THE BLACK Oldsmobile proceeded cautiously over the sand of a beach. Balazs was at the wheel. In the back seat Maurer and Branko sat on either side of a seven-year-old girl wrapped up in a sleeping bag whom they had rendered unconscious with a morphine shot. It was daybreak. With its sidelights out the car was a shadowy outline against the deserted gray strand. The faces of the three men looked pale and their clothing was dark. The violet tip of a tongue peeped from the corner of Balazs’s thin lips as he steered the heavy vehicle over the uneven ground, which was marked by old ruts hardened but crumbling at the edges. They were driving in first gear towards an isolated cubiform house facing the ocean. They reached it, pulled up, and got out. Maurer got back in, took the wheel and put the machine into a rudimentary garage: a lean-to in back of the cubiform house, just a patch of tarmac beneath a vast awning covered with dried reeds and supported by tall poles.
Meanwhile Balazs entered the two-story building. Branko followed him, carrying the unconscious girl. All that could be seen of her was the top of her head: a dull band of forehead and straggly black curls.
Maurer backed the Oldsmobile into one of the garage’s two spaces, the rear bumper against the rear wall of the house. The other space was occupied by a rat-gray Peugeot 203, likewise backed in and empty. The 203 bore Spanish license plates. The plates of the black Olds showed that the automobile was registered in the United States, in Florida.
Maurer alighted from the car, did not lock the doors, showed no interest in the Peugeot. He left the lean-to and made for the front of the house. Walking towards the ocean, he went along the side of the building, behind him a mass of pallid dunes topped by dark grass, above his head a brass-streaked cobalt sky.
Maurer was young, very likely under twenty-five. He was tall and broad and wore rough blue cloth pants, combat boots, and a navy-blue peacoat over a lightweight black turtleneck sweater. His face was square, the chin firm, the lips fleshy, the nose straight between high cheekbones. The eyes were steel-gray, slightly off-kilter beneath nearly colorless eyebrows and a wide forehead. The back of the neck and the temples were shaven. A crowd of very short tow hairs did battle on the top of his skull.
The young man heard a sound like that of a bottle being vigorously uncorked, then a clinking, and then he saw a shower of little pieces of broken glass fall onto the bleached sand at his feet. Without slowing his pace he bent his head back to look up at the window in the sidewall he was hugging. It was upstairs, and protected by shutters like all the house’s few windows. Maurer looked ahead once more and hurried. With four strides he rounded the corner of the house and reached the front door. The walk had undone two buttons of his jacket. He thrust his right hand into the opening in the garment, while with his left he opened and gently pushed the door ajar, stepping aside immediately, leaning his left shoulder against the white rough-cast cement outside wall, then risking a glance inside because the ocean’s dull roar prevented him from hearing anything else.
A living room took up nearly all the ground level, with, in the shadows, a brick-colored tile floor, ill-assorted bamboo easy chairs, two worn canvas-covered couches and a pile of crumpled old periodicals on a low oval table surrounded by rattan seats. There was also an empty fireplace, geometrically patterned drapes and, pinned to the pale walls, large black-and-white photographs torn from magazines and picturing various Spanish soccer teams. Bare, unlit electric bulbs dangled from wires at two points on the plaster ceiling. There was no one to be seen.
Opposite the entrance door a steep narrow stairway led to the upper floor, disappearing into an open trap in the ceiling. Maurer heard footsteps above, quickly entered the room and headed for a little kitchen that he saw separated from the living room by a thin partition. But before he could reach it a man in a long black leather coat and a black woolen cap came down the ladder, his gaze fixed on Maurer. It was neither Branko nor Balazs. Maurer stopped.
“Guido,” he said. (The greeting contained neither surprise nor joy.)
“Program change. I stay with you,” Guido commanded. “The others are upstairs. Close the door.” Guido stepped briskly off the stairs and advanced at the same pace towards Maurer, who stretched out his right foot and kicked the entrance door shut without turning away from Guido, barely visible in the half-light, and without withdrawing his hand from his jacket.
Guido took his hands out of his pockets. He was wearing surgical gloves and in his right hand he held a semiautomatic Sauer Model 38 chambered in .380 ACP and fitted with a silencer. He fired at Maurer just as Maurer lunged like a fencer.
Parang is the Malay word for a large knife whose blade and handle have several functional curves and three different edges. The parang is a good clearing tool, like the machete of South America or the bolo of the Philippines. It may also be used to open shellfish, skin game, or engage in such artistic activities as wood or bone carving. It can also serve as a weapon. A good parang has a blade some thirty centimeters long. Along the greater part of its length this blade is so sharp that it is dangerous to grasp the sheath with one hand while drawing the weapon with the other: the blade is liable in that case to slice the sheath open and the hand likewise. Cautious Malays carry the parang in a wooden sheath.
As Maurer was lunging like a fencer towards Guido, he drew a parang, forty-five centimeters long overall, which he carried under his left arm in a cloth sheath that was batting against his upper thigh.
