Hopscotch

— 4 -

It was a small postal exchange outside Lyons. There was a drizzle that gave the street a fogged pointilliste atmosphere. Kendig went inside unbuttoning his raincoat; he bought jetons and stood in the call box waiting for the interminable connections to be made. It took fourteen minutes and then all he had was Bois Blanc’s switchboard; it used up two more jetons before they pulled Desrosiers out of a conference and Kendig had his voice on the line.

“It’s rather insubstantial, isn’t it?” Desrosiers said cautiously. “Not to say libelous.”

“I shouldn’t worry about libel if I were you,” Kendig said, belaboring the obvious. “In the United States it’s impossible for a public figure to sue for libel. And the Russian’s can’t take you to court, can they.”

“That’s all very well, Miles, but what you’ve given me is unsupported sensationalism.”

“What do you think it is that sells books?”

“I have a reputation for integrity,” Desrosiers said stuffily. The connection, as always in France, was poor; his voice crackled thinly on the line.

“Are they tracing your incoming calls yet?”

“I really don’t know.” And by implication he didn’t care to. Desrosiers was very old-world.

Kendig said, “I’ve got chapter two finished. I’ll have it in the mail to you today.”

“I hope it’s a bit more specific.”

“It’s got nothing in it but nuts and bolts. But it’s the last material you’ll see until I’ve got a contract for it. I’m not giving this stuff away-you can understand that, can’t you?”

“I have spent a lifetime dealing with greedy artists, Miles.”

“Then perhaps you’d like to start mentioning numbers?”

“Not until I’ve seen this new material. You must realize I’ve been handed what you Americans call a pig in a poke more than once. Clearly I cannot commit myself to publishing your work if the whole of it is as tenuously inferential as the sample you submitted last week.”

“You know me better than that.”

“I don’t know you as a writer at all. Do I.”

Kendig was neither angry nor impatient; he was going through the motions, that was all. “I’ll be in touch next week perhaps.”

“Please do. Oh Miles, there’s one thing. I’ve had a transatlantic call from someone called Cutter. He urgently desires that you make contact with him.”

“I’ll just bet he does.” Kendig smiled broadly in the privacy of the booth.

Marseilles was a city of criminal ferment and Kendig went right down into its rancid crotch. Streetwalkers drifted from doorway to doorway, bedraggled, wrung out, degraded, battered and hostile; inquiring out of the sides of their mouths whether he was out for a little sport; loftily ignored by the strolling gendarmes who were the best police that money could buy. The city was as full of vendettas as a Sicilian mountain village and the sharp-featured Corsicans who hurried by were deadly and chronically frightened. It was a capital of international affairs-for smugglers, for businessmen who dealt in cocaine and heroin, for the Union Corse. For Kendig it was familiar turf.

He threaded the passages, moving alertly on the damp cobblestones. A windowless masonry wall was decorated with the tatters of old circus posters and Johnny Hallyday concerts. Rusty fire escapes zigzagged down the alley walls. Spherical black oil lanterns around an excavation looked like sputtering anarchists’ bombs.

He made his way into a flyspecked building. The hall was painted in a dingy yellow that covered a multitude of years in which the turnover in tenants probably exceeded the turnover in wall calendars: the kind of office building whose occupants could be expected to be on the way up, down or out.

The occupant of B, deuxieme etage was unique: he had been there at least eleven years.

A. Saint-Breheret. The paint had faded. Kendig knocked on the panel and after a moment a beam of yellow light appeared at the Judas-hole, dimmed as an eye blocked it, brightened again and then went black; and a key rattled.

Saint-Breheret beamed. “My old friend-it has been such a long time!” He pumped Kendig’s hand and they went inside.

Saint-Breheret was a twinkling little man, fat and half bald, baggy worsteds and a gold chain across his waistcoat; his cheerful smile concealed the chronic indiscriminate terror of a quivering Chihuahua dog.

Kendig said, “I’m only in town a short while.”

“Yes?”

“I heard you’d got your hands on a mint ’seventy-nine peso.”

The teeth flashed brilliantly-on and off, like a timed neon sign. “The news has traveled fast. I bought that estate only last week.”

“I’d like to see it. I’ve still got that hole in my collection.”

