The twentieth arrondissement of Paris, its easternmost, and seamiest, district, slopes on a butte adjoining the highway that rings Paris and defines its limits, the Périphérique, In the eighteenth century, the land supported a village of winegrowers called Charonne. Over the years, the vineyards gave way to small houses, and the houses, in turn, had largely given way to charmless, unlovely structures of concrete. Today, such street names as the rue des Vignoles seem laughably out of place in the downtrodden urban milieu.
The trip to Paris had been nerve-racking; every incidental glance seemed to hold meaning, the very impassivity of les douaniers, the customs officials, seemed a possible subterfuge, a prelude to arrest. But Anna had experience with the balkiness of international alerts, knew how the bureaucracies of each border authority impeded the efficient execution of security directives. She wasn’t surprised that they’d slipped through. She also knew that, next time, it was a good bet they wouldn’t.
Only in the near anonymity of the dense-packed RER from De Gaulle did they start to relax. Now Anna and Ben emerged from the Gambetta m6tro stop, walked passed the large Mairie, or courthouse, and down the rue Vitruve to the rue des Orteaux. They turned right. Opposite them, to either side of the rue des Vignoles, were several narrow streets that followed the precise layout of the vineyards that they supplanted.
The area around Charonne, just south of Belleville, was among the least prototypically Parisian of Parisian neighborhoods, its denizens as likely to be Africans, Spaniards, or Antilleans as French. Even before recent waves of immigration, however, it had long earned the scorn of the city’s bourgeois. It was a place where the poor and the criminal classes were seen to have congregated, a place where the insurrectionists of the Paris Commune, fueled by the disarray of the Second Empire, found populist support. A place of the disaffected, and the neglected. The twentieth arrondissement’s one claim to fame was the cemetery du Pere Lachaise,
a forty-four hectare garden of graves; starting in the nineteenth century, Parisians who would never otherwise deign to visit this arrondissement, let alone live there, agreed to consign their bodies there after death.
Dressed in the casual attire of American tourists, Anna and Ben took in their surroundings as they walked: the aroma of falafel stands, the thudding rhythm of North African pop spilling from open windows, street vendors hawking tube socks and dog-eared copies of Paris Match. The people on the street came in every color, and spoke in a variety of accents. There were the young artists with complicated body piercings who no doubt saw themselves as the legitimate successors to Marcel Duchamp; there were immigrants from the Mahgreb hoping to earn enough money to send to their relatives in Tunisia or Algeria. The smell of pot or hashish, rich and resinous, wafted from the occasional alleyway.
“It’s hard to imagine a corporate honcho retiring to this sort of neighborhood,” Anna said. “What, did they run out of beachfront properties at Côte d’Azure?”
“Actually, it’s nearly perfect,” Ben said, reflective. “If you wanted to disappear, there’s no better place. Nobody notices anybody else, nobody knows anybody else. If for some reason you wanted to stay in town, it’s the most heterogeneous place you’ll find, thronged with strangers, new immigrants, artists, eccentrics of every persuasion.” Ben knew this city, as Anna did not, and his familiarity gave him a measure of much needed confidence.
Anna nodded. “Safety in numbers.”
“Plus you’re still near local mass transit, a maze of streets, a fast train out of town, and the Périphérique. A good setup when you’re planning multiple escape routes.”
Anna smiled. “You’re a fast learner. Sure you don’t want a job as a government investigator? We can offer you a salary of fifty-five thousand dollars and your very own parking space.”
“Tempting,” Ben said.
They walked past La Flèche d’Or, the red-tile-roofed restaurant that was perched over a rusted ghost track. Then Ben led the way down another block to a small Moroccan café, where the air was humid and fragrant with various couscous dishes. “I can’t vouch for the food,” he said. “But the view has a lot to recommend it.”
Through the plate glass, they could see the stone triangle that was 1554
rue des Vignoles. Seven stories high, the building occupied a freestanding island surrounded by narrow streets on three sides. Its facade was stained dark with automotive exhaust and dappled with acidic bird droppings. Squinting, Anna could make out the anomalous remains of decorative gargoyles; erosion from the elements made them look as if they had melted in the sun. The marble ledges, ornamental revetment, and parapets seemed the folly of a long-ago builder, a throwback to an era when some still harbored upmarket dreams for the arrondissement. The building, unremarkable in most ways, breathed the gentle decrepitude of neglect and indifference.
