Then the right side of Alphonsine’s torso was ripped open. As though kicked by a horse, she was hurled sideways, and a glob of crushed bone, pulped flesh, fragments of bronchial tubes, atomized blood, and compressed air—along with the dumdum bullet driving this mass before it—broke explosively from her back. Gerfaut’s hands were still outstretched before him, and he was astonished to find that Alphonsine’s black hair was no longer between his fingers. The young woman’s shoulder struck the ground just as Gerfaut heard the sound of the departing shot from over to his right. He dropped flat on his face, hearing the air split above him, and then a second report. At once stupefied and flooded by hate, his cheek plastered with earth, Gerfaut began unclipping his rifle from its sling. He turned toward Alphonsine, who was not moving. Her mouth was open, and her face was in the mud, and she was dead. The shock had stopped her heart instantly. Her companion’s lips tightened at the sight of her open mouth and the terrible immobility of her features. A third bullet slammed into the earth behind Gerfaut’s back, carving out a shallow cavity. Dirt and shards of stone lashed Gerfaut’s back as the bullet, now completely flattened, ricocheted above him. He had freed the Weatherby now and, rolling over, he got it into firing position. In his sights something flashed briefly, and he pulled the trigger. His adversary stopped firing.
Gerfaut turned toward Alphonsine and looked at her again and kept looking at her until he understood fully that she was dead. Then he got to his feet. Slowly at first, then speeding up as he went, he ran toward the patch of shrubbery that he had aimed at. After a couple of minutes he made out the hit man rolling about in the bushes. Gerfaut’s bullet had shattered the folding butt of the M6, spraying pieces of it in all directions; the bullet had then changed course, destroying the weapon before burying itself in Carlo’s thigh and smashing his femur. The left side of Carlo’s face was covered in blood: there, as in his side, myriad shards of plastic and light alloy were now embedded in the flesh. A clear-cut hole was visible in his pants at the left thigh, the fabric around it gummy with blood. The hit man brandished his Beretta in his right hand and fired at Gerfaut and missed, for he had lost his left eye and could no longer judge distances and was in shock.
It did not occur to Gerfaut to pull up and shoot the man dead. Instead, he went on running faster and faster, and the hit man went on firing at him and missed four more times before Gerfaut was upon him and delivering a great blow with his gun butt to his hand—whereupon the man dropped the automatic—and another to his head and another.
“You bastard!” Gerfaut cried. “You stinking dirty shit! Son of a bitch of a son of a bitch of a bastard!”
He stopped hitting Carlo and crouched down in front of him, his mouth open, his breath whistling in his throat, his chest heaving. He contemplated the hit man, who had slipped onto his side, the intact eye half-closed, and wondered, What shall I do? I’ll do everything I’ll torture him to death rip off his balls rip out his heart I must be calm but I am not all that agitated basically I am in fact ice-cold basically ice-cold.
He saw then that the man was dead. Gerfaut had smashed his skull with the gun butt. Shifting his weight from one buttock to the other, he drew closer to the hit man’s body. He did indeed feel fairly calm and dispassionate. It was a little hard for him to concentrate, but he was not hesitant about what he had to do—this was not like all the other times over the last few months, ever since they had started trying to kill him; not hesitant, either, as he had been, when you came to think about it, for a very long time in his life as a manager and as a husband and as a father, and before that as a student and as a political militant and as a lover before his marriage and as an adolescent and even no doubt as a child.
He went through the dead man’s pockets and found car keys and a driver’s license in the name of Edmond Bron, born in Paris in 1944, domiciled in Paris on Avenue du Docteur Netter. Carlo had strictly nothing else on him.
Gerfaut left the corpse beneath the bushes along with the demolished M6 and the Weatherby. He picked up the Beretta automatic and put it in Carlo’s canvas bag, which he took with him. He went back to where Alphonsine lay dead. Gerfaut’s face was expressionless as he quickly searched the beautiful young woman without finding car keys or anything else of practical use. He got blood all over his hands. He left Alphonsine’s body as it was and made his way back down to the house. He hurried; the exchange of gunfire had made a considerable din, though no one down in the village seemed yet to have paid it any mind.
