Hopscotch

— 18 -

The train was due at nine in the morning and he didn’t arrive at the depot until half-past ten but even so he was among the first; even the station-master hadn’t arrived yet. If the train had been on time nobody would have caught it but this was Mexico and the passengers began to drift in by bus, taxi and foot around eleven o’clock and the train wheezed in with a scrape of sighing brake-shoes at eleven-twenty. Kendig went aboard in the midst of a crowd of mestizos carrying chickens, goats, a small pig, a goose and various baskets of produce for the market town three stops hence. Kendig’s second-class ticket did not entitle him to a seat on the long bench; he stood against a window, resting his elbow on it, trying to breathe while the train lurched into the mountains. But the air was like coarse wool, too hot for relief even at forty miles an hour. Children and animals made a din; the faces were as stoic as those of Auschwitz.

He had no liking for Latin America and he had said as much at least once in Cutter’s hearing; in part that was why he was here. But he’d kept moving for three days and he’d be out of Mexico by tonight.

Sometimes it surprised him a little that everything south of the Rio Grande hadn’t gone Communist by now, It was only because the Cubans had set such an inept example and because Che had been such a visible idiot. They had the temperament for it, though. Tyranny suited them. You could be put up against a wall for nothing more than having a smudged passport or a suspicious face. Cynicism and defeat were their religions. It was not accident that the fugitive Nazis had found their best refuge in Spanish America. They believed only in macho-not courage but merely the surface appearance of courage: like the Oriental concept of face, the value of which also had always eluded him. He was a prisoner of his belief in realities rather than appearances. He had never cared what anyone thought of him, only what he thought of himself.

He was thinking better of himself now. For a time he’d fallen into the trap of conceding the validity of the Agency’s judgment on him: from their point of view he’d been of no further use to them. It had not occurred to him before that he could prove them wrong. He was proving it now. It was possible his actions might save the career of the next middle-aged expert who began to look obsolete to them. Perhaps even Cutter. The thought amused him. He didn’t dwell on it; it was also possible they’d carry their innate nihilism to its logical extreme and neutralize the next one rather than risk another Kendig on the loose. But the most likely probability was that he wouldn’t change anything at all. They’d regard him as a fluke and it would have no bearing on their future decisions. They were not the sort of people who learned from history. No: the game had to be played on its own terms, not the terms of its speculative consequences.

Zacatecas at five-fifteen; he made it by taxi to the little airport by six and was on the evening flight to Mexico City. He was traveling light, just the one suitcase, not carrying the fifteen heavy copies of the manuscript. At the big modern terminal he booked onto the morning Aeronaves 707 to Madrid and paid for the ticket with travelers’ checks he’d bought for cash in Miami under the name Jules Parker. He’d spent nine hours on October second in a Coral Gables motel forging Parker’s passport and driver’s license, the last blanks he’d had from Saint-Breheret. He still had the French passport, unused, which he’d made out in the name of Alexandre Vaneau.

He boarded the flight in the morning and was in Madrid at half-past eight that night, European time.

The next day was Monday, October the seventh. He ticketed Jules Parker onto the afternoon flight to Copenhagen by way of Paris. During the morning in Madrid he went to the huge central post office and identified himself as Parker and collected the airmail parcel from Miami at the general delivery window. He took the parcel to his hotel, opened it on the bed and separated seven stacks, each containing fifteen copies of a single chapter of the book.

He slid the copies of chapter five into fifteen of the manila envelopes he’d bought in Birmingham and addressed the first to Ives, the second to Desrosiers and the rest to his publishers in New York, London, Tokyo, Rome, Ottawa, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Stockholm, Tel Aviv, West Berlin, Melbourne, Johannesburg and Leningrad.

Of the six remaining stacks none was more than an inch and a half thick; the longest chapter, the last one, ran 23 pages in length and made a 345-page stack. He doubled the stacks and laid them three abreast into his suitcase-a flat padding of paper; it took half an hour to stitch the false bottom into place above them. Then he carried the fifteen envelopes back to the post office and airmailed them.

The stop at Orly gave him a three-hour layover between planes. He took a taxi into Paris, paid the driver at the Pont St. Michel and walked across the quai into the medieval narrowness of the rue Seguier. Sooner or later they’d find out he’d withdrawn money from the bank in Zurich; they’d put that together with the fact that he’d begun the operation in Paris and returned to Paris on his way from Madrid to Copehagen. They’d conclude he had cached his money in Paris and at that point they’d begin to cover the commercial and savings banks. That was why he hadn’t put the money in a bank.

The proprietor of the diamond exchange was heavier than he’d been when he’d bought his blue pinstriped suit; it stretched over rolls of fat. The blond hair was stretched over his pale scalp in thin strands. “Ah, M’sieur Vaneau!” With marvelously feigned pleasure he escorted Kendig to the basement vault. Two subtly armed men sat guard on the chamber. It was as impregnable as anything in a bank. Only M. Strauss and his partner M. Losserand had the combinations.