“According to my source, Peyaud, he’s known as ‘L’Ermite.’ The hermit. He lives on the entire top floor. Makes noises from time to time, so they know he’s there. That and the deliveries he gets—groceries and the like. But even the delivery boys have never seen him. They drop off the stuff in the dumbwaiter, and collect their francs when the dumbwaiter comes back down. The few people who pay him any mind at all pretty much dismiss him as a real eccentric. Then again, this place is populated with eccentrics.” He tucked into his lamb tagine greedily.
“So he’s reclusive.”
“Very reclusive. It’s not just the delivery boys he avoids—nobody’s ever seen him. Peyaud talked to the woman who lives on the ground floor. She and everyone else in the building have decided he’s an elderly, paranoid, morbidly shy rentier. A case study in advanced agoraphobia. They don’t realize that he owns the building.”
“And you think we’re going to make an unannounced visit to this possibly unhinged, possibly paranoid, possibly dangerous, and certainly disturbed and frightened individual, and he’s going to pour us some decaf and tell us whatever we want to know?”
“No, I’m not saying that at all.” Ben gave her a reassuring grin. “It might not be decaf.”
“You have boundless faith in your own charm, I’ll give you that.” Anna looked doubtfully at her vegetarian couscous. “He does speak English?”
“Fluently. Almost all French businessmen do, which is how you can tell them apart from French intellectuals.” He wiped his mouth with a flimsy paper napkin. “My contribution is, I got us here. You’re the professional; you’re in charge now. What do the field manuals say? What do you do in a situation like this—what’s the established modus operandi?”
“Let me think. The MO for a friendly visit with a psychotic whom the world believes to be dead and who you think holds the secret to a menacing global organization? I’m not so sure that one’s in the field manual, Ben.”
The lamb tagine started to weigh heavily in his stomach.
She took his hand as they stood up. “Just follow my lead.”
Thérèse Broussard gazed sullenly out the window, down at the foot traffic on the rue des Vignoles seven stories below. She gazed as she might have gazed at a fire, if her chimney hadn’t been plugged with concrete years back. She gazed as she might have gazed at her little television set, if it hadn’t been détraquée for the past month. She gazed to sooth her nerves and alleviate her boredom; she gazed because she had nothing better to do. Besides, she’d just spent ten minutes ironing her large, baggy undergarments, and needed a break.
A heavy-set, doughy-faced woman of seventy-four with piggy features and lank black-dyed hair, Thérèse still told people she was a dressmaker, even though she hadn’t cut a piece of fabric in ten years, and even though she was never particularly accomplished at it. She grew up in Belleville, left school at the age of fourteen, and was never pretty enough to count on attracting the sort of man who would support her. In short, she had to learn a trade. As it happened, her grandmother had a friend who was a dressmaker and who agreed to take the girl on as an assistant. The old woman’s hands were stiff with arthritis, and her eyes had grown dim; Thérèse could be helpful, though the old woman—Tati Jeanne, Thérèse was encouraged to call her—always parted with the paltry few francs she paid her each week with an air of reluctance. Tati Jeanne’s already small clientele was dwindling, and with it her earnings; it was painful to have to share even a tiny amount with someone else.
One day in 1945, a bomb fell near Thérèse as she was walking down the Porte de la Chapelle, and, though she was physically unharmed, the blast entered her dreams at night and stopped her from sleeping. Her nervous condition only worsened over time. She would start at the slightest noise, and she started to eat voraciously, whenever she could find the food to stuff herself with. When Tati Jeanne died, Thérèse took on her remaining clients, but it was scarcely a living.
