It was ten minutes to three in the morning when Bourne approached the Auberge du Coin’s front desk, Marie continuing directly to the entrance. To Jason’s relief, there were no newspapers on the counter, but the late night clerk behind it was in the same mold as his predecessor in the center of Paris. He was a balding, heavy-set man with half-closed eyes, leaning back in a chair, his arms folded in front of him, the weary depression of his interminable night hanging over him. But this night, thought Bourne, would be one he’d remember for a long time to come—beyond the damage to an upstairs room, which would not be discovered until morning. A relief night clerk in Montrouge had to have transportation.
“I’ve just called Rouen,” said Jason, his hands on the counter, an angry man, furious with uncontrollable events in his personal world. “I have to leave at once and need to rent a car.”
“Why not?” snorted the man, getting out of the chair. “What would you prefer, monsieur? A golden chariot or a magic carpet?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“We rent rooms, not automobiles.”
“I must be in Rouen before morning.”
“Impossible. Unless you find a taxi crazy enough at this hour to take you.”
“I don’t think you understand. I could sustain considerable losses and embarrassment if I’m not at my office by eight o’clock. I’m willing to pay generously.”
“You have a problem, monsieur.”
“Surely there’s someone here who would be willing to lend me his car for, say … a thousand, fifteen hundred francs.”
“A thousand … fifteen hundred, monsieur?” The clerk’s half-closed eyes widened until his skin was taut. “In cash, monsieur?”
“Naturally. My companion would return it tomorrow evening.”
“There’s no rush, monsieur.”
“I beg your pardon? Of course, there’s really no reason why I couldn’t hire a taxi. Confidentiality can be paid for.”
“I wouldn’t know where to reach one,” interrupted the clerk in persuasive frenzy. “On the other hand, my Renault is not so new, perhaps, and perhaps, not the fastest machine on the road, but it is a serviceable car, even a worthy car.”
The chameleon had changed his colors again, had been accepted again for someone he was not. But he knew now who he was and he understood.
Daybreak. But there was no warm room at a village inn, no wallpaper mottled by the early light streaking through a window, filtered by the weaving leaves outside. Rather, the first rays of the sun spread up from the east, crowning the French countryside, defining the fields and hills of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. They sat in the small car parked off the shoulder of a deserted back road, cigarette smoke curling out through the partially open windows.
He had begun that first narrative in Switzerland with the words My life began six months ago on a small island in the Mediterranean called Ile de Port Noir …
He had begun this with a quiet declaration: I’m known as Cain.
He had told it all, leaving out nothing he could remember, including the terrible images that had exploded in his mind when he had heard the words spoken by Jacqueline Lavier in the candlelabraed restaurant in Argenteuil. Names, incidents, cities … assassinations.
“Everything fit. There wasn’t anything I didn’t know, nothing that wasn’t somewhere in the back of my head, trying to get out. It was the truth.”
“It was the truth,” repeated Marie.
He looked closely at her. “We were wrong, don’t you see?”
“Perhaps. But also right. You were right, and I was right.”
“About what?”
“You. I have to say it again, calmly and logically. You offered your life for mine before you knew me; that’s not the decision of a man you’ve described. If that man existed, he doesn’t any longer.” Marie’s eyes pleaded, while her voice remained controlled. “You said it, Jason. ‘What a man can’t remember doesn’t exist. For him.’ Maybe that’s what you’re faced with. Can you walk away from it?”
Bourne nodded; the dreadful moment had come. “Yes,” he said. “But alone. Not with you.”
Marie inhaled on her cigarette, watching him, her hand trembling. “I see. That’s your decision, then?”
“It has to be.”
“You will heroically disappear so I won’t be tainted.”
“I have to.”
“Thank you very much, and who the hell do you think you are?”
“What?”
“Who the hell do you think you are?”
“I’m a man they call Cain. I’m wanted by governments—by the police—from Asia to Europe. Men in Washington want to kill me because of what they think I know about this Medusa; an assassin named Carlos wants me shot in the throat because of what I’ve done to him. Think about it for a moment. How long do you think I can keep running before someone in one of those armies out there finds me, traps me, kills me? Is that the way you want your life to end?”
