The Aquitaine Progression: A Novel

  He selected the articles of clothing that fit best and put them on; the rest he threw into the marsh. Whatever he looked like, there was little or no resemblance to the tweedy academic he had tried to be in Bonn. If anything, he could be mistaken for a man who worked on the Rhine, a roughhewn mate or a foreman of a barge crew. He had chosen the chauffeur’s coat, a dark, coarse-woven jacket cut to the hips, with the man’s blue denim shirt underneath—both bullet holes washed clean of blood. The trousers were those of the subordinate executioner; brown creaseless corduroys, flared slightly at the ankles, which, thankfully, they reached. Neither man had worn a hat, and his was somewhere in the landfill; he would find one or buy one or steal one. He had to; without a hat or a cap covering part of his face, he felt as naked, as exposed and as frightened as he would have felt without clothes.

  He lay back in the dry wild grass as the sun disappeared over an unseen horizon and stared up at the sky.

  24

  “Well, Ahh’l be …!” exclaimed the distinguished-looking man with the flowing mane of white hair, his full, nearly white eyebrows arched in astonishment. “You’re Molly Washburn’s boy?”

  “I beg your pardon?” said the Army officer at the adjacent table along the banquette in Bonn’s Am Tulpenfeld restaurant. “Have we met, sir?”

  “Not so’s you’d remember, Major.… Please forgive my intruding.” The Southerner addressed the apology to the officer’s companion across the table, a balding middle-aged man who had been speaking English with a pronounced German accent. “But Molly would never forgive this pore old Georgia cracker if he didn’t say hello to her son and insist on buyin’ him a drink.”

  “I’m afraid I’m at a loss,” said Washburn pleasantly but without enthusiasm.

  “I would be, too, young fella. I know it sounds cornpone, but you were just barely in long pants back then. The last time I saw you, you were in a blue blazer jacket and madder ’n hell at losing a soccer game. I think you blamed it on your left wing, which in my opinion then and now is a logical place to blame anything.”

  The major and his companion laughed appreciatively. “Good Lord, that does go back a long time—to when I was at Dalton.”

  “And captain of the team, as I recall.”

  “How did you ever recognize me?”

  “I dropped in on your momma the other week at the house in Southampton. Proud girl that she is, there were a few real handsome photographs of you in the living room.”

  “Of course, on the piano.”

  “That’s where they were, silver frames and all.”

  “I’m afraid I’ve forgotten your name.”

  “Thayer. Thomas Thayer, or just plain old T.T. as your momma calls me.” The two shook hands.

  “Good to see you again, sir,” said Washburn, gesturing at his companion. “This is Herr Stammler. He handles a great deal of our press relations with the West German media.”

  “How do you do, Mr. Stammler.”

  “A pleasure, Herr Thayer.”

  “Speakin’ of the embassy and I assume you were, I promised Molly I’d ring you up over there when I got here. Mah word on it, I was goin’ to do just that tomorrow—I’m fightin’ jet lag today. One hell of a coincidence, isn’t it? You bein’ here and my bein’ here, right next to each other!”

  “Major,” interrupted the German courteously. “Two people who go back so many years must have a great deal to reminisce about. And since our business is fundamentally concluded, I think I shall press on.”

  “Now, hold on, Mr. Stammler,” objected Thayer. “Ah simply couldn’t allow you to do that!”

  “No, really, it’s perfectly all right.” The German smiled. “Truthfully, Major Washburn felt he should insist on taking me to dinner this evening after the terrible things we’ve had to deal with during the past few days—he far more than I—but to be quite honest, I’m exhausted. Also I am far older than my young friend and nowhere near as resilient. The bed cries out, Herr Thayer. Believe me when I tell you that.”

  “Hey, Mr. Stammler, Ah’ve got an idea. You’re fanned out and I’m droppin’ from the jet stream, so why don’t we leave the young skunk here and both hit the pillows?”

  “But I couldn’t allow you to do that.” The German got up from the table and extended his hand to Thayer. They shook, and Stammler turned to Washburn, shaking his hand also. “I’ll call you in the morning, Norman.”

