Tibetan Cross

by Mike Bond

  Inside the lining was a black plastic and metal device the size of a watch face. He stared at it, slowly nodding his head. So that's it. Schmuck, schmuck, and schmuck again. How conveniently she disappeared when things got hot! He froze and dropped the device back in his pocket. Somewhere right now they're watching me. From behind some tree, from some car, watching, waiting, following the signal from this beeper. And I almost led them to Paul.

  He stood, settled the coat on his shoulders, and strolled casually from the park. Bitch beyond bitch beyond any human possibility. Horror, nightmare; love is death; death loves with a woman's kiss.

  Chest aching with fury, he walked blindly through the sunny Paris springtime streets, his hands trembling with the strangled images whirring through his mind. In rue de l'Assomption he glanced back for the first time, seeing no one.

  A hundred yards back a gray Simca halted at the curb. Three blocks later it was the same distance behind him. He darted across the street, dodged a white camionette, sprinted up rue Boulanvilliers, knocked down a schoolboy carrying a blue briefcase, and crossed Ranelagh, glancing over his shoulder. Cutting through Place Chopin, he ran down rue de l'Annonciation, up rue Bologne, and down rue de Passy. There was no sign of the Simca. He waited panting in the Trocadéro métro station for the sound of an incoming train. It was headed toward Pont de Sèvres. At the last moment he ran down the stairs. A girl in a black raincoat trotted alongside him; when he reached the train he pulled up, letting her enter. As the train pulled away she peered through the window at him with surprised foreign eyes.

  He took the next train, direction Etoile. At Kléber he waited until the doors began to slide closed, then jumped from his seat and jammed them open. The platform was empty but for an old woman in a blue apron who swept listlessly at cigarette butts. The doors shut behind him and the train slipped away. The old woman stared, chewing on a butt that hung from the corner of her mouth.

  A taxi took him over Pont de l'Alma to Place de la Résistance. He ran through parked motorcycles on rue Cognac-Jay and caught another taxi to métro station Duroc.

  At the Gare de l'Est he bought a second class ticket to Strasbourg. “It's not worth it,” he said to the ticket seller behind the plastic screen.

  “Quoi – ça?”

  “This lousy ticket – it's too dear!”

  “Talk to the Pope.”

  “You hear that?” Cohen called to the man behind the next screen. “I make a complaint, and what does your buddy do, he tells me to get fucked.”

  “Perhaps you should, then.”

  “I'll report you guys when I get to Strasbourg.”

  “Do that, couillon!”

  Turning away he crossed toward the Strasbourg platform, bought a paperback Bonjour Tristesse and wrapping paper in the station bookstore and a pocket knife and stamps at the tabac.

  Dropping a franc in the saucer at the men's room he shut himself in a stall. Cutting the center from Tristesse, he took the small black plastic device from his coat and placed it in Tristesse, wrapped the book and addressed it to an imaginary name and street in Strasbourg.

  The platform was busy. With ten minutes till departure he approached a dark-haired young man reading Le Canard Enchainé. “I'm looking for someone going to Strasbourg.”

  “I am,” the young man said.

  “My sister lives there, and I want to send her this book, but it'll take a week from here. Would you be willing to drop it in a mailbox there?”

  “Sure,” the young man smiled. “If it's not a bomb.”

  FROM THE STATION he took several more taxis and métros to arrive finally at Place Odéon. The windows of Le Serpent d'Etoiles opaquely reflected the early afternoon sun. Inside, a few teenagers clustered round a pinball machine; an old man in a blue beret sat contemplatively with a pernod by the door. A man with shirtsleeves uprolled past red elbows, cigar in mouth, tended bar. “I'm looking for a tall black dude,” Cohen said. “He been in?”

  “Not today, unless he's invisible.”

  “Nobody black?”

  “I said nobody. This ain't Tanzania.”

  Cohen sat at the bar. “I'll have an express.”

  The man knocked old grounds from the espresso basket, cranked in new, clamped it up and pulled down the lever. “From the number of blacks I seen in here,” he said, bringing Cohen his coffee, “you could wait a long time.”