“I keep such valuable coins in the bank vault, of course. Would you prefer to wait here or come along to the bank with me?”

“I’ll walk along,” Kendig said drily and waited for Saint-Breheret to get his raincoat down off the rack. The office was as nondescript as its owner: a desk, chair, file cabinet, Oriental rug separated from the rest of the small room by a wooden railing with a gate in it; and a six-foot Mosler safe against one wall.

Saint-Breheret turned toward the door. “It was one of those fortunate strokes one cannot anticipate.” He kept talking on the way down the hall: “The estate of Jean-Louis Arnauld-perhaps you’d heard of him? An amateur collector of course, but quite wealthy. His taste in coins was more eclectic than specialized-the heirs found they could not obtain a fair price for the whole, so there was an auction of individual pieces.” They went down the stairs. “By the ordainment of fate I was able to obtain a few pieces at remarkably fair prices. You won’t be disappointed.” Saint-Breheret held the door for him and they went out into the street.

The firepots smudged the intersection. Saint-Breheret made a right turn and they walked unhurriedly past grimy shops and bistros. “What is it you need?”

“Three passports, three driver’s licenses. At least one of each of them must be American. Blanks only. A couple of credit cards.”

“There’s no such thing as a blank credit card, you know that.”

“As long as they’re fresh. But the passports and licenses have got to be blank.”

The nervous smile: “You have great experience hanging paper?”

“We’ll manage,” Kendig said. “Give me a price.”

They turned the corner past a drunk who sat propped in a doorway. Saint-Breheret had stayed in business for many years because he was a cautious businessman who said nothing meaningful inside any four walls which might be bugged. “The price will be high.”

“Russo stole a truckload of American passport blanks for you three years ago. You haven’t unloaded all of them.”

“They are getting scarce,” Saint-Breheret said imperturbably. “If you prefer a wholesale price perhaps you’d do better to try your own government printing office.”

“You stay in operation because it’s convenient for us to know where you are. We appreciate your co-operation. But if you start dragging your heels maybe we’ll have to re-evaluate your usefulness.”

The tongue darted across the pale lips. “I have never turned you down.”

“How much?”

“Five thousand francs for the passports. Two thousand for the license blanks. The credit cards you may have for five hundred.”

Kendig said patiently, “My bureau is on a budget.”

“Oui. So am I.”

“Six thousand for the package.”

“I must cover my overhead you know.”

“You’ll survive.”

“Seven,” Saint-Breheret said.

“I’d hate to turn in an uncooperative report on you.”

Saint-Breheret threw up his hands. “You would have my blood!”

He worked a full day on the documents. First he penciled in each letter lightly in outline; then he forged carefully with a straight pen with several nibs. He could have had Saint-Breheret do the job-Saint-Breheret was far more accomplished at it-but in time they’d get onto it and question Saint-Breheret and he didn’t want the Frenchman to be able to tell them what names he’d sold Kendig. Saint-Breheret knew the credit cards but that was part of the scheme.

The credit cards were in the name of James Butler and he prepared a passport and a driver’s license in that name; Butler became fifty-four, a management consultant, born in Cincinnati, resident of Arlington. The French passport identified one Alexandre Vaneau, forty-nine, born in Saintes, resident of St. Ouen. The second American passport and license remained blank for the moment because he didn’t want to spend another half day over them.

As James Butler he went over the border to Barcelona and then flew TAP to Lisbon. Butler lost three hundred French francs at the casino in Estoril, spent the night in the Hilton, paid with an American Express card and hired a Volkswagen from Avis in the morning with his BankAmericard. Before noon he left the rented car parked on a lot in Cascais. A man who didn’t give his name-none was asked-took a taxi from Cascais back to Lisbon International and paid the driver fifteen dollars in American cash. At four o’clock, on American Express again, James Butler boarded a Pan Am flight for Dulles International Airport.

Ennui was not a cocoon to be broken out of in one grand flapping metamorphosis. He sat on the plane watching the sunset take shape very slowly while they chased it across the Atlantic. He felt dejected. But he reasoned it was inevitable. The game hadn’t really begun yet; it had been announced but neither the stadium nor the time had been fixed.

