The Infant of Prague

by Bill Granger

  You were someone’s afterthought, Devereaux said in his mind. You were a butterfly and someone tore your wings off. You might have been ignored.

  “If I hadn’t gone to the church that morning…” she said. “I think about killing myself.”

  “Are you going to kill yourself?” he said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t kill yourself,” Devereaux said.

  “I can’t tell you what it’s like. The worst part is the kindness. Everyone is so goddamn kind to me.”

  “Like me.”

  “I called you,” she said.

  He was holding her. It was an act of comfort. “You called me and I was late. I’m always late now. There’s nothing anyone can do.” He knew he was feeling sorry for himself and he despised himself. He wanted sympathy from her and that was despicable. He suddenly got up and went to the window wall and looked down at the city. Ready, he thought. He’s already won. He freezes all my thoughts, my life. I can’t even act to save myself, he thought.

  He felt Ready all around him, grinning in the darkness, watching him, mocking him.

  Rita had set up a place in Georgetown off DuPont Circle and Philippe was coming to Washington at the end of the holidays. He watched Rita as though he was no longer part of her because she could not share the part of him that saw Ready all around, in everything, in every room, at every moment.

  “I’m glad you listened to me,” she said.

  He turned and saw her on the couch in the darkness. He smiled. “Do you believe in weeping statues?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. “I saw it.”

  “The same as Anna.”

  “I’m glad you got Anna back. I’m glad someone turned out all right in this.”

  “What do you need, Kay?” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you need money? Would money help?”

  She smiled. “Money always helps.”

  “And revenge,” he said.

  She stared at him. She understood.

  “Yes,” she said. Her voice was changed; the self-pity was gone.

  “All right,” he said. “I don’t know about the money. But I can get the other thing.”

  “Will you tell me?”

  “You’ll know,” he said.

  Jules Bergen turned the corner from Sixth Avenue and crossed the plaza to the front of the network building. He felt good. Ben was back in Belgrade and the indictments, well, what the hell were a few tax indictments? The whole thing had blown over. When network stock went down six points on the first rumors, Jules bought ten thousand shares and rode the swing back up when the rumors died. Some people knew how to make money out of anything, Ben had said to him with admiration.

  Jules Bergen and the messenger got on the elevator together and rode up together. The messenger carried a package of videotapes and he wore a Sony Walkman and sunglasses, even though the day was bleak and gray.

  Jules did not really see him. No one really sees messengers. He wore a stocking cap pulled down tight to the sunglasses and a battered Army fatigue jacket.

  Ding. Jules stepped out on forty-nine. The messenger came behind him. They went into the executive suite together. Jules and the messenger pushed into the outer offices and Jules said good morning to someone and stepped down the corridor to his own office.

  The messenger was behind him.

  That’s when Jules noticed him.

  Jules Bergen turned and said, “Can I help you?”

  “Yes,” the messenger said. He closed the door. They were in the office together and Jules saw what it was. He went to the desk to press the intercom. The messenger slammed him onto the couch. Jules said, “You can’t do—”

  “Shut up,” the messenger said.

  “Who are you?”

  “The messenger.”

  “Messenger from who?”

  “Messenger from God,” the messenger said. “Gimme all your money.”

  Jules took out his wallet and money clip and handed them to the messenger. The messenger put the videotapes on the desk. The messenger stared at Jules through the sunglasses. The mouth was straight, the shoulders hunched.

  “What are you gonna do?” Jules stammered.

  “Ben Herguth,” the messenger said. “Got a message from Ben.”

  “Ben is in Yugoslavia.”

  “I know where the fuck Ben is. Don’t interrupt me. I’m the messenger.”

  “What’s the message?”

  The messenger smiled. “Ben says he’s tired of you letting him take all the gaff. He says you got to stand out there by yourself on some of this. He says he’s gonna make a deal with the G and give them you. You know why he wants to tell you this? Because he says if you don’t quash those fucking indictments through your friends in the White House, he’s gonna cut all your fingers and toes off and then your nose and then he’s gonna let you hang on a meat hook until you go crazy or dead, that’s what the message is.”

