“Yes, I did!”
“And you couldn’t stop him any more than you can stop me.”
“But why?”
“Because I know every place he knows in Paris, every street, every café, every alley, from Sacré-Coeur to Montmartre. He has to use them, and I’ll find him long before the Deuxième or the Sûreté.” The telephone rang; Marie picked it up.
“I told you I’d call you right back,” said the voice of Alex Conklin. “Bernardine has an idea that might work.”
“Who’s Bernardine?”
“An old Deuxième colleague and a good friend who’s helping David.”
“What’s his idea?”
“He got Jason—David—a rental car. He knows the license-plate number and is having it radioed to all the Paris police patrols to report it if seen, but not to stop the car or harass the driver. Simply keep it in sight and report directly to him.”
“And you think David—Jason—won’t spot something like that? You’ve got a terrible memory, worse than my husband’s.”
“It’s only one possibility, there are others.”
“Such as?”
“Well … well, he’s bound to call me. When he hears the news about Teagarten, he’s got to call me.”
“Why?”
“Like you say, to get him out!”
“With Carlos in the offing? Fat chance, fathead. I’ve got a better idea. I’m flying to Paris.”
“You can’t!”
“I don’t want to hear that anymore, I won’t hear that anymore. Are you going to help me or do I do it by myself?”
“I couldn’t get a postage stamp from a dispensing machine in France, and Holland couldn’t get the address of the Eiffel Tower.”
“Then I’m on my own, which, frankly, under the circumstances, makes me feel a lot safer.”
“What can you do, Marie?”
“I won’t give you a litany, but I can go to all those places he and I went to, used when we were running. He’ll use them again, somehow, some way. He has to because in your crazy jargon they were ‘secure,’ and in his crazy frame of mind he’ll return to them because he knows they’re secure.”
“God bless, favorite lady.”
“He abandoned us, Alex. God doesn’t exist.”
Prefontaine walked through the terminal at Boston’s Logan Airport to the crowded platform and raised his hand to hail a cab. But after looking around, he lowered his hand and stood in line; things had changed in thirty years. Everything, including airports, had become cafeterias; one stood in line for a plate of third-rate mulligan stew, as well as for a taxi.
“The Ritz-Carlton,” said the judge to the driver.
“You h’ain’d got no luggage?” asked the man. “Nudding but d’liddle bag?”
“No, I do not,” replied Prefontaine and, unable to resist a follow-up added, “I keep wardrobes wherever I go.”
“Tutti-fruitee,” said the driver, removing an outsized, wide-toothed comb from his hair as he swung out into the traffic.
“You have a reservation, sir?” asked the tuxedoed clerk behind the counter at the Ritz.
“I trust one of my law clerks made it for me. The name’s Scofield, Justice William Scofield of the Supreme Court. I’d hate to think that the Ritz had lost a reservation, especially these days when everyone’s screaming for consumer protection.”
“Justice Scofield … ? I’m sure it’s here somewhere, sir.”
“I specifically requested Suite Three-C, I’m sure it’s in your computer.”
“Three-C … it’s booked—”
“What?”
“No, no, I’m wrong, Mr. Justice. They haven’t arrived … I mean it’s an error … they’re in another suite.” The clerk pounded his bell with ferocity. “Bellboy, bellboy!”
“No need for that, young fella, I travel light. Just give me the key and point me in the right direction.”
“Yes, sir!”
“I trust you’ve got a few bottles of decent whisky up there, as usual?”
“If they’re not, they will be, Mr. Justice. Any particular brands?”
“Good rye, good bourbon and good brandy. The white stuff is for sissies, right?”
“Right, sir. Right away, sir!”
Twenty minutes later, his face washed and a drink in his hand, Prefontaine picked up the phone and dialed Dr. Randolph Gates.
“The Gates residence,” said the woman on the line.
“Oh, come on, Edie, I’d know your voice under water and it’s been almost thirty years.”
“I know yours, too, but I simply can’t place it.”
“Try a rough adjunct professor at the law school who kept beating the hell out of your husband, which made no impression upon him and he was probably right because I ended up in jail. The first of the local judges to be put away, and rightfully so.”
