Mr. Nimrin's attempt to scoff lacked a certain conviction. “Disappear? How do you expect to do that?”
“Oh, come on,” Robbie said. “Josh probably wouldn't be able to pull it off, so he's dead meat—”
“Hey.”
“—but I'm an actor. I could be somebody else in twenty minutes, stand right in front of you, you wouldn't know it was me.”
“Oh, fine,” Josh said. “Now I've got two masters of disguise.”
“Not disguise,” Robbie corrected him. “Disguise is for amateurs. What I do is character.”
Mr. Nimrin clearly hadn't liked the amateur crack. “If you could disappear so readily,” he said, sounding miffed, “why haven't you done so?”
Robbie spread his hands. “What—and give up show business?”
25
THEY LEFT MR. NIMRIN IN THE waiting room, looking at that interior door. The distant bell rang twice as they went out to the lobby, and Robbie said, “Interesting character, Nimrin. Hard to play opposite, though.”
Josh frowned at his profile as they crossed the lobby. “Play opposite?”
The doorman held open the outer door, and Robbie paused in front of him to say, “You're doing a fine job. Excellent.”
The doorman was surprised, but not displeased. “Thank you, sir,” he said, and even bowed a little.
Outside, Robbie said, “Quick, we'll talk around the corner.” As he went, with long brisk steps, he unbuttoned his shirt cuffs and rolled them neatly above his elbows.
Following, Josh said, “What do you mean, play opposite?”
“He does that exasperation bit,” Robbie said, as they made it around the corner of the building, where he stopped, back against the sandstone wall. “But if you play into that,” he said, pulling his shirt-tail out, “you're just reacting, you aren't creating anything.” Unbuttoning the bottom shirt button, he loosely tied the shirt-tails in front, almost but not quite creating a bare midriff. “So you saw what I did.”
“No,” Josh admitted. “I didn't.”
“No?” Robbie seemed surprised. “I was afraid it was too obvious. Nimrin got it, though,” he said, and pulled a richly blue beret out of his hip pocket.
“I still don't get it,” Josh said.
Robbie shrugged. “I played Nimrin,” he said, and placed the beret carefully on his head, a little forward, a little to the left. “I mirrored it back at him. But a calmer Nimrin. Every scrim he puts up, I put up the same one. I think it helped. How do I look?”
He stepped back a pace and posed, arms out at the sides, palms forward, like a ballet dancer about to make his move. He seemed taller but just as thin, graceful, in his black pants and casually-tied white shirt and jaunty blue beret. Josh nodded at him. “French,” he said.
“Almost,” Robbie said, pulling a crumpled pack of Gauloises from his pocket, “but not quite, not yet.” He pulled one fat lumpy cigarette from the pack and frowned at it. “I hate cigarettes,” he told the Gauloise, then looked at Josh, “but they make such great props. Keep an eye out for him.”
Josh leaned to the side to look around the corner of the building. “Not yet.”
“Probably be a little while with his ladyfriend,” Robbie said. “Anyway, things are looking up.”
Josh looked back at him. The Gauloises pack was gone, the cigarette was lit and now dangled from the corner of Robbie's mouth. Josh said, “What do you mean, things are looking up? I thought I just found out things were even worse than I knew.”
“You mean us being the late great patsies,” Robbie said, taking the cigarette from his mouth, holding it at his side. “Well, it was a good thing for you to know that,” he said. “And much better for it to come from Nimrin. If it just came from me, you might not believe it.”
“I still don't want to,” Josh said. “How are things looking up?”
Robbie offered a very Gallic shrug. “But now, Nimrin is working for us.” He didn't quite have a French accent, but he had something that was a reminder of a French accent.
“Working for us?”
“He'll do our spying for us, will he not?” Another Francophone shrug. “He'll tell us where the bodies are buried.”
“Where our bodies are buried, you mean.”
“Where the evidence against us is buried,” Robbie corrected him. “Very important. What do you think, should I add a little eyeliner, for that decadent look?”
