4–5 Nov 76—PARIS–ZURICH
He had left bread and cheese on the table by the bed and stared at her sleeping. Then he had left as quietly as he entered. He had gone into the streets and set up a trail to see if there were followers.
He walked all over Paris in the rain. The rain was lighter now and it just wet his face and he could have wiped it away with the palm of his hand.
He did not come back until after midnight and she was waiting for him. She had been reading a book. She had removed her dress and sat in bed in a small white bra, covered by the blanket to the waist. She had glanced up when he entered and put the book on her lap.
“I thought you might not be coming back.”
“I was making a trail. To see if anyone was following it.”
“You’re very careful, aren’t you?”
“No. I just don’t like this.”
“What don’t you like? Me?”
“I mean, I don’t like this.” He went to the open window. The rain had stopped. The night was still and it smelled sweet because the rain had cleansed the world. The light from the single bulb was dim and the shadows in the room were huge.
“Why don’t you get in bed with me and we can talk.”
“I don’t want to sleep with you,” Devereaux said. But he didn’t look at her. He stood at the window and looked down the narrow street to the place where the prostitute stood every night under the street lamp and to the other place where the clochard pitched his mattress each evening. The clochard had found some place indoors; so had the prostitute. “I want to know where Kurt is.”
“Kurt is where Kurt is. He wants to see that you have a clean trail.”
He turned and looked at her. “I don’t believe you.”
“I’m really who I say I am,” she said.
“Why do you want to make love then? Why are we here? Why don’t we go and find Kurt?”
“He’ll find us, I told you. If you want to go, then we can leave tomorrow night. We take the overnight train to Zurich.”
“You came to Paris to pick me up and take me back to Zurich with you? This is absurd,” Devereaux said. He shook his head. No worry about finding danger now. It was in the room, in the shadows, waiting on the street, under the bed. In the body of the young woman with small breasts and a boyish haircut and large brown eyes.
“It is not absurd,” she said. “You’re the conductor for safe passage. When it is safe, Kurt will know. And you take him safe to America.”
“I take him safe to the rue de Scribe,” Devereaux said.
“And I tell you what Kurt tells me to do,” Ruth said in that final way that Germans have.
He was alone. He had not liked or trusted Pendleton. He had separated himself and gone into black and purchased a pistol on the illegal market. He had threatened a Section watcher on the street. All right, he had cut himself off and now he was talking to a German schoolgirl who might be death incarnate. He realized he was fingering the trigger guard of the automatic in his coat while he looked at her.
“Kurt is in danger.” Softer in tone. “He would not ask me to do this except for the danger. The Jews want to kill him.”
“Because he helped to kill the Jews.”
She stared at him. There. Just a glimpse of it in the large brown eyes. Devereaux felt reassured by the hatred he saw flame up.
“He is what you are. A spy does for his country.”
“So they say.”
“Did you ever kill anyone?”
Let me think. The first was a boy in Thailand with a bomb in his trousers. The second was… who was the second? The third. Devereaux closed his eyes. Dead bodies on metal tables with bullet punctures and slit throats. Opened his eyes.
“I take you to Zurich. If it is right, then Kurt will go with you to America.”
“What will you do?”
“I will go home.”
“Where is home?”
“In Leipzig.”
“Kurt lives in Leipzig?”
“Kurt lives in many places. Home is in Leipzig.”
“Mother? Father?”
“My father was Otto Sauer. He is dead. Kurt’s father was Ernst Heinemann and he is dead, too. He is dead in America. Kurt was a little boy in America and when his father is dead, my mother—our mother—goes home. To Leipzig.”
“In the German Democratic Republic.”
“It is hard sometimes but it is good, life is good.” Said with the German stamp of approval.
“So you’re a good communist.”
“I am what I am,” she said.
“What are you, Ruth?”
“I am his sister,” she said. “That’s what I am.” She stared at him. “You do not have to be so hard to me. I am only his message to you. He does not trust, you do not trust, you are alike. I cannot think how anyone can live with so many doubts.”
“Why do you want me to sleep with you?”
A question. It hung in the still air of the midnight room.
“Do I have to say?”
Devereaux released the grip of the pistol in his pocket. “Go to sleep, Ruth. In the morning, we can talk about where to go.”
“What will you do?”
“Nothing. Take a walk. Breathe the night air. The rain has stopped.”
“Don’t leave me,” she said. “I am not so brave.”
And he saw it was true.
He went to her and sat down next to her on the bed and he put his arms around her and held her. Then he pulled the cover up to her chin.
“Don’t leave me,” she said.
“No,” he said.
