Hanley blinked and did not speak.
“Perhaps,” Belushka said, “they are already there.”
9
Jeanne Clermont was quite certain she had not been followed, especially by Manning, but the rules required certain procedures. She had entered the gray five-story apartment building at six o’clock and waited ten minutes until the door that led to the little garden in the back was opened. She had followed her conductor across the back to the red building on the opposite street, the rue Thénard. They had silently climbed the five flights to the garret rooms and shaken hands in that formal Parisian manner only at the door.
When she entered the low room, Le Coq was at the window, staring at the city.
She came to him and extended her hand, and he shook it; they might have been fellow workers meeting in the morning at the factory. Traces of the bourgeoisie always lingered, even in radicals.
“You’re late.”
“I was on time,” Jeanne Clermont said, sitting down on a wooden chair. The large room with the low ceiling was badly lit by a single dim bulb hanging over the sink in the back of the room. It was covered with dust and old paintings; it had once been an artist’s studio, but the artist had died, penniless and undiscovered. His paintings were quite bad in any case, and Le Coq saw no reason to get rid of them. Some in the cell occasionally took some of the pictures on Sundays to the quays along the Seine and sold them to tourists. Le Coq disapproved of this — it seemed so middle-class — but he did not intervene.
“In any case, how is it going with him?”
“It goes,” she said.
“Has he made love to you?”
“That’s not important. Not to you.”
“Everything is important, Jeanne, you know that. I’m not asking you for any prurient reason, I assure you. I’m…attempting to gauge the degree of confidence he has in you.”
She stared at Le Coq without speaking until he emerged from the shadows. In the half-light, he stood before her: tall, his face distorted by a vivid red scar that cut down his left cheek, drawing the skin in different ways, right through the socket of his left eye. For a long time, he had worn nothing in the socket, speaking of a glass eye as vanity. But the horror of his appearance — heightened by the eyeless socket, which seemed to stare with more accusation than his good right eye at those he confronted — finally drove his comrades to persuade him that a little vanity could be tolerated, for the sake of the cause.
His gaze was lopsided now as he held her fixed by his glittering right eye. He moved toward her, dragging the broken, healed remains of his right foot behind him.
Le Coq had red hair that stood in short, spiky clumps on his round head. “You look like a bantam rooster with your red coxcombs,” Verdun had once joked of his appearance; and so “Le Coq,” which was a not particularly appropriate nickname, had been given him. He was German, from Bremen, but he had no real home now except Paris. He had been in the city thirteen years and still spoke French with the peculiarly heavy German accent that seems to trample the delicate distinctions in the language. He was frequently misunderstood when he spoke, but Le Coq had become accustomed to patience. And to repeating himself until what he wanted was very clear. Many people, even some who had known him longest, were afraid of him, though no one could remember any harm that Le Coq had done to them.
“The liaison has begun. That’s all,” she said. “William is not so foolish; I have to proceed cautiously in this—”
“Jeanne…”
She waited for him. She rested her elegant hands on the lap of her soft blue dress.
“Is there urgency to this?” she asked at last. Le Coq turned and looked at her.
“Why do you ask that?”
“Because you’ve summoned me twice in the past three weeks. Twice you’ve asked me the same question.” She paused. “If this is more testing of me or my loyalty, then it has become tedious.”
“I am not a waiter at Les Deux Magots,” Le Coq said. “Don’t treat me as one.”
“I’m sorry if my manner offends you; your questions offend me.”
“It was the Company that gave you information about William Manning in the first place…”
Now it was her turn to rise restlessly and go to the windows away from him and look out over the city. The view was cramped by a modern, white university building thrown up at the end of rue des Écoles as one of the half-reforms the university promised the students after the riots of 1968. Its stark lines clashed hideously with the gentle, seedy, century-old buildings all around it.
“That he was an American intelligence agent,” Le Coq said.
“Yes.”
“It was not a test of you, Jeanne Clermont; we trusted you with information that you could have given to Manning, that would have allowed Manning to avoid our trap.”
“Yes.” Dully, not looking at Le Coq.
“And so we want reports, reports of progress.”
“My life is my own,” she said, turning her blue eyes shining with dark contempt. It was as though Le Coq’s mundane utterances had offended her more than his first questions.
“Madame, your life is our life. La Compagnie Rouge. When you know of us, you accept us.” It was meant as a threat, but she did not seem frightened. He took a step toward her, advancing slowly by dragging his broken foot behind him. “Madame, you gave your life to the revolution in 1968 and it was spared; have you grown so comfortable in living that you shrink from a total commitment now?”
“Why do you talk to me like this? As though I were a child at the Sorbonne you sought to recruit to ideals that you utter as meaninglessly as a priest muttering the blessings at Mass? I’m not a child, Le Coq; I’m older than you.”
“But Manning. You were his lover; perhaps you are again. It’s what we wish, but perhaps you shrink from the commitment to what we intend.”
“What do you intend?”
“In time.”
“I won’t kill him; I won’t lead you to kill him.”
“Kill him? Why do we want his life? He is useful only alive.” Le Coq smiled, but it was a more horrible face than his frown.
She stared at him still with her eyes fixed on the horrible expression of his sunken face.
“The newspapers say the Red Brigade killed the American agent in Venice.”
“Newspapers are tools, madame. You should understand that, you of all people. Who said it? Le Matin? Le Monde?”
“L’Humanité,” she replied, pronouncing the name of the newspaper of the Communist Party of France.
“What the Brigate Rosse does is not what we do. We are brothers in a cause, but brothers go their own ways at times.”
“Where did you get information on William? Why did you give it to me?”
“No. The question is, why did William Manning seek you again? To seduce you again? Or to discover your liaison with our organization? Madame, why do you flatter yourself? To think that Manning came back to love you.” Again, Le Coq smiled. “Are there no women in his life? Did he live like a monk for fifteen years after he betrayed you?”
“You tell me he betrayed me—”
“I can assure you he did. We know that.”
“Why do you know? Why must I take what you tell me on your word?” She stepped toward him, and Le Coq retreated a step to the shadows along the outer wall of the room. “What will you do with Manning? I must know.”
Silence.
And then Le Coq shrugged.
“We won’t harm him. We have no reason to.”
“That is not what I asked you.”
“Madame, if it is a matter of kidnapping him, we’ll do it.” The voice was harsh. “We will do what we have to do to learn what mission he has come for. But there is no reason to kidnap him now.”