The Shattered Eye, page 23
“I…no, I wasn’t…”
“But no one else is here,” he said blandly. She turned. The two uniformed security guards were staring at her. She turned back, and John stared at her. They stood in an awkward tableau for a moment. “Look,” she began, “the machine must have malfunctioned.”
John said, “Yes. That must be it.”
“Is this going to take long?”
“We notified Mr. Hanley. He wanted to be notified if anything…happened.”
“But what’s happened?”
“The machine, Mrs. Andrews. It shut down.”
“But we’ve had shutdowns before.”
“Yes, ma’am.” The voice was becoming more distant, cold.
“But am I going to have to wait for Hanley? I have to meet my husband…”
“Yes, ma’am, I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait. You see, I’m just in charge of security, I don’t have anything to do with the machine.”
“But what did you do before? I mean, when the machine shuts down.”
“We notify Mrs. Neumann.” He stared at her. “But she isn’t here now, Mrs. Andrews.”
27
PARIS
Evening lingered in the glow of the afternoon sun, which still brightened the clear sky but cast the buildings of the rue Mazarine into colors of purple and gray. Lights were on in the cafés, and the evening menus were posted on chalkboards in the windows of the narrow streets in the sixth arrondissement. Cars crawled slowly through the narrow ways; dogs—hundreds of different kinds of dogs—loped along the sidewalks, sat outside the cafés and brasseries with begging looks; the streets were beginning to fill for the evening with mingled throngs of students and tourists and the residents of the villages and ordinary Parisians taking part in the carnival life of the evening city.
Jeanne Clermont saw all these things and saw none of them. Her thoughts were turned back, to the reports she had given three men in the Elysée Palace. She hurried along the rue Mazarine, neatly sidestepping clots of tourists who blocked the way by crowding around the menus posted in windows or in stands on the street, and arguing in loud English or American voices how many francs equaled how many pounds or dollars.
She pushed through the massive door at Number 12 and crossed to the large room at the back of the building. The concierge looked out from her little cubicle at her.
“Bonsoir, madame,” she said automatically. But the concierge did not return her greeting. The old woman was cross and civil by turns, each mood lasting about a day, a woman who lamented life and celebrated it by the seasons of her emotions.
Jeanne Clermont climbed the winding stairs to her apartment. Not for the first time in the past month, she thought of that last evening with William Manning, how he had trailed her as they climbed the stairs and then the touch of him at the door, next to her, his breath—sweet with wine—against her cheek. There were matters that could not be put in reports or spoken of to anyone; there were private griefs that no one could know. Giscard—sensitive soul—had told her once as they walked along the Quai des Grands Augustins on a perfect autumn afternoon:
“See them, Jeanne? How many private sorrows do ordinary people hide when they walk on this street on this magnificent afternoon?”
“What do you mean?”
“I think,” Giscard had said, “that as one grows older, one begins to associate all pleasant moments in life with a remembrance of some private sorrow, so that even a beautiful afternoon becomes tinged with melancholy. Will you think of this afternoon someday and be sad because it will remind you of other afternoons when you thought you had been happy?”
Both of them knew that Giscard was dying.
“Yes,” she said now, to herself, to her locked door as she inserted the key in the lock. I will think of William on these stairs, I will think of him next to me as we lay on the couch; watching the thunderstorm come over the city. I will think of Giscard on a perfect afternoon in autumn when he was dying.
She opened the door and went inside and set her purse on the little elegant table in the entry hall and flicked on the foyer light. In two hours the police would arrive to take her to a safe house in the country before the operation began.
She closed the door behind her and then looked at the apartment. Everything had been made a shambles.
Books. Papers. Clothing. They were scattered on the rugs in the front room.
She felt suddenly sickened and afraid.
To cover her fear, she walked quickly into the front room, where she and William Manning had stayed and slept and loved while the storm shook around them.
A man was sitting on a chair of green cloth near the tall windows that opened to the balcony. The windows were shut, as she had left them in the morning. Nothing else in the room was the same; even the paintings on her walls had been removed, and some had been pried from the frames. It was not vandalism, she saw; the paintings rested on the floor, leaning against the walls. There were only the remains of a methodical search of everything she owned.
She stared at the unmoving, silent man.
