The Prone Gunman (3 page)

5

Terrier stopped at a motel around midnight, eighty kilometers from the place where he had killed the pale young man. At the reception desk, a false blonde with delicate features, wearing a heavy, ribbed navy-blue sweater and flannel pants, was reading beneath a desk lamp. She had awe-inspiring breasts and eyelashes. Terrier took her for about twenty-six. She gave him a key.

“What are you reading?” he asked.

Silently, she showed him the cover of her book.

“It's a story about time travel,” she said. “Does that make you laugh? You think it's childish?”

“Not in the least. I'm all for time travel,” said Terrier. “Besides, that's exactly what I'm doing.”

The girl gave him a tired, hostile look.

“You're trying to get me interested?”

“Not really,” said Terrier. “Good night.”

He found his room, washed his face, put on his pajamas, picked up the telephone, and asked for Alex's number. It was one o'clock in the morning. It served her right if he woke her up. But he got the answering machine again. He waited for the beep. He had nothing to say to Alex.

“You can keep the cat, you idiot,” he said.

It began snowing during the night. It was still dark and still snowing when Terrier left the motel. Just after, he left the highway and headed west. The bad weather slowed him down. It was almost noon when the DS reached Nauzac. It wasn't snowing there.

Terrier drove slowly all through the town. At one end of the town, a small, low, white perfume factory had recently been built. In the center of town, traffic was heavy and slow. Several times, Terrier almost headed the wrong way down one-way streets. There were parking meters in the neighborhood of the subprefecture, most of them adorned with stickers that read “NO! No parking meters in Nauzac!” and gave the address of the residents' action committee.

Eventually, the DS left the center of town and plunged into the residential neighborhood, where it drew up near a posh little apartment house. Leaving the engine running, Terrier got out on the sidewalk side. He remained motionless for a second. He seemed to hesitate. He blinked slowly several times. Then he strode to the entrance of the building and examined the mailboxes in the hallway. A West Indian concierge came out of her lodge. Terrier turned away.

“Are you looking for something?”

He turned to the concierge, shook his head, and then nodded.

“Mademoiselle Freux.”

The woman looked perplexed, then raised her chin.

“Monsieur and Madame Freux passed away,” she said.

“I didn't know. And their daughter?”

“Madame Schrader?” asked the concierge. “Madame Schrader?” she repeated impatiently, since Terrier did not reply.

“Yes,” Terrier said at last. A thin white line had appeared around his mouth.

“She doesn't live very far from here. Let me get you the exact address.”

She went back inside her lodge, leaving the glass door open. Terrier turned on his heel. By the time the West Indian woman came out with a piece of paper in her hand, he was already back in the DS and on his way.

He had lunch in the center. The exterior of the Brasserie des Fleurs dated from the nineteenth century and had recently been restored. The interior was full of leather-trimmed booths, little wooden partitions, and decorated frosted-glass panels as well as various modern additions. There were few customers. Terrier sat down in a booth. A bleary-eyed sexagenarian waiter, in a long apron and black jacket, came to take his order. Terrier stared at him as he ordered andouillettes and Munich beer. The waiter noted the order and went away. When he returned with the food and the glass of beer, Terrier tapped his elbow with three fingers.

“Can't quite place me, Dédé?”

The waiter looked at him with suspicion, then sucked air. His red eyes filled with tears.

“God in heaven!” he whispered.

Terrier invited him to sit down. Dédé glanced furtively toward the kitchen and the register and said that he couldn't.

“I have to attend to the room,” he explained. “Martin Terrier! Well, in the name of God, shit!” He rubbed his eyes and forehead with the rag he used to wipe tables. “You've become a real gentleman. If only your father could see you!”

“That would only irritate him,” said Terrier.

“You're in business?”

“That's right.”

“You've come back to see this damn town. You've come back to piss on them all.”

“Not especially,” said Terrier.

Dédé nodded his head and smiled nastily. He was looking off into space and no longer at Terrier, who was attacking his rubbery andouillette.

“You shouldn't stay, you know,” whispered Dédé.

“Excuse me?”

“This is a rotten place to be. Your father and I could have done great things if we'd only remained in Paris. You shouldn't live here.”

“Okay.”

“Dédé!” yelled a sort of manager, a short rat-faced man whose mustache had all of three hairs, from the direction of the register.

Dédé groaned, nodded for Terrier's benefit, and went off, dragging his feet. Terrier made himself eat half of what he'd been served, passed up both dessert and coffee, left the full amount of the check on the table along with a big tip, and walked out of the brasserie without seeing Dédé again.

Back in the DS, he consulted the Michelin guide. Nauzac boasted some half-dozen low-quality hotels and two more ambitious, if timeworn, establishments. One of them merited the pictogram that signifies “quiet” while the other was awarded the same pictogram in red, which signifies “very quiet.” Terrier started off in the direction of the second hotel.