Josh said, “I don't get you. In three days from now, a bunch of professional assassins plan to kill us, kill us dead, and you're just bouncing along, playing games.”
“Listen, Josh,” Robbie said, dropping his Gallicisms to become the Old Trouper, explaining the mysteries of the Theah-ter to the Kid. “We're in a performance, you and I, we've both got a role to play. Very Bulldog Drummond. No, Scarlet Pimpernel. We laugh at danger! Ha-ha-ha!”
“I don't laugh at danger,” Josh said.
“Not in side. But outside, your role and my role is to be supremely self-confident, because if we falter, if we let doubt creep up on us, we're finished.”
“Then I'm finished,” Josh said.
Robbie took another step backward, to give Josh a sweeping up-and-down glance, a stern and disapproving survey. “You know, Josh,” he said, “I need you to play your part. It's hard for me to direct you and play opposite you.”
“I don't know what you want,” Josh said.
“Deliver your lines and don't bump into the furniture,” Robbie said, as though that were the easiest thing in the world. Then he cocked a hip, as though about to start a musical number, pointed at Josh, and said, “You're going out there a scared little girl, but you're coming back a star.”
Josh said, “Shouldn't you be quoting something about ‘with my shield or on it’?”
Robbie laughed. “Now you're getting into the spirit!”
“I am?”
Robbie suddenly looked soulful to the max. With right palm pressed to his heart, he lifted his left forefinger and the Gauloise beside his left ear, and intoned, “Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.” He dropped both hands to his sides. “One Henry Four. I don't know how much I'll accomplish tonight, I have a curtain to make at eight-ten. But luck may be with us, who knows? You go home, and we'll talk tomorrow.”
“Fine.” Josh was ready to go home, even though he knew what was there. “See you, uh, see you.”
“Just exit,” Robbie advised him, so Josh walked away eastward, toward Broadway. When he looked back from mid-block, Robbie was standing with his back against the building, one leg bent, the foot pressed to the wall. Cigarette smoke curled upward from him, like a tiny signal fire.
Josh walked on. At the corner, he crossed to the right, then paused again, to look diagonally back down the long block just as Mr. Nimrin came hurrying around that far corner, managing to move very rapidly while retaining his dignity. He rushed past the skinny Frenchman draped against the building and kept on. Coming this way.
Whoops. Not wanting an unexplainable encounter with Mr. Nimrin at this point, Josh stuck out an arm and hid inside a taxi.
26
TINA PAUSTO WAS ON THE SOFA, watching the network news. “We'll be back in a—” the anchor said, and she offed him with the remote, then smiled at Josh and said, “Well, my dear, how was your day?”
Surprised, he said, “Fine,” and stood just inside the living room to look at her.
This was the warm and congenial Tina Pausto back again, dressed now in a pale blue silk blouse that draped on her like the gowns of Greek goddess statues, plus sleek black slacks and black spike heels. On the coffee table in front of her were the white ceramic ice bucket on the Tweety potholder, unopened champagne bottle thrusting up, two tall skinny champagne glasses, and a closed copy of Vogue magazine thick enough for a sniper to take cover behind.
He remembered last night's decision, under this same coffee table, to ingratiate himself with Tina Pausto, drink with her despite Mr. Nimrin's warning, worm his way into her confidence, le
arn her spy secrets. Now, actually in her presence, the erect champagne bottle between them, he saw he'd been planning to open the tiger's cage and just stroll on in. Whistling, no doubt.
Not that she was caged. Not tamable, not without peril, not to be trusted.
Hoping he didn't sound as skeptical as he felt, Josh said, “What's the occasion?”
If it were possible for a tiger to have a guileless smile, she had one. “Why, it is your return,” she said, “at the end of the long day, putting bread on the table for your family. Such a different life for you.”
He didn't understand. “Different?”
“From the Rimbaud you were, once upon a time,” she explained, and while he sorted that out, deciding she hadn't said “Rambo” after all, she went on, “I have seen your dossier, after all, naturally I have.”
