TWENTY-TWO

LYON

JACOB STREIK PULLED HIS CAR TO THE SIDE OF THE ROAD. HE LOOKED at the road sign blearily. Lyon 36km. What was that – about twenty miles? He’d never been at ease in the metrical world in spite of the years he’d spent going in and out of Eastern Europe. It was as if he wanted to retain a part of himself that was just plain old American, a guy happy with ounces and yards and pints. Yessiree.

OK. He’d find a phone book somewhere. He’d look up Audrey’s number. He’d call. But he’d be circumspect, he’d use one of their old codes. And if there was any kind of problem she’d let him know. That was Audrey. Loyal. Consistent. She wouldn’t let him down.

He continued to drive. Fifteen kilometres from the city limits he parked at a filling station. The afternoon had turned dark, a cold wind blew across the narrow highway, the stripped branches of trees roared in a field where a lonesome horse stared at him with a frigid baleful look.

He hurried inside the public call-box. There was no directory. No goddam directory! He dashed across the forecourt, battered by the wind. A squeaking fuel sign swung back and forth overhead. He hesitated for a while before he decided to risk going inside the station. What if? What if his face was famous, notorious all across France? Shit, he needed to get to a phone book.

Sucking air deeply, he went in the building, a concrete box, where an old geezer with an oxygen bottle attached by plastic tubes to his nose was writing in a ledger. He raised his face at Streik. The bottle, fixed by a harness to his side, made a slight hissing sound, like a bad lung.

‘Monsieur?’ he asked in a raw voice.

‘You speak English?’

‘Anglais? Non. Pas d’anglais. Je regrette.’

‘OK. Watch my hands.’ Streik mimed making a phone call. The old guy smiled and pointed across the forecourt to the call-box.

Streik sighed and tried to be patient. ‘Look. There’s no directory. Understand? No phone book. No … Christ, no livre.’

‘Livre?’

‘Livre des nombres?’ Streik asked hopefully.

The man pondered Streik’s words; he had to be in an advanced state of emphysema. Streik hadn’t heard anyone rattle like this guy before.

‘Nombres du telephone?’ Streik asked.

‘Ah ah ah.’ The old guy opened a drawer and produced a phone directory. Streik began to thumb the pages. He flicked quickly to the Rs. What if she’d married, changed her name? What if she was unlisted? He thumbed through the flimsy sheets. Audrey Audrey, where are you?

R–R–R. He ran his index finger down the names – and there mercifully it was. Rozcak, Audrey. He took out a ballpoint pen and scribbled the number on the back of his hand, then dumped the book on the counter and hurried outside into the black howling wind, which tugged at his jacket, yanked at his pants, threatened to blow him off the face of the earth like a dirigible in a storm. Jacob Streik, lost in space.

Inside the call-box he fumbled with coins, dialled the number, listened to the ringing tone for a long time. She isn’t home, he thought. She’s out. Shopping. Dinner. Possibilities tumbled down the concentrated chute of his brain like silver dollars from a slot machine. And then, praise Jesus, praise Jesus, she answered.

‘Hello.’ The voice was unmistakable, hoarse and smoky.

Streik took a deep breath and asked, ‘I wonder if they have any vacancies at the Adria?’

There was a long pause. Streik tried to picture Audrey’s face and wondered how long it had been since they’d last met. Eight years? Nine?

She said in a whisper, ‘Do you mean the Adria in Wenceslas Square?’

‘Is there any other?’

‘Where the hell are you?’

‘Close. Meet me. I want you to meet me. Name a place, I’ll find it.’

‘You know the area?’

‘Like the backside of the moon.’

‘Rue du Plat. There’s a bookshop. The Eton. Do you think you can find it?’

Streik was assailed by a feeling of being hopelessly lost. Lyon could have been Rio or Adelaide for all he knew. He might venture into the unknown and roam for ever down one-way streets and become trapped in endless grids and never find the Rue du Plat and this Eton bookshop.

She said, ‘Ask anybody for the Place Bellecour if you get lost. Rue du Plat’s right alongside it.’

‘Bellecour.’

‘Right. I’ll wait for you inside the bookshop. There’s underground parking at the Place, if that’s any help.’ She hung up.

Streik stepped out of the call-box and hurried to his car. The horse in the field was gazing at him as if they were comrades in adversity, man and horse against the fiendish elements. Streik wished he could saddle the beast and ride off to far horizons. Hi-ho, Silver.

