The words rogue agent hit Alex squarely, caused him to blink. Not that he hadn’t thought of himself in those terms, didn’t recognize the truth of it. It was hearing it from his father’s lips. His anger flared.
“I should have known,” he said. “I thought you’d come to help me. Finally to do something for me when I needed you. I should have known better. You’re still their boy, still the agency’s puppet.” He stopped to stare at his father. “Well, fuck you, Dad. I’ll get him with you or without you. And I’m sorry I’ve embarrassed you by becoming a rogue.”
Piers recognized the reaction, had counted on it. “You are a rogue,” he said. “But it doesn’t embarrass me. Actually, I’m quite proud of you.” He grabbed Alex’s arm again. “And we’ll let them treat you like a rogue. There will be a punishment for you,” he said, changing directions, creating a new concern. “Forced retirement.” He let the words sink in, waving the stick before he dropped the carrot into view. “But Ludwig won’t hide forever. He’ll crawl out of his hole one day. And we’ll be waiting for him. And it won’t be long. I promise you. And then I’ll personally help you get the bastard. And the agency will help you as well.”
Piers looked toward the room where Michelle and her mother had gone. “And there will be no danger brought to those who have sheltered you,” he added.
Alex closed his eyes and recalled the recent attack. He hadn’t thought of the danger to others, even then. He’d been too consumed by his own need.
“I can go somewhere else. Somewhere no one else can be harmed,” he said weakly.
Piers raised his eyebrows, as if questioning where. “There is another alternative,” he said.
Piers pulled his briefcase onto the table and patted it with one hand. “I have something in here for you,” he said. “It’s a letter from Walter Hennesey on CIA stationery. When Ludwig emerges—and he will—they’ll help you get to him. We will all help you get to him. You won’t be acting officially. You won’t ever be brought back in. You’ll be forever deniable. But we’ll get you to him and give you whatever you need to do it. And a copy of this letter will stay in Hennesey’s safe, so if he’s replaced, the promise won’t be forgotten. And I shall never let them forget. You have my word on that.”
Alex’s face became a mask, and his fists tightened. He turned to Antoine. “Does this mean I no longer have your help?” he asked.
Antoine’s eyes hardened and he looked away from Alex and stared at Piers as he spoke. “You will have whatever help I can give you. The Pisani faction will take you wherever you want to go. If you choose to stay here, it is here you will stay with our full protection. You will be buried here if you die of old age. And no one will reach you before then.” He looked back at Alex, his eyes softer now. “But your father is right. If you wait, you will still have our help. And you will have the help of others. You will be able to get to this pig and kill him the way he deserves to die. And you will live to savor it.”
Hearing the words from his uncle—from a man he trusted more than any other—made the breath rush out of Alex as though he had been holding it for a long time, and he seemed to sag visibly in his chair.
“What do I have to do?” he asked. There was no bitterness, no fight in his voice, and he felt like a weight had been lifted from him. But his gut felt hollow. Everything, even the air about him, seemed empty.
“You’ll fly back with me,” Piers said, gripping his forearm again. “Hennesey will meet us at the airport in Marseilles, and we’ll fly directly back to the States. The Russians have agreed to back off if you leave with us. And they’ll scratch your name from their list. Permanently.”
Alex’s face darkened, and his left eye narrowed almost imperceptibly. “And when I kill Ludwig?” he asked.
“Enough time will have passed,” Piers said. “It will just be the fortunes of war. And you won’t be part of any agency when you do it. They don’t expect their bastards to live forever. None of us do.”
Michelle had listened. She understood English and had heard the agreement the men had reached at the table where she took her meals every day. She had felt a surge of relief, then of renewed fear, knowing it was only a postponement in what Alex must do to unburden his soul.
And as he packed his bag now, she also realized she would never see him again, would never walk with him, speak with him. But he would be safe for now. And perhaps Ludwig would die at someone else’s hand, or a plane he was on would fall from the sky. She would go to the chapel and pray that it would happen, and if it offended God in His own house, so be it.
She was sitting in a chair in the family living room, and her mother came to her and sat on a stool beside her.
“You love him, don’t you?” she asked. She watched her daughter’s eyes fill with tears, and she leaned forward and kissed her forehead and gently stroked her cheek.
Michelle knew what her mother said was true. Alex was the gentlest, most honorable man she had ever known. And despite the suffering that had darkened his soul—the hatred it had produced, the need to kill—he was everything she believed a man should be.
“I want him to be safe,” Michelle said. “All I want is for him to be safe.”
“He will be,” her mother said. “He is going home to the people he belongs to. They will keep him safe. They will give his hatred time to die, and they will help him find a new life.”
“How do you know?” Michelle’s eyes implored her mother for some proof, something she could hold on to.
“I saw it in Antoine’s eyes,” she said. “They have lied to him, and it displeases him that they have. But he has allowed it because he loves him, just as you do.”
Michelle stared down into her lap, where her hands were clenched together. Juliet knew what her child, who was no longer a child, was thinking, how she had lost this man forever.
“It is good that you loved him,” she said. “He is a good man, and it is good to have loved one like him. But, one day soon, there will be another good man. And you will love him too. And that will be even better, because then it will be time.”
