Camille Read Free Page B

scarcely upright before she begins to run.
    At this point, everything goes wrong and what follows is a series of miscalculations, accidents and errors. It is as though, overwhelmed by events, God does not know how to play out the scene and so leaves the actors to improvise, which, ineptly, they do.
    Anne does not know where she is, she cannot get her bearings, in fact in attempting to escape, she heads the wrong way. If she reached out a hand, she would touch the tall man’s shoulder, he would turn and . . .
    She hesitates for a long moment, disorientated. It is a miracle that she manages to stay upright. She wipes her bloody face with her sleeve, tilts her head as though listening to something, she cannot seem to take that first step . . . Then, suddenly, she tries to run. As he watches the video, Camille falls apart as the last pillars of his stoic courage crumble.
    Anne’s instinct is fine in theory; it is in practice that things go wrong. She skids in the pool of blood. She is skating. In a cartoon, it would be funny; in reality it is agonising because she is slipping in her own blood, struggling to stay on her feet, trying desperately to run and succeeding only in flapping and flailing dangerously. It looks as though she is running in slow motion. It is heart-stopping.
    The tall man does not immediately realise what is happening. Anne is about to fall on top of him when her feet finally reach a patch of dry ground, she regains her balance and, as though powered by a spring, she begins to lurch.
    In the wrong direction.
    Initially, she follows a curious trajectory, spinning around like a broken doll. She makes a quarter turn, takes a step forward, stops, turns again like a disorientated walker trying to get her bearings, and eventually manages to stumble off in the vague direction of the exit. Several seconds pass before the robber realises that his prey is attempting to escape. The moment he does, he turns and fires.
    Camille plays the video over and over: there is no doubt that the killer is surprised. He is gripping his gun next to his hip, the sort of stance a gunman takes when trying to hit anything within a radius of four or five metres. Perhaps he has not had time to regain his composure. Or perhaps he is too sure of himself – it often happens: give a nervous man a 12-bore shotgun and the freedom to use it and he immediately thinks he is a crack shot. Perhaps it is simply surprise, or perhaps it is a mixture of all these things. The fact remains that the barrel is aimed high, much too high. It is an impulsive shot. He does not even try to aim.
    Anne does not see anything. She is still stumbling forward through a black hole when a deafening hail of glass rains down on her as the ornamental fanlight above her head is blown to smithereens. In the light of Anne’s fate, it seems cruel to mention that the stained-glass panel depicted a hunting scene: two dashing riders galloping towards a baying pack of hounds that have cornered a stag; the hounds are slavering, their teeth bared, the stag is already dead meat . . . It seems strange that the fanlight in the Galerie Monier, which survived two world wars, was finally destroyed by a ham-fisted thug . . . Some things are difficult to accept.
    The whole Galerie trembles: the windows, the plate glass, the floor; people protect themselves as best they can.
    “I hunched my shoulders,” an antiques dealer will later tell Camille, miming the action.
    He is thirty-four (he is precise on this point; he is not thirty-five). The stubby moustache that curls at the ends looks a little too small for his large nose. His right eye remains almost entirely closed, like the figure in the helmet in Giotto’s painting “Idolatry”. Even thinking about the noise of the gunshot, he seems dumbfounded.
    “Well, obviously, I assumed it was a terrorist attack. [He apparently thinks this explains matters.] But then I thought, that’s ridiculous, why would terrorists attack the Galerie,