Back at the house, he immediately spied Alphonsine’s pocketbook. He took the keys and papers of the Ford Capri as well as what money there was—about a thousand francs. He gathered up such clothes as would pass in town and Carlo’s canvas bag containing the Beretta. Then he got into the Capri, started it up, drove through the village, and proceeded from valley to valley, then from town to town, in the direction of Paris.
On the road, on the car radio, he picked up a number of things that would normally have appealed to him: Gary Burton, Stan Getz, Bill Evans. But they did nothing for him, and he turned the radio off. The fact was, it seemed to Gerfaut that it would be a long time before he would be able to enjoy music again.
21
It was getting late by the time he reached Auxerre and registered in a hotel as Georges Gaillard. He ate badly and slept little. The radio news made no mention of him or of any killing in the Alps. Gerfaut hoped he would be able to use the Capri for a few more hours, and he was not to be disappointed, for the next morning the car got him without incident to Paris. Arriving at lunchtime, he abandoned the vehicle in Pantin, leaving the doors unlocked and the key in the ignition, trusting that, with a bit of luck, the thing would be stolen and any pursuers thereby thrown off the scent. And stolen it was, by what must have been well-organized felons, for no one ever heard of the car again.
Gerfaut took the metro, changed at Gare de l’Est, and got out at Opéra. It gave him great pleasure to be back in the city, though he was not completely aware of it. He was carrying Carlo’s canvas bag with the Beretta and a few clothes in it. For a few minutes, he enjoyed strolling through the maze of side streets that lies to the east of Avenue de l’Opéra. Scurrying office workers, exhausted secretaries—a little world of grumbling and irascible yet contented people flooded the snack bars and cafés, rubbing shoulders with anxious currency dealers and American students. Gerfaut bought France-Soir and leafed through it abstractedly as he sat at the end of a counter eating a frankfurter and fries. The usual things were going on in the world, yet Gerfaut detected an evolution of some kind that was hard to pin down. He finished his beer, left the copy of France-Soir on the counter, and made his way to the headquarters of the daily newspaper Le Monde. Across the boulevard, a staring match was in progress between a large squad of uniformed police and a picket line barring the entrance to a bank. Gerfaut asked if he might consult back issues of the newspaper dating from almost a year earlier. He was told yes, certainly, and given directions; he set himself up, searched, and found what he was looking for. A male who had died at Troyes hospital the year before without regaining consciousness, after having been dropped off by an unidentified man, had turned out be a Monsieur Mouzon, a legal adviser by profession, from Paris, age forty-six. The cause of death was four bullet wounds inflicted by a 9mm weapon—no mention of any road accident. Gerfaut was not surprised.
Nine Mouzons were listed as residential subscribers in the Paris phone book, including someone described as a manufacturer of electric fans. In the listings by profession, however, Gerfaut found a consulting firm called Mouzon & Hodeng. He wrote down the number and as an afterthought noted the nine residential numbers, too. He walked across the post office and stood in line for a telephone cubicle. The business number elicited a recorded message informing him that the number was not currently in service. He began dialing the residential numbers one by one, leaving out the fan maker.
“Hello?”
A woman’s voice.
Gerfaut pressed the button t
o make the connection.
“Monsieur Mouzon, please.”
“Hold on, please. Who’s calling?”
Gerfaut hung up. Tried another number. Same result. Tried a third. Busy signal. The fourth try was different.
“Hello?”
“Monsieur Mouzon, please.”
“Monsieur Mouzon has died. Who is this?”
Gerfaut hung up, then remained motionless for a moment in the cubicle, thinking about death and about the horrible damage that bullets can do. Someone began tapping on the glass door with a set of keys in an obnoxious way. A fat man. Gerfaut came out.
“Fat idiot!” he said as he passed the man.
“What? What was that you said?”
