Devereaux had brooded as he sat, stripped to the waist, on the straight chair next to his bed. His room faced the busy length of rue des Écoles, a faintly shabby street that cut through the old heart of the Latin Quarter. Across the street, students lounged in the afternoon sun in a bar with a few tables on the narrow sidewalk. A mixed odor of strong tobacco and carbon monoxide from the belching and overstrained motors of the street traffic reached the window of Devereaux’s room. He sat alone and stared at the street scene and did not see it; rather, he felt the presence of Manning entering into him. He had to understand him to begin to understand Jeanne Clermont.
On the table was a bottle of Polish vodka purchased at an exorbitant price in the store up the street. He poured a little into a straight tumbler and tasted it.
Manning.
He had been the man to replace Devereaux in Saigon in 1968. He had seemed shot then, as though he were going through the motions. Devereaux had said nothing because his replacement meant nothing to him; he had only observed Manning’s condition out of curiosity.
And one night, in a bar in Saigon that was too loud and too small and that smelled of the peculiar sweet corruption that permeated that city as surely as the smell of cheap, burning diesel fuel, Manning had wanted to tell him. About Jeanne Clermont. About the mission.
Devereaux had not wanted to hear the story, but he had listened. Perhaps he had been burned out as much as Manning; perhaps the hopelessness of the Saigon mission had overwhelmed him; perhaps he was merely tired of telling the truth when everyone preferred to hear lies.
Devereaux had waited for a long time for Manning to tell the end of the story. They had sat in silence, listening to the bar girls chatter and watching a desperately silly Marine captain make a fool of himself by singing college songs to a sour prostitute who did not understand the English used beyond the bedroom. Already, in 1968, the mood of the city had become desperate, as though all the horrors of twenty-five years of war were now coming to a final horror that would be unspeakable.
“Why is he doing that?”
“What?”
“Why is that Marine captain singing those stupid fucking songs?” Manning had asked. “Doesn’t he know he’s making a fool of himself?”
Devereaux had not replied for a moment. “Yes. I think he knows what he’s doing.”
“You see, I keep thinking, it was my first assignment, maybe I was naïve. I’d been laid before, I mean; it wasn’t that. No — it was that; it was everything about her.”
Even now, in the cold quiet of the old hotel room five stories above the cluttered street, facing the French doors that opened to the Paris sky and the little ledge that was the room’s balcony, Devereaux could see Manning as he had been that night in Saigon fifteen years ago.
“Who told you they hadn’t harmed her?” Devereaux had finally asked.
“Hanley. He’s a third man in the Section, in operations.”
“You don’t believe him.”
Manning had paused. “No. That’s it. I don’t believe him.”
“It’s better not to,” Devereaux had said.
“I can’t forget her.”
“Then don’t forget her.”
“But what do you do?”
“You do nothing,” Devereaux had said, fixing his cold eyes on the drunken Marine captain at the bar. What had he been singing? A Yale song about the tables down at Morry’s, a sentimental song that made the longings of youth seem important.
“You went into the game,” Devereaux had said. “There aren’t any rules but you chose to play by certain rules. They wanted you to set up this woman and you did it. So you chose their rules. You could have protected her, you could have saved her; hell, you could have quit the game. But you thought you could work it from every way.”
“That’s not fair.”
“No. It’s only true.”
“But what did they do with her?”
Devereaux had put down his drink. “Do you want the truth or do you want Hanley to lie to you? Think the worst and then assume it to be true.”
Devereaux picked up his tumbler of vodka and walked to the balcony and stared down at the hustling street full of raucous afternoon life. He had been to Paris before, for brief periods, but until now he had never seen the resemblance to Saigon in the noise of the street. But then, the French had made Saigon before the Americans made it over again.
And then he saw the man again.
Devereaux stared down at the few tables in front of the shabby bar-tabac across the wide street. Something had jogged his memory for an instant and now the memory was fixed, like a tape recording stopped by the pause mechanism.
It was the same man, he was certain, but in different clothes. Where had he seen him?
Yesterday afternoon. In the rue Mazarine, as he surveyed the street where Jeanne Clermont’s apartment building was located.
He stared at the figure sitting at the small round table with a glass of red wine in front of him, reading that afternoon’s copy of Le Monde. He had light brown hair and a pale face marked by large and dark eyebrows.
Devereaux stepped back inside the room and put the glass of vodka on the little table. He picked up the shirt hanging from the back of the chair and slipped it on. He went to the closet — it was actually a wooden wardrobe affixed to the far wall — and removed his jacket. On the closet shelf was the small bag that he had packed when Hanley called him that morning in Virginia nearly four days ago. It had clean changes of clothing and shaving gear and the pharmacopeia of the professional traveler, including pills for waking up and pills for going to sleep and pills for chasing away the dread that crept up suddenly on lonely nights in strange cities, when he was doing a dirty little job.
And the pistol as well. He removed the piece of black, hardened steel and hefted it and then slipped the Colt Python .357 Magnum into his belt. He closed the mahogany doors of the wardrobe and turned to survey the small room. The bed was made, the bottle of vodka sat next to the tumbler on the table, a damp towel clung to the back of a second straight chair in the room. Scarcely a trace that the room was occupied at all; Devereaux had lived in hotel rooms for most of his adult life. He had learned the trick of coming and going without leaving marks of himself, like an animal that cannot be tracked through a dense forest.
He reached into his inside pocket and felt the passport and the bills that Hanley had given him. If he was killed now, there was nothing in the room that would trace him back to Section, no way to trace him even to a specific address in the United States. It was the macabre caution that all the agents learned.
He opened the door of his room and closed it.
He took the stairs. They wound down to the lobby at a dizzying scale.
He crossed the lobby. The clerk looked up in the suspicious and bored way of French hotel clerks and then looked down at the France-Soir spread on his desk.
Devereaux stepped into the street and started west, into the eye of the dying afternoon sun. In the reflection of a shop window that displayed English books he saw the man at the table across the street rise and fold his Le Monde and begin to follow him across the way.
The street was crowded with traffic; long lines of Citroëns and Renaults and Peugeots jostled for position at the lights as though the intersections were starting gates. He passed a pâtisserie with its array of fresh breads and stale quiches in the window and a bored, fat woman sitting behind the counter. He stared at the display for a moment as though he intended to buy something; in the reflection of the window he saw the man across the street pause as well and then go on.