For Henry
hopscotch, n. A children’s game in which a player moves a small object into one compartment of a rectangular diagram chalked on the pavement, then hops on one foot from compartment to compartment without touching a chalk line, and picks up the object while standing on one foot in an adjacent compartment.
scotch (2), v.t. To crush or stamp out, as something dangerous; to injure so as to render harmless.
– 1 –
IN PARIS THE gambling was hidden but easy enough to find. This one was in the fifteenth arrondissement near the Citroën factory. The thick door had an iron ring for a handle; a thug absurdly disguised as a doorman admitted Kendig and there was a woman at a desk, attractive enough but she had a cool hard air. Kendig went through the tedium of establishing the credentials of his innocence—he was not a flic, he was not Sicilian, he was not Union Corse, he was not this or that. “Just a tourist. I’ve been here before—with Mme. Labrie. There isn’t a message for me by any chance?”
There wasn’t. Kendig paid the membership admission and crossed to the elevator. There will be an interesting message for you tonight at the Club Rouge. It had been typed, no signature; delivered to his concierge by an urchin clutching a five-franc note.
He went up in a lift cage piloted by a little fellow whose face was the texture of old rubber dried grey by a desert sun: the look of an Algerian veteran. The old fellow opened the gate on the third étage. “Bonne chance, M’sieur.” Behind the smile was a leering cynicism.
Kendig’s fathomless eyes looked past the tables at a desolate emptiness of his own. The crowd was moderate, the decor discreet, the costumery tiresomely fashionable. Soft laughter here, hard silence there: winners and losers. The bright lighting leeched their faces of color. Kendig drifted among the felted tables. A croupier recognized him from somewhere and smiled; he was in the uniform—the tuxedo that only appeared to have pockets; to discourage temptation. Kendig said, “They’ve moved the poker?”
“You must speak with the maître.” The croupier glanced toward a largish man in black who loomed over the neighboring wheel.
Kendig had a word with the maître and had to show his bankroll to the cashier behind a cage. He bought five thousand francs in rectangular chips and the maître guided him officiously past the tables to an oak door with massive polished brass fittings. Beyond it Kendig found the game, six players around a table that accommodated eight chairs. A houseman stood in the shadows.
There was one woman in the game; he knew who she was but they’d never met. He knew the American, Paul Jaynes; the others were strangers.
Jaynes gave him a debonair greeting and the others glanced at him but Kendig hung back until they had finished the hand. They were playing seven stud—unusual for a room like this. And the house wasn’t dealing.
The woman won the hand and gathered the pot; the maître bowed his way out and Kendig pulled out one of the empty chairs and sat down with his chips. His place was between Jaynes and the woman, with the woman on his left; he knew Jaynes’s manner of play and it didn’t trouble him to be downwind of the American.
“Been a while,” Jaynes said with his beefy smile and Kendig nodded acknowledgment. Jaynes had a deep suntan and a huckster’s compulsion to touch anyone to whom he spoke. He was a film producer of independently financed sex-and-sandal epics. The others had the same look: businessmen, promoters—two Frenchmen, a German, a Swede. The woman he knew by sight and reputation; he’d seen dossiers on her—she’d spent a few years as patroness of American exiles in Algeria before she’d tired of the game or been frightened out of it by the professionals. She had been married to a banker but there’d been a divorce and she’d reverted to her maiden name.
“Pot limit of course,” Jaynes told him, laying out the ground rules. “Check-raise. It’s not table stakes—you can go into your pocket if you want to. Or you can tap out. We try to make it easy on ourselves.” He smiled; it was a little nervous—it looked as if he might have started with a larger stake than he had now. “Ante twenty-five francs to the player. The house takes one ante for its cut.”
“Seven stud or dealer’s choice?”
“Seven only.”
The woman said, “We decided by majority when we began.”
“Suits me.” It didn’t matter.
The game proceeded. He tried to take an interest in it but most of it came to him like the adult voices you half-heard when you were a small child dozing in the next room. It was one of the things he found soothing about gambling: its detachment from everything. He folded out of three hands on the first round of each; on the fourth he caught a pair of wired jacks in which he had little faith but he strung them along to the sixth card before he dropped out, unimproved; that cost him three hundred francs.
“You’re getting cool cards for a newcomer,” the woman said apologetically. “You must be disappointed.”
