Monsieur Leblond opened it. He was a short, slight, balding man with spectacles, and in his charcoal gray suit and silver tie he looked like a butler. He led them to the room at the back of the building where Jean-Pierre had been interviewed. The tall windows and the elaborate moldings indicated that it had once been an elegant drawing room, but now it had a nylon carpet, a cheap office desk and some molded-plastic chairs, orange in color.
“Wait here for a moment,” said Leblond. His voice was quiet, clipped and as dry as dust. A slight accent suggested that his real name was not Leblond. He went out through a different door.
Jean-Pierre sat on one of the plastic chairs. Raoul remained standing. In this room, thought Jean-Pierre, that dry voice said to me You have been a quietly loyal member of the Party since childhood. Your character and your family background suggest that you would serve the Party well in a covert role.
I hope I haven’t ruined everything because of Jane, he thought.
Leblond came back in with another man. The two of them stood in the doorway, and Leblond pointed at Jean-Pierre. The second man looked hard at Jean-Pierre, as if committing his face to memory. Jean-Pierre returned his gaze. The man was very big, with broad shoulders like those of a football player. His hair was long at the sides but thinning on top, and he had a droopy mustache. He wore a green corduroy jacket with a rip in the sleeve. After a few seconds he nodded and went out.
Leblond closed the door behind him and sat at the desk. “There has been a disaster,” he said.
It’s not about Jane, thought Jean-Pierre. Thank God.
Leblond said: “There is a CIA agent among your circle of friends.”
“My God!” said Jean-Pierre.
“That is not the disaster,” Leblond said irritably. “It is hardly surprising that there should be an American spy among your friends. No doubt there are Israeli and South African and French spies, too. What would these people have to do if they did not infiltrate groups of young political activists? And we also have one, of course.”
“Who?”
“You.”
“Oh!” Jean-Pierre was taken aback: he had not thought of himself as a spy, exactly. But what else did it mean to serve the Party in a covert role? “Who is the CIA agent?” he asked, intensely curious.
“Someone called Ellis Thaler.”
Jean-Pierre was so shocked that he stood up. “Ellis?”
“You do know him. Good.”
“Ellis is a CIA spy?”
“Sit down,” Leblond said levelly. “Our problem is not who he is, but what he has done.”
Jean-Pierre was thinking: If Jane finds out about this she will drop Ellis like a hot brick. Will they let me tell her? If not, will she find out some other way? Will she believe it? Will Ellis deny it?
Leblond was speaking. Jean-Pierre forced himself to concentrate on what was being said. “The disaster is that Ellis set a trap, and in it he has caught someone rather important to us.”
Jean-Pierre remembered Raoul saying that Rahmi Coskun had been arrested. “Rahmi is important to us?”
“Not Rahmi.”
“Who, then?”
“You don’t need to know.”
“Then why have you brought me here?”
“Shut up and listen,” Leblond snapped, and for the first time Jean-Pierre was afraid of him. “I have never met your friend Ellis, of course. Unhappily, Raoul has not either. Therefore neither of us knows what he looks like. But you do. That is why I have brought you here. Do you also know where Ellis lives?”
“Yes. He has a room above a restaurant in the rue de l’Ancienne Comédie.”
“Does the room overlook the street?”
Jean-Pierre frowned. He had been there only once: Ellis did not invite people home much. “I think it does.”
“You’re not sure?”
“Let me think.” He had gone there late one night, with Jane and a bunch of other people, after a film show at the Sorbonne. Ellis had given them coffee. It was a small room. Jane had sat on the floor by the window. . . . “Yes. The window faces the street. Why is it important?”
“It means you can signal.”
“Me? Why? To whom?”
Leblond shot a dangerous look at him.
“Sorry,” said Jean-Pierre.
Leblond hesitated. When he spoke again, his voice was just a shade softer, although his expression remained blank. “You’re suffering a baptism of fire. I regret having to use you in an . . . action . . . such as this when you have never done anything for us before. But you know Ellis, and you are here, and right now we don’t have anybody else who knows him; and what we want to do will lose its impact if it is not done immediately. So. Listen carefully, for this is important. You are to go to his room. If he is there, you will go inside—think of some pretext. Go to the window, lean out and make sure you are seen by Raoul, who will be waiting in the street.”
Raoul fidgeted like a dog that hears people mention its name in conversation.
Jean-Pierre asked: “And if Ellis is not there?”
“Speak to his neighbors. Try to find out where he has gone and when he will be back. If it seems he has left only for a few minutes, or even an hour or so, wait for him. When he returns, proceed as before: go inside, go to the window and make sure you are seen by Raoul. Your appearance at the window is the sign that Ellis is inside—so, whatever you do, don’t go to the window if he is not there. Have you understood?”
“I know what you want me to do,” said Jean-Pierre. “I don’t understand the purpose of all this.”
“To identify Ellis.”
“And when I have identified him?”
Leblond gave the answer Jean-Pierre had hardly dared to hope for, and it thrilled him to the core: “We are going to kill him, of course.”
CHAPTER THREE
Jane spread a patched white cloth on Ellis’s tiny table and laid two places with an assortment of battered cutlery. She found a bottle of Fleurie in the cupboard under the sink, and opened it. She was tempted to taste it, then decided to wait for Ellis. She put out glasses, salt and pepper, mustard and paper napkins. She wondered whether to start cooking. No, it was better to leave it to him.
She did not like Ellis’s room. It was bare, cramped and impersonal. She had been quite shocked when she first saw it. She had been dating this warm, relaxed, mature man, and she had expected him to live in a place that expressed his personality, an attractive, comfortable apartment containing mementos of a past rich in experience. But you would never guess that the man who lived here had been married, had fought in a war, had taken LSD, had captained his school football team. The cold white walls were decorated with a few hastily chosen posters. The china came from junk shops and the cooking pots were cheap tinware. There were no inscriptions in the paperback volumes of poetry on the bookshelf. He kept his jeans and sweaters in a plastic suitcase under the creaky bed. Where were his old school reports, the photographs of his nephews and nieces, his treasured copy of Heartbreak Hotel, his souvenir penknife from Boulogne or Niagara Falls, the teak salad bowl everybody gets from their parents sooner or later? The room contained nothing really important, none of those things one keeps not for what they are but for what they represent, no part of his soul.
It was the room of a withdrawn man, a secretive man, a man who would never share his innermost thoughts with anyone. Gradually, and with terrible sadness, Jane had come to realize that Ellis was like that, like his room, cold and secretive.