Oh, the blowhard days of Uncle Ray's; of course she'd know all about that, it was the character Mr. Nimrin had made for him nine years ago—with a little help from himself, he had to admit—that had been growing in the darkness all this time, like a poisonous mushroom, now ready to eat. She'd come to this apartment expecting a slightly older version of that fellow, had been amused and dismissive when she'd seen what a domesticated boy he'd become, and now?
He said, “Champagne at vespers? Has that become our regular routine?”
“Oh, my dear,” she said, kindly and friendly and absolutely untrustworthy, “we shall have such a short time together. I asked myself, why should I not be amiable?”
“No reason.” But, he thought, no reason either way.
“You are, after all,” she said, “such a hero.”
“That's not friendly,” he said. “To make fun of me.”
She looked surprised and penitent. “Make fun of you? But no! I mean it. You are a hero.”
“Because I'm working for…whoever you people are?”
“Not at all,” she said. “I assume you are, like most of us, in it for the money. No, to make a marriage, make a family, to remain true and loyal. Loyalty is heroic, wherever we find it. And I may tell you, we find it seldom. Please open the champagne.”
“Oh. Yes.”
As he unbent the wire and worked the cork free, she said, “I thought perhaps, this evening, after you receive your phone call from your wife—Her name is Eve?”
“Yes.”
“May I call her Eve?”
“Not to her face,” he said, and poured champagne as she laughed.
“No, certainly not,” she said. “But after your Eve telephones you this evening—what nice symmetry that is—I thought we might go out to dinner together, if you felt agreeable.”
“Dinner? Oh, well, sure.”
“Just somewhere simple, here in the neighborhood,” she said. “And perhaps a movie after. There's an espionage film playing over on Broadway.”
He handed her her glass, lifted his, they clinked, and he felt again that instant of electricity in the air, circling their arms, but less this time, the force diminished. I must be getting used to her, he thought, and said, “An espionage film? I'd have thought you get enough of that at home.”
She laughed again, as the phone rang. “It is unfair,” she said, “to make me laugh and then not sleep with me. Go talk to your Eve, and then we will dine.”
“Are you all right?”
“Sure. Fine.”
“Did you meet the fellow Dick Welsh found?”
“Oh, yeah. He was there, all right.”
“What's he like?”
“Well, he's in the theater, you know. Theatrical.”
“Doesn't sound as though he'll be much help.”
“Oh, well, I don't know, maybe. He agrees with you that I'm not the type to go off and start a new life.”
“Good. Theatrical but sensible. And the other one is still there?”
“Yes. I was thinking and, you know, I can't come out there this weekend. Maybe Sunday.”
“I had the same thought. I'll miss you.”
“We'll miss each other.”
“I wish it were over.”
“Soon.”
“I thought I'd be sorry when the rental ended. Boy, was I wrong.”
“Love you.”
“Love you, too. Be careful, Josh.”
Well, it's too late for that, he thought, as he hung up, hoping an eavesdropper would not have been able to make too much of that call.
They just strolled idly in the neighborhood in the long summer evening, he and Tina Pausto, or so it seemed, but then she said, “That place looks presentable, let's read the menu,” and it was where he'd had dinner with Eve the night before.
A coincidence? He watched her profile as she studied the menu in its frame on the wall beside the restaurant entrance, but saw nothing to suggest she might be toying with him. And it was after all merely a handy restaurant in the neighborhood, so it didn't have to be a coincidence at all.
At least they weren't shown to the same table, but one closer to the front, and the girl seating the customers tonight was different from the one last night. It was the first time Josh was in a public place with a woman whose beauty was so powerful it made a palpable stirring in the room, and he found that both heady and oddly frightening. They sat, and a different waiter from the previous night brought menus and the wine list.
“You will choose a nice chardonnay,” she told him, when the waiter left. “In the summer, I like a chardonnay.”
“Fine.”
They ordered wine and food, he tasted and approved the wine, and when they were alone again she said, “I'm flattered.”
He didn't get it. “Flattered?”