He made a soundless reply, a courteous expression. She was wrong, actually; disappointment only follows expectation and he’d had none of that.
After the first half hour he was a thousand francs in the hole and had won only two hands. There had been one extravagant pot; he had not participated in it; the woman won it. That was what the game amounted to—like surfing; you endured the ordinary waves while you waited for the occasional big one. The players who approached it professionally would have none of that—they played every hand to win—but the big ones came their way too and whatever their denials it came to the same thing. The woman was pushing the big ones hard and he saw she was the player to beat.
The Frenchman Deroget tapped out and left the table in vile spirits. He left nine thousand francs in the game. When the Frenchman was gone Paul Jaynes said, “More than two thousand dollars. Not much for a game like this one—but too much for a shrimp like him. I’ve heard it around that he’s in pretty deep. They’ll be keeping a close eye on him.” He meant the casino: if a man committed suicide his pockets would be stuffed quietly with money to discourage any idea he might have killed himself over his losses.
A few hands came Kendig’s way and he raked them in without particular joy. He was only marking time.
The fifth card of the hand was dealt around; Kendig’s was a queen and it gave him three hearts face-up. The woman had two nines in sight but she checked them. Kendig checked as well; Jaynes had a pair of fives showing and was eager to bet them—he was cheerfully transparent about it. There were a thousand francs in the pot by then; Jaynes opened the round’s betting with a hundred-franc wager and two of the players beyond him called the bet; the German folded and then it was Mlle Stein’s turn and she saw the bet and raised five hundred francs. It made a nineteen-hundred-franc pot and when Kendig saw the raise it doubled the size of the pot; and Kendig raised the limit. “The raise is three thousand eight hundred.” About a thousand dollars by the day’s exchange rate.
Jaynes called the raise without hesitation but he didn’t raise back; it meant he had his third five but not his full house. The Swede and the Frenchman folded their hands. The woman smiled a little, thought about it and then called the raise. It ended the round’s betting and there was a good sum on the table now: a little over fifteen thousand francs. Two cards remained to be dealt to each player; there would be two more rounds of betting in the hand.
Mlle Stein’s card was another four-spot and gave her two pair in sight, nines over fours. The Swede dealt Kendig the king of spades—no visible improvement of his three-hearts-to-the-queen. Jaynes bought the jack of diamonds: his third suit and no evident help for his matched fives. The three-handed betting began with the woman: she counted out five thousand francs into the pot. It could mean anything. Either she had her boat and wanted to build the pot or she didn’t have it and wanted to frighten her opponents into not raising.
It was Kendig’s turn and he knew every card that had been shown. The hearts were a screen; he had two more queens wired in the hole and he hadn’t seen a single king or deuce anywhere in the table’s up-cards. Caution dictated a straight call but he made the ten-thousand-franc raise and it folded Jaynes and then the woman was smiling again with her valentine mouth and she bumped him back: “I think I must raise you twenty thousand.”
It was as much as some men made in a year. Kendig shrugged and turned to Paul Jaynes. “Can you cover my check?”
“What bank?”
“American Express. Paris branch.”
“Will it buy me a peek at your hole cards?”
“No.”
Jaynes said, “You’ve got enough to cover it of course.” He said it with a bit of an edge on his voice: not quite a threat.
“Yes.” Kendig had a hundred thousand in that bank and a lot more than that in Switzerland. Most of it had come from gambling of one kind or another. Jaynes knew that much about him. Jaynes said finally, “All right. You can play shy here.”
“Thank you.” Kendig said it without inflection; he really hadn’t cared that much. He pulled the woman’s stack of twenty thousand shy and said, “Call.”
“What, no reraise M’sieur?” She was amused. It meant nothing about her cards; she was too good a player to coffeehouse any revelations.
The final card was dealt face-down and of course the woman had to come out betting; it would have made no sense to sandbag and in any case the bet only encouraged one’s opponent to believe it was a bluff: checking the bet couldn’t be a bluff.
She bet twenty-five thousand and Jaynes nodded tautly, covering Kendig. Kendig didn’t have to perform any calculations to know there were one hundred and ten thousand francs in the pot which the woman could collect if he folded his hand. If he were to call the bet it would make it a 135,000-franc pot—nearly thirty-five-thousand dollars. She had been reading him for the heart flush but if he raised she would have to change her thinking.
