He hadn’t been paying any attention to the plumber’s van until the athletic young man got out of it. Now he scrutinized it carefully. He could see the white hump on the roof, yet due to the angle from which he observed, he did not notice the space between it and the roof of the van. Still, the athletic man with the wide shoulders and narrow waist was obviously not a plumber, so that made the van suspicious.
The derelict shifted his weight… and eased the hard mass of the pistol in his coat pocket so it didn’t press against him.
My little garret on the Rue Paradis looked pretty good, let me tell you. I even liked the neighborhood. There were women standing around on the sidewalk at all hours, and they always smiled at me. I smiled right back. Those ladies were the friendliest people in France, by golly. The men I saw weren’t so friendly; they tried hard to avoid eye contact, apparently on the theory that if they didn’t acknowledge your presence, you wouldn’t notice theirs. I always looked carefully at their faces, trying to decide if I had seen them before. Of course, any agency watching me would probably be smart enough to pay a few of these women, but bureaucrats being bureaucrats, who knew?
It rained the night after I saw Marisa, a gentle, steady soaker. I lay in bed listening to the rain patter on the windowpane and gurgle in the downspout right outside the window. The gurgling was nice and loud because I had the window open a couple of inches. The ventilation cooled the room and made it very pleasant for sleeping.
Paris and Baghdad were so different that I wondered if I were still on the same planet. Man, I thought just before I drifted off to sleep, I could get used to this.
On Thursday I walked around Paris for a while, just checking my tail, and finally boarded the Metro and rode out to the airport. I bought a couple of Snickers bars at an airport candy shop, then rented a car, a little four-seater. The sky was cloudy and there was a cool breeze from the west. The trees were in full color. An hour after I left the airport I pulled into the inn on the Marne, across the river from Rodet’s humble shack, got out and looked across the river, then went inside and got something to eat.
After my meal I drove to the bridge and crossed to Rodet’s side. I explored the neighborhood and drove along the road that ran the length of his estate on the landward side. I found the power line that went across the fence, a chain-link with barbed wire on top, and slowed down for a look at the main gate. It was a two-piece affair that looked as if it were triggered by a wireless transmitter, such as a garage-door opener.
On the side of the road away from the river was a forest, with occasional driveways that led to small cabins. The ones I could see looked empty. Weekend getaways, I thought.
I was going to go in with nowhere near enough information. I had told Grafton that, to be safe, I needed two weeks of observation to ensure I knew the size and composition of the household and had a good idea of their routine. “We can’t wait,” he said. “The sooner the better.”
Willie Varner was arriving on Saturday, so we settled on Sunday night. I would just have to play it by ear, do the best I could.
I drove around the neighborhood for almost an hour, checking on where each road went. If I had to boogie, I wanted to know where I was boogying off to.
Finally I pointed the car back for Paris. I found a place to park the thing, in a garage only a few blocks from my apartment, and rode the Metro to the Place des Vosges.
The van was parked in a slightly different place, surrounded by traffic cones. I knocked on the driver’s door. Alberto Salazar opened it and whispered, “We don’t want any. Beat it, bub.”
I joined Cliff and Al inside. “Good thing we’re all friends,” Cliff muttered, squeezing himself over to make room.
“Whaddaya hear?”
“Both maids have dates for the weekend,” Al told me. “One of them is meeting an old boyfriend for dinner tonight, then going out with him tomorrow night. She hopes her current fellow doesn’t find out.”
“Hot stuff, eh?”
“Sizzling.”
“What about Rodet?”
“The woman who came in had a telephone conversation with someone. We only heard her side of it. It might have been Rodet. She said something about dinner. It’s hard to say, but I sorta convinced myself that she’s his girlfriend or something, and he’s coming there after work this evening.”
“So he’s in town?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Someone is coming for dinner. I didn’t hear her say a name. Do you know who she is?”
“Yes. Her name is Marisa Petrou.”
“Want to tell us how you learned that?” Cliff asked.
“No.”
“It’s a mushroom deal,” Rich Thurlow told Cliff.
“Just do your job,” I shot back. “I want everything you can get between Petrou and Rodet. At least one of you must stay on duty all the time he is there.”
“We can’t hear any conversation except those that occur in rooms facing the square.”
I knew that, of course. Not wanting to waste the afternoon listening to them bitch, I climbed out of the van, made sure the door locked behind me, and headed for the Metro.
I had to figure out how to get into that flat.
Al Salazar was the only guy in the van at the Place des Vosges when I stopped by that evening. “Catching anything?” I asked.
“Not even a cold. The man went in, and they talked in the kitchen and maybe the bedroom. I got kitchen noises and occasional words. I have no idea what they talked about.”
“You make a disk?”
“Sure.”
Well, maybe the wizards in Washington could figure out what was said, if they cared. I used a set of binoculars to scan for a watcher. Didn’t see anyone.
Al got up and stretched. “Remember in Baghdad, when those two guys with rifles got out of that car?”
“Let’s talk about something else.”
“What I still can’t figure out is how you knew they were bad guys.”
“I just knew.”
“God, Tommy, it was like a movie or something. Not something real. You pulled out that pistol and gunned those two, bang bang. What if you’d missed?”
“But I didn’t. Hey, man, you’re going to go fucking nuts sitting here thinking about that crap. You’ve got to think about something else.”
He sat heavily and stared out our window at the symmetrical square and the identical buildings and the French mothers with prams and lovers holding hands. “Like what?”
“Hell, I don’t know. Women… your wife. Your kid. Fishing. Sports. The stock market. You can’t sit here all day listening to those French maids jabber and think about nothing but bombs and blood and bad shit. You can’t, Al.”
“What if they had been good guys, Tommy? Ever ask yourself that? What if you had shot the wrong guys?”
“I didn’t.”
“Luck.”
“No, goddamnit. It was instinct. I could see them, see how they were acting. I looked and I saw and I knew.”
“You were lucky.”
I headed home. Unless we got some results with the windowpane gadget, Grafton was going to want me to bug Rodet’s flat. I had that to look forward to. Oh joy. I forced myself to think about that instead of bodies lying in the street oozing blood. The hell with Al Salazar and his bad memories! Yeah, I had ‘em, too, but damn if I was going to let that stuff ruin another hour of my life.
A half hour later I walked down the Rue Paradis and the few paces up my cul-de-sac to my home away from home. It was the coolest address in Paris, and by God, it was mine.
In the lobby the concierge was showing a new tenant the key to her mailbox. She was about my age, fit and
