“Bonjour, monsieur.” It was the driver who had saved his life on the avenue Gabriel, the man who insisted he get in the car only seconds before a fusillade of bullets pocked the windshield.
“Your name’s François,” said Drew, “and I’ll never forget it or you. I wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t—”
“Yes, yes,” Moreau interrupted, cutting Latham off. “We’ve all read the report and François has been sufficiently commended. He took the rest of the day off to calm his nerves.”
“C’est merde,” said the driver under his breath as he started the car. “Is it the park we determined, Monsieur Director?” he continued courteously in English.
“Yes, beyond Issy-les-Moulineaux. How long will it take?”
“Once we reach the rue de Vaugirard, not long. Perhaps twenty minutes or so. It’s the traffic until then.”
“Don’t overburden yourself with city regulations, François. It would be advantageous if you did not run over or crash into someone, but short of that, get us there as quickly as possible.”
What followed belonged on the crassest television show, wherein automobiles replaced characters and became roaring machines hell-bent on self-destruction. The Deuxième vehicle not only weaved perilously in and around the cars in front, but twice François swung up on relatively empty pavements to avoid minor congestions, scattering what pedestrians there were, who ran for their lives.
“We’re going to get arrested!” said an astonished Latham.
“It might be attempted, but we haven’t got time for that,” disagreed Moreau. “Our automobile is equipped with an engine superior to any police car in Paris. We could even put in use the siren, but it startles people and could actually cause accidents, which we cannot afford.”
“This guy’s nuts!”
“Among François’s talents is an extraordinary ability as a driver. I suspect that before he came to us he was what you Americans call ‘the wheels’ in bank robberies—that sort of thing.”
“I saw that a couple of days ago on the Gabriel.”
“So don’t complain.”
Thirty-two minutes later, the foreheads of Drew, Jacques, and even Moreau dripping with sweat from the wild drive, they reached le Pare de Joie, a tawdry alternative to Euro Disney, popular because it was French and inexpensive. In fact, it was a poor distant relation to Disney’s spectacle, more carnival than park, with grotesque, outsize cartoon figures above the various rides and side-shows, the dirt paths littered with debris. The screams of delight from the crowds of children, however, defined the equality with its grandiose American competition.
“There are two entrances, Monsieur Director,” said the driver. “One north and one south.”
“You know this place, François?”
“Yes, sir. I’ve taken my two daughters here several times. This is the north entrance.”
“Shall we use the pass and see what happens?” asked Drew.
“No,” replied the Deuxième chief. “That can come later if we think it will be helpful.… Jacques, you and François go in together, two fathers looking for your wives and children. Monsieur Latham and I will go in separately through different gates. Where would you suggest we meet, François?”
“There is a carousel in the center of the park. It’s usually crowded and the noise from the excited children and the calliope makes it ideal.”
“You both have studied the photograph of Madame Courtland, no?”
“Certainly.”
“Then split up inside and walk around, looking for her. Monsieur Latham and I will do the same, and we’ll meet at the carousel in half an hour. If either of you see her, use your radios and we’ll move up the rendezvous.”
“I don’t have a radio,” complained Drew.
“You do now,” said Moreau, reaching into his pocket.
Madame Courtland had been ushered into a small building at the south end of the seven-acre amusement park. The anteroom was a slovenly mess, garish old posters tacked on the walls in no particular order and without concern for symmetry. Two desks and a long, rickety buffet table were piled high with assorted multicolored flyers, many stained by coffee rings and cigarette ashes, while three employees labored over a mimeograph machine and several stencils. Two were overly made-up women in belly dancer costumes and a young male in a strangely ambiguous outfit—soiled orange tights and a blue blouse—his gender revealed by a scraggly beard. There were four small windows on the upper-front walls, too high for those outside to look through, and the clattering of an ancient air conditioner seemed to be in syncopation with the mimeograph.