She was alone, as she’d always feared, but she had also learned there
were worse things: she owed Laurent that much. Shortly after her sixty-fifth birthday, she met Laurent at the rue Ramponeau, in front of the Soeurs de Nazareth, where she collected a weekly parcel of food. Laurent, another native of the Ménilmontant area, was a decade older than she was, and looked older still. Hunched and bald, he wore a leather jacket whose sleeves were too long for him. He was walking a small dog, a terrier, and she asked the dog’s name, and they began to talk. He told her that he fed his dog, Poupée, before he fed himself, gave the dog first choice of everything. She told him about her panic attacks, and the fact that a magistrate for social services, l‘Assedic, had once placed her under supervision. The magistrate also made sure that the state would provide her with five hundred francs a week. His interest in her perked up when he learned of the support she received. A month later, they were married. He moved into her flat near Charonne; to an impartial eye, it may have appeared small, spare, and dingy but it was still more appealing than his own place, from which he was about to be evicted. Soon after they were married, Laurent pressed her to return to her sewing: they needed the money, the food parcels from the Soeurs scarcely lasted them half the week, the checks from l’Assedic were woefully inadequate. She told people she was a dressmaker, didn’t she? Why, then, didn’t she make dresses? She demurred, quietly at first, holding out her pudgy, blunt fingers, and explaining she no longer had the manual dexterity. He remonstrated, less quietly. She countered with no little vehemence, pointing out that he had a knack for getting fired from even the lowliest jobs, and that she would never have married him if she’d known what a drunkard he was. Seven months later, in the heat of one of these increasingly frequent arguments, Laurent keeled over. His last words to her were “T’es grasse comme une truie”—You fat sow. Therese let a few minutes pass and her temper subside before she phoned for an ambulance. Later, she’d learn that her husband had been felled by a massive hemorrhagic stroke—an aneurysm deep in the brain. A harried physician told her something about how blood vessels were like inner tubes, and how a weakness in a vessel wall could suddenly give way. She wished Laurent’s last words to her had been more civil.
To her few friends, she referred to her husband as a saint, but no one was fooled. Having been married was, at any rate, an education. For much of her life, she believed that a husband would have made her life complete. Laurent had showed her the untrustworthy nature of all men.
As she watched various figures on the street corner near her hulking, poured-concrete apartment building, she fantasized about their private deviances. Which of these men was a junkie? Which a thief? Which beat his girlfriend?
A knock at the door, loud and authoritative, jarred her from her reveries. “Je suis de l‘Assedic, laissez-moi entrer, s’il vous plaît!” A man from the welfare department, asking to be let in.
“Why did you not buzz?” barked Madame Broussard.
“But I did buzz. Repeatedly. The buzzer is broken. As is the gate. Do you claim you didn’t know?”
“But why are you here? Nothing about my status has changed,” she protested. “My support …”
“Is under review,” the man said, officiously. “I think we can straighten this all out if we just go over a few matters. Otherwise, the payments come to an end. I do not wish that to happen.”
Thérèse trudged heavily over to the door and peered through the peephole. The man had the familiar haughtiness she associated with all fonctionnaires of the French state—clerks who imagined themselves to be civil servants, men given a thimbleful of power, and made despotic by it. Something about his voice, his accent seemed less familiar. Perhaps he came from a Belgian family. Thérèse did not like les Belges.
She squinted. The man from social services was attired in the thin worsted wool jacket and cheap tie that seemed to come with the job; his hair was a thatch of salt and pepper and he seemed an unremarkable specimen except for his smooth, unlined face; the skin would be babyish, if it didn’t look almost tight.
Thérèse unlocked the two deadbolts and released the chain before pressing the final latch and opening the door.
As Ben followed Anna out of the café, he kept his eye on 1554 rue des Vignoles, trying to fathom its mysteries. The building was a picture of ordinary dilapidation—too distressed to excite anyone’s admiration, while not so distressed as to arrest anyone’s attention. But looking at it carefully—an exercise, Ben imagined, that no one had engaged in for many years—one could see the bones of a once elegant apartment building. It was evident from the oriel windows, crested with carved limestone, now randomly chipped and fractured. It was evident from the corners
of the building, the quoins, where dressed stones had been laid so that their faces were alternately large and small; and the mansard roof, edged with a low, crumbling parapet. It was evident even from the narrow ledges that had once provided a balcony, before the iron rail was removed, no doubt after it had rusted to pieces and posed a hazard to public safety. A century ago, a measure of care had gone into the building’s construction, which decades of indifference could not entirely efface.
Anna’s instructions to him had been clear. They would join a group of passersby as they crossed the street, falling into rhythm with their stride. They would be indistinguishable from people whose destination was the nearby shop that sold cheap liquor and cigarettes, or the shawarma place next to it, where a large, fatty oval loaf of meat rotated, close enough to the sidewalk that you could reach out and touch it; certainly swarms of flies did. Anyone watching from the window would see no departure from the ordinary patterns of pedestrian traffic; only when they passed in front of the main door would the two stop and enter.
