“No, thanks. Just put the rest on the bill.” He dropped an extra tip near Jules, glanced at Craig, almost spoke, hesitated, then said, “Sorry, I thought I had met you before. My mistake.” He looked enquiringly at Jules with a touch of perplexity mixed with amusement over his small error.
Jules said quickly, “This is Mr. Craig, who is a guest here, too.”
Partridge, pausing as he was about to turn away, said, “You really look very much like a man I knew in Japan about ten years ago.”
“I’ve been there, but I don’t think we ever met.” Is this another try? They’re keeping me busy, Craig thought.
“My name’s Jim Partridge.” The stranger put out his hand. Craig took it. Pressed into his palm, he felt a small round object. “Perhaps we can have a drink together some evening?”
“No reason why we shouldn’t.”
Partridge said very quietly, “You handled him well. No slips.” And turned away definitely, this time.
Craig finished his drink slowly. The tension was gone. So was that very unpleasant feeling of actual fear, when the man who called himself Jordan had patted his shoulder and left. He had stood there, waiting for the second drink, wondering what mistakes he had made. Thank God for Jim Partridge. “No slips,” he had said. But how had he known? Had he been able to listen to the conversation? It was a fantastic thought. Possible? Gadgets, nowadays, were ingenious. Perhaps I’ll learn when we do have that drink together. At least one thing I do know now: I’m not alone.
That was a good feeling. He could even look back on the encounter with Jordan and study it with cool amusement.
* * *
Then there was, two days later, the second encounter. It began, in contrast to the Jordan incident, very quietly indeed. And ended with no amusement at all.
It was late on Monday afternoon. Craig had been searching for old maps of ancient Greece and the eastern Mediterranean, the kind of thing that he might possibly discover in the second-hand bookshops around the Beaux-Arts district. That was also the district where the girl lived, the girl with the dark hair and blue eyes who had walked away from his taxi five nights ago, name unknown, address unknown, swallowed up in the maze of streets, vanishing into the shadows. And although he produced a reasonable excuse each day to get him over to the Left Bank and keep an eye open for that smooth dark head, he had no luck at all. He had the fanciful idea that if he only kept thinking hard enough about her, she might walk out of that baker’s shop, or down the street, or be standing in this bookstore like the hundred other students who did much of their pleasure reading there. But like all fanciful ideas, it was high in expectations and low in results. He never saw her. Perhaps she had left Paris, perhaps she wasn’t a student. And probably she had forgotten all about him by this time. Why, he wondered with considerable irritation, why the hell didn’t he forget her?
His search for maps and ancient charts had led him along the Rue de Seine towards the Boulevard Saint-Germain. He saw a possible bookshop, entered it, and found so much to interest him that he was there for half an hour or more. There were a dozen people around, picking up books, flipping over pages, putting the books down, choosing others, reading. The shelves were crowded to the ceiling, the stacks were so close together that the alleys between them allowed only one-way passage. Craig was in such an alley when a polite French voice said, “Pardon, monsieur.” Craig looked up and saw a middle-aged man with kindly eyes in a likeable face. Craig closed the book he had been reading and stuffed it back quickly on its shelf. “Sorry,” he said, “I’m in your way.”
The stranger broke into English. “Not at all. I don’t think I’m going to find what I’m looking for, either.” Then he laughed. “Are you following me? We are becoming good acquaintances, this afternoon. Didn’t I hear you asking for maps down on the Rue Bonaparte? No luck? I, too, have had no success.” His English was very passable, and saved Craig groping around for a few polite phrases in return.
“I’m giving up the search,” Craig said, coming out of the booklined passage. “It’s all yours.” He stood aside to let the Frenchman enter. The man’s eyes were studying the shelves. He shook his head. “Not here,” he said resignedly. “Just let me ask the owner. Perhaps he can tell us of another bookshop that might have your maps and my Leonardo da Vinci illustrations. One moment, monsieur!” He pressed his way through the groups of students and elderly men, reached the owner behind his table stacked high with dusty books. There was a quick outflow of fine French phrases. Craig made his way to the door, hesitated, started slowly towards the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Helpful people were pleasant, but generally useless. And yet he didn’t want to be rude in return for some politeness (heaven knew it was scarce enough in Paris, nowadays, where foreigners were considered a necessary nuisance), and so he halted to wait for the stranger and at least say thank you.
