“Oh course.” The door opened wider. “As one grows older, one does not expect any virtues from the young.” Quizon smiled at his own aphorism — as he did frequently — and stood aside to let Manning enter. The large oak door closed behind them with the clicking of at least two locks.
Manning waited in the foyer for Quizon to lead him across the hall. The flat was large, and Quizon had purchased it in a day when such an apartment on the boulevard Richard-Lenoir did not seem so expensive. The old man had lived alone in this place for nearly thirty years.
“Let’s go into the little room,” Quizon said. He led Manning down a dark corridor to a locked room. He removed the key from his flowered dressing gown — Quizon was clothed in shirt and tie and trousers and still wore a dressing gown until he went out at four in the afternoon for his first aperitif — and pushed the steel door open. Steel. It seemed such an odd precaution to Manning; and yet, everything done in the precise life of the old man seemed odd.
The room was bright with books and maps and yellowing copies of all the Paris papers. There were file boxes as well, stuffed with clippings accumulated from thirty years of being a watcher in Paris, first for the CIA and then, when he was cut as the CIA bureau moved into the city in numbers, as a retainer for R Section. Quizon had been a journalist all that time, freelancing for one wire service or another, for one paper or another, and though he had achieved no fame as a reporter, he had a certain mystique in the ranks of intelligence. Quizon had seen all the changes and had predicted most of them correctly.
On a wooden table at the back of the windowless room were two large Panasonic radios. The first was tuned to the conventional shortwave frequencies; the second had been altered to pick up the conversations of official Paris, from the police and fire frequencies to the frequency used by President Mitterand’s chauffeur. Mrs. Neumann, back at the Section, complained at times that Quizon’s reports were larded with common gossip, and her complaint was largely correct; Quizon plucked his gossip from the airwaves. But Quizon knew that nothing endears a part-time agent so much as filing gossip with the home office. Quizon, in his years, had learned all the elements of survival of a correspondent far from home. Or a spy.
“Sit down, William, I think I have something that will interest you.”
“I’m to see Jeanne at four.”
“Yes. This won’t take long.” He paused and let a smile form on his thin, bloodless lips. “And it concerns her. And you, for that matter.”
Manning sat down and waited. The old man had thin black hair without a trace of gray; Manning knew he dyed it. His eyes were brittle gray and his face, a jaundiced shade spotted with liver marks, was small and daintily formed. He had been in Paris in 1968, when Manning, freshly recruited, had infiltrated the left-wing cells at the university. Quizon had been his control officer then, as well. But he had been in awe of Quizon in those days. Now he was bored by the ridiculous old man with his fussy manners and his thin, high-pitched chatter. He might have been an aging queen but he was essentially sexless; he was, rather, a period piece, drawn out of a Proustian world of balls and days at the Longchamp racecourse and languid summer afternoons in the Bois de Boulogne.
Manning had not wanted to deal with Quizon as his control. Quizon was too much a part of the memory of 1968, of his first love for Jeanne Clermont; Quizon was the bad part of memory, the reminder of his betrayal.
“Information has come to me,” Quizon began, placing the tips of his fingers against each other. “From a reliable person.”
“In the government,” Manning began.
“Yes. Of course. I have many sources—”
“Le Matin, Le Monde, France-Soir,” Manning replied.
“That is unkind but it is partially true. You prove again that courtesy is the preserve of age,” Quizon said. It was as though each bon mot were plucked from a stream filled with them, held up briefly, and then thrown back into the waters of the mind.
“Quizon, without your usual preamble, what did you learn?”
“About Madame Clermont. Hanley had wanted to ascertain her worth. After all, on the face of it, it doesn’t seem important to spend so much…er…effort on a person in the third ranking in the Ministry of Interior Reforms.” Quizon smiled quite horribly, without mirth, and Manning felt himself becoming angry.
“The assignment came from Hanley; does he want to rescind it now?”
“He has had second thoughts. Something about the budget. I really don’t understand it,” Quizon said, dismissing matters of mere commerce with a wave of his hand. “But I think I have convinced him to give you a little more time with Madame Clermont. You see, my sources are impeccable.”
“And what do your sources tell you?”
“Madame Clermont is worth our efforts,” Quizon said. He stared across the room at a large map of Paris on the wall. The map was layered with colors, the blues dividing the arrondissements, the various lines of the Métro marked with distinctive colors, the whole map conveying a sense of the colors of the city visible to the naked eye.
“What do your sources tell you?” Manning asked again. He felt tired, tired of the old man and his mincing manner and tired of being reminded that he was only an agent in place, that what he felt now or had felt for Jeanne Clermont did not matter. Not to Quizon, not to Hanley, not to the computer clerk who had matched their names on a printout five months before in the Section. Mere emotions never entered into it.
“Madame Clermont was detached six months ago to a special project, as soon as she was appointed to the ministry. She had no known superior within the ministry, except for a functionary named Garouche who is not important to us.”
“How does your source know this?”
“He knows,” Quizon said. “He is utterly reliable; he has never been wrong before.”
“And does he know the nature of Jeanne’s project?”
“No. And absolutely no one does. She works routinely for days and then will disappear. Utterly disappear from the ministry. She makes no written reports, she keeps no notes.”
Manning thought of her apartment, of the schoolbooks, of the photograph hidden in one dusty volume. He thought of the diary that told him nothing. No notes, no recordings, no secret places. It had not occurred to him at the time: It was as though her life were too mundane. It was as though she had created a portrait of herself without blemishes or lines of age.
“You haven’t observed this, Manning? That she disappears for days?”
“No. We don’t meet every day, that stage has not been reached. But if I say to meet on a Friday or Monday or whatever, she rarely begs off. I assumed she worked at the ministry every day.”
“And I,” Quizon said.
“Maybe she goes to the provinces. She mentioned she is doing ombudsman work in the field of primary education. Perhaps she’s doing field observation.”
“No. That’s impossible. She is assigned to the sector concerned only with Paris.”
“Then perhaps she just doesn’t report to the office. I mean, there are a lot of explanations for this kind of thing.”
“Don’t you suppose I thought of that?” Quizon frowned, and the frown was just as unfriendly as his smile. “The least original thought is to suppose that one is vested with original thoughts.”
Manning ignored the aphorism and the satisfied smirk on Quizon’s face. He studied memory, and his eyes focused on nothing.
“What are you thinking now?”