A Tangled Web

by Judith Michael

  “I may have found one. I’ll know by the time you come to Marseilles.”

  “Thursday. I’ll see you then.”

  Max put money on the table for their drinks, and left. Doerner would follow later. They won’t say they’re sure. I couldn’t tell if anybody was lying.

  He drove through the town. None of the names had been known to him, but that meant nothing; Denton could have sent someone who’d never been in the area, someone who could follow a secretary, get friendly with her, get invited to a party . . . or not be at the party at all, but simply follow the secretary to Toulon and wait until she and her boyfriend came out to drive home.

  He knew no more than he had before.

  Outside Carpentras he picked up speed. He turned on the air conditioning, found soma music on the radio, and settled into the seat, absently watching the needle climb to 175 kilometers an hour. Speed helped him make decisions. And he was not far beyond Carpentras when he knew that he would have to leave Provence.

  He did not believe in coincidences, and so he did not believe that his secretary’s death was accidental. Somehow Denton had arranged it, probably as a warning.

  But perhaps not. It had been eight months since the explosion, and not a sign of anyone interested in him. How could Denton have found him? There was no way he—

  There was always a way.

  But Denton was a fool and a dilettante; he’d preen himself on successfully blowing up Max and Sabrina, and wander off to another playground.

  He was also stubborn and vindictive and afraid. A dangerous combination.

  Max had known all this from the beginning, when he began making his plans to disappear, and so he had never expected to stay in France for more than a few months. He had started Lacoste et fils and had run it from London for a year; he had planned to leave it in the hands of Hermann Doerner and Carlos Figueros as soon as he was convinced they could run it without his close presence. Then he would move on, open another company, probably in the United States or Latin America, and settle there.

  There had been no room in that plan for buying a house and living with Sabrina Longworth. But once he made that decision, he had been lulled into complacency. His business was thriving, he had a comfortable home, and he knew Sabrina would want to stay there.

  But he was not in a position to be lulled into complacency. Not with Denton; not even completely with Sabrina. He had carefully rehearsed what he would tell her if her memory suddenly returned, but she would accept his story of danger only if she loved him. And he knew that, still, she did not.

  He believed that the longer her amnesia lasted, the more likely it was that it would be permanent. But he could not rely on that: there was nothing scientific to support it. It seemed he could rely on less and less lately. All his life he had trusted his tough instincts; now, suddenly, instincts, toughness, even brutality, seemed feeble tools for survival.

  We’ll get out of here, he thought. Robert will sell the house and everything in it; we can’t risk a trail of furniture. Carlos will buy a new place for us—Buenos Aires? Los Angeles? Maybe Toronto—and rent a warehouse and create a life for us to step into. We can’t change our names; I couldn’t explain that to Sabrina. But it doesn’t matter. It’s not certain that we’re running away from anything. Not yet.

  I won’t tell her tonight, he thought as he turned into their driveway and saw the house waiting for him, the windows brilliantly lit. It can wait for a week or two, until I have a schedule, a place, a plan.

  A question came to him, but he brushed it aside. Of course she would go with him. There was nothing else she could do.

  She was very quiet at dinner, but it suited him not to talk. And that night he could not sleep, and so spent the hours in his study and, in the morning, had locked the door, as he always did when he was working, before she was awake. Later he caught a glimpse of her car as she drove to work, and then he left the study to greet Robert when he arrived.

  “You look tired,” Robert said. “Another night of insomnia?”

  “It has nothing to do with insomnia; I had work to do. You can analyze and prescribe for your students and your flock, Robert, and for your revolutionaries, but not for me.”

  “Not revolutionaries, my friend, though the vocabulary is often similar. And so is the need for money; thank you for your last deposit; it was an extraordinarily generous one.”

  “We had a good quarter. And I added some of my own.”

  “I thought so. I didn’t see how you could reap such profits from your small printing shop and your exports. But obviously I know nothing about it. Max, as usual when I come to you, I need help.”

  “What do you need?”

  “A passport, a visa, a driver’s license, two or three letters with envelopes canceled at post offices in Haiti.”

  “A difficult country, Robert.”

  “The easy ones don’t need me.”

  “What name for the passport and visa?”

  “Wallace Lambert. Does that sound sufficiently stuffy for the son of a successful British businessman?”

  “Is he?”

  “Of course not. But the people in Haiti will think he is. Is the name a good choice?”

  “Very good. You want the letters addressed to him, I suppose.”

  “Yes.”

  “And when do you need all these documents?”

  “Is one week too soon?”

  “Can the letters be waiting for your person in Haiti?”

  “No, they must be here.”

  “Then I need two weeks. Everything else is easy, but that takes time.”

  “Two weeks, then. Thank you, Max. And something else. There will be someone coming out of Chile soon. I don’t know if you have current business there . . .”

  “I do, as it happens. We’ll be shipping them two front-end loaders in a month or so, about the end of July, and bringing back one that was the wrong model. Will that fit in with your plans?”

  “We’ll make it fit. It’s a young woman, Jana Corley. She’s quite small; I think she would manage easily if the equipment is of a size that requires a large crate. And a front-end loader would, I imagine.”

