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I recalled that, before leaving me, Shakh had uttered this sentence, of which only the first part had seemed helpful at the time: "If you don't get a grip on him instantly, during the first ten minutes, you've lost. From what I've been told, he's an eel." The rest of his words now came back to me and seemed even more important: "But whatever happens, don't forget that for… for her, it's all the same. The die is cast." Calling these words to mind, I told myself that, ever since that walk with Shakh along a path winding around an old farm, I had had the impression of living in some obscure afterlife.

6

In my mind I had fashioned the town where Vinner lived out of the dark and humid stuff of the Parisian spring. I pictured the man himself dressed in an overcoat, his face clouded by rain and suspicion. Exhausted by sleepless nights, by my anticipation of our first meeting, I had not given a thought to the sun over the Gulf of Mexico. As we touched down, the light and the warm wind came surging into my imagined town, and the man in the somber overcoat was me. Traveling to Destin along the coast, I sensed the very particular atmosphere, at once carefree and nervous, of southern towns preparing for the holiday season. It could be detected in the noise made by a workman taking beach chairs out of a shed, in the smell of paint from the fresh lettering that promised a fantastic reduction for those dining early. At the hotel I rid myself of my Parisian clothes, like shameful and ridiculous witnesses beneath this clear sky.

I went out at once, not so much from fear of missing Vinner (I did not even know if he was at home) as in order to forestall a new wave of doubts. I followed Shakh's advice to go directly, without telephoning, without wasting time on normal reconnaissance in the area. Certainly the atmosphere of beach resorts, where everything is designed to lighten the load of things, contributed to the ease with which, half an hour later, I found Vinner's house on the corner of a street. Not a grayish structure, the impregnable fortress my imagination had constructed from the damp stone of Parisian apartment buildings, but a small one-story villa, set back in a garden dominated by several clumps of young palm trees. Behind the metal gate, to the left of the narrow path that led to the house, there was a parked car with an open trunk, which a man, who had his back to me, was cleaning with a small vacuum cleaner, reminiscent of a watering can. I pressed the bell. The man turned, unplugged the machine, left it in the trunk and, instead of coming toward me, which would have seemed natural, walked over to a little sentry box made of pale bricks, which stood beside the gate and was almost entirely hidden beneath the leaves of a creeper. I heard his voice very close to my ear on the intercom and at the same moment noticed the dark, flat eye of the surveillance camera. The voice was slow, thickly American. As I explained who I was, I was hardly aware of what I was saying, dazed by the comical vision I had just seen: a fifty-year-old with close-cut hair, a corpulent man rendered almost square by a white short-sleeved shirt open to his chest, this man who had been running his vacuum cleaner over the carpet in the trunk and who was now greeting my explanations with long drawn-out "Okays," this man was Val Vinner! An almost mythical being, given the evil he had wrought and the scale of what he had, negligently, destroyed, and here he was parading himself in all the banality of this little paradise beneath the palm trees, in the domestic peace of a holiday morning.

Patiently, and giving a very good imitation of the dull-witted amiability Americans devote to the explanation of details, the onetime Russian continued to question me about our mutual friend, now traveling in China, about the purpose of my visit. Suddenly what I saw beyond the gate eclipsed our conversation through the wall. A child, a boy of six or seven, walked around the car and came toward the entrance, clung to the bars, and stared at me curiously. His brother, not yet very steady on his feet, crossed the yard to join the older child. I was to learn later that the older child was the son of Vinner's wife but, seeing these two children, I felt like an emissary from a bygone age, an age since when this renegade had had the time to Americanize himself and found a family at least eight years old.

It was then that a man appeared on the front steps of the house and called to the children. I looked up. It took me a few seconds to overcome the improbability of this face under such a name and in this location. Then I recognized Yuri.

He came to the gate, took hold of the little one and detached him from the bars, despite his protests. The square man in the white short-sleeved shirt (a caretaker? a bodyguard? a gardener?) emerged from the sentry box and began to repeat the information he had gathered, mispronouncing my name, trying to make himself heard above the squeals of the child. But already Vinner was speaking to me in Russian and let me in through the door next to the sentry box.

"I'm really sorry but today I'm taking these two rascals to Miracle Strip Park. I've been promising them this since Christmas. Do you know this park? It's full of attractions for kids. There's even a giant roller-coaster, I don't know how many feet high. So is our friend well? China just now must be quite something. I think he's told me about you. Dave, quit shoving him or you won't get to come with us."

He uttered this threat in English, in that good comprehensible English that gives foreigners away, and threw me a glance in which feigned severity mutated into a father's smiling pride. I noted that his face had changed very little and that his eyes had even kept that youthful brightness that had so touched you in the old days. It was his body that had matured a good deaclass="underline" he had a belly now and his forearms filled the short sleeves of his T-shirt with the flabby bulk you see in athletes who have given up exercise. A tall, fair-haired woman came out of the house, went in again at once and reappeared with a large red thermos. She came toward us, Vinner introduced me, she shook my hand, and I had time to notice that her face showed signs of morning-time distraction, that withdrawal women regularly permit themselves to inflict on their families. The children were shouting impatiently and pushing their father toward the car. I still had the map of Florida under my arm and a loaded pistol in my bag. With one hand I slung this bag over my shoulder and pushed it behind my back, just as one hides a sharp object from children.

Vinner proposed that we should meet again the next day.

That night, recalling his facial expressions, I realized that his features, even though attached to a hated name, had brought the sound of your voice back to life for me, the calmness of your gaze, a few days in our old existence, some of those moments of happiness lost among the wanderings and the wars.

Then, recalling Shakh's warning, in which he had given me the first ten minutes to attack and win, I recognized my defeat. I had a vision of Vinner's two children, hurtling down the roller-coaster. In any case, I was finding it harder and harder to define what victory might have been.

Contemplating the beach that stretched away a few yards from the terrace on stilts where we sat, Vinner had the proud and smiling air of the cocreator of this sun-drenched panorama. Rather as a Parisian, when showing a foreigner the Arc de Triomphe or the Louvre, always feels a little bit as if he were the architect, or at least one of the stone masons. He recited his commentary, pointing into the distance with his fork, and reeling off the names of fish and shellfish, gave a little laugh and threw me a wink at the sight of a pretty girl in a swimsuit walking past the terrace. And when a group of young men in bathing suits rushed toward the waves, shouting at one another as they ran and tossing a big beach ball back and forth over the heads of the vacationers, he smiled indulgently and explained that these disturbers of the peace were, alas, inevitable during the period of the "spring break." He pronounced this phrase with evident pleasure.