The Aquitaine Progression: A Novel

  “Whatever you say, Fräulein Charpentier, will be accurately translated, I can assure you.”

  “Zoals juffrouw Charpentier zojuist zei…” The third voice, the voice in Dutch.

  “I haven’t seen my former husband in several years—three or four, I’d say. Actually, we’re strangers. I can only express the shock my whole country feels.…”

  “Juffrouw Charpentier, de vroegere mevrouw Converse …”

  “… he was a deeply disturbed man, subject to extreme depressions, but I never imagined anything like this.”

  “Hij moet mentaal gestoord zijn …”

  “There’s no connection between us, and I’m surprised you learned I was flying to Berlin. But I appreciate the chance to clear the air, as we say.”

  “Mevrouw Converse gelooft …”

  “In spite of the dreadful circumstances over which, of course, I had no control, I’m delighted to be in your beautiful city. Half-city, I guess, but yours is the beautiful part. And I hear the Bristol-Kempinski.… I’m terribly sorry, that’s what we call a ‘plug’ and I shouldn’t.”

  “It is a landmark, Fräulein Charpentier. It is not verboten over here. Do you feel at all threatened?”

  “Mevrouw Converse, voelt u zich bedreigd?”

  “No, not really. We’ve had nothing to do with each other for so long.”

  My God! Val had come over to find him! She was sending him a signal—signals! She spoke every bit as fluent German as the interviewer! They kept in touch every month; they had lunch together six weeks ago in Boston! Everything she was saying was a lie and in those lies was the code. Their code! Reach me!

  PART THREE

  27

  Joel was stunned, but he had to control his panic and try to isolate the words, the phrases. The message was in them! The Bristol-Kempinski was a hotel in West Berlin, he knew that. It was something else she had said, something that should trigger a memory—one of their memories. What was it?

  I haven’t seen my former husband in years.… No, only one of the lies. He was a deeply disturbed man.… Less a lie, but not what she was trying to tell him. Actually, we’re strangers.… There’s no connection between us.… Another lie, but with some truth in it.… Stop it! What was it!… Before, earlier.… I’m a consultant.… That was it!

  “May I speak with Miss Charpentier, please? My name is Mr. Whistletoe, Bruce Whistletoe. I’m the confidential consultant for Springtime antiperspirant for which your agency is doing some artwork, and it’s urgent, most urgent!” Con molta forza.

  Val’s secretary had been a talker, a marvelous spreader of in-house gossip, and whenever Joel and Valerie had wanted an extra hour for lunch or even a day, he would make such a phone call. It never failed. If a demanding vice-president (one of dozens) wanted to know where she was, the excitable secretary would tell of an urgent call from one of those outside watchdogs of a very large account. It was enough for any ulcer-prone executive, and Valerie’s understated professionalism took care of the rest. She would say “things” were under control and rarely did a relieved account man pursue what might give him an acid attack.

  She was telling him to use the tactic in case the police were monitoring her calls. He would have done so in any event; she was simply reminding him, warning him.

  The interview was over, the last few minutes obviously a recap in Dutch, the camera frozen on a still frame of Valerie’s face. When had the tape been made? How long had she been in Berlin? Goddamn it, why couldn’t he understand anything unless it was spoken in English? When she lied about her inability to speak German, Val had said it was a national disgrace. She was right, but she might have gone further; it was a national disorder rooted in arrogance. He looked around the café for a telephone; there was one on the rear wall several feet from the door to the men’s room, but he hadn’t the vaguest idea of how to use it! His frustrations grew, swirling into circles of panic. Suddenly he heard his name.

  “De Amerikaanse moordenaar Converse is advocaat. Hij is een ex-piloot uit de Vietnamese oorlog. Een ander advocaat, een Fransman, en een vriend van Converse …”

  Joel looked up at the screen bewildered, at once shocked, then paralyzed. There was a film clip, a hand-held camera entered an office door and focused on a body slumped over a desk, streams of blood spreading from the head like a hideous Medusa wig. Oh, Christ! It was René!

