Hopscotch

— 26 -

There was a malignant cloud cover and a raiding wind howled along the Seine. Kendig went up the moss-slick steps with his suitcase and across the quai into the rue Seguier.

Strauss seemed to have gained more weight; he led Kendig downstairs to the vault and Kendig took the black box into the private cubicle. Mainly what he needed was the Alexandre Vaneau passport. But he took all the money out of the box, put it in the suitcase and returned the black box empty to the vault. Strauss escorted him past the two armed guards up the stairs; Kendig went back along the quai to where he’d parked the 2CV van, tossed the suitcase inside and drove down through the sinuous boulevards of the left bank.

He had a room in a pension in the fifteenth arrondissement; he opened the suitcase and dumped the money out on the bed. He filled one of the two money belts he’d bought in the morning when he’d bought the comfortable pair of shoes and the overcoat with the velvet collar; he was still wearing Oakley’s suit under it.

He transferred the remaining chapters of the manuscript from the school-book case into the suitcase and on top of the pages he put something over a hundred thousand dollars and all Oakley’s papers. Then he went out again to finish his daylight errands.

He bought a batard loaf, a chunk of cheese, a bottle of Vittel water that had a screw-on cap, and a box of wooden matches. Then he walked on to a workman’s clothiery where he outfitted himself with dungarees, flannel shirt, a beret, rubber-soled waterproof boots and a drab leather jacket with elastic waist and cuffs. He carried his parcels along the avenue Felix Faure until he found a florist’s where houseplants were a specialty; he bought a tin of powdered fertilizer which had a high concentration of sulfuric acid.

He returned to the pension, left his purchases on the bed and had to go out once more; this time to the Caltex filling station near the quai. He told the attendant he’d run dry six blocks away. The attendant sold him a four-liter can at an exorbitant price and filled it from the pump. Kendig left it on the floor of his stolen 2CV van before he went upstairs.

He broke open the loaf and made a meal of that and the cheese, washing it down with the Vittel water. He poured the rest of the water into a tumbler and then carefully tipped a good share of the chemical fertilizer powder into the empty bottle. He filled it the rest of the way from the sink tap. Then he broke off a piece of his shoelace and dipped it in the solution. The acid was not too concentrated but it ate the leather away after a while; it would do. He capped the bottle carefully and placed it upright on the bureau.

He made a fuse from one of the wall candles, stripping the candle away until all that remained was the wick thinly coated with wax.

He stripped down to his underwear and changed into the workingman’s outfit he’d just bought. After he’d laced up the boots he folded Oakley’s suit carefully and laid it in the suitcase along with Oakley’s topcoat. He tossed his toilet gear in and then gathered the remaining money on the bed; this went into the second money belt and he laid that on the topcoat and closed the suitcase over it.

There was nothing left to do but wait; he couldn’t make the next move until after midnight. He pushed the suitcase aside to make room for himself and lay back with his hands laced behind his head. After a while he drowsed.

In the middle of each night the gendarmerie’s meat wagon made its rounds slowly, its crew stopping by the hunched clochard figures who sprawled in rags on the streets and gutters and doorways of Paris. If the clochard was drunk, asleep or merely deathly ill the flic passed him by because there wasn’t manpower, facility, time or inclination to render assistance. But if the clochard happened to be dead the meat wagon would collect him and he would be taken to the morgue where medical students could learn something from his cadaver before his dissected remains were disposed of by the city. On a normal night there would be about twenty dead ones in the streets.

Tonight a high-pressure weather system had dropped down the globe from the northwest and the cold was more than autumnal; it was intense, several degrees below frost point, and it had caught the clochards of Paris unprepared. There would be an uncommon number of deaths.

Kendig had a general idea of the route the meat wagon took in the fifteenth arrondissement. He set out in the clanking little 2CV van a good two hours ahead of the meat wagon; it was just short of midnight. The frigid cold kept most pedestrians off the streets. The weather gave him a bit of an advantage but he’d have managed without it. He cruised the route slowly, making room courteously for impatient drivers who burst past him in a demented rush.

