washbasin in the men’s room, where he cleaned
himself up. He had brushed his clothes as best he
could and looked in the mirror. He was still a mess,
but somehow he looked more like a man who had
been injured than one who had been beaten; there
was a difference.
Next, outside in the station, he converted his
deutsche marks and five hundred American dollars
into florins and guilders. He then bought a pair of
wide-rimmed dark glasses at a pharmacy several
doors from the currency exchange. As he got into the
cashier’s line, his hand casually covering the bruises
on his face, his eyes fell on a cosmetics counter
across the far aisle. It triggered a memory.
Shortly after their marriage, in one of those
maddening accidents that only happen at the most
inopportune times, Valerie had slipped on a foyer
rug and fell, hitting her head against the corner of an
antique hallway table. By seven that night she had
what Joel had described as ‘one hell of a mouse”; the
black eye was an almost perfect oval, arcing from the
bridge of her nose to the edge of her left temple. At
ten the next morning she was scheduled to lead a
bilingual presentation for agency clients from
Stuttgart. She had sent him out to the drugstore for
a small bottle of liquid makeup, which, except at
close range, had concealed the bruise remarkably
well.
“I don’t want people to think my brand-new
husband beat the hell out of me for not fulfilling his
wildest sexual fantasies.”
“Which one did you miss?” he had asked.
He stepped out of the cashier’s line and made his
way around the cases to the display of creams and
colognes, shampoos, and nail polish. He recognized
the bottle, chose a darker shade, and returned to the
line.
A second trip to a washbasin had taken ten
minutes, but the results justified the time. He applied
the makeup carefully; the scrapes and bruises faded.
Unless someone stood very close to him, he was no
longer a battered brawler but a man who had
perhaps suffered a not too serious fall. Converse
con
448 ROBERT LUDLUM
gratulated himself in that men’s room in the
railroad station. Under other circumstances, he
might not have dressed a client so well before a
trial for assault and battery.
The checklist continued. It had taken him to
where he was now, in the last car on the
straight-through train from Arnhem to Amsterdam.
After buying his ticket on what he inferred was a
low-priced excursion train that made numerous
stops, he had walked out on the platform prepared
to run back at the slightest negative readout, the
first steady glance that held him in focus. Instead he
saw a group of men and women, couples around his
own age, talking and laughing together, friends
more than likely off for a short summer’s holiday,
perhaps leaving the river for the sea. The men
carried worn, dented suitcases, most held together
with rope, while a number of the women held
wicker baskets looped over their arms. Their
luggage and their clothing denoted working
class factories for the men, home and children or
the less demanding clerical jobs for the women all
within that part of the spectrum that suited Joel’s
own appearance. He had walked behind them,
laughing quietly when they laughed climbing on
board as though he were part of the group, sitting
in an aisle seat across from a burly man with a
slender woman who, despite her thin frame, proudly
bore a pair of enormous breasts. Converse’s eyes
could hardly avoid them and the man grinned at
Joel, no malice in his look as he raised a bottle of
beer to his lips.
Somewhere Converse had read or heard that in
the northern countries people going on summer
vacations or on holiday, as was the
term gravitated to the last cars in the
Trans-Europe-Express. It was a custom that
somehow signified their status, producing a general
camaraderie that enlivened the working man’s
junket. Joel observed the none too subtle
transformation. Men and women got out of their
seats and walked up and down the aisle talking to
friends and strangers alike, cans and bottles in their
hands. From the front of the car a few people broke
into song, obviously a familiar country song; others
took it up only to be drowned out by Converse’s
group, who raised their voices in an entirely differ-
ent chorus until the singing of both camps dwindled
away into laughter. Conviviality, indeed, was the
order of the morning in the last car on the train to
Amsterdam. The stations went by, a few passengers
getting off at each, more getting on, with suitcases,
baskets, and broad smiles, and being welcomed on
THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 449
board with boisterous greetings. A number of men
wore T-shirts emblazoned with the names of town
and district teams soccer, Converse assumed.
Catcalls and amiably derisive shouts were hurled at
them by age-old competitors. The railroad car was
turning into an odd Dutch version of a trainload of
suddenly freed adults going off to a summer camp.
The volume grew.
The towns were aumounced, the brief stops made
as Joel remained in his seat, motionless and
unobtrusive, now and then glancing at his adopted
group, half smiling or laughing softly when it seemed
appropriate. Otherwise he looked like someone of
limited intelligence poring over a map as a child
might, equal parts wonderment and confusion. He
was studying the streets and canals of Amsterdam.
There was a man who lived on the southwest corner
of Utrechtsestraat and Kerkstrsat, a man he had to
identify by sight, isolate and make contact with . . .
his springboard to Washington would be as a ‘
member of the Tatiana family.” He had to pull Cort
Thorbecke away from his base of operations without
alerting the hunters of Aquitaine. He would pay an
English-speaking intermediary to get to a telephone
and use words sufficiently plausible to draw the
broker out to some other location, with no mention
of the Tatiana connection or its source in Paris.
Those words would have to be found; he would find
them somehow, he had to. He was psychologically on
his way back toward friendly fire in terms of actual
time less than seven hours from Washington and
men who would listen to him with Nathan Simon’s
help and an extraordinary file that would persuade
them to hide him and protect him until the soldiers
of Aquitaine were exposed. It was not the way
envisioned by a man he had once known in
Connecticut as Avery Fowler hardly the legal tactics
whose roots were in ridicule as prescribed by A.
Preston Halliday in Geneva, but there was no time
now. Time was running out for manipulated webs of
legality.
The train slowed down, jerking as it did so, as if
the engineer far up ahead was trying to send another
kind of message to a rowdy car in the rear, which felt
the shocks most severely. If that was his intent, it,
too, backfired. The pitching motion served only to
accelerate the laughter and provoke insults shouted
at an unseen incompetent.
“Amstel!” screamed a conductor, opening the
forward door between the cars. “Amsterdam!
Amst i” The poor man
450 ROBERT IUDLUM
could not finish the call he had to pull the door
shut to avoid a barrage of rolled-up newspapers
thrown at him. Summer camp in the Netherlands.
The train pulled into the station and a
contingent of T-shirted chests and breasts
announced their arrival with shouts of recognition.
Five or six people at the front of Joel’s group rose
as one to welcome their friends, again cans and
bottles were held in the air and laughter bounced
off the narrow walls, nearly drowning out the
whistles of departure outside. Bodies fell over
bodies, hugs were exchanged, breasts playfully
grabbed at.
Beyond the new an ivals, walking unsteadily, was
the illogically logical capstone for the juvenile antics
taking place in front of Converse. An old woman,
obviously drunk, made her way down the aisle, her
disheveled clothes matching the large, tattered
canvas bag she clutched in her left hand while she
steadied herself with her right on the edge of the
seats as the train accelerated. Grinning, she
accepted a bottle of beer as another was thrown into
her satchel, followed by several sandwiches wrapped
in waxed paper. Again, there were greetings of
welcome as two men in the aisle bowed to the waist
as if to a queen. A third slapped her behind and
whistled. For several minutes the ritual continued,
a new mechanical toy for the children off to summer
camp. The old woman drank and danced a jig and
made playfully suggestive gestures at men and
women alike, sticking out her tongue and rolling it
around, her ancient eyes bulging, rolling, her ragged
shawl twirling in circles like the ballet of some