  As the recognition came an insert appeared on the upper left of the screen. It was a photograph of Mattilon—then another photograph was suddenly inserted on the right. It was he, the moordenaar Amerikaans, Joel Converse. The Dutch newscast had connected two events, the interview with Val and a death in France. Neither language nor diagrams were necessary. René had been killed and he had been named the killer. It answered the question; it was the reason Aquitaine had put out the word that an assassin was heading for Paris.

  He was a giver of death; it was his gift to new and old friends. René Mattilon, Edward Beale … Avery Fowler. And to enemies he did not know, could not evaluate, either as enemies or as individuals—a man in a tan overcoat in a Paris cellar, a guard above a riverbank on the Rhine, a pilot on a train, a memorably unmemorable face at the base of a landfill pyramid, a chauffeur moments later who had actually befriended him in a stone house with bars in the windows … an old woman who had played her role brilliantly in a raucous railway car. Death. He was either the distant observer or the executioner, all in the unholy name of Aquitaine. He was back, back in the camps and the jungles that he had sworn never to return to. He could only survive and hope that someone better than himself would provide the solutions. But at the moment, death was both his closest ally and his most hostile adversary. He wanted to collapse into nothingness—let someone else take up the cause no one knew had been given him in Geneva.

  Jesus! The tape! If it was even twelve or twenty-four hours old, Val probably had not received the envelope he had sent from Bonn! She could not have. She would not have flown to Europe if she had!

  Oh, my God! thought Joel, swallowing the last of the whisky as he rubbed his forehead, his confusion complete. Without the envelope in Nathan Simon’s hands, no plea to him made sense! No call to him would evoke anything but a demand that Joel turn himself in and a telephone trace would be put on the line. Nate would not disobey the law; he would fight violently for a client afterward, but not before that client obeyed the law. It was his religion, far more important to him than his temple, for the law allowed mistakes; it was essentially human, not esoterically metaphysical. Converse’s hands began to tremble; he had to find out!

  “Your filet of sole, Meneer.”

  “What?”

  “Your sole, sir,” repeated the waiter.

  “You speak English?”

  “But of course,” said the gaunt, bald-headed man with detached courtesy. “We spoke before, but you were very excited. This district can do that to a man, I understand.”

  “Listen—to—me.” Joel brought his hand across his lips, emphasizing each word. “I will pay you a lot of money if you will place a phone call for me. I don’t speak Dutch, or French, or German or anything but English. Can you understand that?”

  “I understand.”

  “To West Berlin.”

  “It is not difficult, sir.”

  “Will you do it for me?”

  “But of course, Meneer. You have a telephone credit card?”

  “Yes … no. I don’t want to use it.”

  “Of course.”

  “I mean I don’t—I don’t want it recorded anywhere. I have money.”

  “I understand. In a few minutes I shall be off my shift. I shall come for you. We shall place your call and I shall know the amount from the operator. You shall pay.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “And ‘a lot of money,’ ja? Fifty guilder, ja?”

  “You’re on. Yes.”

  Twenty minutes later Converse sat behind a small desk in a very small office. The waiter handed him the phone. “They speak English, Menee
r.”

  “Miss Charpentier, please,” said Joel, his voice choking, overwhelmed by a kind of paralysis. If he heard her voice he was not sure he could handle his own reaction. For an instant he thought about slamming down the phone. He could not involve her!

  “Hello?”

  It was she, and as a part of him died another part came alive. A thousand pictures flashed across his mind, memories of happiness and anger, of love and of hate. He could not speak.

  “Hello? Who’s this?”

  “Oh … there you are. Sorry, it’s a lousy connection. This is Jack Talbot from … Boston Graphics. How are you, Val?”

  “Fine … Jack. How are you? It’s been a couple of months. Since lunch at the Four Seasons, if I remember.”

  “That’s right. When did you get in?”

  “Last night.”

  “Staying long?”

  “Just for the day. I’ve been in crisis meetings all morning, with another one this afternoon. If I’m not too bushed I’ll catch the plane back tonight. When did you get to Berlin?”

