La Femme trop tard by
Jean-Jacques Pelletier
Prologue: Klaus, p. 3-12
Her face tense, her eyes riveted on the airplane, Claudia waited anxiously for the door to open. Nothing else existed.
Her raincoat open in spite of the wind and the drizzle, she nervously twisted the pendant that hung over her blouse: a kind of fish skeleton of gold with a head plated black.
Klaus was coming back.The man steadied his weapon.
The young woman's face loomed up in the lens and came into focus until the crosshairs lay perfectly over her eyes. Black hair, fine features, rather small mouth, she gave him an impression of class and refinement. But what he noticed the most were her eyes. Mauve eyes, very intense, as if held-back tears intensified their brilliance.
It must be difficult, thought the man, to resist feeling a certain fascination. Then she turned her head. She was now in profile. The work would be easier.Klaus was the third person to come through the door of the airplane.
He was happy to be alive. Once again, he had managed to come through. Given the circumstances, it defied the odds.
He thought for an instant of all the precautions he had had to take, probably without reason, of the reports sent to two different addresses, of the money he had deposited in various accounts, in case. Always following procedure...
Then he saw her.
She was standing near the barrier. Her raincoat opened to reveal a huge patch of mauve. She had put on the dress that she was wearing the last time.
So she had come...The shooter tried to improve his aim using the crosshairs at the centre of the lens. He focussed in turn on the young woman's hair, her mouth, delicate and sensual, her cheek, before returning to her eyes. He made one last adjustment to improve the detail of the eyelashes, then he moved his lens to the left, precisely at eye level, to an imaginary target.
He did not feel well. At the sight of the woman in mauve, a confused uneasiness came over him, as if dark, heavy things were stirring in his memory...
Fortunately, in a few minutes, the work would be over.Klaus had disappeared for two years. Then she had received a telegram. Just a few words: "Returning. Thursday. Seven am." Follow by the name of a regional airport.
She hadn't really believed it. And yet he was there. With the same slightly ironic expression on his face. But something had changed. His features were more determined, his complexion darker. He exuded a feeling of energy and calm that she did not know. He looked indestructible. To think that two years before...
She remembered his last letter. She knew it by heart from reading it again and again.
"If we see each other, I would be incapable of controlling the knots I get in my throat every time I want to simply say a few words to you. Yet when I am alone at home, I spend hours talking to you in my head. That is why I'm writing to you. So I can tell you how empty the world is without you. It's as if all the colours had suddenly disappeared, as if nothing was alive: only things that are moving and that I can't manage to touch..."The shooter again corrected this aim on Claudia's face. The feeling of uneasiness that had seeped into him was starting to get stronger. He was anxious to be done with it. This had never happened to him. Was he getting old? Because he knew the symptoms well: when the brain is no longer able to protect itself from irrational fears, when vague premonitions keep coming back to disrupt an operative's concentration, it means the end is near...
Claudia watched Klaus coming towards her. Her mind was buzzing with memories: the happy times, the nickname she'd given him, Santa Klaus, because he was always deluging her with odd gifts. His shyness, he said: he was incapable of arriving empty-handed.
From the start, in spite of the pleasant and frequently amusing side of this flood, she had found it hard to contend with. She had always been allergic to gifts. She was afraid of getting pulled in, of being bought.
Every time he gave her something, she felt the weight of her debts becoming a bit heavier. And she resented him in spite of herself. Even though she was touched by the attention and happy about what he brought her. It was one of the things that had eaten away at their relationship from the beginning. Klaus had even understood this.
"I always feel like being nice to you. To try to find something to do for you or something to give you, but I know it's pointless. That's what I find most difficult: knowing that I can't do anything, that everything I could give you would only push you further away. More permanently..."