He looked at Paul Jaynes. “Blank check?”
“The size of the pot? Christ that’s more than I have to pay a top star for two weeks’ location work.” Jaynes looked at the three men who’d dropped out of the hand. “Anybody want to lay a side bet against Kendig?”
The German had been very impressed by the woman’s play tonight; and perhaps he wanted to prove something because she was a Jew.… The German said, “Fifty thousand francs?”
“You’re faded,” Jaynes said. “All right, Kendig.”
Kendig looked at the woman. She was watching him, waiting without expression. He said, “Raise the pot.”
“I don’t have that much in chips.” But she was smiling.
“It’s not a table-stakes game,” Kendig said.
She studied him. He’d doubled the pot and it would cost her 135,000 francs to call his bet. It was a big pot now and if she called the bet it would be a hundred-thousand-dollar pot—that much on a single poker hand. Kendig had never wagered as much in his life; such a hand came only once in a lifetime, win or lose. It didn’t matter. His mind began to drift, He accepted the woman’s scrutiny, neither evading it nor challenging it. Jaynes looked on, agape, hands trembling with anticipation. The German watched with his face as stiffly controlled as that of an addict who was declining a fix three weeks after taking the cure. The Frenchman and the Swede were hardly breathing.
She had two pair showing; she probably had her full house; she might even have four nines or four fours. Kendig was a stranger betting with another man’s money—a man he didn’t appear to know too well—and she’d know Jaynes well enough to know he wouldn’t shill for anybody. So it was honest play and she had to make her decision on the assumption that Kendig wouldn’t bluff with Jaynes’s money. She had therefore to conclude Kendig had four queens.
She did not call his raise; she folded her hand. “Well done, M’sieur.”
Jaynes buttonholed him at the bar. “Well?”
“She didn’t pay to see it.”
“But I did, didn’t I? At least I offered to. How was I to know whether you had that much in the bank?”
“Why should I have lied about it?”
That stupefied Jaynes. “You had four queens. You must have had.”
“I’ll tell you this much. I had three queens going in.”
“Then you bought the fourth queen on the last down-card?”
“I don’t know,” Kendig said. “I never looked.”
“The hell you didn’t. I saw you look at it.”
“I shuffled them around. That wasn’t the seventh card I looked at.”
Jaynes smiled slowly. “Jesus H. Christ. How the hell could you keep from looking?”
Kendig shrugged. The plain fact was he hadn’t cared; but it wouldn’t be worth the effort to convince Jaynes of that.
“Well we both did all right, didn’t we,” Jaynes said.
Kendig escaped into the toilette and afterward went back into the poker chamber to collect his winnings. The woman was alone at the table adjusting, her hair in a handbag mirror. She must have been close to fifty but she hadn’t begun to go to seed. “You’re leaving?”
“Leaving this game.”
“That’s hardly sporting.” But it was not said unkindly; she was smiling. “You don’t take much of an interest in it, do you.”
“I suppose not.”
“Such a shame,” she murmured. Then her smile changed. “I don’t know which is worse—a helpless puppy or a lost American. The only thing you really want is to get home, isn’t it.”
“What makes you think that?”
“I’ve never met an American who didn’t. Why don’t you?”
“Perhaps I will.”
“You’ll feel better then.”
“Will I?” He nodded to the houseman, who swept the chips into a sack and went away with them after Kendig finished making the count.
She said, “You are the one who hounded my trail in Algiers, aren’t you?”
“I was one of them. For a little while. They moved me out after a few months.”
“And now?”
“I’m retired,” Kendig said.
“I see.” She didn’t believe it for a minute but she was amused rather than angry. “Our Swedish friend just finished telling me what a success you’ve been on the Continent. Gambling, motorcars, skiing, flying aeroplanes. You’ve a rather interesting sort of retirement.”
“Yes,” he said because that was easier than denying it.
She pushed the cards together and her hands became still: she stared at his face. “Would you care to come home with me tonight?”
“Thank you,” he said, “I think not.” He executed a slight bow and left the room.
The cashier was waiting for him. “M’sieur prefers cash or our cheque?”
“Cash, please.”
“It is a dangerous sum to be carrying on one’s person, M’sieur.”