“Ring the bell?” Ben asked as they reached the building’s main entrance.
“If we rang the bell, we wouldn’t be unannounced, would we? I thought that was the plan.” Glancing around quickly, Anna inserted a narrow tongue of steel into the lock and played with it for a few moments.
Nothing.
Ben felt a sense of rising panic. So far, they had been careful to blend in, to synchronize their pace with those of other pedestrians. But now they found themselves frozen in place; any casual observer would notice that something was wrong, that they did not belong here.
“Anna,” he murmured with quiet urgency.
She was bent over her work, and he could see that her forehead was damp with nervous perspiration. “Take out your wallet and start counting your bills,” she whispered. “Take out a phone and check for messages. Do something. Calmly. Slowly. Languorously.”
The faint sound of metal rattling against metal continued as she spoke.
Then finally, there was the sound of a bolt retracting. Anna turned the lever knob and opened the door. “Sometimes these locks require a little tender loving care. Anyway, it’s not exactly high security.”
“Hidden in plain view, I think is the idea.”
“Hidden, anyway. I thought you said nobody had ever seen him.”
“That’s true.”
“Did you stop and reflect that if he wasn’t crazy when he started out, he might have become so? Total social isolation will do that to a person.” Anna led him to the disheveled elevator. She pressed the call button, and they briefly listened to a rattling chain before they decided that taking the stairwell was the safer option. They made their way up seven flights, taking care to make as little noise as possible.
The hallway of the top floor, an affair of grimy white tiles, stretched before them.
Startlingly, the doorway of the sole apartment on the floor was already swinging open.
“Monsieur Chabot,” Anna called out.
There was no response.
“Monsieur Chardin!” she called, exchanging a look with Ben.
There was a movement from within, shrouded in the gloom.
“Georges Chardin!” Anna called again. “We come with information that may be of value to you.”
A few moments of silence followed—and then a deafening blast.
What had happened?
A glance at the hallway directly facing the open door made things clear: it was cratered with a deadly spray of lead pellets.
Whoever was in there was firing a shotgun at them.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with you people,” Thérèse Broussard said, color rising to her cheeks. “Nothing has changed about my circumstances since my husband died. Nothing, I tell you.”
The man appeared with a large black suitcase, and strode past her to the window, ignoring her for the moment. A very strange man.
“A nice view,” the man said.
“It gets no direct light,” Thérèse contradicted him scoldingly. “For most of the day, it is dark. You could develop film in here.”
“For some pursuits, that can be an advantage.”
Something was wrong. His accent was slipping, his French losing the straightened cadences of the social-services bureaucracy, sounding more casual, somehow less French.
Thérèse took a few steps away from the man. Her pulse quickened as
she suddenly remembered the reports of a rapist who had been brutalizing women in the vicinity of the Place de la Reunion. Some of the women had been older, too. This man was an impostor, she decided. Her instincts told her so. Something about the way the man moved, with coiled, reptilian strength, confirmed her growing suspicion that he was, in fact, the Reunion rapist. Mon dieu! He’d gained the trust of his victims, she had heard—victims who had invited the assailant into their very homes!
All her life, people had told her that she suffered from une maladie nerveuse. She knew better: she saw things, felt things, that others did not. Yet now, crucially, her antennae had failed her. How could she have been so foolish! Her eyes darted wildly around her apartment, looking for something she could use to protect herself. She picked up a heavy clay pot that contained a slightly shriveled rubber plant.
“I demand that you leave at once!” she said in a trembling voice.
“Madame, your demands are meaningless to me,” the smooth-faced man said quietly. He looked at her with quiet menace, a confident predator who knew that his prey was hopelessly outmatched.
She saw a flash of silver as he unsheathed a long, curved blade, and then she threw the heavy pot at him with all her might. But its weight worked against her: it arced quickly downward, striking the man in the legs, knocking him a few steps back but leaving him unharmed. Jésus Christ! What else could she use to defend herself? Her little broken-down TV! She yanked it from the countertop, hoisted it with great effort above her head, and tossed it at him as if aiming for the ceiling. The man, smiling, sidestepped the crude projectile. It thudded against the wall, then dropped to the floor, its plastic casing shattered along with the picture tube.
Dear God, no! There had to be something else. Yes—the iron on the ironing board! Had she even turned it off? Thérèse dashed toward the iron, but as she grabbed it the intruder saw what she was attempting.
