Because at the moment Anne stumbled out into the street, the hairdresser was rushing back with five cups of coffee balanced on a tray. Clients in this neighbourhood are particularly annoying, being well heeled they feel entitled to be demanding, as though exercising some ancestral right.
“Serving lukewarm coffee would be a disaster,” the manageress explains with a pained expression.
Hence the young hairdresser’s haste.
Surprised and intrigued by the two gunshots she hears coming from the Galerie Monier, she is trotting along with her tray when she runs straight into a crazed woman, covered in blood, staggering out of the arcade. It is a shock. The two women collide, the tray goes flying and with it the cups, the saucers, the glasses of water, the coffee spills all over the blue trouser suit the hairdressers in the salon wear as a uniform. The gunshots, the coffee, the delay, she can deal with, but trouser suits are expensive. The voice of the manageress is shrill now, she wants to show Camille the damage. “It’s fine,” he waves away her concerns. She demands to know who is going to pay for the dry cleaning, the law must surely provide for such eventualities. “It’ll be fine,” Camille says again.
“And she didn’t even stop,” the woman insists, as though this were a prang with a moped.
By now, she is telling the story as though it happened to her. She imperiously takes over because, when all is said and done, this was one of “her girls”, and having coffee spilled all over her uniform means she has rights. Customers are all alike. Camille grabs her arm, she looks down at him curiously, as though observing a piece of dog shit on the pavement.
“Madame,” Camille says with a snarl, “stop pissing me about.”
The woman cannot believe her ears. And a dwarf at that! Now she’s seen it all. But Verhœven stares her down; it is unsettling. In the awkward silence, the young hairdresser tries to prove how anxious she is to keep her job.
“She was moaning . . .” the girl says, to distract Camille’s attention.
He turns to her, wants to know more. “What do you mean, moaning?”
“She was making these little cries, it was like . . . I don’t know how to explain it.”
“Try,” says the manageress, eager to redeem herself in the eyes of the policeman, you never know when it might be useful. She nudges the girl. Come on, tell the gentleman, what did they sound like, these cries? The girl stares at them, eyelashes fluttering, she is not sure what she is being asked to do and so, rather than describing Anne’s cries, she tries to mimic them. She begins to mouth little moans and whimpers, trying to find the right tone – aah, aah or maybe uhh, uhh, yes, that’s it, she says, concentrating now, uhh, uhh, and having found the right tone the moans grow louder, she closes her eyes then opens them wide and seconds later uhh, uhh, it sounds as though she is about to come.
They are standing in the street, a crowd begins to gather on the spot where street cleaners have carelessly hosed away Anne’s blood, which is still trickling into the gutter, they step on the fading scarlet blotches leaving Camille distraught . . . The crowd sees a diminutive police officer and, opposite him, the young hairdresser with the sallow tan who is staring at him strangely and making shrill, orgasmic sounds under the approving gaze of a brothel madam. Good heavens, it’s is hardly the sort of thing one expects to see in this neighbourhood. The other shopkeepers stand in their doorways, looking on appalled. The gunshots were bad enough – not the sort of publicity that’s going to attract customers – but now the whole street seems to have descended into a grotesque farce.
Camille goes on taking witness statements, comparing one to the other, trying to piece together what finally happened.
Utterly disoriented, Anne emerges from Galerie Monier onto the rue Georges-Flandrin next to number 34, turns right and staggers up towards the junction. A few metres on, she bumps into the hairdresser, but she does not stop, she hobbles on, leaning on the parked cars for support. Her bloody handprint is found on the roof and doors of several vehicles. To those on the street who heard the gunshots from the Galerie, this woman covered from head to foot in blood seems like an apparition. She seems to float, swaying this way and that but never stopping, she no longer knows what she is doing, she simply staggers on, groaning like a drunk, but moving forward. People stand aside to let her pass. One man dares to venture a concerned “Madame?”, but he is traumatised by so much blood.