He got in his car. Paralysis gripped him. He shut his eyes and laid his damp forehead against the steering wheel and saw with great clarity the eager young face of the German hitch-hiker and suddenly he was consumed by sorrow and guilt. He remembered firing the pistol and seeing the kid fall, remembered the ID card in the wallet; he felt sick to his heart. All this was strange to him, this struggle with conscience. Nerves, that was it. I don’t have time for this, this is too much of a luxury, this wallowing. He heard the wind whip round the car, watched the fuel sign swing, a metal disc brutalized by the weather.

The Adria in Wenceslas Square. Old passwords, old keys. Often they were different. Would you recommend the Koruna Hotel at Opatovicka 16? How’s the grub at the Restaurace V Krakovske? Krak. Kracking up.

He rolled down his window and let the biting air have his face. The wind stung his eyes, clawed his nose and lips. What if Audrey was being followed? What if she was being watched? No. She’d have said something on the phone. Most assuredly she’d have found a way of warning him. That was Audrey. She wouldn’t let him walk into a trap. Unless. Unless she didn’t know she was being watched. No way. She had terrific instincts about such things. She had a brain like a goddam satellite dish, always picking things up out of the clear blue nowhere.

He closed the window, studied his crumpled map. Downtown Lyon looked like a maze of streets surrounded by two rivers, the Rhône and the Saône. On a long skinny peninsula he located the Place Bellecour. Orientation time. OK. It’s simple. Just concentrate, follow the signs.

He started the car, headed along the highway. The wind was so strong the Saab swayed and shook. Streik had the feeling he was riding inside a paper jet.

The countryside disappeared. Buildings rose on either side of him. He was travelling a freeway, three lanes, cars whizzing past him with complete disregard. He had a moment in which he felt the security of anonymity, surrounded as he was by industrial buildings, billboards, apartment towers. This was a big city, he was just another prole lost in the great slipstream of things. This was a comfort.

He came off the motorway at a sign that read Centre Ville. There was a sudden proliferation of signposts. He picked out one that simply said Bellecour and he headed that way. He found himself driving along a riverbank, but he wasn’t sure now if it was the Rhône or the Saône. If it was the Saône, then did he turn left or right? If it was the Rhône, what did he do? He was aware of terraced buildings rising into trees on the far bank of the river, and some kind of illuminated church seemingly floating in the murky light of late afternoon. But landmarks meant nothing if you were lost.

He braked and tried to glance at the map on the passenger seat, causing impatient drivers behind him to lean on their horns. He was disconcerted, impatient, flustered. He wanted to roll down his window and tell them to go fuck off, but instead he took a quick right and found himself in a narrow street. Pedestrians strolled nonchalantly along. A couple of lovers picked at food from a McDonald’s bag, and Streik felt a twinge of homesickness. He yearned for an Egg McMuffin, something that tasted truly chemical, untainted by garlic.

He came to a no entry sign. A pedestrian precinct. Shit. Now he’d have to back up, which complicated everything. He thought of simply abandoning the goddam Saab and taking off on foot, but there were his clothes in the boot, and all the documents he’d collected, and he couldn’t just walk away from that stuff. Keep cool, he thought. Take your time. Look at the map. Get your bearings.

Something thudded against the back window of the car and instinctively he ducked his head down. He saw a bunch of kids gather up a soccer ball alongside the car. They looked at him regretfully. A ball, he thought. It was only a ball. But it might have been a bullet, a grenade, anything. He felt vulnerable. He listened to the ricochet of the ball as the kids knocked it against the wall of an old church and he thought of an automatic weapon being fired. Get the hell out of here, Jake.

He glanced at the church. A sign informed him that it was the church of St-Martin d’Ainay. According to his map, Place Bellecour was only a few blocks away. He put the Saab in reverse, turned it in a tight circle, drove back the way he’d come. He saw frozen boozers passing a bottle of purple wine back and forth in the Square JanMot on the corner of the Quai de Tilsitt, a bleak little wintry cameo. He stared at the runny eyes of one of the alkies and felt an affinity for people who find the world too much for them.

He travelled the Quai de Tilsitt, saw a sign for Bellecour, and took a right which led him directly to a large open square hemmed by trees. The centre of the Place Bellecour was dominated by a statue of some dude on a horse, some kind of general or king sculpted out of greenish metal. Streik steered the car around the square, looking for a place to park.

When he reached the corner of the Place Poncet he found a space and slid into it clumsily. He got out, grabbed his map, locked the car. OK, he didn’t have far to go now. He had only to find the Rue du Plat. The Eton Bookshop. Don’t look like you’re panicky, like your head is about to explode, just go gently.