The vault was vaster than it needed to be. Diamonds did not take up much space. The walk-in interior was sectioned into compartments and each was a small safe in itself with its own lock; when you rented a compartment you set your own combination into it so that no one-not even Strauss or Losserand-could get into it. There was a great demand for such safe-deposit services among businessmen and politicians who were willing to pay high for discretion.

M. Strauss opened the vault for him. Kendig unlocked his compartment and slid the heavy black metal box out of it; carried it into the private cubicle, shut himself in and opened the box.

He’d withdrawn substantial funds from Zurich two weeks before he’d started the game with Desrosiers; he’d made a dent in it but when he refilled his money belt now it still left more than two hundred thousand dollars in American, English and French currency in the box. He wasn’t going to have to forfeit the game on account of poverty.

He took the Alexandre Vaneau passport from his coat and placed it in the black box with the hoard. It would be a risk traveling without it but it wasn’t wise to carry all your weapons on your person. If he needed it he’d come back for it.

He carried the box back to the compartment, locked it in and went upstairs with Strauss, who understood him to be an arms merchant who dealt in cash purchases. He walked out past the display cabinets of glittering stones, flagged a taxi in the boulevard St. Germain and returned to Orly in time to make his second flight of the day.

A chill drizzle muffled the purported gaiety of Copenhagen. It had never been a favorite of Kendig’s; beneath the Hans Christian Anderson image of Tivoli and frivolity it was as grimly brooding a city as Hamburg and the phony cheer only made it more depressing. He thawed himself with an aquavit in the hotel bar before he retired.

In the morning he made the call from a telephone kiosk in the cavernous railway station; he kept the door of the booth ajar so that the phone would pick up the sounds of the trains and announcements.

It took a while for the international operator to place the call. When it rang back he picked up quickly.

“Ja bitte?”

“Herr Dortmund, bitte? Ich bin Kendig.”

“Dankeschon, mein herr…”

A scratching silence, then a click when the extension went up. “Mr. Kendig?”

“I wanted Michael.”

“He is not in Berlin at the moment. My name is Brucher, may I help you?”

He didn’t recognize the voice but Herr Brucher was being most solicitous and that meant Herr Brucher knew who Kendig was. “I’ll want to talk with Michael. Will he be at this number at this hour tomorrow?”

“Zis can be arranged, I sink.”

“Then I’ll call back tomorrow.”

“Perhaps Michael can reach you, Herr Kendig?”

“No, I think not.”

“Very well. Senk you for calling, Herr Kendig.”

He took the boat-train to Stockholm and put up in a small hotel he’d never visited before; it was on one of the outer islands and had a good view of the botanical gardens and the shipping beyond. He wrote a postcard to Joe Cutter and addressed it in care of the Paris office, chuckled aloud when he dropped it in a street-corner postbox and then took the ferry across to the main island in search of a night’s entertainment.

He made the morning call to Berlin from a phone in the airport. It was the same ritual as before-the request to speak with Herr Dortmund, the click of the extension, the voice of Herr Brucher; then Mikhail Yaskov came on the line. “Miles, old friend. How good to hear your voice.” Yaskov contrived to sound both surprised and artless.

“I’ve been writing a book,” Kendig said.

“Yes, I’ve been following it with great interest.”

“I thought you might have done.”

“You’re calling perhaps because the remainder of the book is for sale?”

“No, it’s already been sold. I just wanted to let you know I’ve taken your advice-I’ve brought myself back to life. I’ve got back into the game. Those were your words, I think.”

“I’m so happy,” Yaskov said drily, “to know that you value my sage counsel so highly, old friend. Now what may I do for you?”

A disembodied announcement resonated through the terminal: “Mr. William Scott, Mr. William Scott, please come to the SAS passenger service counter.”

Kendig said into the phone, “I just thought you might like to know that I’m visiting your territory at the moment. Just sightseeing, of course-you know how it is.”

“Are you enjoying the trip?”

“Keenly.”

“I’m so glad,” Yaskov said. “Perhaps we shall cross paths, since as you say you are traveling in my area.”

“That depends on whether you’re still as good at your job as you used to be.”

“You’re giving me an opportunity to find that out, are you?”

“Yes. I thought you’d appreciate that, Mikhail.”

“As a matter of fact I do-very much. Does that surprise you?”

“No,” Kendig said. “I haven’t forgotten what you said about the hunting way of life.”

“Yes, of course.”

“I’ll be forwarding chapters of my book to the publishers at odd intervals. I thought you might like to know.”

“So I understood from the samples you have delivered. Miles, I rather doubt your book will be published in its entirety by the Leningrad press you chose to submit it to. Of course they may see fit to publish certain selected passages from it, perhaps in Isvestia or some such suitable organ.”

“Naturally. Tell them not to forget to pay me for it. You’ve joined the International Copyright Convention now, remember.”

“To whom should such payment be made?”

“My literary agent is John Ives in New York. He has my power of attorney.”

“I’m sure your estate will receive the money in due course, my capitalist friend.”

Kendig let him have the last word; he rang off and went to the counter to check his bag through on the Finnair flight to Helsinki.