“Good God, no!” shouted Marie, something obviously very much on her analytical mind. “I intend to rot in a Swiss prison for fifty years or be hanged for things I never did in Zurich!”
“There’s a way to take care of Zurich. I’ve thought about it; I can do it.”
“How?” She stabbed out her cigarette in the ashtray.
“For God’s sake, what difference does it make? A confession. Turning myself in, I don’t know yet, but I can do it! I can put your life back together. I have to put it back!”
“Not that way.”
“Why not?”
Marie reached for his face, her voice now soft once more, the sudden stridency gone. “Because I’ve just proved my point again. Even the condemned man—so sure of his own guilt—should see it. The man called Cain would never do what you just offered to do. For anyone.”
“I am Cain!”
“Even if I were forced to agree that you were, you’re not now.”
“The ultimate rehabilitation? A self-induced lobotomy? Total loss of recall? That happens to be the truth, but it won’t stop anyone who’s looking for me. It won’t stop him—them—from pulling a trigger.”
“That happens to be the worst, and I’m not ready to concede it.”
“Then you’re not looking at the facts.”
“I’m looking at two facts you seem to have disregarded. I can’t. I’ll live with them for the rest of my life because I’m responsible. Two men were killed in the same brutal way because they stood between you and a message someone was trying to send you. Through me.”
“You saw Corbelier’s message. How many bullet holes were there? Ten, fifteen?”
“Then he was used! You heard him on the phone and so did I. He wasn’t lying; he was trying to help us. If not you, certainly me.”
“It’s … possible.”
“Anything’s possible. I have no answers, Jason, only discrepancies, things that can’t be explained—that should be explained. You haven’t once, ever, displayed a need or a drive for what you say you might have been. And without those things a man like that couldn’t be. Or you couldn’t be him.”
“I’m him.”
“Listen to me. You’re very dear to me, my darling, and that could blind me, I know it. But I also know something about myself. I’m no wide-eyed flower child; I’ve seen a share of this world, and I look very hard and very closely at those who attract me. Perhaps to confirm what I like to think are my values—and they are values. Mine, nobody else’s.” She stopped for a moment and moved away from him. “I’ve watched a man being tortured—by himself and by others—and he won’t cry out. You may have silent screams, but you won’t let them be anyone else’s burden but your own. Instead, you probe and dig and try to understand. And that, my friend, is not the mind of a cold-blooded killer, any more than what you’ve done and want to do for me. I don’t know what you were before, or what crimes you’re guilty of, but they’re not what you believe—what others want you to believe. Which brings me back to those values I spoke of. I know myself. I couldn’t love the man you say you are. I love the man I know you are. You just confirmed it again. No killer would make the offer you just made. And that offer, sir, is respectfully rejected.”
“You’re a goddamn fool!” exploded Jason. “I can help you; you can’t help me! Leave me something for Christ’s sake!”
“I won’t! Not that way …” Suddenly Marie broke off. Her lips parted. “I think I just did,” she said, whispering.
“Did what?” asked Bourne angrily.
“Give us both something.” She turned back to him. “I just said it; it’s been there a long time. ‘What others want you to believe …’ ”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Your crimes … what others want you to believe are your crimes.”
“They’re there. They’re mine.”
“Wait a minute. Suppose they were there but they weren’t yours? Suppose the evidence was planted—as expertly as it was planted against me in Zurich—but it belongs to someone else. Jason—you don’t know when you lost your memory.”
“Port Noir.”
“That’s when you began to build one, not when you lost it. Before Port Noir; it could explain so much. It could explain you, the contradiction between you and the man people think you are.”
“You’re wrong. Nothing could explain the memories—the images—that come back to me.”
“Maybe you just remember what you’ve been told,” said Marie. “Over and over and over again. Until there was nothing else. Photographs, recordings, visual and aural stimulae.”
“You’re describing a walking, functioning vegetable who’s been brainwashed. That’s not me.”
