“I can’t leave her.”
Tyrone sighed. “I know you can’t. I know.”
23
Julia pressed herself into a corner, a kind of vestibule between the office and the main doors of the archives. Perhaps the killer would walk straight past, not see her, walk on.
Then she could run for it. If the killer walked straight down the lobby into the study room or the main archives, she would have a few seconds to flee, without even being spotted.
The door swung open.
The Asian woman stood there, looking left and right. Julia was hidden behind some coats and a stack of boxes, crushing herself backward against the wall. She could feel her heart beating in her lungs and her spine, so hard was she pressed to the rough brickwork.
Again, the Asian woman glanced left, and then right. The face of this woman was pale to the point of unearthliness. There was something wrong with it, something strange.
Now she was staring directly into the gloom of the vestibule. Squinting. Surely she had seen Julia. Surely this was it.
But then the woman walked on into the hallway, and she tapped on the glass. She wanted to speak to the curator. The grouchy old Frenchman.
This was another vortex of anxiety. Assuredly, the French curator would say, “Oh, there is someone here looking for you, she is in the building, she was here a minute ago,” and then — then the killer would turn and narrow those dark eyes and she would see Julia and the knives would come out, or worse.
The curator appeared to be asleep, or to have disappeared. There was no response to the woman’s persistent tapping.
Tap, tock, tap.
“Bonjour? Hello? Anyone there?”
No reply. The small, lithe woman had a soft, deep voice. Maybe an American or Canadian accent. Yet the face was not European, and was bewilderingly pale.
The murderer leaned close to the glass, cupping a hand to her eyes to see better, to see through. Where was the curator?
Tap, tock, tap.
“Bonjour?”
Julia assessed her chances. She could just run now, run right past, out the main door; it might take seconds for the murderer to realize what had happened; to turn and see the door swinging, see Julia sprinting away. Would the killer even come running after? Would she take the risk? Attack Julia in bright daylight?
It was the best option. Do it now. Before the curator returned and pointed and the woman turned.
Sweat trickled. She was sticky and hot and terrified and immobile but she had to do it. She was about to do it, to run, when she heard a voice, the curator’s, heard him sliding back the glass partition.
“Ah, Mademoiselle, pardon, bonjour.”
“Vous êtes occupé?”
“Non, j’étais en train de parachuter un Sénégalais!”
The Asian woman nodded, unsmiling.
“OK, I am going to continue my research. You understand? Je vais poursuivre mes recherches. OK?”
“Oui, oui!” The curator was grinning, feebly, submissively, like a supplicant; Julia realized with a shiver that even this big and grumpy man was frightened by this small, menacing woman, this thing, this killer, the presence she carried with her was so mesmerising, so unsettling.
The killer turned away. This was it. The danger was passing. Julia was going to survive. To make it through. The curator had said nothing. The killer was unaware of Julia’s presence five meters away—
“Un moment,” said the curator, leaning out through the glass partition. “Il y avait deux personnes qui vous cherchaient!”
There were two people looking for you.
The woman swiveled, lithe and tautened, in sneakers and jeans and a dark T-shirt under a fashionably scarred leather jacket.
“When?”
The curator mumbled.
“Ce matin…?” The reaction was instant. The rest of the curator’s sentence was truncated by a brash clattering of glass. Then a grunting noise. Then a fearsome groan. Julia could not see what exactly was happening. The killer was in the way, muscling and tugging. The grunting was horrible, pursued by a pissing noise, a hissing, and another low groan, then silence.
The killer then turned. And ran. Julia could hear running feet, the killer fleeing, surely. A door slammed open; cold wind blew in from outside, from the parking lot and the drizzle and the concrete Algerian slums.
For five minutes Julia remained crouching, half sobbing, half panting in relief and fear. She texted Alex. Go home. Now. Please trust me.
Then she called Rouvier.
The policeman picked up the phone at once and listened to her whispered story in brisk silence. Firmly, steadily, he instructed her: telling her to go to the apartment immediately, where he would send men to interview her. He likewise told her to lock herself in the apartment and answer to no one but him or the Paris police. In the meantime, he was sending cars to the archives of the Musee de l’Homme.
Shudders of relief rippled through Julia. Here again, in her soul, was her father, hugging her in the lobby of the ragged old casino in Sarnia.
Tentatively, Julia stood and turned to leave — but she couldn’t leave. Because she had seen what the killer did. The young “Oriental woman” had punched a hole in the glass partition; then she had evidently pulled the curator’s head through the hole, and slammed his neck down, onto the jagged shark teeth of the glass, severing arteries and veins, almost slicing off the entire head. Impaled on the shards of glass, it looked, grotesquely, like a severed pig’s head on a butcher’s counter.
The man was clearly dead, absurdly dead: his blood spooled across the floor, a luxurious shellacking of tacky red varnish. Julia gawked at the blood. She was almost paralyzed by the sight, this astonishing violence.
And then: a noise. The distinct squeak of rubber shoes on polished floor, returning. The sickly vertigo of fear made Julia sway, at the cliff edge of death. The killer hadn’t left the building: the young woman had gone the other way, slamming through doors, making the other doors swing, inhaling cold air; and now she was back in the lobby with her blank, beautiful, slightly distorted face, leering with fierce and logical intent. Julia screamed — she half screamed — and she ran. She ran or else she would die.
Her mind worked at a panicked speed. The parking lot was wrong, the wrong choice. A vast open space: three hundred meters of nothing. The murderer would catch her — the athletic body, the immense strength—Julia needed somewhere to hide, somehow, somewhere, until the police reached the museum. She had to buy herself time.
She stayed in the building and ran left, down a corridor, heard the killer running after her. Julia dared not look behind — not out of fear, but at the time it would take: a few seconds delay would mean her death. She sprinted as fast as she had ever run, to the end of the corridor, which darkened and turned and turned again, past doors, and boxes of old leather cloaks, reeking with neglect, then a pile of battered bronze drums, gloomy in the dark. She knocked them over as she hurled herself, the drums falling with enormous ancient thumps, resonant booms like beer kegs. Tumbling into the corridor.