He crossed the darkened room swiftly and pulled the heavy mahogany door softly closed behind him. Then he plucked his handwritten card from the brass fixture by his door, stuck it inside his pocket, and made a quick dash for the marble stairway.
The Star of Shanghai was scheduled to sail on the tide at midnight. His old friend Brick Kelly, the CIA director, had informed him that somewhere deep in the bowels of that old rust bucket was a captured American operative formerly working deep cover. A dead man walking who just might be able to save the world.
His name, Hawke had learned in Gibraltar, was Harry Brock.
Chapter Five
Paris, 1970
WHAT A FRIEND ARCHITECTS HAVE IN SNOW, THE CORSICAN chuckled to himself, climbing out of his taxi. Almost a foot of the white stuff had fallen. Even the Gare d’Austerlitz, an ugly duckling by Parisian standards, looked beautiful with its frosting. The barrel-shaped man slogged across the Place Valhubert to the station’s entrance. No boots, just tired leather shoes, his icy wet socks sagging around his ankles in the slush. He’d left the taxi running. His fellow drivers at the stand would look after it, no problem.
Yes, there are many grand railway stations in Paris, Monsieur Emile Bonaparte considered on this freezing December night, brushing wet snow from his eyes with the back of his hand, but this one, this ugly duckling hiding under its mantle of winter white, this one is all mine.
A vaporous yellow light hovered inside the main hall’s soaring web of iron. A cloud of iridescent steam rose above the damp and overheated woolens of the teeming crowds. Surprisingly busy for a Sunday evening, he observed. There was a hubbub of noisy passengers as throngs departing for the South of France, Spain, and Portugal surged against travelers arriving from those selfsame destinations.
Like the battlefield ebb and flow of charging armies, the old soldier imagined, firing a soggy unfiltered Gauloise. Emile felt a certain stirring of his blood, pleased with this ironic, militaristic turn of thought. In the cafe earlier, he’d spied a lengthy piece in Paris Soir and relished every word of the account, chewing it carefully with pride, seeing the action.
On this very day in history, he saw, the second of December, 1805, his glorious ancestor Napoleon and his Grande Armee had defeated the Austro-Russian armies above the small Moravian town of Austerlitz. A sublime trap it had been. A feint here! There! Suddenly, the genius Napoleon had lured the Allies to the Pratzen Heights, had rushed in his III Corps to crush them! Ah, yes. Long ago and far away, but still shining through the mists of memory and history.
An army on a hill. The glory of it. La Gloire!
He looked up at the sudden shriek of a whistle. A massive white-sugared engine, heavily laden with snow, rumbled in amidst a cloud of frosty vapors. A rush of porters and people meeting the Nice–Paris train brushed by him. He jammed the cigarette into the corner of his mouth, shot the cuffs of his rough brown leather jacket, and joined the tide. Ahead, he saw the doors of the second-class carriages open, and his heart beat a little faster. He slipped on his heavy tortoiseshell glasses with brown, tobacco-stained fingers and scanned the emerging passengers. Was that—could it really be?
Luca.
Emile Bonaparte watched his son step down from the train and hardly recognized him. Well, he’s grown, hasn’t he? Emile thought. My God, he’s almost as tall as I am!
“Papa! Papa!” the boy cried. Emile grinned as his son shouldered between two jostling women struggling against the tide. One of the two, the beefy one who’d dropped her string bag full of baguettes, shouted angrily, wagging her stumpy finger at his son. But the fifteen-year-old, seeing an opening, laughed merrily at her and darted and dodged ahead, making his way toward his father.
Two very large men in loud sport jackets remained between father and son. Emile shoved past them and stepped forward and, with his arms spread wide, embraced his child. He was startled at the hard knots of muscle at his back and shoulders.
“Luca!” Emile said, clasping him happily to his breast. “Did you bring it? You didn’t forget, did you?”
“Don’t be stupid, Father! You only need look in my sack.”
Emile released his son from the embrace (Luca was plainly embarrassed by such a show), and his son handed him the parcel. Inside, four brown bottles of Pietra, the beer of his native Corsica, difficult to find in the small shops in the St. Germain des Pres.
“Eh bien, you must be hungry, eh?” he said, tousling the boy’s thick black hair. “Alors. Give me your knapsack. Let’s go eat some supper.” He picked up the boy’s battered valise and they headed for the exit. “Get ready. Cold as a witch’s tit, out there.”
Outside, slogging through heavy snowfall back to the taxi rank, Emile was glad of his leather jacket and worried about Luca’s worn woolen one. With a nod toward his friend Marcel, who’d been guarding his old Renault taxicab, he motioned to his son. “Allons! Vite! Quickly! You’ll freeze!”
“Good boy, Pozzo,” Luca said, opening the door and seeing the dog up front.
The dog, a scruffy old mutt with one eye, but a good watchdog, growled his assent and the boy slid into the front seat beside him. It was filthy in his father’s taxi and smelled of sweat and black French tobacco, yes, but it was warm, and even Luca, who considered himself a true Stoic, was glad of it after trudging through the deep snow. With a single sweep of his short powerful arm, Emile cleared the fresh accumulation of glistening powder from the windshield, and climbed behind the wheel. The ancient engine turned over reluctantly and they were off.
“Maurice is holding a table for me at Le Pin Sec,” Emile said, taking a left out of the car park and maneuvering the old Renault into the rutted snow of the Quai d’Austerlitz. “I know you like it.”
“Papa, no, no. Lilas. I insist.”
“Are you crazy?”
“It’s expensive. Yes. But I will treat you. I have made some money. Doing some jobs.”
“Jobs, eh? What kind of jobs?” Emile looked at his kid with a side-long glance. The bookworm had finally started working?
“I write articles for the papers,” the boy said, his face turned to the frosted window. “Political articles. They don’t pay much but I’ve saved it.”
“Political, eh? More love poems to Lenin and Trotsky? You and your Brigade Rouge. I hoped you would have outgrown this romantic infatuation with Communism by now.”
“There is a deep schism in the Corse, Papa,” Luca said. “The old, which is you. And the new, which is me. The Brigade Rouge.”
“A schism? Is that what you said? Schism?”
Luca just smiled and stared out at the passing images of his favorite city.
“No comment, eh?” his father said. He coughed something up, rolled down his window, and spat it out. He said, “Eh bien. No politics. I’m right and you’re left. I love you anyway. We’ll go to the Lilas. Give you and your fucking Red Menace the night off, eh, boy? Ha-ha!”
Somehow, the old man managed to open a bottle of the Pietra with one hand, and he swigged it while he drove.
“Merci bien,” he said, toasting his son with the bottle as they slid around a corner. “You want some?”
“Merci bien a tu, Mon Cher Papa,” the boy said, taking the bottle and tossing back a swig, his dark almond eyes shining in the glow of the dashlight. Emile laughed. His youngest son had the glossy dark hair, long thick eyelashes, and sallow complexion of a true Corsican. Yes, here was a boy weaned on olive oil; you could almost catch the fragrant scent of the pine forests of the maquis in his hair. As his father drove and drank from his bottle, Luca squirmed uncomfortably.
“What—there is something here—” There was a hard object on the seat, poking Luca’s hip. He raised himself up and grabbed it. A small black automatic pistol, he saw, holding it up to the light. It was flat and deadly looking. And, loaded, too, Luca could tell by the weight.
“Give me that,” Emile said. He flipped the empty bottle over his shoulder into the back and stretched out his
