“Don’t do it. They’ll kill you.”
Cash remained still, leaning against the wall, her mind a blank. The Catalan picked up her submachine gun, removed the jammed magazine and replaced it with another.
Grenades kept on coming in through the broken windows and exploding very loudly in the bedrooms and on the ground floor. The gas spread into the upstairs hallway as clouds of it emerged from the bedrooms near the stairs.
“Where is Épaulard? Where is D’Arcy?” asked Buenaventura.
He had to repeat his query on account of the racket and on account of Cash’s inattention.
“D’Arcy is in the garage,” said the girl. “Épaulard—where is Épaulard?”
“That’s what I’m asking you!”
“He went down. He’s below.”
Cash turned and headed for the stairs.
“Don’t go down there! We can get into the garage by breaking through the roof. Cash!”
The girl took three quick strides and took off down the stairs, disappearing into the clouds of gas. Buenaventura saw no more of her; he merely heard her coughing.
“Well, shit!” he groaned. “And long live death.”
Sticking the automatic into his pants pocket and the Sten under his right arm, he ran to the end of the hallway, to the end of the main building. With his left arm he executed a rapid piston-like motion to prevent it from seizing up. The pain was acute, and the bleeding from his perforated muscle increased.
Cash got to the foot of the staircase coughing. The firing had ceased. Meyer’s body lay by the bottom stair. Cash stepped over it, still coughing, and made for the back door, which was open, and there she came face-to-face with Goémond, two of his deputies and a gendarme armed with a submachine gun. The four men wore gas masks and stared at her through a green and white cloud of chlorobenzalmalononitrile, also known as CS gas.
“I surrender,” said Cash, coughing and raising her hands above her head.
Goémond put a bullet in her chest. The girl was thrown backwards by the impact. She fell supine in the middle of the common area.
“You,” said Goémond to the gendarme, “you will forget what you just saw. Think of your pension.”
He strode to the doorway of the kitchen. He glanced inside and saw Épaulard flat on his face in the room. He signaled the other men to proceed. Moving in fits and starts, the three cops went and hunkered down at the foot of the stairs. The gendarme then let fly with a burst of fire up into the fog as the two policemen rapidly clambered up the staircase.
Goémond went into the kitchen. He leant over Épaulard, who was retching spasmodically. He grabbed his hair and pulled his head up. The eyes of the injured man were red and swollen, and his whole face was purplish.
“Don’t touch me,” he murmured. “My back’s broken.”
Goémond let the fifty-year-old’s head fall back down, and then, slipping his foot under the man’s torso, he gave a good shove and turned him over. Épaulard squeaked like a mouse and his tongue came out of his mouth. Goémond felt for a pulse and then stood up straight, satisfied.
Upstairs, Buenaventura had entered the bathroom and pointlessly locked the door behind him. He had broken through the ceiling and torn away the sections of insulation and tar paper that separated him from the tiles of the roof. Standing on the bathtub, he carefully pushed up one of those tiles to survey the surroundings. He was at the northern extremity of the main building, whose roof adjoined that of the north wing (under which was the garage). Indeed, had Buenaventura had the requisite tools, he could have knocked through the bathroom wall above the tub and so reached the garage directly.
From this vantage point, the garage’s roof was at the center of his visual field. To the right he could see the countryside. From that side no assault had been made, for the farmhouse had no opening that way. Gendarmes were nevertheless to be seen, a small squad crouched in a grove of trees about a hundred meters away.
To the left, Buenaventura’s line of sight passed between the two wings of the farmstead and over the muddy terrain that separated it from the byroad. There a considerable body of gendarmes was visible. The men had ceased firing, either because they had received an order or because there was no further riposte from the farm. They appeared to be awaiting the order to advance.
The Catalan held his submachine gun horizontally before him and gave a good push with it. Fifteen or so tiles shifted and tumbled away. The young man swiftly hoisted himself through, rolled over and slid on his belly down the slope of the roof. He ended up at the opposite sloping roof over the garage and at once began frantically wrenching tiles from it. He was now in plain view of the gendarmes massed on the byroad as well as of those hunkered down in the grove of trees to the north.