  AFTER THE EXPRESS he had a sandwich then a pernod as customers came and went. He felt a listless alienation, a numb heartache. You're a day late, Paul. I'm really beginning to think you're dead.

  He clutched the table in horror. What if Claire tracked me here with that signal, last night, after we split and I escaped the flics? Then I led them to him. I'll kill myself. His hands tore into the aluminum table rim. I'll kill myself. But then why aren't they here now? To get me?

  His head whirled. They trap me not only in the physical world but also in my own spirit, confront me with my own failure, my own unawareness. If they don't kill me they'll make me kill myself.

  Paul if you don't come I'll find Claire, no matter where she hides, no matter what country or city in what corner of the world she goes to. This time, kill her right away, before doubt can creep in. She's a master of enticement, of making me believe her masks. Did I love her? Have to be honest and say yes. Fool beyond fool. Maria was wrong: fortune doesn't favor fools, it tortures them in their stupidity as a boy tearing wings from a fly.

  Though it's better to love without guile. Love is not love unless, like me and Sylvie, trust is absolute.

  Where are you, Paul?

  TIME CREEPING by. Like watching someone die. The chance is dying, chance he might still be alive. Working my way onto my fourth pernod. Low on money, no more in sight. Rob a bank? Don't have a gun. Can't take the chance I'd hurt someone. Nowhere to go. Who do I know'd put me up, someone the CIA couldn't find?

  If Paul came now what would I do? All the cool way we used to be, I wouldn't be that now – I'd grab him and hug him and weep for joy. Even praise God and thank God. Yes I would.

  Though maybe God's like Maria said – maybe He leaves us alone and we should just be grateful for the gift of life. Am I? After all that's come down?

  PAUL strode through the door and Cohen leaped up to grab and hug and squeeze him, to never let go, feeling the fine roughness of his face and the hard barrel of his chest and the long wiry muscles running up his back, feeling the awful harmony of life that kills some people and lets others live, choosing blindly, without justice, and yet this was surely justice to have Paul here – thinner, yes, with purple hollows under bloodshot eyes and a nervous shudder in the shoulders and a way of looking all around without stopping.

  “Hey,” the bartender barked, “I don't want none of that stuff here – there's other places for guys like you – Vite, vite, sortez, sortez!”

  “It's not like that,” Cohen laughed. “We each thought the other was dead – I couldn't wait in K'du,” he added, moving Paul to the table, “What happened to you – Christ, tell me!”

  The barman came for Paul's order. “This guy thought you weren't gonna show,” he said to Paul. “Sure you guys ain't queer? Not that I mind, vous savez, but I got other customers, n'est-ce pas?”

  “No,” Paul grinned, “ça va. We're your average American motherfuckers. Nothing abnormal with us. And I'll have an anis.”

  Cohen grinned at the pun, suddenly there seeming nothing to say and no way to say it; he felt close to tears but would never express them, knew that nearly all had been lost but would not now admit it, knew that he felt joy, but a joy compounded of awful memories and a question of guilt that could never be answered. To have Paul here leaning back in his chair asking for a drink seemed no different than years ago, after a game, in some backstreet U.S.A. bar, Paul hamming to the girls and downing Coors while the world spun in dizzy drunken joy, the joy of youth, of innocence. “You okay?” Cohen said.

  “Fine.”

  “Anybody following you?”

/>   “Not a soul, man. I don't leave tracks.”

  “Why so long, then?”

  “I went berserk, didn't know where I was – weeks passed, maybe, don't remember. Finally I pulled myself out of it, got some clothes, bought a British passport for five hundred bucks, took a flight here from Calcutta. Got in this noon.”

  “Did they tell you I did it?”

  “They didn't tell me nothing, man. I missed you by an hour – got to the house as they were taking Kim's body away. I went crazy, tore half Katmandu apart looking for Stihl. On my way to the Embassy I found he was dead and everyone was hunting you. I quick grabbed a flight to Calcutta and there I fell apart; lived in some awful ghetto sleeping on the street, crawled into myself until no one was left. Old guy took pity on me – skinny as a starving rat, he shares his rice with me when he gets any, old mangy rice thrown out from a TB hospital. Fell apart. I really fell apart.” Paul bit at a fingertip, staring at the wall with its jaundiced photographs of race horses neck and neck at the tape.

