Go ahead and sort that lot out, thought Goémond, picturing the face of the chief of staff when it got back to him.
“Yes, yes!” he shouted to the journalists. “And this informant is alive. He is free. But no, I can’t reveal his identity.”
But Buenaventura Diaz could, he thought, and he felt jubilant as he opened the door of the DS, climbed in, and slammed the door. He started the engine.
“No, I have no further comment!”
He rolled up the window. The DS drew away from the curb, drew away from the crowd, and raced off on the wet roadway onto which the streetlamps were projecting ghostly patches of light.
It was nearly eleven at night when the commissioner reached Treuffais’s street. A small street. There were no passersby. His Renault 15 was double-parked. Goémond pulled up right behind it and got out. One of the deputies was waiting in the Renault’s driver’s seat. The other was in the back beside the unconscious Treuffais.
“Help me get him up to his place,” said Goémond.
Once they were in the apartment, Goémond stretched Treuffais out on the living-room floor.
“Off you go, guys. I don’t need you now.”
“Boss, please let me stay with you,” said the younger deputy.
“Out of the question. But would you mind doing me another favor?”
The commissioner took off his jacket and handed it to his subordinates.
“Take my car to Bercy or thereabouts,” he said, “and leave it in a place where it causes an obstruction. On an expressway entrance ramp, for instance. Leave my jacket on the front seat and spread my papers around on top of it, my ID, okay, and all that . . .”
“That will attract attention.”
“That’s exactly what I want, dodo. It will keep the cops occupied for a while,” said the police commissioner.
“Okay.”
“One more thing: drag things out as much as you can.”
“Okay.”
“See you later, lads.”
“Knock on wood,” said the younger deputy.
38
WHEN a nighttime television bulletin conveyed the news, quoting Commissioner Goémond’s statements with all due reservations, it took Buenaventura, who was eating pâté and drinking cognac in front of the set, a few seconds to realize what the policeman was up to. Then:
“That son of a bitch!” he declared loudly.
For a moment or two he did not move. Then he finished his cognac and went into the garage. On entering the house he had noticed a workbench there. The Catalan poked around among the tools and found what he reckoned he needed. Flashlight in one hand, three saws in the other, he went back into the house and returned to the office. He sawed for some two hours. He was in no hurry. He was thinking, and he was weak. He took care not to reopen his wound with sudden movements.
When he had finished sawing, he had at his disposal, on the one hand, the Charlin shotgun reduced to its simplest form, thirty-five centimeters long with stripped-down butt and barrels, and on the other hand the Erma carbine rifle in a broadly similar state, though a little longer and very reminiscent of the Mare’s Leg—the shortened Winchester beloved by Steve McQueen in the TV series Wanted: Dead or Alive.
The anarchist stuffed his pockets with twelve-gauge shotgun shells and loaded the carbine mag with .22 long rifle ammo. He went back upstairs and managed to find an enormous floppy khaki trench coat with two inside pockets. He cut off the bottoms of the pockets with scissors. He then slid in the two sawed-off guns, one on each side, so that they fitted neatly within the coat’s lining and hung down more or less vertically. He put the trench coat on over his hunting jacket. Weighed down now by several extra kilos, with his automatic pistol in the inside pocket of the jacket, he descended to the ground floor, turned the television off by hitting it with a chair, and left the house by the back door, wheeling his Solex moped.
“Death to the pigs!” he declared fervently as he straddled the bike.
With no light save for the box flashlight, he traveled slowly by back roads. Coming to a sleeping populated area, he smashed a window on a Fiat 128, got into the car, started it up without too much trouble, and set off again.
He succeeded in reaching Paris without running into any roadblocks, without encountering any obstacles to his plans. It felt was as though he had managed to trick fate.
He left the ring road at Porte de la Plaine, headed into the city, and parked on Boulevard Lefebvre. Sitting in the front of the Fiat, he took a break. He was humming.
The building must be locked up, he trilled to the tune of Il m’a dit, “Voulez-vous danser?”
He got out of the car. The cognac had the delayed effect of accelerating his heartbeat. Leaning against the Fiat, he withdrew the Erma awkwardly from the right-hand lining of his coat. His left arm hurt unrelentingly, but no more than it would have with a wooden peg driven through the muscle.
He took the sawed-off carbine in his right hand and slid the remnants of its butt up his sleeve until not much of the weapon was visible. His left hand held the automatic pistol. Thus prepared, he set off, tottering like a drunk. He expected that he would soon run into cops posted around Treuffais’s hideaway. His intention, crazily, was to kill them all and force his way through to his friend. He was surprised not to encounter anyone before reaching the end of the block. The cops must be right inside the building, also no doubt on the roof, just waiting for him to fall into the crude trap set for him by Goémond.