He was in middle age; his hair was gray streaked with dark brown strands. His eyes were gray, cold and unyielding, as they returned her gaze. The line of his mouth was set, not frowning or smiling, but a mouth and face that revealed nothing. She saw that his face was cut with lines of age and experience like cuts of a knife in a wooden handle, to reveal some primitive counting process.
She did not speak. The silence lay between them like an invitation. She walked across the debris of the room to the tall windows and swung them out to catch the breath of cool evening.
She turned again and looked at him.
“This is about Manning,” Devereaux said at last.
“I see. And you—who are you?” Her voice was as cold as his was flat, as unyielding.
“That doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it does. How did you get in here?”
“I came in through the front door.”
“And the concierge?”
“She saw my identification. CID.” Inexplicably, the wintry face altered to a smile.
“Are you from CID?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so. You’re an American.”
“Manning. He was here before he was killed, he was supposed to have met you.”
“How do you know that?”
“Madame Clermont.” The accent was flat; no attempt was made to alter the broad American interpretation of the French he spoke. “He met you at four in the afternoon and he was killed the next morning and his body was dumped in the Seine. He had been with you and then he was killed. Does that suggest any reasonable line of questioning?”
She sat down in a brown chair across the room from him. The lights in the front room remained off. The fading light of day illuminated the shambles of the room in shades of purple; it might have been a battlefield in miniature. Across the dim room, each could see the shape of the other. And their eyes: they could see their eyes clearly, even in the half-light. Jeanne stared at him, and it seemed the color of her eyes changed from moment to moment, green to gray to deep blue and back through the narrow spectrum.
“Who are you?” she said.
“Devereaux,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter. I knew him.”
“William? When did you know him?”
“After the first time.”
“The first time?”
“Nineteen sixty-eight.”
“Where are you from?”
“Did you kill him?
Silence again. She stared at him for a moment before speaking. “No. I would not kill him.”
“No matter what?” Again the winter-hard smile, the unyielding probe of the flat, surging voice. Like a knife repeatedly stabbing, again and again, without anger and without mercy.
“You have no right to question me.”
“It’s not a matter of rights. You knew about Manning, didn’t you? Who told you?”
“William was a journalist from—”
“Don’t say that,” Devereaux interrupted. “It’s a lie, and we can’t start from that base. You knew what Manning was.”
“Did you find out what I was from destroying my room?”
“Nothing is destroyed.”
“Well, what did you learn in my possessions?”
“Your possessions are meticulous. As though you didn’t exist. No souvenirs, no keepsakes. Everything has been stripped from your things, as though you did not exist.”
“I do not need possessions,” she said. “Not to know that I exist.”
“Manning was a spy. He came to spy on you.”
She did not blink; she stared at him.
“You knew that.”
“Who are you?”
“I gave you a name and it doesn’t mean anything. I knew Manning a long time ago.”
“And me,” she said.
They paused.
She said, “I’m sorry he’s dead.”
“Yes. Well. That’s over,” Devereaux said.
No, she thought. I am not sorry he is dead. I am broken by it, but there will not be tears or grief or the horror of revealing these things to a stranger.
“When they found him, he carried something,” Devereaux said.
“How do you know what he carried?”
“I took it from a policeman. From a man who said he was a policeman. It was a photograph, an old picture taken when he was a lot younger. He must have taken it from your rooms when he searched them. It was a souvenir.” The last words were uttered with an ironic tone, as though the word “souvenir” was meant in both the English and French senses of a keepsake and a remembrance of a past event.
“I don’t understand you,” she said quietly.
“He black-bagged your apartment, he must have. It was standard procedure. It must be where he got the photograph.”
She was perfectly still; her eyes revealed nothing, not the soul and not the grief behind them. She stared at her own thoughts: William!
He took out the photograph and handed it to her. She held it and look at it in the dim light. They were standing together before the Tuileries. He seemed so awkward, bantering with the photographer, the monkey of a photographer who had danced around them and complimented her with extravagance.
All those years, she thought with a sudden rush of sadness. It was as though all her memories were dying colored leaves on the branches of a maple tree and now blown away by the first chill wind of autumn.
She touched the edges of the photograph to frame it better in memory, to control the grief rising in her. She must not look at it. Firmly, she gave it back to him.
“Manning was a fool.” His voice came harshly to her thoughts.
“Why would you say that?”
