She had also been in the ladies’ room for nearly ten minutes, a fact that would have disturbed Jason had he been able to concentrate on the time. He could not; he was on fire. Noise and pain consumed him, every nerve ending raw, exposed, the fibers swelling, terrified of puncture. He stared straight ahead, a history of dead men behind him. The past was in the eyes of truth; they had sought him out and he had seen them. Cain … Cain … Cain.
He shook his head and looked up at the black ceiling. He had to function; he could not allow himself to keep falling, plunging into the abyss filled with darkness and high wind. There were decisions to make… No, they were made; it was a question now of implementing them.
Marie. Marie? Oh, God, my love, we’ve been so wrong!
He breathed deeply and glanced at his watch—the chronometer he had traded for a thin gold piece of jewelry belonging to a marquis in the south of France. He is a man of immense skill, extremely inventive… There was no joy in that appraisal. He looked across at the ladies’ room.
Where was Jacqueline Lavier? Why didn’ t she come out? What could she hope to accomplish remaining inside? He had had the presence of mind to ask the maître d’ if there was a telephone there; the man had replied negatively, pointing to a booth by the entrance. The Lavier woman had been at his side, she heard the answer, understanding the inquiry.
There was a blinding flash of light. He lurched backward, recoiling into the wall, his hands in front of his eyes. The pain! Oh, Christ! His eyes were on fire!
And then he heard the words, spoken through the polite laughter of well-dressed men and women walking casually about the corridor.
“In memory of your dinner at Roget’s, monsieur,” said an animated hostess, holding a press camera by its vertical flashbar. “The photograph will be ready in a few minutes. Compliments of Roget.”
Bourne remained rigid, knowing that he could not smash the camera, the fear of another realization sweeping over him. “Why me?” he asked.
“Your fiancée requested it, monsieur,” replied the girl, nodding her head toward the ladies’ room.
“We talked inside. You are most fortunate; she is a lovely lady. She asked me to give you this.” The hostess held out a folded note; Jason took it as she pranced away toward the restaurant entrance.
Your illness disturbs me, as I’m sure it does you, my new friend. You may be what you say you are, and then again you may not. I shall have the answer in a half hour or so. A telephone call was made by a sympathetic diner, and that photograph is on its way to Paris. You cannot stop it any more than you can stop those driving now to Argenteuil. If we, indeed, have our compromise, neither will disturb you—as your illness disturbs me—and we shall talk again when my associates arrive.
It is said that Cain is a chameleon, appearing in various guises, and most convincing. It is also said that he is prone to violence and to fits of temper. These are an illness, no?
He ran down the dark street in Argenteuil after the receding roof light of the taxi; it turned the corner and disappeared. He stopped, breathing heavily, looking in all directions for another; there were none. The doorman at Roget’s had told him a cab would take ten to fifteen minutes to arrive; why had not monsieur requested one earlier? The trap was set and he had walked into it.
Up ahead! A light, another taxi! He broke into a run. He had to stop it; he had to get back to Paris. To Marie.
He was back in a labyrinth, racing blindly, knowing, finally, there was no escape. But the race would be made alone; that decision was irrevocable. There would be no discussion, no debate, no screaming back and forth—arguments based in love and uncertainty. For the certainty had been made clear. He knew who he was … what he had been; he was guilty as charged—as suspected.
An hour or two saying nothing. Just watching, talking quietly about anything but the truth.
Loving. And then he would leave; she would never know when and he could never tell her why. He owed her that; it would hurt deeply for a while, but the ultimate pain would be far less than that caused by the stigma of Cain.
Cain!
Marie. Marie! What have I done?
“Taxi! Taxi!”
18
Get out of Paris! Now! Whatever you’re doing, stop it and get out! … Those are orders from your government. They want you out of there. They want him isolated.
Marie crushed out her cigarette in the ashtray on the bedside table, her eyes falling on the three-year-old issue of Potomac Quarterly, her thoughts briefly on the terrible game Jason had forced her to play.
“I won’t listen!” she said to herself out loud, startled at the sound of her own voice in the empty room. She walked to the window, the same window he had faced, looking out, frightened, trying to make her understand.
I have to know certain things … enough to make a decision … but may be not everything. A part of me has to be able … to run, disappear. I have to be able to say to myself, what was isn’t any longer, and there’s a possibility that it never was because I have no memory of it. What a person can’t remember didn’t exist … for him.
“My darling, my darling. Don’t let them do this to you!” Her spoken words did not startle now, for it was as though he were there in the room, listening, heeding his own words, willing to run, disappear … with her. But at the core of her understanding she knew he could not do that; he could not settle for a half-truth, or three-quarters of a lie.
They want him isolated.
Who were they? The answer was in Canada and Canada was cut off, another trap.
Jason was right about Paris; she felt it, too. Whatever it was, was here. If they could find one person to lift the shroud and let him see for himself he was being manipulated, then other questions might be manageable, the answers no longer pushing him toward self-destruction. If he could be convinced that whatever unremembered crimes he had committed, he was a pawn for a much greater single crime, he might be able to walk away, disappear with her. Everything was relative.