Janine Clunes Courtland was appalled. The Saddle and Bootery was a palace compared to this dump, she thought. Yet this dump, this foul-smelling office, was obviously superior in status to the exquisite leather boutique in the Champs-Élysées. Her doubts were partially put to rest with the sight of a tall, middle-aged man who seemingly appeared out of nowhere, but in reality from a narrow door in the left wall. He was dressed informally, the soft blue jeans and tan suede jacket the best to be found in Saint-Honoré, and the ascot around his throat the most expensive Hermès had to offer. He signaled her to follow him.
Through the narrow door, they walked down an equally narrow but dark corridor until they reached another door, this on the right. The tall man in the extravagant sport clothes pressed a series of digits on a square electronic panel and opened the door. Again, she followed him, entering an office that was as different from the first as the Hotel Ritz was from a soup kitchen.
The walls and furniture were made of the finest wood and leather, the paintings authentic works of the Impressionist masters, the recessed, mirror-paneled bar complete with glasses and decanters of Baccarat crystal. It was the lair of a very important man.
“Willkommen, Frau Courtland,” the man said in a voice warm and ingratiating. “I am André,” he added in English.
“You know who I am?”
“Certainly, you used my name twice and the code of the month, Catbird. We’ve been expecting your contact for many weeks now. Please, sit down.”
“Thank you.” Janine sat down in front of the desk as the park’s manager lowered himself in a chair next to her, not behind his desk. “The time wasn’t right until now.”
“We assumed that. You’re a brilliant woman and your coded messages to Berlin have been received regularly. Through your information regarding the financial watch-dogs in Paris and Washington, our accounts have swelled. We are all eternally grateful.”
“I’ve always wondered, Herr André, why Berlin? Why not Bonn?”
“Bonn is such a small city, nicht wahr? Berlin is and will remain a mass of confusion. So many interests, so much chaos—the crumbling Wall, the influx of immigrants; it’s far easier to conceal things in Berlin. After all, the funds remain in Switzerland, and when they are needed in Germany, the transfers are in successive increments, hardly noticeable in a city of such high finance that millions are sent by computer every hour of the day.”
“My work, then, is appreciated?” asked the ambassador’s wife.
“Extraordinarily so. How could you think otherwise?”
“I don’t. I just think it’s time, after all these years of accomplishment, that I be brought to Bonn and recognized. I’m now in a position to render even more extraordinary service. I am the whore-wife of one of the most important ambassadors in Europe. Whatever our enemies plan against us, I will know. I would like to hear from our Führer that the daily risks I take will be rewarded. Is that so much to ask?”
“No, it isn’t, gnädige Frau. Yet I am André, not an ambassador, of course, but perhaps the most vital conduit in Europe, and I take these things on faith. Why can’t you?”
“Because I’ve never even seen the Fatherland! Can’t you understand that? All my life, since I was a child, I’ve trained and worked myself into states of exhaustion for one cause only. A cause I could never mention, never confide to anyone. I became the best at what I do and could not tell
even my closest friends why I drove myself. I deserve recognition!”
The man called André studied the woman across from him. “Yes, you do, Frau Courtland. You of all people do. I’ll call Bonn tonight.… Now, to more mundane matters, when will the ambassador return to Paris?”
“Tomorrow.”
Drew dodged the hordes of parents and their offspring, in the main mothers chasing after their children, who were chasing other children, laughing or screaming uncontrollably as they raced from one entertainment to the next. He kept shifting his concentration, studying every woman who appeared to be anywhere from early to late middle age, which was just about every female in the amusement park. Sporadically, he raised the radio in his hand, as if expecting the short beeper signal to burst forth, telling him someone had seen something—seen Janine Clunes Courtland. No sound came; he continued walking through the crisscrossing dirt paths, passing the large, malformed figures whose garish grins tempted the onlookers to pay their money and enter.