Here and there he double-parked the van and got out to have a close look at a prone figure or a shadow propped in a nook. Kendig’s penance was the folded fifty-franc note he would slip into the hand or pocket of each drowsing clochard. He found a woman dead, all skin and bones and tattered rags; he went on. There was a man dead in the place de Lourmel but he was very small and skinny and Kendig passed him by; there was another in a passage off the rue Emeriau but that one was much too tall.

The fifty-franc note awakened a dozing fat woman and he hurried away from her profusions with his chin sunk in the heavy collar of his overcoat. He drove the van on, making a concentric circuit of the district, invading the clochards’ privacy and apologizing for the intrusion with his money. There was a corpse on the curb of the rue Varet that met the requirements of size and build but the man was missing his left leg; there was another two blocks away but he was toothless and had a misshapen arm that was evidently the result of an old fracture that had healed unevenly. Kendig moved on. There was no urgent timetable. If he didn’t find one tonight he’d go out again tomorrow night.

He found the right one less than half an hour later in a passage half a block from the Convention metro station. The man’s dead face was ravaged with age but that was the accelerated deterioration of the life he’d led; the backs of the hands were not severely veined or mottled. The man was nearly bald but that wouldn’t matter. Kendig went back to the van and moved it to a position where it masked him from the mouth of the passage, when he picked up the odorous corpse. He placed the body gently in the back of the van and locked the rear doors. The smell filled the small Citroen immediately and he had to drive with the sliding window wide open in spite of the icy cold. He parked it behind his pension and went inside to get the suitcase and Oakley’s topcoat; he brought them downstairs and checked out, paying the sleepy concierge in cash and leaving a tip for the char.

He carried his things out to the van and went around to the right-hand side to feed the case and coat into the passenger seat. He set the bottle of acid against the outside rim of the seat frame and closed the door gently against it to wedge it upright in place. Then the locked the door and stepped around the back of the van.

A car swung into the street from the intersection. Its beams arced along the row of parked cars and caught him in the face before he had time to turn. It came forward with a bit of a lurch and then the lights dipped when the car braked and he didn’t need more than that to know the numerical odds had caught up with him. He was about-facing when the car stopped and he started to run when he heard the doors chunk shut.

They didn’t bother to shout at him but when he threw a glance over his shoulder he saw the fragmentary ripple of reflected light along the pistol barrel. Two of them were out of the car but there was still a man inside it; it was moving again.

A weakening rush of panic; and he rushed across into the narrow foot passage beyond. He could hear their running footsteps; he pounded the length of the alley and the car had already gone around the end of the block; it was swinging around the corner too fast, leaning against the centripetal tug. Kendig ran right toward it; he dodged to one side as the car straightened in the street and then he was up on the curb diving down the steps into the metro subway station. It was shut down; no trains ran this late at night; he had to vault the chain at the foot of the stairs. A few work lights made faint illumination along the platform and several drunks slept on the benches. He dropped into the cut and danced across the tracks staying off the electrified rails and boosted himself up onto the opposite platform; he was at the foot of the exit stair when the two pursuers came in sight behind him but he was up into the shadows before they had time to take aim. He bolted up into the cold empty intersection. Their car was gone; odds were it had returned to keep watch on the street where they’d disclosed him: they might not know which car he’d been about to get into but they’d have seen the car keys in his hand. If there was a two-way radio in their car he didn’t have much time.

On the northwest corner of the intersection stood a modern apartment building with a supermarket in its ground floor. Three steps led up to the lobby doors and you could see straight through to another set of doors that let out onto a passage behind the building where the parking lot was. He went right up the steps and across the lobby into the parking lot. The two pistols were coming up from the metro and he wasn’t in time to get out of their sight; they came sprinting up the steps and Kendig ran down into the parking lot.

A high fence ran around it and the gates were locked up. The railing was topped with blunt metal spikes and he swarmed up it wildly. He heard gristle snap in his shoulder. He went over fast, ripping his coat on a spike; he dropped lightly on the asphalt and moved away swiftly, knees bent, pulse slamming.

The alley behind the lot twisted among low old buildings and he put a jutting corner between him and the guns; he went over a courtyard wall with the acrobatic strength of terror and batted his way through invisible clotheslines and found a gate that he scaled blindly; he dropped from his fingertips into a cobbled passage not more than four feet wide and ran on his toes to its mouth.

