by Bill Granger
The strokes of the brush pushed her back into childhood. Her deep blue eyes began to fade into dreams.
And at that moment, she saw Michael in the rain.
He was bareheaded and wearing a parka. He walked along the canal coming from the center of the city. He was not looking left or right, but there was a tentative quality to his step. He seemed changed. Only two days since she had last lain in his grasp. Michael. She stopped, put down the brush, almost spoke his name, which would not have been heard above the traffic sounds.
At the bridge he stopped and looked up at the hotel. It was just three stories high, a hotel made by connecting three smaller buildings. He saw her in the open window and his lips said her name. His eyes were haunted. Her heart, in that moment, went out to him. Michael suffered, she saw, and she hated whatever made him suffer.
She watched Michael cross the bridge. Bicycles splashed through puddles, and she felt impervious, for the first time, to cold or rain. She got up then to meet him.
She came down the steps and ran to him and embraced him. Felt his arms around her. He whispered her name in an exhausted voice. He was shaking with fear or cold now, in her embrace. She covered his neck with kisses. She pressed against him and said his name in her deep sensuous voice.
“My God, I didn’t think I’d make it. There were men in Berlin.…” He stopped, looked at her. What could he say? She was a century ago, and he had lived to be a hundred in the past two days and nights.
“Are you all right, Michael? What about the tape recording?”
“Damn the tape, damn them all.” A different voice, frustrated and angry because of the frustration. “I’ve been on the move all day. We got out through East Berlin, a plane to Geneva, it was horrible, a mess.… I finally figured it out. Marie figured it out. She suggested we get out through East Berlin. I wouldn’t have made it. The damned credit card, they’re tracing me because I’m using the credit card, the tickets at the counters—” He was distracted, his voice broke.
“Who is Marie?” Rena still held him, but in that question there was just the slightest edge of apartness.
He looked at her blankly.
“Marie Dreiser. She saved my life in Berlin. I ran into an alley. Two men were after me. They had guns. They fired. She pulled me down a coal chute.” He began to giggle. The woman who ran the hotel stared at him from her little desk. The fire was lit in the dining room. The hotel was warmth and safety, like home.
“Michael,” Rena said his name to calm him. “It’s all right.”
“It’s not all right. I have to get away, I have to get to Rome—”
“Rome? You have to get to Rome?”
“It’s too complicated, but everything leads to Rome,” he said. “I have to call, I have to arrange… my reception. Once I give them the tape, they can do what they want. They’re powerful enough—”
He was babbling. The woman of the hotel was staring at him. Rena wanted to slap him to bring him back to the present, but she realized he was hysterical. He had held on to himself for two days and nights, but now this temporary relief was too much. She felt him shudder. Oh, Michael, she thought.
“Michael, a man came with me to Bruges. I didn’t want you in danger, I never wanted you in danger.… An American agent—”
He froze. He held her in his grasp, but he had turned to stone. She stared at his eyes and saw the horror.
“The American agent. I had no choice. There were two men watching me, the American agent killed them. I think he killed both men. He shot them.” She saw it all again, felt the pistol, felt the sound of the shot tearing through fabric and then flesh, felt the shudder of the pistol under her coat, her arms wrapped around him in sensuous embrace, his arms so strong, the smell of him, the male thing that roused her as surely as kisses and touches, and in that moment, death dealt out in a single shot.
“This is a trap?” His eyes grew wide. He stared at Rena as if he had never seen her before.
The words didn’t register for a moment.
She felt his hands fall away from her. He took a step back.
“This is a trap?”
“No, Michael, no, I brought money, he wants you to hide while he arranges what to do with the tape. I believe him, Michael, I really do—”
“Why? Because he showed you a badge? One of the good guys?” Michael’s face flushed. “I asked you to meet me, to bring me money. My God, Rena, what do you think this is about? If you heard that tape, you’d know there was nobody you could trust.”
“Michael, you can’t keep running, not if there are men who want to kill you.”
“Marie said to be careful, that they might have set you up. Not Rena, not my Rena, she’s no fool, she wouldn’t betray me.” A step back, then another, almost to the door of the hotel. The woman behind the desk rose. Rena stepped forward. Michael was full of hatred, and she saw it. She had never been hated. Michael was her lover. She was love, her heart was his to warm himself with.
“You bitch,” he said. The voice was full of contempt. “You stupid silly bitch, you’ve given me to them. They’re going to kill me. Don’t you see that?”
“He won’t hurt you, Michael, I swear to God—”
“Stupid bitch, you traitor—”
Saw all their love shattered in the eyes, the sound of the voice, the color of the words. She stumbled toward him, and he slapped her.
The blow stunned her. Colors turned red and yellow and then black.
The woman of the hotel said something in Flemish. Sounds on the stairs. She blinked and felt tears and a ringing in her head. Michael hit her again, this time with his fist, wanting to kill her.
Stumbled to her knees.