Claude Moreau chose the quieter sections on the premise that the ambassador’s wife would instinctively avoid the more raucous areas, and where her next contact, if there was one, would more likely be situated. Therefore he roamed around the animal cages and the stalls of fortunetellers and souvenir hawkers, where T-shirts and insignia caps lay in rows under canopies. The chief of the Deuxième kept peering beyond the wares into the shadowed interiors, hoping to see men or a woman who did not belong there. Eighteen minutes passed, and the results were negative.
Moreau’s most-trusted subordinate, Jacques Bergeron, was annoyingly caught up in a rush toward a reopened Ferris wheel, which had had a temporary power failure, stranding a number of riders fifty feet in the air. As a result, the crowd racing to the gate included parents who were convinced they had sacrificed their children to the avarice of the park’s owners, who were too cheap to pay their electric bill. At one point Jacques collided with a young child and was struck in the face by a mother’s purse; reeling, he fell to the ground and was trampled. He lay there, his arms covering his head until the enthusiastic-cum-hysterical onslaught passed him by. He, too, had seen no one resembling Madame Courtland.
François, the driver who frankly was delighted with the English term “Wheels,” sauntered past the ramshackle structures at the south entrance, where the signs were small and subdued, announcing the offices of first aid, complaints, lost and found, management (barely legible), and one larger billboard proclaiming the office of group parties. Suddenly François heard the words, spoken by an obese woman addressing her companion, a gaunt, pinch-faced female. “What the hell is someone like that coming here for? That pink dress could feed my family for a year!” said the heavy woman.
“They call it slumming, Charlotte. They think they’re better than we are, so they have to prove it.”
“It’s shit, that’s what it is. Did you see those la-di-da white shoes? Five thousand francs if a sou!”
François had no doubt whom they were talking about! The unit in the Champs-Élysées had described the ambassador’s wife as wearing a pale pink and white summer dress, obviously from one of the better fashion houses. The driver watched the two women, casually walking closer to them as they strolled down the wide dirt thoroughfare.
“I’ll tell you what I think,” said the thin woman with the perpetual pout. “I’ll bet my good-for-nothing husband that she’s one of the owners of this stinking money trap. The rich do that, you know. They buy up places like this because they’re cheap to run and the cash registers ring night and day.”
“You’re probably right. After all, she went into the manager’s office. Damn the filthy rich!”
François dropped behind, then turned and strolled back to the row of shacks that served as offices. He spotted the small sign that read Management; the building was perhaps twenty feet wide, separated from those on either side by narrow paths that looked more like ditches. The front windows were unusually high, and below there was a door that seemed out of place. It appeared to be much thicker or heavier than the wood surrounding it. François removed the handheld radio from his jacket pocket, pressed the Transmit button, and brought the instrument to his ear.
Then abruptly, without warning, he heard two familiar voices, very familiar, and then a third, one he had been listening to for years.
“Papa, Papa!”
“Notre père! C’est lui!”
“François, what are you doing here?”
The sight of his wife and two daughters sent the wide-eyed driver into shock. Finding his voice while awkwardly embracing the two young girls, he spoke. “My God, Yvonne! What are you doing here?”
“You called saying you’d be late and probably not home for dinner, so we decided to come here for a little fun.”
“Papa, can you come on the carousel with us? Please, Papa!”
“My darlings, Papa is at work.…”
“At work?” exclaimed the wife. “Why would the Deuxième come here?”
“Shh!” The perplexed François turned briefly away and spoke rapidly into the radio. “The subject is over here, near the south entrance. Meet me there. I have complications, as you may have heard.… Come, Yvonne; you too, children, away from here!”
“Good Lord, you weren’t joking,” said the wife as the family rushed down the dirt road toward the south entrance.
“No, I wasn’t joking, my dear. Now, for all our sakes, please get into the car and go home. I’ll explain later.”
“Non, Papa! We just got here!”
“It is ‘Yes, Papa,’ or the next time you come here, you’ll be in the Sorbonne!”
