The Art of Murder (18 page)

Gilles took the longest way home he
could reasonably think of. The exercise might help him to sleep a
little better tonight. Sleep was the last refuge, he’d read that
somewhere.

***

His neck felt the squeezing of the
block. While he couldn’t see anyone, just an empty bucket in front
of him on the cold and moisture-oozing concrete, there were murmurs
all around. Their voices mocked him in their indifference, in their
mutual, hollow-sounding good cheer.

“
No! No! I am innocent.”
Andre cried, and wept, and could not even speak meaningful words.
“My wife! She will tell you. I didn’t do it!”

They murmured all around him, but they
ignored him, and then he saw a foot, and a hand came and took the
bucket as his tears fell unheeded. All the time, Andre was trying
to get his attention, but the man, clad in blue trousers and the
sturdy black work shoes they all wore, simply ignored
him.

“
Please, please
listen.”

Andre waggled his head back and forth
as best he could, clasping and unclasping his hands in the hope of
attracting someone’s attention. He was being ignored, and
deliberately. He understood that well enough. The feet moved
suddenly with a scrape of grit underneath. The bucket, having
passed inspection, was replaced. Andre sniffled and gasped, breath
ragged in his throat.

A voice came close beside him, loud in
his ears compared to the others in the room, all speaking in hushed
tones, waiting, waiting for the blade to fall so they could go back
to more pleasant duties, some home to their wife and kids, and some
to homes empty and desolate from a lifetime of alcohol, abuse and
anger. How he knew all that was one of the great mysteries of life,
but cops were human beings too. They were just like anyone
else.

“
That’s what they all say,
my reluctant friend. But don’t worry, this won’t hurt a bit.” He
heard cynical chuckles and a few snide remarks in the
background.

“
Nothing to worry about!”
There came the remark and a bust of laughter.

“
Keep your shirt
on!”

“
Well, if you feel that way
about it, maybe you shouldn’t have done it.” There were other
voices.

“
I didn’t do it! You’ve got
the wrong guy! I swear to God, please don’t, please listen…” He
didn’t even know what it was about, and no one cared.

The voices didn’t come again, not with
any clarity.

No one listened. They had heard it all
a thousand times before. They had heard men beg, and weep, and make
promises, and cry and whimper for a mercy they had never shown
their victims. They had watched them when they pissed themselves
and smelled their shit. He saw all that so very clearly, but in his
case it was all true and no one would listen.

“
Please…please, please
wait…”

Now came the sound of a crank being
turned, and the blade being drawn up, and the terrible gush of
adrenalin was almost more than he could bear. His body trembled and
shook of his own accord, and his hands writhed and twisted, trying
to escape the blocks that held them.

“
Please! Please
listen…”

Andre began to scream when he heard the
latch click into place.

“
Oh, God, oh, God.” Andre
blubbered like a baby, and then the room was silent.
“Please.”

He said it one more time, the word
echoing around the room, to be absorbed by tired patient faces that
had heard it all one too many times before.

“
Please.” Andre begged for
his life, and they wouldn’t listen.

They couldn’t listen, for it would
drive them mad.

There was a click, an accelerating
rumble and the blade was coming down…

“
Andre! Andre!” She was
there, cradling a grown man, sweat pouring off of him, and with him
weeping like his mother and sisters had when Papa went, and the
realization that he was simply having the dream again, washed over
him with its cooling jet of hope, and then came another kind of
anguish, the question of why this was always happening to
him.

“
Oh, God.” Andre wept into
his wife’s shoulder. “Oh, God.”

Her hair glued itself to his face as he
wept, and the snot ran out of his nose, and he didn’t care, he was
just so grateful that this was real. It was real, and it was
her.

“
There, there. It’s over.”
It was all she said, holding him and rocking him back and forth,
but it was enough.

***

At first, the brilliant white half moon
was visible through crystal-clear patches in the sky. They quickly
gave way to low-scudding black clouds with silvered edges, throwing
a vast dark shadow over the streets. The warm lights at all levels
and the wan light of the street illumination was enough to guide
him. He had always wondered who was on the other side of those
panes.

One might reveal a man reading a
newspaper under a lamp with a radio beside him, and on all other
floors the lights were out behind the curtains and anonymous
windows. In the next building, three flats above ground were lit
up, and while one flat was clearly hosting a party, the others
showed more mundane tableaux. For the most part, no one was
visible, yet surely someone was home. Virtually all of the
storefronts were dark, with only the small lobbies leading upstairs
to residential apartments, separate entrances with their locks and
double doors, lit up to attest that there was life
above.

Where there was an alley, a tangle of
fire escapes loomed, hanging overhead in invisible threat. The
windows up high along the alleys were smaller in comparison to the
ones out front. They seemed lonely and isolated. It was easy enough
to interpret them as hallways, a small bathroom, or maybe some
child’s bedroom, although it was late. It was almost as easy to
imagine them a garret, with an avid painter, or a poet, struggling
to make a go of it in an uncertain profession where there was much
pretension and even more competition, and where cash money was more
priceless than true love. The moon popped in and out of sight
behind yet another black cloud. He paced along, feeling guilty of a
momentary truancy or some other nameless sin.

The sky opened up and a thick, heavy
mist began to fall straight down. He knew this weather, the kind of
spring rain that would drench the valley of the Seine and move
slowly across the terrain. The creeks and rivers would barely rise.
It would all be absorbed by the land, and sucked up by the sewers,
and the river would be muddy and brown for days.