“You are going in the right direction,” his mentor told him cheerfully. “There is a shop, very big, very new, you might not think it of any help; but there is a back room, I am told, with all kinds of amazing curiosities. Let me show you. It is on the boulevard itself.” He fell into step beside Craig, mentioning his name (Ardouin), his profession (“an engineer for aeroplanes”), his hobby (collecting illustrations of old inventions for warfare such as da Vinci’s designs). There was such a bookstore, but the back room had been cleared for new stock.
Ardouin, in his own words, was desolated. This extra journey for nothing! Craig must have a drink with him, and they could finish their talk about ancient cartographers who guessed so much and were sometimes almost right.
Craig, ready to call it the end of an acquaintanceship yet still unwilling to cut it short rudely, walked along with the little Frenchman, trying to think of a chance for disengagement. And suddenly, against the friendly chatter at his elbow, against the background of cheerful street noise and bustle, there was a grim and warning note. They were walking along the same part of the boulevard where he had met Sussman. They were passing two cafés where they could have had that drink. “No, no,” said his new friend, “not here! There is a much more interesting place quite near. When I was a student in Paris, it was where the amusing people met. Just down here, around this corner!”
Craig kept his steady pace, didn’t let himself hesitate. He even managed to hold back the quick flash of anger that surged through his body. You’ll have to go through with it, he told himself, go through with it to the end. “But of course,” he heard himself say in a natural voice, answering a question about New York. “There are fashions in cafés everywhere, I guess.” He looked at the faded little awning they were now reaching, the few tables on the narrow sidewalk. “Why,” he said, “I know this place! I was here only a few nights ago. There’s a Buddha inside, and a picture of Socrates. Right?”
Again Ardouin was desolated. “And I thought I would show you something new, something different,” he said. “Shall we sit outside?” And he was choosing the table where Craig had sat before, selecting Sussman’s chair for himself. He fell very silent.
“Yes,” said Craig, “this is even the same table. I hope you aren’t superstitious.”
Ardouin blinked a little. “Engineers are not usually superstitious,” he said with a smile.
“You’ve taken the same chair where my friend sat. And he is now dead.”
“But I am sorry! Does that worry you?”
“I don’t find it exactly cheerful.”
“A drink is what we need,” Ardouin said quickly, and signalled the waiter—he was new but he looked just as sad and slow as the other one, five nights ago. “All Americans drink Scotch, no?”
“It isn’t very good Scotch, here. I’ll try Cinzano. I must say—” he looked around, noticing a car parked nearby with its driver reading a newspaper—“this café is really on the losing end of this street.” It was almost as woebegone in sunshine as it had been in the rain. Few people walked here, and those were in a hurry, as if they were using it only as a short cut to some place more i
mportant.
“Then we shall talk about pleasant things. Last time, perhaps you were listening to depressing talk?”
From the doorway farther down the curving street, on its opposite side a man in a black overcoat stepped out and came walking slowly towards the café. For a moment, Craig had no answer. He looked away from the walking man, found a cigarette and his lighter, was relieved to see that his hands were steadier than he felt. “I spent more time looking than listening,” he said. Good God, he was thinking, is Heinrich Berg going to walk up here?
“Looking?” The Frenchman was alert. “And what was so interesting on this street?”
“A girl. She was sitting over there, behind your chair. And having a very bad time.” Quickly, he gave a brief description of the quarrel.
“How extraordinary,” Ardouin said with complete indifference.
“It was. I mean, what could have caused such a long quarrel as that? I keep thinking about it.” Yes, Heinrich Berg was sitting down at the very same table he had occupied last Wednesday. “Or, rather, I keep wondering what her man would have thought if he could have sat here, where I am, and watched his own performance. Or would he have needed a stranger’s eyes, too, to see what he was throwing away?”