What François had not noticed was a young man dressed in torn orange tights and a ragged blue blouse, only his unkempt beard declaring him a male. He was standing to the left of the heavy door, smoking a cigarette, his attention drawn to the noisy and obviously unexpected family reunion. Especially noticeable was the handheld radio into which the man spoke, and even more startling, the question posed by the woman. “… Why would the Deuxième come here?” The Deuxième?
The young man crushed his cigarette under his foot and raced inside.
The elegant proprietor, who called himself André, broke off his conversation with Frau Courtland, politely excusing himself as he got out of the chair and crossed to the ringing telephone on his desk. “Yes?” he said, then listened silently for no more than ten seconds. “Prepare the car!” he ordered, replacing the phone and turning to the ambassador’s wife. “Were you escorted here, madame?”
“I was driven from the Saddle and Bootery, yes.”
“I mean, are you under the protection of French or American officials? Are you being followed?”
“Good heavens, no! The embassy has no idea where I am.”
“Someone does. You must leave immediately. Come with me. There is an underground tunnel from here to the parking area; the steps are back here. Quickly!”
Ten minutes later, a breathless André was back in his well-appointed office; he sat behind the desk and relaxed, sighing audibly. His telephone rang again; he answered it. “Yes?”
“Go to scrambler,” instructed the voice from Germany. “Immediately!”
“Very well,” said a concerned André, opening a drawer and flipping a switch inside. “Go ahead.”
“You have a most inefficient organization!”
“We don’t think so. What troubles you?”
“It’s taken me nearly an hour to find out how to reach you, and only then after threatening half of our intelligence branches!”
“I’d say that was most appropriate. I think you should reevaluate.”
“Fool!”
“Now, I find that most offensive.”
“You’ll be far less offended when I tell you why.”
“Enlighten me, please.”
“Ambassador Daniel Courtland’s wife is coming to see you—”
“Come and gone, mein Herr,” interrupted André in self-satisfaction. “Thus eluding those who f
ollowed her here.”
“Followed her?”
“Presumably.”
“How?”
“I have no idea, but they put on quite a show, even to the point of employing the name of the Deuxième in a most unusual manner. Naturally, I rushed her away sight unseen and within the next half hour she’ll be safely in the American Embassy.”
“Idiot!” screamed the man in Germany. “She was not to return to the embassy. She was to be killed!”
26
Moreau, his chief aide Jacques Bergeron, and Latham converged on François within moments of each other. Together they walked fifty yards west of the south entrance, where the Deuxième chief held up his hand; the area was less crowded, the shabby tents on the right used for the employees’ toilets and dressing rooms. “We can talk here,” said Moreau, looking at the driver. “Mon Dieu, my friend, such misfortune! Your wife and children!”
“I shall have to invent a very convincing explanation.”
“The children won’t speak to you for a week, François,” said Jacques, grinning sheepishly. “You know that, don’t you?”
“We have other things to discuss,” François broke in defensively. “I overheard two women, too harridans talking.…” The driver described the conversation he had surreptitiously listened to, ending with the words “She’s in there, in the management’s office.”
“Jacques,” said Moreau. “Scout the building in your most professional manner. I’d suggest the inebriated mode; remove your jacket and tie, we’ll hold them.”
“I’ll be back in three or four minutes.” The agent took off his coat and tie, pulled out a section of his shirt, letting it hang over his belt, and started weaving back and forth toward the south entrance and beyond.
“Jacques does this very well,” observed Moreau, looking at his subordinate admiringly. “Especially for a man who never touches whisky and can barely tolerate a glass of wine.”
“Maybe he tolerated too much of both before,” said Drew.
“No,” said the head of the Deuxième Bureau, “it’s his stomach. Something to do with acidity. He can be very embarrassing when we dine with the ministers of the Chamber of Deputies, who control our purse strings. They think he’s a prissy bureaucrat.”
The Apocalypse Watch Page 44