“All the same I’ll have it in cash if you don’t mind.”
“As M’sieur wishes.”
The maître approached, burly and discreet. “Monsieur Kendig? Téléphone, s’il vous plâit.… Par ici.”
He took it in someone’s office. He picked up the receiver but didn’t speak into it until the maître had backed out and shut the door. “Yes?”
“C’est vous, Kendig?”
“Oui.”
“Ici Michel.”
Kendig recognized the voice. It was Mikhail Yaskov. Now Yaskov spoke in English:
“You received my note then.”
“Yes.”
“I should like to meet with you, old friend.”
“For what purpose?”
“To discuss a matter which may prove mutually beneficial.”
“I doubt the existence of any such matter, Mikhail.”
“Nevertheless perhaps you will humor me?”
Kendig’s shoulders stirred. “Why not then?”
“It must be tout de suite I am afraid. I am only in Paris another twenty-four hours.”
“Tomorrow then?”
“Tomorrow,” Yaskov said, his voice very controlled. “I shall be with the messieurs Citroën and Mercier. Do you know them?”
“Yes.” It wasn’t far from here: the intersection of the quai André Citroën and the rue Sebastien Mercier, just below the Mirabeau bridge on the left bank. It was a workers’ neighborhood, narrow passages leading back, their drab walls daubed with Communist slogans. Fitting enough.
Yaskov said, “We shall meet at Number Sixteen, yes?”
Sixteen hundred hours: four o’clock in the afternoon. Harmless enough. “All right, Mikhail.”
“I assure you the transaction will interest you.”
Kendig doubted it but he made no reply. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Yes. Bonne chance, old friend.” A soft chuckle and then the line died.
Kendig cradled it and went out and collected his envelope from the cashier. Jaynes waved at him eagerly from across the room but he only waved back and followed the maître to the lift; he rode down in the cage with the old Algerian veteran and went out into the night with a pocketful of money.
– 2 –
BUT SHE WASN’T discouraged that easily. She was waiting by her car at the curb; she held a cigarette imperiously, waiting to have it lighted. The car was white, a Volvo 1800 a few years old—the super-charged grand-touring coupe they had stopped making in ’72. It didn’t quite suit her; she was more the Jaguar or Ferrari sort—something juggernauty.
When he held his lighter to the cigarette she drew the smoke slowly into her mouth. Her hair was fashionably Medusan; she had a full ripe body and an earthy manner—saloons, cigarettes, cards, beds.
“Well good night again,” he said and began to turn away.
She ignored it. “You have a first name, don’t you?”
“I suppose so.” Everyone always called him Kendig. “It’s Miles.”
“Miles Kendig. I rather like that—it has a strong sound. Come on then, get in. I’ll drop you wherever you like. You won’t find a taxi in this quarter, not at this hour.”
“… Thank you.” He said it grudgingly and went around to hold the driver’s door for her.
She managed the car with poor driving rhythm; it was not an implement to which she’d been born—he suspected she’d grown up amid chauffeurs and taught herself to drive at some point in order to expand the boundaries of her independence but it wasn’t anything she’d ever done for pleasure.
He made conversation because evidently she expected it. “You live in Paris all the time now?”
“Live? I imagine one could put it that way. Living is something most of us postpone, isn’t it. We sell the present for a chance at a future where we may do our living when we’re old and we’ve lost the talent for it.”
“You don’t strike me as a woman who’s saving up for her retirement.”
“Well I was fortunate. I have an ex-husband who settled my pension on me prematurely. Did you ever meet Isaac?”
“No.”
“Tycoon, banker, merchant prince. I’m sure you know the type. They’re always terrified by their Ozymandian dreams. The future must be guaranteed forever. Ninety-nine-year leases and thousand-year trust funds. It’s bloody depressing.”
She drove along the quay. There was a good moon but it was very late for lovers; the evening was silent and uninhabited but for the clochards, the human flotsam in rags sleeping in the streets underneath the globular streetlamps that hung like rotted melons on their corroded stalks. The woman said, “They disturb your friend Jaynes, the clochards. For some reason they frighten him. Would he have us house them in the best hotels, I wonder? Then where would all the Americans live?”
Her laughter was mocking but not unkind. He didn’t respond but he couldn’t share in her contempt for Jaynes’s compassion: he couldn’t deceive himself any longer into mocking anyone else’s convictions. He could only envy them.