“I don’t understand why you should be so concerned,” began Ardouin impatiently, and then corrected his tone of voice to something more natural. “Unless, of course, she was very pretty.”
“But naturally! That is what was so extraordinary.” Craig looked in astonishment at Ardouin. “Haven’t you noticed a considerable decline in pretty girls in the last few years? What’s gone wrong? A cult of ugliness? Or it might be that this is a base form of democracy—let everyone look equally unappetising, destroy the beauties, turn all girls into the same type with the same hair styles, the same grotesque eyes, the same vapid lips? Now I’m assuming that as a Frenchman you have certain standards for the chic and the beautiful, but—looking around Paris—I’d like to ask you what has been happening.” Craig rattled on, listening to himself with a mild disbelief and a touch of rising laughter. For Ardouin was taking him seriously. Ardouin was looking at him nervously, and then with annoyance, and then with complete irritation; the once kindly eyes were showing both contempt and impatience. He finished his drink quickly, glanced at his watch.
“You must go?” Craig asked. Now it’s my turn to be desolated. “I think I’ll wait here for a while.”
“Still hoping that you will see the girl again?” Ardouin asked, shaking his head. These Americans...
“Why not? This place seems to have its regulars.” He glanced at some new arrivals, recognising them faintly from his last visit “She may be one of them. Good luck with the war machines!”
That produced a startled look, and then a very quick “Merci. Au revoir.” A nice formal bow, and Ardouin was in retreat towards the boulevard. Leaving me to pay for the drinks, thought Craig. But it had been worth it.
He did wait for a while. He let Berg pass him with only a cursory, natural glance. Just another regular, that was Craig’s attitude. He noticed that the car, parked not far away, had started to leave, too. He wondered whether he might not have ended inside it if he had started to tell Ardouin to ’phone for the police, for anyone, to catch a man who was possibly connected with a murder. Even if that was a bit of imaginative exaggeration about the car, he was thinking how he might have behaved if Rosie hadn’t given him fair warning. Rosie had only been wrong in one thing so far: he hadn’t given him any telephone number to call in an emergency like this. With the right number, he could have said, “If you want Berg, then he is sitting at a table only twenty feet or so away from me.” And then, annoyance fading, he knew Rosie had been right. One step towards a telephone, either before or after Berg had left, and Craig might have found out whether his crude guess about the waiting car was fantastic or not.
I suppose, he thought heavily, I’m being watched even now. So he paid and left. If he looked depressed, the enemy could assume that he had become tired of waiting for a girl. And who was the enemy? That was one question he was going to ask Rosie. He would like to know who was turning his visit to Paris into a nightmare. That was a score that needed a little settling, quite apart from the bill that had mounted high with Sussman’s death.
He went back to the Saint-Honoré, with the hope that Jim Partridge would be reading quietly in the bar—the news about Berg must be passed on as quickly as possible. But Partridge was entertaining two French friends tonight, a dark-haired young man with blue eyes and ruddy cheeks, and a charming red-haired Frenchwoman. They were talking of furniture, of designs in fabrics, with occasional laughter over Partridge’s brave attempts at French and their equally comic efforts in English to help him out. It was a merry little business meeting, and Craig, just two tables away, found himself believing it authentic. Partridge had only given a polite nod of recognition and a bare “Good evening” as he had entered and found a seat. It was a frustrating feeling to sit there, in possession of some real news, and to have to keep it clamped to himself. Eventually, as Partridge and his friends left, he got the silent message: we’ll contact you when we are good and ready, so sit tight and keep your mouth shut. What the flaming hell, he thought; don’t they want to catch Berg?
He went out searching for dinner, which he didn’t enjoy and which cost far too much anyway. And that was another thing, he told himself as he went angrily to bed after a disappointing movie: you’d better clear out to the Mediterranean; another week of Paris and your budget will be so wrecked that you’ll have only a few weeks left in Europe. Get back to your own world, Craig, and stay where you belong. But can there be any separate world? he wondered as he thought of Sussman.
