Camille

by Pierre Lemaitre

  The story could end here. The story of an ill-fated incident. But the taller of the two men does not see it like that. He is clearly the leader and he quickly weighs up the situation.

  What is going to happen to this woman? What if she regains consciousness and starts to scream? What if she runs back into the Galerie? Worse, what if she manages to get out through the emergency exit and calls for help? Or crawls into a toilet cubicle and phones the police?

  He puts his foot against the door to hold it open, bends down and, grabbing her by the right ankle, he leaves the toilets, dragging her behind him with the same ease, the same casual indifference with which a child might drag a toy.

  Anne’s body is bruised and battered, her shoulder slams against the toilet door, her hip against the wall of the corridor, her head lolls as she is dragged along, banging into a skirting board or one of the plant pots in the Galerie. Anne is no more than a rag now, a sack, a lifeless doll leaving a scarlet trail that quickly clots. Blood dries fast.

  She seems dead. The man drops her leg, abandoning her dislocated body without a second glance; he has no more use for her. He loads the pump-action shotgun with swift sure movements that emphasise his determination. The two men burst into Desfossés Jewellers yelling orders. The shop has only just opened. A witness, had there been one, would be struck by the disparity between their fury and the empty shop. The two men bark orders at the staff (two petrified women), and immediately lash out, punching them in the stomach, the face. The Galerie echoes with the sound of smashing glass, screams, whimpers, gasps of fear.

  Perhaps it due to being dragged along the ground, to her head being bumped and jolted, but there is a sudden pulse of life and in that moment, Anne struggles to reconnect with reality.

  Her brain, like a defective radar, tries desperately to make sense of what is happening, but it is futile, she is in shock, her mind literally numbed by the blows and the speed of events. Her body is racked with pain, she cannot move a muscle.

  The spectacle of Anne’s body being dragged through the Galerie and abandoned in a pool of blood in the doorway of the jeweller’s has one positive effect: it lends a sense of urgency to the events.

  The only people in the shop are the owner and a trainee assistant, a girl of about sixteen, thin as a leaf, who wears her hair pinned up in a chignon to give herself some gravitas. The moment she sees the two armed men in balaclavas, she knows it is a hold-up; hypnotised, sacrificed, passive as a victim about to be burned at the stake, she stands, her mouth opening and closing like a goldfish. Her legs can barely hold her up; she clutches the edge of the counter for support. Before her knees finally give way, the barrel of the shotgun is slammed into her face. Slowly, like a soufflé, she sinks to the ground. She will lie here as events play out, counting her heartbeats, shielding her head with her arms as though expecting a shower of stones.

  The owner of the jeweller’s stifles a scream when she first sees Anne being dragged along the ground, skirt rucked up to her waist, leaving a wide, crimson wake. She tries to say something, but the words die in her throat. The taller of the two men is stationed at the entrance to the shop, keeping lookout, while the shorter man rushes her, aiming the barrel of his shotgun. He jabs it viciously into her belly and she only just manages not to vomit. He does not say a word; no words are necessary. Already she is working on automatic pilot. She clumsily disarms the alarm system, fumbles for the keys to the display cases only to realise she does not have them on her, she needs to fetch them from the back room; it is as she takes her first step that she realises she has wet herself. Her hand trembling, she holds out the bunch of keys. Though she will not mention this in her witness statement, at this moment she whispers to the man “Don’t kill me . . .” She would trade the whole world for another twenty seconds of life. As she says this, and without having to be asked, she lies down on the floor, hands behind her head, whispering fervently to herself: she is praying.

  Given the viciousness of these thugs, one cannot help but wonder whether prayers, however fervent, serve any practical purpose. It hardly matters: while she prays, the two men quickly open the display cases and tip the contents into canvas bags.

  The hold-up has been efficiently planned; it takes less than four minutes. The timing is perfectly judged, the decision to enter the arcade through the toilets is astute, the division of roles between the men is professional: while the first man ransacks the cabinets, the second, standing squarely in the doorway, keeps one eye on the shop and another on the rest of the arcade.