Saint-Breheret could be relied on to be indiscreet; he would put them onto James Butler. In that respect the fun would be in deciding how long to keep Butler-how close to allow them to come. That was the key to his enjoyment of the game: and the enjoyment was chiefly his own; Cutter wouldn’t share in it to nearly the same extent because Cutter could afford to blunder all he wanted to. The game was far more taut for Kendig because he needed to make only one mistake and it would be ended.

It was bound to be anticlimactic; that was one thing that troubled him. The game had to be more enjoyable than the endgame: the chase was what had meaning, not the kill. Victory was never as heady as its anticipation had been. In a very real sense it wasn’t whether you won or lost; it was how you played to win.

For Cutter and his minions it would be a dreary business, wasteful and perhaps distasteful. Chickens would suspend their pecking order when there was a weak sick chicken in the coop: they’d all turn on it and peck it to death; but most likely they didn’t take much pleasure in it. Kendig didn’t see Cutter taking great glee from it; Cutter was a cold man but not a vindictive sort.

So Cutter must be primed. Make him mad, Kendig decided. Flaunt yourself. Embarrass him-insult him.

That was it then. Prolong the game. Stretch it until Cutter made a laughingstock of himself. Force it to the point where Cutter’s career was on the line. Make a fool of him and it had to turn out that way.

He smiled a little and was aware of it; the realization made him smile even more. It was infectious. The stewardess smiled back. “Is everything all right, sir? May I get you a drink?”

“I think I’ll go up to the lounge, thanks.”

He went up the self-conscious little spiral stair. They were Americans, most of them; no one else paid to travel first class. Each of them would have some “business” excuse for the vacation to make the fare tax-deductible. One of them was pounding the piano with more ferocity than skill. There was a lot of drinking and a lot of talk: poses struck, laughter forced. It wasn’t the sort of gaiety he could stand. He had one drink and went back down to his seat.

One of them had been a twin for Myerson, right down to the phony smile. He remembered the last summons to the office down the hall on the fourth floor. “I take it you don’t like it much up here. Or are there personal problems perhaps?”

“Has the man on the fifth floor registered displeasure with my performance?”

“You’ve been lackadaisical, you’ve got to admit that.”

“But not sloppy. I’ve done my job.”

“With all the enthusiasm and initiative of a typist third-class.”

“I wasn’t cut out for shifting bureaucratic rubble from one office to another.”

“We did offer you an alternative.”

“Filling out my time decoding telegrams over at NSA?”

“Assistant Deputy Director for Eastern European Affairs. That’s a responsible position, Miles.”

“A ringing title and a big salary and they’d never let me within a mile of action or policy. A nice faceless assistant to an assistant.”

“Miles, you’re fifty years old and by all the medical prognoses we had a year ago, you should have been dead. You had a God damned bullet in your head.”

“It hasn’t affected my brain. I’m still the best field man you’ve got.”

“We don’t get much call for those kinds of skills any more. You’re perfectly aware of that.”

“Sure.”

“Then what’s your beef?”

“Christ I don’t know. I’m just bored.”

“We’re all bored. It’s just another challenge to meet, Miles. We’ve still got to do the job.”

“Why?”

“Because-oh to hell with it.”

“Look-use me for a decoy. Anything.”

“Begging demeans you, Miles.”

“Not as much as being junked like an old car.”

“Damn it, I hate a man who doesn’t know when the party’s over. At least have the grace to know when to go home. If you can’t fit in behind that desk then give me your resignation. You’ll get a full early-retirement disability pension.”

“Wonderful.”

“Well?”

“You’ll have my resignation this afternoon. With parsley.”

“If that’s the way you want it… Let’s have lunch soon, what do you say?”

Alexandria was a strip town. The long main drag was crowded with impatient kids driving their souped-up cars uselessly about. He walked past a theater that advertised mature adult films. Beyond that was a string of advertising boards along the waiting-bench wall of a bus depot. One of the ads told young men they could get job-training for high-paying skills if they joined the Army. Another begged businessmen to hire unemployed veterans.

He rented a Mustang under the name James Butler and booked himself into a motel near the Interstate. He slept from midnight to nine in the morning and after the rush-hour traffic had dissipated he drove up to Langley and went into a drugstore phone booth and rang the number.

“Farm labor division, may I help you?”

“My field number is four-three-three-eight,” he said. “I’d like to speak with Joseph Cutter. I don’t have his extension.”