He sat on the bed and watched her until she fell asleep. Then he crossed to the windows and pulled up a single straight chair. He took off his shoes and put his stockinged feet on the window ledge and looked at the narrow landscape of the city street. He sat and, after a while, he dozed. Without dreams this time. He would awaken and shake his head and then doze again. In this way he spent the rest of the night. He was not aware of her in the moments when she woke up and stared at him for a long time before falling asleep again.
During the day, he bought her croissants and cafés and they went to the Louvre. The day was bright and crisp and Paris was as beautiful as a storybook drawing.
The train left the Gare de l’Est at eleven thirty each evening. She held his arm and he carried both bags. They paid for a compartment on the half-empty train and the wagons-lits attendant took their passports and promised to wake them just before they arrived in Zurich at six in the morning. He would see they were not disturbed and the passports were stamped at the Swiss border.
“We won’t be disturbed,” she said to him once they closed the door of the compartment. “And there is no chair for you to sit in.”
He smiled at her. She had toured Paris with a heartbreaking enthusiasm that stirred Devereaux. This couldn’t be all fake. He wanted to keep his edge because there was something so wrong about this but she kept blunting the edge with her smiles and little hugs and large-eyed wonder as she toured the stately rooms of the art museum. She overwhelmed him.
“I’m going to stand outside,” Devereaux said.
“Are you afraid of me?”
“No. Outside the train until we leave. Just to watch the trail,” he said.
When he returned the express was rocketing through the eastern suburbs into the French countryside. The night was clear and the bright moonlight painted ghostly fields. He waited in the corridor of the sleeping car for a while, expecting anything. And then he could not wait any longer.
She was in the top bunk, covered to her neck with blankets.
He took off his trousers and shirt and hung them on the door. He slipped into the lower bunk in his shorts.
He lay there with his eyes open and he thought about the girl above him.
He expected it.
Her naked foot was on the ladder and then she stood a moment beside the lower bunk before she pulled down her white panties. He touched her naked belly with his hand; he could not see her face above the bunk line. She pressed her small, slightly rounded belly against his hand and he rubbed her there in slow circles. She took his hand; he still could not see her face. She put his hand between her legs and he felt her there and felt the wetness. She made a sound then that was the sound of wanting and contentment at the same time.
The compartment was locked but doors could be forced. He thought about the pistol in the pocket of his coat hanging on the door. Put the pistol beneath the pillow. Be prepared.
She bent over him and then crawled into the lower bunk. She kissed him, her hands behind his head, pressing herself against him on the covers and licking at his tongue with her tongue.
Security. An agent could crash the door in five seconds with the right pick. Or use the attendant’s key, explain the couple were wanted in connection with a robbery…
“Take those off,” she whispered. The voice was really a growl by now and he pushed down his shorts. She touched him, held him in her right hand, and then she bent over him and took him in her mouth. She made another sound.
The train rocked back and forth through the night. The moon made shadows beneath trees and farm fences and hedgerows. The train was sealed like a secret. The blue nightlight in the compartment only made the darkness more visible.
She lifted her mouth back to his lips and he wanted her very much. He moved over her and was between her legs and he let her lap feel the weight of his body settle on her. She groaned now but there was so much hunger in it that it sounded like a roar to him.
They made love.
After they made love, she told him about Kurt. She said that Kurt was a good man who loved his country and his mother and his half sister and took care of them. He could even arrange for Mother to shop in the special stores. He would come back from Moscow with furs for them but Mother never wore her fur hat because she did not want to assume airs. Mother had buried two husbands in two different countries and she had known all the horrors of modern times, from the time of the war to the Russian liberation to the refugee camps…
Everything she said could be a lie, Devereaux thought, except there was too much.
They made love again after they both awoke from a light sleep. They made love more slowly. Ruth Sauer wanted this and then that and he gave them to her. She asked him what he wanted and he did not say it in words but she felt the pressure of his hands and his body and she gave those things to him that he wanted.
They were asleep in each other’s arms when the attendant knocked at the door. They rose like guilty people and dressed apart, not looking at each other.
The attendant brought them their stamped passports and coffee and croissants. The croissants were large, flabby Swiss ones and the coffee was ordinary, not at all like coffee in Paris.
The Bahnhof bustled, even at six in the morning. Trains were launched across Europe from this place. Cheerful Swiss newspapers with gaudy red headlines crammed the stands next to even gaudier German papers and sober gray sheets from Britain. The world bustled inside the concourse; outside, the city was still dozing beneath the clock tower of Saint Peter and the Alpine peaks all around.
“Where do we go now?”
Ruth looked at him. They had left their bags in the left luggage. She seemed different now because she had broken him down, penetrated, made him surrender suspicions even for a little while in a locked compartment on an overnight train.
“There’s a place we go in the old town,” she said. “Come on.”
