Hopscotch

by Brian Garfield

She ignored it. “You have a first name, don’t you?”

  “I suppose so.” Everyone always called him Kendig. “It’s Miles.”

  “Miles Kendig. I rather like that—it has a strong sound. Come on then, get in. I’ll drop you wherever you like. You won’t find a taxi in this quarter, not at this hour.”

  “… Thank you.” He said it grudgingly and went around to hold the driver’s door for her.

  She managed the car with poor driving rhythm; it was not an implement to which she’d been born—he suspected she’d grown up amid chauffeurs and taught herself to drive at some point in order to expand the boundaries of her independence but it wasn’t anything she’d ever done for pleasure.

  He made conversation because evidently she expected it. “You live in Paris all the time now?”

  “Live? I imagine one could put it that way. Living is something most of us postpone, isn’t it. We sell the present for a chance at a future where we may do our living when we’re old and we’ve lost the talent for it.”

  “You don’t strike me as a woman who’s saving up for her retirement.”

  “Well I was fortunate. I have an ex-husband who settled my pension on me prematurely. Did you ever meet Isaac?”

  “No.”

  “Tycoon, banker, merchant prince. I’m sure you know the type. They’re always terrified by their Ozymandian dreams. The future must be guaranteed forever. Ninety-nine-year leases and thousand-year trust funds. It’s bloody depressing.”

  She drove along the quay. There was a good moon but it was very late for lovers; the evening was silent and uninhabited but for the clochards, the human flotsam in rags sleeping in the streets underneath the globular streetlamps that hung like rotted melons on their corroded stalks. The woman said, “They disturb your friend Jaynes, the clochards. For some reason they frighten him. Would he have us house them in the best hotels, I wonder? Then where would all the Americans live?”

  Her laughter was mocking but not unkind. He didn’t respond but he couldn’t share in her contempt for Jaynes’s compassion: he couldn’t deceive himself any longer into mocking anyone else’s convictions. He could only envy them.

  Past the Tour Eiffel, Napoleon’s tomb, up the Saint Germain, a tourist’s route across the island beneath Notre Dame—the architectural gestures of an ambitious past. His eyes opaque, Kendig watched it all flow past; watched the woman’s animated face hovering above the wheel. A tiny Renault squirted in front of her and she shouted at it: “Cochon!”

  Then they were on the right bank threading the maze below the Opera; his hotel was only a few blocks distant. She hadn’t asked where he was staying but evidently she knew. She slid the sports car in at the curb a block short of it. “You honestly didn’t care, did you.”

  “About what?”

  “Your cards. The size of the wager.”

  He turned his hand palm up.

  “Remarkable,” she said.

  “Is it.”

  “You find it an effort merely to grunt a word or two, don’t you, Miles Kendig. Yet like the ashes of Alexander you were once Alexander. An exciting reputation precedes you, you know.”

  He looked at her. “What the hell.” It was said of her that in her bedroom in Neuilly there was a statuette of a Punjabi idol clutching his distended giant member. “I’ll go to your place.”

  “You needn’t have made it such a bloody concession,” she said angrily; but she put the car in gear.

  In another few years she might become one of those middle-aged divorcées who take up with young Continental gentlemen who teach Italian. But she had not yet degenerated into that sort of female impersonation; she was vital and she stirred what juices had not atrophied in him. “At least you’re not a zombie there,” she told him. He took no particular pleasure from the knowledge.

  In the morning he pushed away his plate of breakfast untasted and left her, on foot, strolling in any direction through the Bois. She had smiled gently but she’d made no demands when he got up to leave: she was interested but not desperate, she was willing to be casual about it and he thought he might even come back to her some time.

  After a while he ambushed a taxi and rode into the snarled center of Paris, made arrangements to have his winnings transferred to Switzerland for deposit, walked to his hotel and met the concierge and paid tomorrow’s rent as if he believed there would be a tomorrow.

