Robert Ludlum - Aquatain Progression.txt

by The Aquitaine Progression [lit]

  minutes, the first he abandoned when he realised he

  was absorbing nothing, seeing only black letters

  forming an unending string of vaguely recog~uzable

  words relating to a figure in the outer reaches of his

  mind. He could not focus on that man; there were

  too many interferences, real and imagined. Nor had

  he been able to read on the two-hour flight from

  Paris, having opted for economy class, hoping to melt

  in with the greater number of people in the larger

  section of the aircraft. The concept at least was valid;

  the seats were so narrow and the plane so fully

  occupied that elbows and forearms were virtually

  immobile. The conditions prohibited his taking out

  the report, both for reasons of space and for fear of

  the proximity to straying eyes.

  Heinrich Leifhelm moved his-mistress and their

  son to the town of Eichstatt, fifty odd miles north of

  Munich, visiting them now and then, and providing

  an adequate but not overly comfortable standard of

  living. The doctor was apparently torn between

  maintaining a successful practice with no social

  blemishes_in Munich and a disinclination to aban

  117

  118 ROBERT LUDLUM

  don the stigmatised and child. According to close

  acquaintances of Erich Stoessel-Leifhelm, these

  early years had a profound effect on him. Although

  he was too young to grasp the full impact of World

  War I, he was later haunted by the memory of the

  small households subsistence level falling as the

  elder Leifhelm's ability to contribute lessened with

  the burden of wartime taxes. Too, his father's visits

  served to heighten the fact that he could not be ac-

  knowledged as a son and was not entitled to the

  privileges accorded two half brothers and a half

  sister, strangers he was never to know and whose

  home he could not enter. Through the absence of

  proper lineage, certified by hypocritical documents

  and more hypocritical church blessings, he felt he

  was denied what was rightfully his, and so there was

  instilled in him a furious sense of resentment,

  competitiveness, and a deep-seated anger at existing

  social conditions. By his own admission, his first

  conscious longings were to get as much as he could

  for himself both materially and in the form of

  recognition through the strength of his own

  abilities, and, by doing so, strike out at the status

  quo which had tried to emasculate him. By his

  mid-teens, Stoessel-Leifhelm was consumed with

  anger.

  Converse stopped reading, suddenly aware of

  the woman across the half-deserted cafe; she was

  seated alone at a table, looking at him. Their eyes

  met and she turned away, placing her arm on the

  low white railing that enclosed the restaurant

  studying the thinning, late-night crowds in the

  terminal, as if waiting for someone. Startled, Joel

  tried-to analyze the look she had given him. Was it

  recogrution? Did she know him? Know his face? Or

  was it appraisal? A well-dressed whore cruising the

  airport in search of a mark, seeking out a lonely

  businessman far away from home? She turned her

  head slowly and looked at him again, now obviously

  upset that his eyes were still on her. Then abruptly,

  in two swiftly defined motions, she glanced at her

  watch, tugged at her wide-brimmed hat, and opened

  her purse. She took out a Krone note, placed it on

  the table, got up, and walked rapidly toward the en-

  trance of the cafe. Beyond the open gate she

  walked faster her strides longer, heading for the

  arch that led to the bag

  THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 119

  gage-claim area. Converse watched her in the dull

  white neon light of the terminal, shaking his head,

  annoyed at his alarm. With his attache case and

  leather-bound report, the woman had probably

  thought he was some kind of airport official. Who

  was the mark, then?

  He was seeing too many shadows, he thought, as

  he followed the graceful figure nearing the arch. Too

  many shadows that held no surprises, no alarms.

  There had been a man on the plane from Paris

  sitting several rows in front of him. Twice the man

  had gotten up and gone to the toilet, and each time

  he came back to his seat he had looked hard at

  Joel studied him, actually. Those looks had been

  enough to prime his adrenaline. Had he been spotted

  at the De Gaulle Airport? Was the man an employee

  of Jacques-Louis Bertholdier? . . . As a man in an

  alley had been Don't think about that! He had

  flicked off an oval of dried blood on his shirt as he

  had given himself the command.

  "I can always tell a good ale Yank! Never missl"

  That had been the antiquated salutation in

  Copenhagen as both Americans waited for their

  luggage.

  "Well, I missed once. Some son of a bitch on a

  plane in Geneva. Sat right next to me. A real guinea

  in a three-piece suit, that's what he west He spoke

  English to the stewardess so I figured he was one of

  those rich Cuban spicks from Florida, you know what

  I mean?"

  An emissary in salesman's clothes. One of the

  diplomats.