“Stop where you are, you revolting old cow,” called the man, a look of disgust crossing his face. “Putain de merde!” With a lightning-fast motion, he grabbed another, smaller knife and flung it across the room. The deeply beveled steel came to a razor-sharp edge along the entire, arrow-shaped blade; the hollowed tang provided a streamlined counterweight.
Thérèse never saw it coming, but she felt its impact as the blade buried
itself deep into her right breast. At first she thought whatever it was had struck her and bounced off. Then she looked down and saw the steel handle protruding from her blouse. It was odd, she thought, that she felt nothing; but then a sensation—cold, like an icicle—began to grow, and an area of red blossomed around the steel. Fear drained from her, replaced with sheer rage. This man thought she was just another victim, but he had misjudged her. She remembered the nighttime visits from her drunken father, which started when she was fourteen, his breath smelling like sour milk as he worked his stubby fingers into her, hurting her with his ragged nails. She remembered Laurent, and his last words to her. Indignation flooded her like water from an underground cistern, from every time she’d ever been taunted, cheated, bullied, abused.
Bellowing, she charged the evil intruder, all two hundred and fifty pounds of her.
And she tackled him, too, slammed him to the ground by sheer momentum.
She would have been proud of what she’d accomplished, truie grasse or no, if the man hadn’t shot her dead a split-second before her body crashed into his.
Trevor shuddered with revulsion as he pushed the obese, lifeless body off him. The woman was only slightly less off-putting in death that she’d been in life, he reflected as he returned his silenced pistol to its holster, feeling the cylinder’s heat against his thigh. The twin bullet holes in her forehead were like a second pair of eyes. He dragged her away from the window. In retrospect, he should have shot her immediately upon gaining entry, but who knew she would turn out to be such a maniac? Anyway, there was always something unexpected. That was why he liked his vocation. It was never entirely routine; there was always the possibility of surprise, new challenges. Nothing, of course, he couldn’t handle. Nothing had ever turned up that the Architect couldn’t handle.
“Christ,” Anna whispered. She had avoided the shotgun spray by a couple of feet at most. “Not exactly the welcome wagon.”
But where was the shooter?
A steady succession of blasts was coming from the open apartment door, from somewhere within its darkened interior. Apparently the gunman was firing through the gap between the heavy steel door and the doorjamb.
Ben’s heart was thudding. “Georges Chardin,” he called out, “we haven’t come to harm you. We want to help you—and we need your help as well! Please, listen to us! Hear us out!”
From the dark recesses of the apartment emanated a bizarre rasping, a shuddering moan of terror, seemingly involuntary, like the night cry of a wounded animal. Still the man remained invisible, cloaked in darkness. They heard the click of a cartridge sliding into the chamber of a shotgun, and each of them raced to opposite ends of the long hallway.
Another explosion! A fusillade of pellets came through the open door, splintering the woodwork in the hall, gouging jagged crevices in the plaster walls. The air was heavy with the pungent odor of cordite. The entire hall now looked like a war zone.
“Listen!” Ben called out to their unseen adversary. “We’re not firing back, can’t you see that? We’re not here to harm you in any way!” There was a pause: was the man hiding inside the apartment actually listening now? “We’re here to protect you against Sigma!”
Silence.
The man was listening! It was the invocation of the name of Sigma, the shibboleth of a long-buried conspiracy thundering in its impact.
At that same instant, Ben could see Anna hand-signaling to him. She wanted him to stay where he was while she made her own way into Chardin’s apartment. But how? With a glance, he saw the large double-hung window, saw her silently nudging open its heavy sash, felt a gust of cold air from outside. She was going to climb- out the window, he realized with horror, walk along the narrow exterior ledge until she came to a window that opened directly into the Frenchman’s apartment. It was madness! He was seized with dread. A stray gust of wind, and she would fall to her death. But it was too late for him to say anything to her; she already had the window open and had stepped onto the ledge. Christ Almighty! he wanted to shout. Don’t do it!
Finally a strange, deep baritone voice emerged from the apartment: “So this time they send an American.”
“There’s no ‘they,’ Chardin,” replied Ben. “It’s just us.”
“And who are you?” the voice came back, heavy with skepticism.