  “Actually, I’m not in Berlin. I saw you on a Belgian broadcast. I’m in … Antwerp, but I’m going to Amsterdam this afternoon. Christ, I’m sorry about all that crap you had to take. Who would ever have guessed it? About Joel, I mean.”

  “I should have guessed it, Jack. It’s all so horrible. He’s so very sick. I hope they catch him quickly for everyone’s sake. He needs help.”

  “He needs a firing squad, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  “I’d rather not discuss it.”

  “Did you get the sketches I sent you when we lost the Gillette account? I figured it was a way to your sack?”

  “Sketches?… No, Jack, I never got anything like that. But thanks for the thought, the sack notwithstanding.”

  Christ! “Oh? I thought you might have looked at your mail.”

  “I did … until the day before yesterday. It doesn’t matter—you’ll be in Amsterdam?”

  “For a week. I wondered if you were going to check any of the agency’s accounts up there before heading back to New York.”

  “I should, but I don’t think so. There’s no time. If I do, I’ll be at the Amstel Hotel. If not, I’ll see you back in New York. You can buy me lunch at Lutèce, and we’ll swap trade secrets.”

  “I’ve got more of them. You buy. Take care, youngster.”

  “Take care … Jack.”

  She was magnificent. And she had not received the envelope from Bonn.

  He roamed the streets, afraid of walking too fast, afraid of staying in one place too long, knowing only that he had to keep moving, watching, finding the shadows and letting them envelope him. She would be in Amsterdam by evening; he knew that, it was in her voice, and she had told him to reach her at the Amstel Hotel. Why? Why had she come? What did she think she was doing? Suddenly, the face of René Mattilon came to him. It was in sharp focus, filling his inner eye, surrounded by sunlight, the face a mask—a death mask. René had been killed by Aquitaine for sending him to Amsterdam. Valerie would not be spared if the disciples of George Marcus Delavane thought she had flown over to find him, to help him.

  He would not reach her! He could not! It was signing another death warrant! Her death warrant. He had taken so much from her, given so little. The last gift could not be the taking of her life. Yet … yet there was Aquitaine and he meant what he had said to Larry Talbot on the phone. He, one Joel Converse, was inconsequential where the gathering of the generals was concerned. So was A. Preston Halliday and Edward Beale and Connal Fitzpatrick. If Val could help, he had no right to let his feelings stop her—the lawyer in him told him that, the outraged man confirmed it. And it was possible she could help, do the things he could not do himself. She could fly back, get the envelope and go to Nathan Simon herself, saying that she had seen him, talked to him, believed him.

  It was three-thirty; it would be dark by eight o’clock or so. He had roughly five hours to remain unseen and stay alive. And somehow find a car.

  He stopped on the pavement and looked up at an overly made-up, extremely bored whore in a window on the third floor of a colorful brick house. Their eyes made contact and she smiled a bored smile at him, the thumb and forefinger of her right hand meeting, the wrist motion leaving little to the imagination.

  Why not? thought Converse. The only certain thing in a very uncertain world was the fact that there was a bed beyond that window.

  The “concierge” was a clerk, a man in his middle fifties with the pink face of an aging cherub, who explained in perfectly fluent English that payment was based on twenty-minute sessions, two sessions paid in advance, one to be refunded should the guest come downstairs during the final five minutes of the first period. It was a loan shark’s dream, thought Converse, glancing at the various clocks placed on numbered squares on the counter. As an elderly man walked down the staircase the clerk hastily grabbed one of the clocks and pushed the second hand forward.

  Joel calculated rapidly, converting guilders to dollars, the rate of acceleration based on roughly $30 per session. He gave the astonished “concierge” the equivalent of $275, accepted his number and headed for the staircase.

  “She is a friend, sir?” asked the stunned custodian of the revels as Converse reached the first step. “An old lover, perhaps?”

  “She’s a Dutch cousin I haven’t seen in years,” replied Joel sadly. “We have to have a long talk.” With heavy shoulders, he continued up the staircase.