  “All right, Gerhard.… Why didn’t you just say you were tired?”

  “And conceivably offend one of my largest clients? Be reasonable, Norman. Good night, gentlemen.” The German smiled again, and walked away.

  “Ah guess we’re stuck with each other, young man,” said the Southerner. “Why not move over here and let me save the embassy a couple of dollars?”

  “All right,” replied Washburn, getting up with his drink and sidling between the tables to the chair opposite Thayer. He sat down. “How is Mother? I haven’t called her in a couple of weeks.”

  “Molly is always Molly, my boy. She came forth and they broke the mold, but I don’t have to tell you that. She looks the same as she did twenty years ago. I swear I don’t know how she does it!”

  “And she’s not going to tell you, either.”

  Both men laughed as the Southerner raised his glass and brought it forward for the touch. The glasses met, a gentle ring was heard. It was the beginning.

  Converse waited, watching from a dark storefront on the shabby street in Emmerich. Across the way were the dim lights of a cheap hotel, the entrance uninviting, sleazy. Yet with any luck he would have a bed there in the next few minutes. A bed with a sink in the corner of the room and, with even more luck, hot water with which he could bathe his wound and change the bandage again. During the last two nights he had learned that such places were his only possibilities for refuge. No questions would be asked and a false name on a registration card expected. But even the most sullen greeting was a menace for him. He had only to open his mouth and whatever came out identified him as an American who could not speak German.

  He felt like a deaf-mute running a gauntlet, careening off walls of people. He was helpless, so goddamned helpless! The killings in Bonn, Brussels and Wesel had made every American male over thirty and under fifty suspect. The melodramatic suspicions were compounded by speculations that the obsessed man was being aided, perhaps manipulated, by terrorist organizations—Baader-Meinhof, the PLO, Libyan splinter groups, even KGB destabilization teams sent out by the dreaded Voennaya. He was being hunted everywhere, and as of yesterday, the International Herald Tribune had printed further reports that the assassin was heading for Paris—which meant that the generals of Aquitaine wanted the concentration to be on Paris, not where they knew he was, where their soldiers could run him down, take him, kill him.

  To get off the streets he had to move with the flotsam and jetsam and he needed a run-down hotel like the one across the street. He knew he had to get off the streets; there were too many traps outside. So on the first night in Wesel he remembered the student Johann, and looked for ways to re-create similar circumstances. Young people were less prone to be suspicious and more receptive to the promise of financial reward for a friendly service.

  It was odd, but that first night in Wesel was both the most difficult and the easiest. Difficult because he had no idea where to look, easy because it happened so rapidly, so logically.

  First he stopped at a drugstore, buying gauze, adhesive tape, antiseptic and an inexpensive cap with a visor. Then he went to a café, to the men’s room, where he washed his face and the wound, which he bound tight, skin joining skin, the bandage firmly in place. Suddenly, as he finished his ministrations, he heard the familiar words and emphatic melody, young raucous voices in song: “On, Wisconsin.… On, Wisconsin … on to victoreee …”

  The singers were a group of students from the German Society at the University of Wisconsin, as he later found out, who were bicycling through the northern Rhineland. Casually approaching a young
man getting more beers from the bar and introducing himself as a fellow American, he told an outrageous story of having been taken by a whore and rolled by her pimp, who stole his passport but never thought of a money belt. He was a respected businessman who had to sleep it off, gather his wits, and reach his firm back in New York. However, he spoke no German; would the student consider the payment of $100 for helping him out?

  He would and did. Down the block was a dingy hotel where no questions were asked; the young man paid for a room and brought Converse, who was waiting outside, his receipt and his key.

