Now in the St. Germain the ashen face he saw reminded him of how tired and racked with pain he was, how much he just wanted to lie down and let his strength come back to him. As Salanne had said, he needed rest badly. He had tried to sleep on the train from Avignon, but the frequent stops at rural depots that were farmers’ points of delivery had jolted him awake whenever he dozed. And when awake, his head had throbbed, his mind filled with a profound sense of loss, confusion, and anger. The one man on earth to whom he had given his trust and love, the giant who had replaced his father and had shaped his life, had cut him loose and he had no idea why. Throughout the years, during the most harrowing and isolated times, he was somehow never alone because the presence of Anton Matthias was always with him. Anton was the spur that drove him to be better than he was, his protection against the memories of the early terrible days, because his přítel had given them meaning, perspective. Certainly no justification, but a reason for doing what he was doing, for spending his life in an abnormal world until something inside him told him he could join the normal one. He had fought against the guns of Lidice and the arbiters of gulag termination in whatever form he had found them.
Those guns will always be with you, my příteli. I wish to Almighty God you could walk away from them, but I don’t think you can. So do what lessens the pain, what gives you purpose, what removes the guilt of having survived. Absolution is not here among the books and argumentative theoreticians; you have no patience with their conceptualism. You have to see practical results.… One day you will be free, your anger spent, and you will return. I hope I am alive to witness it. I intend to be.
He had come so close to being free, his angers reduced to an abstract sense of futllity, his return to a normal world within his grasp and understanding. It had happened twice. Once with the woman he loved, who had given another breadth of meaning to his life … and then without her, loving neither her nor the memory of her, believing the lies of liars, betraying his innermost feelings—and her. Oh, God!
And now the one man who could fulfill the prophecy he had made years ago to his krajanu, his student, his son, had thrown him out of his life. The giant was a mortal, after all. And now his enemy.
“Mon Dieu, you look like a graduate of Auschwitz!” whispered the tall Frenchman in the velvet-collared overcoat and gleaming black shoes standing several feet to the right of Havelock in front of the window. “What happened to you?… No, don’t tell me! Not here.”
“Where?”
“On the Quai Bernard, past the university, is a small park, a playground for children mostly,” continued Gravet, admiring his own figure in the glass. “If the benches are occupied, find a place by the fence and I’ll join you. On your way, purchase a bag of sweets and try to look like a father, not a sexual deviant.”
“Thanks for the confidence. Did you bring me anything?”
“Let’s say you are heavily in my debt. Far more than your impecunious appearance would suggest you could pay.”
“About her?”
“I’m still working on that. On her.”
“Then what?”
“The Quai Bernard,” said Gravet, adjusting his scarlet tie and tilting his gray homburg as he regarded his reflection in the window. He turned with the grace of a ballet master and walked away.
The small park was chilled by the winds off the Seine, but they did not deter the nurses, nannies and young mothers from bringing their boisterous charges to the playground. Children were everywhere—on the swings, jungle gyms, seesaws—it was bedlam. Fortunately for Michael’s waning strength, there was a vacant bench against the far back wall, away from the more chaotic center of the riverside park. He sat down, absently picking tiny colored mints out of a white paper bag while looking at a particularly obnoxious child kicking a tricycle; he hoped that whoever might be observing him would think the youngster was his, reasoning that the small boy’s real guardian would stay as far away as possible. The child stopped punishing the three wheels long enough to return his stare with an astonishing malevolence.
The elegant Gravet walked through the red-striped entrance and levitated his way around the rim of the playground, nodding pleasantly, benignly to the screaming children in his path, an elder full of kindness toward the young. It was quite a performance, thought Havelock, knowing that the epicene critic loathed the surroundings. Finally he reached the bench and sat down, snapping a newspaper out in front of him.
“Should you see a doctor?” asked the critic, his eyes on the paper.
“I left one only hours ago,” replied Michael, his lips by the edge of the white paper bag. “I’m all right, just tired.”