“You have bought for me a more expensive wine than for your Eve last night.”
He stared at her, that pleasant smile, that clear brow, those knowing eyes. There was nothing threatening about her, which was the most threatening thing of all. “You know about that,” he said.
“But my dear, that's my job.” She sipped, put the glass down, smiled at him. “You wouldn't want me to be bad at my job, would you?”
“No,” he said.
Watching her long fingers toy with the stem of the wineglass, she said, “How much have you told her about what we're doing?”
There was no point in denial. In fact, he thought, his only salvation, if there was any salvation, lay in candor. “Some,” he said.
“If Andrei knew,” she said, still not looking directly at him, “he would be very angry.”
“If?” Maybe there would be salvation, after all.
“He would consider it a terrible breach of security,” she went on. “Andrei is very serious about security.”
“I'm sure he is,” Josh said, thinking about Robert Van Bark, and the waiter brought their first course, interrupting the conversation. When he had gone, Josh said, “But Andrei doesn't know.”
“No, I have not reported this to him. This salad is delicious. The walnuts, what a lovely idea.”
“Are you going to report it?” The clenched knot his stomach had become suggested a restaurant was not perhaps the best environment for him right now. A mountaintop cabin a million miles from Tina Pausto and the security-conscious Andrei and the fumbling scammer Nimrin, that might be the place for Josh Redmont right now, if only he could will himself there.
She put her fork onto the salad plate and gazed at him, thoughtfully, as though she hadn't yet decided whether to report him or not. “Again,” she said, “that's my job.”
“Yes.”
“But,” she said, “you could no more hide the truth from your Eve than you could fly.”
“No.”
She nodded, smiling at him. “You would never willingly hurt your Eve, and she would never willingly hurt you. So she will keep your secret.”
“That's right.”
She picked up her fork, speared endive, and again smiled at him. “And I shall keep your secret, too.”
“Thank you.”
“It will be,” she said, “our own little secret.” The en
dive slipped past her lips, her teeth. Her mouth closed, and smiled at him.
Throughout the espionage movie, which Josh thought self-important, Tina Pausto kept laughing her musical laugh at inappropriate places, causing other people to swivel and glare at her, then blink at her beauty and turn back quizzically to the screen; was there something funny there?
Afterward, on the walk home, he asked her what she'd found to laugh at, and she laughed again, lightly, and said, “Oh, actors, they are so winsome. I could eat them up.”
The smile on the face of the tiger.
27
AT TEN-FIFTEEN, THE SECRETARY Josh shared at the office with four other reps buzzed him to say, “A Mr. Robbie on two.”
“I'll take it…Mitch?”
“You do business lunches, don't you?” Deep voice. “We're going to have to increase market share, gentlemen, or we're going to have to drink the Kool-Aid.”
Josh did a smile that Robbie couldn't hear, and said, “You want to come uptown for lunch.”
“Strictly business. Things to report.”
They settled on one o'clock at the Tre Mafiosi, a good Italian place not far from his office, usually full of publishing and television people, and Josh tried to return his attention to his employer's concerns.
It was easier to keep his mind on the job, though it shouldn't have been. The night before he'd folded a winter blanket onto the living room floor as an additional layer of softness and pushed the coffee table even farther away from himself, so he wouldn't wake up with his head under it. Then, after a week and a half of troubled catnaps, he'd slept almost normally on that floor last night, and he'd awakened knowing that, more than the blanket underneath him, it was the dinner conversation with Tina Pausto that had eased his mind and let him relax into slumber.
Should it have? In two days, he had met three Tina Paustos, first the coolly seductive one, and then the impatient dismissive one, and now the pal, keeping his little secrets. As to which of those was the real Tina Pausto, obviously the answer was none. Everything she did was for calculation, and for her employer. If she'd decided that Josh's breach of security with Eve hadn't endangered the current mission, then she risked nothing if she kept her knowledge to herself. At the same time, she put Josh in her debt. Not for any specific payback at the moment, but for insurance on down the line.
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