Tears began to move down Michelle’s cheeks, and she quickly wiped them away as she heard the men moving down the hall. Alex stepped into the doorway to the living room. Antoine and his father remained in the kitchen.
Alex smiled down at them. “Thank you, Juliet,” he said. “I shall never forget your home or your kindness.” He put his bag on the floor and walked over to Michelle and knelt in front of her. He reached out and took her hand. “I wish you great success at the Sorbonne,” he said. “I shall think of you there. And I shall think of you here. And of our walks and the things we talked about.”
He wanted to tell her to write to him, that he would write to her. But he knew it was foolish, and something he should not do. He leaned across and kissed her gently on the cheek.
“Good-bye,” he said. And then he was gone.
Michelle sat quietly, her fingers touching the place where he had kissed her, brushing back her tears so they would not wash it away.
CHAPTER
19
One Month Later
Gerard Morganthau left the consulate shortly after five o’clock, momentarily stood on the sidewalk, and tried to decide whether to take a taxi or to walk. Finally, he turned left and headed down the street, and let his mind fill with the young woman who had joined his staff that morning.
He would have liked to have lingered at the office, taken the time to talk to her, perhaps even take her out for a drink. She was truly exquisite. But he was due to meet his wife. They were to go to a reception that Gaston Defferre, Marseilles’s mayor, was hosting. It was obligatory and unavoidable. Defferre had ruled Marseilles since shortly after World War II, and ruled was not too strong a word. Morganthau, despite his affected Boston accent, had been raised in Chicago and had grown up under the reign of Richard Daley, and Gaston was the closest thing to Daley in the Western world. Some even said Daley was an amateur by comparison. And old Gaston had once he
aded an Allied intelligence network in the south of France, so the obligation carried even more weight.
But there would be time for the consulate’s latest acquisition, Morganthau told himself. There was always time, and given the nature of diplomatic work, the supply was constantly replenished.
He glanced at his watch and began walking more quickly, taking a side street that would bring him to the café where he had agreed to meet his wife. He did not notice the car moving up slowly behind him, did not see it stop, did not see two of its occupants get out. The first he knew of what was happening was the feel of the gun jammed into his ribs, the soft voice and hard eyes that told him he was to get in the back of the car, and of the two hands that gripped his arms on either side and hurried him to the open rear door.
He was being kidnapped. The horror of it flooded his mind as he was jammed between the two men, the gun still against his ribs, the two men no longer looking at him or speaking a word.
He tried to remember what they had told him during his training. Instructions of what to do if kidnapped. But most of what he could remember dealt with how to avoid being taken. And that was long past any use. For the life of him he could not remember what he was supposed to do now. For the life of him. The phrase sent a shudder through his body.
The car picked up speed, raced past the Vieux Port, past the City Hall, where Gaston Defferre was no doubt preparing to leave for his reception, and into the old quarter. There the car slowed and made several turns, seeming at times to turn back on itself in the labyrinth of streets that were a maze to those unfamiliar with them, until it finally pulled into a large warehouse that Morganthau thought must be somewhere near the Bassin de la Grande Joliette, the city’s new port. At least he could hear the sounds of ships in the distance.
Another car waited inside, but he could see no one behind its darkened windows, which became even darker as the doors of the warehouse closed behind him.
One of the men pulled him from the rear of the car, and pushed him roughly into the center of the large, empty room. The second of the men who had taken him from the street approached slowly, a tire iron dangling loosely from one hand.
“Look, gentlemen,” Morganthau began, fighting to keep his voice even and controlled, “I’m sure the United States government will give you what you want if you’ll just telephone and explain.”
The man with the tire iron smiled and shrugged, and Morganthau could read in his eyes that the United States could not offer anything that might interest him.
The tire iron came faster than he expected, making a wide, looping arc and carrying all the power of the man’s shoulder and arm. It crashed into his left knee, shattering the bone in a blinding flash of pain that sent Morganthau’s body crumpling to the floor.
The second blow came immediately, smashing his right knee before the first howl of pain had completely escaped Morganthau’s lips. Then a third blow crushed his right elbow, and as he sobbed hysterically, he could feel the man using his foot to turn his body on his other side. Then the fourth blow came, destroying his left elbow, and finally, with merciful speed, a fifth strike, smashing his nose and forcing his upper teeth into his mouth.
He was on his back now, unable to hold any of his wounds, staring up at the man through the blood that covered his face. The man readied the tire iron a final time, and brought it down between his legs, crushing his testicles.
Morganthau let out a final cry, coughing on his own blood, then fainted. When he awoke, several minutes later, he looked up into the face of Antoine Pisani. He recognized the face, had seen it often in the newspapers, and he was certain now that he would die.
Antoine bent over and spat into Morganthau’s face.
“In six months, when you get out of the hospital, we will come and visit you again,” he said. “Then, when you leave the hospital again, we will come to you. And we will keep coming until you run to a part of the world where we cannot find you. And if you tell anyone who has done this to you, we will kill you. And we will do it in a way that will make this seem a pleasant dream.” Antoine was quiet for almost a minute. “When you fuck a man’s wife,” he said at length, “well, then, you must expect to pay a price for the whore.”