“I’m relieved, but I suggest you clean yourself up, including a shave. The two of us in this particular park could bring on the gendarmes. The opposite poles of an obscene spectrum, would be the conclusion.”
“I don’t feel like being funny, Gravet. What have you got?”
The critic folded the paper, snapping it again, as he spoke. “A contradiction, if my sources are accurate, and I have every reason to believe they are. A somewhat incredible contradiction, in fact.”
“What is it?”
“The KGB has no interest in you whatsoever. I could deliver you, a willing, garrulous defector snapped from the jaws of imperialists, to their Paris headquarters—an importing firm on the Beaumarchais, but I suspect you know that—and I wouldn’t get a sou.”
“Why is that a contradiction? I said the same thing to you several weeks ago on the Pont Royal.”
“That isn’t the contradiction.”
“What is?”
“Someone else is looking for you. He flew in last night because he thinks you’re either in Paris now or on your way here. The word is he’ll pay a fortune for your corpse. He’s not KGB in the usual sense, but make no mistake about it, he’s Soviet.”
“Not … in the usual sense?” asked Havelock, bewildered, yet sensing the approach of an ominous memory, a recent memory.
“I traced him through a source in the Militaire Etranger. He’s from a special branch of Soviet intelligence, an elite corps of—”
“Voennaya Kontra Razvedka,” Michael broke in harshly.
“If the shortened form is VKR, that’s it.”
“It is.”
“He wants you. He’ll pay dearly.”
“Maniacs.”
“Mikhail, I should tell you. He flew in from Barcelona.”
“Costa Brava!”
“Don’t look at me! Move to the edge of the bench!”
“Do you know what you just told me?”
“You’re upset I must leave.”
“No!… All right, all right!” Havelock lifted the white paper bag to bis face; both his hands were trembling and he could hardly breathe as the pain in his chest surged up to his temples. “You know what you’ve got to deliver now, don’t your You’ve got it, so give it to me.”
“You’re in no condition.”
“I’ll be the Judge of that. Tell me!”
“I wonder if I should. Quite apart from the payment I may never see, there’s a moral dilemma. You see, I like you, Mikhail. You’re a civilized man, perhaps even a good man, in a very unsavory business. You took yourself out; have I the right to put you back in?”
“I am back in!”
“The Costa Brava?”
“Yes!”
“Go to your embassy.”
“I can’t! Don’t you understand that?”
Gravet broke his own sacrosanct rule: he lowered the newspaper and looked at Havelock. “My God, they couldn’t,” he said quietly.
“Just tell me.”
“You leave me no choice.”
“Tell me! Where is he?”
The critic rose from the bench, folding the paper, as he spoke. “There’s a run-down hotel on the Rue Etienne. La Couronne Nouvelle. He’s on the second floor, Room Twenty-three. It’s in the front; he observes everyone who enters.”
The bent-over figure of the tramp was
like that of a derelict in any large city. His clothes were ragged but thick enough to ward off the cold in deserted alleyways at night, his shoes cast-off heavy-soled boots, the laces broken and tied in large, awkward knots. On his head was a wool knit cap set low on his brow; his eyes focused downward, avoiding the world in which he could not compete, and which in turn found his presence unnerving. But over the tramp’s shoulder was his soiled canvas satchel, the oily straps held in a firm grip, as if he were proclaiming the dignity of possession: This is my all, what is left of me, and it is mine. The man approaching La Couronne Nouvelle had no age; he measured time only by what he had lost. He stopped at a wire trash basket and dug through the contents with methodical patience—a sidewalk archaeologist.