“When he left you in 1968, he was in love with you. He nearly quit the game. He talked about you, he sounded like a child when he talked about you. He told me he had loved you and betrayed you. And so they sent him back again to do the same job fifteen years later. Only now he didn’t get the chance to betray you.”
“I loved him.”
Devereaux waited for her to speak again, but her statement had surprised them both to silence. She had never thought she would tell that to anyone. Her grief was for herself, and now this stranger had pulled it from her and displayed it.
“When did you know him?” she said when she thought her voice would not betray her.
“In Saigon. After he was here.”
“And what did he say?”
“What I told you.”
“You were his friend.”
“No. Not a friend. He wanted to tell me, he wanted to tell someone.” Devereaux’s voice altered; it was softer now, it was as though he were understanding something for the first time. “You can’t tell anyone. You’re in the Section, you don’t have friends, everything you do is done in secret. You lie, and you close up your life like closing up rooms of a house after you use them. He had to tell me, but I wasn’t his friend.”
“But you’re here,” she said.
“I was sent here.”
“But why?”
“To find out what happened to Manning.”
“Only that?”
“Yes,” Devereaux said.
“You told me that he couldn’t tell anyone,” Jeanne said. “You described yourself.”
Devereaux stared at her. “No. Not myself. I just understood him.”
“Because you could never tell anyone,” Jeanne said.
“He was not my friend.” Devereaux got up and went to the French windows and looked down at the narrow length of rue Mazarine. “We were in a bar in Saigon and got drunk. He felt remorse about you. It wasn’t his fault, it was the Section. He was too young for the job, too much of a romantic. They should have known he would have fallen in love with you.”
“What should he have done?”
He turned, surprised. “Quit,” Devereaux said. “He should have gotten out. Then.”
She smiled. “And come back to me? And gotten me out of prison? And married me, made me an honest woman? And lived happily ever after?”
Devereaux now was silent.
“Who is romantic, Monsieur Devereaux?” Her voice was suddenly weary. “I was in their hands, there was nothing he could have done.”
“So he did the next best thing,” Devereaux said. “He suffered and came back after fifteen years to martyr himself.”
“To betray me again, you said it.”
“No. Not this time. I think I understand that now. It wouldn’t have happened again.” He said it softly.
“That is your romance,” she said.
“No. But you were willing to use him this time, weren’t you?”
“Yes. That’s part of it. It had to be done. I didn’t ask him to come back.”
“And you set him up to kill him.”
“No. Not William. Just to say that means you don’t understand.”
“Who are you, Jeanne?”
“I cannot say. Not now.”
“You must.”
“I work for the government of France.”
“Manning wasn’t killed because of that,” Devereaux said.
“That’s too cruel of you to say.”
“Nothing is cruel except death.”
“What do you want?”
“I want you to tell me about you. And Manning.”
“Do you want my grief then? Do you want tears?” She stood up and walked over to him. He saw her eyes had changed again in the light, that they were the green of a rain forest, and they were damp with tears. “You see, I can cry and I can grieve if you want to see my humiliation. I can tell you that I loved William, but why would you want to know these things?”
“To know why he was killed.” The same dogged words returned to Devereaux. He stared at her tears but he did not move away from her.
“I don’t know. That is part of the grief as well. I don’t know who killed him or why.”
“I—”
Devereaux never finished.
The door of the apartment burst open and three men rushed into the front room. Each was armed with an Uzi submachine gun, fed with large, ugly banana clips of bullets, the murderous black barrels sweeping the room.
The three men wore ski masks and black sweaters and black trousers.
There was no sound; they came around the two of them and pointed the gun barrels at them.
Devereaux did not move, but Jeanne Clermont whirled, her eyes wide, regarding the gunmen with fear and contempt. “What is this? Why have—”
“Shut up, Jeanne Clermont. Traitor.”
“Who is this one?”
“That’s all right; I know.”
“Who are you?” Jeanne Clermont said.
The first one—a larger man with a large head hidden beneath the mask—struck her with the tip of the gun barrel. The barrel crashed against her cheek and drew blood. She fell, one ankle twisting beneath her as her heels dug into the carpeting.
“What do we do with this one? Shoot him?”
“Shut up, Georges.”