“I can tell you, monsieur, I was truly terrified at the sight of the poor woman . . . I didn’t know what to do.”
He is clearly distraught, this elderly man with his calm face and his pitifully scrawny neck, his eyes are misted over. Cataracts, Camille thinks, his father suffered from cataracts before he died. After each phrase, the old man seems to slip into a dream. His eyes are fixed on Camille and there is a long pause before he picks up his story. He is overcome and he opens his frail arms wide; Camille swallows hard, assailed by conflicting emotions.
The old man calls out “Madame!”, but he dares not touch her, she is like a sleepwalker; he lets her pass, Anne stumbles on.
At this point, she turns right again.
There is no point wondering why. No-one knows. Because in doing so she turns into the rue Damiani. And two or three seconds after Anne turns into the street, the robbers’ car appears, driving at breakneck speed.
Heading straight towards her.
Seeing his victim within range, the tall man who smashed her head in and twice failed to shoot her cannot resist reaching for his shotgun. To finish the job. As the car comes alongside, the window winds down and the barrel of the gun is levelled at her. Everything happens quickly: Anne sees the gun, but is incapable of even the slightest movement.
“She stared at the car . . .” said the man, “I don’t know how to put it . . . it was like she was expecting it.”
He realises the enormity of what he is saying. Camille understands. What the old man means is that he senses a terrible weariness in Anne. After everything she has been through, she is ready to die. On this point everyone seems to agree: Anne, the shooter, the old man, fate, everyone.
Even the young hairdresser: “I saw the barrel of the gun poking out the window. And the lady, she saw it too. Neither of us could look away, but this lady, she was right there, right in the firing line, you understand?”
Camille holds his breath. Everyone, then, is in agreement. Everyone except the driver of the car. According to Camille – who has given the matter long and careful thought – at the time, the driver did not know about the carnage in the Galerie. Sitting in the getaway car, he probably hears the gunshots, knows too that the robbery was taking longer than planned. Panicked and impatient, he drums nervously on the steering wheel, he may even be thinking about driving away but then he sees the two men appear, one of them pushing the other towards the car . . . “Was anyone killed?” he wonders. “How many?” Finally, the robbers climb into the car. Under pressure, the driver starts the car and drives away, but as they come to the corner of the street – they have travelled scarcely two hundred metres since the car had to slow down at the traffic lights – he sees a woman lurching along the pavement, covered in blood. At that moment, the shooter probably shouts at him to slow down, rolls down his window, maybe even gives a howl of victory: one last chance, he cannot pass it up, it is as though fate itself is calling, as though he had found his soul mate, just when he had given up all hope she appears. He grabs the shotgun, brings it to his shoulder and aims. In the split second that follows, the driver suddenly imagines himself being held as an accomplice to cold-blooded murder in front of at least a dozen witnesses, to say nothing of whatever may have happened in the Galerie in which he is already implicated. The robbery has gone horribly wrong. He had not expected things to turn out like this . . .
“The car screeched to a halt,” says the hairdresser. “Just like that! The scream of the brakes . . .”
Traces of rubber on the street will make it possible to determine that the getaway car was a Porsche Cayenne.
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br /> Everyone in the vehicle pitches forward, including the gunman. His bullet shatters the doors and the side windows of the parked car next to which Anne stands, frozen, waiting to die. Everyone nearby drops to the ground, everyone except the elderly man who does not have time to move. Anne collapses just as the driver floors the accelerator, the car lurches forward and the tyres squeal. As the hairdresser gets to her feet she sees the old man, one hand leaning against a wall for support, the other clutching his heart.
Anne is lying on the pavement, one arm dangling in the gutter, one leg beneath a parked car.
“Glittering,” according to the old man, which is not surprising since she is covered with shards of glass from the shattered windscreen.
“It looked like a fall of snow . . .”
*
10.40 a.m.
The Turks are not happy.
Not happy at all.