  The C.C.T.V. camera inside the shop will show the first robber rifling through cases and drawers and grabbing anything of value. Outside, a second camera films the doorway and a narrow section of the arcade. It is on this footage that Anne’s sprawled body can be seen.

  This is the point at which the meticulously planned robbery begins to go wrong; this is the moment on the camera footage when Anne appears to move. It is an almost imperceptible movement, a reflex. At first, Camille is hesitant, unsure what he has seen but, studying it with care, there can be no doubt . . . Anne moves her head from right to left, very slowly. It is a gesture Camille recognises: at certain times of the day when she needs to relax, she arches her neck, working the vertebrae and the muscles – the “sternocleidomastoid”, she says, a muscle Camille did not know existed. Obviously, on the video the gesture does not have the tranquil grace of a relaxation exercise. Anne is lying on her side, her right leg is drawn up so the knee touches her chest, her left leg is extended, her upper body is twisted as though she is trying to turn onto her back, her skirt is hiked up to reveal her white panties. Blood is streaming down her face.

  She is not lying there; she was thrown there.

  When the robbery began, the man in the doorway shot several quick glances at Anne, but since she was not moving, he focused his attention on watching the arcade. Now he ignores her, his back is turned, he has not even noticed the blood trickling under the heel of his right shoe.

  Emerging from her nightmare, Anne struggles to make sense of what is going on around her. As she looks up, the camera briefly captures an image of her face. It is heartrending.

  When he comes to this moment on the tape, Camille is so shocked he twice fumbles with the remote control before he manages to stop, rewind and pause: he does not recognise her. He can see nothing of Anne’s luminous features, her laughing eyes in this bruised, bloody face swollen already to twice its size, in these vacant eyes.

  Camille grips the edge of the table, he feels an overwhelming urge to weep because Anne is staring straight into the lens, gazing directly at him as though she might speak, might beg him to come to her rescue; he cannot help but imagine this, and imagination can be devastating. Imagine someone you love, someone who relies on you for protection, imagine watching them suffer, watching them die and feel yourself break out in a cold sweat. Now, go one step further and imagine in that moment of excruciating terror, this person crying out to you for help and you will wish you could die too. This is how Camille feels, staring at the video monitor, utterly helpless. There is nothing he can do save watch, because it is all over . . .

  It is unendurable, literally unendurable.

  He will watch this footage dozens of times.

  Anne behaves as though her surroundings do not exist. She would not react if the tall man were to stand over her and aim the barrel at the back of her head. It is a powerful survival instinct even if, watching it on the screen, it seems more like suicide: scarcely two metres away from a man with a shotgun who only minutes earlier made it clear that he was perfectly prepared to put a bullet in her head, Anne is about to do something that no-one in her position would wish to do. She is going to try to stand up. With no thought for the consequences. She is going to try to escape. Anne is a woman of great courage, but confronting a man with a sawn-off shotgun goes beyond bravery.

  What is about to happen arises almost automatically from the situation: two opposing forces are about to collide and one or other
must prevail. Both forces are caught up in the moment. The difference being that one is backed up by a 12-bore shotgun, which unquestionably gives him the upper hand. But Anne cannot gauge the balance of power, cannot rationally calculate the odds against her, she is behaving as though she were alone. She musters every ounce of strength – and from the flickering images, it is clear she has little left – draws up her leg, hoists herself laboriously with her arms, her hands slipping in a pool of her own blood. She almost falls back, but tries a second time; the slowness of her movements lends the scene a surreal quality. She feels heavy, numb, you can almost hear her gasping for breath, you want to heave her up, to drag her away, to help her to her feet.

  Camille wants only to tell her not to move. Even if it takes a minute before the tall man turns and notices, Anne is so dazed, so out of it that she will not make it three metres before the first shotgun blast all but cuts her in two. But several hours have passed, Camille is staring at a video monitor, what he thinks now is of no importance: it is too late.