  “A woman. I hadn’t thought of women; it’s always been men, until now.”

  “More women are coming to us lately. They’re as idealistic as men, you know, probably more so, and certainly they like adventure as much as men. And they’re very good: they speak softly, but they work with the local priests—”

  “Your local priests.”

  “The ones in our network, yes, of course. They work with them to help the people in these countries feel they have some power.”

  “Starting a kindergarten,” Max said, amused.

  “Does that surprise you? In a village where no one provides education, a kindergarten is a victory. If they can add another grade each year—”

  “A revolution would be faster.”

  “And bloodier, and not at all certain of victory.”

  “But you’re moving an inch at a time. You help these peasants protest when the government stockpiles food for the wealthy; you open clinics where their kids can be vaccinated. It’s window dressing; it doesn’t change a damn thing.”

  “It changes the way they feel about themselves: they begin to think they can have some power over their lives. Until they think that, what can they do for themselves? They rely on outsiders.”

  “Your idealistic boys and girls.”

  “Young men and women. Children of God. If you could work with them you would not be so cynical. They are so beautiful, Max, and they truly become part of the poor people’s lives.”

  “Until the governments come after them, and you have to smuggle them out.”

  “You and I smuggle them out. You know all this, Max; we’ve talked about it before. I think you like hearing me repeat it as a child likes a familiar bedtime story told over and over.”

  Max smiled thinly. “Perhaps.”

  Robert shook his head. “Max, you should not
be so angry when someone understands you. There is no attempt to understand where there is no love.” Max was silent. “Look, my friend, I don’t pry into the dark corners of your life. Whatever you may regret or fear or try to deny is your affair, unless you ask me for guidance. I would rejoice if I could help you with any troubles you have, should you ever ask me. But I see your pleasure in helping me in my cause, however small and slow you think it, and I think that your pleasure comes from doing good, perhaps because it balances other things that you do or have done. And so you ask to hear about it now and then for comfort or for reassurance that your money and your help are still doing good.”

  Max said nothing. He was angry, with the visceral defensive withdrawal that came whenever anyone saw beneath his surface, but he was also impressed. And for the first time he felt a warming toward Robert far different from the casual affinity he had felt until now. There is no attempt to understand where there is no love. It occurred to him that Robert might—in time, and if he let him—become more than the kind of arm’s-length acquaintance Max had had all his life; he might become a friend.

  Except, of course, that soon Max would be half a world away.

  “Well.” Robert sighed. “I’ll have the details about Jana in a couple of weeks; I’ll tell you as soon as I have them. Last time, when it was Afghanistan, you used a cargo plane; I assume this time you’ll use a freighter.”

  “Since it’s Chile, yes.”

  Robert grinned. “I feel sometimes that we are like two boys smoking behind the barn. Smuggling . . . Not something one learns in the kitchen or the seminary. You handle it well, you and Carlos and Hermann. I could almost guess you had done it before, but I know nothing about these things. I should simply thank you for using what you know to help me. I seem to be thanking you all the time. What can I do for you? I’m going to Marseilles this afternoon; is there anything I can do for you there?”

  “Stop by the shop and tell them exactly what you want for whomever you’re sending to Haiti. I’ll call to tell them you’re coming. You know, a post office canceling machine isn’t a bad idea. I’ll look into it.”

  Robert laughed. “You’d need one from every dictatorship in the world.”

  “Not impossible.”

  They shook hands, smiling, more comfortable with each other than at any time in their year-long acquaintance. “By the way,” Robert said. “I saw Sabrina in town this morning, on her way to work. She looks very well; beautiful, as always, and also happy.”

  “Hasn’t she been happy in your cooking lessons?”

  “It seems so, but when we’re together I sometimes wonder whether she might be pretending so I won’t worry about her. This morning, however, she was alone in her car and her face had a lovely brightness I haven’t seen before. So things go well with the two of you?”

  “Very well.”

  Robert searched his face. “You know, Max, I love her. She has so many needs, but she doesn’t demand that we satisfy them; she doesn’t cling or complain. I admire her and I want her to be content, with herself and with the world. I hope indeed that things go well with the two of you. I do know that she is happy in Cavaillon; in such a short time she has truly made it her home.”

  “I’ll see you out,” Max said abruptly, and led Robert to the door. “I have some calls to make,” he said in a kind of apology. “I’ll see you tomorrow, won’t I? Isn’t that the next cooking lesson?”

  “Not this week; I’ll still be in Marseilles. Next week.”

  They shook hands and Max watched Robert walk to his car. It was probably a good thing that he was leaving: Robert often understood too much. Max felt a sinking in his heart. It did not really matter where he was or how comfortable he might begin to feel with another person; there never would be a time when he could completely relax.

  Watching the small car follow the curve in the road and disappear, he wondered for the first time if Robert might be in danger. Probably not; there was no trail leading to a small, quiet priest in Cavaillon who organized a network of activist priests all around the world and smuggled other activists, mostly students, into and out of their countries. We’re two of a kind, Max thought; that’s probably why we get along so well. Two smugglers in a world of police, border guards and identity papers. And if my smuggling has always been to increase my own wealth, and Robert’s is to enhance the lives of the poor and the helpless, we still have our bond. And we need each other. He saw that, even if I didn’t want him to.

