The Aquitaine Progression

by Robert Ludlum

  “There’s a booth over there,” said Connal, pointing to a white plastic bubble that protruded from a concrete pylon on the pavement abutting the drive. “Do you have the number?”

  “It’s here somewhere,” replied Converse, rummaging through various pockets. “Here it is,” he said as he separated the scrap of paper from several credit-card charges.

  “Vermittlung, bitte.” The naval officer sounded authentic as he spoke crisply into the telephone. “Sieben, drei, vier, zwei, zwei. Bitte, Fräulein.” Fitzpatrick then inserted a series of coins into the metal box and turned to Joel. “Here you are. They’re ringing.”

  “Stay there. Ask for him—say it’s his lawyer calling, the one at the hotel.”

  “Guten Tag, Fräulein. Ist Herr—Oh, no, I speak English. Do you speak English? No, I’m not calling from California, but it’s an emergency.… Dowling, I have to reach—”

  “Caleb,” said Joel quickly.

  “Caleb Dowling.” The Navy man covered the mouthpiece. “What kind of name is that?”

  “Something to do with Gucci shoes.”

  “What?… Ja—yes, thanks.” Fitzpatrick handed the phone to Converse. “They’re getting him.”

  “Joe?”

  “Yes, Cal. I said I’d call you after I met with Fowler. Everything’s okay.”

  “No, it’s not, Mr. Lawyer,” said the actor quietly. “You and I had better have a very serious talk, and I don’t mind telling you a hunk of beef named Rosenberg will be just a few feet away.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “A man died in Paris. Does that clear things up for you?”

  “Oh, God.” Converse felt the blood draining from his head and a hollowness in his throat. For a moment he thought he was going to be sick. “They came to you?” he whispered.

  “A man from the German police a little over an hour ago, and this time I didn’t have any doubts about my visitor. He was the real item.”

  “I don’t know what to say,” stammered Joel.

  “Did you do it?”

  “I … I guess I did.” Converse stared at the telephone dial, seeing the bloodied face of the man in the alleyway, feeling the blood on his own fingers.

  “You guess? That’s not something you guess about.”

  “Then yes.… The answer is yes. I did it.”

  “Did you have a reason?”

  “I thought I did.”

  “I want to hear it, but not now. I’ll tell you where to meet me.”

  “No!” exclaimed Joel, confused but emphatic. “I can’t involve you. You can’t be involved!”

  “This fellow gave me a card and wants me to call him if you got in touch with me. He was very specific about withholding information, how it’s considered aiding a fugitive.”

  “He was right, absolutely right! For God’s sake, tell him everything, Cal! The truth. You got me a room for the night because you thought I might not have a reservation and we had a pleasant few hours on the plane. You put it in your name because you didn’t want me to pay. Don’t hide anything! Not even this call.”

  “Why didn’t I tell him before?”

  “That’s all right, you’re telling him now. It was a shock and I’m a fellow American and you’re in a foreign country. You wanted time to think, to reflect. My phone call shook you into behaving rationally. Tell him you confronted me with the accusation and I didn’t deny it. Be honest with him, Cal.”

  “How honest? Should I include my session with Fowler?”

  “That’s all right, too, but it’s not necessary. Let me back up and clarify. Fowler’s a false name and he’s not relevant to Paris, I give you my word. Bringing him in is only volunteering an unnecessary complication.”

  “Should I tell him you’re at the Alter Zoll?”

  “It’s where I’m calling you from. I just admitted it.”

  “You won’t be able to go back to the Königshof.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Joel, speaking rapidly, wanting to get off the phone and start thinking. “My luggage is at the airport and I can’t go back there either.”

  “You had a briefcase.”

  “I’ve taken care of that. It’s where I can get it.”

  The actor paused, then spoke slowly. “So your advice to me is to level with the police, to tell them the truth.”

  “Without volunteering extraneous and unrelated material. Yes, that’s my advice, Cal. It’s the way you can stay clean and you are clean.”

