“Chinese! Are you pulling my leg?”
“No I’m not. There’s a thin thread of association from France to Red China, which I assume you didn’t know.”
“Go ahead and assume.”
“The countries are very similar,” Ken said. “France holds the same position as opposed to the United States in the Western bloc that China holds as opposed to Russia in the Eastern bloc. They’re both big, stupid, well-armed nations being very shrill to cover their inferiority complexes. They’re the two nuclear powers that are in some ways independent of the global balance of power, and their advocates in other parts of the world tend to be sympathetic to both nations. The Quebec Libre groups in Canada, for instance, have sympathetic ties to the Maoist groups in the black ghettos in the states.”
In amazement Grofield said, “Am I the only one in the world who isn’t involved in some crazy organization somewhere?”
“No, Grofield, you’re one with the complacent majority. Most of these organizations have no more than ten or twenty people, and almost none of them have over a hundred. But they have more ultimate effect on the world than ten thousand people like you sitting in front of the television set letting Walter Cronkite make them informed and aware.”
“There are worlds and worlds,” Grofield said. “Mine has gotten along just fine for years without either you people or Walter Cronkite. All right, never mind the rebuttal. Are you trying to say this Albert Beaudry was being a spy for Communist China?”
“Possibly. Or possibly for France. Or possibly for some nation within the Chinese orbit, like Albania.”
“Albania is within the Chinese orbit?”
Ken looked at him in astonishment. “You didn’t even know that?”
“Good night, Ken,” Grofield said.
Fourteen
A Chinaman with a rifle in his hands smiled cozily at Grofield and said, “Say something,” but Grofield knew if he opened his mouth and said something in English the Chinaman would shoot him. But he didn’t know any other languages, so he just stood there, helpless. “You must speak before the bell sounds,” the Chinaman said, and almost immediately the bell sounded, and Grofield’s panic woke him up. He sat up and grabbed frantically at the telephone to make the bell stop, but when he held the receiver to his ear he was afraid to speak because if he said something in English that rotten Chinaman would shoot him.
There was silence against his ear, and his mind was full of confusion and contradictions. Hotel room, hotel room. He was forgetting something.
A hesitant voice said, “Grofield?”
“Mm,” he said, to make a sound, but not yet speaking in English. There was still too much confusion in his head, he didn’t want to take the chance and turn out to have been wrong.
The voice said, “I’m sorry, did I wake you?”
“Mm.”
“This is Marba. Would you prefer me to call back later?”
“Oh!” The name had done it, readjusting him to the waking dream, and now that the confusion was cleared from his head he also recognized the voice. “Hello, Marba,” he said. “No, I’m all right now. What is it?”
“My superiors want to meet you. But not in the hotel, you can understand why.”
“Sure.” He shifted the phone to the other ear, got himself more comfortable against the headboard. “Do I get escorted someplace again?”
“Not exactly. Can you be ready to leave at ten o’clock?”
“What time is it now?”
“Twenty minutes before nine.”
“Ten o’clock? Sure.”
“Can someone come by your room now? To bring you something.”
“That’ll be okay.”
“Good, then. I’ll see you later.”
“Right.”
Grofield cradled the telephone and got shakily out of bed. The nervousness caused by the dream was still in him, making his movements a little shaky and uncertain, but as he moved around the room the reaction faded.
Despite his tiredness, it had been difficult for him to get to sleep last night, and after Ken left he’d wound up lying in bed, head propped on both pillows, watching The Big Sleep with dubbed-in French. Bogart would open that cynical sidewinder mouth of his and some portly nasal Frenchman’s voice would issue forth. The girls were served better by the French substitution, which was in some ways an improvement on the original, the liquid language combining more naturally with the artificial come-on appearance than had the actresses’ own flat, awkward delivery. Most of the commercial interruptions touted Canadian National Railways, also in French, and were nicely scenic. Loving shots of mountains and waterfalls are soporific anyway, and so is an endless dialogue in a language you don’t understand, so by the end of The Big Sleep Grofield was ready for some sleep of his own, and he’d switched off the set, the lights and himself, until the Chinaman and the telephone had conspired to bring him shakily back to a world that might or might not be real.
He dressed quickly and was brushing his teeth when a knock sounded at the door. He walked across the room with the brush sticking out of his mouth to the right side and foam on his mouth like an imitation of rabies. He opened the door and a smiling bellboy was there with an envelope on a tray.
Grofield took the envelope, and while he rooted in his pockets for a quarter he tried to say thank you through a mouthful of toothpaste and toothbrush, but it didn’t work. He found a quarter, which speaks louder than words anyway, put it on the tray, shut the door, and opened the envelope. Inside was a claim check, with a brief note: “The car will be waiting out front at ten.” No signature, no heading.
Grofield put the claim check in his wallet and threw the envelope and note in the wastebasket. Then he went back to brush his teeth, but while he was rinsing he had second thoughts and went back to fish the note out of the wastebasket again. Eat it? A boy had to draw the line somewhere. Burn it? Somehow too melodramatic; he would feel foolish watching himself do it. So he carried it into the bathroom and flushed it away. The envelope happily had nothing on it but his name and room number, typed, so that could stay in the wastebasket.
He had breakfast in the hotel, seeing no familiar faces, and at ten o’clock went out the main door and gave the captain the claim check. “Just one moment, sir.”
It was more like five, and then a green Dodge Polara was driven up by a scruffy man in blue work clothes who presented Grofield with a parking bill of two dollars. Grofield rooted in his wallet and came up with a pinkish Canadian two dollar bill — the Canadians not subscribing to the American notion of that denomination’s bad luck qualities — which he turned over for the car keys. Then he got behind the wheel and drove through the arch and out of the courtyard.
He stopped in the first parking space he came to and looked around, but Marba was nowhere to be seen. Not Marba nor anyone else he recognized.
Now what?
He sat there a minute or so before it occurred to him to look in the glove compartment, and there he found a medium-sized manila envelope with a capital G written on it in ink. G for Grofield, no doubt. He opened the envelope and removed a roadmap of the city and a small piece of paper on which was typed, “Stop for the man in orange.”
Oh, yeah? Grofield opened the roadmap and saw an ink line on it, meticulously marking his route from the Chateau Frontenac out of the city. It involved his driving through the old walled city, down to the harbor, and across Pont Sainte Anne on Route 54. The ink line then continued on Route 54 on up to the top of the map, where it ended in a little arrow pointing upward. So he was to take Route 54 out of town, that was all, and watch for a man in orange.