‘You think it started with Bush? They’re all gangsters. And I know gangsters. What’s your price?’
He believes I’m a hooker, she thinks, and says, ‘I’m a writer.’
‘Are you? What’s your price?’
Now she’s sure he’s crazy, and she tries to reach into her handbag for her cellphone. She has no credit on her phone, but maybe she can bluff the guy. She thinks of what she’ll say, ‘Yeah, I found him. You still tracking me? So you know where we are?’
Before she can, he stops and because of her search for her phone she’s distracted from her original goal to unlock her doors and escape. She’s a moment too late. He relocks her doors with his lock, which overrides hers, and then he sticks a gun in her face.
‘Give me your purse,’ he says.
She’s stunned to see a gun in her face, in Paris. She’s never seen a gun before here, except in the movies or on the news. Only the cops and the gangsters have guns here. In her peripheral vision, she sees that they are near the Mitterrand library on the south-east side of the river, a deserted area at night, with lots of lit-up skyscrapers and no people. Even if she could scream, nobody would hear her. She gives him her purse and asks, meekly, ‘What are you going to do with me?’
He doesn’t answer. She sees his eyes in the rear-view mirror and thinks he is smiling.
‘You can let me out. I can’t identify you. I’ve barely seen your face.’
He doesn’t respond to that. ‘I have committed the perfect crime,’ he says.
‘It’s hardly perfect. The owner of this cab is sure to notice it’s gone-’
‘He won’t miss the car for a while. I staked out this cab for a long time. That was a perfect crime too, but not the one I’m talking about. It’s a night for perfect crimes, and I am on a roll. Earlier tonight, I robbed a robber and killed a killer.’
He’s an admitted killer and she is going to die…
‘Don’t you want to know?’ he asks.
‘Know what?’
‘How I committed the perfect crime?’
‘Sure.’
‘What constitutes the perfect crime? Motive, means, opportunity?’
‘An iron-clad alibi,’ she says.
‘I have all that. You see, the people who would look for me are dead in what appears to be an accident, a gas leak that has filled the house with fumes and exploded, killing everyone. The house was well sealed for the winter. The gas could not escape. There were pilot lights on the stove and the furnace, and a light bulb that had started to short-circuit in the basement. Everyone drank a great deal tonight and went to bed around eleven. I saw the explosion from a hill overlooking the house, and then I drove away. It’s been on the radio.’
‘Murder made to look like an accident, OK. But what’s your iron-clad alibi?’
‘I wasn’t there when the victims were killed. I’m not here now. I’m in Monaco. There’s a paper trail there, a hotel reservation, meals ordered in, a priest with secrets who will say he and I enjoyed a long conversation. Of course, I was never meant to be in Monaco. That was just my cover. I was meant to be on my way to Central Africa, delivering a bribe to a general there. I have delivered the money elsewhere.’
For forty-five years, since he was a kid, he had worked for a man he refers to as the ‘Big Man’. The Big Man was a ‘facilitator’, someone who would do the dirty jobs legitimate companies and countries would not. If a bribe was needed to keep an oil company drilling in a third world country after a coup, the man would make it happen. If an inconvenient person threatened to make trouble, the Big Man made sure the person disappeared. Of course, the Big Man never touched the money or the bodies himself. The cabbie did that, travelling on false passports and under false identities, never who or where he was supposed to be.
He tells her the Big Man got his start at the hands of his father, who did similar work in North Africa when it was still French and colonial, making contacts that spanned the continent. The cabbie, in turn, had followed his own father into employment with the Big Man before they all returned to France. He had been stripped of his identity at an early age and groomed to be invisible, effective, and completely beholden to his masters.
He has a powerful need to impress her, she realises, to be the Big Man, to be recognised after years of anonymity. In the moment, she can’t figure out how to exploit this to her advantage. Should she flatter him, be sympathetic, or be mildly disdainful? She’s never been good at this.
The driver babbles on. He first hatched the plan because he was getting tired of all the travelling, not to mention the danger. There was a dispute with another lieutenant in the Big Man’s organisation, and the Big Man himself was putting more and more distance between them – not that he minded. He now hated the Big Man. Everything he did, the way he spoke, the way he walked, the way he ate, mouth open, talking, crumbs spraying around him, was annoying. He began to feel like he was losing position, and that this might lead to his own ‘disappearance’. So he went with the flow, caused no trouble, plotting, looking for his chance.
She doesn’t believe a word of it now. He’s crazy, or full of shit, she thinks, until he starts going into detail. There’s a poison he liked to use – ricin, because it’s lethal in small doses, easily obtainable and virtually untraceable. Sometimes he had to shoot men, though, and contrary to what you see in the movies, a silencer doesn’t completely silence a gun. But if you put a condom over the barrel before you shoot, that absorbs the remaining sound-
As he talks, her terror grows. Around her neck, her scarf seems to tighten on its own. It would be too easy to strangle her like this, so when he is looking at the road, she slowly pulls it off, inch by inch, into her pocket, where she feels her digital camera.
He tells her about specific victims and dates and places, and she is able to piece this together with news stories she’s read. Now she believes him.
‘I have killed people whose deaths nobody will want to investigate. It would shine too much light into too many dark corners. I have made it look like an accident. I have stolen money nobody knows exists, except for people who cannot admit to it. I’m not even here. It’s perfect.’
They are outside the city now. She is his next perfect crime.
Or maybe not. When she sees him pull into the Bois de Vincennes and into a dark wooded area, she turns her camera on in her pocket. The battery was low when she left the Hotel du Nord, but she is sure she can get one good flash out of it.
As soon as he parks, she flashes the rear-view mirror, temporarily blinding the man, then throws her scarf over his neck, pulls it tight with every ounce of strength she has. At her wrist, the camera swings on its strap.
The attack catches him by surprise and this gives her a moment to consolidate her strength, tightening the scarf more and twisting it to stop his gurgled attempts to scream. He struggles, jerks his body forward and sideways, trying to turn around. Then he tries to aim the gun over his shoulder at her, while reaching for the scarf with his free hand. She manoeuvres her arm in front of the gun and is able to knock it away from her head. He loses his grip on the gun and drops it. She holds on. Her leather gloves give her a good grip. He goes limp.
But she doesn’t let go. She holds on until she is sure that be is, at the very least, unconscious. She unlocks her door, then manually unlocks his and gets out. She takes the bullets out of the gun, puts them under his seat and the empty gun in his pocket. She grabs her purse and pops the trunk, dragging his body out and along the ground to the back, where she slumps his torso into the trunk before heaving his legs in. Carefully, she removes her scarf from the neck of the man, without checking to see if he is dead or not. She doesn’t care to know. She only checks that she has all her things and no blood on her.