Antoine turned and walked back to his car, and the last thing Morganthau heard before he fainted again was the sound of it leaving the warehouse.
BOOK II
CHAPTER
20
Marseilles, 1947
The line of people waiting to buy food stretched down the street, wound around one corner, then still another, and continued on almost out of sight. It numbered in the thousands, and to a casual observer it might seem these people were waiting for medical attention, so many were using canes or crutches or were missing limbs, and few, if any, looked as though they had eaten well in a long time. But it was not medical attention they sought. It was only food. And there was little of that to be had.
The mood of the crowd was not subdued; it was not the mood of beggars awaiting some token gift, or of those so desperate they would endure anything. There was a steady murmur of angry voices, intermixed with occasional oaths, and the soft October rain that had begun to fall seemed to further darken the gaunt, unhappy faces. And, as people shifted impatiently from side to side, the line took on the look of an anxious snake, writhing with displeasure.
The reason for the sullen, angry mood was not the long wait to buy the little food there was. The people had become used to that. The war, and now its aftermath, had conditioned them, and one had only to look at the surrounding buildings, torn and shattered by the Allied bombings, to know that things were not as they once were—would not be for a long time, perhaps would never be again. No, the anger was not about food, or the lack of it. It was about the decision of the newly elected mayor, Michel Carlini, to raise the tram fares, the only means the people had to move about their battered city: to get to the little food there was, to reach their jobs, if they had any, or to travel about to seek one if they had none.
Now, years after the war had ended, years after the last Nazi had been driven from France, the average worker was earning sixty-five percent of what he had during the Great Depression, and eating eighteen percent less than he had eaten then. Even the government had acknowledged it and had promised the people it would soon get better. But its solution had not been more food, more work. It had been to raise the price of a tram ride, which already took food from the mouths of the hungry.
“What do they want from us?” a man shouted from somewhere in the middle of the mass of people. “Why don’t they let us die in the street, then sweep us up like so much garbage?”
“No,” shouted back another. “They can run us over with their empty trams. Then Carlini can sell what’s left in the food shops, fucking pig that he is.”
There was no laughter among the crowd, no display of black humor, or appreciation of it, and the police who moved along the street, watching the line, waiting to quell any small disturbance, looked at each other with nervous eyes.
Strikes had already broken out throughout the city—threatened to spread to all of France—and any driver who dared take his tram into the streets was met with barricades and a hail of rocks. And the police, who controlled the people to what measure they could, knew that they—men who took ample wages home to their families—were no longer regarded as protectors. They were now hated almost as much as the Gestapo had been hated before them, almost as much as the gangsters who controlled the black market and preyed off the misery of the first vanquished, now “liberated” populace, and who were so comfortably in bed with the politicians the people despised more than anyone. And it was getting worse.
Less than a mile from the long, angry line of people, in a nightclub in the Opera district known as Club Paradise, Antoine and Meme Pisani sat at a table talking with an American and the man from the mayor’s office who had brought them all together. They were twenty-seven and twenty-six respectively, and they were dressed in wide-shouldered s
uits and garish neckties. In the shadows of the large, empty room, other young men, who worked for the two brothers, waited expectantly to see how deep Antoine and Meme would be allowed to dip their beaks—as the Corsican saying went—into the profit political turmoil always offered.
The American was tall and rangy, with carefully manicured hands, and he was dressed in a double-breasted pinstriped suit that made him look more like a banker than an official of the United States government. He had been introduced only as Jorgenson, no first name, no official title, but the brothers were sure he represented what had been known as the OSS—the Office of Strategic Services—and which, they had been told, had just the previous month been reorganized into something called the Central Intelligence Agency. They had both dealt with the OSS during the war as part of the Resistance, and this man Jorgenson—if that was truly his name—had the look of those they had known then.
The other man, Pierre Ferri, was a fellow Corsican who worked in some indefinable way for the new mayor. He was a small, plump man of about forty, dressed in a tattered but well-pressed brown suit that made his sallow complexion seem washed out and faded in the dimly lighted room. He smiled often, almost endlessly, with poor teeth as he spoke, and the brothers knew his type well—a man not of the milieu, but one who had emigrated from their native land and chosen politics as his way to wealth.
There was a plate of cheese and bread and fruit on the table before them, and Ferri picked at it as he spoke, more out of habit than hunger.
“Monsieur Jorgenson has a proposition for your faction,” Ferri said around a bit of bread. He saw the pleasure come to Antoine’s eyes—not Meme’s, who hid his feelings better—and he knew his acknowledgment that they now headed their own group within the milieu was still a matter of pride between them. For years the brothers had worked for the faction headed by Paul Carbone, who together with François Spirito had dominated the criminal organization for more than a decade, and they had labored as little more than triggermen and leg breakers. But Carbone had been killed in 1943, when the Resistance had bombed a train on which he was riding, and Spirito, who had collaborated with the Nazis, had fled the country in 1944 with the Fascist ex-deputy mayor Simon Sabiani. Now, with Carbone and Spirito gone, they were among a handful of new leaders within the milieu who were struggling for dominance.
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