“Hey! You there on the roof!” came a shout from a megaphone. “Put your hands up and don’t move! Or we’ll shoot!”
Back inside the farmhouse, Goémond, having just finished off Épaulard, heard and mentally cursed the gendarmerie officer for giving someone a chance to escape with their life.
Buenaventura ripped up three more tiles and dived through the hole he had made without being shot. He found himself on a wooden platform that extended only partway over the ground floor of this wing of the farm, originally serving agricultural purposes. For the most part, nothing came between the dirt floor and the roof six meters above, which was supported by ancient beams. The Catalan was in a former hayloft that the owner of the farm had recently decided to convert into a mezzanine. He approached the edge of the platform and in the half darkness of the place saw the green Jaguar down below with its motor running, the door open, and D’Arcy sitting in the driver’s seat with his legs dangling out of the car, drinking from a liter bottle of red wine.
The alcoholic held a pistol in his other hand and as he continued to drink his gaze was fixed on Buenaventura.
“It’s me,” said the Catalan.
D’Arcy detached the bottle from his lips.
“So I see,” he said. “What’s happening? Where do we stand?”
A ladder led down from the hayloft to the earthen floor. Buenaventura climbed down.
“They’re all dead, I guess,” he said as he completed his descent. “I killed the ambassador. We’re completely surrounded, and we can’t even surrender.”
D’Arcy emptied his bottle and threw it against a wall. It shattered.
“Fine,” he said. “Let’s die. Let’s go for broke.”
“Long live death!” said Buenaventura again.
He walked around the Jaguar, opened the passenger door and climbed in. With the barrel of the Sten he smashed the windshield and cleared away the fragments of glass still clinging to the frame. D’Arcy slammed the driver’s door.
“Directly opposite the exit,” said the alcoholic, “is the byroad we came in on the other evening. I’m stepping on it. We won’t make it.”
“Okay.”
“Goodbye, you old shithead.”
“Goodbye.”
The Jaguar came out of the garage, slowly because it needed to turn right away, then sped towards the exit barrier.
The gendarmes were busy opening the gate and getting ready to move forward. They were taken by surprise as much as they could be, which is to say not very much.
Stuffed down into his seat, his torso jammed against the wheel and his eyes just above the top of the dashboard, D’Arcy accelerated madly. Buenaventura, resting the Sten’s barrel on the rim of the broken windshield, sprayed the way ahead with bullets and emptied the magazine before the car reached the gate. Many of the gendarmes scattered frantically, diving into the ditches and kicking up snow and mud all around them. Others, some armed with Mousquetons, some with submachine guns, opened fire on the Jaguar in a disorderly but effective way. The vehicle was peppered with bullets.
“The tires!” yelled an officer at the top of his voice.
The Jaguar passed through the gate, crossed the byroad and roared onto a tractor track that led off along the side of a little wooded
valley. The car’s side windows were blown to smithereens on the way. The fire from the guardians of the law died down. The tires had been shredded. Holes had been punched in the rear bodywork.
D’Arcy had taken two rounds in the chest, one in the neck, and one in his side. He let go of the wheel and collapsed onto it, nose pointing ahead and arms dangling. Blood spurted from his carotid artery in great sporadic surges. His foot was jammed on the gas pedal.
The Jag gathered speed fast as it went down the track, failed to turn at a bend, uprooted bushes, and veered off to the side into a deep gully that served as a public garbage dump. It rolled over three times amid the trash before crashing at the bottom of the hollow and coming to a halt.
Buenaventura found himself on all fours in the refuse without knowing how he got there. Just as he was contemplating the motionless car some twenty meters further down, its doors open, its tires flat, its roof caved in, its hood gone, it caught fire. First the gas tank spewed a great sinuous flame, then the engine was ablaze, and finally the tank exploded and a plume of smoke and debris rose into the air above the hollow. The Catalan began to run straight ahead along the hillside, continually losing his footing.
