by Peter Straub
“Let me ask you a question. Do you know how strong the yen is against Western currencies? It’s a joke. If you fly first-class on Air France, they give you sushi instead of escargots. Busy little Japanese tourists are running around all over Europe, the Pyrenees included.”
“Sushi instead of snails.” The knowledge that he had heard an almost identical remark not long before set off a mental alarm which subsided at the recollection of the drunken Basques.
“It’s about money, what a shock. Walk right in, right? You want it, we got it. Just ask Tonto. What’s our revenge against the palefaces? Casinos. That’ll work.”
“Like an MBA,” N said. “You’re too embarrassed to admit you went to Harvard, but you did.”
“Now, just how . . .” The contact gave a wheezy chuckle. “You’re something else, pardner. Heap proud, go-um Harvard, but people assume you’re an asshole. Anyhow, lay off the Japs. You see the same ones over and over because that’s where they are.”
“Neat and tidy, peaceful and private. Just Hubert, Martine, and me.”
“See how easy it gets when you dump your anxiety? Try not to mess up his car. Martine’ll drive it back to town. The mule who’s bringing her car down from Paris is going to drive the Mercedes to Moscow. We have a buyer lined up.”
“Waste not, want not.”
“Or, as my people say, never shoot your horse until it stops breathing. I’m glad we had this talk.”
Neat and tidy, peaceful and private. Lying on his bed, N called a private line in New York and asked his broker to liquidate his portfolio. The flustered broker required a lengthy explanation of how the funds could be transferred to a number of coded Swiss accounts without breaking the law, and then he wanted to hear the whole thing all over again. Yes, N said, he understood an audit was inevitable, no problem, that was fine. Then he placed a call to a twenty-four-hours-a-day-every-day number made available to select clients by his bankers in Geneva, and through multiple conferencing and the negotiation of a four-and-a-half-point charge established the deposit of the incoming funds and distribution of his present arrangements into new accounts dramatically inaccessible to outsiders, even by Swiss standards. On Monday, the same accommodating bankers would ship by same-day express to an address in Marseilles the various documents within a lockbox entrusted to their care. His apartment was rented, so that was easy, but it was a shame about the books. He stripped down to his shirt and underwear and fell asleep watching a Hong Kong thriller dubbed into hilarious French in which the hero detective, a muscly dervish, said things like “Why does it ever fall to me to be the exterminator of vermin?” He awakened to a discussion of French farm prices among a professor of linguistic theory, a famous chef, and the winner of last year’s Prix Goncourt. He turned off the television and read ten pages of Kim. Then he put the book in the satchel and meticulously cleaned the pistol before inserting another hollow-point bullet into the clip and reloading. He cocked the pistol, put on the safety, and nestled the gun in beside the novel. He showered and shaved and trimmed his nails. In a dark gray suit and a thin black turtleneck, he sat down beside the window.
The lot was filling up. The German family came outside into the gray afternoon and climbed into the Saab. After they drove off, a muddy Renault putted down the road and turned in to disgorge the innkeeper’s friends. A few minutes later the red L’Espace van pulled into the lot. The three Japanese walked across the road in their colorful new berets to inspect the food and drink in the display case. The blond woman offered slivers of cheese from the wheels, and the Japanese nodded in solemn appreciation. The girl in the blue dress wandered past the kitchen doors. The men across the street bought two wedges of cheese and a bottle of wine. They bowed to the vendor, and she bowed back. An eager-looking black-and-white dog trotted into the lot and sniffed at stains. When the Japanese came back to the auberge, the dog followed them inside.
N locked his door and came down into the lobby. Mouth open and eyes alert, the dog looked up from in front of the table and watched him put his key on the counter. N felt a portion of his anticipation and on the way outside patted the animal’s slender skull. At the display counter he bought a wedge of sheep’s-milk cheese. Soon he was driving along the narrow road toward Tardets, the sharp turn over the river at Alos, and the long straight highway to Mauléon.