39
“YOU ARE completely mad,” said Treuffais.
“No.”
“Do you intend to wait here for long?”
“Two days. Three days. As long as it takes.”
Treuffais shook his head. He was handcuffed all over again to a radiator. He was sitting on the floor with his back to the wall of his seedy living room. Commissioner Goémond was ensconced in the father’s armchair in his shirtsleeves; he was wearing a bulletproof vest, with his service pistol in a shoulder holster and a Colt Cobra on his knees. The kitchen light was on and it shed a yellow rectangle on the living-room floor. On either side of this rectangle sat Treuffais and Goémond looking at each other in the half darkness of the room. The prisoner was in a state of great fatigue. Three days’ growth of beard covered his hollow cheeks. His eye sockets were as deep and dark as drain holes. His shirt was stained and ripped, and his pants were filthy. Across from him, damp as he was, Goémond seemed almost impeccable.
“A couple of hours from now,” said Treuffais, “your superiors will have put an end to this farce.”
“Maybe.”
“Buenaventura Diaz will not be coming here now,” Treuffais reiterated.
“He will come and kill you, you little shit. I know his type. Once they start killing, they can’t stop.”
“He’s already in Italy, you moron,” said Treuffais.
“In Italy? Why Italy?”
“Or in Belgium,” said Treuffais.
“Shut up, faggot. I’m trying to think.”
“Good idea. Listen, I’ll recite you a poem. What would you like, classical or baroque?”
“Shut the fuck up!” said Goémond. “Shut up! When someone rings the doorbell, in a while or even tomorrow, I take the cuffs off, and you go and answer. You open the door. It will be your only chance to get out of this alive.”
“Nobody is going to ring the doorbell,” said Treuffais, and then went on:
O Rose, thou art sick:
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy
“Are you going to close your trap, asshole?” asked Goémond as he rose from the armchair and smashed his heel repeatedly into the face of his prisoner.
40
BUENAVENTURA had walked into the building next door. He had climbed the stairs to the top. Directly above the last landing was a trapdoor that opened onto the roof. It was secured with a kind of lock
that to pick would require tools. The Catalan considered forcing it, but the trap was high up and he had nothing to stand on to reach it. The young man went down a corridor past mansarded maids’ rooms, gently trying each door in turn. The third handle turned. Buenaventura pushed the door ajar. In the shadows he discerned someone sleeping in a narrow bed. He waited for the timer on the stairwell light, which he had activated when coming up, to shut off. Then he crept into a room vaguely lit up by the city lights continually flashing through the dormer window.
The occupant of the narrow bed was snoring. Buenaventura went over for a closer look. It was an old man, unkempt and financially insecure, to judge by his rank odor. He was sleeping like a baby.
The Catalan left the side of the bed, cautiously opened the window, and, clambering over a whitewood commode, got out onto the ledge. There he performed further gymnastics in order to return the Erma to the lining of his coat. Around the dormer, slates rose at a gentle incline to a flat roof. Once both his hands were free, Buenaventura let go of the window and laid his thin body down flat on the moist slates. Their moistness worked to his advantage. The temperature was only just below freezing, so water was not yet ice, not yet slippery but instead somehow adhesive. Inching his way along, Buenaventura crawled all the way to the edge of the flat rooftop. He reached it but remained prone, his eyes plumbing the shadows. Chimneys, television antennae. No sign of any human life. The Catalan hesitated for a moment, then decided to get up onto the roof terrace. Patches of gravel crunched beneath the soles of his sneakers.
Still nobody. Buenaventura was nervous. He imagined a horde of cops watching his every move. Or else, was it possible that they were all in Treuffais’s stairwell? Or again, could it be that he was mistaken and that there was no trap, no Treuffais, no commissioner at all?
He quickly stepped over the low divider separating the rooftop he had reached from its neighbor. Now he was standing on the roof of Treuffais’s building.
Nothing. Nobody. The chimneys and antennae were stock-still in the dark and Buenaventura dismissed the notion that they were looking at him mockingly. He consulted his watch, which he had wound and set to the right time at the Ventrée weekend house. Four in the morning. The proletariat was sleeping with one eye open in its suburbs; middle managers for their part were sleeping like dumb logs in their luxury co-ops overlooking the Seine. The late-night pizzerias in Saint-Germain-des-Prés were closing up and shooing out languid, ravishing transvestites. Daughters of the well-to-do, stupefied by drink and hashish, were getting fucked in Paris’s western outskirts and faking orgasms to mask their nausea. Bums were passing around venereal diseases under the bridges. La Coupole had closed, and intellectuals were parting company at the Raspail-Montparnasse intersection and promising to phone one another. At the printing houses the Linotypists were working away. Headlines concerning the killings of the morning before were being composed. Editorials had been delivered with headlines varying according to the opinion of the particular paper: WHY? or BLOOD or HOW FAR WILL IT GO? or VICIOUS CIRCLE or FOOLHARDY JOE BLOW VS. STORM TROOPERS IN PEAK FORM. Buenaventura was cautiously rounding each chimney for fear of being shot in the back.