  Jules trembled. He was in his own office on the forty-ninth floor in the middle of Manhattan in the middle of the morning and he was listening to a madman with a Sony Walkman and headphones.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jules said.

  “That’s what Ben said you’d say. So I do the second part of the message now.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  The messenger picked up Jules by the shirtfront.

  “I’ll yell,” Jules said.

  “I know,” the messenger said.

  Actually, there was no pain at first. The little finger of his left hand was detached quickly with a sharp cut of the scalpel in the messenger’s hand.

  “Now you can scream,” the messenger said. He picked up the finger and put it in a videotape box and closed the box. “Bye, Jules. Don’t forget the message.”

  And walked out the door.

  All the screaming a moment later just added to the confusion. And when Jules described the attacker to police, the story made the evening news on all the network shows. It was so uncivilized, New Yorkers said to each other: You can’t even trust messengers.

  The next afternoon, Ben Herguth was back in New York but he couldn’t see Jules. The afternoon after that, Ben Herguth was in Washington, D.C., talking to a thin man from the Justice Department, talking about Jules and about Jules wanting to kill him and what kind of a deal could Ben Herguth make.

  The scandal, moribund so long, finally got sexy.

  The whole country started following it, including Kay Davis in Chicago.

  “It is a filthy matter,” Mrs. Neumann said to the man seated at the lunch table across from her. Hanley bit into his cheeseburger. His old Greek friend, Sianis, had lost his place on Fourteenth Street but found another storefront off DuPont Circle, near a bookstore that served booze. It was a strange neighborhood for someone like Sianis, but the cheeseburgers tasted the same to Hanley.

  “They are all filthy matters. Ben Herguth has made his deal and Jules Bergen will receive some sort of punishment.”

  “But who was the messenger?”

  “Yes,” Hanley said. “Well, perhaps we should not probe too carefully.”

  “Devereaux,” Mrs. Neumann said.

  “No. I have it on good authority—from Stowe—that Devereaux is in Europe. In fact, he is in Chartres of all places.”

  “The pilgrim,” she said.

  He studied her. The winter had aged her. The filthy matters had aged her. She was a woman who saw good in the world and did not temporize.

  “I don’t want to know who the messenger is, I don’t want to know about Jules or the CIA,” Hanley said. “The matter of Miki was a failure in the end. It came to nothing. We were lucky not to lose our agent in the end.”

  “The matter isn’t resolved. There is still Ready. Somewhere,” she said.

  He put down his cheeseburger with finality. “That,” he said, “is not my concern. That is a matter that does not concern Section.”

  “Come on,
Hanley,” she began.

  “Mrs. Neumann. The matter of transporting Miki was as straightforward as I put it to Devereaux that afternoon in the cathedral at Chartres. I could not be expected to know that Ready stalked the train, had changed the driver, had subverted our private contractors in Brussels. Ready was driven to kill Devereaux and that was a matter that Devereaux set in motion himself with his childish act of violence on St. Michel, when he cut Ready’s leg instead of sanctioning him. Devereaux is a man of logic but not when it concerns Ready. There is blood between them, blood spilled and blood ties. There are two sides of the same coin, yin and yang, whatever you want to call it. Except Ready is the stronger side.

  “Ready wanted to kill Devereaux, that’s why he hit the train. Miki was a bonus to him. He wanted to ship Devereaux across the wall. He got as cute as Devereaux had been. Well, it is stupid and childish and we have no part of it.”

  “And Devereaux is sitting at Chartres all winter, waiting for him.”

  “Yes. If Ready doesn’t know where he is, it is because Ready is dead.”

  “He isn’t though.”

  “No. I am sure he is not,” Hanley said. “Ready stalks Devereaux to see if it is a trap.”