  “It sounds like fine advice, Joe—Joel, and I certainly wish I could take it, but I’m afraid I can’t.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because bad men like thieves and killers don’t give advice like that. It’s not in any script I ever read.”

  “That’s nonsense! For Christ’s sake, do as I tell you!”

  “Sorry, pardner, it’s not good dramaturgy. So you do as I tell you. There’s a big stone building at the university—beautiful place, a restored palace actually—with a layout of gardens you don’t see very often. They’re on the south side with benches here and there on the main path. It’s a nice place on a summer’s night, kind of out of the way and not too crowded. Be there at ten o’clock.”

  “Cal, I won’t involve you in this!”

  “I’m already involved. I’ve withheld information and I’ve aided a fugitive.” Dowling paused again. “There’s someone I want you to meet,” he said.

  “No.”

  There was a click and the line went dead.

  10

  Converse hung up the phone and braced himself on the sides of the plastic booth, trying to clear his head. He had killed a man, not in a war anyone knew about, and not in the heat of survival in a Southeast Asian jungle, but in a Paris alleyway because he had to make an instant decision based on probabilities. Rightly or wrongly the act had been done and he could not dwell on it. The German police were looking for him, which meant that Interpol had entered the picture, transmitting the information from Paris somehow supplied by Jacques-Louis Bertholdier, who remained out of sight, beyond the scope of the hunt. Joel recalled his own words spoken only minutes ago. If Press Halliday’s life was not terribly important compared with what he was going after, neither was the life of a minion who worked for Bertholdier, Delavane’s disciple, Aquitaine’s arm in France. There were no options, thought Converse. He had to go on; he had to stay free.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Fitzpatrick, standing anxiously near him. “You look like you got kicked by a mule.”

  “I got kicked,” agreed Converse.

  “What happened to Dowling? Is he in trouble?”

  “He will be!” exploded Joel. “Because he’s a misguided idiot who thinks he’s in some kind of goddamned movie!”

  “That wasn’t your opinion a little while ago.”

  “We met; it came out all right. This can’t, not for him.” Converse pushed himself away from the booth and looked at the Navy lawyer, his mind now trying desperately to concentrate on the immediate. “I may tell you and I may not,” he said, glancing around for an available taxi. “Come on, we’re going to put your awesome linguistic abilities to work. We need shelter, expensive but not showy, especially not a place where the well-heeled tourists go who don’t speak German. If there’s one thing they’ll spread about me, it’s that I can’t talk my way through the five boroughs of New York. I want a rich hotel that doesn’t need foreigners, doesn’t cater to them. Do you know the kind of place I mean?”

  Fitzpatrick nodded. “Exclusive, clubby, German business-oriented. Every large city has hotels like that, and they’re always twenty times my per diem for breakfast.”

  “That’s okay, I’ve got money here in Bonn. I might as well try to get it out.”

  “You’re full of surprises,” said Connal. “I mean real surprises.”

  “Do you think you can handle it? Find a hotel like that?”

  “I can explain what I want to a cabdriver; he’ll probably know. Bonn’s small, nothing like New Y
ork or London or Paris.… There’s a taxi letting people out.” The two men hurried to the curb, where the cab was discharging a quartet of passengers balancing camera equipment and outsized Louis Vuitton handbags.

  “How will you do it?” asked Converse as they nodded to the tourists, two couples in the midst of an argument, male versus female, Nikon versus Vuitton.

  “A combination of what we both said,” answered Fitzpatrick. “A quiet, nice hotel away from the Ausländerlärm.”

  “What?”

  “The clamor of tourists—and worse. I’ll tell him we’re calling on some very important German businessmen—bankers, say—and we’d like a place they’d be most comfortable in for confidential meetings. He’ll get the drift.”

  “He’ll see we don’t have any luggage,” objected Joel.

  “He’ll see the money in my hand first,” said the naval officer, holding the door for Converse.