The blade slit the sheath, sliced his jacket without slowing and followed its swing in an upward direction as Maurer extended his right arm in front of him and took the .380 ACP round that Guido fired at him, making a pop like a cork being energetically pulled from a bottle, in the left shoulder.
Guido was competent. He had aimed for the belly because that was the best, but since Maurer had lunged very low, the bullet entered beneath his collarbone, fractured his left shoulder blade, exited through the back of his peacoat, and buried itself in the kitchen wall. The parang sectioned Guido’s wrist and his hand and his Sauer fell onto the tile floor. Under the impact of the shot, Maurer failed to gather his left leg under him, so that at the end of its arc the sharp point of the parang caught only the tip of Guido’s chin, exposing the bone. As he sought to move forward Maurer fell to his right knee. Then he got to his feet. Guido backed towards the foot of the stairs. He said nothing. His eyes gleamed with fright. A good deal of blood was flowing from his wrist onto the floor. Maurer came up to Guido as he collapsed on the lower stairs. He wanted to behead Guido before he cried out. But Maurer hesitated. The great horizontal slash whereby he meant to decapitate Guido succeeded only in cutting the amputee’s throat without detaching the head from the body. Guido appeared to furl up like a blind, his split chin falling onto his gaping throat, his trunk folding over onto his thighs until he finally toppled forward onto his side and came to rest curled up in a ball on the brick-colored tiles. The pool of blood from his wrist and the pool from his throat soon converged. And scarlet streaks were to be seen all over the room.
No sooner had Maurer delivered his horizontal blow than, not having encountered the expected resistance (from the cervical vertebrae), he overbalanced and fell to the floor. He groaned, lay there for a moment, then rolled over in the blood and managed to get up. He walked to the gloved hand still holding the pistol. Groaning and grimacing, he went down on one knee, laid his sticky parang on the tiles, and detached the Sauer from the hand. Pain brought another croak from him as he rose. He picked the parang up in his dangling left hand and held the firearm in his right.
Less than thirty seconds had elapsed since Guido fired at Maurer. And neither the shot nor what followed had made more noise than a man slapping an uncut book on a table and proceeding to cut a few pages.
All the same, a man now appeared at the top of the stairs, a handsome, slim, brown-skinned young guy with dark black hair wearing a Prince of Wales check suit and pointing a long Reising pistol at Maurer, which like the Sauer was fitted with a silencer. He seemed puzzled, he hesitated, and Maurer put three .380 rounds in his torso; the pretty boy fell dead on the top stairs and his body did not tumble any further.
After quickly making sure that there was nobody in the kitchen or the ground-floor bathroom, Maurer started upstairs. On his back, around the exit hole of the bullet that had passed through him, the thick material of his peacoat was soaked with blood over an area a hand and a half wide. Hearing a crash from above, he froze. Someone opened a window, then shutters, and leapt out onto the reed roof of the lean-to garage, crashed through the frail awning and landed on top of one of the cars. Maurer resumed his climb, struggling to move quickly. A car door slammed, a light door that did not sound like the Oldsmobile’s. Then indeed the 203 was heard starting up.
Instantly a shock wave blew out the upstairs windows and a split second later came an explosion like a kilometer of sheet metal being suddenly ripped apart.
Standing on the stairs, swaying, a weapon in each hand and unable to grab for support, Maurer received the whole of the back upstairs window, including the frame, on his head, a cloud of plaster and mortar combined with a blast of shattered glass. The rear wall of the beach house shook. Roof tiles flew. The Peugeot’s engine block, hurled into the air, fell back onto the house’s roof, crashed through it and fetched up on the parquet of the upper floor. Dust and smoke then invaded the house more slowly but more copiously than the first wave of detritus.
Maurer did not fall. He staggered. The plaster had whitened his hair, his face, his chest: he looked like a mad baker’s boy armed with a parang and a pistol. He yelped and pressed on. The staircase was still trembling as he stepped over the dead pretty boy and inspected a hallway and two bedrooms aswirl with the dust and smoke. Through a demolished window he saw that the lean-to had disappeared. There was little left of the 203, little left of its driver, and the remains were on fire. The massive Oldsmobile was overturned, all its windows broken and its tires melted, but it was not yet on fire.
Balazs and Branko had been shot to death in one of the bedrooms. At the back of the other the little girl lay on the floor against the wall in the down sleeping bag on which two bullet holes were visible along with a little blood. Maurer stuck the Sauer in the right pocket of his peacoat and bent over in pain. He touched a finger to the little girl’s carotid artery. She was still alive. He put her over his shoulder, supported himself with the parang as he straightened up, tottered across the room grunting in agony, got back to the stairs, went down cautiously and quickly left the house.
It was morning. The house was sending a column of black smoke into the blue sky. Maurer set off with long strides along the waterline. In time he disappeared over the horizon.
Several years later, in Liverpool, England, Maurer came out one morning from a seaman’s lodging-house to be surrounded by three men in black oilskins, one of whom stuck the short barrel of a revolver into his ear and asked him without ado where is Alba Black.