Hopscotch

by Brian Garfield

  Here and there he double-parked the van and got out to have a close look at a prone figure or a shadow propped in a nook. Kendig’s penance was the folded fifty-franc note he would slip into the hand or pocket of each drowsing clochard. He found a woman dead, all skin and bones and tattered rags; he went on. There was a man dead in the place de Lourmel but he was very small and skinny and Kendig passed him by; there was another in a passage off the rue Emeriau but that one was much too tall.

  The fifty-franc note awakened a dozing fat woman and he hurried away from her profusions with his chin sunk in the heavy collar of his overcoat. He drove the van on, making a concentric circuit of the district, invading the clochards’ privacy and apologizing for the intrusion with his money. There was a corpse on the curb of the rue Varet that met the requirements of size and build but the man was missing his left leg; there was another two blocks away but he was toothless and had a misshapen arm that was evidently the result of an old fracture that had healed unevenly. Kendig moved on. There was no urgent timetable. If he didn’t find one tonight he’d go out again tomorrow night.

  He found the right one less than half an hour later in a passage half a block from the Convention métro station. The man’s dead face was ravaged with age but that was the accelerated deterioration of the life he’d led; the backs of the hands were not severely veined or mottled. The man was nearly bald but that wouldn’t matter. Kendig went back to the van and moved it to a position where it masked him from the mouth of the passage, when he picked up the odorous corpse. He placed the body gently in the back of the van and locked the rear doors. The smell filled the small Citroën immediately and he had to drive with the sliding window wide open in spite of the icy cold. He parked it behind his pension and went inside to get the suitcase and Oakley’s topcoat; he brought them downstairs and checked out, paying the sleepy concierge in cash and leaving a tip for the char.

  He carried his things out to the van and went around to the right-hand side to feed the case and coat into the passenger seat. He set the bottle of acid against the outside rim of the seat frame and closed the door gently against it to wedge it upright in place. Then the locked the door and stepped around the back of the van.

  A car swung into the street from the intersection. Its beams arced along the row of parked cars and caught him in the face before he had time to turn. It came forward with a bit of a lurch and then the lights dipped when the car braked and he didn’t need more than that to know the numerical odds had caught up with him. He was about-facing when the car stopped and he started to run when he heard the doors chunk shut.

  They didn’t bother to shout at him but when he threw a glance over his shoulder he saw the fragmentary ripple of reflected light along the pistol barrel. Two of them were out of the car but there was still a man inside it; it was moving again.

  A weakening rush of panic; and he rushed across into the narrow foot passage beyond. He could hear their running footsteps; he pounded the length of the alley and the car had already gone around the end of the block; it was swinging around the corner too fast, leaning against the centripetal tug. Kendig ran right toward it; he dodged to one side as the car straightened in the street and then he was up on the curb diving down the steps into the métro subway station. It was shut down; no trains ran this late at night; he had to vault the chain at the foot of the stairs. A few work lights made faint illumination along the platform and several drunks slept on the benches. He dropped into the cut and danced across the tracks staying off the electrified rails and boosted himself up onto the opposite platform; he was at the foot of the exit stair when the two pursuers came in sight behind him but he was up into the shadows before they had time to take aim. He bolted up into the cold empty intersection. Their car was gone; odds were it had returned to keep watch on the street where they’d disclosed him: they might not know which car he’d been about to get into but they’d have seen the car keys in his hand. If there was a two-way radio in their car he didn’t have much time.

  On the northwest corner of the intersection stood a modern apartment building with a supermarket in its ground floor. Three steps led up to the lobby doors and you could see straight through to another set of doors that let out onto a passage behind the building where the parking lot was. He went right up the steps and across the lobby into the parking lot. The two pistols were coming up from the métro and he wasn’t in time to get out of their sight; they came sprinting up the steps and Kendig ran down into the parking lot.