He studied the map discreetly, kept walking, nerves tingling, throat held in a tight lassoo. He looked this way and that, as if he might just spot anyone tracking him. A man was lingering with a newspaper outside the Yves Saint Laurent shop and raised his face and seemed to stare at Streik a moment – but they didn’t do that kind of thing, they didn’t hide behind newspapers or hang out on street corners smoking pipes, that was all myth. If they found you, they swooped, and that was the end of it.

He came to a corner of the Place Bellecour. Along the next block was the entrance to the Rue du Plat. He paused. How could he go directly to this bookshop where Audrey waited? Now he was convinced she’d been bugged and followed. It was a fact of nature, indisputable. To imagine anything else was a violation of reality. He had a sense of being suspended, held aloft by thin silvery strands that couldn’t bear his weight. They’d just snap and he’d fall and go on falling and when he hit the ground he’d be hamburger. He didn’t move. Here, in the big sand-coloured heart of a city totally strange to him, he stood indecisively while traffic zoomed past him into the dark and the smell of frying onions floated from the doorway of the Café Bellecour – and he thought of his life all coming down to this pinpoint, this cruelly sharp angle, this place where the air was scented with onions and exhaust fumes. He was, he thought, trapped. Cornered. Onions and gasoline and death.

Instead of heading for the Rue du Plat, he walked to the Café Bellecour. He went inside, sat at a table near the door, asked the waitress for a glass of wine. Her English was excellent. He didn’t have to plummet into his awful French. He tapped his fingers on the table, felt very cold far inside. When the waitress brought him his drink, he asked if he could use the telephone. She led him towards the counter by the cash desk, picked up the receiver, held it toward him. Something in his manner must have been obvious to her because she gave him a look of pity and asked, ‘Who do you wish to call, monsieur?’

He told her the name of the bookshop. She looked up the number, dialled it for him, handed him the phone. He thanked her.

‘Eton Bookshop,’ a man’s voice said.

‘You speak English?’ Streik asked.

‘This is an English bookshop, monsieur,’ the man answered.

‘Do me a favour. Look around. Is there a woman in your shop? A customer?’

‘There is.’

‘Is she late fortyish?’

‘Fortyish? Monsieur, I would not presume to guess a woman’s age.’

‘Lemme speak to her, please.’

There was a silence. Then he heard Audrey’s voice.

‘I’m in a place called the Café Bellecour,’ he said.

‘I know it.’

‘Make sure, make goddam sure you’re not being followed. OK? If you feel good, meet me here. If you have any reservations, any, walk away. Go home.’ He put the phone down, smiled at the waitress, went back to his table. He waited. Audrey would walk a few blocks, window-shop, glance in reflections, wander – and only when she was sure everything was safe would she come to the café.

Streik bit his lower lip. He waited. He downed the wine, called for another, drank it fast. It did nothing for him, didn’t blunt the edges. He stared into the street and thought: What if Audrey was rusty these days? What if she didn’t have the old knack? What if – you could lose yourself in a quagmire of what-ifs. He smoked a cigarette. When he was on his third glass of wine he saw her enter the café and smile at him and suddenly everything was just fine, just dandy.

She came to his table, sat down, opened her large handbag, took out a gold cigarette case. ‘Jake, what kind of shit are you in?’ And she put her hand across the back of his.

‘Good old Audrey,’ he said. ‘Straight to the point, huh? No screwing around.’

She lit a Gitanes, blew smoke away from his face by distending her lip. She had marvellous blue eyes and a froth of deep-red hair. She wore a long tweedy overcoat and under it a gypsy-style skirt to her ankles; it was a look she’d always favoured. There was still something of the Sixties hippie bit about Audrey, evidenced by the great dangling half-moon earrings, the new-age crystal choker at the throat, the blouse that looked as if it had been smeared with pastel paints. Her fingers were long, nails glossy plum.

‘It’s good to see you. No, it’s great, that’s the word I want,’ Streik said. He thought of Prague and Warsaw and East Berlin and all the good old places, the good old days. ‘Why did they have to go and fuck with our world, Audrey?’

‘Times change,’ she said. ‘Progress, Jake.’

‘Progress. We had a fine time until Gorbachev came along with some downright funny notions, didn’t we?’

‘The best of times,’ and she stroked his hand. ‘But it’s a new world, Jake. And you have to adapt. Nothing stands still.’

