt his left arm and found the entry hole in his sweater made by the bullet. He pushed a finger through and tore the garment open from there to the exit hole so that he could examine the wound. His punctured biceps was already swollen and purple, oozing blood and hurting like the devil.
Someone began running down the stairs.
“Don’t come down here!” cried Buenaventura.
Meyer paid not the slightest attention to this injunction. The cops at the front kept up their fire. As he reached the sixth step Meyer took a round in the heart. He sat down on the stairs, dead, then slithered the rest of the way. He landed on top of Buenaventura.
“Are you hit, Meyer? Have you been hit?” the Catalan asked Meyer’s corpse.
Upstairs, Cash was no longer firing because she could not free an empty magazine from her weapon. She had seen Meyer emerge hotfoot from the ambassador’s room.
“That’s enough of that!” he had shouted as he passed her. “We’re fucked. I’m going to give myself up! I have a wife!”
He had then disappeared. Cash looked at the door to the room he had left. She wondered whether Meyer had left his pistol behind in his excitement. She wondered where Épaulard was. She wondered if Buenaventura was wounded. She wondered what D’Arcy was doing.
Grenades launched by the police squad at the front of the house reached the common area and the three upstairs bedrooms and exploded. Cash heard a cry from the ambassador’s room, then the diplomat came out in his undershorts, protecting his face wi
th one hand, the other hand empty.
“Don’t shoot me, I beg of you,” he cried, as she pointed her useless Sten at him.
“Okay. Lie down on your belly by the wall, you fat bastard. And don’t move.”
“You people ought to surrender,” said the ambassador. “You must see that you are helpless. They haven’t the slightest intention of negotiating with you.”
“Shut up!”
At the foot of the stairs, Buenaventura took advantage of the clouds of gas that now filled the common area. He grabbed Meyer’s automatic and took his chances. He rushed up the staircase without being hit and found himself upstairs. Cash aimed her Sten at Buenaventura before recognizing him. The ambassador was lying prone alongside the wall. Buenaventura’s face was as white as a sheet. Blood flowed down over his left hand and dripped onto the floorboards.
“Buen, what’s the matter with you?” asked Cash. Then she yelled, “What are you doing?”
The Catalan shoved her aside, knelt on one knee near Richard Poindexter and put a single round in his head. Cash screeched out in disgust. The back of the ambassador’s skull was shattered, his hair powder-burnt, and his blood was seeping onto the floor around his face. Buenaventura stood up. He looked at Cash, who remained motionless, eyes wide, tight-mouthed from nausea.
“They’re shooting to kill,” said the Catalan. “They came to slaughter, not arrest us.”
He looked thoughtful.
“That makes one less diplomat, at least,” he added distractedly.
Cash threw her Sten down on the floor.
“I’m going to surrender.”
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