But Gerfaut was already on his way out of the post office. He walked to Place de l’Opéra, studied a map of the metro, caught a train, changed at Invalides, and reemerged into the daylight at Pernety. It was only just four o’clock. Things were moving quickly. Having got his bearings, Gerfaut took Rue Raymond-Losserand, which was clogged with cars, delivery vans, road work, street vendors, and a good-humored and noisy throng. He found the house number he was looking for and went into the building where Mouzon had lived. There was no list of tenants. Gerfaut had no wish to ask the concierge. On the fifth floor he came upon an apartment door with a scrap of card pinned beneath the bell: MOUZON—GASSOWITZ, it said. Gerfaut rang. A man opened the door.
“Yes?”
The man wore beige cotton pants and a plaid lumberjack’s shirt. He had greasy hair, thick lips, and a blue chin. With his Robert Mitchum build and beer belly to match, he didn’t look particularly Polish—more like an ex–North African colonial type.
“I’m looking for Madame Mouzon.”
“Yes?”
“That’s it.”
The man weighed the pros and cons, then seemed to reject the idea of throwing Gerfaut down a flight of stairs to the next floor. He turned his head sideways, without taking his eyes off the visitor, and bellowed over his shoulder.
“Éliane!”
“What?”
“It’s for you!”
Bustling could be heard within. The man redirected his chin toward Gerfaut and sighed softly, filling the four cubic meters of air on the landing with Ricard fumes. Éliane Mouzon arrived at the apartment door, but Gerfaut had to crane his neck to see her because the guy still blocked the way.
“What is it?”
She seemed tired, poor, and ordinary: not colorful at all, about forty-five, medium build, quite pretty despite very bad skin, lightly tinted hair, frankly lackluster black-and-white chiné suit, tan rayon blouse, torque of fake gold, bracelet ditto. She was artfully, almost beautifully made up. She was a slave to good taste, but she did not let herself go, and Gerfaut felt sympathy for her.
“I would like to speak to you in private,” he told her. “About Monsieur Mouzon.”
The skin around the woman’s mouth blanched dramatically. She placed a palm against the hallway wall, and her eyelashes fluttered. The heavy-set guy glanced at her, then turned back to Gerfaut, lowering his head like a bull about to charge. His lips, too, were now ringed with white.
“Listen here, buddy,” he growled, “I’m holding back because that’s what she wants. But I don’t know how long I can keep it up. So you’d better piss off, get it?”
“Stop it—he’s not the one,” said Mouzon’s widow from behind his back.
“Oh, okay,” said the heavyset guy—an irate Mr. Magoo struggling to focus and calm down at the same time. “I, er....”
“Come to think of it,” broke in Gerfaut, “it’s you I’d like to talk to. You—Monsieur Gassowitz, I take it? I have to talk to you. You have to let me in. Otherwise, I’ll talk to the police, instead. I’m sure you wouldn’t care for that, am I right?”
Gassowitz did not reply. He was thinking, and he appeared to be bothered by noise. But there was no noise. The landing was deathly quiet.
“I don’t know who you are and I don’t want to know,” said the widow. “Leave me alone. Him, too.”
Quite without warning, she burst into tears. Her cheap mascara ran into her eyes, and she wiped them with tiny fists, mumbling “Oh, my God” in an emotionless and exhausted voice.
“We can’t just stand here on the landing,” ruled Gerfaut.
Gassowitz retreated into the hallway, took the woman in his arms, and nestled her head to his shoulder. He stroked her hair. At the same time, he continued to stare at Gerfaut in a treacherous and angry way. Gerfaut proceeded gingerly into the apartment. Gassowitz used his foot to slam the door shut behind them.
“Baby,” he murmured to the widow, “you go on into the bedroom.”
Mouzon’s widow disappeared into the bedroom. Gassowitz showed the visitor into a kitchen with a formica-topped table. His dark blue eyes were still shooting daggers at Gerfaut, who sat down without being invited. He noticed that he was sweating profusely and put it down solely to the emotional heat being generated on all sides in the small room.
“Shit!” he said. “I had absolutely no idea—I didn’t anticipate anything like this. Listen, she’s told you about it, hasn’t she? What I mean to say is, who was it that came the first time—that other time? A young man, dark, wasn’t it? A young guy with wavy black hair and blue eyes? And a big toothy fellow, older?”
