Magic Terror

The small number of cars in the wide parking lot were lined up near the entrance of the two-story ocher building. Two or three would belong to the staff. Canny little M. Hubert, like all con men instinctively self-protective, had chosen a night when the restaurant would be nearly empty. N parked at the far end of the lot and got out, the engine still running. His headlights shone on a white wooden fence and eight feet of meadow grass with nothing but sky beyond. Far away, mountains bulked against the horizon. He bent down and stepped through the bars of the fence and walked into the meadow grass. In the darkness, the gorge looked like an abyss. You could probably drop a hundred bodies down into that thing before anyone noticed. Humming, he jogged back to his car.

N turned into the lay-by and cut the lights and ignition. Far below, headlights swung around a curve and disappeared. He straightened his tie and patted his hair. A few minutes later, he got out of the car and stood in the middle of the road with the satchel under his arm, listening to the Mercedes as it worked its way uphill. Its headlights suddenly shot across the curve below, then lifted toward him. N stepped forward and raised his right arm. The headlights advanced, and he took another step into the dazzle. As two pale faces stared through the windshield, the circular hood ornament and toothy grille came to a reluctant halt a few feet short of his waist. N pointed to his car and raised his hands in a mime of helplessness. They were talking back and forth. He moved around to the side of the car. The window rolled down. M. Hubert’s face was taut with anxiety and distrust. Recognition softened him, but not by much.

‘Monsieur Maris? What is this?’

‘Monsieur Hubert! I am absolutely delighted to see you!’ N lowered his head to look in at Martine. She was wearing something skimpy and black and was scowling beautifully. Their eyes met, hers charged with furious concentration. Well, well. ‘Miss, I’m sorry to trouble the two of you, but I had car trouble on the way down from the auberge, and I am afraid that I need some help.’

Martine tried to wither him with a glare. ‘Daniel, do you actually know this man?’

‘This is the customer I told you about,’ Hubert told her.

‘He’s the customer?’

Hubert patted her knee and turned back to N. ‘I don’t have time to help you now, but I’d be happy to call a garage from the auberge.’

‘I only need a tiny push,’ N said. ‘The garages are all closed, anyhow. As you can see, I’m already pointed downhill. I hate to ask, but I’d be very grateful.’

‘I don’t like this, Daniel,’ Martine said.

‘Relax,’ Hubert said. ‘It’ll take five seconds. Besides, I have a matter to discuss with Monsieur Maris.’ He drove forward and stopped at the far end of the lay-by. N walked uphill behind him. Hubert got out, shaking his head and smiling. ‘This is a terrible place for car trouble.’ Martine had turned around to stare at N through the rear window.

‘Finding you was good luck for me,’ N said.

Hubert came up to him and placed two fingers on his arm in a delicate gesture of reconciliation. Even before he inclined his head to whisper his confidence, N knew what he was going to say. ‘Your question about that marquetry table troubled me more and more this evening. After all, my reputation is at stake every time I put a piece on display. I examined it with great care, and I think you may have been right. There is a definite possibility that I was misled. I’ll have to look into the matter further, but I thank you for bringing it to my attention.’ The two fingers tapped N’s arm.

He straightened his posture and in a conversational tone said, ‘So you had dinner at my favorite auberge? Agreeable, isn’t it?’ Hubert took one brisk stride over the narrow road, then another, pleased to have concluded one bit of business and eager to get on to the next.

A step behind him, N drew the pistol from the case and shoved the barrel into the base of Hubert’s skull. The dapper little fraud knew what was happening – he tried to dodge sideways. N rammed the muzzle into his pad of hair and pulled the trigger. With the sudden flash and a sound no louder than a cough came a sharp scent of gunpowder and burning flesh. Hubert jolted forward and flopped to the ground. N heard Martine screaming at him even before she got out of the Mercedes.

He pushed the gun into the satchel, clamped the satchel beneath his elbow, bent down to grasp Hubert’s ankles, and began dragging him to the edge of the road. Martine stood up on the far side of the Mercedes, still screaming. When her voice sailed into outraged hysteria, he glanced up from his task and saw a nice little automatic, a sibling to the one in his bedside drawer at home, pointed at his chest. Martine was panting, but she held the gun steady, both arms extended across the top of the Mercedes. He stopped moving and looked at her with an unruffled calm curiosity. ‘Put that thing down,’ he said. He dragged M. Hubert’s body another six inches backward.

