“This is Paris, Signor New York. This is also pazzo!”
“Where’ve you been? You pazzo enough to drive to London, England? I’ve been waitin’ three hours!”
“Where I’ve been is on a number of unlit country roads, which is important only to my nerves. Where I am now is crazy!”
“So where?”
“I’m using a gatekeeper’s telephone for which I’m paying roughly a hundred American dollars and the French buffone keeps looking through the window to see that I don’t steal anything—perhaps his lunch pail, who knows?”
“You don’t sound too stupid for a gumball. So what gatekeeper’s what? What are you talking about?”
“I’m at a cemetery about twenty-five miles from Paris. I tell you—”
“A cimitero?” interrupted Louis. “What the hell for?”
“Because your two acquaintances drove here from the airport, you ignorante! At the moment there is a burial in progress—a night burial with a candlelight procession which will soon be drowned out by rain—and if your two acquaintances flew over here to attend this barbaric ceremony, then the air in America is filled with brain-damaging pollutants! We did not bargain for this sciocchezze, New York. We have our own work to do.”
“They went there to meet the big cannoli,” said DeFazio quietly, as if to himself. “As to work, gumball, if you ever want to work with us, or Philadelphia, or Chicago, or Los Angeles again, you’ll do what I tell you. You’ll also be terrifically paid for it, capisce?”
“That makes more sense, I admit.”
“Stay out of sight, but stay with them. Find out where they go and who they see. I’ll get over there as soon as I can, but I gotta go by way of Canada or Mexico, just to make sure no one’s watching. I’ll be there late tomorrow or early the next day.”
“Ciao,” said Paris.
“Omerta,” said Louis DeFazio.
30
The hand-held candles flickered in the night drizzle as the two parallel lines of mourners walked solemnly behind the white casket borne on the shoulders of six men; several began to slip on the increasingly wet gravel of the cemetery’s path. Flanking the procession were four drummers, two on each side, their snare drums snapping out the slow cadence of the death march, erratically out of sequence because of the unexpected rocks and the unseen flat grave markers in the darkness of the bordering grass. Shaking his head slowly in bewilderment, Morris Panov watched the strange nocturnal burial rite, relieved to see Alex Conklin limping, threading his way between the tombstones toward their meeting ground.
“Any sign of them?” asked Alex.
“None,” replied Panov. “I gather you didn’t do any better.”
“Worse. I got stuck with a lunatic.”
“How?”
“A light was on in the gatehouse, so I went over thinking David or Marie might have left us a message. There was a clown outside who kept looking into a window and said he was the watchman and did I want to rent his telephone.”
“His telephone?”
“He said there were special rates for the night, as the nearest pay phone was ten kilometers down the road.”
“A lunatic,” agreed Panov.
“I explained that I was looking for a man and a woman I was to meet here and wondered if they’d left a message. There was no message but there was the telephone. Two hundred francs—crazy.”
“I might do a flourishing business in Paris,” said Mo, smiling. “Did he by any chance see a couple wandering around?”
“I asked him that and he nodded affirmative, saying there were dozens. Then he pointed to that candlelight parade over there before going back to his goddamn window.”
“What is that parade, incidentally?”
“I asked him that, too. It’s a religious cult; they bury their dead only at night. He thinks they may be gypsies. He said that while blessing himself.”
“They’re going to be wet gypsies,” observed Panov, pulling up his collar as the drizzle turned into rain.
“Christ, why didn’t I think of it?” exclaimed Conklin, looking over his shoulder.
“The rain?” asked the bewildered psychiatrist.
“No, the large tomb halfway up the hill beyond the gatehouse. It’s where it happened!”
“Where you tried to—” Mo did not finish the question; he did not have to.
“Where he could have killed me but didn’t,” completed Alex. “Come on!”
