He marched off to the stand on his stumpy legs, like a soldier going off to battle, and returned with a hot dog gingerly daubed with mustard.
“My fairs’ ‘uht dohg,” he proclaimed in his most atrocious accent. Then he laughed, and Gideon laughed too.
After a few quiet minutes of congenial munching, Delvaux spoke again.
“Ah! I nearly forgot! Do you recognize this?” He placed a battered black umbrella on his lap.
Gideon had vaguely noticed him carrying it on their walk.
“No, should I?”
Monsieur Delvaux popped the last fragment of hot dog into his mouth. “Look here,” he said, pointing to one of several dents in the umbrella. “You are an anthropologist. Would you not say that this indentation matches the cranial conformation of Monsieur Lau?”
“This is Sholokov’s umbrella?” Gideon said.
Delvaux energetically licked some crumbs from his fingertips, then rubbed his hands together. They made a dry, rustling sound. He unscrewed the metal ferrule at the end of the umbrella, slipped off the black fabric with its underlying struts, and set them aside on the bench. What was left was a conventional handle of artificial bamboo attached to a very unconventional length of aluminum pipe a little over a foot long and an inch in diameter. Two inches down from the handle, something that looked very much like a trigger protruded from the pipe.
“Pull it,” said Delvaux.
Gideon did; there was a click and a powerful concussion inside the pipe. Delvaux took the instrument back from him.
“To pull the trigger releases a spring inside,” he said. “The spring drives a piston hammer—you know what a piston hammer is?”
“Sort of,” Gideon said.
“… drives a piston hammer two inches forward. Inside the tube is, or was, a small cylinder of gas that is attached to a hollow needle. Do you follow me so far?”
“More or less. Go ahead.”
The piston drives the needle two millimeters into the victim’s skin—your skin, let us say—at the same instant as the gas impels a miniscule pellet, less than a millimeter in diameter, into the tiny skin puncture. The needle retracts at once, leaving you with nothing more than a passing pin-prick sensation… and an invisible poison pellet lodged under your skin. Ingenious, no?“
Amid the shopping center sounds of normal living, Gideon found it hard to give credence to the device, in fact to the whole conversation. Nearby an eight-year-old and his mother were talking at the mustard dispenser.
“Mom, could Jesus Christ beat up King Kong?”
“Yes,” the mother said, not listening.
“If King Kong was after me, I would punch him in the stomach with a karate chop.”
“That’s right, hon,” the mother said.
Gideon picked up the weapon and looked at it. The soldered joints were surprisingly sloppy. “You know, it’s hard for me to believe this sort of thing really exists.”
Delvaux smiled. “It was used quite successfully in Munich in 1963, in Vienna a few years after that… and who knows how many more times? The poison is unknown and nearly undetectable.”
“Why didn’t he use it this time?”
“I think we can assume he was working his way up to a ‘casual’ brush against you when—so he thought—you spotted him.”
“But why didn’t he use it then instead of hitting John over the head with it?”
“The poison is slow-acting. In four hours the victim notices some difficulty in breathing. In twenty-four hours, by which time he has forgotten all about the brief, stinging sensation of the day before, he is dead. Excellent for leisurely assassinations, but not much use for quick getaways, you see.”
“I killed him, didn’t I?” said Gideon quietly. “In the scuffle. I heard the click.”
“It’s hard to say,” said Delvaux. “He was stabbed several times in the fight with Monkes. But yes, he also had a pellet in his foot. The autopsy has not yet been performed. Probably the pellet would have killed him soon enough.”
Delvaux looked into Gideon’s face, his eyes suddenly concerned. “My dear friend, you cannot allow yourself to suffer for this. It was not your fault. He was an assassin, a professional killer. It was his own weapon, meant for you. He brought it upon himself.”
Gideon wondered what Delvaux was seeing in his face. What he was feeling, if anything, was a detached, mild interest; it was difficult to convince himself that any of it was real, let alone that it involved him. “You’ve explained why Monkes was after me,” he said slowly, “but why Sholokov? Why would the KGB want to kill me?”
“We believe that also is because of a misunderstanding—”
“I’m certainly happy to hear that.”
Delvaux smiled, not without friendliness. “Let me go back a little. As you know, we have been aware for some time that a member of your university has been supplying extraordinarily crucial information to the Russians in connection with a mysterious undertaking we know only as Operation Philidor. Our hope in assigning you to Sigonella and Torrejon, the two remaining bases, was to draw this person out. We hoped that he, or perhaps she, feeling hounded and personally endangered, might turn to you, a naive, ignorant newcomer—you understand the sense in which I speak—for help in getting the needed information. We did not think he—or she—would ask you