‘Stop!’ she screeched.

He stopped and looked back up at her. ‘Yes?’

Martine stood up, keeping her arms extended. ‘Don’t do anything, just listen.’ She took a moment to work out what she would say. ‘We work for the same people. You don’t know who I am, but you are using the name Cash. You weren’t supposed to show up until the deal was set, so what’s going on?’ Her voice was steadier than he would have expected.

Hubert’s ankles in his hands, N said, ‘First of all, I do know who you are, Martine. And it should be obvious that what’s going on is a sudden revision of our plans for the evening. Our people found out your friend was planning to cheat his customers. Don’t you think we ought to get him off the road before the customers turn up?’

She glanced downhill without moving the pistol. ‘They didn’t tell me about any change.’

‘Maybe they couldn’t. I’m sorry I startled you.’ N walked backward until he reached the edge of the road. He dropped Hubert’s feet and moved forward to grab the collar of his jacket and pull the rest of his body onto the narrow verge. He set the satchel beside his feet.

She lowered the gun. ‘How do you know my name?’

‘Our contact. What’s he called now? Our divisional region controller. He said you’d be handling all the paperwork. Interesting guy. He’s an Indian, did you know that? Lives in Fontainebleau. His daughter has a rabbit named Custer.’ N bent at the knees and planted his hands on either side of Hubert’s waist. When he pulled up, the body folded in half and released a gassy moan.

‘He’s still alive,’ Martine said.

‘No, he isn’t.’ N looked over the edge of the narrow strip of grass and down into the same abyss he had seen from the edge of the parking lot. The road followed the top of the gorge as it rose to the plateau.

‘It didn’t look to me like he was planning to cheat anybody.’ She had not left the side of the Mercedes. ‘He was going to make a lot of money. So were we.’

‘Cheating is how this weasel made money.’ N hauled the folded corpse an inch nearer the edge, and Hubert’s bowels emptied with a string of wet popping sounds and a strong smell of excrement. N swung his body over the edge and let go. Hubert instantly disappeared. Five or six seconds later came a soft sound of impact and a rattle of scree, and then nothing until an almost inaudible thud.

‘He even cheated his customers,’ N said. ‘Half the stuff in that shop is no good.’ He brushed off his hands and looked down at his clothes for stains before tucking the satchel back under his left arm.

‘I wish someone had told me this was going to happen.’ She put the pistol in her handbag and came slowly around the trunk of the Mercedes. ‘I could always call for confirmation, couldn’t I?’

‘You’d better,’ N said. In English, he added, ‘If you know what’s good for you.’

She nodded and licked her lips. Her hair gleamed in the light from the Mercedes. The skimpy black thing was a shift, and her black sheer nylons ended in low-heeled pumps. She had dressed for the Arabs, not the auberge. She flattened a hand on the top of her head and gave him a straight look. ‘All right, Monsieur Cash, what do I do now?’

‘About what you were supposed to do before. I’ll drive up to the restaurant, and you go back to town for your car. The mule who’s driving it down from Paris takes this one to Russia. Call in as soon as you get to your – what is it? – your LUD.’

‘What about …?’ She waved in the direction of the auberge.

‘I’ll express our profound regrets and assure our friends that their needs will soon be answered.’

‘They said fieldwork was full of surprises.’ Martine smiled at him uncertainly before walking back to the Mercedes.

Through the side window N saw a flat black briefcase on the back seat. He got behind the wheel, put his satchel on his lap, and examined the controls. Depressing a button in the door made the driver’s seat glide back to give him more room. ‘I almost hate to turn this beautiful car over to some Russian mobster.’ He fiddled with the button, tilting the seat forward and lowering it. ‘What do we call our armament-deprived friends, anyway? Tonto calls them ragheads, but even ragheads have names.’

‘Monsieur Temple and Monsieur Law. Daniel didn’t know their real names. Shouldn’t we be going?’

Finally, N located the emergency brake and eased it in. He depressed the brake pedal and moved the automatic shift from park to its lowest gear. ‘Get me the briefcase from the back seat. Doing it now will save time.’ The Mercedes swam forward as he released the brake pedal. Martine glanced at him, then shifted around to put one knee on her seat. She bent sideways and stretched toward the briefcase. N dipped into the satchel, raised the tip of the silencer to the wall of her chest, and fired. He heard the bullet splat against something like bone and then realized that it had passed through her body and struck a metal armature within the leather upholstery. Martine slumped into the gap between the seats. Before him, a long leg jerked out, struck the dash, and cracked the heel off a black pump. The cartridge came pinging off the windshield and ricocheted straight to his ribs.

