FIFTY-FIVE
The small, elegant, jewellike Banque de Raspail at 128 Boulevard Raspail in Paris’s seventh arrondissement was a small, private merchant bank that seemed to cater to an exclusive clientele of wealthy, discreet Parisians who desired excellent personal service they apparently believed they could not find in banks open to the unwashed masses.
Its interior was an advertisement for its exclusivity: there wasn’t a customer in sight. And in fact it barely resembled a bank at all. Faded Aubusson carpets covered the floor; clustered here and there along the walls were Biedermeier chairs upholstered in Scalamandre silk, fragile-looking Italian busts and urn lamps perched atop Biedermeier side tables. Architectural engravings in gilt frames hung in precise quadrants on the walls, completing the effect of stately elegance and great solidity. I, of course, would not have placed my money in a bank that spent so much on overhead, but I’m not French.
Both Molly and I knew we were operating under enormous time pressure. Two days remained before the assassination, and we still didn’t know who the target was.
And now they-they being Truslow’s agents, perhaps in addition to agents working for Vogel and the German consortium behind him-had pinpointed our location. They knew we were in Paris. They might not know why; they might not know about Sinclair’s cryptic note concerning the Banque de Raspail; but they knew we were here for some reason.
And though I hadn’t permitted myself to talk about this to Molly, I knew the odds were great that we would be killed.
True, I was worth a great deal to American intelligence because of my psychic ability, but now I represented, more than anything, a threat. I knew about what Truslow’s people were doing in Germany, or at least I knew a piece of it. I had no documentary proof, no evidence, nothing solid; so even if I went public now-if I called, say, The New York Times-I simply wouldn’t be believed. I would be dismissed as a raving lunatic. Molly and I had to be eliminated. That was the only logical course for Truslow’s people.
But if only we could make it-forge on ahead to determine who was to be assassinated two days from now in Washington, foil the assassination, make it public, let the sunlight in-we would be safe. Or so I believed.
The clock was ticking.
But who could it be? Who could the surprise witness be? Might it be an assistant of Orlov’s, a Russian, someone he had entrusted with the truth? Or perhaps it might be a friend of Hal Sinclair’s, someone in whom he had confided.
I even briefly considered the most far-fetched possibility of all. Toby? Who else, after all, knew so much? Was it Toby who would be appearing suddenly before the Senate two days from now, testifying against Truslow, blowing the whole conspiracy sky-high?
Ridiculous. For what possible reason?
Frightened, strung out, and at our wit’s end, Molly and I had quarreled at the Duc de Saint-Simon, until finally we came up with a workable plan. We had to leave the hotel as soon as possible, in a matter of moments. Yet we had to go to the Boulevard Raspail; we had to see what it was that Molly’s father had left behind. We couldn’t take the chance of overlooking any piece of the puzzle. Maybe we’d turn up nothing; maybe the box would be empty; maybe there would no longer be a safe-deposit box in his name at the bank. But we had to know. Follow the gold, Orlov had urged. We had done so. And now the trail of the gold led inexorably to this small private bank in Paris.
So, realizing there were few courses of action left to us, we had quickly packed our bags and had the bellboy send them on to the Crillon, tipping him generously for his discretion. Molly explained to him that we were doing advance work for a prominent foreign statesman, that it was vitally important that our whereabouts be kept a secret, that he disclose to no one where he had dispatched our luggage.
The cameo locket, however, was a different matter. I had little doubt that the RF transmitter contained within the locket would in a matter of minutes draw the watchers to the Saint-Simon. Destroying it was one solution, but not the best. Diversion was always better. I took the locket with me and strolled aimlessly out of the hotel toward the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Across from the Rue du Bac Métro station is a café that is almost always crowded. I entered, sidled up to the bar, and ordered a demitasse. Jammed up next to me was a very soigné middle-aged woman with copper-colored hair up in a chignon, clutching an enormous, capacious handbag of green leather and reading a crisp new copy of Vogue. Ever so casually I slipped the locket into the woman’s handbag, finished my coffee, left a few francs, and returned to the hotel. Since these transmitters send the RF signal along the line of sight, our followers would be flummoxed, at least temporarily: as long as my Vogue-reading friend continued to circulate in crowds, they’d never be able to pinpoint the signal, never be able to determine where in the throngs it was coming from.
We had left the hotel separately and by different means of egress-I’ll spare you the details, but suffice it to say that it was highly unlikely we were followed-and from a rendezvous point at the obelisk on the Place de la Concorde, we made our way back, in a taxi, across the Seine on the Pont de la Concorde, down the Boulevard Saint-Germain, until it branched off onto the Boulevard Raspail.
A few sultry, exquisitely dressed young women sat busily working at mahogany tables a good distance from the glass and mahogany doors through which Molly and I entered, and a couple of them looked up with pique, annoyed at this interruption. They radiated attitude, but with a particularly French patina. Then a young man rose from one of the tables and hastened toward us anxiously, as if we were there to rob the bank and take everyone hostage.
“Oui?”
He stood before us, blocking us with an awkward stance. The young banker wore a navy serge double-breasted suit of exaggerated cut, and perfectly round black-framed glasses of the sort the architect Le Corbusier used to wear (and, after him, generations of affected American architects).
I deferred to Molly, who was the one with the official business there. She was wearing one of her odd but somehow stylish outfits, some sort of a black linen shift that would be equally appropriate on the beach or at a White House dinner. As usual, no one could carry off eccentricity the way she could. She began explaining, in her very good French, her situation: that she was the legal heir to her father’s estate, that as a matter of routine she sought access to his safe-deposit box. I watched the two of them speak, as if from a great distance, and pondered the strangeness of the situation. Her father’s estate. Here we were, tracking down her father’s assets, which seemed to include a vast fortune that didn’t belong to him.
The silent spouse, I followed the two of them around the foyer to the banker’s table to conduct our business. Although this was only the second bank I had visited in the course of this drama that had overtaken Molly and me since I’d attained this freakish telepathic ability, it seemed as if I had done nothing but go into bank after bank in the last week or so. The ritual, the forms, everything was entirely, cloyingly familiar.
And as we sat there, I found myself dipping into that particular recess of my brain with which I’d also become so familiar, that strange place into which floated words and phrases. Thoughts. I had some French, as they say, which is to say that I was reasonably conversant in the language, and I waited for the banker’s Gallic thoughts to voice themselves…
… And nothing came.
For a moment I was gripped by a familiar fear: had this peculiar talent, which had been visited upon me so suddenly, now vanished just as suddenly? Nothing was coming across. I thought of the afternoon walking around Boston, after leaving the Corporation, when I was overcome by the incredible profusion of the thoughts of others, the rush of phrases, the thoughts of others, giddy and angry and remorseful, those scraps that came at me without my really having to concentrate at all.