  Cohen felt like reaching out and hugging him. “I've got it figured out.”

  “What's that?”

  “If this address in New York, Kohler Import-Export on Fulton Street, is good, we'll follow it from there. When we find out who they're hooked to, in the CIA or whatever, when we have the names and faces, we'll blow them away in the press.”

  “Why not do it now?”

  “We don't have anything but a story. What proof but a few missing people?”

  Paul laughed, folding his fingers together like the steeple in a child's game. “Who's ever gonna believe you? Who's ever gonna believe that the CIA, or some group within it, gave a nuclear bomb to the Tibetans to use against the Chinese?” He leaned forward, hand on Cohen's arm. “Do you really think the Associated Press and the papers it feeds are gonna print that?”

  “What about what Claire said, and that Algerian colonel, and…”

  Paul shook his head. “Don't be naive, baby. Look at the world through a black man's eyes for a change. What do you think the States is, man, some international do-good agency? Who you are in the States depends on how much you steal – you're a nigger kid and you steal a junk car maybe you get ten years, but you be Senator and you steal from the whole country you get a fancy retirement and get to make even more money as a ‘consultant.’ You ever notice that, how all those politicians when they leave government they become ‘consultants’ – the sultans of con?”

  Cohen chuckled. “So what's that have to do with us?”

  “Cause we're up against all that! When sixty percent of the U.S. budget's for war, do you think that ain't the country's biggest industry? Do you think that industry don't run the government? Elections? They're just Roman circuses, baby. The CIA's just the active foreign arm of America's military government – it's the CIA's job to start wars.”

  “So what now?”

  “Now? We go home, get out of this shit, start a new life. I got everything to forget and nothing to remember.”

  “I'm the opposite. I can't forget a single thing out of the last six weeks.”

  “Then we're different, man; let's each go his own way.”

  “What about vengeance – about getting them back? About killing them for Alex, for Kim?”

  “Don't bring up her name, Sam. Not as motivation for any killing. She don't like that. She don't want to be revenged.”

  COHEN GLANCED around the bar. “It was another world, when we were here. Only three years ago.”

  “Remembering Sylvie, aren't you?”

  “Let's take a walk.”

  As Paul tossed crumbs from a dry baguette to pigeons in Luxembourg Gardens, Cohen recounted his experiences. When the bread was gone they sat on a bench watching girls double-skipping rope on the gravel walk.

  “So what'll they do now?” Paul said.

  “Probably they think I don't know about that transmitter, and that I've gone back to Neuenweg. Or that I'm living in a mailbox in Strasbourg.”

  “I'm amazed they'd sacrifice one of their own people.”

  “The one Claire shot? That's how much it's worth to have us both; they must be very afraid. Must understand how we could blow their scene.”

  “And you still think it was a bomb?”

  “I believe Alex. It's the last thing he said. You and I are the only ones left who know it, and that's why they want us.”

  “It's how I always thought it would start – some terrorist thing, some stolen bomb…but I never dreamed it would happen now. It was always some time in the future, when I'd have time to get ready…”

  Cohen laughed. “Ready for what?”

  “Remember that poster, the parody of the ones we had in school, showing the ten steps to take in case of a nuclear attack, telling you how to find a safe place, how to lie on the floor, your head under a desk or something, and the tenth thing you do is stick your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye?”

  “I don't remember that.”

  “That's what it'll be. We'll all be kissing our ass goodbye.”

  “So we have to reveal this – we have to get them before it goes further.”

  “No.” Paul shook his head again. “Whatever's written's written. I'm gonna live, and learn to love life despite life, like my buddy, that old man in the Calcutta ghetto. I'm not gonna ruin my time running around trying to convince the world how it oughtta operate. If it wants to blow itself up, then fuck it, let it blow itself up.”

  “You can't mean that.”

  “I sure's Hell do.” Paul watched the park emptying now of children on their way to dinner. A housewife hurried by, broccoli heads peeping from her string sack. An old man in a blue cap tossed bread to ducks along the concrete edge of a pond where the sun threw green, dark shadows.

