And what did Manning’s death mean to her except an opportunity like this? She had been going to betray him in any case, just as he had intended to betray her.
Would Manning have grieved if she had died?
She stepped across the threshold and tried not to think of him, but he had haunted her in life and would haunt her again. She endured his memory as though enduring pain or an illness that must run its course; she endured her own grief as though it were something apart from her.
“Madame.”
He was a short man with an enormous belly and a dirty beret perched atop his bald head. He might have been fifty. He had not shaved, and Jeanne could not guess from his appearance if he had been awake all night or had just gotten up. “Café au lait? Croissants?”
“Thank you.” She stepped across the large room. It was a kitchen but it had not been well kept. Dirty saucepans littered the white ceramic stove. A loaf of bread was on the table, along with stale croissants and a scattering of crumbs and bits of jam from an opened jar. The big-bellied man took a pot of coffee from the stove and poured some into a cup along with milk and handed it to her.
“Not like Paris,” he said with a chuckle. “We are simple people here in the countryside.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. She felt enervated by the long ride, by the night of waiting in Le Coq’s rooms, by the constant reminders in her memory of Manning’s death.
She sat down on a wooden chair painted a hideous yellow.
Everything in the room spoke of neglect, as though the occupant of the little house was accustomed to living like a beast among the remains of civilization. She sat primly, her hands folded on her lap. She looked around again, and then she noticed the transmitter.
It was a newer model, she noted, quite compact.
The big-bellied man sat down across from her. He pushed a remnant of croissant toward her across the wooden table, but she did not touch it.
“Madame Clermont,” he said.
She only stared at him. And then he laughed, a low and rumbling laugh like the sound of water rushing in a subterranean drain. His black eyes were without mirth, she saw.
“I am Calle,” he said.
She waited.
He lit a cigarette wrapped in yellow paper and blew the harsh smoke across the table toward her. He smiled again, and the smile revealed yellow teeth with unusually large canines: the teeth of an old dog, still able to tear at the flesh of a rabbit.
She picked up the cup of coffee and milk and sipped it. Despite the mild, it tasted bitter, as though it had been sitting in the pot all night.
“Le Coq said you were ready.”
“For what?”
The Algerian had entered the room and resumed his station at the door. The big man who had blindfolded her was not in the house.
“You see, there has been a matter of some urgency added to our usual caution,” Calle said.
“I don’t know what any of this is about.”
“Who killed Manning?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is that the truth?”
She stared at him without a word. He studied her with small, black eyes, the eyes of a beast. Yes, she thought with a little shiver, he had the air of the beast about him, in his appearance, in his savage face and yellowed teeth, in his soulless eyes that studied her as a cat studies a trapped mouse.
“In any case, you are now at the heart of things,” he said finally. “I asked Le Coq if we could trust you and he said we had no choice. He’s right; there is no choice now. Matters have reached a point where we must proceed.”
“Monsieur,” she began slowly. “Two days ago, William Manning was killed. I don’t know who killed him. I would not want him dead. Le Coq knew this; you should know this, too.”
“You were in love with him,” Calle said.
“That is not for you to say or for you to speak of,” she said in the same measured way. Her voice was soft but oddly tough, as though the softness of her words masked only steel beneath, naked and waiting.
“Madame, all matters are for me to study. Everything that affects La Compagnie Rouge affects me.”
“Who are you?”
“Calle,” he said again, smiling again, flashing the sharpened teeth. He picked up a dirty glass and held it a moment. Then he got up and went to the sink and took an opened bottle of wine from the drainboard. He poured the red wine into the glass and brought it back to the table and sat down. He sipped it and then stared at her again without speaking for a moment.
“You were useful to us in Paris. Le Coq convinced me of that. I approved using you, I approved Le Coq telling you that this Manning was an American agent.”
“Who are you?”
“Be quiet, madame, for a moment.” He drained the glass of wine and lit another cigarette. The room was acrid with the stale smell of burned tobacco from a long night of smoking Gauloises. Butts littered the rough planking of the floor; the windows were clouded with the stains of tobacco smoke etched on the glass. Everything in the room was rank with the accumulated odors of strong cigarettes, garbage, leftovers, and dirty dishes.
“We wanted to see what would happen. With you and with your William Manning. What happened surprised us; yes, I can say it surprised us. We didn’t expect his death anymore than you did. But perhaps it has added that sense of urgency to this matter that was needed. Perhaps it is our signal.”
“To what?”
“What we all wish to achieve,” Calle said. He smiled again.
“Have I been driven in darkness, blindfolded, to this place just to be confronted by another dreary philosopher of the revolution?” She spoke with a Parisian’s instinct for the cutting remark carefully fashioned in the elegant sentence.
But the beast did not move or react. The beast stared at her without guile; the black eyes were fixed on her face as though she might have been a victim.
She waited.
“Madame, it is very close,” he said finally. “These are not children’s games anymore. When you were at the barricades in 1968, taunting the police, you thought it was for sport, that your idealism was a rite of spring, something that youth must do.”
“No, monsieur. You misunderstand me if you think that.” She leaned forward across the table. “My passion is not to be questioned. Not in this. I have earned your respect with every day I served in prison and with every letter I have written and every cause I have served and every time the Deuxième Bureau questioned me or blocked me or blacklisted me or defamed me.”
“Madame, all that has been as nothing.” Calle got up again and went back to the sink. This time he returned with the bottle of raw red wine and another glass. He pushed the second glass at her and poured a generous measure. She picked up the glass and tasted it; the wine burned her throat.
“Bourgaine,” Calle said.
The Algerian nodded and opened the single door and went outside.
Jeanne Clermont waited. Her hand rested gracefully on the squat glass.
“You are in a position to know many things,” Calle began at last.
She stared.
“The appearance of William Manning did not surprise us.”
“What do you mean?”
“We had expected him from the beginning.”
“How could you?”
Calle shook his head. “That cannot be explained. Not now. What I require of you is quite simple, but, unfortunately, it is not so easy for us to obtain. We could have obtained it in time, but now the time is short. Events move too quickly. It is May already.”
“What do you want?”
“I have been afraid of you,” he said. “Of using you.”
“What do you know of me?”
“Everything.”
“And why are you afraid?”
“Because there is nothing we can do to you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your husband is dead. And now your lover is dead. He might have been useful, but that cannot be helped. Your parents are dead, you have no family; you are quite alone.”