by Bill Granger
As she thought these things, her eyes glistened.
“I will go with you,” she said.
He took her hand. “No. I don’t want you in trouble, Marie. I know how to get there, just over the bridge at the Castel Sant’Angelo.… There’s a code I can use. I make a telephone call, he’ll know where to meet me.”
“And if he meets you as he tried to do in Milan, what will you do then?”
“I think that was a mistake.”
“You trust too much.”
“I trust you,” he said.
“I trust you,” she said. They were exchanging vows. They might have been in church, and there might have been religious music and not the mindless din directed now over the speakers. They sat at a plastic table altar.
“So I give you the tape,” he said. And handed it across the table to her.
She took the tape in her small hands and turned it over. It was like a gift, a keepsake, a gift from love. Was she imagining all this? But he had his own woman, didn’t he? Didn’t he mention her name? But she had betrayed him in Bruges, and where had he to turn? It didn’t matter if he had belonged to some other woman. It was good enough that he trusted his girl, his little rat girl found in a cellar in Berlin, his little thin girl with a plain face and plain brown hair. It was good enough if he trusted her.
“Why are you crying?”
“I don’t know, Michael. I never cry. I thought I never knew how to cry.”
“I trust you,” he said again, ritually repeating the vows.
“I will keep it, and I will come when you call me. I will do anything you want me to do.”
“We should find a room first. Then I’ll call. Then I’ll meet with him. I’ll make sure he understands about the tape. That I don’t have it with me.”
“All right, Michael. You must be careful—”
He kissed her. That was so unexpected. She blushed, sitting at the plastic table in the plastic restaurant full of light and smells of grease. It might as well have been a church.
They made love again. The bed creaked beneath their bodies. She was so skilled, he thought. She was satin and silk. She rubbed against him. Her body formed against his body. He felt her buttocks, her stomach, touched her in the place between her legs. He kissed her there. And there and there.
Sleep.
Darkness.
Thunder rolled across the ancient city. Lightning crazed the sky and the ghosts of the Forum were illuminated among the ruins. The Colosseum was filled again with Romans, and the gladiators fought in the pits. Death and the roar of blood. After two thousand years, the blood remained buried in the pit of the stadium, buried in the Forum, stained on the soul of the city.
Thunder awoke them, and they huddled in the warmth of the bed, beneath covers, naked bodies holding each other.
Lightning made her face soft and small. So young. So without fear. So gentle beneath his own gentleness.
He telephoned from the phone at the side of the bed.
Antonio answered and said the cardinal slept.
Michael waited. She lay in bed and watched his naked body. She traced it with her finger, traced his backbone and the gentle curve of his buttocks.
“Michael.” The old voice fighting sleep.
“You sent the men in Milano.”
“Only to talk to you. You attacked them.”
“Yes.”
“Where are you?”
“Do you know the place where you can talk to me?”
“Yes.”
“In one hour.”
“It is raining, Michael. I can hear the thunder. Come here to the congregation. Come to Santo Spirito.”
“Let us say I trust you, Eminence. I always have. I had no reason not to trust you. Then, why would you not trust me? I heard a tape recording, Eminence, and I must tell you. But I won’t have the tape with me. Not the first time.”
Silence.
Thunder. The sound of thunder is much taller in Rome, much more from God than in any other place in the world. The thunder is God’s voice, and lightning is His fire. It illuminates the past. The light crazed above the sluggish Tiber, and across the river was the Castel Sant’Angelo with its brooding bulwarks and immense indifference to the city it faces. On the parapet of the castle is the great figure of St. Michael the Archangel, his sword raised over the city on the seven hills. St. Michael was seen on this parapet by a pope in the Middle Ages during a devastating plague in the city. When the pope beheld the archangel, the plague came to an end, because God had sent the archangel as a sign that he heard the city’s prayers.
Michael had left his lover.
Michael remembered the warmth of her body as he hurried through the rain.
Down the slick streets to the river that flowed like a sewer beneath the great, ornate bridges. Lightning, and he saw St. Michael above him, the patron saint of all named Michael. Would his father or mother have understood this when he was named at birth, would they have thought that on this night would come his salvation as he crossed beneath the statue?
Rain and thunder so that the ruins of antiquity shivered beneath the sternness of God. Pagans in their graves were bones, and so were Christians stacked in catacombs along the Via Appia.
He thought all these things, one thought after another, jumbled like a dream, thought connected to thought by flashes of remembrance.
Remembered the thighs of Rena Taurus that morning in the Savoy Hotel in Malmö. Remembered the child-woman groaning beneath him in Paris. Love and love, smells and smells, each different.… Women were all smells and tastes, the touch of silk or satin or skin the same.
He paused at the Ponte Sant’Angelo and then ran across.
St. Michael, pray for us.
A black Fiat on the Lungo Vaticano turned at the gate of Hadrian’s great castle and started across the bridge for the city.