“We’re Americans, yes, who have … personal reasons why we need your help. You see, Sigma killed my brother.”
Another long silence ensued. Then: “I am not an idiot. You wish me to come out, and then you will trap me, take me alive. Well, you will not take me alive!”
“There are far easier ways, if that’s what we wanted to do. Please, let us in—let us speak with you, if only for a minute. You can keep your weapon trained on us.”
“For what purpose do you want to speak with me?”
“We need your help in defeating them.”
A pause. Then a short, sharp bark of derisive laughter. “In defeating Sigma? You cannot! Until just now I thought one could only hide. How did you find me?”
“Through some damned clever investigative work. But you have my utmost admiration: You did a good job covering your tracks, I must say. A damned good job. It’s hard to relinquish control of family property. I understand that. So you used a fictio juris. Remote agency. Well designed. But then you’ve always been a brilliant strategic thinker. It wasn’t for nothing that you got to be Trianon’s Directeur Général du Département des Finance.”
Another long silence, followed by the scrape of a chair from inside the apartment. Was Chardin preparing to show his face after all? Ben glanced down the hall apprehensively, saw Anna carefully sliding one foot after another along the ledge while clinging to the parapet with both hands. Her hair blew in the wind. Then she was out of his line of sight.
He had to distract Chardin, keep him from noticing Anna’s appearance at his window. He had to keep Chardin’s attention.
“What is it you want from me?” came Chardin’s voice. His tone seemed neutral now. He was listening; that was the first step.
“Monsieur Chardin, we have information that could be invaluable to you. We know a great deal about Sigma, about the inheritors, the new generation that has seized control. The only protection—for either of us—is in knowledge.”
“There is no protection against them, you fool!”
Ben raised his voice. “Goddamn it! Your rationality was once legendary. If you’ve lost that, Chardin, then they’ve won anyway! Can’t you see how unreasonable you’re being?” In a gentler tone, he added, “If you
send us away, you’ll always wonder what you might have learned. Or perhaps you’ll never have the opportunity—”
Suddenly there was the sound of glass breaking from inside the apartment, followed immediately by a loud crash and a clatter.
Had Anna made it through a window into Chardin’s apartment safely? A few seconds later he heard Anna’s voice, loud and clear. “I’ve got his shotgun! And it’s trained on him now.” She obviously spoke for Chardin’s benefit as well as Ben’s.
Ben strode toward the open door and entered the still-darkened room. It was hard to see anything but shapes; when his eyes adjusted, after a few seconds, he made out Anna, dimly outlined against a thick curtain, holding the long-barreled gun.
And a man in a peculiar, heavy robe with a cowl rose slowly, shakily to his feet. He did not appear to be a vigorous man; he was indeed a shut-in.
It was plain what had happened. Anna, plunging through the window, had leaped onto the long, ungainly shotgun, pinioning it to the floor; the impact must have knocked him over.
For a few moments, all three of them stood in silence. Chardin’s breathing was audible—heavy, nearly agonal, his face shadowed within his cowl.
Watching carefully to make sure Chardin didn’t have another weapon concealed in the folds of his monklike garment, Ben fumbled for a light switch. When the lights went on, Chardin abruptly turned away from them both, facing the wall. Was Chardin reaching for another gun?
“Freeze!” Anna shouted.
“Use your vaunted powers of reason, Chardin,” Ben said. “If we wanted to kill you, you’d already be dead. That’s obviously not why we’re here!”
“Turn and face us,” Anna commanded.
Chardin was silent for a moment. “Be careful of what you ask for,” he rasped.
“Now, dammit!”
Moving as if in slow motion, Chardin complied and when Ben’s mind grasped the reality of what he saw, his stomach heaved and he nearly retched. Nor could Anna disguise her shocked intake of breath. It was a horror beyond imagining.
They were staring into an almost featureless mass of scar tissue, wildly
various in texture. In areas it appeared crenellated, almost scalloped; in other areas, the proud flesh was smooth and nearly shiny, as if lacquered or covered in plastic wrap. Naked capillaries made the oval that had once been his face an angry, beefy red, except where varicosities yielded coils of dark purple. The staring, filmy gray eyes looked startlingly out of place—two large marbles left on a slick blacktop by a careless child.
Ben averted his gaze, and then, wrenchingly, forced himself to look again. More details were visible. Embedded in a horribly webbed and wrinkled central concavity were two nasal openings, higher than the nostrils would once have been. Below, he made out a mouth that was little more than a gash, a wound within a wound.
