“Do you think she’s tagged me?” Manning said at last.
“It’s possible. I don’t know.” Quizon rose and went to the radio and adjusted the dial. In a moment, the air of the small, windowless room was filled with the sounds of police calls. In formal, bored tones, the dispatcher at the quay mentioned the possibility of a burglary in progress on the rue Cardinal Richelieu and a common street assault outside St. Eustache in the old Halles district on the right bank of the river.
Quizon tuned the dial finely. The squawks from the police dispatcher came clearly. Quizon stared at the black case of the radio for a long moment before he spoke. “Does she give any indication that she knows who you are?”
Manning slowly shook his head. “Once, a couple of weeks ago, she asked me…why I had come back. I thought…” What could he explain to this old man who showed neither emotion nor curiosity at the bizarre phenomenon of stalking the same woman again fifteen years later?
“Yes,” Quizon said. “You thought she meant why did you come back to cause her pain again?” Softly. “You thought she was hurt because she had loved you once.”
Manning could not speak. Quizon turned from the radio, and for the moment the hard angles of his thin dandy’s face had melted. Yes, Manning realized, Quizon had understood, perhaps had always understood, but a certain propriety that existed in his mind had kept him from ever speaking to Manning of such things.
“Perhaps that’s all she meant. Perhaps she does know and doesn’t care. There are so many complex strands when dealing with the emotions of a woman,” Quizon said. “What do you want to do?”
“What does Hanley want me to do?”
“I can buy a little time, I think. This information is very good, very reliable. And I take it that Hanley is still puzzled by some aspects of this matter.” Quizon resumed his old, hard face, a face that had no emotional involvement with the business at hand. “He won’t share his secret with me, and I take it he did not share it with you. There is something larger here, Manning, something that even Hanley does not understand yet.”
“Why can’t your…informant…get closer?”
“I don’t know. He has every resource. It’s better not to…press him. He’s a man of many secrets, perhaps he does not want to share this secret yet. I tell you, I didn’t think this matter would become so complicated. Hanley won’t tell me everything I need to know; he keeps secrets from you; and now, it appears, Jeanne Clermont has secrets as well.”
“And it could all be nothing,” Manning said. “We get involved in our secrets and sometimes miss the obvious. Your source, for instance — he might just be jobbing you, might just be looking for a little extra payment.”
“He has never been wrong,” Quizon said coldly. “I’m not in the habit of passing along information to the Section unless I’m certain of its authenticity.”
Manning frowned. “Don’t make speeches to me. What do you expect from me? If Jeanne Clermont has been tipped that I’m an agent, where does it put me?”
“Perhaps in danger; perhaps not,” Quizon said. “I thought I should tell you.”
“But you haven’t told me anything.”
Quizon blinked. The gesture was as owlish as Hanley’s own blink when confronted with the outrageous.
“But I’ve forewarned you.”
“You’ve given me the vague idea of a threat to me without telling me where it might come from. You’ve suggested Jeanne Clermont knows my mission or at least my identity and then agreed that it probably isn’t true. You’ve paraded out an anonymous tipster in the government who may or may not have correct information—”
Quizon started to speak, but Manning held up a warning hand. His eyes had become darker, his face more pale; rare anger had boiled inside him, and Quizon had never seen the emotion in Manning before.
“I’m an agent and I do what I have to do, and when that little clerk in Washington told me to job Jeanne Clermont again because of a fucking computer link, I agreed to do it. You see, I do what I’m told. But I’m damned if I’m going to become a part of your little network, Quizon, your goddamn papier-mâché world of intrigues in intrigues inside of circles inside of secrets that don’t even exist outside your own head. You’re an old man, Quizon, I didn’t want to deal with you on this; I told Hanley that—”
“I’m the agent in place,” Quizon said.
“You’re Herbert Quizon, you’ve outlived your time. And now you want to muddy up a complicated business with an anonymous tip from an anonymous source about mysterious disappearances by a woman I have followed or spent time with for three months. I never saw her leave the city in that time. So what does that make your source? Dammit, I was there, Quizon, I wasn’t spying on your fucking radios or tearing clips out of Figaro to fool Hanley into making out another voucher to you.”
“I won’t be insulted. Not by you, not by the Section. If that’s what they think, they can go to hell. I can sell information to others.”
But Manning would not be stayed. He wanted to wound the vanity of the old man; he wanted to lacerate him with words.
“You’re a charity case, Quizon, you’ve been a charity case for ten years. You’re past your time, you live in memories, and Hanley pities you.”
“I don’t want pity. You’re lying to me, you forget.”
“Yes. I forget. But you can’t. You keep remembering your coups. But you won’t retire, you won’t leave the field. You’re past it, Quizon; you have sources that were dry rivers years ago. You haven’t had anything important since 1968, since—”
“Since the last time you were here,” Quizon said. His voice was icy and brittle, like ice on a frozen pond on the warmest day of spring. His voice cracked, groaned, like ice breaking into chill waters. “Since the last time. You came here out of training, you were a puppy. You knew nothing, you didn’t even know the dangers. You didn’t even know the stakes. And at the end, you nearly blew the whole thing. You wanted to ‘save’ Jeanne Clermont. Do you remember when you told me that? You wanted to ‘save’ her from your ‘betrayal.’ Betrayal. Save. You were an agent in the field and you wanted to break the mission because you had fallen in love.” He spoke each phrase with contempt, he made them sound like descriptions of a dull child. “A government was at stake and you had fallen in love with the first French whore you slept with.”
Manning struck him, and the old man reeled across the small room and slammed against the wooden table. The two massive black radios jumped, and the squawks of the police dispatcher continued with calm through the crackling interference. Manning sat perfectly still; his hand stung.
A thin line of blood trickled out of Quizon’s nose. It fell across the angled face. Quizon did not wipe at it, though it felt warm on his upper lip.
“You were going to blow the operation in 1968 and the Old Man sent a hitter from Brussels. They were going to blow you away, Manning; you don’t even know that, not even now. They were going to eliminate you because you had fallen in love. And I sent Hanley a long message and I said, I would take care of it for him. I said I would take care of the problem. I said, if necessary, I would kill you.”
The words chilled him and sickened him. He thought of Quizon as he had been fifteen years before. Betrayal and betrayal; he thought he was the center of the storm and yet he was peripheral to it. Quizon could have killed him; they had wanted him dead. The operation was the only important thing.
“In the end, Hanley believed me. He knew I could handle things. He knew I had never failed the Section, never given them wrong information, never misled them. If I told Hanley that I would take care of you, then it would be done.”
“You’re making this up,” Manning said dully.