“Nothing is cruel except death.”
“What do you want?”
“I want you to tell me about you. And Manning.”
“Do you want my grief then? Do you want tears?” She stood up and walked over to him. He saw her eyes had changed again in the light, that they were the green of a rain forest, and they were damp with tears. “You see, I can cry and I can grieve if you want to see my humiliation. I can tell you that I loved William, but why would you want to know these things?”
“To know why he was killed.” The same dogged words returned to Devereaux. He stared at her tears but he did not move away from her.
“I don’t know. That is part of the grief as well. I don’t know who killed him or why.”
“I—”
Devereaux never finished.
The door of the apartment burst open and three men rushed into the front room. Each was armed with an Uzi submachine gun, fed with large, ugly banana clips of bullets, the murderous black barrels sweeping the room.
The three men wore ski masks and black sweaters and black trousers.
There was no sound; they came around the two of them and pointed the gun barrels at them.
Devereaux did not move, but Jeanne Clermont whirled, her eyes wide, regarding the gunmen with fear and contempt. “What is this? Why have—”
“Shut up, Jeanne Clermont. Traitor.”
“Who is this one?”
“That’s all right; I know.”
“Who are you?” Jeanne Clermont said.
The first one — a larger man with a large head hidden beneath the mask — struck her with the tip of the gun barrel. The barrel crashed against her cheek and drew blood. She fell, one ankle twisting beneath her as her heels dug into the carpeting.
“What do we do with this one? Shoot him?”
“Shut up, Georges.”
The middle gunman pulled out a wide roll of white tape. “Open,” he said in rough French to Devereaux. Devereaux continued to stare at him, his hands held loosely at his side; he was deciding.
And then the third man slipped the pistol out of his belt.
“Open,” the middle gunman said again, prodding Devereaux with the gun at his chest.
Devereaux opened his mouth and the tape was lashed across his opened lips, pushing against his tongue. They wound the tape around his head twice as he stood still. The tape bit against his lips and forced his tongue back into his throat; he felt like gagging.
They grabbed his hands and wound the tape around his wrists behind him. The first gunman was on his knees, repeating the procedure with Jeanne Clermont. She did not struggle. Blood congealed on her darkening cheek.
“We go downstairs to the courtyard in back, and when we push you in the car, you get down,” the middle gunman said. “And if you give us a hard time, we’ll break your face open. You understand, bitch? And you?”
Devereaux felt the gunman behind him prod the gun in his back, urging him forward. The first gunman grabbed Jeanne Clermont by the arm and shoved her along to the door. They were pushed along down the stairs to the main floor, where a fourth gunman waited with an Uzi trained on the frightened concierge.
Out the back way into the court. A gray Citroën, quite large. Devereaux stared at the license plate for a moment and then was hurled into the back of the car, his head forced down between the seat cushion and the back of the front seat. A moment later, he felt shoes against his face; he could smell them. A moment more and he heard a muffled cry from Jeanne Clermont, shoved in behind him. More feet, and then they pulled bags over their heads. He could not breathe for a moment, but forced himself to remain calm. Slowly, he experimented with breathing; slowly, breath came, stale and difficult, as though he were trying to breathe in a small box of a room.
Again he heard a muffled cry from Jeanne Clermont, but he could not see her. He could feel her body pressed against his.
The car started up and lurched into the street.
28
She had dreamed of Leo when she slept. Leo had been far away, down a broad valley full of spring flowers in the mountains. The mountains brooded in gray clouds behind them, but here it was all light. Perhaps it was morning. She could smell the flowers in the freshness of the damp breeze that blew down from the mountains. Leo was walking toward a cabin hidden down in the valley near the base of the foothills. It was so beautiful, she had thought in her dream, it was the first day of their lives together.
The zipper opened the front of the tent and awakened her. Reality pressed against her.
“Damn you, damn you!”
Bill Andrews reached into the darkness of the tent and grabbed her hair and pulled her. She felt herself being lifted up, pain pricking at her scalp.
Mrs. Neumann heard the lock snap, and then she was outside the tent, the chain still around her right wrist but the other end of the chain now held by Bill Andrews.
She blinked her eyes and looked around her, feeling slightly dizzy from the brightness of the room and the sudden sense of open space. She stumbled on her bare feet. And then she saw the pistol in Bill Andrews’ hand.
“You gave Marge the wrong code,” he said. His face was white with fury, as though all the blood had drained to his trembling fingers, tightly clutching both the chain and the pistol. “You tricked us and now Marge is trapped — I’ve waited for an hour for her. I know they’ve got her. They’ve got her because of you, you stupid cow, you stupid fucking bitch!”
Mrs. Neumann stared steadily at him. She kept blinking her eyes, and the brightness that had blinded her began to fade. She was in a laundry room in a basement. A white washer and dryer sat on a ledge; in a corner of the room she saw the top of a submersible sump pump. An electric box of gray metal on one wall. Pipes. A washer tub. Ordinary and horrible. There was no window in the room.
“What kind of code did you give her?”
“What a couple of amateurs,” she snapped. She had made her peace with her fear. She still felt afraid, but she knew it was a temporary condition. In a little while, perhaps in the next moment, Bill Andrews would kill her. The thought of her own death terrified her, but the thought of not seeing Leo every again terrified her more.
She would not be afraid.
“What are you? Spies? Revolutionaries? Or do you just get paid by the KGB so you can keep living your middle-class lives?”
“I’m going to kill you.”
“Yes.” She talked to keep away the fear; she would not plead with him. She tried to fix her eye on the electrical box. Gray. Metal. Box. Wall. “But it doesn’t matter. They’ve got you.”
“So what? They can’t do anything in time. There’s no time left. Thirty-six hours and it will all be over.”
“God, I despise you. How could you work for them?”
“Not them, for my country, for peace.”
“You’re a traitor, a goddamn traitor.”
“People like you are never going to understand.”
“I understand what you are.”
“Get down. I’m going to kill you. Get down on your knees.”
“Go to hell.”
But he pulled the chain abruptly and she stumbled on the cold cement floor and fell, scraping her knees. She struggled up.
“You can go to hell!” she cried out.
He raised the black gun barrel, and she closed her eyes. She thought of a prayer, the only prayer she had ever known:
A child’s prayer. She saw a macramé holder in the window of memory. There was snow on the ground, it was a wheat field in winter, and on the wall was a copy of the prayer lettered above a soft portrait of a child on its knees at bedside, praying with eyes closed.