Then Georg wrote down what he knew, guessed, supposed, and feared, and put the thick batch of papers into an envelope, which he crammed into a second larger envelope, and took it to the post office. He didn’t know if he was being watched. But he imagined himself walking to a mailbox, dropping the letter in, walking on, and suddenly hearing a bang, a flame shooting out of the mailbox, with letters fluttering all over Broadway. They wouldn’t be able to blow up a whole post office, though.
At four o’clock he was standing outside the MacIntyre Building. The door was open and painters were working in the lobby. The same dark-haired beauty with the ugly glasses let him in, and showed him into a small, windowless conference room. “Mr. Benton will be with you in a moment.”
The room was gloomy. Dim light came from a slot between the low ceiling and the wall. Six chairs of dark leather stood around a heavy table made of dark wood. Set into the wall was an empty black screen. The air conditioner was humming.
Georg looked around for a dimmer to turn up the light. He couldn’t find one. There was no knob on the door either. The screen lit up with a gentle buzz, and a small image appeared in the middle and grew, coming toward Georg until it filled the screen. There was a lot of black, with flitting yellow and red lights. It took him a few moments to realize that these were video shots taken from a moving car: yellow headlights and red brake lights that jerked with the rattling of the car from which the video was shot. At times the windshield wipers, the hood, the edge of the windshield, or the steering wheel came into the picture. The car was going fast, and yellow headlights came racing by. It was following another car’s red brake lights on the right side of the road and, trailing them, switched to pass the other cars on the left. The passing maneuvers were rough and aggressive, and the approaching headlights shot like a spray of sparks off the screen. The film had no sound. The traffic grew lighter. When there were no more oncoming headlights, and only the red brake lights were ahead, the car swerved next to the other car in front, the camera swinging toward its interior, to the profile of the driver and his hands on the steering wheel. The image kept jumping, showing a trouser leg and the roof of the car, as if the hand holding the camera had been knocked aside. For a few moments Georg couldn’t make out anything. Then both cars were in the picture. They had stopped, one having forced the other into a ditch. In the glare of the headlights, Georg could see two men beating up a third. Pummeling him. The third man collapsed, and the two other men began kicking him. The camera zoomed in, showing the bloody head of the man who was lying motionless on the ground. It showed his face from the side, and the tip of a shoe that pushed his head to the other side. It showed his face from the front. The image on the screen disappeared with a light crackle. A chill ran down his spine. That was him. They had made a video of beating him up on the road back from Marseille.
“My young friend!” The door opened, the room brightened, and an effervescent Bulnakov came bursting in. He was just as fat, but now had on a blue three-piece suit. Gone were the shirt with the unbuttoned collar, the rolled-up sleeves, and the patches of sweat under his arms. There was a hint of eau de cologne. His English had the same hard tone as his French. “I can’t believe Janis made you wait here in this horrible little room. Come with me into my office.”
Georg followed Bulnakov past the map of the world and up the spiral staircase to the next floor, through an empty room with large pictures of trees, and through a double door. Bulnakov was talking incessantly. “This is quite different from my office in Cadenet, isn’t it? I’d have preferred a green carpet here. If you ask me, they overdid it a bit with the color of the wood, and without the green of the leaves, there’s no brown of the trees. The fight I had to put up for those pictures! Ah, but roughing it over there in the south of France had its charm too. Those were good days! Speaking of south, did you know that New York lies on the same latitude as Rome? You’ve already had a taste of the heat and humidity here. You just up and came to New York, to the New World! I’ll admit I was taken aback! I would never have thought you capable of that! But here you are, and I welcome you to the Big Apple and my office!”
He shut the door. It was a corner room with windows on two sides, a bare wall, and a wall with a picture of two beach chairs beneath an umbrella by the sea. In the corner between the windows stood the large desk, and across from it a sofa and chairs. They sat down. He’s all show, Georg thought, and not even especially good at it. The gloomy room they had put him in for the movie, the door without a knob-that had been quite something. But they’d have done better to corner him right then and there: with the walk to Bulnakov’s office and all of Bulnakov’s swagger, Georg’s fear had dissipated.
“One look at you, and I can see you’re a changed man,” Bulnakov said. “This is no longer the timid young…”
“We’ve been through all that before. I’m sure you know what I want. I don’t like Provence anymore, and Provence doesn’t like me. Beginning a new life in a new place takes money. And I want that money from you.”
Bulnakov sighed. “Money… Had you agreed to my proposal back in Cadenet, we could have saved ourselves a whole lot of trouble. Especially you. But let’s forget about that, it’s water under the bridge, over and done with, finito! You see, I have no funds in connection with this matter anymore.” He held his empty hands out to Georg.
“Over and done with?” Georg replied. “Surely this story has the kind of plot that could go on. In fact, it has gone on quite excitingly for me: scene changes, a world metropolis instead of the back of beyond, this elegant office instead of the little poky one, rare woods and precious gems instead of technical translations, Mr. Benton instead of Monsieur Bulnakov. And yet the interests and the players are still the same. The next episode could be a winner if journalists, the police, and the CIA make an entrance.”
“Let’s not go into all that again. We already established back in Cadenet that the last thing you want is police involvement,” Bulnakov said, shaking his head with the kindly but impatient expression usually reserved for a petulant child.
“I came to you because what I want is two million dollars. I’d be happier with those two million than having to deal with the police, the CIA, or reporters, but if I don’t get the money, I’m quite prepared to endure the little bit of trouble the police might put me through.” Georg stressed little bit and trouble.
“Two million dollars? Are you mad?”
“Fine, then let’s make it three. You mustn’t forget that I’m quite irritated. I loved my life in Cucuron, my cats, and my physical well-being. I’d need a large sum of money to turn my back on all the fuss I could make.”
Bulnakov laughed. “How do you picture your next step? You just go waltzing over to the CIA, ask for whoever’s on duty, and tell him your story? Whisper in his ear that Townsend Enterprises is a front for…”
“… the Polish or even the Russian secret service.”
“And they’ll lap it all up, no questions asked? I have to say…” Bulnakov continued laughing, slapping his thighs, his belly hopping.
Georg waited. “In case you’re interested,” he began, and Bulnakov fell silent, “First of all I’d go to the press and show them all my papers and photographs. I’d let them decide when I should go to the CIA or the police. They’ll have their own ideas about timing and so on. Furthermore… as I’ve just seen in your screening room, you have quite a bit of photographic material yourself, but still you might like this little souvenir of the good times, our good times, back in Provence.” Georg took out the photograph of Bulnakov sitting behind the wheel of his Lancia, his arm resting on the rolled-down window, the sun in his face and on the license plate. He reached across the table and handed it to him.