It was a narrow street with a charcuterie at the corner and he ran to it without sound and whipped around into the alley beside it where there had to be a crowd of garbage cans; he climbed into the midst of them and nested down surrounded by their stink and watched the street through the vertical slits between them.

The two of them came in sight; he saw them hesitate and then begin to spread out like hounds abruptly deprived of their scent. Kendig crouched bolt still, in total stasis; his scalp shrank and his forehead blistered with sweat.

They moved right and left. When the building corners hid them Kendig straightened up and climbed over the cans very carefully to avoid sound. He backed away close to the masonry wall, fingertips dragging it lightly, wrapped in darkness. Tenement flats back here. A door yielded to him with a dry groan; he slipped into a rancid hallway. Somewhere on the floor above an infant yowled. Kendig went through to the back and found a broken-out window; he picked shards of glass from the sill and set them down softly on the littered floor and climbed outside-another cobbled passageway crowded with a bumper-to-bumper line of small cars with their right wheels up on the curb and their doors close along the building walls, He went along the parked line trying doors and when a Renault admitted him he jammed his thumb on the plunger in the hinge wall to extinguish the interior dome light and held his thumb there while he crawled into the car and searched for the switch that would disengage the light permanently; he found it and then extricated his thumb and pulled the door shut silently. He locked both doors and climbed over the transmission hump into the backseat and settled his rump on the floor. His eyes were just above sill level and he watched the street filled with unease, willing his pulse to slow.

When the tall one came in sight at the end of the passage Kendig shrank down as flat as he could go. There was nothing to do but wait it out. After a while he heard the man’s soles prowl toward him, crunching grit. Then the man’s head and shoulders loomed beyond the rear side-window. He stopped and swiveled in a full circle, searching, bouncing the automatic in his fist. Kuykendall, Kendig recalled; one of Follett’s junior agents-no wonder he’d been recognized so quickly. Hatless, puffing out steam clouds of breath, Kuykendall stood as if rooted, his head turning slowly and his scowl deepening. Kendig heard a door slam somewhere; it drew Kuykendall’s immediate attention but still he didn’t move off the spot and if the light had been just a little better he’d have known he was staring his quarry in the face over a distance of not more than eight feet; he might sense it anyway. Kendig lay still, hardly breathing, not even blinking.

Kuykendall’s head veered around and his chin lifted questioningly; then he shrugged and lifted both arms-a signal to his partner at the far end. Kuykendall made a sweeping motion with his left hand, ordering the partner around the block; then Kuykendall trotted away, forward along the line of cars to go around the opposite end of the block.

Kendig watched until Kuykendall turned the corner. He looked back through the rear window but the partner was long gone. He climbed out of the Renault and went back in through the broken window, back along the stinking hallway and out the unlocked door; back past the garbage cans and then across the street swiftly, retracing his exact path because it was least likely they’d look for him where they knew he’d already been and gone.

In just a few more minutes they’d know for certain they’d lost him and they’d beat their way back to their car and stake out the street because they’d reason that he might have something in one of the cars there that he’d have to come back for. In the meantime if there was a two-way they’d want to be there to brief the reinforcements the minute they arrived; after that the whole area would be suicidal for him because the SDECE and the Surete and half the flics in Paris would comb it house to house.

He threw off the overcoat in the alley and hunched his back like an old man and moved purposefully afoot into the street where he’d left the van. There was no car double-parked and none of the parked cars had light on but spotting their car was ludicrously easy; the frigid cold gave it away. It was one among many parked vehicles but the driver had the engine running to warm himself and the windshield was clear from the defroster.

As if he had business there Kendig walked straight along the sidewalk with his old man’s stoop. They were looking for an erect fugitive in an overcoat.

He had the door open before the driver could react to his turn; he hauled the man right out of the seat. In that brief broken instant under the streetlight Kendig saw the wild-eyed look: he’d seen it on a man’s face once before but that had been on a thundering battleground below Cassino. Kendig’s jaws flexed; he hauled the driver right out against his own upraised knee and when the man fell back against the car Kendig locked his left hand around his right fist and drove his right elbow into the driver’s ribs. It collapsed the wind out of the man and when his head dipped in anguish Kendig pushed him right down onto the sidewalk and got a surgical grip around the base of the skull and pressed firmly with fingers and thumb. It closed off the flow of the carotid artery and starved the brain and after a moment the driver went limp. He wouldn’t stay unconscious for more than two or three minutes but he’d be dazed for a while after that.

