“And what is the question you would be happy to ask if you could ask?”
“Ah, you’ve happened upon one of those linguistic issues.”
“No, it’s a logical one. And I didn’t happen upon it-I crafted it. But do go on.”
He pushed his full plate to the side. “I don’t even know what her name is. In France she called herself Françoise Kramsky, but I’m certain that’s not her name. The French and Polish background reflected in that name might be real, but then again it might just have been part of the role she was playing. She was passing herself off as a Polish woman who has to work for the Polish or Russian secret service because her parents and brother back in Poland are in danger. For all I know this may or may not be the case. Either way, she used to live in New York, and I think she’s still living here. After yesterday, I believe this more than ever.”
“How do you know she used to live here?”
Georg told her about the poster in Françoise’s room in Cadenet, about his looking for her at the cathedral, and about his meeting with Calvin Cope. “And you saw what happened yesterday evening at the game,” he added.
“Are you saying that the only thing you knew when you came to New York was that… I mean, all you had to go on was a poster of a cathedral in New York? I used to have a poster on my wall of Gripsholm Castle!”
“But you didn’t make a secret of the fact that it was Gripsholm Castle. Françoise had cut off the wording at the bottom of the poster and told me it was the church in Warsaw where her parents got married. Be that as it may, I now know that she took part in the theater workshop at the cathedral, and that in any event nobody here seemed to have taken her for Polish or Russian. So she not only speaks French, but also English, and both, it seems, fluently.”
“Does she speak Polish too?” Helen asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t know any Polish.”
“She couldn’t have known that. She must have anticipated that you might know Polish. Go on.”
“I’ve told you pretty much all I know. I have reason to believe that her previous employer has an office near Union Square, and that she might still be working for him.”
“Do you have the address?”
“Yes.”
“You went there?”
“I went a couple of times, but didn’t see her going in or coming out.”
“So you’re saying… you’re saying that the Polish or Russian secret service is operating here in Manhattan? And you know the address? Sixteenth Street, seventh floor, ring three times, KGB sort of thing?”
“No, I’m not saying that. But in Cucuron they threatened me, followed me, and beat me up, and here they’ve been shadowing me. There’s no rhyme or reason for all this, except that it must be the same Polish or Russian secret service. And the fellow who’s been following me goes to work every morning and then returns there in the evening after his day of shadowing.”
“Your spaghetti’s getting cold.”
He pulled the plate toward him and began to eat. “It’s already cold.”
She had finished eating. “So you’re asking me how you should go looking for Françoise because I live in New York and might have some ideas about how to find someone in this city. Good, I’ll share my ideas with you. But whether you like it or not, I’ll also give you a piece of my mind about the story you’ve just told me. First, if you believe your girlfriend is in the clutches of an Eastern Bloc secret service and that you can free her on your own, that’s pure nonsense. If she’s in anybody’s clutches, then the CIA would do a far better job at freeing her. If she isn’t going to the CIA herself, then it’s because she can’t or doesn’t want to be freed. Second, you should go to the CIA too. I don’t know what your dealings with the KGB are, but you should have seen your face when you told me about how they beat you up. Do you want to hit back at them? Do you want to blackmail them into returning your girlfriend to you? Do you want compensation for being beaten up? I imagine these secret services are never worth the money put into them, but if they couldn’t handle someone like you, nobody would invest a cent in them. I’ve just tied in my third point with my second one, but that doesn’t matter. To go to the CIA, but also to leave things as they are, wouldn’t be a bad idea. I like that neighborhood, and it gets to me to hear about a KGB office there. My favorite shops are there and a bunch of galleries are not too far away; there’s a nice new restaurant I like, and then the KGB moves in? I don’t like that! Don’t you feel the same way?”
“Look, Helen, these people have finished me off. They used my love, my abilities, destroyed my life in Cucuron, and beat me up. They instigated a car crash that killed a man. They shot my cats.”
“They did what?”
Georg told her. “Perhaps that’s how they threaten the free world. I don’t mean by instigating car crashes and shooting cats, but by manipulating people. In which case my revenge will have something to do with the worldwide battle between good and evil. But that doesn’t affect me, and I don’t care if they’ve set up shop near Union Square or Moscow or Cadenet-I don’t care a bit. I don’t want to let them get away with what they did to me. I want money from them, even if it won’t bring back my cats or Maurin, whom I didn’t particularly like, but he wasn’t a bad guy and never did me any harm. I want money, because they made my life miserable, and because I don’t want to continue living in misery. And also because it will be a defeat for them.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t understand you. But, okay: I promised you some ideas. You have that picture of Françoise, right? So I would go to the foreign bookstores, the French and Polish or Russian ones. I don’t know where they are, but I know they exist. I’d also go to libraries with foreign collections. I would go to the restaurants near that office. Above alclass="underline" since she was in that workshop at the cathedral, she will have lived near here. If she knows French and Polish so well, she will have studied them-probably at Columbia. I’d ask around in the French and Russian departments.”
“Do you have any colleagues there?”
“You can give me a picture of her, and I’ll ask around.” Helen put the picture in her bag, shaking her head. “And when you have your money and your girl-are you going to expose those secret-service people?”
“Expose them? But that would only get them extradited. There was this one guy, Bulnakov, the boss in Cadenet. I would have loved to have strangled him or beaten him to a pulp. I often imagined doing it, but I couldn’t bring myself to. If I could have, I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself.”
“The cats, I keep thinking about your cats. Were they anything like Effi?” She narrowed her eyes, and bit her lips. There was horror and sadness in her face.
“One was white, one was striped, and the third was black with white paws. They were all a year apart, and little Dopey was always putting one over on Sneezy, just like Sneezy had done the year before with Snow White.”