  All yesterday he had walked, following the roads in sight of the railroad tracks until he reached a town named Halden. It was smaller than Wesel, but there was a run-down, industrial section east of the railroad yards. The only “hotel” he could find, however, was a large, shoddy house at the end of a row of shoddy houses with signs saying ZIMMER, 20 MARK in two first-floor windows and a larger one over the front door. It was a boardinghouse, and several doors beyond in the spill of the streetlamps a heated argument was taking place between an older woman and a young man. Above, a few neighbors sat in their windows, arms on the sills, obviously listening. Joel also listened to the sporadic words shouted in heavily accented English.

  “… ‘I hate it here!’ Das habe ich ihm gesagt. ‘I do not care to stay, Onkel! I vill go back to Germany! Maybe join Baader-Meinhof!’ Das habe ich ihm gesagt.”

  “Narr!” screamed the woman, turning and going up the steps. “Schweinehund!” she roared, as she opened the door, went inside and slammed it shut behind her.

  The young man had looked up at his audience in the windows and shrugged. A few clapped, so he made an exaggerated, elaborate bow. Converse approached; there was no harm in trying, he thought. “You speak very good English,” he said.

  “Vye not?” replied the German. “They spend bags of groceries for five years to give me lessons. I must go to her brother in America. I say Nein! They say Ja! I go. I hate it!”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. I’m an American and I like the German people. Where were you?”

  “In Yorktown.”

  “Virginia?”

  “Nein! The city of New York.”

  “Oh, that Yorktown.”

  “Ja, my uncle has two butcher shops in New York, in what they call Yorktown. Shit, as you say in America!”

  “I’m sorry. Why?”

  “The Schwarzen and the Juden! If you speak like me, the black people steal from you with knives, and the Jews steal from you with their cash registers. Heinie, they call me, and Nazi. I told a Jew he cheated me—I vas nice, I vas not impolite—and he told me to get out of his shop or he call the ‘cops’! I vas shit, he said!… You vear a good German suit and spend good German money, they don’t say those things. You are a delivery boy trying to learn, they kick the shit out of you! What do I know! My father vas only a fourteen-year-old soldier. Shit!”

  “Again, I’m telling you I’m sorry. I mean it. It’s not in our nature to blame children.”

  “Shit!”

  “Perhaps I can make up for a little of what you went through. I’m in trouble—because I was a stupid American. But I’ll pay you a hundred American dollars …”

  The young German happily got him a room at the boardinghouse. It was no better than the one in Wesel, but the water was hotter, the toilet nearer his door.

  Tonight was different from the other nights he had spent in Germany, thought Joel, as he looked across the street at the decrepit hotel in Emmerich. Tonight could lead to his passage into Holland. To Cort Thorbecke and a plane to Washington. The man Joel had recruited was somewhat older than the others who had helped him. He was a merchant seaman out of Bremerhaven, in Emmerich to make a duty call on his family, with whom he felt ill at ease. He had made the obligatory call, been soundly rebuked by his mother and father, and had returned to the place and the people he loved best—a bar at the bend of the riverbank.

  Again, as it had been in Wesel, it was the English lyrics of a song that had caught Joel’s attention. He stared at the young seaman standing at the bar and playing a guitar. This time it was not a college football song but an odd, haunting mixture of slow biting rock and a sad madrigal: “… When you finally came down, when your feet hit the ground, did you know where you were? When you finally were real, could you touch what you feel, were you there in the know?…”

  The men around the bar were caught up by the precise beat of the minor-key music. When the seaman finished there was respectful applause, followed by a resumption of fast talk and faster refilling of mugs of beer. Minutes later Converse was standing next to the seagoing troubador, the guitar now slung over his shoulder and held in place by a wide strap like a weapon. Joel wondered if the man really knew English or only lyrics. He would find out in seconds. The seaman laughed at a companion’s remark; when the laughter subsided, Converse said, “I’d like to buy you a drink for reminding me of home; It was a nice song.”

  The man looked at him quizzically. Joel stammered, thinking that the seaman had no idea what he was talking about. Then, to Converse’s relief, the man answered. “Danke. It is a good song. Sad but good, like some of ours. You are Amerikaner?”

  “Yes. And you speak English.”