  “Is it a trap?”

  “No. Devereaux is waiting. I think he is waiting for his own death. I put my faith in the wiser of the foxes, the one who was hunted and escaped his hunters. Devereaux was very good.”

  She felt the horror of the cold words.

  “He was very good and he is going to die. There is nothing we can do about it. Don’t tell me about filthy business, I know how filthy it all is. Devereaux knows he is going to die as surely as I do.”

  “Why?”

  “He settled Rita Macklin, he settled the boy, Philippe, he settled one last score, a quixotic gesture no doubt for some distressed damsel. Well, all his accounts are settled, his bill is paid, the will has been written. He waits in Chartres. Why there? I don’t know, I don’t want to know. Perhaps because it began there and it has to end there.” His voice was rising. He paused. “Devereaux awaits Armageddon. It is poetic but it is nonsense. It is merely two enemies who are going to meet, and one of them is going to die at the hands of the other.”

  “And Devereaux will die.”

  “Assuredly,” Hanley said. He had lost his appetite but the rush of words forced him to go on. “He’s thrown in his hand, Mrs. Neumann. I can see it, Miss Macklin can see it, surely you can see it. He waits like an old man. And what is Ready if not pure hatred, pure evil, with all the vitality of evil. He’s more than that: He is mad. The gods don’t make men mad before they destroy them; they make men mad to destroy other men. You can’t hurt madness or threaten it or reason with it. Being mad is the final advantage. Madness, Mrs. Neumann, finally rules the world because madness is so damned sure of itself.”

  She had known Hanley ten years and never heard him speak this way. He spoke as certainly as a preacher.

  “You don’t want this to happen,” she whispered to him in her raspy voice.

  He blinked at her. He would not speak to her.

  “You don’t want this,” she said.

  “Devereaux once saved my life but he cannot save his own. He has lost the will. He sees Ready in every shadow. Ready has not lost, cannot lose, and Devereaux cannot resist the inevitable anymore. He is in Chartres waiting for the end of things.”

  He blinked again.

  Now, at the edge of his eyes, she saw the wetness.

  42

  THE LAST THING

  He left the cathedral at the same time each afternoon. It was a little visit really and he never thought to pray. He sat in the silence of the great church and he stared at the walls or at the windows or at the huge vaulted ceiling. He thought of men climbing wooden ladders set on wooden trestles, men carrying up stones one by one, putting them in place, wondering if they would live to ever see the finish of it.

  Sometimes, in the darkness of the afternoon in the church, he could see Ready. Sometimes, in the darkness in his room at the hotel, he could see Ready. Ready stood at the edge of the bed. Ready stood grinning at him.

  Rita Macklin wrote to him. He had never thought of letters. The letters touched him more deeply than the sight of her. The words were formed so perfectly, he thought. He could never say such things or use such words. He only knew her name.

  He called her now and then because she wanted to hear his voice. She said that he should come home. He would tell her there was a final assignment and it would take a little while longer. He did not tell her he waited for Ready. He did not tell the boy, Philippe. He had closed the apartment in Lausanne on the Rue de la Concorde Suisse and it was just as well because the Swiss were in one of their periodic antiforeigner moods and the woman who owned the building had decided to ask them to move in any case. Rita wrote to him and told him about daily life in America, about living again in Washington, about her happiness, and her yearning for him. America sounded so strange, he would think after reading her letters. In all his life in Section, in all those years, he had lived out of the country so much that America seemed a vague, slightly old-fashioned idea rather than a real place.

  He waited in Chartres because Ready would want to find him there. The trail was just plain enough to follow. He chose Chartres because of the beauty of the great church and because it comforted him to contemplate it. He saw no ghosts, no gods, no signs or wonders; he only saw the cathedral and the men who had built it, but they were not ghosts, only figments of imagination. Sometimes, when he thought he saw Ready waiting for him, he knew it was only fear.

