Webster started to close the briefcase, then snapped his fingers and reached inside it for a copy of France-Soir, folded to the crime page. He handed Christopher the newspaper, tapping a small item with his forefinger. “I almost forgot to show you this,” he said.
Christopher read the item:
DEATH OF A CRIMINAL
About eleven o’clock last night, police were summoned to the public lavatories near the place Clemenceau to provide assistance to a man who had been found unconscious inside.
The attendant, Mile. R. Calamier, told the guardians of the peace that the man entered a compartment about 10:15. Shortly thereafter, Mile. Calamier, who was cleaning the women’s portion of the public facility, heard sounds of a struggle through the partition.
It was a few moments later that Mile. Calamier found the unconscious man, or the man she believed to be unconscious, in the compartment and summoned policemen on duty nearby.
The investigating officers found that the man was, in fact, dead. He had been struck a hard blow on the nape, judo-style. Police suspected at first that it was an affair of perverts.
However, medical examination revealed that the victim had died from a massive overdose of heroin. A portion of the hypodermic needle used to administer the fatal dosage was found in his arm, perhaps broken in the struggle that preceded his death. The police physician was not of the opinion that the deceased was a heroin addict: his body bore none of the usual signs of that habit, apart from the single fresh puncture in the forearm.
The victim was said to be Jean-Claude Gaboni, a Corsican born in Algeria. Gaboni was known to the police as a criminal type involved in the traffic in drugs. An investigation is in progress.
“You see?” Webster said. “Sometimes poetic justice triumphs.”
Christopher handed back the newspaper. It had been six days since he had told the Truong toe about Gaboni, three days since the Truong toe had given him Molly’s photograph. They were moving no more quickly than he’d thought they could.
“Do you still have Kim’s place bugged?” Christopher asked.
“Yes.”
“You may hear something about Gaboni on those tapes. If you hear anything about me, or about Molly, I hope you’ll let me know.”
“We’re always a week behind on the logs because of the translation problem. They talk Vietnamese all the time.”
“That’s terrific,” Christopher said.
“Wait a minute,” Webster said. “How would Kim know about Gaboni?”
“I told them in Saigon about that mistake with young Khoi in Divonne-les-Bains.”
“You told them? Why, for Christ’s sake?”
“You have to give something to get something,” Christopher said. “I wondered if they’d kill on foreign soil and how quickly. Now I know.”
Molly packed her suitcases without speaking. She laid Christopher’s ski clothes on top of her own in an extra bag. “I suppose there’s some remote chance we’ll both be alive on New Year’s Eve,” she said. “If you come to the mountains you’ll be properly dressed.”
“The worst thing you can do is dramatize,” Christopher said. “I have to go away at least twice in the next few days and I can’t leave you alone. You’ll be all right with Tom and Sybille. They’re used to this kind of situation. They know what to do.”
“And what does one do?”
“Routine precautions,” Christopher said. “A doctor working in a cholera epidemic takes the necessary injections, boils his drinking water, burns his clothes. It’s the same idea-the play-acting, the secrecy, and the codes, and the loud music so that you can talk in a room that may be bugged-all that is the way agents immunize themselves. They may die anyway, but if they take the proper precautions, the chances are against it.”
“All right,” Molly said. “But all this business of solving the crime of the century annoys me so. It’s an interruption. It’s almost Christmas, Paul. I thought we’d be together. I build up these scenes for the two of us in my imagination, and then they don’t play.”
“I promise you I’ll be in Zermatt on New Year’s Eve. It’s a much better holiday than Christmas.”
Molly closed her eyes and put her fingertips on the lids. “I have to be so passive-all our life together I’ve waited for you to come back, waited for you to feel love, waited for you to speak,” she said. “Now I have to wait for you to prevent my dying, and the odd thing is, I’m less concerned about being murdered than about being alone for a week.”
“It’ll be over very soon.”
“I know it will,” Molly said. “Help me to get this stuff off the bed. Before I go I’d like to hold the clean part of you between my legs once more.”
Webster went ahead of them in another car the next morning. They met him on the road to the airport by the ruins of Ostia Antica. Webster turned his back while they kissed, and watched the road behind them. There was still no sign of danger.
Christopher wondered what the Truong toe was waiting for.
TEN
l
Christopher was alone, and that was his advantage. He controlled the rhythm of the operation. Driving back to Rome along the Ostia road, he calculated that he had eight days of safe time left. He thought it would be enough. It is almost impossible for a national police force to keep track of a single agent who continues to move, if the agent takes elementary precautions. For Christopher’s opposition, who dared not go outside their own small circle for help, it was hopeless. They could not know where he was going or what he was doing. Their only chance was to catch Christopher in the open and kill him. He didn’t think they would be able to do that.
He parked his car near the railroad station in a no-parking zone. After he had checked his baggage, he called the police and complained that the car was blocking traffic. By the time he made two more phone calls, the police wrecker arrived and towed his car away. He knew it would be under twenty-four-hour guard in the impoundment lot outside the walls of the city. It was the last place the Truong toe’s men would look for it.
He phoned the Hertz rental agency in Milan and reserved a car for pickup in the late afternoon. At the telegraph office in the railroad station he sent a money order to a man in Ajaccio with a terse message that reminded him how little his methods differed from Klimenko’s; the thought caused him to smile as he handed in the cable form and the money, and the clerk gave him a puzzled look: it was odd that a man, sending news of a brother’s death in Christmas week, should look so cheerful.
Finally, Christopher checked the train schedule for Milan again and reserved a first-class seat on the 9:40 express. It was still only 7:30 when he walked out of the terminal and took a cab to the Vatican.
2
Alvaro Urpi had never taken holy orders, but he had come to resemble a monk. He waited for Christopher in a corner of the Vatican library, his broad face still shining with the effect of his morning prayers. Urpi was the son of a Portuguese soldier and a Chinese woman, and his dark features were such a combination of Iberian and Cantonese peasantry that he might have passed in either country as a native. He was twelve, and already sexually corrupted, when the priests took him off the streets of Macao and taught him to read and write. Before he was wenty, the Dominicans discovered his talent for scholarship, and he never for the next forty years lived outside the Church, or wanted to.
Urpi spoke and wrote every known dialect of Chinese. He had all but forgotten Portuguese, however, and when Christopher had brought him a letter from a relative in Macao, Urpi had had to construe it into Latin before he could understand it. Urpi’s relative had wanted him to find a place in a nunnery for one of his nieces. The girl had never taken the veil; she went to live with a policeman. But Urpi had rediscovered his family through Christopher.