THIRTY-FOUR

MARSEILLE

PAGAN SAW NO FUTURE IN GOING TO LYON AIRPORT – WHICH WAS THE first place he’d be apprehended as soon as the dead woman was discovered or Downey had recovered awareness. For much the same reason he decided against Geneva Airport as a destination; it was close enough to be placed quickly under surveillance. So he told the girl to drive to Marseille, two hundred and fifty kilometres away.

To forestall the possibility of conversation that would have been either stilted or recriminatory, he turned on the radio and for a few minutes there was jazz, before the station drifted and an Italian baritone voice fused uncomfortably with Dizzy Gillespie. Now and then he looked out of the window, fighting sleep; he avoided the girl’s face. The tension inside the vehicle was like a third passenger, somebody having a quiet nervous breakdown in the back seat.

The girl turned off the radio. Pagan had the feeling she was about to speak, and wished she wouldn’t. He didn’t want to hear what she had to say; it had gone beyond that. Silences were preferable. He looked at the reddish glow of the dials, then peered at the highway, here and there seeing farmhouses, the outlines of barren trees, small cafés. A chill dawn sun hung in the sky.

Despite his better judgement, he found himself wondering about the girl’s reports to Barron, the phone calls. How much had she revealed anyhow? How had she phrased her reports? I’ve got him exactly where I want him, Tobias. I really think he’s falling in love with me. He tells me practically everything about his work. These were depressing considerations. He couldn’t dwell on betrayal; it was like sucking on an orange spiked with arsenic. The trouble was how the taste kept coming back at you.

Barron, he thought. And his anger rose up again, sickening him. Barron, do-gooder, benefactor of the meek, the underprivileged, the starving. And what else besides? Connected to Carlotta, and presumably to the bomb, and so to The Undertakers: hence to William J. Caan. The sharp cogs, the teeth of a very complicated machine. And all the while Barron sprayed garlands of goodwill around the wretched planet, he opened clinics, schools, bestowed his blessings on the needy. It was terrific cover.

The girl glanced at him. ‘I want you to know how I got involved with Barron.’

Pagan said nothing. He made an indifferent gesture with his hands. He didn’t care.

She didn’t speak again for a few miles and then it was as if she were addressing herself. ‘It seems sometimes that I’ve known him for ever. He used to come regularly to our house in upstate New York. He’d lock himself away with my father for hours. I was just a kid, what did I know? Two grown-ups discussing business, that’s all. When business was over he was … playful, I guess is the word. He liked games. Croquet. Checkers. He taught me chess moves. Whenever he came to visit, he brought presents.’

‘Good old Uncle Tobias,’ said Pagan wearily.

Undeterred by his tone, the girl continued. ‘I went away to boarding-school for a while. During summer vacations, I’d go visit him in Coral Gables. He always had time for me. He’d drive me round in this big convertible he had. Take me to restaurants. I was maybe thirteen, fourteen, and he treated me like an adult. He was never anything but kind to me …’

Pagan didn’t want to hear any more recollections of Uncle Tobias. ‘Very nice,’ he said. ‘I’m happy for you. I’m delighted you’ve got all these lovely memories to sift. Long sunshine days in Florida. Teaching you chess. Open-air restaurants. Very nice.’

She glanced at him and he looked away. He said, ‘And the sweet little girl grows up to be a potential killer. Uncle Tobias was a terrific influence. A real role model.’

‘I made my own decisions, Pagan. He didn’t force me into anything.’

‘He approached you with a proposition. Get me the dirt on Pagan and don’t worry if you have to sleep with him to do so – it’s all part of the ongoing struggle for justice. He pimped for you and you cruised along with it. Then there’s another proposition. Something new. Something different. Katherine, my dear, I’m afraid you’re going to have to kill Pagan. You don’t mind, do you, Katherine? Or did he call you Kate?’

‘I’m trying to explain,’ she said.

‘And I’m wondering why you feel this burning need. I don’t give a shit—’

‘I don’t believe what you said about Barron, Pagan. That’s why. What you tell me doesn’t square with what I know about him.’

