Brian Garfield: Hopscotch

The two of them came in sight; he saw them hesitate and then begin to spread out like hounds abruptly deprived of their scent. Kendig crouched bolt still, in total stasis; his scalp shrank and his forehead blistered with sweat.

They moved right and left. When the building corners hid them Kendig straightened up and climbed over the cans very carefully to avoid sound. He backed away close to the masonry wall, fingertips dragging it lightly, wrapped in darkness. Tenement flats back here. A door yielded to him with a dry groan; he slipped into a rancid hallway. Somewhere on the floor above an infant yowled. Kendig went through to the back and found a broken-out window; he picked shards of glass from the sill and set them down softly on the littered floor and climbed outside-another cobbled passageway crowded with a bumper-to-bumper line of small cars with their right wheels up on the curb and their doors close along the building walls, He went along the parked line trying doors and when a Renault admitted him he jammed his thumb on the plunger in the hinge wall to extinguish the interior dome light and held his thumb there while he crawled into the car and searched for the switch that would disengage the light permanently; he found it and then extricated his thumb and pulled the door shut silently. He locked both doors and climbed over the transmission hump into the backseat and settled his rump on the floor. His eyes were just above sill level and he watched the street filled with unease, willing his pulse to slow.

When the tall one came in sight at the end of the passage Kendig shrank down as flat as he could go. There was nothing to do but wait it out. After a while he heard the man’s soles prowl toward him, crunching grit. Then the man’s head and shoulders loomed beyond the rear side-window. He stopped and swiveled in a full circle, searching, bouncing the automatic in his fist. Kuykendall, Kendig recalled; one of Follett’s junior agents-no wonder he’d been recognized so quickly. Hatless, puffing out steam clouds of breath, Kuykendall stood as if rooted, his head turning slowly and his scowl deepening. Kendig heard a door slam somewhere; it drew Kuykendall’s immediate attention but still he didn’t move off the spot and if the light had been just a little better he’d have known he was staring his quarry in the face over a distance of not more than eight feet; he might sense it anyway. Kendig lay still, hardly breathing, not even blinking.

Kuykendall’s head veered around and his chin lifted questioningly; then he shrugged and lifted both arms-a signal to his partner at the far end. Kuykendall made a sweeping motion with his left hand, ordering the partner around the block; then Kuykendall trotted away, forward along the line of cars to go around the opposite end of the block.

Kendig watched until Kuykendall turned the corner. He looked back through the rear window but the partner was long gone. He climbed out of the Renault and went back in through the broken window, back along the stinking hallway and out the unlocked door; back past the garbage cans and then across the street swiftly, retracing his exact path because it was least likely they’d look for him where they knew he’d already been and gone.

In just a few more minutes they’d know for certain they’d lost him and they’d beat their way back to their car and stake out the street because they’d reason that he might have something in one of the cars there that he’d have to come back for. In the meantime if there was a two-way they’d want to be there to brief the reinforcements the minute they arrived; after that the whole area would be suicidal for him because the SDECE and the Surete and half the flics in Paris would comb it house to house.

He threw off the overcoat in the alley and hunched his back like an old man and moved purposefully afoot into the street where he’d left the van. There was no car double-parked and none of the parked cars had light on but spotting their car was ludicrously easy; the frigid cold gave it away. It was one among many parked vehicles but the driver had the engine running to warm himself and the windshield was clear from the defroster.

As if he had business there Kendig walked straight along the sidewalk with his old man’s stoop. They were looking for an erect fugitive in an overcoat.

He had the door open before the driver could react to his turn; he hauled the man right out of the seat. In that brief broken instant under the streetlight Kendig saw the wild-eyed look: he’d seen it on a man’s face once before but that had been on a thundering battleground below Cassino. Kendig’s jaws flexed; he hauled the driver right out against his own upraised knee and when the man fell back against the car Kendig locked his left hand around his right fist and drove his right elbow into the driver’s ribs. It collapsed the wind out of the man and when his head dipped in anguish Kendig pushed him right down onto the sidewalk and got a surgical grip around the base of the skull and pressed firmly with fingers and thumb. It closed off the flow of the carotid artery and starved the brain and after a moment the driver went limp. He wouldn’t stay unconscious for more than two or three minutes but he’d be dazed for a while after that.

Kendig pulled the ignition key partway out and broke it off with the tip jammed in the lock. He plucked the microphone off the two-way and tore it out by the cord and dropped it on the seat. Then he pushed the door shut and walked swiftly the twenty paces to his 2CV van and drove away.

They might have a make on the van; he couldn’t keep it. There were thousands of the cheap Citroens in Paris but they’d be distraught enough to tear into every one of them at this point.

He drove as far as the tangle of streets behind the Invalides and parked the van in a dark side-passage. It took him fifteen minutes to walk to the Laennec Hospital. A handful of cars stood parked on the doctors’ lot near the emergency entrance. A doctor in a hurry to reach a critical case didn’t always lock his car or take his keys; Kendig was counting on that and he found a Peugeot still warm and ready to go and he drove it off the lot without looking back. The owner would find it missing pretty fast but what counted was that, the theft wouldn’t be connected with Kendig for a while.

He parked right behind the van and transferred everything into the Peugeot. He put the dead clochard in the trunk, slammed the lid and drove away into the boulevard Montparnasse, forcing himself to drive at moderate speed.

He left Paris by way of Charenton and the Bois de Vincennes; he ran along southeast with the map imprinted on his eyelids. It was somewhere past three in the morning; the well-tuned sedan ran eagerly and there was no traffic on the curving country road. Farmhouses rushed by vaguely, smeared by speed; heavy trees blurred and vanished into the onrushing darkness.

Around four o’clock he crossed the Yonne at Auxerre and took the road toward Chablis: The vineyards made an icy spindle tracery above the highway; occasionally a chateau loomed on the hill.

The gate was fastened with a padlocked chain-he was reminded of the bootleggers’ road in Georgia. He drove right through it, splintering the gate and extinguishing one of the Peugeot’s head-lights. He switched them off. It didn’t matter if he left evidence of destruction now; he expected them to trace him this far.

The Lafayette Escadrille had used it, and then the French training commands and then the Luftwaffe and the American Warhawks; after the war it had been judged too short for the jet generation and it had passed out of government hands into the private aviation sector. The wineries kept their executive planes here and there were planes of all sizes belonging to-and sometimes built by-Sunday fliers. The flying school had three single-engine trainers and a twin Apache.