  “If I want to walk due west, baby, and there's a cliff there I can't climb, I got two choices. One, war: to convince my fellow men we must blow up that cliff, dominate it. Two: I can go around it, alone, on my own path.”

  “I don't give a shit about all that, Paul. I want revenge.”

  “Yeah, but you're hooking yourself up to the same process. Just like Br'er Rabbit and the Tar Baby, the more you fuck with it the more you get fucked by it.” Paul leaned forward. “Why not step outside it, change dimensions? Why not write a book?”

  “Sure,” Cohen shrugged. “And give them my address.”

  “They wouldn't dare touch you then. If they kill you, they prove you right. Look at that guy who wrote all the books on the Kennedy murder – they ain't killed him yet.”

  “Because he hasn't figured out their secret.”

  “Nor have we. But writing a book might help. I could get behind that – that's not killing anyone.”

  “I'm not interested. I am a killer. They've made me that.”

  “Then they've already won, Sam. They've taken over your soul.”

  “Please stay with me on this. Let's go to New York together, find out what's with 293 Fulton. Then we'll decide.” Cohen paused at a fountain darkened by tree shadows. “The Medici'd do anything to gain and preserve power: murder, poison, intrigue, war, degradation of the church. Why should our leaders be different? The Medici Fountain – Do you think some day our descendants'll stand before stuff like this in honor of Johnson, Rusk, or Kissinger, and never realize how many thousands of agonized deaths their reputations are built on?”

  Paul looked out over the treetops dark in the failing light. “I'll stick with you to Fulton Street, Sam. But it ain't my choice.”

  Cohen squeezed his arm. “You won't regret it. Christ, I'm hungry. I dread going back to American food. Going back, want to split up?”

  “Not again. Somebody has to keep you out of trouble.”

  “I already got trouble. The CRS wants my bod; I got no passport.”

  “All in due time. But first the condemned shall eat a hearty meal.”

  Impetuously Cohen grabbed Paul and hugged him. “I'm so broken-hearted by all this. But I'm so happy to have you back.�
�� He felt tears sting his eyes, bit them back. “I'd give anything to have things the way they were – just a few weeks ago.”

  THE STREETS were dark when they left the restaurant. “Strapping tape and glue, then the two maggots,” Paul said.

  “You should learn French. It's an ape, not a maggot.” They descended Boul Mich and crossed at the Ecole de Médecine onto St. Germain. A man leaned against a black Porsche, a slim girl kissing him wildly. Opposite the church they entered a large corner café whose tables crowded the sidewalk. After an hour's serenade by a sidewalk guitarist they followed a tall, lanky man downstairs to the john. He entered the stall.

  “Vous parlez français?” Cohen said when he emerged.

  “Huh? Oui, un peu.”

  “Américain?”

  “Oui.”

  “Where from?” Paul said in accented English as Cohen moved toward the stall. Paul grabbed the American's mouth as Cohen twisted back his arms. They spun him to the floor. Paul locked the door. The American was mumbling through Cohen's hand. Cohen whispered, “Shut up, or I kill you,” and the mumbling was replaced by wide-eyed terror.

  They yanked off the man's necktie, stuffed his mouth with paper towels and tied the necktie tight across it while Cohen rifled his coat pockets, tossing a packet of travel checks and an emptied wallet on the floor.

  Paul held him while Cohen took the passport from his rear trouser pocket. They taped his wrists behind him, then taped his wrists and ankles to the stall door jamb, relocked the door, and walked separately up the stairs. Cohen strolled down rue Bonaparte, turned at rue de Lille and crossed the Seine over the Pont Royal, cut through the Tuileries to the Concorde métro, and took the first train to the Montparnasse station.

  Outside the station he paid an Algerian vendor sixty francs for a used blue nylon jacket too tight across the shoulders, and bought a second class ticket to Calais. In the self-portrait photo booth he took ten frames. Near the station entrance a clocharde was scrunched under a shabby coat over the métro heat ventilator. She reeked of old vomit.