She looked at him, speaking gently. “I’m describing an intelligent, very ill man whose background conformed with what other men were looking for. Do you know how easily such a man might be found? They’re in hospitals everywhere, in private sanitoriums, in military wards.” She paused, then continued quickly. “That newspaper article told another truth. I’m reasonably proficient with computers; anyone doing what I do would be. If I were looking for a curve-example that incorporated isolated factors, I’d know how to do it. Conversely, someone looking for a man hospitalized for amnesia, whose background incorporated specific skills, languages, racial characteristics, the medical data banks could provide candidates. God knows, not many in your case; perhaps only a few, perhaps only one. But one man was all they were looking for, all they needed.”
Bourne glanced at the countryside, trying to pry open the steel doors of his mind, trying to find a semblance of the hope she felt. “What you’re saying is that I’m a reproduced illusion,” he said, making the statement flatly.
“That’s the end effect, but it’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying it’s possible you’ve been manipulated. Used. It would explain so much.” She touched his hand. “You tell me there are times when things want to burst out of you—blow your head apart.”
“Words—places, names—they trigger things.”
“Jason, isn’t it possible they trigger the false things? The things you’ve been told over and over again, but you can’t relive. You can’t see them clearly, because they’re not you.”
“I doubt it. I’ve seen what I can do. I’ve done them before.”
“You could have done them for other reasons!… Goddamn you, I’m fighting for my life! For both our lives!… All right! You can think, you can feel. Think now, feel now! Look at me and tell me you’ve looked inside yourself, inside your thoughts and feelings, and you know without a doubt you’re an assassin called Cain! If you can do that—really do that—then bring me to Zurich, take the blame for everything, and get out of my life! But if you can’t, stay with me and let me help you. And love me, for God’s sake. Love me, Jason.”
Bourne took her hand, holding it firmly, as one might an angry, trembling child’s. “It’s not a question of feeling or thinking. I saw the account at the Gemeinschaft; the entries go back a long time. They correspond with all the things I’ve learned.”
“But that account, those entries, could have been created yesterday, or last week, or six months ago. Everything you’ve heard and read about yourself could be part of a pattern designed by those who want you to take Cain’s place. You’re not Cain, but they want you to think you are, want others to think you are. But there’s someone out there who knows you’re not Cain and he’s trying to tell you. I have my proof, too. My lover’s alive, but two friends are dead because they got between you and the one who’s sending you the message, who’s trying to save your life. They were killed by the same people who want to sacrifice you to Carlos in place of Cain. You said before that everything fit. It didn’t, Jason, but this does! It explains you.”
“A hollow shell who doesn’t even own the memories he thinks he has? With demons running around inside kicking hell out of the walls? It’s not a pleasant prospect.”
“Those aren’t demons, my darling. They’re parts of you—angry, furious, screaming to get out because they don’t belong in the shell you’ve given them.”
“And if I blow that shell apart, what’ll I find?”
“Many things. Some good, some bad, a great deal that’s been hurt. But Cain won’t be there, I promise you that. I believe in you, my darling. Please don’t give up.”
He kept his distance, a glass wall between them. “And if we’re wrong? Finally wrong? What then?”
“Leave me quickly. Or kill me. I don’t care.”
“I love you.”
“I know. That’s why I’m not afraid.”
“I found two telephone numbers in Lavier’s office. The first was for Zurich, the other here in Paris. With any luck, they can lead me to the one number I need.”
“New York? Treadstone?”
“Yes. The answer’s there. If I’m not Cain, someone at that number knows who I am.”
They drove back to Paris on the assumption that they would be far less obvious among the crowds of the city than in an isolated country inn. A blond-haired man wearing tortoise-shell glasses, and a striking but stern-faced woman, devoid of makeup, and with her hair pulled back like an intense graduate student at the Sorbonne, were not out of place in Montmartre. They took a room at the Terrasse on the rue de Maistre, registering as a married couple from Brussels.
In the room, they stood for a moment, no words necessary for what each was seeing and feeling. They came together, touching, holding, closing out the abusive world that refused them peace, that kept them balancing on taut wires next to one another, high above a dark abyss; if either fell, it was the end for both.