Later the colour would change to
something a little more pleasing, green and glassy, but at this
time of year, Paris was subject to as many grey, wet days as the
highly-romanticized sunny ones. The nights were still long, and a
chill wind could whip up out of the northwest on a whim.

Tonight was mild, warm and close, and
now very wet.

There was a car idling by the side of
the road ahead, and he saw a man and a woman inside. The interior
light was on, and their heads were close and intimate. The light
was switched off and the crunch of gears came. Their heads were
black silhouettes, sparsely illuminated by the distant
street-lamps. They moved slowly off up the street, with the vehicle
hesitating at the first intersection. There was much you could
guess, so much you could read into it, but they were just an
anonymous couple, perhaps going home after an evening visit with
friends or some lonely and decrepit old relative. It was all up to
the imagination, and a need for human contact. It was loneliness
and longing, emotional transference, and applied sentiment. His
feelings were understandable, he supposed. He would always be an
outsider. He would remain isolated.

On a nearby block, there were horns and
distant shouts and the sounds of vehicles moving. It was a stream
of life over there, but here and now on this street it was very
quiet. It was a moment to savour, in a way. He wasn’t tired,
although for one thing he was aware that he hadn’t been eating
properly lately. He wasn’t uncomfortable. The emptiness in his gut
was nothing compared to the emptiness in his life, the sickness in
his soul.

Behind him, there was the sound of
another vehicle rounding the corner from a side street. Light
washed over him from its headlights, throwing the blocks of flats
and shops into a new and harsher light.

He thought he heard a car door open up,
and he thought that wasn’t right somehow as the vehicle still
seemed to be accelerating in a low gear.

“
Slow down, you stupid
bastard.” The shout came over his left shoulder and he wondered if
they were speaking to him.

Startled, he turned to see what they
were talking about, and who they were talking to, and that was when
he saw the bare-headed man in a long black coat standing on the
running boards, braced against the wide-open door, and holding
something that looked suspiciously like a machine pistol in his
right hand. When the arm came up and the man took careful aim in an
unmistakable motion, the end lit up and the air was split by a
rapping sound that bounced and echoed off the walls all around.
Gilles flung himself to the ground, desperately trying to scrabble
his way under a parked vehicle.

Unfortunately it was a small
two-seater, with a removable fabric top. Hot lead spat and sang off
the ground and punched through the bodywork as if it was a wicker
basket, while Gilles clutched his hands up around his head and
waited for the hit that would take him out.

“
Go, go, go!” There was a
final burst, and the sports-car rocked on its chassis, while fluids
splashed out onto the street a few feet away from holes punctured
in a radiator and other places.

Gilles popped up on his knees, brought
up his own 7.65 millimetre pistol, and began pulling the trigger as
fast as he could. Even as he did, he saw that the street had a bit
of a bend in it, and that there were houses along there with lit
windows. Sparks flew off the street where his rounds were going.
They showed he was low and behind at first, and then one for sure
went way ahead, and so he pulled down after taking a more careful
bead, trying to lead by shooting at the front end of the vehicle in
spite of the extreme angle. He had the weapon pointed just ahead
and above the corner of the windshield, but the damned gun jerked
around so much. He grunted in anger and tried again.

The snap of rounds hitting the metal
trunk lid confirmed the accuracy of his shooting, but he didn’t
think he had done any good, as the man had awkwardly scrambled back
in and the swaying vehicle zoomed up an incline at the end of the
block. The glare of brake lights indicated a right turn. There was
a squeal of tires, and the sound of an engine under stress finally
faded about three or four blocks away.

Gilles stood panting, blinking sweat
out of his eyes, and cursing with precision. He put the gun up and
dropped the spent clip into his jacket pocket. He re-loaded. A
second car with another machine-pistol would be fatal right about
now.

The vehicle was almost certainly
stolen, but he had some vague impression of a couple of letters
from the license plate.

“
Argh.” In the distance,
dogs barked, people shouted and there were running footsteps, for
fools rush in where angels fear to tread. “Nom de
Dieux.”

He put the gun away. Dogs barked all
around him, but they were all either on chains or behind fences and
walls.

“
What in the hell was that
all about?” Who they were or why they had tried to hit him was a
question he would very much like to answer.

It wasn’t exactly unprecedented, but
even for the busy Paris underworld, it was a little unusual. Loud
voices, frightened voices, came from above and across the street,
as an apartment window or two opened cautiously and dim faces
peered down. Hopefully there was a phone about and someone would
call the gendarmes momentarily.

He must have pissed off somebody
somewhere pretty badly. Someone with a lot of pull, in all the
wrong places.

***

Guy Lenormand studied Gilles closely.
The Inspector didn’t appear to be too badly in shock, although a
lot of people would have been hysterical.

“
The last three digits were
oh-one-three.” Gilles sat in the passenger seat of an official car
as other officers dug around inside storefronts, stepping carefully
on the shattered glass that littered the pavements and the
interiors.

They were looking for slugs, of course,
and it was all pointless, except that once in a while they caught a
break. To match a slug with a weapon in this type of incident would
be very pleasing, but unlikely. The weapons were probably already
disposed of, and of course there were interchangeable barrels. That
would be the mark of a pro.

“
Did you get a look at the
driver?” Guy had pretty much wrung him out, respectfully of course,
but Gilles was a trained observer and he had some hopes.

“
No. It all happened so
fast. I’ve heard it so many times, but it’s true enough. All I can
say is that it appeared to be a male, possibly in his early
thirties. He was clean shaven and had no hat, although he may have
taken it off in the car.”