The middle gunman pulled out a wide roll of white tape. “Open,” he said in rough French to Devereaux. Devereaux continued to stare at him, his hands held loosely at his side; he was deciding.
And then the third man slipped the pistol out of his belt.
“Open,” the middle gunman said again, prodding Devereaux with the gun at his chest.
Devereaux opened his mouth and the tape was lashed across his opened lips, pushing against his tongue. They wound the tape around his head twice as he stood still. The tape bit against his lips and forced his tongue back into his throat; he felt like gagging.
They grabbed his hands and wound the tape around his wrists behind him. The first gunman was on his knees, repeating the procedure with Jeanne Clermont. She did not struggle. Blood congealed on her darkening cheek.
“We go downstairs to the courtyard in back, and when we push you in the car, you get down,” the middle gunman said. “And if you give us a hard time, we’ll break your face open. You understand, bitch? And you?”
Devereaux felt the gunman behind him prod the gun in his back, urging him forward. The first gunman grabbed Jeanne Clermont by the arm and shoved her along to the door. They were pushed along down the stairs to the main floor, where a fourth gunman waited with an Uzi trained on the frightened concierge.
Out the back way into the court. A gray Citroën, quite large. Devereaux stared at the license plate for a moment and then was hurled into the back of the car, his head forced down between the seat cushion and the back of the front seat. A moment later, he felt shoes against his face; he could smell them. A moment more and he heard a muffled cry from Jeanne Clermont, shoved in behind him. More feet, and then they pulled bags over their heads. He could not breathe for a moment, but forced himself to remain calm. Slowly, he experimented with breathing; slowly, breath came, stale and difficult, as though he were trying to breathe in a small box of a room.
Again he heard a muffled cry from Jeanne Clermont, but he could not see her. He could feel her body pressed against his.
The car started up and lurched into the street.
28
FAIRFAX
She had dreamed of Leo when she slept. Leo had been far away, down a broad valley full of spring flowers in the mountains. The mountains brooded in gray clouds behind them, but here it was all light. Perhaps it was morning. She could smell the flowers in the freshness of the damp breeze that blew down from the mountains. Leo was walking toward a cabin hidden down in the valley near the base of the foothills. It was so beautiful, she had thought in her dream, it was the first day of their lives together.
“But no one else is here,” he said blandly. She turned. The two uniformed security guards were staring at her. She turned back, and John stared at her. They stood in an awkward tableau for a moment. “Look,” she began, “the machine must have malfunctioned.”
John said, “Yes. That must be it.”
“Is this going to take long?”
“We notified Mr. Hanley. He wanted to be notified if anything…happened.”
“But what’s happened?”
“The machine, Mrs. Andrews. It shut down.”
“But we’ve had shutdowns before.”
“Yes, ma’am.” The voice was becoming more distant, cold.
“But am I going to have to wait for Hanley? I have to meet my husband…”
“Yes, ma’am, I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait. You see, I’m just in charge of security, I don’t have anything to do with the machine.”
“But what did you do before? I mean, when the machine shuts down.”
“We notify Mrs. Neumann.” He stared at her. “But she isn’t here now, Mrs. Andrews.”
27
PARIS
Evening lingered in the glow of the afternoon sun, which still brightened the clear sky but cast the buildings of the rue Mazarine into colors of purple and gray. Lights were on in the cafés, and the evening menus were posted on chalkboards in the windows of the narrow streets in the sixth arrondissement. Cars crawled slowly through the narrow ways; dogs—hundreds of different kinds of dogs—loped along the sidewalks, sat outside the cafés and brasseries with begging looks; the streets were beginning to fill for the evening with mingled throngs of students and tourists and the residents of the villages and ordinary Parisians taking part in the carnival life of the evening city.
Jeanne Clermont saw all these things and saw none of them. Her thoughts were turned back, to the reports she had given three men in the Elysée Palace. She hurried along the rue Mazarine, neatly sidestepping clots of tourists who blocked the way by crowding around the menus posted in windows or in stands on the street, and arguing in loud English or American voices how many francs equaled how many pounds or dollars.
She pushed through the massive door at Number 12 and crossed to the large room at the back of the building. The concierge looked out from her little cubicle at her.
“Bonsoir, madame,” she said automatically. But the concierge did not return her greeting. The old woman was cross and civil by turns, each mood lasting about a day, a woman who lamented life and celebrated it by the seasons of her emotions.