On the byroad the astounded cops could no longer see the automobile. It had vanished beyond the bend down the tractor track and was now burning and exploding lower down, out of their line of sight. The officer detached a dozen of his men to investigate, and they left at a run, hunched over their weapons.
When they came within sight of the burning wreck, the Catalan had already disappeared into the shady thickets at the far end of the gully. He had found a path that paralleled the departmental road to Couzy. He ran as fast as his legs could carry him. The terrain was wooded. The fugitive was invisible. He came to a turn. Buenaventura emerged onto the departmental road. Couzy was half a kilometer away, but at less than fifty meters there was a small BP gas station. Buenaventura continued running along the main road. He was wheezing badly. He felt very weak and light-headed. His arm was still bleeding. He had sprained his right ankle. He went on running.
On the forecourt of the garage an old Peugeot 203 pickup was being gassed up. Its owner, in blue overalls, was chatting with the pump attendant, a fat, jolly lad, hands black with oil. The Catalan stumbled over to the two and took his automatic from his pocket.
“Fill her up,” he said. “Don’t move.”
Neither man moved. The attendant went on filling the gas tank. Buenaventura leant his shoulder against the 203.
“Is it my truck you want?” asked the man in blue overalls in a stricken voice.
“Yes.”
The man tried to chuckle but only managed to choke.
“It’s not worth anything,” he said. “It’s a clunker.”
“Listen,” said Buenaventura, “I’m the only survivor of Nada, the anarchist group that kidnapped the American Ambassador on Friday night. The police tracked us down at a farm near here and killed my comrades in cold blood. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
“You mean those anarchists who snatched the American Ambassador!”
“Listen,” said Buenaventura wearily, “and try to remember. You can tell this to the press. You’ll have your photo in the paper . . . The police massacred us. The cops killed everyone at the farm. And the ambassador was killed because the cops would not let us give ourselves up. Do you get that?”
“Who killed him, the ambassador?” asked the pump attendant.
“What a fucking idiot!” sighed the Catalan.
The car was filled up. The attendant removed the nozzle of his pump. He replaced the gas cap.
“Turn around, both of you,” ordered Buenaventura.
The two men turned around. The Catalan brought the barrel of his pistol down on the skull of the man in blue overalls, who cried out in pain and collapsed. The attendant took to his heels. He fled towards the garage office. Buenaventura suppressed an urge to shoot at him and leapt into the 203. He started up, turned the truck around and headed in the direction of Paris. From the door of his office the garage attendant fired at the pickup with a single-shot Simplex, and a scatter of number 7 shot riddled the vehicle. The Catalan accelerated. The 203 disappeared around a bend. It was twenty-five past ten in the morning. The mayhem had lasted less than half an hour.
33
THE NEWS came over the radio in the late morning and gave rise to a brief special bulletin that was expanded and commented on at lunchtime, notably on television, where images appeared of “the tragic farmhouse,” the broken glass on the tiled floor, the ambassador’s coagulated blood, and the wrecked Jaguar. Pronouncements and cabled messages multiplied. Condolences of the French government to the ambassador’s widow, to the U.S. government. Communiqué from the minister of the interior announcing that order had been restored, taking credit for this, but at the same time warning everyone to be on guard against any recurrence of such excesses and hastening not to overlook the need to pay respectful homage to the memory of Richard Poindexter. Telegram from the Holy Father to the President of the Republic. Message from the Archbishop of Paris. Telegram from the prime minister to the family of the gendarmerie officer currently fighting for his life in a hospital bed. Congratulatory telegram from the minister of armies to the mobile gendarmerie group deployed at Couzy. Proclamation of a group of Bordigist militants denouncing law enforcement for opening fire without due warning on the farmhouse and thus being solely responsible for the death of the ambassador (a proclamation that almost prompted the minister of armies to bring defamation charges). Confidential message from the commander of the accused mobile gendarmerie force to the director of gendarmerie and military justice lodging a specific formal complaint against Commissioner Goémond (subsequent to which the minister of armies would abandon any defamation charges and request an urgent meeting with the minister of the interior). Communiqué from the Organisation Révolutionnaire Libertaire (ORL), a clandestine organization composed of twelve members, four of them undercover police agents, calling upon all revolutionaries to kill “at least fifty cops” to avenge the comrades killed at Couzy. Statement of Independent Union of Otorhinolaryngologists informing the public that ORLs had nothing to do with the above-mentioned organization. Etc., etc., etc.