  Geneva. It had started in Geneva.

  Too many shadows. No surprises, no alarms. The

  woman went through the arch and Joel pulled his

  eyes away, forcing his attention back to the report on

  Erich Leifhelm. Then a slight, sudden movement

  caught the corner of his eye; he looked back at the

  woman. A man had stepped out of an unseen recess;

  his hand had touched her elbow. They exchanged

  words briefly, swiftly, and parted as abruptly as they

  had met, the man continuing into the terminal as the

  woman disappeared. Did the man glance over in his

  direction? Converse watched closely; had that man

  looked at him? It was impossible to tell; his head was

  turning in all directions, looking at or for something.

  Then, as if he had found it, the man hurried toward

  a bank of airline counters. He approached the Japan

  Air Lines desk, and taking out his wallet, he began

  speaking to an Oriental clerk.

  No surprises, no alarms. A harried traveler had

  asked di

  120 ROBERT LUDLUM

  rections; the interferences were more imagined

  than real. Yet even here his lawyer's mentality

  intervened. Interferences were real whether based

  in reality or not. Oh, Christ! Leave it alonel

  Concentratel

  At the age of seventeen, Erich

  Stoessel-Leifhelm had completed his studies at the

  Eichstatt II Gymnasium, excelling both

  academically and on the playing field, where he was

  known as an aggressive competitor. It was a time of

  universal financial chaos, the American stock

  market crash of '29 further aggravating the

  desperate economy of the Weimar Republic, and
/>   few but the most well-connected students went on

  to universities. In a move he later described to

  friends as one of youthful fury, Stoessel-Leifhelm

  traveled to Munich to confront his father and de-

  mand assistance. What he found was a shock, but

  it turned out to be a profound opportunity,

  strangely arrived at. The doctor's staid, placid life

  was in shambles. His marriage, from the beginning

  unpleasant and humiliating, had caused him to

  drink heavily with increasing frequency until the

  inevitable errors of judgment occurred. He was

  censured by the medical community (with a high

  proportion of Jews therein), charged with

  incompetence and barred from the Karlstor

  Hospital. His practice was in ruins, his wife had

  ordered him out of the house, an order expedited

  by an old but still powerful father-in-law, also a

  doctor and member of the hospital's board of direc-

  tors. When Stoessel-Leifhelm found his father, he

  was living in a cheap apartment house in the poorer

  section of the city picking up pfennigs by dispensing

  prescriptions (drugs) and deutsche marks by per-

  forming abortions.

  In what apparently (again according to friends

  from the time) was a watershed of pent-up

  emotions, the elder LeifLelm embraced his

  illegitimate son and told him the story of his

  tortured life with a disagreeable wife and tyrannical

  in-laws. It was the classic syndrome of an ambitious

  man of minimal talents and maximum connections.

  But withal, the doctor claimed he had never

  abandoned his beloved mistress and their son. And

  during this prolonged and

  THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 121

  undoubtedly drunken confession, he revealed a

  fact Stoessel-Leifhelm had never known. His

  father's wife was Jewish. It was all the teenager

  had to hear.

  The disfranchised boy became the father to the

  ruined man.

  There was an announcement in Danish over the

  airport's loudspeakers and Joel looked at his watch.

  It came again, now in German. He listened intently

  for the words, he could barely distinguish them, but

  they were there. "HamburgKoln-Bonn." It was the

  first boarding call for the last flight of the night to

  the capital of West Germany by way of Hamburg.

  The flying time was less than two hours, the layover

  in Hamburg justified for those executives who

  wanted to be at their desks by the start of the

  business day. Converse had checked his suitcase

  through to Bonn, making a mental note as he did so

  to replace the heavy black leather bag with a

  carry-on. He was no expert in such matters, but

  common sense told him that the delays required by

  waiting for one's luggage in the open for anyone to

  see was no way to travel swiftly or to avoid eyes

  that might be searching for him. He put Erich Leif-

  helm's dossier in his attache case, closed it and spun

  the brass combination disks. He then got up from

  the table, walked out of the cafe and across the

  terminal toward the Lufthansa gate.

  Sweat matted his hairline; the tattoo inside his

  chest accelerated until it sounded like a hammering

  fugue for kettledrums. He knew the man sitting next

  to him, but from where or from what period in his

  life he had no idea. The craggy, lined face, the deep

  ridges that creased the suntanned flesh the intense

  blue-grey eyes beneath the thick, wild brows and

  brown hair streaked with white he knew him, but

  no name came, no clue to the man's identity.