Kendig pulled the ignition key partway out and broke it off with the tip jammed in the lock. He plucked the microphone off the two-way and tore it out by the cord and dropped it on the seat. Then he pushed the door shut and walked swiftly the twenty paces to his 2CV van and drove away.

They might have a make on the van; he couldn’t keep it. There were thousands of the cheap Citroens in Paris but they’d be distraught enough to tear into every one of them at this point.

He drove as far as the tangle of streets behind the Invalides and parked the van in a dark side-passage. It took him fifteen minutes to walk to the Laennec Hospital. A handful of cars stood parked on the doctors’ lot near the emergency entrance. A doctor in a hurry to reach a critical case didn’t always lock his car or take his keys; Kendig was counting on that and he found a Peugeot still warm and ready to go and he drove it off the lot without looking back. The owner would find it missing pretty fast but what counted was that, the theft wouldn’t be connected with Kendig for a while.

He parked right behind the van and transferred everything into the Peugeot. He put the dead clochard in the trunk, slammed the lid and drove away into the boulevard Montparnasse, forcing himself to drive at moderate speed.

He left Paris by way of Charenton and the Bois de Vincennes; he ran along southeast with the map imprinted on his eyelids. It was somewhere past three in the morning; the well-tuned sedan ran eagerly and there was no traffic on the curving country road. Farmhouses rushed by vaguely, smeared by speed; heavy trees blurred and vanished into the onrushing darkness.

Around four o’clock he crossed the Yonne at Auxerre and took the road toward Chablis: The vineyards made an icy spindle tracery above the highway; occasionally a chateau loomed on the hill.

The gate was fastened with a padlocked chain-he was reminded of the bootleggers’ road in Georgia. He drove right through it, splintering the gate and extinguishing one of the Peugeot’s head-lights. He switched them off. It didn’t matter if he left evidence of destruction now; he expected them to trace him this far.

The Lafayette Escadrille had used it, and then the French training commands and then the Luftwaffe and the American Warhawks; after the war it had been judged too short for the jet generation and it had passed out of government hands into the private aviation sector. The wineries kept their executive planes here and there were planes of all sizes belonging to-and sometimes built by-Sunday fliers. The flying school had three single-engine trainers and a twin Apache.

The field had two runways laid out in an X; they were graded earth strips and there was no radar or strobe-light strip-it was strictly a daylight field for small craft. There were two maintenance hangars but if you wanted major work done you had to go to one of the bigger airstrips that had overhauling facilities. The planes were parked at hard-stands along the verges of the runways in high yellow grass. Some of them were tied down against the danger of high winds that might tip them over and snap a wing.

They’d never kept a night watchman and he assumed they’d had no reason to hire one since he’d taken his lessons here. He drove without lights right up to the dark hangars and switched off.

According to Oakley’s watch it was four-twenty. This time of year nothing would begin stirring here until at least seven-thirty, more likely eight. There was plenty of time. He checked out the hangars cursorily and then went down the line of aircraft to pick out a plane. He knew what sort he wanted but he wasn’t sure there’d be one. He’d settle for something else in that case.

But there was one. It was an old PBY Catalina amphibian-a small twin-engine flying boat on wheels. Some of the vintners liked to use amphibians because it made for handy access to quiet shores along the inlets of Lake Geneva on trips to Swiss banks they preferred not to advertise. It was a service Kendig had used a few times to get his money in and out of Zurich.

He took note of the civil air numbers painted on the plane and he went back to the hangar and broke into the office. He didn’t want to turn on a light; there were two chateaus on heights within less than a mile. He lighted a wooden match and found the key on the pegboard by the number on its tag. Nobody stole airplanes; they were too traceable; so there was no security imposed.

