Midnight In Madrid

TEN

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND, SEPTEMBER 7, TWO MINUTES PAST MIDNIGHT

The sunshine of the early summer afternoon that had warmed the streets of Geneva faded to dusk and then to darkness. Shortly past 8:00 p.m. the streetlights of the old city were illuminated. The many open-front cafés at lakeside were alive with the clinks of glasses and tableware, punctuating conversations in many languages.

Bankers and businessmen finally relaxed for the day, savoring what they might have accomplished or anticipating their next move for tomorrow. As best they could, they kicked back with their guests, the tourists, the idle rich, the occasional film star, and the university students. As the evening grew later, they swapped advice and attempted seductions. Some would succeed, others would fail.

The high spirits had not penetrated a secure sprawling apartment in a modern building two blocks away. There, the aging Colonel Laurent Tissot of the Swiss army sat at an ornate nineteenth-century desk before his visitor. Two in-progress packs of American cigarettes lay on the colonel’s desk. A cloud of smoke gave the air within the apartment a cancerous, bluish haze.

Tissot was a short man with a slight moustache, a high forehead, and an immense bald head. Though Tissot still professed a high rank within the Swiss military, it had been years since he had worn a uniform. Tonight he wore a dark brown suit with a neat white shirt open at the collar. The suit had been elegant once, but that time had long passed. In that way, Tissot’s attire matched the furnishings of the flat, as well as the business at hand.

Seated in a chair across from Colonel Tissot’s desk was a second man, richly muscled beneath casual clothing. He was a Polish national known as Stanislaw, trim, very tall, and sturdy. He had wide shoulders, closely cropped blond hair, and blue eyes.

The room was quiet, aside from the rumble of traffic that rose from the narrow rue Ausnette outside. Tissot closed a file that the second man had brought to him and looked up.

They spoke in English, the shared language in which they were most fluent. “And so?” Tissot said, moving the brief meeting toward a conclusion. “The Pietà of Malta remains in our possession?”

“That’s what my report says.”

“Well done,” said Colonel Tissot.

He closed the folder and rose from his desk. He walked across the room to a fireplace that bore a gas grate. Tissot knelt and gently laid the file in the fireplace. He used a cedar match to ignite the file, then turned on the gas with a key at the side of the hearth. With an abrupt whoosh, the entire file erupted in flames.

A careful, precise man, Tissot stood before the fireplace and watched the file disintegrate into a harmless gray powder.

He turned and walked back to his desk.

“So now it’s the Americans,” said the colonel with exasperation. “Now they plan to send someone?”

Stanislaw nodded and pondered the point. “The result will be the same.”

“I know,” Tissot said. “Fools,” he muttered.

But while his lips passed a single word, volumes passed in his mind. He was midway through his eighth decade of life. He had been brought up in a world that had possessed its standards of good and evil, right and wrong. The colonel had tenaciously held those standards and still lived by them. Yet the world was a different place now. He dimly recognized a new world social order, and he did not like it. So he battled against it.

Colonel Tissot withdrew a thin file from his antique desk. He handed it to Stanislaw. The file was in English. Stanislaw scanned it.

“The American they will probably send is very young and highly inexperienced,” Colonel Tissot said, reverting to English. “That is what my contacts in Spain have advised me. Foolish, foolish. But the Americans are invariably foolish.”

Stanislaw raised an eyebrow. He reached to the back page of the file with his scarred left hand. He withdrew a photograph of the subject. For a moment, Tissot’s gaze settled on the scar, and he remembered its origin. A decade earlier, in a drunken rage over a woman, Stanislaw had attempted to kill a man with his bare hands. In trying to defend himself, the other man had shoved a knife through Stanislaw’s right palm. Stanislaw had pulled it out by himself and used it to slit the victim’s throat.

Afterward, he had bandaged the hand with a bar towel, sutured the wound by himself, and refused any subsequent medical attention.

Stanislaw glanced at a series of surveillance photographs.

“The pictures are less than ten days old,” Tissot said. “Good to know who the enemy is, isn’t it?”

“Yes. It is.” He glanced at the pictures for a few final seconds.

Then he placed the photos back in the rear of the file and closed it. He leaned back in his chair.

“You’ll take care of this?” Tissot asked.

Stanislaw gazed off for a moment. “Americans are naïve and undisciplined. The men when they travel sneak off to brothels. The women have sexual liaisons with strangers that they would dare not have back in America.” The Pole’s eyes twinkled. “The agent will be found dead of a gunshot with evidence suggesting that sort of immoral behavior.”

Tissot raised an eyebrow in approval and nodded.

“You will have the first opportunity. Act upon it immediately, if you please. A backup team in Spain has already been engaged, but I would prefer not to use them.”

Stanislaw nodded. “I expect no difficulties,” he said.

Colonel Tissot leaned back in his own chair. He rubbed his tired eyes.

“Nor do I,” he said. “Take the file with you. Burn it after you’ve memorized it. And do not make any mistakes. There is no room for mistakes.”