Michael turned. Flung open the door and hit the cobblestones at a run. Saw the figure across the canal coming toward him. Ran along the narrow street. A shout behind him.
He expected explosions, expected bullets in his back.
Ran to the next street where a warehouse opened on the canal. Turned toward the wall that encircled part of the old city. Ran slapdash on the street, threading through bicycle traffic, slickered riders, old men walking with umbrellas.…
He pushed a fat woman blocking his way, and she went down with a startled, angry shout.
Expected death at any moment. He had turned white with fear.
The man chasing him was threading through the same crowd of traffic, slowed by a bicycle that suddenly turned in front of him. Devereaux slipped, fell on the cobblestones, rose. He saw Michael turn at the corner and disappear. Devereaux felt the breath burning out of him.
His feet slapped at the wet stones, slipped again, recovered. At the corner he stopped and then saw Michael emerging from a courtyard into a side street next to an old church. Devereaux ran at an angle for the church, and the bicyclist smashed into him from a blind alley. The rider was heavy and middle-aged, the black bicycle frame old and bent, and Devereaux went down in a tangle of spokes and slickers. The rider landed on top of him. Devereaux cracked his brow on the stones, felt his hands scrape the earth.
The rider shouted in Flemish.
Devereaux, faintly dazed, pushed him off. Got up. Wiped his head and saw blood on his hand. It didn’t matter.
The goddamn fool thinks I want to kill him.
Devereaux started again for the church and reached the corner. He looked down the narrow street that twisted in a slow arc that hid its end. He ran along the street and he shouted Michael’s name. He ran to the end of the street. He looked around and there were six streets off this intersection. They were filled with bicycles and riders and walkers and women with string shopping bags. The skies were dark, and for the first time Devereaux felt the chill of the rain on his head. His hair was soaked, the rain mixed with the cut on his forehead, and the blood dripped to his eye. He wiped his forehead carelessly. He stared at the narrow streets. There was nothing he could do.
Devereaux trudged back to the hotel in the rain. Michael had fled with the tape and would not trust Rena aga
in. Rena was watched by the opposition, and Devereaux had rescued her from them. He had killed two men to do it. And he had been instructed by Hanley to get the tape and to eliminate Michael Hampton, who had listened to the secrets. So someone would kill Rena, and someone would kill Michael, and the secrets would be safe, and the faceless people who ran the world would say it was worth this many deaths.
All for the sake of friendship with Moscow. Yesterday, Moscow was the enemy. Now it was the comrade in killing. Would Devereaux get the blame? Of course. Things worked that way.
It was a quarter hour later when he reentered the small hotel where Rena had waited for Michael. His coat shimmered with raindrops. He wiped his feet on the rug provided and started toward the elevator.
His way was blocked by the woman who ran the hotel. She looked stern in the way only the Flemish can.
“I don’t understand what you intend to do, but I would appreciate it if you and the lady will leave my hotel,” the woman said.
“I don’t understand,” Devereaux said.
“What are you running? I have friends with the police. I don’t want to call them, but I have a respectable establishment.”
Devereaux stared at her and waited.
“First you bring her here. Then she waits in the window like… like a prostitute, showing herself. And a man comes in and embraces her and then runs away. And then, five minutes later, another man comes in and he takes her away. I do not want prostitution here, I will not have it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You know very well.”
“Who was this man? The second man?”
“Just another type. He took her away. Does he have to buy her a meal before they go up to the room?”
Devereaux said nothing. He felt damp in his joints, cold in his bones. He had lost Rena to them. They had come to Bruges after all and found her, and now he had lost Michael as well.
The thoughts made him frown, his eyes went cold, and the woman who ran the hotel took a step back because his look was frightening.
He had lost them both, but Rena was more important because she was innocent of this matter. Michael had put her in the way of harm because they were lovers.
He remembered the smell of her and it obliterated any other thought. He felt her breasts against his chest again.
Rena. He had to save Rena, even at the cost of Michael.
Hanley would say, Not at all.
To hell with Hanley, Devereaux thought.
And patiently he began to ask the woman of the hotel all the necessary questions.
20
PARIS
They sat in the brasserie across the wide street from the Gare du Nord. They sat in the window and could see the crowded, littered street.
Marie Dreiser ate with the eternal hunger of the gamine. She ate greedily and without particularly good manners. The waiter seemed amused by her. Michael Hampton did not touch his steak or fries. When she had finished her portion, she started on his.
“You have to eat,” she said once, between bites.
Michael stared at her. He had been in this state since Bruges. Since he had stumbled into the tavern off the square where Marie had waited for him. Marie didn’t hesitate. She knew what to do. She pulled him out of the tavern. They rented bicycles and pedaled in the rain along one of the canals until they came to a little town called Damme. They abandoned the bicycles when she found a car, an old Renault Five. She amazed him. He did not protest anything, and she drove in the rain back to Brussels, on the wide four-lane highway full of tandem trailer trucks pushing to and from the North Sea ports. The little car was buffeted in the wind, but she drove with her eyes fixed on the road and with a certain manic glee. It was wonderful, everything he told her. She had expected something like this. “Don’t worry, lamb,” she had said. “I’ll take you wherever it is you are going, wherever this sanctuary is.”