She remembered what she had said to him, when she left him. "You are my whole world, my whole life. No one knows me like you do. But it's not passion. Something in you gets in my way, constantly gets on my nerves. I don't know how I could live without you, but I want to be able to open myself up, let myself go. I want lightness, gentleness in life. I want tranquillity..."Leaning against the hangar, the man once again adjusted the lens to follow the least movement of Claudia's face. Then he moved the crosshairs to an imaginary target, approximately thirty centimetres in front of those mauve eyes, precisely at the same height.
Still waiting...
The uneasiness had not left him. He wondered for an instant if the anxiety and excitement he had read on the young woman's face had contaminated him. He should, however, be immune to this kind of reaction. For more than thirty years he has been practising this trade. The first time he was thirteen years old...Just as he stepped through the barrier, Klaus saw Claudia wave to him. A gesture in which he read a confirmation of what he had no longer expected.
As for Claudia, she could not take eyes off him. Bits from the letter were still buzzing in her head.
"The whole city is imbued with your absence. I spend my days walking outside, with no precise goal, with the unconscious hope, no doubt, of finding you. I miss you everywhere, in all the places where we went together and where I look for you against my better judgment. I constantly came up against the same void. I felt like I was dragging around me a nagging, permanent bubble of desert. When I walk, it hurts less. Even though everything remains empty, inconsequential. I can only abide myself in movement. As soon as I get home, invisible hands lie in wait for me in every corner to grip me in the pit of the stomach and squeeze, squeeze..."The shooter again adjusted the crosshairs of the telescopic sight. His uneasiness had changed into a severe migraine that kept him from concentrating and made his task even more difficult.
He repositioned the sight as best he could to include in the image the face of the approaching Klaus.Their movements were hesitant, as if they did not know how to touch each other. Then, suddenly, they were in each other's arms.
Klaus then stepped back from Claudia so he could see her better. He touched her face with his fingertips, and squeezed a tear from the corner of one eye.
Then Claudia took Klaus's face in her hands and looked at him. It was something that had always moved her, looking into his eyes for a long time. Other passages from his last letter surfaced in her mind.
"Even though you are going away, I'm not able to leave you. You are bonded to me by all the memories of your gestures, by the passion of your eyes. Every time I meet you, I feel like everything is crumbling inside me. Everything is falling to pieces. This would be so much easier if we could hate each other. But if I can't leave you, at least I can go away. Even though you remain what is most precious in my li..."
Klaus continued to meet her gaze without saying a word. He still had the same look: tenacious, a bit of go-getter and a show-off, but he seemed more determined than ever. His eyes were a little sadder too.
At the instant when she brought her lips close to his, a shower of blood and bony shards whipped her face and torn into her skin. As if Klaus's head had exploded in her hands.
Very slowly, he collapsed on her.At the far end of the parking lot, behind the hangar, the door of the limousine closed on Claudia's scream. The job was done. Final arrangements, said the contract. A euphemism. As always.
The automobile moved unhurriedly away while the man, prostrate on the back seat, let the memories and disgust rise and engulf him, as they did every time.
Always the same succession of symptoms: first the migraine, more violent than usual, as if someone was plunging burning splints into his brain; then the nausea, the shaking.
He curled up in a corner and let the black veil fall over him.
In the rear-view mirror, two eyes watched him worriedly: it had been a long time since he had had an attack of such intensity.*** While the ambulance carrying Klaus and Claudia made its way to the highway to Montreal, a man in a navy raincoat and with vaguely Asian features made his report in a telephone booth.
After he had used various access codes and gone through many security systems, a woman's voice answered him.
"You can talk."
That meant that the line was "clean." If not, another voice would have answered. A recorded voice. A voice that would have asked him to call back in ten minutes. Which he would not have done.
He would have left and waited twenty minutes, then he would have made sure he was not being followed. Only then would he have looked for another telephone booth.
The woman, who he knew simply by the initial F, never spoke on a line that was not absolutely secure. She did not want to take any chances that anyone could identify her voice print.
"Bamboo here."
"What's happening?" asked the woman.
