In the street the soccer fans with their flags and bottles were marching along among the cars, which honked as they swerved to avoid them.
"And in order to pass their exams they'll repeat what they've been taught: once upon a time there was a wicked man called Hitler who didn't like the Jews and killed six million of them and would have killed more if the Americans hadn't come down from heaven with their jeeps and their chocolate bars. And the hardest thing will be for them to learn the names of the camps by heart. But they'll invent some mnemonic device. That's how we learned the names of the Great Lakes of America: Erie, Michigan, Huron, Superior, Ontario. There's a kind of jingle to it, no? They're sure to find one for Buchenwald."
In the feigned levity in his voice, I sensed the desire to keep at bay the questions we could not avoid. I stared at his face, which had aged the way the faces of men of action age: the dangers overcome are transformed into an outward appearance of steadfastness and lines of force expressing strength. And it seemed to me increasingly unlikely that within the next few minutes this man might tell me where I could find you.
Shakh must also have noticed that we were talking about the film in order to avoid speaking about what our meeting had suddenly revealed. He fell silent and cocked his head a little to one side. Then, gazing out of the window he remarked, "That said, at the sight of all the Parisian glamor this evening, I was remarking to myself, as I often do when I come here, that our friend Jansac- you remember that agent we negotiated with in Aden who died shortly after the hostages had been released-yes, I was saying to myself that, instead of repatriating his body, the Legion would have done better to bury him down there, in a tomb cut into the black rocks looking out toward Aden, across the Strait of Bab el Mandeb. I find it hard to picture him living or dying here in this country, such as it has become."
I waited no further and asked him about you. I knew that the initial tone of his voice would already tell me a great deal. He gave me a quick, hard look, probing me with an unspoken question, as if to say, "It's me you're asking?" But what he said dispelled this air of reproach immediately.
"I don't know what's happened to her. I would certainly never have met up with you again in order to tell you of her death. Condolences from relations and friends was not her style. But, for your own sake, think carefully. It's often easier to live in vague hope. As long as you don't know…"
"But that's it: I want to know."
Shakh gave me another hard look, then he confided to me, as if reluctantly "Her last identity was German. A German who'd lived in Canada for a long time and returned to Europe. So you can forget your Russian quest. Don't waste your time. All you'll find among these Russian women living in Paris will be violinists from Saint Petersburg, Ukrainian prostitutes, and Muscovite wives. Sometimes all combined in one person. I'll be coming back through France in ten days' time and by then I think I'll know which country you need to look for her in."
Before our next meeting I had time to take stock of what had changed in Shakh. It would have been easy to say he had aged. Or to explain the bitterness that showed through in his words by the disappearance of the country he had served for so many years. But there was something else. He was now working without any protection, like a trapeze artist whose safety net has been taken away, and worst of all, if he were caught, without the slightest hope of being traded for a westerner, as they used to do in the old days. I mentioned this to him when I saw him again. I said that in Moscow they were thinking more about opening Swiss bank accounts than spiriting away agents. He smiled. "Sooner or later, you know, we shall all be spirited away by the good Lord."
That evening, on the day of our second meeting, we were indeed talking about those years when everything in Moscow had turned upside down. The years when the Kremlin was turning into a swollen Mafia tumor whose cancerous spread undermined the whole country. The years when, as in the panic after a lost battle, they were abandoning former allies, writing off wars, dismantling the army. The period when the collapse of the empire was tearing apart, link by link, the intelligence networks woven during the seventy years of its existence. The period when we never knew if an agent who failed to keep a rendezvous had been intercepted by the Americans or sold down the river by our own people. The period when one day I had watched you disappearing into the crowd at Frankfurt airport after a few deliberately inconsequential words of good-bye.
Shakh made me talk about your departure, about the months preceding it, about the colleagues we saw at that time. I told him how we had been besieged in that revolving restaurant in the middle of a blazing city, and, going back in time, about the weeks spent in London, and, still further back, about the disappearance of the couple who were supposed to replace us, Yuri and Yulia. Your remorse at not having been able to protect them.
"What was he like, this Yuri?" Shakh suddenly interrupted me.
"Fair-haired, quite hefty, an engaging smile."
"That I know. I've seen the photos. Have you heard him speak English?"
"Er-no, why?"
Shakh did not reply, stared hard at me, then rubbed his brow.
"What's almost sure is that she spent a certain amount of time in America. I have the address, the contacts. But after that there was this great upheaval at the Center and a good deal of disruption in the departments and it's from that moment on it's difficult to keep track of her. We can talk about it at the end of the month, if you like. I guess I'll have a clearer picture by then."
Shakh had come to our meeting with a suitcase that still had baggage labels on it. As he set this bag down beside our table it reminded me vividly of the nomadic life you and I had led, a life this man was still leading, in an endless round of cities and hotels, of winter mornings in empty cafés where the coffee machine hisses and a customer, leaning on the counter, talks to the barman who nods his head without listening. And that suitcase. He caught my eye and announced with a smile, "The most precious item is not in the suitcase but here." He gave a little pat to a leather briefcase that lay on the bench. "Two million dollars. That's the price they want for this pile of papers. The complete technical documentation for a combat helicopter. A marvel. I wonder how the engineers, who haven't been paid for months, can go on making machines of this quality. Beside it, the American Apaches are flying tin cans. But Russia remains true to herself. The engineers get nothing and the mafiosi who organize the leakage buy themselves villas in the Bahamas. This briefcase will return to Moscow tomorrow, but, you know, the craziest thing is that I don't know if the people at the Center will be really pleased to have it back. It's quite likely that the very person there who takes delivery of it was actually hoping to be paid a commission for selling it."
Guessing what his work was now, I thought again of the trapeze artist without his safety net. I knew from experience that in extreme cases this total lack of protection could become a great advantage. Doubtless Shakh was playing it that way. The void that was all that lay between him and death freed him. He no longer had to take account of death, nor to master fear, nor to check parapets or fire exits in advance. He met people taking briefcases out of Russia crammed with secrets for sale, he passed himself off as an intermediary for an American arms manufacturer, negotiated, asked for time for an expert opinion. The sellers, he knew, were no longer agents of the old school, with their well-honed tactics and refinements like lethal umbrellas. These people thought little and killed quickly and often. It was his indifference to death that confounded them, they took this indifference as a guarantee of his all-American respectability. And he was successful because he surpassed all the degrees of risk imaginable.