  “Okay. I don’t read no good, aber I speak okay. I’m on merchant ship. We sail Boston, New York, Baltimore—sometimes ports, Florida.”

  “What’ll you have?”

  “Ein Bier,” said the seaman, shrugging.

  “Why not whisky?”

  “Ja?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Ja.”

  Minutes later they were at a table. Joel told his story about a nonexistent whore and a fictional pimp. He told it slowly, not because he felt he had to pace the narrative to his listener’s understanding, but because another option was coming sharply into focus. The guitar-playing merchantman was young, but there was a patina about him that indicated he knew the docks and the waterfront and the various businesses that flourished in that very special world.

  “You should go to the Polizei,” said the man when Converse had finished. “They know the whores and they will not print your name.” The German smiled. “We want you back to spend more money.”

  “I can’t take the chance. In spite of the way I look, I deal with a lot of important people—here and in America.”

  “Which makes you important, ja?”

  “And very stupid. If I could just get over into Holland, I could handle everything.”

  “Die Niederlande? Vat is problem?”

  “I told you, my passport was taken. And it’s just my luck that every American crossing any border is looked at very carefully. You know, that crazy bastard who killed the ambassador in Bonn and the NATO commander.”

  “Ja, and in Wesel two, three days ago,” said the German. “They say he goes to Paris.”

  “I’m afraid that doesn’t help me.… Look, you know the river people, the men who have boats going out every day. I told you I’d pay you a hundred dollars for the hotel.…”

  “I agreed. You are generous.”

  “I’ll pay you a great deal more if you can somehow get me over into Holland. You see, my company has an office in Amsterdam. They can help me. Will you help me?”

  The German grimaced and looked at his watch. “Is too late for such arrangements tonight and I leave for Bremerhaven on the morning train. My ship sails at fifteen hundred.”

  “That was the amount I had in mind. Fifteen hundred.”

  “Deutsche marks?”

  “Dollars.”

  “You are more crazy than your Landsmann who kills soldiers. If you knew the language, it cost no more than fifty.”

  “I don’t know the language. Fifteen hundred American dollars—for you if you can arrange it.”

  The young man looked hard at Converse, then moved back his chair. “Wait here. I will make phone call.”

  “Send over more whisky on your way.”

  “Danke.”

/>   The waiting was spent in a vacuum of anxiety. Joel looked at the weathered guitar lying across an extra chair. What were the words?… When you finally came down, when your feet hit the ground … did you know where you were? When you finally were real, could you touch … what you feel, were you there in the know?…

  “I will stop for you at five o’clock in the morning,” announced the merchant seaman, who sat down with two glasses of whisky. “The captain will accept two hundred dollars, aber only if there are no drugs. If there are drugs, you don’t come on board.”

  “I have no drugs,” said Converse, smiling, controlling his elation. “That’s done and you’ve earned your money. I’ll pay you at the dock or pier or whatever it is.”

  “Natürlich.”

  * * *

  It had all happened less than an hour ago, thought Joel, watching the hotel entrance across the street. At five o’clock in the morning he would be on his way to Holland, to Amsterdam, to a man named Cort Thorbecke, Mattilon’s broker of illegal passports. All the passenger manifests on all aircraft heading for the United States would be watched by Aquitaine, but a hundred years ago he had learned that there were ways to elude the watchers. He had done it before from a deep, cold shaft in the ground and despite a barbed-wire fence in the darkness. He could do it again.

  A figure emerged under the dimly lit marquee of the hotel. It was the young merchant seaman. Grinning, he beckoned Converse to join him.

  “Hell’s fire and Jeesus H, what is it, Norman?” cried the Southerner, as Washburn suddenly went into an erratic series of convulsions, his lips trembling as he gasped for air.

  “I … don’t … know.” The major’s eyes grew wide, the pupils now dancing and out of control.

  “Maybe it’s that Heimlich thing!” said Thomas Thayer, rising from the banquette and quickly moving toward Washburn. “Hell no, it can’t be! Our food’s not here; you haven’t eaten!”