The Mad and the Bad

37

She sat up straight. A noise had woken her, but perhaps she had dreamt it.

She saw a white light through the curtains. Her watch said it was five thirty. Dawn. Julie had no desire to get up at dawn. She laid her dark head once more on the pillow without a pillowcase. But again there came a slight noise, from the hallway, like the sound of a large mouse. Julie got out of bed and slipped into her shorts. She went out of her room. In the blue half-light of the hallway, Peter, with his bow under his arm, was picking up arrows that he had dropped on the floor.

“Go back to bed this minute!”

“I’m not sleepy anymore.”

“It’s far too early to get up.”

“This is our last day,” said the boy. “We’re going to go home, and then where will I play with my bow and arrows?”

Julie untangled her hair with her fingers.

“Oh to heck with it!” She sighed. “I might as well make coffee.”

“While you’re doing it,” cried Peter, dashing down the hallway, “I’ll play with my bow and arrows. I’ll come back in when the coffee is ready.”

He raced off.

“Peter!”

He was gone.

“Goddammit!” said Julie.

She went into her room and sat down on the bed, but she no longer felt like going back to sleep. She drew the curtains. The sky was the color of milk, the vegetation dripping with dew. Peter was going to catch his death of cold. Drat! The girl left her room again, went down the hallway and out onto an interior courtyard with a stream running through it. She brushed her teeth, freshened up, then went into a hexagonal kitchen and put a coffeepot on the propane stove. The panes of the kitchen’s two windows turned yellow as the coffee began to brew.

When the coffee had finished brewing, Julie opened one of the windows and looked for Peter, meaning to call him, but he was not to be seen on the broad terrace outside. The boy had gone beyond the edge. Down below, in a wooded hollow, was a muddy track. The Fiat was stuck there, and Thompson and Hartog were trying vainly to free it up. The two were infuriated. They were way behind their planned arrival time. They had spent the last two hours losing their way down primitive, barely passable roads that never led where they wanted to go.

Peter could hardly make out the car and the two men through the pine branches. Persuaded that what he was looking at was a stagecoach in difficulty, he tried to creep up soundlessly and remain out of sight until he could shoot an arrow at the palefaces.

Julie poured herself a bowl of coffee, touched it to her lips and burnt herself. She put the vessel down and left the kitchen. She almost lost her way in the web of corridors and rooms. Then she stepped into Fuentès’s room. The failed architect was lying on his back in bed, wearing khaki shorts. Empty beer bottles were strewn across a good half of the room. He had dried beer on his chest. His thoracic hair was sticky with it. He was snoring. Julie contemplated him with commiseration and chagrin. She regretted the fact that he was not a handsome young man and that he had not tried to possess her. She would have struggled, scratched his face no doubt, and in any case men did nothing for her, but, all the same, she regretted it.

She was still regretting it when she heard the first gunshot.

“To blazes with it!” Thompson had just said. “To blazes with the car. We’re only a few kilometers at most from that labyrinth affair. Let’s walk it.”

“We’ll have to haul ass,” replied Hartog, “once the job is done. We’ll need the car.”

With great nervous energy he began breaking off pine branches and sliding them under the Fiat’s wheels. Thompson shrugged, taking his sailor’s canvas bag from the car and extracting the case containing his weapon. Opening it on the back seat, he assembled the gun with great care. The magazine was full. Rifle in hand, he turned round smiling. At that instant, through the branches, at ground level some fifty meters away, he spied Peter’s face. A hemorrhage made itself felt in his stomach. In a single motion he shouldered the gun and pressed the trigger. The rising sun was briskly evaporating the dew, causing a slight distortion of the light. Instead of hitting the boy exactly in the middle of the face, the round tore off an ear.