Her face contorted as though cigar smoke was getting in her eyes. It went squashy and she began to sob. She didn’t cry. She didn’t do that mascara-respecting display of grief that winkles tear-drops out of the eyes with the corner of a tiny lace handkerchief while watching the whole thing in a well-placed mirror. She sobbed and her face collapsed. The mouth sagged, and the flesh puckered and wrinkled like blow-torched paintwork. Ugly sight, and ugly sound.
‘He’ll die,’ she said in a strange little voice.
I don’t know what happened next. I don’t know whether Maria began to move before the sound of the shot or after. Just as I don’t know whether Jean-Paul had really lunged at Robert, as Robert later told us. But I was right behind Maria as she opened the door. A .45 is a big pistol. The first shot had hit the dresser, ripping a hole in the carpentry and smashing half a dozen plates. They were still falling as the second shot fired. I heard Datt shouting about his plates and saw Jean-Paul spinning drunkenly like an exhausted whipping top. He fell against the dresser, supporting himself on his hand, and stared at me pop-eyed with hate and grimacing with pain, his cheeks bulging as though he was looking for a place to vomit. He grabbed at his white shirt and tugged it out of his trousers. He wrenched it so hard that the buttons popped and pinged away across the room. He had a great bundle of shirt in his hand now and he stuffed it into his mouth like a conjurer doing a trick called ‘how to swallow my white shirt’. Or how to swallow my pink-dotted shirt. How to swallow my pink shirt, my red, and finally dark-red shirt. But he never did the trick. The cloth fell away from his mouth and his blood poured over his chin, painting his teeth pink and dribbling down his neck and ruining his shirt. He knelt upon the ground as if to pray but his face sank to the floor and he died without a word, his ear flat against the ground, as if listening for hoof-beats pursuing him to another world.
He was dead. It’s difficult to wound a man with a .45. You either miss them or blow them in half.
The legacy the dead leave us are life-size effigies that only slightly resemble their former owners. Jean-Paul’s bloody body only slightly resembled him: its thin lips pressed together and the small circular plaster just visible on the chin.
Robert was stupefied. He was staring at the gun in horror. I stepped over to him and grabbed the gun away from him. I said, ‘You should be ashamed,’ and Datt repeated that.
The door opened suddenly and Hudson and Kuang stepped into the kitchen. They looked down at the body of Jean-Paul. He was a mess of blood and guts. No one spoke, they were waiting for me. I remembered that I was the one holding the gun. ‘I’m taking Kuang and Hudson and I’m leaving,’ I said. Through the open door to the hall I could see into the library, its table covered with their scientific documents: photos, maps and withered plants with large labels on them.
‘Oh no you don’t,’ said Datt.
‘I have to return Hudson intact because that’s part of the deal. The information he’s given Kuang has to be got back to the Chinese Government or else it wasn’t much good delivering it. So I must take Kuang too.’
‘I think he’s right,’ said Kuang. ‘It makes sense, what he says.’
‘How do you know what makes sense?’ said Datt. ‘I’m arranging your movements, not this fool; how can we trust him? He admits this task is for the Americans.’
‘It makes sense,’ said Kuang again. ‘Hudson’s information is genuine. I can tell: it fills out what I learnt from that incomplete set of papers you passed to me last week. If the Americans want me to have the information, then they must want it to be taken back home.’
‘Can’t you see that they might want to capture you for interrogation?’ said Datt.
‘Rubbish!’ I interrupted. ‘I could have arranged that at any time in Paris without risking Hudson out here in the middle of nowhere.’
‘They are probably waiting down the road,’ said Datt. ‘You could be dead and buried in five minutes. Out here in the middle of the country no one would hear, no one would see the diggings.’
‘I’ll take that chance,’ said Kuang. ‘If he can get Hudson into France on false papers, he can get me out.’
I watched Hudson, fearful that he would say I’d done no such thing for him, but he nodded sagely and Kuang seemed reassured.
‘Come with us,’ said Hudson, and Kuang nodded agreement. The two scientists seemed to be the only ones in the room with any mutual trust.
I was reluctant to leave Maria but she just waved her hand and said she’d be all right. She couldn’t take her eyes off Jean-Paul’s body.
‘Cover him, Robert,’ said Datt.
Robert took a table-cloth from a drawer and covered the body. ‘Go,’ Maria called again to me, and then she began to sob. Datt put his arm around her and pulled her close. Hudson and Kuang collected their data together and then, still waving the gun around, I showed them out and followed.
As we went across the hall the old woman emerged carrying a heavily laden tray. She said, ‘There’s still the poulet sauté chasseur.’
‘Vive le sport,’ I said.
31
From the garage we took the camionette – a tiny grey corrugated-metal van – because the roads of France are full of them. I had to change gear constantly for the small motor, and the tiny headlights did no more than probe the hedgerows. It was a cold night and I envied the warm grim-faced occupants of the big Mercs and Citroëns that roared past us with just a tiny peep of the horn, to tell us they had done so.
Kuang seemed perfectly content to rely upon my skill to get him out of France. He leaned well back in the hard upright seat, folded his arms and closed his eyes as though performing some oriental contemplative ritual. Now and again he spoke. Usually it was a request for a cigarette.
The frontier was little more than a formality. The Paris office had done us proud: three good British passports – although the photo of Hudson was a bit dodgy – over twenty-five pounds in small notes (Belgian and French), and some bills and receipts to correspond to each passport. I breathed more easily after we were through. I’d done a deal with Loiseau so he’d guaranteed no trouble, but I still breathed more easily after we’d gone through.
Hudson lay flat upon some old blankets in the rear. Soon he began to snore. Kuang spoke.
‘Are we going to an hotel or are you going to blow one of your agents to shelter me?’
‘This is Belgium,’ I said. ‘Going to an hotel is like going to a police station.’
‘What will happen to him?’
‘The agent?’ I hesitated. ‘He’ll be pensioned off. It’s bad luck but he was the next due to be blown.’
‘Age?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘And you have someone better in the area?’
‘You know we can’t talk about that,’ I said.
‘I’m not interested professionally,’ said Kuang. ‘I’m a scientist. What the British do in France or Belgium is nothing to do with me, but if we are blowing this man I owe him his job.’
‘You owe him nothing,’ I said. ‘What the hell do you think this is? He’ll be blown because it’s his job. Just as I’m conducting you because that’s my job. I’m doing it as a favour. You owe no one anything, so forget it. As far as I’m concerned you are a parcel.’
Kuang inhaled deeply on his cigarette, then removed it from his mouth with his long delicate fingers and stubbed it into the ashtray. I imagined him killing Annie Couzins. Passion or politics? He rubbed the tobacco shreds from his fingertips like a pianist practising trills.