  A high fence ran around it and the gates were locked up. The railing was topped with blunt metal spikes and he swarmed up it wildly. He heard gristle snap in his shoulder. He went over fast, ripping his coat on a spike; he dropped lightly on the asphalt and moved away swiftly, knees bent, pulse slamming.

  The alley behind the lot twisted among low old buildings and he put a jutting corner between him and the guns; he went over a courtyard wall with the acrobatic strength of terror and batted his way through invisible clotheslines and found a gate that he scaled blindly; he dropped from his fingertips into a cobbled passage not more than four feet wide and ran on his toes to its mouth.

  It was a narrow street with a charcuterie at the corner and he ran to it without sound and whipped around into the alley beside it where there had to be a crowd of garbage cans; he climbed into the midst of them and nested down surrounded by their stink and watched the street through the vertical slits between them.

  The two of them came in sight; he saw them hesitate and then begin to spread out like hounds abruptly deprived of their scent. Kendig crouched bolt still, in total stasis; his scalp shrank and his forehead blistered with sweat.

  They moved right and left. When the building corners hid them Kendig straightened up and climbed over the cans very carefully to avoid sound. He backed away close to the masonry wall, fingertips dragging it lightly, wrapped in darkness. Tenement flats back here. A door yielded to him with a dry groan; he slipped into a rancid hallway. Somewhere on the floor above an infant yowled. Kendig went through to the back and found a broken-out window; he picked shards of glass from the sill and set them down softly on the littered floor and climbed outside—another cobbled passageway crowded with a bumper-to-bumper line of small cars with their right wheels up on the curb and their doors close along the building walls, He went along the parked line trying doors and when a Renault admitted him he jammed his thumb on the plunger in the hinge wall to extinguish the interior dome light and held his thumb there while he crawled into the car and searched for the switch that would disengage the light permanently; he found it and then extricated his thumb and pulled the door shut silently. He locked both doors and climbed over the transmission hump into the backseat and settled his rump on the floor. His eyes were just above sill level and he watched the street filled with unease, willing his pulse to slow.

  When the tall one came in sight at the end of the passage Kendig shrank down as flat as he could go. There was nothing to do but wait it out. After a while he heard the man’s soles prowl toward him, crunching grit. Then the man’s head and shoulders loomed beyond the rear side-window. He stopped and swiveled in a full circle, searching, bouncing the automatic in his fist. Kuykendall, Kendig recalled; one of Follett’s junior agents—no wonder he’d been recognized so quickly. Hatless, puffing out steam clouds of breath, Kuykendall stood as if rooted, his head turning slowly and his scowl deepening. Kendig heard a door slam somewhere; it drew Kuykendall’s immediate attention but still he didn’t move off the spot and if the light had been just a little better he’d have known he was staring his quarry in the face over a distance of not more than eight feet; he might sense it anyway. Kendig lay still, hardly breathing, not even blinking.

  Kuykendall’s head veered around and his chin lifted questioningly; then he shrugged and lifted both arms—a signal to his partner at the far end. Kuykendall made a sweeping motion with his left hand, ordering the partner around the block; then Kuykendall trotted away, forward along the line of
cars to go around the opposite end of the block.

  Kendig watched until Kuykendall turned the corner. He looked back through the rear window but the partner was long gone. He climbed out of the Renault and went back in through the broken window, back along the stinking hallway and out the unlocked door; back past the garbage cans and then across the street swiftly, retracing his exact path because it was least likely they’d look for him where they knew he’d already been and gone.

  In just a few more minutes they’d know for certain they’d lost him and they’d beat their way back to their car and stake out the street because they’d reason that he might have something in one of the cars there that he’d have to come back for. In the meantime if there was a two-way they’d want to be there to brief the reinforcements the minute they arrived; after that the whole area would be suicidal for him because the SDECE and the Sureté and half the flics in Paris would comb it house to house.

  He threw off the overcoat in the alley and hunched his back like an old man and moved purposefully afoot into the street where he’d left the van. There was no car double-parked and none of the parked cars had light on but spotting their car was ludicrously easy; the frigid cold gave it away. It was one among many parked vehicles but the driver had the engine running to warm himself and the windshield was clear from the defroster.

