hoped those two were pros and knew what the heck they were doing.
When trying to spot surveillance, the secret is not to appear to be looking for it. A surveillance subject who stops to look for reflections in windows, pauses to tie his shoes, darts across traffic or jumps on or off a subway at the last moment red-flags himself, telling the watcher that, indeed, he is worth watching.
I checked my watch and, exactly at twenty-one minutes past eight in the evening, stepped out of a Left Bank bar onto the sidewalk. I turned right and was walking along when a blue Citroen pulled over to the curb. A man was in the right seat with his window rolled down, and he was smoking a cigarette. I recognized him; his name was Rich Thurlow, and he was originally from Brooklyn. “Need a ride?” he said, just loud enough for me to hear.
“Yeah,” I said. I opened the rear passenger door and climbed in. The car was in motion again as I slammed the door. I lay down in the rear seat.
Rich turned around and looked at me. He nodded toward the driver. “You know Al.”
“Hey there,” I said, and tried to make myself comfortable. The back seats of Citroens are not designed for guys over six feet to lie down in.
“Hey,” the driver said, and concentrated on driving.
“Long time no see,” Rich said. He tossed his weed out the window and fished another from a pack in his shirt pocket.
“So how’s everything?” I asked.
“The frogs had two cars on us tonight. We led them around for about an hour before we put some moves on them.” They laughed.
Well, if you couldn’t brag a little about your exploits, why be a spy?
“Think you’re clean?”
“Yeah, but hell, you never know. Fucking frogs…”
I sat up, putting my head into one corner so I would be difficult to see from a trailing car. “Won’t getting ditched make them suspicious?
“Would if this was the first time we did it,” Al Salazar said with a laugh. “We do it every time we go anyplace. They expect us to. They play the game awhile and let us go.”
Or follow unobtrusively. Well, this was Thurlow and Salazar’s station — all I could do was hope they knew what they were doing.
I knew them both, so I had reason to believe they did. Rich Thurlow and I had broken into a bank in Zurich, among other things. I had known him for about three years. He had a wife who cheated on him if left alone too long and a teenaged son who experimented with marijuana. He lived to fish and carried a telescoping rod with him everywhere. He even fished in the Seine during his lunch hour.
Alberto Salazar and I had worked together during my four months in Iraq. We ran on-the-job experiments with new technology to detect explosives through walls and in vehicles. He was about five and a half feet tall, very athletic, and single. Al was from Texas and spoke machine-gun-quick Spanish. His English was lightly accented, his Arabic pretty good, and his French tolerable; he could cuss a blue streak in any of those languages. He had an innate grasp of how a thing should work, so he was easy on the equipment and got results.
In short, Thurlow and Salazar were competent career professionals. When I told Grafton that I didn’t trust my colleagues, that statement might have conveyed a false impression. I had no specific complaints against anyone. And yet… sometimes it seemed that the harder we worked, the fewer results we had to show for it. Now and then a subject found out we were doing surveillance, or the other side transferred the guy we wanted somewhere else, making him unavailable, or people stopped talking in rooms we had bugged. Things are going to go wrong occasionally — that’s life — yet it seemed to me that in Europe, especially in Europe, things went wrong a little too much. Occasionally. Nothing I could put my finger on. Or maybe I’ve been in this game too long.
Hell, maybe we all had. “So Goldberg says you want a brief.”
“That’s right. Need to know everything you know about Henri Rodet.”
Both men turned to look at me. Salazar got his eyes back on the road two seconds later as Rich whistled. “Rodet, huh? Gonna start right at the top and work down.”
“Yeah. I want to see DGSE headquarters and Rodet’s residences. I hear he has a flat in Paris and a chateau somewhere outside the city.”
“Well, yeah, we can do that,” Salazar said, glancing at me again in the rearview mirror.
“Gonna get to know him better, are you?” Rich muttered. “I know him on sight, but that’s it. Never met the man and don’t want to. Real asshole, from what I hear — one hard, ruthless, tough son of a bitch. Made a lot of money somehow or other and runs a tight ship. Used to be the DGSE was a bunch of Inspector Clouseaus with attitudes, strictly amateur hour. Every naughty little thing they did got leaked to the press. You opened the morning paper to see what the spooks had been up to last night. Murders, kidnappings, smears of political enemies — they did it all. Rodet stopped the leaks. Hasn’t been a leak in years. They may be doing the same stuff, but you won’t read about it in Le Monde.”
Salazar was wending his way through the streets as Rich talked. I could see his right eye in the rearview mirror. His eyes never stopped moving — checking the mirrors, looking at traffic to the right and left, oncoming, checking pedestrians …
Rich finally tired of talking about the French spooks and got started on Paris station gossip. He and Salazar gave me the latest on the boss, George Goldberg, who was trying to eat his way through every restaurant in Paris during his tour. He had eaten in 237, by his count, according to Salazar. They discussed the possibility that George might be lying about that number. They condemned George’s practice of eating dinner in one establishment and dessert in another and adding both to his list.
Rolling through the streets and listening to my colleagues gab, I thought about how nice it was to once again be in a place that had toilet paper in the restrooms. I have a theory about toilet paper: Social organization is required to get it into the restrooms, public education tells the average Joe what it is and how to use it, and public order prevents the first guy who sees the stuff from stealing it. Paris had all three; Baghdad none of them.
Salazar rolled into a square and found a spot at the curb where we could sit for a moment. He pointed. “Over there, the second building from the left, second floor above the arcade. That’s Henri Rodet’s apartment.”
I thought I knew the square. “Isn’t this the Place des Vosges?”
“Yeah. These houses date from the Renaissance. They’re about four hundred years old.”
“So which apartment does Rodet have?”
“Man, he’s got a whole floor. Not that the flats are all that big, but they’re cool, y’know?”
“Who does he keep here? Wife or mistress?”
“Top secret stuff like that is way above my pay grade,” Salazar said solemnly.
“You see him, you ask him,” Rich chimed in. “Then tell us.”
“Okay,” I said. “Let me out. Come back and get me in thirty minutes.” sure. I got out of the car, and Salazar got it under way.
Nine symmetrical houses lined the east, west and south sides of the square, with seven on the north. Whoever designed it four hundred years ago was probably very uptight. If you really like symmetry, this is the sort of thing you will like. A people place, complete with sidewalks, trees and wrought-iron benches, formed the interior of the square. The ground floors of all the houses formed an arcade that stuck out over the sidewalk. When the houses were built back in the good old days, pedestrians were probably grateful for the arcade since the folks in the top floors of the houses emptied their chamber pots out the windows into the streets, symmetry or no symmetry. France had its pre-toilet-paper era, too. The wonder is that the people lived long enough to reproduce.
I walked across the park toward Rodet’s building as I looked it over. Streetlights lit the fronts of the buildings, so every feature was visible. Some of the windows had drapes, others did not. Some buildings, especially those on the west side of the square, looked as if they were being renovated. That meant contractors and craftsmen and their vehicles.
I could see lights in Rodet’s windows. He had four windows, two with drapes and two without. The main entrance to the building was off the arcade. I looked for security cameras and didn’t see any. Still, the head of the DGSE probably rated a bodyguard or two, and no doubt they were upstairs or somewhere out here on the square, keeping watch.
There was a walkway under the center building in the block, so I passed through. Sure enough, a narrow alley led behind all the buildings. Metal fire escapes were arranged on the exterior walls. There should be a rear staircase, too, I reasoned, because even before fire escapes, people in buildings didn’t want to be trapped.