Backed into a place near the bottom of the arcade, he took careful bites of moist cheese, unfolding the wrapper in increments to keep from dropping crumbs on his suit. Beneath the yellow umbrellas across the square, an old man read a newspaper. A young couple dangled toys before a baby in a stroller. Privileged by what Charles (Many Horses) Bunce called its fuck-you plates, M. Hubert’s Mercedes stood at the curb in front of the antique shop. A pair of students trudged into the square and made for the café, where they slid out from beneath their mountainous backpacks and fell into the chairs next to the couple with the baby. The girl backpacker leaned forward and made a face at the baby, who goggled. That one would be a pretty ride, N thought. A lot of bouncing and yipping ending with a self-conscious show of abandonment. An elegant woman of perhaps N’s own age walked past his car, proceeded beneath the arcade, and entered the antique store. He finished the last of the cheese, neatly refolded the wrapping paper, and stuffed it into an exterior pocket of the case. In the slowly gathering darkness, lights went on here and there.
There were no Japanese golfers in Basque berets. The backpackers devoured croque monsieurs and trudged away, and the couple pushed the stroller toward home. An assortment of tourists and regulars filled half of the tables beneath the umbrellas. A man and a woman in sturdy English clothing went into Hubert’s shop and emerged twenty minutes later with the elegant woman in tow. The man consulted his watch and led his companions away beneath the arcades. A police car moved past them from the top of the square. The stolid man in the passenger seat turned dead eyes and a Spam-colored face upon N as the car went by. There was always this little charge of essential recognition before they moved on.
Obeying an impulse still forming itself into thought, N left his car and walked under the arches to the window of the antique store. It was about twenty minutes before closing time. M. Hubert was tapping at a desktop computer on an enormous desk at the far end of a handsome array of gleaming furniture. A green-shaded lamp shadowed a deep vertical wrinkle between his eyebrows. The ambitious Martine was nowhere in sight. N opened the door, and a bell tinkled above his head.
Hubert glanced at him and held up a hand, palm out. N began moving thoughtfully through the furniture. A long time ago, an assignment had involved a month’s placement in the antiques department of a famous auction house, and, along with other crash tutorials, part of his training had been lessons in fakery from a master of the craft named Elmo Maas. These lessons had proved more useful than he’d ever expected at the time. Admiring the marquetry on a Second Empire table, N noticed a subtle darkening in the wood at the top of one leg. He knelt to run the tips of his fingers up the inner side of the leg. His fingers met a minuscule but telltale shim that would be invisible to the eye. The table was a mongrel. N moved to a late-eighteenth-century desk marred only by an overly enthusiastic regilding, probably done in the thirties, of the vine-leaf pattern at the edges of the leather surface. The next piece he looked at was a straightforward fake. He even knew the name of the man who had made it.
Elmo Maas, an artist of the unscrupulous, had revered an antiques forger named Clement Tudor. If you could learn to recognize a Tudor, Maas had said, you would be able to spot any forgery, no matter how good. From a workshop in Camberwell, South London, Tudor had produced five or six pieces a year for nearly forty years, concentrating on the French seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and distributing what he made through dealers in France and the United States. His mastery had blessed both himself and his work: never identified except by disciples like Maas, his furniture had defied suspicion. Some of his work had wound up in museums, the rest in private collections. Using photographs and sl
ides along with samples of his own work, Maas had educated his pupil in Tudor’s almost invisible nuances: the treatment of a bevel, the angle and stroke of chisel and awl, a dozen other touches. And here they were, those touches, scattered more like the hints of fingerprints than fingerprints themselves over a Directoire armoire.
M. Hubert padded up to N. “Exquisite, isn’t it? I’m closing early today, but if you were interested in anything specific, perhaps I could . . . ?” At once deferential and condescending, his manner invited immediate departure. Underlying anxiety spoke in the tight wrinkles about his eyes. A lifetime of successful bluffing had shaped the ironic curve of his mouth. N wondered if this dealer in frauds actually intended to go through with the arms deal after all.