At the far end of a small French-style garden, the hotel was a big limestone building with a slate roof, with many turrets and big wooden shutters with paint flaking off. The driveway between the gravel paths was muddy. On the central lawn, an empty Kronenbourg bottle lay next to a ceramic imp, and the effluvium of hot cooking fat was in the air. Things were a little better inside, though dusty. There were many carpets, wall hangings, varnished wood, a young clerk in a burgundy jacket, and, acting as the bellboy, an immaculate chambermaid to whom Terrier turned over his travel bag. They reached the third and last floor by means of a very narrow elevator, evidently a more recent addition. The room was vast, with a high ceiling, moldings, a very big bed, and antique furniture. There were rust tracks in the bathtub, but it was grand, enormous. No bar. Terrier had a bottle of J&B, ice, and a six-pack of ginger ale sent up, along with a telephone directory for the département. He poured himself a glass, picked up the telephone, and called Anne.

“Anne Schrader speaking. Hello.”

“It's Martin,” said Terrier.

“Hello? What number are you calling?”

“Anne, it's Martin Terrier. I'm in town.”

“You've misdialed,” said the neutral voice, and Anne hung up.

Terrier gave a small sigh. After an instant of immobility, he consulted the yellow pages and found the number of the Freux Electrical Company. (In point of fact, it was a small factory utilizing exclusively female manual labor to assemble record players based on turntables manufactured elsewhere.) He called and asked for Félix Schrader. He was asked who was calling. He gave his name. Félix was put on the line.

“Well, what do you know!” exclaimed Félix Schrader. “Martin Terrier! Is it really you? Where are you?” His voice slipped out of control. He tried for baritone but slid toward countertenor at the end of each of his exclamations.

“In town. I've come back.”

“You're back? For good?”

“I don't know yet.”

“Great!” Félix seemed truly happy. “We'll have a drink? Wait!” Terrier waited. “Would you like to come eat at home?” asked Félix after a moment.

“I wouldn't want to impose.”

Félix said not at all, not at all, he had to come, that very evening.

“Say,” he asked, “did you know that I married Anne Freux?”

“I heard. Congratulations.”

“Thanks. I'll give you the address. Eight o'clock this evening, okay?”

Terrier said it was okay and took down the address. He lay down on the bed, his glass within reach, his hands under his neck. Later, he suddenly awoke bathed in sweat, with a coated tongue. It was dark outside the window and in the room. He turned on the lights. In the mirror of the armoire his yellow reflection looked back with suspicion. It was exactly seven in the evening.

Because of the damage done his wardrobe during the ransacking of his apartment, Terrier didn't have much choice in what to wear. He went into the bathroom with a powder-blue suit, a blue shirt, and a tie with blue stripes. He showered, shaved, and changed. No matter how hard he brushed his teeth, he couldn't get rid of the metallic taste in his mouth.

The hotel lobby was brilliantly illuminated when Terrier came downstairs, and people were heading toward the bar and chattering. There were two or three affluent couples and a group of loudmouthed males. Everyone was obviously over forty-five and pretty well heeled.

A counter sold newspapers, cigarettes, and trinkets. Terrier bought Gauloises and glanced at the newspapers. A bad photograph of Alex was on the front page of
France-Soir.
Terrier bought the newspaper and got into his car, which was parked in the driveway. He checked his watch and turned on the overhead light to read what they were saying about Alex.

She had been killed between midnight and three in the morning, after being raped and tortured at length. It was the cleaning lady who had discovered the corpse in the morning. According to her neighbors, the young woman led a very free life. According to investigators, there were at least three aggressors. The police claimed to have a solid lead.

As he read, Terrier brought his thumb and index finger to his face and mechanically smoothed his eyebrows. Then he threw the newspaper on the floor of the DS, turned off the overhead light, and passed the palm of his hand across his forehead to smooth it out. He seemed to reflect for a moment. He did not seem shocked. Perhaps he experienced a little sadness. Certainly he must have been thinking, for his face was screwed up in concentration.

After a moment, he clicked his tongue and started the engine. He continued to frown all the way to his destination.

The Schraders' house was a sort of elegant wooden chalet painted white and bright blue, with a well-kept yard, in the middle of a neighborhood of analogous residences. It had a wooden awning over the front door, and under the awning was an electric lamp that lit up as soon as Terrier rang the doorbell. And so, when the door swung open on Anne, there she was in the bright light, just as beautiful as he remembered her.

6

He remembered. Anne Freux had promised to wait ten years for him.

“I'm asking you for ten years,” said Martin. “It could be less if I'm lucky. If not, I've calculated it will take me ten years.”

Anne swore that she would wait for him. She tearfully kissed him. She was sixteen and a half. Martin was eighteen—tall, strong, stupid, and calculating. His calculations weren't intelligent, either.

