I crawled on all fours along Carlo’s trail of blood to the bedroom door. I’ve always hated farce—all that painful inevitability before the tragedy. The dark smears went down the corridor to the front of the house. Why hadn’t he gone out on to the stoop? He was confused, half dead, a hole in his chest, an animal crawling off to die. The trail of blood came back up the corridor from the locked front door and went into the room with the tables and chairs. I didn’t want to stick my head round that door.
I went back to the bedroom and found the broom and hung the hurricane lamp off the end of it. Back in the corridor I eased the lamp waist-high into the centre of the doorway. Three shots of colossal loudness rang out and shattered the lamp, which burst into flames on the ground. See what I mean about farce?
I ran back into the bedroom and tore the heavy horsehair mattress off the bed. On the way back out I hit Marnier coming in from the stoop and we both went down fighting the mattress between us.
‘What the ... fuck ... is going on!’ hissed Marnier.
‘Carlo’s in there, alive, with a gun. The place is on fire,’ I said. ‘That’s it.’
‘Putain merde,’ said Marnier, and he left the house via the stoop. I threw the mattress over the flames. Carlo let off another shot, the mattress taking it in the gut, a terrible quantity of horsehair stuffing tore out the back of it as it went down. I slid to the floor by the smouldering door jambs.
‘You know somethin’,’ said Carlo, his voice coming out in little pops and crackles from the blood collected in his lungs and throat.
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘I know you totally ballsed up this situation. It should be Marnier in there with his chest half out, not you.’
‘Fuck you,’ said Carlo. ‘He was fuckin’ waiting for us. You told him, you big fuck.’
‘I didn’t have to tell him.’
‘You know what, fucker?’
‘I don’t know anything any more.’
‘You’re dead meat. You’re dead the worse way you could ever possibly fuckin’ imagine.’
‘That’s not something I spend too much of my time thinking about.’
‘One day...’ were Carlo’s last words. A faint light clicked on in the room. Three shots. The noise, loud and continuous, careened around my cranium. The tinnitus staying and staying so that I knew this night would be in my head for years. I looked round the door jamb. The light from Marnier’s torch was still on Carlo, who had jammed himself into the corner of the room. His eye, nose and jaw were missing. Marnier was standing by an open shutter, his torso in the room, the gun still extended in his left hand. He looked down at the floor.
‘Bring him out,’ he said. ‘I’ll hold the light on him.’
It was a business getting Carlo out. His shoulders, arms and chest were slippery with gore and although he wasn’t a big-framed man he must have weighed in at around eighty-five kilos. I got him up in stages, using the chair and table, until I could slide him on to my shoulder. Marnier helped things along with a stream of suggestions from the window until I was half laughing, half crying. I plodded down the corridor and met Marnier out the back, who lit the way for me down into the yard where Felix was standing, crouched under Gio’s weight, who was still out cold.
‘Suivez-moi,’ said Marnier, picking up the shovel.
He took us down a path, among the tall grasses, that you wouldn’t have known was there. We came to a pile of gravel in front of a wooden shed which was padlocked. Marnier had to go through his pockets a couple of times, with Felix and I grunting and Gio beginning to stir. He opened the shed.
Inside the shed, which was the size of a single-car garage, was a beaten earth floor in which three holes had been dug. Three grave-sized holes. There were maybe twenty sacks of concrete piled on some plastic sheeting at the far end.
‘Wait,’ said Marnier, checking the holes with his torch. ‘Put Carlo in this one.’
I staggered to the graveside with the last of my strength and let Carlo slide off into the watery hole. I collapsed to my knees and elbows, forehead against the cool earth, my whole body coursing with acid, my shirt, slick on my skin, soaked with sweat and blood.
‘Glad you had the contrefilet now?’ said Marnier. ‘Imagine trying to do that with a little filet de barre inside you.’
He took a camping gaz light off the wall and lit it and a cigarette. He hung the light from a steel crossbeam in the roof, where it hissed. Felix had let Gio fall to the ground and, now that I was unburdened, I realized with some nervousness that, first of all, Gio was stripped naked, and there were three holes in the shed and only two obvious occupants.
But, hell, I couldn’t do anything about it. I was weaker than a licked kitten.
Gio rolled over on to his back to take a look at how dark his circumstances were. Marnier stared down at him and smoked.
‘Amenes les machettes, Felix,’ he said, and I suddenly felt like sobbing.
Felix dumped the polypropylene sack at Marnier’s feet and retreated to the door of the garage where he picked up the shovel and started filling in Carlo’s hole. I slumped on to my side. Marnier took the machetes out of the sack. There were two types. A long thin whippy one for grasses and a short, heavy, thick-bladed version for chopping through anything that was less strong than mild steel.
‘Ah, Gio,’ sighed Marnier, taking the thin-bladed machete and flicking it so that it walloped in the thickening air.
There was nothing in Gio’s features that was translatable into any human emotion. His face was still, composed and huge. If Marnier wanted satisfaction he was going to have to work for it because Gio was as relaxed as if he was on a pool side. With one knee crooked and the other leg straight out, I realized what he was showing Marnier.
Most men faced with an ugly death would have had genitals contracted to a pebble cluster in lichen—Gio’s sizeable penis slept along his thigh as peaceful as a sun-doped seal. Marnier, with measured disdain, flipped it up on to Gio’s abdomen with the end of the blade. Gio lashed out with his leg and caught Marnier on the shin so that he slipped into one of the holes feet first with a splash.
‘Felix,’ said Marnier, calmly.