‘You’re trying to defend a man who orders you to shoot me? You’re trying to tell me he’s basically good, is that it? Sorry if I’m not buying, love.’

There was anger in the girl’s voice. ‘Look. He was kind to me, goddamit. After my father died … shit, I couldn’t begin to tell you. You wouldn’t listen anyway.’

‘You’ve got that right,’ he said.

She tightened her hands on the wheel, accelerated, overtook a convoy of cumbersome trucks in a reckless way. Then she braked slightly as if her anger had dissipated. ‘Your perspective is just so goddam narrow, Pagan. You’ve been chasing terrorists for so long it’s warped your judgement. You see things that aren’t there. You impute motives to people who don’t deserve to be maligned. This Carlotta, this bomb on the Underground, you’ve got that all wrong when you blame Barron. OK, he wanted you out of the way, but he’d have a sound reason, because he wouldn’t order death unless it was necessary, and even then he’d be unhappy about it, it would make him miserable—’

‘Mr Conscience,’ Pagan remarked. ‘Even as he tells you to off me, he’s wringing his hands and blowing his nose into a hanky and his eyes are watering.’

‘You’re a shit,’ she said.

‘When it comes to people like you and Barron, I’m more than a shit. I’m a monster.’

‘You could never understand the part he played in my life.’ The girl stared at him a second before returning her eyes to the road. ‘I was fifteen when I understood that Barron was helping the Cause. I knew about my father’s involvement before that – how could I not have known? It was all around me. You were right about that much at least. When he died, I went to live in Barron’s house in Florida for a time. When I was seventeen, and pretty damn bitter about the way both my father and brother had been killed, Barron asked me to run an errand for him. A simple thing, really. I was to deliver an envelope from Belfast to New York. I jumped at the chance. I didn’t know what it contained, I didn’t care. I assumed it was money, a cheque maybe, I don’t know. All I knew was I was making a contribution … And it excited me, Pagan. I was doing something real.’

Pagan said, ‘And one simple errand leads to another. Then another. By which time you’re ready for your first big assignment – namely, Frank Pagan.’

She nodded her head. ‘I was happy to be asked. Do you understand that? It meant I’d grown up, I was to be trusted, Barron needed me for something important. I knew your name, of course. I knew about you and Patrick. I wanted the job, Pagan. And when it came down to killing you, I wanted that as well.’

Pagan stretched his legs, felt his neck throb, tried to adjust his position in such a way that the friction of collar against burn would be alleviated. He stared from the window, seeing apartment buildings and an industrial estate. Somewhere a bonfire was burning and ragged red cinders rose into the sky. Beyond, over the Golfe du Lion, the sun was cloudy, a forlorn old biddy of the sky.

‘Now you’re trying to convince me Barron’s a liar,’ she said. ‘And I’m not ready to accept that. Not on your word alone, Pagan. No way. What are you running on anyway except some wild stories, some flight of goddam fancy?’

Pagan glanced at her profile and felt a slight sadness. She was lost to him – or at least his ideal of her was lost. An evaporation had taken place, a vanishing. But it was unproductive to think about that; the road led nowhere. She came into your life, she went out of it again, and amen. Sadness was irrelevant. He had to put himself in a place beyond feeling. Cold storage.

At Marseille Airport, she parked the car. Pagan stuck her gun with the silencer in the glove compartment. They went inside the terminal building, walked to the Air France desk. When he stated his destination the putty-faced woman behind the console looked at him in a surprised way. ‘I’m afraid there’s no direct connection, sir,’ she said. ‘You need to go through Rome.’

‘What about another airline then? What about Alitalia?’ he asked.

The woman patiently punched her keyboard. ‘Alitalia has no direct flight either. You would have to fly through Milan on that airline. Sorry.’

Sorry. Pagan realized he’d fallen into a trap of assumptions. He’d come to Marseille because he’d assumed, wrongly, that a direct flight to Venice would be instantly available, he’d buy a ticket, flash a passport – presto, a window seat, coffee, a quick flight.