Jeanne Clermont climbed the winding stairs to her apartment. Not for the first time in the past month, she thought of that last evening with William Manning, how he had trailed her as they climbed the stairs and then the touch of him at the door, next to her, his breath—sweet with wine—against her cheek. There were matters that could not be put in reports or spoken of to anyone; there were private griefs that no one could know. Giscard—sensitive soul—had told her once as they walked along the Quai des Grands Augustins on a perfect autumn afternoon:
“See them, Jeanne? How many private sorrows do ordinary people hide when they walk on this street on this magnificent afternoon?”
“What do you mean?”
“I think,” Giscard had said, “that as one grows older, one begins to associate all pleasant moments in life with a remembrance of some private sorrow, so that even a beautiful afternoon becomes tinged with melancholy. Will you think of this afternoon someday and be sad because it will remind you of other afternoons when you thought you had been happy?”
Both of them knew that Giscard was dying.
“Yes,” she said now, to herself, to her locked door as she inserted the key in the lock. I will think of William on these stairs, I will think of him next to me as we lay on the couch; watching the thunderstorm come over the city. I will think of Giscard on a perfect afternoon in autumn when he was dying.
She opened the door and went inside and set her purse on the little elegant table in the entry hall and flicked on the foyer light. In two hours the police would arrive to take her to a safe house in the country before the operation began.
She closed the door behind her and then looked at the apartment. Everything had been made a shambles.
Books. Papers. Clothing. They were scattered on the rugs in the front room.
She felt suddenly sickened and afraid.
To cover her fear, she walked quickly into the front room, where she and William Manning had stayed and slept and loved while the storm shook around them.
A man was sitting on a chair of green cloth near the tall windows that opened to the balcony. The windows were shut, as she had left them in the morning. Nothing else in the room was the same; even the paintings on her walls had been removed, and some had been pried from the frames. It was not vandalism, she saw; the paintings rested on the floor, leaning against the walls. There were only the remains of a methodical search of everything she owned.
She stared at the unmoving, silent man.
He was in middle age; his hair was gray streaked with dark brown strands. His eyes were gray, cold and unyielding, as they returned her gaze. The line of his mouth was set, not frowning or smiling, but a mouth and face that revealed nothing. She saw that his face was cut with lines of age and experience like cuts of a knife in a wooden handle, to reveal some primitive counting process.
She did not speak. The silence lay between them like an invitation. She walked across the debris of the room to the tall windows and swung them out to catch the breath of cool evening.
She turned again and looked at him.
“This is about Manning,” Devereaux said at last.
“I see. And you—who are you?” Her voice was as cold as his was flat, as unyielding.
“That doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it does. How did you get in here?”
“I came in through the front door.”
“And the concierge?”
“She saw my identification. CID.” Inexplicably, the wintry face altered to a smile.
“Are you from CID?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so. You’re an American.”
“Manning. He was here before he was killed, he was supposed to have met you.”
“How do you know that?”
“Madame Clermont.” The accent was flat; no attempt was made to alter the broad American interpretation of the French he spoke. “He met you at four in the afternoon and he was killed the next morning and his body was dumped in the Seine. He had been with you and then he was killed. Does that suggest any reasonable line of questioning?”
She sat down in a brown chair across the room from him. The lights in the front room remained off. The fading light of day illuminated the shambles of the room in shades of purple; it might have been a battlefield in miniature. Across the dim room, each could see the shape of the other. And their eyes: they could see their eyes clearly, even in the half-light. Jeanne stared at him, and it seemed the color of her eyes changed from moment to moment, green to gray to deep blue and back through the narrow spectrum.
“Who are you?” she said.
“Devereaux,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter. I knew him.”
“William? When did you know him?”
“After the first time.”
“The first time?”
“Nineteen sixty-eight.”
“Where are you from?”
“Did you kill him?
Silence again. She stared at him for a moment before speaking. “No. I would not kill him.”
“No matter what?” Again the winter-hard smile, the unyielding probe of the flat, surging voice. Like a knife repeatedly stabbing, again and again, without anger and without mercy.
“You have no right to question me.”
“It’s not a matter of rights. You knew about Manning, didn’t you? Who told you?”
“William was a journalist from—”
“Don’t say that,” Devereaux interrupted. “It’s a lie, and we can’t start from that base. You knew what Manning was.”