Michael thought of Cardinal Ludovico waiting for him beneath the colonnades of the square of St. Peter’s. The cardinal preferred to speak of intimate things in the fresh air, away from rooms that listened. They would stroll the square together, the priest and the translator, the priest with his hands locked behind his back, his eyes seeing the vision of his words and instructions and not the man strolling next to him.
Lightning froze the action of the world for a moment.
Michael saw the car and three men inside.
Two pistols.
Windows.
Shots.
Automatic fire.
He was in Vietnam.
He thought of Will being hit by a truck in Bangkok.
32
BRUSSELS
Rena slept a long time, through the night of rain and lightning.
Devereaux sat with her.
She slept in a room at the Amigo Hotel behind the city hall. The lightning illuminated the beautiful Grand Place in front of the hall and all the spires of the medieval buildings around it.
Devereaux waited. He waited for her to awake and for a telephone call. There was nothing to do. Rome was completely socked in and so was Milan.
A night of stupid waiting. He wouldn’t let Rena go home, because it wasn’t safe. He asked her again and again to see if she could remember a limping man hanging around the conference in Malmö.
The call came in a buzzing ring.
He listened for a long time as the international operator chatted to Rome, and then he heard Mr. Gobetti.
“Mr. Devereaux. It is quite sunny in Rome.”
“But there’s rain predicted, Mr. Gobetti.”
“I’ll return in a moment.”
The Rome stationmaster broke the connection. The greeting and response were satisfactory. He wanted to make no mistake, because he had never met Devereaux.
In fact, it was still raining very hard in Rome and in Brussels and across the face of Europe. The Rhine was surging along its banks, and Cologne was facing the threat of flood. The Seine was also surging, and there was talk about the worst autumn rainstorms in Europe in fifty years.
The telephone rang again. This time, Devereaux had pressed a key on the phone and attached a small electronic device that cost $3.59 to manufacture and which was purchased in wholesale lots by agencies of the United States government for $690 each. The scrambler beeped once to show it was activated.
“Mr. Devereaux.”
“Mr. Gobetti.”
“There is terrible news. This Michael Hampton is dead. He was shot to death about midnight on the Ponte Sant’Angelo. He was going to the west side, presumably to the Vatican.”
Devereaux let the words sink in him.
“The tape.”
“There was nothing on the body. Cardinal Ludovico was awaiting Michael Hampton in the Piazza Santo Pietro.”
“Are you certain?”
Gobetti snorted. “How long have you been in this business, signor? I am as eternal as Roma.”
“So they have the tape—”
“No, I do not think so, signor. There was a woman with this man. We’re quite certain of that. There was a tap placed of course on the house on Borgo Santo Spirito.”
“A woman? Are you certain?”
He saw Rena stir in the bed. She wore a satin gown she had purchased in Copenhagen while they waited at Kastrup for a flight out. Everything was late. Planes were forbidden to take off and to land. The world was reduced in the storm to crawling on its stomach across the earth.
“Nothing is certain, but this was surely a woman with him. There is an ambiguity to the last conversation Michael Hampton had with His Holy Eminence, the great spy.” Gobetti stopped to let his prejudices air. “Michael indicates the tape but indicates he will not have it at the meeting. So there is a possibility he entrusted the tape to his confederate.”
“Are you sure there was a woman?”
“Unmistakably. I had three dozen men waiting for him. Naturally, I put such a man in the one place where most Americans go when they first come to Rome. To see the Spanish Steps and look at the bad paintings of the bad artists. We have, if you can imagine this sacrilege, a McDonald’s across from the Spanish Steps. The great gift of American culture.”
Devereaux waited out the irrelevant indignation.
“Nevertheless, my agent saw the couple. He even took their photograph. And there was something exchanged, but it is not clear from the photograph. It could be a tape recording. It is difficult at the moment to do a proper examination of the photograph, if you understand me.”
“You did fine,” Devereaux said. He had no time for praise, for himself or others, but he sensed that this was a good thing to say to Signor Gobetti.
“Unfortunately he lost them, and we presume they went to a hotel. There are so many hotels, but we are going through them, one by one, with patience. If she stays in the rooms until dawn, it will be all right.”
“Is there a way to run down their passports and get identification?”
“Of course.” Gobetti sounded insulted. “We have her name, which may or may not be true. Marie Dreiser of Berlin.”
He was coming from Berlin. He was coming to Bruges to see Rena. He was coming for help.
Lightning.
Rena stirred again, rose to a sitting position. Her skin was ivory in the lightning bursts against the window. She seemed serene, aware. She looked at him with those eyes.
“I remember the limping man,” she said in English. “It was in my dream.”
Devereaux stared at her and listened to Gobetti. The scrambler made his voice very thin, very high.
“They entered on the Rome Express at the Swiss-Italian border at six-thirty in the morning. The train, unfortunately, suffered a breakdown in Milano. They apparently made a contact to Cardinal Ludovico’s residence from Milano. That is when he mentioned the girl, on the telephone, but it was not this name but another, Rena Taurus.”