The two Americans retreated down the gravel path past the gatehouse and into the darkness of the rising hill of grass punctuated by white gravestones now glistening in the rain. “Easy,” cried Panov, out of breath. “You’re used to that nonexistent foot of yours, but I haven’t quite adjusted to my pristine body having been raped by chemicals.”
“Sorry.”
“Mo!” shouted a woman’s voice from a marble portico above. The figure waved her arms beneath the pillared, overhanging roof of a grave so large it looked like a minor mausoleum.
“Marie?” yelled Panov, rushing ahead of Conklin.
“That’s nice!” roared Alex, limping with difficulty up the wet slippery grass. “You hear the sound of a female and suddenly you’re unraped. You need a shrink, you phony!”
The embraces were meant; a family was together. While Panov and Marie spoke quietly, Jason Bourne took Conklin aside to the edge of the short marble roof, the rain now harsh. The former candlelight procession below, the flickering flames now gone, was half scattered, half holding its position by a gravesite. “I didn’t mean to choose this place, Alex,” said Jason. “But with that crowd down there I couldn’t think of another.”
“Remember the gatehouse and that wide path to the parking lot? … You’d won. I was out of ammunition and you could have blown my head apart.”
“You’re wrong, how many times have I told you? I couldn’t have killed you. It was in your eyes; even though I wasn’t able to see them clearly I knew what was there. Anger and confusion, but, above all, confusion.”
“That’s never been a reason not to kill a man who tries to kill you.”
“It is if you can’t remember. The memory may be gone but not the fragments, not the—well, for me they were … pulsating images. In and out, in and out, but there.”
Conklin looked up at Bourne, a sad grin on his face. “The pulsating bit,” he said. “That was Mo’s term. You stole it.”
“Probably,” said Jason as both men in unison looked back at Marie and Panov. “She’s talking about me, you know that, don’t you?”
“Why not? She’s concerned and he’s concerned.”
“I hate to think how many more concerns I’ll give them both. You, too, I imagine.”
“What are you trying to tell me, David?”
“Just that. Forget David. David Webb doesn’t exist, not here, not now. He’s an act I put on for his wife, and I do it badly. I want her to go back to the States, to her children.”
“Her children? She won’t do it. She came over to find you and she found you. She remembers Paris thirteen years ago and she won’t leave you. Without her then you wouldn’t be alive today.”
“She’s an impediment. She has to go. I’ll find a way.”
Alex looked up at the cold eyes of the creation once known as the Chameleon and spoke quietly. “You’re a fifty-year-old man, Jason. This isn’t Paris thirteen years ago or Saigon years before that. It’s now, and you need all the help you can get. If she thinks she can provide a measure of it, I for one believe her.”
Bourne snapped his head down at Conklin. “I’ll be the judge of who believes what.”
“That’s a touch extreme, pal.”
“You know what I mean,” said Jason, softening his tone. “I don’t want to have happen here what happened in Hong Kong. That can’t be a problem for you.”
“Maybe not. … Look, let’s get out of here. Our driver knows a little country restaurant in Epernon, about six miles from here, where we can talk. We’ve got several things to go over.”
“Tell me,” said Bourne. “Why Panov? Why did you bring Mo with you?”
“Because if I hadn’t he would have put strychnine in my flu shot.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Exactly what it says. He’s a part of us, and you know it better than Marie or myself.”
“Something happened to him, didn’t it? Something happened to him because of me.”
“It’s over with and he’s back, that’s all you have to know now.”
“It was Medusa, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, but I repeat, he’s back, and outside of being a little tired, he’s okay.”
“Little … ? Which reminds me. A little country restaurant six miles from here, isn’t that what your driver said?”
“Yes, he knows Paris and everything around it thoroughly.”
“Who is he?”
“A French Algerian who’s worked for the Agency for years. Charlie Casset recruited him for us. He’s tough, knowledgeable and very well paid for both. Above all, he can be trusted.”
“I suppose that’s good enough.”
“Don’t suppose, accept it.”