“Satisfactory?” Manning said, annoyed.
“There were many disturbances this evening. Because of the events. Were you on the rue Mazarine just now?”
“Yes.”
“Shop windows were broken…”
“I’m hardly a student.”
“What is your occupation?”
“Journalist.”
“Ah.”
“Yes. Ah. I’m an American. Can I have my passport?”
“One moment.”
The policeman returned to the Renault and leaned in the rear window and spoke with someone in the backseat of the car. Manning could not see the figure except that he wore civilian clothing.
The policeman came back to Manning on the walk. His face was imperturbable.
“You will come with us for a while,” the policeman said.
“I will not come with you. What’s this about?”
“Please, monsieur.”
“Can I have my passport?”
“If you come with us.”
The policeman handed the passport back to Manning. Manning held it for a moment and then replaced it. He followed the policeman to the Renault. The car was without any official markings on it.
Manning opened the rear door and slid inside. His legs were cramped. Next to him was a large man with a large nose and comic eyes, like Fernandel. He appeared to be a caricature of a Frenchman.
“What’s this about?”
“Monsieur,” the civilian said. “You will be kind enough to come with us?”
“Why?”
“We have a few questions.”
The car started up quickly and shot into the center of the street. Paris was empty; it was as though it had been only a stage play and all the actors were home. Only the garbage trucks moved slowly down the boulevard St. Michel, picking up the burdens left from the day before. The Renault made a left turn at the bridge and headed toward the cluster of gray, official buildings on the Île de la Cité in the middle of the Seine.
“Are we going to the Palace of Justice?”
But the civilian did not answer. In the front seat, the two uniformed policemen stared straight ahead.
The car crossed the island and continued to the right bank of the river and made another left turn, this time heading toward the Louvre and the Tuileries gardens.
“Where are we going?” Manning said, and for the first time he felt uneasy. With a small movement, his arm pressed against the small pistol hidden in the sleeve of his jacket. He could not reach the pistol now in any case; but once he was free of the car, he would withdraw it.
The little car shot down a ramp near the Louvre and screeched to a stop on the empty quay. The black river surged beyond the ancient stones.
“Get out,” the civilian said.
“What are you talking about? I’m not going to get out of this car!”
“Please,” the civilian said, with courtesy and with a certain boredom of tone, as though he had said these same things a thousand times before.
Manning stared at the other man. But it was comic; he inspired laughter, not fear. Manning shook his head and moved out of the car awkwardly. He was not built for small cars.
Neither was the civilian. The civilian pushed his large legs out in front of him and heaved himself up. The two policemen were already out of the car. The car had no lights showing.
Gray Paris dawn broke reluctantly against the honeycomb of clouds.
“What’s going on?” Manning said.
He saw the small weapons before they had lifted them. Part of his mind catalogued them as he stood frozen against the stone steps of the quay. Uzi. Manufactured by the Israelis and copied by the French. An automatic weapon capable of firing a forty-round burst in something under seven seconds. It was an extremely light weapon with a hollow handle that could be retracted beneath a jacket. Or a policeman’s tunic.
I love you, Jeanne, he thought. You see, that was what I finally realized. I had betrayed you but that was not as important as the fact that I still loved you. I had never stopped loving you.
The weapons were without silencers.
They burst. He did not feel pain, only a certain sense of dread as he fell. This could not be reversed, he thought oddly; they could not be sorry for what they had done. They have killed me, he thought.
He fell across the stones. Blood seeped into the cracks of the stones.
The two policemen replaced the Uzis beneath their tunics.
The civilian grunted an order and pointed at the body of William Manning.
The two policemen picked him up and carried him — one at the shoulders, the other at the feet — nine steps to the edge of the quay. They threw the body into the river and it made a loud splash. The two policemen looked at the spot where they had thrown the body and then at each other. One led the other back to the Renault. Both climbed into the front seat. The civilian already sat in back.
Without lights, the car backed up the stone ramp to the level of the street.
In a moment, it had disappeared around the corner of the rue de Rivoli, leading west from the light of the new morning.
13
The Eastern Airlines 727 sat poised at the far end of the main north-south runway at National Airport on the Virginia side of the Potomac River. It had been waiting five minutes, not because the runway was occupied but because the destination — Kennedy Airport on Long Island in New York — was stacked up. Under the system devised since the air traffic controllers’ strike nearly two years before, the planes were held up at the takeoff end of a run and not left to circle waiting to land.
At last the signal was given in laconic tones from the controller in the distant tower. The day was warm — it had been warm all week in Washington — and heat shimmered along the runway. The jet revved suddenly and strained at its own brakes and then began the galloping leap along the concrete. Roaring with a full-open throttle, the three-engine jet leaped off the pad 2,345 feet after starting the run and climbing slowly as the banks of the Potomac loomed ahead.
Suddenly, the plane veered sharply to the left and continued its tricky ascent, now paralleling the river in a northwesterly direction, rising above the squares and neat grid of streets of Washington on the right and Alexandria on the left. Washington was a quiet zone, mandated by Congress, and so each takeoff was forced to the left, away from the capital, until it cleared the metropolitan area. At three thousand feet, the no-smoking lights were turned off, but the strain of the climb was still trembling through the floor in the passenger cabin. Again the plane banked, and a broad portrait of the distant Blue Ridge Mountains appeared in the portholes.
Devereaux stared at the mountains. He thought he could see the lazy, sprawling curve of the Shenandoah River, but perhaps it was his imagination; in any case, the plane banked again and now was heading directly north by northeast for the short run to Kennedy.
“The situation has changed,” Hanley said. He sat in the seat next to Devereaux and gripped its arms tightly with white fingers.
“Yes. You said,” Devereaux replied. He turned away from the window and looked at Hanley. Meeting on the flight had been Hanley’s idea; it was more than his usual paranoia about overheard conversations. Hanley had seemed genuinely frightened this time. “Security,” Hanley had said. “We must take precautions.”
“I thought you wouldn’t come,” Hanley said.
“I was curious.”
“I didn’t have anything to do with…the situation.”
“No, Hanley. You were out of the line of fire, as always.”
“Dammit. There were political considerations. The Old Man had his reasons to move on you. You have to admit that you’ve been…unorthodox in your approach at times.”