“Did you find out what I was from destroying my room?”
“Nothing is destroyed.”
“Well, what did you learn in my possessions?”
“Your possessions are meticulous. As though you didn’t exist. No souvenirs, no keepsakes. Everything has been stripped from your things, as though you did not exist.”
“I do not need possessions,” she said. “Not to know that I exist.”
“Manning was a spy. He came to spy on you.”
She did not blink; she stared at him.
“You knew that.”
“Who are you?”
“I gave you a name and it doesn’t mean anything. I knew Manning a long time ago.”
“And me,” she said.
They paused.
She said, “I’m sorry he’s dead.”
“Yes. Well. That’s over,” Devereaux said.
No, she thought. I am not sorry he is dead. I am broken by it, but there will not be tears or grief or the horror of revealing these things to a stranger.
“When they found him, he carried something,” Devereaux said.
“How do you know what he carried?”
“I took it from a policeman. From a man who said he was a policeman. It was a photograph, an old picture taken when he was a lot younger. He must have taken it from your rooms when he searched them. It was a souvenir.” The last words were uttered with an ironic tone, as though the word “souvenir” was meant in both the English and French senses of a keepsake and a remembrance of a past event.
“I don’t understand you,” she said quietly.
“He black-bagged your apartment, he must have. It was standard procedure. It must be where he got the photograph.”
She was perfectly still; her eyes revealed nothing, not the soul and not the grief behind them. She stared at her own thoughts: William!
He took out the photograph and handed it to her. She held it and look at it in the dim light. They were standing together before the Tuileries. He seemed so awkward, bantering with the photographer, the monkey of a photographer who had danced around them and complimented her with extravagance.
All those years, she thought with a sudden rush of sadness. It was as though all her memories were dying colored leaves on the branches of a maple tree and now blown away by the first chill wind of autumn.
She touched the edges of the photograph to frame it better in memory, to control the grief rising in her. She must not look at it. Firmly, she gave it back to him.
“Manning was a fool.” His voice came harshly to her thoughts.
“Why would you say that?”
“When he left you in 1968, he was in love with you. He nearly quit the game. He talked about you, he sounded like a child when he talked about you. He told me he had loved you and betrayed you. And so they sent him back again to do the same job fifteen years later. Only now he didn’t get the chance to betray you.”
“I loved him.”
Devereaux waited for her to speak again, but her statement had surprised them both to silence. She had never thought she would tell that to anyone. Her grief was for herself, and now this stranger had pulled it from her and displayed it.
“When did you know him?” she said when she thought her voice would not betray her.
“In Saigon. After he was here.”
“And what did he say?”
“What I told you.”
“You were his friend.”
“No. Not a friend. He wanted to tell me, he wanted to tell someone.” Devereaux’s voice altered; it was softer now, it was as though he were understanding something for the first time. “You can’t tell anyone. You’re in the Section, you don’t have friends, everything you do is done in secret. You lie, and you close up your life like closing up rooms of a house after you use them. He had to tell me, but I wasn’t his friend.”
“But you’re here,” she said.
“I was sent here.”
“But why?”
“To find out what happened to Manning.”
“Only that?”
“Yes,” Devereaux said.
“You told me that he couldn’t tell anyone,” Jeanne said. “You described yourself.”
Devereaux stared at her. “No. Not myself. I just understood him.”
“Because you could never tell anyone,” Jeanne said.
“He was not my friend.” Devereaux got up and went to the French windows and looked down at the narrow length of rue Mazarine. “We were in a bar in Saigon and got drunk. He felt remorse about you. It wasn’t his fault, it was the Section. He was too young for the job, too much of a romantic. They should have known he would have fallen in love with you.”
“What should he have done?”
He turned, surprised. “Quit,” Devereaux said. “He should have gotten out. Then.”
She smiled. “And come back to me? And gotten me out of prison? And married me, made me an honest woman? And lived happily ever after?”
Devereaux now was silent.
“Who is romantic, Monsieur Devereaux?” Her voice was suddenly weary. “I was in their hands, there was nothing he could have done.”
“So he did the next best thing,” Devereaux said. “He suffered and came back after fifteen years to martyr himself.”
“To betray me again, you said it.”
