Babayaga

“Who’s he with?” Obscured by the brush, they could only dimly make out a group of figures standing in a small clearing about fifty meters away. Maroc and Lecan moved in closer, stepping carefully between the thornbushes and tree branches in an effort not to make any noise. Coming closer, they found a situation of such interest that it made them completely forget their missing suspect.

There were seven people there, all of whom appeared to be frozen as stiff as wax statues. As Maroc and Lecan came to a break in the trees, it became clear why the group of people were immobile, as the majority of them had guns pointed at one another. A small bald man was moving about and talking. Maroc squinted into the darkness, trying to make out what was happening. “What the devil is he—?”

That was when the little man produced a gun and shot one of the men in the head.

Maroc immediately pulled his whistle from his pocket and blew it as loudly as he could, rushing headlong into the middle of the clearing, with Lecan right behind him. “Police! Put down your weapons and stay where you are.”

Maroc had, up until this point, served largely in administrative roles, and in his entire professional history he had very little actual experience working in the streets among the citizens of the city’s neighborhoods. His long, comfortable career had begun with a desk job in a Paris office; then, during the Vichy years, he’d moved on to more bureaucratic work in Bordeaux, then back to a desk in Paris, where he aided Papon in various departmental roles, and where, over time, he had grown quite comfortable thinking of himself as an important figure of authority and power. Therefore, when he yelled “stay where you are!” he was logically convinced that everyone would do just that. He was, therefore, quite bewildered when his imperious command, combined with his piercingly loud police-whistle blast, had entirely the opposite effect. All the characters in that small clearing, who had, in fact, been standing perfectly still before as they stared down the barrels of one another’s guns, all now suddenly flew into a burst of frantic and frenzied motion. Guns were fired, people ran off in all directions, and, to make things worse, the forest itself seemed to spring into life as two broad caped shadows came swooshing down from the trees, blocking his vantage of the fleeing suspects while knocking one of the women to the ground. What the hell was going on? Who were these superheroes swinging out of the sky like some wild characters from the Fantax or Fulguros comics? Then Maroc realized the large swooping creatures were actually owls and the capes he had imagined were their wide wings. Were these the same killer birds that had attacked the man by the Galeries Lafayette? What was this, some mad homicidal falconry? What went on in this damn park? Lecan went dashing off into the forest, pursuing several of the fleeing group, while Maroc chased down one of the men. Grabbing at the man’s legs, he forced him to fall forward. The man’s gun went off as they hit the ground. When the man started shouting out in English, an infuriated Maroc instinctively punched him hard in the face and knocked him cold. After handcuffing the uncousious man, Maroc stood up, dusted off his coat, and looked around the scene. The birds were gone, frightened by the gun, no doubt. Most of the other people had vanished too. Lecan had not returned. The woman the owls had attacked lay close-by. In her gray suit, she looked ordinary, a secretary perhaps. She was spread out on the ground with her eyes open, staring up at the sky with bloody scratches on her face and a leaking bullet hole in her temple. The dead man, whom the little bald fellow had shot before all the commotion, lay by her side, his legs bent wrong and his arm extended so that the two almost looked as though they were holding hands. Maroc shook his head in dismay. Papon would not like this at all.

Hearing a noise, Maroc looked up to see Lecan coming out of the brush, his hair askew, covered in dirt and leaves. He was pulling another handcuffed man along by his elbow. “I managed to trip him up as he was running by,” he said. “He’s an American.”

“I think this one’s American too,” said Maroc, pointing at the unconscious figure in the dirt. “You’d better take yours to the car and radio the station for some assistance. Get an ambulance here too. Tell them we have two bodies and two arrests.”

Lecan led his prisoner off, leaving Maroc standing in the clearing, looking over the three prone figures. Maroc remembered how when he was little, his overprotective mother would never let him play in the small local park after dusk. “Bad things happen in the dark when God cannot see you,” she would say. He wondered what she would think if she could see him standing in this clearing, in the company of two dead bodies and one unconscious prisoner. Yes, Mama, you were right, he thought, very bad things happen in the dark.

II