  In his room he stripped and bathed and took the trouble to shave; the little daily routines reassured him a bit. In the mirror his face showed the years: every crease. He still had a full head of hair, pepper-grey now; his face was rectilinear, all parallel planes, and his eyebrows were two bushy triangles over his slanted eyes. It was a middle-Caucasion face that had served him well in the chameleon years. In France he passed easily for a Frenchman because it never occurred to the French that a foreigner could speak the language properly. He had posed at one time or another as an Italian, an Arab, a German and a Croat.

  From eleven until three he sat in the room waiting, neither reading nor smoking nor otherwise stirring his consciousness. At three he went out.

  He had a croque monsieur in the Deux Magots and took the bus along to the rue de la Convention, dismounted at the quay and had a look around, more through habit than from any particular caution. A woman in dusty black hawked tickets to the Loterie Nationale. Lower-class Frenchmen sat at dirty checkerclothed tables before a pair of cafés and a brasserie, drinking table wine. A block distant a group of street workers leaned on their tools, never laughing, seldom working, ogling a girl who strolled by—just another girl who worked the bars and the men in them, a brittle black-haired borderline alcoholic who probably couldn’t remember the faces of the men she’d bedded in the past week; but she held the workers’ full attention until she disappeared. In Switzerland, Kendig recalled, the street workers laughed and they worked. And all that energy and spirit had produced, in five hundred years of peaceful civilization, the cuckoo clock.

  A coachload of tourists decanted along the quay and Kendig moved around, keeping out of the way of the Americans taking slide photos and Super-8 movies of one another. He was thinking: if you compressed all the matter in a human being, closing down the spaces between cells, the spaces between electrons and nuclei, you would end up with a heavy mass about the size of a one-eighth karat diamond, and far less useful.

  Yaskov came along, elegant in a suede jacket with a Malacca cane in his spidery hand; he gave Kendig the benediction of his grave nod. Russians do not smile politely; they smile only when they are amused. It makes them appear rude to outsiders. Kendig fell in step and they walked out to the center of the bridge and down the steps onto the tiny island. The park benches were deserted. “So nice to see you again,” Yaskov said. His gleaming skin was stretched over the bones almost to the point of splitting. In the profession he was an éminence grise; his name commanded respect in all the agencies. He was not the sort of Russian who would be surprised to learn that America was no longer a land of sweatshops and scarlet letters and riders of the purple sage. (It was truly amazing how many of them were still like that.)

  Yaskov’s urbane English was almost perfect. “You won a great sum of money last night, yes? It was your good fortune I sent you there.”

  “Well I’m deeply grateful.” Kendig was wry.

  Yaskov too was a gambler; his face never betrayed him. “I’m distressed to see you so lackluster, old friend.”

  “It’s only post-coital tristesse.”

  “For so many months?”

  He was tired of the roundabout game. “Then you’ve been keeping tabs on me. Why? I’m out of the game now—you know that.”

  “By choice, is it?”

  “I’m sure you know that too.”

  “Actually I’m not sure I do, old friend. My sources in Langley haven’t always been reliable. It’s said you were retired—involuntarily.”

  “Is it.”

  “Is that true?”

  “I don’t see that it matter
s whether it’s true. I’m retired—that’s truth enough.”

  “You have fifty-three years.”

  “Yes.”

  “Absurd,” Yaskov said. “I myself have sixty-one. Am I retired?”

  “Do you want to be?”

  “No. Avidly no. I should be bored to distraction.”

  “Would you now.”

  They sat down on a bench. A barge drifted past laden with what appeared to be slag. Its aftercabin had a Citroën 2CV parked on the roof and a line of multihued washing strung like an ocean vessel’s signal pennants. The barge’s family sunned on the afterdeck—a fat wife, three children—while the husband manned the tiller and smoked. Generations of them were born, lived and died aboard the canal barges. It was a peaceful life and a bastion of unchange.

  A little motor runabout zipped past the barge, disturbing its tranquillity with the sharp chop of its frenetic wake.

  Kendig said, “What’s your offer, Mikhail?”

  “Life, old friend.”

  Kendig grinned at him. “And the alternative?”