A team of medical examiners was preparing a set of autopsy reports, but in the mind of the public the chain of events was already as clear as day. Surrounded, the terrorists, rather than surrendering, had preferred to kill their hostage and open fire on law enforcement, who had laid siege to the house. André Épaulard (“a strange kind of international adventurer”), Nathan Meyer (“a waiter described by his coworkers as an aggressive and unbalanced introvert”), and Véronique Cash (“the group’s Pasionaria”) had all been killed, weapons in hand, during the police operation. Benoît D’Arcy, “scion of an alcoholic and degenerate family,” had been neutralized moments later as he broke through a barrier at the wheel of an expensive sports car and fired on the police. Buenaventura Diaz, “undoubtedly the most dangerous, a veteran anarchist with no visible means of support,” had managed to make a getaway and was being actively sought. Television broadcast his picture. He had the pale face of a scrawny thug with long hair and eyes terrifying enough to make respectable people shake in their shoes.
34
BUENAVENTURA was looking at his likeness on the television screen.
In the Peugeot 203 pickup, he had reached the Morin Valley and cruised unknown roads indecisively. After an hour he drove the vehicle into a quarry. What kind of quarry, the Catalan did not know, but the fact was that yellowish, somewhat clayey walls rose like ramparts around an area covered by large puddles of water where mud-streaked orange trucks stood dormant alongside rails and rusty quarry tubs. An iron-gray work-site shed, prefabricated, was in one corner. After parking the 203 behind a truck out of sight of the main road, Buenaventura broke open the door of the shed with the help of a crowbar. He was hot, he was cold, he sweated, he shivered. Inside the shed he came upon an empty cot,
a desk, plastic hard hats, yellow oilskins, an opened liter bottle of wine, piles of documents, and a Vélosolex moped. He had struck lucky.
Buenaventura lingered for a while inside the shed. The quarry would probably remain deserted until Monday morning, but it was a precarious hideaway. Furthermore, there would be dances in the valley, and couples could easily drive up here eager to make out and then spot the 203, which had certainly been reported stolen by now.
Since his wound continued to bleed sporadically, the Catalan applied a compression bandage composed of a dirty rag and a bungee cord. He slipped back into his dark sweater with its ripped sleeve stiff with blood. He felt very feeble. He drank a little wine and immediately threw up. He staggered. He wiped his chin and forehead with the back of his right hand, clumsily donned a yellow oilskin, and took the moped outside.
The machine’s motor would not start. Buenaventura was unfamiliar with its operation. As much as he jiggled with every part that seemed jigglable, the engine would not come to life. Perhaps the bike had broken down. The Catalan resigned himself to pedaling despite his greatly weakened state. He returned to the road, zigzagging, comfortable on the downhill, struggling on the up, and striving to put a good distance between himself and the 203.
Thanks to the snow and the weekend’s dismal damp weather, the traffic was not heavy. The odd car came towards him or overtook him, but for the moment no one paid attention to the Catalan.
Eventually he left the road and went up a broad driveway leading to an isolated house. It had a lugubrious villa-like aspect and stood amid trees in a square clearing with a meticulously laid-out and maintained rock garden in front of it and grass behind and on either side. It appeared to be a weekend place, and it was closed up. Buenaventura gained access by first entering the garage (breaking a frosted-glass window) and then forcing the communicating door between the garage and the living quarters. He emerged into a small foyer with a tiled floor, opened the nearest door and found himself in a stolid living room with fake country-style furniture. A portable television sat on the floor tiles at the far end. Buenaventura consulted his watch, which had stopped at ten twenty-three. He walked over to the television and turned it on. When the screen lit up, he saw himself.
Nada Page 12