The Day After Tomorrow

39

Saturday, October 8, 3:15 A.M.

AGNES DEMBLON sat in the living room of her apartment working on her second pack of Gitanes since midnight and staring at the telephone. She still wore the same wrinkled suit she’d worn at the office all day Friday. She hadn’t eaten or even brushed her teeth. By now, Henri should have been back or at least called. Somehow she should have heard from him. But she hadn’t. Something had gone wrong, she was sure. What, though? Even if the American had been a professional, Kanarack would have handled him with the same efficiency he had Jean Packard.

How many years had it been since he’d first pulled her hair and lifted up her skirt in front of everyone in the play yard of the Second Street School in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Agnes had been in the first grade and Henri Kanarack—no, Albert Merriman!—in the fourth grade when it had happened. He’d done it and laughed and then swaggered off with his friends to tease a fat boy and punch him and make him cry. That same afternoon Agnes got even. Following him home from school, she sneaked up behind him when he’d stopped to look j at something. Stretching to her full height with both hands over her head, she brought a huge rock down on the top of his head. She remembered him hitting the : pavement, with blood everywhere. She remembered actually thinking she’d killed him, until he suddenly reached out and tried to grab her ankle and she ran off. It had been the beginning of a relationship that had lasted more than forty years. How was it the same kind of people always sought each other out, even from the beginning.

Agnes stood up and rubbed out a Gitane in an overflowing ashtray. It was now 3:30 in the morning. Saturdays the bakery was open a half day. In less than two hours she would have to leave for work. Then she remembered Henri had her car. That meant taking the Métro, if it was open that early. She didn’t know. It had been that long since she’d last done that.

Thinking she might have to call a taxi, she went into her room, took off her clothes and put on her robe. Then, setting her alarm for 4:45, she lay down on the bed. Pulling the top blanket over her, she turned out the light and lay back. If she could sleep, seventy-five minutes would be better than nothing.

Across the street, Bernhard Oven, the tall man, sat behind the wheel of a dark green Ford and looked at his watch. 3:37 A.M.

On the seat beside him was a small black rectangle that looked like the remote control to a television set. In the upper lefthand corner was a digital timer. Picking it up, he set the timer at three minutes, thirty-three seconds. Then, starting the Ford’s engine, he pushed a small red button at the bottom right of the black rectangle. The timer activated and began counting down in tenths of seconds toward 0:0:00.

Glancing across at the darkened apartment building once more, Bernhard Oven put the car in gear and drove off.

3:32:16.

Strung across the cluttered floor in the basement of Agnes Demblon’s apartment building were seven very small bundles of highly compact, incendiary plastic attached to a primary electronic fuse. At a little past 2:00 A.M., Oven had broken in through a cellar window. Working quickly, in less than five minutes he had placed the charges among stacks of old furniture and stored clothes and paid special attention to the thousand-gallon drum that held the building’s heating oil. Afterward he slipped out the way he had come in and went back to his car. By 2:40 all the building’s lights were out but one. At 3:35, Agnes Demblon turned hers out as well.

At 3:39 and thirty seconds the plastic charges went off.