He shoved the pistol back home and tapped the accelerator. Martine slipped deeper into the well between the seats. N thrust open his door and cranked the wheel to the left. Her hip slid onto the handle of the gearshift. He touched the accelerator again. The Mercedes grumbled and hopped forward. Alarmingly near the edge, he jumped off the seat and turned into the spin his body took when his feet met the ground.

He was close enough to the sleek, recessed handle on the back door to caress it. Inch by inch, the car stuttered toward the side of the road. Martine uttered an indecipherable dream-word. The Mercedes lurched to the precipice, nosed over, tilted forward and down, advanced, hesitated, stopped. The roof light illuminated Martine’s half-conscious struggle to pull herself back into her seat. The Mercedes trembled forward, dipped its nose, and with exquisite reluctance slid off the earth into the huge darkness. Somersaulting in midair, it cast wheels of yellow light, which extinguished when it smashed into whatever was down there.

Visited by the blazing image of a long feminine leg unfurling before his eyes like a lightning bolt, N loped uphill. That lineament running from the molded thigh to the tender back of the knee, the leap of the calf muscle. The whole perfect thing, like a sculpture of the ideal leg, filling the space in front of him. When would she have made her move, he wondered. She had been too uncertain to act when she should have, and she could not have done it while he was driving, so it would have happened in the parking lot. She’d had that .25-caliber Beretta, a smart gun, in N’s opinion. Martine’s extended leg flashed before him again, and he suppressed a giddy, enchanted swell of elation.

Ghostly church bells pealed, and a black-haired young priest shone glimmering from the chiaroscuro of a rearing boulder.

He came up past the retaining wall into the mild haze of light from the windows of the auberge. His feet crunched on the pebbles of the parking lot. After a hundred-foot uphill run he was not even breathing hard, pretty good for a man of his age. He came to the far end of the lot, put his hands on the fence, and inhaled air of surpassing sweetness and purity. Distant ridges and peaks hung beneath fast-moving clouds. This was a gorgeous part of the world. It was unfortunate that he would have to leave it behind. But he was leaving almost everything behind. The books were the worst of it. Well, there were book dealers in Switzerland, too. And he still had Kim.

N moved down the fence toward the auberge. Big windows displayed the usual elderly men in berets playing cards, a local family dining with the grandparents, one young couple flirting, flames jittering and weaving over the hearth. A solid old woman carried a steaming platter to the family’s table. The Japanese golfers had not returned, and all the other tables were empty. On her way back to the kitchen, the old woman sat down with the card players and laughed at a remark from an old boy missing most of his teeth. No one in the dining room would be leaving for at least an hour. N’s stomach audibly complained of being so close to food without being fed, and he moved back into the relative darkness to wait for the second half of his night’s work.

And then he stepped forward again, for headlights had come beaming upward from below the lot. N moved into the gauzy light and once again experienced the true old excitement, that of opening himself to unpredictability, of standing at the intersection of infinite variables. A Peugeot identical to his in year, model, and color followed its own headlights into the wide parking lot. N walked toward the car, and the two men in the front seats took him in with wary, expressionless faces. The Peugeot moved alongside him, and the window cranked down. A lifeless, pockmarked face regarded him with a cold, threatening neutrality. N liked that – it told him everything he needed to know.

‘Monsieur Temple? Monsieur Law?’

Without any actual change in expression, the driver’s face deepened, intensified into itself in a way that made the man seem both more brutal and more human, almost pitiable. N saw an entire history of rage, disappointment, and meager satisfactions in his response. The driver hesitated, looked into N’s eyes, then slowly nodded.

‘There’s been a problem,’ N said. ‘Please, do not be alarmed, but Monsieur Hubert cannot join you tonight. He has been in a serious automobile accident.’

The man in the passenger seat spoke a couple of sentences in Arabic. His hands were curled around the grip of a fat black attaché case. The driver answered in monosyllables before turning back to N. ‘We have heard nothing of an accident.’ His French was stiff but correct, and his accent was barbaric. ‘Who are you supposed to be?’