A Foreign Country

73

As Akim stepped into the lift, sweating beneath the heat and weight of the leather jacket, he heard a woman’s voice behind him and turned to find a dark-haired girl, speaking in Italian, running towards the lifts. If she had not been young he would have allowed the doors to close, but he pressed the button at the base of the panel and they parted just in time to allow her to squeeze into the cabin.

‘Grazie,’ she said, breathless and gratefully catching his eye, then corrected herself, remembering that she was in Paris: ‘Merci.’

He liked the naturalness of her, a raw girl from nothing who had made it to a place of money. She wasn’t a whore; maybe somebody’s mistress or a guest at a family reunion. Looked like she knew how to be around a man; looked like a woman of experience. He breathed in the smell of her, the way he sometimes walked into a woman’s perfume a second after she had passed him in the street.

‘Prego,’ he said, a little late, but he wanted to make a connection with her. Akim switched to French and said: ‘My pleasure.’

She was not exactly beautiful, but pretty enough and with that glint in her eye that made everything come together. He wished he could have more time to be with her. He had pressed the button for the fifth storey and she now pushed six.

‘We are almost going to the same floor,’ he said.

The lift climbed through the building. The Italian girl did not respond. Maybe the adrenalin of the job was making him seem pushy. As the doors opened on the fifth floor, Akim muttered ‘Bonsoir’ and this time she did respond, saying ‘Oui’ as he walked outside. He waited until the lift had closed, then turned left towards 508.

The corridor was deserted. He came to Vincent’s door and knocked quietly. He heard the soft padding of approaching footsteps, then the slight contact of Vincent’s head as it touched the door, staring through the fish-eye lens. The latch came off and he was invited inside.

‘Where’s Luc?’

Not: How are you, Akim? Not: What a nice surprise. Just: Where’s Luc? Like Akim was a third-class citizen. Vincent had always made him feel like that.

‘They’re coming later,’ he said.

The room was large and smelled of cigarettes with a breeze blowing through it. There was a window open, a plastic pole on the curtain tapping against the glass. Vincent was wearing a white Lutetia dressing-gown over blue denim jeans with bare feet and looked, for the first time in Akim’s memory, like he had lost control of himself.

‘What do you mean “coming later”?’

Akim sat in a chair facing the double bed. Vincent’s head had made a neat dent in one of the pillows on the left-hand side, like a kid had done a karate chop. There was a remote control on the bedcover, two miniature bottles of whisky beside the TV.

‘Are you going to answer me?’ Vincent placed himself between the bed and the chair, like it was Akim’s duty to tell him whatever he needed to know. ‘How did the British find out about me? Who told them? What’s happening with François?’

‘I thought you were François, Vincent?’ Akim replied, because he couldn’t resist it. They’d all laughed about how seriously Vincent had taken the job. ‘Brando’, Slimane called him, even to his face, because at the house he’d never once dropped out of character.

‘You making fun of me?’ Vincent said. He possessed some physical strength and his temper was quick, but he had no guts. Akim knew that about him. Nothing to respect.

‘Nobody would ever make fun of you, Vincent.’

Akim watched as Cévennes moved to the side of the bed and sat down. The Academy pin-up, the DGSE golden boy. Vincent had always had a high opinion of himself.

‘Where’s Luc?’ Vincent asked again.

Akim was already bored by the questions and decided to have more fun. ‘What about Valerie? Don’t you care about her, too?’

‘Luc’s the boss,’ Vincent replied quickly.

‘You reckon?’

There was silence between them now, time in which Vincent seemed to come to terms with the anomaly of Akim’s presence in his room.

‘What’s this about?’ he said. ‘You got a message for me?’

‘I do,’ Akim replied.

It was simple after that. Just a question of commitment. He unzipped the motorbike jacket, reached inside for the gun, moved it level with Vincent’s chest and fired a single silenced shot that lifted him back towards the wall. Akim stood up and stepped forward. Vincent’s eyes were drowning in the shock of what had been done to him; there were tears in his eyes. His face was white, blood gargling in his throat. Akim fired two further shots into his skull and heart; the first of them shutting Vincent down like a doll. He then picked up the spent cartridges, secured the gun inside the jacket and moved towards the door, checking that nothing had fallen out of his pockets when he had sat on the chair. He looked through the fish-eye lens, saw that the area outside was clear, and walked into the corridor.