Dim streetlights were throwing an orange-colored light on the dirty façades and the damaged asphalt. Closed metal shutters covered with tags completed the street’s sordid look. Jean Servant grimaced with pain as he stepped off the curb. He put his right hand on his shoulder to support it. For once, his pain had nothing to do with his arthritis.
He was walking even more slowly than usual. Despite his caution, he unintentionally kicked a beer can that had been left in the gutter. The can rolled across the street and stopped when it hit the heel of a young Arab, who suddenly stood up, looking for the person who had committed the offense. Jean’s right hand slipped from his shoulder to his belt. Under his overcoat, he still had the Beretta read for use. But the young man, seeing that it was only an old man with white hair, transformed his aggressive scowl into a pleasant smile.
Jean went on his way.
He found this part of Perpignan particularly dirty and wretched. Even the suburbs of Buenos Aires seemed to him better maintained. Was France slowly being transformed into a third-world country? He recalled that some people used to say that the loss of Algeria would mean the loss of France’s grandeur. He’d never really believed that at the time. Or more precisely, he didn’t give a damn about it. Unlike his hero Lieutenant Degueldre, Sigma had not engaged in the battle out of patriotic passion but in the single, mad hope of spending his whole life in the country of his childhood. Political commitment came later. And even then . . . Had he really ever had real political convictions? All his life he’d acted more on the basis of affinity and loyalty than on that of dogmas or certainties. His friends in Argentina had often needed his help. He’d given it to them freely.
And he’d never hesitated to kill.
Death was part of his nature and his education. Of his childhood and youth. The Second World War had killed his parents, the conflict in Algeria had killed his illusions. Today, young people grew up in the comfort of living rooms and a haze of marijuana smoke; he’d grown up on the street amid the bitter fragrance of gunpowder. Today, no one could still understand the violence that survived in him. Moreover, his daughter had never accepted it. She’d stopped speaking to him when she’d discovered the details of his past. In Algeria and then in Argentina.
Fortunately his daughter had learned about his turpitudes only long after Gabriella’s birth. Bonds of intimacy and love had had time to be woven between the grandfather and his granddaughter, and Consuela hadn’t dared break them.
Gabriella . . . Would he see her angelic smile again someday? Would he enjoy again the pleasure of hearing her honeyed voice and her pure, crystalline laughter? Without this fierce desire to see his granddaughter again, he would never have tried to escape after Lloret’s death. Exhausted by the hunt, wounded by his old accomplice, he would have sat down in that delightful patio and calmly waited for the police to come. Or he would have killed himself. Maybe, yes, he might have had the courage to do that. Babelo had told him that he had all the marks of a martyr. Perhaps he hadn’t been completely wrong?
He grimaced again.
The cool night air made his wound hurt again. The bullet had passed through his shoulder just below the collarbone. Nothing serious. He’d found what he needed to clean and bandage it in a pharmacy in Girona, and knew that he no longer had anything to fear. In a few days, he would be healed. But it was painful, and he was less and less able to endure pain.
He felt old and tired.
He was weary.
He looked up at the plaque attached next to a kebab vendor’s sign. Rue Lucia. He was no longer very far from his hotel. Soon, he would disinfect his wound again and change his bandage. Then he’d take his pills and go to bed, dreaming about Gabriella.
He hoped he would be able to leave France the next day. He’d reserved a seat on the train to Genoa, via Marseille and Nice. Only the French and Spanish police must be looking for him. In Italy, everything would be easier.
He had to get to the train station in Narbonne by late morning.
But first he had to complete a final mission. Or rather he had to pay a debt. That was the reason why he had come back, contrary to all prudence, to spend a night in Perpignan. He was aware of the risks, but he’d never compromised when it came to honor. Whatever might be said about his crimes and misdeeds, it also was in the name of that value that he had lived, and it was in the name of that old-fashioned and quaint notion that he had come to carry out the last three murders in his life.
So the next morning he would get into his new rental car and set out for a small village in the Catalan outback. He would put a ridiculous gift on a stone. A gift that was valuable precisely because of the risk he was running.