“I think he really wants to get away clean this time. He won’t steal a car—it could be traced, somebody might remember he bought gas or stopped for lunch. He’d have to abandon the car somewhere and that would give us a place to start looking if we ever connected the car with him.”
“Climb into the back of a truck full of lettuce.”
“And go where?”
“Some country village where we’d never look for him in a hundred years.”
Cutter said, “He’s a chameleon but he’s a deep-rooted American. He won’t settle down in a place where English isn’t the native tongue. It’s not the language, it’s the way the language makes you function. He speaks good Spanish but he’s never had any empathy with the way the Latin mind works. It’s the same with the others. If he’s going to ground for the rest of his life it’ll be in English-speaking surroundings. Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the United States.”
“He tried that before.…”
“We knew he was there. If we didn’t think he was there would we have any chance of finding him there?”
“Is this getting us anywhere, Joe?”
“Maybe it is. I think we’re psyching him about right. He’ll want to get far away from this corner of the world without anyone ever knowing he’s done it.”
“I don’t see how that tells us where to start looking for him.”
Cutter didn’t answer right away. Tourists and expatriates drifted through the building. Ross saw a lot of furs and long suede coats; it was a cold autumn. Downstairs there was a queue at the postal delivery window but it was nothing like as long as the one in the summer.
“Come on,” Cutter said; he uncoiled as if he had hinges and walked away.
Ross caught up and followed him outside. Traffic clotted the square. He had to hurry to keep up. Cutter had his hands thrust deep in his pockets; he was walking with long strides—down the Madeleine and the rue Royale, around the corner of the Place de la Concorde, past the palace gardens and up the Champs-Elysées. He crossed over with the light and cut off the Champs and Ross said, “Where are we going?”
“Follett’s office.”
“What for?”
“I want to be there when Kendig says good-bye.”
– 26 –
THERE WAS A malignant cloud cover and a raiding wind howled along the Seine. Kendig went up the moss-slick steps with his suitcase and across the quai into the rue Seguier.
Strauss seemed to have gained more weight; he led Kendig downstairs to the vault and Kendig took the black box into the private cubicle. Mainly what he needed was the Alexandre Vaneau passport. But he took all the money out of the box, put it in the suitcase and returned the black box empty to the vault. Strauss escorted him past the two armed guards up the stairs; Kendig went back along the quai to where he’d parked the 2CV van, tossed the suitcase inside and drove down through the sinuous boulevards of the left bank.
He had a room in a pension in the fifteenth arrondissement; he opened the suitcase and dumped the money out on the bed. He filled one of the two money belts he’d bought in the morning when he’d bought the comfortable pair of shoes and the overcoat with the velvet collar; he was still wearing Oakley’s suit under it.
He transferred the remaining chapters of the manuscript from the school-book case into the suitcase and on top of the pages he put something over a hundred thousand dollars and all Oakley’s papers. Then he went out again to finish his daylight errands.
He bought a bâtard loaf, a chunk of cheese, a bottle of Vittel water that had a screw-on cap, and a box of wooden matches. Then he walked on to a workman’s clothiery where he outfitted himself with dungarees, flannel shirt, a beret, rubber-soled waterproof boots and a drab leather jacket with elastic waist and cuffs. He carried his parcels along the avenue Felix Faure until he found a florist’s where houseplants were a specialty; he bought a tin of powdered fertilizer which had a high concentration of sulfuric acid.
He returned to the pension, left his purchases on the bed and had to go out once more; this time to the Caltex filling station near the quai. He told the attendant he’d run dry six blocks away. The attendant sold him a four-liter can at an exorbitant price and filled it from the pump. Kendig left it on the floor of his stolen 2CV van before he went upstairs.
He broke open the loaf and made a meal of that and the cheese, washing it down with the Vittel water. He poured the rest of the water into a tumbler and then carefully tipped a good share of the chemical fertilizer powder into the empty bottle. He filled it the rest of the way from the sink tap. Then he broke off a piece of his shoelace and dipped it in the solution. The acid was not too concentrated but it ate the leather away after a while; it would do. He capped the bottle carefully and placed it upright on the bureau.
He made a fuse from one of the wall candles, stripping the candle away until all that remained was the wick thinly coated with wax.
He stripped down to his underwear and changed into the workingman’s outfit he’d just bought. After he’d laced up the boots he folded Oakley’s suit carefully and laid it in the suitcase along with Oakley’s topcoat. He tossed his toilet gear in and then gathered the remaining money on the bed; this went into the second money belt and he laid that on the topcoat and closed the suitcase over it.
There was nothing left to do but wait; he couldn’t make the next move until after midnight. He pushed the suitcase aside to make room for himself and lay back with his hands laced behind his head. After a while he drowsed.
In the middle of each night the gendarmerie’s meat wagon made its rounds slowly, its crew stopping by the hunched clochard figures who sprawled in rags on the streets and gutters and doorways of Paris. If the clochard was drunk, asleep or merely deathly ill the flic passed him by because there wasn’t manpower, facility, time or inclination to render assistance. But if the clochard happened to be dead the meat wagon would collect him and he would be taken to the morgue where medical students could learn something from his cadaver before his dissected remains were disposed of by the city. On a normal night there would be about twenty dead ones in the streets.
Tonight a high-pressure weather system had dropped down the globe from the northwest and the cold was more than autumnal; it was intense, several degrees below frost point, and it had caught the clochards of Paris unprepared. There would be an uncommon number of deaths.
Kendig had a general idea of the route the meat wagon took in the fifteenth arrondissement. He set out in the clanking little 2CV van a good two hours ahead of the meat wagon; it was just short of midnight. The frigid cold kept most pedestrians off the streets. The weather gave him a bit of an advantage but he’d have managed without it. He cruised the route slowly, making room courteously for impatient drivers who burst past him in a demented rush.
Here and there he double-parked the van and got out to have a close look at a prone figure or a shadow propped in a nook. Kendig’s penance was the folded fifty-franc note he would slip into the hand or pocket of each drowsing clochard. He found a woman dead, all skin and bones and tattered rags; he went on. There was a man dead in the place de Lourmel but he was very small and skinny and Kendig passed him by; there was another in a passage off the rue Emeriau but that one was much too tall.
The fifty-franc note awakened a dozing fat woman and he hurried away from her profusions with his chin sunk in the heavy collar of his overcoat. He drove the van on, making a concentric circuit of the district, invading the clochards’ privacy and apologizing for the intrusion with his money. There was a corpse on the curb of the rue Varet that met the requirements of size and build but the man was missing his left leg; there was another two blocks away but he was toothless and had a misshapen arm that was evidently the result of an old fracture that had healed unevenly. Kendig moved on. There was no urgent timetable. If he didn’t find one tonight he’d go out again tomorrow night.