Brian Garfield: Hopscotch

He made a fuse from one of the wall candles, stripping the candle away until all that remained was the wick thinly coated with wax.

He stripped down to his underwear and changed into the workingman’s outfit he’d just bought. After he’d laced up the boots he folded Oakley’s suit carefully and laid it in the suitcase along with Oakley’s topcoat. He tossed his toilet gear in and then gathered the remaining money on the bed; this went into the second money belt and he laid that on the topcoat and closed the suitcase over it.

There was nothing left to do but wait; he couldn’t make the next move until after midnight. He pushed the suitcase aside to make room for himself and lay back with his hands laced behind his head. After a while he drowsed.

In the middle of each night the gendarmerie’s meat wagon made its rounds slowly, its crew stopping by the hunched clochard figures who sprawled in rags on the streets and gutters and doorways of Paris. If the clochard was drunk, asleep or merely deathly ill the flic passed him by because there wasn’t manpower, facility, time or inclination to render assistance. But if the clochard happened to be dead the meat wagon would collect him and he would be taken to the morgue where medical students could learn something from his cadaver before his dissected remains were disposed of by the city. On a normal night there would be about twenty dead ones in the streets.

Tonight a high-pressure weather system had dropped down the globe from the northwest and the cold was more than autumnal; it was intense, several degrees below frost point, and it had caught the clochards of Paris unprepared. There would be an uncommon number of deaths.

Kendig had a general idea of the route the meat wagon took in the fifteenth arrondissement. He set out in the clanking little 2CV van a good two hours ahead of the meat wagon; it was just short of midnight. The frigid cold kept most pedestrians off the streets. The weather gave him a bit of an advantage but he’d have managed without it. He cruised the route slowly, making room courteously for impatient drivers who burst past him in a demented rush.

Here and there he double-parked the van and got out to have a close look at a prone figure or a shadow propped in a nook. Kendig’s penance was the folded fifty-franc note he would slip into the hand or pocket of each drowsing clochard. He found a woman dead, all skin and bones and tattered rags; he went on. There was a man dead in the place de Lourmel but he was very small and skinny and Kendig passed him by; there was another in a passage off the rue Emeriau but that one was much too tall.

The fifty-franc note awakened a dozing fat woman and he hurried away from her profusions with his chin sunk in the heavy collar of his overcoat. He drove the van on, making a concentric circuit of the district, invading the clochards’ privacy and apologizing for the intrusion with his money. There was a corpse on the curb of the rue Varet that met the requirements of size and build but the man was missing his left leg; there was another two blocks away but he was toothless and had a misshapen arm that was evidently the result of an old fracture that had healed unevenly. Kendig moved on. There was no urgent timetable. If he didn’t find one tonight he’d go out again tomorrow night.

He found the right one less than half an hour later in a passage half a block from the Convention metro station. The man’s dead face was ravaged with age but that was the accelerated deterioration of the life he’d led; the backs of the hands were not severely veined or mottled. The man was nearly bald but that wouldn’t matter. Kendig went back to the van and moved it to a position where it masked him from the mouth of the passage, when he picked up the odorous corpse. He placed the body gently in the back of the van and locked the rear doors. The smell filled the small Citroen immediately and he had to drive with the sliding window wide open in spite of the icy cold. He parked it behind his pension and went inside to get the suitcase and Oakley’s topcoat; he brought them downstairs and checked out, paying the sleepy concierge in cash and leaving a tip for the char.

He carried his things out to the van and went around to the right-hand side to feed the case and coat into the passenger seat. He set the bottle of acid against the outside rim of the seat frame and closed the door gently against it to wedge it upright in place. Then the locked the door and stepped around the back of the van.

A car swung into the street from the intersection. Its beams arced along the row of parked cars and caught him in the face before he had time to turn. It came forward with a bit of a lurch and then the lights dipped when the car braked and he didn’t need more than that to know the numerical odds had caught up with him. He was about-facing when the car stopped and he started to run when he heard the doors chunk shut.

They didn’t bother to shout at him but when he threw a glance over his shoulder he saw the fragmentary ripple of reflected light along the pistol barrel. Two of them were out of the car but there was still a man inside it; it was moving again.

A weakening rush of panic; and he rushed across into the narrow foot passage beyond. He could hear their running footsteps; he pounded the length of the alley and the car had already gone around the end of the block; it was swinging around the corner too fast, leaning against the centripetal tug. Kendig ran right toward it; he dodged to one side as the car straightened in the street and then he was up on the curb diving down the steps into the metro subway station. It was shut down; no trains ran this late at night; he had to vault the chain at the foot of the stairs. A few work lights made faint illumination along the platform and several drunks slept on the benches. He dropped into the cut and danced across the tracks staying off the electrified rails and boosted himself up onto the opposite platform; he was at the foot of the exit stair when the two pursuers came in sight behind him but he was up into the shadows before they had time to take aim. He bolted up into the cold empty intersection. Their car was gone; odds were it had returned to keep watch on the street where they’d disclosed him: they might not know which car he’d been about to get into but they’d have seen the car keys in his hand. If there was a two-way radio in their car he didn’t have much time.

On the northwest corner of the intersection stood a modern apartment building with a supermarket in its ground floor. Three steps led up to the lobby doors and you could see straight through to another set of doors that let out onto a passage behind the building where the parking lot was. He went right up the steps and across the lobby into the parking lot. The two pistols were coming up from the metro and he wasn’t in time to get out of their sight; they came sprinting up the steps and Kendig ran down into the parking lot.

A high fence ran around it and the gates were locked up. The railing was topped with blunt metal spikes and he swarmed up it wildly. He heard gristle snap in his shoulder. He went over fast, ripping his coat on a spike; he dropped lightly on the asphalt and moved away swiftly, knees bent, pulse slamming.

The alley behind the lot twisted among low old buildings and he put a jutting corner between him and the guns; he went over a courtyard wall with the acrobatic strength of terror and batted his way through invisible clotheslines and found a gate that he scaled blindly; he dropped from his fingertips into a cobbled passage not more than four feet wide and ran on his toes to its mouth.

It was a narrow street with a charcuterie at the corner and he ran to it without sound and whipped around into the alley beside it where there had to be a crowd of garbage cans; he climbed into the midst of them and nested down surrounded by their stink and watched the street through the vertical slits between them.