  Anne’s actions are not governed by thought but by sheer determination which knows no logic. It is obvious from the video that her resolution is simply a survival instinct. She does not look like someone being threatened by a shotgun at point-blank range, she looks like a woman who has had too much to drink and is about to pick up her handbag – Anne has clung to the bag from the beginning – stagger to the door and make her way home. It seems as though what is stopping her is not a 12-bore shotgun, but her befuddled state.

  What transpires next takes barely a second: Anne does not stop to think, she has struggled painfully to her feet. She manages to stay standing, her skirt is still hiked around her waist. She is scarcely upright before she begins to run.

  At this point, everything goes wrong and what follows is a series of miscalculations, accidents and errors. It is as though, overwhelmed by events, God does not know how to play out the scene and so leaves the actors to improvise, which, ineptly, they do.

  Anne does not know where she is, she cannot get her bearings, in fact in attempting to escape, she heads the wrong way. If she reached out a hand, she would touch the tall man’s shoulder, he would turn and . . .

  She hesitates for a long moment, disorientated. It is a miracle that she manages to stay upright. She wipes her bloody face with her sleeve, tilts her head as though listening to something, she cannot seem to take that first step . . . Then, suddenly, she tries to run. As he watches the video, Camille falls apart as the last pillars of his stoic courage crumble.

  Anne’s instinct is fine in theory; it is in practice that things go wrong. She skids in the pool of blood. She is skating. In a cartoon, it would be funny; in reality it is agonising because she is slipping in her own blood, struggling to stay on her feet, trying desperately to run and succeeding only in flapping and flailing dangerously. It looks as though she is running in slow motion. It is heart-stopping.

  The tall man does not immediately realise what is happening. Anne is about to fall on top of him when her feet finally reach a patch of dry ground, she regains her balance and, as though powered by a spring, she begins to lurch.

  In the wrong direction.

  Initially, she follows a curious trajectory, spinning around like a broken doll. She makes a quarter turn, takes a step forward, stops, turns again like a disorientated walker trying to get her bearings, and eventually manages to stumble off in the vague direction of the exit. Several seconds pass before the robber realises that his prey is attempting to escape. The moment he does, he turns and fires.

  Camille plays the video over and over: there is no doubt that the killer is surprised. He is gripping his gun next to his hip, the sort of stance a gunman takes when trying to hit anything within a radius of four or five metres. Perhaps he has not had time to regain his composure. Or perhaps he is too sure of himself – it often happens: give a nervous man a 12-bore shotgun and the freedom to use it and he immediately thinks he is a crack shot. Perhaps it is simply surprise, or perhaps it is a mixture of all these things. The fact remains that the barrel is aimed high, much too high. It is an impulsive shot. He does not even try to aim.

  Anne does not see anything. She is still stumbling forward through a black hole when a deafening hail of glass rains down on her as the ornamental fanlight above her head is blown to smithereens. In the light of Anne’s fate, it seems cruel to mention that the stained-glass panel depicted a hunting scene: two dashing riders galloping towards a baying pack of hounds that have cornered a stag; the hounds are slavering, their teeth bared, the stag is already dead meat . . . It seems strange that the fanlight in the Galerie Monier, which survived two world wars, was finally destroyed by a ham-fisted thug . . . Some things are difficult to accept.

  The whole Galerie trembles: the windows, the plate glass, the floor; people protect themselves as best they can.

  “I hunched my shoulders,” an antiques dealer will later tell Camille, miming the action.

  He is thirty-four (he is precise on this point; he is not thirty-five). The stubby moustache that curls at the ends looks a little too small for his large nose. His right eye remains almost entirely closed, like the figure in the helmet in Giotto’s painting “Idolatry”. Even thinking about the noise of the gunshot, he seems dumbfounded.

  “Well, obviously, I assumed it was a terrorist attack. [He apparently thinks this explains matters.] But then I thought, that’s ridiculous, why would terrorists attack the Galerie, there’s no obvious target,” and so on . . .

  The sort of witness who revises reality as fast as his memory will allow. But not someone to forget his priorities. Before going out into the arcade to see what was happening, he looked around to check whether there was any damage to his stock.