  As if he had business there Kendig walked straight along the sidewalk with his old man’s stoop. They were looking for an erect fugitive in an overcoat.

  He had the door open before the driver could react to his turn; he hauled the man right out of the seat. In that brief broken instant under the streetlight Kendig saw the wild-eyed look: he’d seen it on a man’s face once before but that had been on a thundering battleground below Cassino. Kendig’s jaws flexed; he hauled the driver right out against his own upraised knee and when the man fell back against the car Kendig locked his left hand around his right fist and drove his right elbow into the driver’s ribs. It collapsed the wind out of the man and when his head dipped in anguish Kendig pushed him right down onto the sidewalk and got a surgical grip around the base of the skull and pressed firmly with fingers and thumb. It closed off the flow of the carotid artery and starved the brain and after a moment the driver went limp. He wouldn’t stay unconscious for more than two or three minutes but he’d be dazed for a while after that.

  Kendig pulled the ignition key partway out and broke it off with the tip jammed in the lock. He plucked the microphone off the two-way and tore it out by the cord and dropped it on the seat. Then he pushed the door shut and walked swiftly the twenty paces to his 2CV van and drove away.

  They might have a make on the van; he couldn’t keep it. There were thousands of the cheap Citroëns in Paris but they’d be distraught enough to tear into every one of them at this point.

  He drove as far as the tangle of streets behind the Invalides and parked the van in a dark side-passage. It took him fifteen minutes to walk to the Laennec Hospital. A handful of cars stood parked on the doctors’ lot near the emergency entrance. A doctor in a hurry to reach a critical case didn’t always lock his car or take his keys; Kendig was counting on that and he found a Peugeot still warm and ready to go and he drove it off the lot without looking back. The owner would find it missing pretty fast but what counted was that, the theft wouldn’t be connected with Kendig for a while.

  He parked right behind the van and transferred everything into the Peugeot. He put the dead clochard in the trunk, slammed the lid and drove away into the boulevard Montparnasse, forcing himself to drive at moderate speed.

  He left Paris by way of Charenton and the Bois de Vincennes; he ran along southeast with the map imprinted on his eyelids. It was somewhere past three in the morning; the well-tuned sedan ran eagerly and there was no traffic on the curving country road. Farmhouses rushed by vaguely, smeared by speed; heavy trees blurred and vanished into the onrushing darkness.

  Around four o’clock he crossed the Yonne at Auxerre and took the road toward Chablis: The vineyards made an icy spindle tracery above the highway; occasionally a chateau loomed on the hill.

  The gate was fastened with a padlocked chain—he was reminded of the bootleggers’ road in Georgia. He drove right through it, splintering the gate and extinguishing one of the Peugeot’s head-lights. He switched them off. It didn’t matter if he left evidence of destruction now; he expected them to trace him this far.

  The Lafayette Escadrille had used it, and then the French training commands and then the Luftwaffe and the American Warhawks; after the war it had been judged too short for the jet generation and it had passed out of government hands into the private aviation sector. The wineries kept their executive planes here and there were planes of all sizes belonging to—and sometimes built by—Sunday fliers. The flying school had three single-engine trainers and a twin Apache.

  The field had two runways laid out in an X; they were graded earth strips and there was no radar or strobe-light strip—it was strictly a daylight field for small craft. There were two maintenance hangars but if you wanted major work done you had to go to one of the bigger airstrips that had overhauling facilities. The planes were parked at hard-stands along the verges of the runways in high yellow grass. Some of them were tied down against the danger of high winds that might tip them over and snap a wing.

  They’d never kept a night watchman and he assumed they’d had no reason to hire one since he’d taken his lessons here. He drove without lights right up to the dark hangars and switched off.