The big man with his dogged expression is driving carefully, but as he negotiates the roundabout at the place de l’Étoile and heads down the avenue de la Grande-Armée, his knuckles on the steering wheel are white. He is scowling. He is naturally demonstrative. Or perhaps it is part of his culture to readily show emotion.
The younger brother is excitable. Volatile. He is swarthy with a brutish face, he is obviously thin-skinned. He too is demonstrative, he jabs the air with his finger, it’s exhausting. I don’t understand a word he’s saying – I’m Spanish – but it’s not hard to guess: we were hired to pull off a quick, lucrative robbery, and find ourselves caught up in the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. He flings his arms wide: what if I hadn’t stopped you, what then? There is an awkward silence in the car. He spits the question, he’s obviously demanding to know what would have happened if the girl had died. Then, suddenly, he snaps, he loses his rag: we were supposed to be raiding a jeweller’s, not committing mass murder!
Like I said, it gets a bit wearing. Good thing I’m a peaceable man because if I’d got angry, things might have got out of hand.
Not that it really matters, but it’s frustrating. The kid is wasting his breath dishing out the blame when he’d be better off saving his strength, he’s going to need all his energy.
Things didn’t go exactly as planned, but we got a result, that’s all I care about. There are two big bags on the floor. Enough to be going on with for a while. And this is just the beginning, because I’ve got big plans, and there are more bags where those ones came from. The Turk is eyeing the bags too as he jabbers away to his brother, it sounds like they’re planning something, the driver is nodding. They carry on like I’m not here, they’re probably calculating the compensation they think they’re entitled to. Entitled . . . that’s a fucking laugh. From time to time, the little guy turns to me and yells something. I catch a couple of slang terms: “dosh”, “divvy up”. Where the fuck they learned them, I’ve no idea, they’ve hardly been in the country twenty-four hours. Who knows, maybe the Turks have a gift for languages. Not that I give a shit. Right now, the best thing I can do is look confused, play it cool, nod my head and give them an apologetic smile. We’re coming in to Saint-Ouen, traffic is light, we’re in the clear.
The banlieue flashes past. Jesus, the big Turk has got some pair of lungs on him. With all the shouting, by the time we get to the lock-up, the air in the car is unbreathable, it feels like he’s just getting to his Unified Theory of Everything. The little guy yells at me, asking the same question over and over, he’s demanding an answer, and to show he’s serious he flashes an index finger and taps it against his closed fist. Maybe it’s an offensive gesture back in Izmir, but here in Saint-Ouen it’s a different matter. The gist is obvious enough, it’s intended as a threat, the best course of action is to nod my head and agree. I don’t feel I’m being dishonest, because things are going to be sorted out soon enough.
Meanwhile, the driver has got out of the car and he’s struggling to open the padlock on the metal shutters of the garage. He twists the key this way and that, comes back to the car looking puzzled, he’s obviously thinking back: when he locked up, the key was working fine. He turns back towards the car and stands there sweating while the engine runs. There’s not much chance of us being spotted on this dead-end road in the middle of nowhere, but even so I don’t fancy hanging around for ever.
As far as they’re concerned, the padlock is just one more unexpected hitch. One too many. By now, the little guy is almost apoplectic. Nothing has gone according to plan, he feels conned, betrayed – “fucking French bastard” – the best thing I can do is look baffled, this whole thing about the lock not working is bizarre, we tried it yesterday and the garage door opened. I calmly step out of the car, looking surprised and confused.
The magazine of a Mossberg 500 holds seven rounds. Instead of yelling and screaming like a pack of hyenas, these arseholes would have been better off counting the spent rounds. They’re about to find out that if you don’t know shit about locks, you’d better know a thing or two about arithmetic. Because once I’m out of the car, all I have to do is walk slowly as far as the door to the lock-up, gently push the driver to one side – “Here, let me give it a go” – and when I turn, I’m perfectly positioned. There are just enough bullets to quickly aim at the driver and put a 70mm shell in his chest that flings him back against the concrete wall. Now for the little guy. I turn slightly and feel a sense of relief as I blast his brains out through the windshield. See the blood spurting. The shattered windscreen, the side windows dripping blood, I can’t see anything else. I step closer to inspect the damage: his head has been blown to pieces, all that’s left is his scrawny neck and his body, which is twitching still. Chickens run around after they’ve had their heads chopped off. Turks are much the same.