“No. Not this time. I think I understand that now. It wouldn’t have happened again.” He said it softly.
“That is your romance,” she said.
“No. But you were willing to use him this time, weren’t you?”
“Yes. That’s part of it. It had to be done. I didn’t ask him to come back.”
“And you set him up to kill him.”
“No. Not William. Just to say that means you don’t understand.”
“Who are you, Jeanne?”
“I cannot say. Not now.”
“You must.”
“I work for the government of France.”
“Manning wasn’t killed because of that,” Devereaux said.
“That’s too cruel of you to say.”
“Nothing is cruel except death.”
“What do you want?”
“I want you to tell me about you. And Manning.”
“Do you want my grief then? Do you want tears?” She stood up and walked over to him. He saw her eyes had changed again in the light, that they were the green of a rain forest, and they were damp with tears. “You see, I can cry and I can grieve if you want to see my humiliation. I can tell you that I loved William, but why would you want to know these things?”
“To know why he was killed.” The same dogged words returned to Devereaux. He stared at her tears but he did not move away from her.
“I don’t know. That is part of the grief as well. I don’t know who killed him or why.”
“I—”
Devereaux never finished.
The door of the apartment burst open and three men rushed into the front room. Each was armed with an Uzi submachine gun, fed with large, ugly banana clips of bullets, the murderous black barrels sweeping the room.
The three men wore ski masks and black sweaters and black trousers.
There was no sound; they came around the two of them and pointed the gun barrels at them.
Devereaux did not move, but Jeanne Clermont whirled, her eyes wide, regarding the gunmen with fear and contempt. “What is this? Why have—”
“Shut up, Jeanne Clermont. Traitor.”
“Who is this one?”
“That’s all right; I know.”
“Who are you?” Jeanne Clermont said.
The first one—a larger man with a large head hidden beneath the mask—struck her with the tip of the gun barrel. The barrel crashed against her cheek and drew blood. She fell, one ankle twisting beneath her as her heels dug into the carpeting.
“What do we do with this one? Shoot him?”
“Shut up, Georges.”
The middle gunman pulled out a wide roll of white tape. “Open,” he said in rough French to Devereaux. Devereaux continued to stare at him, his hands held loosely at his side; he was deciding.
And then the third man slipped the pistol out of his belt.
“Open,” the middle gunman said again, prodding Devereaux with the gun at his chest.
Devereaux opened his mouth and the tape was lashed across his opened lips, pushing against his tongue. They wound the tape around his head twice as he stood still. The tape bit against his lips and forced his tongue back into his throat; he felt like gagging.
They grabbed his hands and wound the tape around his wrists behind him. The first gunman was on his knees, repeating the procedure with Jeanne Clermont. She did not struggle. Blood congealed on her darkening cheek.
“We go downstairs to the courtyard in back, and when we push you in the car, you get down,” the middle gunman said. “And if you give us a hard time, we’ll break your face open. You understand, bitch? And you?”
Devereaux felt the gunman behind him prod the gun in his back, urging him forward. The first gunman grabbed Jeanne Clermont by the arm and shoved her along to the door. They were pushed along down the stairs to the main floor, where a fourth gunman waited with an Uzi trained on the frightened concierge.
Out the back way into the court. A gray Citroën, quite large. Devereaux stared at the license plate for a moment and then was hurled into the back of the car, his head forced down between the seat cushion and the back of the front seat. A moment later, he felt shoes against his face; he could smell them. A moment more and he heard a muffled cry from Jeanne Clermont, shoved in behind him. More feet, and then they pulled bags over their heads. He could not breathe for a moment, but forced himself to remain calm. Slowly, he experimented with breathing; slowly, breath came, stale and difficult, as though he were trying to breathe in a small box of a room.
Again he heard a muffled cry from Jeanne Clermont, but he could not see her. He could feel her body pressed against his.
The car started up and lurched into the street.
28
FAIRFAX
She had dreamed of Leo when she slept. Leo had been far away, down a broad valley full of spring flowers in the mountains. The mountains brooded in gray clouds behind them, but here it was all light. Perhaps it was morning. She could smell the flowers in the freshness of the damp breeze that blew down from the mountains. Leo was walking toward a cabin hidden down in the valley near the base of the foothills. It was so beautiful, she had thought in her dream, it was the first day of their lives together.