  “Not so much as a scratch!” he says, flicking his thumb against his front tooth.

  The Galerie is higher than it is wide; it is a corridor some fifty metres across lined by shops with plate-glass windows. In such a confined space the blast is colossal. After the explosion, the vibrations ripple out at the speed of sound, ricochet off every obstacle sending back wave upon wave of echoes.

  The gunshot and the hail of glass stopped Anne in her tracks. She raises her arms to shield her head, tucks her chin into her chest, stumbles, falls onto her side and rolls across the glittering shards, but it takes more than a single shot and a shattered window to stop a woman like Anne. It seems incredible, but once more she gets to her feet.

  The tall man’s first shot missed its mark, but he has learned his lesson; he takes the time to aim. On the C.C.T.V. footage, he can be seen reloading the shotgun, staring down the barrel; if the video were sufficiently high resolution, it would be possible to see his finger squeezing the trigger.

  A black-gloved hand suddenly appears; the shorter man jostles his shoulder just as he fires . . .

  The window of the nearby bookshop explodes, splinters of glass, some large as dinner plates, sharp and jagged as razors, fall and shatter on the tiles.

  “I was in the little office at the back of the bookshop . . .”

  The woman is about fifty, an archetypal businesswoman: short, plump, self-confident, expensive make-up, twice-weekly trips to the beautician, tinkling with bracelets, necklaces, chains, rings, brooches, earrings (it is a wonder the robbers did not take her with the rest of their loot), a gravelly voice – too many cigarettes and probably too much booze, Camille does not take the time to find out. The incident took place only a few hours earlier, he is in shock, impatient, he needs to know.

  “I rushed out . . .” she gestures towards the arcade. She pauses, clearly happy to be the centre of attention. She wants to make the most of her little performance. With Camille, it will be short-lived.

  “Get on with it,” he growls.

  Not very polite for a policeman, she thinks, must be his height, it’s the kind of thing that must make you bitter, resentful. Moments after the gunshot, she witnessed Anne being hurled against a display case as though pushed by a giant hand,
bouncing back against the plate-glass window and then crumpling on the floor. The image is still so powerful that the woman forgets her affectations.

  “She was thrown against the window, but she was hardly on the ground before she was trying to get up again! [The woman sounds amazed, impressed.] She was bleeding and disorientated, flapping her arms around, slipping and sliding, you get the picture . . .”

  On the C.C.T.V. footage, the two men seem to freeze for a moment. The shorter one shoves the shotgun aside and drops the bags on the floor. He squares up, it is as though they are about to come to blows. Tight-lipped beneath his balaclava, he seems to spit his words.

  The tall man lowers the gun, one hand gripping the barrel, he hesitates for a moment, then reality takes hold. Reluctantly he watches Anne as she struggles to her feet and staggers towards the exit; but time is short, an alarm goes off inside his head, the raid has taken far too long.

  His accomplice grabs the bags and tosses one to him; the decision is made. The two men run off and disappear from the screen. A split second later, the tall man turns back and reappears on the right-hand side of the image, grabs the handbag Anne abandoned when she fled, then disappears again. This time he will not be back. We know that the two men went through the toilets and out onto the rue Damiani, where a third man was waiting with a car.

  *

  Anne barely knows where she is. She falls, gets up and, somehow, manages to make it out of the arcade and onto the street.

  “There was so much blood, and she was walking . . . she looked like a zombie.” A South American girl, dark hair, copper skin, about twenty. She works in the hairdressing salon on the corner and had just stepped out to get some coffees.

  “Our machine is broken and someone has to go out and get coffee for the customers,” the manageress, Janine Guénot, explains. Standing, staring at Verhœven, she looks like a brothel madam, she has the same qualities. And the same sense of responsibility: she is not about to let one of her girls talk to some man on the street without keeping an eye open. The reason the girl went out – the coffee, the malfunctioning machine – hardly matters, Camille brushes it aside with a wave. Though not entirely.