  “I did not invite you to join me here on such a pleasant day in order to impose ultimata upon you,” Yaskov said. “I make no threats at all. The alternative would be of your own making, not of mine. I simply offer to revive you. I wish to bring you back to life.”

  “The resurrection of Miles Kendig.” His tongue toyed with it. “A fine title for an autobiography.”

  “Don’t be evasive.”

  “What is it you want, then? Are you short a defector this month?”

  “Oh defection is such a degrading transformation, don’t you think? In any case I should imagine you’d be just as bored in a Moscow flat as you are here. My dear Miles, I’m offering to put you back into the game. Back into action. Isn’t it what you want?”

  “As a double agent I’d be of very little use, I have no access to my former employers.”

  “Double agents are tedious little people anyhow,” Yaskov said. “They’re required to be so colorless. I don’t think it would suit you at all. No, it’s really quite straightforward. I should like to run you in the field. As my own agent. I can assure you the members of my string regard me as a most amiable Control. How does it strike you?”

  Kendig tried briefly to put some show of interest on his face. Yaskov did not speak further; he left his invitation dangling like a baited hook.

  The barge disappeared round the bend on its leisurely passage to Le Havre. The little powerboat came zigzagging back upstream, splitting the water with its razor bow, planing and slapping gaily. The sun on Kendig’s cheek was soporific. He didn’t want to have to think.

  Yaskov began to draw circles on the pavement with the rubber tip of his cane. It was a subtle rebuke. It forced Kendig to speak. “It wouldn’t be worth it to me, I’m afraid.

  “We’d make it worthwhile of course. There’s plenty of money.”

  “Money costs too much when you have to earn it that way.”

  “Then what is it you want? Power?”

  “God no.”

  “I could let you run a string of your own if you like. You might even rise to the policy level in time. Doesn’t that intrigue you? The possibility of making policy for your former enemies?”

  “Sounds tedious to me.”

  “Our kind has been on this planet for perhaps two million years,” Yaskov said, “and during all but one percent of that period we lived as hunters. The hunting way of life is the only one natural to man. The one most rewarding. It was your way of life but your government took it away from you. I offer to return it to you.”

  “It’s self-destructive lunacy, that’s all it is.”

  “Well my dear Miles you can’t lead our kind of life and expect to live forever. But at least we can be alive for a time.”

  “It’s all computers now. World War Three will be known as the Paperkrieg. There’s no need for my kind of toy gladiator any more. We’re as obsolete as fur-trapping explorers.”

  “It’s hardly gone that far, old friend. Otherwise why should I be making you this offer?”

  “Because you can’t face obsolescence—you won’t acknowledge it the way I’ve done. You’re as redundant as I am—you just don’t know it yet.” Kendig smiled meaninglessly. “We’ve seven’d out. All of us.”

  “I don’t know the expression but you make it clear enough.”

  “It’s to do with a dice game.”

  “Yes, of course. You’re beginning to annoy me. You’re not merely disenchanted; you’re condescending. I don’t need to be patronized. I suspect behind your smokescreen of boredom you’re resisting my offer out of some absurd vestige of chauvinistic scruple.”

  “It could be that. Who knows.” When Kendig had learned the game he’d had Truman and the Yaskovs had had Stalin; it had been easy enough to discern which of them wore the white hat and which the black hat. Now there was none of that left. The only distinction was that the West’s leadership was more petty than the East’s. It wasn’t even a game for the intelligence operatives any more; it was only a nihilistic exercise, going through the motions out of habit, answering not to any sense of mission or principle but only to the procedural requirements of bureaucracy. There was no point to it any more. But Yaskov might be right; Kendig might have hated his side too long to be comfortable with the idea of working for them. He didn’t know; he didn’t really care.

  Yaskov brooded toward the enormous monolith of the Radiodiffusion which cowed the right bank beneath it. “Well it was an intriguing idea to me. I did hope you would take an interest.”

  “You’d better forget it. I’d be no good to you—I’d put my foot in it anyway.”

