Brian Garfield: Hopscotch

It meant only that the idea of recruiting him had been Yaskov’s own. Probably he hadn’t cleared it with his superiors. Therefore its failure would not reflect on Yaskov. It meant Kendig was in no danger from them; there’d be no retribution. Somehow the realization angered him.

Yaskov stood up and prodded the cement with his cane. “You were one of the very best. I feel quite sad.” Then he walked away.

He sat on the bench without stirring. Pigeons flocked around, then drifted away in disappointment when he had nothing to feed them. Yaskov’s high narrow figure dwindled along the quay and was absorbed. Traffic was a muted whirring hum on the pont; a thin haze drifted across the sky and Kendig stared among the trees with empty eyes. Recollections drifted through his mind. Lorraine-a dreadful woman with a dreadful name. The caper along the Danube when they’d brought Rozhsenny out in the rain with the Soviet guns spitting blindly in the night. The old man, and the idea of suicide that had hung around him always. Kendig had no scruple against it. A man always ought to have the right to remove himself from the world at his discretion.

But it had no appeal. There was no challenge; it was too passive. He didn’t want to be dead: he was already dead. Yaskov had strummed a chord there. To be alive might be the goal. But it was harder to find, all the time. He’d done everything to provoke his jaded sensibilities. High risks: the motor racing, skiing, flying lessons, the gambling which had been satisfying until his own capacities had defeated its purpose: he’d always been professional at whatever he did and his skills were the sort that took the risk out of it after a while. He’d bent the bank at Biarritz a month ago and since then he’d lost all interest in it. And he’d long since given up the athletic challenges. They’d all got to looking the same way-the way bowling had looked when he’d been a college freshman. As soon as he’d discovered that the object of bowling was to learn how to do exactly the same thing every time, he’d lost interest.

He thought part of it was the fact that there was no human antagonist. There was no “other side” with which to compete. He had a quarter century of playing the running-dog game and it had educated his palate to its own flavor; his appetite had been trained to crave human conflict: the chess game of reality with stakes that weren’t tokens, rules that weren’t artificial.

At one time he had tried to get reinstated.

They’d sent him into the Balkans on a very chancy mission but the objective had some meaning so he’d volunteered for it. He’d accomplished the job but he’d been injured badly-it had been critical for a while-and his cover had been blown. After he’d convalesced he’d done some office work and then they’d put him out to pasture on early retirement. Eighteen months later he’d asked for reactivation but he was too old, they told him, too old and too hot. And in any case Cutter had taken his place and wasn’t about to relinquish it. They didn’t want any part of him. They’d offered him a sop-a time-filler desk over at NSA with a fair GS rank and salary, punching decodes through computers. A bloody file clerk’s job.

When the sun tipped over it got chilly and he left the islet. Snatches of things ran through his mind in a jumbled sort of order and he made a desultory game of tracing the pattern they made. They came without chronology from the retentive cells. The suicide note left by the screen actor George Sanders: “I am leaving because I am bored.” Fragmentarily a poem by Stephen Crane which he hadn’t read since he was a sophomore; he was sure he didn’t have it right: “A man said to the Universe, ‘Sir, I exist!’ ‘Yes,’ replied the Universe, ‘but that fact does not create in me a sense of obligation.’” At any rate something like that… I wish to bring you back to life… The resurrection of Miles Kendig… My dear Miles, I’m offering to put you back in the game. Back into action. Isn’t it what you want? The hunting way of life is the only one natural to man. I offer to return it to you.

Well it was something Yaskov didn’t have it in his power to restore.

But it was the first time in months he’d felt things churning and he kept toying with them while he slouched up the rue Lecourbe toward Montparnasse. It was the first time his dialogue with himself hadn’t taken the flavor of a talk with a stranger in the adjacent seat of an airliner: an exchange of meaningless monologues, half of them self-serving lies, the other half mechanical responses and none of it designed to be remembered beyond the debarkation ramp.

He ate something in a cafe and had two Remy Martins and walked all the way back to the hotel. There were no personal things in sight although he had resided in the suite for nearly two months; its occupant had kept himself hidden from it.

The telephone.

“M’sieur-a gentleman wishes to see you.”

“Who is he?”

“I do not know, M’sieur.”

“I’ll be down. Ask him to wait.” He wasn’t about to invite to his room any man who wouldn’t give his name.

The rickety cage discharged him into the dusky lobby and he saw Glenn Follett in the reading chair in the alcove. Follett charged beaming to his feet, hearty ebullience filling his dewlapped Basset face. “Hey old buddy-long time no see, hey? How they hanging?”

It made Kendig wince. Follett pumped his hand enthusiastically and reared back: tipped his head to one side and tucked his jowly chin in, contriving to look affectionate and conspiratorial at once. “My goodness you do look well.” He said it in the voice of a man telling a polite lie. “Life of luxury in retirement, hey?”

“What do you want, Glenn?” It was a question to which he already knew the answer because he didn’t believe in the sort of coincidence that would drop Follett on his doorstep within hours of his meeting with Mikhail Yaskov. But he asked it anyway because it was the best way to shut off Follett’s backslapping spout of painful old-buddy pleasantries.

Follett waved his arms around. He was utterly incapable of talking without the accompaniment of vast gestures. “What do you say we have a drink or two?”

“I’ve already had a drink. We can talk here.”

Follett shot a glance toward the concierge behind the desk. That was twenty feet across the lobby. Kendig said, “He’s a little deaf and he’s only got about forty words, of English. Stop looking around-the lamps aren’t bugged.”

“Well if you say so, sure. Hell. Well then let’s have a seat, hey?” Follett led the way back into the alcove and Kendig trailed along reluctantly. Follett sat down with his elbows on his knees so he could flap his hands when he talked. “Damn good to see you again. I mean that.”

“Come off it.”

“Well Christ Kendig, it has been a long time, and here we are both living in the same town. I mean it’s good for old friends to get together-we ought to do it more often, you know?”

Kendig said, “You had a tail on Yaskov today, didn’t you.”

Follett grinned unabashedly. “Sure. Why else would I be here?”

“All right. Get it off your chest. I haven’t got all night.”

“The hell you haven’t. What have you got, Kendig-a vital business meeting? A hard-breathing tryst? Don’t give me no bullfeathers. You haven’t got a Goddamned thing to do except go upstairs to your little ten-by-twelve room and stare at the walls. I’d think you’d welcome some company from an old officemate.”

Kendig just watched him. Follett made a face and dropped his voice several decibels. “All right. What was it about?”

“What was what about?” He didn’t want to give Follett the satisfaction.

An exasperated jerk of head, pinch of lips. “The meet with Yaskov, old buddy.”