“Brendan? Dear God, it’s you! I never believed all those things they said about you.”
“Believe, my sweet, they were true. But right now I have to speak to the lord of the Gates. Is he there?”
“I suppose he is, I don’t really know. He doesn’t speak to me very much anymore.”
“Things are not well, my dear?”
“I’d love to talk to you, Brendan. He’s got a problem, a problem I never knew about.”
“I suspect he has, Edie, and of course we’ll talk. But at the moment I have to speak with him. Right now.”
“I’ll call him on the intercom.”
“Don’t tell him it’s me, Edith. Tell him it’s a man named Blackburne from the island of Montserrat in the Caribbean.”
“What?”
“Do as I say, dear Edie. It’s for his sake as well as yours—perhaps more for you, if truth were told.”
“He’s sick, Brendan.”
“Yes, he is. Let’s try to make him well. Get him on the line for me.”
“I’ll put you on hold.”
The silence was interminable, the two minutes more like two hours until the graveled voice of Randolph Gates exploded on the line. “Who are you?” whispered the celebrated attorney.
“Relax, Randy, it’s Brendan. Edith didn’t recognize my voice, but I sure remembered hers. You’re one lucky fellow.”
“What do you want? What’s this about Montserrat?”
“Well, I just came back from there—”
“You what?”
“I decided I needed a vacation.”
“You didn’t … !” Gates’s whisper was now essentially a cry of panic.
“Oh, but I did, and because I did your whole life is going to change. You see, I ran into the woman and her two children that you were so interested in, remember them? It’s quite a story and I want to tell it to you in all its fascinating detail. … You set them up to be killed, Dandy Randy, and that’s a no-no. A dreadful no-no.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about! I’ve never heard of Montserrat or any woman with two children. You’re a desperate sniveling drunk and I’ll deny your insane allegations as the alcoholic fantasies of a convicted felon!”
“Well done, Counselor. But denying any allegations made by me isn’t the core of your dilemma. No, that’s in Paris.”
“Paris … ?”
“A certain man in Paris, someone I didn’t realize was a living person, but I learned otherwise. It’s somewhat murky how it came about, but a strange thing happened in Montserrat. I was mistaken for you.”
“You were … what?” Gates was barely audible, his thin voice tremulous.
“Yes. Odd, isn’t it? I imagine that when this man in Paris tried to reach you here in Boston, someone told him your imperial presence was out or away and that’s how the mix-up began. Two brilliant legal minds, both with an elusive connection to a woman and her two children, and Paris thought I was you.”
“What happened?”
“Calm down, Randy. At the moment he probably thinks you’re dead.”
“What?”
“He tried to have me killed—you killed. For transgression,”
“Oh, my God!”
“And when he finds out you’re very much alive and eating well in Boston, he won’t permit a second attempt to fail.”
“Jesus Christ … !”
“There may be a way out, Dandy Boy, which is why you must come and see me. Incidentally, I’m in the same suite at the Ritz that you were in when I came to see you. Three-C; just take the elevator. Be here in thirty minutes, and remember, I have little patience with clients who abuse schedules, for I’m a very busy man. By the way, my fee is twenty thousand dollars an hour or any part thereof, so bring money, Randy. Lots of it. In cash.”
f f f
He was ready, thought Bourne, studying himself in the mirror, satisfied with what he saw. He had spent the last three hours getting ready for his drive to Argenteuil, to a restaurant named Le Coeur du Soldat, the message center for a “blackbird,” for Carlos the Jackal. The Chameleon had dressed for the environment he was about to enter; the clothes were simple, the body and the face less so. The first required a trip to the secondhand stores and pawn shops in Montmartre, where he found faded trousers and a surplus French army shirt, and an equally faded small combat ribbon that denoted a wounded veteran. The second, somewhat more complex, demanded hair coloring, a day’s growth of beard, and another constricting bandage, this bound around his right knee so tight he could not forget the limp he had quickly perfected. His hair and eyebrows were now a dull red—dirty, unkempt red, which fit his new surroundings, a cheap hotel in Montparnasse whose front desk wanted as little contact as possible with its clientele.