  He was very afraid.

  He thought he had been afraid before but this fear was more real to him. It was more than a physical fear. He thought of a word: dread.

  He had dread. It soaked into his bones.

  A taxi almost hit him once. It was only an accident. Would it be that way?

  Another time, a man followed him back to the hotel. When he confronted the stranger in the shadow of the street near the hotel, he discovered that the Frenchman was only a homosexual, looking for a lover.

  Dread woke him in the mornings after the night of dreams. He always dreamed. The dreams filled his mind the moment he fell asleep and they hammered at him furiously all night long, night after night, so that when he awoke, he was exhausted. Once in a while, he dreamed of Rita Macklin and he awoke with greater dread than he felt after the other dreams.

  The season of Christmas proceeded into the season of Lent. The season of Lent began on Ash Wednesday and all the people of Chartres wore ashes on their foreheads that day. The day was blustery and gray and the faithful came into the cathedral and knelt before the priest at the railing around the high altar and they received the ashes. The ashes were made from the palms that had been burned on Sunday. The palms came from the palms of the previous year, given to the people to remind them of the entry of Christ into Jerusalem and the way in which the people had greeted his entry. The Church calendar rolled in cycles like the seasons, and Devereaux watched the changing calendar and the change from winter to spring and he thought it would be very soon now and he thought Ready was very close. On Ash Wednesday, he went to the church and watched the people trudge forward and receive the smudge of the ashes on their foreheads while the priest repeated, over and over, “Remember, man, that you are dust; and unto dust, you will return.”

  Devereaux received no ashes. He sat in the Café au Départ near the station as he always did in the afternoon. Today, the proprietor thought he should put out the tables because it was going to be spring. The French are very optimistic about spring and always put out their tables too soon.

  Devereaux sat at the table and drank his café noir and watched the world. He saw Ready at the entrance of the little station and he knew that this time he was not seeing his fear. He was seeing the dread of reality.

  He did not have his pistol. It was in the hotel room. Had Ready watched him for days? Or was this just chance?

  Ready c
rossed the plaza in front of the station and went to the café and stood over the table. He looked down at Devereaux.

  “Pistol is cocked and aimed,” he said and grinned. “You made it a little hard but not too hard.”

  “You’re a wanted man,” Devereaux said. “You should turn yourself in to the police.”

  “I thought he was you. At the Hilton in Paris. I mean Miki. The concierge said he had a bandaged hand. I thought it was you.”

  “It doesn’t matter. The tapes were made.”

  “Where is our girl? I miss her.”

  “Away.”

  “Well, I can always find her.”

  “Sit down and have some coffee,” Devereaux said.

  “I’m going to kill you, man.”

  “That’s what I supposed.”

  “Aren’t you afraid, Devereaux?”

  Devereaux thought about it. “Up to this moment, I was afraid. I think it was seeing you finally and hearing your voice. Sit down, Ready. You’ve got time for coffee.”

  “Come on or I shoot you where you sit.”

  “All right.”

  He got up and put coins on the tip saucer. He said, “Where do we go?”

  “I rented a car. Over in the car lot by the station. We’ll go out to the country and that’s where it’ll be.”

  Devereaux got in the car and sat in the driver’s seat. Ready sat next to him with the pistol in view. It was long-barreled and automatic.

  “Go south,” he said.

  Devereaux drove carefully through the town to the sign that divides the world neatly in every place in France: One part of the sign has an arrow that says Paris and the other part an arrow that points to Autres Directions.

  They found a gray place in the gray countryside and they stopped the car at a dirt road. Devereaux sat with his hands on the wheel and Ready got out of the car. Then Devereaux got out on the other side. They stood on either side of the little Renault.

  “Get on your knees,” Ready said.

  “No.”

  “If you won’t get on your knees, I might have to shoot you in the belly instead of in the head. Chop, chop, just like Nam, Devereaux. One behind the ear. What do you say?”