What the man she loved had to be able to say to himself was not that the past no longer existed, but that it had, and he could live with it, and put it to rest. That was the rationalization he needed, the conviction that whatever he had been was far less than his enemies wanted the world to believe, for they would not use him otherwise. He was the scapegoat, his death to take the place of another’s. If he could only see that, if she could only convince him. And if she did not, she would lose him. They would take him; they would kill him.
They.
“Who are you?” she screamed at the window, at the lights of Paris outside. “Where are you?” She could feel a cold wind against her face as surely as if the panes of glass had melted, the night air rushing inside. It was followed by a tightening in her throat, and for a moment she could not swallow … could not breathe. The moment passed and she breathed again. She was afraid; it had happened to her before, on their first night in Paris, when she had left the café to find him on the steps of the Cluny. She had been walking rapidly down the Saint-Michel when it happened: the cold wind, the swelling of the throat … at that moment she had not been able to breathe. Later she thought she knew why; at that moment also, several blocks away inside the Sorbonne, Jason had raced to a judgment that in minutes he would reverse—but he had reached it then. He had made up his mind he would not come to her.
“Stop it!” she cried. “It’s crazy,” she added, shaking her head, looking at her watch. He had been gone over five hours; where was he? Where was he?
Bourne got out of the taxi in front of the seedily elegant hotel in Montparnasse. The next hour would be the most difficult of his briefly remembered life—a life that was a void before Port Noir, a nightmare since. The nightmare would continue, but he would live with it alone; he loved her too much to ask her to live it with him. He would find a way to disappear, taking with him the evidence that tied her to Cain. It was as simple as that; he would leave for a nonexistent rendezvous and not return. And sometime during the next hour he would write h
er a note:
It’s over. I’ve found my arrows. Go back to Canada and say nothing for both our sakes. I know where to reach you.
The last was unfair—he would never reach her—but the small, feathered hope had to be there, if only to get her on a plane to Ottawa. In time—with time—their weeks together would fade into a darkly kept secret, a cache of brief riches to be uncovered and touched at odd quiet moments. And then no more, for life was lived for active memories; the dormant ones lost meaning. No one knew that better than he did.
He passed through the lobby, nodding at the concierge, who sat on his stool behind the marble counter, reading a newspaper. The man barely looked up, noting only that the intruder belonged.
The elevator rumbled and groaned its way up to the fifth floor. Jason breathed deeply and reached for the gate; above all he would avoid dramatics—no alarms raised by words or by looks.
The chameleon had to merge with his quiet part of the forest, one in which no spoors could be found. He knew what to say; he had thought about it carefully as he had the note he would write.
“Most of the night walking around,” he said, holding her, stroking her dark red hair, cradling her head against his shoulder … and aching, “chasing down cadaverous clerks, listening to animated nonsense, and drinking coffee disguised as sour mud. Les Classiques was a waste of time; it’s a zoo. The monkeys and the peacocks put on a hell of a show, but I don’t think anyone really knows anything. There’s one outside possibility, but he could simply be a sharp Frenchman in search of an American mark.”
“He?” asked Marie, her trembling diminished.
“A man who operated the switchboard,” said Bourne, repelling images of blinding explosions, and darkness and high winds as he pictured the face he did not know but knew so well. That man now was only a device; he pushed the images away. “I agreed to meet him around midnight at the Bastringue on rue Hautefeuille.”
“What did he say?”
“Very little, but enough to interest me. I saw him watching me while I was asking questions. The place was fairly crowded, so I could move around pretty freely, talk to the clerks.”
“Questions? What questions did you ask?”
“Anything I could think of. Mainly about the manager, or whatever she’s called. Considering what happened this afternoon, if she were a direct relay to Carlos, she should have been close to hysterics. I saw her. She wasn’t; she behaved as if nothing had happened except a good day in the shop.”
“But she was a relay, as you call it. D’Amacourt explained that. The fiche.”
“Indirect. She gets a phone call and is told what to say before making another call herself.”
Actually, Jason thought, the invented assessment was based on reality. Jacqueline Lavier was, indeed, an indirect relay.
“You couldn’t just walk around asking questions without seeming suspicious,” protested Marie.
“You can,” answered Bourne, “if you’re an American writer doing an article on the stores in Saint-Honoré for a national magazine.”
“That’s very good, Jason.”
“It worked. No one wants to be left out.”
“What did you learn?”
“Like most of those kinds of places, Les Classiques has its own clientele, all wealthy, most known to each other and with the usual marital intrigues and adulteries that go with the scene. Carlos knew what he was doing; it’s a regular answering service over there, but not the kind listed in a phone book.”
“People told you that?” asked Marie, holding his arms, watching his eyes.
“Not in so many words,” he said, aware of the shadows of her disbelief. “The accent was always on this Bergeron’s talent, but one thing leads to another. You can get the picture. Everyone seems to gravitate to that manager. From what I’ve gathered, she’s a font of social information, although she probably couldn’t tell me anything except that she did someone a favor—an accommodation—and that someone will turn out to be someone else who did another favor for another someone. The source could be untraceable, but it’s all I’ve got.”
“Why the meeting tonight at Bastringue?”