He pocketed the PBY key and got back in the car and drove it out the runway, racked it alongside the Catalina and got to work. He checked the fuel gauges and found it full; that was standard procedure-you filled after you landed, not before you took off; that way you were ready to go on short notice. He took out the three logbooks-by regulation there was one for the airframe and a separate one for each engine-and left them askew on the floor by the right-seat rudder pedals. He didn’t care what shape the plane was in but it had to look as if he did. Cutter wasn’t going to give him any help if he left too many doors open.

He put the suitcase in the plane, belt-strapping it onto one of the pry-rigged passenger seats in the midships blister. The manuscript was in the suitcase. He had to give it up to them or they wouldn’t buy any of it; and it had to be the real manuscript, not a fake and not a partial-no tricks, nothing withheld.

He took the clochard out of the trunk and laid him out on the grass under the high wing. He stripped the clochard to the skin. There were scars here and there-it hadn’t been an easy life for the clochard-but none of that would matter. He brought the four-liter can of gasoline out of the Peugeot and bathed the corpse with the stuff to get rid of any telltales that might have adhered. The clochard’s filthy rags had to disappear; Kendig bundled them up and set the bundle aside.

He poured the acid solution out of the Vittel bottle onto the clochard’s face. He wasn’t cold-blooded enough to do it without a cringing nausea. When the acid had done a fair job of eradicating features he washed it away with gasoline. Then he dressed the body in his own old underwear and socks and Oakley’s suit and topcoat; he put Oakley’s identification and wallet in the clothes along with the passport photo of himself that he’d rescued from the London police sergeant’s desk. Then he added the Alexandre Vaneau passport-again with his own photo in it-to the contents of the dead man’s pockets.

The clochard was stiffening with rigor by now and that was all to Kendig’s advantage. He dragged the corpse forward, closing his mind to the ghoulishness of it and the reek of gasoline. He propped the body in the pilot’s seat and belted it in.

Outside on the grass he opened the bundle of filthy clothes and spread the coat out flat. He piled into the center of it the rest of the clothes, the empty Vittel bottle and his own spare pair of shoes. He tied up the arms and skirt of the coat and carried the bundle into the plane together with the can of gasoline. Then he went back outside again and explored in the trunk of the Peugeot. It was slightly redolent of the dead but that would dissipate. He found a combination windshield-scraper and brush; it would do. He used it to rake the grass where he’d been working. He left no sign in the earth except a set of vague foot-impressions to show he’d walked from the car to the plane; he left the trunk lid ajar with the keys in it both to air it out and to indicate he’d been in a hurry.

When he climbed in the waist door he latched it shut behind him and went forward up the steeply tilted companionway into the cockpit. He tested the clochard’s limbs but they hadn’t stiffened quite enough yet. He couldn’t bear the thought of sitting beside the ghastly dead man for any length of time; he went back into the fuselage and sat under the blister watching the night. Along the edge of the field bare branches were silhouetted against the dark sky, as jagged as cracks in a porcelain surface. Scarves of cloud hung low in the southwest but the clear intense cold held.

He felt a vague urge: the impulse to communicate his gratitude to Carla Fleming. He remembered her soft self-assured voice, her long-boned Modigliani features. He’d never get in touch with her; he couldn’t take the chance.

More than half his money was in the clochard’s money belt and the suitcase but he had about forty thousand dollars in his own belt and pockets and when it ran out he had the talent to make more. He had no papers of any kind but that wasn’t a problem either. This would be a poor time to try to make long-term plans. He’d drift a while and think about what he wanted to do with the rest of his years. There was plenty of time for it. He wouldn’t get bored; he’d got over that, he’d changed too much to fear it. He was capable of life now; perhaps even capable of love-he’d find out about that someday.

He stripped Oakley’s watch off his wrist. After six now; he couldn’t wait longer. He moved at a crouch into the cockpit and got the watch onto the dead wrist. The joints were so stiff he had a lot of trouble moving them; that was how he wanted it.

It had to be done with great caution because if there was a spark at the wrong moment it could incinerate him. He threw all the windows wide open before he began to splash the gasoline around. He poured it liberally around the cockpit, over the corpse and the upholstery. Then he capped the gasoline can and stuffed it into the bundle of things he couldn’t leave behind. He took the candlewick fuse from his shirt pocket and wedged it into a metal seam by the edge of the soaked carpeting. Now he had to wait again while the wind carried the fumes off and evaporated the surface petrol and the rest of it soaked deep into things.