“Oh, dear God.” Ben slowly breathed the words.
“You are surprised?” Chardin said, the words scarcely appearing to come from his wound-like mouth. It was if he were a ventriloquist’s dummy, one designed by a deranged sadist. A cough-laugh. “The reports of my death were quite accurate, all except for the assertion of death itself. ‘Burned beyond recognition’—yes, indeed I was. I should have perished in the blaze. Often I wish that I had. My survival was a freak accident. An enormity. The worst fate a human being can have.”
“They tried to kill you,” Anna whispered. “And they failed.”
“Oh no. I think that in most respects they quite succeeded,” Chardin said, and winced: a twitch of dark red muscle around one of his eyeballs. It was apparent that the simple act of talking was painful to him. He was enunciating with exaggerated precision, but the damage meant that certain consonants remained blurry. “A close confidant of mine had suspicions that they might try to eliminate me. Talk had already begun about dispatching the angeli rebelli. He came by my country estate—too late. There were ashes, and blackened timber, and charred ruins everywhere. And my body, what was left of it, was as black as any of it. He thought he could detect a pulse, my friend did. He brought me to a tiny provincial hospital, thirty kilometers away, told them a tale about an overturned kerosene lamp, gave them a false name. He was canny. He understood that if my enemies knew I had survived, they would try again. Months passed in that tiny clinic. I had burns over ninety-five percent of my body. I was not expected to live.” He spoke haltingly but hypnotically: a tale never before spoken. And then he sat down in a tall-backed wooden chair, seemingly depleted.
“But you survived,” Ben said.
“I did not have the strength to force myself to stop breathing,” Chardin said. He paused again, the memory of pain imposing further pain. “They wanted to move me to a metropolitan hospital, but of course I would not permit it. I was beyond help anyway. Can you imagine what it is like when consciousness itself is nothing other than the consciousness of pain?”
“And yet you survived,” Ben repeated.
“The agony was beyond anything our species was meant to endure. Wound dressings were an ordeal beyond imagining. The stench of necrotic flesh was overpowering even to me, and more than one orderly would routinely vomit upon entering my room. Then, after the granulation tissue formed, a new horror was in store for me—contracture. The scars would shrink and the agony would be rekindled all over again. Even today, the pain I live with every moment of every day is of a degree I never experienced in the whole of my preceding life. When I had a life. You cannot look at me, can you? No one can. But then I cannot look at myself, either.”
Anna spoke, clearly knowing that human contact had to be reestablished. “The strength you must have had—it’s extraordinary. No medical textbook could ever account for it. The instinct for survival. You emerged from that blaze. You were saved. Something inside you fought for life. It had to be for a reason!”
Chardin spoke quietly. “A poet was once asked, If his house were on fire, what would he save? And he said, ‘I would save the fire. Without fire, nothing is possible.’” His laughter was a low, disconcerting rumble. “Fire is after all what made civilization possible: but it can equally be an instrument of barbarity.”
Anna returned the shotgun to Chardin after removing a last shell from the chamber. “We need your help,” she said urgently.
“Do I look like I am in a position to help anyone, I who cannot help myself?”
“If you want to call your enemies to account, we may be your best bet,” Ben said somberly.
“There is no revenge for something like this. I did not survive by drinking the gall of rage.” He withdrew a small plastic atomizer from the folds of his robes, and directed a spray of moisture toward his eyes.
“For years, you were at the helm of a major petrochemical corporation, Trianon,” Ben prompted. He needed to show Chardin that they had
puzzled out the basic situation, needed to enlist him. “An industry leader, it was and remains. You were Emil Ménard’s lieutenant, the brains behind Trianon’s midcentury restructuring. He was a founder of Sigma. And in time you must have become a principal as well.”
“Sigma,” he repeated in a quavering voice. “Where it all begins.”
“And no doubt your genius in accounting helped in the great undertaking of spiriting assets out of the Third Reich.”
“Eh? Do you think that was the great project? That was nothing, a negligible exercise. The grand project … le grand projet …” He trailed off. “That was something of an entirely different order. And nothing you are equipped to comprehend.”
“Try me,” Ben said.
“And divulge the secrets I have spent my life protecting?”