Michael was dead.
“When will you be in Roma?”
“I don’t know. I have calls in to the airport. Both airports.”
“The weather will break here in the morning.”
“Then in the morning.”
“Do you need directions?”
“No. I’ll trust the cabdriver.”
“Tell them on the Monte Aventino. The idiots can at least find mountains. Then ask at the local trattoria for Via Icilio. Don’t think they’re cheating you. There’s too many streets in Rome, and most of these people are illiterate.”
Devereaux saw her get up from the bed. He could see her and then be unable to remember the curves of her body except as smells and remembered touches.
“I’ll be there. If you can, get the girl.”
“By any means?”
“In any way.”
“And the tape.”
“Of course. Keep the watch on the prelate.”
They broke the connection. Devereaux removed the scrambler and put it in his pocket.
He stared at her for a moment. She didn’t speak at all, but she sensed the thing he had to tell her. He stood up, and she ran to him and held him and began to cry.
“Michael,” she said. “Michael.”
“He was killed. I was too late. If it hadn’t been for the storm…”
He felt her sobs.
When she was finished with tears, he led her to the chair at the window. She sat down and stared up at him with her extraordinary eyes. They were shining in the lightning, wet and sad.
“You know the limping man now. You know what he looks like,” he said.
She shook her head. “What does it matter? Michael is dead. It doesn’t matter now—they have the tape.”
He stared at her.
They have the tape.
He stared at her for a long time.
“Why did you do it, Rena?”
She trembled.
She did not speak.
“You set him up. You could have stopped this. Even in Bruges. You wanted him to run.”
“No, I never wanted him to die. I never wished him harm. They said there would be no danger at all.”
“Who told you? The limping man?”
“I didn’t tell you. Yes. He is an American, but it wasn’t him. He was part of it. Two weeks ago in Brussels.… Michael is dead, and I killed him.”
“You were one of them who killed him,” Devereaux said.
“Don’t you have pity for me?”
“No. Not now.”
Thunder clapped and lightning danced. The city was under siege.
“The damned rain. You would have stopped him. But the tape…”
“What was on the tape?”
“I don’t know.”
He slapped her as hard as Michael had slapped her that afternoon in the lobby of the hotel in Bruges. She felt the sting of it for lingering seconds, and there were tears again in her eyes.
“Go ahead and hit me again,” she said.
“What was on the tape?”
“I don’t know. They said there would be an agreement in Malmö, that my Michael was there at the behest of a secret society. They said it was very important that Michael carry the true agreement to that secret society. They told me this.”
“Who told you?”
“I won’t betray them.”
He saw her eyes in the light of the sky. “You killed him, you know.”
“You want to hurt me. I know I killed him. And the tape… I hurt them as well.”
“Who?”
“It doesn’t matter to you. You’re an American. You love Moscow now, it is the fashion. Americans are so fickle. They forget Estonia and Latvia. They forget Lithuania. I am Lithuanian, not Russian. I am Catholic, not like the Russians. I am not a barbarian like the Cossacks. You let them take my country and then you turn the other cheek when Moscow demands that you sell us out. Do you know how many lives are at risk in Vilnius alone? Do you know how people live while they work for our freedom?”
“Are you a patriot, then?”
She let the question answer itself.
“Was it worth Michael?”
<
br /> “You think nothing is worth a life?”
“You betrayed your lover.”
“I betrayed him the moment you put your arms around me. Yes. I betrayed him to carry the message, but I didn’t want him in danger, I did not want him to die. I’ll punish myself for his death all my life. But I betrayed Michael, not in Malmö but here in Brussels when you put your arms around me and held me and I could feel your body and I wanted you. I wanted you to hold me and make love to me. I betrayed him then and kept on betraying him. We all betray each other, isn’t that true?”
Yes. It was true. It was perfectly true.
She touched him and clung to him.
It was perfectly true. She had smiled in pleasure in the window of the Hotel Adornes that day, and it was not Michael that gave her pleasure in that moment but the thought of Devereaux. He could feel her desire rise just as she could feel his. God stopped the world with rain and storms, and a boy died in Rome who was completely innocent, the only innocent in the world. Innocence had to be punished in some way, and it was carried out on a night of storms.
He looked at Rena. There was no innocence at all. He was too late, and she had delayed him for the sake of some cause she did not even understand.
“Not innocent,” she said, reading his thoughts.
He took her for a long time, and she took him. There were kisses, and the passion was horrible because it satisfied them, both of them, to sin against God and Michael and their own innocence and to smear their passion over each other’s body until they were both drenched with lovemaking. When he broke into her body, he was a barbarian without any thought but cruelty and the taking of pleasure. Michael was dead, and she didn’t care. She had to have Devereaux now and had to have him completely possess her. She smelled him like an animal and saw forests, silences, snows, great mountains, the panorama of existence frozen in his touch. She didn’t care, she didn’t care.… She bit him on the shoulder, and he bit her neck, and she didn’t care.…