  “Slapen?” exclaimed the woman with the spangled dark hair and heavily rouged cheeks. She was as astonished as her keeper below. “You want slapen?”

  “It doesn’t translate well, but yes,” said Converse, removing his glasses and his cap and sitting on the bed. “I’m very tired and sleep would be terrific, but I suspect I’ll just rest. Read one of your magazines, I won’t bother you.”

  “What is the matter? You think I am not pretty? Not clean? You yourself are no fine picture, Meneer! Cuts on your face, a bruise here and there, red eyes. Perhaps it is you who are not clean!”

  “I fell down. Come on, I think you’re adorable and I love your deep-purple eye shadow but I really want to rest.”

  “Why here?”

  “I don’t want to go back to the hotel. My wife’s lover is there. He’s my boss.”

  “Amerikaans!”

  “You speak our language very well.” Joel took off his shoes and stretched out on the bed.

  “Ach, I start with Amerikaan college boys. All talk, most are too afraid for nothing but talk. Those who get on the bed—poof!—is over. Then talk, too goddamn much talk. Then your soldiers and your sailors and your businessmen. Most drunk; they behave like giggle-children. All talk. Twelve years, I learn.”

  “Don’t write a book. They’re probably all senators and congressmen and priests by now.” Converse placed his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling. There was a glimmer of peace. He softly whistled the tune first, then found the words: “ ‘Yankee Doodle’ came to Holland/nothing in his pistol …’ ”

  “You are amusing, Meneer,” said the whore, laughing coarsely and picking up a thin blanket off a chair. She carried it to the bed and spread it over him. “You don’t tell the truth but you are amusing.”

  “How do you know I’m not telling you the truth?”

  “If your wife had a lover, you would kill him.”

  “Not so.”

  “Then she would not be your wife. I see many men, Meneer. It’s in your face. You are a good man, perhaps, but you would kill.”

  “I’ll have to think about that,” said Joel uncomfortably.

  “Sleep, if you wish. You paid. I am here.” The woman walked to the chair against the wall and sat down with a magazine.

  “What’s your name?” asked Converse.

  “Emma,” replied the whore.

  “You’re a nice person, Emma.”

  “No, Meneer, I am not.”

  He awoke, startled by the touch, and bolted up
right on the bed, his hand instinctively rushing to his waist to make sure his money belt was in place. He had been so deep in sleep that for a moment he had no idea where he was, then he saw the garishly made-up woman standing beside him, her hand on his shoulder as she spoke.

  “Meneer, are you hiding from people?” she asked softly.

  “What?”

  “Word goes up and down the Leidseplein. Men are asking questions.”

  “What?” Converse whipped the blanket off the bed and swung his legs to the floor. “What men? Up and down where?”

  “Het Leidseplein—This district. Men ask questions. They look for an American.”

  “Why here?” Joel moved his right hand from the money belt up to the outline of the weapon above.

  “People who wish not to be seen often come down to the Leidseplein.”

  Why not? thought Converse. If he thought of it, why wouldn’t the enemy? “Do they have a description?”

  “It is you,” answered the whore frankly.

  “And?” Joel looked into the woman’s eyes.

  “Nothing was said.”

  “I can’t believe our friend downstairs felt so charitable toward me. I’m sure they offered money.”

  “It was given,” corrected the whore. “More promised with additional information. A man remains behind down the street. In a café next to a telephone. He is to be called and will bring back the others. Our … friend downstairs thought you might want to match the funds.”

  “I see. An auction. One head on the block.”

  “I do not understand.”

  “What are we talking about? How much?”

  “A thousand guilder. Much more if you are taken.”

  “Our friend still sounds too charitable. I’d think he’d grab it and close up shop.”

  “He owns the building. Also, the man was German and spoke like a soldier giving orders, that’s what our friend downstairs said.”

  “He was right. The man is a soldier but not in any army Bonn knows about.”

  “Zo?”

  “Nothing. Find out if our friend will take American money.”

  “Of course he will.”