“You said it yourself: What life?” Ben took a step toward him, forcing down his revulsion in order to maintain eye contact. “What have you left to lose?”
“At last you speak truly,” Chardin said softly, and his naked eyes seemed to swivel, peering penetratingly at Ben’s own eyes.
For a long moment he was silent. And then he began to talk, slowly, mesmerizingly.
“The story begins before me. It will continue, no doubt, after me. But its origins lie in the closing months of the Second World War, when a consortium of some of the world’s most powerful industrialists gathered in Zurich to determine the course of the postwar world.”
Ben flashed on the steely-eyed men in the old photograph.
“They were angry men,” Chardin went on, “who caught wind of what the ailing Franklin Roosevelt was planning to do—let Stalin know he would not stand in the way of a massive Soviet land grab. And, of course, it’s what he did do before his death. In effect he was ceding half of Europe to the Communists! It was the grossest betrayal! These business leaders knew they would be unable to derail the disgraceful U.S.-Soviet bargain at Yalta. And so they formed a corporation that would be a beachhead, a means to channel vast sums of money into fighting communism, strengthening the will of the West. The next world war had begun.”
Ben looked at Anna, then stared off into space, hypnotized and astonished by Chardin’s words.
“These leaders of capitalism accurately foresaw that the people of Europe,
embittered and sickened by fascism, would, in reaction, turn to the left. The soil had been scorched by the Nazis, these industrialists realized, and without the massive infusion of resources at key moments, socialism would begin to take root, first in Europe, then throughout the world. They saw their mission as preserving, fortifying, the industrial state. Which meant, as well, muffling the voices of dissent. Do these anxieties seem overstated? Not so. These industrialists knew how the pendulum of history worked. And if a fascist regime was followed by a socialist regime, Europe might be truly lost, as they saw it.
“It was seen as only prudent to enlist certain leading Nazi officials, who knew which way the wind was blowing and were also committed to combating Stalinism. And once the syndicate had established its political as well as financial foundations, it began manipulating world events, bankrolling political parties as if from behind a curtain. They were successful, astonishingly so! Their money, judiciously targeted, brought to life De Gaulle’s Fourth Republic in France, preserved the rightist Franco regime in Spain. In later years, the generals were placed in power in Greece, bringing to an end the leftist regime that the people had elected. In Italy, Operation Gladio ensured that a continual campaign of low-level subversion would cripple the attempt of leftists to organize and influence national politics. Plans were drawn up for the paramilitary police, the carabinieri, to take over radio and television stations if necessary. We had extensive files on politicians, unionists, priests. Ultraright-wing parties everywhere were secretly bolstered from Zurich, so as to make the conservatives seem moderate by contrast. Elections were controlled, bribes paid, leftist political leaders assassinated—and the strings were pulled by the puppet masters in Zurich, in conditions of absolute secrecy. Politicians such as Senator Joseph McCarthy in the U.S. were funded. Coups were financed throughout Europe and Africa and Asia. On the left, extremist groups were created, too, to serve as agents provocateur and guarantee popular revulsion toward their cause.
“This cabal of industrialists and bankers had seen to it that the world was made safe for capitalism. Your President Eisenhower, who warned about the rise of the military-industrial complex, saw only the tip of the iceberg. In truth, much of the entire history of the world in the last half-century was scripted by these men in Zurich and their successors.”
“Christ!” Ben interrupted. “You’re talking about …”
“Yes,” Chardin said, nodding his hideous faceless head. “Their cabal gave birth to the Cold War. They did. Or, as perhaps I should say, we did. Now do you begin to understand?”
Trevor’s fingers moved swiftly as he opened his suitcase and assembled the .50 caliber rifle, a customized version of the BMG AR-15. It was, in his view, a thing of beauty, a precision-machined sniper weapon with relatively few moving parts, and a range of up to seventy-four hundred meters. At more proximate distances, its penetrative capacities were astonishing: it could pierce three inches of steel plate, would leave an exit hole in an automobile or hammer off a corner of a building. It could drive through crumbling mortar handily. The bullet would have a projection velocity of over three thousand feet per second. Resting on a bipod, and surmounted by a Leupold Vari-X scope with thermal imaging, the rifle would have the accuracy that he needed. He smiled as he seated the rifle into the bipod. He could hardly be considered underequipped for the job at hand.
His target, after all, was directly across the street.