She was amazing. She picked the pockets of three men in the space of five minutes in central station in Brussels. There was more than enough for the ride to Paris. And just enough for a meal in this brasserie and a cheap room in one of the hotels that clustered in grimy slums around the station. Paris was sad in November because of the chill that made the brasseries pull in their sidewalk tables. Marie had handled everything, as though Michael was a child.
“It’s good steak,” she said, finishing his portion. “Ahh.” Just as though none of this had happened, as though they were on a vacation together.
Michael said, “Are you going to steal some more money?”
“Of course, my lamb. Without money, we can’t go on to your mysterious sanctuary.”
“Marie…” Words failed. It was so hopeless, all of it.
She put her hand over his on the table and leaned forward. Her eyes were large and playful, and she was smiling up at him. “Little lamb,” she said.
“Don’t say that.”
“Then what do you want me to say?”
“Don’t say anything.”
“All right, Michael, I won’t speak. Not ever. When you want me to do something, just order me like a dog, and I’ll do it.”
Still smiling.
Michael shook his head slowly. “They got Rena.”
“That was easy to see, now that you explained it to me. They knew you were lovers.”
“She betrayed me.”
“Are you in love with her?”
Michael stared at the childlike face. “Maybe she didn’t understand.… I hit her, I was so angry—”
The face hardened. “Oh, she understood all right.” The Berlin accent was tough, the way it can be. “She sold you out, Michael. Maybe it was for money. But you knew it—”
“I thought he was going to shoot. There were too many people in the street. I looked back once. A gray-haired man, he was running flat out after me.”
“You make yourself sick thinking about it, Michael,” she said. “I helped you, didn’t I? I didn’t betray you, did I?”
“Marie,” he said. It was all true. He softened. What could he say to her?
“Lamb,” she said. Softly. “Come on, you need sleep. They won’t find us tonight. We use our brains, we use cash. How far is it that we have to go?”
“Far. It depends. The reception… I have to call tomorrow morning, I have to get through to my… source,” he said.
“I don’t ask you, Michael, I don’t want your secrets, not if they make you that unhappy.”
“It’s true, Marie, you helped me.”
“Come on,” she said.
They left francs on the table. The girl zipped her dark jacket. Her soft brown bangs fell across her forehead. She took his arm. They walked along the broad boulevard de Magenta and then turned into the side street where they had booked a room. They climbed the steep, uncarpeted stairs to the fourth level and went into the room. It was a sad room with faded wallpaper and a single tall mournful window shut against the cold.
The room depressed him, but she smiled and closed the door. It was her palace for the night.
The bag was on the bed.
“Aren’t you curious? I am,” she said.
“About what?”
“About what’s in the bag.”
“I don’t understand why you had to steal a bag—”
“Hotels want people with bags and passports and all that, don’t you know that?”
“We showed our passports on the train. They’ll know we’re in France.”
“They’ll even guess we’re in Paris. But not until morning. They can find us, but they need time,” she said.
She opened the bag. With luck, it might have belonged to a woman who was her size, but the case was pretty.
She opened it and found the things a woman carries in a small, weekend bag. The clothes had been worn; the woman had returned to Paris from a long weekend in Normandy, perhaps with her lover. Perhaps the clothes still smelled of their lovemaking.… Marie took a nightgown and held it to her nose and breathed through the satin
. Lovers and the odors of love. She closed her eyes to sense the smells better; pretty smells and soft clothing, and there was lovemaking in her mind. She opened her eyes and saw other treasures. There were silks and satins and pretty underwear. She closed her eyes and let her fingers touch the clothing of another woman.
Michael sat down on the bed while she went through the clothes. Then he lay back and stretched, his hands behind his head. Fully clothed, he lay staring at the cracked ceiling.
“Are you going to sleep like that?” she said. “At least take your shoes off.”
He did as he was told. The raincoat was on the single chair in the corner of the room. He wore the same shirt he had worn since Saturday.
He thought about it. He decided to take the shirt off.
“Oh, take your trousers off, too,” she said. She was still waiting.
“Marie—”
“You think you’d shock me? I’ve seen enough men in my life, I thought I told you that.”
Michael looked at her. His eyes were dull. He was tired, worn by shock after shock to his system. He had scarcely said a word to her.
“Come here, lamb,” she said. She had stopped waiting.
He went to her.
She unbuttoned his trousers. They fell to the floor. He stood in his shorts. She looked at him and then at his face. She caught his eye. Her eyes were soft with desire. She reached up and kissed him, and he kissed her in return. In a moment, they were embraced.