It was a risk but he had to take it and when he judged enough time had passed he turned the ignition switch on and pressed the Mesh button for the Number One engine. The flywheel spun with a grinding effort but the engine didn’t catch right away and he pushed the mixture control to full rich. No sparks in the cockpit; this wouldn’t have worked with a plane that had the engine in the nose of the fuselage. Both engines were in nacelles high on the wings and outboard of the cockpit.

The flywheel struggled and he heard the cylinders catch; he revved it a bit and then got the star-board engine running.

He unlocked the brake and ran the engines up and the PBY started to bounce, rolling slowly out of its parking space onto the strip. He kicked the pedal hard and she turned sedately to the right; he lined her up on the runway and taxied slowly to the far end and made the U-turn wide and slow. Now he had the length of the runway in front of him and a row of high trees at the far end. He remembered the strain with which the instructors regarded student takeoffs; if you didn’t get the nose up fast enough you’d go right into those trees or the power lines beyond.

The emergency hatch was in the bow forward of the windshield; you had to crawl under the dashboard to get to it. That wouldn’t be fast enough. He broke the half-window out of its frame on his right and judged he could work it from there. He set the bundle on his lap and ran up both engines against the brakes. When the plane began to shudder and lurch he released the brakes. It rolled forward and he throttled back; this had to be done precisely and he couldn’t have a lot of speed at first. He bounced forward at twenty miles an hour or so, steering with his feet while he leaned across the aisle and fixed the clochard’s dead fingers to the crescent wheel. He locked both the fists onto the control yoke and jammed the clochard’s feet under the rudder pedals so that they couldn’t kick back and send the plane into a ground loop.

Bumping along on the uneven ground he had a hard time climbing out the window but finally he was hanging there with both shoulders wedged into the opening so that he wouldn’t fall out before he wanted to. The starboard propeller was frighteningly close behind him but he could avoid that easily enough; it was the wing strut and the landing gear he’d have to worry about when he made his drop.

He had two matches in his left hand, pressed together. With that hand he reached the throttles and thrust them all the way forward to emergency speed. There was about a quarter mile of runway left. He struck the two matches and touched the flame to the gasoline-soaked tip of the candlewick. The flame soared bright; he had only a glimpse of it and then he was hunching his shoulders, clutching the dead matchsticks in his left hand and the bundle of oddments in his right.

When he compressed his shoulders he slid down out of the jouncing window. He let go and dropped with his legs all gone to rubber; he felt his feet touch down and he willed himself to collapse and he was still dropping when he saw the strut coming at him but it only glanced off his upraised arm and then the starboard wheel was rutting past him and he was under it and free.

He rolled over and lay flat while the tail surface rumbled overhead, the tail wheel bouncing and veering a little from side to side. He didn’t move after that: he lay prone on his belly and watched, uncaring of the blunt pain in his corded forearm; waiting with his eyes wide stark staring and the breath hung up in his throat.

Gathering speed the PBY began to yaw dangerously and he feared the ground loop but the clochard’s stiff joints held it on something like a course and it kept wobbling toward the end of the runway with a high angry whine of overaccelerated engines. He saw the flames burst alight in the cockpit, fueled by the gasoline-soaked carpeting and Oakley’s saturated clothes. Perhaps it had been unnecessary but he had to make sure the plane caught fire to mask the work he’d done on the clochard with the acid… It veered right and then left but it didn’t flip over and it didn’t loop around and it must have been doing at least seventy miles an hour when it smashed head-on into the trees. It was an earsplitting crash and there was afterecho and silence before the flames tongued into a ruptured tank and the whole thing went up with a spectacular thundering conflagration: even from where he lay he felt the heat of it on his cheeks.

He picked up the bundle and backed his way to the edge of the runway, dragging the bundle to erase his footprints; he faded into the brush, walking with care and rubbing it out when he left any signs.

At the vineyard fence he went through the staves carefully and then he turned and walked uphill, a bit jaunty and smiling without reservation, toward the violet smear along the east that predicted the dawn.