The Prone Gunman by Jean-Patrick Manchette

want to raise the level of tension in France, just take a bazooka and boom!” He laughed.
    Terrier and Anne stood waiting in the empty office with the man with the revolver and the Eurasian driver. The short guy had slipped out through a communicating door. He reappeared and signaled to Terrier.
    â€œCome in. The girl stays here.”
    â€œIf something goes wrong, shout,” Terrier said to Anne.
    He went into the next room. Seated at a metal desk, Cox was eating fries with his fingers from a paper plate. He was wearing a gray flannel three-piece suit and hadn’t taken off his camel’s hair overcoat, which was hanging open around him. He had a spot of grease on his double chin. He seemed tired.
    â€œWould you like some coffee?” he asked. “There’s a coffee maker. Would you like some fries? I don’t have anything else to offer you.” Martin shook his head. “I’m glad you changed your mind,” Cox said, affecting great conviction.
    â€œYou’ve read my ad already?”
    â€œOf course.”
    â€œIn tomorrow’s paper?”
    â€œOf course,” Cox repeated. “We don’t use a hundred different press outlets for our correspondence. It’s not hard to pay the odd employee for advance knowledge of a small section of the classified ads. Pure routine, Christian.” He smiled. “Martin Terrier, I should say.”
    â€œDid you know that from the beginning?”
    â€œWe like to be well acquainted with our employees. You’ve screwed things up in a big way.” Cox was still smiling. “You have this Anne Schrader with you, it seems.”
    Terrier nodded. Cox shrugged.
    â€œIs it important to you? Does she matter to you?” Terrier didn’t answer. Cox smiled at him again. “Are we still in agreement on one hundred and fifty thousand francs?”
    â€œTwo hundred thousand,” said Terrier. “You talked about two hundred thousand.”
    â€œThat was before you were run to ground. Now it’s one hundred and fifty, and that’s still a good price. And there are some in-kind benefits: you and this woman, papers, passports, all the necessaries. The target in two weeks. Until then, you’ll be taken care of, naturally.”
    â€œI don’t want the girl taken care of. I want you to let her go.”
    â€œOf course that’s what you want,” said Cox. “It’s impossible, of course.” He glanced wearily at Terrier. “Do you want to argue? Do you want to waste our time?”
    â€œNo. Where will the target be?”
    â€œHere. In Paris.”
    â€œI want to spend the two-week wait in the South Sea Islands,” said Terrier.
    â€œWhy?” asked Cox with genuine surprise.
    â€œBecause I can’t think of anything better. Where would you go, in my position?”
    â€œI wouldn’t budge.”
    â€œThat’s not surprising.”
    â€œYou’re stupid, Christian,” said Cox with a kind of anger. “You’re an idiot. I wouldn’t make a move from here or any other place where I happened to be, because there’s not one place that’s any different from any other anymore, except for the communist countries, which are even worse. There’s no place good anymore, don’t you understand? No, I wouldn’t budge! There’s nowhere to go.”
    â€œI want to go to the South Sea Islands,” Terrier said again.
    â€œYou will go to the Tronçais forest,” Cox said firmly.

15
    It was an old country house that had been transformed into a sort of hunting lodge. The ground floor consisted of three rooms: a common room that doubled as a kitchen, with stone sinks, a cast-iron stove, and a big table covered with an oilcloth; a bedroom; and, finally, a small room with an uneven tile floor that was part storeroom and part living room, with its logs and armchairs, its hearth and little stone table, and its rifles in a display case.