  The telephone was ringing in his study and he went to answer it.

  “The contract came, from Bimerji in Iran,” Carlos said. “Will you be here soon, or shall I send it up?”

  “I’ll be there Thursday.” Iran, he thought with satisfaction. He had been talking to the Iranians for months, and now they’d taken the last steps, bringing in Bimerji to buy the construction equipment, and sending the contract to Lacoste et fils in Marseilles. He’d known they would come through; everyone knew there were factions in Iran trying to undermine the government, and what better way to start than to flood the country with counterfeit currency? But to know the contract was there . . . that was the satisfaction he had waited for.

  He pictured Carlos sitting in the office that everyone, including Robert, thought was a small print shop connected to Lacoste et fils. Carlos would be at his small desk behind the counter beside steel shelves stacked with paper, envelopes, inks and rubber stamps. Through a nearby door one could glimpse the large copy camera with its anachronistic-looking bellows, two offset printers, and a small laser scanner; the closed door of the darkroom was just beyond. On the walls of the front room, with its counter for customers, hung samples of party invitations, announcements, business cards, letterhead and printed envelopes: the kind of careful work the shop did so well.

  Everything was neat, orderly, modest: an unobtrusive windowless wooden building jutting from one side of his warehouse. But in a room behind the darkroom sat Andrew Frick, an American of genius—so the judge had called him when sentencing him the last time—a man who called himself a true artist. Frick was passionately absorbed in the romance of copying, engraving and printing money in dozens of currencies. He had invented an ink mixed with magnetic metal powder that duplicated the inks used throughout the world, and he had found a way to use nonfluorescent pigments to simulate the whiteness of cotton fiber instead of using the bleach that less artistic counterfeiters used, which fluoresced beneath ultraviolet light, showing them instantly to be counterfeit.

  Andrew Frick’s counterfeit money was so fine it had been compared by experts to the delicate purity of a Botticelli. And Andrew Frick had never been as happy in his life as he was in Max Lacoste’s back room, where he could make his own hours and have the most modern equipment to do what he loved best, and receive in return generous pay, an apartment near the harbor and a charge account, billed to Max, at Fauchon and Galeries Lafayette.

  Frick had burned all his bridges in America, moved everything he owned to France, and thrown in his lot for all time with Max Lacoste. He never wanted to be anywhere else.

  Seeing all of it in his mind as he stood at his desk in Cavaillon, Max thought ahead to Thursday. “How much do they want in Iran?” he asked Carlos.

  “One hundred fifty million rials.”

  “When?”

  “A month. I suggested a shipment of three backhoes about the end of July. If they find they don’t need one of them after all, the contract specifies that they can send it back.”

  A hundred fifty million rials would take no more than two or three cubic feet of space, Max calculated. The Iranians would convert thirty-seven and a half million rials—his fee—to francs and ship them to him in the backhoe that they would find they did not, after all, need.

  “You’re satisfied?” he asked Carlos.

  “I think everything is there. I want you to go over it.”

  “Good. I’ll be there early on Thursday, eight or eight-thirty. By the way, Father Chalon will be there tomorrow. He need
s identity papers; he’ll tell you about them. I’d like them rushed through.”

  “They always are, for him. Anything else?”

  “No, I’ll see you Thursday.”

  He stood beside his desk after he hung up. Of course Robert is in danger, just as I am. There is always the chance that someone will talk, someone will recognize a face, someone will follow a trail that seems so faint as to be invisible but that, to just one person, is as clear and straight as an arrow.

  Which is why I have to move.

  And which is why a priest in Cavaillon, who believes prayer is good but prayer with action is better, might also have to move one day.

  Maybe three of us will go, Max thought. Or Robert will join us later. That would make leaving Cavaillon easier for Sabrina to accept. I’ll mention that to her as a possibility. He locked his door and went back to his desk, to return to work.

  * * *

  “I thought perhaps a hike and picnic,” Léon said on the telephone. “It’s been five days since Fontaine-de-Vaucluse and I am badly in need of exercise.”

  “No five a.m. bicycle rides?” Stephanie asked. She was in the back room of Jacqueline en Provence an hour before the shop would open. She had begun coming in early every morning, to work alone and to feel, for that brief, wonderful time, that it was her shop, her own place, to mold any way she wished. It was like a secret she carried with her. And now Léon was another secret. It was the first time he had called since their afternoon at Fontaine-de-Vaucluse.

  “I haven’t even thought about bicycling; I’ve been working on a new series of paintings, very different and exciting. Perhaps you’ll come to the studio to see them.”

  “I’d like that.”

  “After our picnic, then. Are you free this afternoon?”

  “No. I’m sorry. But on Thursday . . .”

  “Three more days.”

  Stephanie was silent.

  “Well, then, Thursday. You choose the place; I’ll bring the food. I’ll call you the day before, about this time, if that’s all right. I’ve missed you, Sabrina; I’ve replayed last Tuesday in my head a dozen times. It was a very special day.”