“It was the young one,” said Gassowitz. “They both came together. But it was the young one who....”
“I killed him yesterday. I smashed his fucking skull; I busted his head in.”
Words failing him, Gerfaut burst into tears. Folding his arms before him on the formica table, he laid his head on his forearms and sobbed strenuously. His tears stopped suddenly, but for several minutes he went on quaking and hyperventilating. He sounded like a Brazilian musical instrument.
Unsentimentally, Gassowitz tapped him on the shoulder.
“Here, you need a drink.”
Gerfaut sat up, grasped the proffered mustard glass and tossed down the six centiliters of undiluted Ricard it contained. The pastis burned his throat. He felt it trickle ever so slowly, like a small raspy hot egg, down his tight gullet. Gassowitz sat down gently on a kitchen chair, his left leg extended and his right bent. Gerfaut glanced at the man’s shoes—cheap tasseled things—and got the feeling that if at that moment he were to make a dash for the door, Gassowitz would plant his foot right in his face without bothering to get up from his chair.
“They killed Mouzon, obviously,” said Gerfaut. “Then they came here to make sure that his widow knew nothing. If she had known anything, they would have finished her off, too. And they made doubly sure.” He glanced at the white-lipped Gassowitz. “You are—what? Her lover, naturally. You met her after the fact. Listen, I don’t want to know what they did to her.”
“No, right,” replied Gassowitz in an ordinary conversational tone.
“Listen,” repeated Gerfaut, “I’m the guy that picked Mouzon up from the side of the road. It was me that dropped him off at the hospital. Then they caught up with me. It wasn’t easy for them, but they caught up with me several times, and they did worse stuff to me than—well, I’m not sure that it was worse. I can try and give you the details if you like. I have to know if they were taking orders from someone. They saw me coming to Mouzon’s rescue. They took my plate number. I suppose they figured I’d heard his last words. It’s all so banal, it’s pathetic. I can’t....”
“I want the details.”
“Okay, I’ll try.” And Gerfaut told his whole story to the heavyset guy. It took more than half an hour, because Gassowitz kept asking questions, to some of which Gerfaut had no answer. Gassowitz wanted to know why Gerfaut had not gone to the police, and Gerfaut said that that would have been a pain in the ass.
“But still, I mean, going right ahead like that!”
“Yes, yes, I know. But I can’t explain. I can’t really understand it myself.”
“Maybe you were just sick of everything?”
“But could it
be that simple?”
“It could.”
Gassowitz also wanted to know how come the two thugs had found Gerfaut at the gas station, the time the toothy man had gone up in flames, but Gerfaut couldn’t explain that, either.
Éliane Mouzon came in to see what was going on, her pretty face collapsed and ravaged. Gassowitz sent her back into the bedroom, promising to explain everything later, but he did so with great tenderness.
“That’s it,” said Gerfaut at last. “Is that what you wanted to know?”
“I suppose so,” grumbled Gassowitz.
Gerfaut drank a little Ricard diluted with water.
“I don’t know why I told you all this. The only thing I’m interested in is finding whoever gave those two bastards their orders. And you know nothing. Your—Madame Mouzon knows nothing, either; otherwise, they wouldn’t have let her off that easily, and....”
“I’m interested in that, too,” Gassowitz broke in.
“Okay, but you don’t know anything, you don’t know why....”
“Hodeng.”
“Huh?”
“Philippe Hodeng. Mouzon and he were partners. They were legal advisers. You know, they got pathetic people to pay their debts by throwing a scare into them. With letterheads and legal-sounding threats, that sort of thing.”
“Debt recovery?”
“Something like that. But sleazy. And they came across all kinds of stuff. They would get information on people, then offer their so-called services. Mouzon was an ex-cop—I expect you knew that?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Well, he was. He was canned or whatever you call it. Something about theft—while he was still in the police, I mean. But he was amnestied later—which is how he was able to set up his consulting business. Hodeng, I don’t know exactly, but I think he was a sort of stool pigeon of Mouzon’s when he was still a cop. Then, later, they went into partnership, get it?”
“I get it, all right.”
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