vagabond cleaned his nails with a long knife. Bruno grabbed Sylvie by the arm and the camera showed his fingers pressing into her skin. It didn’t matter much to Ivan. His chin kept dropping onto his chest, then he would snap awake. The idea of an old man sleeping in a movie house in the middle of the afternoon was very depressing, simply not the sort of thing he would do, but there seemed to be no way to avoid it. They didn’t find him until after midnight, when an usher came down the aisle to wake him up and couldn’t.
On his way to work, Khristo saw the headlines: DIPLOMAT SOVIET ASSASSINE LA MORT A VISITE L’OPRA! JOUR DE MAI EST JOUR DE MORT POUR DIPLOMAT SOVIET
There were photographs. It took him a moment to recognize “Boris,” a dark shape tossed carelessly on a gray pavement. He stood in a small crowd in front of the kiosk and read the secondary headlines and lead paragraphs. Trotskyist pamphlets had been found on the body of Dmitri Myagin, assistant cultural attache at the Soviet embassy. Ivan Donchev, a Bulgarian citizen but long a resident of the city, had been discovered dead of a gunshot wound in a movie theater near the site of the assassination. The DST, the French internal security service, was treating the death as associated with the Myagin shooting. All emigre groups in the city would be questioned regarding the incident. An anarchist splinter party, LEC (Liberte, Egalite, Communite), had claimed credit for the action. The Soviet ambassador, in a written statement, had decried violence and murder in the streets, and lawlessness in general, as maladies of an oppressive capitalist system. What would be said to the grieving widow? The fatherless children?
Khristo, standing in the sunlight, went cold. Fools. Who could not accomplish a simple street robbery without killing. And old Ivan-what in God’s name had Omaraeff been thinking of, to permit an innocent like that in the vicinity of an action? The assassins reportedly fled in a taxi. Was that Pazar? In his own taxi, perhaps? It was unspeakable. Nobody could be that stupid. There had been a good chance that a simple, quiet robbery might not even have been reported by the Russians-one little crime was nothing compared to their obsession with gold-for it would have imperiled the operation at Floriot. But murder, in front of witnesses, in the middle of the afternoon, in a good neighborhood, with obvious Balkan overtones-that would stir up the newspapers for weeks and the police would be forced into making a serious effort.
And the searching finger, he knew, would be scratching at his door soon enough.
The Russians would find a way to break into the investigation-the Paris NKVD residency surely had its friends in the DST Perhaps his passport photo was being studied by the police right now. His assumed identity would not hold up under scrutiny-Omaraeff had seen through it easily enough.
In addition, the death of Kerenyi on a Montmartre street still gnawed at him. He wasn’t at all the type to look for a fight in a whorehouse. He too might have defected-from Spain or wherever they had sent him after Arbat Street-and hidden out in Paris. If the man who’d killed him was a Spetsburo assassin, evidence pointed to a desire for publicity. An
Perhaps they had succeeded.
He was ice cold, but a droplet of sweat ran down his side, and there was a claw in his stomach. He had money, hidden in the light fixture in the hallway outside his room. Perhaps they could run. Where? Into Germany? Into Spain? That was madness. Holland, then, or Belgium. Very well, then what? They would have to work soon enough. That meant permits, and police, and no Omaraeff to smooth the way. But if the murder of Kerenyi had been NKVD work-and the more he thought about it the more he knew he had to make that assumption-it was intended to flush the game, to make the rabbits run. Thus, if he ran, he was playing into their hands. They would snap him up.
And he knew what came next.
By the time he was pounding up the Rue du Bac, a few blocks from Heininger, the blackness had come down upon him hard. Everything he had so carefully pieced together, from love and work and a few tenuous dreams, was trembling in the wind. How flimsy it was, he thought. Built on sand. How he had deluded himself, that he could make what he wanted out of his life. It wasn’t so.
“Dear boy.”
He stopped dead and looked for the voice. It came from an open two-seater, a forest green Morgan parked at the curb. Recognition arrived a moment later-the reddish hair swept across the noble brow, cool eyes shadowed with dark makeup. The man who had given him his card at Winnie Beale’s birthday party on the Rue de Varenne.
” ‘Lo there, Nick. Come sit with us a minute, will you?” It wasn’t precisely a request. He walked around the back of the car and climbed in. The upholstery on the bucket seat was worn smooth with time and care and smelled like old leather.
“Roger Fitzware. Remember me?” They shook hands.
“Yes,” he said. “At Madame Beale’s house.”
“You were going to come ‘round and get your picture took, you bad boy.”
Khristo shrugged. “I am sorry,” he said simply.
“No matter, no matter. Everybody’s so blasted busy these days. Even old Nick, eh?”
“Yes. Even now, I was going to work.”
“Oh let’s steal a minute, shall we? First of all, you must say ‘congratulations.’ “
“Congratulations, Mr. Fitzware.”
“Plain Roddy, dear boy. And I thank you. Seems I’ve got me a job. Of all things! The old family back in Sussex would absolutely perish from the shock if they heard, but there it is.”
“I am glad for you.”
“Thank you, thank you. Sort of a society column kind of a thing, it seems, fellow wasn’t all that clear about it. ‘Just a few tidbits, dear boy,’ he says. ‘The odd
“Yes, I think so. Tid, bits.”
“That’s it!”
“And from me you want …?”
“Tidbits, dear boy. Just as you said. You’re in the way of finding out all sorts of things, aren’t you. One goes here and one goes there and one finds old Nick choppin’ up a salmon, eh? It’s a natural, that’s what I say. Here you are, having to listen to every sort of prattle all day and half the night, now here’s the chance to make the odd franc at it. Oh say yes, Nick, I’d be truly grateful.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Fitzware. I must not do such things. My job….”
“Dear boy! Don’t even think it. You must, y’know, really you must.”
Khristo-not Nick the waiter at all-gave him a long look. Fitzware sat casually, half turned, at the wheel of the Morgan, his dark blue blazer-double-breasted and stoutly made-hung perfectly, and the striped tie meant something, though Khristo wasn’t sure exactly what. A man who had everything he wanted, yet his face was tense and pale, in fear, evidently, that he would receive no tidbits.
“I must?”
“Yes, well, damn it all, Nick, there it is. You must.”
“Be your spy, you mean.”
“Dear boy, such language.”
“But that is what you mean. Who goes in bed with who. What people say when they drink too much. Who doesn’t pay their bill at the restaurant. That is what you want from me. And you will pay for it.”
Fitzware, in one fluid motion, produced a thin pack of hundred-franc notes from somewhere, laid it on Khristo’s knee, and patted it twice. “Smart lad,” he said, in a voice entirely different from the one he always used.
Khristo picked up the banknotes, wet the tip of his thumb, counted them-there were twenty-folded the sheaf twice, to make it a thick wad, then reached across the car and stuffed the money in the breast pocket of Fitzware’s blazer.
“Well. Now you’ve surprised me, Nick. And you can’t imagine how difficult it is to surprise me.” His eyes were wide and unmoving, like an insulted cat.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Fitzware. But I must go to work now.”
“Last thing. Have a look in the glove box, will you?”
Khristo turned the knob and the wooden panel fell open. There was an envelope lying flat on the felt interior.