Once he was sure there was no cat and no cop abroad on the roof, he felt perplexed. His perplexity did not encourage him to venture down Treuffais’s stairs. He set to work instead on the television antennae. Taking the guylines that prevented them from swaying or breaking in high winds, he tied them end to end with fiercely tight knots. The long cable that he created in this way was terribly slippery because the guys were sheathed in plastic. Buenaventura lashed one end securely around a chimney stack, set himself up to rappel, and launched himself into the void above the street. His right hand, around which he had twisted the line, ensured that he descended slowly. He went spiderlike down the front of the building until he reached Treuffais’s floor. The soles of his sneakers silently grazed the balcony before achieving a firm footing. He stood outside the windows, through which he could see the living room, dimly illuminated by the kitchen lights, and two silhouetted figures not looking his way.
41
“YOU STILL haven’t found Goémond?”
“No, sir.”
“Have you tried going to the home of the Treuffais guy? Marcel Treuffais?”
“No, sir.”
“So go there. What are you waiting for?”
“Nothing, sir. As you wish, sir.”
42
BUENAVENTURA Diaz burst through the living-room window screaming with joy and despair. He held the sawed-off carbine in his left hand and, as shards of glass still showered down around him, dropped to one knee and opened fire on Goémond, operating the Erma’s lever with his right hand. The .22 LR bullets hit the commissioner in the back. He was precipitated forward. His forehead struck the frame of the communicating door. Rebounding, he flung himself down on his stomach behind the father’s armchair, which bullets continued to fill with holes.
As he was wearing a bulletproof vest, the commissioner was shaken up but unwounded.
The Erma’s firing pin clicked on empty and Buenaventura threw the carbine into the middle of the room and with his left hand drew his automatic.
“Death to pigs!” he cried just as Goémond fired at him around the armchair and shattered his elbow.
Buenaventura screamed and whirled, executing a full turn on his heels. Goémond put another bullet in his chest with the Colt Cobra. The Catalan’s lung burst and he fell backwards, crashed into the window and collapsed onto his back. He felt under his trench coat with his right hand. His pistol was lying in the middle of the threadbare carpet.
Goémond uttered a cry of glee and dashed towards the terrorist, Cobra in hand.
“Long live death!” said Buenaventura as he withdrew the shortened Charlin from the left-side lining of his trench coat and emptied the two barrels into the policeman’s face.
At such close quarters the shot fused into a single projectile that demolished and removed Goémond’s head. Fragments of bone and brains and tufts of hair hurtled through the air like the grand finale of a fireworks display, then splattered onto and adhered to the ceiling, the floor and the walls. The commissioner’s headless body sailed into the air with feet together before flopping down on its back in the middle of the room with a squelch. Buenaventura tossed the sawed-off aside and started to vomit blood.
“Buen,” called Treuffais. “Are you hit?”
“I’m finished,” gurgled the Catalan.
Treuffais struggled frantically, reached the commissioner’s decapitated corpse and went through the policeman’s pockets. He found the keys to the handcuffs. Buenaventura lay unmoving beneath the window, his chin on his chest, as a rosy stream flowed from his mouth and nose and stained his white sweater, his hunting jacket, and his trench coat. Being of pulmonary origin, the blood was full of bubbles and it foamed like spilt beer.
“The tapes are in my jacket pockets,” said the wounded man.
“What are you saying?”
The Catalan made no reply. Treuffais unlocked his cuffs and hurried to his friend’s side, stepping over Goémond’s corpse. He knelt down next to Buenaventura, who looked at him for a moment without a word and then died.
“Farewell, dumbass,” said Treuffais, and his eyes brimmed with tears. Sobs shook him so violently that he began to retch.
He got up and opened the apartment door. The light was on in the stairwell. Neighbors were calling out to one another from one floor to the next. There was talk of gunshots, telephoning, police emergency services. Treuffais returned to his apartment, bolted the door, and went over to the telephone. He dialed the number of a foreign press agency, asked to speak to a reporter, and was put through to one.
Through the broken windowpanes came the dismal whine of fast-approaching police vans.
“Listen, man, and take careful notes,” said Treuffais, eyeing the corpses. “I am going to tell you the short but complete history of the Nada group.”
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Jean-Patrick Manchette, Nada
Nada Page 14