Bourne could not change his color for the immediate moment. It would be false, and there was no room for artifice. “We need some rest,” he said. “We’ve got to get some sleep. It’s going to be a long day.”
They made love. Gently, completely, each with the other in the warm, rhythmic comfort of the bed. And there was a moment, a foolish moment, when adjustment of an angle was breathlessly necessary and they laughed. It was a quiet laugh, at first even an embarrassed laugh, but the observation was there, the appraisal of foolishness intrinsic to something very deep between them. They held each other more fiercely when the moment passed, more and more intent on sweeping away the awful sounds and the terrible sights of a dark world that kept them spinning in its winds. They were suddenly breaking out of that world, plunging into a much better one where sunlight and blue water replaced the darkness. They raced toward it feverishly, furiously, and then they burst through and found it.
Spent, they fell asleep, their fingers entwined.
Bourne woke first, aware of the horns and the engines in the Paris traffic below in the streets. He looked at his watch; it was ten past one in the afternoon. They had slept nearly five hours, probably less than they needed, but it was enough. It was going to be a long day. Doing what, he was not sure; he only knew that there were two telephone numbers that had to lead him to a third. In New York.
He turned to Marie, breathing deeply beside him, her face—her striking, lovely face—angled down on the edge of the pillow, her lips parted, inches from his lips. He kissed her and she reached for him, her eyes still closed.
“You’re a frog and I’ll make you a prince,” she said in a sleep-filled voice. “Or is it the other way around?”
“As expanding as it may be, that’s not in my present frame of reference.”
“Then you’ll have to stay a frog. Hop around, little frog. Show off for me.”
“No temptations. I only hop when I’m fed flies.”
“Frogs eat flies? I guess they do. Shudder, that’s awful.”
“Come on, open your eyes. We’ve both got to start hopping. We’ve got to start hunting.”
She blinked and looked at him. “Hunting for what?”
“For me,” he said.
From a telephone booth on the rue Lafayette, a collect call was placed to a number in Zurich by a Mr. Briggs. Bourne reasoned that Jacqueline Lavier would have wasted no time sending out her alarms; one had to have been flashed to Zurich.
When he heard the ring in Switzerland, Jason stepped back and handed the phone to Marie. She knew what to say.
She had no chance to say it. The international operator in Zurich came on the line.
“We regret that the number you have called is no longer in service.”
“It was the other day,” broke in Marie. “This is an emergency, operator. Do you have another number?”
“The telephone is no longer in service, madame. There is no alternate number.”
“I may have been given the wrong one. It’s most urgent. Could you give me the name of the party who had this number?”
“I’m afraid that’s not possible.”
“I told you; it’s an emergency! May I speak with your superior, please?”
“He would not be able to help you. This number is an unpublished listing. Good afternoon, madame.”
The connection was broken. “It’s been disconnected,” she said.
“It took too goddamn long to find that out,” replied Bourne, looking up and down the street. “Let’s get out of here.”
“You think they could have traced it here? In Paris? To a public phone?”
“Within three minutes an exchange can be determined, a district pinpointed. In four, they can narrow the blocks down to half a dozen.”
“How do you know that?”
“I wish I could tell you. Let’s go.”
“Jason. Why not wait out of sight? And watch?”
“Because I don’t know what to watch for and they do. They’ve got a photograph to go by; they could station men all over the area.”
“I don’t look anything like the picture in the papers.”
“Not you. Me. Let’s go!”
They walked rapidly within the erratic ebb and flow of the crowds until they reached the boulevard Malesherbes ten blocks away, and another telephone booth, this with a different exchange from the first. This time there were no operators to go through; this was Paris. Marie stepped inside, coins in her hand and dialed; she was prepared.
But the words that came over the line so astonished her:
“La résidence du Général Villiers. Bonjour?… Allô? Allô?”
For a moment Marie was unable to speak. She simply stared at the telephone. “Je m’excuse,” she whispered. “Une erreur.” She hung up.
“What’s the matter?” asked Bourne, opening the glass door. “What happened? Who was it?”
“It doesn’t make sense,” she said. “I just reached the house of one of the most respected and powerful men in France.”