Magic Terror Read Online Free PDF

mocking bow. The girl bent down, slid her forearms beneath the sacks, lifted them waist high, and carried them deeper into the kitchen.
    Impressed, N turned around and took in yellowish-white walls, a double bed that would prove too short, an old television set, a nightstand with a reading lamp, and a rotary phone. Framed embroidery above the bed advised him that eating well would lead to a long life. He pulled the carry-on toward him and began to hang up his clothes, meticulously refolding the sheets of tissue with which he had protected his suits and jackets.
    A short time later, he came out into the parking lot holding the computer bag. Visible through the opening, the girl in the blue dress and another woman in her twenties, with stiff fair hair fanning out above a puggish face, a watermelon belly, and enormous thighs bulging from her shorts, were cutting up greens on the chopping block with fast, short downstrokes of their knives. The girl lifted her head and gazed at him. He said,
“Bonsoir.”
Her smile put a youthful bounce in his stride.
    The telephone booth stood at the intersection of the road passing through the village and another that dipped downhill and flattened out across the fields on its way deeper into the Pyrenees. N pushed tokens into the slot and dialed a number in Paris. When the number rang twice, he hung up. Several minutes later, the telephone trilled, and he picked up the receiver.
    An American voice said, “So we had a little hang-up, did we?”
    “Took me a while to find the place,” he said.
    “You needum Injun guide, findum trail heap fast.” The contact frequently pretended to be an American Indian. “Get the package all right?”
    “Yes,” N said. “It’s funny, but I have the feeling I was here before.”
    “You’ve been everywhere, old buddy. You’re a grand old man. You’re a star.”
    “In his last performance.”
    “Written in stone. Straight from Big Chief.”
    “If I get any trouble, I can cause a lot more.”
    “Come on,” said the contact. N had a detailed but entirely speculative image of the man’s flat, round face, smudgy glasses, and furzy hair. “You’re our best guy. Don’t you think they’re grateful? Pretty soon, they’re going to have to start using Japanese.
Russians.
Imagine how they feel about that.”
    “Why don’t you do what you’re supposed to do, so I can do what I’m supposed to do?”
     
    N sat outside the
café tabac
on the Place du Marche in Mauléon with a nearly empty demitasse of espresso by his elbow and a first edition of Rudyard Kipling’s
Kim
in near-mint condition before him, watching lights go on and off in a building on the other side of the arcaded square. He had used the telephone shower in his room’s flimsy bathtub and shaved at the flimsy sink, had dressed in a lightweight wool suit and his raincoat, and, with his laptop case upright on the next chair, he resembled a traveling businessman. The two elderly waiters had retired inside the lighted café, where a few patrons huddled at the bar. During the hour and a half N had been sitting beneath the umbrellas, a provincial French couple had taken a table to devour steak and
pommes frites
while consulting their guidebooks, and a feral-looking boy with long, dirty-blond hair had downed three beers. During a brief rain shower, a lone Japanese man had trotted in, wiped down his cameras and his forehead, and finally managed to communicate his desire for a beef stew and a glass of wine. Alone again, N was beginning to wish that he had eaten more than his simple meal of cheese and bread, but it was too late to place another order. The subject, a retired politician named Daniel Hubert with a local antiques business and a covert sideline in the arms trade, had darkened his shop at the hour N had been told he would do so. A light had gone on in the living room of his apartment on the next floor and then, a few minutes later, in his bedroom suite on the floor above that. This was