Past the Tour Eiffel, Napoleon’s tomb, up the Saint Germain, a tourist’s route across the island beneath Notre Dame—the architectural gestures of an ambitious past. His eyes opaque, Kendig watched it all flow past; watched the woman’s animated face hovering above the wheel. A tiny Renault squirted in front of her and she shouted at it: “Cochon!”
Then they were on the right bank threading the maze below the Opera; his hotel was only a few blocks distant. She hadn’t asked where he was staying but evidently she knew. She slid the sports car in at the curb a block short of it. “You honestly didn’t care, did you.”
“About what?”
“Your cards. The size of the wager.”
He turned his hand palm up.
“Remarkable,” she said.
“Is it.”
“You find it an effort merely to grunt a word or two, don’t you, Miles Kendig. Yet like the ashes of Alexander you were once Alexander. An exciting reputation precedes you, you know.”
He looked at her. “What the hell.” It was said of her that in her bedroom in Neuilly there was a statuette of a Punjabi idol clutching his distended giant member. “I’ll go to your place.”
“You needn’t have made it such a bloody concession,” she said angrily; but she put the car in gear.
In another few years she might become one of those middle-aged divorcées who take up with young Continental gentlemen who teach Italian. But she had not yet degenerated into that sort of female impersonation; she was vital and she stirred what juices had not atrophied in him. “At least you’re not a zombie there,” she told him. He took no particular pleasure from the knowledge.
In the morning he pushed away his plate of breakfast untasted and left her, on foot, strolling in any direction through the Bois. She had smiled gently but she’d made no demands when he got up to leave: she was interested but not desperate, she was willing to be casual about it and he thought he might even come back to her some time.
After a while he ambushed a taxi and rode into the snarled center of Paris, made arrangements to have his winnings transferred to Switzerland for deposit, walked to his hotel and met the concierge and paid tomorrow’s rent as if he believed there would be a tomorrow.
In his room he stripped and bathed and took the trouble to shave; the little daily routines reassured him a bit. In the mirror his face showed the years: every crease. He still had a full head of hair, pepper-grey now; his face was rectilinear, all parallel planes, and his eyebrows were two bushy triangles over his slanted eyes. It was a middle-Caucasion face that had served him well in the chameleon years. In France he passed easily for a Frenchman because it never occurred to the French that a foreigner could speak the language properly. He had posed at one time or another as an Italian, an Arab, a German and a Croat.
From eleven until three he sat in the room waiting, neither reading nor smoking nor otherwise stirring his consciousness. At three he went out.
He had a croque monsieur in the Deux Magots and took the bus along to the rue de la Convention, dismounted at the quay and had a look around, more through habit than from any particular caution. A woman in dusty black hawked tickets to the Loterie Nationale. Lower-class Frenchmen sat at dirty checkerclothed tables before a pair of cafés and a brasserie, drinking table wine. A block distant a group of street workers leaned on their tools, never laughing, seldom working, ogling a girl who strolled by—just another girl who worked the bars and the men in them, a brittle black-haired borderline alcoholic who probably couldn’t remember the faces of the men she’d bedded in the past week; but she held the workers’ full attention until she disappeared. In Switzerland, Kendig recalled, the street workers laughed and they worked. And all that energy and spirit had produced, in five hundred years of peaceful civilization, the cuckoo clock.
A coachload of tourists decanted along the quay and Kendig moved around, keeping out of the way of the Americans taking slide photos and Super-8 movies of one another. He was thinking: if you compressed all the matter in a human being, closing down the spaces between cells, the spaces between electrons and nuclei, you would end up with a heavy mass about the size of a one-eighth karat diamond, and far less useful.
Yaskov came along, elegant in a suede jacket with a Malacca cane in his spidery hand; he gave Kendig the benediction of his grave nod. Russians do not smile politely; they smile only when they are amused. It makes them appear rude to outsiders. Kendig fell in step and they walked out to the center of the bridge and down the steps onto the tiny island. The park benches were deserted. “So nice to see you again,” Yaskov said. His gleaming skin was stretched over the bones almost to the point of splitting. In the profession he was an éminence grise; his name commanded respect in all the agencies. He was not the sort of Russian who would be surprised to learn that America was no longer a land of sweatshops and scarlet letters and riders of the purple sage. (It was truly amazing how many of them were still like that.)