  According to Oakley’s watch it was four-twenty. This time of year nothing would begin stirring here until at least seven-thirty, more likely eight. There was plenty of time. He checked out the hangars cursorily and then went down the line of aircraft to pick out a plane. He knew what sort he wanted but he wasn’t sure there’d be one. He’d settle for something else in that case.

  But there was one. It was an old PBY Catalina amphibian—a small twin-engine flying boat on wheels. Some of the vintners liked to use amphibians because it made for handy access to quiet shores along the inlets of Lake Geneva on trips to Swiss banks they preferred not to advertise. It was a service Kendig had used a few times to get his money in and out of Zurich.

  He took note of the civil air numbers painted on the plane and he went back to the hangar and broke into the office. He didn’t want to turn on a light; there were two chateaus on heights within less than a mile. He lighted a wooden match and found the key on the pegboard by the number on its tag. Nobody stole airplanes; they were too traceable; so there was no security imposed.

  He pocketed the PBY key and got back in the car and drove it out the runway, racked it alongside the Catalina and got to work. He checked the fuel gauges and found it full; that was standard procedure—you filled after you landed, not before you took off; that way you were ready to go on short notice. He took out the three logbooks—by regulation there was one for the airframe and a separate one for each engine—and left them askew on the floor by the right-seat rudder pedals. He didn’t care what shape the plane was in but it had to look as if he did. Cutter wasn’t going to give him any help if he left too many doors open.

  He put the suitcase in the plane, belt-strapping it onto one of the pry-rigged passenger seats in the midships blister. The manuscript was in the suitcase. He had to give it up to them or they wouldn’t buy any of it; and it had to be the real manuscript, not a fake and not a partial—no tricks, nothing withheld.

  He took the clochard out of the trunk and laid him out on the grass under the high wing. He stripped the clochard to the skin. There were scars here and there—it hadn’t been an easy life for the clochard—but none of that would matter. He brought the four-liter can of gasoline out of the Peugeot and bathed the corpse with the stuff to get rid of any telltales that might have adhered. The clochard’s filthy rags had to disappear; Kendig bundled them up and set the bundle aside.

  He poured the acid solution out of the Vittel bottle onto the clochard’s face. He w
asn’t cold-blooded enough to do it without a cringing nausea. When the acid had done a fair job of eradicating features he washed it away with gasoline. Then he dressed the body in his own old underwear and socks and Oakley’s suit and topcoat; he put Oakley’s identification and wallet in the clothes along with the passport photo of himself that he’d rescued from the London police sergeant’s desk. Then he added the Alexandre Vaneau passport—again with his own photo in it—to the contents of the dead man’s pockets.

  The clochard was stiffening with rigor by now and that was all to Kendig’s advantage. He dragged the corpse forward, closing his mind to the ghoulishness of it and the reek of gasoline. He propped the body in the pilot’s seat and belted it in.

  Outside on the grass he opened the bundle of filthy clothes and spread the coat out flat. He piled into the center of it the rest of the clothes, the empty Vittel bottle and his own spare pair of shoes. He tied up the arms and skirt of the coat and carried the bundle into the plane together with the can of gasoline. Then he went back outside again and explored in the trunk of the Peugeot. It was slightly redolent of the dead but that would dissipate. He found a combination windshield-scraper and brush; it would do. He used it to rake the grass where he’d been working. He left no sign in the earth except a set of vague foot-impressions to show he’d walked from the car to the plane; he left the trunk lid ajar with the keys in it both to air it out and to indicate he’d been in a hurry.

  When he climbed in the waist door he latched it shut behind him and went forward up the steeply tilted companionway into the cockpit. He tested the clochard’s limbs but they hadn’t stiffened quite enough yet. He couldn’t bear the thought of sitting beside the ghastly dead man for any length of time; he went back into the fuselage and sat under the blister watching the night. Along the edge of the field bare branches were silhouetted against the dark sky, as jagged as cracks in a porcelain surface. Scarves of cloud hung low in the southwest but the clear intense cold held.