‘Yeah. Adapt. I tried that.’ He had a sense of security all at once. His heart, that sluggish ship so close to capsize, had become calm. This was a good sensation. He gazed at Audrey. There was a mellow light in her eyes.

She crushed her cigarette half-smoked and asked the waitress for a citron pressé. ‘So, Jake. What the hell is going on with you? What are you running from?’

‘I made the mistake of getting involved with The Undertakers.’

She shook her head, puffed her cheeks. ‘The Undertakers? More than a mistake, Jake. Way more.’

‘You know how it is. I was bored. I needed action. I needed bread. I wanted the taste of the old business.’

‘The business is changed, Jake. Face it. Me, I just accepted the fact you can’t stand in the way of history. So I stepped aside. I don’t miss the old days.’

He enjoyed the way she was making circles with her fingertips on his hands. Her touch lulled him. He felt his eyelids become heavy. He needed to sleep in a warm safe place.

‘You happy?’ he asked.

‘I’m doing all right, Jake. I have a small apartment on the Rue de Marseille. I share it with my cats. I do some translating. I took up oil-painting, but I haven’t lifted a brush in ages. I get by. It’s not a thrilling life. But it suits me.’ She withdrew her hand, gazed out of the window a second, then turned her attention back to him. ‘How deep is the shit?’

‘Very deep,’ he said.

‘What kind of scam was it?’

‘Bagman.’

‘And you wanted out.’

‘Let’s say it started to get too fucking hot, Audrey.’

‘You knew too much.’

‘I knew too much. You know those guys. They operate in dark places. Then they get the idea you might be a liability instead of an asset and that makes them anxious. The Undertakers don’t take prisoners.’

‘So you’re running.’

He nodded. ‘On empty.’

‘Talk to me about the bagman angle,’ she said.

‘The money was being filtered into some pretty weird areas via The Undertakers. My connection inside wasn’t happy about it. And I wasn’t happy with it either. I saw a whole lotta trouble coming down on me. I mean, it was no skin off my nose where the fucking cash went, I wasn’t about to go out and shout it from the rooftops, but I guess The Undertakers got a tad edgy about me. So they bug my phone. They trail me. I begin to feel highly insecure. They don’t have a reputation for charity, those guys. So it came down to: did I want to sit round and wait for the hand of fate or did I want to run?’ He laughed in an unconvincing way. ‘I’m a survivor.’

‘You’ve always been that,’ Audrey said.

‘I kept records,’ he said. ‘I kept notes on every delivery. Every transaction. I wrote it all down.’

‘Dangerous paper, man.’

‘Yeah. Dangerous paper is right.’

‘These records,’ Audrey said. ‘What do you intend to do with them?’

Streik shrugged. ‘I had some notion I could show them to somebody in authority.’

Audrey laughed at this in her bronchial manner. ‘Lotsa luck, Jake. Where do you find somebody in authority you can trust?’

‘That’s the Big One, aintit,’ Streik said. ‘I played with the vague idea – don’t laugh at this, Audrey – of getting them eventually to the White House, into the President’s hands.’

‘Excuse me.’ Audrey covered her mouth with her hand.

‘Jesus, I asked you not to laugh.’

‘Streik, even if the President was a guy in a ten-gallon white hat, even if he rode some great white steed and was the offspring of Mother Theresa by John Wayne, how could he help you? You wouldn’t get within a mile of him. Your papers would cross the desk of some shit-hot assistant, who’d do one of two things. Either he’d turn the papers over to Langley, or else he’d have you removed and placed in Straitjacket Hall. Either way, you’re a dead man … After all this time, Jake, you still believe in America, don’t you? You still think wrongs can be put right by presidential fiat. Send me your poor, your huddled masses crap.’

‘Yeah. Well. I guess it’s engrained.’

Audrey was quiet a moment. ‘What do you want me to do? Help you find a hiding-place? Is that it?’

‘The thought popped into my mind, Audrey. I need some space, some time to think. Jesus, I really need to think.’

She sipped her drink. ‘Maybe I could stash you away, Jake. But obviously not at my apartment.’

‘I don’t want you running risks,’ he said. ‘Meeting me like this is bad enough. These guys have watchers, Audrey. You know they’re good at it.’ He looked out into the street a second. ‘You sure you weren’t followed?’

‘Sure as I can be.’

‘And you haven’t seen anyone strange around? Haven’t had anything out of the ordinary happen?’

She shook her head. ‘As far as I know.’