Yaskov’s urbane English was almost perfect. “You won a great sum of money last night, yes? It was your good fortune I sent you there.”
“Well I’m deeply grateful.” Kendig was wry.
Yaskov too was a gambler; his face never betrayed him. “I’m distressed to see you so lackluster, old friend.”
“It’s only post-coital tristesse.”
“For so many months?”
He was tired of the roundabout game. “Then you’ve been keeping tabs on me. Why? I’m out of the game now—you know that.”
“By choice, is it?”
“I’m sure you know that too.”
“Actually I’m not sure I do, old friend. My sources in Langley haven’t always been reliable. It’s said you were retired—involuntarily.”
“Is it.”
“Is that true?”
“I don’t see that it matters whether it’s true. I’m retired—that’s truth enough.”
“You have fifty-three years.”
“Yes.”
“Absurd,” Yaskov said. “I myself have sixty-one. Am I retired?”
“Do you want to be?”
“No. Avidly no. I should be bored to distraction.”
“Would you now.”
They sat down on a bench. A barge drifted past laden with what appeared to be slag. Its aftercabin had a Citroën 2CV parked on the roof and a line of multihued washing strung like an ocean vessel’s signal pennants. The barge’s family sunned on the afterdeck—a fat wife, three children—while the husband manned the tiller and smoked. Generations of them were born, lived and died aboard the canal barges. It was a peaceful life and a bastion of unchange.
A little motor runabout zipped past the barge, disturbing its tranquillity with the sharp chop of its frenetic wake.
Kendig said, “What’s your offer, Mikhail?”
“Life, old friend.”
Kendig grinned at him. “And the alternative?”
“I did not invite you to join me here on such a pleasant day in order to impose ultimata upon you,” Yaskov said. “I make no threats at all. The alternative would be of your own making, not of mine. I simply offer to revive you. I wish to bring you back to life.”
“The resurrection of Miles Kendig.” His tongue toyed with it. “A fine title for an autobiography.”
“Don’t be evasive.”
“What is it you want, then? Are you short a defector this month?”
“Oh defection is such a degrading transformation, don’t you think? In any case I should imagine you’d be just as bored in a Moscow flat as you are here. My dear Miles, I’m offering to put you back into the game. Back into action. Isn’t it what you want?”
“As a double agent I’d be of very little use, I have no access to my former employers.”
“Double agents are tedious little people anyhow,” Yaskov said. “They’re required to be so colorless. I don’t think it would suit you at all. No, it’s really quite straightforward. I should like to run you in the field. As my own agent. I can assure you the members of my string regard me as a most amiable Control. How does it strike you?”
Kendig tried briefly to put some show of interest on his face. Yaskov did not speak further; he left his invitation dangling like a baited hook.
The barge disappeared round the bend on its leisurely passage to Le Havre. The little powerboat came zigzagging back upstream, splitting the water with its razor bow, planing and slapping gaily. The sun on Kendig’s cheek was soporific. He didn’t want to have to think.
Yaskov began to draw circles on the pavement with the rubber tip of his cane. It was a subtle rebuke. It forced Kendig to speak. “It wouldn’t be worth it to me, I’m afraid.
“We’d make it worthwhile of course. There’s plenty of money.”
“Money costs too much when you have to earn it that way.”
“Then what is it you want? Power?”
“God no.”
“I could let you run a string of your own if you like. You might even rise to the policy level in time. Doesn’t that intrigue you? The possibility of making policy for your former enemies?”
“Sounds tedious to me.”
“Our kind has been on this planet for perhaps two million years,” Yaskov said, “and during all but one percent of that period we lived as hunters. The hunting way of life is the only one natural to man. The one most rewarding. It was your way of life but your government took it away from you. I offer to return it to you.”
“It’s self-destructive lunacy, that’s all it is.”
“Well my dear Miles you can’t lead our kind of life and expect to live forever. But at least we can be alive for a time.”
“It’s all computers now. World War Three will be known as the Paperkrieg. There’s no need for my kind of toy gladiator any more. We’re as obsolete as fur-trapping explorers.”
“It’s hardly gone that far, old friend. Otherwise why should I be making you this offer?”
