Camille Read Online Free PDF Page A

steering wheel, he may even be thinking about driving away but then he sees the two men appear, one of them pushing the other towards the car . . . “Was anyone killed?” he wonders. “How many?” Finally, the robbers climb into the car. Under pressure, the driver starts the car and drives away, but as they come to the corner of the street – they have travelled scarcely two hundred metres since the car had to slow down at the traffic lights – he sees a woman lurching along the pavement, covered in blood. At that moment, the shooter probably shouts at him to slow down, rolls down his window, maybe even gives a howl of victory: one last chance, he cannot pass it up, it is as though fate itself is calling, as though he had found his soul mate, just when he had given up all hope she appears. He grabs the shotgun, brings it to his shoulder and aims. In the split second that follows, the driver suddenly imagines himself being held as an accomplice to cold-blooded murder in front of at least a dozen witnesses, to say nothing of whatever may have happened in the Galerie in which he is already implicated. The robbery has gone horribly wrong. He had not expected things to turn out like this . . .
    “The car screeched to a halt,” says the hairdresser. “Just like that! The scream of the brakes . . .”
    Traces of rubber on the street will make it possible to determine that the getaway car was a Porsche Cayenne.
    Everyone in the vehicle pitches forward, including the gunman. His bullet shatters the doors and the side windows of the parked car next to which Anne stands, frozen, waiting to die. Everyone nearby drops to the ground, everyone except the elderly man who does not have time to move. Anne collapses just as the driver floors the accelerator, the car lurches forward and the tyres squeal. As the hairdresser gets to her feet she sees the old man, one hand leaning against a wall for support, the other clutching his heart.
    Anne is lying on the pavement, one arm dangling in the gutter, one leg beneath a parked car.
    “Glittering,” according to the old man, which is not surprising since she is covered with shards of glass from the shattered windscreen.
    “It looked like a fall of snow . . .”
    *
    10.40 a.m.
    The Turks are not happy.
    Not happy at all.
    The big man with his dogged expression is driving carefully, but as he negotiates the roundabout at the place de l’Étoile and heads down the avenue de la Grande-Armée, his knuckles on the steering wheel are white. He is scowling. He is naturally demonstrative. Or perhaps it is part of his culture to readily show emotion.
    The younger brother is excitable. Volatile. He is swarthy with a brutish face, he is obviously thin-skinned. He too is demonstrative, he jabs the air with his finger, it’s exhausting. I don’t understand a word he’s saying – I’m Spanish – but it’s not hard to guess: we were hired to pull off a quick, lucrative robbery, and find ourselves caught up in the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. He flings his arms wide: what if I hadn’t stopped you, what then? There is an awkward silence in the car. He spits the question, he’s obviously demanding to know what would have happened if the girl had died. Then, suddenly, he snaps, he loses his rag: we were supposed to be raiding a jeweller’s, not committing mass murder!
    Like I said, it gets a bit wearing. Good thing I’m a peaceable man because if I’d got angry, things might have got out of hand.
    Not that it really matters, but it’s frustrating. The kid is wasting his breath dishing out the blame when he’d be better off saving his strength, he’s going to need all his energy.
    Things didn’t go exactly as planned, but we got a result, that’s all I care about. There are two big bags on the floor. Enough to be going on with for a while. And this is just the beginning, because I’ve got big plans, and there are more bags where those ones came from. The Turk is eyeing the bags too as he