“I’ve been looking for a set of antique bookcases to hold my first editions,” N said. “Something suitable for Molière, Racine, Diderot—you know the sort of thing I mean.”
Avarice sparkled in Hubert’s eyes. “Yours is a large collection?”
“Only a modest one. Approximately five hundred volumes.”
Hubert’s smile deepened the wrinkles around his eyes. “Not so very modest, perhaps. I don’t have anything here that would satisfy you, but I believe I know where to find precisely the sort of thing you are looking for. As I stay open on Sundays I close on Monday, but perhaps you could take my card and give me a call at this time tomorrow. May I have your name, please?”
“Roger Maris,” N said, pronouncing it as though it were a French name.
“Excellent, Monsieur Maris. I think you will be very pleased with what I shall show you.” He tweaked a card from a tray on the desk, gave it to N, and began leading him to the door. “You are here for several more days?”
“Until next weekend,” N said. “Then I return to Paris.”
Hubert opened the door, setting off the little bell again.
“Might I ask a few questions about some of the pieces?”
Hubert raised his eyebrows and tilted his head forward.
“Is your beautiful Second Empire table completely intact?”
“Of course! Nothing we have has been patched or repaired. Naturally, one makes an occasional error, but in this case . . . ?” He shrugged.
“And what is the provenance of the armoire I was looking at?”
“It came from a descendant of a noble family in Périgord who wanted to sell some of the contents of his château. Taxes, you know. One of his ancestors purchased it in 1799. A letter in my files has all the details. Now I fear I really must . . .” He gestured to the rear of the shop.
“Until tomorrow, then.”
Hubert forced a smile and in visible haste closed the door.
Ninety minutes later the Mercedes passed beneath the streetlamp at the edge of town. Parked in the shadows beside a combination grocery store and café a short distance up the road, N watched the Mercedes again wheel sharply left and race back into Mauléon, as he had expected. Hubert was repeating the actions of his dry run. He started the Peugeot and drove out of the café’s lot onto the highway, going deeper into the mountains to the east.
Barely wide enough for two cars, the winding road to the auberge clung to the side of the cliff, bordered on one side by a shallow ditch and the mountain’s shoulder, on the other a grassy verge leading to empty space. Sometimes the road doubled back and ascended twenty or thirty feet above itself; more often, it fell off abruptly into the forested valley. At two narrow places in the road, N remembered, a car traveling up the mountain could pull over into a lay-by to let a descending car pass in safety. The first of these was roughly half the distance to the auberge, the second about a hundred feet beneath it. He drove as quickly as he dared, twisting and turning with the sudden curves of the road. A single car zipped past him, appearing and disappearing in a flare of headlights. He passed the first lay-by, continued on, noted the second, and drove the rest of the way up to the auberge.
The small number of cars in the wide parking lot were lined up near the entrance of the two-story ocher building. Two or three would belong to the staff. Canny little M. Hubert, like all con men instinctively self-protective, had chosen a night when the restaurant would be nearly empty. N parked at the far end of the lot and got out, the engine still running. His headlights shone on a white wooden fence and eight feet of meadow grass with nothing but sky beyond. Far away, mountains bulked against the horizon. He bent down and stepped through the bars of the fence and walked into the meadow grass. In the darkness, the gorge looked like an abyss. You could probably drop a hundred bodies down into that thing before anyone noticed. Humming, he jogged back to his car.
N turned into the lay-by and cut the lights and ignition. Far below, headlights swung around a curve and disappeared. He straightened his tie and patted his hair. A few minutes later, he got out of the car and stood in the middle of the road with the satchel under his arm, listening to the Mercedes as it worked its way uphill. Its headlights suddenly shot across the curve below, then lifted toward him. N stepped forward and raised his right arm. The headlights advanced, and he took another step into the dazzle. As two pale faces stared through the windshield, the circular hood ornament and toothy grille came to a reluctant halt a few feet short of his waist. N pointed to his car and raised his hands in a mime of helplessness. They were talking back and forth. He moved around to the side of the car. The window rolled down. M. Hubert’s face was taut with anxiety and distrust. Recognition softened him, but not by much.