Havelock separated a torn lamp shade from a soggy bag of half-eaten lunch, and angled the small tinted mirror between them, his hands concealed by the filthy fabric of the shade. He could see the Russian directly above in the second-floor window; the man was leaning against the sill, watching the street, studying the pedestrians, waiting. He would stay by that window for a simple reason: his strike force was deployed; had a counterstrike been mounted? Michael knew him—not by name or reputation, or even from a photograph in a file, but he knew him, knew the set of the face, the look in the eyes. Havelock had been where this man had been—where he was now. The process had been set in motion, the word cautiously put out; word was awaited back at the command post of one. The lethal compromisers had been reached, none having allegiance to anything or anybody except the dollar, the franc, the pound and the deutsche mark. A sliding scale of incentive payments had been circulated, bonuses matching the value of various contributions, the highest, of course, the kill with proof of the kill. Word and method of the target’s arrival, sightings at specific locations, alone or with known or unknown associates, a hotel, a café, a pension, a rooming house—all had value in terms of immediate payment. A competition had been created among the qualified practitioners of violence, each professional enough to know that one did not lie to the command post. Today’s loss was another day’s kill.
Sooner or later the man in the window would start getting his responses. A few would be mere speculation based on secondhand information; others would be honest error, which would not be penalized but analyzed for what it was. Then a single call would come, its authenticity established by a descriptive phrase or a certain reaction—unmistakably the target’s—and the command post would have its first breakthrough. A street, a café, a bench perhaps in a children’s park on the Seine—the practitioners would have spread out everywhere. The hunt was on, the prize many times a year’s income. And when the hunt came to an end, the man in the window would come out of his movable prison. Yes, thought Michael, he had been there. The waiting was the worst part.
He looked at his watch, his hand buried in the refuse. There was a second wire trash basket down the block, on the other side of the hotel’s entrance; he wondered if it would be necessary to go to it and continue foraging. He had gone past the hotel twice in a taxi—projecting his movements on foot, calculating his timing—before he had sought out the used—clothing shops in the Séverine—those and an obscure shop on the Sommerard where he had purchased ammunition for the Llama automatic and the magnum. He had phoned Gravet seven minutes ago and told him the clock was on; the Frenchman would place his call from a booth in the Place Vendôme; the crowds would guarantee his untraceable anonymity. What was holding him up? There were so many possibilities. Occupied booths, out-of-order phones, a talkative acquaintance who insisted on prolonging a street-corner conversation, all were reasonable assumptions, but whatever, Havelock knew he could not stay where he was any longer. Awkwardly, like an old man in pain—and indeed he was a not so young man in pain—he began to push himself up. He would force a deliberately unfocused eye to see what it should not see.
The man in the window whipped his head around. An intrusion had interrupted his concentration on the street; he walked back into the shadows of the room. Gravet had made his call. Now.
Michael lifted the satchel off the ground, dropped it in the wire receptacle and rapidly walked diagonally across the pavement toward the short flight of steps that led to the hotel’s entrance. With each stride he lessened his stooped posture to return gradually to normal height. As he climbed the concrete steps he placed his hand on the side of his face, his fingers gripping the edge of the wool knit cap. No more than eight feet above was the window in which the Soviet VKR officer had been standing only seconds ago, and in seconds he would return. Gravet’s call would be brief, professional; in no way could it be construed as a device. There was a possible sighting in the Montparnasse. Was the target injured? Did he walk with a pronounced limp? Whatever answers the Russian gave, the call would be terminated, probably in mid-sentence. If it was the target, he was heading for the Métro; the hunter would call back.
Inside the dark, musty lobby with the cracked tile floor and the cobwebs spanning the four corners of the ceiling, Havelock took off his cap, flattened the lapels of his disheveled jacket and ripped the already torn cloth that hung from the bottom of his coat. It was not much of an improvement, but in the dim light and with erect bearing, it was not inapppropriate for a hotel that catered to drifters and whores. It was not an establishment that scrutinized its clientele—only the legitimacy of their currency.