  Joel kept waiting for some sign of recognition

  directed at him. None came, and involuntarily he

  found himself looking at the man out of the comer

  of his eye. The man did not respond; instead his

  attention was on a bound sheaf of typewritten pages,

  the type larger than the print nominally associated

  with legal briefs or even summonses. Perhaps,

  thought Converse, the man was half blind, wearing

  contact lenses to conceal his infirmity. But was there

  something else? Not an infirmity, but a connection

  being concealed. Had he seen this man in Paris as

  he had seen another wearing a light-brown

  122 ROBERT LUDIUM

  topcoat in a hotel basement corridor? Had this man

  beside him also been at L'Etalon Blanc? Had he

  been part of a stationary group of ex-soldiers in the

  warriors' playroom . . . in a corner perhaps, and

  inconspicuous because of the numbers? Or at

  Bertholdier's table, his back to Joel, presumably

  unseen by the American he was now following? Was

  he following him at this moment? wondered

  Converse, gripping his attache case. He turned his

  head barely inches and studied his seatmate.

  Suddenly the man looked up from the bound

  typewritten pages and over at Joel. His eyes were

  noncommittal, expressing neither curiosity nor

  irritation.

  "Sorry," said Converse awkwardly.

  "Sure, it's okay . . . why not?" was the strange,

  laconic reply, the accent American, the dialect

  distinctly TexasWestern. The man returned to his

  pages.

  "Do we know each other?" asked Joel, unable to

  back off from the question.

  Again the man looked up. "Don't think so," he

  said tersely, once more going back to his report, or

  whatever it was.

  Converse looked out the window, at the black

  sky beyond, flashes of red light illuminating the

  silver metal of the wing. Absently he tried to

  calculate the digital degree heading of the aircraft

  but his pilot's mind would not function. He did

  know the man, and the oddly phrased "Why not?"

  served only to disturb him further. Was it a signal,

  a warning? As his words to Jacques-Louis

  Bertholdier had been a signal, a warning that the

  general had better contact him, recognise him.

  The voice of a Lufthansa stewardess interrupted

  his thoughts. "Herr Dowling, it is a pleasure, indeed,

  to have you on board."

  "Thank you, darlin'," said the man, his lined face

  creasing into a gentle grin. "You find me a little

  bourbon over ice and I'll return the compliment.''

  "Certainly, sir. I'm sure you've been told so

  often you must be tired of hearing it, but your

  television show is enormously popular in Germany."

  "Thanks again, honey, but it's not my show.

  There are a lot of pretty little fillies runnin' around

  that screen."

  An actor. A goddamned actor! thought Joel. No

  alarms, no surprises. Just intrusions, far more

  imagined than real.

  "You're too modest, Herr Dowling. They're all so

  alike,

  THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 123

  so disagreeable. But you are so kind, so manly . . . so

  understanding. '

  "Understandin'? Tell you somethin'. I saw an

  episode in Cologne last week while on this picture
/>   and I didn't understand a word I was sayin'."

  The stewardess laughed. "Bourbon over ice, is

  that correct, sir?'

  "That's correct, darlin'."

  The woman started down the first-class aisle

  toward the galley as Converse continued to look at

  the actor. Haltingly he spoke. "I am sorry. I should

  have recognised you, of course."

  Dowling turned his suntanned head, his eyes

  roaming Joel's face, then dropping to the

  hand-tooled leather attache case. He looked up with

  an amused smile. "I could probably embarrass you if

  I asked you where you knew me from. You don't

  look like a Santa Fe groupie."

  "A Santa Fe . . . ? Oh, sure, that's the name of

  the show." And it was, reflected Converse. One of

  those phenomena on television that by the sheer

  force of extraordinary ratings and network profits

  had been featured on the covers of Time and

  Newsweek. He had never seen it

  "And, naturally," continued the actor, "you follow

  the tribal rites and wrongs the dramatic

  vicissitudes of the imperious Ratchet family, owners

  of the biggest spread north of Santa Fe as well as the

  historic Chimaya Flats, which they stole from the

  impoverished Indians."

  "The who? What?"

  Dowling's leathery face again laminated itself into

  a grin. "Only Pa Ratchet, the Indians' friend, doesn't

  know about the last part, although he's being blamed

  by his red brothers. You see, Pa's no-good sons

  heard there was oil shale beneath the Chimayas and

  did their thing. Incidentally, I trust you catch the

  verbal associations in the name Ratchet, you can take

  your choice. There's just plain 'rats,' or Ratchet as in

  'wretched,' or Ratchet as in the tool screwing

  everything in front of it by merely pressing forward."

  There was something different about the actor