The Mossberg makes a hell of a racket, but the silence afterwards!
There’s no time to lose now. Unload the two bags, dig out the right key to open the lock-up, drag the big brother into the garage, roll the car in with the kid inside in two neat pieces – I have to roll it over the other guy, but it doesn’t matter, he’s not going to make a fuss now – pull down the metal shutters, lock it and it’s done and dusted.
All I need to do now is pick up the bags, walk to the far end of the cul-de-sac and get into the rental car. Actually, we’re not quite done yet. You might say this is just the beginning. Time to settle the scores. Take out the mobile phone, punch in the number that will set off the bomb. I can feel the shock wave from here. I’m a fair distance away, but even at forty metres I feel the rental car shake from the force of the blast. Now that’s an explosion. For the Turks, it’s a one-way ticket to the Gardens of Delight. They’ll be able to feel up a few virgins. A plume of black smoke rises over the roofs of the workshops – most of them are boarded up, the local municipality has the land earmarked for redevelopment. I’ve just given them a helping hand with the demolition. It’s possible to be an armed robber and still have a sense of civic duty. Within thirty seconds, the fire brigade will be on their way. There’s no time to lose.
Stash the bags of jewellery in a left-luggage locker at the Gare du Nord. Drop the key into a letterbox on the boulevard Magenta.
My fence will send someone to pick up the haul.
Finally, assess the situation. They say killers always return to the scene of the crime. I like to respect tradition.
*
11.45 a.m.
Two hours before going to Armand’s funeral, Camille receives a phone call asking whether he knows a certain Anne Forestier. His number is the first entry in the contacts list on her mobile and the last number that she dialled. The call sends a cold shiver down his spine: this is how you learn that someone is dead.
But Anne is not dead. “She has been the victim of an assault. She has been taken to hospital.” From the tone of the woman’s voice, Camille immediately knows that Anne is in a bad way.
In fact, Anne is in a very bad way. She is much too weak to be questioned. The officers in charge of the investigation have said they will call round
as soon as possible. It took several minutes of heated negotiation with the ward sister – a thirty-year-old woman with bee-stung lips and a nervous tic affecting her right eye – for Camille to get permission to go into Anne’s room. And then only on condition that he not stay too long.
He pushes open the door and stands for a moment on the threshold. Seeing her like this is devastating.
At first he can only make out her bandaged head. She looks as though she might have been run over by a truck. The right side of her face is a single, blue-black bruise so swollen that her eyes, barely visible, seem to have withdrawn into her skull. The left side is marked by a gash at least ten centimetres long, the edges where the wound has been sutured are a sallow red. Her lips are split and inflamed, her eyelids blue and puffy. Her nose has been broken and has swollen up to three times its normal size. Anne keeps her mouth slightly open, her bottom gums are bleeding, and a thread of spittle trickles onto the pillow. She looks like an old woman. Her arms, bandaged from her shoulders to her splinted fingers, lie on top on the sheets. The dressing on the right hand is smaller and it is possible to make out a deep wound that has been stitched.
When she becomes aware of Camille’s presence, she tries to reach out her hand, her eyes fill with tears, then her energy seems to drain away. She closes her eyes then opens them again. They are glassy and expressionless; even her beautiful green irises seem colourless.
Her head lolls to one side, her voice is hoarse. Her tongue seems heavy and clearly painful where unconsciously she bit into it; it is difficult to make out what she is saying, the labial consonants are inaudible.
“I feel sore . . .”
Camille Page 3