“Monsieur Maris? What is this?”
“Monsieur Hubert! I am absolutely delighted to see you!” N lowered his head to look in at Martine. She was wearing something skimpy and black and was scowling beautifully. Their eyes met, hers charged with furious concentration. Well, well. “Miss, I’m sorry to trouble the two of you, but I had car trouble on the way down from the auberge, and I am afraid that I need some help.”
Martine tried to wither him with a glare. “Daniel, do you actually know this man?”
“This is the customer I told you about,” Hubert told her.
“He’s the customer?”
Hubert patted her knee and turned back to N. “I don’t have time to help you now, but I’d be happy to call a garage from the auberge.”
“I only need a tiny push,” N said. “The garages are all closed, anyhow. As you can see, I’m already pointed downhill. I hate to ask, but I’d be very grateful.”
“I don’t like this, Daniel,” Martine said.
“Relax,” Hubert said. “It’ll take five seconds. Besides, I have a matter to discuss with Monsieur Maris.” He drove forward and stopped at the far end of the lay-by. N walked uphill behind him. Hubert got out, shaking his head and smiling. “This is a terrible place for car trouble.” Martine had turned around to stare at N through the rear window.
“Finding you was good luck for me,” N said.
Hubert came up to him and placed two fingers on his arm in a delicate gesture of reconciliation. Even before he inclined his head to whisper his confidence, N knew what he was going to say. “Your question about that marquetry table troubled me more and more this evening. After all, my reputation is at stake every time I put a piece on display. I examined it with great care, and I think you may have been right. There is a definite possibility that I was misled. I’ll have to look into the matter further, but I thank you for bringing it to my attention.” The two fingers tapped N’s arm.
He straightened his posture and in a conversational tone said, “So you had dinner at my favorite auberge? Agreeable, isn’t it?” Hubert took one brisk stride over the narrow road, then another, pleased to have concluded one bit of business and eager to get on to the next.
A step behind him, N drew the pistol from the case and shoved the barrel into the base of Hubert’s skull. The dapper little fraud knew what was happening—he tried to dodge sideways. N rammed the muzzle into his pad of hair and pulled the trigger. With the sudden flash and a sound no louder than a cough came a sharp scent of gunpowder and burning
flesh. Hubert jolted forward and flopped to the ground. N heard Martine screaming at him even before she got out of the Mercedes.
He pushed the gun into the satchel, clamped the satchel beneath his elbow, bent down to grasp Hubert’s ankles, and began dragging him to the edge of the road. Martine stood up on the far side of the Mercedes, still screaming. When her voice sailed into outraged hysteria, he glanced up from his task and saw a nice little automatic, a sibling to the one in his bedside drawer at home, pointed at his chest. Martine was panting, but she held the gun steady, both arms extended across the top of the Mercedes. He stopped moving and looked at her with an unruffled calm curiosity. “Put that thing down,” he said. He dragged M. Hubert’s body another six inches backward.
“Stop!” she screeched.
He stopped and looked back up at her. “Yes?”
Martine stood up, keeping her arms extended. “Don’t do anything, just listen.” She took a moment to work out what she would say. “We work for the same people. You don’t know who I am, but you are using the name Cash. You weren’t supposed to show up until the deal was set, so what’s going on?” Her voice was steadier than he would have expected.
Hubert’s ankles in his hands, N said, “First of all, I do know who you are, Martine. And it should be obvious that what’s going on is a sudden revision of our plans for the evening. Our people found out your friend was planning to cheat his customers. Don’t you think we ought to get him off the road before the customers turn up?”
She glanced downhill without moving the pistol. “They didn’t tell me about any change.”
“Maybe they couldn’t. I’m sorry I startled you.” N walked backward until he reached the edge of the road. He dropped Hubert’s feet and moved forward to grab the collar of his jacket and pull the rest of his body onto the narrow verge. He set the satchel beside his feet.
She lowered the gun. “How do you know my name?”