He sat forward over the table, nervy again. His head was fogged. ‘They gotta know about your connection with me, Audrey. There’s no way they couldn’t know. These guys have files like you wouldn’t believe. They’ve got computers that can tell them your blood type and when you last took a piss. That’s what bothers me. Why they haven’t been on your ass.’

Audrey shrugged, smiled. ‘Unless I’ve lost my touch, Jake.’

Streik looked back into the street. Insecurity dogged him afresh; he was assaulted by dread. He heard off-key notes in his brain.

‘Where’s your car?’ she asked.

‘Other side of the square there.’

She got up. She was a big woman, leaning toward stoutness. She tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Let’s go.’

He didn’t want to leave the café. Outside, he was going to be exposed again. But he rose reluctantly, followed Audrey to the door.

‘Where are we going?’ he asked.

‘Let me worry about that, Jake.’

She pushed the door open. He moved after her slowly. The air was freezing. His breath came in small clouds. His lips felt like marble. He followed her toward the Place Bellecour, passing under dead trees through which streetlamps pierced. The square was enormous, scary. Despite the chill, he was sweating heavily under his coat.

‘Keep moving,’ she said. She was scanning the place, looking from side to side in a practised manner. She had a way of doing this that suggested an inner calm. She wasn’t nervous, wasn’t obvious. They might have been two people simply strolling through a French city, maybe heading for a cinema, a theatre. She took his arm, and the illusion of the commonplace was bolstered by this intimacy.

‘There’s the car.’ He pointed to the Saab.

‘Give me the keys,’ she said.

He did so. She unlocked the door, got in behind the wheel. He sat uncomfortably in the passenger seat. His throat was ash dry. His tongue was like a dead lizard in his mouth. He watched her place the key in the ignition. He had the alarming thought that as soon as she turned the key the car would explode, a bomb had been attached to the vehicle, something that would go off when the engine fired up. Click. She twisted the key. The motor hummed. Life goes on, he thought, in a series of sentences and reprieves. He tried to relax.

The windscreen shattered. Streik flinched and cried aloud in shock.

His first thought was that a kid had thrown a stone or some other missile. Audrey snapped her head back. Streik ducked down, grabbing for her arm at the same time, as if he needed something solid to hold on to. Oh, Audrey, Audrey, have you ever lost your touch.

‘Jesus,’ she said. She backed the car directly into the BMW behind, spun the steering wheel, edged forward. Streik peered through the splintered windscreen. The figure that had fired the shot stood about twenty feet away, face concealed by upraised coat collar, a perception barely registered by Streik. The gunman fired a second time and Streik felt something yield in his chest. The pain was brutal, and he gasped, pitched forward. He had the weird druggy sense that he was floating out across the rooftops of Lyon. He was a kite set free.

‘I’m bleeding, Audrey. I’m bleeding like fuck.’

But the voice wasn’t his own. It came from another region altogether. He was dimly aware of motion, of the car lurching forward through a series of explosions, the deadening rattle of gunfire on metal, more glass breaking. Then Lyon was flowing past in a bright sequence of sparkling lights, neon, flashes. The pain was crippling; he’d never felt anything this severe in his life. It was so bad it seemed to spawn a malignant existence of its own. Like a cancer. Like a pulsating fungus. He heard Audrey say something like Hang in there, Jake, hang in. But he couldn’t be sure, everything was misted with uncertainty. Streets, traffic signals, buildings, everything was a string on which senseless little knots of perception had been tied at irregular intervals. In the extremities of his pain he forgot his name and why he was travelling inside a car with a shot-out windscreen through the streets of a city that surely only existed in his fancy.

‘Hang on, Jake. Just don’t give in. I’ll get us out of this.’

They seemed to be crossing a bridge, Streik couldn’t be sure. He glanced sideways at the woman. He uttered the unthinkable. ‘I’m dying, I’m fucking dying.’

‘No, Jake. You’re going to be OK.’

OK, he thought. He tipped his head back against the seat. Pain was rampant in him, pain triumphed over him. He shut his eyes.

‘Jake, for Christ’s sake. Stay awake. Don’t drift.’

But Streik had already drifted, down and down into some whirlpooling dream, into caverns under roiling surfaces of water, a world of green tendrils and silver floating things – and there, swimming toward him, hair swept back by currents, eyes open and knowing, was Bryce Harcourt, good old Bryce.

Hi, Jake.

Streik’s last puzzle was how anyone could talk under water without drowning.