He groped for the telephone on the nightstand at the side of the ornate oak bed. The room was clammy and cold. Outside, in the half-light of a gloomy dawn, rain fell straight down in the sheets on the old city. It had been a moody June, full of rain and sudden thunderstorms, oppressive with long, steamy days of muggy weather beneath ever-present gray clouds.
Simeon grunted his hello.
It was not common to receive a call in his apartment. Few people had his number, and it was changed every five weeks in any case. Fewer still at the Bureau would disturb him at this ungodly hour.
It was a woman’s voice.
“I want to meet you.”
He waited; he did not speak; his breathing sounded heavy to himself. The gray windows were streaked with rain.
“Will you meet me?”
“I have nothing to say to you, madame.”
“You know me.”
“I know your voice.”
“Then will you meet me?”
“No, madame; I do not see the profit of that.” He held the ornate receiver in his hand; his mind was racing. The line was not bugged although she could tap the line; but for what purpose? She had been discredited in the government, she had resigned and placed herself beyond the pale of respectable radicalism again. What did she want of him?
Except revenge.
“I will meet you anyplace,” she said. Her voice was dull, even strange; but Simeon thought it must be the connection. It was merely the storm.
“We have nothing to say to each other, madame,” Simeon said at last. No, it was better not to be involved with her. If she proved a problem, much later, he could deal with her quietly.
“Your son, David,” she said.
For the first time since the breakup of the terror network, Simeon felt a momentary pang of fear. But he said nothing; he was a hard man in a hard service, and he would not speak his fear.
“He is at Rouen,” she said.
“Madame Clermont, you threaten me?”
“Yes.”
“What have you done?”
“Nothing. I want you, Simeon, only you. But I will do what I have to do to get you.”
“Are you insane?”
Now she waited.
“Madame?”
But only silence lay between them.
He thought then of David, working alone at Rouen; he was not part of any of this. If Simeon loved — and Simeon was certain he had loved in his life — then he loved David.
“What do you want?”
“I want to see you,” she continued patiently. “I want you to explain to me why you killed William.”
“I did not, madame.”
“But I know you did. I am not in the government now, monsieur. I am not a court. I do not need proofs and bits of evidence. It only remains for me to be convinced that you killed him, and I am convinced.”
He listened, but heard only the crackling on the telephone line.
She was a terrorist still, he thought then; what act of terror would be beyond her? She was an enemy of the State.
Simeon thought those things without any contradiction in conscience. He had never confused his duties to France and his requirements as the paid contractor for the Soviet Union. One did not threaten the other. If he became moderately wealthy in his dual roles, then it was not more than what he deserved.
But Madame Clermont was out of control now.
“Where will you have me meet you, madame?” he said at last.
He waited for the trap she would spring — a room on some obscure street, a place where she could gain the advantage over him.
“Should we meet at Versailles?”
“What?”
“At eleven this morning, in the garden. Do you know the place by the Grand Trianon? I will wait for you there alone.”
“Why do you choose that place?”
“But you favor Versailles, monsieur.” The voice was flat but not without irony. “A place for your paid terrorists. A place for kings, it’s all the same. Government and terror are part of the same village.”
He did not understand anything she said. He thought of the gardens in his mind’s eye. There would be no trap. The gardens were open, he could approach her alone and determine that she was alone. After all, he was the chief of the antiterror bureau and she had proven to him that she was a terrorist. It would not be so difficult. His moment of fear was past. He was certain again.
Versailles was a dreary suburb of Paris, sleepy in its habits, existing off the tourists who poured through in the hundreds of thousands to see the great palace and grounds erected by the Sun King, Louis the Fourteenth. Louis had chosen Versailles to escape from the mad dictates of the Paris mob, which had always cowed French kings. He had constructed a carefully balanced world at Versailles where the tensions of court society were exactly matched; it was an artificial world in a palace where Louis stood at the head of all events. And the artificial world had endured until those same raging Parisian mobs killed Louis’s grandson and stormed the palace and grounds. The palace and the vast formal gardens beyond remained a peculiar landmark of power — of kings and mobs.
None of these ironies occurred to Simeon as he pulled up at the edge of the gardens behind the vast palace buildings.
It was shortly before eleven and it was still raining. The rain slanted across the legion-perfect rows of formally cut trees in the immense gardens.
The gardens were separated by two great canals that intersected and formed a cross. At the right edge of the transverse of the cross was the piazza that led to the Grand and Petit Trianons, the little palaces on the grounds constructed as palaces for kings to tryst with their lovers. The piazza was approached by stone steps that led up from the “little” canal, so called because it was smaller than the upright of the cross of water called the Grand Canal.
He crossed the grounds slowly beneath the umbrellas of the trees. Here the grass did not grow and the ground was not so wet. For three hundred years the stately trees had grown according to the plan of a king.
Simeon felt for the Walther PPK in his pocket. It was a very precise pistol and Simeon was a very good shot with it. He understood what he would do. If Madame Clermont was ignored, she would strike at him, perhaps with an act of terror against his son or himself. She could not be ignored.
Simeon, during the long drive from the capitol, had thought the matter over and decided that Madame Clermont was mad.
Devereaux had made a reservation on the Concorde for his return to Washington. Despite the rain, Devereaux had been assured by the woman at Air France that the flight of Concorde for Washington would leave as scheduled that afternoon.
Now he finished packing his single bag in the small hotel room and again considered the rain falling relentlessly beyond his window. He felt vaguely unsettled, as though there had been no resolution to the problem presented to him by Hanley on that flight to JFK airport.
“But there are no solutions,” Hanley had told him once. “There are only little moments when you can lift your head up out of the mud and see that you are still surrounded by mud.”
The speech by Hanley on the transatlantic line had amused Devereaux. “Your new power has changed your way of talking.”
“No,” Hanley had said then. “I always thought these things, you know.”
The bag was closed on the rumpled bed. Devereaux slipped on his soiled raincoat. It was just after ten in the morning; he would have plenty of time to get to de Gaulle airport.
There was a knock at the door.
He opened it, and the concierge of the small hotel stood before him. She wore a perpetual frown, but Devereaux ignored it; it was the professional frown of the Parisian in service.
“Monsieur Devereaux,” she said. “This message was to be given to you at ten o’clock.”