  Lieutenant Commander Connal Fitzpatrick, USN, member of the military bar and limited thereby, impressed Joel Converse, vaunted international attorney, to the point where the latter felt foolish. Effortlessly the Navy lawyer got them in a two-bedroom suite at an inn on the banks of the Rhine called Das Rektorat. It was one of those converted prewar estates where most of the guests seemed to have at least a nodding acquaintance with several others and the clerks rarely looked anyone in the eye, as if tacitly confirming their subservience—or the fact that they would certainly not acknowledge having seen Herr So-and-So should someone ask them.

  Fitzpatrick had begun his campaign with the taxi driver by leaning forward in the seat and speaking rapidly and quietly. Their exchanges seemed to grow more confidential as the cab sped toward the heart of the city; then it abruptly veered away, crossing the railroad tracks that intersected the capital, and entered a smooth road paralleling the river north. Joel had started to speak, to ask what was happening, but the Navy lawyer had held up his hand, telling Converse to be quiet.

  Once they had stopped at the entrance of an inn, reached by an interminably long, manicured drive, Fitzpatrick got out.

  “Stay here,” he said to Joel. “I’ll see if I can get us a couple of rooms. And don’t say anything.”

  Twelve minutes later Connal returned, his demeanor stern, his eyes, however, lively. “Come on, Chairman of the Board, we’re going straight up.” He paid the driver handsomely and once again held the door for Converse—now a touch more deferentially, thought Joel.

  The lobby of Das Rektorat was unmistakably German, with oddly delicate Victorian overtones; thick heavy wood and sturdy leather chairs were beside and below filigrees of brass ornamentation forming arches over doorways, elegant borders for large mirrors, and valances above thick bay windows where none were required. One’s first impression was of a quiet, expensive spa from decades ago, its solemnity lightened by flashes of reflecting metal and glass. It was a strange mixture of the old and the very old. It smelled of money.

  Fitzpatrick led Converse to a paneled elevator recessed in the paneled corridor; no bellboy or manservant was in attendance. It was a small enclosure, room for no more than four people, the walls of tinted, marbled glass, which vibrated as the elevator ascended two stories.

  “I think you’ll approve of the accommodations,” said Connal. “I checked them out; that’s why it took me so long.”

  “We’re back in the nineteenth century, you know,” countered Joel. “I trust they have telephones and not just the Hessian express.”

  “All the most modern communications, I made sure of that, too.” The elevator door opened. “This way,” said Fitzpatrick, gesturing to the right. “The suite’s at the end of the hall.”

  “The suite?”

  “You said you had money in Bonn.”

  Two bedrooms flanked a tastefully furnished sitting room, with French doors that opened onto a small balcony overlooking the Rhine. The rooms were sunlit and airy, the décor of the walls again an odd mixture: a reproduction of an Impressionist floral arrangement was beside dramatic prints of past champion horses from the leading German tracks and breeding farms.

  “All right, wonder boy,” said Converse, looking out the open French doors, then turning back to Connal Fitzpatrick, who stood in the middle of the room, the key still in his hand. “How did you do it?”

  “It wasn’t hard,” replied the Navy lawyer, smiling. “You’d be surprised what a set of military papers will do for a person in this country. The older guys sort of stiffen up and look like boxer puppies smelling a pot roast, and there aren’t that many people here much under sixty.”

  “That doesn’t tell me anything unless you’re enlisting us.”

  “It does when I combine it with the fact that I’m an aide assigned by the U.S. Navy to accompany an important American financier over here to hold confidential meetings with his German counterparts. While in Bonn, naturally, incognito is the best means for my eccentric financier to travel. Everything’s in my name.”

  “What about reservations?”

  “I told the manager that you’d rejected the hotel reserved for us as having too many people you might know. I also hinted that those countrymen of his you’re going to meet might be most appreciative of his cooperation. He agreed that I might have a point there.”

  “How did we hear about this place?” asked Joel, still suspicious.

  “Simple. I remembered it from several conversations I had at the International Economic Conference in Düsseldorf last year.”

  “You were there?”

  “I didn’t know there was one,” said Fitzpatrick, heading for the door on the left. “I’ll take this bedroom, okay? It’s not as large as the other one and that’s the way it should be, since I’m an aide—which Jesus, Mary, and Joseph all know is the truth.”

