In the photograph, she stood next to him as they had been fifteen years ago. Her hair was much longer than the way she wore it now. Her hands were in the pockets of her skirt. Her face was open and smiling, amused by the moment and by the chatter of the itinerant old photographer who had snared them at the entrance to the Tuileries that Saturday. It had been Saturday, he remembered it clearly. He remembered the photographer and his droll teasing of her: “Madame is too beautiful not to be photographed, even by someone like me.” He had smiled, revealing yellow and broken teeth.
“Then you may photograph me, monsieur.”
“Only fifty francs.”
“But consider the honor, monsieur, to photograph someone so beautiful.”
“Of course, of course, the honor is great, but unfortunately, I have not been a man of honor for some years…”
How she had smiled, Manning thought again, holding the photograph in his hand in the dull afternoon light of her apartment. She had not only infected the moment with good feelings but she had somehow conveyed the warmth of it to memory, recalled again by the touch of the picture.
He had not wanted to be photographed, and in the picture he was shy and scowling. She had scolded him for his frown. “It could have been such a lovely picture, my keepsake,” she had said.
“But you have me,” he had said.
“How long, William?”
“As long as you want.”
Of course, it had been a lie. Everything was a lie, everything he had said led to betrayal. He could not tell her that the agent who had recruited him had warned him, “You must not be photographed, that’s elementary, at the demonstrations or at school. Remember, you don’t know who’s taking your picture and what he intends to do with it.”
But Jeanne Clermont had twisted round him and had made him pay the fifty francs for the Polaroid photograph from the old photographer. What harm could there be in a Polaroid photograph?
“Please, William, don’t be so sour, you are famous and wealthy, a correspondent from America, you have plenty of money.”
“But the photograph won’t last…”
“I swear, monsieur, on the grave of my mother, it will last forever.”
And so it had. Here, in a page of a dusty schoolbook at the bottom of a bookcase in a Paris apartment. They had stood in the sunlight, facing the gardens, their backs to the Louvre. She held his arm and smiled. What would the Section have said?
He had felt a moment of loss so great that he thought he would die, that he was already dead. Three days ago, sitting on the floor of her bedroom, holding the photograph, hearing the voices of the past — Jeanne, the photographer, Verdun, and the others at the university…What had their expectations of life been on that rare day fifteen years ago? She had shared her bed with him and, after a time, her love. And he had responded in a charade that would end only with terror and betrayal.
“I love you,” he told Jeanne in the darkness of a spring night fifteen years ago. He had spoken the words over and over as they held each other in dreamlike embrace, sated by lovemaking, conscious of the feeling and the smells of the other commingled, breathing softly as one. He had loved her, in fact, which Hanley never knew, or Quizon, or anyone; he had loved her and betrayed her. Why hadn’t he saved her? She might have escaped the net closing around them; she might have gone with him. But he had known, even as he held her, that she would not accept his love and the betrayal of the others. And so he had said nothing to her but that he loved her and would love her forever.
“Monsieur?”
Manning glanced up quickly at the waiter who suddenly hovered at his table.
The waiter had removed the cup of coffee and the plate that had contained the croissants and the ten-franc coins. In the rude way of brasserie waiters in Paris, he was unsubtly demanding further rent on the use of the table in the corner of the empty restaurant. Manning ordered a glass of beer. The waiter made a face that might have been disapproval or merely gas; he withdrew to the counter.
“I think I should arrange the matter on Saturday morning,” Manning had told Hanley laconically on the safe phone thirty-six hours ago.
“Is it time?” The voice, scrambled by complex connectors at each end and flung across an ocean, was curiously tinny.
“I don’t know. I’ve done all I can.”
“But what if she turns you down?”
“Hanley, there are no certainties in the world.”
“But it’s important.”
“I don’t understand that; you’ve never explained that.”
“We’re not certain.” Despite the flat tone, the voice from Washington was suddenly withdrawn into secrets. “We can’t proceed on logical grounds.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Be careful.” So Hanley had repeated the inane advice, the same he had given at the start of the assignment. He had said it might not work, that he could not predict the human factor. And Manning had not understood a word of it except that they wanted him to confront Jeanne Clermont after fifteen years and lie his way back into her confidence and, if possible, into her bed.
As he followed her, the scenes of the old city had made him ache with nostalgia. He had not been in Paris since 1968, since the night he fled the capital after giving the Section her name and the names of the others and the proofs and the locations of the secret houses. Three years later, after a tour in Vietnam, he had learned what had happened to her. A trade had been arranged between R Section and the French espionage agency, the Deuxième Bureau. It was not made clear to him what the Section had obtained. The French, teetering on the brink of revolution, had obtained time. And the names of those most likely to effect the revolution. And proof enough for a secret court and a secret state trial. Jeanne Clermont had simply disappeared for sixteen months.
Manning could not have returned to Paris on his own.
And then, on the first of February, Tinkertoy had turned up his name in a routine scan of names of personnel changes in the French government. Jeanne Clermont had linked William Manning.
“You might say this is a form of computer dating,” Hanley had said flatly, unable to resist the joke but equally unable to make it funny.
“But she would know I betrayed her. How do I explain the absence of fifteen years?”
“You were a correspondent,” Hanley said, consulting the file in front of him that day in February. “You told her you were pulling out for Saigon, that the war was heating up after Tet.…”
“And she was arrested three days later,” Manning had argued.
“She expected it,” Hanley said.
“And I never came back…”
“You were wounded in Saigon,” Hanley had persisted. “We can make it seem to make sense to her.”
But I had loved her, he thought then. I had made love to her, I had touched her, I had seen the hint of her soul behind her eyes.
“We need leverage,” Hanley had said. “Inside the Mitterand government. These are uncertain times, I don’t need to tell you that—”
“All times are uncertain.”
“With the peace demonstrations and the Soviet disinformation program in West Germany — why, the West Germans are practically petrified, and—”
“Don’t tell me politics. What do you want me to do?”