“Because you can’t face obsolescence—you won’t acknowledge it the way I’ve done. You’re as redundant as I am—you just don’t know it yet.” Kendig smiled meaninglessly. “We’ve seven’d out. All of us.”
“I don’t know the expression but you make it clear enough.”
“It’s to do with a dice game.”
“Yes, of course. You’re beginning to annoy me. You’re not merely disenchanted; you’re condescending. I don’t need to be patronized. I suspect behind your smokescreen of boredom you’re resisting my offer out of some absurd vestige of chauvinistic scruple.”
“It could be that. Who knows.” When Kendig had learned the game he’d had Truman and the Yaskovs had had Stalin; it had been easy enough to discern which of them wore the white hat and which the black hat. Now there was none of that left. The only distinction was that the West’s leadership was more petty than the East’s. It wasn’t even a game for the intelligence operatives any more; it was only a nihilistic exercise, going through the motions out of habit, answering not to any sense of mission or principle but only to the procedural requirements of bureaucracy. There was no point to it any more. But Yaskov might be right; Kendig might have hated his side too long to be comfortable with the idea of working for them. He didn’t know; he didn’t really care.
Yaskov brooded toward the enormous monolith of the Radiodiffusion which cowed the right bank beneath it. “Well it was an intriguing idea to me. I did hope you would take an interest.”
“You’d better forget it. I’d be no good to you—I’d put my foot in it anyway.”
“Certainly you would if the work didn’t excite you. I won’t press you again but you might bear in mind that I won’t have closed the offer.”
It meant only that the idea of recruiting him had been Yaskov’s own. Probably he hadn’t cleared it with his superiors. Therefore its failure would not reflect on Yaskov. It meant Kendig was in no danger from them; there’d be no retribution. Somehow the realization angered him.
Yaskov stood up and prodded the cement with his cane. “You were one of the very best. I feel quite sad.” Then he walked away.
He sat on the bench without stirring. Pigeons flocked around, then drifted away in disappointment when he had nothing to feed them. Yaskov’s high narrow figure dwindled along the quay and was absorbed. Traffic was a muted whirring hum on the pont; a thin haze drifted across the sky and Kendig stared among the trees with empty eyes. Recollections drifted through his mind. Lorraine—a dreadful woman with a dreadful name. The caper along the Danube when they’d brought Rozhsenny out in the rain with the Soviet guns spitting blindly in the night. The old man, and the idea of suicide that had hung around him always. Kendig had no scruple against it. A man always ought to have the right to remove himself from the world at his discretion.
But it had no appeal. There was no challenge; it was too passive. He didn’t want to be dead: he was already dead. Yaskov had strummed a chord there. To be alive might be the goal. But it was harder to find, all the time. He’d done everything to provoke his jaded sensibilities. High risks: the motor racing, skiing, flying lessons, the gambling which had been satisfying until his own capacities had defeated its purpose: he’d always been professional at whatever he did and his skills were the sort that took the risk out of it after a while. He’d bent the bank at Biarritz a month ago and since then he’d lost all interest in it. And he’d long since given up the athletic challenges. They’d all got to looking the same way—the way bowling had looked when he’d been a college freshman. As soon as he’d discovered that the object of bowling was to learn how to do exactly the same thing every time, he’d lost interest.
He thought part of it was the fact that there was no human antagonist. There was no “other side” with which to compete. He had a quarter century of playing the running-dog game and it had educated his palate to its own flavor; his appetite had been trained to crave human conflict: the chess game of reality with stakes that weren’t tokens, rules that weren’t artificial.
At one time he had tried to get reinstated.
They’d sent him into the Balkans on a very chancy mission but the objective had some meaning so he’d volunteered for it. He’d accomplished the job but he’d been injured badly—it had been critical for a while—and his cover had been blown. After he’d convalesced he’d done some office work and then they’d put him out to pasture on early retirement. Eighteen months later he’d asked for reactivation but he was too old, they told him, too old and too hot. And in any case Cutter had taken his place and wasn’t about to relinquish it. They didn’t want any part of him. They’d offered him a sop—a time-filler desk over at NSA with a fair GS rank and salary, punching decodes through computers. A bloody file clerk’s job.
