“Of course,” Marge said. “I’ll go with you.”
They walked back down the side corridor that led to computer analysis. The flooring was standard gray-green government tile, designed to look like no color at all. It was shiny because the cleaners had just been at it; the buffing machine had created whirls of wax rings, endlessly intertwined, all the way to the end of the corridor.
“How are you, John?” she said nervously as they walked along. The two security men brought up the rear.
“Were you working on the machines?”
His voice was abrupt, without friendliness, the voice of a traffic cop cataloguing details of an accident.
“Why, yes, I was in fact, I—”
“We were signaled two terminals were down. They were fed the emergency shutdown code. Only six people have that code.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You’re not one of them, Mrs. Andrews.”
“John—”
But they had already turned off the corridor into the nest of offices that huddled along the south wall of the building and were used by the computer analysis section.
They entered the second office and the blank computer face, now a dead gray, faced them.
“Were you working in here, Mrs. Andrews?”
“I…no, I wasn’t…”
“But no one else is here,” he said blandly. She turned. The two uniformed security guards were staring at her. She turned back, and John stared at her. They stood in an awkward tableau for a moment. “Look,” she began, “the machine must have malfunctioned.”
John said, “Yes. That must be it.”
“Is this going to take long?”
“We notified Mr. Hanley. He wanted to be notified if anything…happened.”
“But what’s happened?”
“The machine, Mrs. Andrews. It shut down.”
“But we’ve had shutdowns before.”
“Yes, ma’am.” The voice was becoming more distant, cold.
“But am I going to have to wait for Hanley? I have to meet my husband…”
“Yes, ma’am, I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait. You see, I’m just in charge of security, I don’t have anything to do with the machine.”
“But what did you do before? I mean, when the machine shuts down.”
“We notify Mrs. Neumann.” He stared at her. “But she isn’t here now, Mrs. Andrews.”
27
Evening lingered in the glow of the afternoon sun, which still brightened the clear sky but cast the buildings of the rue Mazarine into colors of purple and gray. Lights were on in the cafés, and the evening menus were posted on chalkboards in the windows of the narrow streets in the sixth arrondissement. Cars crawled slowly through the narrow ways; dogs — hundreds of different kinds of dogs — loped along the sidewalks, sat outside the cafés and brasseries with begging looks; the streets were beginning to fill for the evening with mingled throngs of students and tourists and the residents of the villages and ordinary Parisians taking part in the carnival life of the evening city.
Jeanne Clermont saw all these things and saw none of them. Her thoughts were turned back, to the reports she had given three men in the Elysée Palace. She hurried along the rue Mazarine, neatly sidestepping clots of tourists who blocked the way by crowding around the menus posted in windows or in stands on the street, and arguing in loud English or American voices how many francs equaled how many pounds or dollars.
She pushed through the massive door at Number 12 and crossed to the large room at the back of the building. The concierge looked out from her little cubicle at her.
“Bonsoir, madame,” she said automatically. But the concierge did not return her greeting. The old woman was cross and civil by turns, each mood lasting about a day, a woman who lamented life and celebrated it by the seasons of her emotions.
Jeanne Clermont climbed the winding stairs to her apartment. Not for the first time in the past month, she thought of that last evening with William Manning, how he had trailed her as they climbed the stairs and then the touch of him at the door, next to her, his breath — sweet with wine — against her cheek. There were matters that could not be put in reports or spoken of to anyone; there were private griefs that no one could know. Giscard — sensitive soul — had told her once as they walked along the Quai des Grands Augustins on a perfect autumn afternoon:
“See them, Jeanne? How many private sorrows do ordinary people hide when they walk on this street on this magnificent afternoon?”
“What do you mean?”
“I think,” Giscard had said, “that as one grows older, one begins to associate all pleasant moments in life with a remembrance of some private sorrow, so that even a beautiful afternoon becomes tinged with melancholy. Will you think of this afternoon someday and be sad because it will remind you of other afternoons when you thought you had been happy?”
Both of them knew that Giscard was dying.
“Yes,” she said now, to herself, to her locked door as she inserted the key in the lock. I will think of William on these stairs, I will think of him next to me as we lay on the couch; watching the thunderstorm come over the city. I will think of Giscard on a perfect afternoon in autumn when he was dying.
She opened the door and went inside and set her purse on the little elegant table in the entry hall and flicked on the foyer light. In two hours the police would arrive to take her to a safe house in the country before the operation began.
She closed the door behind her and then looked at the apartment. Everything had been made a shambles.
Books. Papers. Clothing. They were scattered on the rugs in the front room.
She felt suddenly sickened and afraid.
To cover her fear, she walked quickly into the front room, where she and William Manning had stayed and slept and loved while the storm shook around them.
A man was sitting on a chair of green cloth near the tall windows that opened to the balcony. The windows were shut, as she had left them in the morning. Nothing else in the room was the same; even the paintings on her walls had been removed, and some had been pried from the frames. It was not vandalism, she saw; the paintings rested on the floor, leaning against the walls. There were only the remains of a methodical search of everything she owned.
She stared at the unmoving, silent man.
He was in middle age; his hair was gray streaked with dark brown strands. His eyes were gray, cold and unyielding, as they returned her gaze. The line of his mouth was set, not frowning or smiling, but a mouth and face that revealed nothing. She saw that his face was cut with lines of age and experience like cuts of a knife in a wooden handle, to reveal some primitive counting process.
She did not speak. The silence lay between them like an invitation. She walked across the debris of the room to the tall windows and swung them out to catch the breath of cool evening.
She turned again and looked at him.
“This is about Manning,” Devereaux said at last.
“I see. And you — who are you?” Her voice was as cold as his was flat, as unyielding.
“That doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it does. How did you get in here?”
“I came in through the front door.”
“And the concierge?”
“She saw my identification. CID.” Inexplicably, the wintry face altered to a smile.
“Are you from CID?”