luck, hot water with which he could bathe his wound
and change the bandage again. During the last two
nights he had learned that such places were his only
possibilities for refuge. No questions would be asked
and a false name
424 ROBERT LUDLUM
on a registration card expected. But even the most
sullen greeting was a menace for him. He had only
to open his mouth and whatever came out identified
him as an American who could not speak German.
He felt like a deaf-mute running a gauntlet,
careening off walls of people. He was helpless, so
goddamned helpless! The killings in Bonn, Brussels
and Wesel had made every American male over
thirty and under fifty suspect. The melodramatic
suspicions were compounded by speculations that
the obsessed man was being aided, perhaps
manipulated, by terrorist organizahons
Baader-Meinhof, the PLO, Libyan splinter groups,
even KGB destabilizahon teams sent out by the
dreaded Voennaya. He was being hunted
everywhere, and as of yesterday, the International
Herald Tribune printed further reports that the
assassin was heading for Paris which meant that
the generals of Aquitaine wanted the concentration
to be on Paris, not where they knew he was, where
their soldiers could run him down, take him, kill
him.
To get off the streets he had to move with the
flotsam and jetsam and he needed a run-down hotel
like the one across the street. He knew he had to
get off the streets; there were too many traps
outside. So on the first night in Wesel he re-
membered the student Johann, and looked for ways
to re-create similar circumstances. Young people
were less prone to be suspicious and more receptive
to the promise of financial reward for a friendly
service.
It was odd, but that first night in Wesel was both
the most difficult and the easiest. Difficult because
he had no idea where to look, easy because it
happened so rapidly, so logically.
First he stopped at a drugstore, buying gauze,
adhesive tape, antiseptic and an inexpensive cap
with a visor. Then he went to a cafe, to the men’s
room, where he washed his face and the wound,
which he bound tight, skin joining skin, the bandage
firmly in place. Suddenly, as he finished his
ministrations, he heard the familiar words and
emphatic melody young raucous voices in song: “On,
Wisconsin…. On, Wisconsin . . . on to victoreee. . .”
The singers were a group of students from the
German Society at the University of Wisconsin, as
he later found out who were bicycling through the
northern Rhineland. Casually approaching a young
man getting more beers from the bar and
introducing himself as a fellow American, he told an
THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 425
outrageous story of having been taken by a whore
and rolled by her pimp, who stole his passport-but
never thought of a money belt. He was a respected
businessman who had to sleep it off, gather his wits,
and reach his firm back in New York. However, he
spoke no German, would the student consider the
payment of $100 for helping him out?
He would and did. Down the block was a dingy
hotel where no questions were asked; the young man
paid for a room and brought Converse, who was
waiting outside, his receipt and his key.
All yesterday he had walked, following the roads
in sight of the railroad tracks until he reached a town
named Halden. It was smaller than Wesel, but there
was a run-down, industrial section east of the
railroad yards. The only “hotel” he could find,
however, was a large, shoddy house at the end of a
row of shoddy houses with signs saying ZIMMER, 20
MARK in two first-floor windows and a larger one
over the front door. It was a boardinghouse, and
several doors beyond in the spill of the streetlampsa
heated argument was taking place between an older
woman and a young man. Above, a few neighbors sat
in their windows, arms on the sills, obviously
listening. Joel also listened to the sporadic words
shouted in heavily accented English.
“. . . ‘I hate it here!’ Das habe ich ihm gesagt. ‘I
do not care to stay, Onkel! I vill go back to
Germany! Maybe join .Baader-Meinhofl’ Das halve
ich item gesagt.”
“Barr!” screamed the woman, turning and going
up the steps. “Schweinehund!” she roared, as she
opened the door, went inside and slammed it shut
behind her.
The young man had looked up at his audience in
the windows and shrugged. A few clapped, so he
made an exaggerated, elaborate bow. Converse
approached; there was no harm in trying, he thought.
“You speak very good English,” he said.
“dye not?” replied the German. “They spend bags
of groceries for five years to give me lessons. I must
go to her brother in America. I say Nein! They say
da! I go. I hate it!”
“I’m sorry to hear that. I’m an American and I
like the Cerrnan people. Where were you?”
“In Yorktown.”
“Virginia?”
“Nein! The city of New York.”
“Oh, that Yorktown.”
426 ROBERT LUDLUM
‘Ja, my uncle has two butcher shops in New
York, in what they call Yorktown. Shit, as you say
in America!’
“I’m sorry. Why?”
“The Schwarzen and theJuden! If you speak like
me, the black people steal from you with knives, and
the Jews steal from you with their cash registers.
hreinie, they call me, and Nazi. I told a Jew he
cheated me I vas nice, I vas not impolite and he
told me to get out of his shop or he call the ‘cops !
I vas shit, he said! . . . You vear a good German
suit and spend good German money, they don t say
those things. You are a delivery boy trying to learn,
they kick the shit out of you, What do I know! My
father vas only a fourteen-year-old sol dier. Shit!”
“Again, I’m telling you I’m sorry. I mean it. It’s
not in our nature to blame children.’
“Shit!”
“Perhaps I can make up for a little of what you
went through. I m in trouble because I was a
stupid American. But I’ll pay you a hundred
American dollars . . .”
The young German happily got him a room at
the boardinghouse. It was no better than the one in
Wesel, but the water was hotter, the toilet nearer
his door.
Tonight was different from the other nights he
had spent in Germany, thought Joel, as he looked
across the street at the decrepit hotel in Emmerich.
Tonight could lead to his passage into Holland. To
Cort Thorbecke and a plane to Washington The
man Joel had recruited was somewhat older than
the oth ers who had helped him. He was a merchant
seaman out of Bremerhaven, in Emmerich to make
a duty call on his family with whom he felt ill at
ease. He had made the obligatory call been soundly
rebuked by his mother and father, and had returned
to the place and the people he loved best a bar at
the bend of the riverbank.
Again, as it had been in Wesel, it was the
English Iyrics of a song that had caught Joel’s
attention. He stared at the young seaman standing
at the bar and playing a guitar. This time it was not
a college football song but an odd, haunting mixture
of slow biting rock and a sad madrigal: “. . . When
you finally came down, when your feet hit the
ground, did you know where you were? When you
finally were real, could you touch what you feel,
were you there in the know? . . . ‘
The men around the bar were caught up by the
precise
THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 427
beat of the minor-key music. When the seaman
finished there was respectful applause, followed by a
resumption of fast talk and faster refilling of mugs of
beer. Minutes later Converse was standing next to
the seagoing troubador, the guitar now slung over his
shoulder and held in place by a wide strap like a
weapon. Joel wondered if the man really knew
English or only Iyrics. He would find out in seconds.
The seaman laughed at a companion’s remark; when
the laughter subsided, Converse said, ‘I’d like to buy
you a drink for reminding me of home. It was a nice
song.”
The man looked at him quizzically. Joel
stammered thinking that the seaman had no idea
what he was talking about. Then, to Converse’s
relief, the man answered. “Danke. It is a good song.
Sad but good, like some of ours. You are
Amerikaner?”
“Yes. And you speak English.”
“Okay. I don’t read no good, aber I speak okay.
I’m on merchant ship. We sail Boston, New York,
Baltimore sometimes ports, Florida.”
“What’ll you have?”
“Sin Bier,” said the seaman, shrugging.
“Why not whisky?”
‘Baja?”
“Certainly.”
“Ja. ”
Minutes later they were at a table. Joel told his