  “Wait a minute,” Converse broke in, stepping forward. “What about our luggage? Since we don’t have any, didn’t that strike your friend downstairs as a little odd for such important characters?”

  “Not at all,” said Connal, turning. “It’s still in the city at that unnamed hotel you rejected so emphatically after twenty minutes. But only I can pick it up.”

  “Why?”

  Fitzpatrick brought his index finger to his lips. “You also have a compulsion for secrecy. Remember, you’re eccentric.”

  “The manager bought all that swill?”

  “He calls me Kommandant.”

  “You’re quite a bullshitter, sailor.”

  “I remind you, sir, that in the land of Erin go bragh it’s called good healthy blarney. And although you lack certain qualifications, Press said you were a master of it in negotiations.” Connal’s expression became serious. “He meant it in the best way, counselor, and that’s not bullshit.”

  As the Navy lawyer began walking to the bedroom, Joel felt an odd sense of recognition but could not define it. What was it about the younger man that struck a chord in him? Fitzpatrick had that boldness that came with the untried, that lack of fear in small things that caution would later teach him often led to larger things. He tested waters bravely; he had never come close to drowning.

  Suddenly Converse understood the recognition. What he saw in Connal Fitzpatrick was himself—before things had happened. Before he had learned the meaning of fear, raw fear. And finally of loneliness.

  It was agreed that Connal would return to the Cologne-Bonn airport, not for Joel’s luggage but for his own, which was stored in a locker in the baggage-claim area. He would then go into Bonn proper, buy an expensive suitcase and fill it with a half-dozen shirts, underwear, socks and best off-the-rack clothing he could find in Joel’s sizes—namely, three pairs of trousers, a jacket or two and a raincoat. It was further agreed that casual clothes were the most appropriate; an eccentric financier was permitted such lapses of sartorial taste, and also such attire more successfully concealed their non-custom-made origins. Finally, the last stop he would make before returning to Das Rektorat was at a second locker in the railroad station where Converse had left his atta
ché case. Once the case was in the Navy lawyer’s possession and the taxi waiting outside had picked up its passenger, there were to be no further stops. The cab was to drive directly to the countryside inn.

  “I wanted to ask you something,” said Fitzpatrick just before leaving. “Back at the Alter Zoll you said something about how ‘they’ would spread the word that you couldn’t talk your way through the five boroughs of New York. I gathered that referred to the fact that you don’t speak German.”

  “That’s right. Or any other language, adequate English excepted. I tried but it never took. I was married to a girl who spoke fluent French and German, and even she gave up. I don’t have the ear, I guess.”

  “Who did ‘they’ refer to?” asked Connal, barely listening to Converse’s explanation. “The embassy men?”

  Joel hesitated. “A little wider, I’m afraid,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “You’ll have to know but not now, not yet. Later.”

  “Why later? Why not now?”

  “Because it wouldn’t do you a damned bit of good, and it might raise questions you wouldn’t want raised under, shall we say, adverse circumstances.”

  “That’s elliptical.”

  “It certainly is.”

  “Is that it? Is that all you’ll say?”

  “No. There’s one other thing. I want my briefcase.”

  Fitzpatrick had assured him that the switchboard of Das Rektorat was capable of handling telephone calls in English—as well as at least six other languages, including Arabic—and he should have no qualms about placing a call to Lawrence Talbot in New York.

  “Christ, where are you, Joel?” Talbot shouted into the phone.

  “Amsterdam,” replied Converse, not wanting to say Bonn and having had the presence of mind to make the call station-to-station. “I want to know what happened to Judge Anstett, Larry. Can you tell me anything?”

  “I want to know what’s happened to you! René called last night.…”

  “Mattilon?”

  “You told him you were flying to London.”

  “I changed my mind.”

  “What the hell happened? The police were with him; he had no choice. He had to tell them who you were.” Talbot suddenly paused, then spoke in a calmer voice, a false voice. “Are you all right, Joel? Is there something you want to tell me, something bothering you?”