When the sun tipped over it got chilly and he left the islet. Snatches of things ran through his mind in a jumbled sort of order and he made a desultory game of tracing the pattern they made. They came without chronology from the retentive cells. The suicide note left by the screen actor George Sanders: “I am leaving because I am bored.” Fragmentarily a poem by Stephen Crane which he hadn’t read since he was a sophomore; he was sure he didn’t have it right: “A man said to the Universe, ‘Sir, I exist!’ ‘Yes,’ replied the Universe, ‘but that fact does not create in me a sense of obligation.’” At any rate something like that.… I wish to bring you back to life.… The resurrection of Miles Kendig.… My dear Miles, I’m offering to put you back in the game. Back into action. Isn’t it what you want? The hunting way of life is the only one natural to man. I offer to return it to you.
Well it was something Yaskov didn’t have it in his power to restore.
But it was the first time in months he’d felt things churning and he kept toying with them while he slouched up the rue Lecourbe toward Montparnasse. It was the first time his dialogue with himself hadn’t taken the flavor of a talk with a stranger in the adjacent seat of an airliner: an exchange of meaningless monologues, half of them self-serving lies, the other half mechanical responses and none of it designed to be remembered beyond the debarkation ramp.
He ate something in a café and had two Remy Martins and walked all the way back to the hotel. There were no personal things in sight although he had resided in the suite for nearly two months; its occupant had kept himself hidden from it.
The telephone.
“M’sieur—a gentleman wishes to see you.”
“Who is he?”
“I do not know, M’sieur.”
“I’ll be down. Ask him to wait.” He wasn’t about to invite to his room any man who wouldn’t give his name.
The rickety cage discharged him into the dusky lobby and he saw Glenn Follett in the reading chair in the alcove. Follett charged beaming to his feet, hearty ebullience filling his dewlapped Basset face. “Hey old buddy—long time no see, hey? How they hanging?”
It made Kendig wince. Follett pumped his hand enthusiastically and reared back: tipped his head to one side and tucked his jowly chin in, contriving to look affectionate and conspiratorial at once. “My goodness you do look well.” He said it in the voice of a man telling a polite lie. “Life of luxury in retirement, hey?”
“What do you want, Glenn?” It was a question to which he already knew the answer because he didn’t believe in the sort of coincidence that would drop Follett on his doorstep within hours of his meeting with Mikhail Yaskov. But he asked it anyway because it was the best way to shut off Follett’s backslapping spout of painful old-buddy pleasantries.
Follett waved his arms around. He was utterly incapable of talking without the accompaniment of vast gestures. “What do you say we have a drink or two?”
“I’ve already had a drink. We can talk here.”
Follett shot a glance toward the concierge behind the desk. That was twenty feet across the lobby. Kendig said, “He’s a little deaf and he’s only got about forty words, of English. Stop looking around—the lamps aren’t bugged.”
“Well if you say so, sure. Hell. Well then let’s have a seat, hey?” Follett led the way back into the alcove and Kendig trailed along reluctantly. Follett sat down with his elbows on his knees so he could flap his hands when he talked. “Damn good to see you again. I mean that.”
“Come off it.”
“Well Christ Kendig, it has been a long time, and here we are both living in the same town. I mean it’s good for old friends to get together—we ought to do it more often, you know?”
Kendig said, “You had a tail on Yaskov today, didn’t you.”
Follett grinned unabashedly. “Sure. Why else would I be here?”
“All right. Get it off your chest. I haven’t got all night.”
“The hell you haven’t. What have you got, Kendig—a vital business meeting? A hard-breathing tryst? Don’t give me no bullfeathers. You haven’t got a Goddamned thing to do except go upstairs to your little ten-by-twelve room and stare at the walls. I’d think you’d welcome some company from an old officemate.”
Kendig just watched him. Follett made a face and dropped his voice several decibels. “All right. What was it about?”
“What was what about?” He didn’t want to give Follett the satisfaction.
An exasperated jerk of head, pinch of lips. “The meet with Yaskov, old buddy.”
“Ships and shoes and sealing wax.”
“Why are you making it so hard for me?”
“Maybe it amuses me.”
“Then why aren’t you smiling?” Follett flapped his palms. “Come on now. What did he want?”
“The same as you. He thought it would be pleasant if a couple of old friends got together and reminisced about the good old days.”