"The esteemed target seems to be very damaged. In a catastrophic and final way, I would say. As for the honourable collaborator..."
"Yes?"
"She is shaken."
"Shaken..."
"Yes. Very shaken. Nothing serious, but very shaken."
"Do you know where they've taken her?"
"Such information has actually reached my humble ears."
"Very good. Continue to follow the plan as agreed. The natives will take care of clean-up."
The natives in question were, of course, the local police. They would take care of the paperwork, transform the incident into a settling of accounts linked to organized crime and would provide the media with a version of the events that would blunt their curiosity.
"Your wish is my command, honourable ordainer."
"For the clinic, have you made the arrangements as planned?"
"The minutest remarks of the gifted ordainer were diligently applied."
It is with a certain exasperation that the woman then asks him:
"Bamboo, could you do me a favour?
"The modest executor by your unfathomable intentions aspires only to that which is agreeable to you."
"Couldn't you speak normally?"
"Despair inundates me profusely and entirely. I am completely desolate to have brought umbrage to Your Highness. If my immeasurable limitations..."
"Enough!" F cut him off, with, in spite of everything, a touch of amusement in her voice. "Find the young woman and report to me as soon as you have something new."
"Immediately, precious ordainer of my itinerary! My feet are already on their way. My miserable hand just has time enough to..."
The dial tone told the woman that Bamboo had just hung up.
A funny character, she thought for the umpteenth time. How could anyone imagine that someone so discrete, so reliable and capable, could express themself in such an extravagant way?
An approximation of mannerisms from Imperial Chinese, Bamboo had declared one day. The Tang Dynasty, he had even specified with the greatest seriousness. It was most certainly fake, with him, but one could never be sure.
On that same occasion, Bamboo had explained to her, in a flight of rhetoric interspersed with fantastic formulas of courtesy, that it was a survival tactic.
"A spy must go unnoticed," he said. "He will disappear. And doesn't the best way of disappearing consist in emptying oneself to become just a character? Who could see the one who is empty, the one who is only appearance? And if that appearance is a caricature, a caricature of servility, who could be suspicious of it?"
Over forty, thin, her body straight, the director paced the room. She waved her hand as if to chase away those memories. Then her eyes settled on the desk where the photos were lined up.
Operation Gambit had just been set in motion for real. The woman thought for a moment about the cynicism that usually went into choosing names for operations; then she lit a cigarette and settled into her chair. The next stage was recruitment. It would remain to be seen if the other side would act as anticipated.
For three days, she had not stepped out of her office. Officially, she was visiting one of her friends, on a ranch in California. In fact, she had stayed holed up in her secret office in Washington. For the three days, she had coordinated actions, updated files, directed surveillance... All that with the secret hope that there would be a way to avert the worst.
But the attack had taken place. By now, Klaus was probably lost. The report from the hospital would soon confirm it. Because the director knew who had fired. He was the best. He never missed.
One of Bamboo's phrases came to mind again: "The worst is always certain. One need only wait long enough."
Another of his third-rate aphorisms! When he put his mind to it, Bamboo could become a veritable instant wisdom dispenser.
The director's hand paused for a moment on the file folder, then she stood up. It was time to go see if the rain of last few days had revived the grass as much as the forecast had predicted.*** By the time they reached the border, the man had almost completely regained his composure. Only the migraine persisted, weaker but still stabbing, as if the splints, when they were pulled out, had left behind splinters in his brain.
He shook his head and looked at his watch. In less than four hours, he would be in New York.
With the money from the contract, he was going to buy another impressionist painting. Or perhaps a Mondrian. Unless he ended up, as he frequently did, choosing a bonsai... But, strangely, his imminent purchase was not enough to hold his attention. He was unable to banish from his mind the mauve eyes of the young woman and the expression he had read on her face, at the last moment, when she had understood...
© 2001 Éditions Alire & Jean-Jacques Pelletier
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