Felix helped Marnier out and then turned Gio over on to his front. Marnier, with two swift, practised slashes cut through Gio’s Achilles tendons so that the calf muscles snapped up behind his knees. The gaslight hissed on. Christ knows what Gio was biting on, because there wasn’t a peep from the man. Two more strokes from Marnier and the hamstrings were gone. Gio’s head and shoulders came up off the floor. He bowed his back and lumps of muscle bunched between his scapulae. Deep divots appeared in the back of his arms where the triceps strained against the nylon rope around his wrists, but there was no give in it.
I knelt and went back on my heels and tried to breathe the contrefilet back down. Then I saw the state of my shirt, black with Carlo’s blood. I tore it off and threw it into the half-filled grave and sent a stream of vomit in after it.
Marnier changed machetes. He put his foot down the middle of Gio’s white, sweat-lined back and chopped him on either side of his neck with a heavy-handed knighthood that went down to the clavicle bone. Gio slumped forward. Nothing flowed through the arms any more. Marnier hacked through the ropes and Gio’s hands slipped down the side of his buttocks. I crawled to the door.
‘Where are you going?’ asked Marnier.
‘Out of here,’ I said. ‘This isn’t my battle. It’s between you and these people talking to each other in the only way you can.’
‘Violence,’ said Marnier, cigarette in the corner of his mouth, his hair unlocked from his scalp, mad-looking, ‘the Esperanto of our century.’
‘Right.’
‘There’s no other language for a man like this.’
‘You’re going to kill him in the end. Why not kill him now? Be civilized if you can be. Your wife—’
‘Shut up about my wife!’ he said, and brushed his hair back off his face as if that was enough. ‘If I don’t do this he will die knowing he’s won.’
‘And you get what?’
‘I will have avenged my face,’ he said, and motioned Felix to turn Gio back over.
‘Gio did that to you?’
‘And don’t you believe that he didn’t know what he was doing. He could have killed me too ... quickly. He had a gun. But it satisfied him more to send me out into the world as an example of his work.’
I knew Marnier was right because Gio allowed a squiggle of emotion to play in his face. He looked up and smiled—nigh on beatific—a genius with his magnum opus.
‘You lost, Jean-Luc,’ I said. ‘He knows you’ve got to kill him. And he knows as you push him into that hole that you’re still going to be out there with the face he made for you. Now finish it, for Christ’s sake, finish it.’
Marnier looked back at Gio and saw his grin. It triggered something in him—a raw, savage, primitive anger that I’d only ever seen on a man like Franconelli. He slashed at the man’s genitals and reduced Gio’s face to a ribboned skull. Then, without finishing him off he had Felix throw him in the hole and fill it in. He sat on the cement sacks and watched, smoking cigarette after cigarette while Felix brought the two holes up flush with the floor.
Marnier stamped the two graves down and told Felix to pile on more earth.
‘What’s the third hole for?’ I asked.
‘That was for you,’ said Marnier, ‘if you hadn’t told me they were coming. You made the right choice, Bruce. I’m happy for you.’
‘Did I? Are you?’
‘You’ll look into your child’s eyes. Think of that.’
‘But what will it see in them?’
‘Maybe you’ll have to learn to act.’
‘And what happens when Franconelli comes to see me?’
‘More acting.’
‘What part?’
‘Improvise.’
‘With Franconelli?’
‘We’ll work on it,’ he said. ‘You must tell him that Gio and Carlo were never here. You gave them the information. They never showed.’
‘What about their car? There must be a car.’
‘We have to find it.’
‘Are you going to dig a hole for that too?’
‘Felix will put it in here once he’s laid the concrete.’
‘What do you think is going to be the first thing Franconelli will do when I tell him they didn’t show?’
‘He’ll ask to see you, which is why—’
‘He’ll send some troops down here to find out what the hell happened.’
‘Then he’ll be showing his ignorance of Africa.’
‘Don’t tell me you rule this town too.’
‘I have made some connections,’ he said. ‘But you are right. Let’s find the car and I will teach you something.’
‘I always hated school, Jean-Luc.’
‘I’m sure, but what I’m going to teach you isn’t just to get you through an exam.’
He headed for the door spouting Mina, Felix’s language, the words peppered with French like cailloutis and béton. Felix didn’t stop shovelling, filling in that third hole which would have been mine if Marnier hadn’t insisted that confession out of me. I didn’t know what to think any more. I was glad to be alive, a quick flicker of Heike in my brain confirmed that. But Marnier, the horror merchant, full now of nothing more than building instructions. And Franconelli with that head, those charcoal-smudged eye sockets, the gravestone teeth and atomic anger. The gunshots still whined in my ears and the violence of this night was already branded on me for life. Franconelli would be able to look in my eyes and see it all replayed before him like a private viewing.
‘Viens, viens,’ said Marnier. ‘And stop thinking about it. The process of forgetting starts now.’
‘Forgetting?’ I said, smacking him on the shoulder, spinning him round. ‘Forget that?’
I was showing him my hands and arms, my bare chest and torso covered with Carlo’s blood, even my trousers bloodied to the knees.
‘It’ll wash off.’
‘You never saw Macbeth?’
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘The brain is a different matter. Now let’s find the car.’
I followed Marnier into the grasses. Looking at the back of his head I began to feel what Michel Charbonnier must have felt, that with this man you didn’t know who you were any more. Anger, hate, fear, awe—were all part of the Marnier experience. But then there was more complicated stuff and I bridled to admit it. I found something to admire in him. He was fearless and tenacious. Even after what Gio had done to him he still had a will to live, a drive.
For a second I had something on Marnier. Something like the germ of a poem which if grasped could be got down true, but it ran away from me, scampered off into the night brain to confuse future dreams.