“He came over to me when I was leaving and said a very strange thing.” Jason did not have to invent this part of the lie. He had read the words on a note in an elegant restaurant in Argenteuil less than an hour ago. “He said, ‘You may be what you say you are, and then again you may not.’ That’s when he suggested a drink later on, away from Saint-Honoré.” Bourne saw her doubts receding. He had done it; she accepted the tapestry of lies. And why not? He was a man of immense skill, extremely inventive. The appraisal was not loathsome to him; he was Cain.
“He may be the one, Jason. You said you only needed one; he could be it!”
“We’ll see.” Bourne looked at his watch. The countdown to his departure had begun; he could not look back. “We’ve got almost two hours. Where did you leave the attaché case?”
“At the Meurice. I’m registered there.”
“Let’s pick it up and get some dinner. You haven’t eaten, have you?”
“No …” Marie’s expression was quizzical. “Why not leave the case where it is? It’s perfectly safe; we wouldn’t have to worry about it.”
“We would if we had to get out of here in a hurry,” he said almost brusquely, going to the bureau. Everything was a question of degree now, traces of friction gradually slipping into speech, into looks, into touch. Nothing alarming, nothing based on false heroics; she would see through such tactics. Only enough so that later she would understand the truth when she read his words. “It’s over. I’ve found my arrows…”
“What’s the matter, darling?”
“Nothing.” The chameleon smiled. “I’m just tired and probably a little discouraged.”
“Good heavens, why? A man wants to meet you confidentially late at night, a man who operates a switchboard. He could lead you somewhere. And you’re convinced you’ve narrowed Carlos’ contact down to this woman; she’s bound to be able to tell you something—whether she wants to or not. In a macabre way, I’d think you’d be elated.”
“I’m not sure I can explain it,” said Jason, now looking at her reflection in the mirror. “You’d have to understand what I found there.”
“What you found?” A question.
“What I found.” A statement. “It’s a different world,” continued Bourne, reaching for the bottle of scotch and a glass, “different people. It’s soft and beautiful and frivolous, with lots of tiny spotlights and dark velvet. Nothings taken seriously except gossip and indulgence. Any one of those giddy people—including that woman—could be a relay for Carlos and never know it, never even suspect it. A man like Carlos would use such people; anyone like him would, including me… That’s what I found. It’s discouraging.”
“And unreasonable. Whatever you believe, those people make very conscious decisions. That indulgence you talk of demands it; they think. And you know what I think? I think you are tired, and hungry, and need a drink or two. I wish you could put off tonight; you’ve been through enough for one day.”
“I can’t do that,” he said sharply.
“All right, you can’t,” she answered defensively.
“Sorry, I’m edgy.”
“Yes. I know.” She started for the bathroom. “I’ll freshen up and we can go. Pour yourself a stiff one, darling. Your teeth are showing.”
“Marie?”
“Yes?”
“Try to understand. What I found there upset me. I thought it would be different. Easier.”
“While you were looking, I was waiting, Jason. Not knowing. That wasn’t easy either.”
“I thought you were going to call Canada. Didn’t you?”
She held her place for a moment. “No,” she said “It was too late.” The bathroom door closed; Bourne walked to the desk across the room. He opened the drawer, took out stationery, picked up the ballpoint pen and wrote the words:
It’s over. I’ve fou
nd my arrows. Go back to Canada and say nothing for both our sakes. I know where to reach you.
He folded the stationery, inserted it into an envelope, holding the flap open as he reached for his billfold. He took out both the French and the Swiss bills, slipping them behind the folded note, and sealed the envelope. He wrote on the front: MARIE.
He wanted so desperately to add: My love, my dearest love.
He did not. He could not.
The bathroom door opened. He put the envelope in his jacket pocket. “That was quick,” he said.
“Was it? I didn’t think so. What are you doing?”
“I wanted a pen,” he answered, picking up the ballpoint. “If that fellow has anything to tell me I want to be able to write it down.”
Marie was by the bureau; she glanced at the dry, empty glass. “You didn’t have your drink.”
“I didn’t use the glass.”
“I see. Shall we go?”
They waited in the corridor for the rumbling elevator, the silence between them awkward, in a real sense unbearable. He reached for her hand. At the touch she gripped his, staring at him, her eyes telling him that her control was being tested and she did not know why. Quiet signals had been sent and received, not loud enough or abrasive enough to be alarms, but they were there and she had heard them. It was part of the countdown, rigid, irreversible, prelude to his departure.
Oh God, I love you so. You are next to me and we are touching and I am dying. But you cannot die with me. You must not. I am Cain.
“We’ll be fine,” he said.
The metal cage vibrated noisily into its recessed perch. Jason pulled the brass grille open, then suddenly swore under his breath.
“Oh, Christ, I forgot!”
“What?”
“My wallet. I left it in the bureau drawer this afternoon in case there was any trouble in Saint-Honoré. Wait for me in the lobby.” He gently swung her through the gate, pressing the button with his free hand. “I’ll be right down.” He closed the grille; the brass latticework cutting off the sight of her startled eyes. He turned away and walked rapidly back toward the room.
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