Brian Garfield: Hopscotch

“That’s shrewd enough,” Cutter said, “but he’ll walk right past them the same way he walked past our people last night.”

Myerson slapped the arm of his chair. “Even if he does I agree we’ve got to assume he’s in Paris. I think we’ve got to bottle up the damn city the way it’s never been bottled before.”

Follett waved his big arms wildly. “There’s a thousand roads out of Paris. It can’t be done.”

Myerson glared at him and then shifted the glare to Cutter. “And you want to go out on your own and sniff like a bloodhound. That’s your last and best shot, is it?”

“If I get close to him I’ll feel it. I can’t get more exact than that.”

Ross said, “Is he really going under, do you think?”

“Maybe,” Cutter said. “He’s changed his tactics-it means he’s changed his mind. He doesn’t want to die any more, if he ever really did. What he’s got left is knowing he won’t give up and lie down and die. But he may have been telling the truth about going into hiding. I think he’s tired of the hectoring game.”

“That doesn’t change anything for us,” Myerson said.

“I realize that.”

Myerson gave him a cold look and sank the knife, twisting it: “Give it your best, Joe. Because I’m going to phone Mikhail Yaskov and give him every scrap we’ve got.”

Ross said, “What?”

“Yaskov was right all along,” Myerson said, not without bitterness. “The important thing was to stop Kendig-not who stopped him. I’m going to bring Yaskov right up to date and wish him luck. And if he gets in there ahead of you, Joe, you can kiss everything good-bye.”

They sent the overnight bags on with Follett and took a taxi in from Le Bourget; Cutter told the driver to let them off at the Place de l’Opera and Ross followed him into the American Express and Cutter sat down on a bench on the mezzanine.

“Okay,” Ross said, “what now?”

“Put yourself in his shoes. You’re here in Paris and the whole world’s gunning for you. You want to disappear. You pick up whatever money you’ve got left in your stash. Then what do you do?”

“I don’t know. What do you do?”

“I don’t know either,” Cutter said. “Let’s just think a while.”

“Why’d you pick this place? Because he used to have a checking account here?”

“He still has it,” Cutter said. “But there’s only a few hundred francs in it. He won’t come here.”

“Then we shouldn’t be here either.”

“All right Ross, where should we be?”

“Put it this way. He knows we’re looking for him. He’d go where he didn’t expect us to go.”

“Where’s that?”

“The Folies? The bar at the Ritz?”

“Kendig? No.”

“It won’t be any kind of public transportation. He might steal a car-it wouldn’t be the first time.”

“I think he really wants to get away clean this time. He won’t steal a car-it could be traced, somebody might remember he bought gas or stopped for lunch. He’d have to abandon the car somewhere and that would give us a place to start looking if we ever connected the car with him.”

“Climb into the back of a truck full of lettuce.”

“And go where?”

“Some country village where we’d never look for him in a hundred years.”

Cutter said, “He’s a chameleon but he’s a deep-rooted American. He won’t settle down in a place where English isn’t the native tongue. It’s not the language, it’s the way the language makes you function. He speaks good Spanish but he’s never had any empathy with the way the Latin mind works. It’s the same with the others. If he’s going to ground for the rest of his life it’ll be in English-speaking surroundings. Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the United States.”

“He tried that before…”

“We knew he was there. If we didn’t think he was there would we have any chance of finding him there?”

“Is this getting us anywhere, Joe?”

“Maybe it is. I think we’re psyching him about right. He’ll want to get far away from this corner of the world without anyone ever knowing he’s done it.”

“I don’t see how that tells us where to start looking for him.”

Cutter didn’t answer right away. Tourists and expatriates drifted through the building. Ross saw a lot of furs and long suede coats; it was a cold autumn. Downstairs there was a queue at the postal delivery window but it was nothing like as long as the one in the summer.

“Come on,” Cutter said; he uncoiled as if he had hinges and walked away.

Ross caught up and followed him outside. Traffic clotted the square. He had to hurry to keep up. Cutter had his hands thrust deep in his pockets; he was walking with long strides-down the Madeleine and the rue Royale, around the corner of the Place de la Concorde, past the palace gardens and up the Champs-Elysees. He crossed over with the light and cut off the Champs and Ross said, “Where are we going?”

“Follett’s office.”

“What for?”

“I want to be there when Kendig says good-bye.”

There was a malignant cloud cover and a raiding wind howled along the Seine. Kendig went up the moss-slick steps with his suitcase and across the quai into the rue Seguier.

Strauss seemed to have gained more weight; he led Kendig downstairs to the vault and Kendig took the black box into the private cubicle. Mainly what he needed was the Alexandre Vaneau passport. But he took all the money out of the box, put it in the suitcase and returned the black box empty to the vault. Strauss escorted him past the two armed guards up the stairs; Kendig went back along the quai to where he’d parked the 2CV van, tossed the suitcase inside and drove down through the sinuous boulevards of the left bank.

He had a room in a pension in the fifteenth arrondissement; he opened the suitcase and dumped the money out on the bed. He filled one of the two money belts he’d bought in the morning when he’d bought the comfortable pair of shoes and the overcoat with the velvet collar; he was still wearing Oakley’s suit under it.

He transferred the remaining chapters of the manuscript from the school-book case into the suitcase and on top of the pages he put something over a hundred thousand dollars and all Oakley’s papers. Then he went out again to finish his daylight errands.

He bought a batard loaf, a chunk of cheese, a bottle of Vittel water that had a screw-on cap, and a box of wooden matches. Then he walked on to a workman’s clothiery where he outfitted himself with dungarees, flannel shirt, a beret, rubber-soled waterproof boots and a drab leather jacket with elastic waist and cuffs. He carried his parcels along the avenue Felix Faure until he found a florist’s where houseplants were a specialty; he bought a tin of powdered fertilizer which had a high concentration of sulfuric acid.

He returned to the pension, left his purchases on the bed and had to go out once more; this time to the Caltex filling station near the quai. He told the attendant he’d run dry six blocks away. The attendant sold him a four-liter can at an exorbitant price and filled it from the pump. Kendig left it on the floor of his stolen 2CV van before he went upstairs.

He broke open the loaf and made a meal of that and the cheese, washing it down with the Vittel water. He poured the rest of the water into a tumbler and then carefully tipped a good share of the chemical fertilizer powder into the empty bottle. He filled it the rest of the way from the sink tap. Then he broke off a piece of his shoelace and dipped it in the solution. The acid was not too concentrated but it ate the leather away after a while; it would do. He capped the bottle carefully and placed it upright on the bureau.