“We can take a taxi—”
“No. We must walk. Maybe Kurt is watching us now, watching the trail—”
Devereaux felt absurd and exposed again. Of course Kurt could be watching. So could Mossad. So could KGB and anyone else who might want to kill a German terrorist about to defect. Or capture an American spy. What would Hanley say when Devereaux disappeared into Lubyanka prison in Moscow? What would Pendleton explain in his report but that Devereaux went into black against instructions and it was no business of Pendleton’s from then on?
They walked down the Bahnhofstrasse toward the lake. The dawn was drab because the sun takes a long time to rise above mountains. The dingy air did not conceal the glitter of the street. So many watches and furs and rich people’s things were arrayed behind thick glass displays.
“How can you go home?” The thought had nagged him from the first.
“I am nothing,” she said. “Not Stasi, not nothing. Nothing will touch me, we are Germans after all, not barbarians like the Rumanians. If Kurt must go to America, he must go to America.”
“But you don’t want to go.”
“I am a German.”
“I don’t understand you. Any of this.”
She stopped and looked at him and held both his arms on her hands. “I am what I am.”
“What are you?”
“I do this for Kurt, except I make love to you for me. That was mine. You are pretty, November. You have cold eyes but they are clear and your teeth are pretty. I felt your arm and it was very strong and then you said you were not careful, only afraid. Only a strong man can say he is afraid. So I wanted to see you naked and to feel how you could make love to me. That is all this is. That is honest. Kurt is honest. He must become safe and he does what he must. That is all, November; life is not so complicated.” She smiled in the way of women smiling at foolish men.
They walked all the way to the Züricher Zee. The swans were nestling in the water at the retaining wall. Drug addicts were smoking on the bridge, living off their highs of the evening. The druggies watched the girl and the man pass them. Devereaux looked into every face.
They went into the tangle of old streets and walked in the middle of the road because the streets were so narrow and because Devereaux did not want to be close to shadowed entrances. He gripped the pistol in his coat and flicked the safety. She seemed not to hear the click.
A small wooden sign: Gasthaus.
She took a key out of her pocket.
Devereaux wet his lips. He was trusting her and that was stupid, all of it was stupid from the fat Cadillac at the airport to this place on a Zurich morning.
The key led to a courtyard to a narrow entrance at the back and an unlocked door. The door led into a corridor full of more doors. She used another key on another door at the end of the corridor and opened to a large, windowless room. There was a bed with a featherbed on it and a dresser without a mirror. She turned on the wall light and illuminated the room.
“Now we wait,” she said.
“For what?”
“For Kurt.”
She closed the door. The lock clicked. A room without windows, typical of rooms behind the garish clubs of the red-light district. Rooms for prostitutes and their customers, without a view but with a modicum of privacy.
She said, “I would like to make love to you again.”
“Your brother might walk in.” He waited.
She bit her lip. “He might walk in,” she said.
So she didn’t know. Devereaux watched her thinking about it. Now she really was a girl again, thinking about an illicit rendezvous with a stranger, thinking about how to get away with it. It reassured him in that moment. Maybe everything was true.
He thought that as the door burst open.
Two men in stocking masks.
Uzis.
He registered this and fired through his coat.
The second man grabbed Ruth by the throat and she screamed.
The bullet struck the first man in the face and it exploded in the confines of the nylon stocking like a tomato dropped on concrete.
The second man pushed Ruth on the bed and turned the Uzi toward Devereaux just as Devereaux fired twice more. The Uzi sputtered a streak across the ceiling, smashing plaster into snow. He was dead as he hit the floor and Ruth was screaming and couldn’t stop.
He grabbed her arm and still she couldn’t stop. He slapped her hard.
She stared at him.
“Where’s Kurt?” he said.
“I don’t know—”
He hit her, and not to stop her screaming. He hit her to hurt her. She flinched and he hit her again. His eyes were colored by the killing. Two men dead and he could smell the powder in the room and his eyes glittered because of the killing.
“Where is he?”
“He told me to wait here, he told me—”
“You fucking liar,” Devereaux said. He looked at the dead men. KGB or Mossad, what did it matter, this was some kind of a setup and he was the stooge and she was the lure and—
Her nose was bleeding. Blood on her teeth. She wiped at it and there were tears in her eyes. “They were going to kill us,” she said.
Maybe it was true.
He saw his hand was shaking even though it held the pistol. He was feeling it as suddenly as deceleration from a high speed, feeling the pressure on his face and kidneys. He wanted to beat her until she told him the truth but there were dead men on the floor.
He grabbed her arm and pulled her roughly over the bodies and through the open, splintered door. The corridor was empty.
“Come on,” he said. He half dragged her down the corridor.
“We have to wait—”
He turned to her then.
Which was why he didn’t see the opening door behind him.
Didn’t even feel the blow except to see black expanding from the edges of her wide-eyed, innocent face as he crumpled to the floor.