He said goodbye to Dédé that same night. He said nothing to his father. Charles Terrier had arrived in Nauzac a little after the Second World War, accompanied by his pregnant wife and his pal Dédé. The two men had just made themselves a little nest egg in scrap and rags, especially in the salvaging of non-ferrous metals. That was the era when junk dealers, large and small, most of them Auvergnats, were battling to see who would salvage the most military surplus. They greased palms, schemed, often stole from one another, sometimes even exchanged gunshots. Charles Terrier took a Mauser rifle bullet in the head, and it stayed there, sometimes provoking a kind of attack, especially if he had been drinking. He stopped drinking. According to Dédé, he had been a pretty clever fellow before his wound. Then he married a nag and let Dédé convince him to leave the Paris area—where things had started to get too hot for them in variety of ways—and move to the Southwest to get into the mink-raising business.

“A clean life,” said Dédé. “You'll be your old self again.”

The minks died, the money was lost, Martin was born, and his mother packed up and left with a truck driver who had spent two days in Nauzac on account of a busted axle. The mother left Martin behind. Charles Terrier brought up the kid the hard way. Dédé also took care of the kid, and he was more affable and easygoing. Later, when Charles Terrier wanted to put his son to work, it was Dédé who convinced him to send the kid to the lycée, instead. It was also Dédé who took Martin to Paris one weekend for his sixteenth birthday and got him initiated by a prostitute in the vicinity of the Madeleine. He gave him a moped, too.

At the lycée, Martin hung out with bourgeois kids who borrowed his moped. It was the moped that got him in with the children of the rich, and then he fell madly in love with Anne Freux, who had expensive clothes and sheer dark stockings and wore Guerlain perfumes.

Everyone wanted to get Anne Freux, who just laughed, tossed her hair, and slipped out of reach. Martin paid rather a lot for a mail-order muscle-building course. But he had no success with the girls of the group, who found him a little vulgar. He made up for it elsewhere; he even had an affair with a girl working for the Freux company. But a girl like that didn't satisfy his imagination.

Nevertheless, one Saturday evening when Anne had asked him to take her home after a party where they had danced to Miles Davis, she and he kissed violently, then Martin said that if she'd asked him to take her home it was only to get rid of the others. She was indignant. He said he was embarrassed at his humble origins, and she was indignant again. She said that she found Martin much more colorful than the others, and she said that it was precisely because of his social background and because the others were spoiled children, but not him—he was acquainted with real-life problems, he worked in the summer instead of going on vacation, he had to struggle to elevate himself, and all that, she said finally, made him deeper and more mature.

But when Martin slipped his tongue in her mouth, she seemed surprised, and when he tried to feel her up, she pulled away and said good night and disappeared, a little flushed, into the posh little apartment house that would later have a West Indian concierge.

The following Saturday, Martin told her he loved her. Then things moved along at their own pace. During summer vacation, Anne often didn't answer the letters from Martin, who had remained in Nauzac to work. But at summer's end, she kissed more enthusiastically and accepted more daring caresses. And at the beginning of October, to his astonishment, Martin was invited to dinner at the Freux's. For the occasion, he wore a tie and borrowed a shirt and cuff links from his father. Submitted to a running fire of questions by the Freux parents, he answered clumsily and mishandled the silverware. Tipsy from drinking white wine followed by red, he became voluble at the end of the meal, and his vocabulary deteriorated.

After dinner, the elder Freux led him into his study. He gave the young man to understand that he did not have a brilliant future and that Anne would one day marry a man from her milieu. In conclusion, he ordered Martin never to see his daughter again and sent the adolescent out by the service stairs.

That evening, blind with rage and humiliation, Martin almost hit his father because Charles Terrier was drunk and looking for a fight about the borrowed shirt and cuff links. Fortunately, the father had one of his fits before things went seriously to hell.

Charles Terrier had begun drinking again a while before. Friends of Martin's, guys from his little crowd, had bought Charles a drink at the brasserie where he was a waiter, and they found the resulting rapid disturbance in the employee's behavior very funny. They came back on other days to buy him more drinks. They began calling Charles Terrier “Charlie Chaplin.”

When the waiter was dismissed for his misbehavior, the young smart alecks surrounded him, alternately shamefaced and condescending. They went barhopping with him. As soon as Charles Terrier was drunk again, his foolishness started up even worse than before. In the wee hours, the man was overcome with uncontrollable anger. The last smart asses dispersed. Charles Terrier wandered the empty streets shouting that he wanted to leave town, and then he stole a motorcycle and, at the first turn, lost his balance and smashed his skull against the curb.

“I will return, I will kill them, I will drag them through the shit, I will make them eat shit,” said Martin Terrier to Dédé at dawn after he had kissed Anne and she had sworn to wait ten years.

Even if his father had not been dead, Martin would have had nothing to say to him. He took a train that morning without waiting for the burial. He got as far as Toulouse, where he joined the army.