His old, knotty thumb, deformed by rheumatism, gave him a violent electric shock when he cocked his gun. With his free hand, he adjusted his glasses on his nose. In front of him, the target was rolling terrified eyes.
His swollen hand closed on the breech.
He’d been right to attack the weak link in the group. Fear made people talk. Now he knew everything. The bastards were going to pay. One after the other.
It hurt when he put his twisted index finger on the trigger.
The target was squirming desperately on his chair, even though his hands were cuffed behind his back. The target would have liked to shout, scream, or weep, but the gag that had been stuffed into his mouth allowed him to emit only rumbling noises.
He didn’t understand this pointless agitation. When your time came, you had to be able to resign yourself to it. There were two men in this locked apartment. One of them was tied up, the other was holding a Beretta 34. There would be no escape, no happy ending, no last-minute turnaround. This wasn’t the movies, it was life. True, hard, pitiless life.
El-Mektub . . . Destiny was going to strike.
He found the old man facing him pathetic and ugly. Fear deformed his features even more than age. He could hardly recognize him.
Memories flooded in like waves. Long ago was yesterday. Years could be bridges, walls, or simply parentheses. He hadn’t forgotten anything. Anything at all. The blinding sun burned his skin and dazzled his eyes when he emerged from a shaded alley that was still cool. It was blue everywhere, the sea and the sky. The sound of the waves, the breath of the boats, the aromas mixed of anise, iodine, and spices. Shards of voices, laughter, insouciance, an unparalleled joie de vivre.
He had to avoid nostalgia. He knew that. It was stronger than he was. He’d succeeded in forgetting it for several decades before it came back to take possession of his heart and mind. He tried to think about the last months of his youth, the paradise that changed into hell, the sound of the beaten saucepans, the cries, the tears and the blood. And above all a smell of gunpowder, a heady, intoxicating smell, savage and violent.
He winced. His ailing hand gripping the gun was hurting.
The target facing him showed him what he looked like. He himself was old and ugly. All the better if his Gabriella swore to him that it wasn’t true.
He was old and he hurt.
Severe polyarthritic rheumatism had led to painful calcium deposits on his joints. First it had deformed his fingers, forcing the extremities of his digits to assume unexpected angles. Then it had gnarled his hands. Bumps had risen up here and there in the course of sleepless nights. He smiled when he thought about Gabriella, who liked to run her fairy hands over his gibbosities.
Gibbosities . . . Where did that obsolete word come from? His French had gotten stuck at the beginning of the 1960s. Since then, he no longer spoke his native tongue.
His prisoner, sitting on the chair, seemed to have calmed down. Was he resigned to his fate? Maybe . . . Or else he’d given him a fleeting smile in the hope of being spared. Hope is an invincible phoenix, it can be reborn from a sigh or a breath. It can also die in a look.
Their eyes met and stared at each other for a few seconds before shifting to the three letters painted in black on the door of the living room.
Three accursed letters.
Three magic letters.
There would be no pardon. That was impossible. He hadn’t awakened his sorrows for nothing, he hadn’t traveled so far, crossed the sea, to draw back now. He’d go all the way to the end of the mission he’d assigned himself.
The last one.
His tongue clicked in his dry mouth. He was thirsty. Slowly, he got up. His bones cracked. He tried not to sigh. The illness had spread from his hands to his whole body. On some days, living—just living—meant suffering. Then he thought about his grandmother: she, too, had suffered the torments of hell. “The day I don’t hurt anymore,” she said, “will be the day I die.”
He took a clean glass off the drain rack by the sink and ran tap water into it. He drank a few sips and then set it down again. Coming back to the old man tied to the chair, he grabbed the pillow he’d put on the table. A little while ago he’d taken it out of his target’s bedroom.
Soon his target would be his victim.
He felt strange and forgotten sensations again. The surprising calm in action, the impression that he was outside his body, the curious feeling of being merely a witness to his acts.
The sound of the neighbors’ television came through the wall. He could hear the canned laughter of an American sitcom. He’d wanted to turn on the TV in the living room to mask the sound of the gunshot that was coming, but quickly gave up the idea when he saw how complex the remote control was.
The target opened wide his rheumy eyes. His despair and fear could be read in them as in a book. But the old killer no longer saw anything, he no longer heard the groans, he was elsewhere. Fifty years ago.
“It’s time,” he said.
Then he went around the chair and put the pillow against the nape of his prisoner’s neck. He put the Beretta on the worn fabric. His deformed index finger caressed the trigger. He counted to three before firing. The shockwave transmitted by his tormented bones made him cry out in pain.