‘What’s the earliest connection we could make?’ he asked.

‘For Rome, nine twenty-five. You’d arrive there at ten forty-five. That would get you to Venice at fourteen twenty-five.’ The woman tugged at her eyelashes, one of which came off on the tip of her finger like the leg of a spider.

‘OK,’ Pagan said. ‘We’ll go through Rome.’

He watched as she tapped her keyboard. The printer, whirring into life, issued two tickets. He paid with his credit card, stuck the tickets in his pocket, then, followed by the girl, wandered round the terminal. It was eight-thirty according to the departure screens. A brief time to kill. He got some coffee from a machine, thought about smoking, changed his mind.

He looked in the window of a shop selling souvenirs of France, jars of Dijon mustard, baguettes, wines. He perceived his own reflection in glass. He looked pallid, worn down. In the same window the girl seemed like a ghostly shadow standing just behind him. It was, he thought, an appropriate little cameo – a faded snapshot, a creased item you carried in the back of your wallet.

He sat down, finished his coffee. The girl sat alongside him. Pagan crushed his cardboard cup, dropped it in a waste bin. He gazed at the information screens, pondered faraway destinations.

‘When we get to Venice, what then?’ she asked.

‘We go to Barron’s.’

‘Together?’

‘You step inside – I’ll be right behind you, armed and ready. He’s expecting you. I’ll be the surprise.’

‘Just like that?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t like it.’

‘Why? Do you feel you’re betraying Barron? Is that what you feel?’

‘Maybe.’

‘My heart aches,’ he said.

She pressed her hands between her knees and looked at the floor and was silent a long time. When she spoke her voice was quiet. ‘In a strange kind of way I’m sorry we—’

‘I don’t want to hear it,’ Pagan said. ‘You have any regrets, keep them to yourself. Spare me.’

She raised her face, looked into his eyes. She said nothing. Restless, he got up, moved around the terminal. The girl followed him a few yards behind. His attention drifted to the doorway of a news-stand, where there was a rack of the morning’s papers. The headlines concerned the devastation that had taken place in Prague, the assassination of Svobodin and several of his ministers inside the Castle. A picture showed smoke rising from the building.

Pagan, tired of bombs and destruction, weary of hatreds, allowed his eye to wander across the front pages of various newspapers – Italian, French, English. There were photographs of Vladimir Gurenko, looking small and startled, perhaps even vaguely deranged, by the flashbulbs of cameras. Three separate photographs – Gurenko shaking hands with the British Prime Minister, Gurenko in the presence of the French President.

And the third – Gurenko being greeted by Ambassador William Caan on the steps of the US Embassy in London. Caan looked positively beatific, glowing in the Russian’s presence. Gurenko wore a stressed-out laboured smile, that of a man obliged to carry on his back the burden of a nation splintered by factions.

Pagan stared at the Ambassador’s handsome face, then lowered his eyes and glanced at the text accompanying the pictures. The words he read caused a darkness to stir at the back of his brain. He’d been too preoccupied with the tunnel, and with Brennan Carberry, and Streik, and Carlotta, to pay anything but the most superficial attention to what was going on in the wider world around him. He’d been drawn so far down into his own depths that the movement of politicians was remote from him, like an ancient clock he heard from time to time ticking asthmatically in a distant room.

Caan greets Gurenko.

Gurenko, according to the text, is on his way to meet the Italian Prime Minister in Venice. A lover of art, the President will also visit the Scuola Grande di San Rocco …

Venice. Wintry Venice.

Where Tobias Barron resides …

Where Carlotta may be …

He seized a newspaper from the rack and gazed at the photographs and he had the curious sense he was in some way seeing beyond them, he was looking into another dimension, as if what he held in his hand was not a record of the recent past but an insight – slim and tenuous – into the future.

The girl stood behind him, looking over his shoulder. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.

He wondered what his expression revealed. He stuffed the newspaper back in the rack. ‘I hope it’s me,’ he replied.