7
“It was tempting,” Rosie said softly. “It was very tempting to have that man followed.”
“You think he might have been Berg?” Partridge asked.
“The waiter’s description of him was almost a duplicate of what Craig told me at the Meurice last Tuesday morning. He wore the same kind of coat, walked from the same doorway, sat down at the exact table.”
“No wonder Craig was so tight-faced this evening. He came into the Saint-Honoré bar about seven when I was there with Yves Duclos and Mimi. He looked as if he had just about had it.” Partridge watched Rosie prowling around the small room restlessly, checking the locked window, pulling the torn shade closer to the sill, dragging the narrow strips of curtain more together. Fortunately, the light was too dim to throw any shadows in the direction of the run-down street outside. “Not very elegant,” Partridge agreed as Rosie stared at the brash cubist design on the curtains, “but this is the kind of place where everyone finds it pays to mind his own business. Balances my room over at the Saint-Honoré very nicely.” Both hotels had been Partridge’s own idea. He had moved into them last Thursday soon after he had arrived in Paris; a cheap bag for this room, a leather suitcase respectably labelled for the Saint-Honoré, and he was nicely set up. “Easy commuting, too.”
“Very neat,” agreed Rosie, and gave his full approval. He sat down once more on the only chair, and faced Partridge, who was lounging on the narrow bed.
“So Berg walked away from that café,” Partridge said thoughtfully, wondering what agent had slipped up there.
“If that was a mistake, then it’s mine. Berg has not only brains but intuition. Better give him no warning signals of any kind. Better wait, try to find out what his mission in Paris is. Then we can pick him up, get Insarov-Berg in one neat package. That’s the way I see it anyway. I may be wrong. I’ve been arguing with Bernard over at the Sûreté about this. He is, naturally enough, interested in any spy networks that are working in Paris. I feel that there may be more than a network involved. If Berg is Insarov, that is...” His voice trailed away with his thoughts.
“You’re beginning to believe it, too?” Partridge asked quickly, and he couldn’t be more delighted.
“Yes, but not for a very satisfactory reason—that is, not sati
sfactory to anyone except myself. I read through the dossiers you collected on both Berg and Insarov. And it was by remembering some of the Insarov details that I—well, let’s say that Berg’s actions today didn’t astonish me too much.”
“You studied Insarov and came up with Berg?”
“That’s about it. But it doesn’t prove a thing. I could be wrong.”
Yet he had believed it enough, himself, to persuade Bernard to have a waiter installed for the last four days in the café, Partridge thought. “No photographs possible?”
He doesn’t miss much, thought Rosie, and smiled. “No. The waiter had a microfilm lighter all ready to use, but Berg didn’t take out a cigarette. And he kept his back turned to the restaurant. And he waved away any attempt to take an order; managed to avert his face, too. So the waiter follows his basic orders, which were to note any middle-aged man who wasn’t known as a regular customer and to report to the Sûreté at once. He did this, but Berg was already leaving. He staged his exit right past Craig’s table, and then was picked up by a car that had been waiting near by.” Rosie thought that over. “I didn’t have anyone ready to follow him, but you know something? I feel relieved about that. If it was a mistake, I think it was a mistake in the right direction. One suspicion aroused, and the whole Berg-Insarov operation would plunge underground. When, and where, it would emerge wouldn’t even be worth a guess.” He made a good attempt at a smile. “Yes, you could say that I had almost as bad a day as Craig, poor devil.”
Partridge nodded understandingly. They could easily lose the fingertip hold they had on this case. Then all the work Chris Holland and he had done in those intense four months would be made useless. “I think the French might be pretty riled, too, if we lost Insarov just at this time. Duclos was pretty excited about some new developments.”
“Oh?”
“He gave me a few background details over dinner, asked me to pass them on to you tonight. He’s missing your visits to his studio.”
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