  “Certainly you would if the work didn’t excite you. I won’t press you again but you might bear in mind that I won’t have closed the offer.”

  It meant only that the idea of recruiting him had been Yaskov’s own. Probably he hadn’t cleared it with his superiors. Therefore its failure would not reflect on Yaskov. It meant Kendig was in no danger from them; there’d be no retribution. Somehow the realization angered him.

  Yaskov stood up and prodded the cement with his cane. “You were one of the very best. I feel quite sad.” Then he walked away.

  He sat on the bench without stirring. Pigeons flocked around, then drifted away in disappointment when he had nothing to feed them. Yaskov’s high narrow figure dwindled along the quay and was absorbed. Traffic was a muted whirring hum on the pont; a thin haze drifted across the sky and Kendig stared among the trees with empty eyes. Recollections drifted through his mind. Lorraine—a dreadful woman with a dreadful name. The caper along the Danube when they’d brought Rozhsenny out in the rain with the Soviet guns spitting blindly in the night. The old man, and the idea of suicide that had hung around him always. Kendig had no scruple against it. A man always ought to have the right to remove himself from the world at his discretion.

  But it had no appeal. There was no challenge; it was too passive. He didn’t want to be dead: he was already dead. Yaskov had strummed a chord there. To be alive might be the goal. But it was harder to find, all the time. He’d done everything to provoke his jaded sensibilities. High risks: the motor racing, skiing, flying lessons, the gambling which had been satisfying until his own capacities had defeated its purpose: he’d always been professional at whatever he did and his skills were the sort that took the risk out of it after a while. He’d bent the bank at Biarritz a month ago and since then he’d lost all interest in it. And he’d long since given up the athletic challenges. They’d all got to looking the same way—the way bowling had looked when he’d been a college freshman. As soon as he’d discovered that the object of bowling was to learn how to do exactly the same thing every time, he’d lost interest.

  He thought part of it was the fact that there was no human antagonist. There was no “other side” with which to compete. He had a quarter century of playing the running-dog game and it had educated his palate to its own flavor; his appetite had been train
ed to crave human conflict: the chess game of reality with stakes that weren’t tokens, rules that weren’t artificial.

  At one time he had tried to get reinstated.

  They’d sent him into the Balkans on a very chancy mission but the objective had some meaning so he’d volunteered for it. He’d accomplished the job but he’d been injured badly—it had been critical for a while—and his cover had been blown. After he’d convalesced he’d done some office work and then they’d put him out to pasture on early retirement. Eighteen months later he’d asked for reactivation but he was too old, they told him, too old and too hot. And in any case Cutter had taken his place and wasn’t about to relinquish it. They didn’t want any part of him. They’d offered him a sop—a time-filler desk over at NSA with a fair GS rank and salary, punching decodes through computers. A bloody file clerk’s job.

  When the sun tipped over it got chilly and he left the islet. Snatches of things ran through his mind in a jumbled sort of order and he made a desultory game of tracing the pattern they made. They came without chronology from the retentive cells. The suicide note left by the screen actor George Sanders: “I am leaving because I am bored.” Fragmentarily a poem by Stephen Crane which he hadn’t read since he was a sophomore; he was sure he didn’t have it right: “A man said to the Universe, ‘Sir, I exist!’ ‘Yes,’ replied the Universe, ‘but that fact does not create in me a sense of obligation.’” At any rate something like that.… I wish to bring you back to life.… The resurrection of Miles Kendig.… My dear Miles, I’m offering to put you back in the game. Back into action. Isn’t it what you want? The hunting way of life is the only one natural to man. I offer to return it to you.

  Well it was something Yaskov didn’t have it in his power to restore.

  But it was the first time in months he’d felt things churning and he kept toying with them while he slouched up the rue Lecourbe toward Montparnasse. It was the first time his dialogue with himself hadn’t taken the flavor of a talk with a stranger in the adjacent seat of an airliner: an exchange of meaningless monologues, half of them self-serving lies, the other half mechanical responses and none of it designed to be remembered beyond the debarkation ramp.