He lived alone. Hunter produced some photographs of his address. They had been provided by Scorpia and showed a ground-floor apartment with glass doors and double-height windows on the far side of a courtyard shared by two more flats. Although one of these was empty, the other was occupied by a young artist, a potential witness. An archway opened onto the street. There was no other way in and an armed policeman – a gendarme – had been stationed in the little room that had once been the porter’s lodge. To reach Vosque, we had to get past him.
In all our discussions, we called Vosque “the Cop”. As always, it was easier to depersonalize him. On the Saturday, we watched him leave the flat and walk to his local supermarket, two streets away. He was a short, bullish man, in his late forties. As he walked, he swung his fists and you could imagine him lashing out at anyone who got in his way. He was almost bald with a thick moustache that didn’t quite stretch to the end of his lip. He was wearing an old-fashioned suit but no tie. After he had done his shopping, he stopped at a café for a cigar and a demi-pression of beer. Nobody had escorted him and I thought it would be a simple matter to shoot him where he sat. We could do it without being seen.
But Hunter wasn’t having any of it. “That’s not what Scorpia wants,” he said. “He has to be killed in his home.”
“Why?”
“You’ll see.”
I didn’t like the sound of that but I knew better than to ask anything more.
Our Paris holiday was over. Even the weather had changed. On Sunday morning it rained and the whole city seemed to be sulking, the water spitting off the pavements and forming puddles in the roads. This was the day when Vosque was going to die. If we wanted to find him alone in his flat, it made sense. Monday to Friday he would be in his office, which was situated inside the Interior Ministry. According to his file, most evenings he went out drinking or ate with friends in cheap restaurants around the Gare St-Lazare. Sunday for him was dead time – in more than one sense.
That morning, Annabelle Finnan, the artist who lived next door to Vosque, received a telephone call from the town of Orléans, telling her that her elderly mother had been run over by a van and was unlikely to survive. This was untrue but Annabelle left at once. We were waiting in the street and saw her flag down a taxi. Then we moved forward.
We were both wearing cheap suits, white shirts and black ties. We were carrying bibles. The disguise had been Hunter’s idea and it was a brilliant one. We had come as Jehovah’s Witnesses. There had been real ones, apparently, working in the area and nobody would have noticed two more, following in their wake. The gendarme in the porter’s lodge saw us and dismissed us in the same instant. We were the last thing he needed on a wet Sunday morning, two Bible-bashers come to preach to him about the end of the world.
“Not here!” the gendarme grunted. “Thank you very much, my friends. We’re not interested.”
“But, monsieur…” Hunter began.
“Just move along…”
Hunter was holding his bible at a strange angle and I saw his hand press down on the spine. There was a soft hissing sound and the gendarme jerked backwards and collapsed. The bible must have been supplied by Gordon Ross, all the way from Malagosto. It had fired a knock-out dart. I could see the little tuft sticking out of the man’s neck.
“And on the seventh day, he rested,” Hunter muttered and I recognized the quotation from the second chapter of Genesis.
The two of us moved into the office. Hunter had brought rope and tape with him. “Tie him up,” he said. “We’ll be gone long before he wakes up but it’s best not to take chances.”
I did as I was told, securely fastening his wrists and ankles, and using the tape and a balled-up handkerchief to gag his mouth. After everything Hunter had told me, I was a little surprised that he hadn’t simply shot the policeman. Wouldn’t that have been easier? But perhaps, at the end of the day and despite everything he had said, he preferred not to take a life unless it was really necessary.
With the gendarme hidden away, we walked across the courtyard, our bibles in our hands. I thought we would go straight to Vosque’s door but instead Hunter steered us over to the artist’s flat and rang the bell there. It was a nice touch. She wasn’t in, of course, but if Vosque happened to be watching out of his window, the fact that we were patiently waiting there would make us look completely innocent. We stood outside for a minute or two, ignoring the thin drizzle that was slanting down onto the cobblestones. Hunter pretended to slip a note through the letterbox. Then we went over to Vosque’s place and rang the bell.
He must have seen us coming and he didn’t suspect a thing. He was already in a bad mood as he opened the door, wearing a vest and pants with a striped dressing gown falling off his shoulders. He hadn’t shaved yet.
“Get the hell out of here,” he snarled. “I haven’t-”
That was as far as he got. Hunter didn’t use another anaesthetic dart. He hit him, very hard, under the chin. It wasn’t a killer blow, although it could have been. He caught the Cop as he fell and dragged him into the apartment. I closed the door behind us. We were in.
The flat was almost bare. The floor was uncarpeted, the furniture minimal. There were no pictures on the walls. It was private. Net curtains hung over the windows and although there was a glass door leading into a tiny back garden – unusual for a Paris property – nobody could see in. A bedroom led off to one side. There was an open-plan kitchen, where, from the looks of it, Vosque hardly ever cooked anything much more than a boiled egg.
Hunter had manhandled the Cop across the floor and onto a wooden chair. “Find something to tie him up with,” he said. “He should have some ties in the bedroom. If you can’t find any, use a sheet off the bed. Tear it into strips.”
I was mystified. What were we doing? Our orders were to kill the man, not threaten or interrogate him. Why wasn’t he already dead? But once again I didn’t argue. Vosque had quite a collection of ties. I took five of them from his wardrobe and used them to bind his arms and legs, keeping the last one to gag his mouth. Hunter said nothing while I worked. I had already seen that intense concentration of his when we were in the jungle but this time there was something else. I was aware that he had something in his mind and for some reason it made me afraid.
He checked that the Cop was secure, then went over to the sink, filled a glass of water and threw it in his face. The cop’s eyes flickered open. I saw the jolt as he returned to consciousness and the fear as he took in his predicament. He began to struggle violently, rocking back and forth, as if there was any chance of him breaking free. Hunter signalled at him to stop. The Cop swore and shouted at him but the words were muffled, incomprehensible beneath the gag. Eventually, he stopped fighting. He could see it would do no good.
I didn’t dare speak. I wasn’t even sure what language I would be expected to use.
Hunter turned to me.
“You want to be an assassin,” he said, speaking in Russian now. “When you were in the jungle, you told me you killed some of the men who came after us. I’m not so sure about that. It was dark and I have a feeling I was the one who knocked all of them off. But that doesn’t matter. You said you were ready to kill. I didn’t believe you. Well, now’s your chance to prove it. I want you to kill Vosque.”