It had been Michael’s intention to project the image of a man painfully coming out of a long drunk, seeking a bed in which to shake through the final ordeal. It was not necessary; an obese concierge behind the cracked marble counter was dozing in a chair, his soft, fat hands folded on his protruding stomach. There was one other person in the lobby: a gaunt old man seated on a bench, a cigarette dangling from his lips below an unkempt gray moustache, his head bent forward as he squinted at a newspaper in his hands. He did not look up.
Havelock dropped the cap on the floor, side-kicked it toward the wall, and walked to his left, where there was a narrow staircase, the steps worn smooth from decades of use and neglect, the banister broken in several places. He started up the creaking steps and was relieved that the staircase was short There were no turns, no midpoint landings; the steps led straight from one level to the next. He reached the second floor and stood motionless, listening. There was no sound other than the distant hum of traffic, punctuated by sporadic shrieks of impatient horns. He looked at the door ten feet away, at the faded painted number, 23. He could discern no vocal undercurrent of a one-sided telephone conversation; the call from Gravet was over and the Soviet VKR officer was back at his window, the elapsed time no more than forty-five seconds. Michael unbuttoned his ragged jacket, reached underneath, and gripped the handle of the magnum. As he pulled the gun out from under his belt, the perforated cylinder caught briefly on the leather; with his thumb he released the safety and started down the dark, narrow hallway toward the door.
A creak on the floorboards—not his, not under him, behind him! He spun as the first door on the left beyond the staircase was pulled slowly open. Since it had been left ajar, there had been no sound of a turning knob; the open crack was a line of sight for someone inside. A short, heavyset man emerged, shoulders and spine against the frame, a weapon in his hand at his side. He raised the gun. Havelock had no time for assessment or appraisal, he could only react. Under different circumstances he might have held up his hand and whispered sharply a word, a signal, a note of warning to avert a terrible error; instead he fired. The man was blown off his feet, buckling back into the doorframe. Michael looked at the gun still gripped in the man’s hand. He had been right to shoot; the weapon was a Graz-Burya, the most powerful, accurate automatic produced in Russia. The VKR officer was not alone. And if there was one.…
A knob was being turned; it was the door directly across from Room 23. Havelock lurched to the wall to the right of the frame; the door opened and Michael spun around, the magnum raised chest-high, prepared to fire or deliver a blow—or drop his arm if it should turn out to be an in
nocent hotel guest. The man was in a crouch, and held a gun. Havelock crashed the barrel of the magnum on the man’s head. The Russian fell back inside the room; Michael followed and gripped the door to prevent it from slamming shut. He held the crack open less than an inch, stood still and waited. There was silence in the hall except for the faraway sounds of traffic. He backed away from the door, the magnum leveled at it, his eyes scanning the floor for the man’s gun. It was several feet behind the prone, unconscious figure; he kicked it forward beside the body, kneeled down and picked it up. It, too, was a Graz-Burya; the detail sent to Paris was equipped with the best. He shoved it into his jacket pocket, reached over and pulled the Russian toward him; the man was limp and would not be conscious for hours.
He got to his feet, went to the door and let himself out. The violent movements had drained him; he leaned against the wall breathing slowly, deeply, trying to put out of his mind the weakness and pain in his body. He couldn’t stop now. There was the first man in the door beyond the staircase; the door was open. Someone walking past would look inside and go into hysterics—after no doubt furtively checking the dead man’s pockets for money. Michael pushed himself away from the wall, and silently, on the balls of his thick-soled feet, made his way down the narrow corridor past the staircase. He pulled the door shut and started back toward Room 23.
He stood facing the barely legible numbers and knew be had to find the strength. There was nothing for it but to depend on the shock of the totally unexpected. He tensed his chest and stepped back from the door, then rushed forward leading with his unwounded shoulder, and crashed the full weight of his body against the wood. The door splintered and broke open; the VKR officer pivoted away from the window, his hand reaching for the exposed holster strapped to his belt. He stopped, swiftly thrusting both hands out in front of him, his eyes staring at the huge barrel of the magnum pointed at his head.
“I believe you were looking for me,” said Havelock.